An alarm bell rang, loud and fast. Isabelle and Bitterlich sprang up, overturning the bench and nearly tripping over it. They bolted outside in time to hear the lookout cry. “War balloons! War balloons starboard and high!”

CHAPTER

Twenty-Four

Isabelle gawped at the war balloons, one painted red and black, the other blue and yellow.

These were not the lesser-clan balloons Isabelle recalled from her youth, but massive structures, each a wooden tower with several tiers of platforms all bristling with guns. These aerial fortresses hung suspended below vast armored gasbags. They moved through sky at the direction of their Windcaller choruses, as fast as any warship, and indifferent to the natural wind.

They will burn, Primus said, old hatred flaring to life like banked coals. He still remembered how the Gyrine betrayed him at the Battle of Treacher’s Coast, how he’d watched helpless and outraged from the shore when the clan balloons that had been protecting his supply fleet opened fire on it instead. The Windcallers stole the breeze from some ships and left them helpless, and dashed others against one another with hurricane winds.

If Isabelle was going to reconstruct Primus’s personality into something she could live with, she couldn’t just dispel him every time he showed up.

That was four hundred years ago. Everyone involved is long dead, she pointed out.

It is not over, Primus insisted. Not until the last clan balloon falls flaming into the Gloom, the vermin aboard sent to the Halls of Torment unredeemed. Out of the corner of her eye, she could almost see him standing by her shoulder.

Clearly, reason was not the optimal tool for this job, at least not in its most direct form.

We are not going to start a fight, she said.

Of course not. We are outnumbered and outgunned. What we will do is scout, collect intelligence on the leaders, find out their vices, their secrets, and their closest, most intimate enemies. We will turn them against each other, shatter their alliances, and isolate each clan in fear of the other. Only then, when they are alone and unwilling to call for aid, will they be ripe for annihilation.

Primus retreated before Isabelle could retort.

Isabelle ordered all the sails taken in, save those needed for maneuver. The Gyrine could deaden the wind to make sails irrelevant, or they could send in a gale to shatter the masts of a ship under full sail. Furling all but a few of the smaller sails obviated the first approach and mitigated the second.

The blue-and-yellow war balloon opened the shutter on an optical telegraph and flashed a message. Isabelle’s Skaladin signalman translated, “They say they are the First Owl clan. We are to surrender immediately and prepare to be boarded.”

Similce said, “We’re stuck in it now.”

Isabelle looked to Marie. “You have the helm. Steer us true.”