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We ran into the palace and were largely ignored on account of our size. The kynd slaves seemed only interested in killing nine-footers and making off with whatever they might carry. I saw to my disgust that the card game with the queen was still underway. I led Galva up the stairs that led to the servants’ floor, but they stopped there. The roof garden and the cloud-ship nest could only be gotten to by ascender. Of course, the living engines of that mechanism were busy murdering their masters, so it wouldn’t be serving again anytime soon. The shaft would still be there, though, wouldn’t it?

I led us there, opened the wee gate.

As I had explored this shaft on my night wanderings, I knew there were footholds carved into the stone so repairs could be made and the massive chain that pulled the ascender inspected for wear. There would be no going up to the roof this way, however; the little bit of light leaking into the shaft showed that the ascender itself had stopped at the roof. Its great bronze bulk filled the shaft and would stop us reaching the exit to the roof even if we were able to make the climb.

“We have a problem,” I said, showing Galva.

“So, what, we climb out a window and up?”

“I can. I’m less sure about you.”

“I climb well with rope, if you go first.”

“Alas, we haven’t any.”

“Tie our belts together?”

“Smart! If we were fatter, perhaps. There’s a wall on top of the roof, and it’s flat and smooth, twelve feet at least from window to wall-top. It’s a job for a Guildron, which, no offense, you are not.”

“I am unoffended to be told I am no thief.”

“Well, you’ll be unoffended and smothered in rocks and ash if we don’t figure out a way to get up there and bargain or fight our way onto that cloud-ship.”

“What if the—what did you call the lifting-box?”

“Ascender.”

“What if it fell?”

“Thought of that. But that chain’s a bastard. We’d need a saw. Now there’s one downstairs, but it’s a two-man saw, and I don’t see how we’d get the angle and leverage to do the job.”

“I might have a tool for this work,” she said, and as soon as she stripped off her shirt and chain mail, I knew what she meant to do.

“You brilliant karker,” I said as she stood bare-chested before me, her tattoo of Dalgatha already bleeding, already squirming. I noticed now the wrap around her middle, the one covering the slakesword wound Apia had given her in the arena and which the king’s doctor had used his art to heal. It was spotted with fresh blood.

“Say, your sword-hole’s leaking.”

In a perfectly Ispanthian gesture, she shrugged so minutely you could barely see it, then started shaking with the effort of waking the sleeper-tattoo on her flat, mammetless chest.

I looked away—it hurt my mind to watch that bird get birthed from her, and here it came. The sound of it was no more comforting.

War corvid beaks are one of the hardest things in this world, owing to the magics that went into their breeding-up. And they’re sharp as well. Steel is no match for them, let alone mere iron, and rusted iron at that. Once Galva showed the chain to the great, stag-sized bird and made the gesture for attack, Dalgatha braced herself in the shaft and let go a series of fast, brutal pecks that had sparks and stone-dust flying. The iron creaked and then squealed, and then Galva had her bird by the wing, tugging her in before the falling ascender box shortened her by a head. The sound of that thing screaming down past our floor to smash on the lowest level underground was most gratifying—there’s something in us that loves to wreck things.

The same is true for corvids, and this one hopped in excitement to see what great mischief she had wrought.

She would make yet more.

Once Galva had shrugged back into her mail, we started up the shaft. The inset rungs were easy enough for kynd to climb, but they were not sized for a corvid’s talons, and, below me, Galva had to help and coax the great beastie up with much wing-flapping and a couple of near falls. I couldn’t watch. At the top of the shaft now, on the little landing between the shaft and the bronze ascender gate, I peeked through the bars and saw the cloud-ship lowering to the roof now, about to bump its great lower runners onto the stone quay meant for it.

That’s when I saw them.

Hiding and waiting off to the left among some square-cut hedges in the small rooftop garden.

The fucking goblins.

Luckily, the foliage that hid them from the airship and partially from me was hiding me from them.

Galva had gotten to the landing, coming behind her great murder-bird, and she now saw what I was seeing. As she was pressed against me, I felt her body move—fuck if she wasn’t about to launch herself toward them, but I held her arm, got my mouth as close to her ear as I could. There was a lot of noise in the air, but as Galva had once warned me in handcant, goblins hear good.