Chương 68: 2.15. Propeller

"After this, I came to a village called Onavail," the Blue Ekadao said.

"This was a beautiful place, with many nectarines. Have you had a nectarine?"

"Oh, yeah," Seth said, his voice raised over the rushing wind and the hard-breathing snorts of his Tondarre exchange horse.

"Love a nectarine."

"I would have spent many months there, but I was made unwelcome after two."

"I'm losing count of the villages you've been run out of, the Blue Ekadao." Seth shifted back in his saddle. His borrowed horse was a rangy chestnut courser, whose speed dwarfed Annalise al Equis's, but the ride was bumpy; if Annalise (the woman, not the horse) hadn't taught him to post in, his balls would be crowding out his tonsils.

"This one was my fault, in the main." The Blue Ekadao had an unnerving way of getting louder without getting higher.

"Everyone was so kind at the market, you see. I had a half dozen nectarines, like an egg snake devouring a nest, and then I gave a happy bow and a grateful grateful —my Territory Tongue at this time was as unseasoned as I was. And then off I waddled, and a red-faced fellow caught up with me and I learned for the first time the difference between a market-day and the harvest feasts to which I was accustomed."

"The expectation of payment." The Blue Ekadao laugh-chittered.

"Just so." That lavender scent again.

"You spot the problem quicker than I did." Seth had privately feared the ride would be arduous or awkward with this decidedly inhuman fellow passenger. To his gratified surprise, the Blue Ekadao had proven a pleasant traveling companion. Fond of talking about himself, sure, but being Seth's first sarkanian he was interesting enough that it didn't annoy, and it saved having to fish for other conversation.

"That was my first year in the Plainlands in a nutshell." The Blue Ekadao squinted into the wind. His tongue darted across his jagged teeth.

"I gained half my weight again in nectarines and sweetly marbled game, and sweated it all off scurrying from village to village. They feared me too healthfully to truly harm me, for which I am grateful to my instructor, Officiyant Duruth al Mekz."

"Did you ever have to threaten them? Hold up the fireball gesture?"

"Not in that way. I have fewer digits, you see?" The Blue Ekadao detached a claw from his reins and raised its three fingers.

"But these were not violent individuals. They acted in simple fear, to which lightning-eyed violence begins as merely a handmaiden. When one is wise, one learns to expect her advancement to governess, and make oneself scarce first." Shipfarrok's chalkstone switchbacks loomed up from the emerald grassland. They slowed their horses as the road coiled along the breaks.

"I am sure you are familiar with the tingle one gets, when the time comes to move on," the Blue Ekadao said.

"One suspects you have faced much the same." Seth's face warmed. He had hoped that his smart black clothes and his proximity to a Legion officer would reclassify him from thief to gentleman thief, and muffle whatever parts of him still screamed outlaw.

"What do you mean?"

"You're unlit. A nature less welcome even than a son of Sarkani."

"Oh." A wash of relief loosened the knot behind his breastbone.

"Of course."

"You were aware of this, yes?" The Blue Ekadao quirked his head birdlike.

"I have not surprised you?"

"No, it's just new."

"How did it happen?"

"I'm the Verdugo's boyfriend."" Her?" Sarkanian emotions remained protean and strange to Seth, but the incredulity in the Blue Ekadao's her was unmistakable.

"I thought myself habilitated to humanity, but you have given me much to learn. She seemed far more eager to twist your head off than give you her belly in ardor."

"She's… not always such a jerk," Seth said.

"She switches heads. That's her Darkness."

"Ahh." A smell like freshly cut grass from the Blue Ekadao.

"This seems complex."

"Sorta. Never boring, though."

"Surely not. It is as if you have your own knfz in one woman."

"You understand I don't know what that word means, man."

"Eh, a Sarkani thing. A result of our asymmetry. Each male has many lovers."

"Like a harem?"

"If you say so."

"I dunno if she'd be thrilled to be called that," Seth said.

"Well, maybe Lisa."

"I have thought now and then of becoming unlit for the benefit of its longevity and power," the Blue Ekadao mused.

"But this is a female pursuit in my lands, as most pursuits are besides the insemination of one's knfz. A mateable sarkanian male is quite the commodity. I am, as I have told you, in the minority."

"I remember," Seth said. It was the fourth time the Ekadao had mentioned it.

"It is not the fashion for a male to sally forth in this way. There is a perfumed tent full of eager would-be mothers who lack me."

"Sounds a bit like you're bragging, the Blue Ekadao." The Blue Ekadao's tail swished, further getting to his thoroughly gotten-to horse.

"It is a brag, yes. I am glad that came through without the scent cue." The long lozenge of the stormship sat derelict where Tiago had touched it down, in the shadow of the ridge upon which Shipfarrok sat. Grounded and inanimate as it was, it put Seth again in mind of a fish—a dead one, this time, drifted to the pooling silt. And, like a corpse, scavengers were picking at it.

