Red sky at morning
Life at sea can be quite exciting. For the chief engineer of the steam barque Clarion Adamant, the day begins with a pleasant surprise and then ends... well... rather more thrillingly. It's all easier to deal with when you have a warm bed and a good companion.
Life at sea can be quite exciting. For the chief engineer of the steam barque Clarion Adamant, the day begins with a pleasant surprise and then ends... well... rather more thrillingly. It's all easier to deal with when you have a warm bed and a good companion.
A sequel to "A grey dawn breaking" and "Storm warnings," as the steam barque Clarion Adamant continues on its voyage. The further you go from safe harbor, the closer you get to the great unknown... This has a little more plot, a little more worldbuilding, and a few new characters. No, don't worry, you don't need to keep track of them all :P As always, share and enjoy, and please chime in with criticism and feedback! If you like the story, that makes me happy. If you don't like it, the only way I can get better is if you tell me.
Released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. Share, modify, and redistribute -- as long as it's attributed and noncommercial, anything goes.
"Red sky at morning" by Rob Baird
Most of the Clarion Adamant's crew were sailors by trade; they had no knowledge of steamships. Once, staring at the machinery, captain Gethet Issich had asked if the big side-lever engines ever became comforting. If, watching their operation as the ship cruised sedately along, they were somehow hypnotic.
They were not. Milus Elerring, who had spent two thirds of his life around steam engines, still found them objects of terrifying awe. In the engine room, he was separated by a heavy bulkhead from the big furnaces that fed the side-lever engines, but even still the sound was a constant low roar that soaked into the burly chief engineer's bones until the bear heard it everywhere -- even safe in bed, ashore.
They'd been at sea for a week. By now his body had become used to the swing of the shifts -- four hours on, eight hours spent trying, and mostly failing, to sleep. Milus stared into the darkness above his bunk. He did not need an alarm to wake on time: he knew instinctively that it was only fifteen minutes before he was expected to be back below.
A grunt from next to him told him that his companion had noticed his return to consciousness. Milus turned; it was too dark to see, but he felt for Rolen's body in the darkness. The husky grunted again. "Up early."
Later -- when high seas kept them all under constant stress and they'd been sailing so long they no longer remembered the feeling of dry land -- the crew would tumble straight from their beds into something approximating wakefulness. They would rouse themselves fully on the shambling walk to their posts. They would sleep without knowing it, in thirty-second intervals on the ropes.
But for now, Milus chuckled tiredly, and turned to wrap the husky up in a tight hug with his shaggy arms. "You're up late," he teased.
Rolen huffed, and his tongue found Milus's nose, giving it a soft lick. "I wasn't. You know I'm a light sleeper... When do you go back on? Now?"
"Fifteen minute 'r so?"
"You look tired," Rolen snickered, and kissed the bear on the lips. "You need some help waking up?"
Milus grumbled noncommittally, and then he felt a paw searching lower, through his thick fur... stroking his belly... the bear arched his back, and when he felt Rolen's fingers folding around his sheath he surrendered with an encouraging groan. Fifteen minutes would be long enough...
The husky served with the deck crew, but his fingers were still soft and searching, insistently tugging and squeezing at the shaft throbbing larger and larger in his grasp. "Good boy," Rolen giggled playfully, and then wriggled beneath the covers, disappearing from the bear's sight, leaving only the quickening strokes of his paw.
Before Milus could comment on the husky's absence, he felt wet, silky warmth curling around his cock. Rolen had a dog's tongue, long and broad, and as Milus groaned he worked it over every inch of the bear's heavy length. The husky lapped at him hungrily, so diligently that Milus wanted to ask if he had missed the previous night's supper. But, buried beneath the blanket, Rolen could not have heard.
Wet lips parted around the bear's cock, and he felt Rolen suckling on him gently, his tongue working in circles around the pointed tip. The big man shuddered and started to buck his hips gently, working in time to the bobbing strokes of his husky's muzzle as it slurped wetly over him.
