The Aeronaut's Windlass (22 page)

Esterbrook ducked his head once. “I’m grateful to you, Captain. I have wounded of my own. Where are you headed next?”

“I intend to patrol the perimeter of the atrium and—”

With no warning whatsoever, a ginger tomcat sailed over the garden wall and sprinted toward them. Kettle let out a brief sound of surprise, his hand darting toward his sword on reflex. The cat hurtled up to Esterbrook and slid to a halt with a long, chewy-sounding burble of throaty sound.

Esterbrook blinked down at the cat and held up a hand. “Wait, wait, slow down.”

The cat seemed to bound back and forth in place, stiff legged, as if he could barely keep himself from breaking into another sprint. The stream of agitated feline sound continued.

“The beastie’s gone mad, sir?” Kettle asked.

“Not mad, I think,” Grimm said. “Mister Esterbrook, can you understand him?”

“I only speak a bit,” Esterbrook said. “‘He’s . . . there,’ ‘danger.’ ‘Help.’ Those I understood.” He shook his head. “What danger? Who needs help?”

“Wait,” Kettle said. “I know they’re clever beasts, but . . . you mean the things actually
talk
?”

The cat turned two frantic circles and then darted over to the corpse of a fallen Auroran Marine in his stolen uniform. He stopped to make sure they were all looking at it and then deliberately swiped at the dead man’s chest, hissing.

“More of them?” Esterbrook asked. “Like that one?”

The cat made another sound that Grimm could have sworn was an exasperated affirmative.

“Merciful Builders,” Kettle breathed. “Is the man serious?”

“My bosun on
Perilous
kept a cat aboard,” Grimm said. “The little monster was not to be underestimated.” He looked up at Esterbrook. “Is this creature known to you?”

“Yes,” Esterbrook said at once. “He is. His name is Rowl.”

“Then it would appear I know where I’m going next,” Grimm said calmly.

Rowl whirled to look directly at Grimm, wide eyes intense. Then he let out another mrowling sound and darted back toward the wall of the garden. He leapt to the top and paused to look back over his shoulder.

“Mister Creedy!” Grimm called. “We’re moving out!”

“Aye, sir!” Creedy said. “Where are we headed, Captain?”

Rowl leapt down and darted into the dimness, pausing thirty yards later to look back.

Grimm started moving, Kettle at his side. “At the quick march, Mister Creedy. Follow that cat.”

Chapter 16

Spire Albion, Habble Morning, Ventilation Tunnels

B
ridget had never really given much thought to what it might be like to be held prisoner with her captor’s hand quite literally threatening to choke the life out of her, but she felt quite sure that she would never have imagined that the experience would primarily be tedious.

At first she had been racked with confusion and fear, but in the standoff that came after she had been taken, she felt increasingly humiliated, insulted. What kind of fool was she to let herself be taken prisoner and used against her own Spire by its enemies? And right in front of Benedict?

The Auroran warriorborn Marine Ciriaco held her back firmly against his chest, with one arm wrapped around her stomach and the other hand lightly holding her throat. Initially she had thought that she might be able to take him off guard and throw him, but at the slightest shift in her weight, Ciriaco’s hand would close and shut off her air entirely.

After several minutes of tense silence, Bridget turned her head enough to see part of Ciriaco’s face. “Just so you know,” she said, “you’re holding me uncomfortably. My back is going to start cramping. When it does, I’m not going to be able to hold still.”

“I’m sure you’ll be missed,” the Auroran replied calmly, giving a little twitch of the fingers around her throat by way of demonstration.

Benedict, his eyes locked on the Auroran, let out a low and utterly inhuman-sounding growl.

“Careful, boy,” Ciriaco drawled. “If you let it out right now, it’s not going to end well for any of us.”

“I’m quite serious,” Bridget said. “Sir, if my back starts to cramp and I begin to spasm and you kill me for it, my friend will most certainly come for you and matters will devolve.”

From where she still lay on the floor, aiming her gauntlet at the explosives, Gwen said, “One might even say ‘explosively devolve.’”

The Auroran grinned at that. “Damnation, but I admire women with spirit. But it’s been my experience that prisoners who do anything at all are prisoners who are trying either to escape or to kill me. So you don’t get an inch.”

“There’s another option you haven’t considered,” Bridget said.

“And what is that?”

“Take me. Leave your explosives here and depart.”

“Nonsense,” Gwen said.

“Miss Lancaster,” Bridget said in a very cross and rather loud tone, “would you
please
stop helping me. Your only solution necessitates, as its linchpin, the deaths of everyone standing in this tunnel. Why not let me take a pass at finding something a bit less sweeping?”

Ciriaco let out an almost musical chuckle Bridget could feel along her spine. “I’m listening. Why would I do such a thing?”

“Because it salvages as much as possible from the situation,” Bridget said.

“I need those explosives.”

“You don’t get them,” Bridget said in a frank tone. “In very nearly every scenario that might play out here, you do not retain the explosives. If our reinforcements arrive, you do not get them. If your people arrive and someone doesn’t make a perfect shot before my associate knows it is happening, you do not get them. If no one shows up, you do not get them. If my back cramps up and the chain of events progresses as we expect, you do not get them.”

The Auroran made a rumbling sound.

“But consider: If you retreat and take me with you, you have the means to prevent my friends from opening fire—the threat to my life. Nor will you be pursued—if you leave the explosives, they will have little choice but to remain with them to prevent you from using them for their intended purpose.”

