Break the Chains

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The Larkspur’s controls were familiar in his hands, the waxed wood stable and reassuring, just as it had been in the days after he’d first stolen the ship out from under Thratia’s nose. It’d be smooth sailing, if Pelkaia hadn’t gone and moved some of the rigging around. Blasted woman had a nasty habit of meddling with everything she touched.

Detan eyed a suspiciously small wheel to the lower right of the primary wheel, dyed a bright cherry red, and wondered what would happen if he gave it a twist.

“Best not,” Tibs said. The twerp wasn’t even looking Detan’s way. He’d stationed himself at the navigator’s podium, a smaller version of the captain’s, and had his head down to fiddle with some contraption or another.

“How in the black did you–”

“How couldn’t I?”

Detan rolled his eyes and snapped his attention back to the task at hand, doing his level best to ignore that tempting little wheel. Someone had gone and dyed the wood a cherry stain, the bright color drawing his eye even as he focused on the yaw of the ship. Couldn’t see much of the horizon from the captain’s podium, not with clouds sealing them in, but Tibs was fitted up with periscopes and signal flags. Of course, the crew who was supposed to speak with the navigator in semaphore were currently occupied recovering a fortune’s worth of sel – so, really, he just had his periscopes.

Which should pits well be enough. If Tibs could spot Detan sneaking a sweetcake off a cart at a hundred paces, he had better be able to spot any new threat sneaking up on them. Tibs was sometimes worse than a mother dogging his heels.

“Mark course.” Detan popped out one of the chock pegs inset into the podium that were designed to brace the handles of the primary wheel.

“Course?” Tibs’s voice ratcheted high. “You find me some stars, I’ll find you a course.”

A cottony blanket of grey cloud scraped the sky above their sails, blotting out all hope of navigation. The soft glow of Petrastad’s lights smeared the horizon to their aft, and nothing but empty blackness yawned to their fore. Below, all around, the black silk of the sea stretched. Endless and, without the stroke of the moon’s light to give its sheen away, too easy by far to confuse with the horizon.

He swallowed, realizing the nightmare they’d been pushed into. Out over the open water, in the middle of the night, with a storm coalescing all around them, horizon blindness could settle in quick.

If he could get a drop of selium, he could let it go – watch it rise to be sure of their vertical axis – but all the ship’s excess was tied up in the illusion the Larkspur’s crew was struggling to recover. The buoyancy sacks in the ship’s belly should hold enough to keep them a touch above neutral, the ship’s ability to climb reliant upon its propellers and the angle of its stabilizing.

If the watchers didn’t back off, give them time to gather themselves and orient properly, there was a very real chance Detan would accidentally steer them straight into the sea. And in his very limited experience, there was no charming one’s way out of a shark’s mouth. Or hypothermia, for that matter.

“We’re fucked.”

“The thought had occurred to me,” Tibs drawled.

“Climbing,” Detan said, and reached down to crank the wheel that controlled the tilt of the lift propellers. He set it spinning, letting the masterful gear ratios do the heavy lifting for him, one hand on the wing’s wheel to keep them as close to level as possible.

A narrow liquid level had been set into the top of the captain’s podium, the air bubble within gleaming up at him as he stared it down, keeping the thing right smack in the middle of the central lines. He couldn’t let the Larkspur yaw to one side or another – any subtle variation could set them on a course to the waves.

“Mark weather,” Detan called back to Tibs, unwilling to peel his eyes from the level while they were ascending.

“Fuckin’ soup.”

Detan kept on climbing, sweat breaking across his brow as he stared down that bubble, not daring to breathe too hard lest he twitch the wings the wrong way. How high? If this ship had a barometer, he couldn’t see it, and Tibs wasn’t calling out the pressure as he would have if he’d had access to the right instruments. Wisps of cloud licked at his clothes, dampening him all over. Detan’s ears popped.

“Tibs?”

“Thinning.”

Clear air washed over his back, brushing away the thick moisture of cloud cover as the Larkspur heaved itself atop a wooly blanket of grey cloud. He locked the lift wheel into place and the ship jerked as it nosed down, almost stalling into an aft-slide.

He glanced up, expecting to see clear sky, but instead Pelkaia filled his view, her tired features pinched into a tight scowl. He’d have much rather come face to face with more nasty weather.

