"Just curious," she said; her voice was even quieter; he leaned still closer.
Then she opened her mouth and screamed.
Gaby Donohue's image exploded out at Duncan. He felt something sharp tear at his face. Then pain, worse than any he'd known in twice ten years. He reeled away from it and went off balance. His toppling chair carried him to the floor. "Gods!"
He couldn't open his eyes. Things tore when he tried to do that. He raised his hands to them, encountered flesh and blood and sharp edges. "Captain!"
No answer. There were distant cries, a faraway roaring that began to grow louder.
Captain Walbert stood alone at the wheel; with all his men assigned to other tasks or left behind in the Monarch Building, he had to fly his ship practically single-handed. But that wasn't why his back and shoulders were locked with tension. No, that was the fault of Duncan Blackletter, with his unreasonable orders and anger spewing across the talk-box every few beats. It could only be moments before some new offense would issue from the screen—
He was right, after a fashion. He heard a scream from the talk-box behind him and it burst, raining sparks and debris all over his back.
The crewman at the bow gun fired again, trying to put his stream of tracers onto the rotorkite sinking away from the liftship. The rotorkite was a difficult target, in spite of the plume of smoke that was already billowing from its engine compartment.
He heard a shriek beside him, an odd noise to come from the talk-box the old sodder had had installed so the liftship would be "modern." Then the talk-box exploded. He saw glass and fire rain down through the hatch into the liftship interior.
Fire—
The talk-box in the rotorkite's cockpit panel burst, raining hot bits of glass and wire all over Noriko. She jerked in surprise. The rotorkite veered, but she kept control, getting far enough away that the liftship's guns would no longer pose a threat to her.
She looked back at
Storm Cloud
and saw it. A glow, golden-yellow, shone through the liftship's skin toward the bow, illuminating the ship's metal skeleton from within. The skin there began to char black.
Doc paused on the catwalk running down the center of the
Storm Cloud
's interior. He took his bearings. Directly above, crewmen descended toward him along access ladders, their feet in felt boots. Below, blue-uniformed officers ascended toward him. None would shoot at him, nor he at them, with giant envelopes of hydrogen surrounding them. Forty feet below was the access shaft down to the liftship's gondola.
Then he saw fire blossom above, toward the bow.
He leaped over the catwalk rail and dropped past the men below, catching one crossbeam twenty feet down, stopping his plummet through sheer grace and strength; the impact wrenched his shoulder and he felt the flesh of his arm sear where it came into contact with steel. Then he dropped again, slowed himself by grabbing a beam ten feet above the shaft, and hit the catwalk beside the access shaft. He could already feel the heat from the wave of fire advancing toward him, and the men above were yelling. He swung into the shaft and slid down the length of the metal ladder into the gondola.
Above were the roar of fire and the screams of the men caught in it. His arms trembled from iron poisoning.
He stood in the vehicle's bomb bay. He saw the hatch leading into a room forward, another leading aft, open doors showing the buildings of Neckerdam below. And Harris Greene, panting, stood in the forward doorway.
"Fancy meeting you here," said Harris.
"I'll look aft, you look forward," Doc said. "Don't waste time. We're on fire."
"Good to see you, too." Harris went forward.
The third door Doc opened belonged to Duncan.
His withered, ancient son lay bleeding on the floor. Doc saw the ruin of the man's eyes and winced in sympathy.
For a moment he was awash in memories. Dierdriu smiling at their baby boy as she nursed him. Finding the body of the child Duncan strangled the morning he left home forever. The guardsman of Beldon telling him his wife had been found in the river. The body of Siobhan Damvert with her head twisted around nearly backwards and her eyes staring sightlessly.
Doc tried to harden himself against what had to happen now. And, just as it had been twenty years ago, he could not.
Duncan moved feebly, hearing him. "Captain?"
"No."
"Desmond." Duncan shrank away from him, drawing back against the wall of his cabin. "Father. Don't kill me."
Doc felt something break in his heart. "I'm sorry, Duncan. Gaols cannot hold you. If you do not die now, someone else will die because of you." He crossed the cabin, knelt before his boy, and drew his pistol. He saw his hand shake. His head felt light as once more the decision to do what he had to do threatened to overwhelm him.
