Behind them, the French Quarter drifted away. Its gas lamps struggled against the darkness, signaling the stars and mimicking the moon. But the fog had rolled in hard, and it blanketed the blocks with its warm coverage and left the curfew-quieted neighborhood a low, gray smear against the waterline.
Finally the ferry pulled up against the western pier, and another crane lowered another drawbridge down against the deck. The passengers disembarked into near emptiness.
Josephine shivered despite herself, and despite her too-warm cloak. “Now comes the hard part,” she breathed.
“Pourquoi?”
Gifford Crooks answered Ruthie as they walked away from the water, back toward the docks and the small shipping district that springs up around any ferry’s destination. “Now we have to cross the marshes. Now we have to get to the island.”
Ruthie nodded. “Then, on y va! Before it gets any later.”
Josephine asked, “You’ve never been to Barataria before, have you?”
“How do you know?”
“If you’d ever been, you’d understand why the rest of the trip is a problem. Gifford?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Where’s our boat?”
“A mile from here down the river road, on the edge of the canal,” he said quietly.
She asked, “Are you sure?”
“No, but that’s where we’ve been leaving the blowers for coming and going—and that’s where I left mine, when I came to town to give you Fletcher’s message. If it’s not there, I don’t know what we’ll do.”
“If it’s not there, we’ll come back and look for something else. Mr. Crooks, do you have a light?”
“I do,” he promised, and he pulled an electric torch from his jacket. It was small, but it’d have to do. The roads up and down the marsh’s edges were not uniformly lit, and they were dangerous.
Now Ruthie’s concern showed through, only a little, leaking past her determined demeanor. “We will walk a mile, in the dark?”
“Mostly in the dark,” Josephine confirmed. “But it shouldn’t be too bad. The Texians are purging the bay, aren’t they? We shouldn’t run into any robbers or mercenaries.”
“Unless they have been chased out of the bay,” Ruthie mused. “Some of them are alive. Deaderick’s still alive.”
Gifford tried to reassure them. “Most of the pirates went out to the Gulf, heading south if they could. There are ships at the coast to take them in—and those who didn’t get that far went deeper into the swamps. There are dozens of islands between the pirate docks and … and anything else. The rest of Louisiana. The river. The ocean.”
“And we have to wade past them.”
“The blower has an engine,” Gifford informed them. “We’ll get through pretty quick, all things considered.”
“I hope it has oars, too,” Josephine said, setting off down the packed-earth stretch leading in the direction Gifford had indicated. “Because we can’t risk the noise. Not once we get past Bay Sansbois.”
The Pinkerton man took a deep breath and said, “Sooner than that, to tell you the truth. We’ll have to take the water straight down to the edge of the islands at Point à la Hache, and then cross our fingers, cut the motor, and slink over to the big shore.”
Ruthie asked, “What about the siege?” and she darted to catch up as Gifford pumped a switch, then flicked it—sparking a filament to create a wobbly yellow beam. The small device hummed in his hands. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a glove, which he wrapped around the torch like an oven mitt. Within twenty minutes, the thing would be too hot to hold.
He took Ruthie’s elbow with his free hand, guiding her to walk beside him. “The siege … I don’t know. They’d done their worst by the time I left ’em, and mostly they were just sweeping the place, blowing up what airships they could reach, and wreaking havoc to wake the devil. If we’re real lucky, they’ll have gotten bored and gone home. They’ve done what they set out to do, haven’t they?”
“It depends on what they were up to. I mean, what they were really up to,” Josephine worried aloud. “If all they wanted to do was scare some pirates, or blow Lafitte’s old docks to pieces, I guess they’ve done their duty. Texas can afford to waste the time and ammunition on a bunch of outlaws who’ve been camped there for a hundred years, but why now? Why would this new fellow make it a priority, first thing? The pirates didn’t have anything to do with his predecessor getting eaten.”
Gifford speculated, “Maybe they don’t know that. Maybe they think the bay boys had something to do with it, and they don’t know anything about these … about the dead, down by the river.”
Josephine didn’t respond right away. She walked on Gifford’s left, with Ruthie on his right, and she scanned the narrow strip of road she could see by the light of the electric candle. Eventually she said, “Deaderick was there, and Fletcher Josty. I hate to wonder, but I can’t help it.”
“Wonder what?” he asked.