"Hey," Seth murmured, and then " Hey!" as he spurred his colt into another bruising gallop. A pair of Sheepfuckians—a man and a woman—had harnessed a mule to a peeled-out edge of sheet metal, and now smoked hand-rolled marshmallow root cigs as their beast of burden grunted and pulled at the loosening panel. Seth reeled his ride to a halt and ogled the piebald patches missing from across the fuselage.

"What the hell are you doing?"

"Getting a new roof," the woman said. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Y'blew the old one down when you parked the big fucker." The man tapped his smoke's ash away.

"So, then."

"Untie your animal." Seth hopped from his horse and landed on both feet in the spongy topsoil.

"Don't touch the ship." The man hocked a loogie to the earth.

"Who're you, boy?"

"I'm Legion," Seth said, which was about as true as it needed to be.

"And that's Legion property. So get some other fucking roof, please." He jogged toward the village, leading his horse by its calfskin reins. The Blue Ekadao gave a bow to the perplexed Shipfarrok folk and rode after him. Karla the not-Corregidor was sitting with both mud-caked boots up on the fence rail in her cottage's front yard, at the center of Shipfarrok's ring of homes. She watched without alarm as Seth came to a halt by the fencepost.

It had been repaired with the heavy-gauge rivets that had once adorned the stormship's cockpit door.

"Karla," Seth said.

"What's-your-face," Karla replied.

"You were told to leave the stormship where it was until the Legion could retrieve it."

"We have," Karla said. Seth spun to take in the center of Shipfarrok's ring of homes.

"That man is saintfucking grilling on a piece of it."

"Aye, well. Cleaned it first. We cleaned it, Gunter?" The thick-browed man at the grill made a grunting sound like "Fuh." Karla nodded her satisfaction.

"You can have some cracklings, goodman, if it'll calm you down."

"That would be most pleasing," the Blue Ekadao said.

"Anyway." Karla detached herself from her porch and strolled to the improvised grill to prod at the fire beneath it.

"You left it here, and its descent knocked over half the paddocks. It's a lot to rebuild at once. And the thing's just been lying about."

"The thing is a miracle of modern fucking magitech," Seth said.

"And you're grilling on it." The Blue Ekadao diverted his attention from the sizzling meat.

"I do not mean to undermine your apposite wrath, friend il Gutierre, but most of these panels will not be needed for the brief and eventful life you've planned for this vessel." Karla folded her arms.

"What's that he means, then?"

"We are crashing the stormship into a seraph," The Blue Ekadao said. Karla snorted.

"Ah, well. Can see why you're wanting it all spick and span then."

"We're gonna push the whole way," Seth said.

"I can't have it shaking apart in the sky, Karla."

"Your lizard says it won't," Karla said.

"We will be needing this piece, however." The Blue Ekadao pointed to the rooftop Annalise had hauled a tree off when they were last in Shipfarrok.

"This is a propeller blade." Seth balled his hands into fists.

"You took the propeller?"

"All right, goodman." Karla just smirked at Seth's consternation. He wished he were Annalise's height.

"Haven't seen a stormship before, have we. We'll get that taken down and refitted, won't we, Gunter?"

"Fuh," Gunter said again, which sounded unpromising to Seth, but he was up and fetching a ladder.

"There is another somewhere," the Blue Ekadao continued.

"I saw two missing. You see by its sibling that it will be longer and thinner than the rest. It will have rivet holes on its edge." Seth inspected the scrap's narrow shape as Gunter gathered a team to retrieve it.

"Anything like that in Shipfarrok?" Karla, who'd taken over from Gunter at the grill, turned a crackling length of sheep-belly. An answer was skulking behind her eyes, trying not to show itself.

"Please, Karla," Seth said." Please. Every minute we spend on this is—""Soya il Mandrak," Karla said.

"The widow Soya il Mandrak. She has that piece." Seth was hurrying across the village into the cragland before the dread at his reunion with the widow he'd helped to make could bog his feet down. The Blue Ekadao trotted after him, bobbling a strip of crispy meat in his claws to cool it down. Soya il Mandrak stood at her pasture gate. Her dead husband's dog sat nearby, chewing a knot of rawhide. Her dead husband's propeller blade had replaced a stallion-length chunk of fence.

She had no words for the unlit man and the lizard who approached her, just a scowl.

"I'm taking it, Soya." Seth leaned partway on his guided horse to catch his breath.

"I'm sorry about what happened."

"Taking what," she demanded, flatly.

"Your—that." He pointed at the propeller metal.

"No," she said.

"You've taken enough from Shipfarrok."

"I'll pay you for it if I need to."

"What I want in repayment, you can't give," Soya said. Seth wiped his hands down his face, pulling the skin in exasperation.

"I don't have time to get into this cathartic conversation thing with you right now. I'm all out of angst and I'm running out of time." He dug through his slouch-felt satchel for a coin purse.

