Deryn scowled and stretched.
"Barking lovely weather," she croaked. Her lips were parched and her bum was very, very sore.
Then she saw the tentacles coiling around her.
"What now?" she moaned, though she'd have welcomed a flock of birds attacking them, as long as it brought the beastie down. A bumpy landing was better than hanging here till she died of thirst.
Deryn scanned the horizon and saw nothing. But she felt a trembling in the leather cords of her pilot's rig and heard the thrum of engines in the air.
Her eyes widened.
A huge airbeast was emerging from the gray clouds behind her, its reflective silver topside glistening in the sunlight.
The thing was gigantic - larger than St. Paul's Cathedral, longer than the oceangoing dreadnought Orion that she'd seen in the Thames the week before. The shining cylinder was shaped like a zeppelin, but the flanks pulsed with the motion of its cilia, and the air around it swarmed with symbiotic bats and birds.
Chapter 6
The medusa made an unhappy whistling sound.
"No, beastie. Don't fret!" she called softly. "They're here to help!"
At least, Deryn assumed they were. But she hadn't been expecting anything quite so big to come hunting her down.
The airship drew closer, until Deryn could make out the gondola suspended from the beastie's belly. The foot-tall letters under the bridge windows came slowly into focus... . Leviathan.
She swallowed. "And barking famous, these friends are."
The Leviathan had been the first of the great hydrogen breathers fabricated to rival the kaiser's zeppelins. A few beasties had grown larger since, but no other had yet made the trip to India and back, breaking German airship records all the way.
"THE LEVIATHAN APPROACHES."
The Leviathan's body was made from the life threads of a whale, but a hundred other species were tangled into its design, countless creatures fitting together like the gears of a stopwatch. Flocks of fabricated birds swarmed around it - scouts, fighters, and predators to gather food. Deryn saw message lizards and other beasties scampering across its skin.
According to her aerology manual, the big hydrogen breathers were modeled on the tiny South American islands where Darwin had made his famous discoveries. The Leviathan wasn't one beastie, but a vast web of life in ever shifting balance.
The motivator engines changed pitch, nudging the creature's nose up. The airbeast obeyed, cilia along its flanks undulating like a sea of grass in the wind - a host of tiny oars rowing backward, slowing the Leviathan almost to a halt.
The huge shape drifted slowly overhead, blotting out the sky. Its belly was all mottled grays, camouflage for night raids.
In the sudden coolness of the huge shadow, Deryn stared up, spellbound. This vast, fantastic creature had actually come to rescue her.
The Huxley shuddered again, wondering where the sun had gone.
"Hush, beastie. It's nothing but your big cousin."
Deryn heard calls from above, and she saw movement.
A rope tumbled into view, unrolling past her. Another followed, then a dozen more, until Deryn was surrounded by an upside-down forest of swaying ropes.
She stretched out for one, but the width of the air-beast's gasbag kept the rope out of reach. Deryn swung the pilot's rig, trying to get closer.
Her motion made the Huxley's tentacles curl up tight, resulting in a sickening lurch downward.
"Aye, so now you want to head down?" she complained. "Just useless, you are."
The airship's engines changed pitch again, and the dangling lines reappeared, still out of reach. But then the engines overhead set up a grinding pattern, on-off, on-off ... and the ropes began to sway in rhythm with the sound.
That was one clever pilot up there.
The ropes swung closer with every pulse of the engines. Deryn stretched out one arm as far as she could... .
Finally her reaching fingers caught hold. She pulled the rope in, knotting it to the ring over her rig - then frowned.
Were they going to hoist her up into the gondola? Wouldn't that flip the Huxley upside down?
But the line stayed slack, and a few moments later a message lizard made its way down. Its tiny webbed hands cupped the rope as though it were a thin tree branch. The lizard's bright green skin seemed to glow in the shadows below the airship.
It spoke with a posh accent, the deep voice uncanny from such a wee body.
"Mr. Sharp, I presume?" The lizard let out a throaty chuckle.
Gobsmacked as she was, Deryn almost answered. Of course, the message lizard was only repeating what one of the officers overhead had said to it.
"Greetings from the Leviathan," it continued. "Our apologies for the delay. Bad weather and all that." It made a noise like a man clearing his throat, and Deryn half expected the lizard to raise a tiny fist to its mouth. "But here we are at last. We'll be taking you in on the dorsal side, of course - standard procedure."
The lizard paused, and Deryn pondered what "dorsal" might mean.
"Ah, yes. I'm told you're just a sprog. Well done, getting lost on your first flight."
Deryn rolled her eyes. First a bag of gas and insect guts had carted her halfway across England, and now she was getting cheek from a barking lizard!
"I expect you don't know standard procedure. Well, it's quite simple, really. We'll drop below you, then come up under and bring you in with the dorsal winch. Any questions?"
The message lizard stared up at her expectantly, blinking its wee black eyes.
"No questions, sir. I'm ready," Deryn said, remembering to use her boy's voice. She wasn't about to admit she didn't know what "dorsal" meant.
The message lizard didn't move, just blinked again.
"So ... standard procedure it is?" she added.
The lizard waited another moment, but when Deryn said nothing more, it scampered back up the rope to repeat her words to whoever was at the other end.
A minute later the other ropes were all hoisted away, but the line attached to her pilot's rig was given more slack. It looped down almost out of sight, a quarter mile of rope, it looked like. Then the airship's idling engines sprang to life again.
The huge shadow pulled back against the wind, so that the sun broke out from behind its nose, half blinding Deryn. The airship dropped then, venting hydrogen with a sound like rushing water, steadily descending till the officers in the bridge windows were dead even with her, only twenty yards away.