Havemercy Read online

  The thing was, it was just a game of tag at this point: We had to keep letting ’em know we were still okay for flying, because if they weren’t clear of us, they couldn’t leave the cover of the mountains. The main problem with this plan was that they could hold out a hell of a lot longer than we could, since the only girls we consistently had up in the air were my Have, of course, and the other two Jacquelines, those being Jeannot on Al Atan and Ace on Thoushalt. As for the rest, there was Adamo on Proudmouth, Ghislain’s Compassus, then, when they could wing it, Evariste and Niall on Illarion and Erdeni, in that order. All the other girls were fucking out. It pissed the others off, especially Ivory, who I’d never have pegged for it, but that was how it’d broken down, and that was how we had to abide by it.

  It pissed me off, too. There wasn’t none of this that didn’t make me redder than Ke-Han wine with rage, but all I could do was keep picking them off one by one, if I got lucky.

  Oh, and I had to get out well before sunup, too, since Have got confused by the light now, on top of everything else. The way we’d learned that was a real son-of-a, nearly taking the whole Airman down with us.

  But that night was quiet, just me and the whole Ke-Han army hiding like rats in the mountain and Have occasionally spitting.

  Then, she said, “We aren’t alone.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “right, sure. Whatever you say, darlin’.”

  “No,” she told me. “I’m not mad. Don’t use that tone with me or I’ll snap your neck, you foul-mouthed whoreson.”

  “Leave my mother the fuck outta this,” I said. “She didn’t do a thing to you, and you know it.”

  “She birthed you, didn’t she?” Have asked, real snide, just like old times. It wasn’t like old times, though, and I had to keep reminding myself of it.

  “Yeah, guess so,” I said. “So who’s with us, then?”

  “All of them,” Have said. “Everyone’s coming.”

  Maybe this was a sign—maybe she really was losing it, and this was where my luck ran out. I’d been drawing too much on it lately anyway, and I guess I should’ve been expecting it.

  Then, there was a sound like a swift coming up on my left. I twisted, assuming the Ke-Han’d taken the time in the Cobalts to figure out how to get their catapults to actually work—only I saw the glint of fading moonlight off metal wings.

  “Shit,” I said.

  It was Balfour, riding Anastasia.

  Have was right; I should’ve known to trust my girl. Behind me I could see the winking of the other airmen and their rides, like the stars had come down from the heavens to dance with us, to interfere in the lives of mortal men just like they did in the old stories.

  “Shit,” I said again.

  “We have a target,” Balfour called out to me, voice almost swallowed up by the wind. He made a fast circuit around me, doubling back.

  “The fucking coordinates,” I shouted back at him.

  “We’re taking out the magicians,” Balfour howled. “We’ve got to hit them—at once!”

  There might’ve been more to what he’d said, but I didn’t need to hear it. Every man jack of us knew that the magicians of the Ke-Han stayed all together in their blue dome. I hoped to the sky that they hadn’t decided to break that tradition and start working with their army rather than from back at home.

  We’d never been able to get close enough to the city before—but then again, the entire Ke-Han army hadn’t been holed up in the mountains waiting to invade Volstov before, either. Having enough fuel to get there and back didn’t matter for shit, now. Worrying about the Ke-Han winds didn’t matter for shit, now. We had a chance, however small it was, and we had to take it.

  It was like spitting below you in the pitch-dark, but we had barely an hour of nighttime left, and if we were going to get this done—and all the boys’d come out to play, so you’d better believe we were sure as fuck going to try—then we had to fly out now.

  One thing I knew for sure: We could make it back to their big blue city before their warriors could, even on horseback.

  “We can do this,” Have said in a queer voice.

  I spurred her in the flanks. “That’s my girl,” I said.

  And then we were flying, me and Have in the front, but all fourteen of us more or less flying together.

