CHAPTER
One
Jean-Claude clung to the St. Marie’s guardrail with one hand and to his tether with the other. He wanted a word with Captain Jerome, who stood on the quarterdeck, an impossible distance away. Unfortunately, doing the impossible was a sworn part of Jean-Claude’s duty, so he slide-stepped awkwardly toward the skyship’s stern as the vessel climbed a tall ridge of turbulence. The whistling wind made jib sails of his tabard’s loose sleeve flaps, tugging him toward the rail and the emptiness beyond.
All around him, deckhands scurried about, tugging on lines, adjusting sails in a madman’s dance choreographed to the boatswain’s cry. Jean-Claude reached the curling stair to the quarterdeck and climbed, stumbling as his leather riding boots slipped on cloud-slicked steps. He achieved the top of the stair just as the St. Marie crested the pressure ridge.
The masts creaked, and the vast spiderweb of rigging hummed with tension as the ship’s enormous stresses shifted. For a moment, Jean-Claude hung weightless, floating free as a smoke puff on the wind. His toes strained to reach the deck beneath his feet but succeeded only in propelling him away from it. The skyship banked, bumping and tilting him halfway over the rail. Beyond that flimsy frontier and far below the turvy sails thrusting down beneath the hull awaited the Gloom, a fathomless abyss of lightning-shot clouds. Those clouds beckoned him like the pillowed embrace of a familiar paramour. Against all good sense, he yearned toward the abyss. His grip on the rail slipped.
Then his own weight landed on him hard. He hit the deck with a knee-popping thump. His boots slipped and he tumbled to his backside. His heart rattled around his ribs like a die in a cup. Carefully, he eased away from the edge of the ship.
He hated skyships. How many men before him had been claimed by the fatal impulse to let go? How many had felt the sick urge to fall forever, down to where the clouds never parted, the rain never ceased, and the wind ripped ships and men to pieces? Every time Jean-Claude saw it, it called to him.
I should have stayed a farmer. If only he had been an obedient lad, dutifully following a plow through rocky fields, he would never have sneaked away from his chores to watch the Duc d’Orange’s forces bring battle to the raiding Mark of Oberholz. Then he would never have chanced upon the wounded duc or hidden him from the mark’s search parties. He would never have earned the duc’s gratitude or been shoehorned into l’École Royale des Spécialistes. He would never have been attached as liaison to the Comte des Zephyrs, and he never would have been ordered to get on one of these hundred-times-damned flying boats.
From the forward rail of the quarterdeck, Captain Jerome watched Jean-Claude’s progress with evident amusement.
“Six weeks aloft and you still haven’t got your sky legs,” Jerome said with an aloof, aristocratic delight that suggested he’d expected no better. A landless, penniless seventh son of minor clayborn gentry, Jerome treasured the singular noble privilege to which he was entitled: disdain for the lowborn. His sole redeeming feature, in Jean-Claude’s eyes, was that he was good at his job, an asset rather than an impediment to his crew, a circumstance all too rare in the gentry-swollen navy.
Jean-Claude scrambled to his feet and tried to recover poise as well as balance as the skyship accelerated into the next aerial trough.
“You said we were about to make land!” His own privilege, as King’s Own Musketeer, was deferring to no one outside his own very short chain of command. Of course, keeping that privilege meant completing his missions without falter or fail, no matter the distance or danger. Orders like “Deliver this message from my lips to the comtesse’s ears ere the baby is born” did not account for time spent evading pirates or allow for being blown a week off course by an unanticipated aetherstorm.
Jerome stood on the rolling deck as if nailed to it, not a hair of his white powdered wig out of place. He jerked his chin toward the bow and said, “We’re coming in widdershins on the trailing edge,” as if that clarified the matter. “If we don’t undershoot and ram the light tower, we should make harbor within the hour.”
Jean-Claude turned. With the St. Marie on a decline, l’Île des Zephyrs rose into view. There was the afternoon glitter of Lac Rond tucked in amongst the rolling hills. Nearer at hand, the green blanket of the forest crept out of the wrinkled uplands and took a peek at oblivion over the scalloped edge of the sky cliff. Thin plumes of smoke, the telltale signs of human endeavor, curled from behind a ridge to the left. There, on a promontory of rock overhanging the endless fall, was des Zephyrs’s light tower, its reflector flashing rhythmically.
“Aren’t we coming in a little high?” Jean-Claude asked. Skyships could not fly over land—his academy instructors had said aetherkeels needed a certain amount of air to support them, and flying over rock robbed them of buoyancy—and the St. Marie seemed to be aimed at a hillside.
Captain Jerome gave a long-suffering sigh. “You can’t steer a skyship to where her destination is. You have to steer her where that destination is going to be. Helmsman, make ready to slip. Steer to port on my mark. Reef the main sails and level the beam screw.”
“Aye. Steer to port. Reef the mains. Level beam screw. Aye!” replied the helmsman. Farther down, the boatswain picked up the cry, bellowing a series of orders that must have made sense to the crew, for they scampered about as if the Breaker herself were nipping at their heels. Lines and canvas shifted. The ship shuddered as if in anticipation.
“Steering a skyship requires forethought, strategy, calculation,” Jerome said. “Helmsman, now!”
The helmsman leaned into the wheel, and the huge fantail rudder flagged to the left.
“You might want to hang on to something,” Jerome said mildly.
Jean-Claude grabbed a piece of railing that no one else seemed to be using and swallowed hard. The ship nosed to the left, turning away from land, then rolled over some invisible frontier and began to tilt and slide to the right, until Jean-Claude swore it was going to flip over and throw them all to their deaths. He clung to the rail as the ship tried to fall out from under him. Wind buffets sent his feet sliding. Blood flowed from his mouth where he had bitten his tongue.
The St. Marie veered to a course nearly parallel to the sky cliff, angling steadily downward, picking up speed … gliding. The turbulence dissipated. It felt like the ship was tobogganing down a smooth, icy hillside with only the occasional rippling bump. With effort, Jean-Claude unclenched his white-knuckled fingers. “What happened?”
Jerome cupped one hand and twirled his finger over it. “Large masses like skylands produce an aetheric vortex, and the vortex has grooves in it. Poke a hole in the bottom of a bowl full of water and you’ll see what I mean. We’re riding one of those grooves down and toward the center. This one should take us right under des Zephyrs’s light tower. Then we deploy braking sails and pop up like a cork in the harbor. Of course … timing is everything.”
“You are a madman,” Jean-Claude said, and Jerome tipped his tricorn, taking it for the compliment it was.
The St. Marie drew level with the cliff wall, a pockmarked scarp a hundred feet high. Then they passed below the rim where the sinking Solar illuminated the belly of the skyland, a vast downward-pointing cone of rock bristling with an upside-down forest of salt-encrusted, aether-emitting cloud-coral stalactites that kept the skyland aloft.