The Conjuring Man, page 13
Adam nodded, staring down at the desert below. He could see a dark mass in the distance, plumes of smoke rising into the sky ... he blinked in astonishment as he realised it was Farrakhan itself, the giant city seemingly tiny even though he knew it sprawled for miles beyond the walls. A faint line on the ground below, leading from the city to Heart’s Ease, puzzled him until he worked out that it was the railway, damaged but hopefully not beyond repair. The craftsmen had insisted, from what he’d heard, that the desert wasn’t ideal for railways and the rails needed to be replaced regularly, if only to avoid accidents. He told himself they’d be inspected and replaced as soon as the fighting was over and the kingdom was at peace again, with the university safe from all harm.
“I can’t see the army,” Taffy said. “Where is it?”
“Down there,” Yvonne said, indicating a dust cloud moving near the railway. “The cavalry, at least. The infantry is somewhere behind them. They’ll catch up soon enough.”
“Yeah,” Adam said. “We’ll be there first, won’t we?”
He stared forward with a twinge of discomfort. They were ploughing through the air and yet, the city didn’t seem to be getting any larger. Gusts of wind brushed against the gas bag and gondola, sending shivers running through the hull ... it was easy to believe, suddenly, that the wind was trying to blow them back into the desert. The king had sorcerers, didn’t he? Weather control spells were rare, almost impossible without a team of trained ritualists, and yet ... could the enemy be trying to literally blow them out of the sky? Or was it just ... normal? He didn’t know. Voidsdaughter was the first craft to fly under its own power. They had so much to learn ...
Lilith joined him as the city slowly – very slowly – grew in front of them. It was a towering mass of buildings, surrounded by giant walls that seemed strikingly pointless given how many homes and apartments were outside the walls. Farrakhan had expanded rapidly, he recalled, in the years since Lady Emily had liberated Heart’s Eye. The city had been the gateway to the university town and the brave new world it portended, the world the king intended to destroy before it could take shape and form. He didn’t blame the citizens for being angry at their monarch, or for rising up against him. And yet, without rivers to protect them – and walls that only protected the innermost heart of the city – how could they hope to survive long enough to win?
We’ll help them, he told himself. If they won the coming fight, they could raise new soldiers and continue the offensive. If they lost ... he refused to think about it. The enemy might take one look at the airship and raise the white flag. And if they don’t surrender, we can hammer them into dust from far beyond their range.
“If the reports are accurate, the king’s loyalists have concentrated themselves in the castle,” Yvonne commented. She’d passed the helm to Praxis and come forward, pressing a telescope against her eye as the city came into view. “It would have been good thinking on their part, a decade ago. Now ...”
“The rebels may not have artillery,” Blademaster said. “It’s easy to smuggle muskets and rifles into a city, but harder to move cannons and barrels of gunpowder.”
Adam looked up. “They can’t produce them for themselves?”
“The original guns were seen as little more than toys, and gunpowder as suitable for fireworks and nothing else,” Blademaster explained. “The monarchs didn’t see the point of banning them. That changed, and they passed laws making it illegal to produce or own weapons. There might be some blacksmiths down there producing cannons, but probably not very many of them. The king’s spies are everywhere.”
Yvonne snorted. “Anyone would think they thought their people might rebel.”
“Quite,” Blademaster agreed. “And so that castle is relatively immune to attack until the cannons arrive.”
“Or us,” Yvonne said. She turned and looked at Praxis. “Steer us over the castle.”
Praxis saluted. “Yes, Captain.”
Adam turned and watched as the airship slowly glided over the city. The streets below looked chaotic – he spotted people running as the airship’s shadow passed over them – and a handful of buildings were either on fire or little more than burnt-out shells. A couple of fires were burning out of control, but the remainder looked surprisingly concentrated ... he guessed, as they kept moving, that the townspeople were taking advantage of the chaos to settle some old grudges. It had happened in Beneficence, when Vesperian’s Folly had collapsed under its own weight and law and order had – briefly – broken down. He shook his head, remembering both the chaos and the aftermath. No one had shed any tears for the loan sharks, who’d had their books burnt and families driven from their homes, but it had made it harder for the poor to get loans afterwards. They might have come under ruinous conditions – there was no doubt about it – yet they’d been the only hope many of the poor had had.
“Bombardiers, to your stations,” Yvonne ordered, as the castle grew larger. “Drop on my command.”
Adam took the telescope and peered down at the castle. The walls were lined with armed men, staring at the airship as if they couldn’t believe their eyes. They probably couldn’t. They might have heard of the airship, and they might even have believed it could actually fly, but to see it gliding towards them ... he wondered, idly, how many of the men below had wanted to flee before realising it was impossible. The streets around the castle might have been cleared – the dead bodies bore mute testament to the murderous fire from the battlements – but the rebels were waiting in the untouched streets beyond, ready to tear any sally party to pieces. There was no escape. There was nowhere to go.
Serve the bastards right, he thought. The men below him had signed up to oppress their former peers. They deserved death or worse. It was one thing to sign up to defend the university, another to fight to crush freedom for a king who wouldn’t give a damn if you died in his service. They could have run instead of trying to fight.
