Beneath a Burning Sky (The Dawnhawk Trilogy Book 3) (52 page)

The other Bluecoats fought the few still-standing Revenants—there weren’t much left of either. His own crew, however...

They lay or knelt in a semicircle around Crown Prince Gwydion. Farouk clutched a bleeding arm tightly to his chest. Henry lay on the platform, dead or unconscious, along with Reaver Jane. Maxim rolled across the platform, wreathed in the pale flames of some arcane mishap. Konrad chased after him, trying to put him out. Omari crouched over a hysterical young Paine, though she was weeping herself at the horror of the battle, while a bleeding, gasping, Ryan Gae struggled to draw a pistol from his bandolier. Lina Stone crawled forward along the ground for a dropped cutlass. He did not see Rastalak.

Gwydion himself stood fine. His clothes were still only slightly scuffed. His Worked blade gleamed bright, slicked with blood as it was. He stalked over to Lina Stone and put his boot upon the small of her back, causing her to yell out.

“Hold the big redhead steady,” he called to his guards. “I’ll deal with her after I cut this one’s head off.”

Fengel put out a hand, trying to focus through fading vision and the roaring in his ears.

Gwydion raised his blade up high, then swung down.

Something darted through the gloom. It glowed red and spat viciously, flitting down into Gwydion’s face. He swore and dodged aside, swinging wildly. The Worked blade in his hands connected, splitting the enraged, flying scryn in two.

Runt fell as Lina screamed and Gwydion continued to curse. The crown prince raised his blade again, just as another figure went sprinting past the royal guard.

It was the ex-soldier, Michael Hockton. He held a small crate in both hands, whose contents he emptied in full at the crown prince.

Small, wormy things flew through the air. They hissed and spit and writhed and landed upon the arm Gwydion raised to block them. He screamed as they slithered and bit, flinging his longsword out reflexively. The tip of it caught Hockton across the face, sending him back with a yell of his own.

Gwydion dropped his blade and staggered away. The scrynlings writhed all over him now, though still mostly on his outstretched arm. His well-tailored jacket was ragged and tattered, bulging with the little monsters as they burrowed beneath into his flesh.

The roaring in Fengel’s ears grew louder. He saw the royal guards shouting, but he did not hear them. They dropped their halberds and went for their liege. Fengel blinked, and suddenly they were all together, swatting at the scrynlings. Then he blinked again, and Natasha was there, lying beside him. She fired pistol after pistol at the retreating crown prince, the whole of it weirdly silent. Gwydion screamed and flailed with the remnants of his arm, and Fengel thought he saw glistening bone. Then they hauled him back aboard the
Glory.

Fengel blinked again, and Natasha was looking at him now. She was filthy, gore-slicked, and shouting. He had never loved her more.

Then the roaring in his ears reached a crescendo, sweeping Captain Fengel away into the dark.

Epilogue

Crown Prince Gwydion stared at the letter before him.

It was a report to his royal father, one of the rare pieces of bureaucracy he dared not shirk. The letter was blank, and the pen beside it untouched. Two balls of crumpled paper lay nearby, next to a mostly drained glass of whiskey, evidence of earlier drafts. Anything he found to say just seemed so utterly insufficient.

Gwydion’s private cabin aboard the
Glory
of Perinault
was luxurious. Warm teak paneled the walls, punctuated here and there by wide windows with armored shutters, a change he had insisted upon from the original design. Exotic rugs from far-off Zhong-hei covered the floor, and the desk atop it was richly inlaid. Gwydion fingered a splintered gouge in that inlay, the legacy of some stray shot that had breached the hull. He stared outside, where the Atalian Sea stretched endless beneath the sky.

Gwydion picked up the mechanical ink pen and tried to start again. After only a few sentences, he paused, distracted by the implement itself.

Machinery fascinated him. The wonders he’d seen crafted back home were going to change...everything. Steam engines, volleyguns, advanced automation—to say nothing of aerial flight. The
Glory of Perinault
was just a test, a prototype; soon there would be a fleet.

And these were just the things under development by the Kingdom! The artificers of Triskelion regularly experimented with mundane wonders, and the Mechanists of the Copper Isles worked with such ingenious skill that it rivaled aetherite magic.

