Dead Men's Tales (Tales of the Brass Griffin Book 5) (3 page)

“Damnation,” Anthony said bitterly
.

The wooden deck planks, already savaged by fire and artillery shot, had given way beneath the two young men. William had managed to leap to safety. Lucas, dangling like fishing bait on a hook, had not.

At the moment the wood had shattered, then collapsed beneath the young pilot’s right foot, it had sent the young man plunging downward. Before Lucas had vanished beneath the deck, he had
managed to grab onto a length of rope still tied to where a mast twenty feet away was bolted to the main deck. While the young man clutched at the rope with sweat-slick hands, beneath his feet, he could feel the rising heat of a fire below.

Next to Lucas, William frantically yanked on the wood, breaking off small splinters and fragments at a time – nothing large enough to free the young pilot from his death trap.

Anthony raced across the deck, helping to move the wood with which William struggled. It did little good. Even with both men pulling, the planks remained resolutely in place. Through gaps in the hole, Hunter could see where the wooden edge had sliced both Lucas’ pants and leg like a torrent of knives, leaving long, bloody gashes. Lucas needed to be bandaged, and soon.

Without warning, the ship shuddered violently, knocking William and Hunter off their feet
as a muffled explosion erupted somewhere below decks.

“Go on!” Lucas yelled, tears streaming from his eyes from pain and terror, “I’m done for!”

“Not on my watch, lad!” Hunter replied sharply, looking around for anything close at hand. Grabbing a length of bent pipe, the captain slammed one end down into a small gap in the wood like a crack of thunder. “Pull, Will! Put your back into it!”

“Aye, Cap’n!” William Falke replied, grabbing hold of the pipe and pulling with every fiber of his being.

Wood protested, splintered, then snapped, flying out in all directions as William and Hunter fell backwards to the deck. William rolled over, clutching Lucas by his left arm before he could fall farther. The captain grabbed onto the young man’s right a moment later. Together they hauled the wounded apprentice up, then half-carried him across the deck.

O’Fallon quickly wrapped a tether around Lucas. “Haul away!”  He shouted.

Aboard the
Brass Griffin
, two crewmen pulled hard, the leather going abruptly taught. Lucas gasped in surprise and pain, swinging up into the air, then away from the
Fair Winds
. Once the wounded young man was safely on the other ship, O’Fallon tossed a tether to William, then another to Captain Hunter.

No sooner had the pair strapped in,
a belch of white-orange flame erupted like a geyser through the
Fair Winds
’ deck. Wooden shards exploded up and out, showering everything in their path with hundreds of steaming hot needles. The three men were summarily tossed into the air, then slammed to the
Fair Winds’
main deck.

Dying, the
Fair Winds
pitched sideways, listing as the gas bag above them caught fire,
 
and scorched rigging snapped like twine. On the vessel’s main deck, Hunter blinked his eyes, then shook his head, clearing the fog from his mind. Next to him, William was out cold, having struck his head against the deck. Already, a bruise was starting to form on the young man’s forehead.

O’Fallon, who had grabbed a broken piece of deck, let go his grip and slid down to where William’s body rolled loose. The Scotsman dug in his heels, slowing himself to a stop to grab William by his left arm to steady him. The tight leather straps of the tethers creaked, preventing all three men from falling into the flames.

Hunter glared defiantly at the blaze, then up at the railing. Their tethers twitched but nothing more. With a stomach-churning drop, the
Fair Winds
tossed again, giving Hunter a brief glimpse aboard the
Brass Griffin
. Their tethers still stretched between the ships, but were caught up in a knot at the pulley!

“The tethers are fouled at the main pulley,” Hunter shouted out over the roar of the flames.

O’Fallon squinted from the soot and heat, “the old girl here’s dyin’ Cap’n! Near as Ah see it, she’s givin’ it all she’s got to keep us alive for now. She won’t hold much longer! If they’re not pullin’ us aboard now, we’ll not make it!”

The captain looked over at O’Fallon and yelled out as more explosions started to shake the mortally wounded vessel in rapid succession, “then there’s only one place to go! Follow me!”

With a tight grip on William’s right arm, Hunter staggered to his feet alongside O’Fallon. The pair exchanged a glance, then looked toward the railing not far ahead of them. They were easily three miles above the cold, dark waters of the North Sea.

