Ichor Well Read online

  “Nah. I reckon it was best to run it by you first.”

  “Johnson ever tell you why he only has three teeth and a crooked nose?”

  “Nah.”

  “He tried to sell me that story six years ago. The man’s been selling that recipe for fifteen years. Next time you see him, you knock out another couple teeth and let him know who told you to do it.”

  “Sure thing, Cap’n.”

  “How’d you do with trade?”

  “Darn good, Cap’n. We took in something like four hundred victors for them dresses Nita gave me. And that fugger booze is still fetching a good price. Oh, Nita, I got my hands on some of that ugly wood you said your folks were on about.”

  Nita’s face brightened. “You got some purple gnarlwood! How much?”

  “Roundabout twenty board feet, I reckon.”

  “Wonderful. I know at least a dozen carvers who would give their firstborn child for enough gnarlwood to do a decent inlay.”

  “You Calderan folk do like some strange stuff, Nita.”

  She laughed. “I could say the same for you Rim folk. Those dresses you’ve been selling are practice designs by apprentices. If I hadn’t asked for them on your behalf, they would have been burned.”

  “Guess it takes all types,” Coop said.

  “You all can jaw about the gossip later. I’ve got to get back to the wheel,” Mack rumbled. “Lil, you got the mail. Anything else I need to know about?”

  “Not as such, Cap’n,” Lil said.

  He nodded. “Glinda, we set for food and medicine?”

  The captain remained the only member of the crew who referred to Butch by her given name, a lingering side effect of their former status as husband and wife. Butch’s reply was her usual half rant. Nita only understood every third word, but since Butch made it a habit to say three times as many as she needed to, that was enough to get the gist. Broadly speaking, the answer was a colorfully phrased “yes” with a few admonishments about suggesting she didn’t know how to fetch such things by now.

  “Fine, fine. Miss Graus, how’s the inside of the ship looking?”

  “Running smooth, Captain,” Nita said. “I’ve finished swapping out all the bearings. A few more valves and seals and the Wind Breaker can start using Calderan replacement parts for most of the key assemblies, so we won’t have to worry so much about getting parts second- or thirdhand from the fug folk.”

  “But we can still use the fug-made parts if we get them.”

  “Yes, Captain. You’ll have the only ship in the sky that can go both ways.”

  Coop and Lil snickered.

  “Settle down, you two. But while we’re on you two, how’s the education coming along? These two coached up on the boiler yet?”

  Lil shrugged a bit, trying to pull her head into the shoulders of her oversize overcoat like a turtle.

  “Well… Lil’s coming along. She can swap ruptured pipes well enough. Coop too.”

  “Wink could swap pipes. I’m talking about the tricky bits. Turbines, engines, them parts.”

  “They’re… coming along,” she said a bit more slowly.

  “So if we ran into the wailers tomorrow and you caught a spike while you were up there getting the turbines spinning again, would Lil or Coop be able to get them spinning again instead?”

  “Not just yet.”

  “Then they ain’t coming along,” Mack said. “Damn it, crew. All these years we had to toe the line the fuggers drew because we couldn’t fix our own ship. Now that we’ve got an engineer on board, you folk should be tripping over each other to learn how to do what she does. If in two more weeks Gunner and Nita are still the only two members of this crew who can keep the engine pumping, then I’m going to have to start thinking about just how much I want to keep the rest of you.” He thumped down his now-empty bowl. “That takes care of the inside. Wink, how’s the outside?”

  The patch-wearing aye-aye began to tap one of his long fingers on the table. His official purpose on the ship was as the inspector. Every fug-made ship in the air, and thus every ship in the air, was assigned an inspector to track down leaks and wood rot while the ship was in flight. That was the official reason they were on board. The unofficial reason, and one that only the Wind Breaker crew had discovered, was to spy on the activities of the crews to make sure they’d been obeying the rules set forth by the fug folk. Every time they returned to port, the inspectors would tap out a message, and if any rules were broken, the fug folk would know and take appropriate action. Wink and Nikita were the only two aye-ayes who no longer delivered messages to the fug. Their tapped-out messages nevertheless remained quite effective for everyday communication, even if it was taking a bit of effort to train out some of the linguistic quirks.