Milus had no intention of holding back; he didn't have the time, anyway. The muscles of the bear's broad thighs tensed. He felt for Rolen's head beneath the blanket, holding it in place as he began to thrust urgently into the canine's tight muzzle. The husky knew what was coming -- sucking harder, his nimble tongue dancing lightly right at the tip where the bear was most sensitive.
He let out a guttural groan as the pleasure of the husky's wet maw overwhelmed him, his broad paws grabbing desperately for the blankets. His throbbing shaft jerked and pulsed, thick spurts of his musky seed painting the roof of the dog's muzzle. He felt Rolen swallowing everything he had to give him, until the bear was merely twitching; then he gave a parting lap, and wriggled back up to face Milus.
"Feeling better?" he asked.
The bear could smell the scent of fresh seed on his breath. "Aye," Milus muttered thankfully, and gave him another kiss. "You get back to sleep, dear. Next shift starts 'fore you know it."
"I know..." Rolen let him go, and then nudged him from the bunk with his knee. "Take care down there, big guy..."
It had been like that for three years. Milus was torn. He liked the husky's company -- some parts of it in particular, he admitted with an inward laugh. At times he longed for something a bit less ephemeral, but Rolen was too young to want to settle down, and Milus was not naïve enough to think that there was much room for permanence in the life of a sailor.
Before he descended into the engine room he stopped by the galley, long enough to grab a thick stone mug of coffee. It was the coffee that had kept him aboard Issich's ship. His friends in Harradon had long since moved to the steamer trade, but steam captains were odd -- too corporate, too starched. Issich at least knew to keep his crew in coffee and tobacco.
It wasn't good coffee, but he inhaled the smell deeply and let the steam warm his sinuses. Then he tramped down the steep metal stairs into the bowels of the Clarion Adamant.
When the ship's engines were new they had been a marvel of engineering. They were of the side-lever type; the steam cylinders pushed on long rods that turned the big paddlewheels. She had two engines, one for each side -- in this way, with one paddle turning forward and the other in reverse, she could be made to steer faster than with sails or rudder alone.
Other designs had surpassed the barque's engines, at least to some degree, but Milus still considered them to be a work of art. They were perfectly machined, and when they were warm they ran nearly silently -- just the snickering rhythm of the rods as they went about their incessant business, never faltering.
"You're relieved," he told the man at the gauges, tapping his shoulder gently.
The tension went out of them at once; he sagged. "Fuck, I'm definitely relieved," the feline sighed, and then gave a yawn that bared his sharp fangs widely. "Thanks, boss."
"Anything I should know about?"
The other man shook his head. "Running just fine. Not even a change of throttle from the boys up top, bloody sundrenched bastards."
"Tis dark outside. Sun won't be up while another two hour."
"Well, you know what I mean."
"Get some sleep, Semmis. Hadaway," Milus grinned, and clapped him on the shoulder again. The cat grinned back, and made his exit, leaving Milus alone with the machines he thought of very nearly as his children.
He did not have a large crew. A proper steamship would have a full coal gang shoveling, stoking the boilers. It was an art -- Milus had learned it at his first job, as a fireman for the Carregan Transcontinental Railroad. Long days on the mainline, gliding east under a blistering sun to the river Sheyib, had taught him well.
The coal in the bunkers came in chunks the size of the bear's head -- or larger. They needed to be broken down to the proper size for efficient combustion. The result needed to be spread just right on the grate, so that the coal would burn evenly and the ash would fall clean. It was a menial, numbing job -- but it took skill, and a skilled crew.
There were no such workers in Milus's gang. Instead, the Clarion Adamant had two of RM Keering's Patented Mechanical Stokers, which were supposed to do the job just as well. They drew coal from the hoppers, ground it up, dumped it into the big boilers -- the whole affair, one machine for each side of the hull.