Yelling as if charging into battle, Hunter and O’Fallon raced up the sloping deck towards the rail, with William’s unconscious form being carried between them. Immediately behind the trio, the deck erupted in rapid succession
 
with each step. Orange balls of fire vomited skyward, and wood shattered into thousands of jagged teeth scattered across the wind. Heat clawed at their lungs, and fire
clutched at their boot heels, as if the flames themselves had taken life and were hungry for prey. 

The men reached the rail at a dead run, the deck dissolving in the flaming purgatory fast chasing them. They leaped up, stepping off from the rail, throwing themselves outward into the smoky, empty space of air growing between the two ships.

Suddenly the
Fair Winds
shattered in a savage fireball, exploding like a bomb. The sky roared behind them, screaming with the fury of hell itself.

F
lames consumed the sky, with acrid black smoke choking out the sun. The heat blistered the air around Anthony Hunter, and everywhere he looked flared the dusky orange blaze of hell struggling to swallow him whole. Heat gripped his lungs, and fire lashed at his arms, searing his skin to the breaking point.

With a wordless shout of pain, he jerked upright in his bunk. Instinctively, the captain rolled to one side, coming to his feet with a pistol clutched tight in his right hand. Panting, his wits slowly returned
as he recognized the familiar surroundings of his cabin.

An abrupt break from the hellish landscape of his nightmares,  warm sunlight streamed through the dusty cabin windows, gracing the old wood of his desk
and the smooth planks of the deck beneath his feet. Hunter sighed heavily as the nightmare slowly evaporated in his mind, retreating like fog from the morning sun.

Suddenly, the door to his cabin flew open. Krumer Whitehorse rushed inside, followed by Dr. Thorias Llwellyn. His nerves still on edge, Hunter spun immediately, pistol at the ready. Seeing their disheveled captain standing there in trousers, soot-stained shirt, wool socks, and brandishing a loaded gun and a angry snarl, the pair immediately threw themselves to either side of the door.

“Captain, wait! Hold fire!” Krumer said quickly.

Captain Hunter blinked twice, looking past the lingering vision of flames and imagined scores of pirates bearing down on him to finally see Krumer and Thorias. Anthony glanced down, considering the pistol a
 
moment, then dropped it into the holster next to his bunk.

“My apologies,” The captain said, slightly distracted by the last fleeting memories of the nightmare.

Krumer looked around the cabin in alarm, “Captain, what is it? Why the shout?”

“The ship?” Hunter asked, ignoring the first mate’s question, “how is she?”

Seeing the captain was in no danger, the first mate relaxed. “Fine enough, for the most part. We’re a bit singed, but nothing that can’t be patched as we go.” Krumer gave Hunter a suspicious glance, “Captain, are you certain there isn’t anything wrong?”

“Nothing,” Hunter said wearily, “it’s nothing.”

“Nothing doesn’t inspire one to grab a firearm, and wave it about while half-dressed,” Thorias quipped, giving his old friend an amused look.

The captain rubbed his left shoulder, suddenly realizing that it ached just slightly. Crossing the room to a washbasin on the far side from his bunk, he stripped off his torn, soot-stained shirt, and turned a spigot to fill it with a little water pumped up from below decks. Shutting off the spigot, he splashed some of water on his face.

“Just reliving the leap from the
Fair Winds
,” Anthony finally admitted, turning the crank that drained the water from the basin towards the ship’s water purification distillery next to the engine room. Turning away from the water cabinet, he crossed to a small wardrobe to retrieve a clean, blue cotton shirt. “How long have I been out of commission?”

“Before you do that, let me check your shoulder,” Thorias said quickly before the captain could pull on the fresh shirt, “best check now to see if anything new has developed.”

Hunter waited impatiently. “Very well. It’s
only a mild ache. I’m right as rain, all things considered.”

“I’ll be the judge of that. Also, given how you came back aboard with O’Fallon and William, I’m surprised it’s only just an ache,” Thorias said wryly. “You’ve been here for four hours at the least, old man. The blast took a good bit out of you, and naturally William, too, as he’s not fully recovered from his own adventure in Edinburgh with that murderer. O’Fallon is, well, as he always is.”

Krumer chuckled, his deep voice rumbling with humor. “Which means if he felt any of it, who’d notice? He’s scaling rigging now, doing some patch work on the gas bag.”

