The Wind Merchant
Authors: Ryan Dunlap
THE WIND MERCHANT
Ryan Dunlap
First Printing, July 2012
Copyright © 2012 by Ryan Dunlap
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party web sites or their content.
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Cover art, “The Getaway” by Grant Cooley (
Illustration by Marisa Draeger
Cover design by Phil Earnest (
The text type was set in Adobe Caslon Pro
For Sarah, because you told me to never give up.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There is something that creatives need in order to affirm they aren’t merely broadcasting into the ether: support. Whether that support came in the form of being an early draft reader, financial supporter, or cheerleader, I will risk the cliche and dare to say that this book wouldn’t have become a reality if not for the following people:
Steve Arensberg, Dustin & Gloria Ballard, Andrew Blankenship, Jason Carter, Donna Coker, David & K Cole, Grant Cooley, Jessica Cox, Laurie Cummings, Shirley Darch, Marisa Draeger, David & Lory Dunlap, Sarah Dunlap, Phil Earnest, Scott Fujan, Zach Garrett, Matt Giesler, Mark Gullickson, Tammy Haxton, Joanne Heck, Karen Johnson, Bill & Ola Jordan, Timothy Kane, Lee Kebler, Michael Kennedy, Ellen Knight, Jason Knight, Michael Lewis, Thomas Loyd, Stan Meador, Elisha McCulloh, Josh McKamie, Lindsay Morris, Nathan Nasby, Heather O’Daniel, Gloria Olman, Dan Pavlik, Nic Peaks, Adria Pendergrass, Austin Penick, Patrick Riffe, Tiffani Sahara, Clara Seaman, Logan Sekulow, Adam & Andrew Smith, Kawana Smith, Greg Thorne, Josh Toquothty, Kevin & Becky Tucker, Stuart Turner, Will & Carol Underwood, Tiffany Unruh, George Vuckovic, Nicki Waldorf, Nick Whiley, & Erik Yeager
At risk of further sounding cliche, I also must chiefly give thanks to the Originator of Creativity and Story, who I am daily inspired by. Without Christ, I am nothing. I offer my utmost and sincerest thanks for your contribution to
The Wind Merchant
, and can only hope that I told the best story I had in me.
Sincerely,
Ryan Dunlap
THE WIND MERCHANT
Prologue
As any pilot with a few years under his belt knew, turbulence alone never downed an airship. However, cannonballs were a different matter.
Elias Veir madly spun the large, spoked wheel in a desperate attempt to avoid the next barrage as an explosion of splinters, glass shards, and twisted brass melded cacophonously with a scream of pain. Under more favorable circumstances, Elias would have considered the world above the field of amber clouds truly beautiful, but the air tasted oddly of cinnamon and blood, marring the effect.
“Morris?” Elias called, still devoting the greater part of his attention to the second enemy airship joining the fray.
“I can’t feel my legs,” came the reply.
Elias looked back to see the young man slumped against the railing near the Captain’s quarters with a large scrap of fuselage protruding from his midsection. “We’ll get you to a doctor,” Elias said, hoping his hollow words at least sounded comforting.
With the only other surviving member of the crew out of commission, Elias’ options were dwindling. The engines no longer responded to climbing maneuvers. Desperation crept into his growl as he shoved the wheel forward, and his stomach leapt into his throat.
The airship dove into the clouds, then shot through to the blood-red world below. Elias leveled off the ship and looked back. Superstitious or no, their pursuers wouldn’t take long to decide it worthwhile to risk dropping beneath the clouds.
“What have you done?” Morris said, eyes glassing over as he stared up. “I can’t be down here.”
“It’s only for a little bit,” Elias said.
Three airships descended from cloud cover in attack formation. Elias spun the wheel hard to starboard hoping to buy enough time to enact his plan. He stabilized the rudder and dashed across the deck to fling open the Captain’s quarters door.
Faint pops of cannon fire encouraged him to work quickly.
Elias was scrambling to open the desk drawer containing his flare gun and parchment when an unholy shriek assailed his eardrums. An instant later, a concussive force blasted through the back wall, showering the quarters with wood splinters and rocking the ship side to side.
