The Kraken King, Part 3 Page 4

  How could anyone build defenses against such a woman? She’d jumped fearlessly from a falling balloon flyer and lured a boilerworm with fire, and now she was willing to stand up to men in mechanical suits.

  But she’d misread this situation. The twins were arrogant, but they knew better than to summon him.

  “It’s an invitation,” he said. “And authorized transportation to their fortress.”

  Ferocity turned to worry. “Then they know you’re coming to see them.”

  They would have been told of Ariq’s arrival within minutes of his entering the den. He nodded, then rose from the bench and started for the ladder.

  The twins would also be told if he showed any preference toward one of his passengers. He didn’t hold Zenobia too close or for too long when he helped her down, though her warm scent filled his every breath and his hands never wanted to leave her waist. The need to reassure her burned within him, but he pretended not to see her concern when she glanced from the guards to him. He turned away and boarded the twins’ balloon instead of watching her pass through the inn’s gate, and was halfway to the fortress before he stopped wondering if she’d glanced back when he’d left.

  Smoking hells. Why hadn’t she come into his life a year ago, before the marauders’ attacks had threatened the destruction of his town? Or a year from now, when it would be over? Why couldn’t she simply be the clever woman who’d made him laugh and who’d set fire to his blood? Why did she have to be the woman who carried dangerous information in her satchel and lied about who she was?

  He needed to shove her out of his mind. Yet as he watched the city pass below and familiar frustration rose from his gut, he still thought of her.

  You helped create this. You can’t change it now?

  Ariq could. Waging war was in his bones. He could destroy the twins and anyone who took their place. But he knew the cost of that war would be far too many of the lives below. Thousands would die. And if Ariq started the battle it would be his war, not theirs.

  Whatever the twins professed to believe, they didn’t rule by strength alone. They relied on fear, just as the Great Khagan did. Eventually the people would rise up against that terror, just as the rebels in the Golden Empire had. But Ariq wouldn’t force them into a fight they weren’t ready for, and weren’t ready to die for.

  So for now, he studied the hovering fortress ahead and imagined all the ways he could blow it out of the air.

  It wouldn’t take much, despite the fortress’s impressive defenses. The twins had based the layout of their fortress on designs from an old Nipponese imperial palace, including a tenshu surrounded by roughly concentric moats and with no direct approach from the perimeter. Only the technology they’d used had altered. Watchtowers mounted with rail cannons stood at regular intervals; the tower guards would shoot any unauthorized airship that came near. Flyers waited to defend against a multipronged attack. If an enemy managed to land, they would have to fight their way across the air moats to reach the engine controls and the twins, both protected within the keep.

  But the fortress had one unalterable weakness: they’d built it in the sky—and the designers of ancient imperial palaces never had to plan for that vulnerability. Targeting the engines and balloons would bring it down. By gun and gravity, the fortress would fall.

  So the watchtowers and the guards weren’t the fortress’s real defense against men who waged war as Ariq did. The people living beneath it were the defense. Anyone who chose to attack the twins with guns and cannons would sacrifice every person living below.

  No one had done it yet. The twins would have called that reluctance weakness. To Ariq, it disproved the notion that humans were only animals, clawing out their continued survival by strength alone.

  One day, someone would find a way to change the dens for the better. Someone smarter than Ariq. Because the only way that he could see was destruction and death.

  The balloon tethered above a small courtyard in the second circle. There was no proper ground to walk on, only steel grates. The reverberation of the engines hummed like a hive of bees beneath Ariq’s feet. The heliosails spinning above pushed a continual breeze through the compound, along with the heavy odor of hot metal and burning oil.

  Guards in mechanical suits flanked the narrow bridge to the inner circle. Extra weight consumed extra fuel, so no water filled the wide moats. Instead, any enemy who tried to cross them risked plunging into the engines below.

  But any enemy who managed to fly onto the fortress wouldn’t land in one of the outer circles or attempt to cross the moats. They’d fly straight for the keep.

