Behemoth Page 6

  Alek looked at Dylan. “You didn’t just happen along, did you?”

  “No. I couldn’t sleep. And you know how Dr. Barlow doesn’t want us bothering each other on egg duty? Well, I thought if I dropped by now, she wouldn’t be about.”

  “But I wasn’t there,” Alek said.

  Dylan nodded. “And that was a wee bit odd. So I thought I’d sniff around and see what you were up to.”

  “Didn’t take you long to find me, did it?”

  “The beasties’ ruckus helped, but I reckoned you’d be down here in the storerooms.” Dylan leaned closer. “You’re looking for a way to escape, aren’t you?”

  Alek felt his jaw clench. “Am I that obvious?”

  “No. I’m just dead clever,” the boy said. “Have you not noticed?”

  Alek took a moment to think about this, then smiled. “I have.”

  “Good.” Dylan took a step past him and knelt at a small hatch on the opposite side of the room. “Come through here, then, before we start the beasties yammering again.”

  Dylan went first through the hatchway, climbing down a few rungs mounted on the slanted wall.

  Alek passed the wormlamp down, spilling light into the small spherical chamber. He’d seen this place from outside the airship: a round bulge in the gondola’s underbelly. The space was crowded by what looked like a mismatched pair of telescopes pointed down at the sea.

  “Is that a weapon?” he asked.

  “No. The fat one is a reconnaissance camera,” Dylan said. “And the wee one’s a sight for aerial bombs and navigation. But they’re useless at night, so it’ll be private enough.”

  “If not luxurious,” Alek said. He climbed down and wedged himself onto a corner, half squatting on a giant gear attached to the camera’s side. “But aren’t we right below the bridge?”

  Dylan glanced up. “That’s the navigation room over us, and the bridge is above that. But it’s safer here than in the lizard room. You’re lucky you didn’t send out an alert to the whole barking ship!”

  “That might have been awkward,” Alek said, imagining an army of lizards scampering through the airship’s message tubes, shouting in his voice to the sleeping crew. “I’m a pretty useless spy, I suppose.”

  “At least you were clever enough to be caught by me,” Dylan said. “And not someone who might have objected to you skulking about.”

  “Not so much skulking as bumbling,” Alek said. “But thank you for not reporting me.”

  The boy shrugged. “I reckon it’s a prisoner’s duty to escape. After all, you Clankers keep saving the ship—that’s three times now—and the captain’s treating you like enemies! And just because Britain declared war on your granduncle. I think it’s dead rotten.”

  Alek found himself smiling. On the subject of Dylan’s loyalty, at least, Volger’s suspicions were completely wrong.

  “So that’s why you were looking for me,” Alek said. “To talk about how we can escape.”

  “Well, I’m not keen to help you. That might be a squick too treasonous, even for me. It was only …” Dylan’s voice faded.

  “What?”

  “We’ll be in Constantinople by noon tomorrow, so I reckoned you might be slipping away soon, and this might be our last chance to talk.” The boy wrapped his arms around himself. “And I’ve hardly slept anyway.”

  Alek squinted through the darkness. Dylan’s fine features looked drawn, even in the soft light of the glowworms. His usual smile was missing.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It was what happened to Newkirk. It’s left me dead shattered.”

  “Shattered?” Alek frowned. Dylan’s strange way with the English language was playing tricks again. “Newkirk is the midshipman whose Huxley burned, right?”

  “Aye, it was so much like … what happened when my da died. It’s given me nightmares.”

  Alek nodded. The boy had never said much about his father’s death. Only that he’d been lost in an accident, and that Dylan hadn’t spoken for a whole month afterward.

  “You’ve never told anyone about it, have you?”

  The boy shook his head, then fell still.

  Alek waited, remembering how hard it had been to tell Dylan about his own parents. In the silence he could hear the wind sweeping around the prow of the airship, testing its joints and seams. A draft swirled up from where the camera thrust out into the night sky, snatches of cold air coiling around their feet.

  “I mean, since you’re leaving the ship anyway,” Dylan said, “I reckoned it wouldn’t burden you too much to hear it.”

