Iron Jaw and Hummingbird (22 page)

“Remove?” said one of the Society followers standing behind Gamine, sounding alarmed and insulted at the same time.

Gamine narrowed her eyes. “Just what do you mean by ‘this area,' anyway?” She glanced from side to side, indicating the dirt at their feet. The shadow of the canyon wall now fell across her legs, its forward line falling on the ground just between her and the Bannerman. “Here?” She took an exaggerated step to one side, and pointed to the place where she'd been standing. “There?” She smiled. “I'm not sure I understand.”

Gamine realized that she probably shouldn't taunt the man, considering that he and his dozen or so friends were all heavily armed, but somehow she couldn't help herself. There was something about his overly formal manner that reminded her of someone, and she simply reacted instinctually. It was a matter of moments before she consciously recognized the similarity to Madam Chauviteau-Zong's prim manner.

The Society followers behind her, though, saw only a bare slip of a girl standing up to a squad of Bannermen with a smile on her face. That story would be shared around the camp in coming nights, more proof that the powers shone upon Iron Jaw.

“There is no jest in my words, child,” the Bannerman went on, “and I'm not playing a game. You've made some powerful enemies, and it's time for you to move on.”

Gamine's smile began to fade. “What
enemies
?”

The Bannerman jerked his chin at the camp behind Gamine, where followers hung back, watching intently, partially hidden by canvas and twine that would do nothing to protect them if the squad should decide to attack. “How many of your people here left good jobs behind, these last weeks, eh?”

Gamine's lips drew into a tight line. The Combine. If it had been a snake, it could have devoured her leg whole before she saw it.

Many of the more recent converts in the camp had once farmed their own allotments, but after the drought and quakes they had been forced to find work as laborers on plantations owned by the Combine. When the laborers discovered that their lives under their new masters were not as satisfying as those they'd once known, many of them were hungry for something better, desperate for some meaning in their lives. And many had found that meaning, and that better life, in the Society of Righteous Harmony.

“I'm told,” the Bannerman went on, “that just a few days ago there as was a mass defection of laborers from a Combine plantation near here, after one of their number attended one of your ‘services' here and then carried back to the others what he'd heard.”

“I can't imagine why the Combine would take offense. You can't tell me there aren't more people ready to take their place. There aren't enough jobs to go around.”

“Perhaps,” the Bannerman allowed with a slight smile. “But it sets a bad precedent, if nothing else. The Combine has been in touch with the governor-general himself, and word's come down that your little group has orders to pull up stakes and move along. You're not welcome here any longer.”

“And ‘here,' again, would be where?” Gamine took two theatrical steps to the left. “Is
this
far enough?”

The Bannerman's grin widened slightly, but his grip tightened ominously on his sword's handle. “You're no longer welcome in the Great Yu Canyon, child. You've been given five days to break camp, pack your things, and be on your way, or my men and I will be forced to act.” He pulled the saber a fraction from its scabbard, the blade gleaming in the last sunlight spilling over the canyon wall. “And trust me, child, you do
not
want to see us in action.”

Gamine met the Bannerman's gaze and felt ice dripping down her spine. She repressed the urge to shudder and tightened her hands into fists at her sides.

“We've never spoken against the Combine and have no desire to interfere with its interests.”

“That's as may be,” the Bannerman admitted with a shrug. “But I've got orders to move you, and so you're going to move.”

At a signal from him, the other Bannermen all drew their weapons, the naked blades of their sabers gleaming in the dying midday light.

Gamine looked from the Bannerman to the Society followers who stood directly behind her, and the ragged circles of tents stretching out beyond. The followers were looking at her with expressions of expectant anticipation, eager to see what she would do, how she would respond. After all, didn't the powers speak to, and through, Iron Jaw? If the Bannermen wanted a fight, couldn't the Society's divinely inspired leader, invulnerable so long as the spirits possessed her, stand against them with ease?

