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The mop stood against the rail at an angle I'd spent real thought on — set down mid-stroke, a man clearly coming right back. The bucket I'd toed behind a coil of rope where the stern couldn't see it. I leaned over the bow and let the work wait.
The clouds had caught fire. Reds bleeding to orange, orange to a gold that slid across the top of the cloud sea as the sun went down, and the whole gray floor of the world glowed soft from underneath like a lamp left burning somewhere below. I'd have stolen the color if it'd hold still.
Under my boots the Maiden's Squalor let out a long low creak and I patted the rail before I caught myself doing it. Old girl. Built before they worked out the Black Lacquer trick, which meant her Float Stone was sealed the bad old way, painted and patched and prayed over, and I'd seen the tar gone thin in three places down by the keel-line my first day aboard.
I knew the rule the way every sky-child knows it, drummed in before you can walk: water near a Stone and the Stone quits. Quick, too — a pebble goes dead in the time it takes to swear about it, and then it just falls, plain rock, for as long as its size says it must. Hours for a pebble. Years for a boulder. The Stone always comes back. The folk hanging off it don't, on account of the distance in between. I ran a thumb over one of the thin patches of tar in my mind and made myself stop.
Couldn't help the next part, though. I looked down.
The cloud sea reached up at us in slow misty fingers, and between them the gaps opened on nothing, and my gut rolled like the deck had dropped though it hadn't moved at all. A long way. Nobody'd crossed it. Old stories put a whole world under there, ground that ran on forever without a cliff to end it — same stories swore my aunt cured warts by humming — but I caught myself leaning out past the rail anyway, far as my arms would let me, like a few more inches would show me the bottom.
"Hey, rookie!"
I came off the rail so fast I nearly went over it, which would've answered the cloud-sea question quick.
Jace stood midship, arms crossed, one brow up. He looked from me to the mop, from the mop to the rope coil, and reached down and lifted the bucket out into plain view by its handle. Held it there. Said nothing.
"That bucket's resting," I said. "Worked hard all morning."
"It's done nothing all morning."
"We're a matched set, then. Be cruel to split us up."
The corner of his mouth went, and he fought it, and he lost, and instead of chewing me out he came and set his forearms on the rail beside mine and looked west.
"I'd trade you for the view," I said, "but I've got nothing on me worth a sunset. You want a bootlace? Got a spare."
"Why've you got a spare bootlace."
"Man never knows."
He huffed through his nose. Then the laugh went out of his face and a few years with it. "Listen, kid. Before you learn it the hard way — and the hard way charges too much — it ain't all pretty sunsets up here. Most days it's rope burns and bad grub and your own —"
White light stuttered low in the south. Wrong color for sunset, wrong place, hard and blue-edged against a cloudbank that had gone black while neither of us watched.
I lifted the mop and pointed it, for all the good a mop would do. "That normal?"
Jace went still as a held breath.
The thing came up out of the cloud sea like it was climbing, and it got bigger between one blink and the next — clouds don't do that fast enough to see, and this one did. It boiled up in columns of black and slate, lightning lighting itself off somewhere deep inside, on and on, every few heartbeats. Its underside was flat as a griddle and dragged along the top of the cloud sea, hauling the gray up into itself, eating it, fattening on it. It climbed until I had to tip my head back to find the top, and the further back I tipped my head the smaller the deck felt under me.
Rain came off its belly in solid sheets. All of it — every column, every sheet, the whole walking horror of it — was water.
My tongue went to the roof of my mouth and found it dry.
"Clouds below." The color drained out of Jace's face between the words. "That's a big 'un." Then he had his hands cupped round his mouth and his voice tore sternward over the rising wind: "Captain! Weather comin' in faster than a kraken with its head on fire!"
The deck broke into running. Pell shot past me with an armful of canvas. A rigger I didn't know dropped to a cleat and recoiled the line I'd done wrong an hour back without so much as a glance at me. Hatches banged shut down the length of her. Old Marcus got a shoulder under a loose barrel and walked it to the lashings on his legs alone, and I'd never once seen the man move faster than a grumble.
I didn't move at all. I stood with the mop in my fist and watched the water come.
A thought surfaced, the way they do when the rest of you's gone quiet: Glad I never bought the bird. Half the recruiters won't take you serious without a shoulder-bird, and I'd come aboard bare-shouldered and red about it — but a bird would've been screaming now, scrabbling at my collar, or just gone into the gray. Being broke had its uses. I filed it away to feel pleased about later, if there turned out to be a later.
The storm closed on us like a jaw.
She groaned — not her knees-creak, something from deeper in the wood — and then the deck heaved up under my boots and dropped out from under them, and the rain hit from every side at once so thick the bow vanished into gray. Bile climbed my throat. I swallowed it.
"Secure that line!" Jace, somewhere left of me, half his voice gone in the wind.
One line whipped loose across the deck. I lunged, missed, lunged, missed, got it on the third — wet hemp dragging across my palms and taking skin with it — got a turn on the cleat, got another, and it held. One line. My hands were shaking and the line held.