“Bombs away,” Yvonne said. “I say again, bombs away.”
The airship jerked as three bombs fell from the racks and dropped towards the ground. Adam hastily moved around the gondola, Lilith and Taffy following him, to watch as the bombs landed around the castle walls and exploded. The airship shook again, the entire hull quivering as fireballs rose into the air. Yvonne cursed like a sailor. The bombs had overshot their targets and come down too far from the walls to do any real damage.
“Bring us about,” Yvonne ordered. “And drop us down.”
“Aye, Captain,” Praxis said.
“Sorcerer,” a crewman snapped. “I can see him!”
Adam followed his pointing finger. A black-clad figure was standing on the battlements, waving his hands frantically as he cast a spell. Adam froze as a fireball darted from the sorcerer’s fingertips and rose towards the airship, only to splatter into nothingness well short of its target. Adam breathed a sigh of relief as the sorcerer tried again and again, hurling fireball after fireball with a reckless disregard for his reserves or his personal safety. It was enough power to do real damage to a solid wall, but none of the fireballs reached their target before evaporating into nothingness. The sorcerer was wasting his time.
“Amateur,” Lilith commented. “He’s not even trying to adapt his spells to keep them alive for a few seconds longer.”
Yvonne snapped orders. “Gunners, take aim and fire on my command,” she said. “I want those walls swept clean of life.”
She paused. “Fire!”
The airship rocked again as the riflemen opened fire. Adam saw the sorcerer stumble back – he wasn’t sure if the man had actually been hit – and fall off the wall, plummeting into the castle. The rest of the defenders scattered, some trying to get under cover or off the walls before it was too late. He smirked, even though the battle wasn’t over. The airship was effectively immune to anything the defenders could throw at it ...
“Bombardiers, drop on my command,” Yvonne ordered. “Bombs away!”
The airship jerked again. This time, the bombs landed within the walls themselves. Adam sucked in his breath, realising the walls had turned the castle into a death trap. The explosions were caught within the stone, the firestorms ravaging the open hallways and chambers and burning anyone unlucky enough to be caught within the blast. He saw a flaming figure running to the edge of the walls and falling, plunging to his death; he saw others rappelling from the outer battlements, trying to get out of the castle and lose themselves in the side streets before it was too late. The castle walls shuddered as a third set of bombs crashed down, the stone disintegrating under the impact. Adam grinned, savagely. The rebels could just walk in now, even if most of the defenders were still alive. He doubted it. The castle might have been designed to stand up to catapults and human wave assaults, but no one had expected to be attacked from above.
There may be stories of dragons attacking human settlements, he reminded himself. He’d certainly heard quite a few stories that veered between absurd to filthy, from Lady Emily befriending a dragon by pulling a thorn out of its paw to a particularly stupid knight who’d thought he’d been told to lay the dragon rather than slay it and discovered himself a father a few months later. But hardly anyone takes them seriously enough to take precautions.
Taffy’s thoughts were running in the same direction. “The world just changed,” she said, soberly. “What happens now?”
Adam said nothing as he watched the rebels – he assumed they were the rebels – flow out of the nearby buildings and storm the remains of the castle. There didn’t seem to be any real resistance, save for a pair of soldiers who were overwhelmed and beaten to death within minutes. A set of ladies appeared on the top of the crumbling building, staring around before taking their courage in their hands and jumping into thin air. Adam felt sick as they plummeted to their deaths. They’d killed themselves rather than fall into rebel hands. He swallowed, hard. It was easy to talk about slaughtering all the aristos, and wiping out their families root and branch, but harder to accept that that sort of talk meant killing innocent women and children. And yet, he knew the aristos wouldn’t hesitate to slaughter every last rebel and their families if they won the war.
“Shit,” Lilith said, quietly. “We could have saved them.”
Adam shook his head as the brief struggle came to an end. The rebels didn’t seem interested in taking prisoners. A handful of men were walked out of the castle – Adam guessed they were former prisoners, held in custody before the uprising – but everyone else was killed. He tried not to think about what it might mean for everyone unlucky enough to be caught. The aristos and soldiers might have deserved their fate, but what about the women and children?
Yvonne cleared her throat. “Blademaster, are you ready to drop down to meet with the rebels?”
“Yes, Captain,” Blademaster said. “If you’ll drop the rope, I can get down.”
“I can fly you down,” Lilith offered. “Or ...”
“It won’t work,” Praxis said, cutting her off. “The spell would fail the moment he passed through the shields and send him plummeting to his doom.”
Lilith flushed. “Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Praxis said. “It gets us all at times.”
Blademaster nodded and headed through the hatch, heading down to the lower levels. Adam didn’t envy him. Climbing rope ladders was bad enough on sailing ships – there was no shortage of horror stories about people who got injured or even killed while climbing up and down the mainmast – and he was sure it would be worse on an airship. And yet ...
“We need to go after him,” Taffy said. “As Levellers, we need to meet our comrades down there ...”
