Break the Chains

Chapter Twenty-Five

Detan grabbed Pelkaia’s arm, saw Tibs do likewise for Coss, and ran like the fiery pits were opening up beneath him. He watched in fascinated horror as the realization of what Pelkaia was washed over the gathered watchers, watched the initial tinges of revulsion fade away to shock and anger.

It was easy to hate a thing once you’d learned to fear it.

“Make way!” Detan screamed, because he figured that was at least worth a shot. Watchers spent their lives listening for an authoritative bellow and, sure enough, a few stepped clear of his path on instinct, bafflement overriding fear, anger, and duty. He could have laughed – if it wouldn’t have meant making himself vulnerable to do so.

Pelkaia wrested from his grip and slipped sideways, skimming past the reaching arms of a nearby watcher. Shock passed. They closed in upon the fleeing five, a wall of blue cutting off Detan’s view of the dock – and the Larkspur – beyond.

“Hullo,” Detan said, waving his fingertips with overwrought glee at the watcher who stood before him. He took a nervous step backward and his back thumped into Pelkaia. They’d been corralled into a sour little knot in the center of the room. Closer to the exit than they’d been when they’d started, sure, but as far as Detan was concerned that dock was as close to him as the Valathean isles were.

“Now, now,” he spoke as if coaxing a startled child, patting the air before him with his hands, and let himself babble to give himself time to think. “I’m sure we can talk this through. There’s no need to send a perfectly good sel-sensitive to their death, now is there? She’ll be no menace to society all locked away on the Remnant, as a proper prisoner of the Fleet.”

“The Fleet!” The watch-captain spearheaded his way through the nervous cluster. A dusting of spittle speckled his whiskers. “You really expect me to believe you’re sands-cursed Fleeties after that? Run! I heard you clear as the skies are blue.”

“I think you’ll find the skies are quite black at the moment,” he rambled, peering through gaps in the ring of watchers. Someone moved on the dock – Pelkaia’s people? He had to keep the watchers talking long enough for Jeffin and his yokels to realize something had gone amiss.

“To the pits with the color of the sky! You and your gaggle of… of … Who are you people?”

“I believe,” Laella cut in, “we have already been introduced.” She’d had time enough to calm herself and smooth her features back into something like the hard, authoritative mask she’d worn when she’d first walked through the door. Maybe she’d be good at this sort of thing someday after all.

“Are you challenging my commodore?” Detan threw in, just to snap the watch-captain’s head back to him. He hadn’t a clue if that sort of attitude was something a real Fleetie would put on, but it didn’t matter. He had to keep the captain confused, keep him talking. Keep him from giving the order to clap them all in chains.

“Will you be silent!” the captain snapped at Detan and jerked his attention back to Laella. The girl stood straighter, thrusting her shoulders back as she crossed her arms over her ribs.

“You are in no position to give orders to my men. I apologize that this one overreacted; many would do the same in the face of such a creature.”

The captain snorted. “Commodore Eradin of the Mirror, is it? We’ll see. You’ll all have to wait until we can get word back from Valathea confirming your identities. Men.” He snapped his fingers twice in the air. “Show the ‘Fleeties’ to their new rooms on the top level, and secure that ship of theirs. Throw the doppel and her associate in a new cell until we can arrange an execution.”

“This is unconscionable!” Laella stomped her foot in typical spoiled-aristocrat fashion and jabbed the captain in the chest with her finger. The watchers hesitated. Every soul on the Scorched knew not to move a muscle when an uppercrust was busy throwing a fit. Fits had a way of latching on to the slightest of movements. “You will not make me get caught in the monsoon!”

Outside, the sky gave a grumble of thunder as if to punctuate her point.

“Miss, if this is a misunderstanding, then I apologize. But we’ve gone beyond your schedule.”

The watchers stepped toward their huddled group, reaching for batons and shackles alike. Sweat itched between Detan’s shoulder blades. He couldn’t think of a thing to say. At least, nothing that’d do any more good than getting him cuffed for speaking. He shuffled back as the watcher he’d waved to reached for his arm, pressing his back tight against Pelkaia’s.

A strange keening echoed from the direction of the dock, a mournful wail that sounded far away – as if his ears were stuffed with cotton.

Behind him, Pelkaia murmured, “Finally.”

The doors to the dock burst inward on a mighty blast of wind, the keening growing and swelling until it was an all-out banshee wail. Detan flinched, ducking down as the front of the storm slammed into the gathered watchers. He shivered as he sensed the source of that wind.

Wasn’t wind at all, that gust blowing the doors so wide they cracked their frames. A wave of selium washed over him, around him. He had a chance to take a breath before it enfolded him, filling every crevice. An unseen sensitive shifted the gas back to its natural hue. It glimmered and flashed like someone had taken an opal and turned it to smoke.

The selium displaced the air around them, fogged their eyes and tingled in their nostrils. Someone screamed, then a whole lotta someones were screaming. The first needles of panic probed at Detan’s nerves and he shivered, ducking his head, as if he could cower away from the glittering shroud that wrapped him tip to toe.

Someone grabbed his wrist and he lashed out, panicked. His other wrist was grabbed and he stared into Tibs’s calm, weathered face, saw the rangy bastard’s lips moving but couldn’t hear a word he was saying over the keening in his ears.

