Quillblade (6 page)

‘Border sighted!' The lookout's voice came vibrating down the speech tube several hours later. It was the same woman Lenis had heard before. Lenis sighed with relief. Aeris had been flying almost all day and would need to rest for the night. He hadn't relished the idea of landing the
Hiryû
in the Wastelands.

The woman on the other end of the speech tube suddenly swore. ‘Airship sighted flying the red dragon banner!'

‘Prepare to be boarded.'

Missy felt her chest constrict at Andrea's words.

The Shôgo airship had come up alongside them and was now flying just over their starboard balloon. There was going to be a fight. Not an airship-to-airship battle, but a person-to-person, blood-spilling, life-threatening fight, right here on the
Hiryû
's deck.

She watched as all but Shin, who remained at the tiller, made their way out onto the deck, their weapons at the ready. The captain, first officer and Yami each had a sword. Kenji had a pistol with him, though Missy couldn't imagine how he had managed to smuggle one out of Pure Land. They were relics built using lost technology, and so few of them actually worked that you needed a special permit from the Ruling Council just to own one. They
never
let them out of the country in case some foreign power worked out how to replicate them.

From the other side of the airship, the cook came up on deck, still wearing his apron. He had a big smile on his face and was swinging an ugly-looking sickle and chain.

Behind the cook, Long Liu emerged carrying a large, battered bag over one shoulder. Missy had been trying to avoid the Tien Tese doctor ever since she had first seen him. He wore what could only be called a threadbare sack and loose-fitting trousers. Missy wasn't sure if the tangle of twigs and beads on his head was supposed to be decoration or if he simply never washed his hair. His teeth – the ones that remained – were yellowing and cracked and his skin was sallow. His most unsettling features, however, were his eyes, which lacked any colour and darted around spasmodically when they weren't staring at a point just in front of his nose. How had this strange man from the western empire become the
Hiryû
's doctor?

Ropes were thrown from the Shôgo's airship and a dozen warriors wearing black and red uniforms came swinging down, wielding a variety of weapons. Without realising it, Missy had pulled the Quillblade out of her robe and was clutching it in her right hand. She moved onto the deck with the others.

Somehow she managed to remain upright while she faced the oncoming warriors, despite the shaking of her knees. The quivering rose up and flowed through her, down into the hand that held the Quillblade. The weapon trembled in her grip. No, it wasn't trembling, it was
pulsating.
The Quillblade
hardened and her fear vanished. Somehow, she didn't know how, the
shintai
of the Thunder Bird had absorbed it and the weapon had come alive because of it. It was
feeding
off her fear, just like Tenjin had said it would. Missy smiled. She wielded the power of Lord Raikô and nothing was going to stop her! She took one step forward, ready to join the fight with the others, and felt something on her shoulder. She turned to find herself looking directly into her brother's eyes.

‘What are you doing?' Lenis pointed at the Quillblade in her hand. ‘What is that? Where did you get it?'

Missy looked back at him, unsure, but the doubt soon left her. The corners of her brother's mouth dropped further. The Quillblade was tingling pleasantly in her grasp. A metallic gleam ran across its surface.

‘I just have to –'

‘What? Join them?'

He turned her back around to face the battle. Captain Shishi, Arthur and Yami had already engaged the first rank of the Warlord's warriors. Time seemed to slow as Missy watched Arthur's heavy blade tear through a man's torso with a dreadful cruelty. The captain was much quicker, but the swift flicks of his blade drew more blood, disarming and wounding but leaving his adversaries alive.

Yami's foes simply fell where they stood. His blade was of a dark metal and seemed to deflect enemy weapons, but when it met flesh it passed through without leaving a mark, as if the weapon was somehow insubstantial, and the damage
it caused was all beneath the skin. Though Yami's adversaries never shed a drop of blood, they fell to his phantom blade as readily as if it had actually cut them down.

The fight on the flanks was even worse for its savagery. To the captain's left, Hiroshi swung his dreadful implement, hacking at the limbs of his foes. The half-crazed doctor juggled a series of small crystal balls he pulled out of the bag on his shoulder. Each was filled with a different smoke, gas, or liquid. They shattered as Long Liu hurled them at his foes, and the effect of each was unique. The purple smoke from one blinded an assailant, while the bright green liquid of another clung to the clothes of the next and burnt through to the skin. The smell of the tortured tissue brought a foul taste to the back of Missy's throat. The doctor danced as he tossed his crystal balls and sang in his native Tien Tese tongue. The tune was simple, but the words were gibberish.

Missy shuddered and dropped the Quillblade. It hit the deck with a metallic clang and the fear came back. Her brother's grip on her shoulder was like an anchor, keeping her there, watching. Just in front of them, Andrea fought a semi-circle of attackers with nothing but her knives, the fighting too close for her crossbow.

‘It's terrible, isn't it?' Lenis asked her.

She nodded mutely, turning to look into his sad, bluegreen eyes again.

‘Go, Ignis,' Lenis said.

It was then that Missy realised what, or rather who, Lenis was holding in the crook of his other arm. Ignis. Bestia of fire. She watched, wide-eyed, as the Bestia leapt out of his grasp and scampered across the deck.

‘Lenis!' She tore away from his hold at last and rounded on him. ‘How could you –'

‘Watch.' He pointed after Ignis and Missy stared. She had no desire to see scorched flesh, to know that her brother had made it happen, but she could not refuse his quiet command.