A streak of red hot pain shot through his left leg. Elias looked down to see a scrap of wood paneling jutting from his thigh, but he had no time to address it. Grabbing a scrap of parchment, he scrawled a note and stuffed it into the message tube that he had already loaded in the flare gun. Too much rode on the success of this mission for him to fail here.
As he hobbled back to the outside deck, another volley rocked the ship, severing the bow ropes connecting the balloon to the deck. The horizon climbed and Elias braced himself against the console. He grabbed the transmitter. “Mayday, Mayday! This is Elias Veir, I—”
Another lurch threw Elias to the floor, yanking out the transmitter cabling with him. Elias aimed his flare gun to the sky.
I’m sorry
, he mouthed
.
He pulled the trigger, and with a crack the message tube was lost to the clouds.
An eerie peace fell as the soft crackling of fire filled the absence left by the formerly churning engines, at least until Morris’ scream penetrated the calm with an intensity that would have unnerved Elias even on his better days.
“Stop me,” Morris pleaded to nobody in particular.
With no clue as to what the young man meant, Elias watched the three ships line up and fire a final barrage.
The explosion hurled the wind merchant over the bow railing and into thin air.
CHAPTER ONE
The Convergence
Ten years later.
“I love you, but this isn’t working for me,” Ras Veir said, pulling down his welding goggles and flicking on his torch.
The Copper Fox
rarely surpassed first impressions. Equal parts gasbag relic and salvage-yard special, the airship’s mind was set on hanging dead in the sky. Inside its dank hold, sparks flared as a begoggled young man in his early twenties welded a metal plate over the most recently ruptured pipe. “Don’t worry, nobody’s going to notice,” he said, inspecting the messy patch job. After all, it looked right at home within the context of its cobbled together surroundings.
“Atta girl,” Ras said, flicking off the torch and standing to stretch his legs. A low-hanging pipe sounded an atonal clang as it connected solidly with the back of his head. Stars flooded his vision, punctuating the fading glow of the retina burn from his arc-welder.
“Not your fault,” Ras said through gritted teeth. He gingerly removed his welding goggles, releasing a sweaty, tangled mess of dark brown hair into his face. He brushed it away, and as he did so, he caught his distorted reflection in the one redeeming feature of his ship: the massive glass container filling half of the hold.
Ras had mixed feelings about the inherited wind collection tank. The replacement part was the last vestige of his father’s lost ship,
The Silver Fox
, and reminded him that his entire vessel was a slapdash homage to his father’s legacy. From the stained patchwork balloon to the thirdhand engines, his ship felt like a child’s scribble compared to a lost set of blueprints.
Extricating himself from the pipes, Ras walked to one of his twin scoop engines. He crouched and twisted the valve from the newly patched pipe, restoring the flow of Energy-filled air from outside to the machine. With a pull of a lever, the iris inside the steel barrel opened and shut, throttling the Energy feed. He allowed himself a moment of celebration even though another pipe would likely need his attention later in the week.
A win is a win
, he thought, flicking on both engines before climbing above deck.
With the reassuring rattle of the engines once again filling the air, he let the cool wind whip his hair and ventilate his baggy third-generation clothing, drying the sweat worked up in the hold. At moments like this, Ras appreciated that his grandfather and father weren’t small-framed men. After sufficiently cooling off, he cinched up the thin leather straps at his elbows and knees to avoid letting the wind play with the extra fabric.
Staring out at the open horizon of white, fluffy clouds, he imagined the days long gone when a wooden ship like his didn’t need the gasbag to travel from place to place over the…big thing made of water.
He could never remember the name of anything below Atmo.
The tension eased from his shoulders when he took a moment to appreciate the subtle beauty of the clouds, knowing that nobody would ever see them quite this way again.
It was such a shame they would kill him if he ventured too low.
The very first time his father took him down to the cloud level, the proximity to the abandoned world below became his favorite part of sailing. It sparked his imagination with possibilities from an early age, but gaps to peek below were rare after The Clockwork War.
The constant presence of the clouds reminded him of a time when his father was the breadwinner for the family, and the responsibility of providing for he and his mother didn’t weigh so heavily.
Ras lowered the ship’s collection tube to let it troll just above the cloud level. He prided himself on being a traditional wind merchant, but was painfully aware that it was only because he lacked the means to acquire the more modern Energy hunting tools.