  No big leaks in the envelope. Two boards, deck two, starboard, stern, were rotten. Gig was loose. Everything else was good. Butch gave Wink good food now, he tapped.

  Butch gave Nikita good food too now, Nikita chimed in.

  “Now, Nikita, what’d I say? You ask nice. You too, Wink,” Coop said.

  Nikita looked to Coop, then tapped again. Did Coop gave Nikita good food instead?

  Both aye-ayes looked to Coop expectantly.

  Coop shrugged. “Eh, that’s halfway there. At least it’s sort of a question.”

  He fished a couple of pieces of breadfruit out of a pocket and handed them to the creatures.

  “I’m impressed,” Nita said. “Even last week neither of them knew how to ask questions. If they can figure out present and future tense, they’ll be able to speak as well as any of us.”

  “Maybe they’d be able to teach Coop,” Gunner said.

  “Ain’t nobody need to tell me how to talk proper.”

  “Clearly,” Gunner said.

  Captain Mack forced down a biscuit and wiped his hands. “Lil, let’s get the mail call over with.”

  Lil nodded and pulled the paper bundle from her pocket. She produced a blade from somewhere inside the coat and cut the twine tying the bundle. The package split to reveal a stack of letters and small packages, mostly wrapped in their own paper covering. She shuffled through them, dealing them out into piles.

  “Cooper… Cooper… von Cleef… Cooper… Heh, there’s one for ‘The Calderan Girl,’ Nita… And the rest are West,” Lil said, squinting at the writing. “I gotta say, a girl could get used to having an address. This is twice in a month I heard from my cousins. I wasn’t even sure we had any cousins left.”

  “Me neither,” Coop said. “Shame they all seem to want to borrow money. Guess that’s how you find out how much family you got left. Do something that seems like it’d make you rich.”

  “All right,” Captain Mack said, scooping up his mail. “Finish up and get back to your stations. Gunner, I want you on deck with your rifle up and your eyes peeled. You too, Coop. Wink, you’re with me. If we’re going to be tight on phlogiston, I want to make double sure we spot any raiders or pirates before they spot us. Nita, get down to your room and tighten up the gig. Don’t want that dragging in the wind if burn-slow is getting scarce. Glinda, last I checked we were getting low on bandages. Prep some more when the cooking’s done.”

  “Aye,” the crew replied.

  Captain Mack thumped out of the room and down the hall. After a precisely judged amount of time, conversation continued.

  “Is it just me, or is the captain a bit more… gruff than usual?” Nita asked.

  “Sometimes he gets like that. ’Specially during the winter. You stand up on deck at the wheel for as long as he does on days like these and see if you’re feeling rosy,” Lil said.

  “I don’t know… I think there might be more to it. Someone should talk to him.”

  “I reckon the cap’n being in a sour mood is a good reason to let him be,” Coop said. “And I been a part of his crew lots longer than you.”

  “Back home they teach us an angry person is a person with a problem that needs solving,” Nita said.

  “Back home the
y teach us you don’t poke a mean dog,” Lil said. She cleaned her plate and gave Nita a slap on the back. “Let’s get that gig tightened up. Your room’s gonna be a mite nippy if that gig’s not good and tight. You want I should stow your letters, Coop?”

  “May as well,” he said.

  The group finished their meals and set off to their assigned tasks.

  #

  “Well ain’t you gonna open it?” Lil said, rolling up her sleeves and prancing along in front of Nita like a child.

  “We’ve got work to do, Lil,” Nita said.

  “We always got work to do, but you ain’t always got a letter to open. It ain’t like you got family here in Rim that’ll be after you for a handout. All your folks are back in Caldera. So open it! Maybe it’s from a secret admirer.” She elbowed Nita and winked. “Aside from the ones you already got on board.”

  Nita pushed open the door to what had become her room on the lowest deck of the Wind Breaker. A powerful gust of wind confirmed what Wink had observed, something was letting a hell of a draft into the room.

