Young Sherlock Holmes_ Red Leech - Andrew Lane [103]
Time to try. Time for action.
He touched the tied-up strip of jacket at the head of the first arrow to the flame inside the oil lamp. The oil-soaked material caught fire instantly. He raised the arrow up and notched the cord into the base, then took up the tension, pulling the cord back while holding his left hand straight out in front of him, grasping the bow. He aimed towards the balloon that seemed to have fewest people around it, but he aimed over it so that the arrow would fall down on to it.
The cord bit into the fingers of his right hand. He could feel the bow trembling under the tension. The glowing material caused a bright spot in his vision that almost blanked out everything else.
Was he doing the right thing?
Too late to wonder about that now.
He released the cord. The arrow arced high in the air, reaching a peak and seeming to hang there for a moment before falling like a tiny meteor straight down on to the top surface of the balloon.
Nothing happened for several heartbeats; long enough that Sherlock was convinced that the burning material had somehow extinguished itself, or the arrowhead had failed to penetrate the varnished silk, or that the gas in the balloon wasn’t hydrogen at all but something else, something non-flammable, but then the material around the top of the balloon seemed to peel back like the petals of a flower, and Sherlock’s vision was blinded by a ball of flame that leaped up from the balloon and reached up towards the sky.
A tremendous shout welled up from the area of the camp. People were running around, throwing buckets of water and trying to douse whatever burning material was raining down on them, but the inferno was rising up, not falling down. Hydrogen was lighter than air, after all.
Sherlock grabbed another arrow and lit it, then quickly aimed at another balloon and fired. The tiny spark of the flaming arrowhead described a glowing line in the air as it flew, first up into the darkness and then down on to the sloping side of the second balloon.
This time he couldn’t see the material peel back, but the resulting fireball was equally as impressive as the first.
As chaos reigned in the camp below, Sherlock fired arrow after arrow at the remaining balloons. By the time he had run out, the air was filled with smoke and the ground was littered with the smouldering remnants of the varnished silk. And nobody had been hurt! He marvelled at the thought, but he couldn’t see a single person injured. Frantic and frightened, yes, but not hurt. The incandescent hydrogen had risen into the air, and whatever burning fragments of material had fallen to earth had been easily avoided.
He took a deep breath. The balloons would not be flying tonight, and it would take days, perhaps weeks to get more balloons to the area. By that time, Balthas-sar’s Army would either have dispersed or marched on Canada and been intercepted by the Unionist Army. He had succeeded.
Part of him wanted to do something about the pile of explosive devices that was sat at one side of the camp. They had survived unscathed. Sherlock had been worried that scraps of burning material might have fallen on them, setting them off and causing general carnage, but either they were more difficult to ignite than he thought or they were sufficiently far way that they had avoided any falling sparks or flaming cloth. He supposed he could creep back down and do something to them – pull their fuses out, or something – but what would be the point? They were useless, now there was no means of delivering them.
A shout went up from below. He glanced down, towards the camp. A man was pointing at him. The light from the burning hydrogen had revealed his presence. More people stared up at him. Some of them started running towards the slope that led up to his hiding place. Most of them were