“If not the explosives, then what profit do I have from this proposal?”

“You get to survive the hour,” Bridget said. “Your men survive. You get to escape into the tunnels and fight another day.”

Ciriaco grunted his acceptance of the statement. “And what do you get?”

“You don’t get to blow up whatever you’d planned to blow up,” she replied. “And both of my friends survive the hour.”

He growled. “And what do
you
get, miss?”

“Raped and murdered, likely,” she said. “But as that decision will hardly be up to me, there seems no point in dwelling on it. I’m a bit new to this sort of thing, Sergeant, but it seems to me that standing around hoping for some soldier who might or might not come along to be perfectly stealthy and to make a perfect shot at the correct target on his first attempt seems to be a course of action with a very low probability of success—especially when any failure or incorrect decision on his part means that everyone dies in an explosion. By contrast, my proposal guarantees your immediate survival and gives you hope to survive the future, to possibly negotiate better terms for a surrender, or even to escape Albion altogether.”

One of the other soldiers evidently spoke Albion, because he looked from Bridget to Ciriaco and said something in a tense voice. The warriorborn Marine snapped out a brief, savage-sounding answer.

“By all means, discuss it,” Bridget said. “The more we talk, the more likely we’ll find some sane way to end this.” And, Bridget thought, it would give Rowl more time to find another solution. She only hoped he had better sense than to stage some sort of one-cat surprise assault. “Sergeant, surely you must see that—”

Ciriaco’s fingers tightened again, shutting off her air, and he said in a mildly irritated voice, “You people can’t get enough of the sound of your own voices, can you? I’m thinking.”

“She doesn’t say it well,” Benedict said in a low, hard voice. “But she’s right. Whatever your mission was, you’ve little chance of accomplishing it as planned now. And the longer you stay here, the more likely it is that something bad happens to all of us.”

“Something tells me,” the Auroran said, “that you aren’t going to just stand there while I walk away with the girl.”

“That will depend,” Benedict said.

“On what?”

“What happens to her,” he said. “Treat her with respect and release her unharmed, and we’re all just soldiers.”

“And if I don’t?”

Benedict was quiet for a moment before he said, “It’s personal.”

Bridget, who had not been able to breathe during this exchange, slapped the fingers of one arm against Ciriaco’s steely forearms, as if tapping out of one of Benedict’s holds in training.

“Hmm?” Ciriaco said. Then, “Ah, yes.” His fingers loosened, and Bridget sucked in a lungful of air. The motion shifted her weight by some minuscule degree.

And, so quietly that she almost thought she’d imagined it for a moment, Ciriaco made a sound of pain.

Bridget froze, considering that. That was right; the Auroran had taken a gauntlet blast to the shoulder. She could still smell the stench of charred cloth and what might have been burnt flesh. The wound had been significant enough that he had feared to challenge Benedict to battle. In fact, now that she considered it, the hold Ciriaco had on her was hardly an efficient one. A few weeks of training did not make her an expert, but she knew that he could have been holding her locked quite easily with his right arm, freeing his gauntlet hand. Instead, his left arm was wrapped around her midsection—and not particularly tightly.

Why not? Obviously because he
could
not. He might not be able to lift his arm at all. That would explain why he wouldn’t allow her to shift her position. His left arm might be a good deal less strong than he would like her to believe—and she was tall enough that if she altered her posture, the fingers on her throat would not have as sure a grip. Granted, the fingers of his right hand held her windpipe like a vise, and were perfectly sufficient to the task of killing her—or to dissuade her from testing the strength of his left arm.

There might be a way for her to escape, she realized. But it all depended upon the Auroran’s resolve. How willing was he to kill her?

“Albion,” Ciriaco said. “Do not for one second think that I’m afraid of your taking things personally.”

“If you’re not afraid, let go of the girl,” Benedict said.

“I’m fearless,” Ciriaco replied in a dry tone, “not stupid. And as smart as it would be to accept her offer, it isn’t going to happen.”

Bridget turned her head toward him again. “Why ever not?”

“Because I am a loyal son of Aurora,” Ciriaco said. “And I have a duty. I’ll fulfill it or die trying.” After a moment he said in a softer tone, “And, miss, however this turns out—if we’d taken you, I’d have gutted any man who tried to lay a hand on you. If it had to be death, I’d have given it to you clean and quick.”

“To be clear, you are not a rapist,” Bridget said, “but you are a murderer.”

“You seem to have it surrounded, miss,” he said.

He sounded entirely sincere—which made any attempt to exploit his weakened arm something best left to a moment of desperation. Though her back began to twinge again, and she feared that moment was rapidly drawing nigh.

The two groups fell into a tight, withering silence for a moment more. And then the rather eerie voice of a cat echoed through the dim hallway.

“Littlemouse,” Rowl said. “Help comes.”

Ciriaco tensed at once at the sound, looking up and down the hallway as though seeking its source, but even the remarkable eyes of the warriorborn were not able to see into blackness from a small and relatively well-lit area.

“This may be your last opportunity, Sergeant,” Bridget said. “Walk away.”

Ciriaco made a growling sound in his chest. “Cats are a vicious little plague, but they don’t frighten me either, miss.”

Several of the other Aurorans spoke in their home Spire’s tongue, a quick, terse exchange, which was ended when Ciriaco growled the same phrase he’d used a moment before. Then his eyes widened and he snapped out another order. The Aurorans looked at one another, but lowered their gauntlets and started backing out the way they’d come.