by A. C. Cobble
“Yes, if there was a real spirit…” she said then groaned. The man was kicking his boots off and tossing his remaining belongings to the bank. “Don’t tell me you’re…. Duke! We don’t know for sure—”
He dove into the water without comment, his body knifing deep into the clear liquid, his legs kicking powerfully.
“And there he goes...” Muttering to herself, she walked out of the pool and sat on the bank, stripping off her own boots and shaking them, cursing the cobbler who’d sold them and told her they were waterproof. Maybe enough to keep her dry through the puddles in Westundon’s stone streets, but standing calf-deep in the pool, the knee-high boots had gotten soaked in heartbeats.
Duke resurfaced, spluttering and gasping.
“Do you not swim?” he asked after he caught his breath, treading water in the center of the pool.
“I do,” she answered, “just not before a jungle hike home. Imagine how wet your feet will be in those boots of yours.”
“Suit yourself,” he said then drew a deep breath and ducked back under the water.
She could see him clearly, pulling and kicking deeper under the surface until he reached the bottom. When he resurfaced again, she asked, “Well, anything other than skeletons?”
“I believe it may be star-iron,” he claimed, treading easily in the crystal-clear pool. “The bottom is covered in a layer of silt and… and bones. There are hunks of a hard material buried underneath of it, though, and it has a smooth feel. I’d expect the natural rock of this place to be rough. The water isn’t running here, so it wouldn’t smooth the surface like it would river stones. If it’s not star-iron, I still don’t think it’s natural to Imbon.”
He swam to the bank, and she averted her eyes again as he lumbered out of the water, shaking his body like a dog and bending down to try to squeeze water from his dripping trousers.
“I should have taken these off,” he grunted.
She studied the trees around them.
“Are you blushing?” he asked.
She turned her gaze back to him, forcing herself to look at his face. “No… it’s, it’s just hot out here. It’s mid-afternoon. Are you not warm?”
“I just went for a swim,” he reminded her before plopping down next to her and leaning back on his elbows, letting the sun fall on his outstretched length. He dug through his satchel and pulled out the half-empty bottle of wine and took a sip before offering it to her. “I’m sorry. I thought… I thought after the comments you made about the baroness… I thought, well, I thought maybe you preferred the company of someone like her. A woman.”
Sam’s face reddened more.
“It’s frowned on in some groups, like the Church,” continued Duke, “but you have no worries of judgement from me. Believe me, I’ve seen stranger things.”
Sam didn’t respond and was unsure she could if she wanted to.
“Seriously, I apologize,” offered Duke. “I imagined you were well-experienced in that regard. I don’t mean to offend.”
Flabbergasted, she stared at him. Finally, she managed to reply, “That’s about the most offensive thing you’ve said all day.”
“What? That… oh.”
“I am experienced,” added Sam, “with both men and women, and you were right, I prefer the latter. Not that it is any of your business.”
Duke sat up and untied his hair, shaking the wet locks free. He was quiet and busied himself pushing his damp hair back into a ponytail and retying it.
“I don’t know why I told you that,” admitted Sam.
Duke grinned at her. “You don’t have a lot of friends, do you?”
She blinked at him, mouth agape. She was bouncing between laughing or punching, certain she should be doing one of the two.
“That was offensive, too, wasn’t it?” he said, a genuine look of remorse on his face. He raised a hand to his hair then dropped it, evidently remembering he’d just adjusted the tie. “Sorry. I—”
“You’re right,” she confirmed. “About it being offensive, and… and the other bit.”
Duke stood and offered a hand to pull her up. “We fought a man to death together back in Harwick while investigating a strange murder that shouldn’t have been possible in Enhover,” he said. “You helped me dispose of a drunken paramour after listening to, well, you know. You knocked out a former pit fighter in a back alley of Westundon to save my skin. We’ve drank together, spent over a week sharing a tiny room on an airship, hiked a tropical island, and I hope we’ve found a new deposit of star-iron together. We haven’t even made it to Archtan Atoll yet. It’s not unusual for people to tell a little bit about themselves through the course of all of that. I’m sorry if I pried, but take it as I meant it and not as it sounded.”
