by Drew Wagar
Promoting peace. Sending messages hither and thither? It sounds so dull …
‘We must work for peace,’ Charis continued. ‘Nerina understands this, others are yet to share this view.’
She means Merrin!
‘So what happens now?’
‘Now?’ Charis smiled. ‘Now you rest.’
Kiri yawned involuntarily.
‘But after …’
‘Tomorrow we will start your training,’ Charis advised. ‘It takes four rounds for an acolyte to become a priestess. You have much to learn, not least how to properly use this gift of yours.’
‘Oh …’
‘You still want to be a healer?’
Kiri hesitated. ‘Yes. Yes, of course.’
‘You still need rest. Get some sleep now’ Charis said, getting up. ‘There will be a meal at the eighth chime, I will see you then.’
Kiri smiled and watched as Charis got up and left, closing the door to Kiri’s room behind her. Kiri pulled her knees up to her chin.
An ancient war we still learn to fight for, an enemy long forgotten yet still remembered. Unrest in the land. Priestesses who fight and squabble for position and here’s me with a gift I don’t understand which they either resent or they want me to use for them!
So I’m an acolyte now. Charis tells me it’s about healing and promoting peace. Rihanna and Merrin certainly don’t have peace on their mind! Launa’s emotions were real, whatever Charis says. Nerina said we’d change the world together. What did she mean? Were those evil Nirians real, or just a story? Machines that could fly through the air? Really?
Another thought entered her mind, uncomfortable and awkward.
And Sahria …?
She lay back on the bed, sliding herself under the covers with a sigh. She rested her head on her pillow, surprised to find it was hard against her head. She turned over and inspected it. There was something tucked into the pillow case. She pulled it out.
It was a book, old and tatty.
What’s this …?
She turned it over. The text was scrubbed and timeworn, but still readable enough. She recognised it from similar books Charis had shown her.
The sixth element!
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Scattered Isles
Round 2306, Fifth Pass
Mel had taken Meru around the quayside, where they collected various parts from the enormous stash of pieces that she and Coran had assembled over the last few rounds. There seemed to be countless bolts, bearings, shims and other assorted components. Meru wasn’t sure how Mel managed to keep it all in her head, but slowly, after several stretches and much attention and instruction he gained a good working knowledge of the engine and other systems aboard.
Mel believed that the cavern had been cut out of the rock in some fashion in the distant past, forming the quays and mooring points. The vast majority of it was empty, but Meru could see that there would once have been mooring for a dozen ships the size of the Mobilis. Mel had shown Meru a vast storeroom of material, everything carefully preserved against decay, spare parts and machinery for repairing ships. It had clearly once been a major operation.
All abandoned long ago, but left as if the owners expected to return …
‘They would have had machines to move all this stuff around,’ Mel commented as they lugged components back towards the Mobilis. ‘We have to rely on elbow grease!’
It wasn’t at all straightforward. Meru quickly developed an awe of how Mel had figured out the systems, let alone fixed them. That the ship took power from the air was simple enough to grasp, but the detail behind it was like nothing Meru had ever come across before. Operating the ship, now that Mel had tamed what she called ‘the flow’, was also straightforward, certainly simpler than the complex rigging of the fishermen’s ships. With little preamble you could pretty much just go wherever and whenever you wanted. Despite that, the systems seemed mercurial, erratic and unreliable, frequently breaking for reasons that remained obscure. When a part was replaced it was always fettled slightly differently than before as Mel searched for solutions to the problems.
If the ancients really had mastered this power so long ago …
Large components had to be craned aboard the Mobilis by use of the ancient derricks that surrounded the quay. The repairs to the engine slowly progressed under Mel’s expert guidance, with Daf and Creg doing the heavy lifting of the machinery. Meru quickly learnt they were simple men with straightforward tastes that were mostly concerned with the variety of strong dark ales that Coran had brought with him. Meru picked up a list of colourful curses from them and a series of raucous shanties, which were mostly about fishing, beer and loose women. That had been quite an education for him too.
