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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE


“Rast, stop gawking out the window and put some pants on!” Chesa ran into the room in full battle dress, armored skirt and elven bow glinting in the flickering electric light. She took a quick look at the blood leaking from my shredded calves and stumbled to a stop. “I swear, every time I walk in on you, you’re bleeding in a whole new way. What happened?”

“Old home week,” I said. “One of the valhellions. Raised from the dead, I think, same bad attitude. I’ll be fine. She said something about the Iron Lich.”

“That’s twice. We have to tell Tesla,” she said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “And now we have a non-vampire source. Sounds like Lumiere’s making a whole army of the dead.”

“Well, go get your kit on. We can do the Scooby-Doo thing later. The rest of the team’s already fighting. Addie’s helping Gregory buckle his leggings in the back.”

“I’ll bet she is,” I muttered, limping away from the window.

“Don’t be a weirdo. Just get back there and get ready to fight.”

“Some more. Fight some more.” I gestured at the room. “I’ve been fighting.”

“Ugh, whatever,” Chesa said, then sprinted toward the front of the airship.

“I’m just saying, while the rest of you were putting your big kid clothes on, I was out here, buck naked, winning battles and taking names,” I said to myself. “Actually, did I catch her name? There were two of them we killed, weren’t there? Leddi? Vivaldi? No . . . Veldi?”

The Silverhawk shook and tilted wildly to the side. The crackle of gunfire echoed through the airship’s claustrophobic hallways. I picked up the pace.

I left a trail of sticky, crimson footprints on the fancy carpeting that led to our containment cell. When I came through the hatch, Gregory and Adelaide were locked in a struggle with the knight’s pants. He was in his chain-mail undercoat, which looked like a set of silver footie pajamas. Addie was behind him, both fists wrapped around leather straps that held the cuisses in place, yanking with all her might.

“If you would stop . . . moving! For just a second!” she shouted.

“You’ve caught the cuisses in my vambraces,” Gregory said, jerking his elbow away from Addie’s fists. “You’re going to hogtie me!”

“Why in heaven’s name is everything held together with straps and twine? Haven’t you people heard of zippers?” She dropped the leather and bent to his ankles. The cuisses tumbled forward, falling off his thighs in a crash of metal. “Oh, piss. We’re going to have to start over.”

“There’s no time,” I said, limping in. “We’ve been boarded. Grab your sword and follow me.”

“Listen, Rast, that’s fine for you to—” Gregory’s jaw dropped when he saw me.

“Is it really that bad?” I asked. Behind me, pools of blood seeped into the floorboards. “Yes, okay, I suppose it’s bad. Have you seen the Saint? Or, science help me, the Doctor?”

“They’re both in the infirmary, running triage.” Addie glanced up, then joined Gregory in gaping at my wounds. “Holy cow, John. Did you walk across a field of broken glass?”

“That’s exactly what I did. The valkyries didn’t just knock politely at the front door, you know.” Another round of crashing impacts shook the airship. I dropped onto my cot and started pulling on my leggings. Blood soaked into the cotton wadding immediately. It would have to do for a bandage until I could get some proper healing. “Greg, it’s the valhellions. But they’ve somehow been raised from the dead, and the one I was tangling with mentioned someone called the Iron Lich.” I looked at Adelaide. “That mean anything to you?”

“Doesn’t sound familiar. What’s a lich?” she asked. Gregory managed to get his chestpiece in place while she was distracted. Addie noticed, and started in on his shoulders.

“Depends on your rules system. Usually a necromancer who has somehow trapped their soul in some kind of cage, to escape death.” I pulled on my greaves and started buckling together my spaulders. In real life, this whole process takes around ten minutes, but Greg and I were magical heroes. Convenient armor was just part of the gig. “They’re undead, they’re powerful, and they’re usually up to no good. Did the Lumieres have anything like that going on?”

“Before we met the vampires, I would have said no.” Addie finished tying Greg together, then wiped her hands on her pant legs. “Now? They’re capable of anything.”

“A great and foreboding evil,” Gregory growled. He grabbed his sword and held it against his heart, like a cleric casting Turn. “It is my sworn duty to slay the servants of death, wherever I find them. I will destroy this lich of iron!”

“Well, now you’ve screwed up the arms,” Addie said. One metal sleeve was buttoned up, but the other dangled from Greg’s wrist like a weird, misgrown wing. “Stop swearing oaths of vengeance for just one second.”

“You’ll have to forgive him,” I said. “Greg gets rambunctious around apparitions of absolute evil.”

“Yeah, that doesn’t sound like our jurisdiction,” Addie said. “Not a lot of undead necromancers in the Victorian age.”

