Chapter 42
42
G RAYLIN STOOD IN the dark hold of the Sparrowhawk . The beached ship listed on its starboard side. The cavernous space had been emptied of its storehouse of crates and barrels. Even the hay that lined Kalder’s and Bashaliia’s former pens had been swept clean. He stood before a lake of seawater that filled the stern half of the hold.
Kalder paced the water’s edge. The vargr looked as concerned as Graylin felt.
Not only did they need to repair the hole blasted out of the hull’s side, but the ship’s keel had shattered when the Sparrowhawk crashed into the sea.
A sharp curse burned his ears, echoing his own sour sentiment. He turned to see Darant climb out of a hatch in the decking, rising from the bilge, which was equally swamped down below.
The pirate clambered to the planks and shook himself like a drowned dog. He wore only leggings, but they were soaked. His dark hair was plastered to his scalp. Despite his dousing, his arms were stained with black oil to his elbows, along with swaths across his chest.
“Were you successful in freeing the stern forge from its moorings?” Graylin asked.
Darant scowled and waved to the hatch. “Only because Shiya never has to breathe, lucky her. She was able to crawl underwater, unlock the bolts—with her bare fingers, I tell you.” He swiped his brows, plainly impressed and maybe envious. “She dragged the forge clear of the water, where I was able to inspect it for damage.”
“And?”
“A broken fuel line, a couple bent rods. I have enough spare bits to fix her up.” He glowered at Graylin. “But why waste the sweat?”
Graylin understood his consternation. “How much flashburn do you have left in the extra tanks?”
“Maybe enough to keep Brayl’s sailraft aloft for a day or so. Certainly not enough to get the Hawk into the air. That’s if we even had enough fabric to patch our shredded balloon.”
A shout echoed through the empty hold, coming from the top of the spiral stairs that led to the wheelhouse. “Come see this!” Jace called down to them. “Up on the middeck!”
The timbre of his voice rang with excitement and something Graylin had not felt in ages: hope.
“What is it?” Darant hollered.
“You have to see it!” Jace vanished away.
Darant shared an exasperated look with Graylin and waved toward the stairs. “If that bastard wants to show us some new bird or sarding fish, I’m gonna stew his bollocks in the last of our flashburn.”
Graylin understood. Jace and Krysh had spent the past days exploring the wonders of the Crèche, debating a thousand subjects. Their enthusiastic jabbering wore thin, especially considering the dire straits—and the gloom surrounding all the deaths. The pirate had lost four men during the attack.
Still, something had fired up the young man.
Graylin motioned for Kalder to stay below. The vargr crossed to his freshly swept pen and set about sniffing it, then lifted a leg to reclaim his spot.
Graylin and Darant clambered up into the wheelhouse and out the forecastle door to the open middeck. They had to sidestep past the shredded remains of the giant gasbag. Its fabric had been gathered and folded to the portside and weighted down by thick coils of draft-iron cables. One baffled section of the balloon remained intact, hanging overhead, still swollen by its lifting gasses.
Darant glanced up at it with a sad shake of his head. He didn’t need to raise yet another difficulty. Even if they could repair the rest of the balloon, there was no distillery that could refill it with fresh gas.
“Over here!” Jace called to them.
He knelt with Fenn and Krysh, who crowded close. Rhaif shadowed over them, leaning on a crutch, favoring his wounded leg. Even Meryk stood with them, a palm over his mouth.
Rhaif spotted them and waved them closer. “You truly need to see this.”
Graylin frowned.
What is going on?
He and Darant crossed the planks and joined them. Fenn shifted aside to reveal what had drawn everyone’s attention.
Krysh crouched over a pumpkin-sized swell of a tiny balloon, made of sewn bits of fabric. Framing its open mouth, woven threads ran down to a tiny tin cup that danced with flames below it.
Jace spoke rapidly. “I remembered reading the histories of flight in an old book back at the Cloistery. It spoke of such early efforts.” He waved to Krysh, who held those tiny threads. “Show them.”
The alchymist released his fingers, and the small balloon and its flaming package miraculously rose off the planks. It floated past their shoulders and continued upward.
Graylin backed a step, watching it sail ever higher into the air.
“What alchymy is this?” Darant blurted out.
“Nothing but hot air,” Jace explained, clearly enthused. “Hotter than what surrounds it.”
Still on a knee, Krysh looked up at them. “It functions like a wyndship’s lifting gasses. Maybe we could employ such a method instead. Especially once we clear this warm rift and reenter the frigid dark. The colder the surroundings, the stronger such flame-heated air will lift.”
Graylin already identified many problems with such an endeavor.
Darant did, too, and proceeded to list them. “First, we’d need far more fabric than we have. We lost swaths of it during that battle.”
Krysh acknowledged that and made it more challenging. “If my calculations are correct, the balloon would have to be considerably larger than its prior size.”
“Unless we lightened the Hawk, ” Jace countered. “Got rid of the cannons, the excess cargo, stripped the ship lean.”
