Queen of the Sky Frontier - Chapter 11

Chapter 11

Azrael didn't even realize she'd slept until the light of day cracked the sky and woke her. She shifted and almost fell out of her tree, grabbed for purchase as her belly flipped over and her heart raced. She was higher than she'd imagined, and looking down through the moss-hung branches she couldn't think how she'd climbed so far in the dark.

She was stiff all over, and cold, her left leg was asleep and her back hurt. Groaning, she retrieved her boots and pulled them on, found them still damp but it would have to do. Birds sang in the trees and the sky was clear with no sign of clouds. Humidity made her shirt cling to her skin, streaked with mud and dried blood.

Careful, she climbed down to the ground, looking around as she touched a foot to the soil, sure some hideous monster was about to rush upon her, but the only sign of life was a big dragonfly buzzing past indifferently. She knew the river was that way, but she didn't want to get near it right now. The waterway headed northwest, so that was the way she would go. Azrael always knew what way she was facing.

It wasn't hard to make her way through the terrain of the bayou, as there wasn't much undergrowth besides long grass. She threaded her way between the cypress and liveoaks, ducking under the heavy falls of moss. As the day deepened great clouds of insects rose and swarmed in the air, but as always they did not bite her, nor pay her any attention. Her only problem was the prevalence of stagnant pools of water or the expanses of mud that blocked her path and forced her to backtrack around them.

By noon she was sweating and exhausted, stumbling through the marshy landscape, her boots muddied and her face streaked with dirt. Whenever she got too close to the waterway she was warned off by the grunts and bellows of alligators sunning themselves on the bank. One or twice she was sure she heard the chugging of a riverboat engine, but was afraid to rush headlong through the wilderness to the water. Besides, what if they would not stop for her?

She saw only a few shacks built in the shadows of the bayou, and it turned out she was far too apprehensive to approach them. They looked abandoned - slumped and moss-covered, windows like empty eye-sockets. She didn't want to go into them and risk encountering moldering bones, or else whatever debased people would inhabit such a house.

When she stumbled upon the road she almost didn't realize what it was, and she almost left it behind before it dawned on her that the deep gouges in the muddy earth were wheel-ruts. She followed the dirt track through the trees and came to a small plank bridge across a spur of the river, and she knew she was getting somewhere.

She was hungry, but had no food, and seared with thirst but balked at drinking the muddy river water. So she staggered along until the mud track joined another one and became something much more recognizable as a road. Weeds grew over it in places, and it did not look well-traveled, but it was going the right direction.

Afternoon set in with heavy sun and the droning of insects in the trees and Azrael felt weak from exhaustion, but she kept walking until she crested a small hill, turned a corner, and there was a town tucked into the bayou right in front of her. At first she thought it must be an illusion, a mirage of this humid wasteland, but she blinked and it remained. A few dozen buildings lined a short street with fading paint on storefronts and garish advertisements splashed on their sides. A sign close by, gray with age, proclaimed it "Karnak, Population one-hundred fifty-six. Airship Capital of the Bayou".

Azrael blinked, looked up, and saw that just past the center of town a short gantry loomed like a moss-covered hallucination, and what she had taken for a dark cloud was in fact a massive airship hung with crimson banners like the flagship of an imaginary sultan's dream-armada. It was drawn up to the small mooring like a whale at a river jetty, casting half the town in shadow. It was no warship, with florid lines and elaborate carving on gunwales and prow. It looked like something imaginary, too big and too beautiful to be real.

She blinked at it, wondering if she were, in fact, about to collapse into sheer hallucination, but instead she bit her lip to shake off the haze in her thoughts and strode purposefully into town. Whatever it was, that ship was her way out of this wilderness, and she intended to get aboard however she had to.

---

The town seemed somnolent, with only one old man on his front porch in sight. Azrael was almost immediately distracted by a barrel full of rainwater beside an empty horse trough. With no one around to tell her not to, she plunged her entire head into the water and drank until she almost drowned. When she pulled out of the water she swiped her wet hair back and stood still for a long moment, wondering if she were going to be sick, but the feeling passed and she felt worlds better.

Quickly she scrubbed dirt from her face and neck, washed her hands as best she could, and sighed, feeling almost human. She scraped the mud off her boots with the edge of the trough and tried to straighten her shirt a bit. She was sure she still looked like a street urchin, and wished she had a hat again to help disguise her gender. Well, she'd have to do the best she could.

She walked up the street toward the ship, paused to glance at the old man. He looked her over without any reaction, and she decided to chance talking to him. "Say there, where is everyone?"

He grunted, spat into a brass cup beside his foot. "Up at te ship, a'course. Wharelse wood dey be?"

"Oh, yes, obviously." Azrael scratched at her neck and mentally sneered at how dirty she felt. She would kill for a real bath. "What ship is that?"

The old man looked at her, shifted his seat and she realized he was missing his left leg below the knee. Gator, likely. "You donno te Princess a Texas? Wheryoo from den eh?"

"Oh, so that's the Princess of Texas," Azrael said with false assurance, nodding as if she knew what that was. "I've been looking for. . . that." She smiled at the man and got moving before he asked any more questions. She hurried down the muddy street and passed into the shadow of the ship, looked up and almost got vertigo from the sheer size of her. The liner she'd crossed the ocean on had been big, but this. . .

Closer to the gantry, she could see it was swarming with people, in fact it looked like every single inhabitant of the town besides the one old man was gathered here. The ship loomed overhead, a hatch in her belly open with men passing in and out, mostly out, carrying tools and covered with engine grease.

So that was it. A ship this grand would have no reason to stop at a place like this, but it was in need of repair and had to stop here. This little speck of a town was a shipyard of some stripe, possibly the only one for hundreds of miles.