“Wonder if Texas didn’t follow them down from Pontchartrain. Wonder if Texas is killing two birds with one stone, uprooting the Lafittes and going after the Ganymede in one big push. Ganymede isn’t at Barataria, but Texas doesn’t know that.”
And then all of them were silent, all the way down to the canal.
Six
North Texas was as good a place to stop as any, and on the edge of Oneida was a temporary hydrogen dock—the kind that was scarcely temporary anymore, and had become a small town of its own, hanging on to the settlement’s edge like a barnacle … a barnacle that might explode and take half the desert with it, given just the right sort of accident. Bigger cities had bigger, better regulated docks; but on the unincorporated frontier, these mobile constructions squatted wherever they found a place to do so. Dangerous, dirty, and marginally managed by whoever was richest and had the biggest guns, the docks were not popular with travelers or merchants, but they were necessary. And heaven knew the air pirates were happy to make use of them.
All across the Panhandle, the flat, brown earth was speckled with tufts of dark grass, cactus nubs, and tumbleweeds being kicked about by the occasional dust devil. It was a dry, dull, featureless place in Cly’s opinion, but he didn’t have to live there, so he didn’t feel moved to complain about it.
As the Naamah Darling arrived, the whole settlement—hydrogen barnacle and all—was digging out from underneath a windstorm that had knocked down horses, sent water troughs rolling through the streets, and picked roofs off buildings only to fling them miles out into the empty, prickly nothing beyond the town’s grid.
Pale yellow sand the color of sun-bleached leather drifted into piles in the corners of fences and up against the warped wood walls of the church, bar, saddle company, law office, laundry, jail, dry goods store, and clapboard train station with its lonely pair of tracks. Men were already setting upon the tracks and sweeping them, and from the drifts of bone-dry dirt, the occasional flap of canvas would disturb the seamless layer of brown.
Dirigibles large and small were tangled together on the dock’s eastern edge, implying a western zephyr that had moved with the might of a bored god’s fist. Riggers and engineers swarmed around these docks, shouting to cooperate and untangle the lobster claws and lines, and to dig out the pipes themselves to determine what had been uprooted, and what had only been bent out of place.
But the western line of the dock was nearly unoccupied, save for two small mail express dirigibles that had been battened down with better rigging. Cly set his own bird down beside them, and ten minutes later he was on his way to town.
Fang and Kirby Troost remained with the ship to see if the sulfuric acid vats were stable and could be hooked up to the hydrogen hoses, and if not, to assist with repairs. But Houjin accompanied the captain, ostensibly to get a gander at Oneida. Houjin was seventeen, and nothing short of brilliant. But he’d spent most of his life sheltered under the Seattle streets. Any chance to get out of the city was a chance for him to learn, observe, and drive people crazy.
“This place is a wreck!” the kid declared. “Is it always like this?”
“No, they’ve had a storm,” the captain told him again. The subject had already come up while they were overhead, surveying the damage in advance of landing.
“But everything is so dry!”
“That’s why they call them windstorms. Or … dust storms. But they’re common out here. No trees, you see. No grass, no plants with roots to hold on to the soil. No mountains to break up the sky and give the weather something to work around.”
“It’s hot as hell.”
A straggling gust of warm, dusty air smacked them in the face and dragged itself past them, tugging at their clothes and coiling off into tiny dust devils behind them. The captain pulled his goggles down off his head and fixed them over his eyes to keep out the next batch of blown debris, and he said, “You think this is hot? Wait until we get to the Gulf.”
“It’s even worse?”
“It’s just as bad. It’s wet, and the river runs through it—so there aren’t just trees but swamps, and grasses that grow out of the water as tall as me. Moss hangs off every branch of every tree, and everything is green and overgrown. Everything lives there. Giant trees that look like they’re melting. Animals like you’ve only heard about in books.” An almost wistful look crossed his face, but he put it down quickly by recalling, “You’ll sweat through everything you’re wearing. It’s like you never dry off, not really.”
The boy’s enthusiasm flagged, but quickly buoyed back up again. “Can we swim in the river? That’d be a good way to cool off.”
“I wouldn’t recommend it, not unless you want to get bitten by snakes, or eaten by alligators.”
“Hm,” Houjin said, chewing this over as they strolled past a dog crawling out from under a saloon’s porch. The animal sneezed and shook itself, then wandered away. “And you used to live there?”