had struck a windowpane.
There was little time to regret or even think about the day before.
Information had leaked that an Iscan zeppelin had crashed near Bittern Moor along the White Leech—territory now controlled by Saergaeth. It was a massive supply ship called the Orison.
In addition to food, medicine and military correspondence, the Orison had carried weapons. Gas bows, chemiostatic swords and other controlled munitions. Potentially as bad as the loss of troop locations and timetables, government sources had muttered that undisclosed highly sensitive technology had also been on board.
The papers were quick to black extras with headlines that read, ISCAN DISASTER MAY BE WATERSHED FOR MISKATOLL. And: HOW BAD IS IT? ISCAN WAR SECRETS IN SAERGAETH’S HANDS. The news was so stunning that the previous day’s events in Ghoul Court were mostly overshadowed.
CREW OF FIFTY FEARED DEAD AFTER ZEPPELIN GOES DOWN!
Family members of the missing airmen were rounded up and taken to a secluded government estate in Octul Box where they awaited further developments.
By late afternoon, commanders of small arrowy spy dirigibles confirmed that despite the crash’s proximity to Fallow Down, light war engines marked with burgundy emblems had already converged.
Apparently Saergaeth had no fear of the haunted wasteland of Fallow Down. Conspiracy theorists were already speculating that the two disasters were somehow linked.
Saergaeth had an array of sky sharks patrolling the region within hours. The prospect of several tons of food alone would have been sufficient to catch Saergaeth’s attention. Yrisl guessed his troops were being fed from supplies seized at sea before the Iscan dreadnought and her escorts had plowed north to guard Tentinil’s harbors.
Like a beached whale, the downed leviathan was to the rebellion as a carcass laid before the happy bewilderment of gulls and crabs.
Saergaeth’s troops were giddy.
Spies brought Caliph the details: Saergaeth’s soldiers poking gingerly through the wreckage, looking for booby traps. There were corpses strewn everywhere. Blackened and burnt or terribly marked with posthumous bruising.
But nothing sprang from the shredded compartments. No hideous automatons or holomorphic hexes triggered when grunts lifted timbers or huge sections of the punctured gasbag’s drapery of skin.
The booty was tremendous.
Saergaeth’s ranking officer found the schematics, the charts and battlefield maps. Caliph’s spies confirmed that Saergaeth would have the locations of troops hidden in the hills east of Forgin’s Keep. On top of this, there were two dozen chemiostatic swords, fifty gas-powered crossbows, five suits of chortium armor and a coffer containing a dozen trade bars in gold.
And then there was the massive reinforced tank covered with pipes and chugging engines that still hummed despite the zeppelin’s violent landing. A circular door, sealed with a great wheel at its center, capped one end of the vaguely cylindrical tank.
When the troops opened it, their astonishment distilled from silence. Drooling icy vapor trickled from its frosty mouth across the tilted floor.
Inside was surreal bounty.
On great hooks, fifty enormous bulbs of unidentifiable meat depended, each several times the size of an entire cow.
A soldier stepped forward and stabbed at one with his sword but the frozen carcass was like granite. His powerful thrust wasn’t even enough to set the obscene hunk of flesh swinging.
There didn’t seem to be many bones. It was all meat. Enough meat, in fact, to feed a huge amount of men. Besides the protein there were bags of flour and canned goods. Pearlums and beans and salted corn.
Lastly, in a vault, were the glass tubes flanged in bolted metal, glowing peculiar hues of purple, electric-pink and blue and other colors impossible to name. They shimmered in the vault like baroque jewels.
One of the sky sharks was signaled down. It dropped tethers and an army of men strained to secure it along the river’s edge.
It took four hours to load all the new cargo into the belly of a ship no longer designed to ferry supplies.
The sky shark had been outfitted like the rest of Saergaeth’s fleet with turrets and ballistae and racks of aerosol bombs.
In order to fit the huge tank of meat, they had to shuttle some of the zeppelin’s munitions into the already cramped war engines chugging nearby.
The two-hundred glowing canisters were left strapped in their vault. The entire closet-sized room was then winched on a crane that extended off one of the engine’s scorpion-like tails and hoisted into the zeppelin’s hold.
Finally, just as night was falling, the sky shark revved its engines and headed into the deadened sky.
When Caliph got the news, he left Isca in the Byun-Ghala, escorted by several zeppelins that emerged like underwater