Behemoth (11 page)

“Well, talk to Lord Churchill, then!” the man cried. “It’s hardly the Foreign Office’s fault when he goes and snatches a …”

His words faded as a metal groan filled the air, the world tilting beneath them. Deryn’s dress boots skidded sideways on the silk carpet, and everyone went stumbling toward the howdah’s starboard side. The railing caught Deryn at stomach level, and her body pitched halfway over before she righted herself.

She stared down—the foreleg pilot below had toppled from his perch, and lay sprawled in a circle of protesters. They looked as surprised as the pilot did, and were bending down to offer help.

Why had the man fallen from his saddle?

As the machine stumbled to a halt, something flickered in the corner of Deryn’s vision. A lasso flew up from the crowd and landed around the shoulders of the rear-leg pilot, then he, too, was yanked from his seat. A man in a blue uniform was scrambling up the front leg.

“We’re being boarded!” Deryn cried, running to the
port side of the howdah. The
Dauntless
was under attack there too. The man driving the rear leg had already been yanked from his perch, and the foreleg pilot was pulling against a rope around his waist.

Deryn watched as another man in blue uniform—a
British
uniform—took the place of the rear-leg pilot and grasped the controls.

Suddenly the machine lurched back into motion, taking a massive stride into the crowd. Someone screamed as a huge foot bore down to shatter cobblestones into dust, and the protesters in red fezzes began to scatter.

“Do something, Mr. Sharp,” cried Dr. Barlow above the din. “We appear to have been captured!”

“Aye, ma’am, I noticed!” Deryn reached for her rigging knife, but of course her full-dress uniform had no pockets to speak of. She’d have to use bare fists.

“How do I get down to the saddles?” she asked the howdah pilot.

“You can’t from here, sir,” he said, his knuckles white on the trunk’s controls. He was pushing people to safety as the machine stumbled through the panicking crowd. “The leg pilots climb on from the ground, while the elephant’s kneeling.”

“Blisters! Do you have any rope aboard?”

“Afraid not, sir,” the man said. “This isn’t a sailing ship.”

Deryn groaned in frustration—how could any ship not have
rope
? The machine stumbled again, and she grabbed the railing to keep her footing.

Making her way around the edge of the howdah, Deryn saw that three of the pilots had been replaced by impostors in blue uniforms. Only the foreleg pilot on the port side remained in his seat. But the rope was still around him, stretching down into the crowd. He’d be pulled off soon enough.

In the meantime three of the walker’s legs were scraping and stamping, trying to get the contraption moving again. As she watched, the huge right forefoot stamped down on a vendor’s cart, scattering peeled chestnuts like hailstones across the street.

“Barking stupid machines!” Deryn muttered. A real beastie would know who its proper masters were.

Suddenly the trunk swung to the port side. It reached among the protesters and found the man trying to drag the foreleg pilot off his seat. The man shrieked, letting go of the rope as he was flicked aside.

“Good work!” Deryn said to the howdah pilot. “Can you yank the impostors off?”

The man shook his head. “Can’t reach the rear saddles at all. But maybe …”

He twisted at the controls, and the trunk whipped about to the starboard side. It curled back, reaching for
the pilot on the foreleg, but stopped a yard short, metal segments grinding.

“It’s no use, sir,” the man said. “She’s not as flexible as a real beastie.”

However inflexible, the machine was barking powerful. It was lurching down the street now, scattering people and vehicles in all directions. One of its huge feet stamped down on a wagon and smashed it into splinters. The remaining British pilot struggled to bring the machine to a halt, but there was only so much that one leg could do against three.

“Can you grab something to use as a weapon?” Deryn asked the howdah pilot. “You only need another few feet of length!”

“This is a Clanker contraption, sir! It’s hardly as nimble as that.”

“Blisters,” Deryn swore. “Then I suppose it’ll have to be me!”

The man took his eyes from the controls for a second. “Pardon me, sir?”

“Bend that trunk up this way. And make it fast, man!” she ordered, pulling off her fancy jacket. She turned to toss it back at Newkirk, then climbed out of the howdah and onto the elephant’s head.

“What in blazes are you doing?” Newkirk cried.

“Something barking daft!” she called as the tip of the
metal-jointed trunk reared up before her. She readied herself on the rocking surface of the elephant’s head.

And jumped …

Her arms wrapped around the shining steel. The segments rasped and clanked as the trunk flexed, carrying her high above the crowd. Her feet swung out from the centrifugal force, as if she were riding the end of a huge whip whistling through the air.

The blur of passing shapes resolved around her—she was swinging toward the starboard foreleg. The impostor pilot stared, wide eyed, as she aimed both feet at him.

But he ducked at the last second, her dress boots whistling over his head. As she swung past, Deryn’s palms skidded on the shiny metal trunk, her grip sliding.

The man scowled at her and drew a knife.

There was something about his face—he was paler than most of the protesters in the street.

“Dummkopf!”
she shouted at him.

“Sie gleichen die!”
he yelled back. Clanker-talk!

Deryn narrowed her eyes—this was no Turk, or Vlach, or Kurd, or whatever else they had here in Istanbul. The man was a German, as certain as anything.

The trouble was, how to get
rid
of him? She didn’t fancy her dress boots in a fight against that knife.

She glanced up at the howdah. Dr. Barlow was shouting something at the howdah pilot, and Deryn hoped
whatever the boffin was cooking up would work quickly. With every lurching step the elephant took, her grip on the polished steel loosened a squick.

