by Jeff Minerd
“Father warned you about this. He told you people have mental difficulties on long solo voyages.”
“I’m not going to go crazy just because I’m alone for a few months. Only a weak-minded person would do that.”
“Well shut up then.”
The sky had been gray for days, and the grayness wore on her spirit. She missed the cheery morning green, the deep noon blue, and the serene evening lavender of Etherium’s usual sky. The gray clouds above merged with the gray surface clouds below so that the horizon disappeared. The Devious became a ghostly gray ship floating in a gray void. It was hard for Brieze to even tell that she was moving. The Eastern Emptiness. She hadn’t realized how true that name was until now. She longed to see a mountain, a bird, any sign of life—but she knew it would be more than another month yet. The gray sky offered her only cold rain and freezing sleet. Gusts of wind sawed at her rigging over and over again like the bow of a maniacal violinist, making each taut, quivering rope whimper and moan.
She’d taken to spending more and more time in the ship’s weather shelter—a kind of tent rigged up between the fore and aft masts, with flaps at the front and back. Such shelters were standard gear for long-distance, cold-weather traveling. Inside the shelter were the ship’s two thwart benches with her sleeping bag laid out between them, a lantern, and her personal odds and ends. She sat on one of the benches, carefully emptied the candy bag into her palm, and counted them. There had been fifty when she started.
There were thirteen left.
She counted again just to make sure. Thirteen.
She did a quick calculation in her head. With a month and a half left in her voyage, that came to 0.28888 candies per day.
“No point in rationing them anymore. Might as well finish them off.”
“What are you going to do when they’re gone?”
She shrugged.
“Can you stand a month-and-a-half more of this?”
She shrugged again.
“You could turn around and head home. Right now. You could try again in the spring. Go with your father, like he suggested. And maybe Tak, too.”
She popped a candy into her mouth and considered.
“Nope,” she said, rolling the butterscotch-flavored ball around on her tongue. “No turning back.” She imagined the looks on their faces if she returned home without finishing the journey, defeated by nothing more than her own loneliness. She’d rather perish in the Eastern Emptiness than endure that humiliation.
“Get a grip on yourself then. You’re starting to lose it.”
She took several deep breaths. “Okay,” she said. “I’ve got a grip. I’m good.”
She was carefully transferring the candies back to the bag when the ship lurched with a gust of wind and they spilled out of her palm. They went bouncing and skittering and rolling in every direction, disappearing into every corner and crevice of the ship.
Brieze shrieked. Tears welled up in her eyes.
She spent the next several hours on her hands and knees, crawling around the ship, hunting candies.
In another couple of weeks, Brieze started to hear things. She spent almost all her time inside the weather shelter now. The lantern-lit space inside its canvas walls was small and manageable. The world outside, with its endless clouds and sky, was too big, too empty and overwhelming. She went out there only when necessary. She’d run out of candies, but she held onto the drawstring bag. Whenever she craved one, she stuck her nose into the bag and breathed deeply, sighing at the faint aromas of cinnamon and mint.
She’d taken to lying on her sleeping bag for hours at a time, stroking her long braid. She’d pull it over her shoulder, curl her hands around it, and run them along its length, first one hand, then the other, over and over, enjoying its knotty texture against her palms. It was a soothing habit she’d acquired in childhood. Holding onto her braid, Brieze felt a connection to her mother. Her mother had started braiding her hair when she was little, and she’d taught Brieze how to do it when she got older.
She listened to the sounds of the ship. The spider silk sail fluttered and snapped as the wind shifted. Ropes creaked as they stretched taut and slackened. An empty water cask in one of the storage compartments rolled back and forth, back and forth, as the ship rocked. And Brieze swore she still heard that last candy rolling around somewhere. She’d dropped twelve of them, but only recovered eleven. One was still hiding aboard the ship, rolling around, taunting her. She’d looked everywhere for it. Then she looked everywhere again. She’d unpacked and searched every storage compartment. She’d spent hours on her hands and knees, probing every nook and crevice of the ship with her fingers.
