Void Spheres, page 26
Their garrisons were long dead, but that hadn’t stopped the void spheres from attacking Flyer before—and Brushfire was actively concerned over the trio of five-sided warships still docked at the closer fort.
Time had moved even these forts away from the strait and where they’d originally hung. The charts said the six forts should have formed a three-by-two wall some five hundred leagues across about a hundred leagues ahead of the exit from the passage.
Now the closest fort was almost a thousand leagues away from the passage out of the sphere. They couldn’t easily avoid it, not with the limitations on Void Flyer’s maneuvering, which meant that Brushfire was focusing on how to deal with it if the wraiths woke up on it.
Once they were into the strait, she’d join the others in worrying about Stormfall. The Warden of Stone wasn’t clear for them yet, however dead it felt. Just because they’d encountered threats by this point in each of the void spheres before them didn’t mean this sphere was safe.
The expected knock finally came on the chart-room door.
“Come in,” she told Fistfall without looking up.
He chuckled and walked over to join her at the chart table.
“You knew it was me, first-sister?” he asked.
“No one else on this ship knocks that high on the door,” she told him. “Plus, I did send a runner for you. What took so long?”
She looked up in time to see him flush darkly.
“I… wasn’t where Sky expected,” he admitted. “I… Um. Was in Officer Smallwolf’s quarters.”
“Anything I should be concerned about?” Brushfire asked him, giving him her best Officer Warning look—which happened to very closely resemble her best Sister Warning look.
“I… Um.” He swallowed. “She didn’t seem to think so?”
Even as the words came out of his mouth, though, he straightened his shoulders and looked Brushfire directly in the eye.
“If there is a problem, First Officer, I take full responsibility,” he said crisply. “I believe Officer Smallwolf understood my status as a mage in training to put me on equivalent status to an officer and avoid any potential concerns.”
“She did understand that,” Brushfire said, her tone level. “Because I told her so.” She grinned at her brother, who took a moment to realize she’d been teasing him.
“I also, I want to make sure you know, told her that she needed to talk to you about anything beyond that. I try not to make the same mistake twice, Fistfall,” she continued gently. “She and I spoke because she was concerned you wouldn’t be willing—or able—to see an elvar in a romantic sense.”
“I.” He stopped, then nodded. “I can see why she would be concerned,” he finished. “I would not have even considered the question a dance ago. If asked, I might have said I couldn’t. Now, though…”
He shrugged.
“I realize I don’t care what var she is. I know her.”
“If that’s good enough for you, Fistfall, it’s good enough for me,” Brushfire told him. “Do me one favor?”
“Most likely,” he said carefully.
“Try to avoid needing a runner to find you in her quarters. This ship isn’t anyone’s military, and there are, so far as I am concerned, basically no rules on this. But the Captain and a bunch of the crew are elvar, and face and discretion are key for them.
“So, err on the side of discretion,” she told him. “Let Bogsong set the pace with her people, and talk to her before you set the pace with ours.”
“I… need to talk about ours,” he admitted. “I know a lot of folk wanted to see me with Petal as much for the chance of new children as anything else. Bogsong and I… don’t have that chance.”
“You don’t, and people will give you grief for it,” Brushfire confirmed. “Ignore them if you can; send them to me if you can’t. If you really need a stick, remind them that elvar think of relationships in ten-dance cycles.”
She smiled gently at him as he stopped to digest that.
“I don’t mean she’s going to leave you in ten dances, but both of you will live for hundreds of dances, little brother. That’s time enough to decide you need something else, something different—or to mutually decide to make special arrangements for children, if that ends up important to you.”
“And if we don’t survive the archmage’s quest?” Fistfall asked bluntly.
“Then what matters is that you are happy today and tomorrow,” she told him. “I don’t want you to think like that, Fistfall. But the moment you’re in is always the moment you have. Be as happy as you can.”
He chuckled.
“And this is why you’re the shaman and the eldest sister and I am merely a mage-trainee,” he told her. “Because I might have magic, but you have actual wisdom.”
“Nine-tenths of which, if I’m being honest, is just repeating phrases my teachers drilled into my head,” Brushfire told him with a chuckle of her own. “It wasn’t just magic I was learning from aged shamans in smoky caves, little brother.”
She gestured his attention toward the chart on the table.
“Now, do you need more sisterly or shamanly advice, or can we talk about what I called you here for?” She smiled gently at him to make it clear the offer was more open than it might sound. “We have time for either.”
“I am here to help,” Fistfall said. “What do you need?”
“How many of the storm staves are ready to use?”
The problem, as Cat had explained it to her, was that the staves recharged by drawing on the surrounding aether. Without aether, they could not recharge—and slowly lost what charge they had, too.
“One,” her brother told her. “Just one. I’m not sure what we can do with just one stave blast.”
“Piss someone off, probably,” she admitted, turning back to look at the updated chart with the two forts and three ships. “So far, everything at the strait into Stormfall appears to be dead, but I don’t trust it. I don’t think Cat and Armand are able to repeat what they did—but you can’t tell anyone else that; am I clear?”