  It wasn’t the most luxurious of quarters on the ship, that was certain, but it was without a doubt the roomiest. The official name was the “gig room.” It was a single room that took up the center third of the deck. Steam pipes fed two potent cranes that held the captain’s gig in place. The gig was a small boat, really little more than a raft, that served the dual purpose of ferrying the crew to shore when they moored over relatively open water and hauled cargo up into the belly of the ship. When not in use, it was pressed to the belly to streamline its shape and seal the worst of the weather out of the cargo hatch in the center of the room. Nita had laid claim to one corner of the room, where the steam pipes kept her cozy at night and a hammock rocked her to sleep.

  The forward edge of the gig was pulled down easily six inches, causing the whole boat to rock a bit and funneling the full brunt of the wind up into the room. Sea spray had already formed a patch of frost around the edge of the hatch.

  “Who brought the cargo down this time?” Nita grumbled, eyeing the mess the constant wind had left of her hammock.

  “This time was Gunner, I think,” Lil said.

  Nita frowned and picked up an overturned pot of grease that had been dislodged. “He owes me a pint of number three axle grease then. And he’s cleaning up the last one.”

  She turned a valve and released steam from the complex network of pipes into the workings of the winch, then pulled the appropriate lever to take the slack out of the chains that held the gig. It rattled into place in a second or two, sealing out the pale light from the outside that had been leaking in. Nita reached up and twisted another knob, this one a transparent tube above her hammock. Gas seeped into the glass capsule, and a bright green light filled the room, the glow of a phlo-light. The fug-made gadgets ran on a minuscule amount of the same gas that filled the envelopes, and tended to be the only light available in the bowels of an airship.

  “There. Job’s done. Read the letter,” Lil said.

  “The job’s not done! Look at all the ice that crusted up the workings here,” she said, looking reproachfully at the winch mechanism as it crackled with frost. “Now I need to make sure nothing buckled from the temperature swing. And I’ve got to bleed the lines again to make sure they don’t freeze up and clog.” She shook her head. “If I’d have known how much harder it is to keep a steam system happy in the cold, I would have thought twice about staying on the crew in the first place.”

  “Well can you read and work?”

  “If you want to know what it says so much, then you read it.”

  “I ain’t much for readin’ out loud, Nita,” Lil said. “Really ain’t much for readin’ at all.”

  “Then it can wait.”

  Nita took out a wrench and began to loosen a few of the fittings on the winch. She grinned as she saw Lil fidgeting out of the corner of her eye. The impatient deckhand had her arms crossed and was tapping her boot.

  “Do you at least need any help?” she asked.

  “This has to be done in sequence, one thing at a time. You can do the other one if you want.”

  “What I want is to hear what your letter says,” she pouted.

  “Tough,” Nita replied.

  “… You sure you don’t mind me reading it?”

  “Like you said, it can’t be from someone I know, so it can’t very well be something sensitive or personal.”

  “Well all right. But no laughing if I stutter.” She tore open the letter. “‘Dear Miss Calderan Lady. I am nine years old. I never met a Calderan Lady before. I want to ask you some… questions. How come you got skin like that? My daddy says you was born on a volcano. Is that why? Did you get burned?’” She snickered. “Don’t that beat all? … That ain’t why, is it?”

  Nita looked at her flatly.

  “I didn’t think so, I was just makin’ sure.”

  Lil continued to work her way through the substantial list of questions from the young knowledge seeker. As Nita listened, shaking her head at how little the people of Rim knew of Calderans, she hopped down into the gig to get a better angle on the next piece of piping. Her heel caught the edge of something and sent it rattling around the floor of the gig.

  “… ‘Daddy says you live on the ground in Caldera. How come you can breath down there? Fuggers live on the ground, and they got different skin too. Daddy says…’ This kid’s daddy sure does know a little bit about a whole lot. … What you got there?”

  Nita had chased down the mystery object and held it into the light. It was a small metal canister, a bit shorter than Nita’s forearm and roughly the same diameter. A purple-stained swatch of paper was tied securely around it. She slipped the loop of string free and unfurled the slip of paper. Her eyes widened as she read it.

