Over the sound of the incessant drone of chanting came another noise: the clang and rattle of metal. Thaddeus turned to see that down on the stone ramp below them, another cage was being readied for use. There came another shout: angry, indignant. A ripple of movement was passing through the rows of swaying cult members — someone was being dragged, kicking and fighting, to the cage. That someone had short dark hair and was dressed all in black. Thaddeus stared hard.
The new prisoner fought hard, but whoever it was seemed to be hampered by an injured leg. In the end, the cult was too strong — four grabbed an arm and a leg each and carried the struggling figure the rest of the way to the cage and threw it inside. The cage was immediately winched into the air, jerking the prisoner around inside with each pull as it gradually rose to meet the others.
“’Ere,” said J, “is that Rémy? ’As she got ’erself caught ’an all?”
Thaddeus had been wondering the same thing, but as the prisoner drew nearer he saw that though the incarcerated may be a Brunel, it definitely wasn’t Rémy.
The cage slid into place beside the rest of them. For sure, Thaddeus thought, it could have been Rémy. It was most certainly her twin. The man swinging beside them would have been her mirror image if not for the square stubbled jaw and the faint scars crisscrossing his weather-beaten face. He was bleeding from a shallow cut on his dirt-smeared cheek and his trousers were ripped, showing a nastier gash in his thigh. Breathing hard, the prisoner got gingerly to his feet and looked at them each in turn. Then he shook his head and busied himself by tearing a strip of cloth from his ruined trousers and using it to bind his wound.
“An old man, two children, and a sunburned, threadbare vagabond,” he said with a bark of unimpressed laughter. “I should have known.”
“Who are you?” Thaddeus asked.
The man finished tying his bandage and put his hands on his hips. “Can’t you tell, Thaddeus Rec?”
“You must be Rémy’s brother,” Thaddeus replied, “but beyond that you have the advantage over me, Mr… . ?”
The man stared back at him with eyes that were disturbingly similar to Rémy’s. “Kai,” he said. “My name is Kai.”
“Where is she?”
Kai glanced around with narrowed eyes, taking in the room. “On her way here, I would think.”
“As a prisoner? Or free?”
Kai’s eyes met his again. “That’s to be determined. For our sakes we’d better hope that both she and Upala are still the latter.”
“Upala?” It was Desai who asked the question this time.
Kai flicked his glance toward Desai with a serious look on his face. “Upala. She’s a gem, that one. If they’re both still free, then we may have a chance.”
“Wot about the airship?” J piped up. “Is she bringing that, too? I ’ave a feelin’ we ain’t getting’ out of ’ere without it.”
Kai looked at him seriously. “You’re J,” he said. “She told me you built it. Was she lying?”
J puffed his chest out, scowling. “No, she ain’t lying. I got it to work.”
Rémy’s twin smiled. “I’m impressed.” Then his smile faded. “I’m also sorry to report that the airship is no more. We were brought down by fools with flaming arrows. The very last of it is probably still burning out there now.”
J’s face turned pale and his shoulders slumped. “Burned?”
“Aye. We came in like a sack of rice hurled from a cargo ship. We’re lucky any of us survived the crash at all.”
“But — but you all did?” Thaddeus asked, fear curling like smoke around his heart. “Rémy wasn’t hurt?”
Kai looked at him thoughtfully. “Actually, now you come to mention it … I didn’t see Rémy leap from the ship. But surely you know by now that she has more lives than a cat?” He grinned. “She and I, we both do. She’ll have made it.”
Thaddeus rubbed a hand over his face, trying to swallow his distress. He felt Kai’s curious eyes on him, but Thaddeus didn’t meet his gaze again. A moment later, Kai turned his attention to Desai.
“So you are the one who filled their ears with children’s stories, are you?”
Desai raised an eyebrow at the implied accusation and then lifted one arm and swept it out to indicate the rows of swaying cult members below them. “Children’s story or not, I would say my prediction of trouble was accurate, wouldn’t you, Mr. Kai?”
Kai followed his gesture and narrowed his eyes again. “It’s just Kai,” he said. “I’m no English gentleman and I won’t be treated as such.” He thrust his chin at the men and women below. “That armor. It’s not just armor, is it? There’s something … strange about it.”
Thaddeus had to agree. “I think it’s grafted to their bodies,” he said, pushing his worries about Rémy to one side. “Look at where the rivets have been placed at their joints. I don’t think they can take it off.”
“What’s the good o’ that, then?” J asked. “Won’t their skin just be all manky underneath, like? Why wouldn’t they want to take it off?”
Thaddeus didn’t have an answer for that, except … “We saw something similar in France. And in England, come to think of it. Mechanical soldiers.”
“But these ain’t mechanical,” J reasoned. “They’s people. Ain’t they?”
“Maybe they are at the moment.” Thaddeus looked up at Desai with a frown. “But maybe they won’t be for long.”
Desai’s face was serious as he nodded thoughtfully. “There is alchemy that can turn men to stone,” he said, “but as for turning them into metal …”
“Why turn men into metal,” Kai asked, still looking out at the mass of people below, “when you can simply cover them in it?”
“Metal men have no thoughts of their own,” Thaddeus pointed out. “They’ll do whatever they’re ordered to, however terrible the order. They are automatons.”
