The tavern was falling out of the sky when Orra Pell reached the captain.
Tables slid toward the open side of the room. Tankards lifted from their hooks and spun through the blue-lit air. Beyond the broken shutters, the Aethersea boiled beneath the island in a luminous sheet of violet and green, close enough that its poisonous radiance painted every face like a corpse’s.
Orra caught the old captain by the collar before he went over the edge.
His boots scraped against the tavern’s tilted floor. One hand clutched a brass case to his chest. The other was slick with blood.
“Mind the winch!” Orra shouted.
Nobody minded the winch. Brask-of-the-Rails was already halfway through the tavern window, one arm hooked around a roof strut while he wrestled a chain-harpoon into position. Vey Sarn stood at the bar, firing commands at the island’s dock crew below. Nima Quill had abandoned her drink and was crouched in a storm of floating astrolabe cards, trying to stitch the tavern’s failing ward back together.
The island lurched again.
Orra’s shoulder slammed into a pillar. The old captain’s collar tore in her hand, but she got her other arm beneath his ribs and hauled him away from the drop. He smelled of scorched wool, blood, and the sharp mineral tang of Aethersea exposure.
“Where’s your ship?” she asked.
He stared at her as though she had asked him to name the moon.
“Gone,” he rasped. “All gone.”
“That is not useful.”
His gaze dropped to the brass case.
Something inside it pulsed.
Not glowed. Pulsed. A steady throb passed through the metal and into Orra’s palm, timed almost exactly with the beating in her wrist.
“Take it,” he said.
Orra looked toward Vey. The captain was busy preventing their own ship, the *Morrowfin*, from being crushed against the tavern’s mooring tower. He would not hear her over the splintering wood and the roar of released aether.
“Why?”
“Because they followed me.” The old captain swallowed blood. “They’ll follow that.”
A cannon blast rolled across the tavern.
The outer wall burst inward. Aether-shot tore through bottles and brass lamps, filling the room with blue fire. Orra shoved the captain down and covered his head as glass rained over them.
Through the smoke, she saw three black vessels climbing around the island’s edge. Their sails were crimson, not painted crimson but dyed in some lightless substance that drank the sky. A silver veil had been stitched across the lead ship’s prow.
Next
With two hostile fleets pursuing them, Orra must convince Vey to cross into the forbidden zone and reach Ghost Isle before the beacon draws its pursuers onto the island.
“Everyone knows who they are,” Vey said. “Brask, stop introducing our problems.”
The old captain made a strangled sound. His fingers locked around Orra’s sleeve.
“They cannot have it.”
“Who?”
A second group of ships appeared above the far ridge. White hulls. Tall, narrow masts. Sunburst pennants snapping from every line.
Nima glanced over her shoulder, and all warmth left her face. “Grand Inquisition.”
The room went quiet in the way a deck went quiet before a mast broke.
Orra knew enough about the Inquisition to understand that pirates were not necessarily the worst people to have shooting at you. The Grand Inquisition did not salvage relics. It purified them. Usually with fire. Sometimes with the people holding them.
The captain dragged the brass case toward her.
“Open it,” he whispered.
“That seems unwise.”
“It is the only wise thing left.”
The case had no lock. Orra tested the hinges anyway. They were sealed with a thin ring of dark wax stamped with a symbol she did not recognize: three broken circles around a hollow point.
Nima landed beside them as the ward flashed overhead. The barrier bowed under another impact.
“What’s in the box?” she asked.
“Something that has made our evening expensive,” Orra said.
The old captain’s eyes fixed on Nima’s astrolabe cards. “You weave constellations.”
“I do.”
“Then you know the stars have been wrong.”
Nima’s expression sharpened.
The captain coughed. Blood spotted his beard. “Three nights ago, the mist withdrew in the forbidden zone. Not parted. Withdrew. Something rose beneath it.”
Outside, the *Morrowfin* groaned against its lines.
Vey shouted from the bar, “Orra! We leave in thirty seconds!”
She looked at the dying man. “What rose?”
He gave her a cracked smile. “An island.”
The brass case pulsed again.
This time, the vibration answered from somewhere beyond the walls.
A low, distant note rolled through the tavern and through Orra’s bones. For one instant, every lamp went dark. In that darkness she saw a shape below the broken shutters: a black mass rising from the Aethersea, vast enough to cast a shadow through the mist. Jagged towers protruded from its back. Something like a dead forest clung to its sides.
Then the lamps returned, and the shape was gone.
The old captain sagged.
Orra caught him before his skull struck the floor. His breathing had become shallow, wet, and uneven.
“What island?” she demanded.
