The Wall of Storms, page 78
She pressed her bone speaking tube against the back of Korva’s neck and spoke an order that she thought she would never have to give:
Talons.
Korva repeated the order to the other garinafins with mournful bellows.
In traditional garinafin warfare, this was an order given only in desperation. Only a pilot whose mount had exhausted almost all supply of fermented gas and could not maintain flight or fire breath would resort to fighting with the last weapons possessed by her mount: teeth and talons—and the garinafins right now lacked even teeth.
Yet Princess Vadyu’s order wasn’t completely insensible. The airships, after all, were fragile constructions of silk and bamboo, lacking the tough leather and flesh that armored the garinafins. They could hardly withstand a direct strike from the powerful beasts.
Most of the garinafins were still too pain-addled to respond, but a massive brown garinafin now approached Spirit of Kiji, one of the airships forming a wall of the box formation, her talons leading the way as she folded her wings in a killing dive.
The airship crew tried to work even faster at winching back the crossbow. The pilot of the garinafin whistled sharply, and the other riders on the garinafin’s back let loose a barrage of hard, round stones with their slingshots. Several of the crossbowers fell down, their skulls crushed by the missiles. Another screamed as her left arm hung uselessly, broken.
A few women emerged from the hull to take the place of their fallen and injured comrades, and more arrows flew from the arrow slits, but most bounced harmlessly off the riders’ tough leather armor.
“Now!” the pilot shouted into the speaking tube pressed against her mount’s neck.
She and the rest of her crew braced themselves against the harnesses and atop the saddles as the garinafin reared up, her powerful wings generating a wild, turbulent storm, and reached out with her left claw, slashing the sharp talons across the billowing hull of Spirit of Kiji.
Instantly, a massive gash appeared in the silk-and-bamboo hull. Bamboo girders snapped like toothpicks, and lift gasbags lay exposed like the swim bladders of a great fish.
“Compensate for Kiji’s loss of lift,” Mazoti shouted from within Silkmotic Arrow. All the airships were connected together in this formation, and Kiji threatened to drag the whole formation down. “Rescue survivors if you can, but get those crossbows loaded!”
The brown garinafin continued to tear and rip at the hull of Spirit of Kiji. Gasbags popped like the soap bubbles blown by children in summer. Crew tumbled from the widening gash like pearls spilling out of a ripped pouch; screaming, they fell to their deaths in the raging waves below.
As the crews of the other airships scrambled to help the crew of Spirit of Kiji escape their dying craft and adjusted the gasbags in their own ships to maintain the stability of the overall formation, everyone held their collective breath. If a spark appeared now, all the Imperial airships would be doomed.
The garinafin ripped away the last of the gasbags on this side of the ship, and, with a triumphant series of bellows, flapped her wings and backed away. What was left of the billowing, bulky frame of Spirit of Kiji was now too heavy to be supported by the other ships. Slowly, the box formation began to sink toward the sea.
“We have to detach!” shouted Dafiro Miro.
Gin Mazoti nodded, her face grim. Not all the crew of Spirit of Kiji had been rescued, but loss of altitude was fatal to the rest of the fleet. Dafiro gave the order by banging a pattern on the gongs.
Crew members at the rims of the hulls of the other ships climbed to the very edges and cut the cables that kept Spirit of Kiji attached to her sister ships.
Slowly but inexorably, Spirit of Kiji separated from the box formation and fell toward the ocean, taking with it about a dozen crew members who had refused to abandon their places at the massive crossbow, including the captain. The desperate crews of the other airships tossed out silken ropes to the sinking hulk, hoping to rescue as many of their comrades as possible. But the crossbowers shook their heads, refusing to reach for the lines.
“Ready to fire!” Mota Kiphi, the targeting officer, reported to Captain Mué Atamu of Spirit of Kiji. He was one of the few men who served aboard the airship, as his extraordinary strength compensated for his relatively heavier weight.
