Steal the Sky Read online

  The lanky man rolled his eyes as he hoisted himself to his feet, and to Detan’s never-ending consternation took his time about brushing the dust from his trouser legs. Damned funny thing, a mechanic with a fastidious streak.

  “Simple-said, there’s no repairing either of the buoyancy sacks. They were half-patches long before they took this latest damage and that mast is about as stable as a– well, uh, it’s just fragile, all right?”

  “Was that so hard?”

  Tibs grunted and wandered over to the flier. He gave one of the sacks a nudge with his toe and shook his head, tsking. “Got no imagination, do you?”

  “I got enough imagination to figure out what to do with a lippy miner.”

  “I’m your mechanic.”

  “Mechanic miner then.”

  Detan snatched Tibs’s hat off his head and put it squarely on his own. Tibs plucked it back with a disappointed cluck of the tongue. “Tole you to bring a spare.”

  “Well, I didn’t think I’d be doing barrel rolls over the Black Wash last night. Sweet sands, Tibs, what were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking I’d like very much to get away from the ship shooting spears at us. Sirra.”

  Detan ignored his smirk and took over his old chum’s spot under the reedpalm. He sank down onto the black dirt and tipped his head back against the tree’s rough trunk. In the shade, the breeze didn’t feel like it was trying to steal his breath away. His eyes drifted shut, his muscles unknotted.

  Tibs kicked his foot.

  “What?” Detan grumbled.

  “You win us enough to fix her up?”

  “Better.” He wrestled with his belt pouch and tossed it up to his companion. Tibs poured the contents out in his wide, flat hand, barely able to contain all the fingernail-sized grains of copper and silver. He whistled low. “Mighty fine haul, but may I ask who’s going to be hunting us down to get it back?”

  “You lack faith, old friend. That there is a genuine upfront payment from Watch Captain Ripka Leshe herself.”

  Tibs did not look as impressed as Detan would have liked. “Payment for what?”

  “She’s hired us to steal Thratia’s lovely new airship, the Larkspur, of course. Seems the ex-commodore is getting a mite too comfortable here in Aransa, and needs to be shown her place.”

  He beamed up at Tibs, relishing the slow shock that widened his eyes and parted his lips. It was good to surprise the shriveled smokeweed of a man, but it didn’t last. Tibs’s eyes narrowed and his shoulders tensed. “That doesn’t sound much like the watch captain.”

  Detan frowned. “No, it doesn’t, does it? But that’s the way it’s been played to us. We just have to get a step ahead.”

  Tibs sighed and cast a longing look at their downed bird. “Sounds like a mess. Maybe we should just take the money and move along. Thratia isn’t known for her forgiving nature, you know, and monsoon season’s coming. Wouldn’t want to get stuck in a sel-mining city come the rains, would we?”

  Detan flinched at the thought of being stranded here, so very close to the Smokestack. All that tempting selium being pumped out from the bowels of the world no more than a ferry ride away. It was hard enough keeping his sensitivity to himself when they were in the sel-less reaches of the Scorched. Stuck in a city full of it? He’d give himself away in a single turn of the moon.

  For the barest of moments he considered writing to Auntie Honding for enough grain to get the flier airworthy again. But any response from his dear old auntie would come with strict instructions to return home at once for a lengthy stay, complete with brow-beating. And he knew damned well that lingering at Hond Steading, with its five selium-producing firemounts, would make hiding his sel-sensitivity from the proper authorities a sight more difficult than managing Aransa’s single mine.

  Detan squared his shoulders, forcing his body to display the confidence he wished his mind held. They had time before the rains came. He was sure of it. “Make off with Ripka’s money? She’d have us hanged if we ever showed up here again!”

  “More like have our heads lopped off.” Tibs grimaced and spat into the dust.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “City’s all worked up over it. Seems a doppel got caught impersonating some puffed-up mercer. Our new benefactor took his head clear off at sunrise. Not a friendly town for sel-sensitives of deviant abilities, you understand.”

  At sunrise. He glanced up the city toward the station house, and though he couldn’t see it from this vantage he imagined all the little watchers returning to it after a good morning’s work.

