CHAPTER 36: SIDEWAYS SANCTUARY

  “I screwed up.” It was an admission Briley Soren seldom made and yet one that, when she was certain of it, no one could talk her down from. They were two days into their four-day return trip to Sailor’s Rise, and each time one of them popped down to the steam engine to feed it more cobrium, they could see the dwindling proof of the problem firsthand. Perhaps they had held out hope for a while, wondering if it might be just another one of their classic close calls, but by now the math was unmistakable. “We don’t have enough cobrium to make it back,” Briley said what they were all thinking.

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Briley,” Bertrand replied. “We all screwed up.”

  “I’m in charge of managing our supplies,” she shot back, “including fuel. And we don’t have enough of it. Our heating system has been a bigger drain than I anticipated. We’ve never flown in weather this cold for this long. I noticed it on the way to Saint Albus, but I had built in some buffer as I always do, and we would have been fine if not for”—her gaze shifted and stopped on Iric Halvorson deep in conversation with Jalander on the bow—“our new cargo.”

  “He can’t weigh that much,” Bertrand protested. “He is a large man, I’ll grant you, but he’s only human, and I’m hardly a light fellow myself.”

  “The crates of nickel,” Briley clarified.

  “Right.”

  The Two Worlds Trading Company’s three employees were huddled in a semicircle around the ship’s wheel, still cold to the bone but, after a few days acclimatizing to the north, simply more used to it. It was also not quite as cold above deck as it had been the day before. They had crossed the border out of the United North earlier that morning and now found themselves flying over the relatively desolate Katumala Territory. Tundra had turned into trees, visible through a thinning patchwork of clouds, but while foliage had increased, the same could not be said of people. There were still no signs of civilization for as far as the eye could see, even with the fine brass telescope they had acquired in Azir that summer.

  Briley collapsed the instrument and shrugged. “I don’t know where we’re going to find more cobrium.”

  “Could we turn off the heating system?” Elias asked. “I realize it will be unpleasant, and Islet may never forgive us, but I would rather be cold than stranded.”

  Briley’s head bobbed halfway between a nod and a shake. “It might help, but it won’t be enough at this point. We need to make up a day’s worth of fuel, and we’re not going to dump our cargo.”

  No one would suggest that, but they needed to do something. Iric reeled himself over, drawn to their visible befuddlement as the ever-eager helper he was. “You look troubled.” He went straight to the point, as was also his way. “What is it?”

  “We’re low on cobrium,” Briley informed him. “We didn’t account for our new cargo, and our heating system has been a drain. It’s my fault.”

  “These things happen.” Iric seemed unbothered. “In the north, everything breaks. I care not for whose fault a thing is. It could be the fault of man, the fault of nature, the fault of circumstance. Who cares? The end is the same. Solutions matter.”

  Bertrand agreed and put the problem to him. “Can you think of any? Elias suggested turning off the heating system, but apparently that won’t cut it.”

  Iric nodded knowingly, then said, “Look over the bulwark. What do you see?”

  “Clouds,” Bertrand offered.

  “Try again.”

  “Trees,” Elias contributed.

  “Can your engine burn wood?”

  “In theory,” Briley said, tossing and turning the idea in her head. “Wood is way less efficient than cobrium. It will take a lot of wood to add only a little power, so we’ll still need to shut off the heating system. I’m not sure how far wood will get us, but it’s an idea.”

  “I have an axe.” Iric referenced the rugged tool hitched to his belt. “It is fortunate you brought me along.”

  On that point, there could be little doubt.

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  “I’ll look for somewhere to land,” Briley said, heading to the bow with their telescope in hand. A minute later, she called them over.

  “Find a good landing spot?” Elias asked.

  “Even better,” she said. “Smoke. Over there.”

  The smoke, they could see with their naked eyes.

  Briley handed Elias the telescope and told him to take a closer look.

  He peered through the lens, and now he could see structures, too, popping faintly through the dense forest. It was hardly a city, but it was certainly more than a single house. “It looks like a village,” he said, “all the way out here. Odd. Do you think they have cobrium?”

  “That depends on whether or not they ever leave their village,” Briley said, and she was right, for there were few roads in the Katumala Territory, and none were walking distance from their present vantage point. The only vehicle that could connect this unlikely community with the wider world was an airship. “Let’s find out,” she added. “If not, Iric has an axe.”

