Iron Jaw and Hummingbird (15 page)

With that, Zhao slammed the sword back into the scabbard, turned on his heel, and marched out of the chamber. When he had gone, the bandits at the table exchanged meaningful glances, shooting dark looks Huang's way, and then followed their chief out.

Left alone with his table scraps, Huang felt an icy lump of fear growing in his gut.

 

Huang needed to escape, and soon.

He had survived this long only at the bandit chief's whim, and it seemed certain that it was only a matter of time before Zhao's mood shifted and Huang found himself no longer a valued “pet” and instead ended up spitted on the end of his own sword.

The key, he was sure, was the locked cabinet of breather masks and insulated suits. If he could gain access to that, he'd be one step closer to making good his escape.

The problem, of course, lay in the word
locked
.

On three different occasions Huang had been ordered to assist the mechanics working on the airship in the hangar, and all three times he had stood by while the mechanics opened the locked cabinet and broke out the necessary masks and suits. He'd gotten a good look at the lock on two of the occasions, but seeing what he was up against hadn't made him any more confident of his chances.

The cabinet was secured with a combination lock. There were three wheels, each with ideograms engraved around its circumference. The lock was shaped like a stylized dog, the wheels forming the dog's belly and chest. As near as Huang could tell, the lock was forged steel, and therefore essentially unbreakable as far as he was concerned. The only way he'd be able to get it open would be to move the wheels in the proper combination to open the lock.

There were several problems with that plan. First, Huang didn't know the combination. If this lock was anything like the other combination locks he'd seen over the years, when the wheels were in the correct positions, the ideograms would spell out a word or phrase. Even if Huang knew the combination, though, he still had the second problem to contend with: he didn't know
where
the wheels were to line up. Combination locks of this type had a second level of security beyond the combination itself, which was that there were no marks to indicate where the entered combination should be aligned. If the wheels were off by only a few degrees, then the lock would remain unopened.

So all that remained for Huang to do was to find the combination, discover the proper wheel alignment, and get to the cabinet when no bandits were around to stop him.

Of course, if he got
that
far, he'd still need to get the heavy steel doors open, get into the airlock corridor, open
another
heavy steel door, get out into the hangar, reach one of the cave mouths, navigate the caves, find the disused mine shaft, and hope against hope that he could remove the obstruction blocking the shaft entrance.

And survive long enough once he was outside in the trackless wilderness that he could be rescued or reach civilization on his own.

All without the bandits catching him.

Easy.

Well, easier than cleaning the latrines again, at any rate.

 

Huang finally got his break a few days later.

All morning the Aerie had been abuzz with activity. It seemed that Zhao had received word of a particularly valuable shipment in a convoy spotted a short distance off. It was a merchant shipment, leaving Forking Paths and bound for the Southern Fastness. Since these were merchants and not imperial bureaucrats safeguarding the shipment, though, the merchant convoy was much better protected and armed than had been the Green Standard convoy of which Huang had been a part. Instead of just the dozen bandits who had accompanied Zhao on the earlier raid, therefore, nearly the whole complement of bandits in the Aerie would be taken along on this foray.

Huang was run ragged all morning, helping the bandits load and secure their arms and armament in the airship. Provisions sufficient for a two-day journey were stowed away in the gondola, and enough fuel to reach Tianfei Valley and back were rolled into the airship's hold in great steel drums.

Virtually all of the bandits were being employed in this foray—the cooks and mechanics, men and women, young and old. Only a few bandits, either too infirm or too injured to be of any use, were left behind at the Aerie. And Huang, of course.

When Zhao and the others left the relative comfort of the cave complex to load into the airship in the hangar, the bandit chief stopped to visit Huang. The prisoner had been tied up in his customary position along the wall in the dining chamber, and a day's worth of table scraps and a bowl of greasy water had been set in front of him like food left out for a dog locked at home while his masters went away for the day.