Duncan brushed his leg against Doc's.
Doc saw a flare of brightness as lightning leaped between them. He heard the unaimed gun fire in his hand, felt his muscles jerk as the electrical jolt coursed through him.
Then he knew nothing more.
Duncan heard Doc fly across the cabin, hurled by the force of the old devisement. Doc hit the wall with a shuddering impact. Duncan heard him slide to the floor and go still. Smelled the odor of charred flesh rising from him.
Imbecile
, Duncan thought.
You didn't think I'd prepared myself after our last meeting? For years I've renewed that devisement each morning . . . and finally it has proved worth the effort.
He straightened up, ignoring the pain in his eyes—the hurt and blindness would be gone once he passed some gold to very expensive doctors he knew. He groped around on his tabletop.
Now, where did I leave that knife?
The gondola narrowed as Harris continued forward. The passageway passed between a small washroom starboard and a larger radio room port.
The next chamber was some sort of map room with windows to either side. Two long tables were laid out with maps and charts Harris didn't bother to look at. The hatch forward was open.
Harris stepped through into the control room, the forward end of the gondola. Windows all around provided a panoramic view of Neckerdam and the river immediately ahead. A large, impressively carved wooden wheel, a ship's wheel, was situated at the very front.
A uniformed man stood there, impassively guiding the airship on its course. He turned a little as Harris entered. He was bearded, looked sober and intelligent.
"Where's Duncan?" Harris asked.
"Aft," the captain replied. "Cabin Four."
"We're on fire."
"You think I don't know?" The man sagged just a little. "I'll be putting her into the river. I won't let her fall on the city. You have nothing to fear from me." He turned away.
Knife in hand, Duncan crawled up his father's body. Three cuts, he decided. A grimworld smiley-face. One blow each into Doc's eyes, then a sweet curve across his throat. It would be a charming way to remember the man; a pity he couldn't photograph the moment. Then, he'd make his way to the pilot room and find out just what was going on—
For the second time, someone entered his cabin without permission. "Captain?" he asked.
Harris stepped through the doorway and sidekicked. The blow caught Duncan in the sternum and threw him off Doc's body. Harris felt frail bones break under the blow.
Duncan, twisting in pain but not unconscious, crawled away from his enemy. There was hate as well as pain in his voice this time: "Who's there?"
Harris stared at the shriveled, bloody-faced thing in the corner. Every bit of him wanted to take another two steps and kick the life from Duncan Blackletter.
But Duncan had caught Doc in a trap. He might have others waiting. Harris wouldn't let Duncan win through a mistake. Even the delay it took to kill him might prove fatal.
He grabbed Doc beneath the arms, pulled him out into the passageway. Doc looked bad, with burns on his arm, smoke rising from his hair and clothes.
"Who is it?" Duncan asked, voice harsh yet quavering. "Talk to me, you wretch—"
Harris let go of Doc. He stepped back into the cabin and swung the door away from the wall. He struck an open-palm blow at the inside knob. The blow knocked it free. "Enjoy your ride," he said, his voice cold. Then he stepped out again and closed the door.
As he dragged Doc forward, he could feel the liftship tilting down at the bow; the angle increased, became troublesome even before he got into the bomb bay.
Smoke poured down from the access hatch; the air was hot and getting hotter. In a bare minute, he'd be burning. He heard pounding from the direction of Duncan's cabin. Pounding and shouting.
The gondola was only two or three hundred feet above the ground. Even as he watched, the liftship moved out over the river.
The gear in the bomb bay included a winch. But it was wound with cable and not rope—nothing he could tie around Doc.
With his knife, he cut free a piece of the rappelling line he'd climbed. He tied one end to a loop at the end of the winch cable, the other end to Doc. He hoped the decidedly non-Boy Scouts knots would hold. The skin on his back was blistering from heat before he was done.
"Captain?" he called.
"Not done yet," the man replied.
Harris shook his head. He gently levered Doc over the lip of the hole in the floor, keeping his grip on the rope, playing it out as carefully as he could; it still tore flesh of his palms as Doc descended.
