The Servants of the Storm

by Jack Campbell

“Yes.” She gave him a look. “Don’t you? You’ve never mentioned that sort of thing, have you?”

  “No,” Alain said. “I have not imagined having any feeling for clothing. If others feel as you do, it must be because of my Mage training.”

  “Very likely,” Mari said. “You’re taught not to care about people, so it’s no surprise you don’t care about clothes. And maybe you’re better off not worrying about something that really isn’t all that important. That’s the breakwater, isn’t it? We must be entering the harbor.”

  “The motion of the ship on the waves has lessened,” Alain said. Off to one side he could see one of the harbor fortifications, a light shining atop it, oblivious to the danger posed by the Pride. Ahead, the waterfront of Landfall blazed with lights flickering through an increasingly dense forest of masts from ships and boats.

  “Time to go,” Mechanic Deni said, coming up to them and speaking softly. “Take good care of Captain Banda for us, will you? Once we set the Terror loose, we’ll head back out to sea and stay well away for the next week to avoid running into Imperials. After that we’ll come in as close as we can to the harbor each night until we hear from you. If for some reason we miss a rendezvous near the harbor, Captain Banda has a position to head to at sea where we’ll be looking for you during the day.”

  “He thinks we can do this in a week?” Mari asked. “It’s a long way up the river to Palandur and then Marandur beyond that.”

  “It’ll be slow going on the way there,” Deni agreed. “You’ll be fighting the current and not able to move in daylight. But the way back down should be a lot faster.”

  Deni led them to the smallest of the Pride’s boats, which was carefully lowered once Alain, Mari, another Mechanic from the Pride’s crew, and two rowers were seated. Once on the water, it only took a few strokes of the oars to reach the Terror. Asha stood amid the tangle of wood, helping first Mari and then Alain onto the strange craft. The sailors in the boat maneuvered to the tow lines and began unshackling them from the Terror.

  The other Mechanic from the Pride and Mari went to the fake tree trunk standing straight up and began doing mysterious Mechanic things to its base. “Careful,” the Mechanic cautioned as the trunk opened as if cut through. A piece on one side allowed it to pivot down. Alain felt a gust of hot air from the foreshortened stack as Mari helped fasten down the trunk, then assisted in getting the tow lines loose. “Fair winds and following seas!” the Mechanic from the Pride whispered, then jumped back across to the boat. Alain had only a moment to watch as the boat returned to the ship, breaking their last contact with the others.

  Asha showed Alain the hatch that led into the ship. He went down the ladder, finding himself in a room of metal that conjured up unpleasant memories of his and Mari’s captivity onboard a Mechanic Guild ship. Light came not from lanterns, but from some of the Mechanic “bulbs” whose glow never changed. Asha came down the ladder behind him. “The bunks where we sleep are there. Behind that wall,” she said, pointing to a metal bulkhead, “is the room where Mechanic Dav and Mari will tend the creature they call a boiler. Dav has been in there all day. In the other direction there is another ladder leading up to where Mechanic Captain Banda sees to steer the ship, and beyond that an area holding food, a table, and the space where Dav says most of the texts will be placed when we have them.”

  Mari came down the ladder, pausing at the top to swing shut the hatch and dog it securely. “Not a lot of room, is there? Sorry.”

  “Why?” Asha asked.

  “Because we had to cram in the boiler and the steering mechanism and a small generator and the intake and exhaust fans and the generator and food and—" Mari stopped speaking, then laughed. “Oh, you wanted to know why I apologized, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know. They did the best job they could in the time we had,” Mari said. “One thing about dealing with Mages that’s nice is you guys never complain about the food or the accommodations. Alain, I’m going to go back and help Dav with the boiler.”

  “What tasks must Asha and I do?” Alain asked, worrying that he would only be a passenger while Mari did all the work.