“Sharing about myself is unusual for me,” replied Sam, her eyes fixed on the pool, ignoring the hand he’d held out. She turned up the bottle of wine and took a big swallow.
Duke collected his shirt, wrung it out, and then shook it. He held it up and sighed.
“Well, since we’re sharing,” he said, pulling on the shirt, collecting his jacket, and stuffing it in his rucksack, “why don’t you tell me about where you were raised and how you learned to fight like you did against that boxer? What was his name, Baron Child’s fellow?”
“Jack,” she reminded.
“Yes, Jack. Tell me how you learned to fight a man like that.”
“I think I’ve shared enough for one day,” said Sam. Then, she stood and started off into the jungle, pushing aside a shoulder-high palm frond and ducking underneath a branch.
“That’s the wrong way,” called Duke. When she reemerged from the greenery, he complained, “You’ll tell me about your sexual preferences but not about how you became a priestess who can fight?”
“I’ve told you before,” she said. “I’m not a priestess. Besides, you guessed my… my preferences. I didn’t volunteer to tell you. Now, before it gets dark out here, lead us back to the compound. It seems my sense of direction is no good outside of a city.”
He grunted and started off in the same direction she’d been heading.
Closing her eyes and drawing a deep breath, she slowly released it before following the infuriating man into the foliage.
“Star-iron you think?” queried Governor Towerson. “Very interesting.”
“Judging the size of the crater, I’d estimate it to be a large find, perhaps the biggest that has been logged in the tropics. Outside of Rhensar and perhaps the Westlands, they are so rare, you know,” said Duke. “It’s all an estimate, of course.”
“Of course,” agreed Towerson. “An estimate is where it always begins. The potential is intriguing, though. Very interesting, young man. Will you be claiming a share?”
“No, not any more than I’m entitled to as a stakeholder in Imbon Colony,” replied Duke.
“That’s generous,” remarked Towerson.
Duke shrugged, and Sam raised an eyebrow. The governor was practically inviting him to claim a higher percentage of the wealth, and he had turned it down.
Duke sipped on a glass of cold punch and propped his feet on the governor’s rattan ottoman. He was looking out at the dark jungle beyond the rail of the veranda. “My only concern? We’ll have to check back on the terms of agreement we had with the natives. Nothing like this was codified, I imagine, because at the time there was no expectation we’d have any mineral finds of note. Hopefully, the clerks were foresighted enough to include a clause for something unexpected, but you never know.”
“I don’t think it will be a problem,” said Towerson, shaking out a small hand towel he’d been mopping his bald head with. “Whatever the documents say, I’m sure we’ll be able to work something out. We’ve been using a soft hand for years now. It’s about time we had an opportunity for it to pay off.”
“There are the totems to think about also,” reminded Sam. “They’re fakes, but they looked real enough. Whoever crafted them knew what they were doing. Somehow, the local
s have access to a shaman — a druid — and that person went to a great deal of effort to protect this pool. I don’t know if they’ll be amendable to—”
Towerson waved a hand. “Don’t worry about that, girl. I’ve spent much of my adult life negotiating with people such as Imbon’s natives. With a little persuasion, we’ll encourage them to allow access to this pool, and if it’s a find like Oliver believes it to be, then they’ll help us extract it. What is good for the Company is good for them.”
Sam frowned, unconvinced.
Duke, finishing his punch and leaning forward to pour another, asked Towerson, “Did Giles ever tell you about the time I had to bail him out of prison in the Southlands?”
Towerson chuckled and confirmed he’d heard the story but then launched into one of his own, one about how the adventurous Giles had finally been tamed by a local woman from Imbon and how the sharp-dealing senior factor’s personal wealth was now entirely in the hands of his wife due to their marriage being performed under local customs. Like any story involving Giles, apparently, it started with the man getting roaring drunk.
