by Jeff Minerd
“If a pirate ship draws close enough, toss one or two of these onto its deck,” he’d said. “That will take care of them.”
Brieze rummaged through her gear and brought out two of the bombs. Her nimble mind was forming a plan. Simply tossing the bombs at the Nagmor would do no good. They would probably just bounce off the creature’s thick skin and blow her and the merchant ship to bits. But if she could get one down the beast’s throat, that would do some damage.
To get a bomb down its throat, though, she’d have to throw from close range, and at the correct angle.
In other words, from the deck of the merchant ship itself. From about where the captain and his men were standing, readying themselves to charge.
Brieze’s mind worked fast in tight situations. So fast she was hardly aware of it, she just moved, acted. She angled her sail, leaned on her tiller, pressed the wing flap pedals, and banked the Devious into a tight turn, aiming for the ship’s rigging—the complicated system of ropes, stays, and ratlines that ran from the deck and gunwales up to the masts and yards and sails. She crashed into the rigging on purpose. The Devious sliced through some of the ropes, but others caught and held the ship as if it were a bird tangled up in a net. That would keep it close and prevent it from drifting off. The Devious leaned at a crazy angle. Brieze unclipped her lifeline, lit the fuses of the two bombs, and jumped from the deck with one in each hand, aiming straight for the captain and the knot of men gathering on the foredeck. She spread her arms and legs wide—the wings of her flightsuit snapped taught as they caught the wind. It was hard to control her descent with a heavy, burning bomb in each hand. She veered and wobbled, but she managed…
What the men on the merchant ship saw, each of them sure he was about to die, was a winged figure in black descending on them from above. Its hands glowed with fire, trailing sparks. The thing landed among them, knocking some down, scattering the others.
“Back!” the figure cried. “Get back!”
The apparition gathered itself up and strode right up to the mouth of the beast. It hurled one bit of fire down the beast’s throat. Then the other. Both disappeared. And then, for the space of a few heartbeats, nothing happened.
With a guttural bellow that shook every plank of the ship, the Nagmor erupted. It exploded into several large pieces, scatting its awful innards in every direction—the bones of old ships and devoured crew, chunks of prey that had been rotting inside it for untold time, other pieces of filth too bizarre to name or describe.
The tail of the beast spun away into the darkness. The head remained intact, mouth still gripping the bow. But the mouth had gone slack. Tentacles flopped limply to the deck. With a grating of sharp, spiked teeth against wood, the giant head slipped away from the bow and fell into the darkness below, snapping the bowsprit and dragging its lifeless tentacles with it.
For a long time, nobody said anything. Everyone was too dazed with shock, with fear, with relief, with the incomprehensible reek of the beast all around them. The men gathered in a loose knot around Brieze. They looked at her. They looked at each other. She stood doubled over, hands on her knees, trying to get her breath back but at the same time trying not to breathe too deeply for fear of being overcome by the stench.
The wind whistled through the rigging. The wounded ship groaned.
And then, one by one, the men knelt and bowed their heads. Some got down on all fours and pressed their foreheads to the deck. They murmured fearfully but excitedly among themselves. Brieze caught a word here and there. Tenshi. Angel. Kami. Divine being.
The captain knelt, but on one knee only. He bowed his head slightly, keeping his eyes on Brieze. He was not as superstitious as his crew. His mind tended to rational, not supernatural, explanations of things. Still, an awed expression softened the rough features of his bearded, weather-beaten face. He knew he was in the presence of something very much out of the ordinary.
“Whatever you are,” he said in the Eastern language, “whoever you are, we are grateful to you beyond words. We owe you our lives. My ship, my crew, and I are at your service.”
Brieze straightened up, caught her breath, and began to stammer. Her hands shook with adrenaline. “I’m not an angel. I’m just…just a girl.” Few of the men appeared to understand her, so she repeated this in the Eastern language.