“Get off my podium.”

Detan snorted, straining as he held the wheel straight under the buffeting of higher altitude winds. “You can captain this ship when you’ve got all the sel back.” He called over his shoulder to Tibs, “Mark course already!”

“Working on it,” Tibs’s voice was strained, made thready by the wind whipping past his lips.

“This isn’t your ship, Honding. Step aside and help the others.”

“By the pits, Pelkaia, you think I’m enjoying this? You ever flown into a sea storm before?”

The twitch at the corner of her eye was the only answer he needed – no, she hadn’t. Detan straightened, firmed his resolve not to let her take control of the wheel. An inexperienced pilot in this mess could send them all splashing down. And he’d just replaced his boots, too. It’d be a shame to ruin them in the salt water.

“I see you haven’t. Well, I have, and I’ll be damned if this is the right moment to teach you how to handle it. Thank your cursed stars I happened to be aboard, and go get your sel back. And don’t come bitching to me if we lose the watchers before you succeed. My goal is getting us out of this alive and free. I don’t care about your surplus.”

Pelkaia opened her mouth to protest just as a gust struck the ship, throwing the mainsail hard to one side. Detan cursed and clutched at the wheel, bracing himself against the podium as he straightened the ship’s sideways slew.

“You want to help? Get those sails down! And have everyone tie in. Things are gonna get rough.”

She glared at him, but strode off anyway, her footsteps easy and comfortable over the bucking surface of the deck. Soon dark silhouettes moved across the deck, away from the aft where the struggle over the sel continued, spindly figures swinging up on the masts to bring the great sails down. He breathed a sigh of relief. One less thing to worry about.

A black bolt skittered across the deck, nicking the heel of his fine new boots. He yelped, jumped forward enough to slam his chest into the wheel. The ship began to slide, but he straightened before the effect could be troublesome.

“What in the black–”

“Company to starboard,” Tibs said.

The watchers’ craft had caught up, pacing the Larkspur’s rail. It was a low-bellied thing, narrow enough to cut through the sky just as quick as its propellers could force it along. Selium shimmered all around it, twisted into strange, knotted shapes as the sensitives on board the Larkspur struggled to wrench it away from the three sensitives Detan had seen fixing the craft when they’d first arrived. All along the deck a string of watchers spread out like links in a chain, at least eight of the bastards, with blackened crossbows pointed straight at the Larkspur’s deck. And there wasn’t a sensitive aboard the Larkspur willing to answer those crossbows with the ship’s harpoons so long as the sel remained in jeopardy.

“You make a real nice target,” Tibs mused.

Another bolt skittered across the deck near his feet. One thunked into the wood of the podium with a heavy twang. “Pits!” Detan hunched down in the three walls of the podium, struggling to keep his body hidden while still being able to exert enough leverage to work the great wheels.

“They’ve got a harpoon!” one of Pelkaia’s crew yelled, voice sharp with panic above the howl of the storm-winds.

“Hold on!” Detan called back, praying to the clear skies that Pelkaia had got his message across to everyone to tie themselves in. Huddled as he was, the wheel was a bear to turn, but turn it he did, groaning and growling as he heaved the wheel to the larboard. The sleek ship responded immediately, tearing away from the watchers’ vessel so quick Detan feared he’d roll them. Screams – mostly startled – popped up all around. He jerked the wheel straight and risked a glance over the top of the podium for the starboard side. The watcher craft was a good couple of hundred strides away, and although Pelkaia’s crew was scattered like thrown sand all across the deck, they appeared to all be there.

“Whoo!” He grinned, popping up to his full height, and angled the ship for a gentler curve to take them away from the watcher craft. Soft, fat drops of rain began to pelt Detan’s head, running down his hair and into his eyes. The shadow of the watchers’ craft turned, following tight behind.

A damp Pelkaia marched toward him, the rain making the sel on her face shimmer as it plowed riverbeds through her illusion. It gave the effect of her skin cracking, as if she were leaking selium from within. Detan shivered.

“Blow it,” she demanded, thrusting a finger toward the watchers’ craft. Selium enveloped it – Pelkaia’s surplus.

