Plummeting Through Lacquered Paper

Smoke clung to the carved cedar rafters like dirty wool, but the sulfur drift could not mask the telltale click of a wheel-lock being wound three tiers above the floorboards. Rostislav Benov paused beside an overturned banquet console, his silk sash trailing across shattered porcelain plates, and tilted his chin toward the shadowed catwalks where eighty terrified diners expected another volley of lead. If he did not clear the ceiling riggings before the gunners reloaded, the mezzanine exits would turn into a slaughter pen.

A sharp snap echoed from thirty feet above. A lead slug gouged a fist-sized furrow through the lacquer tabletop an inch from his left boot, showering his trousers with spicy plum sauce and cedar splinters.

"Impatient," Rostislav murmured, flicking a sticky morsel off his pastel sleeve. "And thoroughly lacking in festive manners."

He slid the confiscated brass spyglass securely into his sash beside his purse, gathered his balance on the balls of his feet, and launched himself upward.

The Thousand-Crane tradition did not teach men to climb; it taught them that timber and rope were merely springboards waiting for weight. Rostislav caught the edge of a decorative dragon pillar with the toe of his soft leather boot, twisted his hips in a tight half-circle, and rebounded into the void. His flexible court rapier trailed behind him in a low, humming arc. Before gravity could arrest his ascent, his left hand snapped out, fingers closing around the cold links of a swinging brass chandelier chain.

The chain groaned under the sudden kinetic purchase. Rostislav did not fight the swing. He fed his own rotational momentum directly into the pendular rhythm, pumping his knees to widen the arc across the vaulted ceiling.

Above him, three privateers in greased canvas jerkins crouched along the narrow maintenance catwalk. Two scrambled to seat fresh powder charges into their short carbines, while the third—a burly shooter with a patch over his left eye—cursed in guttural dockside cant and leveled a cocked wheel-lock directly at the swinging aerialist.

"Shoot the clown!" the one-eyed gunner barked. "Drop him into the wine bowls!"

The carbine flashed.

At twenty paces, a wheel-lock ball traveled faster than the human eye could track, but the spark in the pan provided all the warning Rostislav required. With a violent snap of his core, he hauled his body parallel to the ceiling beams and spun like a tossed bobbin. The slender blade of his court rapier traced an iridescent silver spiral in the air.

Clang.

Rotational qi met flying lead at an exact glancing angle. Instead of absorbing the blunt shock, Rostislav's blade sheared across the projectile's trajectory, knocking the flattened slug sideways into an overhead iron tie-rod. The impact sent a chime vibrating through the rafters while the ricochet buried itself harmlessly in an oak brace.

The shooter stared at his smoking barrel, his jaw dropping slack.

"Allow me to return the compliment," Rostislav called out.

He released the chandelier chain at the peak of its upward swing. For a fraction of a second, he hung suspended beneath the gilded roof boss, weightless in the rising cloud of gunpowder haze. Then he tucked his shoulders, caught the timber rail of the catwalk with both heels, and drove his full rotational momentum into a devastating drop-kick.

His boots struck the one-eyed gunner square in the chest.

The impact drove the privateer backward through the decorative partition separating the catwalk from the ventilation corridor. It was an exquisite piece of craftsmanship: six hinged panels of translucent mulberry paper stretched over red-lacquered cedar frames, painted with nesting cranes among gold-leaf bamboo.

"Pardon the intrusion, ladies," Rostislav muttered to the painted birds as the frame splintered into kindling.

The gunner howled as he crashed straight through the fragile paper panels, tumbled off the rear scaffolding, and plummeted forty feet downward into a massive brass vat of iced melon soup on the service terrace. A thunderous splash echoed from below, followed by frantic splashing and coughing.

The two remaining marksmen froze. One dropped his priming flask; the other fumbled with a jagged boarding pike.

Rostislav landed lightly on the catwalk's narrow cedar runner, his rapier held level in an effortless low guard. His pastel silks settled around his limbs without a whisper.

"Now then," he said, offering a cordial half-bow that barely perturbed his breathing. "My colleagues on the lower decks are remarkably ill-tempered compared to me. I assure you that surrendering your sidearms to an acrobat is by far the gentler prospect."

The pike-wielder looked at the ruined screen, then down at the distant melon soup, and flung his weapon over the rail. The third man dropped his carbine immediately, falling to his knees with both hands pressed against the back of his neck.

"Wise decisions preserve expensive clothes," Rostislav said cheerfully.

He stepped past them toward the catwalk's junction platform. Mounted against the main load-bearing pillar stood the brass gearing of the master ceiling winch. Below the iron turnbuckles, slumped against an equipment locker, lay the marksman squad's overseer—a privateer boatswain whom Rostislav had clipped with a throwing baton during the initial skylight breach.

The boatswain was groaning, clutching a cracked collarbone. Rostislav knelt beside him, his fingers moving with swift, practiced efficiency through the man's salt-stiffened oilskin pockets.

A heavy object clinked against his knuckles. Rostislav drew out an eight-inch iron lever with four notched teeth: the master winch key. With this, a single man could release the overhead counterweights and drop the great decorative festival banners straight down through the open central well to the lower decks, creating an unbroken aerial highway sixty feet down.

"A pleasant start," Rostislav murmured, securing the key beside his spyglass.

His fingers probed deeper into the boatswain's inner tunic and encountered oiled vellum. Rostislav withdrew the rolled parcel, untying the tarred twine with one hand while keeping his rapier point resting lightly against the floorboards near the overseer's throat.

He flattened the sheet against his thigh.

It was not a plunder inventory or a list of noble ransoms. It was a precise hydrographic map of the Morovian Pleasure-Rotunda and the surrounding harbor shoals, drafted with fine charcoal and fresh red ink. Several dozen pontoon compartments were marked with black crosses, detailing the exact disposition of the thirty-two-pounder carronades mounted in the pagoda's submerged hull.

The lower battery was deliberately firing blank intimidation charges into the harbor wharves to pin down the civilian merchant vessels. But that was not what made Rostislav's chest tighten.

Stamped across the upper margin in thick vermilion wax was the triangular trident seal of the Sovereign Trade Council's Admiralty Guard. Beneath the seal, written in the cramped, bureaucratic hand of the Harbor Master, ran a dated military directive:

Notice of Incendiary Clearance: By decree of the Sovereign Trade Council, the Morovian Pleasure-Rotunda is declared a mutinous hostile fortress. In the event of battery activation, all civilian salvage claims are voided. Three imperial mortar galleasses have taken anchor at the outer breakwater with orders to initiate high-angle incendiary bombardment precisely sixty minutes following the first lower-deck salvo.

Rostislav stared at the ink. The paper still smelled of dockside lamp oil.

The first lower salvo had roared through the pontoons scarcely five minutes ago.

He glanced over the rail. Far below, through the smoke drifting across the grand spiral stairwell, the muffled sounds of metal striking metal rose from the second-tier feasting hall. Boleslav was down there somewhere, likely preening before terrified aristocrats while privateer boarding teams converged on his table. Below him, in the reeking galley bilge, Danika was almost certainly trading powder and lead in the dark.

Neither of them knew that the harbor fleet had already written off the floating pagoda. In fifty-five minutes, three naval galleasses would drop flaming pitch canisters through the roofs, turning sixty lashed pontoons into a floating funeral pyre.

Rostislav folded the chart, slipped it inside his tunic against his ribs, and turned toward the massive crimson silk banner moored to the ceiling winch.

"So much for an unhurried evening," he said.