  “Of course you can tell me, Dylan. You know plenty of my secrets, after all.”

  The boy nodded, but fell silent again, his arms still wrapped tight around himself. Alek took a slow breath. He’d never seen Dylan afraid to speak his mind. The boy had never seemed afraid of anything before, much less a memory.

  Perhaps he didn’t want anyone to see him this way, looking weak and … shattered.

  Alek slipped off his jacket and laid it over the wormlamp. Darkness wrapped around them both.

  “Tell me,” he said gently.

  A moment later Dylan began to speak.

  “Da flew hot-air balloons, you see, even after the hydrogen breathers got so big. I always went up with him, so I was there when it happened. We were still on the ground, the burners firing to warm up the air in the envelope. Then suddenly there was this great blast of heat, like opening a boiler door. One of the kerosene tanks …”

  Dylan’s voice had gradually gone softer, almost like a girl’s, and now it faded away altogether. Alek slid closer, putting his arm around the boy until he spoke again.

  “It was just like with Newkirk. The fire shot straight up until the whole balloon was burning overhead, the heat pulling us skyward. The tethers held, even though they must have been on fire too. And my da pushed me out of the basket.”

  “So he saved you.”

  “Aye, but that’s what killed him. With my weight gone, the ropes broke, all at once, like knuckles cracking. And Da’s balloon went roaring away.”

  Alek’s breath caught. He remembered again the German zeppelin in the Alps, falling right in front of him, its hydrogen ignited by machine-gun fire. He could still hear the snow beneath the wreck hissing as it turned to steam, and the thin screams from inside the gondola.

  “Everyone saw how he’d saved me,” Dylan said, reaching into his pocket. “They gave him a medal for it.”

  He pulled out a small decoration, a rounded silver cross that dangled from a sky blue ribbon. In the darkness Alek could just make out the face of Charles Darwin engraved upon its center.

  “It’s called the Air Gallantry Cross, the highest honor they can give a civilian for deeds in the air.”

  “You must be proud,” Alek said.

  “Back in that first year, when I couldn’t sleep, I used to stare at it at night. But I thought the nightmares were over and done with, until what happened to Newkirk.” Dylan looked at him. “Maybe you understand a wee bit, how it comes back? Because of your ma and da?”

  Alek nodded, staring at the medal and wondering what to say. He still had dreams, of course, but his own parents’ death had happened in far-off Sarajevo, not in front of his eyes. Even his nightmares couldn’t compare with what Dylan had described.

  But then he remembered the moment when the Tesla cannon had fired, his horror that the Leviathan would be engulfed in flame.

  “I think you’re very brave, serving on this ship.”

  “Aye, or mad.” The boy’s eyes glistened in the glimmers of wormlight from beneath Alek’s jacket. “Don’t you think it’s daft? Like I’m trying to burn to death, same as he did?”

  “Don’t be absurd,” Alek said. “You’re honoring your father. Of course you’d want to be on this ship. If I weren’t …” He paused. “I mean, if things were different, I’d want to stay here too.”

  “You would?”

  “Well, maybe it’s silly. But the last
few days, it’s like something’s changing inside me. Everything I ever knew is upside down. Sometimes it’s almost as if I’m … in love …”

  Dylan’s body tightened beside Alek.

  “I know it sounds silly,” Alek said quickly. “It’s quite obviously ridiculous.”

  “But are you saying that … ? I mean, what if things were different than you thought? If I were … or have you guessed already?” Dylan let out a groan. “Just what are you saying?”

  Alek shook his head. “Perhaps I’m putting this stupidly. But it’s almost as though … I’m in love with your ship.”

  “You’re in love,” Dylan said slowly, “with the Leviathan?”

  “It feels right here.” Alek shrugged. “As if this is where I’m meant to be.”

  Dylan let out a strange, choked laugh as he put the medal back into his pocket.

  “You Clankers,” he muttered. “You’re all cracked in the head.”

  Alek pulled his arm from the boy’s shoulders, frowning. Dylan was always explaining how the airship’s interwoven species sustained one another, how every beast was part of the whole. Surely he could understand.