He nodded silently, his steadiness always reassuring.
“Hunter and I have a… an option,” he said slowly. “We wanted to sort through some more details before we presented it, but we thought we were prepping for something in Stormfall. But you’re expecting trouble here?”
“There are two old fortresses and three aether ships still standing at the gateway out of the Warden of Stone,” she told him. “Each of those fortresses could easily have as many weapons as that twentysail. They likely will not all work—but the twentysail’s staves shouldn’t have worked.
“I don’t know what the wraiths are capable of, but we don’t have much choice about sailing past those forts on our way forward. One storm stave isn’t going to do anything to them, so I’m open to listening to options.”
“Things in the void keep going till they hit something,” her brother said quietly. “So, we figure, a ballista bolt will go a long, long way. Won’t do much damage on its own, though, but… well, we figured we have all of these stave crystals sitting around that aren’t charged enough to fire.
“Doesn’t mean they have no charge, though.”
Brushfire blinked.
“What are you and Hunter suggesting?” she asked slowly.
“A couple of the carpenters are working on a ballista,” he admitted. “Back home, a few of the Kingdoms used them on the smaller aether ships, where they stuck all kinds of nasty things on them to make them useful.
“Aether slows the bolt, which limits the range, but void doesn’t seem to. And while we don’t have a lot of options, Hunter says that even a discharged stave failing is massively destructive. Draining a crystal completely is a slow, careful task.”
“And the var charged with making sure our staves don’t critically fail has a decent idea of how to make them critically fail?” Brushfire asked.
“He says.” Fistfall looked nervous. “We can’t really experiment. But Hunter says he’s done it before—though that time, he was apparently blowing it in place on the ship.”
Her brother coughed.
“He didn’t seem inclined to tell me why he did that or whose ship it was. But we think we can rig the storm stave’s thunder crystals to explode on impact. We mount the ballista on the right kind of structure on the hull—Axfall will have to build it; no one else on the ship is good enough!—and I can launch the bolts at our targets.”
“That’s… an option,” Brushfire said, consideringly. “I need to talk to the Captain, I think.”
She considered the chart in front of her and smiled at her brother from the corner of her mouth.
“But talk to Axfall and get him started on that mount. If nothing else, I think we do need to test the idea, and whether the forts wake up or not, I think they’re going to make great targets.”
Cat listened to her lay out what Fistfall had told her, then sighed.
“I would dearly like to say that sacrificing our storm staves for a handful of shots with a primitive giant crossbow was a terrible idea,” he said drily. “And yet, we have one useful stave remaining. Hunter is correct that the others may have enough energy in the thunder crystals to cause major damage to a target, but if we make it through to the Clan Spheres and are once more in aether, we may need those staves.”
“And if we won’t make it through without using them as ballista bolts?” Brushfire asked.
They were alone in his office. Void Flyer’s crew had some sense of what they were facing, but there was a level of frankness she still wasn’t going to engage in where most of the crew could hear her.
“I would very much like to say I think we will, but I’m not that foolish,” Cat told her. “Give me a moment. I want to actually bring Paintrock into this.”
He rose from his desk and crossed to the door, opening it in time to see Fistfall standing on the other side, about to knock—with Hunter Paintrock at the big gobvar’s side.
“Captain,” the blue elvar said brightly. “I had the feeling you were about to send someone for me?”
“I was,” Cat agreed. “Both of you. Come in; grab seats.”
The office felt a lot less spacious with Fistfall in it, but it still had room for all four of them to sit.
“Lay it out for me, Master of Staves,” Cat ordered. “I want to be sure I fully understand and that nothing was lost passing between Fistfall and Brushfire.”
“I learned a long time ago to have an ace up my sleeve, sir,” Paintrock said. There was a poetry to the phrase that suggested he meant it as part of something else, but Brushfire didn’t know what.
“And our storm staves have been leaking power since we left Brokenwright,” Cat noted. “So, you have a plan?”
“Not a plan, really,” Paintrock admitted. “An idea. An option. The thunder crystals, even after firing, still hold a huge amount of energy. They can’t fire as storm staves, but they still need to be handled very, very carefully.
“And I may have, in another life, learned to rig them to explode. We never thought of launching them at anyone, but we turned other people’s staves into bombs on their ships, if you follow.”
Brushfire knew that Cat knew that Paintrock was an ex-pirate. So long as the elvar was on their side and stayed on their side, she could live with that—and so, she hoped, could her Captain.
“But while I passed even my misspent dances with stave and battlewand, our gobvar crew were more limited in their self-defense tools,” the Master of Staves continued. “Fistfall here raised the thought of a really big crossbow.”
Paintrock grinned and Fistfall grimaced.
“Turns out there’s a word for that, but neither of us knew it. Ballista.” He let the word roll off his tongue like it was his own clever invention. “Couple of the carpenters I roped in had seen them serving in hally fleets.”
Presumably elvar carpenters, Brushfire knew. The halvar and darvar kings were sometimes more open-minded than the elvar, but while gobvar served here and there on merchant ships and traders, no one hired them to man aether warships.