Ignis wasn't interested in the fighting. He ran to the
Hiryû
's railing and up one of the ropes connecting the two airships, followed by a small tendril of flame that clung greedily to the rope.

‘Stop!' Lenis shouted, and for some reason they did. Even Long Liu had halted his dancing mid-step and now stood frozen like some ridiculous statue. As one, the warriors looked from Lenis to the thin trail of fire connecting both airships. ‘Leave! Or I'll burn your airship to the ground!'

Missy looked into Lenis's eyes and saw something in them she hadn't seen since they'd been sold to the Warlord of Shinzô. She caught a glimmer of the old Lenis, the one who had played pranks on their owners and the slavers back home in Pure Land. The one she had seen slowly fade on the journey to Shinzô. Had his horror at the violence around them shocked him into remembering who he had been back then?

‘I mean it!' Lenis went on. ‘Get back on your airship and land it. Empty your balloons and don't try to follow us.' Still, no one moved. ‘Do it!'

Above them, Ignis ran along the railing of the Shôgo airship and another of the ropes connecting the two vessels caught fire. A moment later it fell away from the Shôgo airship and curled down to land in a smoking heap on the
Hiryû
's deck. The Shôgo warriors backed away from their opponents and shuffled closer to their diminishing escape route.

‘Move!'
Lenis cried, and Ignis burnt another rope.

This seemed to be enough to convince the Shôgo warriors. Abandoning all pretence of protecting their retreat, they rushed to the remaining ropes and climbed back to their airship.

Ignis remained crouched on their railing, sending small wisps of flame towards anyone who approached him. A few moments later the airship began to pull away and Ignis jumped down onto the
Hiryû
's starboard balloon and ran across the mast-shaft to Lenis's shoulder.

Arthur wiped the blood from his sword. ‘We had better leave in case they try to follow us.' He looked over at the Shôgo's airship.

The captain cleaned his own sword and sheathed it in one smooth movement. ‘Certainly. Mister Hiroshi and Miss Namei, please clean the decks. Master Clemens, please return to the engine room and get us moving.'

Lenis slowly let out a breath and made to follow his captain's command. He was shaking as he moved below decks. Absently, he took Ignis off his shoulder and began patting him. The Bestia wriggled in Lenis's arms and kept trying to lick his face, thrilled at the attention and the excitement of it all. Lenis's mind was elsewhere. Why had he and his sister been caught up in this madness? Stealing an airship from a foreign Warlord? How could he do the
right
thing when he didn't even know who was in the right and who was in the wrong? Worse, what would the captain do to him now that he had seen what Lenis was capable of? He had acted on impulse, without thought for the consequences of his actions, and had done the one thing a slave must never do. People with authority feared slaves with power. Lenis knew this. He'd pulled plenty of stunts that had gotten them sold on before, but nothing that would make his owners think he was
dangerous.
Who would the captain sell them to now that Lenis had flaunted his power in front of him? Anyone in Shinzô who bought the Clemens twins would probably hand them back to the Warlord, either to gain his favour or for a price, and then ...

Lenis arrived at the engine room. The sight of the engines reminded him that Aeris had been powering the airship all day. That was one of the most serious flaws in airship design. There was no way to switch over the Bestia powering the engines without first shutting the engines down, and they couldn't do that while they were flying, which meant most of their travel relied on Aeris's stamina. Under normal circumstances
that wouldn't be a problem, as airdocks were usually built within a day's flight of one another, but they were hardly flying under normal circumstances.

Lenis stopped thinking about himself. He didn't like to push Aeris this hard, and by now, she would already be nearing exhaustion. He wondered how long it would take them to reach Gesshoku airdock.

‘I'm sorry, my lady,' he whispered into the engine block, where the Bestia quivered from fatigue. ‘What wisdom forbids, necessity dictates. Just a little while longer, I promise.'

The lie felt worse than anything else he had done that day.

The
Hiryû
flew into the night. They had been boarded in the early evening, and the captain pushed them on, eager to put as much distance between the stolen airship and the Warlord's forces as possible. Lucis lit their way, running through a series of pipes interwoven throughout the airship's hull. She trailed radiance in her wake and generated enough light for Andrea to guide them from the crow's nest. It would make them easy to spot but was necessary to ensure they didn't run into any mountaintops. They were flying through a range of them now, making their way to Gesshoku.

Missy was exhausted from hours spent scanning the airways around them for any sign of pursuit. So far there had been none, which only served to heighten her unease. The tension and constant mental effort had given her a headache
and, on top of that, she was hungry and worried about her brother. The look in his eyes as he had sent Ignis up to the Shôgo airship was familiar. Lenis had pulled some wild stunts back in Pure Land – a lot of enslaved Bestia Keepers did. It showed they could work well with their Bestia and usually drove up their selling price, but there was a limit. A common prank was beating a competing vessel to a great berth by pretending to be an airdock communications officer and sending misleading message-images, or flying faster than the legal limit to shave hours off a delivery schedule. Buyers wanted their Bestia Keepers to show skill and a bit of spirit. They did not want to see dangerous and powerful slaves, ones who could or would fight back. Slaves who could turn a Bestia's power against their owners. Lenis had done just that.