“Oh. All right.” The boy sniffed and gently put the cat on the ground. She hunkered down on the warm stones, shivering. Kella frowned and turned to leave just as she heard a familiar voice in the hallway.
“…stupid animal. We have no time for-” The speaker broke off as she emerged onto the edge of garden. Lady Sade’s hair was weighed down with silver rings and her dress was much plainer than the ones she wore in Arafez. Several other women clustered behind her in the shadows of the hallway.
Sade quickly affected a concerned smile and strode toward the detective. “There he is, my darling boy, we were all so worried! And your precious kitty cat. Thank goodness.”
Kella kept her head bowed beneath her hood, her eyes on the ground. She saw Lady Sade’s feet arrive just a few paces from her. “My lady.”
“Thank you for finding the child.” Lady Sade reached down for his arm and gently tugged him toward her. “Pick up your cat, please.”
Kella tilted her face up.
Lady Sade reacted only slightly, though sharply. She froze, still clutching the boy in one hand. “You’re not looking well, detective.”
“I feel worse than I look.”
“How unfortunate for you. However, I believe you’ll be feeling worse still when the Royal Guards arrive.”
“I’m sure you’re right about that, but I’d still rather be me than you right now. I saw what was going on in that basement. And I talked to the marshals. What’s inside that cat?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I saw the scar. Is it something electrical? Something to shock the queen? No, that’s too random, too unreliable. That poor girl Jedira said she smelled nitroh down there. A bomb then, isn’t it? A bomb that the queen might have in her arms when it goes off, I suppose, with her family close by. How many people are you hoping to kill today?” Kella’s arms shook. The cuts were opening and stinging. “This is all going to end right now, and it’s going to end very badly.”
Lady Sade smiled. “You’re going to arrest me?”
“Somehow, I don’t think arresting you will do much good.” Kella pulled out the marshal’s revolver from inside her dress and leveled it at Sade’s chest. “Your advocates would have you free and blameless in a matter of minutes and I would turn up the victim of some pathetic accident shortly thereafter, courtesy of your Persian friends.”
Lady Sade’s smile faded. “So you’re simply going to murder me instead?”
“No. You’d die a victim, not a criminal, and your little friends would all go free, and then I would be executed for killing you. Which is not what I had planned for my retirement.”
“A stalemate, then?”
Kella wanted to grin, to look brave or menacing, but she had no strength for it and no stomach for it. A cold, empty pit of horror and disgust gaped in her belly as she tried not to look down at the boy and the cat. “No.” She pointed the gun into the air and fired once, and then screamed, “Guards! Guards! Sade has a gun! Help! Guards!”
Before Lady Sade could react, Kella grabbed her empty hand and shoved the revolver into it, and then pretended to wrestle with the weapon over their heads so that the gun was clearly visible high in the air. The heavy pounding of armored feet echoed nearby.
“Guards! Guards!” Kella gasped from the strain as Lady Sade began to grapple for control of the gun in earnest with both hands. The little boy, now free, darted around the pair and clung to the back of the detective’s dress.
Lady Sade’s face twisted into a hideous angry mask as she tried to pry the weapon out of Kella’s hands. “You idiot, the guards wouldn’t dare shoot a woman in the middle of a struggle like this. They aren’t stupid!”
“I know.” Kella grit her teeth. “They’re going to need a better reason to shoot on sight, aren’t they? Especially if I want them to arrest your whole entourage, too.”
The gun shook in the tangle of fingers and bandages and jeweled rings, and the sound of the running soldiers thundered ever closer.
“So let’s give them a very good reason to kill you right now.” Kella yanked the gun down, prayed that she was pointing it at something she could live without, and shoved Sade’s finger against the trigger.
The shot echoed across the enclosed garden, followed by a smattering of surprised cries from Sade’s companions. Kella reeled back, unable to breathe. She felt the blood running down her side, hot and wet, trickling inside her clothes. The pain was bizarre, a riot of sharpness and stiffness and burning and coldness. She fell and a moment later the ground slammed into her back and a pale blue sky appeared before her. To her left, she saw the scared little boy sobbing and wiping at his eyes. His face was painted red.
Then she heard young men shouting across the garden. “Gun-gun-gun!” Half a dozen rifles cracked almost in unison, followed by another smattering of gasps and screams from the women in the hall. To her right, Kella saw Lady Sade fall, her eyes wide, lips parted in a silent cry of surprise.
Then there was a lot of dull noise: footsteps, muddled voices, screaming and crying, arguing, armor clanking. Men were barking orders, “Down on the ground! Hands on your heads. On the ground now!”
Kella tried to swallow and blink, and out of the corner of her eye she saw a hooded figure dart by, the hood falling back to reveal a tight silver bun behind wrinkled features, and in the crook of woman’s arm was the cat.
A moment later the white uniform of a guard leaned over her, and dimly she felt hands on her face and neck and belly. As she slipped away, Kella heard a young man hollering, “Medic!”
Chapter 44. Taziri
Taziri looked up at the major. “Well? What do you see?”
“It’s Chaou. I can see her silver hair.” Syfax held the binoculars tight against his eyes. “But I can’t see Sade or Othmani. There are a lot of people down there. Royals, kids, servants, the air crew, the guards. Wait, something’s happening.”
“What?” Taziri and Ghanima asked in unison.
“Chaou. She’s moving through the crowd. She’s holding something. It almost looks like a dog. Damn, the crowd is running from her. Servants, kids, all running. But the queen and some others are still between Chaou and the airship. What the hell is that dog-thing?”
“A dog?” Taziri frowned for a moment before the realization struck like lightning in her brain. “There’s something in the dog! Just like the shock device in Chaou’s arm. That’s the weapon, that’s how they smuggled it past the guards.”
“A bomb in a dog. Cute.” Syfax grimaced. “And if she throws the bomb near the queen’s skybarge…”
Taziri nodded. “Then everyone on that field will die.”
“We need to get down there. The guards aren’t doing squat. They’re just pointing their guns at Chaou. They must be worried about setting off the bomb.” Syfax lowered the binoculars. “What about now? Maybe the bomb will keep them all distracted for a few minutes. Will the men at those anti-aircraft guns still shoot at us now?”
“Definitely.” Ghanima nodded, wide-eyed. “We can’t possibly land there now.”
Taziri felt an idea slide up from the back of her imagination, a silly idea, a bit of reckless nonsense that seemed too stupid to actually say out loud, but no one was talking and the need to do something, anything, suddenly felt much stronger than the need to not say something stupid. So she said, “We can crash.”
“What?”
“All airships have a few emergency switches and releases. They’re designed to release the gas bag in the event of a collision or a fire.” Taziri’s hands gestured nervously, illustrating what she was saying. “The idea is that if an airship gets blown off the airfield, or has some disaster near the ground, you hit the release and the gas bag floats away and you don’t explode. If we can trigger the emergency collision switch in the nose of the queen’s skybarge, the gas bag will just float away and Chaou’s bomb will just be a regular bomb, instead of a super-bomb.”