  Right away some of the others started dropping altitude, like they were having real trouble flying in a straight line, and some of the girls were bucking in the air no better than wild horses, but the sky was pretty big even with all of us in it, and I guessed there was room for everyone. It was only instinct that set me against moving as so large a group. We’d make a damn big target for any lucky son-of-a who happened to look into the sky at the right time. Flying solo had its own risks, but it never made me feel itchy in quite the same way as this, like Have and I were getting crowded in on either side. Even though the corps was a team, official-like and all that, everyone with a brain knew that Havemercy and I worked best when it was just the two of us alone together. We just rose above that, was all, and though it was a weird time to think of him, fucking Hilary, he’d never seemed able to get that straight from the first, either.

  It wasn’t like I wouldn’t help any one of the boys who needed helping, but my job was to do that by taking down every last man of the Ke- Han that I could, and that came first.

  We were all taught to look after our own selves before anyone else, and if it went against what everyone else did, well, we weren’t nothing like anyone else, anyway.

  The wind whistled past my ears as Have picked up speed, like we were racing against the others rather than with, the way we did some nights coming home, punchy with adrenaline and no way to bleed it off but to act like we were ten years younger and stupider to boot. Now there wasn’t anything we were racing against except time, and it had all become deadly serious.

  I caught sight of Jeannot having a real problem with keeping Al Atan from speeding off ahead of the rest; he was keeping her reined in nice and tight just to hold whatever sad-bastard formation we were clinging to with so many limping, crazed machines underneath us. I’d never had cause to think of Have as a machine before, but then she’d never fought me like this before. Thinking of her as a person only made it seem just like watching somebody’s mind unravel like they said Caius Greylace made happen once, and that was something I didn’t like any which way.

  Right then, Have was humming a little tune under her breath, sweet and strange, and a little eerie, too. To our right, Vachir gave a screech, like the kind she wouldn’t ever have made if she’d been in her right mind and knowing what we had ahead of us, how important the element of surprise was. I couldn’t quite make out Merritt astride her, but I knew he had to be shit-panicked at that, wondering whether she was going to do it all the way there and warn the Ke-Han where we were and just how fast we were coming. But she didn’t make another sound after that, though, and I’m sure we all felt a little relieved about that.

  So long as I was feeling things, a little bit of pride didn’t hurt either, since we were each one flying at best with a half-cracked dragon, and not one of us was falling to anything worse than a little dip here, or an exceptionally strong tug on the reins there. As far as I saw it, so long as everyone could keep from crashing into the Cobalts, it’d be all right. There was a shaky moment there when it seemed like Raphael would have a scrape of it with his Natalia, but then she pulled up real sharp in a wrench that’d probably have broken her neck if she’d had bones to break, and after that it was air silence from that end same as from Vachir’s.

  We’d never flown in such a group before, except in the real bad times—and even then it wasn’t all of us, maybe seven or ten at a time. Th’Esar just didn’t like the idea of losing all his dragons at once, if it came to that. There were always a few of us kept in reserve; it was good strategizing, pure and simple.

  Only it seemed like there wouldn’t be any need for strategy if the Ke-Han were just going to waltz into the capital and ta
ke over. We’d been pushed into making a move, and now we just had to fight it out or die trying. That sort of thing suited me just fine, I guess, seeing as how it was better than just waiting around.

  It was still dark out, and a good thing that it was, but it wasn’t so dark that you couldn’t see the color of the mountains beneath us, blue and deep like the fucking ocean, only the ocean had some sparkle to her, cheerful, like maybe if you crashed then it’d still work out all right. Not so with the range. They were dead blue, steel blue, capped white on the top and no more beautiful than a great jagged stretch of deception.

  Lapis was carved out like a bowl by the edge of the Ke-Han River on one side, and on the other tucked into something like a valley—which was going to make the flying real difficult—and the big domed haven for the Ke-Han magicians smack in the middle, like the big blue target on a dart board. Its obviousness had always made my skin prick just a little, but I wasn’t a complete idiot, and there’d been no way before now to make it work without running out of fuel entirely or being dashed to bits against the Cobalts for trying until the sunrise. Taking down the Ke-Han wasn’t worth losing Have, only now it was sort of like I’d lost her already. I couldn’t really think about that.

