The Aeronaut's Windlass (59 page)

Naun made a rumbling sound in his throat. Then he turned to Rowl and said, “Our kits are our future. What would you have me do?”

“
Teach
them,” Rowl growled, letting his voice carry to the hall. “Will you bow to the will of humans? Will you show them how to meow and purr for human charity next? To catch their mice and leave them as gifts? To besot themselves on human plants, human drink?” Rowl lashed his tail and bounded up onto the clan chief’s furniture, all the way to the level just below Naun. “Naun, chief of the Nine-Claws. I would have you
show
them what it means to be
free.
To be
cat
.”

Rowl turned to the room before hisses of outrage could rise. “I have climbed the ropes to the den of the silkweavers.” He lifted the claws of one front paw. “I have slain their brood by the score, and my humans have slain them by the hundred. They are
dead
. Their matriarch lies
dead
and rotting in a human tavern. Their mature hunters lie crouched around the approaches to a human camp in
your own tunnels
. In territory that these
interlopers
have taken from
you all
.” He whirled back to Naun. “Now is your time, Nine-Claws. They have no forces left to fall upon your kits. Now is our chance to strike them down. Give me every warrior in your clan. Let me remind them what it is to be
cat
. To deal with anything that would harm your kits with
tooth
and
claw
!”

A chorus of excited yowls and low battle cries went up with that, enough to draw Naun’s gaze from Rowl to scan the chamber.

Naun’s eyes came back to Rowl and his voice dropped to a low, low growl, one for Rowl’s ears alone. “Is what you say true?”

“By my paws and ears, by my whiskers and tail, it is true, O Naun,” Rowl said.

“He lies!” Neen screeched. “He seeks to use us! To shed our tribe’s blood to protect his humans in their war! To leave our kits vulnerable and defenseless!”

Rowl spun his head toward Neen, his vision suddenly sharpened with rage, his mouth suddenly watering with a need to taste blood.

“Presently,” Rowl said, “I shall grow weary of your mewling.”

“I say this creature is a fool!” Neen cried. “I say that his mouth is full of lies! I say that he cannot see or hear or hunt! That this useless creature knows nothing!”

The words rang out into sudden silence, as well they might—for Neen had uttered the deadliest insult one cat could utter to another.

“Useless,” Rowl purred, very quietly.

Silence quivered, tense and waiting.

“You give me your word,” Naun growled finally, his eyes closing almost entirely. “You, a stranger. My kit tells me that you are filled with lies. How am I to know which of you is right?”

“With your permission, Clan Chief,” Rowl said, a growl throbbing in his words, “I shall
show
you.”

Neen let out a hiss, his fur rising, his claws sliding from his paws. Neen was large—larger than Rowl. His fur shone with health, and his claws were long and sharp. He stood upon his home territory, surrounded by those loyal to him, and, having not done battle multiple times in the past several hours, he was fresh.

Rowl would have no chance of surviving battle with the prince of the Nine-Claws, not with all the warriors and hunters present who would support him—but if the clan chief permitted it, he might be able to beat
Neen
, standing alone.

Naun stared hard at Rowl for a long moment, as if waiting for any quiver of movement.

Rowl faced him, completely still, showing every ounce of respect he could muster.

“Yes,” Naun said then.

Rowl, prince of the Silent Paws of Habble Morning, let out the throaty music of his war cry and flung himself at Neen, claws extended, with Littlemouse’s fate hanging in the balance.

Chapter 49

Spire Albion, Habble Landing Shipyards, AMS
Predator

G
wendolyn opened her eyes and regretted it almost at once.

She had never drunk wine or other spirits to excess, though she had seen the effects it had produced in any number of House Lancaster’s armsmen after various holiday celebrations. She had always found their winces and green faces somewhat amusing.

She suspected she would have more sympathy for them in the future.

The light did not merely hurt her eyes—it stabbed it with rotted, rusty old swords. Her heartbeat sent pulses of pain through her skull and down her neck as if on wires, and for the life of her, it was everything she could do not to simply roll to one side and commence evacuating the contents of her stomach.

Wait a moment.
Had
she become drunk? The last thing she remembered was the mad old etherealist singing sadistically unfortunate lyrics to a truly disgusting aeronaut’s song, and then . . .

And then . . . an enormous surface creature? Though surely that was an artifact of the feverish barrage of nightmares she’d endured for she knew not how long. Perhaps this
was
simply a hangover. If so, she had some apology notes to write to Esterbrook and his men.

She found herself letting out a groan and
that
hurt as well, on top of everything else, as if sudden fingers of fire had dug into her ribs and her back. She put a hand to the pain, and found that it met with something a little rough and tight. She had to open her eyes to see what. Bandages. Beneath a rather thin shift, her torso had been wound with bandages until they were almost uncomfortably tight.

She had been injured, then. While drinking? God in Heaven, please no. Benedict would never let her hear the end of it.

She lifted a hand to her aching head and found
more
bandages there, for goodness’ sake. Her head pounded in steady time. A head injury? Ah, then. Perhaps she hadn’t humiliated herself after all. Perhaps she’d simply had her wits scrambled by a blow of some kind.

That settled, she turned her eyes to the room she was in. Wood. All wood, walls, floor, and ceiling. One wall was slightly curved. She was most likely aboard an airship, then, which would make the wall a bulkhead, and the floor a deck, and the ceiling a . . . Well. She wasn’t sure what ceilings were called on airships. Ceilings, she supposed.

