On Discord Isle (37 page)

“That was a one-in-a-million shot!” exclaimed Lina, somewhat stunned herself. “And the ’bag is made of individual cells. We’ll be fine! Probably!”

Those nearest the breach rose to their feet to obey the Mechanist. Though the gas was mostly invisible, it left a blur in the air when it passed in enough concentration. The gas billowed down at the deck in a hazy column, and the pirates scrambled to get away from it. Tricia wasn’t so lucky, and Lina’s heart sank as the woman dropped abruptly to the deck beneath the breach in the gas bag where the haze was thickest.

The sound of a thousand hammers pounding against the hull added to the chaos. Splinters flew from the gunwales as fat iron marbles skipped up over the side with lethal force. Lina watched Fat Thomlin jerk violently as he was struck, and a dozen others fell to the deck as they were hailed with spars of broken wood.

“Grapeshot?” gasped Lina. “They’re able to hit us with grapeshot?”

The airship heaved beneath her feet as it twisted back onto its course. Distantly, she spied Henry and tall, gaunt Maxim fighting with the helm. Konrad was closer, raising his thick-fingered hands at gas bag and deck. A wind kicked up, too strong and sudden to be anything natural. The heat-haze poison of the light-air gas dissipated before it, and Lina caught only the faintest whiff of the stuff. It smelled sour, like milk gone bad.

Once the airship had righted, the Mechanist marched down the deck, calling out commands in his harsh voice. A few of those crew uninjured by the attack and not crippled by wounds suffered last evening rushed to obey. In such a situation, he was in charge, and they all knew it. Her friend Andrea led the race to the equipment lockers running down the deck, breaching them to pass out gas masks and coils of rope. The Mechanist then led them up the rigging to repair the damage above.

Lina’s gaze went to those still on the deck. Gunney Lome and the others of the committee were helping where they could, but most of the emergency supplies had been used during their escape from Breachtown. She couldn’t tell how serious the grapeshot volley had been, but there would be at least two on the crew who wouldn’t rise again.

A horrible thought occurred to Lina.
Or will they?

She wheeled around on Omari. “Stop! Don’t do it!”

The other woman stared at her with frightened, angry eyes. She shrugged after a moment, helplessly.

Lina cursed and ran away, down the deck to where she’d seen Fat Thomlin and Tricia fall. Pirates screamed and yelled for help as she passed them.
What am I going to do?
I can’t just toss the bodies off the ship!
Couldn’t she? The others would never understand….

A dozen paces away, she saw she was already, horribly, too late. Fat Thomlin twitched. He raised one mangled arm, then another. Groaning, he sat up and stared at Lina with dead eyes.

“Thomlin!”

Reaver Jane appeared at Lina’s side. Belatedly, she remembered that the committee-member was close friends with the recently returned corpse; both had been on Natasha’s original crew.

Fat Thomlin the Revenant gave a guttural groan and faced Jane. Blood soaked his torso, and still dribbled from where the grapeshot ball had destroyed his right arm and torn out his throat.

The committee-member gasped in horror and drew her cutlass.

“Wait!” cried Lina. “Wait, they shouldn’t be violent.”

Reaver Jane turned a horrified, incredulous look on Lina. “They?”

Lina closed her eyes as Tricia groaned as well, and the young piratess lurched and gurgled and crawled to her knees, tongue lolling and skin blackening from light-air gas overexposure.

Omari appeared beside Lina, along with several others. The Yulan woman grabbed her by the arm and pulled her back. “What mad horror is this?” she cried, casting a meaningful look at Lina, wanting her to play along.

“Oh by the Goddess,” breathed Sarah Lome, wide-eyed.

“Revenants!” cried Nate Wiley.

“Just like back in Breachtown,” moaned Reaver Jane.

The Revenants twitched and groaned, but did little else. Thomlin tried to stand again and failed. Tricia let out a horrible wet gurgle, emptying hemorrhaged lungs onto the deck. More of the crew clustered to see the cause of the commotion, only to fall back and draw their weapons.

“We’ve got to destroy them!” called a pirate.

“How do you kill them?” asked another. “They’re already dead.”

“Cut off the head,” replied the first. “A priest once told me that works.”

“You can’t cut off his head! And why are they even coming back?”

“It’s her fault,” said Lina. Everyone looked at her. She jerked a thumb back at Omari, who glared daggers. “She’s cursed, or an aetherite, or some damned thing. Says dead things just come back around her.”

