Chapter 18: Cold Ascension

Chapter Eighteen

Cold Ascension

Melo had once remarked, in his easygoing fashion, that Elias was competitive in the way that birds have wings. It wasn’t so much an attribute he possessed as it was a fundamental part of his very being. Absent his competitive nature, Elias Vice—or Fisher at the time, before that name was outcompeted too—would simply be another man. Bertrand may have been surprisingly unintimidating, but Elias could be quite the opposite in moments when he forgot his manners.

Elias savored his victories as much as he was spurred by his failures, but it was the latter that branded in him searing lessons he vowed not to learn again. For example, he had learned to never celebrate a win before the game was won.

Briley, a not uncompetitive person herself, evidently hadn’t learned this lesson. “We pulled it off,” she said. “Your ludicrous plan actually worked.”

Elias felt a smile tug at the corners of his mouth. He forced himself to contain it.

And yet, the hard part was over. At least, the part he had believed would be hardest. Indeed, it had taken them longer than expected to deflate the ballonets—or, as Briley had explained in simpler terms, “the small balloons inside the big balloon.” The ballonets’ denser air weighed down the airship and kept it grounded, Elias had been told, while deflating the air bags had the opposite effect, allowing the larger hydrogen-filled balloon to win a sort of skyward tug-of-war.

Elias took a moment to appreciate the medium-sized vessel now in their tenuous possession: its surprisingly aerodynamic oak hull and the cedar planks that groaned under his footsteps as he went to inspect the ship’s great cabin. He wagered it could comfortably carry a dozen crew and passengers, depending on their cargo, which was only a little less than The Sleeping Sparrow.

Briley stopped him before he got to the door. “The steam engine,” she said, spinning the wheel as the ship tilted and followed the wind. In their effort to escape the Graystone Junkyard silently and swiftly, they had left the engine cold. They would need to fire it up if they wished to actually sail this thing to their intended destination.

“One of us should stay up here.” Briley was already holding the wheel.

“I’ll take care of it,” Elias confirmed.

“Do you know where it is? Do you know how?”

“Bertrand gave me a tour of The Sleeping Sparrow,” he explained to an unconvinced audience. “Get a fire going, shovel in some cobrium—how hard can it be?”

“Even a cobrium engine takes a while to get going,” she said soberly. “We’ll be floating aimlessly until then.”

“Then I shall get right on it.” Elias peered over the bulwark before he did so, observing the industrial neighborhood shrinking below them, its flat, snow-covered roofs turning into a game of white tiles. He searched for Bertrand without avail. Was their friend still lingering in the junkyard? Would that fortress become his prison? Elias desperately hoped not.

“I thought you were getting right on it,” Briley remarked.

Elias nodded, abandoned his worry, and quickly found the companionway to the lower deck. He heaved open its heavy hatch doors before disappearing into the ascending vessel’s unlit hull.

Beams of dust-speckled light shone in through the portholes of an otherwise lightless lower deck. Elias caught the glint of an oil lamp resting on a wooden table, then dug through his coat pocket until he found an old tinderbox. Striking flint against steel, he birthed a small flame and carried it carefully to the lantern on a sulfur spill.

“There we go.”

The oil lamp cast the lower deck in a warm amber glow. Elias examined the space in a new light, spotting half a dozen bronze cannons stored neatly in a dim corner. Even merchant ships required protection from pirates, though weight was always an issue. Protection came with a price.

He could analyze the ship’s inventory later. Elias had an engine to find. He found the engine room easily enough, through an arched door at the back of the ship, but finding the complicated contraption wasn’t the tricky part. He had never started a steam engine before, though he fancied himself clever enough to figure it out, often preferring to teach himself new skills rather than learn them from someone else—even when it was to his own detriment.

The problem was that he couldn’t find any cobrium: the pale green rock used to power modern airships. Some still ran on coal and a few even used wood, but Elias couldn’t find fuel of any sort anywhere. He opened every door and rummaged through every empty cabin, getting an impromptu tour of the relatively compact vessel, if nothing else.

He wandered back to the engine room and crossed his arms, staring and sighing at an unfed furnace, at the metallic valves and cylindrical pistons he couldn’t truly decipher. Briefly and vainly, he entertained the idea that perhaps his newfound talent might provide some utility here, but how would good aim get a couple of propellers turning?

Their plan had hit a snag.

Elias returned to the main deck wearing the appearance of someone who had just been punched in the face, metaphorically speaking. “We have a problem,” he said.

“I can see that.” Briley already looked disappointed, though not entirely surprised. Granted, Briley never looked surprised, even when she was. “What is it?”

