by Iain Lindsay
Hand of the Storm
Book One of The Airship Wars
Iain Lindsay
Hand of the Storm is © 2017 by Iain Lindsay
This digital edition published 2017
Words, art, and design by the much-caffeinated author, with the additional help of:
Gimp 2.8 – open source image editor.
Eragon’s mountain and map brush set.
This book is a work of fiction, and any similarity to persons, institutions, or places, whether living, dead, or otherwise still shambling is entirely coincidental.
I would like to thank you for purchasing this book, and helping out the author!
iainlindsay.wordpress.com
Mutant Airship Crew (Newsletter)
DEDICATION
For Olly, Symoni, Iris & Caleb – my own ragtag, boisterous crew of nephews and nieces.
Contents
Map of the World-Islands…
Map of the Susha Coast…
Prologue…
Breaker’s Reach…
1. Talin of the Nhkari
2. The Machine
3. The Lords of the Reach
4. Serin, Hunting-Wolf
5. Lost Sailors and Storms
6. A Generous Mood
7. Don’t Touch My Boat
8. Never Been Partial to Beatings
The Susha…
9. The Storm
10. A Man Remade
11. Inspection
12. The Boreal Centrifuge
13. Caravans
14. The Ceremony
15. The Waystation
The City of Marduk…
16. Water Landings & Ribs
17. The Merchant Burandin
18. Where Are You?
19. Root & Rot
20. The Travails of House Tremaine
21. Some Manners
22. Trophies
23. Sky-Metal
24. Fire & Ruin
The Burnt Lands…
25. Storm-Holder
26. Sorcerous
27. Breaker’s Mark
28. Casimar’s Oasis
29. The Princess Eliset
29. Raiding Party
30. The Chiefs of Old Nhkar
31. Dark Sands
32. Cages
33. Distractions & Crossbows
34. Old Enemies
35. The Volt
36. A Ship’s Anger
The Northern Gate…
37. Deadman’s Drop
38. Welcome to the North
39. Charters
Epilogue…
Dear Reader, Shhh! A Secret…
Extract: Storm’s Gambit…
IAIN LINDSAY
Map of the World-Islands
Map of the Susha Coast
Prologue
The Old Gods of the World Islands are a fractious lot, and worse – they are also dying.
It is said by the southern Nhkari desert-peoples that when the story of the World Islands began all was water, teeming with spirit-life. Out of this song of water was fashioned islands, and the Old Gods took form. They played, they argued, and they fought. Perhaps it is these arguments of gods, and the raising of the peoples; the forests and the hills; heroes and dynasties that so occupied the Old Gods that they didn’t see the darkness that was coming for them from below.
The Abyss. The tear in the fabric of the song itself. As the darkness grew, the prayers of the Known Islands faded, and the world took a different course. Now there are airships that scream through the skies, there are kingdoms and cities, oil lamps and cannon-fire. One by one, the Old Gods started dying, and of these, the divines of the Nhkari are the nearest to extinction.
Two spirits are meeting on a plain of eternal, burning sand. One is tawny-furred, with eyes that burn with the light of stars. She is the size of a mountain, and with paws that tread silently through the dreams of mortals, Wolf, protector of the desert Nhkari, considers her fate.
“I know you are there, Raven” the god growls.
A flutter of dark feathers in the vaults of heaven – a shabby shape forms on the silent plain, that of a man, but dressed in a cloak of black wings, crude-voiced and beak-faced. “You’re late.” Raven cocks his head up at the giant Wolf, seemingly nonchalant in his own miniscule stature.
“I am never late. How can a god be late?” the Wolf states, dipping a snout to lick daintily at lake-sized paws.
“Hmph. We are all late, it seems.” Raven ruffles his wing-cloak, coughing. “Where is Eagle? Lynx? Buffalo?”
Wolf-mother raises her head to look mournfully over the eternal desert. When she speaks her voice is as soft as night and as threatening as a building storm. “They are gone. Passed onto whatever we become, after this.”