The result was not as efficient as a real stoker; the coal didn't burn as well, and the boilers were less responsive to quick changes. But it meant that instead of a crew of twenty stokers, the ship only needed a handful of people to supervise the work and to clear jams. Begrudgingly, Milus understood why Issich had made the choice.
Issich was, in general, a smart man. Occasionally, Milus thought, he tended to let himself be led by his heart. There was, for example, the matter of these pilgrims. They were paying their way, Milus supposed -- rather handsomely, if rumors were to be believed. But they were demanding that the ship sail westward quite near to the edge of the world, and now the self-same rumor machine said they were being pursued by ships of the Royal Navy.
And what, he thought, was Issich going to do when they reached the Meteor Islands and discovered that there was no coaling station there? Good god, sometimes Milus couldn't believe the senior staff and their curious optimism about the world. He'd told the boatswain, and Jenssa had chuckled knowingly. They would probably be making their way back under sail, hoping for favorable winds.
Milus believed in coal. He believed in it at least as much as he believed in the gods of the Aernian pantheon -- anyway, at least coal behaved predictably. So he had invested in a company that was planning to export coal to the Meteor Islands; it was not finished yet, and would not be until the steam-powered coastal trawlers found the courage to venture further west.
A clang sounded from the engine telegraph. Milus glanced over to it: whoever was standing watch had ordered the ship's engines to full speed. He turned up the governor on the Keering stokers, keeping an eye on the steam pressure gauges. They had plenty of power -- it was a perfectly ordinary maneuver, and he kept the steam up for such occasions.
But maybe it was more exciting. The topside crew told fantastic stories: whales the size of dreadnoughts pacing the ship to either side, pirates off the starboard beam they'd had to outrun, lightning striking the mainmast and just barely sparing the hapless bastard in the crow's nest.
Most of this was undoubtedly complete bullshit. Sailors had a pathological aversion to telling the truth, after all -- if one told you the whale had been thirty meters long, you could safely assume it was twenty. And Milus had been known to exaggerate once or twice himself. But sometimes...
The bear entertained the thought of fantastic adventures until he felt the ship heeling over. So they were tacking, probably, and using the engines to keep up speed until the ship could be brought through the headwind that was trying to blow it sternward. Sure enough, a few minutes later the telegraph rang again, and they wanted the throttle slowed.
But though the shift could be monotonous, it never lulled him into complacency. He was keenly aware of the driving rhythm of the side levers, and could've reported the pressure in the cylinders to anyone who asked at a moment's notice. No, it was never hypnotizing.
So it was that he heard the sound from the hatch above him before the door opened -- fingers scrabbling for the latch and pulling against heavy hinges. Milus looked up, his ears flicking. It was only a little over halfway through his shift, and visitors were not common in the engine spaces.
The hatch swung open and admitted someone he took at first for a child, before he decided that she was merely short of stature. A white wolf with hair pulled back in a bun and glasses that gave her a matronly air despite her size. She was panting, taking the stairs two and three at a time -- stumbling on the last one so that she nearly fell into him, and he had to catch her.
"Where're you goin'?"
The wolf looked up, struggling for breath. "Looking -- chief engineer -- need to --"
"Well, you've found 'im, duck." He sized her up again; she was not dressed like a sailor. Besides, her snowy fur didn't have the grime and the grease of a working man. "Civilians aren't allowed below decks, love; best get back topside."
She shook her head vehemently. "Can't -- emergency. Your coal -- you burn -- is your --"
Milus stepped back, and put one of his huge paws on her shoulder. "Calm down, duck. What's going on?"
At first she bared her fangs, and Milus lifted an eyebrow. Then his guest thought better of it, flattening her ears and shutting her eyes tightly for a few deep gasps of breath. "The coal you burn. Symbiotic?"