“Bruised but not broken, which is good, considering you partially landed on that shoulder when you rolled across the deck.” Thorias said, stepping back from the captain.

Hunter finished pulling on his shirt, ignoring the complaints from his shoulder. “Good enough for now,” he said, picking up his coat from the back of a chair.

The doctor shook his head slightly. “I would suggest you rest, but I know better. If you both will pardon me, I need to check on Lucas and William. Both of whom, I might add, are dutifully following the doctor’s orders,” Thorias chided, shaking a finger and giving a stern look at Captain Hunter.

Krumer grinned broadly, while Thorias turned smartly on his heel and stalked from the cabin. A bemused smile crossed Hunter’s face before he, too, left the cabin for the main deck.

On deck, a brisk wind raced across the ship and through the rigging. The steady pulse of the ship’s propellor hummed in the air, driving the
Brass Griffin
forward. Sunlight warmed the deck the ship sped along in the clear, almost cloudless sky over the North Atlantic.

Captain Hunter paused to listen to the crew going about their business:
the creak of the ship’s wood, the rustle of the fabric of the gasbag overhead, and the rasp of the sailcloth stretched by the wind. Familiar and comforting sounds, much opposed to the sounds of fire and explosions.

“Anything come of those recording cylinders?” Hunter asked when Krumer joined him on deck.

“Moira has them now,” the first mate replied. “She said she could cobble something together that could play them from the spare parts of an opti. That was a few hours ago, though.”

“Between those and that ruined servitor, she’s bound to have found something by now,” the captain said, walking across the deck to a raised cover protecting one of the two hatches below decks. Hunter paused just before the hatch, staring ruefully at the ladder as he massaged his aching shoulder.

“Well, Arcady is with her,” Krumer said matter-of-factly, “so given it’s a machine they’re repairing, I’ve no doubt he’ll be helpful.”

“‘He’?” The captain said with a smirk, “not ‘it’? Softening on the Clockwork as a whole?”

A faint blush crept into the orc’s cheeks, “it’s simpler to think of Arcady as a ‘he’. An ‘it’ would be a chair, and a chair doesn’t talk back. Arcady talks incessantly.”

“Well, he does spend quite a lot of time with Thorias,” Hunter offered, chuckling, before carefully descending the ladder.

Just below the main deck, towards the rear of the vessel, the pair walked between a couple of wooden shelves, one set resting above a lower one. These were edged with wooden planks to fashion a bed frame for crew members.

Every bunk contained a modest blanket and canvas duffle, or ‘ditty bag’, that held a sailor’s personal belongings. The occasional clockwork ‘spark’ lanterns, small hand-sized lanterns lit by an electric arc dancing between a pair of carbon rods, hung from wooden pegs providing an eerie pale blue-white glow.

This was one of two ten-foot-long sleeping compartments for the crew. This one was situated adjacent to the
Brass Griffin’s
claustrophobic engine room where the massive steam engines, clockwork mechanisms, and Tesla barrel transformers regulated the vessel’s power.

Crossing to the far end of the room, the captain and the first mate stopped at the narrow wooden door, stained with water and other odd residue from the boilers. The faded words ‘Wear your Goggles!’ Could still be made out on worn, scarred surface. Anthony opened the door, just as Moira Wycliffe was about to do the same from the opposite side.

“Cap’n! Mr. Whitehorse!” She exclaimed in surprise. Moira grinned from beneath a pair of her leather-framed work goggles. The lenses gave her a slightly bug-eyed appearance. “I was about to go find ya both!”

Anthony raised an eyebrow with a smirk. “Indeed? We were coming to see if you’ve made any progress on that servitor.” 

“Quite a bit,” she said cheerfully, gesturing for them to follow her. Inside, Moira led the two through the tangle of wires and confusion of pipes that was commonplace in most airships
.
Through the narrow corridor and into the engine room itself, she turned right and stopped at a narrow workbench littered with both tools and half a reconstructed owl servitor.

On the table, a buzzing sound hummed over the racket of the ship’s engines. In a blur, an oversized dragonfly of brass and leather leapt up into the air, hovering over the dismantled servitor. “Greetings Mr. Whitehorse, and good to see you fully functional, Captain. You are repairing well?”