Maggie woke to the gentle touch of Alaia’s hand upon her cheek.
“It is nearly dawn,” she said. “Gather up your things, for Spider Woman will pass her shuttle many times in your life’s pattern before I see you again.”
“She will? How do you know? But we will see you again, won’t we?” Lizzie always came wide awake, with none of the sleepy stretching and curling Maggie did.
“I feel that we will, little daughters of the air.”
Maggie smiled and stretched up her arms for a hug. “I like that. Thank you for everything.”
Alaia smelled of wood smoke and warm grass and the capsaicin they had extracted from the chiles the night before, and her lips on Maggie’s forehead were soft as she gave her a mother’s kiss. “Come. I have given your little hen enough corn for many days, and she is safe in her box. Alice is waiting.”
The sky was a clear bell of ink over their heads, cold with the promise of frost before too many days passed. But on the hems of it burned a gray light that was rapidly strengthening to a shine of pure pewter.
Maggie hefted the lightning rifle, rolled in a wool rug with a lightning pattern woven into it—Alaia possessed a sense of humor—and the weaver’s clever fingers passed a wide knotted sash around her that hugged the bundle close against her back.
“Remember, daughter. Should you need a rope, merely tug these knots. The thread is thin, but I have woven metal into it. It will not break.”
Lizzie picked up a rucksack filled with food, Maggie collected Rosie’s hatbox—the hen’s head poking out and tracking their movements with interest—and they followed Alaia outside, where Jake was waiting for them.
“’Ow we getting to the ship?”
Her bow tethered to the pinnacle of stone that was her mooring mast, the Stalwart Lass rode serenely on the updraft not twenty yards off, but in between was a drop at least as high as the top of Big Ben.
“I ’ope yer recovered from last night,” Jake said, adjusting his own rucksack of food. “We got to go down the stone stair on this side and up inside that pinnacle. See the hatchway?”
Maggie groaned, gave Alaia a final kiss, waved to her boys, who lounged against the door eating their breakfasts, and plunged down the stair.
When she emerged at the top of the pinnacle opposite, legs aching and lungs aching, Alice was waiting on the gangway, utterly heedless of the drop directly below her feet. “Careful, now. That’s it, don’t look down. And right through here. Well done, Maggie.”
The gondola of the Lass was much smaller than that of Lady Lucy. It held the wheel and the instruments, and a speaking horn protruded from one wall, but there were no control panels, and no gears to signal changes in engine speed to the stern, because the engine was right behind it. A person only need shout to give a command.
Alice closed the hatch. Jake chucked his rucksack on the floor and took up a station next to the navigation charts and the huge viewing glass as if he belonged there.
“Nine, full reverse,” Alice said, and Maggie jumped nearly a foot as behind her, a gleaming brass automaton took hold of the gear levers and began to work them.
“Seven and eight, stand by to close vents.” Two more automatons moved stiffly to obey.
“Cor,” Lizzie breathed. “That’s ’ow they flew the ship wiv only two in the crew. The rest of ’em’s them automatons.”
“What should we do, Alice?”
Alice spun the wheel, and the Stalwart Lass floated up and over the mesa, where down below, Luis and Alvaro waved their flatbread in farewell.
“It’s going to take us a few minutes to find out what pinnacle they’re holding him on,” she said. “We don’t have much light to see by, but that means they won’t see much of us, either.” She straightened the ship’s course, and through the viewing glass—pocked with bullet holes—Maggie could see the city dead ahead, lights beginning to come on in some of its windows.
“I want you girls to go with Four and Six here, and station yourselves in the bombing bays, one in each fuselage. I can give you some orders through the speaking horn, but it’ll be up to you to keep them from shooting at us.”
“Aye, Cap’n.”
Alice grinned. “I suppose I am, aren’t I? I kinda like the sound of it.” She handed each of them a big burlap sack that clinked in a most ominous way. “Off with you, now. We’ll be overhead in a few minutes and I don’t want to give them a lot of warning. Leave Rosie there, on that hatch. And don’t forget to use the safety lines up top.”