  * * *

  With no obvious manmade docks suitable for parking a medium-sized airship anywhere in their visible vicinity, the crew searched for and eventually found the next best thing: a wide enough river. It was barely deep enough. Briley cringed as their hull bounced off the riverbed, but it would do, and it was not the roughest landing they had ever committed.

  Iric helped Bertrand put down the gangway, which enjoyed a softer landing on the grassy shore. Indeed, the forest around them was unexpectedly verdant, resisting winter’s gray palette with its rich green pines, its blue-needled spruces, and a surprising warmth. The weather was still cool, objectively speaking, the ground patchy with half-melted mounds of hardened snow where the sun could not quite slip through. But they had grown accustomed to the bite of higher altitudes and the cruel caress of ceaseless wind, and so, comparatively speaking, the forest floor felt like a sanctuary.

  Their party of now five headed down the gangway to enjoy its solid ground and determine their next steps. Iric volunteered himself to fell trees and chop wood, as plan B still seemed a likely outcome, and Briley suggested she should test the engine with Iric’s archaic fuel source before “making assumptions about feasibility and performance.”

  As for plan A, Elias and Bertrand would head deeper into the forest—they had landed in a small clearing by the river—with their compass in hand and an approximate sense of where the village had appeared from above.

  Jalander stopped them before they could leave, raising his hand like a shy student. “What should I do?”

  “You don’t need to do anything,” Bertrand said. “You’re a paying customer.”

  “That is true. Do I get a refund for this excursion?”

  Elias was pretty sure he was joking, but no one challenged him on it.

  “Well, as a paying customer, I must entertain myself somehow,” Jalander went on. “I shall join Elias and Bertrand. I am admittedly curious about this village in the middle of nowhere, and I’m not bad with a rapier if we run into any bears.”

  Elias waved him along, glad to have the company—and his rapier—as he told Briley and Iric, “We’ll be back… when we’re back.”

  On that clarifying note, they gradually disappeared behind a curtain of trees. There was no trail for them to follow, and Elias checked his compass religiously as Bertrand tripped and stumbled over an exposed root and then another. Jalander appeared to be enjoying himself.

  “It is rather beautiful here, isn’t it?” their client observed, his gaze hopping from branch to branch as he reached into his pocket and pulled out his pipe. “Tranquil.”

  “It is,” Elias agreed, spotting and losing track of a chipmunk scampering up a tree trunk.

  Everywhere around them, the forest was alive with birdsong, a constant melody of territorial conquest, courtship, and warning. So completely removed from civilization they were, and yet countless lives were lived and stories were written every hour in this expansive forest. Elias recalled the naturalist who had wandered into Fairweather Provisions when he was still finding his footing as a junior employee. “Entire ecosystems exist all around us, whole worlds lost in our periphery,” the man had said.

  One noise he had not anticipated, however, was what sounded to his ears like a whale crashing through the ocean’s surface.

  “What in heaven or hell was that?” Bertrand voiced their collective confusion.

  Whatever it was, it was not too far from them. They followed the strange crashing noise as it grew louder and closer, until they could see the answer to their burning question through the thinning of trees, amid another small clearing.

  A geyser had erupted, spewing steam and boiling water from its sinter cone like a locomotive at full speed. Elias had never seen a geyser before, and Bertrand confirmed it was his first experience witnessing one as well. The former man found that strangely and quietly satisfying. So many of his novel experiences were repeat ones for Bertrand, but this—this they were experiencing together.

  “We have geysers in the Southlands,” Jalander said, “not far from where I grew up. It has been an age.”

  While it may not have been an entirely new sight for the Southlander, he seemed no less entranced by it as they entered the clearing, water pooling on the barren ground. There were no surviving snow patches here. The eruption reached as high as the highest tree as they stopped to stare at it from a safe distance. The event probably lasted only a few minutes, but time could slow when every second was savored.

  When the geyser calmed enough that they could hear each other again, Bertrand twitched, grimaced, and reached a hand toward the back of his neck. “I think a bug bit me,” he said before confirming the truth of it.

  If it was indeed a bug, it bit Elias in short order too, before turning its needle to Jalander. Bertrand was holding what looked like a dart pinched between two fingers, though Elias’s eye for detail felt suddenly fuzzy.

  “Oh, no,” he thought he heard Bertrand say. The bigger man stumbled again, and not over a root this time. He landed with a splash as he made himself a bed of stone.

  Watching his friend fall, Elias got thinking that he, too, could go for a nap. The ground seemed to come to him as his compass landed with a clatter. The last thing he saw before closing his eyes was the geyser’s final farewell, spewing sideways across his vision.