The captain arched an eyebrow skeptically. He noted her preference for the Western tongue and responded in kind, speaking fluently. “Just a girl? A girl who appears out of nowhere, flies on her own wings, and destroys the beast that my crew and I could not? Are you sure that you are really just a girl?”
“Well,” Brieze said, and a little smile crooked the corner of her mouth. She couldn’t help feeling flattered, “I am a wizard’s apprentice.” She repeated the phrase in the eastern tongue.
The men looked to one another, comprehension dawning on their faces. The captain nodded. That explanation made some sense to him. But the men remained kneeling. Brieze could tell by the looks and whispers that passed among them that while a wizard’s apprentice might not be an angel or divine being, it was close enough in most of their books.
“My name is Brieze. Apprentice to the wizard Radolphus of the Kingdom of Spire in the West.”
The captain stood and offered her a formal bow. “I am Captain Hiroshi of the city of Kyo. This ship is called the Kinzou. My crew and I are at your service. Is there something we can do to repay you for your kindness and bravery? Ask anything you wish. If it is in my power to grant, I will.”
“Well…” Brieze cocked her eye up at the ship’s rigging. “You could help me get my ship out of your rigging.”
“Ship?” Captain Hiroshi squinted, following her gaze. “I see no ship up there.”
Brieze smiled. There was a thing or two she would have to explain to these men.
SEVEN
In the hours immediately after the Nagmor attack, there was little time for Brieze to explain anything. Captain Hiroshi’s first order of business was to keep the Kinzou from sinking. The first of its four tall, strong masts had been snapped by the Nagmor’s squeezing tentacles, and the second had been badly cracked and splintered. The ship could no longer carry enough sail to keep itself aloft. It was losing altitude at an alarming rate, sinking nose-down. Hiroshi asked that Brieze remain at his side until he had dealt with this problem. She agreed, but it was difficult to do, as the man was everywhere at once, striding from one end of his ship to the other and shouting orders to the crew as they made frantic repairs.
Some of the crew disentangled the Devious from the rigging. Once they’d gotten over boggling at its properties of color, the captain asked if they could tie the Devious to his own ship’s sagging bow. Even the small lift its sail could provide would help, he said. Brieze agreed. A new bowsprit was quickly rigged and the Devious was lashed to it with sturdy rope. The warped and cracked bow planks were hammered back into place and patched up as best the crew could.
A much shorter and weaker temporary spare mast replaced the snapped foremast. And the second cracked mast was bolstered and braced. Sails were quickly raised on these masts, but not nearly as much sail as the originals could have carried. On the good masts, sail yards were lengthened by tying on extra lengths of wood to their ends. Extra sail was stitched on, riggers working furiously while hanging precariously from harnesses.
While all this was going on, some crew members scrubbed the decks, trying to remove the Nagmor’s terrible stench.
All these repairs and riggings were not enough. The Kinzou was still too heavy. Its nose straightened out, but it continued to lose altitude, though at a much slower rate. The ship creaked and complained. Every squeaking rope threatened to give up and snap.
Captain Hiroshi announced they would have to toss some cargo.
The crew groaned in dismay.
“Quit your belly aching!” Hiroshi shouted. “I don’t like it any better than you. But do you want to get ho
me alive, or would you rather be ghosts wandering and wailing beneath the clouds?”
The men got to work.
The Kinzou had sailed to the Kingdom of Spire with its holds full of rice, silk, tea, and spices. The captain had traded these for a commodity the west had plenty of, but which had grown rare and precious in the east—wood. The ship’s cargo holds were filled with tightly packed, heavy pine trunks that had been felled by lumberjacks in the Dragonback mountains. This timber was destined for the capital city of Kyo, where it would be sawed into lumber. Some of it would be used to replace the old, rotting wooden doors and window frames of the city’s stone houses, but most of it would be used to build new airships. The Eastern Kingdoms always needed more airships.
The captain and crew of the Kinzou would make a tremendous profit on the timber they carried. Every tree they tossed would lessen that profit.