The racket that old engine was making, Maggie didn’t see much hope of approaching undiscovered. But she and Lizzie had a job to do, and if she’d learned anything since Snouts had allowed them into the gang, it was that each person had their part. If you didn’t do your part, it put everyone else in danger.
And this raid was touch and go to start with.
She and Lizzie emerged from the top hatch and when the automaton called Four began the climb up the ladder into the starboard fuselage—this one seemed to be an earlier model, and its legs were articulated backward, like those under their walking coop—she clipped a waving safety line to her belt and handed one to Lizzie. The wind whipped at their braided hair and sawed through their dresses. “Good shooting,” Lizzie shouted, and Maggie nodded the same back. Then she followed Four—who had not bothered with a safety line—up the ladder and into the bombing bay.
It held no bombs, which was something of a disappointment. But Four braced himself—itself?—against a strut and Maggie looked down past the rack where bombs might have been, down … down into whistling, empty air.
The ground floated past seven hundred feet below her boots, covered in the square reddish-brown buildings all laid out in neat, dusty rows, like cakes in an abandoned bakery-shop window.
And then they drifted over the first pinnacle cell.
Maggie gasped and clapped a hand to her mouth, rearing back from the bay and fetching up next to Four, who might as well have been a metal strut himself for all the response he made. The coffee she had bolted down just before they’d lifted rose in her throat, and she swallowed hard.
A skeleton, dry and bleached and horribly human, lay on the flat top of the pinnacle, the bones of one arm extending out and the little bones of its fingers hanging off the edge, as if the poor sod had tried to wave someone down in his last moments.
Maggie gulped cold air. She must not faint. She must not throw up. She must do her part.
“All right up there?” came Alice’s voice through the horn.
“Aye,” Maggie managed. A squawk in the depths of the horn, she assumed, had come from Lizzie.
“Say a prayer for the poor devil. It helps.”
Doing her part would help more. It would be downright satisfying, in fact. Maggie ordered her stomach to behave, and took up her position next to Four.
When the next pinnacle passed under her boots, she nearly averted her gaze, and then realized the man was still alive. He lay face down, one hand beating the rock in a steady rhythm. The light had strengthened now so that she could see color—the dark red pool of drying blood beneath that pounding hand.
Oh dear. Courage, she heard the Lady say in her memory. Courage and good cheer, Maggie.
Well, she could not manage the one, but she could certainly try for the other. “Courage,” she said in bracing tones to Four.
He did not respond.
Right, then. She was on her own.
The clattering drone of the Lass’s steam engine changed pitch, and Maggie knew beyond doubt that Alice had seen Mr. Malvern’s pinnacle.
“Look sharp, ladies,” came her voice. “We’ve been spotted. Seems like they were expecting some kind of rescue—though maybe not from this angle.”
Maggie doubted they expected anything like them at all—how could there be another airship flown by a girl who’d probably not even seen twenty summers, a boy who’d come back from the dead, a pair of nearly eleven-year-olds, half a dozen automatons, and a hen in a hatbox?
Below, a shot rang out, and she flinched, expecting the bullet to tear through the fuselage and strike her where she stood. But it did not hit the ship at all. Instead, Alice’s laugh came rat-a-tat through the horn.
“They’re gonna have to break out something more serious than a sixgun with a three-hundred-yard range if they want to scare us.”
“I dunno, it worked up ’ere,” Maggie muttered.
Never mind. Concentrate. Do your part.
And then she sucked in a breath of air that chilled her lungs, but the sight was so grand that she hardly felt it.
Mr. Malvern!
He clung to the top of what was surely the smallest pinnacle of them all. If the other poor blokes had had enough flat space to spread themselves out, then they had it good. Mr. Malvern had only enough to sit on with his feet drawn up. It was cruel—inhuman. A man could not sleep, nor stretch, nor do anything but sit or stand—and once unconsciousness finally claimed him, nothing would keep him from slipping off the side and falling to his death.
