Jane Carver of Waar (15 page)

I watched as the bulky airship lumbered into a turn, pulling one of its sails in and letting the other fill with wind. What a way to travel. Not exactly the SST, but I bet the view was terrific.

About an hour later we rode out of the woods at the crest of a hill. I stopped to take in the scenery.

A wide plain stretched away from us for about two miles until it hit a high cliff. At the base of the cliff was an honest-to-god city. It wasn’t big by LA standards. Hell, it wasn’t even big by Albuquerque standards, but it was definitely a city. Towers and domes and spiky steeples stuck up over the walls and smoke rose into the air from a thousand chimneys.

I followed the smoke up with my eyes. The sky was filled with airships going every which way. I wished I had a camera.

Lhan pulled up beside me. “Kalnah, city of the sky.” He started pointing out things like a tour guide. “To the south, by the river Kal, is—”

I laughed. “River? Back home that trickle wouldn’t qualify as a creek.”

Lhan coughed. “By the
river
Kal, is the Navy’s shipfield and stockade.”

He pointed where the airships were thickest: an open field next to a stone fort between the river and Kalnah proper. Docked airships floated above it like a fleet of Porky Pig balloons from the Macy’s parade.

Lhan pointed straight ahead. “On the cliff over the city...” He looked over at me, sly. “You have no objection to the designation ‘cliff?’ Perhaps this would only qualify as a stepping stone back home?”

“No no, that’s a cliff alright, wise-ass. Go on.”

“You are most gracious. On the cliff over the city is Kedac-Zir’s ancestral castle, which also serves as quarters for his high-ranking officers.”

I had to squint to see the castle. I hadn’t even noticed it before. With the sun behind it, it looked like part of the cliff. It was black and blocky, and the walls seemed to spread out wide along the edge like the wings of a vulture, hovering over the city.

“Cheerful place.”

Lhan laughed. “Like its master.”

Sai groaned. First sound he’d made all morning.

***

The streets of Kalnah were all hustle and bustle and a stink like an open sewer. Crowds of sky-sailors—they called them Kir-Dhans, which basically meant airmen—were everywhere: soldiers too, army and marines, in uniform versions of Sai and Lhan’s fighting harnesses, unit insignia and symbols of rank on their breastplates and shoulder guards. There were shipyards and sail makers and rope makers, and a huge, heavily guarded enclosure with walls so high I couldn’t see in. Something inside was roaring like a turbine.

I turned to Lhan and raised my voice. “What’s in there?”

Lhan shouted back. “That is the temple of flight, where the priests make the levitating air.”

“Priests, huh? Not engineers?”

“I know not the word.”

We passed through streets full of bars and food stalls and shops and houses and apartment buildings, some as high as eight stories tall, all using the hexagon floor plan, and painted like candy wrappers—reds, oranges, yellows, purples.

This was where the reality of Waar really started to sink in. I mean, I knew it was all real before. I’d been cut, bruised, gone hungry and eaten like a queen, but this is where I started to feel it.

Before it had all been like some fairy tale—a really violent fairy tale: all castles and princesses and four-armed ogres. Now I was around people who were just making a living. Women slapping clothes on the lip of a fountain in a courtyard laundry, guys carrying big loads around on their backs, boot makers, brick makers, butchers, millers, fruit-and-vegetable sellers, street kids, merchants with snooty wives, a dentist fixing a tooth using something that looked like a railroad spike. Beggars, acrobats, pickpockets, hookers, and guys who, with a change of clothes and a Harley between their legs, could have joined the Angels no questions asked.

I liked it. I got it. I understood these people. The guys were just guys. The chicks were just chicks. They wouldn’t die for some sucker’s idea of honor if you told them heaven was an eternal blowjob. They might die for love, or friendship or even their country, but they wouldn’t throw their lives away because it was more honorable to be dead.

Sorry. I guess Sai was pissing me off a little at that point. I bet he could have ditched his title, got the girl and lived down here on Sailcloth Street and nobody here would have given him a second glance. But with his upbringing that would probably have been harder for him than dying. Oh well, fuck it.

About ten blocks in, Sai snapped out of his funk and looked around. “Lhan, where do you take us?”

Lhan motioned ahead. “Kalnah was my home for two years while I served in the Navy. I roomed with relatives of my mother’s: the Dhan Dal-Var and his family.”

