by E J Kitchens
“And perhaps a certain Sky Keeper smuggler we both know?” he asked.
“And maybe a certain Sky Keeper smuggler we both know.”
“One-third of the island is supposedly uninhabited,” he continued after a pause, sounding more thoughtful than agitated now, “from the hill we were on over to the rocky coasts. I once saw a map of the island—”
“You do deal in forbidden items, don’t you? A map. I envy you. I’ve always felt like such a fraud as a captain. Seems like we ought to navigate, not simply arrange business deals and keep the crew in line.”
“It wasn’t without cost to the one who shared it, so be careful what you’re envious of. The map indicated the island on that side was hilly terrain, rocky, but with a natural bay that could be approached unseen from the other ports on the island. No one’s allowed in that section, on account of the faeries, it’s said.”
“You really should warn people about those creatures. So they don’t follow seemingly friendly lights to their doom.”
Bertram chuckled. “They don’t frequent the docks, and few people willingly come to Sheffield-on-the-Sea to stay, so there didn’t seem to be much point. Anyway, there’s plenty of land for the Time Keepers to have a secret operation here, though why it would need to be secret I can’t guess.”
After a moment, she felt Bertram scooting closer, crowding her feet.
“Here.” The tip of something dry brushed her fingers. “Have breakfast. hardtack and a bit more brandy and pounded wild lettuce seed.”
“You’re joining me in this repast, aren’t you?” she asked, leaning up as much as she could to eat.
“I’ll wait until after we’ve finished with this PullLine business. On Uncle Philip’s advice, I always carry enough supplies to last a few days when I go on these jaunts, in case I get lost or … um … can’t return home for some other reason.”
The heaviness in his voice indicated such a time had likely come. Even if the Time Keepers didn’t find them in the cave, they’d know who was missing from the villages. Especially with a bevy of school children running amuck without their teacher.
4
Bertram permitted a short break, then strapped on the PullLine harness and arranged Marianna’s feet on his shoulders, allowing her to ride while he took the brunt of the dragging force. After two more extensions and retractions, the stone above them rose away into a domed chamber.
With a prayer of gratitude, which Marianna echoed, Bertram helped her to her feet. She returned his jacket, did her best to straighten and dust her filthy clothes, then looked around. The ceiling rose to a height even Bertram’s purloined lamp couldn’t penetrate. In the center of the circular chamber was a throne, once fine, but the fabric of the padded seat had mostly rotted away, leaving a mesh of purple threads. The carved ruins of its stone arms and back were chipped where gems had been reclaimed.
“What do your very special eyes say I’m looking at?” she asked Bertram.
“My very special eyes have nothing special to tell, which I find curious.”
Armed with Bertram’s lantern, Marianna chuckled as she ran her hand along the angular characters bordering the seat back. “With all this adventure, there ought to be treasure—ancient, fair folk–collected treasure. I must write a letter of complaint to all adventure authors and express my disillusionment.” She began easing her way onto the throne. Rotten cushion or not, it was a real seat.
Bertram caught her arm and gently tugged her down the dais. “Sorry, but it’s never a good idea to sit on an ancient throne: lingering curses, ancient prophecies, tests of courage, and all that.”
Marianna groaned and looked about for a less auspicious seat. “I detest magic.” She spotted a stone bench and shuffled over to it.
“Only when it’s not working in your favor.”
“Which it never is. Don’t forget who cast the Star Veil.”
“I haven’t, don’t worry.” Bertram wandered around the cavern, tapping his toes against the bottom of a dry fountain; poking at a chest resting on its side, lid open and empty; peeking in a ten-foot-high wooden wardrobe; and finally settling on a large, locked chest with wide metal bands strapped over once fine wood.
“Now,” he said, between bites of hardtack, “tell me about your family, your favorite of the places you’ve visited, and whoever is waiting for you back home.”