The main deck’s cargo hatch was opened. Teams of men hauled up the heavy pine trunks and heaved them overboard. Captain Hiroshi ordered that they be thrown overboard one at a time, and he looked up at the sails and gauged the effect before allowing another to be jettisoned. He looked miserable as he did this, like he was in physical pain, as if he were giving up teeth to a dentist’s pliers.
Brieze, standing at his elbow, felt the urge to comfort him. “It’s just wood,” she said. “There’s plenty more where that came from.”
Hiroshi sighed. “Where I come from, every one of those trees is worth its weight in silver.”
Brieze chewed on that for a while.
“Still,” he said. “We are alive thanks to you. And we might yet reach home safely. And there will still be profit.” He closed his eyes, breathed slowly and calmly, and folded his hands into a contemplative pose. “So all is well. I am grateful.”
When about a quarter of the cargo had been dumped, the captain judged they were light enough to get back to Kyo. And so with every sail and rope straining, the Kinzou made its slow, aching journey home.
Brieze spent the remainder of her journey to the Eastern Kingdoms aboard the Kinzou as a guest, getting to know the ship, its crew, and especially its captain. Hiroshi had more or less begged her to stay with them. “My men would feel…safer if you continued with us on our journey,” he’d said, and added with a hopeful smile, “and I confess that I would, too.”
Brieze didn’t take much convincing. She didn’t want to go back to talking to herself in the gray void of the Eastern Emptiness. She’d felt a bond with these men the first time she heard them singing by the light of their colored lanterns at night, and she didn’t want to break it. And travelling with them would give her the opportunity to sharpen her language skills and learn more about the strange culture she was about to immerse herself in, she told herself.
She’d planned on sleeping in the weather shelter aboard the Devious, but the captain insisted that she use his cabin. He bunked in the hammocks with his officers. The tiny cabin was the only sleeping quarters on the ship with a real bed, though a small one with a thin mat instead of a mattress, and a window that looked out from the stern of the ship.
Hiroshi also insisted that she dine with him in the cabin each evening, at a table that folded out from the wall. The meal was most often flying fish, heavily salted but prepared in a variety of delicious ways, with rice. Sometimes, when the crew could catch food, the fare was more exotic—a jellyfish stew or roasted octopus. With a little instruction from Hiroshi, Brieze grew adept at using the two sticks Easterners used for utensils, instead of forks or spoons.
“What is this flavor I’m tasting?” Brieze asked at their first dinner, closing her eyes and savoring a bite of fish. “It’s sweet, but nutty.” Flying fish was frequently eaten in the west, but it was usually fried or baked, and bland.
Hiroshi smiled. “That would be coconut,” he said. “We get them from the south, and we simmer the fish in their juice.”
“Coconut?” Brieze said. “I never heard of it.”
“I’ll have the cook give you one,” he said.
She decided to tell Hiroshi the reason for her journey, although she left out the details of what she planned to do when she met her biological father. She trusted the captain, and he seemed like someone who could help and advise her. He listened gravely to her story. His eyes widened at the mention of the name Fujiwara. “The Fujiwaras are a numerous and powerful clan,” he said. “They essentially rule the city of Kyo and the mountains of Onshu while the Emperor keeps to himself in the north. I do not know specifically of a man named Kaishou Fujiwara, but Kaishou is a common name and there might be several Kaishou Fujiwaras in Kyo.”
“How can I find the right one?” Brieze asked.
Hiroshi grinned. “When we get to Kyo, the story of how you saved us from the beast will make you famous. You’ll be a celebrity. I’m sure the leaders of the Fujiwara clan will want to meet you, and they will know where your Kaishou is. I can make the arrangements for the meeting.”
Brieze thanked him, but inwardly she felt troubled. Her business with Kaishou Fujiwara was a private matter, and she wanted it to be a secret. She had thought to slip unnoticed into the city of Kyo, discover the whereabouts of the man, and confront him. She didn’t like the idea of arriving in the city as a celebrity and having everyone know her business.