Mel had told him that the pair had been thieves, but not very good ones, repeatedly getting caught and arrested. It had got to the point at which they were going to be marooned on one of the nearby islands on the sunright side of Amar, a punishment worse than a quick death in many ways. Those islands were small and inhospitable. Coran had offered to take them on, if they worked for him in perpetuity. They had eagerly accepted and were now unfailingly loyal.
‘Good in a pinch, if you need some simple muscle,’ Mel had said. ‘Once saw them get Coran out of a brawl. They just waded in and men flew in all directions. Tough as hergs they are. Not much up top though.’
Daf, Creg, Fitch and Coran had taken a tatty old sailing vessel back to Amar for provisions. They’d been gone for a pass whilst Meru and Mel continued to work on the engine. Coran had a returned with a vessel weighed down with cargo. More crates to be loaded on to the Mobilis; food stuffs and cooking utensils. The list went on and on. Meru spent stretches with Daf and Creg shoving and pushing them around in the hold of the Mobilis.
Meru wondered how it was all being paid for, but Mel informed him that even the junk bits of metal were valuable enough on Amar to be tradable.
Fitch kept to himself for the most part, but on one occasion he was being particularly attentive to a series of boxes that were being loaded into the forward hold of the Mobilis. Meru, curious as always, had tried to get a look, but had been firmly shoved aside by the thin, gangly man.
‘Trying to get us all killed, boy?’
‘No,’ Meru retorted crossly.
‘No place for a boy this,’ Fitch growled, rubbing his hands together. ‘Dangerous this cargo, needs to be treated with respect.’
‘What is it?’ Meru demanded, looking around Fitch at the boxes. They seemed to contain long tubes made of thick stiff paper, stuffed with something and then sealed at each end with wax. Meru caught sight of a taper emerging from the base of each tube. In another box was a complex contraption that Fitch had begun to unpack. It was composed of a series of metal frameworks, gimbles and balances. Meru had no idea what it was.
‘Never you be minding!’ Fitch said angrily. ‘And don’t let me find you anywhere nearby.’
Fitch quickly stored the mysterious crates in the forward hold, locking them securely and then taking great delight in waving the key in Meru’s direction. Meru scowled at him and went back to his work.
Something to do with how Fitch killed the squider perhaps?
Meru had sat pondering the map for many spells, trying to figure out how the ancients had managed to navigate accurately enough to be able to plot it. It was maddening. At the beginning of the stretch he’d walked to the edge of the cave to watch for the passing of Mayura, having calculated it would soon be due. From there at least he’d be able to calibrate the timers effectively.
Meru had always been taught that the problem was insoluble. It was pretty easy to understand. On land, with reference points such as mountains and trees, moving sunright or shaderight could be easily measured, by seeing the changing angle of Lacaille to the left or the right. There were extensive maps in the libraries of Amar that showed the angle of Lacaille in the sky and its position left and right compared with the peaks of mountains and hills from particular van
tage points. It didn’t take long to string them all together to make a chart.
The trouble was there weren’t any reference points at sea. Yes, you could measure the height of Lacaille in the sky. That told you whether you’d moved shadeward or sunward easily enough, but without something else to measure, there was no way to track your progress sunright or shaderight. It was impossible. Worse, if you went too far, there was no way to tell the difference between moving in any direction. Lacaille might have dropped because you’d gone shaderight or shadewards, there would be no way to tell. Navigation out of sight of land was impossible. All sailors knew it and accepted it.
So you stay in sight of land or the smokes. And yet the ancients managed it …
Meru had scoured the Mobilis for any other equipment that might have been used, but aside from the intricate timers and a similarly ornate sextant with two axes rather than one, there was nothing else aboard and no obvious place where some amazing piece of equipment might have been sighted.
He rubbed his forehead in frustration, looking up at the warm unchanging disk of Lacaille.