  The whole city was laid out in circles, which I guess was the shape the Ke-Han worshipped, only because of us, half the wall, the outermost circle, was torn down.

  The way I looked at it, the magician dome would make a pretty target if we all could see to flying that far. Ivory in particular seemed to be taking it rough, with Cassiopeia making hollow, smoke-filled sounds like she’d forgot the proper way to breathe fire, and Magoughin’s Chastity undulating in the air like some kind of sea serpent, only we sure as fuck weren’t flying through water.

  The only problem I could see was that Lapis doused her lights at night—the Ke-Han weren’t dumb any way you sliced ’em—and without fire to depend on as any kind of a reliable resource, we were pretty fucked as far as seeing our target ahead of time went.

  The color blue wasn’t so easy to see in the nighttime. It just blended into so many shadows, and I didn’t much like our chances.

  At least there was always the possibility that some idiot had helpfully repaired the guard towers, fitted with wide, silver bowls of fire that were just cozy as beacons lighting our way.

  We came up over the crest of the mountains, Adamo nearest me. Proudmouth didn’t seem to be having it as bad as all the rest, though I had an idea that had a lot to do with Adamo himself, and how when he told a thing what to do, it sure as bastion had better do it. And sure enough, the city was black as the night around us—which would be getting lighter in an hour or maybe less—and I didn’t know whether that was a blessing, like they didn’t know we were coming, or whether it was another one of their fucking traps.

  But at this point, did it really matter whether it was a trap or not? We’d come so far, taken the dragons out past all reasonable endurance.

  We were going to finish it, or finish ourselves; one or the other. Like I said, decisions seemed real easy when there wasn’t any of that horse-shit sitting-on-the-fence kind of waffling.

  We knew what we had to do, and we were going to do it. Only two sides of the coin.

  All that mattered now was what we knew, and what we knew was that somewhere in the lapis city there was a big blue saucer that had a bull’s-eye on it.

  “The sun’s going to be coming up,” said Have, like she could smell it.

  “We’ve got a while yet, girl,” I answered, though privately I wished there’d been more time for us.

  Adamo rose up in front, wheeled around halfway like he wanted to say something to the lot of us, only he thought that’d make things seem too morbid.

  “Bastion fuck!” I called to him, loud and heckling over the rush of wind. “You got a speech to make you’d better do it now!”

  He paused, like he really was thinking about it, and shit, I thought maybe he had every reason to after all.

  It’d be dawn soon, and with first light there was no telling what the dragons might do, the condition they were in now. Might be some of them weren’t so sensitive as my girl about it, or might be we’d all drop like stones from the sky and that would be that. It was a pretty ballsy gamble all around, especially for th’Esar to make with his beloved dragons. I thought about what he’d told us about how if he said so, then the dragons were as good as sacrificed. He’d meant us that day too, though I’d been so mad and caught up about Have that I hadn’t quite caught it proper.

  Knowing it now didn’t make me as angry as I thought I’d be, but my shoulders hurt, and my wrists were starting to ache where they were tied up, and I was just exhausted.

  “Don’t do anything stupid!” Adamo barked at us finally, then turned Proudmouth so that her tail flicked wide of the lot of us. Then, she dove in a steep descent toward the city.

  We all followed, fourteen beauties glistening in the night just a little too swiftly to be clouds. I almost thought it was a shame nobody was looking out their windows this time of early morning, ’cause they would have had quite a sight to see.

  The wall was crumbling in all but a few places when we flew over it, and I felt a savage sense of triumph that we’d accomplished something at least that hadn’t been just another part in the Ke-Han’s giant ruse.

  It was a pretty neat reminder of what happened when you messed with Volstov, when you thought you could take on the Dragon Corps.