  Takes some time, to lop a man’s head off and clean up the mess. Enough time for Ripka to make it back to the station, little more than a mark after sunrise, to question him then kick him loose? And what of those who had arrested him – they’d said they were acting on the captain’s orders. Where had she been, to see him and order his arrest at the Blasted Rock in the wee hours of the night while preparing to execute a man? He’d never seen her at the inn, true, but…

  Detan cleared a sudden hitch in his throat, and Tibs narrowed his little lizardy eyes down at him. Stranger yet, in all her talk of doppels Ripka had failed to mention that she’d done one in just that morning.

  He decided not to mention the watch captain’s lapse of memory to Tibs. It was usually best not to worry the man with silly things like that. Ole Tibs liked straight paths, and dithered at forks. Tibs would spend his life wasting away at a crossroads if Detan wasn’t there to push him along. He smiled at what a good friend he was.

  “Don’t worry yourself overmuch, Tibs, it’ll give you wrinkles. Now, the watch captain has asked for our help and on my honor I won’t be leaving the poor woman without assistance. Could you do that? Just leave her here with Thratia itching to take power?”

  Tibs gave him a rather ungentlemanly look, but Detan fancied himself too well bred to be given a rise by that sort of thing.

  “I suppose we must help the watch captain,” he grated.

  “Splendid!” Detan clapped his hands as he sprang up and strode over to the downed flier. “Now we have to get this old bird airworthy again.”

  “I thought we were soon to acquire a much finer vessel?”

  “Have you no sentimentality? We can’t just leave it!”

  A little smile quirked up the corners of Tibs’s dry, craggy face. “I suppose not.”

  “Brilliant! One step ahead already!”

  * * *

  They hired a cart to help them move the flier up a few levels to the inn Detan had scouted on his way through the city. It wasn’t upcrust by any stretch of the imagination, and he figured that made it the perfect place to lay low. Thratia never came down this way herself, and Ripka only when there was something that needed cleaning up. It was a nice bonus that the innkeeper didn’t know him, and that he was less likely to run into any of the uppercrusts he’d swindled in the past.

  Their room had a half-door in the back that swung open into an old goat pen, just big enough to stash the flier in. Wasn’t likely anyone would steal it, but he felt better about having it close. From the edge of the pen they could see the sweep of Aransa, or at least all those levels that tumbled out below their room.

  The downcrust levels were a hodgepodge of daub and stone construction with a few brave souls throwing up the occasional scrap-wood wall. The houses huddled up the side of the mountain, clinging to the good stable rock beneath, and the city was a mess of switchbacking streets. Glittering black sands reached across the distance between Aransa and the Fireline Ridge, the firemount they called Smokestack spearing straight up through the center of the ridge, belching soot and ash. The winds were in their favor today, and so the greasy plume drifted off to the desolate south instead of laying a film of grime over all Aransa.

  Blasted dangerous place to stick a city.

  From this far away, the glint of metal holding leather-skinned pipes to the Smokestack’s back was the only evidence of the firemount’s rich selium product
ion. Dangerous or not, there’d be folk settled here until the sel was gone. Or until the whole damned place blew.

  “Enjoying the view?” Tibs slunk up beside him and wiped his hands on the filthiest rag Detan had ever seen.

  “Hasn’t changed much, has it?”

  “Don’t suppose it has a need of change. Anyway, bags are stored and the flier’s tarp-tied. Smells like goat piss in there so don’t come whining to me when the whole blasted contraption stinks of it later.”

  “I’d never blame the odor of goat on you, old chum. Your bouquet is entirely different, it’s…” He waved a hand to waft up the right word. “It’s distinct.”

  Tibs ignored the slight and kept his eyes on a brown paper notebook clutched in one hand. Somehow he’d rummaged up a bit of pointed charcoal and was using it to sketch broad strokes that eventually came together to form their flier. Or, what would have been their flier, if it were in one piece. New formulae appeared around their cabin, and Detan went cross-eyed.

  “You can’t possibly know what you’re doing there.”

  “Just ’cause you’re an idiot doesn’t mean everyone else is. Sirra.”