“Not a lot of steam-powered robot men in the late 1800s, or clockwork angels, or, for that matter, airships the size of yachts.” I threw my gorget around my throat, adjusted the fit, then kicked my helm up into my hands. “Let’s go smack some villains!”

“We have to find them first,” Gregory said as he pulled on his final gauntlet.

“Shouldn’t be too hard.” Addie stepped back, admiring her part in the assembly of his armor. I noted three buckles out of place, and an overtightening of the codpiece. “We’re all stuck on the same airship. Not like they have far to go.”


The villains came to us. We exited the cargo bay and made our way toward the front of the airship, weaving our way between packs of Pinkerton agents in full retreat. Addie led the way, since neither Greg nor I really knew the layout of the ship. We had spent too much time confined to quarters to prevent things like selkies in the boiler room. But looking around now, the situation was pretty grim.

“See, this is what Esther was talking about,” I said. “The Silverhawk is awfully fragile for an HQ.”

“We usually just fly away when things get rough,” Addie said.

“Not so easy when you’re being attacked by valkyries, is it?”

“I can see why you’re so popular with your friends,” she said. “You’re a real gem of a conversationalist.”

“I try.” We came around a corner and found it packed with Pinkertons. “This looks promising.”

Addie grunted, then unfolded her magical firearm into a short-barreled shotgun and held it like a prow in front of her, cutting through the traffic. “Clear the way!” she shouted. The Pinkertons pressed against the sides of the corridor, giving us just enough room to squeeze past.

“Should we be worried about falling out of the sky?” I called over the blaring alarms. The closer we got to the command deck, the louder they got.

“No!” Addie yelled over her shoulder.

“That’s good.”

“Because if we fall out of the sky, we’ll all be dead, and there will be nothing left to worry about.”

“Oh. Uh. Not so good.”

“No,” she agreed. She grabbed a limping Pinkerton by the arm. “Cooper! What’s going on up there?”

“Some kind of Norwegian sky pirates, m’lady!” the man said. “The bridge is cut off, but Captain Honorius and Mr. Tesla are holding strong. There are incursions on the foredeck, the observation lounge, and the crew bar.”

“Long as we hold the bridge, it should be okay. Where’s the rest of the team?”

“Cassius and that magic man are at the bridge. The two medieval ladies . . .” He glanced at me and Gregory before swallowing hard. “They were last seen on the observation deck. Three of the Viking bitches are up there.”

“Observation deck it is,” I said. Greg nodded vigorously, but Addie grabbed me before I could make any progress.

“No offense, Rast, but there’s nothing mission critical in Observation.”

“My friends are pretty mission critical to me,” I said.

“If the ship goes down, there’ll be no saving them, no matter where they are. We need to get to the bridge.”

“Damn your bridge!” Gregory shouted, much too loudly. “I will bleed and fight and die to save the lady Chesa!”

“And the rest of the team, big guy. Hold your exuberant horse.” I turned to Addie. “Think about it. If the valhellions are pressing the observation deck, they must have some reason. This is not some random attack. They’re after something.”

“Perhaps it’s you lot,” the Pinkerton agent growled. “Nothing like this happened before you came aboard.”

“And I never fought an undead valkyrie before today, either. We’re all adding to our memory journals.” I pushed him aside. “Come on, Addie. Let me and Greg storm the observation deck. You go to the bridge and see what you can find out.”

She thought for a long moment, then shook her head. “No, can’t risk it.”

“Like hell,” I said, and tried to move past her. She put a very heavy hand on my chest.

“Let me finish. I can’t risk the two of you unattended in the Silverhawk. There’s no telling what sort of protomundanity will manifest. I’ll go with you.” She cycled the chamber on her shotgun, then gestured down the corridor. “Lead the way, hero-man.”

“Huzzah!” Gregory shouted, and charged down the hall, with Addie and the Pinkerton close behind.

“I think she was talking to me, man.” I closed my visor and tightened the straps on my shield, then lumbered after them. “Anyway. Whatever. Huzzah.”

We passed through the star . . . board? Port? The left-side sponson, which was set up as an open-air bar and lounge. I say “open-air” because the floor-to-ceiling bay windows had all been smashed out. Wind tore at us as we hobbled through, clinging to the inside wall like ants in a hurricane. When we reached the other side, Addie cycled the hatch and locked it, applying a pressure seal that made my ears pop.

“Much more of that and we’re going to start running into some very mundane problems,” she said.

“What do you mean?” Gregory asked.