“No nonsense while I'm away, Hummingbird,” Zhao warned, fastening the stays of his insulated thermal suit, his breather mask dangling from one ear. “Consider this a little vacation, a respite for a day or two from your normal chores. Generous of us, isn't it?” The bandit chief laughed, and then strode out of the dining chamber to join the others in the airlock corridor.

Muffled by the distance, Huang heard the steel door open and close. Now he was alone in the Aerie with only one or two bandits, and those so infirm that they were practically bed-ridden.

If ever he was going to have an opportunity to escape, it was now.

 

The first hurdle was the cord securing him to the wall. This was simple enough to manage, comparatively. Since the bandits had first captured him, Huang had been careful never to attempt removing the bonds or untying the knots while in their sight, but when he was left on his own, he had experimented with the knots as long as he still had feeling left in his overworked fingers. He'd found, after a few days' trying, that he could untie and retie the simple knots securing him to the wall with relative ease. He had always tied the knots securely once more before the bandits returned, to cover the evidence.

Now he had only to untie the knots and slip loose his bonds and he was free to leave the dining chamber and make for the locked cabinet.

 

The infirm and injured bandits appeared to be abed, so fortune was with Huang. He reached the steel door to the airlock, and the nearby locked cabinet, without encountering any resistance.

Now he had only to accomplish the impossible and unlock the cabinet.

It was not as impossible, though, as Huang had originally thought.

He still did not know the combination, but on two different occasions he'd heard the bandits say something about wanting gold while opening the cabinet. Once the bandit had paused with the lock in his hands, evidently having forgotten the combination, and the other bandit prompted him by asking, “Do you want the gold?” Upon hearing that cryptic phrase, the bandit smiled and nodded, and then spun the wheels and opened the lock. On the other occasion, the bandit had chuckled ruefully when opening the cabinet, saying, “I sometimes wish there
was
gold in here, and not just these damned stinking masks.”

Huang's guess, then, was that the word or phrase that the ideograms on the wheels combined to form had something to do with gold.

As he lifted the dog-shaped lock in his hands, its tail a thick loop of steel that connected to the back of its head, he saw in short order that he was right. One of the ideograms engraved on the last of the three wheels was in fact the symbol for
gold
. Whatever the combination, then, it would include that symbol.

Which meant he was a third of the way there. Not counting the correct alignment, of course.

There were eight symbols engraved on each of the wheels, it appeared. Even though he knew one, that meant there were still sixty-four more possible combinations. And something like a hundred possible positions in which the wheels could be aligned. A brute-force attempt of every combination, then, would mean
thousands
of attempts. He'd eluded resistance this long, but even if he was able to stumble on the right combination and alignment before the airship returned, he was bound to be found out by one of the few bandits remaining at the Aerie in the interim.

So he would have to be smart.

He wished his brothers were here, who had a much better head for this sort of thing than he did. Or his old fencing partner Kenniston. This was exactly the kind of puzzle that Kenniston used to do for fun. When they weren't fencing, Huang would most often be off drinking and making time with attractive young ladies, while Kenniston amused himself with riddles and puzzles. Kenniston could never beat Huang at elephant chess, but any other game that demanded logic to solve was Kenniston's own domain. But Kenniston was off somewhere being an elite Bannerman, while Huang was trapped in a bandits' hidden camp with the smell of dung perpetually in his nostrils.

One limitation of this kind of combination lock, Huang knew, was that the word or phrase spelled out by the wheels couldn't be random. It needed to be something actually used in spoken or written language. Which meant that he could eliminate anything that was gibberish with the symbol for
gold
at the end. That seemed to eliminate at least half of the options, if not more, assuming that the combination wasn't a real word that simply wasn't in Huang's vocabulary—which certainly wasn't impossible.

Maybe there was another clue in the things he'd overheard. The bandits had talked about wanting gold. Was that of any use?