“Ghost Isle,” he said. “That is what the old charts called it.”
Nima reached for the case. Orra stopped her with one hand.
“Gloves,” Orra said.
Nima blinked. “It’s in a box.”
“Aether exposure travels through skin. So does cursed metal. I’m not interested in learning which one this is.”
For once, Nima did not argue. She pulled a pair of silver-thread gloves from her belt.
Orra took the case, wrapped it in the captain’s coat, and cracked the seal with the edge of her belt knife.
The lid opened.
Inside lay a crystal no longer than her thumb, faceted like a shard of frozen lightning. It was cloudy at the center, with a dark thread winding through it. The pulse came from that thread. Each beat sent a needle of pain up Orra’s arm.
Nima leaned over it.
“The resonance is structured,” she murmured. “That is not a natural crystal.”
“What does it do?” Orra asked.
The crystal turned in its padding.
Not rolled. Turned.
Its sharpest point swung toward the eastern horizon, where the Aethersea had begun to brighten beneath the clouds.
A thin beam of violet light lanced from its tip and passed through the tavern wall.
Far away, something answered.
A second pulse rose from the mist. Then a third. The echoes formed a line, a direction, a road drawn through empty sky.
Nima’s breath caught. “It’s a beacon.”
“To what?”
The old captain’s hand found Orra’s wrist one last time. “The flagship.”
Whose flagship?”
His pupils had already gone wide and distant. “The gods’.”
He died before Orra could ask which gods.
For half a second, the tavern held only the sound of the failing ward.
Then Vey put a pistol through the nearest window and fired.
“Orra!”
She slid the crystal into the inner pocket of her work vest. The pulse struck against her ribs like a second heart.
“I have it,” she called.
Vey’s head snapped around. “Have what?”
“An expensive reason to leave.”
That earned the ghost of a smile. “Good enough. Move.”
Brask swung through the window and landed hard enough to crack a floorboard. “The red sails are boarding the dock. White coats are sealing the upper lifts. We can take one route.”
“Which?”
“The bad one.”
“There is only one?”
“Today, yes.”
They ran.
Orra was last into the rain-slick street, stopping only long enough to pull the old captain’s coat over his face. The tavern’s proprietor stared at her from behind the bar, mouth open.
“Was he yours?” the woman asked.
“No.” Orra looked at the blood on her hands. “But he was someone’s.”
A pistol cracked above them. Wood exploded from the tavern’s sign.
Orra sprinted for the dock.
The *Morrowfin* hung beyond it, a small, battered galleon suspended on four levitation sails. Its hull was patched in three kinds of timber. Its elemental crystals glowed pale green beneath the keel. It was not a ship made for legends. It was a ship made for surviving long enough to earn them.
Brask reached the gangplank first and kicked it loose as the dock shuddered.
Nima climbed aboard, scattering astrolabe cards into the wind. They snapped into a shifting constellation around her hands.
Vey seized the helm. “Orra!”
She jumped.
Her fingers caught the rail. For one sharp instant, her boots swung over open air and the Aethersea blazed beneath her. The mist was beautiful from above: auroras braided through it, colors moving with no sky-born wind. It was also lethal. A fall into that light would strip the breath from her lungs before she reached the bottom of the world.
Brask hauled her over the rail.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
“I had it.”
“You had one hand.”
“I have two now.”
The *Morrowfin* lurched forward. Its sails filled with blue fire.
Behind them, the Crimson Veil ships fired grapples. One caught the stern and went taut.
Brask’s grin vanished. He seized the harpoon winch. “Cutting us loose!”
Above the dock, the Inquisition’s lead ship unfolded a device shaped like a brass eye. White light gathered inside it, aimed directly at the crystal hidden beneath Orra’s vest.
Nima saw it too. “They have a resonance reader.”
Vey’s hands tightened on the helm. “Then we cannot go where the beacon points.”
The crystal pulsed against Orra’s ribs.
On the horizon, the Aethersea opened like a wound.
An island rose from the luminous mist, enormous and black, shedding waterfalls of glowing vapor. Broken towers crowned its ridges. Along one exposed cliff lay the ribs of a ship so vast that the *Morrowfin* could have sailed between them.
The beam from Orra’s crystal struck its highest ruin.
Every window in the dead fortress lit at once.
Orra watched the two pursuing fleets turn toward them, one red and one white.
Then she drew the crystal from her vest.
“Take us there,” she said.
Vey stared at her. “That is the forbidden zone.”
“I know.”
“Nothing comes back from the forbidden zone.”
Orra looked at the impossible island, at the ship bones large enough to belong to a god, and closed her fingers around the pulsing crystal.