"What? No, of course not." Some of the more reckless captains were known to have their coal enchanted -- catalyzed by magic so that it burned hotter, more efficiently. This was a dangerous practice, illegal and immoral in the Iron Kingdom, and Issich would never have stood for it. "It's pure, straight from Tilladen. Nowt to worry about."
The wolf frowned; she did not seem particularly mollified. "Then..."
"Then what?"
She was wearing a corset, but the stately look was ruined by a few leather pouches hanging from a tightly cinched and not terribly well-fitting belt below it. She fumbled one open, and pulled a small brass device from it. It had a dial like a compass, with a semi-circular gauge like an open, grinning mouth along the lower half. The needles of both were swinging lazily. "I was... I was getting thaumaturgic readings when I was above here..."
"Well, aye..." He didn't get what was so upsetting about this. It was true that magicworking was not especially popular in the Kingdom, and blending magic and technology was frowned upon. But they respected the limits, didn't they? He trusted that morose panther, Rettari Halvas. "T'boilers an' fittings are reinforced with spells, sure."
"You need to shut the engines down." The wolf could not have been more than five feet tall standing on her tiptoes, and Milus was nearly seven, but still she spoke with a she-wolf's well-practiced imperiousness.
"The captain tell you that?"
He could see her bite her cheek, muffling a curse. When she spoke, though, it was deadly calm. "We're sailing into a thaumaturgic eddy. Apparently you don't have those on your charts."
"A what?"
She growled. "I don't have time to explain this. It's a place where thaumaturgic effects become unpredictable, or... or stop completely. If you're reinforcing your boilers with magic, the spells could come apart."
"They never 'ave before," Milus told her. "An' me an' me boilers've been through some proper bad weather, love. I bet this is your first time at sea, aye?" He tried to make his voice sound as calm and soothing as possible.
"No. Well -- yes -- but that doesn't matter. Listen to me, we're..." She glanced down at the device. "It's already growing weaker. Please, trust me, I'm a scholar." She held the thing up, as though Milus could make a damn bit of sense from it. "Look, we don't have much time. At least slow down until I can explain it to you?"
The chief engineer thought of himself as a scientist -- logical to the end, always looking for the most reasonable explanation for anything that happened aboard ship. But there was nothing a sailor trusted nearly so much as his instincts, and even if he didn't understand the diminutive wolf she did seem to genuinely believe something was wrong. Keeping his eyes on her, he uncapped the speaking tube and blew into it. "This is t'engine room. Everything fine up there? We're on course? Only felt t'one tack, aye?"
"Everything's fine," the muffled voice answered. It sounded like Karn Gebbenbech, another wolf -- and a slightly less excitable one. "Steady wind from the starboard beam; we're making good time. I came upwind earlier on a new course with better sailing. Meteorologist told me to head there."
The Clarion Adamant did not have a real meteorologist, so Milus had to assume he was talking about the slender, well-dressed stoat he had been tagging along with since the start of their journey. Karn had said she studied "the weather, or so," and given a vague wave of his paw. Still, he was up on deck, and could see their conditions, and he didn't seem to think that anything was the matter. But gut instinct gnawed at the big bear. "I need to back off the engines a bit to check something. Fair warning."
Even this didn't faze the other man. "Sure thing, chief. We can hold her with the sails for now." He was in a good mood, better than he'd been in a few weeks. Milus imagined the second mate was probably getting laid regularly.
"Thank you," the white wolf said, her voice finally softening.
"Mi'n't do owt yet," Milus pointed out. He leaned over to check the pressure gauge. "See? Ninety pound in the pipe." But even as the bear watched, the needle wavered: 89... 88... 87... "Huh. Well, that's a bi'od, ennit?"
"What?"
He tapped the gauge. Eighty. He hadn't yet started turning down the speed of the Keering stokers -- there was no reason they should be losing steam. "Tis a bit odd," he tried enunciating for her benefit. Erring on the side of caution, he turned down the rate of operation on the stokers, which would with some delay calm the furnaces in the boilers. "Gorra figure out why we're losin' pressure, lass. Stand back, why don't ye?"