  It rose before him, a graceful tower atop a steel base. Gabled roofs painted a bold blue topped each level; guards walked the balustrade of each tier. If the twins had spared any materials to lighten the structure’s massive weight, it didn’t show, and unlike the fortress’s other defenses inspired by ancient designs, the keep would be equally difficult to penetrate on the land or in the sky.

  The gate opened at Ariq’s approach. A chill tightened his skin as he stepped through. Even the warmth outside had difficulty penetrating the keep. Bare steel walls welcomed him in. His topknot brushed the low ceiling. He didn’t bend his head.

  Two attendants greeted Ariq and led him deeper into the keep. Fifteen or sixteen years of age, slender, with shaved heads and plain robes, they might have been boys or girls. Ariq couldn’t tell. Both were pale. Not light-skinned like Zenobia, but with the pallor of a corpse. Either they never saw the sun or the twins had already begun altering them. Aside from their color, however, there were no visible changes.

  There were visible changes on other servants. They passed a maid who bowed and backed up to the wall, her eyes lowered and sweepers grafted to her legs. Most of the guards wore mechanical suits, but others had limbs replaced with weapons and armor melded to flesh. There were likely more elsewhere, some with less successful modifications.

  The twins liked to experiment.

  Ariq suspected they always had. They’d come to the dens from Nippon almost fifteen years ago—only a few months after power had changed hands from the former empress to her daughter. Upon arriving in the Fox Den, the twins had immediately killed the den lord and taken his place, then built their fortress in the sky.

  And that was all most people knew about the twins. Despite his contacts, Ariq hardly knew any more for certain. Most valuable information from Nippon passed through the Fox Den and was brokered by the twins. If any rumors about their history had existed, they’d managed to quash most of them.

  Not all. Bits and pieces of rumors often became larger stories, but there was still a kernel of truth in some. One story was that the empress had wizards at her command. In the Golden Empire, many people believed the same of the Khagan. But they weren’t magicians; they were scientists, given leave to protect the royals at any cost. Their experiments had created the zombie infection, the monsters in the sea, the war machines that had helped them conquer continents—and much more. Nippon’s scientists had built the imperial city and developed creatures like the screw beetles that had tortured Ariq’s brother in their prison. Such scientists might be called soldiers, fighting wars and defending their empires. But creating weapons that could kill and torture so many required a different, crueler sort of mind than any warrior whom Ariq had ever fought with possessed.

  He thought the twins both possessed that sort of mind. But if they had once served the empress by experimenting on others, they weren’t serving her now, and they hadn’t spared themselves.

  The attendants showed him into a great hall. Unlike the lower chambers, the walls were of wood and the ceilings high. Hissing gas torches stood in columns and cast a warm glow over painted panels. In the first, Empress Go-Jingu led her people out of Nippon, flying upon a chrysanthemum, her hair unbound and clutching a spear in her fist. A fleet of ships as plentiful as a school of herring followed her, wit
h Fuji standing in the background—art making victory of a defeat. Sartaq Khan had taken that island shortly after that empress’s escape, and centuries later, Ariq’s mother had been born a citizen of the Golden Empire in the shadow of that mountain.

  More wall panels showed the empress meeting the Turrbal and Jagera tribes on Australia’s eastern shore. Ariq had seen similar scenes in many Nipponese homes. Most didn’t possess paintings of the slaughters and the plagues that followed. The twins did, the panels stretching far down the hall. He might have commended them for not forgetting that part of the past, but he suspected that the blood and death pleased them to look upon, in the same way that a beautiful landscape might please another.

  They waited for him on a dais covered by a mat of woven gold silk. Lady Amako sat with her steel hands clasped on her lap and legs folded beneath her. Ariq didn’t think Lady Shizuko still had human legs. She sat higher than her sister, as if squatting on a block, and the bottom of her robe covered a rounded mass that rumbled like a well-oiled engine. On both women, bursts of scars surrounded the bulging dark lenses embedded in their eyes. Their faces were unlined, but gray threaded through their black hair. Had his mother still lived, she would have been of the same age.

