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Several large explosive traps closed off hill passes.
The brilliantly colored Azteca horde continued forward after clearing them and
unknowingly followed the path Haidan hoped they would. Every hour the leaders
of the mongoose-men sat with Dihana to update her on what was happening.
Until this morning. They told her there was no more information to give. The
airships spied on the
Azteca, and the city waited for the siege to begin.
Dihana left the Ministry building to find Haidan.
He stood on one of the walls, looking out over the empty villages and depots
around the city's walls. The fringe of jungle green lay beyond a wasteland of
barbed wire, trenches, troops, and brown earth. Dihana imagined the shadows of
Azteca creeping through it.
"What about their airships?" she asked.
"We can hold most of them with what we got. We got explosive shell we can fire
from these wall. And we own airship go battle them down if they come too near.
But they can still fly in the distance, watch the battle, try to look inside
the city."
Dihana allowed him to take her in hand and tour the rest of the walls, where
men grimly manned guns of all sizes, machetes strapped to their sides. Most of
the defenses on the wall weren't useful until the
Azteca broke the outer rings of trenches and came much closer to the wall.
"Haidan, what could we have done to prevent this?"
"I don't know. More spy in Azteca land?" He'd been up for nights in a row,
overseeing every possible detail, hounding his men. It showed in his puffy
eyes and gravelly voice. He leaned against the wall and put his head in his
hands. "If we still alive after this, we go have to change things. Bigger
forces, more villages. More cities. This entire land go have to be powerful,
dynamic. We can't wait, can't be laid-back.
There a thousand things we need."
Dihana nodded. "We will have to be the ones on the move, not them. No more
defensive waiting."
"That too." Haidan stood up. "We still can't find any Loa."
"Where do you think they went?"
"Deep under the city?"
Dihana nodded. "They give you a gourd? One with a plague in it?"
"We could fire it into the Azteca when they attack our walls," Haidan
suggested. "And hunker down.
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Maybe we won't catch it?"
"I think the Loa would have suggested that if it worked, don't you?" She
walked with Haidan back toward one of the heavy platforms on the edge that
would lower them to the streets.
"I collected all the other ones, the ones the Loa left behind for the
priestesses, the one they gave the
Councilmen, and the one they gave me, in a locked vault. I want yours there as
well."
Haidan helped her onto the platform, the wood squeaking under her feet. "You
think you go use them, if it get to that point?" Haidan asked, his teeth bared
in what wasn't a smile, but not quite a grimace.
"Destroy everything, so no one gets anything?"
"That would be like Hope's Loss. For us to point our own weapon at ourselves,
just like our ancestors destroyed all of each other's machines so no one would
have anything. So many died then, Haidan. How could I do that?"
The platform jerked. The steam motor powering it hissed as it let the brakes
go, and she dropped down toward the ground. "You hope you die with it all,"
Haidan said, "and never get held responsible for such a thing."
"The Loa are hoping to hide this one out and come back up when either their
disease has claimed everyone, or we survive by some miracle. Maybe that was
what the old-father thought they could do.
Wait it out. They could have just been trying to buy some time."
Haidan chuckled. "All that had survive of the old-father were the Councilmen
them. Not so good, eh?"
The platform slowed and stopped at ground level.
There were more meetings to be had with the people in the city. No one knew
how long this would take. Food and water supplies were critical, and meting
them out meant dangerous decisions. No one was sure how long they could hold
off an Azteca attack, but with so many people behind the walls, Dihana didn't
think it was long. A couple months? Maybe more if the fishermen kept their
larders full.
Dihana wondered how much longer she could hold up without sleep. As she
stepped into a waiting
vehicle, she mentally set aside time in the afternoon for a nap.
Later in the night she awoke to a series of deep thuds. When she walked over
to her window, she heard people shouting in the street.
Up on the walls of Capitol City, flashes of gunfire lit the night sky with
stabbing orange streaks. A
cloud of eerie-colored backlit powder floated in the air. Below the clouds
seed-shaped figures coasted over the city, dropping flares.
Dihana leaned against the windowsill and cried.
The Azteca were here.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
La Revanche landed three days into the third week. Pepper stood on deck along
with the other crew, all shivering, frozen, but awed at the majestic mountains
covered in snow. All around them the staccato snaps of breaking ice and swoosh
of calving icebergs filled the air.
It took another day before they were stuck in ice. The crew grew nervous, but
Pepper saw from
John's calm that this was something John expected.
The bottom of the steamship was shallow and curved, not the sharp cutting
shape of the traditional sail-ship. John explained that he'd seen shallow
skiffs survive the freezing ice in his previous trip with that design and seen
deeper-keeled skiffs staved in. Pepper watched over the next night, his eyes
piercing the dark, to see unstoppable sheets of ice push against the sides of
La Revanche
, then slip under the hull and lift the boat up onto the ice.
La Revanche was shaped like the fishing skiffs that could be pulled up onto
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ground and float over shallow reef water easily. John was right. As a result,
the ice could push up without damaging the hull. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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