The guards took her and Enard roughly in hand, and she suffered a poorly done pat-down before her wrists and ankles were clasped in shackles. She cringed as the cold metal closed over the wrist of her injured palm, even that small jostling causing her some agony.
“We were assaulted…” Some bastard cuffed her on the head.
“I said be quiet,” the guard holding her bonds growled in her ear. “We can see well enough what you’ve done.”
“I–” she took another thwack to the skull. Vision slewing, she blinked her sight clear. Enard stared straight at her. He gave a slight shake of the head, and she resigned herself to silence. They had allies to call upon, eventually, but these were not them. Whether they were Radu’s, or neutral in the Remnant’s power games, it was best to keep silent. He was right, though it grated at her. No explanation could smooth away the scene these guards had stumbled upon. No doubt they’d think she’d cut her hand trying to wrestle the whistle away from the fallen guard before he could call for assistance.
It was, she realized bitterly, precisely the decision she would have come to under the circumstances. Her stomach dropped. Maybe these were Kisser’s allies, after all. Maybe she’d set them up.
Captain Lankal picked his way down the path, his expression wrought with bright anger. He glanced to Enard, to Ripka. Took in the whole scene, and shook his head with disappointment. Ripka flinched, hanging her head despite herself.
“Captain,” a guard said, and Ripka looked before she realized he was talking to Lankal. The guard held out the oilcloth pack, the top flipped open to reveal the contents. Pale, silvery grey bark in tight curls filled the interior. It was rather pretty, but Ripka could not place it. She doubted the source was native to the Scorched.
“I see,” Lankal said, prodding at the contents with a finger. “Warden will want to see this.”
The guard said, “This time of day, sir, the warden has meetings.”
The way Lankal’s expression darkened, Ripka realized the only regular meetings Radu held were with a bottle. He evaluated the angle of the sun, and nodded. “And I bet they’ve already begun. Very well. Take those two to an apothik, then throw them in the well for the night. And if either of you struggle, I’ll have the other killed first. Clear?”
“Yes, sir,” Ripka and Enard said in unison.
The captain looked a little surprised by their obedience. He took his hat off, ran his fingers through greying hair, then glanced back at the sack of curled bark. Disgust twisted his mouth. He shoved his hat back on with purpose.
Back up the unstable cliff side they were marched. Ripka’s thoughts struggled as she tried to figure out a way to explain what had happened to Radu.
Whether Kisser had betrayed them or not, she required an explanation that would not, under any circumstances, reveal the presence of Nouli Bern.
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.