The Wondermark Gazette

“Hold your fire!” I shouted to the soldiers ringing the aero-carriage. The last thing I needed was for some errant shot to provoke the lightning from above before I and my love were safely absconded. “These ships are delivering food and medicine! Hearty beef dinners for all to-night! Steady, men! Ho!”

Who knew if they heard me through the din of a hundred steam-engines belching with throttle-power, or were too paralysed with loins-lubricating fright to squeeze the triggers of their weapons, well-trained in battle as they clearly were — but in either case, with a shudderous bump, the aero-carriage left the ground and Lara and I were aloft. Safe, I thought, though the ships still hung above us. Now, to flee this doomed land! “To London, and hastily,” I called to the pilot. “Or at least some shore far afield of Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats! Bugglesburg, Stamps-upon-Staves, Gloomswick even — you can see its pouty spires on the horizon e’en now!”

The pilot wrenched back to steal a glance through the grate separating the passenger-cage from his compartment. “Ye’re flippin’ daft if ye think this racket can make London. With this weight, we’re lucky if we can make altitude back to the Countess’ flag-ship, an’ I’ve got a salt-beet ration tonight I dinnae intend to waste!”

“At least get us out of here,” I cried, banging on the grate. As the craft strained to chew the air and spit it back out beneath itself, like all known whales of yore, I turned to Lara. “It’s not safe here,” I said. “I can explain everything. I’m saving you — you’ll see!”

She stared at me blankly, surprisingly calm for having been rushed from her water-closet into this contraption with decidedly fewer plumbing-apparatus. There was no fear in her eyes — she did not seem to recognise me as the one who’d blown up her ferry-boat. Such was good, as she may still’ve had that silver Colt on her person; but she as well did not seem to recognise me from the first time we had met, back at the Police Bureau, when I had first fallen in love with her graceful, g-g-g-ghost-loving form.

“We’re friends, you and me,” I added, just to be on the safe side. “Total friends. Good relationship, us. Charming conversations, we’ve had. You’ll remember. Really great stuff.” To cap it: “Seriously.”

I looked a wreck, I was sure. Still, her face had not faded from my mind’s eye these last months, except for the briefest of dalliances with…well, never-mind; thus it seemed natural that I still lived somewhere deep in the recesses of her memory. I realised that I still clung to her hand from having ushered her into the craft. I looked down at our clasp, and she withdrew, not shamefully but simply, as if she’d set her fingers one place and now wished to set them elsewhere. Was I slimy?

“You don’t know me at all, do you?” I asked her. I suddenly saw how this situation might be awkward.

She smiled politely. “You’re the Crown’s Regent,” she nodded, gesturing to my uniform. “At your service, milord.” Her words nearly swallowed by the thrashing of the air-screws behind us, I snatched them from the furious wind, tucking each syllable safely in a pearl-box for safety. I would draw them out later, to drink their nectar; such were their sweetness to my chapped and blistered inside-ache, and I liked them.

I could not touch her hands again; such would be untoward. Vainly, I hoped that a sudden jolt of the carriage might toss me guilt-lessly against her, and so I began to subtly exaggerate the effects of its swaying movement upon my balance. I played it as coolly as I dared, which is to say, super-cool. “We met once, before this unpleasantness,” I said. “I was at your service as a loyal citizen, when you were the Head Inspector.”

“Oh! I know him,” Lara perked.

In the dimness it took a moment to parse that she was gazing directly past my shoulder, at something behind me.

Down in the prison-yard passing now thirty feet below the carriage, I saw Viktor the ferry-guard, struggling against the efforts of several prison soldiers detaining him on my prior orders. He seethed against their grasp, held at bay only by the prodding of pointy rifle-tips; clearly he sensed the injustice being dealt him. One of my finer and more clever moves, I thought, having him arrested — before he could convince any-one that I had in fact been declared an enemy of the Crown myself.

“Yoo-hoo! Viktor! What a lovely ride we’re having,” Lara screamed down to the prison-yard as we blasted past. I flinched at the volume cascading past my ears, but it was surely lost to the racket of the engine; Viktor would never notice a word.

Yet he did. Lara’s voice pierced the distance in a register unoccupied by rival sounds. Viktor looked up, saw Lara, saw me — and that was it.