Sai cringed. “Please, Lhan. I would not stay where I would be recognized. Could we not instead find an inn?”

Lhan looked shocked. “You would ask an Aldhanshai to stay at an inn?”

“No, of course not. If I succeed, I will gladly accept your relative’s hospitality for Wen-Jhai and myself, but since I have no hope of succeeding, I would not suffer the pity of good-hearted people who know that I go to die.”

Lhan waved a hand, impatient. “Sai, enough. If you continue to speak like this you will defeat yourself long before Kedac-Zir ever has his chance.”

“I only speak the truth.”

Lhan turned his krae with a shrug. He was pretending not to care, but I could tell he wasn’t happy. “Then away to the Nightflower ward with us, where beds are cheap and discretion is an industry.”

Lhan led us into a neighborhood of dirty streets and shabby buildings. Slutty chicks laid their boobs out on windowsills like grocers showing off grapefruits. Shady guys talked in groups on the corners, watching us as we passed. I’d been in plenty of places like this, the Tenderloin, the Bowery, the Combat Zone. Every city on Earth has one. It looked like Waar was no different.

We stopped in a square surrounded by sketchy-looking inns and filthy food shops. Lhan dismounted. “Wait here. I shall inquire after a room.”

Sai looked around in horror. “How do you know of such places, Lhan?”

Lhan grinned. “I was a Kir-Dhan when I lived here, Sai. Not a priest.”

He crossed to the nearest inn. I wondered if he’d picked this area as some kind of revenge against Sai for being such a goober.

Sai looked up over the crumbling adobe skyline at Kedac-Zir’s castle, which you could see from just about any point in the city. He swallowed, nervous. He was looking more gray than purple. Now, after dragging us all the way here with his, “I must, ’tis the only honorable course,” he was staring his destiny in the face and not liking it much.

“You alright there, Sai?”

He shook his head. “No, Mistress. I fear I am not.” He didn’t look at me. He couldn’t take his eyes off the castle.

Lhan came back. “We have a room, and I have discovered that we arrive not a moment too soon. Out host informs me of gossip that Kedac leaves with Wen-Jhai for Ormolu tomorrow at dawn. You have only tonight to challenge him.”

Sai paled. He turned suddenly to Lhan. “What... what if she’s content, Lhan? Kedac is Kir-Dhanan of all Ora, the commander of a thousand air-ships. What would she want with a mere Dhanan’s son? I don’t want to ruin her happiness.” He was practically begging Lhan to agree with him.

Lhan fiddled with his krae’s harness, embarrassed. “A charitable thought, Dhan Sai. Perhaps you should ask her.”

Sai caught the sarcasm and flushed a deep maroon, but even Lhan’s disgust couldn’t cure him of his cold feet. He played it off like Lhan had meant it. “Yes, yes! I must do exactly that. I must reach Wen-Jhai somehow and ask her the way of her heart. We must find a way into the keep.”

Lhan jerked his mount toward the tavern. “Come. The stables are this way.”

Sai was practically melting from shame, but he didn’t call Lhan back. I felt as uncomfortable as a kid when mom and dad are fighting.

***

Things were a little strained in our room. It wasn’t exactly a big room in the first place: a ten-by-ten box with two beds and a table, and with all the tension and hostility Sai and Lhan were throwing off, it felt like a matchbox. At least it beat the roost, which is where most people stayed. That was a big open room with cots all over like in a flop house, and a stink like the bunkroom of a biker’s clubhouse after a week-long beer bash.

Sai kept trying to catch Lhan’s eye, but Lhan just polished his sword and wouldn’t look up.

Sai wailed. “But, Lhan, how horrible if I win Wen-Jhai only to find she preferred Kedac all along.”

“Do you know her as little as that?”

“But I must be sure, must I not?”

Lhan’s sword flexed he was rubbing it so hard. “Unless you go through the main gate with an honorable challenge, you go alone.”

Sai sagged like he’d been punched in the chest. “If that is what you must do, I understand. I know how this appears. But... but could you not at least help me to prepare? You have been in Kedac’s keep before. Is there some way to gain entrance without detection?”

Lhan’s voice hardened like concrete. “Unless you go through the main gate with an honorable challenge, you go alone. I will wait here in case you repent of this folly.”