  Mari pointed to the second ladder. “There’s just enough room up in the steering area for two. On this trip, Dav and I will be tending the boiler, and Banda will be either steering us through the night or sleeping during the day. That leaves you and Asha to look out for trouble from the Imperials or any other source. You’re our sentries. We’ll need you mainly during the day, but depending on how heavy the river traffic is at night we might need one of you up there all the time.”

  “I have been in the steering area,” Asha offered. “Mage Alain should see it as well.”

  Perhaps because it was mostly underwater, the Terror felt to Alain as stable as a much larger ship. He nonetheless moved carefully around the tubes and pipes and other Mechanic devices, remembering the many times that Mari had cautioned him about what might happen if something was damaged or shoved in the wrong way. Asha came with him, and as he reached the forward ladder she gestured around. “Does this feel odd, Mage Alain?”

  “It does,” Alain admitted. “We are surrounded by the illusions the Mechanics have made. There is nothing familiar to us.”

  “There is Dav,” Asha said.

  “And Mari,” Alain agreed.

  “We will speak later,” Asha said, stepping back.

  Alain went up the ladder a short distance, finding himself in a small, low space ringed with circular windows each about the size of his outspread hand. Captain Banda sat in a seat fastened to the deck, looking forward in the direction of the Terror’s motion, before him a small ship’s wheel and various Mechanic devices. The views out of the windows were partially obscured by the driftwood camouflage. Directly overhead was another hatch.

  Captain Banda glanced back to see his visitor. “Welcome, Sir Mage. There is another seat there and you are welcome to it. Would you do me a favor first, though? There is a curtain suspended down below that can be drawn around the ladder to ensure no light from inside the ship shines through these windows. It could be fatal if we betrayed our presence that way. Please draw the curtain and then rejoin me.”

  Alain went down, but his task was interrupted by Mari dashing past and up the ladder to talk in a low voice with Banda. She came back down within a very short time. “Sorry, love. I needed to make sure I knew what we were planning on doing tonight. I’d love to sit up there and hog the view, but you need to familiarize yourself with the situation and be ready to react if you have to.” She leaned to kiss him. “Here we go!”

  “It is exciting,” Alain said.

  “You sound calm, not excited,” she said. “But I agree. Exciting. And scary. Let’s get this done and go back to the relative safety of Tiae, where all we have to worry about is armies of assassins.”

  Alain returned to the seat behind Banda. It was a bit cramped, but he could see in all directions. The surface of the harbor lay close to the lowest edge of the windows so that the water seemed uncomfortably near. Occasionally it lapped across the very bottom of the windows at the front.

  He looked at the lights of the harbor. Some were moving, probably small boats in motion, others stationary, marking anchored ships or buildings on shore. Watching those lights, Alain realized that the Terror was moving as well, heading steadily toward the place where the Ospren River flowed through Landfall and into the harbor.

  A dark shape looming to one side gained detail as they drew closer. They were passing just astern of an anchored Imperial war galley, only a single light burning on the prow to mark its position. As the Terror glided by, Alain could see above him a solitary sentry leaning on the galley’s rail and staring out across the harbor, oblivious to the strange craft almost right beneath his nose.

  “It’s good we have that driftwood around us,” Banda muttered, his voice tense with concentration as he peered into the night. “Any boats that see us are steering clear so they don’t risk dam
age from colliding with a bunch of heavy, sharp-edged scrapwood. But it also means I have to keep our speed down. I can’t make it obvious that this wood is moving faster than anything drifting in the harbor should be. Tell me for my future knowledge, Sir Mage, if it is needed can you use one of your spells against something you see through one of the portholes, or would you need to view it directly?”

  “If I can see something, I can place a spell on it,” Alain said. “There is little power available on the water,” he added. “My abilities are limited.”

  “Will that be true on the river as well?” Banda asked.

  “I will learn that when we reach the river.”

  The river’s mouth was guarded by a large watch tower on each bank and by another war galley that was moored nearby. Banda cursed under his breath as he struggled against the current to get the Terror into the river and past the Imperial defenses without being noticed. Under the push of the water, the Terror swung close to one side, where the sentries on the nearest watch tower could have easily looked down and perhaps spotted the dark shape beneath the driftwood. Alain felt the ship drag on the right as it brushed against a subsurface sandbar. Banda tried to wrestle the Terror back toward the main channel, leaning forward toward another tube. “I need more power!”