“My brother Davy and I bunk with my parents at the family estate in Calandra when we’re not traveling. My oldest brother, Kingsley, died a few years ago trying to find his own way to navigate. Went to find some rumored tribe in the tropics that still knows the secret of navigation, and never came back. The Time Keepers reported his ship, the Dusk Crier, down, all hands lost.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shrugged, not wanting to deal just then with the ache thinking of Kingsley and his lost crew caused, or of the possibility her family might suffer that same pain on her account now. “He would’ve called himself a casualty of war and been proud of it. As for a favorite place, I like anywhere that’s green, Calandra and Sheffield-on-the-Sea, for instance. All your sheep are adorable.”
“You’ve never had to deal with them.”
She laughed. “No, we hardly allow livestock to roam free on airships. Now, it’s your turn. Tell me about your family. And what you’d be eating for breakfast if you were at home now.”
A surprised cry muffled by a mouthful of biscuit was swallowed up by the splintering of wood and the stretching of metal bands as Bertram’s trunk collapsed, and he fell into it.
More muffled exclamations followed as he wriggled to extricate himself one-handed. His other hand was occupied in keeping the hardtack free of dust.
Biting back a laugh—only because it would hurt her ribs to release it—Marianna strolled over. The chest had cracked open in the back, spewing its contents as a pillow for Bertram’s upper half. His knees on down poked out the front end.
“Comfortable?” she asked.
He finally swallowed. “Ha ha.” He waved the hardtack at her. “Take this and put it away. I’m going to need your help.”
After much pushing and pulling, scrambling over piled faerie treasure, and shifting of broken wood, they finally decided to dig him out. That is, to remove the pile beneath him and let him ease down backward.
Marianna knelt behind him and, nose scrunched, began shoving the trunk’s dusty, nectar-scented, non-gold-and-jewels contents to the side.
Books. She never knew the faeries valued them, and with them smelling so, she could hardly blame the faeries for leaving them. But she couldn’t resist noting the titles.
Navigation over Land and Mountain; Basics of Nautical Navigation; Sun, Moon, and Stars and What They Tell Us; Elusive Longitude; The Building and Accurate Functioning of Clocks; Atlas of the Known World; Star Chronometer and Navigation.
Marianna’s hands shook. The Time King, who was in charge of education as well as everything else, taught that man couldn’t understand such things as navigation and time, that the automatons were the gracious gifts of the faerie queen to a race bound to his own village and the brightening and dimming of the sky crystals in the Star Veil. She’d never really believed that, for the Word—also forbidden—said otherwise and talked of sun, moon, and stars and men traveling on their own, but to see proof…
“Would you mind playing librarian later? This is a very uncomfortable position.” Bertram glanced over his shoulder at her. “Are you okay?”
“Oh, Bertram, the faeries took their treasures but left ours! Look! What the Word says is true!” She shoved Star Chronometer and Navigation in his face and began digging again.
“Marianna!” Holding the book, Bertram scrambled backwards and soon extricated himself and began flipping through the book. “Do you know what this means?”
“Yes, the Time Keepers now have a really good reason to want us dead.” But it’d be worth it to get this knowledge out, just to have seen proof. Their ancestors’ publications on navigation and their
equipment must have been collected by force or by magic after the Star Veil was cast, but these few were saved. The hoard of a rival faerie court?
“Yes, no, but—” He stuffed the book into his gunnysack and joined her in digging through the chest.
“The heavens declare the glory of God.” He read the epigraph of a book on charting stars. He shut the book softly, a solemnness falling over him that seemed to drape itself over Marianna as well.
“What is it?” she asked, stopping her examination of a strange metal disk with movable arrows over a circular board labeled with numbers and only four letters: N, E, S, W. Was it some sort of code?
Bertram took off his hat and rubbed a hand through his hair. “Even if we make it out with some of these, I fear the Star Veil will block our minds from being able to use them.” He gripped the book as if trying to keep it from being dragged away. “All this precious knowledge may be useless.”