  “We’re gonna need something to wreck,” he said, anxious to be of some use, “a decoy.”

  Tibs just grunted.

  Detan grinned. Couldn’t help himself. Some sense was emerging from the mist of numbers and angles, familiar shapes made bigger, stronger. Their tiny little cabin adapted for an entirely larger vessel altogether. Adapted further to be modular, easy to piece apart and slap back together again. Easier still to wrap around their current cabin until the time it would be needed.

  It was perfect, really. This way they didn’t need to know what Thratia’s ship looked like ahead of time – all ships had cabins on their decks of some kind or another. Once the ship was in hand, he and Tibs could break off a chunk of Thratia’s original and leave it as a wreck somewhere in the scrub beyond the city. Work up a good fire around it and no one would go looking for the rest of the ship; they’d assume it’d all burned up and give up the trail.

  Then he and Tibs could shift the knock-down cabin from their flier onto the deck of Thratia’s ship to cover any holes their hasty carpentry might leave behind. Nothing more suspicious than a big ole ship trundling around the skies without a cabin.

  “Oh, that’s clever!” he blurted as Tibs’s plan crystallized in his mind.

  “One of us has to be. I’ll need to get a look at the real bird to make sure it all connects, but it should work well enough for a quick switch.”

  He gave Tibs time to work out the finer details, then watched in admiration as the crusty man ran his charcoal bit back over all the salient points, thickening the lines as he committed them to memory. When he was finished, Tibs tore the page out, crumpled it, and shoved it in his pocket.

  Detan threw an arm around his shoulder. “Come along, now. Let’s go spend some of Ripka’s grains.”

  Chapter 4

  The market bazaar of Aransa was precisely how Detan remembered it. Unfortunately.

  Shops were scattered all over the middle level of the city, as if some drunken god of mercers had waved a full bottle about while staggering his way home and wherever the droplets landed a filthy stall had sprung up. Some trades attempted a clumped confederation, but the edges of all of these were loose and fraying.

  Produce vendors clustered along the rail that marked the edge of the level, protruding slightly over the level below. When the day was done they hucked the worst of their wares over the edge. Rumor was, some pretty choice mushrooms could be plucked from the shadow of that overhang. Mushrooms which were then resold by the very same purveyors of the fertilizer. Detan shuddered at the thought, or the smell, or really just the whole cursed experience.

  Tibs glided through the press of cloth-hawkers and fruit gropers, somehow managing not to bump so much as an elbow with another soul. For his trouble, Detan was jostled and stymied, his feet trampled and his coat wrenched all askew. With a curse, he slapped away the third set of little fingers to go dipping about his pockets, and finally broke through the crowd to the more sedate stalls of the metalmen and woodworkers.

  Here, at least, order had been imposed. It seemed even choice real estate wasn’t worth the risk of getting an errant ember in your stall’s awning, and so the hodgepodge of transient sellers stayed far away. Tibs’s sizable head swiveled, seeking the right shop, and Detan left him to it.

  He liked to think he had a silver tongue, but these were folk close to the work, real crafters of wood and metal. They didn’t much care for Detan’s style of dealings. Tibs claimed they could smell the Honding blood in him.

  Detan doubted they could smell much of anything over Tibs’s own unwashed trousers.

  The shop Tibs picked was a good one by the standard of the others. Its paint was fresh and its sign had actual words on it in place of the myriad pictographs its neighbors used. The door hinges didn’t even squeak when Tibs swung them inward. Detan shuffled along behind, hanging back as he let his eyes adjust to the smoky lamplight.

  It was smaller than it’d looked from the outside, but then Detan realized that there was a big desk cutting the room in half with a curtain behind it. Workshop adjacent, then. Possibly even a sleeping space. The burly old man behind the counter certainly looked like he might sleep here, he practically had wood shavings for hair.

  “Morning, sirs.” The shopkeep adjusted a rather fine looking pair of spectacles and shut the cover on the sketches he’d been muddling through. Nice sketchbook, that. Smooth, pale paper with a creamy hide cover. Detan prepared himself to pay more than the supplies were worth.