The Princess of Texas was huge - Azrael counted at least six decks, and all of them looked bigger than standard. She was painted in gorgeous scenes from classical myth with satyrs and fauns cavorting over the hull in swathes of gold and crimson and lusty-looking flesh. She had high, ornate windows like might be found in a cathedral except with what looked like gold instead of leading between the panes. She had two wing decks that jutted out to the sides, partly enclosed with glass and also open promenade decks where Azrael saw brightly-dressed passengers standing to look down on the bayou. The sight of them gave her an even better sense of the scale of the ship - she was bigger than any warship Azrael had ever heard of.

She reached the foot of the gantry and stalled for a moment when she realized that almost every person going to and fro was dark-skinned. Azrael was one of maybe a dozen pale faces in that crowd, but she squared her shoulders and waded in, climbed the stairs without making eye contact with anyone. She was surrounded by a hubbub of voices all speaking that backwater patois she could barely make sense of.

There were so many people so close that for a moment she almost panicked, then she came to the main landing and got ahold of herself. There were supplies here, big coils of wire and bundles and boxes stamped with numbers. She saw a big man hoist two coils of wire on his shoulders and carry them off towards the ship. Azrael was fairly sure the coils were too heavy for her, and so she grabbed one of the crates. It came up easily, much lighter than she'd expected, and she propped it on her shoulder and headed up the stairs.

The higher the scaffold went the more she could feel the boards shift under her feet, and she was glad there was almost no wind in this river-bottom country. She tried not to look around, but kept climbing as if she knew where she was going and was supposed to be here. The stairs took three turns and then the hull of the ship was looming overhead, close enough to give her vertigo when she looked at it.

Here was the hatch, not big compared to the ship itself, but still large enough to drive a good-sized wagon across it. It folded down from the sloping underbelly of the ship and formed a ramp across to the gantry. There was a step cut into the edge of it, because the reinforced hull was thick enough that climbing it without one would be difficult.

Azrael expected some guards or something - someone to keep riffraff - like her - out of the ship, but no one said anything, or even seemed to be watching. She stepped aboard and looked around, found herself in a storage space that seemed to follow along the inside of the hull, all exposed steel beams and stacked crates. It was only lit in places, and she glanced around to see if anyone was looking her way.

No one was paying her any attention, and so she just carried the box off to one side, threaded her way around the piled cargo until she was out of sight, and then she found a dark corner and snugged herself down between two piles of boxes with her back to the wall, the box she carried placed in front of her to help hide her from a casual glance.

Her heart pounded, and she waited for someone to come looking, to poke their noses into the corners. Surely, on a ship like this, they had precautions against stowaways. Azrael listened to the footsteps of others coming and going, heard shouts and laughter and noise as the last of the supplies were loaded aboard.

Eventually, the sounds trailed off, and then there was a slow, ratcheting sound. The light diminished, and she realized they were winching the hatchway shut. A low vibration reverberated through the hull as the aperture closed, and then loud clacks as it was locked in place. Azrael sat hunched in the dark, let out a long breath, and after a span of time she could not measure with no light, she fell asleep.

---

She woke suddenly, jerked awake as if by a loud sound, and for a moment she could not remember where she was. Even the electric bulbs were turned off and there was almost no light in the hold at all. It was also deeply, achingly cold.

Azrael shifted her position and was shocked by how stiff her fingers and legs already were from the chill. The ship was moving, she could feel that, as well as the dull throb of engines somewhere. Obviously up away from the ground the air was much colder. She struggled to her feet and found herself shivering. God, if she hadn't woken up she could have frozen to death.

She had to get out of here and into a warmer part of the ship, there was no possibility of staying here the entire journey. Without any idea of how long the ship would be traveling or where it was headed - she might be trapped in here for days, by which time she would certainly be dead.

It occurred to her that she didn't even know the way out of this cargo hold, and she began to panic. She could be trapped down here - really trapped. She staggered out from her hiding place and felt her way around. She could see better than most in the dark, but it was all but pitch black in here. She had to make herself stop and take deep breaths, tried to still her shivering.

This place was packed with supplies for the ship. It was not really for cargo. There had to be access for when the crew needed something. She was at the bottom of the ship, so it was most likely that access would be up.

Slowly, shivering, she felt her way through the hold until she reached a wall, then she moved along it, feeling her way, searching for a ladder and hoping there was one. This was a ship, as much as possible would be built in or bolted down. Now she wished she still had the jacket she'd abandoned in the river - anything to keep warm.

She felt sleepy and fought it, knowing if she sat down to rest she might never get up. Her hands suddenly closed on a rung set into the wall of the hold and she almost laughed aloud. A ladder! Shaking, she felt for more rungs and then began to climb, pulling herself up through the cold darkness.

It seemed like an eternity before she felt wood overhead, and then her hands outlined a trapdoor in the ceiling. For a panicked moment she thought there was no handle on the underside, then she felt the ring set into the stout wood. A few hard tugs freed it, and then she tried pulling but got nowhere. The iron was ice-cold, and it stung her hands to touch it too long.

Then she thought to turn it and heard a loud clack like a key in a lock. The whole panel shifted, loose, and she pushed, using her shoulder to lever the trapdoor open. Warmth washed over her and she gasped, saw light as fog formed around her, streamed up from the open hatch. She struggled out into a narrow hallway and let the trapdoor fall shut behind her with a loud click as it re-locked automatically.

She lay on the floor, shaking, soaking in the wonderful warmth. When she felt she could move she rolled over and pushed up to her feet, hadn't even made it all the way when a strong hand grabbed her wrist and the scruff of her shirt, hauled her around.

"Well now," a rough voice said. "What do we have here?"

Continued in Chapter 12

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