by Iain Lindsay
Talin hung in the dusty shadows between the hulls, his heart pounding in his chest as he tried not to sneeze. He clutched onto the witchbeam supports, as the square section of wood slid back of its own accord. Knife-blade slivers of light pierced the gloom, and through them Tal could make out a large metal spring and lever on the back of the panel. A hidden door!
But why would a merchant’s boat have hidden doors? Why would the captain lie? Tal had no time to ponder these questions as the door to his room suddenly barged open.
“Got a bed, sir!” A guard called.
Shadows cut the slivers of light, matching to heavy boot sounds.
“Captain Trecastle? Can you explain this?” The Officer said, as more feet entered the tiny room.
“Just a spare bunk, officer,” Tremaine sounded relieved and surprised at the same time. “Sometimes we take on more crew, and I need somewhere to put them. It might all be very cozy over on your brigantine, officer – but here we have standards!”
“Hm.” Someone was kicking and shoving at the bed, the sails, the crates.
“Black powder, officer,” Tremaine growled. “Careful you don’t get it all over yourselves, now…”
A hiss of disgust, more noises of moving feet. “I’ve seen enough. Hold?” The officer led the party out of the room, their feet growing fainter.
Tal breathed out, and suddenly aware that his limbs were aching from holding the beams. I can’t go back in there yet, he thought, at least not until the Protectorate had gone. He could hear the thumps and bangs as the soldiers searched the rest of the vessel, as he slowly lowered himself down to the next support, and the next.
His feet touched something soft which shouldn’t be there. There was a sack under his boots. No, not a sack – leather satchels, about five of them wedged against the outer hulls. They were open, and from one of them hung a fine, soft, gauzy material. Tal climbed down to peer at it in the murk. He couldn’t be sure, but it looked colored, and felt like the finest cloth he had ever held, much finer than even the linen he wore on his back. The Captain said they had silks to trade at Marduk, but all that was on the main deck are grain and spices.
“Captain?” The muffled voice of the officer from a little way off. “The Boreal Chamber as well, if you please,” he snapped.
Tremaine’s voice was suddenly low and fierce. “You know the Conventions, sir. No one but the Captain goes in there. It is my responsibility, my privilege, not yours.”
“Every room is to be searched, Captain.” The officer said, and there was a slide of metal.
“God’s forsaken half-witted…” Tremaine muttered, before there was a jangle of keys, and the chink of a heavy lock being opened.
Tal watched as, further below him and towards the middle of the darkness, the light between the hulls started to change. It started to turn blue.
A glow was rising from the space where the officer and the Captain had just entered. The same glow that Tal had seen aboard the Iron Judge’s trading brig. Tal moved, hand over hand, towards the glow, sliding into it as silent as a ghost as it filtered between the planks of the inner hull.
He pressed his eye to one of the tiniest of cracks, to see that on the other side was a room, barely as big as the Forecastle, dominated by whirling and grinding shapes.
The machine in the Storm moved a lot faster than the other one had done in the other vessel. It’s gravity-defying circles were moving not with the slow scream of metal on metal, but instead with a smooth, constant hum of activity. The glow was emanating from the center of the spinning gyres, just as it had before.
“You see? Nothing in here but the Boreal centrifuge,” Tremaine’s voice was tight, as dark shapes moved across the glow. The Officer and the Captain alone, no other soldiers were allowed in, it seems.
There was something happening to the medallion hidden in Tal’s belt. He was sure that it was growing colder against his skin. It was usually a strangely warm metal, but now it felt like it was made of ice.
“Ach” Tal shifted uncomfortably. Any more, and the cold would burn him.
A sudden scrape of a boot, and Tal held his breath. Had they heard him?
“Everything here seems – as it should be,” the officer said tartly, before moving back through the door. Tal watched as Captain Tremaine turned his head slowly around the walls, to the place where he was hiding, before casting a glance at the spinning, blue-glowing device. He stooped quickly to press a hand against the floor.
