From the east side of its walls, looking over the alumen graveyard, the Blue Keep was very much true to its name. Every lumick line that laced along its stone heights had been turned on, and their brightness was enough to reduce the torch fires along the tops of the wall to mere points of red and yellow. The lumick light reflected off the high walls and the icy trenches and white snows below, bathing the mountains and the valley between them in an eerie blue glow.
The picture of it might’ve been beautiful, Shae thought, if it didn’t feel so small and desperate.
The feet of the alumen army resounded through the valley like a thousand ceaselessly beating drums. Shae heard it, and she was afraid. She had seen the destruction caused by a single metal man. They’d survived fighting it by luck and chance. Even now, weeks later, Kayden’s hands upon the airship’s wheel did more than just steer the ship—they held his half-broken body up.
Ragan and Tadd, standing by the bags of firepowder at the foredeck, were looking over the side at the waves of glowing eyes swarming up the valley. They’d exclaimed their astonishment at the sight again and again. So, too, had Aro, who’d twice stepped away from his parts and his tools to do the same.
Shae refused to look. She feared it would stop her heart.
Better to focus on what she could control. Keep Kayden upright. Get the ship into position.
He was bringing the airship up along the highest of the peaks, just ahead of the swarm of alumen. The slope of the mountain below was steep. The snows appeared to be thick. If they could set them loose, they could bring down an avalanche. If the avalanche was big enough, it might sweep up the alumen. If the snow was wet enough, it might kill them.
If, if, if.
“Up-plane just a little more,” Kayden instructed. “And slow us down.”
Shae moved the levers accordingly. The lumick engines thrummed. The turning rotors alongside the airship slowed them to a crawl, while the nose of the airship rose toward the peak.
The slope was close enough that the engine blades were picking up the skiffs of snow that the winds peeled off the mountain’s surface. The crystalline flakes shimmered across Shae’s vision.
The feet echoed off the mountainside. Tadd turned back toward them from his position up front. “They’re almost below us!”
Kayden nodded. They all knew the plan. If it was going to work, they needed to set the slope loose upon the mass of the army. “Be ready!” he shouted back.
Tadd nodded. He had a metal cylinder in his hand—the same kind of device that Aro used to light his pipe, that Kayden had used to light the firepowder when he’d destroyed his own airship. Tadd would use it to light the fuses of the bags they were going to drop.
The bombs.
“Any more up-plane?” Kayden asked. He was anxious to get higher on the slope. They all were.
Shae tried to pull the lever back farther. “It’s all we’ve got. Wind off the peak is pushing us down.”
“Could give it more power,” Aro said from behind them. Though he was busy putting the final touches on his reconstructed aluman, the lumicker was listening to everything happening on the ship.
“No,” Shae and Kayden both said at once. She looked at him, saw that he was beaming at the coincidence. He nodded at her to go ahead. “If we did that and the wind stopped, we’d crash into the mountainside. And with all the firepowder on board …”
“Yeah,” the lumicker said. “Don’t do that.”
“I wish we could at least distract them,” Shae said. “Slow them down?”
“Try Perle’s Eyes,” Aro said, and then he cursed as he dropped a tool and had to scramble for it along the deck.
Kayden looked over at Shae, confused.
“His big gun,” she explained.
Kayden’s face was strained with exhaustion, but for the moment, he had the ship under steady control. “Get it.”
Shae had slipped the long boltgun just inside the hatchway below. In seconds, she’d hopped down to the mid-deck, opened the door to grab it, and brought it back to the helm. Pulling the leather strap across her shoulder, she leaned over the port side of the airship—close enough that she could grab the helm the instant Kayden needed help—and looked down across the valley.
“Mother,” she whispered to the wind.
Before, when she and Marek had seen the army nearly head-on, it had looked like a blue wave. Now, seeing it from above, it looked like a river. Uncountable and uncontrollable. The walls of the keep, mighty as they were, wouldn’t stop it. The river might pile up its dead against that lumick-lit dam, but they’d eventually flow up and over it. They’d breach the keep. Marek would die. Everyone there would die. There’d be nothing else to stop them.
It was the end.
Shae steadied herself against a rope ladder that ran to the bag above them. She raised the boltgun and looked down the longer line of its barrel. She aimed it as best she could at what seemed like the front of the marching alumen. She pulled the trigger.
Perle’s Eyes coughed blue light and kicked back against her shoulder. She couldn’t tell if it hit. The alumen didn’t react. But she was glad for the padding of the furs keeping her warm.
“Quick,” Aro said from behind her. “Let me see it.”
As Shae handed the weapon over to him, the lumicker pulled from his things a brass-tubed looking glass, almost exactly like the one she’d used to spy vessels on the horizon from the deck of the Pale Dawn—only his had two rings attached to the bottom of it. He slipped the fittings over the end of the weapon’s barrel and carefully slid it down until it fit snugly near its base. “Now you’ll see what you’re aiming at,” he said. Then he showed her how to move the lever to reload it. “And now you’ll have another shot.”
He handed it back, and again she braced herself against a rope ladder. She raised the boltgun. This time, she squinted one eye to look through the glass.
She could see the alumen now. Not just a pulsing mass of them. Individuals. She centered one in the circle of glass, then tried to think how a fang shot from a blowpipe would fall over a distance. This was much farther. But the bolt moved much faster. She aimed high. Then a little higher still. She pulled the trigger.
The boltgun coughed. Something blue flashed off the shoulder of an aluman in her vision.
