The Aeronaut's Windlass (12 page)

Spire Albion, Habble Morning, Ventilation Tunnels

T
here was no time to react and no room to wield even the short, straight blade of his sword. Grimm fell before the horrible, painful weight and thrust at it with an arm, shoving something that snarled and spit and drew blood with teeth and claws. The creature was perhaps the size of a large child. It flew up and away from him.

“Grimm!”

“I’m fine!” Grimm snapped, rolling swiftly to his feet. He tore his jacket from his shoulders and wrapped it swiftly around his left arm. “Cats?”

“I think not. No cat ever made a sound like that.”

The howling sound repeated itself from either direction of the tunnel. “More than one of them,” Grimm said.

“Back-to-back,” Bayard replied, and Grimm felt the sudden, wiry pressure of the other man’s shoulders pressed against the middle of his back.

“I should be friends with taller people,” Grimm panted.

“Bite your tongue, old boy, or I’ll hack apart your ankles.”

There was another motion in the dark and the creature flew at Grimm again. This time he interposed his leather-wrapped arm, and felt claws and teeth sink into it. Grimm let out a shout and spun to his left, slamming the creature against the stone of the Spire’s wall. He continued the motion of the spin with his right arm, thrusting his short blade home into the thing, and felt the weapon bite sharp and deep. A warbling shriek like nothing he had heard before filled the hallway, even as he heard Bayard cry out, “Hah!” A snarling cry came from somewhere behind Grimm.

Grimm had no time to turn to Bayard. The creature was thrashing madly, its claws biting into Grimm’s arm even through the layers of thick leather hide. He struck with the sword as swiftly and viciously as he knew how, praying that he didn’t misjudge its length in the dark and impale his own arm. He could see nothing but a vague shape struggling against him, but he could feel hot blood splashing from the wounds his blade inflicted.

The thing let out another scream and then it was abruptly gone. Cries echoed up and down the halls from both directions, fading as they retreated. Grimm instinctively found Bayard again, and made sure his back was against the other man’s for the next several moments. They both gasped for breath. Grimm’s wounded arm throbbed and burned in a most unpleasant fashion.

“Cowards,” Bayard panted a moment later, when it was clear that the attack was over. “Bloody cowardly things.”

“Indeed,” Grimm said. “Shouldn’t we be running now?”

“Absolutely,” Bayard said. “But half a moment. I’ve a light here somewhere.”

Grimm waited impatiently while Bayard’s clothing made rustling sounds. “Ah!” he said. “In my weskit. I’d almost forgotten.” A moment later there was a dim source of pale blue light as Bayard removed a lumin crystal the size of a fingernail from one of his pockets and held it up.

The tunnel was unsightly. Blood that looked black in the pale light was splattered everywhere—more near Grimm than Bayard. Bayard himself was scarcely mussed from the action. His sword, though, was stained dark to half the length of its blade.

“God in Heaven, you’re a sight,” Bayard said, lifting an eyebrow. “There’s more blood than man.” He looked past Grimm to the heavy splatters on the wall. “My word, old boy. You missed your calling as a butcher.”

“Tried,” Grimm said. “But I couldn’t manage. I had to settle for the Fleet.”

“Bitterness does not become you, my friend,” Bayard said. His dark eyes flicked around the hallway. “How’s your arm?”

“Painful,” Grimm said. “I’d as soon not unwrap the coat from around it until we’re somewhere where we might find bandages.”

“Best we move deliberately, then,” Bayard said. “It would be rather funny to watch you run until your heart pumped all your blood out, but I’m afraid Abigail would be cross with me. She might refuse my attentions for hours. Even days.”

“We can’t have that,” Grimm said. He shook as much blood as he could from the blade of his sword, and then grimaced and wiped it off on the leg of his trousers not already soaked with the stuff. He returned the weapon to its sheath just as Bayard finished wiping his sword clean with a kerchief and offered the cloth to Grimm.

“You might have said something,” Grimm growled.

“That outfit’s ruined anyway.”

Grimm glowered at him and opened his mouth to say something more, when Bayard abruptly pitched sideways and began to fall.

