A Safe Distance to Listen

The jury sail held for three hours, then tore loose at its lower seam.

Brask caught the spar before it could swing into the rigging. He pinned it against the rail with one shoulder while Orra hauled the line clear of a pulley that had begun to smoke. The Morrowfin dipped hard toward the Aethersea. Below, the mist shone in bands of green and violet, bright enough to show the island’s black underside ahead.

“Patch it or cut it?” Brask shouted.

Orra leaned into the line. The pulley’s rim had warped. “Cut the spar free. Keep the canvas. We can lash it lower.”

He gave her a quick grin that vanished as the ship lurched again. “You heard the diver. Save the cloth.”

The crew shifted the jury sail by hand, drawing it down and aft until it caught a thinner current. The Morrowfin steadied, though its nose wandered and the remaining lift crystal gave off a tired, uneven glow. Vey held the helm with both hands. He had stopped trying to make the ship fly straight. Now he kept it from turning broadside to the wind.

The hidden island emerged from cloud in pieces: first the twin spires, then the dark saddle between them, then the narrow shelf where they had anchored before. No welcoming lights marked it. The ancient windlass waited beneath the island’s stone, with its chain dropping out of sight into the Aethersea.

Orra watched the keel-instrument in her lap. Since they had turned away from the immense curved structure, it had stayed still. The brass needle pointed back along their wake, as if the hull beyond the cloudbank had tied a line around it.

“Can we set her down?” she called.

Vey measured the shelf, the current, and the sail. “We can try. Nobody stands under the spar.”

They came in crooked. Brask and two deckhands caught the mooring lines; the ship scraped stone, swung away, and scraped again before the lines took her weight. The Morrowfin settled against the shelf with a shiver through the deck. The last lift crystal kept burning. That counted as a landing.

Orra climbed down with the instrument wrapped in sailcloth. The others followed more slowly. Nima brought her astrolabe, its brass rings turning in small, uncertain increments. Vey stayed aboard to check the damaged crystal and keep the ship secured. Brask went with Orra, one hand resting on the coil of line at his hip.

“You’re going to the basin,” he said.

“I’m going to find out what the instrument is doing.”

“Those can be the same place.”

The old basin stood on a rise above the mooring shelf. Six carved pillars ringed its shallow center, their faces dark. The living course had passed through here before, lighting routes across the islands. Orra had seen it answer the keel-instrument once. She had never tried to use the basin as a listening post.