The platform jerked wildly as the ship swung from side to side, trying to balance itself. The crossbow crew stumbled and several fell.
Captain Atamu, an old veteran of the Chrysanthemum-Dandelion War, held on to a spoke for the crossbow wheel and nodded. “Let’s make this count!”
Because the few crossbowers who remained were far fewer than a full complement, turning the wheel was a slow and laborious process made possible only by Mota Kiphi’s extraordinary strength. He guided and rallied his comrades until the massive crossbow was pointing at a tan garinafin with light green stripes gliding away from them.
“Stop!” shouted Mota. Then he swallowed nervously and asked, “Captain, do you think they’ll remember us in the future like they remember the Hegemon?”
Captain Atamu looked at him. Mota was so young, so hopelessly in love with the idea of history. She looked at the other crossbowers, all of them looking expectantly back. The yearning in their eyes broke the old captain’s heart.
She kept her voice gentle as she said to them, “Probably not. Most soldiers who die are quickly forgotten. But we don’t fight to leave a name; we fight because it’s the right thing to do.”
“Oh,” said Mota, disappointment making him slump at the wheel. “I was hoping for a song.”
“Not all heroes need songs composed about them,” said Captain Atamu. “It is enough that we know who we are.”
Then she gave the order to fire.
The bolt leapt from the crossbow and traced a gentle arc through the air that ended in the body of the tan-and-green-striped garinafin. A loud moan. Then the sky was lit up with another fiery explosion.
The crossbowers cheered and embraced each other.
As the doomed wreckage of Spirit of Kiji continued to sink, the rest of the garinafins, now recovered somewhat from the pain of the caltrops stuck in their mouths, approached and took out their anger by swiping their sharp talons at individual crew members, ripping some cleanly in half and crushing others into bloody meat pies before tossing them to the ocean. Not a single crew member pled for mercy, and all died with their short swords in their hands, though they were useless against the garinafins.
The empty wreck of Spirit of Kiji crashed into the sea, and the small ships of the Dara navy had to scramble to get out of the way.
Heart of Tututika, Resolve of Fithowéo, and Vigor of the Twins shifted their positions to fill in the gap left by Spirit of Kiji. The airships, having reloaded their crossbows, fired again, and two more garinafins were struck by the bolts and disintegrated in the air.
But it was undeniable that the formation was now less formidable than before, and there were more blind angles that couldn’t be covered by the silkmotic bolts.
Tanvanaki didn’t hesitate to take advantage of this newly discovered weakness of the Imperial airships. She ordered the remaining garinafins, who had been focused on massacring the crew of Spirit of Kiji, to return to the airship cluster and attack it with their claws before the crews could reload again.
This was the moment for the marshal’s last surprise.
“Plum Formation! Expose the sight lines,” Mazoti shouted. “Shockers, prepare for action.”
The crews of the airships carried out her orders. The great ballast balls shifted and the airships altered their positions.
Silkmotic Arrow and Moji’s Vengeance now also stood up on their tails and moved into the same plane as Heart of Tututika, Resolve of Fithowéo, and Vigor of the Twins. All five ships rotated until they were standing in the air, back to back, like five swordsmen preparing to meet enemies coming from every direction, their ballast balls dangling below them.
As the garinafins approached, the thin silk skin of the airships split, ripped, and fell away from the bamboo skeleton to trail underneath the airships like the tails of kites. Deprived of the structural support of the silk skin, the frameworks wobbled and flexed even more, as though about to come apart at any moment.
What are they playing at? Tanvanaki wondered. Again she held Korva back and watched as the other garinafins approached the rippling skeletal airships, which now looked like birdcages holding clusters of eggs. Flaps of garinafin hide taken from the dissected carcasses cradled the vulnerable gasbags, apparently an attempt at some shielding against garinafin fire breath.