  We followed the path of the river, fat and gleaming in the fading moonlight as it bordered the city and fed toward the ocean. It wouldn’t lead us to the magicians’ flat, round tower, but when you only ever saw a city from the air, you got to picking out focal points that would help you triangulate your own position in relation to whatever was visible around you. We’d never got so far into the city as to be able to take out the magicians, but the tower itself was pretty hard to miss, so we were sitting pretty in terms of finding the thing in the dark.

  As far as our luck stretched, that was about it, because next second a blast of wind hit us all so fierce that I thought for one minute it was going to send every man jack of us spinning off in different directions as easy as dandelion seed.

  “Goodness,” said Have. Or rather, she screeched, else I’d never have heard her over the hurricane threatening to tear the skin off my bones. “It’s too windy to have tea with the Emperor today. More’s the pity.”

  “Damn it, Have,” I said through my teeth, trying to wrench her back into a straight line. It wasn’t easy, with her fighting me and the wind at the same time, twisting frantically like a pinned animal. Only she was a pinned animal with enough metal and crazed, dying magic in her to kill me without a second thought. First rule: Never go against your dragon’s nature.

  But I wasn’t dropping out just so the rest of the boys could be heroes and get statues built of them, Ghislain’s twice as big as all the others.

  Just as quick as it had started, the wind changed direction, like it was pulling, and I thought about how wind could tear houses down, rip trees up from the ground, all that kind of reassuring stuff you start to think about when you’re caught in it and ain’t got no proper recourse but to wear it out lest it wears you out first. I pushed Have up so that we were near to vertical, and twisting over and over like she’d used to do when I bragged I’d never get airsick, one swift tight barrel roll after another.

  I could hear some of the boys shouting, and occasionally felt the buffet of air that meant someone had passed too damn close to us. But for all purposes, my mind had shrunk to hold no more than me and Have. It was what I knew, what I was good at, and it was the only way any of us was going to survive this.

  “You’re going to make us both sick,” said Havemercy. “And there won’t be time for cakes at all.”

  I didn’t know whether she was trying to be funny or if this was just the end of the road for us.

  I didn’t figure much that I even cared.

  Instead of answering, I gri
tted my teeth and pulled her out of the climb, facing the wind head-on again. We’d come no closer to the tower in all this time, and I saw then that the magicians’ plan was pretty standard, but it’d serve them just fine, ’cause they just assumed they needed to keep us off until morning, which was all they’d ever done before. By morning, we’d have to either back off or have found a way past the gale. What they didn’t know—that there wasn’t any backing off—was no fucking comfort if we couldn’t get near enough to their tower to take them down. Fighting this wind wasn’t going to do us any favors with saving fuel, either, and it was going to hit the swifts first since they were built the smallest.

  Even if we could get near, there was no telling how well we’d be able to use fire to our advantage in razing it to the ground. At this rate, we’d be better off to wait for the first of us to fall from the skies and hope he aimed for the Ke-Han tower.

  The thought didn’t cheer me any.

  “We’re never going to get near them like this!” Jeannot screamed over the wind. The only way I could tell it was him was by seeing Al Atan, twisting crimson and gold like a contortionist’s trick in the air; I couldn’t see any of the others, which meant I couldn’t hear them, either.

  Then there was this sound.

  I’d’ve sworn by all of bastion that it was the worst sound I ever heard in my life, like metal scales being peeled away from metal bone. I knew that wasn’t the way our girls were built, but still, it was like someone was being ripped apart, starting at the wings. Have groaned something awful, which I only knew ’cause she started shaking underneath me and then I saw where the original noise was coming from.

  Compagnon was riding Spiridon through the fucking storm.

  I don’t know how he did it. Must’ve been that he figured if he got high enough above the winds and just barreled down through them, he might make it, and that was what was happening. He’d only get one shot with it, and I realized right away what that shot meant. If he got through, he’d be too low too fast, and he wouldn’t be able to come ’round again, but it would sure as fuck work—whatever that meant.