His reckoning hadn’t been far off. As he sat watching it, a small indentation appeared on the far left side. Mayura was beginning its pass. The strange black spot would take precisely a single chime to move across the surface of Lacaille. He leapt to his feet and ran to the Mobilis, setting the timer mechanism to start counting, watching as the sand began to flow in the first glass vial. A melancholy thought occurred to him, as he realised that across Amar, hundreds of timekeepers would have just carried out the same procedure.
He wandered to the cave mouth, sitting down in the bright shine, looking up as the small disc of Mayura slowly moved across the much larger disc of Lacaille. A small black circle inside a much larger one …
His heart thumped in his chest.
The map!
He got to his feet and ran back into the cavern at breakneck speed, yelling at the top of his voice. Mel and Coran were looking down into the engine bay when he leapt on to the deck from the quay.
‘Steady on, Meru …’
‘The map! Where’s the map?’
‘It’s in my cabin, what … ?’
Meru was already gone, leaping down into the galley way without using the ladders. Coran and Mel exchanged a puzzled look and then watched as Meru vaulted up with the map rolled under his arm, heading for the wheelhouse.
‘Quick!’ Meru shouted. ‘I know how they did it!’
Coran and Mel joined him. Meru had unrolled the map and was feverously looking across it.
‘Yes! It’s so simple! So clever!’
‘What in blazes are you talking about?’ Coran demanded.
‘It’s Lacaille and Mayura. Of course it is. How could I have missed it? So obvious. Even a child would be able to do this.’
‘Do what?’ Mel asked.
‘I need the sextant,’ Meru said, gesturing with his hand, not taking his eyes off the map. ‘Should be slanted here, yes, we’re shaderight of Amar and a little shadeward, the sextant has two axes, it would need to have … so it’s designed to measure … yes!’
Coran had taken the sextant out of its protective box and handed it to Meru.
‘Are you going to … ?’
Meru was running again, the sextant in his hand.
‘Bring the map!’ he yelled over his shoulder. In a moment he was gone. Coran and Mel could see him running up the quay towards the bright light at the cavern entrance.
‘He’s as high as a dach,’ Coran said, bemused
‘He’s your apprentice,’ Mel said with a grin.
‘Let’s find out if we can get some sense out of him.’
By the time they had caught up with Meru, he was busy taking measurements with the sextant, his hands trembling with excitement.
‘Thirty two degrees!’ he finally announced, looking back at them in delight. ‘Thirty two!’
‘So?’ Coran demanded. ‘Start making sense lad, or I’ll get Daf to give you a ducking.’
‘It’s the circles on the map,’ Meru explained, breathlessly. ‘They aren’t circles, they’re diagrams of Lacaille and Mayura. They’re showing the pass.’
Coran shrugged. ‘And how does that help?’
‘Remember how there was a line drawn through Mayura and the line had different slants? They’re angles. The angles tell you how far shaderight or sunright you are. Each of those fan lines are marked. Look at the map!’
Coran pulled out the map and held it open. Meru and Mel clustered around it.
Meru pointed at the Scattered Isles. ‘See?’
Coran shook his head.
‘It’s obvious!’ Meru said, ‘There’s a line just to the left of the Scattered Isles, yes?’
Coran nodded.
‘Look at the top.’
Coran traced his own finger up the line until it reached the circle diagram. Underneath the circle was marked a number. 30.
The circles show the angle that Mayura takes across the sun,’ Meru continued. ‘If you’re somewhere on that line, then Mayura’s pass will be at an angle of 30 degrees. That’s why the Mobilis’ sextant has an extra axis, so it can measure that at the same time as measuring the angle of Lacaille. I’ve just measured Mayura’s pass at thirty two degrees, which means …’
‘We’re a little bit further sunright!’ Coran exclaimed.
‘Coupled with the height of Lacaille …’
Coran drew his finger down the map again, slightly to the right of the marked line. His finger crossed straight across the Scattered Isles.
Coran looked at Mel and then at Meru, his voice soft.