“Bah. Gone. Dead. Eaten, more like!” Raven grumbles, before sighing wearily. “Just like our Nhkari. Broken and scattered.”
“Not yet! Not all!” Wolf is suddenly fierce. “There are still some who remember the ancient ways.”
Raven sidles, scratches in the sand with his clawed feet. “We could try again, just like we used to – one last time?” the spirit-bird cackles, remembering the sagas of the mortal lives he used to throw under fate’s wheel.
Wolf-mother’s starry eyes flash. “What do you have in mind…?”
Breaker’s Reach
1. Talin of the Nhkari
Break, damn you! Dark-haired Tal jammed the chisel under the twisted metal and once more tried to pry it from its wooden home. Sweat trickled down his back, getting under the leather harness that held Talin Nhkari to the ropes. It didn’t help that the metal was rivetted into the witchbeam joist. It didn’t help that the teenager was dangling some eight hundred feet above the ground, either.
Under his swaying legs, Tal could see the complicated wooden struts and spars like spiderwebs that made up the edge of the Eastern Docks, and far – far – below that; the gold-brown scrub of the Susha Plains. If his concentration slipped, if his harness tore, if his ropes broke, then he would have a while before he died.
But he would still die, all the same.
“Get that Tal up here!” One of the other lads on his team was hissing his name over the side. Pale Kenrath, older than all the others, with limbs like tree whips and his spray of red hair. Tal gritted his teeth and tried to ignore him, even though he knew it was no good. Kenrath, like all the motley youth on the Eastern Dock Team had seniority over him, a lowly Nhka, and the youngest of their crew.
“Tal! Move your arse!” The snigger went down the side of the hulk that they were working on, from boy to girl until the dark youth hanging under the airship’s hull couldn’t ignore it.
“Coming.” Tal said with a sigh, and started the arduous, muscle-aching work of hauling himself back up the way that he had climbed, abandoning the large metal bracket that would have been worth a few Ducats, even after Overseer Jekkers had taken his half.
Hand over hand on the rope, Tal climbed the hull of the half-demolished clipper, and as he did so the platforms and buildings of the Eastern Docks came into view, and beyond them, the rest of the wooden fastness that made up Breaker’s Reach.
It was a collection of wood towers, of sorts, if someone had decided to mount them onto the sides of sheer cliffs, and still wasn’t happy with how low it was. The levels, platforms, jetties and walkways soared hundreds of feet into the air above the cliffs and scrubby plains, constantly keening with the hot winds, and at which the dotted shapes of half-dismantled hulls were shackled. It was to the Breaker’s Reach that decommissioned and ruined airships came to die, their parts broken up, repurposed and sold to the highest bidder. Up here, Tal could see clear across the Susha like a green-brown blanket to the dark line of hills beyond. Distant f
locks of blue-winged birds flickered over trudging bison, while the specks of the black-winged vultures spun and wheeled in their endless search for the unfortunate.
An awful lot of space, and I’m stuck here, he thought as his hands seized onto the top rails and pulled himself onto the mostly still-intact planks of the upper deck.
“There he is,” Kenrath was crouching beside his cronies; blonde Olander, pudgy Vestas, all grinning from where they sat around the ugly hole in the ship, their leather satchels already full with metal pried from the hulk’s skin.
“What do you want?” Tal muttered. He didn’t trust the young man or any of his cohorts one bit, but he knew that refusing to help would just incur more curses, shoves, and potentially dangerous accidents up here, high above the southern plains.
“We need a climber to get down there, and quick, too” Kenrath cast a wary look at the distant members of the team who were busy stripping what remained of the guide ropes, sail fixings, anchor hooks and any other bit of useful scrap they could get away with. No sign of Overseer Jekkers, not yet.
“See down there? Past the brace?” the pale youth pointed down into the cavity, which must be the remnants of the collision or ballista attack, Tal couldn’t be sure. The impact had taken out this section of gunwale fence and had crashed through the top deck behind, not stopping as it chewed its way through the inner and outer hulls below.