Sai looked at Lhan for a long second, then sniffed. He stood, jaw out. “Come mistress Jae-En. If Dhan Lhan-Lar chooses to forget the many times in his youth that his steadfast companion Sai-Far followed him into folly, we do not need him. We are not helpless. We will reconnoiter the castle ourselves, despite the dangers.”

He was obviously hoping to shame Lhan into coming along, but Lhan wasn’t rising to the bait. He just glared at the sword in his lap as Sai walked out the door.

I rolled my eyes. What a pair of boneheads. They were like passive aggressive newlyweds having their first tiff. Disgusting.

I went after Sai. Not that I felt much like going. I didn’t feel much better about this trip than Lhan did, but my future was sort of tied up with Sai’s, so I felt obliged.

The crazy part was that what Sai was planning was as suicidal as facing Kedac one on one. I guess the difference was that, although he knew raiding the castle was dangerous, he wasn’t absolutely positive it would kill him. He was absolutely positive Kedac would kill him.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

VIOLATED!

I
t was sundown when Sai and me left the seedy inn and headed across the city to case the approaches to the castle. We got plenty of good looks at it along the way. The red sunset lit the place up like a picture postcard, a postcard that said “wish you were somewhere else.”

What I had thought were long, low walls that morning when the the sun had been behind the castle turned out to be hundreds of dark brown tents that seemed to surround the castle on three sides. The side facing us butted against the sheer cliff. The place was wrapped up tighter than Fort Knox.

Sai sagged. “We shall never penetrate all that.”

I agreed with him, but I wasn’t going to say it. I knew if I pushed him he’d get all stubborn and try it just because I said it couldn’t be done. If I wanted him to give up, I’d have to play along and let him figure out for himself how impossible it was. “Maybe there’s another way. Come on, lets go see what the front door looks like first.”

***

The front door looked like the gates of hell. The road up to the castle was a shallow zigzag carved into the face of the cliff just to the south of town. The only access to the road was through the navy base at the bottom of the cliff. Not exactly promising.

We peeked at the gates from behind the hull of a boat—a plain old float-on-the-water boat—turned upside down in a shipyard by the river Kal. The navy base was on the far side of the river, across a stone bridge. The walls of the base were thirty feet high, ten feet thick, and crawling with archers.

A squad of marines stood outside the gate checking a line of carriages and pedestrians waiting to get through. The line was an odd mix. There were fancy coaches with uniformed drivers that got waved through right away, but there were also lots of people in funny costumes. As we watched, a bunch of short, muscly guys in matching tights were being let in. They looked like the Oran National Gymnastics Team. Right behind them was a gaggle of cooch dancers in g-string loincloths and pasties.

I didn’t pay them much mind. I was too busy trying to see around them through the gate. As the gymnastic team went in I got a look. It was grim. Right inside, four burly marines were patrolling with vicious, six-legged monsters that looked a cross between a bear and a panther: low and slinky, with powerful muscles and glossy, purple black fur.

“What are those?”

Sai shuddered. “Ki-tens. From the jungles of the south.”

I snapped my head around. “Kittens? Are you shitting me? If those are kittens I’d hate to see your cats.”

Sai pursed his lips. He wasn’t in the mood. “You say it incorrectly. Ki-tens. The most ferocious animals on Waar.”

“Go figure.”

I looked above the walls to the cliff. The approach didn’t get any easier once you got to the zig-zag road. There were stone guard towers, chock full of bowmen, set every fifty feet along it, with a gate house at every switchback.

I could hear Sai swallow. “It does look formidable, does it not?”

I nodded. “And I ain’t got a clue how we get through that once we get up there.”

“Could we perhaps—climb the cliff and go over the wall?”

I broke out in a sweat. I probably could, damn it. “Uh, well, I might be able to get up the cliff, but look at the wall. It’s as smooth as glass.”

Sai’s face dropped. “Yes, I see that.”

Now was my chance. If I pulled this off I could get him to forget the whole thing right here.

I sighed, playing it big. “I’m sorry, Sai. I’m all outta ideas. Since we’re here, maybe you should just go announce yourself and face Kedac the way you meant to from the beginning.”

Of course I didn’t expect Sai to agree with that. What I hoped was that mentioning Kedac would push him over the edge and send him scurrying back to the inn with his tail between his legs. And I think it might have too, except that just then we got handed our ticket in on a silver platter.