Driftmetal (9 page)

“There’s a floater up ahead,” Blaylocke said, “about
two o’clock. We’re too far down and I can’t see what’s on it. We
need to get higher.”

“Doing the best I can,” I said. “Help Vilaris with
that firewood.”

“Firewood?”

Vilaris filled him in with a five-second physics
lesson.

I sized up the pile of wood he’d gathered. “Okay,
that’s plenty. There should be lots of unlit coal in the furnace
room. Get a few shovelfuls in there and burn what you can. The wood
will start faster and burn quicker until the coals get going. Now
move it.”

The two men left the command capsule with their arms
full of firewood, leaving me to coax every inch of altitude I could
get from the
Clarity
before it turned to stone. The needle
on the pressure gauge was still sinking. Even with the prop engines
pushing us vertical, we were creeping upward at a disheartening
pace. Chaz was speaking softly to himself, still tied to his chair.
I leaned forward to catch a glimpse of the floater Blaylocke had
mentioned, but all I could see past the balloon’s bulk were clouds
and the open blue of the sky. There were folds and creases inching
across the balloon’s surface, visible signs of the loss in
pressure.

I should’ve told them to let me know when they
got the furnace going
, I realized. “How you doing, buddy?” I
said, giving Chaz a smile.

He didn’t smile back this time. His brow wrinkled.
He licked his lips. “I… I don’t… know,” he said.

“Chaz? Chaz. It’s me, Mull. Do you understand
me?”

Silence, and another confused look.

“Chester,” I said. “Chester Wheatley. Is that your
name?”

Chaz sighed. His head lolled to one side. He
blinked, raised his eyebrows, closed his eyes as if enduring a bad
headache. “Without a doubt.”

“Chester,” I repeated, turning to face forward
again. “If you can understand what I’m saying, I need you to talk
to me. It’s very important.”

“What…” he said, trailing off into another sigh.

I wanted to go to him, but I didn’t dare leave the
pilot’s seat now. “You’re tied to your chair. Can you find the
knots and start untying yourself?”

Another moment of silence. “I can’t… move my
fingers. It feels stiff when I… try to tell my hands what to
do.”

“Just a little hiccup in the fine motor skills, pal.
Keep trying. You took a hard hit to the dome, but your brain knows
what to do. Concentrate.”

The needle on the pressure gauge fell into the red.
I pushed the engines past half speed and up to full. The altimeter
stopped rising, started falling. So did we. My stomach leapt into
my throat, a rush of fear and adrenaline. We were sinking, a slow
and continuous descent. All the upward thrust
The Secant’s
Clarity
could muster couldn’t prevent us from falling anymore.
Dangit Leridote, if we have to land on that Skytemple of yours,
I’m gonna be pissed
…

Vilaris came leaping down the steps, hoisting
himself by the handrails. “We got the fire going. The air’s warming
up, but it’s not hot enough yet.”

“How much longer?” I asked.

“Another minute or two.”

I bounced my knees, drummed on the armrests with my
fingers; reached for the valves, took my hands away. “Untie Chaz,”
I said after a moment. “He’s doing better. I think he understands
it when you talk to him now.”

Vilaris obeyed. “Chester? Do you know who I am?”

Chaz cleared his throat, gulped. “Yes… I can
remember. I know you.”

“What do you think?” I interrupted, feeling the
ballast pipes for warmth. “Now?”

“I don’t know. Try it,” said Vilaris.

“I can’t
try
it. If I fill the ballonets
before there’s hot air in the pipes, they’ll fill with cold air
instead and we’ll drop even faster. Here, take the helm for a
minute. I’m gonna go check.”

I leapt over the controls and darted up the steps,
taking them two at a time. On the deck, the clouds were rushing by,
heading upward too fast now for comfort. I descended into the aft
cabin, where Blaylocke sat tending the fire. His face had a dour
look, black smudges and fingerprints across his eyes and nose.

“How’s it looking?” I asked, crouching to get a look
at the furnace myself.

“Fine.” He was listless, his face a mask of
sorrow.

I felt the exhaust pipe and the lines that snaked
across the ceiling toward the command capsule. Both were hot to the
touch. “We’re going to be alright. Just keep that fire going, and
keep it as hot as you can.”

Blaylocke nodded, staring into the flames as though
he hadn’t heard me.