Warily, Tal peered over the edge, unconvinced. “It’s just a hole, Kenrath.”
“Pff. Look, there, past the brace and down again.” The older youth stabbed with his finger. Tal gingerly levered himself to the edge, his hands coming away blackened from the burn of whatever had torn through this ship.
It was still a hole. But inside that hole was the framework of the stout inner hull, partly broken open, next to the thinner wooden wall of the outer hull. Witchbeam supports and braces crisscrossed between the two like a ladder.
Something glinted in the darkness. If the boy squinted and kept his head out of the light, he could make out what looked like something snagged onto one of the supports.
“It’s not worth my hide if Jekkers catches me, Kenrath…” Tal tried to back out of what he knew the older boy was going to ask him to do.
“Oh yeah?” The flame-haired youth elbowed him sharply out of the way, and produced from his own harness pocket a small, tarnished mirror, which he used to angle the rays of the sun into the tormented gap, down over the beams, down again, to see-
It was a solid silver chain, caught where it had fallen between the hulls, a fine piece of work, with the chain no thicker than a stalk of grass perhaps, but still expensive.
Tal bit his lip nervously. He’d heard about stuff like this happening on Breaker’s Reach before, of course. One of the teams on North Dock had found a purse full of gold Ducats, all the way from the citadel. The work team had only got one each of course, and their Overseer had kept the rest – but one Ducat was better than none, right? Maybe the silver got knocked down there when this clipper was attacked, or maybe it was lost between the hulls when the ship was built, and it’s been down there ever since, like a very expensive fly trapped in a very tight bottle…
“Get in there, Tal. Go and get ‘it for us. I know one of the traders that comes to buy the goods from the Overseers. We can sell ‘it direct ourselves, no money for old man Jekkers…” Kenrath grinned slowly.
A shadow over Kenrath’s shoulder and a loud thump as a shape climbs over the broken gunwale to join them. Stocky body and grey-blue skin like scaled bark. “We’re not meant to go inside, Tal,” grunts Jotni, the largest of their work team and the only one whom Tal could come close to calling a friend. Jotni with his thick hide and the nubs of horns at his brow was a Heimr, one of the northern races who were rarely seen this far south, but the thick lines of scar tissue across his shoulders and wrists attested to the fact that he had been sold from slaver to slaver until finding his way here, at Breaker’s Reach.
Kenrath laughed derisively. “Well, I know you’re not going to be brave enough, Jotni, I was hoping that Tal here wasn’t so damp,” the northerner raised an eyebrow at Tal. “What do you say, Tal? You gonna go in there and make us some money? Or are you just another lazy, good-for-nothing Nhka?”
Pig. Tal gritted his teeth. No use saying anything. No point in shouting back – that would only earn him more shoves and insults.
But still. Shame and hatred burned its slow fuse inside of him. It wasn’t his fault he was born a Nhka. It wasn’t his fault his skin was the color of burnt honey, or that his mother had trudged here, under smoke-smudged skies and over burning plains to start a new life at Breaker’s Reach. His mother who now coughed and hacked every day thanks to the dust and fibers where she worked stripping down the sails and tarpaulins. You have no idea what my family went through. Tal’s hands tightened on the blackened edges of the torn hull.
“Tal, don’t, it’s already near end-of-shift,” Jotni said. But Olander and Vestas were sniggering at them both, rolling their eyes.
“Just another cowardly Nhka,” Vestas echoed, as Tal’s temper snapped.
“Half. I want half of whatever I bring back.” He said. That would be a lot of coin. Maybe enough to buy his mother the medicine she needed.
“As if!” Blonde Olander scoffed, but Tal’s eyes were only on the ringleader. Kenrath was scratching a chin that was already speckled with wiry stubble, looking speculatively at the rest of the deck to be certain that the Overseer was nowhere to be seen.