She stood to the side obligingly, and he spun the hatch that separated his engines from the steam plant on the far side. It was a heavy iron thing, but it swung easily. Sound and heat roared over them; he had to shout to be heard. "Oy! Who's in 'ere?"
Six huge boilers lay below them -- big, round hulking things. The furnace doors clattered and banged in a steady rhythm as the mechanical stokers made their rounds -- and the darkness below the catwalk flickered with intermittent hellfire.
They stood ten feet above it, though not far enough to be insulated from the heat and the noise. Further ahead, in the middle of the boiler room, lay the control panels, from which one person could monitor the whole thing.
A badger, his face completely black from coal dust, leaned around its edge, peering at the pair through narrowing eyes. "That you, chief?"
Milus pulled the hatch closed again and strode over. "We're down on pressure forward. Problem wi' t'coal, boy?"
Adan Hartfellow shook his head. "None here, boss. Take a look."
He heard the wolf's boots tramping on the metal catwalk behind him as the pair made their way around the panel assembly. Gauges measured the speed of the conveyor belts from the coal hoppers, the weight of coal in the bunkers and the water level, and the cycling of the furnace doors.
No, there was nothing much out of the ordinary. There was plenty of water left. His ears caught nothing irregular in the sound of the stoking machinery. Perhaps there was a leak, though; leaks meant trouble. "Right. Well. Adan, you go forward an' check one an' four." Even two feet away, he had to raise his voice.
Adan nodded and headed back in the direction of the engine room hatch, to where two catwalks branched out to the gauges for the individual boilers. The white wolf looked to Milus: "What are we doing?"
He started heading aft, so that he could take a closer look at the other boilers. "Looking for leaks," he told her, when they reached the junction of the aftermost catwalk. "We'll check the pressure gauge; see if we can 'ear any escaping steam."
"Does that sound like a whistle?"
He paused, turning to her. "It could?"
"Not like the one you hear now, though?"
Milus's heart skipped a beat. He couldn't hear anything: long, noisy years had taken their toll on his ability to hear high-frequency sounds. The wolf looked young -- and their hearing was good anyway, wasn't it? "I don' 'ear anythin'..." he trailed off, cautiously.
The wolf's ears flicked and swiveled, brow furrowing in concentration. "It's over that way." She pointed next to them, at boiler three, the furthest aft boiler on the ship's port side. "Getting louder."
Then he could hear it too: a high-pitched whistle that slipped into one's ear like a stiletto. But boiler three was in good shape. They'd just overhauled it three trips before -- a new outlet valve, new riveting. Rettari Halvas had even... Milus's thoughts froze. It was the first boiler that Halvas had played a complete hand in refitting. Every plate in the damned thing would be soaked in magic.
Abruptly the whistle broke into a tortured wail -- and he could see the steam scouring the wall. It was under pressure, at a temperature of four hundred degrees. Milus yelled over it, trying to still his panic: "Adan! Get out!"
He couldn't see the badger, who was hidden by the big control panel, but he heard the man's voice. "What's the matter? What just happened?"
"Get the fuck out of 'ere!" Milus screamed. The wolf was frozen in shock, staring. He grabbed her arm and ran, as quickly as he could. He could tell it would not be enough -- the sound of the escaping steam was shifting, becoming unstable. Beneath it he could hear his every footfall: a loud, dull thud echoing in his ears.
He used his free hand to grab for the edge of the control panel, pivoting around it, the wolf a heavy weight on his other arm. His foot came down awkwardly, he stumbled, and heard the sound of a gunshot from behind them -- the rivets were starting to let go.
Too late, he had time to think, darkly. He shoved the wolf to the catwalk on the far side of the console, heard her yelp in pain, and flung himself down atop her. The world ended a half-second later: a deafening crash, a rush of heat, and the high-pitched banshee screaming of a dying monster.