He threw off the guards in a feat of sur-human strength, dashing their skulls together like cocoa-nuts and drinking that milk for power. The rifle-tip at his back he bent into a shepherd’s-crook, and though I wouldn’t have thought it possible, a blast fired by the soldier in fear curved back through the hook-shape and nailed the man right in his own face. Snatching up that weapon before it fell, Viktor dashed its butt into the last guard’s butt, then leapt to a run in an instant, trailing the aero-carriage at speed, bellowing inaudible curses and no-doubt the most colourful of invectives at us through the darkening night. Men in his position always come up with the most creative things to say.

“Higher! Higher,” I urged the pilot, and the steam-engine strained in response, but though the craft vibrated more pleasingly with an increase in noise, altitude-response was sluggish at best and snailish at medium. Viktor was gaining on us, scrambling atop loam-barrels and the desiccated corpses of prisoners awaiting trial, reaching with his hooked rifle, swiping at the aero-carriage’s under-carriage.

“He can’t reach us,” I reassured Lara, as an ominous ka-thunk pulsed through our seats.

“Cannae take it,” the pilot shouted. “Watch yer arms — the cage-edge’ll take ‘em right off!”

With a roar that surpassed even the howl of the engine, Viktor pulled the aero-carriage from the sky and ripped the door from the passenger-cage. Nothing separated his fury from my face but a solid eighteen inches of mean-filled atmosphere.

“I anticipate your coming objection,” I said calmly, holding up one finger, “and since there is a lady present, I propose we settle this disagreement with a formal, gentleman’s duel.”

He grabbed me by the throat and wrenched me to the ground. The dirt tasted of the shuffling desperation of the men who’d trod it ceaselessly before collapsing in lonely abandonment and despair — a bit chalky.

Lara let out a bull-froggy gasp. The pilot worked a lever for the steam-valves. “Ye can stay an’ rot,” he spat, mashing the shaft to the stop — but something was stuck; he cranked a shift-rod back and forth several times. “Come on, Annie — don’t leave me here with this-all!” The engine sneered in response, its overly-complex gear-arrays twisted out of alignment by the rough landing. A lesson to the smarties who thought that all-exposed brass mechanism made for prettier engine-works.

“A duel!” I cried again. “And we can settle this! Our hands as clean as our honour. A single, quick bout of Eton-rules satisfaction.”

“I don’t know those rules,” Viktor growled.

“How handy that I happen to have them right here,” I said, sitting up and handing him the parchment envelope from my coat-pocket.

Viktor stared at the paper.

“Now we each take fifty paces, and do what it says on the paper,” I said. “Ah! No peeking. I promise the time spent reading will give you no disadvantage.”

Viktor looked over at Lara. This stratagem would be hard to explain off to her, but it was the only way I was getting out of this.

“Fifty paces,” he said. “You’ll shoot me in the back.”

“I have no gun,” I said, standing and brushing sad-dust from my uniform. “Fifty paces. Turn, and march.” I did so myself, and seeing me expose my vulnerable back-side to him, he did like-wise. A noble warrior, at least, this Viktor, if a bit thick.

As I ticked off steps I glanced up to see if the air-ships were still blotting out the sky over-head. Yes, indeed. Some battle-drum within my breast began to beat a basso count-down to disaster. Twenty steps I had taken. Thirty, now. Thirty-five.

The steam-whine of the carriage’s engine suddenly grew sharply in pitch. “There we go!” the pilot cried. “Annie, I’ll never doubt you again!”

Thirty-seven. Screw it. I turned back and ran for the carriage. Viktor still plodded away, probably at forty steps now. Forty-two. Forty-four. There was no time to lose.

Lara still stood still, watching the whole affair blankly. “We have to go!” I hissed to her, and she obligingly settled into the passenger-cage.

“Oh no you donnae!” the pilot called, reaching to pull his own cage shut behind him.

I powered into him at a full run, my whole weight behind an out-stretched fist, and the shocking blow drove him straight out the other side of the craft, tumbling stiffly onto his head, then flopping with boots skyward down fully to the furrowed earth. I glanced back at Viktor. Forty-six. Forty-eight.

I pulled every lever I could reach in the pilot-cage. The craft left the ground like a fly tired of poop.

Viktor turned and opened the envelope. I turned away just as he disappeared into a swirling gout of flashing green flame, his body atomising into powder in the first bright second, only his feet surviving to tumble away in the blast.

I wrenched the carriage-tiller as hard as I could away from the island, knocking Lara against the side of her cage, thrusting me toward a gaping opening in my own. For the briefest moment I wished that I was back there with an excuse to fall into her –

– And then the sky filled with furious hot lightning from the air-ships massed above us.

Next: A Daring Rescue

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