Huang almost shouted with joy when he found the symbol for
want
on the middle wheel. He remembered himself just in time, or else he'd have attracted the attention of the bandits who, injured or infirm or no, would doubtless have been able to subdue him with pistols and rifles in hand.

So the combination was most likely a phrase, having something to do with wanting gold. Something
want gold
or Something
want the gold
or Something
wanting gold
. Two down and three to go.

The only problem was, none of the eight ideograms engraved on the first wheel made any sense. None of them, combined with the two known variables, produced anything about someone wanting gold. They just produced gibberish, all but one that said . . .

His breath caught when he realized what he was seeing.

The first wheel, turned to the only ideogram that made any kind of sense, produced a phrase that was actually quite clever, in retrospect.

I don't want the gold
.

Huang couldn't help himself. He laughed. Here was a lock designed to keep someone out, and the combination was a phrase that meant that the person entering it didn't want the valuables within. Was that some kind of Zen Buddhist koan or just an ironic joke?

He had the combination, and it had taken him only . . . How long? It was hard to say for sure, but by the way his stomach was grumbling, it seemed to have been much longer than he'd realized. Hours, at least.

There was no time to waste. Huang began testing the hundred or so different alignments. Unfortunately, here brute force
was
the only option, so Huang went to work moving the wheels into a position, tugging on the dog's steel tail, and then, when the lock failed to release, carefully moving the wheels another fraction and trying again.

And again. And again. And again.

 

When the lock finally popped and the cabinet swung open on squeaking hinges, Huang wanted to shout with joy. Then, on seeing the cabinet's contents, he wanted to howl in despair. It was more a matter of fatigue than stealth that he kept silent and did neither.

There were no insulated thermal suits in the cabinet, and only one breather mask. Worse, the mask was not hung carefully on a hook, but flung carelessly onto the floor of the cabinet. And it was easy to see why. The mask was cracked, and there were visible rents in the tubing.

Only then did it occur to Huang that he'd never seen more than two dozen of the masks and suits in the cabinet, and with nearly all of the bandits suited up and on the airship on this latest raid, there wouldn't be any extras left behind. The injured and infirm had been left behind because there weren't enough masks and suits to go around, not just because of their poor health.

Huang didn't have a choice. He'd have to make do as best he could.

He began by tearing strips from the cuffs of his ragged cast-off tunic. These he tied as tightly as possible around the gaps in the tubing. Then he tore another strip, wadded it up, and stuffed it into the crack in the front of the mask. It wasn't perfect, but with any luck it might hold for a while.

Slipping the mask first over one ear and then the other, he snugged it into place over his nose and mouth and then went to work on the steel door.

 

Huang managed to get both doors opened and closed without attracting the attention of the bandits. Precisely how, he would never know, but he presumed that they were either too deep in the complex to hear the noise or had just assumed that one of the other bandits who'd stayed behind had done it. Whatever the case, Huang was through the airlock corridor and out into the hangar.

The lights were off, and the only illumination in the huge space was the small bit of sunshine that trickled down from the chimney-light skylight overhead. The hangar was twilight gray like the desert at night with only one moon in the sky. Huang could just barely make out the oil stains on the stone floor where the airship was customarily parked, and the darker shadows of the passage mouths in the dark gray walls.

Huang's stomach grumbled, and he wished for the hundredth time that he'd had the opportunity to prepare before making the escape attempt. As he'd formulated his plans these last days, he'd decided that his best chance at survival lay in securing a supply of food and water before trying to leave the Aerie. However, the unexpected departure of the airship and bandits from the mountain had forced him to accelerate his schedule and had left no time to get supplies. He'd have tried to obtain some before making this last-minute attempt, but the kitchen lay on the far side of the complex from the dining chamber, and the quarters of the injured and infirm bandits lay in between. He'd brought with him the few scraps Zhao had left in his bowl, stuffed in his pockets, but he'd munched on these while trying to work out the combination and the alignment, and had none left.