Hot sweat mingled with the cool rain on his neck. “No.”

“No? No? Look at it! We’ve lost it. Blow the watchers, and we can reel in what’s left.”

Detan squinted, shading his eyes to keep the rain clear. The amorphous blob of pearlescent gas twisted at the edges closest to the Larkspur, connected to the main blob around the watcher craft by thready wisps. His little stunt had gotten them out of harpoon range, but it’d been too sudden – half the crew had lost their hold.

But he could still feel it, looming like the promise of a stiff drink in his mind.

“So you lost it. So what? I told you–”

“Sirra.” There was a warning note in Tibs’s voice so stern that both Detan and Pelkaia whipped around to look his way. “We’ve a problem.”

Tibs pointed. Detan’s gut nearly emptied itself on his new shoes. A great column of cloud, grey and bulbous and churning, loomed on the horizon. It speared up from the sea like a god’s leg, its body crackled with streaks of lightning. The patchy clouds that spilt rain upon them reached out toward that swollen pillar, twisted into smears as they were pulled in under the force of the storm’s updraft.

He’d seen columns like that before. Usually on the far horizon. Spears in the sky bidding him to go around. Had seen the bodies and ships of those who’d flown too close to them, too. Broken husks, cracked in so many pieces they looked as if they’d fallen down the rocky side of an endless canyon. Half-frozen and half-mashed.

Never had he seen one so close it filled his view, dwarfed his vision and his hope.

“What–” Pelkaia began, but he cut her off.

“That’s a cloud suck. A god’s tower. That’s death.”

“Captain!” Coss struggled toward them, the growing winds already swirling clockwise over them. “The watchers are gaining again.”

Detan looked to the watchers, standing between them and Petrastad. Looked to the cloud suck, standing between him and Ripka. Made his choice.

“Right,” he said, bracing himself, straightening his spine. “Pelkaia. Use what you’ve got left and block the watchers’ view of us. Throw up a mirror of the cloud suck, right in their path if you can. We’re going the long way around, and we don’t want them following. We’ll have enough problems without ’em on our heels.”

“Just blow the cursed–”

He slammed a chock-plug in to brace the wheel and turned, grabbing the front of Pelkaia’s shirt in one fist. She gasped, startled, as he jerked her forward to stare eye-to-eye with him.

“I said no.”

“Think you can intimidate me, too? I’m not my crew, Honding. I know the make of you. Now blow that skies-cursed ship.”

The crew went quiet, every last eye on the deck glued to Detan and their captain. He felt them all. Felt them probing at him, wondering. Wondering if he’d blow more than the watcher vessel, if Pelkaia pushed him just right. Wondering if they could bash his head in before he got the chance. Detan cleared a rough catch in his throat and lowered his voice to a raspy whisper. “No innocents.”

“You think they are?”

“You think Ripka wasn’t?”

She swallowed, catching his meaning. Watchers were just doing their jobs. Doing the best they could to keep their cities safe, never mind their masters.

“We clear?” he said.

“As these skies.”

He released her. She spat at his feet. They stared at one another, nothing in all the world except Pelkaia’s storm-grey eyes tinged with green, her skin of selium peeling in the rain, her thin lips twitching with all the foul words she held back. To put up a mirror to scare off the watchers would be to lose the sel involved in its making. That’d be it. The whole of their reserve. A fortune lost to the storm. To running. She knew it. He knew it. He didn’t dare look anywhere but at her cold, hard stare.

Detan refused to say another word. Just stood steady, and waited for the crest of her anger to break. Her cheeks twitched. She reached up to drag her fingers through wet hair.

“Won’t be any hiding the Larkspur after this,” she said.

Detan turned his back on her, gripped the smooth controls of the ship he’d planned to steal all that time ago.

“Then I suggest you practice putting on Thratia’s face.”

She stomped off, Coss trudging at her heels. Detan shut them out of his mind. Shut the howl of the wind and the cursing of the crew away. Shuttered aside the cold on his skin and the weakness suffusing his bones. Damped the white ember of rage blossoming in his chest.

When he opened his eyes again he was centered, calm. Only Tibs’s voice mattered now. Tibs’s voice, and the feel of the wind.

Tibs marked a course, and Detan began to steer around the rising storm.