As her ears strained to locate that rolling candy, they caught a new sound.
The deck creaked as if someone were walking around outside.
Yes! There it was again. Definitely footsteps.
Someone else was aboard the Devious.
And instantly, Brieze knew who it was. It was Tak. He had wanted to come with her. Somehow, he’d managed to stow himself aboard unseen. And now, he was sneaking around outside. He probably wanted to show himself, but he was hesitating because he knew she’d be angry with him. That would be just like him. Except she wouldn’t be angry. She desperately wanted to see him. She would throw her arms around him and kiss him. Kiss him a lot.
“Tak is not out there,” the more sensible part of her said. “You’re pathologically lonely and you’re hearing things.”
“It wouldn’t hurt to look,” she answered.
She poked her head out of the rear flaps of the weather shelter. There was no one in the stern of the ship. The stern seat was empty. The tiller was still tied there, keeping the ship on its easterly course. The wing flap pedals were in neutral position.
The deck creaked again. From the bow!
Brieze dashed around, scrambled over the thwart benches, and stuck her head out the front flaps of the weather shelter.
She screamed with shock and joy.
Tak was there! Standing right there on the bow deck, grinning at her. His brown hair and lanky arms waved in the wind.
Except it wasn’t Tak…it was just her cloak, which she’d hung from the bowsprit stay. It had gotten soaked with rain, and she’d hung it there hoping it would dry. Its empty hood and arms flapped in the wind.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “If you don’t do something soon, you’re going to go completely off the deep end.”
“What can I do? I need to talk to someone. But there’s no one around for hundreds and hundreds of miles.”
She chewed her lower lip and thought about that.
An idea came to her.
“Letters!” she said. “You could write letters.”
She pulled her head back inside the weather shelter. She dug through her pack and found her paper and ink, her envelopes and wax. She arranged these on one of the benches. She turned up the lantern so it burned brighter.
“They won’t get these letters for a long time, but they will get them. They’ll read them one day. So this will be like talking to them.”
For the next several hours, Brieze wrote letters. Her quill scratched against the paper, plunged into the jar of ink, scratched again. She wrote Tak first. A long letter. A letter unlike any she’d ever written. She told him over and over again how much she missed him, and she said a lot of other things she would never have said under ordinary circumstances. Romantic, mushy, tender things. It felt good to say them. It made her heart beat a little faster, her breath quicken.
After that, she wrote to her mother and her wizard father. When the letters were finished, she addressed them and sealed them with wax. Her hand ached from all the writing. The sun had set. Brieze doused the lantern and crawled into her sleeping bag. She held the letters to her chest, and she fell asleep to the gentle rocking of the ship with a contented smile on her face.
SIX
A ship!
Brieze and the Devi
ous were overtaking a merchant ship—large and heavy, clearly from the Eastern Kingdoms by the square shape of its sails and the lines of its hull, and heading back from somewhere west. Brieze blinked and rubbed her eyes to make sure she wasn’t hallucinating.
It was real!
This was good. It confirmed she was on the right course.
“Hail them! Talk to them! Find out where they’re going!” she said to herself.
But as starved as she was for human company, something made her hesitate. A reluctance, a fear, that was difficult to put into words. She knew that women were treated differently in the East. They weren’t allowed to serve on airships. Eastern airmen were extremely superstitious, and they considered a woman on a voyage to be bad luck. What would they think of her, a young woman appearing out of nowhere in a strangely invisible airship, half-crazed with loneliness? What if they told her to go away, to get lost?
“I couldn’t bear that,” she said.