That
was what had finally attracted his attention to the navy—why he had insisted to his royal father he join in the action. His own people were decades behind the Mechanists in terms of what they were accomplishing. The chance to capture working examples of their technology, or even some of their number, was simply too good to pass up.

Not that it had worked out even remotely well. Oh, the
Glory
had been a blazing success, as had the Brass Paladins. But his crowing over them could only fill a small part of the report to his royal father. The rest would be filled with miserable failure: three dozen ships, thousands of soldiers, hundreds of officers, and the Brass Paladin themselves...all lost. Even the legendary sword of the Kingdom, the priceless relic Danlann, was gone. Gwydion felt downright queasy at that last bit. How was he going to explain that he had lost an eight-hundred-year-old royal treasure?

And what did they have to show for it all? Future maps would certainly claim the Copper Isles for the Kingdom of Perinault—not that they could hold them. But the enemy they’d sought to crush had just taken their town and...flown away.

He could try to blame everything on the Lord High Admiral of the Sea. Wintermourn had been a wasteful, bloodthirsty tyrant, an old stuffed shirt who Gwydion had enjoyed prodding, and there was much that could be laid at the dead man’s feet. But no one would believe that Wintermourn had been the one to so recklessly order the fleet into the island interior—there were far too many witnesses to the contrary.

Gwydion set the pen back down with a sigh. The
Glory
flew back to the Kingdom, while what was left of the fleet remained behind to cordon off the Copper Isles and receive any survivors of the retreat. There had been a few, last he’d heard. The rest were dead—or stuck on the isles with that brazen Voornish monster the pirates had unleashed.

How was he to make any of that look good before his father?

A dull ache began again in his other arm. He looked to the freshly bandaged stump terminating at his elbow. Then the Crown Prince of the Kingdom of Perinault reached for the whiskey, once again, with a groan.

* * *

The Dray Engine hunted.

It pushed through thick green jungles, cracking palms and flattening undergrowth as it stalked. The native wildlife hooted as it passed, a mild irritation. Of far more import were the slave-humans in blue pelts who ran ahead. There were just so very many of them, screaming and hiding, gloriously panicked at its approach.

Things hadn’t gone terribly well of late. First the Dray Engine had been stuck on the bottom of the ocean. Then, following the oh-so-weak aether-bands, it had found itself trapped on an island to the north. And as if
that
wasn’t enough, the slave-human female reappeared, the irritating one with the golden eyes and shrill voice who had woken it back within the Foundry of Garaam.

At first, that development had excited the Dray Engine. The female had bested it, mocked and escaped it. The Dray Engine positively dreamed of squashing her beneath its armored feet. Killing the humans on the isle where it had been trapped was positively boring compared to the joyous thought of crushing her.

Well, only a little. It
did
love squashing slave-humans.

But she’d come back! The Dray Engine ignored the why and how and unlikely odds of such a thing. It focused instead on how it would step on her, slowly, like a mob of vermin Draykin—or maybe a cow that couldn’t move fast enough.

Surprise, then, when not only did she manage to stun it but bind it to the bottom of her sky-boat! Injury and insult followed, and then it was dropped like a rock atop a primitive collection of hovels in the middle of some lagoon, which was just
crawling
with even more repulsive slave-humans.

It was that fall which changed things.

Something had been jarred within the Dray Engine. Whether knocked back into place or simply unlocked, it didn’t matter. Systems long forgotten came online, ready to be used. Testing them on the golden-eyed female’s sky-boat had proven immensely satisfying.

Then the human hovels...flew away. Which was perplexing. And infuriating. The Dray Engine had wanted to climb up atop them. It wanted to find the wreck of the sky-boat and the golden-eyed woman’s corpse, just to grind it flat.

Oh well. There were plenty of slave-humans left for it to crush. The ones with the blue pelts were just
everywhere.

There still hadn’t been any commandments across the aether-bands. Though, with its newly unlocked capabilities, the Dray Engine
did
sense a few, faint, coded signals. It pondered this development before ultimately deciding they were just more dead noise from abandoned installations like the one to the north, not worthy of investigation.