The rest of the evening was spent in pleasant conversation. After laughing over several stories about the senior factor, they called the man in to hear it from his own mouth. Captain Haines came with him and they sipped the governor’s punch and looked over the colony of Imbon as they waited on dinner.
During the meal, Governor Towerson regaled them with his exploits amongst the Company’s earliest colonies. Senior Factor Giles, perhaps hoping to steer the conversation by his superiors away from his personal exploits and into safer territory, told them how the world’s supply of spices was collected and distributed from the small, tropical islands to the world’s capitals. Captain Haines shared how he’d gotten his start on one of the first of the Company’s airships, working for Director Randolph Raffles and participating as a shipboard factor on a mission supporting the royal marines in the Coldlands. Eventually, on board the airship, he’d followed the army as it had marched across most of the United Territories. It had been in anticipation of that campaign that the three nations had united, and it had been to end the campaign that they had signed the treaty making them tributes of Enhover.
Both Sam and Duke stayed quiet. She was uninterested in sharing any of the details of her upbringing or past with the group, and everyone thought they knew about Duke.
The Cartographer VII
Oliver rolled off the couch, his bare feet setting on the smooth wooden floor, his body aching in protest as he stood and stretched. He bent, grabbing his toes with his fingers, then stood and leaned to one side and then the other. He twisted at the waist, wincing at a sharp crack from his spine, and then placed an arm across his body and pulled it tight, stretching his shoulder. He swapped arms then touched his toes again, trying to force some flexibility back into his muscles after another night spent on the short couch.
“You could sleep in the bed if you wanted,” offered Sam.
He paused in his routine. “Is that… an invitation?”
“It’s an invitation to sleep in the bed,” she responded then slipped off the comfortable-looking mattress and ran her fingers through her tussled hair. A linen shirt hung on her shoulders, the laces half undone, the fabric sliding down her shoulder until she caught it and adjusted it.
He thought he’d caught a glimpse of some sort of marking or a tattoo, thin and dark scrawl tracing the line of her collarbone, but he was distracted that once centered, the too-big shirt displayed a tantalizing view of the inner slopes of her breasts. It hung loosely on her, stopping at mid-thigh. He spent a moment wondering when she’d changed into it, and if she had no underclothes on up top, what she was wearing down below.
“Are you waiting for me to take this off?” she asked.
“No, I—” He paused, frowning at her. “Is that my shirt?”
“It is,” she replied. “Did you want to wear it?”
“I… Not right now,” he mumbled. “Why are you wearing my shirt?”
“There wasn’t time to pack, so I didn’t bring much in the way of clothing. Your shirt is more comfortable in the humidity than my own. My leather trousers were a terrible choice also, but that’s all I had that was clean, and they look good, so it was steal your shirt or sleep naked. You don’t mind, do you?”
He scratched his stomach but did not reply to that.
She twirled a finger. “Turn around and you can have the shirt back. We arrive today, right? I should have a chance to get laundry done then.”
Sighing, he turned and looked down on the short couch he’d been sleeping on for the last two weeks, barring the one night in Imbon. It made his back ache just seeing the thing.
“Invite me to bed but tell me not to look,” he complained. “You’re a confusing woman, Samantha.”
His shirt hit him in the back of the head and he spun around.
“The bed is big enough for both of us to sleep in,” she said as she fastened her vest closed and adjusted the knife belt at her hips. She called over her shoulder as she swept out of the room, “A place to sleep, that’s all I’m offering.”
He sighed, taking his time getting dressed. Today, they would be passing into the fringes of Archtan Atoll, seeing the scattering of islands that formed the outer rim, passing through the center of the chain and the masses that floated there, and then descending to Archtan Town sometime before dark.
Two weeks in the air since they left Enhover, and he still had not figured out what he would say to Governor Dalyrimple, or was it Earl Dalyrimple, he wondered? The man was entitled to either honorific. He cursed himself for not checking with someone who knew. The little things mattered, and it was foolish to not know which title he preferred. Dalyrimple’s wife had been murdered, and he deserved the sympathy due anyone in those circumstances.
