Skykeep (5 page)

“No, Cap’n,” Coop said, shouldering the rifle
and returning to his position.

Gunner shook his head and polished one of the
lenses on his weapon. “I’m sure this is going to be a match made in
heaven,” he muttered.

#

About an hour behind schedule, Captain Mack
brought the
Wind Breaker
into the port of Lock. Like any
reasonably sized city on the mainland, Lock was a precarious
assemblage of walkways and platforms clinging to the mountaintops.
It was anything but a pleasant or simple way to live, but it was a
necessity due to the ever-present fug that lapped at the lower
slopes of the mountains. The fug was a reeking, toxic purple vapor
that hung like a permanent blanket of fog over the bulk of the
mainland. It had decimated the continent decades ago, and no one
seemed certain where it came from or what it was, but its arrival
had claimed the lives of most of the surface dwellers. Nearly all
of those who didn’t flee to the skies, mountaintops, and plateaus
were suffocated or poisoned by the horrid stuff. The fraction who
survived and thrived within the fug had become what polite people
called the “fug folk” and most others called “fuggers.” They were
emaciated, ghost-white parodies of humanity who held the continent
in their iron grasp by being the only providers of a number of
inventions and products that had become indispensable in the
fug-stricken world. These included the boilers and turbines that
ran the ships, the inspectors that checked them for flaws, the
maintenance that corrected these flaws, the burn-slow that fueled
them for long voyages, and the phlogiston that kept them airborne.
In short, they held all the cards.

As home to those unfortunates who had fallen
out of favor with the fug folk, Lock had a few features that other
mountain cities lacked. The first was its windmills. Whereas the
rest of the
world
seemed to run on steam, Lock had no such
luxury. Instead, they relied upon the near-constant wind to keep
their power demands satisfied. As a result, Lock was instantly
recognizable from afar, with each major and minor peak in the area
hosting a large, slowly rotating windmill, tiny shafts linking them
and delivering power to the town.

Lock also had one of the deepest and most
productive coal mines in all of Rim, which was almost a slap in the
face. It would have made for ample fuel for fug-made boilers if
they were able to use them. Instead the coal was mostly burned to
heat the homes and cook the meals of the residents, as well as
traded to those few airmen and seamen with the nerve to do business
with the forsaken town.

While the almost unbroken ring of mountains
that gave Rim its name served as something of a bowl to hold the
fug in the inland areas, there was always a thin layer of the stuff
leaking out between the mountains or flowing over the low points in
the mountain chain. This made seagoing ship’s docks unpleasant
places at best and lethal at worst, since the layer of fug could
easily poison any sailors who drew near to the shore. Lock was
lucky enough to be situated a few hundred feet above a relatively
sheltered cove on the seaward side of the mountains. A quirk of
wind and geography managed to keep this harbor free enough of fug
to accept sea traffic, so Lock kept itself fed with ample fishing.
The fishermen and their day’s catch were hauled to the city via
wind-powered elevators, and barges carried coal to more popular
trading posts to trade for essential supplies. All in all, the
place was a testament to the ability of a society to find a way to
persist in spite of the odds mounded against them.

When they were near enough to one of the
three mooring points the city maintained for those few airships
daring or desperate enough to visit, Lil turned to Wink. The
inspector was clinging to the main support pole for the
envelope.

“Okay, critter, make yourself scarce,” she
said.

Wink darted down the pole and into the bowels
of the ship.

“Good thing you remembered. I keep forgetting
to get rid of the little bugger,” Coop said. “Why we doing that
again, Cap’n?”

“Because fuggers have eyes in every port,
even Lock.”

“And what’s that mean to us? Wink don’t rat
us out no more.”

“That ain’t general knowledge, Coop. And I
want to keep it that way.”

“Oh. Why?”

“Because if the fuggers knew that
we
knew the inspectors were the reason they knew what we were all
doing, they’d probably kill them all off and find a new way to do
it.”

“What’s that matter to us?”

The captain grumbled impatiently. “I’m not
too fond of the thought of being the reason the inspectors all get
killed, and besides, having everyone
but
us using the
inspectors means we can listen in on what they’re up to.”