So it hunted.

The Dray Engine wasn’t happy, really. Such a state may not have been possible for it. Yet as the pitiful, blue-pelted slave-humans ran before it, the Dray Engine felt a sort of contentment. The time and people that had created it were long gone. It could not truly fulfill the purpose for which it had been made. Still, it decided to focus on the little pleasures. And maybe that would be enough.

* * *

The sun shone down as Fengel left the Skydocks. Slowly, he made his way across Nob Skywalk—it was the same terrace he’d always known, apart for the flying. It didn’t quite seem right to call it by the same old name anymore. So he’d changed it. The other captains didn’t seem to care; they were all too preoccupied with their own losses, crippled as they were now. As for the townsfolk, they were just happy to have someone in charge again.

Pirate King
has such a nice ring to it.

He staggered down the boardwalk, done arguing with Brunehilde and the others for the moment, leaning heavily on his cane. Cubbins, the fat orange tabby cat, wove figure eights between his legs. The little fur ball had lost an ear sometime after they’d parted but had seemed to be in otherwise good health when Fengel found him after the battle. His steward, Henry Smalls, walked behind them both.

“All right back there?” asked Fengel.

“Aye, sir,” said Henry. His steward had two splinted arms, in contrast with Fengel’s much-fractured leg. Still, he insisted on attending Fengel, even though Fengel was forced to trim his own mustache for the time being like some kind of barbarian.

Fengel paused to let a stream of Mechanists pass, along with a column of drafted townsfolk. The Brothers of the Cog had been busy in the days since the escape shoring things up, repairing structures, evaluating resources, and starting new construction. Fengel hadn’t taken the time to talk with them, and so far they hadn’t sought him out.

It could wait. Now didn’t seem a good time for discussion anyway. The groaning and swearing townsfolk labored under the weight of a brazen humanoid machine while the Mechanists chastened them along towards the Brotherhood Yards. They carried one of the Perinese clockwork automatons, thankfully inert at the moment. Fengel dimly remembered it crashing down into the Gasworks during that last frantic, frenetic fight. He could only imagine how eager the Mechanists were to study the thing.

After the column tromped on past, two stragglers came limping after the rest of the Mechanists. He recognized them. Allen ambled along with a crutch under his arm, one leg in a brace, his hand bandaged, and his other arm splinted. Beside him walked Imogen, eagerly shoving a stack of papers in his face.

“Look,” she said to him. “The math all works out. You’ll have to carry a small steam boiler, but the functionality should be close to 50 percent more than what you have right now.”

“Imogen,” panted Allen, “can’t this wait? I don’t know why I’m even out here right now. I should be resting.”

“Oh, I told the Cabal that you were fine.
I’m
a full Brother now, and you’re a Mechanist-Aspirant still. Now, with my design for a mechanical hand, we can even add
extra
fingers...”

Fengel noted how closely Imogen walked beside the maimed young man, something of which Allen seemed completely oblivious. They disappeared around a corner, following the others. Fengel just shook his head and smiled.

Music drifted to him from up ahead. Henry paused, a small frown of surprise on his bulldog features. “Oh,” he said. “Is that a patter song?”

“Well,” replied Fengel. “Why don’t we go see?”

Common sailors always expected Copper Isles pirates to love sea shanties, when in truth it was the patter songs that rang throughout Haventown. That was how Fengel knew things had finally changed; everyone was singing lately. There was so much cheer in the air, now that they’d escaped invasion and certain death.

The song came from the Bleeding Teeth, Euron’s old tavern and the center of what passed for government in the pirate city. The place was more festive now than it had been during his reign, with a crowd sitting and hanging off of the porch, all caught up in the song; even the White Ape was there, its fur half-burned away, crouching atop the roof and trying to catch gulls as they flew past. Fengel stopped to appreciate it all, thumping his cane in time with the cadence. As the song ended, a familiar young woman emerged from the tavern, staggering beneath a platter full of mugs. She passed them out, lingering over a pirate wearing an eye patch. Someone catcalled at her, and she replied with the empty platter flung like a discus. It caught a drunk pirate across the forehead and knocked him out cold.