It was, indeed, only the screaming that convinced him he was not dead. Pressure on his wrist -- he looked up. Adan was pulling him back to his feet, dragging the pair towards the open hatch. Milus forced his muscles to work -- somehow, stumbling blindly forward. His shin caught the entrance awkwardly; pain jolted through his leg, and he tumbled again. He rolled onto his back in time to see Adan pulling the hatch closed. Through it the too-bright glow of the boiler room -- and the sight of dull red light that could only have come from outside.
"You alright?" Adan was asking.
The sight of the dawn terrified him as no nightmare ever had. Milus clawed himself back upright, stumbling for the engine controls. Adan had been faster; he'd already shut the stokers down completely, and the controls for the pressure-relief valves were wide open. The speaking-tube. He grabbed it, using it for support. "Port helm," he gasped into the tube. "Get t'helm over!"
"The hell's going on down there?" Karn Gebbenbech shouted back. "Are you --"
His paw clamped around the tube, squeezing so tightly he could feel the metal deforming. "Heel her to starboard or we'll lose the bloody ship!"
The explosion -- it must've been a ruptured valve; they would not have survived a boiler failure -- had ripped a hole in the Clarion Adamant's hull. Milus had a terrifying vision of cold seawater spilling in, striking the huge boilers, setting them off...
Karn might not have understood the danger, but he knew enough to trust a frantic engineer. Milus felt the deck tilting beneath him. The white wolf, who did not seem terribly the worse for wear, was bracing herself against a railing. He felt dizzy; his world was uneven, and his leg burned when he tried to stand on it. Milus glanced down to find his pants stained red where he'd slammed his calf into the metal frame of the hatchway. Blood, not much darker than the dawn, spilled messily over his boot. He growled and looked away.
Pressure in the steam pipe was dropping swiftly, and the howling from the boiler room grew weaker. Milus ignored the shouts coming from the speaking tube, and with Adan's help spun the hatch wheel open again. They were careful, feeling for a pressure differential or the heat that might imply a fire. Nothing.
Fires were a sailor's worst fear. The engineer knew that the explosion would've scattered hot coals over the floor... but when they pulled the hatch open, there was no smoke, and he breathed a sigh of relief. The mechanical stokers exposed only a small amount of coal at any time -- not enough to have set the room ablaze.
That left only the gaping hole in the side of the ship. The wood had splintered apart between two of the barque's iron ribs, a five foot wide gash through which the morning sun lanced in ominously. Leaving Adan to monitor the cooling boilers, Milus limped up the stairs, which heeled with the ship at a precipitous angle. The wolf got beneath his arm, helping him.
She was surprisingly strong. "Thanks, duck," he muttered. His leg was beginning to smart badly.
"Siron," she answered, and nudged the door open for him. "My name's Siron."
The deck was abuzz with activity. Gethet Issich and Karn were shouting orders to the crew, but the letter paused when he saw Milus, padding over carefully to help him climb the stairs to the poop deck. "The hell happened there?"
"One o' the pipes blew under pressure. Put a bloody great 'ole clear through t'side." The bear pointed, to where steam was still spilling from the side of the ship.
"Why?" Issich demanded angrily. The tiger's normally immaculate uniform had clearly been tossed on in a hurry, and his tail lashed unevenly. "Maintenance problems?"
"Nay," he shook his head fiercely. "Di'n't breathe a word of it on t'last o'erhaul. She was workin' better nor t'others 'til just now, even."
"Sabotage?"
"The ship sailed into a thaumaturgic eddy," Siron spoke up. "The charms holding the joints together failed."
"Magic?" Issich jerked his head, and his lips curled. "This is about magic?"
"Yes."
Milus caught the rare flash of keen, piercing anger in the tiger's eyes. "Damn it all. Where's Halvas? Is he forward? Someone get him."
As it turned out, the panther was already on his way; less than a minute later he was pulling himself clumsily up the canted stairs to the deck. "Captain Issich?"