Oliver had to admit, though, there were too many unanswered questions about why the governor hadn’t raised an alarm when the woman had gone missing, why he hadn’t done… anything from what they could determine. Even Governor Towerson, Darlyrimple’s closest peer and friend in the region, had very little word from the man over the last several months.
Oliver hadn’t told Imbon’s governor about the dead countess, and Towerson hadn’t mentioned that there were any issues in Archtan Atoll. Perhaps… No, something was amiss. A man’s wife did not travel halfway around the world and get murdered, and the husband had no concerns over the matter. Governor Dalyrimple held some missing piece to the puzzle, and Oliver meant to find out what it was.
“What are you doing?” asked Sam from the doorway.
He blinked.
“Have you been getting dressed all of this time? You’re worse than those old lords and ladies who still wear the wigs and all of the makeup. Even they would have been suited by now. Come on. You have to see this.”
Oliver pulled on his jacket, suppressing a sigh, and followed her out into the morning sun.
“There!” she exclaimed, leading him up onto the forecastle and pointing out at the horizon.
He held a hand over his eyes, shielding the rising sun, and saw what she meant. The first green dots of the atoll had appeared on the horizon, breaking up the endless stretch of blue water topped by blue sky. Above the islands, between feathery streaks of white cloud, they saw the fabled levitating islands of Archtan Atoll drifting in the distance.
Floating serenely, hundreds to thousands of yards above the sea, the islands were out of a dream. Giant formations of rock, humped on top, tapering to points below, they ranged in size from that of the airship to that of Prince Philip’s palace in Westundon. The largest had accumulated enough soil on top and birds or wind had brought enough seeds over the years that they sprouted thick vegetation. Those were the ones that hung lowest, with the smaller rock-only islands floating high above.
The islands twisted gently in the wind, moving but always staying within the confines of the atoll below them. Speculation was they’d originally been islands in the sea, bu
t they’d been invested by air spirits and had lifted skyward. It offered some explanation why the rocks sank when doused with water, as air and water spirits were thought to be opposed, but no one could explain how they would have been invested by spirits in the first place or why they wouldn’t float away on the wind, drifting far from the atoll.
As far as Oliver knew, no one from Enhover had ever managed to corner a druid and tease an explanation out of them. By the time Enhover discovered the levitating formations, the druids had disappeared from the nation. Plenty of adventurers had given finding one a go, though, and it explained why the life-aspected magicians were so hellish to find anywhere now. They’d gotten tired of the pestering and threats of imprisonment.
As the Cloud Serpent drew closer, all hands assembled on deck. Following the barked commands from the First Mate Catherine Ainsley, the crew steered them into the maze of floating masses.
“Should we be going around this?” wondered Sam.
Oliver shrugged. “In calm weather, the levitating variety aren’t much more difficult to avoid than an island on the sea. It would add an extra half-day of travel to avoid them. Besides, you wanted adventure, didn’t you?”
“I don’t recall saying that,” responded Sam, her eyes fixed on the first looming chunk of rock. It was three- or four-hundred paces higher than their sails, and as they passed beneath, they could see the weather-worn stone hanging directly above them.
“What if a piece breaks loose and drops?” she whispered nervously.
“If it breaks loose, it’s going up,” reminded Oliver. “The stones float, remember? Individual pieces do break off from time to time, I’m told, but they rise up. Eventually, they disappear, passing so high into the sky they’re no longer visible or finding their way out of the area and splashing down into the sea. It’s underneath us you have to keep an eye on.”
In a slow-motion ballet, Captain Haines, First Mate Ainsley, and their men guided the ship between the drifting masses, never passing within more than two hundred yards of any one of them but giving Sam and Oliver plenty to look at as the massive shapes floated gracefully by. As they cleared the thickest cluster of rock, they saw the first one which was being actively mined.