Marianna covered his hand with hers. “We don’t know that.”
“Why haven’t we figured it all out again, if we could?”
“The curse? No moon or stars to go by? I don’t think we came here by chance, Bertram. We were meant to find this and get it out, I’m sure of it. What happens after that may not be up to us.”
He huffed, but then squeezed her hand. “You may be right. Perhaps the information could be adjusted to fit the sky crystals.”
Marianna shrugged, and they went back to sorting, making a small pile of loot to take with them. Marianna held up a tiny spyglass, flourishing it in the lamplight. “At least I know what this is. But why is it attached to this wedge-shaped piece of metal with these other lenses and a curved ruler?”
“Beats me, but add it to the pile.”
“These books are oddly well-preserved. And maps!”
“Faerie treasures don’t disintegrate, even if the faeries have move their court.”
“I take back what I said about magic.”
“I thought you mi—what’s that?”
Marianna held her breath. Voices? Surely no one had crawled through that tiny tunnel after them? She did a double take on the dim outline of one of the throne room’s many exits. Unlike the one they’d come through, this one was at least nine feet high, and it held the glow of a distant light.
“Mother of catastrophes,” Bertram spat and jammed a few more books, maps, the metal disk, and the odd spyglass into his bag, while Marianna picked up the only solid piece of wood she could find, tucked it under her arm, and once again checked her revolver. The Time Keepers would know to check the little roads again; they’d have to change tactics.
Tinkering with her PullLine, Bertram dispensed a hook and an adhesion pad from the little storage compartments and quickly attached the hook to the inside of the archway at about neck height. Taking the wooden plank from her, he guided them behind the column flanking the right side of the tall archway, the column granting them concealment from a quick survey of the chamber. They turned off their lights and waited.
And waited.
Marianna’s fingers twitched. She missed the flurry of excitement and rush of preparation before a pirate attack. How could Bertram be so still?
What was that whirring?
A light flashed around the chamber as the guards entered. Marianna flattened against the wall.
“Lookie there, boys.” Footsteps moved toward the opposite side of the room and the broken chest.
Marianna darted a glance around the column and Bertram. Three guards strode to the broken chest and its treasures. A self-propelled automaton sat in its wheeled box just inside the entrance. Bertram tapped Marianna’s hand, confirming her own thoughts—they needed that automaton.
He inched around the edging to the archway, quietly securing the end of one of the PullLine’s cords on the opposite frame of the archway and then passing the line through the hook on their side. That done, he lost himself in the dark passageway beyond. Marianna followed, ducking under the line.
“Take your stand in the first side tunnel,” he whispered, maneuvering her in front of him. Marianna nodded and trailed her finger along the wall to guide her. He fell behind, and as soon as she slipped into a side tunnel, he said in a whisper far too loud, “Run!”
But it had the desired effect.
“There they are! Stop!” The guards’ lights swept up the passageway. Marianna drew her revolver and backed further into her hiding spot as Bertram zigzagged his way up the tunnel.
Another yell from the guards was followed by two strangled cries, two thuds of fallen men, and one loud curse. The report of a gunshot echoing through the tunnel nearly caused her to drop her own weapon to cover her ears. Don’t let him hurt Bertram.
“Stop!”
The wobbling beam of light streaming past her tunnel grew larger, the incoming footsteps louder. A lantern, a revolver, a guard passed her.
Marianna leaned out and connected the butt of her gun to the guard’s head. He hit the floor with a delightful thump.
“Good work.” Bertram dashed past her going back to the chamber. She followed slowly, arriving in time to see that the other two guards would be unconscious for a while.
Not wanting the guards to find and destroy the books they couldn’t carry out with them, they hid the remaining treasure in a narrow passageway concealed, but not to Bertram, by a faerie glamour. That done, Bertram stripped the coat and hat off the guard closest to him in size and stuffed his own items in the bulging gunnysack. “Do I pass?” he asked as he buttoned the jacket.