The elvar had a stranglehold on that particular career path across all of the Courts and Kingdoms. It was part of why the High Court was so powerful—while not all elvar saw it as their primary loyalty, everyone knew that the High Court could offer a given elvar more than any halvar or darvar king could.
“So, you have built one,” Cat said.
“Mostly,” Paintrock said. “Few bits and pieces we haven’t quite worked out. Torsion is the word my var Shale used. I couldn’t find any ropes aboard that quite worked, so we’re still poking.”
“And the bolts using the thunder crystals?” Brushfire asked.
“I have four bolts ready, but I haven’t removed any thunder crystals from the staves,” the elvar replied. “It’s not a simple process, and while I can put the crystals back in, I figured I’d get permission before I went that far.
“And since I couldn’t get the ballista working…”
“You should have spoken up sooner,” Cat said with a chuckle. “Master Paintrock, may I remind you what Alloy Bellowforge is?”
There was a long silence.
“An artificer good enough to build this ship,” Paintrock finally said. “So, def’ one who could sort out torsion.”
“Exactly. Brushfire,” Cat turned to her. “Take Master Paintrock to talk to our Engines Officer. I’m not certain what they’re going to need, but if anyone on this ship can take a half-assembled device and a vague concept and turn it into a working weapon in half a clock-day, it’s Alloy.”
“And the test, Cat?” she asked.
“If the ballista is ready, then I would be delighted,” he repeated his earlier phrasing with a grin, “to see one of those forts rendered safe to pass.
“Do we think we can manage that, people?”
Chapter
Forty-One
Alloy apparently took four hours to completely redefine the concept of ballista for Cat’s crew. Cat himself was only passingly familiar with crossbows, let alone their larger cousins, but he was reasonably sure that most ballistae did not involve quite so many gears that moved on their own.
“These crystals here hold the stored energy you’re relying on,” the artificer told Fistfall, tapping a set of six gleaming blue gems mounted along the side of the weapon. “Once they’ve discharged, you’ll need to rotate this wheel here to rearm the ballista.”
Alloy regarded the massive gobvar listening attentively to him carefully for a moment. “It won’t be easy, even for you, to fire it without the crystal charge.”
“How many charges?” Fistfall asked before Cat could.
“Twelve. So, more than you have bolts, as I understand,” the artificer noted. “I have some thoughts on payloads for bolts, too. They’ll take time, though—and we have the thunder bolts already, right?”
“Four of them,” Paintrock confirmed, the Master of Staves reentering the space with a cart. “Did you keep the storage— Yes, I see it!”
Two of the elvar stavemasters followed their boss into the room like lost puppies, falling in at a gesture to help him lift the first of the munitions.
The thunder crystals alone were over a yard long. With the casing, shaft and vanes, the bolts were even taller than Fistfall.
“Careful,” Alloy warned. “Everything on the ballista is now set up to run from the gears. Once they’re in those storage slots, that lever”—he indicated—“will pull the cable back and load the bolt.
“We do not want to release this thing inside. Unloaded, the cursed cable might snap. Loaded, it will put whatever we’ve stuck in it right through the hull. I will be much happier once my latest creation is outside my ship!”
Cat chuckled, examining the ballista.
It was still clearly exactly what Paintrock had called it: a scaled-up crossbow. Steel arms attached to a steel cable, with heavy hooks in place to draw the cable back and then release it. A crossbow had a handful of gears at most, though, and the ballista was practically festooned with mechanisms.
Cat had enough familiarity with clockwork and crystal-empowered arcane devices to be able to work out the components. They couldn’t rely on lodestone pull out on the hull, so the bolts were loaded below the bow itself and would be lifted into place once the cable was drawn back.
The same platform that lifted them into place would act as the final guiding channel when the cable was released. The sighting system, just above where the cable would reach its greatest extent, didn’t resemble anything Cat had ever seen on a weapon.
It resembled, in fact, the sextants from the bridge sufficiently that he wondered if Alloy had taken one of them.
“We had a spare sextant,” the artificer told him, following his gaze. “I dismantled it for parts. Fistfall! This is the most important part.”
“I am listening,” the gobvar said mildly. He had, from what Cat could tell, been listening all along and paying more attention than Cat would have expected from most of the crew.
Though he was the one who was going to have to stand out on the hull and fire the ballista.
“This runs like one of our sextants, but its gears are matched to the ones of the ballista mount,” Alloy told Fistfall. “Turn the main wheels; both move. This one left to right; this one up and down. If you release this latch, here, you can maneuver the telescope by hand, but it needs to be put back into the cradle here to be used for aiming.”
“So, leave it in the cradle,” Fistfall concluded.
“You may need the telescope to find where you’re aiming, so I set it up with the option, but yeah… If you take it out, I can’t be sure it will work as well after.
“Now, you don’t need to worry about drop or even a storm stave’s maximum reach,” the darvar continued. “Point and release, and it will probably hit. Um. Eventually.”
“How eventually?” Cat asked.