“There now, beauty. It’ll be alright,” he whispered, before turning and leaving the room, locking the door behind him.
Tal was left with the freezing metal against his hip, and his eyes pressed to the crack in the wood. Did all airships have these devices? What had the Office called it – the Boreal?
As he watched, the blue glow started to fade once more after the humans had left, leaving just the spinning wheels humming in the dark. As the glow subsided, so too did the cold against Tal’s skin, until it became once more the body-temperature warmth of the odd gold.
Hidden silks, fake names, and strange devices, Talin thought. A few days aboard an airship was already proving stranger than an entire life at the Reach.
Despite not being able to find the stowaway, the officer of the Protectorate vessel did not seem content to believe their tale. Maybe there were too many questions; the damaged air fan, the deviated journey, the ballista the size of a small pony that had sat under the stack of sail cloth on the main deck.
“That’s Big Bertha. She’s for defense,” Tal heard Captain Tremaine – or Trecastle – explain.
“What are you defending against, a mountain?” the soldiers weren’t convinced.
Tal had climbed up through the gap between the outer and inner hulls as high as he could, reaching the place where the outer hulls merged into the gunwales, and the slats of the railing could afford him a much better view of what was going on. He had found no more hidden stashes of silk or any other good on his climb, but he had seen at least two more of the spring-loaded door panels, one leading into the inner hull near the lower deck, and one leading out of the outer hull.
“Where is your homeport?” The officer of the Her Grace barked.
“Iza” Sevesti said, now sitting on the firing seat of ‘Big Bertha’ and wiping a handkerchief across his forehead in the hot desert sun.
“Strange, that your cabin, merchant, has no tapestries, no books, no pieces of art. More like a crewmember’s cabin if I had to guess…” the officer tapped his chin.
“This was only supposed to be a short run!” Sevesti blustered. “Why would I risk losing more of my goods to the pirates?”
“Ah yes, these pirates.” The officer then turned to the captain. “Off the Izant coast, you say? The Izantine navies should have record of them, if I send a bird?”
“That would take days.” Tremaine growled.
“I have empty holding cells about Her Grace,” the officer smiled. “And enough rations for all of us to wait…”
The officer smelled a rat, Talin could see. There was a touch of the same cruelty in him that Overseer Jekkers had, he thought. Or maybe with that sort of power comes that sort of petty malice. Either way – he was going to be discovered if they waited here for much longer. Tal, you have to move. You have to do something. At his hiding spot on the edge of the deck, he could see the much larger Protectorate brigantine dwarfing the smaller Storm. It’s many cannons where a whole lot more menacing than the two small-cannon that the Storm had. On their main deck they had a mounted ballista that was almost as big as Bertha, and already pregnant with their hull-smashing harpoons pointed at the Storm.
The Her Grace had soldiers with brimmed, rounded tin hats and studded leather hauberks. They carried crossbows or short swords. The Storm was doomed.
Something that big, you can’t use spears, Tal looked at the ship. How would his mother hunt it?
You trip it up.
“Which home port did you say you were from again?” The offi
cer was prodding and testing the crew, as Talin moved to the trapdoor that led out onto the outer hull, and climbed out.
Instantly, the wind whipped and tore at his thin shirt as he held on with his fingers and toes to the grab-lines that were strung to the outer of the ship’s hull (a last-ditch measure in case someone fell overboard, that they might – might – just be able to catch one before falling the hundreds of feet to their deaths below).
Even used to higher heights than this, not having the security of a threaded rope on his harness made Tal nervous. He climbed quickly, swinging out to catch the next section of hull with his feet, reaching for the next grab-line-
Got it! He performed his leap-frogging climb again, until he rounded the aft under the stern, where his climb got a lot easier thanks to the overhanging support beams.
There, in front of him and above him, was the Her Grace. She dwarfed his vision, at least two more internal decks than the Storm had. Reinforcing braces of iron had been fixed at intervals across her beams. She was a ship built ready for war.