But Darant wasn’t finished with his objections. “And how do you propose we fuel that warming flame? I assume it will have to burn continuously to keep all that air heated. And right now, we don’t have enough flashburn to fire up one forge, let alone warm a massive gasbag.” He pointed at the flicker of flames high above. “Knowing that, I should burn your arses for wasting flashburn just now.”
“We didn’t use flashburn,” Jace explained. He craned his neck toward Meryk. “What did you call it?”
“Whelyn flitch,” the Panthean said.
Krysh turned to Darant. “It’s the waxy fat from some great beast of the sea. You see it filling all their firepots throughout Iskar. The village had great reserves stored in ice caves.”
Jace nodded. “We performed some tests. It burns hotter than flashburn. And in its semisolid form, it’s lighter than the same amount of flashburn, but its flame lasts four times as long.”
Despite his own pessimism, a flare of hope warmed through Graylin. He challenged Darant, “Could you—maybe with Jace and Krysh’s help—find a way to use this flitch to fuel the ship’s forges?”
Darant rubbed his scrub of beard. “Maybe,” he drawled out. “If that sarding fat could be refined in some way, liquefied even. Or if I tweaked the forges themselves.”
Hope brightened in Graylin’s chest, only to be quashed by Darant.
“But do I have to remind you of the obvious?” the pirate warned. “We still don’t have nearly enough wood or fabric to make proper repairs. Even if I scavenged material from both sailrafts, we’d need far more.”
Graylin looked to Jace and Krysh to solve this dilemma, too. But the pair of scholars just glanced to each other, then down to the planked deck.
Another voice spoke up.
“I know where you can find all of that,” Meryk said.
A BELL LATER, Graylin crouched in the stern of a flat-bottomed skiff.
Ahead of him, Meryk stood braced at the bow, wielding a set of woven reins that ran out to a pair of orksos who were harnessed and tethered to the boat. The beasts humped through the waves as Meryk guided them along the shoreline.
“Where is he taking us?” Jace whispered, voicing Graylin’s nagging question.
The young man sat with Krysh and Darant.
Meryk had refused to tell them where they were headed, only assuring them it was important. Graylin craned back, noting the flames of Iskar in the distance, nearly lost in the mists. They must be over two leagues from the village by now. Worry nagged him. He hated leaving Nyx, but she had Vikas with her. Plus, before departing, he had sent Fenn with Kalder to join her at Meryk’s home.
Still, Graylin’s patience had worn to a razor’s edge. He shifted higher and called to Meryk, “How much farther must we go?”
Meryk glanced back over a shoulder and pointed past the bow. “We are here.”
Graylin leaned over the boat’s side. The stretch of shoreline ahead looked no different from the leagues they had passed. Then he spotted a tiny canal that cut through the sand and aimed for the ice cliffs. He only noted the waterway because of tiny flickers of flames near the base of the cliffs. He squinted enough to make out the source.
Two tall firepots flanked the canal, as if maintaining an eternal vigil.
Meryk guided the skiff over to the canal and turned into its mouth. It was deep enough to accommodate the orksos and wide enough that two skiffs could have traversed it side by side. Graylin stared into the water, wondering if it had to be dredged regularly to keep it open.
But why?
Meryk leaned down to ignite a small pot of flitch that rested in a stanchion at the prow. Flames sputtered, then blew brighter.
Jace tilted to get a better view. “There’s a cave in the ice ahead.”
Graylin had noted it, too, but thought it was a rift in the ice, as if the waterway were a stream melted out of the cliff. As they neared it, the flames of Meryk’s firepot revealed that it was indeed the entrance to a colossal cave.
“This is a holy spot for my wife’s people,” Meryk said. “It might anger many if they know that I brought you here. But you deserve to know the truth about our shared history.”
The orksos hauled them past a pair of giant sandstone urns and under the entrance’s arch of ice. Beyond it, the flames from the skiff’s prow illuminated a yawning space. Firelight reflected off its ice walls, illuminating the treasure within.
Jace gasped.
Darant swore.
A small lake filled the cavern. Beached within it was a huge ship. Its hull dwarfed the Sparrowhawk. Its draft-iron prow rose even higher, sculpted into the likeness of a fierce wyrm, whose outspread wings flanked the hull.
“It’s the Fyredragon, ” Jace exclaimed, not looking away. “Rega sy Noor’s old ship.”
G RAYLIN PACED ALONGSIDE Darant as they circled around a cold beach that edged the lake. He carried a small lantern and held it high.
The Fyredragon rested crookedly in the water. The apparent majesty of the ship upon first sight had waned. The curve of its hull had caved in on one side. Hoarfrost caked everything, including the stacks of centuries-old fabric atop the deck and the massive curls of draft-iron cables.
“What do you think?” Graylin asked Darant. “Can you scavenge enough from the Fyredragon to repair the Sparrowhawk ?”
“I’ll get my crew to scour over her. But after sitting in that dank water for so long and frozen on top, there’s no telling how much rot and ice has damaged those planks.”