  “Good evening, Kraken. We are so very honored by your presence.”

  Amako greeted him, her voice soft and cultured, her expression smiling. Already enjoying herself. Every conversation with him was an experiment of another sort, to see what she could take from him. She would probably like today’s results. He rarely needed anything from them.

  More acerbic than her sister, Shizuko added her short welcome and invited him to sit. He joined the twins on the mat, facing them. The attendants remained behind, silent. He didn’t want them at his back. But he could see their reflections as pale spots in the twins’ lenses, so they couldn’t move without his noticing.

  Though she also smiled, Shizuko wasn’t taking the same pleasure in his presence that her twin did. “It has been some time since you visited us.”

  And the last time had been to tell them to stop killing the people in the den who couldn’t pay their tribute—a difficult command for Shizuko to hear, because he could still hear the bitterness in her voice, as if it had echoed within her over the years.

  He didn’t care. Let it fester. “I come with news.”

  “And with westerners,” Amako said. The torchlight gleamed against her dark lenses. “French aviators . . . and women. Tell us of the women.”

  “An ambassador’s wife and her companion.” He told the same lie Zenobia had. He wouldn’t give the twins any reason to look twice at her.

  “Their airship was destroyed?” Shizuko asked.

  Ariq didn’t know if they’d already learned of the attack or were guessing. It didn’t matter. If the marauders continued their attacks, then the dens were in the same danger as Ariq’s town. The twins believed the strong could destroy the weak at will—but none of them was as strong as the empress. By helping him, they could save themselves, too.

  “Yes,” he said. “Just like the others—except it was a French naval ship.”

  Amako pulled in a breath and looked to her sister. No words passed between them—not that Ariq could hear. But they were communicating somehow. Through the devices in their eyes or by some other method, Ariq didn’t know.

  But he expected that they reached the same conclusion Commander Saito had: The empress wouldn’t tolerate an attack against a foreign government’s ship while she was opening trade to her cities. If the empress can’t remove a splinter from a finger, she’ll cut off the arm. The marauders were the splinter, and the arm was every settlement on the western Australian coast.

  Shizuko looked to Ariq again. “So why have you come to us?”

  “They rode jellyfish balloon flyers. Fourteen, at least. I want to know who bought them.”

  “We did not sell them,” Shizuko said slowly. “But it came to our attention last year that two dozen balloons had been procured and sold.”

  Two dozen. More flyers that had been destroyed in the attack on the French airship. “By whom?”

  Amako’s smile widened, revealing the glint of polished steel teeth. “That is not our business. Our business is trade.”

  “And your price?”

  “Only what your Khagan has already discovered, and that we have been trying to duplicate,” Amako said.

  “Strength.” A gasp of steam escaped Shizuko’s lower block as she spoke. Her body rose three inches, and two segmented legs emerged from the sides of her robe before she settled again. “We make it for ourselves, but that strength is only a shell. It does not live within us. We cannot pass it on. Yet you were born with it.”

  “So we want your seed,” her sister finished. “And our issue will be the strongest this land has ever seen.”

  His child. Not even for his town would Ariq put an infant into their hands—his or any other.

  “No.” He didn’t conceal his disgust. “Not ever.”

  Amako recoiled. “We do not ask you to mount us,” she said, equally disgusted. As if that horror was the only objection Ariq could have. “We would collect it. Our attendants will service you.”

  Shizuko gestured them forward. “Girl or boy, whatever your preference.”

  The attendants moved closer. To take his seed. Rage boiled up, hot and sharp.

  He’d kill them all if they touched him.

  “Stop!”

  The pale reflections in the twins’ dark lenses froze.

  Ariq closed his eyes. Took a deep breath. Let the building anger out.

  Finally, he said, “A kraken beached near my town. It was male.”