  Alain heard Mechanic Dav’s response come out of the same tube. “Understood.” The Terror shook a little more, but Alain could feel the drag on the right side of the ship increasing. The ship slowed further. He leaned to look up through the nearest windows. They had almost drawn even with the Imperial guard tower on this side of the river. He could barely see the top of the tower, which must provide an ominously good view of the struggling ship below.

  “Reversing,” Banda called into the tube, his voice clipped with anxiety.

  The Terror slid backwards slightly, twisting a little, but then halted again.

  “Going forward.” This time the Terror barely moved at all.

  Two more attempts to go forward and back produced no result.

  Mari stuck her head up the ladder. It was too cramped in the steering room for her to join them, so she stayed there, her expression not easy to make out in the dim light filtering in through the windows. “We’re not moving. Are we stuck?”

  “Yes, we’re stuck,” Banda said angrily. “All of this effort, all of this work, and we have come this far to run hard aground on a submerged sandbar under the noses of Imperial fortifications with the journey barely begun. It is entirely my fault, Master Mechanic Mari.”

  Chapter Nine

  “What can we do?” Mari asked, her voice low, calm, and yet insistent. “How do you free ships when they run aground?”

  “When we’re hard aground like this? Wait for the tide to lift them,” Banda said, bitterness filling every word. “But look out there at the water marks on the rocks. You can’t see any. We’re at high tide already. When the tide goes out, we’ll not only be stuck, but we’ll be sticking out of the water enough that any fool will see us.”

  “Alain?” Mari asked.

  “I cannot think of any spell that Mage Asha or I could do that would free this craft,” Alain said. “We could make some of the sand or mud holding us disappear, but only if we could tell where it was by seeing or by touch, and that might be only a small portion of what holds this ship.”

  “Captain,” Mari said, “I did not endure riding a Roc for four days so I could abandon this job when it was barely begun. What other options do we have?”

  “Unless you know a way to get under the ship and pick it up off the bar, there are no options,” Banda said.

  Mari frowned at him in a way that Alain recognized. She was thinking. An idea was close. “We have to raise the ship?”

  “Yes,” Banda said.

  “I talked to Calu about this ship, and about the ships it was based on, the ones that could ride fully on the surface or fully underwater. I know we can adjust the buoyancy of the Terror. That was planned in so that when we used fuel and food we could lower the ship to keep it concealed, and when we took the texts on board we could—"

  “Increase the buoyancy,” Banda broke in, slapping his forehead. “Blazes! I’m an idiot! I’m in a totally new kind of ship, but I’m still thinking as if it were like all other ships! We can pump out some of the water in the ballast tanks and make the ship ride higher, which means the bottom of the ship will rise, hopefully enough for us to clear that sandbar!”

  He paused. “We’ll have to fire the boiler at full pressure to have enough power to run the pumps and keep enough propulsion to make sure we don’t get pushed the wrong way when the ship gets free. That will make some noise, and we’re right next to one of the Imperial watch towers. The pumps will also make some noise, and the water we shove out may create some noticeable turbulence on the surface. So will the screw while we’re stuck and it’s thrashing away. And the higher we rise the more of the actual ship will be exposed above the surface of the water for anyone to see.”

  “We don’t have any choice,” Mari said. “Alain, you and Asha watch for trouble. Captain Banda, Dav, and I are going to be fully occupied trying to get this ship free. If the Imperials start reacting to us, you and Asha do whatever you think is best, but keep in mind that we want to raise as little fuss as possible.”

  Alain waited, hearing Mari and Dav rushing around and calling out to each other. Asha appeared at the foot of the ladder and nodded to Alain to indicate her readiness.

  There was only a moderate amount of power here. Not much at all. If he and Asha had to use spells they would quickly deplete it.