‘Tells us precisely where we are. You’ve done it, lad. You’ve only gone and flaring done it!’
Many more stretches of hard work had passed before Mel pronounced the repaired engine ready for an exploratory test. Meru allowed flow from the coils past the cut-offs and Mel turned on the switches that allowed the power to flow from the accumulators into the engine. She spun a wheel and sparks flickered brightly around them. Meru jumped back at the intense heat.
‘Do remember to be outside of the engine room when I switch the accumulators over,’ Mel had chided. ‘It would take me stretches to scrape your incinerated carcass out of there.’
‘Thanks for the tip,’ Meru replied.
Coran gave the orders to depart. Daf and Creg shipped the moorings and the Mobilis took to the water once again, now running solely on her repaired engine.
They spent the stretch making adjustments, fine tuning the mechanisms and running in the engine, slowing moving around the harbour and checking how the ship behaved. Mel eventually pronounced she was happy with the result. The engine spun smoothly, running up to full speed and back several times without issue. Meru took the opportunity to check his accuracy with measurements.
Proven to their satisfaction, they eventually turned the Mobilis back to its berth, exhausted, but elated that their ship was mobile once again.
That evening Coran called a council. The entire crew, all six of them, were packed into the mess room, just below and behind the bridge. A simple meal of stew and vegetables had been served. Coran had broken out his precious supply of Ochren, Daf and Creg had hauled in a massive crate of dark ales with dubious sounding names. Talk was sociable and inconsequential whilst the meal was consumed, but after the dishes were cleaned away Coran thumped an empty ale bottle on the table for attention.
‘Lady and Gentlemen!’ he announced, with a slight slur to his voice.
‘I aint no Lady!’ Mel retorted immediately, to guffaws from Daf and Creg. ‘Many men will attest to that.’
Coran gave her a pointed look and then continued. ‘Equipment is stored, provisions are aboard and all is stowed, shipshape at last. Thanks to young Meru, we can now find our way across the Straithian Sea …
That brought a cheer from everyone apart from Fitch, but Meru was surprised to see a slight incline of Fitch’s hat in his direction.
‘We can only measure
our position once each pass,’ Meru said. ‘That’s twenty stretches in between each time.’
‘Details my boy!’ Coran waved him aside. ‘Only the last part of getting this ship ready remains.’
‘It’s still going to take several more passes to get the second engine ready.’ Mel cautioned. ‘And we need to find a way to improve the accumulators. We can’t store enough flow. It’s not like we can go tomorrow.’
‘But it is possible now,’ Coran replied. ‘Just a case of working hard and getting it done. Nothing stands in our way.’
‘And precisely where might we be going when we do finally leave?’ Fitch snapped.
‘Well you might ask,’ Coran replied. ‘Clear some space, will you?’
Coran brought out the map again. Meru was a little surprised to find out that, with the exception of Mel, none of the other members of the crew seemed to know precisely what they were about. Daf and Creg, criminals on parole as they were, cared little, but it immediately made Meru wonder why Fitch was part of the crew.
What does he do? And what was in those boxes?
Coran had spread the map on the table, pointing out the island of Amar and the main continent to the shaderight. Meru paid closer attention this time. He found the city of Nireus marked straight away. It was on the coast, but far to the shadeward. It was clear it was a huge distance.
‘We leave the islands here and head shadeward for a stretch and pass to the shaderight of Amar.’ Coran said, pointing at a peninsular that jutted out from the mainland. ‘Once we’re clear of that we turn full shaderight and drive across the Straithian Sea.’
‘How long will it take?’ Meru asked, looking at the map and trying to gain a sense of scale.
‘From here to the mainland is five times the length of Amar, according to this map.’ Coran said. ‘Amar is two hundred marks from end to end.’
‘Near a thousand marks across the sea?’ Meru asked. Like most of the people of Amar, the thought of being out of sight of land for days on end was terrifying. ‘That will take passes!’