"What happened to the charms on our boilers, you miserable bastard?"
"I... I'm not certain." Rettari Halvas leaned on the railing awkwardly. "It seems they have become... uncast..."
His halting answer did not pacify the captain. "Because of this -- what did you call it, lady?" He frowned, as if noting her appearance for the first time. "Why are you up here, anyway? This is for crew only."
"Thaumaturgic eddy," Siron repeated. "And I'm here because I saved your damned ship."
"Woulda caught it ourselves," Milus muttered, somewhat reflexively; he was not happy with the idea that anything in his engines had taken him by surprise.
Issich didn't comment. "Does that mean anything to you?"
The panther's tailtip twitched. "Yes," he said flatly. "But it's not... it refers to a... theory... one that is not well-regarded." Seeing the burning stare from the captain, Halvas continued carefully. "It is a question of whether magic is a fundamental constant, or whether it is... related in some way, I suppose, to the physical world. Nearly everyone agrees it is the first. Some iconoclasts argue --"
"And research demonstrates," Siron cut in hotly. "We've seen that --"
Halvas raised his voice and continued. "Some iconoclasts, captain, believe that the magical and the physical world are tightly linked, and therefore that magic is not universally distributed."
"I've studied this," Siron protested. "The data are quite clear."
"I'm not," Halvas shot back, with more energy than Milus had ever seen him use, "going to argue with a Konarist." This drew a growl from the wolf, which Halvas ignored. "If the boiler charms wore off, sir, I admit I... do not know why... but I wouldn't trust this one's explanation, not without evidence."
Milus was not always good at reading the body language of canines, but Siron was clearly seething; her ears were back, and her eyes glowed softly. "She did seem t'know what was goin' on, captain, 'fore I did. Might 'ear 'er out."
"Who are you?"
"Siron Barnard. Dr. Barnard," she amended. She spoke with an Aernian accent but, now that Milus thought about it, she had not affected the upper-class cadence so many scholars seemed to feel necessary. "I was a junior professor of eschatology at Queen Loren's College in Lake Peraford."
"As I said," Halvas growled. "A Konarist."
"No," she said curtly. She was, she explained, a scholar of the Fall -- whatever catastrophe it was that had leveled the World Before. Almost nothing had survived; mostly the ruins that the desert had preserved, and which Milus had seen from the cab of the transcontinental railroad. There had been great societies, though, Siron said, with fantastic technology and --
Issich waved a huge paw to silence her. "Yes, this is all very interesting. Get to the point."
"Well... I first noticed in an excavation at Kessea that none of our charmed instruments were working. That led me to the work the Tiurisk have been doing charting the ebb and flow of magical properties. It seems that it has a sort of... flow to it, and that in certain places, eddies form of... complete calmness, with no thaumaturgic energy whatsoever. Archaeologically, it's interesting because --"
"Fuck your archaeology," Issich said curtly. "I want to know if she's right. Halvas, are any of your talents working?"
The panther looked at him, and then to Siron. Finally, shaking his head, he admitted that they were not. "I... am not certain why. I'm tired, and..."
Karn spoke up, gesturing back towards the deck of the ship. "If the magic's not working, that could explain why the blocks are all locked up. Had to get the whole deck crew just to brace the mainmast."
Gethet Issich, nodding carefully, seemed to have made up his mind. "How did you know this was here, Dr. Barnard?"
"I didn't -- not exactly. We've charted a few in the continent's inland, but towards the Edge of the Known World, out in the water, we don't have the money to fund expeditions. But we can conjecture their location, and... it only makes sense, to a point. We expect the charmed world to be increasingly turbulent as we near the edge. After we changed course, the telltales became clearer that we were headed into it..."
"An' ye did tha' on advice, aye?" Milus asked Gebbenbech. "Comin' up on yer new tack."