  “If we use spells, the elders and other Mages in Landfall will know we are here,” Asha said. “We should only use spells if there is no other choice.”

  “You are right,” Alain said. He felt frustratingly helpless. The Mechanics had built this ship. In a way, they had created this world and this situation, and only they could fix the trouble it was in. He wondered if Mari had felt like this when riding on the back of a Roc, able to do little but watch and wait.

  “Ready at the pumps!” Mari called, her voice echoing oddly off the metal sides of the ship. “Dav is bringing the boiler up to the highest safe pressure!”

  Alain could hear a soft roaring sound, like that of a blazing fire muffled by distance. The boiler. He had never forgotten the noise they made, and how it could rise to a bellow before they destroyed everything around them.

  Captain Banda called back to Mari. “Start the pumps. Be ready to stop the moment I call. I’m advancing the throttle now and will hold it at full.”

  A low rumbling was added to the other noises, along with a deeper hum of Mechanic devices laboring. The vibrations shaking the Terror increased.

  Alain looked upward as far as the window permitted. He was just able to see the edge of the top of the tower. As the noise and shaking increased, Alain saw the silhouette of a sentry lean out, gazing down. The night was dark, and darker in the river away from the lights on the shore, and darker yet under the water. What could be seen from up there?

  Apparently, not enough. Another sentry joined the first, their bodies canted out and down as they stared toward the commotion in the river. Alain waited for one or the other to jerk back in alarm, for indications that warnings were being shouted from the tower, but as the moments passed the sentries kept studying the scene beneath them.

  “We’re not rising!” Mari called. “The gauges say water is being pumped out of the ballast tanks but I can’t feel us rising!”

  “There’s suction holding our hull to the sandbar! It’s mostly mud,” Banda called back. “We’ll need enough buoyancy to break the suction. Be ready to reverse the pumps and take on more water, because we might jump as much as a lance length higher in the water when we finally break free. How is the boiler doing?”

  “Dav says it’s holding pressure. Do you need more?”

  “We’ll see!”

  In the midst of the Mechanics’ furious activity and the noises and vibrations, Asha mai
ntained total, impassive calm where she stood at the foot of the ladder. Alain realized that he was doing the same, reverting to Mage training in the face of the emergency to be ready for the worst.

  One of the sentries high overhead raised a torch, holding it out from the tower in an attempt to get a better view of the activity below.

  The Terror suddenly lurched upward just as if it were a Roc caught by a strong updraft. Alain and Asha grabbed for support as the ship surged forward and up while Captain Banda, a sheen of sweat visible on his face, steered toward deeper water near the center of the river. “Stop the pumps!” Banda yelled. “Stars above, we’re about a half-lance higher in the water! Start taking on ballast again!”

  “Are we clear of the sandbar?” Mari yelled back.

  “Yes! Definitely! We’re past the buoys that mark the edges of the main channel down the river that the Imperials keep dredged. We’re all right. I’m throttling back now. But we need to get the Terror lower in the water again before somebody spots the bulk of the ship beneath the camouflage.”

  The shaking of the ship had fallen off a great deal. Alain could hear the hum of the Mechanic devices again.

  “Dav!” Banda called into the tube. “You can reduce pressure to standard steaming. We’re clear.”

  Alain spotted something odd on the river alongside the ship, bubbles bursting to the surface. “There is something next to the ship.” He checked the other side. “And there as well.”

  “That’s air being vented from the ballast tanks as we take on water,” Banda said. “Can’t be helped. Did the Imperials notice that show we just put on?”

  “The sentries were watching, but did not show clear signs of alarm, just curiosity. I saw no signs of reaction to a possible threat.”

  “Let’s hope you’re right. Mari! Slow the pumps. We’re almost low enough in the water again.”

  A short time later, Banda ordered the pumps stopped as the Terror drove up the river. “This will do until we get enough light tomorrow to readjust our depth,” he said. “I assume you want to continue with our job?”