  “Dylan, you know I’ve always been alone. I never had schoolmates, just tutors.”

  “Aye, because you’re a barking prince.”

  “But I’m hardly even that, because of my mother’s blood. I never mixed with commoners, and the rest of my family has always wanted me to disappear. But here on this ship …” Alek laced his fingers together, searching for the right words.

  “This is one place where you fit,” Dylan said flatly. “Where you feel real.”

  Alek smiled. “Yes. I knew you’d understand.”

  “Aye, of course.” Dylan shrugged. “I just thought you might be saying something else, that’s all. I feel the same way as you … about the ship.”

  “But you’re not an enemy here, or hiding what you are,” Alek said, sighing. “It’s much simpler for you.”

  The boy gave a sad laugh. “Not quite as simple as you’d think.”

  “I didn’t say you were simple, Dylan. It’s just that you’ve got no secrets hanging over you. No one’s trying to throw you off this ship and put you in chains!”

  Dylan shook his head. “Tell that to my ma.”

  “Oh, right.” Alek recalled that Dylan’s mother hadn’t wanted him to join the military. “Women can be quite mad sometimes.”

  “In my family they’re a squick madder than most.” Dylan pulled Alek’s jacket from the wormlamp. “Full of stupid ideas. Mad like you wouldn’t believe.”

  In the sudden wash of green light, Dylan’s face was no longer sad. His eyes had their usual spark, but there was an angry gleam in them. He tossed the jacket to Alek.

  “We both know you can’t stay aboard this ship,” Dylan said quietly.

  Alek held his gaze a moment, then nodded. He would never be allowed to serve on the Leviathan, not once the Darwinists understood their new engines. They would take him and the others back to Britain for safekeeping, whether or not they learned exactly who he was.

  He had to escape.

  “I should get back to my skulking, I suppose.”

  “Aye, you should,” Dylan said. “I’ll go up and watch the eggs for you. Come back before dawn, though, or the lady boffin will have both our heads.”

  “Thank you,” Alek said.

  “We can only stay in Constantinople twenty-four hours. You’ll have to find whatever you’re looking for tonight.”

  Alek nodded, his heart beating a little faster. He reached out a hand. “In case we don’t talk again, I hope we’ll stay friends, whatever happens. Wars don’t last forever.”

  Dylan stared at the offered hand, then nodded.

  “Aye, friends.” He stood up. “Keep that lamp. I can find my way in the dark.”

  He turned and climbed up into the blackness without another word.

  Alek looked down at his hand, wondering for a moment what had happened, why Dylan had turned suddenly cold. Perhaps the boy had let more of his feelings show than he’d meant to. Or maybe Alek had said the wrong thing somehow.

  He sighed. There wasn’t time to think about it—he had skulking to do. Once the Leviathan started back for Britain, there wouldn’t be another chance to escape. He had to be off this ship in less than two days.

  Alek picked up the wormlamp and started for the hatch.

  Deryn had never seen a Clanker city before.

  Constantinople rolled past below, the hills filled to bursting with humanity. Pale stone palaces and domed mosques squashed against modern buildings, some rising up six stories tall. Two narrow arms of sparkling water carved the city into three parts, and a placid sea stretched away to the south, peppered with countless merchant ships under steam and sail, flying a dozen different flags.

  A pall of smoke hung over everything, coughed up from countless engines and factories, veiling the walkers striding the narrow streets. The muddled air was empty of messenger birds; only a few biplanes and gyrothopters skimmed the rooftops, skirting stone spires and bristling wireless aerials.

  It was odd to imagine Alek being from a place just like this, full of machines and metal, hardly alive except for human beings and their bedbugs. Of course, it was strange to think of Alek at all right now. She’d made such a Dummkopf of herself last night, blethering on about Da’s accident, then mistaking Alek’s confidences for something more than they were.

  How completely daft, imagining for a moment that a barking prince would think of her that way. Alek didn’t even know her real first name. And if he learned somehow that she was a girl in boy’s clothes? He’d run a mile.

