She swung her legs over the side of the berth and dialed down the thermal crank. The ticking slowed. She reached for her bra, dangling on the back of a chair, pulled it off and wrapped it around her waist. Something interrupted the moonlight pouring through her room’s only porthole.
Frightened, she poised mid-fasten. The back of her throat felt tacky and dry. She wanted a glass of water but pulled up her holster, thumbed its straps over her shoulders and sidled toward the window instead. An infinite indigo and silver-specked canopy sloshed around the moons.
The soprano offered up another disquieting gurgle: crossing boundaries from the province of sleep. It was faint, high-pitched and filtered through the hum of the airship. Could it be night birds?
Taelin buttoned up her blouse and tucked her thick cotton pants into her boots before unlocking her door and stepping into the rich paneled hallway, which felt abnormally cold.
She passed a gaslight flickering in a henna sconce. Its red light quavered down the hall and landed on the body of a man. His shoulder and head propped open the door at the end of the passageway that led to one of the fore observation decks. A harsh, freezing wind whined in.
For a moment Taelin stood staring at the slumped figure. A large shadow from the sconce moved horribly over his back like a feeding specter. She recognized it as an illusion conjured by the drafty hallway, but the flapping darkness made the body doubly terrifying. Taelin took a step back then, berating herself, scooted forward and crouched down to see if she could rouse him. He wasn’t breathing.
With some difficulty, she rolled him onto his back. No visible injuries. She screamed for help then pumped his chest with her palms. The wind took the door and folded it back on its hinges. A blast of icy air tore through the hall. The light went out. For a second, she heard the gas continue to hiss, then the safety valve squeaked and Taelin was alone with the wind.
The man’s body seemed to be cooling.
She tried to pull him away from the door, gripping his ankles. He was two hundred pounds of nothing she could move. She screamed again for help.
“Lady Rae?”
Taelin turned around at the voice, instantly relieved. “Mother of Mizraim, thank gods—” But her vision was adjusting to the dark. When she saw the speaker, when she saw the nightmare form that filled the hallway, she lurched sideways over the man, eyes ringent. Her feet kicked at the floor. Taelin gagged and shrieked and pushed herself through the doorway, out onto the deck. Air currents poured over her as the ship barreled south.
She scrambled to her feet.
From the blackness inside the door frame, the man’s arm still extended across the threshold, gray and motionless. And above it, a woman’s voice curdled, vowels strange and lilting: “Ooo fundou hiroo. Shioo osou hirioo!” The firefly twinkle of tiny lights oozed through the doorway.
Taelin tried to block out the memory of the floating head, the octopus-jumble of sickly shapes beneath it: tendrils, lumpy masses and the filaments of veins, but she could not shake it.
She turned to run and pulled up short, horrified by another body. This one lay on her side like a sleeper in a heavy leather jacket. The wind stirred her hair. Lying beside the woman was a velvet gun.
Taelin scooped it up and ran.
The weapon was heavy but it was also soft and silky, like the belly of a cat. It undulated in her grasp. She nearly dropped it, but moved her hands back from the living part to the wooden stock. It made a bubbling mucous sound.
Taelin mounted a metal staircase that corkscrewed up from the deck and onto the roof of the cabins. She nuddled into the cramped cable-strung space that ran beneath the gasbags. Tools, boxes and weights were piled on the flat roof, instigating stumbles.
She could smell the chemicals from the aft batteries and see the ebbing green patterns that bled from slender glass windows on the housings. The emerald radiance together with the gold-orange sidelights that studded the zeppelin’s port skin, bloomed intermittently through the jungle of cables, creating shapes and shadows that forced Taelin to aim the gun in a host of directions.
“Hiroo.”
Taelin screamed. She couldn’t help it. The terror that the voice provoked was intractable. Her finger brushed the trigger as she spun on the sound—so near! The gun’s deep wine-colored nap swelled like a ten-pound catfish at the trigger’s insistence, ballooning for possible ejaculation. Its fur dwindled near the front where fleshy red-purple antennae drooped and curled below half a dozen perfect black pearl-shaped eyes.
Something floated in the shadows cast by the zeppelin’s starboard battery. It drooled a slow cascade of twinkling motes.
Taelin, still screaming, fired.
Thick jets of milk-colored slime squirted from the gun’s oral tubes. Impossible amounts. The viscous lines struck cables and walls then sagged like ropes gone slack from the front of the weapon.
The bizarre, daedal shape of the gut-encumbered head floated out into moonlight; the expression on its face grim.
Out of the sky, Taelin discerned other shapes: floating, flying, moving fast. She didn’t know how many. All that mattered was escape.
The dark jungle of cables proved impossible to navigate. A pink-gold solvitriol cell burned beneath the weapon’s cherry-wood stock. It powered tiny sprockets and implants that controlled the lab-grown life form’s neural system. Taelin used it as a dim torch to check her footing.
She skittered forward to the edge of the roof, deliberated then turned and fired again.
Two more gouts of white ooze exploded into the darkness. One coil hit the monstrosity and pulled it down. It glided awkwardly to rest on the deck, convulsing in the sticky mess.
Taelin pulled the trigger one more time but the weapon only burped, coughing up thin lines like an infant vomiting milk. Airborne shadows loomed over her like the heads of tropical trees.
Taelin tossed the gun down and jumped.
Not well-planned. What if the airship’s trajectory and speed …
The deck came up. The rail seemed to spin below her but she landed on the deck. White-hot pain exploded inside her knee. The gun had left her hands. It rested nearly where she had found it, next to its previous owner. She saw the oral parts bite into the woman’s shoulder, slicing through meat and bone, pulling out great plugs of flesh. Its metabolism was legendary. It spewed out a digestive sauce and lapped up the nutrients. The gun was reloading.
Taelin started to crawl toward it when the airship pitched. Her knee throbbed with agonizing fire. Unable to brace herself, she felt her body slide. She scrabbled at the floor but there was nothing to grasp. Frantically she searched for a handhold and saw the gun and the dead woman roll to port, slip through the railing and tumble into the dark.
The head that had been stuck in the gun’s filaments was also gone.
Taelin plastered herself to the deck, clothing snagging against textured metal, but it wasn’t enough. She felt herself go.
The rough cleat-like surface of the deck scraped her face and palms. She cast her hands wildly for a shining metal bar and seized it. A railing newel. Her feet flew out into space. Her hips went with them. But her torso, her arms, were folded tightly around the post.
“Please, please, please…” she prayed to Nenuln. Her knee was on fire, sapping her strength. Between her breasts, her grandfather’s golden artifact was slippery with sweat.
“Taelin.”
Taelin opened her eyes. She hadn’t even realized she had clenched them against the horror. The entire airship seemed to be listing, she dangled off the edge of the deck. Three of the gruesome faces floated around her in the cold.
As she screamed she sensed one of the faces, so close she could smell its breath. It was a beautiful face despite the cable grease that marred one cheek. Wild blond hair blew in profusion around scintillating eyes. Its stomach dragged over the deck as its mouth jerked closer.