  “We need to talk to Captain Mack. He’s going to want to know about this…”

  #

  Coop pulled his coat a little tighter and buttoned an extra button. The sun was beginning to set now, and though Captain Mack had taken the Wind Breaker high enough to be free of the dampness of the sea, all that did was add a sharper bite to the cold and a stiffer wind to contend with. He was dressed in an outfit identical to that of his younger sister Lil. Precisely identical, in fact, because Lil tended to inherit his clothes when he picked up a fresh set. His coat was thus a bit crisper, his knitted cap had fewer holes, and his scarf wasn’t so frayed, but otherwise they were a matched set. The clothes did fit Coop properly, though, which mean he’d added a pair of gloves to the mix to keep his hands warm, since they didn’t tuck into his sleeves like Lil’s did. Completing the ensemble was a long-barreled rifle and a conspicuous bulge beneath the jacket where Nikita was nestled.

  He scanned the horizon. For the moment there was nothing but clear sky in all directions. When he was satisfied, he paced over to the opposite side of the deck, where Gunner stood. The munitions officer was predictably better armed, his own rifle sporting three barrels, a clockwork system ostensibly for reloading it, and a set of optics that was a match for the captain’s spyglass. Unlike the common leather trench warn by Coop, Gunner was more or less in uniform, with a sharp gray overcoat with gold and silver trim. He wore a stiff cloth mask over his face and nose in lieu of a scarf, and while Coop was making do with squinting, Gunner wore a pair of goggles with another set of complex optics.

  “Seen anything, Gunner?” Coop asked, pulling out his pistol and aligning his eye with the sights.

  “Did you hear me raise an alarm?”

  “Not as such.”

  “Then that would imply I haven’t seen anything.”

  “I reckon so,” Coop said with a nod. Coop alternated between eyeing the sights of the rifle and pistol. “How come I gotta keep fixin’ the sights on my pistol, Gunner?” he asked.

  “Because you fail to understand that the sights of pistols and rifles need different calibrations. If you’ve ‘fixed’ your pistol sights again, you’ve probably spoiled them.”

&
nbsp; After a few moments of nothing but howling wind, Coop rested the butt of his rifle on the ground, holstered his pistol, and reached into his pocket. “So I added a line or two…” he began.

  “For heaven’s sake, Coop. In all the years I’ve been working with you on this ship, I never thought the thing that would bring me to the brink of throwing you overboard would be poetry.”

  “You’re the only fella on the ship who’s good with words and all that, seein’ as you spent all that time in that academy of yours. Who else am I going to run this sort of stuff by?”

  “Ideally no one. You don’t honestly think anything you write could even approach the level of beauty and truth that even the most inept Calderan poet would scribble in the margins of his scrap paper, do you?”

  “Yeah I do, on account of Calderan folk ain’t seen the sort of stuff I seen, so they ain’t got the same stuff to write about,” Coop said simply. “So here’s what I got so far. Ahem. I like lookin’. And I like cookin’, ’specially when it’s pie. Sometimes I reckon, the mornin’ sun beckons, fer me to look it straight in the eye. When I see a bird, it churns up these words, and then I’m fixin’ to write ’em down. ’Cause eggs in a clutch, an’ flowers an’ such, are pert near the pertiest things around. What do you think? Reckon Nita will like it?”

  “I’ve got to hand it to you, it certainly rhymes. And I wouldn’t have expected to hear the word ‘beckon’ out of you.”

  “Yeah, I like that one too. Used to be a bit about birds and peckin’, but I already got eggs and birds in the other bit. She’ll like it though, right? It’s got flowers an’ such. Womenfolk like flowers an’ such.”

  “You have a penetrating insight into the female mind, Coop.”

  “Yep! And I know how ladies think, too. I reckon one more bit, maybe about… something else pretty, and I’ll be done. What else is pretty? I got flowers and birds. And pie. You reckon—”

  His artistic pondering was interrupted by clamoring footsteps from the stairway to the lower decks. Nita burst from below, prompting him to stuff the poem back in his pocket.