  Thankfully, Alek was planning to run in any case. Sometime tonight he and his Clanker friends would slip away into that smoky mass of city, and be gone for good. Then she’d be done with acting like some village girl, her fists twisting in her skirts whenever a certain boy walked by.

  Not that pathetic unsoldierly fate for Deryn Sharp.

  The Leviathan swept in low over the water, and Newkirk leaned closer to the big window of the middies’ mess, staring down, wide eyed. No doubt he was searching the forest of masts and smokestacks below for the deadly spindle of the Goeben’s Tesla cannon.

  “See any German ships?” he asked nervously.

  Deryn shook her head. “Just a few merchants and a coaler. I told you those ironclads would be long gone.”

  But Newkirk, his dress uniform cap pulled down tight over his singed hair, didn’t look entirely reassured. The sea below them stretched all the way back to the Dardanelles, with plenty of nooks and crannies to hide a dreadnought in. The Leviathan had come to Constantinople over land, after all, not wanting to risk the ironclads’ Clanker lightning again.

  “Midshipmen Sharp and Newkirk!” came a voice from the doorway. “I must say you’re both looking handsome.”

  Deryn turned and bowed a squick to the lady boffin, feeling awkward in her full-dress uniform. She’d worn it only once before, at her swearing-in ceremony. The tailor who’d made it for her in Paris had probably wondered why some daft girl was going to so much fuss for a costume ball.

  Now, a month later, the fancy jacket stretched tight over the new muscles in her shoulders, and the shirt felt as stiff as a vicar’s collar.

  “Frankly, ma’am, I feel a bit like a penguin,” Newkirk said, adjusting his silk bow tie.

  “That may be,” Dr. Barlow said, “but we must look respectable for Ambassador Mallet.”

  Deryn turned back to the window with a sigh. The storerooms were empty, and they had only twenty-four hours to resupply the whole ship. It seemed daft to bring diplomats along to the Grand Bazaar, especially if it meant dressing up. Dr. Barlow was all in riding clothes, like a duchess on a fox hunt.

  “Do you reckon we’ll find corned beef in Constantinople?” Newkirk asked hopefully.

  “Is-tan-bul,” Dr. Barlow said, tapping her riding crop against her boot once for each syllable. “That’s what we must rememb
er to call this city. Otherwise we shall annoy the locals.”

  “Istanbul?” Newkirk frowned. “But it’s ‘Constantinople’ on all the maps.”

  “On our maps it is,” the lady boffin said. “We use that name to honor Constantine, the Christian emperor who founded the city. But the residents have called it Istanbul since 1453.”

  “They changed the name four hundred-odd years ago?” Deryn turned back to the window. “Maybe it’s time to fix our barking maps.”

  “Wise words, Mr. Sharp,” Dr. Barlow said, then added quietly, “I wonder if the Germans have already fixed theirs.”

  The Leviathan came down on a dusty, mile-wide airfield on the western edge of the city.

  A mooring mast stood at the center of the field, like a lighthouse in a sea of grass. It looked no different from the mast back at Wormwood Scrubs. Deryn supposed that whether Darwinist or Clanker, an airship had to be secured from the fancies of the wind in pretty much the same way. The dozens of ground men certainly looked sharp as they corralled the landing ropes, their fezzes bright red against the grass.

  “Mr. Rigby says they get plenty of practice on German airships,” Newkirk said. “Says we should study their technique.”

  “We could, if we were closer,” Deryn said. She itched to be down there helping, or at least working with the riggers topside. But Dr. Barlow had warned the two middies not to muss their dress uniforms.

  The engines were pulsing overhead, turning the ship into the wind. Even Alek and his Clanker friends had honest work to do.

  Ten minutes later the Leviathan was secured by a dozen ropes, each held by ten men, and the airbeast’s nose was pressed against the mooring mast, its great eyes covered with blinders.

  Deryn frowned. “They’ve lashed us a bit high. We’re still fifty feet off the ground!”

  “All according to plan, Mr. Sharp,” said Dr. Barlow, pointing her riding crop into the distance.

  Deryn looked up and saw what was coming out of the trees—her jaw dropped open.