“There’s no cobrium on board, or coal, or anything to get the engine going,” Elias explained.

“That is a problem,” she agreed. It was not an easily solved problem either. “I can land this thing once the wind blows us over a clearing, but it’ll be a free meal for pirates.”

“I know,” he said, thinking.

He squinted out over the ship’s smooth oak edge for answers. Elias had not seen the city in full view since the day he first arrived here, back when its winding streets and cramped buildings were still a foreign maze to him. Now he searched for familiar sights. He had no trouble identifying Bartholomew Grimsby’s expansive estate, the venue of the Solstice Eve Ball he and Bertrand had attended a couple of weeks earlier—where Elias had acquired the intel that led them to this fateful moment.

The Fairweather’s estate was harder to find, though he more easily eyed The Sleeping Sparrow hovering next to its medium-sized berth, the protruding pathway upon which Elias had arrived two seasons ago. He had found the ship as a child reads the ticks on a clock, his gaze circling the city before finally landing on the appropriately placed pier.

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Had that modest dock been his entrance to this maze, to the city he once dreamed about, to a mountain metropolis shaped like a ship’s wheel? And had Elias finally found the prize that all mazes purport to hide, for why else would one enter a maze? Why else, indeed. Their present predicament certainly carried the illusion of freedom, but with no engine to guide them, he wagered they were simply drifting toward another, albeit spectacular dead end.

Briley had stopped the ship from ascending, but the wind was slowly moving them across the city until they would pass by it completely. Certainly, they would miss the landing spot Elias had picked out for them, probably by the better part of a mile.

The landing spot in question was another clever solution to a problem they had pored over two days earlier. It took time to register a ship, a few days at least. Until then, the vessel wasn’t really theirs, and the Graystones could “steal it back” as easily as they had “not stolen it” in the first place. Hiding it was one option, but hiding a ship wasn’t like hiding a coin in one’s coat pocket. The solution: a mechanic in Lowtown. Bertrand had told the mechanic their recently procured airship required a thorough inspection to ensure it was airworthy, adding that they still needed to rent a berth for the vessel—technically true—and could they store it inside their hangar for a few days? An additional fee made it so. Once the ship was registered, they would pay the mechanic and find it a new home.

Yes, it was a great plan. They really had thought of everything—everything except for cobrium.

“I guess we’re fucked, then,” Briley said.

Elias didn’t want to believe it. He dug through the deepest recesses of his mind, desperate to excavate something, anything. His thoughts kept gravitating toward his skills as an amateur collector, as if trying to tell him something. The first time they met, Jalander had explained that his gift helped Elias find the Serpent Moon School. “You sensed it,” he had said, “the path that brought you here tonight.” Was Elias sensing something now, or was he just all out of ideas?

Both could have been true. He reached into his coat pocket anyway and felt the jagged edges of two relics. He squeezed them together and closed his eyes, practically praying. Praying to money. It might have been a laughable cliché were the situation not so dire.

Suddenly, the relics disappeared.

Elias relaxed his empty fist. There had been two this time. He had never made two relics vanish together before.

He turned back toward Briley, who remained utterly oblivious to the goings-on of Elias’s coat pocket, and then saw it: the answer he hadn’t been able to find, an answer perhaps no one could have found—no one without his gift of sight. A faint green line appeared over the ship’s wheel Briley still clung to, flashing in and out of existence like a shooting star.

It was a direction. Of course. They didn’t have a working engine, but the airship still had a rudder and, as Briley had pointed out, the ability to adjust altitude.

“Turn the wheel to the right.” Elias approached her. “Quickly.”

She looked, understandably, confused. “Your right or my right?”

“My right,” he confirmed.

“So, left.” She turned the wheel left.

Another green line appeared. “Lower the ship a bit,” he instructed her next.

“Lower it how much?”

“I don’t know. I’ll tell you when.”

Briley rolled her eyes but, absent a better plan, entertained whatever this was. The airship slowly descended as they filled the ballonets. “If I go any lower, we’re going to crash into Mr. Grimsby’s estate,” she said, easing their descent.

“Just a little more,” Elias insisted. “There.”

They noticed it together: the wind had changed direction and the drifting of their ship with it. “You’re going to float us there?” Briley asked incredulously.

“You got any other ideas?” Elias asked in return.

They were now hovering westward over Sailor’s Rise—and closer to the city than was considered polite. Close enough that Elias could see people staring up at them as he leaned over the bulwark. The sun had found another break in the clouds, and the shadow of their vessel raced and warped itself across roads, rooftops, and crowds of befuddled onlookers. But they were heading in the right direction.

