He was distantly aware that Lithe had put her hand on his shoulder, that she must be reaching through him too, trying to use her mentor’s skills to help.
Then something light and sharp flowed through the carving under his hand, a sudden shock, like sticking his hand into a fire. He hissed in startled fear as Lithe flinched. Then it was gone, leaving only a fading memory of the brief pain. He opened his eyes, still frowning in concentration. “I think I felt something. Or heard something. But—”
A metallic groan rose outside, so loud it overwhelmed the roar of the wind. Chime stepped to a relatively clear patch of window. All he could see was the top of the nearest wheel structure. He snarled and scraped at the crystal, then froze. The wheel was moving, falling away from them . . . No, the whole ship was falling. Whatever protected the cabin kept them from feeling it, except for the sense of their altitude rapidly dropping. He said, “Something happened!”
The floor moved underfoot and he jolted forward to bang his head against the crystal. It must have knocked him out for an instant because in his next moment of awareness he was shoved up against the window. Lithe lay crumpled in a heap beside him. The view through the crystal swam back into focus and he saw swirling water—He took a sharp breath, the spike of fear clearing his head. The wall of water towered above the skewed stern of the ship, looming over it like a mountain. He croaked, “I think we made the ship move. We hit the side of the passage.”
Lithe braced an arm on the window and pushed herself up with a groan. “Do you think that helped?”
“Maybe,” Chime began. Then another jolt rocked the cabin and metal screamed like a dying grasseater. “Uh, that sounded—”
“—like the ship is falling apart,” Lithe said and pushed up off the wall, dragging Chime with her.
Once on his feet the floor swayed. The whole cabin was unsteady, as if some of the pillars supporting it had given way. “I think we have to get out of here,” he said.
They made it down the climbing bars to the lower cabin. The view out the door confirmed Chime’s worst fear: the outer stairway was sheared off and the unobstructed view was of the sky, the blue mottled with gray in cloud patterns Chime had never seen before.
Breathless with nerves, he said, “We’ll need to climb out. Hang onto me.”
Lithe wrapped herself around him and hooked her claws in his collar flange. Chime swung out the door and scrabbled up the side of the cabin to the roof. Out here the sway of the ship was terrifying, the wind pushed at him with the force of a slap from a kethel. He had to keep reminding the part of him that was still Arbora that he could fly.
Once atop the cabin, he looked toward the dock and hissed in astonishment. The ship had snapped free of its mooring, the big cables whipping dangerously in the wind. The jolt must have been more than the ancient structure could stand, because the whole central flower-stalk column of the dock was breaking up. Sections slammed away into the wind, the curved stems and the petals of the pods breaking and tumbling out and away. He gasped, “Did we do that?”
Lithe twisted to look and tightened her hold on his collar flange. “Maybe?”
“But where is everybody?” Chime said, all the implications dawning on him. They were inside there . . .
Then Lithe said, “There’s the wind-ship!”
Chime turned and spotted the Golden Islander boat. It waggled back and forth in the tumultuous wind in a way he had never seen a wind-ship move before. It couldn’t be good.
He looked back at the dock as another graceful petal gave way with a tearing shriek. They couldn’t stay here. “We have to go to the wind-ship. Hold on.”
Lithe ducked her head down and buried it against his shoulder so she wouldn’t affect his balance. Chime braced himself, wrapped one arm around her, and thought, you can do it, you have to do it. He leapt into the wind.
It shoved him back toward the docks but he kept control of his wings and didn’t let it tumble him. He fought his way up but it was like scaling a cliff wall that rippled continuously. He told himself he wouldn’t give up but the words I’m not going to make it were in his head. At least there was no fancy flying trick that he had failed to learn; he just wasn’t strong enough to beat this wind.
Then something shot past them. Chime flinched away and fell sideways. Then Lithe shouted in his ear, “It’s a rope, from the boat!”
Chime caught the movement again in the corner of his eye and saw the rope whipping in the wind. He ground his teeth in effort, and tilted his wings. It sent him back the other way across the rope’s path. Lithe let go with one hand and grabbed, her claws sinking into the skeins.
Chime wrapped his hands around it, managed to pull his wings in, and climbed the rope. They swung wildly around, the wind still buffeting them mercilessly, but at least they knew where the wind-ship was. Then he realized the rope was pulling them up, that the wind-ship was reeling them in.
The elegant and extremely welcome shape of the bow appeared abruptly and Chime freed one hand to grab the railing. A scaled Raksuran hand caught his arm and then Lithe’s and yanked them both over the rail.
Chime collapsed on the deck, looking up at the Opal Night warrior Flash. Niran stood beside nearby, beside a winch device that had been clamped to rings on the deck. Bramble crouched on top of the rail, her claws sunk into it to hold her steady. All of them wore harnesses attached to ropes secured to the rail along the steering cabin.
“Tlar, Beran, we need harnesses!” Niran bellowed over the howl of the wind.
“Don’t get up yet,” Flash said, keeping a firm grip on Chime and Lithe. “You need ropes or you’ll be swept off the boat.”
Chime nodded, too tired to flick his spines, breathing too hard to talk. Lithe said, “Where are the others? We split up.”
“Don’t know yet,” Bramble said, all her attention on the sky as she scanned it anxiously. He couldn’t tell if her spines were flared or it was just the wind.
Tlar hurried up carrying two bundles of harness straps, already roped to the rail. She gave one to Lithe and handed the other to Chime, saying, “It doesn’t fit over wings and spiky things, but if you put it on backwards, it works.”
Chime hastily shrugged it on and figured out the way to buckle it across his chest. He fastened the strap that went around the back for Lithe, then turned so she could do his. “This is a good idea,” he managed to croak.
“Before we got everyone fastened on, Flash had to catch several people,” Tlar said. “It was very frightening.” She yanked on the ropes to make sure they were attached correctly.
Lithe pushed to her feet and gave Chime a hand up. He stumbled to the rail, his joints still trembling from the effort of fighting the wind. Then he looked down and gasped in dismay.
More pieces peeled away from the dock, circling it like dirt and grass running down a bath drain. The others are still in there, Chime thought, shocked to numbness. He hadn’t really believed it before. He had thought he would see them in the air, fighting to reach the wind-ship.
Below the docks the ground was visible, the yellow-green of a field of tall grass. It looked nothing like the frozen sea that the dock had rested in. They really had moved through a passage from the world above all the way back down to the lower continent. The wind was warmer, free of the stinging ice crystals.
Then the giant metal ship swung away into the maelstrom. Everyone on the rail screamed and ducked, but it shot back up to disappear in the roiling clouds above. Chime eased to his feet again, staring after it. If the wind-ship had still been above it, it would have smashed it like a gnat.