Incredibly, the soldiers aboard the airships stopped winching their giant crossbows. Instead, they retreated into the interior of the cagelike hull, where, working in small teams, they assembled segments of bamboo into long lances fifty feet in length tipped with bronze. Then, dividing into two columns, they raised the lances into the air and braced themselves inside the cage, along two major structural members of the hulls like two walkways. Two lances pointed forward, and two lances pointed at the back.
They were preparing to meet the onslaught of the garinafins like foot soldiers bracing with pikes against a cavalry charge, except that the riders they faced had mounts many times the size of elephants. A brutal, desperate measure that had no hope of succeeding.
The garinafins flapped their wings and dove in, their sharp talons extended.
The soldiers on the airships braced with their long lances, their expressions grim.
The battle was about to descend into a primitive mêlée contest in the air, like the ancient duels of heroes sung in the sagas.
Mazoti glanced at the thin silvery wires attached to the bronze tips of the long lances and seemed to hear deep in her heart the humming of the power beneath her feet.
The first of the garinafins loomed up against the front of the ship, its claws poised to rip the fragile frame of Silkmotic Arrow asunder.
“Forward Kana team, attack!” Mazoti ordered.
With a collective grunt, the lance team on the left side of the ship dashed forward, thrusting the lance through the open lattice of the hull toward the chest of the hovering garinafin.
The garinafin was prepared for this. Easily and gracefully, it grabbed the tip of the lance and shoved it to the side. Though its jaws were still blocked by the lodged bamboo caltrop, its eyes seemed to curve into a cruel smile. The giant lance wielded by the puny humans was no match for its reflexes and strength.
“Forward Rapa team, now!” Mazoti cried out.
And the column on the right side of the ship dashed forward, thrusting their lance through the open lattice of the hull at the garinafin.
Contemptuously, the garinafin reached out with its other claw. This attack would be deflected as easily as the first. Once it had grabbed the two lances, it intended to drag the humans out from their gondola like ants crawling along some branch and toss them to the roiling ocean below.
The claw closed on the lance.
The garinafin shuddered. Some unseen force coursed through its limbs, and the entire hovering body convulsed in the air. The riders on the garinafin felt the same jolt: It was an indescribable sensation, as though some giant skewer had pierced their bodies in an instant and frozen all their muscles.
Time once again slowed down.
The garinafin tried to let go of the lances and found that it could not. The muscles in the claws no longer obeyed its will. The force coursing through its body seemed to grow stronger, as though a million red-hot iron lances had bored into its torso and were now twisting inside.
Lines of crackling silkmotic force crisscrossed the body of the garinafin, catching it inside a web of lightning sparks. The glow from the lines of power was so bright that the soldiers closed their eyes as they hung on, willing the power they wielded to hold and destroy the massive beast in front of them.
Burning patches appeared on the garinafin’s body, first on its feet, and then all over its torso. Dark columns of smoke rose. The garinafin convulsed and spasmed in midair along with its riders, puppets seized by a power that they could not understand.
With a loud pop, the garinafin’s claws finally freed themselves from the lances. The lifeless body hung in the air for a second before falling, plunging straight down to the ocean below. Lines of silkmotic force still raced and crackled over its body as it splashed into the water, raising up a large wave that drenched and rocked the stunned crew observing from Pride of Ukyu.
CHAPTER SIXTY
BATTLE OF ZATHIN GULF, PART II
THE DAMU MOUNTAINS, A FEW MONTHS BEFORE THE BATTLE OF ZATHIN GULF.
The ascent grew steeper, and Zomi Kidosu stopped by the side of the trail, leaning against her walking stick.
“Do you want to rest for a little while?” Princess Théra asked, concern suffusing her voice. She reached out to support Zomi under her arm.
Zomi tried to catch her breath. “I’m just not used to hiking this far without my harness. I’ll be fine.” She squeezed Théra’s hand and gave her a quick kiss.
After weeks of silkmotic therapy, Zomi was now able to walk for the most part without her harness, relying on a walking stick only for strenuous hikes. She could feel her leg growing stronger every day with practice.
Princess Théra looked at the sky: The roiling, dark clouds in the east were fast approaching. She was worried.