The captain’s next words troubled her further. “I will give you some advice. The Fujiwaras are powerful and proud. They hold their family honor dear. If this Kaishou Fujiwara did as you said, then he acted dishonorably. If you were to meet with them and bluntly accuse them of this dishonor, it would not go well. I urge you to be more…diplomatic.”
“I have some experience with diplomacy,” Brieze said.
“And another thing. The Fujiwaras are a scheming lot. They’re always looking to increase their power and advance their interests. If they can figure out a way to use you for their own ends, they will. So be careful. Don’t become a pawn in one of their games. Be wary. They can be quite…devious.”
“Devious,” Brieze smiled wryly. “That sounds like my family.”
One evening Brieze leaned her elbows on the aft deck rail of the Kinzou and watched the sun set in the evening lavender of the western sky. As the sun’s disc touched the horizon, it seemed to set the surface clouds afire. They burned with that special pinkish-orange glow that only the setting sun creates.
A lookout called something she didn’t quite catch, and men began to exclaim and call to each other throughout the ship. She turned. Everyone gazed and pointed at something on the eastern horizon ahead of them. A crowd gathered on the forward deck. She moved through the crowd—every man stepped back to give her room and offered her a deferential bow. She smiled and nodded back. She stood in the prow of the ship and looked.
The eastern horizon was already dark as night. But she spotted what seemed like fire there, too. Flickers and sparkles of red and orange, as if there were tremendously tall mountains ahead and huge bonfires had been lit on their peaks. She guessed what they must be, and a little thrill ran through her.
Hiroshi came to her side and confirmed her guess. “The Wind’s Teeth,” he said. “The rays of the setting sun are just catching their peaks. We should reach them tomorrow, shortly after sunrise.”
Brieze had read all about The Wind’s Teeth and had heard the countless stories. They were the greatest natural wonder in all of Etherium, nothing else came close—a beautiful and strange, dazzling and dangerous geological formation.
“I was going to fly around them,” she said. “I don’t have the skill to navigate them on my own. What are you going to do?”
Hiroshi stroked his beard. “It takes two or three weeks to go around, but only one day to go through,” he said. “So I will take the risk. Our pace is slow. We’ve lost much time and can’t afford to lose any more.”
“Wow,” Brieze’s eyes sparkled. “I can’t believe I’m going to see them up close, and actually go through them!”
<
br /> Hiroshi grinned wryly. “Spoken like a true wizard’s apprentice and Nagmor-slayer,” he said. “I myself, who have been through them many times, am not quite so enthusiastic.”
In the dawn light, The Wind’s Teeth stood before them—taller than any mountains by far and much thinner and sharper. To Brieze, who’d been waiting for a first glimpse of them in the prow of the Kinzou since before sunup, they at first looked like a forest of glittering crystalline stalagmites holding up the roof of the sky. The next moment, they looked to her like a vast shimmering field of upside-down icicles. But she could see now how they got their name. They also looked like rows of ragged fangs protruding from the lower jaw of some impossibly huge creature, a creature that could swallow entire worlds with a single bite.
The Teeth stretched far away to the north and south, sparkling like diamonds in the morning sun.
The Kinzou aimed for a small gap that marked the middle passage. Hiroshi took the wheel and steered the ship himself. He called orders to the knots of crewmen who worked the ropes to trim the sails. As they entered the middle passage and nosed along it, the Teeth closed in behind them, and the wind grew rougher and less predictable. That was one of the tricks the Teeth played with the wind. They forced the big trade currents to break up into smaller currents that twisted and turned as they slithered through whatever gaps they could find. Sometimes the currents looped and eddied and turned back on themselves, forming whirlpools or windspouts.
Brieze stood in her privileged spot at the captain’s side. It was hard for her to keep her sense of direction. She couldn’t see the sun, and wherever she looked the view was the same—mind-boggling huge spires of crystal scattered in every direction, with only small slivers of sky visible between their sharp peaks. But Hiroshi kept a close eye on the compass in the binnacle, and he seemed to know where he was going.
