Butcher Bird

"No. He was very evasive."

"So, you're just guessing."

"I'm observing. I'm a traveler. We learn to read people or we don't survive."

"No offense, man," said Spyder.

"None taken, sir."

"What do we do now?" Spyder asked Shrike.

She finally drank her whiskey, in two long gulps. "Sail on," she said. "Quickly. The sooner we reach the Kasla Mountains, the better."

"The young prince is still attached to the bow," said Primo.

"Get him off and get us out of here," Shrike said.

"Right away."

"So, the plan is we run real fast and hope they don't pounce on us like a cat on a baby chick?" asked Lulu.

"There's not much else we can do, bobbing along like a damned cork."

"This balloon idea was bullshit."

"A ship, a caravan or a magic pumpkin pulled by mice. It doesn't matter. Someone was going to try and stop us from getting to the gates of Hell. I was just hoping we'd get more of a head start."

Spyder was no longer gulping the whiskey, but sipping it. Still, its warmth wasn't particularly comforting. Just when he felt like he was getting used to the high weirdness that had swallowed his life, that lost-at-sea feeling was coming on him again.

When Jenny was packing to leave and the warehouse had iced over into glacial silence, Spyder had rewatched what, in his opinion, was Orson Welles's most peculiar movie, Mr. Arkadin. The flick was a puzzling mish-mash of Citizen Kane crossed with a baroque postwar crime melodrama sort of spot-welded onto the side. Mr. Arkadin was about an ambitious young smuggler who's researching how the mysterious financier, Gregory Arkadin, made his first fortune. Arkadin himself ends up hiring the smuggler to finish the project. Apparently, he had amnesia and didn't know his own early history. The story dragged the young ne'er-do-well through the junk and small-time gangster debris of postwar Europe, taking him from a flea circus to fleabag motels to mansions where drunks hinted at escapades in white slavery. As the bad guys who were murdering the people the ne'er-do-well had interviewed got closer and closer to him, Spyder didn't understand why the guy didn't just take his pocket full of expenses money, hop a train and head for the hills.

One thing about the movie had always stuck with Spyder, however: Arkadin's amnesia story. Spyder wondered what that was like, waking up in some stranger's clothes, afraid to touch anything because it might be a mirage, or a papier-mache prop on a movie set or a museum artifact wired to an alarm. The cops would come running in and beat you, maybe kill you, before ever you had the chance to explain that you were simply lost. Drinking his whiskey, Spyder felt definitely lost, trapped in someone else's life, imprisoned in some other loser's skin.

The airship shook. Then shook again, knocking the whiskey decanter and teakettle onto the floor. Outside, the booming voice of the Christians' talking head was back.

Spyder ran out onto the deck, followed by the others. The sacred heart airship had come much closer. At this distance, its size was shocking. The other ships, which had been keeping a discreet distance, were also closing in. When Spyder described the scene to Shrike, she yelled, "Primo, get us moving!"

"I can't! The prince's ship is still attached," Primo yelled, struggling with the claw that still gripped the railing.

"Get that thing off us," Shrike told Spyder. "Primo, get back to the navigation. When Spyder shakes us loose, take us low and away from here."

Spyder kicked at the golden claw and managed to put a few cracks in the surface of the rail, but whatever the rail and line were made of, they were very tough. Lulu ran over and kicked along with Spyder, but both the claw and railing remained where they were. Then Lulu stopped what she was doing.

"Shrike, get away from the railing," Lulu said.

Spyder turned to see what had caught Lulu's attention. The Seraphic Brotherhood's great burning heart was slowly opening, like the doors of a hangar. A burst of light and angels (or angel-shaped things) poured from the opening, flaming swords out before them. They scattered across the sky, some coming toward their ship, some toward the scorpion, while others headed for the more distant ships. The sound of cannon fire erupted across the sky as several of the more distant airships began to shoot at the angels and the Brotherhood's heart.

Something scraped against Spyder's side, and he remembered Apollyon's knife. Pulling it from its scabbard, Spyder swung it down. The blade split the claw and sliced through the railing so easily that, at first, Spyder thought he'd missed. A thick black fluid pumped from the claw's wrist as it and its tether fell away. The scorpion ship shuddered, perhaps in pain or perhaps in response to the angels slashing it with their burning blades.