"I've got a fewscore here—" The Blue Ekadao stepped in front of him.

"If you do not return it, Madam il Mandrak, I will destroy you with a fireball." Soya's eyes were dull and unastounded.

"You're a sorcerer?"

"Yes," The Blue Ekadao said.

"An unkind one. My associate will tie this propeller to our horses now and take it away."

"That's how it is, then." She gathered her shoulders in.

"Legion does what it wants."

"What it must." The Blue Ekadao handed his reins off to Seth.

"Quickly, please, friend Il Gutierre." They lashed the propeller to their horses. The fence it had been built into groaned and splintered as it tugged away and tobogganed across the loam in the animals' wake. Soya watched it go with mute dispassion. Alongside his horse, Seth blew out the rest of his tension in a raspberry.

"You were kind of a tough chew there, the Blue Ekadao."

"She was behaving with no sense," the Blue Ekadao said.

"Should she complain to the authorities about the theft of her scrap metal, I'll accept whatever penalty I am assigned." He looked longways down his snout at Seth's clouded expression.

"You are displeased?"

"Thought you didn't flash that around so often. What was that you said about violence being fear's handmaiden?"

"She is," the Blue Ekadao said.

"But she has a pretty laugh for me, sometimes."

"We killed that woman's husband," Seth said.

"The al Ydrises and I. He all but asked us to, but still. I keep visiting misery on the woman. I don't love it."

"Grief is a fitting culprit for her fay mood." The Blue Ekadao patted his huffing horse.

"But her grief cannot be honored without grief compounding at Shaheill's gate."

"True enough," Seth said.

"We were rough with her. That's all."

"There is a parable among my people: to brew the fragrant fig juice one must remove the spotted fruit, even when it is the largest; otherwise the mold takes the whole concoction. Perhaps thinking on it will serve you." Seth lapsed into confused silence.

"Or perhaps not," the Blue Ekadao allowed.

"I'm sure it's quite powerful in the original translation." Seth halted their horses at the windswept lip of Shipfarrok's cliffs and they began their journey down the switchbacks to the stormship.

"I've gotten gooey and underbaked in the middle, I think. I've stolen way worse than propellers from way kinder people. Falling in love, man. It pulls weird tricks. I think giving her my heart might've changed me harder than giving her my soul."

"You have pillow sentimentality. Because of your new love." The Blue Ekadao's eternal grin grew an inch toothier.

"I hope it does not apply to the sheep, as I will need to kill a half-dozen to fuel our vessel." Seth fished out the coin purse he'd been seeking earlier and underhand tossed it to the Ekadao.

"You go on back to the village and buy as many of 'em as you need. I'll take this the rest of the way down."

"Am I paying the hexis price alone?" The Blue Ekadao asked.

"Or are we procuring the meat?" Seth chuckled.

"You're a hungry sonofabitch, aren't you?"

"My metabolism demands much of me in the cold."

"You want to bring some barbecue back to the troops, I'm sure they'd be thrilled. Get us those, and pass a few braces around to whoever they've got pulling that other propeller. We need it down here as quick as they can get it." The Blue Ekadao gave his sinuous bow and scurried back up the way they'd come. Seth was alone with the horses and the painstaking drudgework of driving them down the switchbacks.

"Heya, Saint Raike," he murmured on the descent.

"Been a stretch, hasn't it? Maybe you don't recognize me with the new color scheme. Seth il Gutierre. I'm more of a Saint Procas guy, though I barely talk to him, either. I wouldn't call in, but I figure this is a you-problem and the Saint of Salvation probably won't mind if I'm a rare caller. I'm not a saintspeaker or anything, and I haven't paid any tithe to one, so I guess this is an I. O. U. But…" Pebbles cascaded off the toe of his boot.

He cursed and weaved himself and his horses and their cargo tighter to the switchback's limestone wall.

"But if you're any sort of real and any sort of listening, then hear me," he said.

"Hear my prayer for better and worthier people than myself. Keep Anna and Ofelia and Tiago safe. Keep them whole." His team and their trailing cargo entered the stormship's shadow. No unwashed sheep farmers trying to pry his ride apart anymore, at least. Seth bent and untied the propeller from its equine honor guard.

"And if you can't do that, go talk to the Saint of Winds, whichever one that is," he said.

"Sorry, there's a fucking hundred of you. But if one of you could get me a draft and a half, I'll go kill a seraph for you. How about that? You crazy bastards love that sort of thing." With a heavy clunk the raised end of the propeller landed in the dirt.

"Not that I'm one to talk." Seth dusted his rope-raw hands on his pants.

"I reckon I'm becoming a bit of a crazy bastard myself." And he gazed upward at the great steel bulwark he was preparing to ride into a blackfeather's face, and hoped with stomach-churning desperation that they wouldn't be too late.