Gamine saw all these thoughts and more in the eyes of the followers, and shrank from them.

“Very well,” she said in a low voice, turning back to face the Bannerman. “Tell your men to stand down, and I'll have my people break camp.”

Behind her, Gamine heard the followers gasp in surprise and disappointment, but the Bannerman just nodded, his expression unreadable. Letting his saber slide back into its scabbard, he motioned for his men to sheathe their weapons, and the brief confrontation was at an end.

 

Days later, the Society of Righteous Harmony was once more in motion, migrating to the north, following the line of the canyon walls. Their frequent companion, hunger, was now with them always, the mealtime rations growing smaller with each passing day. And not just hunger, but death followed them, as well. A few days out of Yinglong, Master Wei finally gave up the mortal world and moved on to the reward that awaited him in the life to come.

Wei was buried in the shadow of the Great Yu Canyon's walls, under a cairn of rocks prized from the slope. When she performed the funereal rites that Wei himself had devised, Gamine could not help but envy the old man, if only a little. His travails were at an end, while hers, she feared, were just beginning.

 

As the airship approached Mount Shennong, Huang idly sharpened the blade of his sword with a whetstone. The sword's blade was rugged, bearing scars and nicks, pitted here and there with age. It held a fine edge, though, and was nicely weighted for his grasp. Huang had taken it off an unconscious foe during a raid on a refinery some seasons before, and though it had yet to replace the red-bladed saber he'd been given by Governor-General Ouyang, which was still Zhao's prized possession, it had become familiar and comfortable in his fist.

The pilot signaled from the makeshift controls that the skylight entrance to the Aerie was within sight, and that they'd be touching down in moments. All the bandits on board the airship were relieved, looking forward to getting back into the protection of the Aerie and putting their feet up, if only briefly. This latest foray had taken them farther from home than most, nearly halfway to the Great Yu Canyon, and all they had to show for their trouble were a few crates of machine parts and the knowledge that they'd disrupted the activities of the Green Standard Army in the region for another few weeks at least.

Zhao had announced a brief respite, a vacation from their routine. Once the airship was landed and unloaded, he would order a feast prepared—“feast” in relative terms, nearly twice the normal rations—and a case of wine cracked open, and then the bandits would have a few days' vacation. They could all use the rest.

Even as the airship descended into the skylight, and they saw that there were no lights on in the hangar below, the bandits still did not suspect anything was amiss. The approach of the airship should have sent off proximity signals with the Aerie, alerting the few bandits who had remained behind on this last raid to ready the chamber for their arrival. But the space beneath them was dark as a moonless night, lit only by the thin sunlight streaming down from the thin chimneylike opening through which the airship descended.

“Maybe they've started their vacation early,” Jue suggested, shouting to be heard over the thrum of the airship's engines.

Huang smiled, the expression no doubt completely hidden behind his mask and goggles. He gave an exaggerated nod instead. “I can't blame them,” he shouted back.

Finally, the airship touched down, and the engines were stilled. As they gradually whirred to silence, the bandits opened the hatch and climbed out into the gloom beyond.

Sounds could not carry far in the thin air of the hangar, but Zhao shouted for the ground crew to attend, all the same, cupping his hands around his breather mask like a trumpet and bellowing for all that he was worth. As it was, Huang, only a few paces away, could scarcely hear him.

Then the lights flared on, blinding bright. Huang squinted in the glare, his eyes struggling to adjust from the darkness of a moment before to the newfound brightness.

Huang saw immediately why the lights had remained unilluminated. The bandits who had remained behind, and were to act as ground crew, now lay bound and gagged on the cold stone floor of the hangar. Those who were not unconscious stared up at them helplessly. And Huang understood in an instant what could render such stout bandits helpless—a full platoon of Bannermen.

Three dozen heavily armed and armored Bannermen filled the hangar, well entrenched and with their weapons trained on the airship and the bandits now standing before it.