For a moment Talin quailed at the sight of her. She was too big, surely, what could a homeless Nhkari youth do against a boat that big?
Trip it up. His mother’s advice rang in his head as he headed to the edge of where the ships met.
“Now or never,” he whispered, searching for the opposing grab-line on the Protectorate vessel, tensing his legs…
He jumped.
A moment of dizzying weightlessness. Nothing under his hands or feet, before he thumped against the Her Grace and was falling, his fingers tearing at the wood...
Rope!
“Ach!” his hands found the rough hemp and tried to brace with his legs as the rope burnt a line through his hands. But he wasn’t falling anymore, he was dangling; but not falling.
“If I never have to do that again it’ll be too soon,” he muttered as he climbed quickly toward his objective: one of the two large iron anchors that sat, strapped to the side of the Her Grace, just as the Storm had two (but of a much smaller design).
The larger aft anchor was a curling ‘T’ of iron, rusted and dented in places, and many times larger than Tal was himself. This was what Her Grace would drop to hold them in position overnight, or to anchor them when out at sea. The smaller, fore anchor (still as big as Tal was) could be used as extra stabilizer if needed.
But his goal wasn’t the smaller anchor. It was the largest and heaviest, the one that could pound holes through the mud and rock of the plains below if dropped from high enough.
The anchor was attached to a heavy rope, and that rope disappeared through a reinforced hole in the side of the Her Grace to a room in one of the lower decks. It was a simple job to climb over the rope and into that room, finding it dark and unoccupied, as there was no need for any guard on such a mundane bit of equipment.
Think, Tal, he told himself, seeing the spokes of the wheel that raised and lowered the roped anchor. Large chocks of wood were braced against them, holding the rope and the anchor in place.
He took out the small knife he had been given to work the ropes with, and made a sharp slice across the thick hemp threads wound around the wheel. With a twang, half of the threads sprang apart and coiled in the air like wriggling worms, as the hemp started to unwind. The wheel, and the rope, and the aft anchor, started to judder.
Go! Move! Tal ran for the hole in the hulls, feeling the giant rope under his hands thrumming with tension as he climbed out to repeat his climb – this time to descend away from the anchor and find the matching grab-line along the Storm. He felt a shudder go through the Her Grace underneath him, the entire boat starting to sway and bob.
He jumped. Another moment of terrified flight, before thumping against the Storm’s outer hull, but this time to miss the grab-line he had been aiming for and to slide downwards, the wood blurring around him.
Something, please! Something solid caught under his hands and he bounced, his shoulders screaming in agony as he realized that he was hanging from one of the shutters of the Storm’s small cannons in the lower deck. Relief and joy replaced his fear as he rolled himself inside over the gun, to collapse with a thud in the floor of his lower deck. His arms and back were on fire, and he was too exhausted to care if there were any soldiers down here – but lucky for him, there wasn’t.
“What was that thump over the side?” a soldier was saying on the main deck.
There was the faintest of sounds like someone dropping a heavy block of wood, and then a grinding noise of wood-on-wood, matched by a chaotic buzz as the rope wheel suddenly playing out.
“What!?”
“Help!”
“The anchor!” Shouts went up, as Talin felt the almighty thud against their own ship from its neighbor.
The Her Grace jumped suddenly skywards as her anchor and it’s snapped rope fell the hundreds of feet to the plains below. She had lost a large part of her ballast, and was now too light for the winds of the Plains. There were shouts of alarm as both boats started bobbing and swaying.
“We’ve lost the aft anchor!” Their Sailing Master was shouting. “Reef that sail! I don’t want us pulled away…”
More angered shouts aboard the Storm.
“Get control of your boat before you lose it, officer!” Tremaine was bickering on the main deck. “We’ve answered your questions, don’t destroy my boat for your pride!”
“Is this your doing?” the officer hissed angrily, as the Storm started to list to one side, being dragged upwards by the rising brigantine. Tal was thrown across the lower deck. Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea at all.