The trunk began to flex again, swinging Deryn low over the street, a blur of paving stones passing below. She wondered what sort of boffin-inspired strategy she was expected to figure out while hurtling through the air.

Then the trunk came to a shuddering halt, the pilot keeping her steady as the machine lurched along. Deryn glanced down. She was hanging just above a table piled with spices.

“What in blazes?” she muttered. Did Dr. Barlow expect her to tempt the German off his perch with a home-cooked meal?

But after a moment of hanging there, a tickle started in the back of Deryn’s throat, and her eyes began to burn. Even an arm’s length away, the spices were fiery enough to notice.

“Not bad, Dr. Barlow,” she muttered, then sneezed.

Deryn reached down, snatching up the reddest and meanest-looking bag of spices.

The trunk swung back into action, whipping her back toward the German driving the starboard foreleg. She could see the cold look on the man’s face as she zoomed toward him, the knife flashing in his hand.

“Try this for dinner, bum-rag!” she shouted, and flung the entire bag straight at him.

The momentum of the speeding trunk redoubled the force of her throw, and the sack hit the German like a cannonball. It exploded against his chest, enveloping him in a dark red cloud. Spice billowed in all directions, swirling back at Deryn.

Red-hot fingers clamped shut her eyes. She gasped for breath, and liquid fire spilled down her lungs. Her chest felt stuffed full of embers of coal, and her grip was slipping.…

But she landed softly—the howdah pilot had set her down. She lay there coughing and sputtering, her body trying to expel the spices from her lungs.

Finally Deryn forced open her burning eyes.

The metal elephant stood motionless. Both its front legs were bent, as if the huge machine were bowing down to her. The back legs alone had not been enough to keep it moving.

Deryn saw flashes of blue slipping through the crowd, the two other impostors running away. But the German she’d blasted with spice lay in a pile of red dust, still coughing and sputtering.

As she rose to her feet, Deryn looked down at herself.

“Barking spiders!” she cried, then sneezed. Her uniform was ruined.

But the loss of one middy’s dress slops was nothing compared to the trail of destruction that stretched down
the street—overturned carts and wagons, a donkey-shaped walker squashed as flat as a metal bug. The gathering crowd was quiet, still in shock at what the rampaging elephant had done.

A gangway descended from the walker’s belly. Two of the ambassador’s assistants grabbed the spice-addled German, while Newkirk and Eddie Malone ran through the crowd to her.

“Are you all right, Mr. Sharp?” Newkirk cried.

“I think so,” Deryn said as Malone’s camera flashed with a
pop
, blinding her again.

“Then, we’d better get back aboard,” Newkirk said. “These chaps could get unruly again.”

“But someone might be hurt.” Deryn blinked away spots, looking down the street. Were there bodies anywhere among the splintered wood and broken windows?

“Aye, that’s why we’re in a hurry. We need to find our pilots and get moving again, before things get ugly!”

“Things already look ugly to me,” Eddie Malone said, feeding a handful of sugar cubes to his firefly. He aimed his camera down the devastated street.

Still blinking away red spice, Deryn followed Newkirk back toward the
Dauntless
. She wondered how many people had seen the impostor pilots coming aboard a hundred yards back. Would anyone realize that the elephant’s British crew hadn’t caused this disaster?

Even if the crowd had seen what had happened, the newspapers wouldn’t report it that way. Not the ones the Germans owned.

“You saw, right?” she said to Eddie Malone. “It was impostors driving! Not our men.”

“Don’t you worry. I saw them,” the reporter said. “And we only print the truth in the
New York World
.”

“Aye, in New York,” Deryn sighed as she climbed the gangway. The crowd was already stirring around them as the shock of the rampage faded away.

The question was, would anyone believe them here in Istanbul?

Alek waited in the machine room, wondering when the signal would come.

He loosened another button on his jacket. Dr. Barlow had made the room as hot as an oven tonight. She always seemed to add more heaters when Alek watched the eggs, just to annoy him.

At least he wouldn’t have to suffer much longer. He could already hear the distant rumble of glow plugs firing in the starboard pod. Klopp, Hoffman, and Bauer were up there, pretending to work on the engine. And being noisy about it, so no one would be surprised to see Alek heading up to help.

After the disastrous start of Dr. Barlow’s mission today, the escape plan had changed. Alek had watched the elephant-shaped walker’s hasty return, carrying no supplies, its side spattered with some sort of red dust. Rumors had
spread through the ship that the walker had been attacked, an incident in which dozens of civilians had been injured.

Within an hour angry crowds had arrived at the airfield’s gate, threatening to attack the
Leviathan
. Guards were posted at all of the airship’s hatches now, and a ring of Ottoman soldiers surrounded the gondola. There would be no sneaking out through the cargo deck tonight.

From his station up in the engine pod, however, Klopp had reported that no one was guarding the mooring tower. It was connected to the airbeast’s head by a single cable that hung eighty meters in the air. If the five of them could climb across and down, perhaps they could escape across the darkened airfield.

Alek listened to the engine misfiring, waiting for the signal. Now that the captain considered him a prisoner of war, he was happy to leave the airship behind. He’d been a fool to let himself grow so attached. Volger was right—pretending that this flying abomination was his home had lead only to misery. Dylan might have been a good friend in some other world, but not this one.