Chapter Twenty-three

  Celestial Sights

  Over the course of their first two days sailing toward Azir, Elias often leaned over the bulwark, staring down at the Great Continent drifting and shifting far below them. He would confirm the patchy lakes and mountain ranges he saw in person with the map they kept stored in the great cabin, where Elias slept each night after having won a coin toss.

  Briley had accused him of cheating, of course, before checking the copper and confirming it possessed two distinct sides. Technically, she wasn’t entirely wrong either. Elias hadn’t meant to cheat. He had merely hoped to win the coin toss—as anyone would have, he later told himself—and saw which way to flip it at the last second. His gift was proving itself useful in ways he had not foreseen.

  In any event, Briley backed off the matter when Elias reminded them that he had the worst living situation in Sailor’s Rise, which no one could argue with. Let him have the nice room for a few days.

  Like his room back home, the cabin became something of an art gallery for Elias’s myriad sketches. He decided to channel his mother’s penchant for landscapes, sketching the world as it appeared before the horizon—but never beyond it. He was trying to ground himself in reality, in the beauty of things right in front of him. He drew scenes from the ship, too, and Briley’s portrait at one point when she wasn’t looking. He showed her afterward, expecting a rebuke, but she seemed almost surprised. Surprised at the sight of herself or perhaps by how someone else saw her.

  As for Bertrand, he had acquired as much information as he could about Sultan Atakan ahead of their departure, though it amounted to little more than what his father had already told them. They wouldn’t know what work they might be bidding on until they connected with his master of coin, a woman named Saba Khali. After landing, assuming they arrived as planned, they would have two nights in Azir before making their pitch alongside any competition. That was another mystery. How many companies would be competing for the same contracts, and how would they compare to The Two Worlds Trading Company? Irvin told them not to waste time and energy worrying about it. And yet, for much of their journey, that’s precisely what Bertrand did.

  Elias shared his friend’s anxieties, but despite the high stakes, he savored a rare moment of peace each evening looking out beyond the bow. They were flying westward, into the setting sun, and there was something calming about twilight and the gradual dimming of the Great Continent, something that made the world seem inexplicably small and containable.

  He sometimes imagined their destination, Azir, hoping to see green lines guiding them toward it, but the ancient city was too far, and Elias was not yet that powerful, assuming he ever would be. As a point of comparison, when he focused on what was right in front of them, such as the gap between two approaching mountains they would soon fly through, his magic successfully revealed itself. His ambition could only reach so far. It felt like an apt metaphor.

  And a beautiful one. He had only thought of those faint lines as practical before, but high above the earth in dusk’s dying light, they seemed almost celestial.

  While Elias was looking forward, lost in thought, Bertrand had evidently spotted something behind them. “How long has that ship been following us?” he asked, snapping Elias out of his trance.

  “What ship?” Briley stepped out from the companionway and followed Bertrand’s finger.

  Elias joined them on the stern. “She was flying southward before. Now it appears she’s following us westward through that break in the mountains. Perhaps they’re heading to Azir too.”

  “Perhaps,” Briley said, fetching the brass telescope she had set down by the ship’s wheel. She expanded the instrument and adjusted the lens, her typically stoic face contorting into a mixture of uncertain expressions as she stared through it.

  “Let me see.” Elias grabbed the telescope before Briley was done looking. He immediately shared her confusion. The ship trailing them looked at least a generation old—perhaps the sort of vessel Jasper had learned to repair—and not better off for it. It was small too, smaller than The Sapphire Spirit. There were a few crew members above deck, though he could hardly judge their character from here, aside from the fact that one of them, like Bertrand, was wearing a tricorne.

  “They’re not carrying passengers on that thing,” Briley deduced. “Could be traders, but… it is a tiny ship. Wouldn’t carry much cargo, and no one would be out this far”—they were in the middle of nowhere—“for a quick jaunt.”

  “Could be merchants,” Bertrand muttered, unwilling to completely abandon that theory. They were all carefully avoiding the P word.

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  “Let’s stay comfortably ahead of it,” Elias said. “That thing shouldn’t be able to catch up to us.” He returned to the bow and peered forward as if searching for an escape route. Once they were past the two large mountains fencing them in, their view would be less obstructed.

  And then another airship appeared, small like the other one.

  It emerged from behind the northern mountain, slightly ahead of them, and suddenly their situation became viciously clear. Between two ships and two mountains, The Sapphire Spirit was cornered. They could ascend, but the vessel ahead was already higher, ready to intercept such an attempt.

  Bertrand joined him at the bow. “I knew it! I told you guys—I told you!”

  “Fucking pirates,” Briley fumed.

  “This is no time to panic,” Elias said, invoking the other P word. “Briley, is there a way to evade them? We’re fast, right?”

  “We can try, but—” She shook her head. “Whether we go up or down, that one will cut us off, and the other ship will catch us if we turn around.”

  “Try anyway,” Elias replied. “Bertrand, go load the cannons.”