She decided, for the time being, to just stick close and watch them. With the Devious taking on the color of the sky, she could approach closely without being spotted. Close enough to make out every detail of the ship, and even the faces of the crewmen, through her spyglass. Like many merchant ships, it flew by sail alone, without the heaviness of steel boilers and propellers, which allowed it to carry more cargo. It was weighed down with freight, riding the currents with a ponderous rising and falling, every sail hoisted and straining to keep it aloft. The ship was lightly armed, with only a few small cannon mounted in the bow and stern, although she saw racks of spears, shields, and cutlasses along the gunwales.
It was strange to see so many faces with Eastern features like her own. Raven-black hair. Almond-shaped eyes. The captain of the ship was tall, and he wore a very long, elaborately plaited black beard, the end of which he tucked into his broad belt. He usually stood on the command deck, gazing anxiously eastward, stroking his beard. Or he strode the decks from bow to stern, shouting orders, the tails of his greatcoat flapping in the wind.
At night, Brieze stole in closer—so close she heard the creaking of the ships’ wooden beams and the men calling to each other. She could make out a few of the words. She caught whiffs of their dinner cooking, the scent of exotic spices she had no names for. And after dinner the men lit colored paper lanterns, strung them up in the rigging, and sang. Sometimes the singing was light and cheery, other times slow and mournful. The melodies, with their odd notes and dips and lilts, were at once strange and familiar. They stirred up odd feelings in Brieze, and things that were like memories, but memories she never knew she had, of places she’d never been. They filled her with an intense longing to be home. But not her old home on Footmont or her new home on the wizard’s island.
Some other home.
Where was that?
On the third night that she traveled unseen in their company, something happened to bring Brieze closer to these strange yet familiar men.
She saved their lives.
The night was calm. The sky was clear. The stars were scattered from horizon to horizon overhead, burning brightly, without a cloud or mountain peak anywhere to blot them. The men on the ship lit their colored lanterns and sang a cheerful song. The lanterns attracted strange glowing creatures from the depths of the night. There were little pink ones that buzzed and darted among the lanterns. The men paid them little mind. Some of these creatures sensed the Devious in the darkness, though the ship showed no lights. They flitted curiously about. One landed for a moment on the gunwale near Brieze. It looked like a cross between a shrimp and a dragonfly. Its two pairs of wings whirred. Its glowing pink crustacean tail and antennae twitched. It darted off, joining its fellows.
The pink creatures attracted something else—a school of ghostly, glimmering aerial octopi. Brieze had come across these creatures before, but never so many at once! She knew them to be gentle, harmless, intelligent even. Their bodies were mottled with a bluish-green bioluminescence, in a pattern like camouflage. Their pulsing, balloon-like heads were about the size of her own. Their eyes glistened, and, as they floated all around her, their long tentacles slithered sinuously and mesmerizingly on the night breeze, like something out of a dream.
The stars, the music, the strange beauty of the nighttime creatures—Brieze leaned back and breathed in the enchantment of it all. The comforting melody of the song and gentle rocking of her ship lulled her into a peaceful doze. Her eyes closed. She smiled.
And then something changed. The men’s singing stopped abruptly. Brieze’s eyes snapped open. The pink creatures and the octopi had disappeared. The men called to each other in urgent whispers and extinguished the lanterns and all other lights on their ship.
A nasty smell like rotting fish wafted on the night air.
Brieze’s heart thumped and her throat tightened. She knew what that stench meant—Nagmor. The depths of the Eastern Emptiness were filled with nighttime predators, but the biggest, scariest, and least studied and understood of these were the Nagmor. Brieze had read everything there was to read about them, which wasn’t much. In the old language, the name translated literally into “night death.” The gigantic creatures were capable of overwhelming a ship and crushing it to pieces. And they smelled worse than anything in Etherium. Other than that, not a lot was known about them. Few who encountered them lived to report back. No one had ever gotten close enough to study one in any detail.