“This is ’ow you keep yer word, eh, Mr. Gold Birds?” she snarled. “Guarantee ’is safety, will you?” The only thing she’d guarantee was that the Lady would blast him to bits if she ever saw him again.
“Girls!” came Alice’s voice, urgently. “We got company to port—look sharp, Lizzie!”
Down below, an enormous engine with as many arms as a spider or an octopus lumbered into view at the base of the pinnacle. Maggie recognized it at once—Jake had hidden behind it not eight hours before. In the open chamber at the top of it stood at least eight men—one to operate each arm—every one with his eyes trained upward.
An arm ratcheted back and Maggie’s eyes widened as she realized what was in the bucket at the end of it. In the next moment, the arm gave a great heave and flung a boulder as big as Alaia’s house straight at them.
It struck the pinnacle fifty feet below where Mr. Malvern clung, and Maggie heard him cry out as the spire of stone shuddered and cracked.
Below, men began to scream.
A flash in the air—the tinkle of glass far below—more screams.
Three of the engine’s arms fell idle, whatever their purpose had been abandoned as their operators shrieked under the assault of the gaseous capsaicin, and attempted to scramble free.
“Well done, Lizzie!” she shouted, though she had no idea if her twin could hear her.
“My stars, that’s a nasty trick,” came Alice’s voice. “I guess that makes us vicious rabble—or a criminal gang, maybe. Look sharp, girls, it’s got five arms left. Jake, stand by to lower the basket.”
This time Maggie did not wait for an arm to reveal its weaponry. She threw down the glass globe full of its crippling liquid, and the aim that had not failed her with stone and brick did not fail her now. An arm with a giant grappling hook—one from which an entire cargo car might have hung on a mighty chain—halted in midair, touching the pinnacle as softly as a woman touching a child’s cheek.
The gondola obscured Maggie’s view of the Lass’s basket, but from the encouraging sound of Mr. Malvern’s shouting, he was able to see what they were about.
Boom!
Maggie staggered. “We’re hit!” she shrieked to Four, who still did not reply.
“No, we’re not. Steady on, girls. Seems they’ve got a few Canton chemists roped into this. That was an exploding rocket. Maggie, watch it—one more of those and we’ll be landing on this pinnacle ourselves.”
The Canton chemists looked like dolls from this height, but even so Maggie could see the chains looped from one to another.
“I’m sorry!” she shouted to the poor devils before she lofted another globe, and winced when, moments later, it shattered all over the cannon they were using to launch them. Men spilled over like ninepins, writhing. She shouted another apology as if they could actually hear her, and threw another one as a second crew ran into to replace the first.
The great engine, dragging four of its arms, backed up.
“They’re giving up!” she yelled.
“Maggie! Fire!”
“But they’re—”
And then she saw what they meant to do. The engine growled and seemed to gather itself—and then it picked up a train car with two of its arms.
It had cracked the spire of basalt the first time. One more strike and it would shatter, raining rock down upon the poor suffering Cantons chained to that cannon, and burying Mr. Malvern in the wreckage.
“Lizzie!” she shrieked. “One—two—three!”
She flung the last globe and saw another fly from the opposite bay. Winking in the sun, they fell, and shattered dead in the center of the chamber where four of the men cranked the levers and gears with mad precision.
Gaseous capsaicin formed a green cloud of agony, and Maggie shouted, “I’m out! If ’e’s not in the basket now ’e’s a goner!”
Not five seconds later, Alice hollered, “Winch, Jake, fast as you can! Seven, Eight—up ship!”
Someone had roused the poor Cantons, who were now tracking their course with the mouth of their cannon tilted skyward. Sandbags rained down among them and they dove for cover.
The Stalwart Lass fell straight up into the sunrise … and freedom.