 

Huang never knew quite how the Bannermen had come to be in the hangar. The most likely explanation was that the military had successfully tracked the airship back to the Aerie after one of the bandits' raids, and had waited until the airship was away on another foray to storm the mountain stronghold and subdue the few bandits left behind, most of whom were too aged or infirm to put up much of a struggle. Then they had only to lie in wait for the airship to return, signaled by the proximity signals of the airship's arrival, at which point they would take up their positions in the hangar and ambush the bandits when they least expected it.

Of course, that being the case, why would they have dragged the bound and gagged ground crew into the hangar and left them on the cold stone floor?

Huang didn't have to wonder for long.

The bandits were still squinting in the bright lights, while the Bannermen's own eyes were shaded by dark goggles, their faces covered from the nose down by armored breather masks, with only their foreheads left visible.

The leader of the Bannermen, who had a cross-shaped scar above his right eye, carried a loudspeaker of some kind, which amplified his voice loud enough to be heard by the bandits even through the thin high-altitude air.

“Lay down your arms,” the Bannerman shouted, his voice distorted and amplified by the machine, until it sounded like he was speaking in peals of thunder. “Surrender, and you may yet live.”

Zhao, brandishing his red-bladed saber, stood his ground defiantly.

The lead Bannerman only shrugged, and in a single grisly motion whipped his saber from its scabbard and brought it point down into the back of the nearest captured bandit, who lay with his hands and feet bound, facedown on the cold stone floor beside him.

As the Bannerman swept his saber out of the bandit's back, dark arterial blood sluicing from its blade, he again addressed the bandits through the loudspeaker. At his feet, the injured bandit jerked upon the floor, punctured lung struggling in agony for breath, his life pouring from the wound in his back.

“That's one of your number lost. How many more will follow?”

There were some sixteen bandits standing before the airship, and by Huang's estimation a full platoon of thirty-six Bannermen circling them on all sides.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” the Bannerman with the cross-shaped scar said absently. “Can't have you running off, can we?”

At a signal from the lead Bannerman, one of his men raised a metal tube on his shoulder, and a torrent of fire gushed from its forward end, trailing black smoke. The mortar struck the airship just above the gondola. The envelope crumpled like paper, and had it been filled with an inflammable gas like hydrogen, the entire hangar would have gone up in the conflagration. As it was, the airship employed nonflammable helium, which did little more than pour from the massive rents in the envelope, filling the hangar. Had the bandits and Bannermen not been wearing breather masks, they would have squeaked at one another in comically high voices until they suffocated from lack of oxygen. The escape of the gas was all but unnoticeable, except for the evidence of the deflated, crumpled airship.

The gondola, though, was filled with breathable oxygen and caught fire immediately, burning like a magnesium torch, taking with it what little plunder the bandits had brought back from their most recent raids.

The force of the explosion knocked the nearest of the bandits still standing to their knees, and it was at this point that the Bannermen made their move.

 

Despite the cavalier way he'd dispatched the bound and gagged bandit at his feet, it was clear to Huang that the Bannerman did not intend to kill them all, at least not right away. If he had, he could simply have commanded his men to open fire on the bandits with rifles and pistols, all of them having had the opportunity to properly brace themselves against their weapons' recoil before the airship had even touched down. That he hadn't given any command of the sort, but instead had allowed a number of his men to meet the bandits with drawn swords in close combat, suggested he'd been ordered to take at least some of them alive.

More than likely, the Bannerman had been instructed to bring some of the bandits back to stand trial, or to be made examples of, preferably the leaders.

What that meant to Huang, aside from the fact that they might be better off dead if the alternative was to serve as the governor-general's example to other potential bandits, was that they had a fighting chance to escape. If the Bannermen were hesitant to open fire and rain bullets upon them, the bandits might just be able to fight their way clear. Just where they would
go
was still a cause for concern—with the Bannermen controlling the Aerie and the airship in smoking ruins behind them—but anywhere was preferable, at this point.