“Templars like to kill first and ask questions later. The OBO would rather experiment first and kill later. Either way you end up dead, but at least with the OBO there’s a chance of escape.”
“Very optimistic.” Miss Sekhmet looked, if possible, even more worried.
Primrose poured her another cup of iced milk.
They were two days out from Wady Halfeh. All that first afternoon, they floated high and fast over the gates of the cataracts. Anyone free of shipboard duty hung over the railings staring down at the widening of the Nile below. The great river became a near lake, dotted with white rapids and the peaks of a thousand varied islands – rocky, sandy, or covered in palm trees. During the night, they floated over Ass?an, a town so small they barely marked it passing. Dawn had them at the second cataract. Rue had never before wished to explore groundside so badly. The fierce beauty of the place drew her, the rapids forming a barrier so inhospitable that no villages edged this Nile, yet the scattered lush islands were the stuff of fairy tales.
They continued on, over the unmarked Nubian border, finally arriving at Wady Halfeh. At first glance it was similar to all the previous villages in Egypt. The buildings built of mud-brick with tile roofs, all tan, yellow, and orange. Paths cut from it out into the desert in sand wheel-whorls. But as they de-puffed, it became apparent that Wady Halfeh was different.
The town jutted up on pillars fully three storeys high, out over the Nile. It was constructed to allow for the annual flood, but its focus seemed turned to the desert, looking to the camel trails for trade because the river was too fraught to provide. Tall industrial pipes spiralled into the skies like obelisks, smoke gusting out. This shrouded the town in sooty gloom, not as much as London, but only because the Nile’s persistent breeze carried some particulate away. Still, it covered much of Halfeh in a layer of grime, making the town grungier than the desert around it.
From above, it looked like a great big smudge.
This place was more a creature of the modern age, as Rue had come to understand it, than any she had seen in Egypt. She half expected to find a railroad, spearing out into the desert towards Abu Hammed.
“The desert eats it up,” Anitra explained when Rue asked. “The tracks, I mean. It’s been tried but it never lasts. One could parallel tracks along the Nile, as they do in the Delta, but the flooding is less predictable here. It’d have to stop half the year and then be dug out after. So, with no train, Wady Halfeh does the heavy lifting for aircraft in these parts.”
Rue nodded her understanding. “There’s always lot of airships where trains can’t go.”
“Exactly.”
Rue nodded. “Can’t complain. After all, we intend to refuel here.”
“Nubia has a few way stations further south. But respectable dirigibles don’t moor there unless it’s an emergency. Even then I wouldn’t recommend it. At least Wady Halfeh has some laws.”
Rue nodded. “Understood. Percy, take us down.”
The Spotted Custard sank down, de-puffing in stages towards what looked like the main dockyard. It wasn’t designed up, like most dirigible service ports; instead it soared out over the Nile, bringing airships in low to tether to one island or another.
“We are responsible for our own water intake while moored?”
Anitra nodded. “Coal transfer takes place via a centralised venting system in the centre of town. See there?”
“Percy, take us there first, please.”
The coal-dispensing station looked like a massive cauldron, with holes plus anchor points at various junctures, like a strawberry pot. They were hailed the moment it became clear they were in need of fuel and directed into one vent by the gesticulations of a precariously stationed native boy.
Spoo supervised as they let out the lines to a group of eager local sooties whose hands reached out from the cauldron interior in an eerie disembodied manner. Like a poltergeist.
Anitra undertook a rapid haggle over cost.
Primrose, as ship’s purser, stood by wearing a deeply contemplative expression more common when deciding how to dress for a ball.
For a price that Prim deemed just shy of extortionist, a tube was ejected outward and connected to the open porthole of The Spotted Custard’s boiler room. Coal was transferred aboard and gold transferred off. Transaction complete, they were gestured rudely away by the disembodied hands.
Rue directed Percy to moor far out over the rapids, at the most isolated island.
She still felt their position exposed. True, there were white-water rapids between them and shore, but there were also rope bridges aplenty and small light aircraft developed exactly to deal with the difficulty inherent in living near cataracts.
“I don’t like this, Lady Captain. We’re awfully easy to board.”
“Agreed, Spoo. But what can we do? We need water and this is the only way to take it on.”
Tasherit joined them, leaning over the forecastle rail.