Brieze sensed as much as she saw the creature behind them—an expanding splotch of denser darkness in the night sky, blotting out the stars. It was big, and approaching fast. The merchant vessel, completely lightless now, drifted passively on the current. It was as still and quiet as a large airship like that could be. Brieze nudged the tiller of the Devious and kept pace with the ship, floating a few lengths off their starboard side. The Nagmor came up close behind the merchant ship, also keeping pace with it. The creature seemed to be studying the vessel, considering whether or not it might be prey. It was difficult to tell in the darkness, but the beast and ship seemed about the same size. The Nagmor’s putrid reek grew so powerful it watered Brieze’s eyes. She felt it like a tickle in the back of her throat.
Most airship captains faced with a Nagmor approaching from behind would have tried to veer away and make a run for it. But that would have been a mistake. Acting like prey would have only triggered the animal’s hunting and killing instinct. And Nagmor can move faster than any airship. The merchant vessel’s captain didn’t flinch. Didn’t make a move. He just allowed his ship to drift as the creature drew closer.
The Nagmor dove beneath the ship, passed underneath it, fast as the wind, creating a wave that made the ship bob and toss. Brieze thought that maybe they were safe now, that the beast decided to pass them by. But the creature rose up, ahead of them now. More quickly than she would have thought possible, it turned in the air. In the moonlight and starlight, she could make out suggestions of its long body, bulbous head, and grasping tentacles as it flew straight at the merchant vessel.
Still, the captain didn’t flinch. He maintained his course. He appeared to be betting the safety of his ship and the lives of his crew on the not-acting-like-prey idea. He seemed to be hoping that, if he played a game of chicken with the beast, it might swerve first and leave them alone. The two light cannons in the bow, which had been silently and stealthily loaded, fired. After all the darkness and silence, the flash and crack of the cannons made Brieze blink and jump. The shots must have hit—the Nagmor was at point blank range and closing fast—but the beast didn’t swerve or slow down.
With a tremendous crunch, ship and animal crashed together.
The ship came alive with noise and light. Men cried out as they were knocked off their feet and scrambled to regain their footing. They lit torches and lanterns. Distress flares shot into the sky, though who the men expected to see them Brieze couldn’t guess. The flares trailed orange sparks and glowed a phosphorescent red, hanging in the sky and casting an eerie li
ght on the scene.
Brieze saw the Nagmor more clearly in the glow of the flares. Its cone-shaped body tapered to a pointed tail with a wing-like fin—or was it a fin-like wing?—on either side. A roundish head bulged from the wide end of the cone, with glassy black eyes. Nasty-looking tentacles covered with suckers and spines sprouted from the head. The tentacles rimmed a gaping mouth lined with spiky, inward-pointing teeth. The mouth clamped down on the bow of the merchant ship. Teeth dug into the wooden beams. Tentacles thick as tree trunks slithered across the deck, coiling around and squeezing whatever they could find. Men screamed horribly. Masts cracked and splintered. Taut ropes snapped and whistled in the air.
Everywhere, men hacked at the tentacles with cutlasses and stabbed them with spears. The Nagmor made deep, filthy grunting sounds as if in pain, but otherwise the blows had no effect. The beast’s mouth bit down harder on the bow of the ship, and the planks there began to warp and crack. The captain stood on the forward deck, facing the creature. He drew his cutlass and brandished it, shouting for his men to gather around him. Some of them did. They appeared to be readying themselves to charge directly into the mouth of the beast.
Brieze watched, frozen with horror and fascination. But she snapped herself out of it as she realized she could help these men. Her wizard father had loaded the Devious with an arsenal of devices and weapons to help her out of any danger she might encounter. In other words, a lot of stuff. What leapt to her mind were the bombs. Unique bombs containing an explosive the wizard had invented himself, ten times more powerful than gunpowder. The bombs looked like nothing more than black, egg-shaped lumps of iron, with a short fuse at the small end. They fit comfortably in her hand. The wizard had instructed her in their use, thinking they would be ideal for repelling a pirate attack.