“What’s the deal with Blaylocke?” I asked Vilaris
when I’d returned to the controls. I was already cranking the
valves to start the ballonets filling.

Vilaris gave me a knowing glance. “Is he still
looking miserable back there? We couldn’t find kindling to start
the fire with, so Gareth had to use parchment paper… including a
letter he’d written to his wife. When we started falling, he got
pretty upset. He was like, ‘
We won’t survive this time. This is
it. It’s the end.
’”

“How was he planning to mail letters to a hidden
city that nobody knows about?”

“He was going to write to her every day, like a
journal of sorts, and give her the letters when we got back.”

I shut my mouth. I didn’t know what it was like
having a family you
wanted
to get back to. Not anymore. I’d
only been away from my parents for a few weeks, but I could say
without reservation that they’d been the best few weeks of my
life—torture and other hardships aside. Being on your own was the
absolute
nuts
, as far as I was concerned. I didn’t need
anyone, I told myself, unless they had the potential to be of use
to me. Blaylocke was weak, and that gave me another reason not to
like him.

Soon we stopped sinking and leveled out. After a
minute, the ballonets filled up with the warm smoky air from our
impromptu fire, and we began to rise again. I rotated the engines
to push us forward, knowing I’d have to use engine thrust alone to
control our altitude now. We collided with a thick head of clouds
and found ourselves engulfed in a pocket of obscuring mist. I sent
The Secant’s Clarity
rising faster, wanting to escape the
feeling of sightlessness before anything else went wrong.

When we cleared the tops of the clouds, they became
a carpet below our feet. The airship seemed nothing more than an
insect, soaring over the soft white blooms of a cotton field.
Grand, stately floaters drifted on skyward currents, massive
islands replete with sprawling towns and palatial cities that
dotted the blue as far as we could see. Against all odds, we’d
reached the stream.

I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder. It was Chaz,
standing behind me, unsteady on his feet. Vilaris was supporting
him on the other side. There were tears in his eyes. “I never
imagined it could look like this.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty great, isn’t it,” I said.

“It’s a whole ‘nother world.”

“Looks can be deceiving,” I said. “Especially for
you guys.”

Vilaris was in a similar state, his eyes wide and
shining with the reflection of the sky. “So… what do we do
now?”

“We pick one.”

We let Chaz pick. He chose the closest, easiest
landing spot, a massive floater I recognized as Mallentis, home to
the twin cities Hibantya and Eulaya. Each city sat high up on its
own plateau, the two joined together by a series of colossal steel
bridges that spanned the canyon running between them. We got
bluewave clearance from the crow’s nest and touched down in the
wide valley that ran out from the canyon like a river delta, a
grassy field strewn with airships.

Travelers too poor to afford accommodations in the
cities were camped out at their ships, chatting and carrying on
like the attendees of some big peace festival for land-huggers.
Multi-bagged helium dirigibles sat beside sleek hoverships and
small, lightbulb-shaped hot air balloons with brightly-colored
skins. There were sleek streamboats of every size, copters and prop
planes, and even a few gliders.
The Secant’s Clarity
looked
like a greasy rag in a sea of silk robes, its hull sundered, its
plain envelope sagging over the two ballonets within.

“Someone should stay with the ship,” I suggested,
after we’d secured the mooring lines and located the hole where the
crossbow quarrel had pierced the skin of the balloon.

“I’ll go with you,” said Vilaris. “Gareth and
Chester should stay here and get some rest. Stay on the bluewave,
Gareth. And be sure to listen in on Muller’s sub-signal, too.”

Neither of the men objected, so Vilaris and I made
our way toward the canyon as the afternoon shadows lengthened on
the cliffs. A set of elevators ran up each side, bullets of
gleaming brass rocketing hundreds of feet through open shafts lined
with pulsing blue lights. The elevators on the left took passengers
to Hibantya; the ones on the right, to Eulaya.

“Which way?” asked Vilaris.

“Depends. You want to buy a streamboat or rent
one?”

“What’s the difference, price-wise?”

“That’s like asking how much food costs. How much of
it do you want? What kind? Do you want to wash your own dishes?
There’s no simple answer unless you can be more specific.”

“We charter a fifty-foot ship, complete with captain
and crew. Or we buy that same ship and hire each crewmember
separately. How much of a difference are we talking?”

“Okay… roughly? About a year’s salary. Now, if it
takes us longer than a week or two to find Gilfoyle, your rental
costs go up. And this is all assuming we don’t let slip that you
three are… who you are. It costs extra to keep mouths quiet, you
know.”

