Chương 55: 2.2. Stormship

Seth plonked the thick iron tureen down on its ring stand and lifted its lid. So uncovered, the mutton stew billowed a pale aromatic cloud into the air. Annalise inhaled deep and sighed gratefully. Her hand found his waist and stilled him before he could cross to his seat.

"That smells deadly, il Gutierre," she said, and pulled him into her lap.

"I gotta get the plates," he protested.

"My man can cook," she said.

"He's got a tight little arse and he can cook." She kissed him, and he barely recognized himself in the noise he made when she nipped his lower lip. He eased away from her as the kiss entered its fifth second.

"I really gotta—" She hummed her lack of care and curled her fist into the collar of his shirt to keep him still. He laughed and shifted his face, but that only made her kisses start raining down on his nose and jaw.

"The kids are coming."

"Let 'em," she murmured against his skin, but she released him. Seth made his narrow escape; Annalise's hand landed a solid slap on his ass as he left her lap. He sat next to her, and swatted lightly back at her, and his butt tingled in an unfamiliar but lovely way. The kids are coming. There was a sentence he'd never have thought he'd say. Tiago and Ofelia approached from the nearby carriage, lugging the folding table between them.

"Tiago says Sheepfuck is the staging ground for a cloud pirate." Ofelia kicked the legs into place and set the table down.

"Do I have that right?"

"We're on a ragged edge of dome here." Tiago dug into his pack and removed a rolled-up cloth map. He unfurled it across the table, keeping it halfway off the side to avoid the drippings as the al Ydris ladies served themselves.

"You have yourself a stormship, you skirt out on the Eastern Deadwater. They're made to sail on the water as well as the sky. So you let the wind carry you south—call that a solid three weeks over sea." Ofelia carefully avoided the meat, and dolloped a scoopful of broth and caramelized onion into her bowl.

"Long trip."

"Uh huh. Sort of thing that needs full larders. Might help explain our missing sheep." As if this tangent had reminded him of his slowly cooling dinner, Tiago took up his spoon.

"So you sail down the Deadwater, hugging the shore, mostly—" He took a distracted bite of Seth's stew and paused.

"What's this?"

"Mutton," Seth said.

"Mutton doesn't taste this good."

"Low and slow, my friend," Seth said.

"And a lot of onions, and acid. Some of that red wine Feeli forgot to cork last week."

"Thus doth time gild the mystic's mistake," Ofelia said.

"And solecism is made sacred." Annalise chuckled around her fork.

"Who wrote that, love?"

"Inathi il Sarpai's Second Apologetics." Ofelia went back into the tureen for a meatier portion.

"I'd check, but I shredded it for kindling last month."

"How do you remember this stuff so well?" Seth asked.

"My third-ring passive." Ofelia touched her stomach.

"The Drooping Eye. The active rips memories out of heads to show them to me."

"Why have we never used that?"

"It gives severe brain damage on the way out," Ofelia said.

"Not the sort of side effect that makes for light usage. Mostly I took it for the passive eideticism, to be honest, and because I like how it looks." She lifted the hem of her shirt to reveal a psychedelically-patterned downcast eye blazoned across her navel.

"It seeees you," she intoned.

"You sail south," Tiago reminded them, around another mouthful of mutton.

"You fill your envelope past the Plainland with one of the outlaw reefs. or an onboard magician if you've got one. And now you're latched right into the sky artery coming up from the Kanjir floodplain and the Sarkani Territory. Right on time for the Summer season." His black-nailed finger re-enacted the fanciful voyage in a wide loop-de-loop along the map.

"You suck the legion's blood all along the mountain belts, all through the summer, then you catch a tributary wind back up the western corridor, and cut back across overland." Ofelia tilted her head owlishly.

"You'd be seen, surely." Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

"Not if you took yourself up through the craglands. And what's one of the last cragland spots before you're too far north, and you're spotted by Legion air scouts with their eyes peeled for advancing seraphs?" Tiago stabbed a finger triumphantly into the map.

"Sheepfuck." Askance silence followed this pronouncement, as they digested their mutton and misapprehension.

"I mean…" Annalise scratched her pointed nose.

"The geography makes sense. Give you that. And the statue."

"Ballast," Tiago said.

"Permissible loot to loosen, and you might need to if you're bringing on a man and three head of sheep."

"And a dog," Ofelia said.

"I'd throw the dog off a cliff, if I was a pirate," Tiago said.

"You are a nasty little person," Ofelia said.

"Anyway, I'm looking for another explanation about the statue," Tiago said.

"But how else would you carry that cracked-in-half broad up a mountainside?"

"A broad like me could manage it," Annalise said.

"There is no such thing as a broad like you," Tiago said.

"Is there no more straightforward explanation?" Seth leaned on his elbows.

"Soya mentioned those gales. Are we sure one didn't just tug him and a few wooly friends off the mountainside?" Tiago snapped his fingers. They made a thwap against his leather glovelettes.

"That's the thing. Gales getting worse these past few years. That's what convinced me. A Sarkani stormship, you fill it once at the beginning of the season, and it lives in the air for months and months." He took hold of his fork and lifted it above the table.