“Lura, get our boat in order!” Tremaine was shouting. “Odestin – help her on the sails!”
“Bah!” the officer shouted in thwarted fury, ordering his men to return to their brig while they still could. There was the sound of scrapes and angered shouts, and then, as soon as they left;
“Quartermaster?” Tremaine’s bark.
“Already on it, Cap’n.” Sharp thuds of a hatchet hitting wood and the grappling lines that had held their two vessels together were cut, and the Storm was falling free under the rising and shaking Her Grace.
“Full sails. I want to be dust on the horizon by the time they retrieve that anchor.” Tremaine was shouting as the Storm turned it’s dive into a swoop, catching the breeze and racing across the southern scrub like a hunting hawk.
When the Protectorate vessel was little more than a bobbing balloon behind them, and all the regular crew of the Storm were on deck pulling ropes and tightening sails to speed their flight, Tal groaned from where he lay on the lower deck as the fine black-leather boots of the Captain emerged on the steps up to the top deck.
“Tal.” The Captain said heavily. “What the hell did you do to their boat, and how can I stop you from doing it to mine?”
“Uh…” The youth said, rubbing his pained shoulders.
The Captain crossed his arms over his black waistcoat. “I think that it is about time that we talk, don’t you...?”
13. Caravans
The Overseer – if that is still what the changed man could be called – travelled. A junker caravan, heading due east from the Reach, rattling along the stonier high ground that erupted into the Reachian cliffs themselves. By night he would ascend to the upper deck of the multi-wheeled, segmented construction, there to stand under the tattered and rippling tent and ignore his fellow passengers. They held little interest for the robed shuffling man they’d picked up at the Reach, anyway, and out here it was wise not to borrow trouble.
The Overseer was left alone as the various salvage merchants, explorers, and the odd mercenary or defector swaggered the boards. The crew of the caravan were similarly incommunicative, but the fat Caravan Chief had been paid a substantial amount by the Lords of the Reach to carry their newest passenger to where he needed to go. Which was, for the moment, due east.
The first day passed, and then the second in agonizing slowness, as the Overseer took shelter down in his crampe
d cabin next door to an obnoxiously loud salvage merchant with a fake wooden hand. The harsh daylight of the Susha Plains was too much for his new eyes, too glaring and sharp, and it gave him a headache. The man didn’t know if it was a part of the healing process, or some new condition that he would have to live with. No one seemed to notice the Overseer’s absence during the daylight hours, or, if they did they didn’t care to mention it to his face during the night.
Thud. Thunk. The one-handed salvage merchant next door was being noisy again, and Jekkers hissed from his bed. He had the window shuttered against the dry, dusty breeze and bright sun, but still some of the light seemed to filter its way through, casting shafts of hateful brightness into the room. Just the sight of the sun annoyed the Overseer now.
Thunk. Thunk. Thud. Again.
“Will you shut up! Let me sleep you miserable hag! Shut up!” Jekkers hissed, crossing the small room (more a sort of leaning) to thump his fist against the wood. Strange, how he didn’t even feel the impact at all on his silvered, pale hands anymore.
Blessed silence followed, bringing with it a momentary relief from the headaches.
“I might as well check,” Jekkers frowned at the offending wall (and beyond it the offending woman) before shuffling back to his bed (through the hateful light) to shuffle on hands and knees as he dragged forth his backpack. Inside was a change of robes, a roll of dressing and ointment in a fat brown glass bottle that the Lords of the Reach had advised him to lather on his affected parts every day, a variety of small weapons, knives, and leather devices, and then finally his hands found the device that the Breakers had given him, called an Oculant.
It was disk-shaped, about the size of his hand, and thick. A girdle of metal holding a thick slab of glass – only it wasn’t one single piece of glass, it contained within a bluish-green liquid, so light and almost translucent as if to be a cloud, which glowed very faintly when in the dark. Bobbing around in the blue was a small triangular piece of bone, subtly serrated on two edges if the Overseer looked closely enough.