No, that wasn’t it at all, Grimm thought. Bayard was standing perfectly still. His friend hadn’t fallen—
Grimm
had. He could distantly feel the cold spirestone floor beneath his cheek. Bayard’s mouth was moving, but the words seemed to be coming at him from several hundred yards down the tunnel, and he couldn’t quite make them out. Grimm tried to put a hand beneath him and push himself up, but his limbs wouldn’t move.

“Bother,” Grimm mumbled. “This is rather inconvenient.”

Bayard leaned down and peered closely at Grimm’s face. The last thing Grimm remembered of the moment was the feeling of being hoisted up onto Bayard’s slim, wiry shoulders.

*   *   *

G
rimm opened his eyes and found himself in a warm, dim room. The ceiling was made of hardened clay—one of the most common construction materials for the more modest residences within Spire Albion. It hadn’t been painted white, but instead was covered with a colorful and rather fanciful mural that looked like it had been done by a particularly enthusiastic child. It made little sense, containing seemingly random images of airships, the sun, some sort of odd-looking plants that only partially resembled trees, and an image of the moon that was much too large in relation to the sun opposite it. Strange creatures occupied the same space, none of them familiar to Grimm, though he might have seen some of them in his more fanciful childhood storybooks.

The room was lit by dozens and dozens and dozens of tiny, nearly dead lumin crystals, collected in jars of clear glass. Their light was a nebulous thing, showing everything clearly and seemingly originating from nowhere. It was a small, spare chamber, sporting a student’s desk and a small and overstuffed bookshelf. He lay on a bed of woven ropes with a thin pad over them, and blankets had been piled over him until they more threatened to smother him than keep him warm.

He began to push them away, only to find that his left arm had been bound to his chest. Both arms were wrapped in what seemed to him irrational amounts of cloth bandages. They weren’t white. Instead they had been made from a broad spectrum of every color and texture of cloth imaginable. One of the strips had little pink heart shapes alternating with bright yellow suns.

Grimm sat up, wincing at the pain from his arm. He had a number of other cuts on his upper body, apparently, which were also covered in bandages and some kind of pungent sterilizing ointment. He didn’t remember receiving the minor wounds, but that was hardly unusual in combat. There was a foul taste in his mouth, and his throat burned with thirst. A pitcher and mug on a tray on the bed’s nightstand stood ready, and he poured the mug full of water and drank it down three times running before his body began to relent.

Someone tapped on the door and then opened it. Grimm looked up to see a young woman enter the room. She was dressed . . . not so much untidily, he decided, as
randomly
. Her grey shirt was made of ethersilk, patched in several places, and looked as though it had been tailored for a man almost two hundred pounds heavier than she was. Though the shirt was long enough to serve as a gown itself, she wore a green undergown, with rustling skirts that fell to the floor. As she walked toward him, he saw that she wore stockings instead of shoes—green and white polka dots on one foot, and orange and purple stripes on the other. She wore an apron—but it looked to be made of leather, and was burned in several places, a smith’s garment rather than kitchen wear. Her hair had been dyed in crimson and white stripes, and then braided so that it resembled a peppermint candy. One lens of her spectacles was pink, the other green, and the band of her too-large top hat was fairly bursting with folded pieces of paper. She wore a necklace from which depended a glass vial of nearly spent illumination crystals, and she carried a covered tray in her arms.

“Oh,” she said, pausing. “He’s awake. Goodness. That was unexpected.” She tilted her head, peering at him first through one lens of her spectacles and then through the other. “There, you see? He’s fine. He’s not mad. Except that he is. And I should know.” She carried the tray to a small table against one wall and whispered, “Should we tell him how improper it is for a gentleman not to wear a shirt when there is a young lady present? It isn’t that we don’t appreciate the view, because he’s quite masculine, but it does seem like something one should say.”

Grimm blinked down at himself and fumbled for the bedcovers with one hand, pulling them up. “Ah, please excuse me, young lady. I seem to have lost my shirt.”

“He thinks I’m a lady,” she said, and beamed at him. “That’s quite unusual, in my experience.”

Grimm racked his mind for the proper thing to say in such a circumstance, and found little. “To be called a lady?”

“Thinking,” the young woman said. “Now, here is some fresh soup, which doesn’t taste very good, but he should eat it all because the poison thinks it’s even worse.”

Grimm blinked. “Poison?”

The young woman turned toward him and came close enough to lay a hand on his forehead. “Oh, dear. Is he feverish again? No, no. Oh, good. Perhaps he’s just simple. Poor dear.”

