Authors: Adrian Tchaikovsky
He gave her a brief bow – more than a jumped-up commoner should ever have merited – and then he was off to greet some Assembler in warm tones.
Arianna clung to the balcony as though she were drowning.
Stenwold was not taking well to seaborne life. The motion of the boat kept him constantly off balance, and he had already almost pitched over the side more than once. He now sat miserably before the mast as the Fly-kinden crew flew and skittered across the woodwork all around him. Three days out now and, according to Tomasso, making good time towards this mythical Kanateris, there was nothing to see but sea.
That was what he found most disturbing: horizon to horizon there was only the sky and the waters. It felt like falling.
My kinden must be more earth-bound than I thought. Give me a dozen seers and seven different clocks and compasses, and I’d still be hugging the coast, thank you very much.
He couldn’t see that the Flies would fare any better than he would, if some catastrophe should suddenly strike the ship. He doubted that any human being alive would have the stamina to make it ashore from here.
‘’Ware weather!’ came the shrill call from the bows. Stenwold’s head jerked up. The little robed figure of Fernaea had its arms outstretched, facing along the ship with her face shadowed by her cowl, a Moth-kinden in miniature.
‘What course?’ Gude bellowed back.
‘Two points starboard and tie everything down!’ the Fly seer returned. Stenwold noticed Gude take a deep breath.
‘You heard her! Get everything ready for the Lash!’
The crew, who had seemed to be busy enough a moment before, were abruptly in a frenzy. They swarmed across the deck, leaving nothing loose behind them, in such a fervour that Stenwold was mildly surprised not to find himself stowed in a locker.
He stood up, leaning on the mast for purchase. ‘What should I do?’ he asked.
Laszlo touched down beside him, without warning. ‘Depends, Ma’rMaker. You reckon you’re any good at climbing rigging?’
‘I’ve been nothing but ballast so far.’
‘Ballast? Good nautical term,’ Laszlo grinned.
‘What’s the Lash, Laszlo?’
The grin widened, though not without a little tension underlying it. ‘It’s the sea out hereabouts, Maker, when the storm takes it. It’s why nobody but us does anything so stupid as venture this way. Come forward a moment.’ He skipped off, leaving Stenwold to lumber behind him, up to where Fernaea was standing.
‘What’s the news, Fern? How long?’ Laszlo was asking.
She had her hands on the railing, staring ahead, but she glanced back as he hailed her. Stenwold was almost surprised to see that she had blue eyes, rather than the white orbs of a Moth. ‘See for yourself,’ was all she said.
The sky ahead of the
Tidenfree
was fast losing the light. A darkness was gathering there like a swarm of locusts, a great weight of cloud blotting out the blue. The wind was freshening, too, gusting now as a pale harbinger of the storm.
Stenwold could think of nothing but the occasion when they had destroyed the
Pride
, in the yards outside Helleron. The rail automotive’s engine had called up a storm when it exploded, returning its lightning to the sky.
The crew behind him were furling the sail. They no longer coursed freely through the air but swung from rope to rope of the rigging, and he saw the wind contending with them over the disposition of the canvas. Seeing the crew down on deck securing themselves with lines, Stenwold pointed to them.
‘Should I be doing that?’ He found that he had to raise his voice a little, as the lines all around them started to keen as the wind tugged at them.
‘Can you fly?’ Laszlo demanded.
‘No!’
‘No point, then. You’d end up in the sea and we’d never be able to haul you out during the Lash. At least we folk can just drag along in the air like a kite until we’re hauled in. Mar’Maker, maybe you’d better get below.’
Stenwold bared his teeth. ‘Is there nothing I can do? I’m sick of being luggage.’ He ducked as something swung close to his head, and then Tomasso had skidded to a halt beside them.
‘
Someone
go kick that idiot Despard,’ the bearded Fly shouted. ‘Because the sail’s down but the engine isn’t up, and we’ve got about ten minutes to put that right.’
Laszlo and Stenwold exchanged glances. Overhead, the day was being blotted into dusk by the clouds’ vanguard.