Elias was hopeful once more, though he couldn’t tell if Briley shared his enthusiasm. He opted against explaining precisely how he had known to adjust the ship just so. Let her think he could read the wind like a book, or let her think it was a coincidence, so long as they arrived in the right place in one piece.

At their current pace, they could stick with this trajectory for a few more minutes, though Elias kept an eye on the wheel and the lever that controlled the ballonets.

The silence of a still moment beckoned him to say something. “I’m sorry about the other night.” He was not sure why he went with that, why he felt the need to bring it up again. “I don’t know what got into me.”

“About seven beers, give or take,” Briley replied. “It’s fine, Elias. Believe it or not, I’ve been in your shoes before. Only in my case, even when they are interested, they aren’t always open to being interested.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” Elias admitted.

“People conform to what’s expected of them,” Briley said. “Cute girls are supposed to like cute boys—boys like you.”

Elias chuckled, a little flattered. “You should tell them that.”

“You could be a bit less intense.” She grinned a half-grin.

“Speak for yourself,” he said, then added, “Let’s start lowering the ship again.”

They were nearing the docks that ringed the edge of Hightown as the green lines that had guided them this far flickered more faint instructions. As they descended farther downward, Briley still visibly skeptical, the piers of Sailor’s Rise took on another identity. They were Lowtown’s wooden canopy, casting their long shadows over its poor, haphazard neighborhoods. Elias hadn’t spent much time in Lowtown and felt, once more, like a tourist as he analyzed its streets and citizens from above.

They soon spotted their destination: the exhaustively named Mr. Mason’s Ship Repair and Other Services. Elias made a few more adjustments as they neared the mechanic’s shop, a single wooden hangar beneath the eternal shadow of a large, looming dock. He could hardly believe this had worked—sailing unforeseeable winds between opposite ends of the city—and, by the looks of her, neither could Briley.

“How—” She searched for words. “How did you know where to steer us? I thought it was just dumb luck when the wind first changed. Now… I don’t know what to think.”

Elias nearly spat out the truth then and there. Would Jalander, the man who had insisted he “keep his head low,” have approved of him telling people the truth? Certainly not. Did Elias care about Jalander’s approval? Only slightly, but eagerness had undermined his efforts before. Eagerness was the caged animal inside of Elias, rattling the bars in moments such as these, desperate to be heard and understood. Would Briley have believed any of it?

“It’s not something I can really explain,” he eventually blurted out.

Briley cocked an eyebrow, obviously unconvinced. “Clearly.” She quickly shrugged it off. “Well, time to land this thing in front of that hangar. What next, wind reader?”

Elias looked for answers, for the green lines that had pointed him in the right direction and taken them this far. Only they were not appearing this time, and Mr. Mason’s Ship Repair and Other Services was fast-approaching. A stiff wind shifted their trajectory. Briley seemed to notice his sudden concern as Elias told her, “I’m not sure. I think we’ll have to wing it.”

“I thought we were already winging it.” Briley gripped the wheel extra tightly. “Fine, I’ll… wing it.” She lowered the ship at an even pace and started turning the wheel. The wind picked up, tousling Briley’s normally neat hair. She was struggling now, struggling to outmuscle the wind, to align their ship for a soft landing.

Elias sprinted forward and seized the other side of the wheel, pushing it in the direction that she pulled. The wheel finally turned as his strength surprised them both. Another benefit of the relics, perhaps? Jalander had foretold as much. It wasn’t just sight they granted him, but strength, speed, and intelligence too. Of course, his was a temporary high. He wondered how long it would last—long enough, he hoped.

The entrance to the hangar was only a stone’s throw ahead of them now, but they were still two stories too high. Distracted by the wind, Briley hadn’t lowered their altitude hastily enough. She did so now, as fast as she could, as fast as the ship would allow.

“Come on,” she pleaded.

The airship descended. Elias and Briley both clung to the wheel, met eyes, and braced for impact. Their hydrogen balloon struck first, bouncing off the hangar door. The bounce sent them backward as Elias heard the hair-raising melody of a ship hull grating against the rough ground. They struck a fence. The fence fell—and so did Elias—as the vessel finally stilled.

It wasn’t quite the soft landing they had hoped for, but it was, at least, a landing. Elias picked himself up and peered out over the bow at more bemused onlookers, at the old man and the young girl who ran forth from the wooden hangar. He waved at them as the man crossed his arms and shook his head. The girl waved back.