Tibs. Tibs is here and the watchers aren’t grabbing me and this is our rescue and it’s going to be all right just run – just fucking run.

He nodded to Tibs, letting him know his panic had settled, and parted his lips to find he could breathe. Whoever controlled the sel that covered them had pulled back, switched from an all-consuming front of fog to a whip-like storm. Lashes of brilliance tore through the air, separating the watchers from their prisoners, stirring up real wind and scattering the light.

The watchtower’s oil lamps blinked out, one by one, leaving only the gleam of sel, beautiful in its endless anger. Detan reached out a hand, entranced by the shattered and coalescing rainbows flowing around him. He’d never seen it like this before, never seen it so whipped up and… and not free, not exactly – but he sensed a delight in it. As if, in this wild storm, it could release a little of its anger, a little of its frustration at being tamed – at not being allowed to rise up and up and kiss the sun.

Could the sel feel? He wondered, trailing fingers through a wisp that turned carnelian and malachite and broke across his skin in waves of topaz. Did it know what it was to be tamed?

Did it hate being caged like he did?

Did it want him to free it, even if it meant its destruction?

Tibs yanked Detan’s wrists and he stumbled, remembering where he was, remembering he needed to run. He’d done a lot of that – of running. He was good at it. Better than he probably had a right to be.

Severed from communion with the selium, he ran through it without a thought. Wisps brushed against his clothes and skin as he plowed straight through. Watchers shied away from those ribbons as if they were poison, calling amongst themselves various words of reorganization. He heard, as if from a distance, the captain’s whistle give its futile toots, trying to rally them against their terror.

Hopeless, really. Detan doubted the poor sods had ever seen selium up close, unless it was contained within the banal leather of buoyancy sacks. This was something beyond their ken, something out of old fairytales. Detan wouldn’t be surprised if the poor launderers had an extra basket of watchers’ trousers to clean tomorrow morning.

He staggered out the door after Tibs, broke through the storm of sel onto the strangely peaceful dock, bathed in plain moonlight instead of the restless, thrashing prism of selium.

The Larkspur reared before him, as glorious in its sleek lines as it had been that first night, so long ago, when it had loomed in the embracing arms of Thratia’s dock. A fresh love for it swelled within him, choked him briefly. Tibs stalled as well, his eyes wide as if he were trying to drink in every glorious line of her.

On her smooth deck Jeffin stood, surrounded by a half dozen other sensitives Detan did not know, sweat sheening all their faces, dampening their tunics so that they plastered across their shoulders and chests. Every last drop of the selium used to disguise the Larkspur’s iconic beauty had been stripped away, manhandled by her small crew to disorient Pelkaia’s captors.

A jolt of awe startled Detan. A small part of his mind worked the cost of all that precious gas, and what it would sell for on the black market, even as he marveled at the ship itself.

Pelkaia cuffed him on the back of the head. He jolted, spun around to tell her off, then noticed the watchers spilling onto the dock. A scant handful had mastered their fear long enough to break through the storm, but there would be more. With a grunt he sprinted toward the Larkspur’s gangplank, dragging a startled Tibs along behind him. They scrambled up together, fell panting side by side in a heap of silky-smooth ropes piled up against a cabin wall.

Laying on his back, shivering with remembrance of the whole experience, he watched Pelkaia stride up the gangplank after him, her first mate and young, brave Laella trotting at her heels.

“Bring it in!” she barked to her sweating, straining crew, and spun around to heave up the gangplank with her own hands.

The ship jerked as she hauled the plank in, slewing away from the dock by the unseen force of someone – no doubt Pelkaia – shoving on the selium hidden away in the ship’s buoyancy sacks, clustering it to one side of the ship. A sloppy turn, but a decent enough fix to lurch them out of reach of watcher hands.

Groaning, Tibs hauled himself to his feet and offered a hand to Detan. He eyed it, wary.

“Get up, sirra. Work to be done.”

“Ship’s got a full crew,” he grumbled.

“Little busy right now.”

Detan took Tibs’s hand and allowed himself to be hauled to his feet, every joint screaming in protest. The sensitives were arrayed against the Larkspur’s aft rail, hauling in the clouds of selium they’d used to frighten the watchers. Great snakes of it flowed out from the watchtower lobby, trailing after the ship like the tail of a shooting star. They were straining, all of them, and even Pelkaia had gone to join them. Every hand was needed to hold onto and reclaim the precious selium that hid their ship from prying eyes.

And not a single hand was left to see to the ship’s tiller.

“Good ole-fashioned flying,” Detan grinned at Tibs as he forced himself over to the captain’s podium, working the cranks that angled the sails and set the gearboxes on the ship’s great propellers spinning.

“Not for long,” Tibs said, jerking his chin to starboard. Detan leaned from his heightened perch at the captain’s podium, peering down at the dock they’d abandoned. The watchers piled onto the craft he’d spotted earlier, encouraged by the sweet prize of the Larkspur, and were lifting off below.

“Oh,” Detan said, fingers going white on the wheel.

“Tie on!” Tibs barked, and reached for his anchor rope even as he latched one onto Detan’s belt.

Muscles burning, breath stuttering, Detan threw his back into the crank of the Larkspur’s largest aft propeller, throttling them out and into the clouds – and toward the dark smudge of a storm appearing upon the horizon.

The watchers followed, chasing the starfall trail of selium Pelkaia’s crew struggled to reel back in.