  The twins looked to each other. Their displeasure vanished in a gleam of avarice. Just slivers of meat from a kraken’s penis sold for a fortune on the mainland and in Nippon.

  “Adult?” Shizuko asked.

  Ariq nodded. “Young. But its organ fully intact.”

  The tips of Amako’s fingers chimed merrily when she tapped them together. “Its length?”

  “Like another tentacle.”

  The sisters grinned. “The upstart Lord Jochi sold the flyers,” Shizuko said.

  The lord of the Rat Den. Ariq hadn’t dealt with him before, except as the second-in-command to the former den lord, Merkus. Young and quiet, Jochi hadn’t made a strong impression when Ariq had met him. He’d been overshadowed by his belligerent and stupid den lord. But two years ago, in an arena full of spectators, Jochi had challenged Merkus and taken his place.

  So Ariq would soon discover the sort of man that Jochi was. Not from the twins, though. He wanted more important information from them—now, while the fortune he’d given them had the sisters in a generous mind.

  “What do you know of Archimedes Fox?”

  Shizuko gave a strangled cough. Steam burst from beneath her robes.

  “What do we know of him?” her sister echoed, utter surprise slackening her expression. Then she cackled and rocked back and forth. “We know that he has not earned us as much as your squid penis will. But he has earned us gold enough.”

  By selling what? More letters like Zenobia carried?

  “Where do I find him?”

  “You do not follow his adventures?” Shizuko’s laugh echoed her sister’s. “Of course, there is a real man named Archimedes Fox. To locate him, look to Lady Nergüi.”

  Ariq frowned. He knew several women named Nergüi.

  But, no—he realized. Shizuko didn’t mean a woman. She meant an airship. And he did know one by that name. A skyrunner, it had flown into his town the previous year, then was gone the next morning. He’d known the passengers—westerners who’d hid in his town for a brief time. He hadn’t met anyone else aboard.

  “What is your interest in Fox?” Amako asked.

  Their amusement still hadn’t abated. He’d taken a ri
sk mentioning the man’s name. If they managed to link Fox to the companion of an ambassador’s wife, Zenobia might be in danger. Yet they were treating his question as a joke.

  Ariq didn’t understand it. But he wouldn’t reveal that. Silent, he waited.

  Amako’s fingers chimed again. Still enjoying herself. “Do you think his stories seditious, too? You must admire that, a rebel yourself.”

  Seditious stories? “I haven’t read them.”

  “Ah. So you have only heard rumors from the imperial city and a name.”

  “Yes,” Ariq lied. Nothing he’d seen in Zenobia’s letters had mentioned Nippon’s imperial city.

  Shizuko shook her head. “Fox’s story was the same as every one of his adventures—nothing but fanciful rubbish.”

  “Popular rubbish,” her sister said. “Particularly with women.”

  “We cannot print enough translations to send across the wall. Even the empress reads them.”

  Even the empress. Every merchant and smuggler with a ware to sell made that claim—even the empress loved their merchandise.

  And it was clear now what they had been speaking of: adventure stories. Fanciful rubbish, and a man called Archimedes Fox wrote them.

  That wouldn’t be the man who’d written letters about Ariq’s uncle to Zenobia. There was nothing fanciful about exposing one of the Khagan’s most celebrated generals as a rebel.

  Except the name. Archimedes Fox. A character in these stories. It wouldn’t be the first time that a rebel had used the name of a folk hero to conceal his true identity. Was Zenobia his ally? Or had she been forced to carry the letters?

  “The latest story was no different in essentials,” Amako said. “The hero has changed—the adventures feature a woman now—but the content is as foolish.”

  “A thinly veiled retelling of Bushke’s overthrow at New Eden,” Shizuko told him. “There were rumors Lady Nergüi and Fox visited that city.”

  Bushke. A tyrant who had ruled over a balloon city, forcing airships and their crews into service. “Fox killed him?”