  “The cannons.” Bertrand repeated the word like a joke.

  “They won’t load themselves.” Elias skipped into a jog. “I need to fetch my pistol.”

  He grabbed his gun and a full powder horn from the great cabin, loading the weapon as quickly as fingers could fly as he returned to the main deck. As instructed, Bertrand had ventured below deck, hopefully to load the cannons. They all knew how to do so in theory, having made a point to learn a few months earlier, but they had never actually fired one before. Cannon balls were not as cheap as bullets.

  Briley, meanwhile, was maneuvering them to the right, attempting to slip between the pirate ship closing the distance between them and the sheer mountainside looming ever larger. The other vessel was fast too. Not as fancy as The Sapphire Spirit, but small and nimble, probably built for the purposes of piracy.

  It was already obvious that Briley was right: they would be intercepted. The pirates knew their trap well.

  Elias readied his pistol and eyed the oncoming vessel. The first ship was still a considerable distance behind them, but the one about to cut them off was coming into troubling clarity. Its crew members looked more disheveled than even Captain Fairweather’s worst workers, as if they lived on the compact ship, and most likely they did.

  One of them stepped up to the bulwark and yelled something. He had to yell it twice before Elias could make out the warning over the hollow whistle of rushing wind. “Throw your weapon overboard, and hand over the ship!”

  “No!” Elias yelled back, not taking a moment to consider the offer.

  “You only get one warning, kid, and this is it!”

  “Leave us alone!” No one had put Elias in charge of negotiations, normally Bertrand’s purview, though it mattered little what he had to say or how he said it. They were pirates intending to steal, not traders out to bargain. “We don’t have any valuable cargo! We’re humble travelers!”

  “Not your cargo I’m interested in! That ship is all the treasure I need!” Their negotiator was a bald man with a bird’s nest of a beard that seemed to compensate for the hair he lacked above his eyebrows. “Last warning—I mean it!” He aimed his pistol at Elias. It would be a difficult shot, though not impossible.

  Elias counted six men aboard the other ship, twice their number and certainly more seasoned in matters of combat. Was that where this was headed? He wasn’t going to give up The Sapphire Spirit. Not ever. And where would they leave them if he did? To die in the woods, no doubt.

  He briefly considered taking the initial shot, but alas, Elias would never know whether he possessed the nerve, for the decision was swiftly taken from him. He heard the thunderclap of the bald man’s gun and the bullet strike their hull a few feet below him.

  And so Elias shot back.

  He aimed in a way most people never could—not only with a practiced hand, but with a unique gift of sight—and fired.

  He saw only a hint of red bursting from the pirate’s eyeball as the man tumbled lifelessly onto the planks. It was the first time he had ever shot someone, let alone almost certainly killed a man. That would be a lot to process—at a later date. The situation unfolding around him was so unreal that he could scarcely register the gravity of it.

  Also, two more pirates were taking shots at him. Elias ducked behind the bulwark as a bullet pounded his wooden barricade and another flew over top his head. He began reloading his pistol, spilling black powder over his fingers as his hand trembled. “Stop it,” he scolded himself. “Focus.”

  Cautiously, Elias peeked over the edge and saw the enemy ship nearing them, no farther than the length of a pier, and apparently they had a walkway of their own. He met his navigator’s terrified gaze. No longer a closed book was Briley, not now. She was crouching too, her right hand still clutching the wheel.

  Elias heard a loud creak and then a sudden crash, the latter sounding very near his head. A makeshift gangway had been affixed to the pirate vessel, on hinges that allowed it to be raised and dropped onto the deck of another ship flying in parallel, as The Sapphire Spirit was now.

  He knew he had to break that connection, and so he wished for it, harder than he had ever wished for anything. He popped his head up, along with his pistol, searching for an answer, for his sight to tell him where to shoot to stop them from boarding. And nothing appeared.

  There was nowhere he could shoot, not that would stop this.

  Someone noticed him. Elias fired back, unassisted this time, and grazed the man’s arm. A rumbling of boots grew louder as the first skyjacker made his way over, Elias suddenly wishing he had saved his bullet for the man a few seconds away from grabbing him. Grabbing or, more likely, stabbing.

  And so he made another wish—to find cover farther back without getting shot—and this time his skill obliged, sending him toward Briley and behind the enclosed banister blocking the ship’s wheel. Another bullet whizzed past him as he crouched down beside her.

  “Do you have a weapon?” he asked, once again reloading his own.

  She unsheathed a slender dagger from her leather boot, barely bigger than a letter opener, though it looked sharp enough—as sharp as the determination forming on Briley’s face.

  “Good,” Elias said. “Use it.”

  And then, for but a fleeting instance, they heard the sound of hope. A startlingly loud bang erupted from below deck, startling even their pursuers, as the pirate ship swayed like a cradle. Bertrand had fired his first cannon ball.

  It wasn’t enough.

  The two vessels remained connected, and Elias could hear those boots again, now pacing toward them across the deck of The Sapphire Spirit.