Not where she’d been aiming. But close. A little to the left, she thought. And not quite as high.
“First bag!” Kayden called out. “Light it!”
Shae looked up along the railing to the foredeck. Ragan was already picking up the first bag. He balanced it on the wood of the railing, carefully holding the line of fuse out. Beside him, Tadd triggered the metal cylinder he’d been holding. He set it to the fuse, cupping his hand over the dancing flame to shelter it from the wind. When the fuse began to spark, he cut the flame off the lighter, and Ragan tipped the bag overboard.
Shae watched the bomb fall, a line of light flashing red in the blue, trailing smoke. It hit the snow, sank into the powder, and went silent.
“Damnit,” Kayden muttered. “Another!”
Shae levered another round into the boltgun, then brought it back to her shoulder. She aimed, adjusted, and pulled the trigger. This time, the bolt went true. It lashed into the side of an aluman’s head, and the huge metal thing went down. Several of the alumen around it looked in their direction. “Got one!”
“Well done,” Kayden said. “Only a couple thousand more to go.”
The two men up front dropped a second bag of lit firepowder. It, too, sank into the snow without a sound. “The snow is snuffing the fuses!” Ragan called back.
Kayden grunted as he tried to stay steady on the wheel, and Shae threw the leather strap of the gun around her shoulder as she turned back to the helm. She helped him turn the wheel, then helped to hold it while he settled his weight on the handles again. He looked terrible. “You can’t even stand,” she said.
He smiled through gritted teeth. “I’ll sleep tomorrow,” he said. “Go help them send another. Try to hit a hard patch where it won’t sink.”
Shae nodded and ran to the foredeck. The two men saw her coming.
“My lady?” Ragan said.
Shae just pointed to the next bag of firepowder. “Get ready.”
The wind stung at her eyes as she leaned out over the side, staring down at the snowy slope.
There. Just ahead. There was a stretch of white that reflected the distant light of the keep with a different sheen. More like glass. It ran down to a lip of ice over a snowy chute.
“We need this one to work!” Kayden called up.
Shae looked back at him and pointed. “Steady-plane! Slight to port!”
Kayden nodded. The handles of the helm turned.
They were running out of time. They all knew it. There might only be one more chance here.
“Got one ready,” Ragan said.
Shae looked over at the burlap sack in the man’s hand. How thick would the ice be? What if the bomb wasn’t enough? What if it didn’t break the slope loose? She looked around at what they had at hand. “Any of the barrels still have firepowder?”
Tadd nodded. “One does.”
“Bring it here. We’re pitching it over first.”
The two men exchanged looks, but they didn’t argue. Tadd heaved the half-full barrel up onto the railing.
Shae took over for him, holding it balanced while she pointed. “I’m going to drop this on the ice. It should slide down and then get stuck, right there at the edge. See it?”
“Aye,” Tadd said.
“Soon as I’m dropping it, you’ll light the fuse on that. I want it coming right on top of it. Right after.”
Ragan seemed to get what she was going for. He nodded and lifted the bomb up beside her barrel. Tadd had his cylinder ready at the fuse.
“One chance,” she whispered. The wind pushed snow across the glassy slope. It made a kind of scratching sound. Perfect. “One, two—”
Tadd was lighting the fuse. She eased the barrel over.
The lit bomb followed it, fuse flashing.
The barrel hit. The ground crunched, but it didn’t give way. It was ice, and the barrel was sliding down just as she’d hoped.
The bomb hit, too, almost perfectly in line with the impact, and it was sliding after it, tumbling across the crusted snow.
“Gods,” Tadd gasped. “No.”
For a moment, Shae couldn’t see what he was talking about, but then she realized that the rolling of the bag was bringing the fuse around and onto the ground. It was still lit, though.
They’d only need seconds.
The barrel rolled up to the precipice, slowed, and stuck. The bomb slid up to it, upside down, its fuse snuffed.
Ragan made a sound like he’d been kicked in the gut. “Get another ready,” she said.
“But, Lady, we’re past the ice,” Tadd said.
“Then we’ll come around again.”
She turned back to the helm to shout directions to Kayden. He was slumped over the wheel. “Kayden!”
She ran for the helm. Aro, turning at her shout, got there first. By the time she leaped the steps to the rear deck, the lumicker had pulled Kayden down and set him on the stool beside the map table.
“I’m fine,” Kayden said.
The air on the deck was close to freezing. His forehead was slick with sweat. “Don’t think you are, lad,” Aro said.
“Just can’t stand.” He smiled weakly, then looked up at her. “Did it work?”
Shae shook her head. “I’ll try to bring the ship around. See if we can try again.”
Kayden sighed. “No time. Winds.”
He was right, now that she heard him say it. With the winds pushing down off the mountain, it would take them at least half an hour to work back into position. “We just need one,” she tried.
There was a mighty boom from the Blue Keep.
Shocked, Shae looked down and saw the smoke rising from a cannon on the mighty walls—and the corresponding debris bursting up from the frozen earth where the iron ball hit among the alumen. A few were tossed back, but the rest pressed on. The first of them were hitting the start of the lumicklines stretched across the valley floor. There were flashes of blue light as the metal men fell over the lines and more piled up over them, charging onward.
“This isn’t working,” Kayden said. He shook his head, as if he were clearing cobwebs. “Take the helm, Shae. Down-plane. Hard to port. Full power.”
Shae looked at the wheel, then back at him. “That’ll take us right to them.”
He grinned. “Rain fire, Shae. Rain fire.”