“I follow, Cap’n… but why’s that mean Wink
can’t be out and about?”

“Honest, Coop. You better have Glinda check
and see if that head of yours has any extra holes, because it seems
you’ve got a leak. I must have told you a dozen times.”

“Well, make it a baker’s dozen and maybe
it’ll stick.”

The captain gritted his teeth. “If we don’t
want them to know we’re wise to the inspectors, then the only way
we’ll end up without one ratting us out is if we don’t
have
one.”

“Oh… I got it now, Cap’n.”

“Yeah, until tomorrow,” Lil muttered.

Lil and Coop threw out lines to a port crew
quite happy to see them. As the
Wind Breaker
was secured,
the captain turned to address his crew, which had assembled on deck
without being summoned.

“All right, you lot can draw straws to pick
the lookouts if you want to swap. Like I said, I want at least two.
I’ve got matters to attend to in town, but when I’m through I’ll
relieve one of you. We’ll be in port for two days. Glinda will see
to placing the orders for the fuel, phlogiston, and other such. The
lookouts will also be loading them up. Nita, you’re off the hook
for this one, if you’re willing to put them wrenches to work for a
few of the locals.”

“Always glad to lend a hand,” Nita said.

“You boys are already on watch. You figure
you can stay on for a bit? Nita said she’d show me a thing or two
about fixing them boilers and such,” Lil asked.

“May as well,” Gunner grumbled. “Sticking
near the ship should give me the chance to get back to work on that
gun I’m tinkering with. Besides, once you’ve spent a few hours in
Lock, you’ve done everything there is to do.”

Coop nodded. “I’ll agree with you there.
Ain’t much I miss about the old days, but a rowdy night in Keystone
is one of them.” He turned to Nita. “You ever seen something so
silly as all that with the windmills, ma’am?”

“I don’t know. I think it’s rather lovely.
The way the blades are all turning at the same speed, it is like
they are choreographed, dancing. And there’s so much less smoke to
blacken the air. The whole cityscape is picturesque, like the
townsfolk made ornaments to decorate the mountains.”

Coop scratched his head. “Well, when you put
it like that I reckon it
is
… uh… pretty.”

Captain Mack headed toward the hatch below
decks.

“Nita, Lil, come with me,” the captain said.
“You boys keep an eye on the ship.” He lowered his voice. “And keep
an eye on Wink while you’re at it. He’s been going below decks to
pick at Nita’s sweets. Bad enough he should be nabbing from the
crew, but all that sugar makes him a right awful terror come
sundown. I don’t want to come back to my inspector bouncing off the
walls.”

Wink looked to the captain reproachfully from
his perch within the hatch leading to the lower decks and tapped
his middle finger at the ground.

“Now hold on now… that was something about…
the crew and… dang it, that little thing taps too fast,” Coop
said.

“Oh Coop, he said ‘The crew ate good food,
then the inspector ate good food. This was fair.’ You could hear it
plain as day,” Lil said impatiently. “What’s the matter, you forget
how to learn or something?”

“I spent years learning to tune out that
stuff. Takes a bit of time to learn to pay attention is all,” Coop
said.

“Coop, you stay on deck. Gunner, since you’re
staying on lookout, man the gig and handle any trade the good folks
of Lock might be after.”

“Aye, Captain,” Gunner said.

The crew filed one by one down the hatch,
leaving Coop on deck and Wink just below the open hatch. The
creature looked up to the deckhand with its one eye and began to
slyly slink into the darkness.

“Cap’n said I should keep an eye on you. That
means you stay where I can see you, you little critter,” Coop
said.

Wink scowled at him and tapped a finger.

“I think I caught a jab about me being big
and dumb in there. You’d best be remembering the big part, because
you keep slinging comments like that and we’re going to see just
how far this boot of mine will send you,” Coop said.

Wink rattled off a message that Coop was
reasonably sure had to do with the fact that, since Coop had to
stay on deck, there was nothing he could do to stop the inspector
from having free rein down below. He then darted off into the
bowels of the ship.