“Maybe we can try this another day.”
Zomi shook her head. “We need to get to the open field before the rain starts. Don’t be distressed about me.”
The two had been climbing the mountain for hours. Traveling without an entourage so as to draw less attention, they each carried a large canvas bag stuffed full of experimental equipment.
The mountainside was deserted. Hunters and firewood gatherers had long descended from the mountains to avoid the approaching storm. The Damu Mountains were famous for sudden thunderstorms during the summer, and it was not a laughing matter to be caught on the mountains during one: The detritus trails left by flash floods and the split trunks of trees struck by lightning provided plenty of warnings.
But the lure of lightning was precisely why they were here.
Research into weaponizing the silkmotic force had been going on for months, and everyone was growing frustrated. Despite the best efforts of Miza Crun and Atharo Ye, exploding arrows that relied on the silkmotic spark as the firing agent was the best that the engineers could do.
Several other avenues of research had not panned out. An attempt to devise a more powerful flamethrower was ruled out early on as it was simply too dangerous given the flammability of the new Imperial airships, which relied on fermented manure gas for lift. Intrigued by the Adüan fire rod, Atharo tried to see if it could be weaponized along the same lines as the silkmotic arrows. However, the resulting bolts, which relied on the fire rod instead of an Ogé jar as the detonator for firework powder, were devoid of any obvious performance benefits over the silkmotic arrows—in fact, they were worse, as the fire-rod arrows lacked the paralyzing jolt that the silkmotic arrows delivered.
“Silkmotic force, silkmotic force . . . ,” Miza Crun muttered. “I’m certain that this is the proper direction.”
The fact that a small Ogé jar charged fully by the massive silkmotic generator could let out a jolt powerful enough to kill a chicken was tantalizing. Working day and night, Miza Crun tried to squeeze more power out of his instruments of healing and entertainment so that they could become machines that killed.
The first, obvious thing to try was to create larger Ogé jars to hold more silkmotic charge. A great deal of experimentation revealed that the capacity of an Ogé jar could be increased by making the jar itself as thin as possible while making the surface area for the channeling coatings as large as possible. However, making large, thin-walled jars out of glass or porcelain proved impractical: They were too fragile to handle and transport.
The mathematician-administrator Kita Thu gave Miza Crun an idea: “While it’s hard to build one large hall with a spanning dome, it is easy to make many small interconnected rooms with small domes. The total capacity of each is the same. Can the same principle not be applied to Ogé jars for the storage of silkmotic power?”
Miza Crun cursed himself for not thinking of this path earlier. Connecting multiple Ogé jars together to combine the silkmotic force stored inside each was a trick he already had some experience with. When he connected the jars end to end in a series, the intensity of the spark on discharge increased—that is, the spark could stretch across a longer gap between the two channeling rods attached to the inner and outer walls of the Ogé jars. But when he connected the jars side by side—for instance, by placing all the jars on a silver plate and then tying wires attached to the inner surfaces into a single bundle—the reservoir formed by the collection of jars generated a thicker spark, though it could not leap across as wide a gap. In other words, with the jars connected in parallel, the silkmotic force seemed to have more quantity, though it wasn’t as intense.
A large reservoir of Ogé jars generated a shock powerful enough to kill a sheep or calf, though the channeling rods had to be held in such a way that the silkmotic current flowed right through the heart of the animal. It was conceivable that with enough Ogé jars, a reservoir could become powerful enough to kill a garinafin.
But calculations by Kita and Zomi revealed that such a collection of Ogé jars would be much too massive to even fit inside the hull of an Imperial airship. Besides, even if such a collection could be constructed, charging them using the single silkmotic generator would take forever. As it was, the generator had to operate continuously to create a usable supply of silkmotic arrows.
What they needed was a source of silkmotic power that would be strong enough to kill a garinafin in a single jolt and a reservoir to hold such power that wasn’t so bulky or fragile as glass or porcelain Ogé jars.