‘Now
that
I can help with,’ the Beetle declared, and hurried as best he could towards the hatch, watching Laszlo disappear through it ahead of him with enviable speed.
He had got just three steps down towards the cramped confines below, when something solid struck the ship and sent every plank, spar and line thrumming. Stenwold’s boots skidded from under him and he took the rest of the stairs all at once, keeping his feet at the bottom by jamming his arms against the narrow walls. Laszlo was hovering in the air before him, utterly still though the walls of belowdecks lurched about him,
‘What was that?’ Stenwold demanded, although he already knew, in truth.
‘That was the Lash!’ Laszlo told him, already retreating down the little wooden corridor, and Stenwold followed, bending almost double. He could hear others of the crew pitching below: heading, he guessed, for the cargo hold to tie everything down and get themselves out of the weather. He just hoped the weather didn’t come indoors after them.
They were abruptly in a room large enough for him to stand in, and his best guess was that it was at the very stern of the ship. From the fittings about the walls, he saw that there had been a big steam engine in here once, but the oil-burner they had hauled in to replace it was half the size, leaving enough room for even a Beetle-kinden to get round it. The engine was a Collegium-made piece, modified over and over by small and nimble fingers. Despard was half obscured by it, artificer’s goggles down over her eyes and a wrench in one hand.
‘Chief wants to know why so quiet,’ Laszlo told her cheerily.
She shot him a vile look that the goggles only helped send on its way. ‘Seized up since we left harbour, can you believe?’
‘I can believe chief wants it working right now, Despot.’ Laszlo’s sanguine calm was already getting on Stenwold’s nerves and, from her present reaction, he wondered how Despard had managed to share a ship with him so long.
‘Can I help?’ he asked.
‘You know engines?’ she snapped back.
He bit down on the part where he reeled off his College accredits and just said, ‘Yes. What can I do?’
‘Give me tools when I ask for them, hold things down where I tell you, and punch Laszlo in the face if he so much as opens his mouth.’ She ducked back behind the engine.
The ship lurched again, and stayed lurched, the room canting twenty degrees off vertical. Stenwold proceeded hand over hand, hanging from the remnants of the old steam engine, finding Despard’s tools as her tight voice rapped out a demand. He could hear the whole
Tidenfree
complaining as the wind dragged at it, timbers shifting one against the other. The floor beneath him was never still, jumping and sloping without pattern. Each time it moved, the two Fly-kinden were momentarily airborne, wings blurring by pure instinct, keeping them steady. Stenwold could only cling on and curse the limitations of his kinden.
‘Stand back!’ Despard shouted. Stenwold did his best, squeezing himself into a corner as she dragged down on a lever with all her weight, wings flurrying for extra purchase.
With a roar the engine came alive, filling the room with the smell of burning. From above, Stenwold could hear Fernaea’s voice somehow, high and clear even over the tearing wind that was making every rope on the ship shriek and sing. Even Gude’s bellowing replies were lost, but the seer’s directions rode the wind like a nightmare. Stenwold imagined her clinging to the very point of the prow, the stormwinds catching and dragging at her grey robe, eyes facing the skies, and somehow, somehow, working some magic to find their way through the storm.
And backed by good Collegium artifice, no less. These Flies have stolen the best of both worlds. No wonder they’ve survived on the seas for three generations.
The
Tidenfree
shuddered again, the vibration of the engine merging with the shaking of the timbers as the ship began abruptly turning into the wind. There was a sound like a great vat boiling over, hissing and steaming, and a moment later Stenwold realized that it was the ferocity of the rain pounding the decks above him. The ship boomed hollowly as another fist of wind struck it, and water was running down the stairs and washing round the soles of his boots.
‘Are we sinking?’ he cried.
‘Just the rain, Ma’rMaker!’ Laszlo assured him. ‘If it gets too bad, we’ll pump.’
Stenwold had gone to the entrance, hunching over with the vague intention of going up on deck. The two Flies shouted at him.