A moment later, he threw the main lever on the winch, watched the motor turn and cable unspool; he grabbed the cable with both bloody hands, swung out over open space, and rode the cable down, Doc dangling a dozen feet below him.
The heat was scarcely better here. He glanced up, saw the entire surface of the liftship glowing gold and white, a cleansing fire that would burn the last of Duncan Blackletter's stain from this world.
Witnesses along Neckerdam's eastern shore and Pataqqsit's western saw the slate-gray airship sail majestically over the river. The golden glow brightened in the ship's bow, then swept toward the stern, making an oblong sun of the ship, eating through its rubberized cloth skin, twisting its metal skeleton with unimaginable heat.
Two men made it out of the liftship, descending by cable from the gondola; one towed the other away from the descending wreckage. When the gondola was a dozen yards from the water's surface, a third man, his back afire, leaped out through the forward windows.
The ship was completely consumed with fire as it touched down on the water. It rested there a long moment, burning, dying, then began its final descent to the bottom of the river.
Tugboats and Novimagos Guard rescue craft approached as close as they dared and picked up the survivors.
Gaby opened her eyes.
The room was dark, but not so dark that she couldn't recognize Harris' face above her own. Recognize the feel of him as he crushed her to him. She held on to him with fierce strength.
She was in her own room in the Monarch Building, more tired than she thought it was possible to feel, but not too tired to remember. "Doc?"
"He's a little burned, a little stiff. He'll be okay."
"The others?"
"Everybody's banged up some. Except Joseph. Joseph . . . didn't make it."
"Dammit." She was silent a long moment. "What about Duncan? And the Changeling?"
"Dead. Really, truly, dental-records-prove-it dead. They scraped Darig off a rooftop the day it happened, fished what's left of Duncan out of the river yesterday."
"
Yesterday
—"
"You've been asleep for a couple of days, baby. You wiped yourself out."
"Did Doc . . . " She forced herself to ask the question. "Did Doc have to kill him?"
"No. If anybody did . . . I did. And you did, with that marvelous stunt with the exploding talk-boxes. You blew out talk-boxes in the liftship, in the Monarch Building, and all over this part of Neckerdam." He smiled. "It sort of makes sense. Gaby Donohue, Programming Director. You beat him with TV."
The stoneware urn held a shovelful of clay. That was all of Joseph anyone had been able to recover.
As the priestess spoke about death and rebirth, summer and spring, crops and trees, Gaby placed a loaf of bread in the urn. Doc, leaning on the cane he'd be using for a few weeks, added a leather pouch of salt.
Alastair contemplated a glass flask of fine uisge before placing it down in the clay. Noriko followed suit with a cup and a plate of fine copper, a fork and a knife of silver. Ixyail added the pouch packed with clothes and coin.
Last in the ceremony, Harris placed the tiny jeweled axe, symbol of warriors and warrior-kings, into the urn. He stepped away and linked arms with Gaby.
The six of them drew away from the graveside. Workers of the cemetery capped the urn, then carefully lifted it and lowered it into the grave.
Harris looked out over the people attending the graveside ceremony. Associates of the Sidhe Foundation. Sturdy construction workers, Joseph's fellow workers, uncomfortable in dress clothes. A detachment of Novimagos Guard in full uniform, ready to fire the salute for a man who had briefly been, by association with Doc, a guardsman. An interesting gathering.
"Harris," Gaby said.
He smiled at her. She was resplendent in a shimmering gown of red. He admired the funerary garb of the fair world. He felt foolish in his matching dress suit, but she'd said he was gorgeous and he didn't mind her lie. "What?"
"This is an interment, not a stakeout."
"Oh, that's right."
"So stop giving everybody the eye."
The priestess carefully poured a handful of grain into the grave. She withdrew. The guardsmen fired their volley. The men and women in attendance rose, freed from the obligation of ritual, and began talking to one another. Workmen shoveled dirt into the grave.
Harris drank in the details. Ladislas and Welthy, too hurt to attend, even after being tended by Alastair, would want to know everything. And Fergus, who was not so badly hurt but who felt unwanted around the associates—and, for the most part, was correct. "Doc."