“Sure, Nhka. If you manage to bring that silver out, I’ll see you get half.” He slapped his palm on the wood and offered it to the smaller boy. Tal nodded, and did the same.
2. The Machine
It was dark, dark save for the columns of dust-filled light thrown from the hole above. Tal moved as much with the sensation of his feet and hands as he did his eyes. But at least it was cooler than outside.
Tal could smell the sharp, astringent resin of the pinewood planks of the outer hull as he squeezed himself downward; one foot on one beam, hands reaching for the next brace. His back was pressed against the heavier slabs of the Witchbeam inner hull, pale in the greying light from above, and lined with silver-grey threads like worm casts. The idea, Tal had learnt from his years of work, was that the precious woods of the inner hull gave the vessel strength, while the outer hull acted as buoyancy and protection against the scouring winds. At least any ship’s captain could patch and replace the outer hull if they needed to, but if the Witchbeam rotted out, or was compromised?
Then the airship ended up here. At Breaker’s Reach.
Within just a few minutes, Tal was further inside an airship than he had ever been. The hole had become a small window far above him, and he was already curving around the bellied-out body as he drew closer to his prize. Noise travelled strangely down here. He could hear the distant knocks and thuds of the Eastern Dock Team far above him as his colleagues tried to rip what use they could out of it before the real Breakers came in.
There were scratches on the wood. The workings of saws and architect’s marks, the corkscrews of shavings as fresh now as they were the day that the clipper had been fashioned. Tal wondered which Yard it had come from. Was it one of the Iron Judges? Ausbridge? This battered old clipper was surely not the work of Master Airship Builder Senior Falciore, so who then?
Every airship in the world comes from one of three Air Yards, Tal repeated silently. One of the few things that he had been “taught” here in the Reach, when the gangly-pallid Overseer Jekkers was in one of his rare good moods, self-congratulatory of his own overheard wisdom.
‘You want strength and industry? Go to the Iron Judges. You want comfort? Go to Ausbridge. But ah, if you want the very best – a bird that can fly as fast as a hawk, as light as a bee? Then you can only choose Falciore.’
“This old girl looks…” Tal rubbed a hand over the Witchbeam threads. Sturdy and strong, solid enough to last a lifetime, if it hadn’t had several holes punctured throug
h it. Iron Judges it was then?
“Tal? Where are you? Get me that silver!” It was Kenrath’s whispering voice, echoing and doubling strangely from above.
Your silver? Tal turned to see where the silver chain was now only a few feet away, swaying in the wind that had worked its way into the hulk.
It was a silver chain alright, like a noblewoman’s maybe, or some piece of extravagance for a very successful merchant. The chain was thin, but it was a foot-long loop. Worth a good bit of coin. He reached for it-
Fingers ghosted across the cool metal, making it swing back out of his grasp.
“Come on!” The boy growled, tried again.
“Tal? Tal!” This time the whispers up above were more insistent, urgent. Had Kenrath been spotted?
But I’ve almost got it. Tal waited for the pendulum swing to come back around in his direction, and-
Got it!
He snatched at the cool metal, a feeling of warm victory flushing through him, just as the Witchbeam slab that he had been standing on, that strong, tough, durable Witchbeam, decided to collapse inwards.
“Aii!”
Sharp pain seared up Tal’s forearms as splinters snatched at the thin canvas of his clothes. He did what comes naturally to any Reacher – he kicked out, flung his arms wide, hoping to catch any plank or support before he fell all the way down, and then down some more again… But instead of falling, he hit something solid with a heavy thump!
There was a planked floor just a few feet inside the splintered Witchbeam wood, and Tal was laying with his back on it, coughing in the plumes of wood dust.
“Urgh.” Tal groaned. It felt like his spine had been kicked by the cliffs of the Reach itself. The dust settled, and he found that he was in a near-pitch darkness, in the interior of the airship. We’re not meant to go inside. The Overseer will skin me alive if he finds me inside…