“Air pressure. Drag. Lift. This thing doesn’t exactly follow the rules of traditional physics. Those windows would never hold in a real pressurized cabin, not at this altitude. And every time reality is reminded of that, the Gestalt degrades.”

“I get it,” I said. “It’s like eating processed food screws up the Unreal. We have to stick to a medieval diet or our powers degrade.”

“Not to mention your colon.” Addie looked nervously up at the ceiling. The lights flickered. “Point is, we need to solve this before the real world decides we’re flying on nothing more than the power of imagination.”

The next corridor was eerily quiet. The overhead electric lamps were out, and the only illumination was a dull red glow coming from a series of terminals at the end of the hall. Narrow doors lined the hallway, each sealed shut, with blinking white lights overhead. The far door was a heavy bulkhead hatch with a wheel lock and a small bulbous window.

“Doesn’t look like they’ve been through here,” I said as we crept down the darkened corridor. The adjoining rooms were sealed shut.

“Which is strange. They obviously breached the employee lounge. Where would they have gone?” Addie mused.

“What’s in these rooms?” Gregory paused and pressed his face to the foggy glass of one of the staggered doors. “A greenhouse?”

“Crew housing. My room is over there.” She nodded to one of the doors. “The room you’re looking at belongs to Cassius. He has a thing for plants.”

“Well, whatever they’re doing, they—” I shut up as a shadow passed in front of the glass viewport at the end of the hallway. A metal wing blocked the light, then disappeared. Addie motioned us to stay still, then crept to the door and peered through. Her face fell.

“What?” I whispered as she crawled back to us. Instead of answering, she keyed the door to her room and waved us inside. It wasn’t until the door was closed and locked that she spoke.

“Ten of those damned bird women in the mess. They’ve barricaded the exits and are loaded for bear. Some of them have guns.”

“Valkyries with guns. I don’t like that,” I mused.

“How many of these bloody things are there?” Gregory asked.

“Well, we killed quite a few of them. Maybe they’ve been recruiting,” I said.

“We can worry about the who of it later.” Addie jerked her thumb back toward the mess. “Point is, we’re not getting through that way.”

“So how are we supposed to get to the observation deck?” I asked.

“I have an idea,” she said after a moment. “Follow me.”


Her idea was terrible. It was suicidal. It was exactly the kind of nonsense heroes are supposed to do. I hated it.

Gregory, on the other hand, was thrilled. That man never shies away from an opportunity to potentially do himself harm in the name of adventure. Weirdo.

We stood in the open door of the starboard cargo bay, about halfway up the length of the Silverhawk. The sounds of fighting echoed overhead, most likely from the observation deck. The floor thrummed with the steady thud of heavy cannon, fired from the belly turret under our feet. I hadn’t even known the Silverhawk had external guns. Neither had the valhellions, apparently.

“You do realize they have wings, right?” I shouted over the tearing wind.

“That’s the point, Rast! They’ll never expect it!” she shouted back.

“Because it’s stupid,” I muttered to myself. “No one expects the stupid.”

“Sorry?”

“Nothing!” I called back, plastering a smile on my face.

“We will strike at them from the air!” Gregory shouted, grinning like a maniac. “Hoist them by their own petard! The irony!”

“If they’ve breached Observation and the port sponson, they have no reason to be out here,” Addie shouted at us. She was busily hooking up a climbing harness to my cuisses. The fit was tricky, and didn’t inspire confidence. “All we need to do is crawl along the outside until we reach the observation deck without being seen.”

“Are there handholds?” Gregory asked.

“Kind of. Have either of you ever been rappelling?”

“No,” I said, just as Gregory gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

“Did a lot of free-climbing in high school. Good way to build up your core,” he said.

“Good way to fall to your death,” I answered.

“Well, it’s like that,” Addie said, testing the fit of her harness. “Keep the cable taut and your legs straight. Lean out from the hull, like you’re water skiing.”

“Haven’t done that, either,” I said.

“Have you done anything outside?” Gregory asked, exasperated. “Rock climbing? Horseback riding? Swimming?”

“I read a lot of books,” I said, leaning my head out the door. The wind deafened me, tugging me backward. “Won’t the wind just knock us off?”

“Well, that’s what the cable is for.” She cinched the harness tight, then hooked it into a steel cable that led outside. “This is designed for maintenance crews, usually while we’re docked. But I’m sure it’ll hold.”

“You’re sure? Or you hope?” I asked.

“Yep,” she said, then hooked her own harness to the cable and swung out into the wild blue sky. Gregory pounced after her, his metal legs flailing wildly for a moment before finding their grip. Neither of them tumbled off the side of the ship to their doom, so after a few deep breaths, I gripped the cable and followed Gregory out the hatch.


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