The keel was cracked amidships. He could feel the fibers of the timber grinding back and forth against each other, like the two bones in a badly broken arm. But the crack didn't extend right through. There should be enough support for him to bring the ship down in one piece… if he was careful. If he applied too much force, or turned the ship too sharply, the damaged keel would part, and then there'd be nothing even the ultimate helm could do to save it. Carefully, he started to pull the Boundless out of its stern-first plunge.
The ship jolted sideways-none of his doing!-threatening to rip the keel in two. Blossom!
"Get her off the helm!" the Cloakmaster screamed, loud enough to tear his throat and bring the bright copper taste of blood into his mouth. In an instant the spurious motions were gone, and he recognized that the ship was again entirely his.
Carefully-oh, so carefully-he started to apply forward power. With the stem of the vessel pointing downward, that began to slow its fall. He felt timber strain, felt the keel shift a fraction of an inch, another dozen wood fibers shearing under the stress. Then he started to bring the bow down-a couple of degrees a second, no faster. He tried to gauge how far they still were above the mountains below, but realized instantly that even that slight shift of his attention decreased his control over the ship's motions.
"Get Blossom to call out the altitude," he croaked to Djan, and heard the half-elf relay the instructions down the speaking tube.
He could feel Blossom sitting on the helm. She was no longer trying to exert any influence on the ship, but he could sense her extended perception overlapping his. He didn't need Djan as a relay when she announced, "Ten leagues."
Slowly he continued to push the squid ship's bow over. He tried adding a touch more forward force, instantly felt the damaged keel complain, and backed off again.
The ship's attitude was still forty-five degrees stern-down. But now the hull was exposing more surface area to the strong wind that whipped through the atmosphere envelope. He felt their downward speed start to diminish further… as the strain on the keel increased again.
"Four leagues." Even through the-artificial calm that connection with a helm brought, he could hear the fear in the woman's voice.
He didn't have much time left. The ship had a huge amount of speed; there was nothing he could do to bleed it all off, he knew. It's make or break, he told himself. He forced the bow over even harder.
He felt his stomach lurch and his feet almost leave the deck as the ship pivoted around an axis running horizontally through its beam. He felt and heard the screaming of tortured timber. But now the ship was horizontal, falling keel-first through the sky.
"Two leagues."
Still he pushed the bow over, until the Boundless had fifteen degrees of downward pitch. He felt the air catch the spanker sails bracketing the stern, felt the wooden supports take the strain. He fought the ship's desire to flip into a vertical bow-down attitude. Wood and canvas screamed a banshee wail.
It was working. With the spanker sails catching the wind, some of the ship's downward speed was being converted into forward velocity. If the spanker sails didn't tear loose, and if the keel didn't part… Again he added a touch more forward power.
The wind was a howl around him. He knew that, with the main helm effectively inactive, the ship's atmosphere envelope would collapse if he released control. Then the speed of their flight would tear the masts away, fling everyone on deck over the stern, even peel the decks themselves away from the hull.
"One league."
We really might make it! He knew it with sudden clarity. The ship was still in a screaming dive, but it was traveling bow first now. He had control of both its attitude and its heading. He started to bleed off speed with feather-touches of reverse power. Wood ground against wood as the keel flexed. If the keel were ever going to let go, now was the time, as his attempts to decelerate effectively tried to compress the Boundless along its longitudinal axis.
But the magnificently strained keel held. The death scream of the wind faded to a faint whistle. Then it fell silent as the ship's air envelope reasserted itself over the slipstream. The ship still was at a fifteen-degree angle and he didn't think he could pull it up again without tearing the vessel in two, but at least the speed was down to manageable levels.
"Altitude," he croaked.
"Two thousand feet," he heard Blossom gasp. Then she shouted, "Mountains!"
But he'd already seen them, some of the peaks reaching several thousand feet above the deck of the squid ship. By sheer luck, he'd brought the Boundless in along the line of a steep-sided pass between the highest of the peaks. Less than a league to one side or the other of their present course, and the ship would have been smashed to splinters against the rocky slopes.
What in Paladine's name am I going to do? Teldin asked himself. The squid ship was designed solely for a water landing, but there wasn't any water for dozens of leagues, and he knew he wouldn't be able to keep the stricken ship in the air for much longer before something critical failed.
So be it, then, a ground landing it had to be. He knew all too well what it would do to the ship, but his sole concern now was the lives of his friends and his crew.
He looked below the ship for a flat place to land, but couldn't spot anywhere suitable. The pass was actually a V-shapeed valley, with boulders-some as large as farmhouses-around the bottom. To bring the ship down there would be to court disaster.
The pass was narrowing ahead of the ship, he saw, the valley floor rising in altitude until it merged with a high rampart of mountains two leagues or so directly ahead. He was running out of time.
Teldin tried to slow the ship further, managed to bring it down to little more than a walking speed. But each second of flight, he could feel the stress increase on the keel. The cracks in the heavy wood had spread and were on the verge of fracturing the ship's "backbone" at any instant. The Boundless is doomed, he recognized, no matter what I do. The only question is, can I keep us alive? He let the big ship descend several hundred feet for a better view of the terrain.
The walls of the valley were precipitous-forty-five degrees or even steeper, he judged-covered with a thick blanket of trees. The only places where he could see gaps in the forest were where large outcroppings of red-brown rock jutted out of the mountainsides.
The trees will tear the bottom out of the hull, he thought, probably killing us. But if I hit one of those rock outcroppings, we're definitely dead. He smiled mirthlessly. Yet again, circumstances seemed to be conspiring to force him onto a path he hated.
"Open space ahead!" Julia screamed.
Teldin focused his enhanced perception ahead of the squid ship.
Yes, she was right. A quarter of a league ahead, the right side of the pass leveled out, forming a kind of shoulder. For some reason, no trees were growing there, revealing a verdant meadow almost a hundred yards across. The grass-or whatever it was-seemed totally flat, without even any rolls or hummocks.
Perfect. He started to turn the ship around so that its bow pointed directly toward the meadow. Simultaneously, he let the vessel's altitude creep down, while trying to decrease the speed even further.
Almost there. Just a few more ship-lengths, and he could set the Boundless down. The upper branches of the tallest trees whipped the underside of the hull. Even those minor impacts sent shudders through the tortured keel that Teldin could sense plainly. Just a hundred feet more…
And there was the meadow, right below the bow. Teldin tried to bring the ship to a hover, but as he applied the reverse force, he felt the sickening crack as the keel gave way. His control started to evaporate as the ship ceased to be a ship, becoming instead a broken-backed wreck. With the last vestige of control, he forced the ship's bow down so it couldn't overshoot and plow into the trees beyond.