"It can only sink, see. Can't rise. Not without landing all the way and recasting, which our fugitives won't do." He set his fork along its journey in a slowly descending arc across his place setting.

"Now the Artery airships, they know exactly how long the trip'll be," he said.

"The breath magicians calibrate the envelopes carefully, to send their vessel forth and back in one long parabolic gust. But sky piracy, that's an inexact business with amateur magicians." He restarted the fork's path, higher and jerkier.

"You push as much storm into your envelope as'll fit. Once you slink back to your hideout, you have to vent what you didn't use. And there's only really the one way to do it, which is violently."

"Gales that can pluck a man off a mountain." Annalise pulled her pipe from its loop in her bag and stuck its stem between her teeth.

"How about that. I may have to cosign this cockamamie story of yours, boyo." She reached across the table and ruffled Tiago's hair. He begrudgingly allowed the motion for a bare second, then muttered "Okay now," and jerked away from her hand.

"So these pirates came down," Seth said.

"They picked Corbin and his animals up—why? What does he offer besides his sheep?"

"Maybe nothing," Annalise said.

"Maybe he is dead, after all. Somewhere on the rocks. Maybe it's a murder, maybe it's a kidnapping, maybe Seth's right and he leapt at something worth leaping for." Seth thought of Soya, looking into the mist.

"We can ask the man when we see him," Tiago said.

"Cause if I'm right, there's an illegal stormship around here with a pack of guilty hexis-headed freebooters aboard."

"And we can't just send a letter and wash our hands of it," Ofelia said.

"By the time the legion tasks a team, they'll have sailed away."

"Okay," Seth said.

"So we've maybe got ourselves a flying machine to find. How?"

"How else would you find a flyer that runs on ensorcelled wind?" Tiago plucked a wildflower from the ground and flicked it upward. Its petals scattered into the pallid sky.

"Follow the wind." Ofelia knew the statue before breakfast was cold. They'd tossed a few solitars to the miller to borrow his wagon, and brought the cracked woman in halves back down the ridge. It stood upright now against the rain barrel outside Karla's, its halves married at the hip with a wrapping of waxed cord, so that the marble lady leaned drunken and ersatz to one side. Feeli sat cross-legged in front of her, shadow shortened by the noonday.

A half-eaten heel of bread sat forgotten atop a pewter plate in her lap. One of her interminable collection of mutilated books lay before her on the cobbles. Its front cover had been soaked and dried and torn halfway off sometime on its journey; it proclaimed itself a PANTH OF TH SOUT SAI.

"The stone tart is St. Sahune," Ofelia said.

"The Calm of the Waters." Seth gnawed his own chunk of bread. It had a complicated chew to it and a thick crumb; maybe the elevation at play. Baking had never been his thing.

"St. Sahune strips like that?"

"In Kanjir she does," Ofelia said.

"They have a more liberated attitude toward the nipple. They keep her in the prow-niches of the river barges. You carry one so the lanes stay quiet under your keel and the water brings you back to your family." She turned a page.

"Her gown is nephrite because the floodplain runs green at the spring melt. The bared breast is the milk of safe arrival. It isn't meant to be looked at the way Tiago looked at it."

"With respect, you mean," Tiago said, from the bench where he was oiling his saber.

"You whistled."

"I whistle at fine craftsmanship," Tiago said. Seth settled beside Ofelia and studied the tranquil marble face. Up close, the chisel-and-polish craft was so fine it seemed more dreamed than carved.

"So a southern vessel carried her."

"A southern vessel up a very long way from the south." Ofelia closed the lexicon and a piece of its cardboard cover flaked off.

"And a long way from grace. No Kanjir sailor would drop a Sahune. You'd sooner pitch your own mother."" You wouldn't." Annalise tsked.

"See you try."

"Whoever took her doesn't believe she's listening anymore." Ofelia picked her bread back up and considered it.

"I agree with Tiago, is what I'm saying. Rather annoying to admit it, but I do."

"Sounds like I've got the votes." Tiago pointed the curviform edge of his steel toward Seth.

"Unless he of little faith still objects." Seth stuck his hands in the air.

"I surrender. There's sky pirates." Ofelia nibbled at the crust of her bread's heel and poked the toe of her boot into her mother's.

"You're extra-glad you have the Tower now, eh?" Annalise nailed the girl with a look.

"Whist about my tower." Seth must have had the question on his face, because Ofelia pounced on its tail: "The tower's one of Mother's hexentats, and it's—""And it's very useful," Annalise said.

"Lets me double my weight for a moment. When I need to stomp something in extra-hard or keep my footing." Ofelia nodded dismissively.

"That's the active. But the passive is why she got it." Annalise was blushing.

"Don't go spreading lies." Seth felt the need to play along and see the blush deepen.

"What's the passive?"

"It removes the fear of heights," Ofelia said.

"Mother used to hate heights."

"All right, all right. Enough." Annalise pulled her hat further over her face, to give her blush cover in its shadow.

"Finish your breakfast, you little beast, and let's go get Tiago a bird."