The wolf froze. His eyes darkened. "Ah. Yes... Well. One of the pilgrims, a meteorologist, told me the weather was better. Anyway the wind was definitely calmer..."
"Meteorologist?"
"A, ah... an ermine. Her name's... Malla, I think. Or Pella or... Kella or..."
"Hannu," Siron Barnard interrupted. "Hannu Kirayara. She was a meteorologist in Tabisthalia before she joined the church. She'd know the signs of changing weather well enough."
"And this... eddy? Of yours?"
"It's hard to say. Probably not; it's not common knowledge unless you study thaumaturgy, like I do." The white wolf shrugged at them. "It's not entirely a coincidence -- calmer weather probably accompanies lower magical energy. But not deliberate."
Milus was not given to thinking in terms of coincidences. But they had more pressing issues to deal with now: the ship would need to be repaired, and they needed to get back underway. Gethet dismissed the others and, pulling himself to the side of the ship, peered down at the ragged hole.
"We got lucky, didn't we?"
It was hard to look at the damage to his beloved ship. Milus sighed. "Aye."
"Valve can be replaced?"
"In 'Arradon, sure. I'll 'ave the machine shop look, but I wouldn't trust it. Until then, we can run on four boilers -- I don't trust t' facin' one, neither, Halvas an' me worked on 'er, too. T'other ones, though, they're solid. Gorra patch t'hull, too."
"Will it hold?"
"For now? Aye. In 'igh seas... cor, cap'n, it's a gamble."
"Always is, Milus." The morning light gave his whitening fur an eerie glow "I asked you to run the boilers over their rated pressure, back when we were escaping."
"Aye..."
"Could that have..."
Milus put his paw over the captain's, holding it to the railing and giving it a squeeze. "No' worth it, cap'n. No' worth the guessin'. I run those engines every bloody day. If I thought they were unsafe, what kinda fool ye think I'd be sittin' down there with 'em?"
Gethet nodded. "I know. I just... can't figure out what I'm getting us into." He turned, and for several long seconds he stared out towards the horizon, and the blood red sun struggling into the sky. Finally, turning away, he sighed. "Fix my ship, Milus. We can't be stuck here."
Fortunately, the engineering crew knew what needed to be done. They had enough wood for the hull, and tools to check the boiler. When Milus asked the head machinist if the valve could be replaced, though, the otter had laughed raucously and ushered him unceremoniously from the machine shop.
Three hours after his shift ended, with the ship back on an even keel while they worked on the hull, Milus finally made his way to the infirmary. His leg hurt badly. The ship's doctor dressed it with the brutal skill of a battlefield surgeon and sent him on his way. Halvas, Milus thought, would be able to help him. Then he wondered: what if Halvas had set a broken bone, or soothed an inflamed appendix? Would that suddenly have been undone, too?
Magic. He understood why real engineers hated it. So bloody unpredictable. And yet so tempting... it would be so easy to ask Halvas to cast some spell on the deep cut that ran across his shin, to take the pain away...
Instead he downed a glass of rum, and limped back to his quarters. Rolen was asleep; he tried to settle gently into the bunk, but the strength was draining quickly from his limbs, and he fell against the husky heavily.
"Long day?" Rolen mumbled drowsily, rolling to offer Milus a smile.
"You slept through that?"
Shrugging, the dog took advantage of Milus's return to snuggle up against him gently. "They didn't call for all hands..."
"We're stopped," the bear told him. "Broke t' engines. Should be an easy shift for you, at least..." Milus would be back on in four and a half hours; it left precious little time for sleep. "Me, I'm gonna try t' knock meself out..."
Rolen nodded. Still half asleep, he pressed his lips to the bear's tenderly. Tired as he was, Milus smiled; he tilted his head, deepening the touch until the other man pulled away with a muffled sigh. The bear embraced the smaller dog warmly, holding him as close as he could. His fur was so soft; his breathing, so gentle and soothing...
Well, he thought, as the darkness took him. At least some magic still works...