“Not with those pants and shoes.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.” He twirled his finger, and she turned away to study the automaton. It had the same eerie child-like porcelain face as her ship’s navigator, but instead of a full body, this one’s torso disappeared into a rounded wood-and-metal box set on wheels. Its jacket was a foreboding black to match the guards’ uniforms and was studded with the crystals the Rí Am marked all his belongings with. The clear, identical crystals set against the black reminded her of the crystals of the Star Veil, but where they formed a tedious checkerboard of light against dark, these outlined a twisted tree, the Rí Am’s emblem. She didn’t know which pattern she loathed the most.
Shaking herself, she returned her focus to the task at hand. How did the guards activate the automaton to get it to take them to the next stop on their route? And eventually to the exit?
Her gaze passed over the automaton and its mechanized chair again, then fell to the still-clothed guard slumped beside it. A crystal-studded band peeked from beneath his cuff.
Could it…?
Marianna unbuckled the three-inch-wide leather band from his wrist. Inside the outlined tree’s canopy, the crystals formed a ring with one crystal at the center. A pattern of movable gears overlaying small brass arms connected to the crystals bordered both sides of the ring. She guessed the gears could be slid or used to turn other gears in a complicated pattern to unlock the center crystal and move another to its place. To direct the automaton?
“They mean for only the select few to operate those things.” Bertram leaned over her shoulder.
“While I’m becoming one of The Select, why don’t you shove each of our guests up a different little road? It’ll give them something to think about other than us when they wake up.”
Bertram grinned. “No wonder the pirates fear the Bowditch name.”
Marianna shot him a look, but he saluted her, then jogged off with an “Aye, Captain,” to retrieve the guard left in the passageway. “I do have the traditional rope as well,” he called over his shoulder.
Bertram had just stowed all the bound guards, one of whom was already moaning, when Marianna, sweat beginning to bead on her brow, twisted a gear that nudged another that pumped an arm that shifted a crystal.
The automaton whirred into motion down the passageway.
5
Bertram had the distinct feeling he was going to be late for school. It happened often in his nightmares, but never, either
in real life or his dreams, because he was following a beautiful smuggler through a forbidden cave carrying ancient, priceless books destined to help overthrow a cruel regime.
Well, at least he was sure he could get an excuse from the teacher. He wasn’t so certain he’d get one from the students though.
He barely stopped a chuckle from escaping. He really needed sleep, or more excitement than the indeterminable-thanks-to-the-faerie-curse length of time they’d been plodding after the automaton on the guards’ route had provided.
“Whatever you’re wishing for, stop it.” Marianna shook him gently by the shoulder.
“What?” He rubbed his eyes.
“You were mumbling to yourself, and now we’re approaching a lighted hallway.”
“What’s bad about that? It could be the way out.”
“It could also be occupied by guards.”
“There you go, spoiling my dreams.” He gave Marianna a sideways glance. He’d collected a guard’s jacket and hat for her, and she wore them now. The disguise probably wouldn’t fool anyone, but it made him feel better to have tried. “Slow your pace. Let’s let the machine go ahead. Remember, we are the guards occupying the hallway.”
The automaton’s constant whir picked up a notch as it crossed the raised boundary between their dark cave path and the polished floor of a mining operation station.
Bertram paused at the threshold. Walk like you belong here, he told himself, and stepped across it.
It didn’t prove too difficult a task, that walk, as the only guard they passed was more interested in hiding the flask he’d been drinking from than in noticing the woman doing her best to hide between Bertram and the wall without appearing to do so.
“You enjoyed that,” Marianna whispered as soon as it was safe.
“What?” Bertram asked innocently.
“Glaring at the man as if you were considering turning him in.”
Bertram grinned. “Oh, that. That wasn’t fun: it was purely a distraction technique.”
“Uh huh.” Marianna’s mouth curved into a charming half smile, one Bertram found more than a little distracting.