“Right. So you know some people? Some sailors, I
mean? What do you recommend?”

“I say we go both ways. That sounds bad—let me
explain. Eulaya is where the rich folks live. The smaller of the
two cities, the less crowded, and the more exclusive. Anybody who
owns a streamboat worth buying will be there. Once we have our
boat, we cross over to Hibantya and round up a crew of the most
despicable, cutthroat sailors we can find. And we put an ear to the
ground for information about Gilfoyle’s whereabouts while we’re at
it.”

We veered to the right at the edge of the airfield,
where a handful of gypsies was dancing around a raging pit fire,
while a dozen more sat in the shadows of their airships looking
on.

Vilaris gave the gypsies a wide berth. “I hope you
don’t plan on hiring anyone too despicable. No… pirates, or
anything.”

I scoffed. “Pirates. What
is
a pirate,
really? You’ve never stolen anything in your life?
You
might
be a pirate, for all I know.”

“If having stolen something were the only criterion,
most people would be pirates. You, especially.”

“I beg your pardon,” I said. “I prefer to think of
myself as a commodities appropriation and merchandising
specialist.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

I shook my head. “Pirates steal for glory and
adventure. I steal for no reason at all, and regardless of whether
it’s necessary.”

Vilaris rolled his eyes.

We approached the elevators that would take us up to
Eulaya. A squad of green-clad customs officers stood by, processing
the tourists, merchants, and cargo shipments that were coming and
going. The narrow canyon was filled with them; crowds of people and
their wagons and carts carrying all manner of trade goods and
supplies. We waited in what passed for a line while the sun began
to throw rays of pink and orange across the clouds. Soon one of the
officers, a tall thin man in a stiff green suit, stepped toward us
with a clipboard and pen in his hands.

“Welcome to Mallentis, gentlemen,” said the man.
“Are you citizens or visitors?”

“We’re all citizens of the world, aren’t we, my good
man,” I said. “Say, how tall are these cliffs, here?”

“On this side, close to three-hundred feet. On the
Hibantya side, a little over two-hundred. Now—”

“The easier for the haves to look down on the
have-nots, eh? Which side do you live on? You’re a Hibantyan, I’ll
bet.”

“That’s right. Now, sir, I need—”

“I knew it. A man of the people. I figured on that
the second I saw you. What’s your name, old chap?”

“Andrew Partridge,” was all I gave the officer time
to say.

“Andrew… Hal Nordstrom.” I took Andrew’s clipboard
and shook the hand that had been holding it. “Pleased to meet you.
Heavens bless men like you, who work so hard to keep this place
organized and on the level for the upstanding businessmen of the
world. Thank you so
very
much for your service. Say, we’re
in need of a little help. Would you be so kind?”

“Certainly, but first—”

I handed him the clipboard without stopping to take
a breath. “We’ll be wanting a quick bite and some rousing
conversation. Do you know a place that can offer us both? Cost is
no object. My friend here is a moneyed man.” I prodded Vilaris with
an elbow. “Not a working stiff like you and me. Truth be told, I
can’t stand the fellow. Wretched man. Wouldn’t know a hard day’s
work if it slapped him in the face. Look at him. Can’t you see it
in the way he carries himself? He puts on airs, what with the
shaggy beard and unwashed appearance. And yet, do you see how new
these clothes are? Exactly the way a wealthy man
would
disguise himself. Any suggestions for a lively place where this
deplorable creature and I might dine this evening, Andrew, old
friend?”

“There’s the Crescent Restaurant, The Hart’s
Antlers, and the Cliffline Resort. Those are where I’d go if money
were no object. But sir, please—”

“That’s very kind of you, Andrew. Now don’t misjudge
me: I myself am guilty of having come into a little extra coin
every now and then, but every chip of it is thanks to a generous
helping of hard, honest work. If we weren’t only passing through
for the night to pick up a few supplies for the voyage home, and
you weren’t otherwise engaged, I’d offer to take you with us in
thanks for your dedication to the safety of Mallentis. That’ll have
to wait for next time, however. We’ll be sure to call on you when
we’re in town again. You can show us the sights, and we’ll show you
a good time. How does that sound?” I turned to Vilaris. “Be sure to
give Andrew here a generous tip, will you, you wealthy son of a
gun?”