There was another occupant in the room, a man she didn’t know, from his dress one of the sailors aboard
Predator
. He was armed with sword and gauntlet, but he was currently sitting in his chair and snoring heavily. There were bags under his eyes. The poor man looked utterly exhausted, and one of his legs was dressed with a bandage. One of the men wounded in the first Auroran attack, perhaps? Poor fellow. He was doubtless there to guard her and make sure she didn’t get out of bed without speaking to some sort of physician, who wasn’t there anyway, so there seemed to be no real sense in waking him. And besides, she was barely clothed.

Gwen sat up slowly. Her head spun wildly for a moment, and then settled down again. There was a pitcher and a mug on a nearby table that proved to be water. She drank three mugs down, hardly stopping to breathe, and in a few moments felt nearly human.

Gwen found her clothing lying in a heap nearby. It was stained with . . . Goodness, what
was
that horrible purplish color? And they smelled absolutely hideous. She winced with distaste, put them down except for her gauntlet, and began to rummage quietly through the compartment’s cabinets, until she located a modest collection of men’s clothing in a trunk. She donned the shirt and the pants, found that they hung off of her like a small tent, and spent the next few moments rolling up the sleeves and legs. Then she donned her gauntlet and felt somewhat better when the cool presence of its weapons crystal rested against her palm.

She looked down at herself when finished, and felt certain that Mother would be entirely scandalized by her appearance. It would do.

Gwen left the cabin quietly to find her cousin. Benedict would mock her outfit, too, but he’d know what was going on. She opened the door and stepped into mist-shrouded, late-afternoon daylight. Afternoon? How long had she been asleep? Her last memories trailed off around eight o’clock the previous evening, and she found that gaping blank space in her mind unnerving.

Even eerier, the deck of
Predator
was utterly empty.

“Hello?” Gwen called.

There was no answer.

She frowned and began pacing the length of the ship. No one in the masts. No one in the galley or the kitchen. No one in any of the passenger cabins, and the door to the captain’s cabin was locked.

Gwen rubbed wearily at her eyes, and it was just then that she heard a man’s voice bawling vile curses, muffled by the planks of the deck. Gwen moved over to the hatch leading belowdecks, and the curses grew clearer and louder. She followed them, and in short order found herself in the engineering room, the beating heart of
Predator
, where the air hummed with the steady drone of an active power core crystal.

For a second she thought that the room’s floor was littered with corpses, but after a moment she saw that it was covered with exhausted men who had simply stretched out on the floor and gone to sleep. Several were snoring, though that sound was being drowned out by the invective of the one man still on his feet.

He was stocky and bald, and sported an enormous, bristling mustache. His coveralls were stained with sweat and grease, and though he wasn’t particularly tall, his hands looked strong enough to crush crystals in his fingers. He was crouched in front of the adjustable hemisphere of curled copper bars known as a Haslett cage, and he was working ferociously on an awkwardly placed bolt that secured one of the bars in place. The angle was bad for the wrench, but his stumplike forearms couldn’t slip through the bars of the cage very easily, and he was having trouble wrangling the tool into position.

Gwen stepped over a sleeping man and said, “Excuse me, sir.”

“What?” snarled the bald man, without looking up from his task.

“I’m looking for Sir Benedict Sorellin. I was wondering if you’d seen him?”

The man grunted. “He in here?”

Gwen looked around the room at the sleeping men. “Ah. Definitely not.”

“Same answer,” the man growled. The wrench slipped as he began to apply pressure, and he wound up gouging his hand on the frame. “Curse you for a whore!” he shouted. “Bloody strumpet! You’ll be the death of me!”

Gwen blinked several times. “
Excuse
me, sir? What did you say to me?”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” the man bellowed, going red all the way across his bald pate. “I was talking to the bloody
ship
!” He shot a look over his shoulder and froze there, his mouth open for a moment. Then he scowled, turned back to the Haslett cage, and began trying to squeeze his arm inside to grab the wrench he’d dropped. “Fantastic. Like I don’t have enough to do already. Now I have to deal with aristo-brats, too. Captain hates me. That’s what it is. ‘You can’t go fight, Journeyman. You have to stay on the ship and fix her up enough for me to ruin, Journeyman.’ God in Heaven, the man hates me.”

Ah, the ship’s chief etheric engineer, Journeyman. She’d heard his name mentioned when the ship was docking. Well, chief engineer or no, Gwen felt as if she should have been pinning the man’s ears back—but her head hurt horribly. She really didn’t feel like smashing it against any more metaphorical walls. Or literal ones. “Sir, I’ll be glad to leave you to work. If you could please direct me to the captain, I’ll get out of your hair.”

The man’s eyes whipped around to her, narrowing. “My what?”

“Lair,” Gwen said quickly. “I said I’d get out of your lair.”

The man scowled again and went back to reaching for the wrench. “Captain’s gone. Doc’s gone. Every deckhand still on his feet is gone. It’s just my crew and these hired slackers left, and Tarky, but Tarky’s barely able to hobble along. Guess that means your Benedict is gone, too.”

“Gone where?”

“Motherless whore-spawned mistsharking tunnel rat!” Journeyman snarled, jerking his hand free.