‘I can’t just stay here,’ he said. The sound from above was unimaginable, the wind shrieking through the lines, the waters crashing and thundering. He could not imagine what it might look like from abovedecks. If he discovered three sea monsters tearing the vessel apart between their pincers, he would not have been surprised. Still, it could not be worse than being trapped down here and
not
knowing. The very planks beneath his feet were grinding and shifting, never level, tilted now this way, now that. The
sea
: he could feel the sea trying to get him, with teeth and claws grating on the other side of the hull.
‘You’ll be over the side in an instant, if you go up there!’ Laszlo warned him. ‘Most of the crew will be below now. Only Fern and Gude and maybe a couple more to help Gude with the oar. Everyone else will be down in the hold or the cabins.’
‘What if we sink?’ Stenwold demanded.
‘Then we drown!’ Despard snapped. Stenwold felt his legs give way as the floor shifted again. Abruptly he was sitting down in the water that washed back and forth in sympathy with the waves outside.
It shows how much we turn our back on the sea
. He had never thought of drowning, not once, but now the idea seemed so terrifying to him that his innards were locking up with it. He had thought to die on a sword’s point, perhaps, or burned by the sting-fire of a Wasp, or falling from the sky with the tatters of an airship’s gasbag torn open above him, but not this: not dragged into the pitch cold dark of the sea.
‘Where will the wind take us?’ he demanded. ‘To what shore?’
‘The wind takes us nowhere while this engine’s running!’ Despard declared.
‘Other than that,’ Laszlo added, ‘to no shore any man knows. When the Lash is driving, it’ll drag you all the way out into the grand ocean. If you’re lucky, your corpse might wash up on the Atoll Coast, but other than that . . . nobody ever sees you or your sails again. Some say there’s a whole graveyard of broken ships out there, far past the horizon. Maybe some day we’ll go look.’
Stenwold clung to the old engine fittings. It was not illness that afflicted him, not the sea-malady he had heard of. Beetles had iron stomachs, as a rule, and even the pitching of the waters was not undoing his constitution. No, his sickness was entirely bred of fear.
We have no business being out here.
I
have no business being out here.
Beetles were never meant to go to sea and Master Failwright could go hang himself, if he wasn’t already dead.
Why did I think this was a good idea?
‘Tell me . . .’ He had to speak, had to wrench his mind away from thoughts of the grasping waters. ‘The Atoll Coast, you’ve been there?’ A casual conversation, save that he was shouting at the top of his voice to get the words heard over the storm.
‘Not us!’ Despard called back. ‘Himself did a lot of business there, I think, but the chief’s contacts are mainly down the Strand.’
‘She means the Spiderlands coast, Ma’rMaker,’ Laszlo put in. The floor was abruptly sloping a good thirty degrees the other way, and Stenwold clung on gamely to avoid sliding away into what was now the low corner of the room. The two Flies had merely taken to the air briefly again: every time the ship around them shifted and shook, their wings flickered to lift them from the deck and keep them stable. They did it without even thinking, a Fly-kinden’s version of sea-legs. Stenwold was bitterly envious.
‘You never went to Tsen, then?’ he asked.
Tsen. Collegium politics. The business with the Vekken. Anything else but the sea. Not the drowning hungry sea, at all.
‘Never. Heard of it, though,’ Laszlo stated. ‘Why?’
‘I heard they have some . . . interesting boats there,’ Stenwold got out. The water was like a little river flowing into the room now. Despard flitted over to the engine and began making adjustments.
‘They’re mad there,’ she called over her shoulder.
‘Submersibles!’ Stenwold shouted, like a curse.
‘Come over here, Beetle, and make yourself useful!’ was her answer to that. He hauled himself towards her, half falling down, half climbing up. He saw that she had rigged up something with a handle.
‘You use those big arms of yours to get this going!’ she ordered him. ‘Pump, Beetle, pump!’
‘Where does the water go?’
‘Out! There’s a set of double-lock valves. Don’t worry, it all goes out and nothing gets in.’ As he started working the pump, surprisingly heavy work for something manufactured for Fly-kinden, she yelled, conversationally, ‘Submersibles, is it?’