Silver flashed past my nose. Cloud-jumpers, a school of them, cutting through the storm like the storm was happening to somebody else, their little Stones holding them dead level while a forty-foot ship pitched around them like a tossed coin. One rolled lazy right in front of my face. Then they were gone.
The deck kicked and my boots went out from under me.
Flat on my back, sliding — wood slick as poured oil — sliding toward the rail and the gap beneath it and the open dark past that, palms screaming, heels finding nothing, the rail coming up — and a fist took my collar and hauled me back so hard my boots left the deck. Jace, one arm hooked round the mainmast, the other knotted in my shirt, lightning on his teeth. He was grinning.
"Told ya it ain't all pretty sunsets!" he roared. "Welcome to the real life of a sailor!"
"You could've led with that! Before I signed!"
"Wouldn't've been as funny!"
A sound that wasn't a sound — the air cracked, one blow to both ears — and the world went white off the port side and every hair on my arms stood up and the rain near the strike turned to steam. And in that white half-second the deck planks under my hands went bright, lit from below, the Stone glowing up through the hull like the ship had swallowed a star.
A voice came up raw from belowdecks. "Float Stone's takin' water! She's quittin' — we're droppin'!"
I felt the floor of my stomach go. Droppin'. The one word.
I looked over the rail to find the cloud sea, and it was nearer than it should've been. A lot nearer. While I watched, the rail crept down toward the gray a hand's width, then another. The Stone was going dead the fast way and once it went it'd stay dead for days — days of falling — and we did not have days. We had the distance to the cloud sea, and the cloud sea was rising to meet us.
"All hands to stations!"
The captain — a gray narrow man I'd barely heard make a sound all week — cut the noise clean in half. "We're not dyin' tonight! The Stone don't quit all at once — she's still got pull in her — so neither do you! Trim her up and hold!"
I watched a roomful of fear decide to believe him. Pell stopped moving his lips in prayer and got two hands on a line. Marcus threw his whole weight backward onto the ballast rig. And my own hands — I looked down and they'd quit shaking; they were hauling where Jace pointed, fast, sure, ahead of my thinking, because the man had said not tonight and I'd decided to take him at it.
The rain thinned for half a breath and I saw the cloud sea up close — churning, heaving, lashed white. And down where the gray went black, shapes. Big and slow, moving against the storm instead of with it, longer than the ship, one of them rolling through a gap and gone before my eyes could finish the thought.
I shut my mouth on it and hauled. Some things keep till there's time to scream proper.
There's no clock in a storm. There's the next line, and the rain, and Jace's fist finding my collar before the rail does, and then the next line again. My arms went from burning to numb to just doing the work without me. My palms stopped being palms. The rail crept down toward the gray, and then — slower — slower — stopped creeping. Held. Crept up a finger's width. The captain called a trim and the crew answered it and the old leaking unsafe Maiden's Squalor, that nobody in their right mind should've trusted with their life, hung on by the last pull left in a dying Stone.
Then the storm opened its hand. Not faded — let go, all at once. One blink, a wall of rain and a screaming wind; the next, open air, the howl gone to a hiss and then to nothing, and forty people on deck dragging breath like they'd just remembered they were owed it.
I tipped my head back and didn't know the sky.
The cloud sea below us had gone green. Faint, soft, lit from underneath — and I'd watched that gray floor in a hundred colors at a hundred sunsets and never once in green. Up and down the deck, men went to the rail and gripped it and stared, and not one of them said a word, and that was how I knew none of them had seen it either.
I got to the rail on legs that barely answered.
Something sat low on the horizon, dark against the green. Big. I waited for it to turn into an island, or a mountain, and it wouldn't do either — too sharp at the top for a mountain, those edges that might've been spires or might've been my eyes giving out. It just sat there at the edge of everything. I'd sailed the charts in my head every night in my hammock for a year, and there was nothing on any of them where that thing was. Not the Archnola survey. Not the Lesting routes. Not the yellow old ones the captain kept rolled in his cabin.
Boots beside me. Jace, soaked through, the grin long gone, his face caught between two things he couldn't sort. He looked at the green clouds, then the dark shape, and held his peace a long moment, which from Jace was a marvel on its own.
Then he put a hand on my bare shoulder — the one no bird had ever sat on — and left it there.
"Well, rookie." Soft. "You've gone further than the traders between Archnola and Lesting ever do. Further than anybody." His voice dropped near to nothing, like he was afraid the horizon might hear and pull back. "Welcome to truly uncharted skies."
"Don't suppose it's on a trade route."
"Nothing's out here, kid."
I watched the dark shape and felt that old tug behind my navel, the one that had pulled me up off the islands in the first place. "Bet there's something on it, though."
The Maiden's Squalor came about, slow and wounded, water still weeping from her seams, and pointed her battered bow at the dark thing on the green edge of the world. I closed both torn hands on the rail and didn't let go.
No bird in its right mind would've come
along, where we were going. Good thing I'd never bought one.