Kai looked down at the chanting army below with a shrug. “You think those men and women down there won’t obey any command they are given?” he said scornfully. “Whatever minds of their own they once had are long gone. They are already automatons, Thaddeus Rec. And I bet real people are a damned sight cheaper to find than metal men.”
“Then whose command are they taking?” Thaddeus wondered. “They look like worshippers, not like soldiers. Desai, I’ve been thinking. If you’re still telling me this is all for the raja and his mystic … I don’t think I believe it. Not now I’ve seen them.”
Desai smiled at him thinly. “Ever the detective, Thaddeus Rec. I confess, I was thinking the same thing.”
“Well, what then?” Dita’s voice made them all look toward her. She was pale, her face fearful. “What is happening here? And what are they,” she nodded in the direction of the people below, “going to do with us?”
The rest of them had no answer for that. No good one, anyway. Below them, the dull droning of the chant went on and on. It felt like a drug, flooding Thaddeus’s mind until he couldn’t even think clearly.
“Well, there’s no sense waiting around to find out,” Kai said, his voice cutting through the fog of noise around them. “We’ve got to find a way out of here.”
As they watched, he climbed quickly and easily to the top of his cage. Thaddeus was reminded of Rémy again — Kai was almost as graceful in his movements as his sister. He shook the hatch at the top of the cage, but to no avail — it was locked fast.
“Anyone got something I can pick this lock with?” Kai called down to them. “I suppose that would be too much to hope for, wouldn’t it?”
“Pity Rémy ain’t ’ere,” J observed. “She’s always got that sort of fing on ’er.”
Kai smirked. “And there she was trying to tell me that she was a reformed character …”
The end of his sentence rang into silence.
The chanting had stopped. Just like that, as if someone had snapped their fingers or flipped a switch, the noise ended. Every one of the hundreds of people below them fell silent in one single breath.
The change sent a prickle up Thaddeus’s spine. The new quiet was so absolute that he could hear his heart thumping in his chest. Slowly he turned and looked down. No one moved. No one said a thing. The cult of the Sapphire Cutlass had lifted their chins and now stared up at the four prisoners in complete and utter silence, their wild eyes wide and unblinking as if they were nothing more than posed dolls on a child’s shelf.
A drumbeat began to sound. It reverberated around the cavern in a rumble like thunder. Low at first — slow at first — it grew louder and faster with each stroke.
Thump thump thump thump
Thump-thump-thump-thump
Thump-thump-thump-thump
Thumpthump-thumpthump-thumpthump
Thumpthump-thumpthump-thumpthump …
Their cages began to move. They rattled along the track set into the cave roof above them, inching toward the raised stone stage set with the throne that Thaddeus had spied earlier.
“Oi!” J yelled. “Now what?”
Thaddeus looked up at the track above them, illuminated in a way it had not been before the torches were lit. It wasn’t leading to the stage, he realized. It stopped short before that. It ended above the darkened pit sunk in the cavern floor, but he still wasn’t close enough to see what it held, though whatever it was moved restlessly in the dim light.
“Desai,” he shouted to the front of the line of cages. “What is that? What’s down there?”
Desai didn’t have a chance to answer. A piercing scream shattered the air, loud enough to drown out the drums.
It was Dita. In the cage beside Desai, she was almost as close to the pit as he was. She pointed at what was below them.
Thaddeus peered down as his own cage finally reached the lip of the pit.
Snakes.
The pit was full of thousands of writhing, squirming snakes.
Dita had stopped screaming and slumped to the bottom of her cage, her knuckles white where they gripped the bars.
“Don’t you worry,” J shouted to her, his voice almost lost beneath the sound of the drums, “Dita, we’ll get out of here before — before anyfin’ ’appens wi’ those snakes. You hear me? Dita? We’re all right fer now, ain’t we? They can’t get us up ’ere. Can they, eh?”
The little girl didn’t answer — perhaps she hadn’t heard. She was still staring down into the pit as her cage came to a stop above it with the others sliding into place beside her.
“This is getting worse by the minute,” said Kai. “We have to do something.”
“Like what?” Thaddeus asked.
Kai looked around. Then he threw himself to the other side of his cage. It swung wildly on its chain, bumping into the one in which Thaddeus was trapped.
“Hey, watch it!”
Kai took no notice. He scrambled to the other side of the cage just as it was swinging back into place, forcing it into further motion. This time it avoided bashing into Thaddeus’s prison, arching into a wider swing. Thaddeus saw Kai grin as he leapt to the other side of the cage again. The cage swung even more.
“What are you doing?” Thaddeus asked.
“What do you think? Use your brain, copper! Why else would they put us over this pit unless they intend to drop us right into it? If you ask me, we’ve got until those infernal drums stop their racket.”
“So? What is dashing about like a lunatic going to achieve?”
Kai didn’t look at him, still moving swiftly from one side of his cage to the other, rocking it wildly. “We can’t stop them from dropping us. The only thing we can do is try to change where we’re going to land.”
Thaddeus watched as Kai’s prison swung again. The chain rattled harshly, pulled as taut as it would go as the cage hovered, just for a moment, over solid ground rather than over the pit. If the chain had snapped then, the cage would have crashed to the floor of the cavern rather than down into the writhing mess of snakes.
“He’s right!” Thaddeus exclaimed. “Everyone — do what Kai’s doing. Do it now!”