Karen Memory

Chapter Twenty

I’d never been in an airship before. I expected quarters to be cramped, as I’d read they were on ships, but the salon was plenty big for all four of us, and there was coffee. Hot, too, from a gadget that brewed each cup as you wanted it. I drank four and then had to go find the head. That was tiny enough to suit my prejudices.

Captain Colony, of course, was in the control room. The rest of us tried to come up with a plan for a while, but we didn’t know enough about what we was getting into to even begin one. Find Bantle and break his meeting up, have the Marshal arrest him and Scarlet, if Scarlet wasn’t dead.

I drove the Marshal and Merry crazy walking in circles, jittering, but it had been coffee or collapse. Priya just kept handing me cookies. They was sugar cookies with peppermint icing, slightly stale. I ate every one she gave me, soaked in the coffee.

Mostly, we fretted and stared and tried to figure out how to sneak up on them. At least the airship was quiet and we figured we could have Captain Colony let us off down the beach and hike in.

“I hope they’re out in the open,” the Marshal said while his own third cup of coffee cooled between his palms. “Otherwise I don’t know how we’re gonna find them.”

“It ain’t a big camp,” I said. “And this time of year, ain’t nobody there but a caretaker, I’d submit.”

The Marshal flashed his smile. Rain had begun drumming on the big gasbag overhead. It was strange to hear that, and nothing on the canopy of the gondola. But of course we hung in that gasbag’s shadow, so there weren’t no rain falling over us.

“You know much about logging?”

I wandered around the salon some more, smudging brass fixtures fiddling with ’em. The aloe juice was soaking through the fresh bandages Miss Lizzie’d wrapped on my hands, though they didn’t hurt anymore. “Grew up in Hay Camp,” I said. “I know a little.”

He stared out the window into black overcast for a minute or two. “I asked Mr. Hayden that when Sky wakes up, he ask him to track down that Bruce Scarlet fellow. Or his remains. And put him under arrest if he can manage it, and he ain’t already permanently arrested. But I’m thinking it might be within my remit to slap irons on Mr. Bantle, too, for conspiracy to commit murder.”

He nodded, satisfied.

“Mr. Hayden?” I asked.

“Mr. Crispin Hayden?”

My face went hot as coals and I leaned on the brass railing I’d been finger-spotting. I’d never even thought to learn Crispin’s surname.

Marshal Reeves, watching me, snorted. “Live and learn, child,” he said. “Everybody’s worthy of respect.”

I went to fix another cup of coffee, trying to sort how I felt. Other than like a damned fool. I went and sat next to Priya and drank my coffee and wished I’d brought a book.

Fortunately, it was only another ten minutes or so to Baskerville. By the time we got there I could imagine there was a little gray through the clouds outside, but I knew I was probably imagining it. Down below, though, I could make out the narrow pale strip of the beach, so I stared at that — and just as I realized that the soft hum of the engines had changed a little, I also realized the blurred light-colored ribbon underneath was getting broader. Or closer.

“What’s that?” Priya asked.

She pointed, but I didn’t see anything but black. “What?”

“I thought I saw lights. Over there.”

“That’s ocean,” I said. “Or Sound, anyway. I’d hate to be the ship’s master out on this night. Maybe there’s a lighthouse?”

There were lighthouses. A lot of them. All up and down the coast. It was as good a guess as any.

Priya reached out to touch Merry awake — it didn’t take a shake or even a nudge — and the three of us clustered by the window. After a moment, the Marshal came over, too. I touched the cool butt of Miss Francina’s Colt and I thought I’d just been pawing all that brasswork to keep my hand off the pistol. It was a comforting sort of coldness, smooth and heavy.

I wondered if I was going to shoot somebody tonight. And if it would be Peter Bantle.

I decided I wouldn’t feel bad about that if it happened. And now I know that that particular delusion showed pretty well that whatever Miss Francina thought, I weren’t too much of a grown woman yet after all. Time fixes that for most of us, though. More’s the pity.

Worse pity for them who don’t get either the time nor the fix.

* * *

I’d thought maybe we were going to have to slide down ropes or something else dramatic, and I would even have been looking forward to it if it weren’t for the state of my hands and the ice freezing all over everything. Instead, Minneapolis Colony set that gaudy airship down on the sand like a feather. There wasn’t even a thump when it landed. I had no idea then how it worked — Priya said it was something about canisters and vents and compressors.

Anyway, Captain Colony came back to wish us well and tell us he’d wait for us right here, unless he had to take off for safety. He said his real concern was ice weighing down the gasbag, but he had some way of heating it up to keep it from freezing. That didn’t seem too prudent to me, what with the hydrogen and all, but I ain’t no airship mechanic. I’m just a seamstress who can gentle horses.

If he had to take off, he said he’d not go far. He also said something to Priya in a language I didn’t know; she laughed and answered.

On the way down the gangplank I looked at her.

“It was Hindi,” she said. “He wished us … luck, I think I’d translate it. Good fortune.”

“Well,” I answered, “we’re going to need it.”

Then we were out from under the shadow of the gasbag, and the rain spiked down on us like needles of ice, sharp and cold.

* * *

We followed Merry and the Marshal up the beach in the thumping rain. It was sure enough graying by now, but when I looked back over my shoulder even that great, gaudy balloon didn’t show up much as of yet. Ahead of us, we couldn’t see a damned thing, neither — not the lumber camp, and not a glimmer of light. It was cold, and I didn’t have mittens, and the coat I’d borrowed from Captain Colony was canvas and too big and already wet through the shoulders. The Marshal offered me his gloves. They was so big they didn’t make no difference, so I handed ’em back. I’d pinned my hair up in a couple of braids, but they weren’t standing up to the weather. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt the frozen curls of your hair scratching around your cheeks and ears, but I can’t rightly recommend it.