  “Got a flier needs fixin’,” Tibs said, cutting straight to the quick of it so fast Detan thought the shopkeep would blanch with offense. But no, if anything he looked a mite relieved to get the pleasantries over with.

  “Let’s see it then.” He brushed his journal aside, making room for Tibs to place his own sketch on the desk. Tibs set it down and smoothed it out, not too careful, then let it sit there curling back in on itself like a smashed bug.

  “Hrm,” the shopkeep said.

  “Got the stuff I need?” Tibs prompted.

  “Sure, sure. Well, the stuff you need, I got. The stuff you’re asking for won’t be easy.”

  Detan blinked at the shopkeeper’s audacity, and Tibs shot a hand back, palm out, telling him to hold still, which was right insulting, because he hadn’t been planning on… oh. He’d taken a half step forward without realizing it.

  “The stuff I’m asking for is the stuff I need.”

  “This, here, I understand.” The shopkeep traced something on the paper with a finger. “Your flier looks in bad shape, and I can see how you want to patch her up. Looks good, too. Anyway, that’s fine, okay, but your materials take a shift here. You got reinforced leather for the sacks, proper stuff but nothing too fancy, and local wood for the supports and the rails, but all your cabin stuff is just too blasted big. And you’ve designed the whole mess to be removable. I can’t even imagine why you’d want that.

  “I’m sorry, sirs, but I can’t recommend this at all. You’re asking for imported materials. They’ll be worth more than the whole thing. And anyway, you don’t need it, yeah? Outfit like this would work well on just a handful of vessels. I can only think of one in the whole city big enough not to be thrown off balance by… ah. I see.”

  He stopped, blinked over his glasses at them, screwed his face up tight as he looked at Tibs. Detan couldn’t see Tibs’s expression, but he knew well enough the coot wasn’t good at feigning calm when he’d been had.

  Time for Honding blood to stink things up, then.

  “You told me these market men were discreet!” He stormed up to Tibs and shook a finger at him. “What will our mistress say, hm? Every mog in Aransa is wagging their lips over the tiniest bit of gossip surrounding her, and you bungle this? By the pits!”

  Tibs ducked his head down, looking proper contrite, then dragged his hat
off and set to fussing with the brim. Detan spared a sideways glance at the shopkeep and found him pale as a desert bone. Good.

  “Now, there’s no need for upset, sirs. I’m happy to work quietly. I just needed to be sure you weren’t overreaching yourselves, you understand. Don’t want to be sticking my nose in anyone’s business, just want to make sure I offer a fair deal to all.”

  “Well.” Detan cleared his throat, cracked his neck, and smoothed the front of his shirt. “I suppose that will have to do. When can you have these materials?”

  “Day or two, sirs. Last shipment of Valathean wood came across on Mercer Agert’s vessel and, well… It’s in escrow, but should be out soon. I’ll put pressure on it.”

  “See that you do.” Detan leaned over and flipped the man’s sketchbook open, then scribbled the name of their inn on a blank sheet. “Have it all sent there when it’s ready.”

  “That’s not the most, ah, pleasant of addresses.”

  “No.” He slammed the sketchbook shut. “It isn’t.”

  “Right. Right. Happy to oblige, sirs. Now, ah, about payment…”

  The shopkeep glanced to his book, scrawled upon so carelessly, and Detan had to bite back a grin. Just like that, the shopkeep knew they had grains to spare. And people with grains to spare were often the cheapest of bastards.

  “Here.” Detan pulled open Ripka’s pouch and tossed a pinch of silver grains down – worth maybe a quarter of the total. “You’ll get the rest on delivery.”

  “Yes, sirs, very good, sirs.” He swept up the bits of metal, and by the time he looked up again Detan and Tibs were gone.

  Standing in the dusty street, Detan threw a companionable arm about Tibs’s shoulders and slipped his hand up toward the back of his hat. “Almost fouled the whole thing up, rockbrain.”

  Tibs shrugged. “Didn’t see another clean angle. We needed that stuff, just like it was. No hiding it.”

  Detan narrowed his eyes, realization dawning bright as the desert sun. “You sly son of a–”