The crew exploded. Rough hands grabbed Omari.

“Why? Why would you do this?”

“And after we take you onto our ship?”

“Toss her over the side!”

“End your magics, damn you!”

“It’s not my fault!” howled Omari. “It just happens when I’m around! They’re harmless if you leave them alone! Mostly!”

Lucian Thorne stepped forward. “As if everything else going on wasn’t bad enough, now we’ve got to contend with this.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, miss, but there’s
really
no place for you aboard. We’ll give you a float, and maybe the Perinese can pick you up.”

“Wait!” growled Reaver Jane. “Aren’t we a committee? There should be a vote. And my suggestion is to just gut her here and now. Why give her anything?”

“But what do we do about the Revenants?” asked Sarah Lome.

“No one is doing a damned thing,” growled Henry Smalls.

The steward shoved his way violently into the crowd. At his back came Andrea Holt, both Allen and the older Mechanist, and the aetherites, Maxim and Konrad. Behind them stood the small knot of crew who had remained onboard during the Breachtown excursion. All held gas-mask respirators, tools, and swathes of canvas and rope.

Lina felt a moment’s panic. If they were up here, who was piloting the
Dawnhawk?
The thump of cannon fire had grown faint. She realized that they had gained a lead again on their pursuers.

Henry stared at them all in turn. The pleasant, older fellow who had always politely suffered through inconvenience was gone now, replaced by a grizzled bulldog of a man who wore the threat of violence like an old pair of boots. Lina was shocked at the change.

“I don’t like it any more than you,” replied Lucian, “but the committee—”

“To the Realms Below with your committee,” snarled Henry Smalls. “It’s been a miserable failure ever since it started. You argue and you bluster and in the end, you just throw up your hands and take whatever path is easiest, with no thought to who gets hurt. And look at you now! We’re being chased by the damned Perinese, we’re trying to keep this ship in the air, and you’re arguing about a couple of probably harmless corpses!”

He shook his head and quieted. No one said anything in response. Lucian, Sarah Lome, and Reaver Jane all stared at him, as if a loyal hound had suddenly transformed into a dragon. Even the Revenants watched the proceedings with their dead-alive eyes.

Henry pointed a finger at Omari. “You say they’re not violent?”

She shrugged. “Mostly! They tend to get agitated if there’s violence around them, or if they are kept from doing what they loved most in life. Or, uh, if they were really violent to begin with. But I’m sure they’re fine!”

The steward watched her a moment longer. Then he shook his head. “This woman stays aboard. What happens to her isn’t our call to make.”  

Lucian threw up his hands. “She’s making Revenants, Henry! We’ve got to do something about that.”

The steward glared at Lucian. “No, we don’t. In fact, we’re not changing a thing. Everything is as-is until we get to where we’re going and fix this mess.” Those behind him all muttered an affirmation.

“But where are we going?” asked Lucian. “How are we going to fix this?

“We’re going to get the captains back.”

Henry Smalls spun about and stalked back to the helm. The rest of the crowd dissipated, slinking off to tend to the damage the ship had just taken. Lina and the rest of the committee were left with the groaning Revenants.

“But what about the Revenants?” asked Lucian, shouting back at the helm while gesturing to the corpses writhing beside him.

Lina shook her head and turned away to find Omari standing before her, glaring furiously.

“Why did you do that?” she demanded. “They would have killed me!”

Lina’s emotions shifted from hard and unyielding to feeling like a bag of broken glass, but the other woman’s fury stoked her own. “Because you’re
raising the dead!
These people were my friends! I’ve gamed and laughed and drank with them. They’re the closest thing to a family I’ve got left!”

“I told you that it’s not my fault,” growled the other woman. “I don’t do this intentionally! What—”

A panicked cry from above cut her short. Lina glanced up just as a bright flash exploded out from the bottom breach in the bag, and a jet of fire shot down toward them. Omari threw herself aside with catlike reflexes, and then Lina was flying back, through no fault of her own.

She hit the deck beside Michael Hockton, who’d appeared from nowhere to knock her out of the way. Heat washed over her half-bared face, almost scalding. The air filled with the stink of Hockton’s sweat, burning hair, and light-air gas.

The ex-marine held her a moment longer. “Are you all right?” he asked.