What I can recommend is somebody you love holding your hand in a black-ice storm. Even if you is both sneaking up a beach with the river — Miss Bethel would call it an estuary — hissing on your right side and the trees creaking like they’re wont to shatter on the left. This’d be snow up in the mountains and rain down in Rapid, but here it was freezing and falling at the same time, and it weren’t good. My feet was starting to crunch through a rime of ice when I put ’em down on the sand.

The sky was graying up some, but it weren’t exactly what you’d call dawn. More just lightening. And we was all still pretty invisible in that gloaming, especially as we kept to the tree line and off the white sand of the beach. The mountains weren’t out today, for sure, I guess is what I’m saying.

You could still kind of sense their presence, though, by the way those left-hand trees mounted up steep directly as they got beyond the river. Underneath ’em was nothing but hints of wet green dark and moss and dripping logs and fallen logs big around as a paddle wheel. I glanced longingly at the shelter, but trying to walk through that was asking for a snakebite on top a broken ankle. The tips of the trees was lost in the mist.

I swear to this day I did see a dark man-like shape ghosting between trees deep back in the shadows, and I regret to this day that I didn’t have time to go look and see if it was a real Sasquatch. In any case, I ain’t never been so weather miserable in my life. And whatever I was feeling, it weren’t nothing on Priya, who just weren’t acclimated. She shivered and minced even though the Marshal hung his hat and his duster on her — the duster dragged in the sand — until finally Merry and I chivvied her into a kind of stumbling trot. It don’t matter so much if your skin gets cold if you keep your muscles warm, and it weren’t cold enough out for frostbite. But she could still freeze to death if she didn’t keep moving.

Hell, any of us could. I hoped we could get inside when we got to Baskerville. Otherwise it was going to be a long walk back to Captain Colony’s airship when we was done.

* * *

I about cried with relief when we glimpsed a light. I don’t think we’d come more than a mile, though it felt like twelve. But there was Baskerville looming up out of what was passing for morning, and it was shuttered up for winter just as it should of been. Except for the loadmaster’s stripped-log cottage alongside the pier, that is — which glowed with a merry enticing light and whipped a tangy banner of woodsmoke from its chimney up through the whistling cold.

“Sons of bitches,” the Marshal said, and I don’t mind saying I sympathized. I wanted to bust that door down and go take that fire away from them. It took more than a modicum of self-constraint to hunker down and observe the situation, and I know I weren’t the only one as felt so.

“Are we sure that’s them?” I asked. “I don’t see no boat nor no airship.”

“Airship’d want to get up above the mess, if there were any wait anticipated.”

We huddled together, a bit, and that helped some. I held my tongue, because I could about feel the Marshal thinking.

He thought as fast as he could, too, but Merry and I had joined Priya in shivering by the time he started talking.

“You two creep up,” he said to me and Priya. “Get in that shed there.”

It was just a lean-to against the back of the house, open on one side. But it was shelter, and I knew the Marshal was being kind to Priya and me. I was so cold I didn’t even put up a fight about it.

He went on, “Looks like there’s a rear door under that roof. Maybe you can hear what they’re plotting at if you sneak up to it. Merry and me, we’ll take the front. Miss Memery, you got you a six-shooter, don’t you?”

I nodded.

He offered his two Colts out in each hand — one to Priya and one to Merry. He still had his Winchester across his back.

Merry took a pistol silently. Priya tucked her eggshell fingers into the sleeves of the Marshal’s duster and said, “I don’t shoot.”

He shrugged and slid the pistol back into his holster. Freezing rain beaded on the oiled leather, which was when I realized that it had got light enough to see such things.

“You think Nemo is in there already?”

“I think given the weather, and that I don’t see no boat tied up, I ain’t going to assume either way. Now look — when I give a signal, I want you, Miss Memery, and you, Miss Swati, to make a good bit of noise in the shed and then run for the trees. Make it sound like you knocked something over on accident, then just light out. Zigzag when you run in case they open fire. Miss Lee and me will cut them off from the house, and when we’ve got the drop on ’em we’ll demand a surrender. Are you all right with that? It ain’t safe.”

“What in life is?” Priya asked.

“What’s the signal?” I asked.

“You know what a burrowing owl sounds like?”

I did, but Merry and Priya both took some convincing there even was any such thing. The Marshal and I took turns demonstrating—who-heoo! who-heoo! — until Priya succumbed to a fit of ague and nervous giggling.

“Right,” the Marshal said. “I do that, and it means make a ruckus. You do it, and it means something’s wrong, get out and regroup. There’s no burrowing owls around here, so it won’t happen by accident.”

“What’s your signal for get out?” Priya asked.

He pursed his lips, thinking. Merry watched him think for a moment. Then she put her hands before her mouth and made a fluted, echoing, ethereal cry.

“That’s a phoenix,” she said. “There’s none of those around here, either.”

“Good enough,” the Marshal said. He looked around at us, shaking his head a little in … wonder? Disbelief at what he had to work with? Grudging respect? I couldn’t say, rightly.

Then he said, “By the power invested in me by the Ninth Circuit Court of these United States of America, I’m deputizing each and every one of you ladies. You’s my possemen now.”

We stared at him for a minute. I don’t know about the others, but me, I was wondering if this was the first time Irish and Oriental women was ever deputized as U.S. Marshals before. The silence started to drag a bit, I’ll be honest, but I didn’t know how to break it.

Then, “All right,” Priya said. “Let’s go.”