Before she could turn away, Grimm caught her wrist in his hand.

The young woman . . . no, he decided, the
girl’s
breath seemed to catch in her throat. Her entire body went stiff and she breathed, “Oh, dear. I hope he doesn’t decide to harm me. He’s quite good at doing harm. It took forever to clean off all the blood.”

“Child,” Grimm said in a low voice. “Look at me.”

She froze abruptly. After a silent second, she said, “Oh, I mustn’t.”

“Look at me, girl,” Grimm said, keeping his voice gentle and calm. “No one is going to hurt you.”

The girl flicked a very quick look at him. He saw only a flash of her eyes over the spectacles when she did. One was an even, steady grey. The other was a shade of pale apple green. She shivered and seemed to sag, her wrist going limp in his hand.

“Oh,” she breathed. “That’s so sad.”

“Who are you speaking to, child?”

“He doesn’t know I’m talking to you,” the girl said. The fingertips of her free hand rose to the crystals in the little bottle around her neck. “How can he hear me without realizing something so simple?”

“Ah,” Grimm said, and released the girl’s wrist very slowly and carefully, as he might a fragile bird’s body. “You’re an etherealist. Forgive me, child. I didn’t realize.”

“He thinks I’m the master,” the girl said, ducking her head and blushing. “How can he be so clever and so stupid all at once? That must hurt awfully. But perhaps it would be more polite if we didn’t say anything. He seems to mean well, the poor thing. And he’s conscious, mobile, and lucid. We should tell the master that it looks like he’ll survive.”

With that, the girl scurried out of the room, nodding to herself, her soft litany hanging for a moment in her wake.

Grimm shook his head. Whoever the girl was, she’d been serving her apprenticeship for a goodly while, despite her apparent youth. All etherealists were odd and became more so as they aged. Some were a good bit odder than others. The child was at least as strange as any other etherealist he’d met.

He went to the tray and uncovered it. There was a bowl of soup and several flatbakes, along with a spoon that would have been modest had it not been made from dark, glossy wood. He tasted the soup, bracing himself for the bitter taste of most medicines, and found it surprisingly bland but pleasant.

He fetched out a stool, sat down at the desk, and devoured the soup, along with the flatbakes and two more glasses of water. By the time he finished, he felt almost like a human being. He took note of a plain robe that had apparently been left for him, and managed to tug it on one-handed and belt it at the waist.

No sooner had he finished than there was a heavy thump upon the door to his chamber.

“Ow,” said a man’s voice. “Damnation to you.” The latch rattled several times and the man sighed in a tone of impatience. “Folly.”

“He doesn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” said the girl in an apologetic tone. “He’s just too brilliant for you.” The door opened, and the girl stepped back hurriedly without meeting Grimm’s eyes.

A man entered the room holding a rumpled handkerchief against his apparently bleeding nose. He was a scrawny specimen except for a small potbelly, and it made his limbs look out of proportion, almost spidery. His hair was a dirty grey mop, his face covered by sparse white stubble. He was dressed in a suit about two decades out of date, in sober shades of brown and grey, and large, soft slippers made of some kind of creature with green-and-black-striped fur. Too old to be middle-aged, too young to be elderly, the man had eyes that were a vibrant shade of blue Grimm had seen only in the autumn skies high above the mists. The man walked with the aid of a wooden cane tipped with what might have been a weapons crystal from a ship’s light cannon. It was the size of a man’s clenched fist.

“Ah!” he said. “Aha! Captain Grimm, welcome, welcome, so good to be able to speak to you when you aren’t delirious.” He glanced aside at the girl and mumbled out of the corner of his mouth, “He’s not delirious, is he?”

The girl shook her head with wide eyes that didn’t leave the ground. “No, master.”

Grimm was quite unsure how to respond with courtesy to such a greeting, but he settled for bowing slightly at the waist. “We haven’t met, sir. I’m afraid you have the advantage of me.”

“Yes, we did, tomorrow,” the old man said. “And no, you aren’t, and the last is a matter for debate, perhaps. What do you think, Folly?”

Folly bit her lip and touched her vial of crystals. “He doesn’t realize that Captain Grimm is quite uncomfortable because he doesn’t know anyone’s name.”