Oh no
. Echoes reverberated through the deck below them as pirates pounded past, rushing to extinguish the flames. She looked up at the gas bag above.

The opening in the belly of the frame was a smoky hole, blackened around the edges. Just beneath it hung the corpse of another pirate, one who’d been suspended from the gas bag to stitch canvas, squarely catching the blast. The Mechanist stood directly below, yelling commands at the crew as they scurried to maintain the ship. She spied Allen disappearing around the corner of the gas bag, reaching it through the primary hatch.

“If another cell lights off, we’re all dead,” said Lina.

Michael swallowed at that and looked past her to the airship gasbag. Lina let herself be held, and watched with him. Seconds ticked down, and she held her breath.

A yell came from inside the hole, and a round, red-black object fell to the deck like a stone. It was the cannonball that had struck the
Dawnhawk
earlier, still hot, scorching the deck where it lay. Allen poked his head out of the smoking hole, peering through his gas mask at the pirates below. He held up a hand with his thumb upraised, before disappearing back inside.

The crew clapped and gave a ragged cheer. Lina sighed in deep relief and extricated herself from Hockton’s grasp. She spied Omari out of the corner of her eye, climbing wearily to her feet.

Andrea Holt stalked past with a gas mask around her neck and a bolt of canvas over one shoulder. She took five steps and stopped suddenly, whipping around to stare at Lina. No, not at Lina, at Hockton behind her.

“What?” she said. “What is
he
doing
here
?”

Michael Hockton gave a lazy smile. “Hello. I don’t think we’ve been acquainted. I’ve, ah, been hiding in the forward stairwell the last few hours. Seemed a nice, out-of-the-way place. Michael Hockton, pleased to meet you. I’d like to sign aboard, if I could—”

Andrea dropped the bolt of fabric and darted forward, lashing out with a right cross that jerked the ex-marine’s head around like a top. He fell back against the deck, and before he could recover, she was there, with both hands on the lapels of his battered blue jacket, hauling him up to the gunwales as if to throw him over.

“Scum,” growled Andrea. “Worm. Good friends of mine are dead because of you and yours. Even in just the last half an hourglass!”

Lina started. “Wait! He’s with us!”

Andrea glanced back over her shoulder. “Realms Below he is.” She bent Hockton back just as Lucian Thorne and Sarah Lome came over to see the commotion.

Lina looked to Lucian and back to her friend. “No! Really, he’s with us! He came over, left the marines, helped us get out of the counting house last night.”

“A Bluecoat?” said Lucian. He held a length of rope in his hands, while Sarah Lome held a long gaff-hook on a pole. “Ridiculous. Toss him over the side.”

 “No!” cried Hockton. “No, really! I mean it, I’m on your side now.” He hunted from face to face for an ally. “I gave you all the key to the side door. I’m done with the navy, and the Kingdom. They were going to kill me!”

“Quiet you,” said Lucian. “Over the side, Miss Holt, if you please.”

Sarah Lome stepped forward. Her face was colored with ink, stained blue from too many long hours attempting to work out the mathematics of supply. The huge gunnery mistress put out a hand to Andrea’s shoulder. “No,” she said.

Lucian raised an eyebrow. “Sarah?”

“Ship’s injured. We’ve got work to do.”

Andrea’s shoulders sagged. “You’re right.” She shook her head and released the ex-marine. Hockton slumped down the gunwales to the deck. “Henry’s right. We’re not doing anything. But if Ryan dies because some Bluecoat bastard shot him...and, and comes back as a
thing
because of her”—she jerked a thumb at Omari—”then I....” She fell silent, shaking her head again. “Just stay out of my way.”

She pushed past Lina. The rest of the committee watched her go. Hockton gave a relieved sigh. Lucian looked at him sharply.

“Don’t think you’re getting off free, just because we’re not throwing you overboard. The question now is, what do we do with you?”

“Really, sir,” said Hockton. “I promise to stay out of the way. I’ll be quiet as a mouse.”

“What you’ll be,” growled Sarah Lome, “is useful.” She hauled the man up to his feet. “Doing something that will keep you out of sight. Stitching canvas in the hold should suit.”

Lina winced. Stitching together old canvas for the frame was a miserable, thankless job that took forever. If Lome buried him down in the hold doing
that
, she’d never see him. Worse, it wasn’t that important. What he needed was a task that would keep him at least mildly protected because no one else wanted to do it.