Yvonne, surprisingly, didn’t seem inclined to argue. Adam had the odd feeling he was being set up for something, before realising Yvonne was a Leveller herself. She had every reason to be, given her femininity and lack of family connections. He thought she’d make a better spokesperson than him, although – as one of the university staff – there might be limits on how involved she could allow herself to be. Taffy nodded to Yvonne, then led Adam and Lilith through the hatch too. The air seemed to grow colder as they reached the lower levels. The hatch in the deck looked terrifyingly intimidating ...
Don’t look down, Adam told himself. Really, don’t look down.
“I could let myself drop, then catch myself before I hit the ground,” Lilith said. Adam couldn’t recall ever hearing actual fear in her voice before. She’d lost her powers and she’d been completely at his mercy, and she still hadn’t sounded so afraid. “I could land safely ...”
“Bad idea,” Taffy said. Adam suspected the understanding in Taffy’s tone was only making it worse. “If you didn’t make it, you’d be smashed to a pulp.”
“I’ll go first,” he said. “You come after me and Taffy will bring up the rear.”
Lilith essayed a weak smile. “Are you planning to peek up my dress?”
“No,” Adam said. It would be a better view than looking down at the ground, but ... he kept that thought to himself. “I’ll be keeping my eyes on the rope. You do the same – don’t look down or you’ll start to panic.”
“Really,” Lilith said. “How very reassuring.”
Adam gritted his teeth, then forced himself to step onto the rope ladder and descend to the ground. It wasn’t the first time he’d been on a rope ladder – they were common on the docks – but it was easily the worst. The wind tore at his fingers, the gusts freezing cold even though they were in the desert. He felt the rope sway as he descended, wishing someone had had the sense to tie the rope to the ground so it would be a little more stable. The air grew warmer, somehow, as he neared the ground, but the road still caught him by surprise. His legs felt wobbly as he held the ladder steady, not daring to look up. Lilith would never have forgiven him if he’d taken advantage of her. Taffy wouldn’t have let him get away with it either.
“That wasn’t fun,” Lilith managed, as she practically fell off the ladder and into his arms. “Do we have to climb up again?”
“I hope not,” Adam said. Descending had been hard enough. Getting up would be an absolute nightmare. He knew there were sailors who went up and down the rigging like monkeys, but he wasn’t one of them. “I think ...”
He felt his voice trail off as he stared at the remains of the castle. It looked crumpled and broken, as if it had been struck by an angry god. He thought it would have been easier to see if it really had been nothing more than a pile of rubble, but the damaged walls and cracked fortifications were somehow harder to take. He tasted bile in his mouth as he saw the bodies lying on the ground, soldiers and rebels and unfortunates in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’d seen dead bodies before and watched helplessly as enemy armies tore through the university town, but this ... he took a breath and shuddered at the stench of burning flesh and smoke.
Taffy was right. The world had changed.
Blademaster called to them. “This is Dalia,” he said, introducing a grim-faced girl carrying a rifle slung over her shoulder. “Dalia, this is Adam, Taffy and Lilith.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Adam managed. Dalia reminded him of his sister, but his sister had never carried a gun. “We’re from Heart’s Eye.”
Dalia smiled, but there was no humour in the expression. “Thank you for your help,” she said, in a tone that suggested she’d gone too far in the previous hours to feel much of anything. “What now?”
“Good question,” Taffy agreed. “And we need to come up with answers quickly, before someone else does it for us.”
Chapter Fourteen
Adam had had the impression, when dealing with Betty and the rest of the Levellers in Heart’s Ease, that the movement was very well organised. The Farrakhan Levellers were nothing of the sort. There were five cell leaders known to the others, two more who had apparently existed completely in isolation, and a bunch of others who weren’t elected leaders – as he understood it – but had taken command in the chaos and were now backed by surprisingly high numbers of voters, activists and people who’d taken to the streets to fight for freedom. And then there were the merchants, the workers, the various more open-minded guilds – the closed-minded guild leaders had either been killed or forced to flee – and various other factions. It was impossible, he decided as his eyes swept the table, for the town to put together a working council in a hurry. There were just too many voices demanding that their agendas be given precedence, even at the expense of everyone else.
He sighed, inwardly, as the debate raged on. He was no expert – he’d attended a few council meetings back home, but there the real decisions had been taken in private and then presented to the rest of the city as done deals – and yet it seemed to him that power blocs were already taking shape and form. The radicals, led by Dalia; the moderates, led by the man who’d been her mentor before she struck out on her own; the conservatives, who came from the merchant classes ... there were even a handful of royalists, arguing Princess Violet’s cause to anyone who’d listen. It wasn’t going to end well, he thought. There were too many weapons in plain view, too many factions who’d resort to violence if they thought they were being marginalised or primed for extermination. It had been touch and go when the princess’s cavalry had arrived, with some of the factions wanting to welcome them and others insisting they stayed firmly outside the city. They’d been very lucky that most of the king’s forces had been overwhelmed or forced to run before the cavalry arrived. If the princess’s troops had entered the city, it might have proven difficult – if not impossible – to get them out without heavy bloodshed.
“We demand a formal statement of equality before the law,” Dalia said, bluntly. Her supporters, male and female alike, cheered in agreement. “And an end to parental rights over their grown children.”