“I miss back when I was smarter than that
critter. Or at least when I thought I was,” he muttered to
himself.

#

“You know something,” Lil said, pacing along
beside the captain and Nita as they made their way off the swaying
catwalk of the pier and deeper into the moderately more secure
platforms of the town. “The hustle and the bustle of Keystone is
nice and all. They got pretty near anything a gal might want all in
one place, but I think I like Lock better. Folks here are so much
happier to see you. And the air smells a good bit fresher. Ain’t
nothing like a breath of fresh air.”

“I imagine when so few people use the port,
the locals would be happy to see any new face,” Nita said. “I’m
just happy that people seem to have finally gotten used to seeing a
Calderan complexion.”

“How come?” Lil said.

“You didn’t notice how people would stare
whenever I showed up the first few times?”

“Come to think of it, you did get a few funny
looks. I always figured it was your outfit. Even in your work
clothes you dress fancier than folks around here are used to. Well
heck, you do
everything
fancy. Just look what you done to
the ol’
Wind Breaker
.”

Lil turned Nita to view the crew’s ship at
the end of the pier. At this distance the whole ship was visible,
from the sideways teardrop of the envelope to the gleaming brass
turbines and the gondola that would have looked just as appropriate
on a seagoing frigate as an aircraft. The captain’s gig, the dinghy
that was held to the belly of the ship while in flight, had been
loaded with goods and lowered to the pier, with a line of people
eagerly chatting up Gunner as he described their wares.

When Nita had first joined the crew, the ship
had looked positively decrepit. There had been splintered and
poorly replaced planks all over the hull. Bolts were half-inserted,
badly tarnished, and sometimes flat-out missing. It was airworthy,
but just barely, and not a moment of thought had been put into how
it
looked
. To a Calderan, trained from birth to see the
potential for beauty and artistry in all things, it was something
she couldn’t bear to witness. To the crew, her most important role
in the ship was the work she’d done on its mechanisms. Under her
ministrations, the boiler and turbines had been simplified and
carefully tuned. They were now much easier to fix, and they ran as
smoothly and efficiently as the day they were made. That made for a
ship that moved faster from port to port and hadn’t had more than a
few hours of downtime in months. But as far as she was concerned,
her greatest achievement had been turning the ship into the work of
art it deserved to be.

Every spare moment had been spent polishing
this or painting that. She’d brought gold paint from her home in
Dell Harbor and added sweeping highlights and designs to the hull,
decorating the trim and railings. With acid and a steady hand she’d
etched similar detailing into the cowling of the turbines
themselves, and she’d worked hard to acquire lumber of the same
grain and figuring to patch any hull damage, such that the ship
looked almost brand new. She’d even contributed more than a bit of
her own money to purchase replacement envelope cloth that matched
as closely as possible not the
original
color of their
envelope, but the one it had faded to over the years, such that
from this distance the patches were barely noticeable.

“Thanks to you we got the prettiest ship in
the sky,” Lil said.

The captain, a momentary break forming in his
month’s-old shell of surliness, turned to the ship and nodded.
“Always been proud of the ol’ girl. Now she looks as good to the
rest of you as she always did to me.”

“I’m pleased you like it, but that’s just
what comes natural to a Calderan. We’re all artists at heart, and
they say every Calderan is obligated to produce at least one
masterpiece before we meet our maker. The
Wind Breaker
was a
fine canvas for it.”

“So you ask me, that’s why folks were looking
at you. It ain’t like you’re the first person any of them seen
that’s been dark skinned. Anyone who works in the sun gets pretty
much brown before long, and here in Lock half of the workers finish
their day in the mine even darker than you, what with all the dust
and such.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Nita said. “I suppose
I’ve never been comfortable being singled out. Lucky I didn’t
become a dancer like my sister. I’d have never survived the
stage.”

“See, me? I’ve got the opposite problem. I
got just about the most plain face you could ever hope to see, not
a pretty one like yours. And I ain’t got curves like you, either.
Coop and me may as well be twins, ’cept he’s taller and don’t wear
a bow,” she said, adjusting the red ribbon that held her short hair
out of her face.