“Still, there’s hope, right? Meryk told me that the Noorish have been preserving the vessel as best they could over the two centuries. Oiling its hulls, polishing its steel and draft-iron, chipping off the worst of the ice. All to honor this shrine to their ancestors.”
Darant nodded, sizing up the ship. “It’s indeed a mountain of wood and acres of fabric. Gotta be enough in there somewhere to mend the Hawk ’s flanks and get her wings to fluttering again.”
“You should see this!” Jace called over.
Around a curve of the beach, he and Krysh searched through a swath of sand strewn with detritus. Crates and barrels lay scattered everywhere, looking as if they had been washed ashore from a shipwreck—which was partially true.
Graylin and Darant crossed toward the clutter.
Once close enough, the pirate swore. “Look at that.”
Darant rushed to the side, to where a waist-high forge engine sat in the sand. It must’ve been dragged from the ship. Darant began examining it, digging through it, likely looking for what could be salvaged from it.
Jace waved Graylin over to Krysh. The alchymist had pried the lid off a barrel. Graylin caught the whiff of a familiar spicy scent as he approached. The barrel was full of a dark emerald gelatinous liquid.
“Is that old whelyn flitch ?” he asked. He searched back toward the cavern entrance, where Meryk had remained with his skiff and orksos.
“It’s old,” Krysh admitted, swirling a finger into it, proving it was still thick but not firmly solid. “But I don’t think it was decay that softened or darkened it. I believe it’s been refined into its current state, likely centuries ago.”
“By Rega sy Noor?” Graylin asked.
“Or someone in his crew,” Jace said. “Remember, Rega’s trip was one of exploration. He traveled with a dozen alchymists. There’s a table near the far wall, piled with books on chymistry, though they’ve been molded into slabs by the cavern’s dampness. Fortunately, the titles are still legible.”
Krysh nodded. “They must have been trying to do exactly what we talked about earlier, experimenting with a new fuel for its forges.”
“Were they successful?”
Jace shrugged. “There are scores of barrels on this beach, all smelling of flitch. ”
“And there’s possibly more stacked atop the Fyredragon ’s deck.” Krysh pointed to the ship, to rows of barrels sitting there.
Darant had heard their discussion and came over. He scowled at the open barrel and dipped his whole hand in, then lifted it out. He let the viscous flitch ooze between his fingers.
“That forge over yonder has been tweaked,” Darant informed them. “The fuel lines are fatter, likely to allow this thicker sludge to flow through. And they added a bigger damper in the flame barrel. I reckon to keep the hotter burn of this flitch from blowing the whole thing up.”
“Do you think they got it to work?” Graylin asked.
“Only one way to find out.”
Darant reached again into the barrel, this time with both hands. He scooped up a good amount of flitch and carried it over to the forge, losing most of it along the way. Still, he dumped the rest into a fuel feed and waited for it to seep into the forge’s heart.
He then took Graylin’s lantern.
“Best stay back,” the pirate warned. “This lump of cold metal is four times as old as any of us.”
They all retreated, but Darant waved them even farther back.
Once satisfied, he opened the lantern and used a sliver of old wood to carry its flame to a fuel tap. He opened the valve enough to let a single drop of green flitch show, then lit it with the taper. As it caught the flame, Darant snugged the valve and dashed backward.
He didn’t get far.
The heavy forge bumped hard with an ear-pounding boom, nearly lifting off the sand.
Darant tripped onto his backside.
Ahead of him, flames belched from the forge’s baffles—then in another breath, it ignited, roaring like the namesake of Noor’s ship. It was so fierce that the engine skidded across the sand, driven by the dragon’s fire. It hit the lake, plowed through the shallows, and vanished underwater before coming to a stop.
Beneath the surface, the fires continued to burn.
They all gathered closer. Graylin helped lift Darant, whose face was cracked with a savage smile. They all stared into the water as the flames glowed brightly, boiling the shallows.
“That’ll do,” Darant said.
For far longer than Graylin would have imagined, the forge continued to burn, fueled by mere dregs of that gelatinous flitch.
By now, Meryk had raced along the beach to join them. He arrived breathless and panicked, likely fearing what had befallen them. He gaped at the boiling waters, at the fire down below.
Krysh looked over at the other barrels along the beach. “Rega was successful. But if so, then why did he and his crew remain in the Crèche? Surely, with enough time, they could’ve patched the Fyredragon. ”
Jace tried to answer. “Maybe they didn’t think about using hot air to fill their ship’s balloon.”
Krysh cast him a dubious look.
It was Meryk who offered the more likely answer. “The Noor feared the raash’ke.”
Graylin nodded, sympathetic to Rega’s dilemma. All the flaming forges and hot air wouldn’t help the Fyredragon escape the bridling song of that black horde. Or their ripping claws. No matter the number of repairs or the ingenious alchymy, Rega and his crew were trapped in the Crèche.
Just like us.