Skykeep (6 page)

“Oh, don’t say that. You’re very pretty,”
Nita said, placing a hand on Lil’s shoulder.

“Nice of you to say it, but I got a mirror.
Don’t bother me much, though. Most days it’s easier if folks don’t
pay you no mind, ’specially in the rougher towns. But I’ll tell you
what. Once we’re done fiddling with whatever it is we’ve got to
fiddle with, I’m heading back to the ship and putting on one of
them fancy Calderan dresses you gave me and we can hit the town
proper.”

Nita smiled. “It might be nice. Seems like I
only get to wear a dress when I visit home.”

“Heck, Nita, if it’s just gonna be nice,
there ain’t no reason to do it. It’ll be better than nice, it’ll be
fun
. Just the girls for once. ’Cept… there’s a few shops and
such we won’t be visiting.”

“Why?”

“Aw, early on when I was first on the crew,
we were hard up for money for provisions and such. Cap’n Mack
didn’t
exactly
tell us we had to pinch stuff to get the
supplies we needed, but he made it darn sure that we didn’t have
coins to get it all the proper way.”

“So you… creatively acquired some items.”

“Heck no, I stole ’em. Got pretty good at it,
too. Eventually I got caught enough that I had to stop. So I
started picking pockets for a while. That’s how I got so good with
my hands. Like so.” Lil dug into her pocket. “You got a
victor?”

“I think so,” Nita said. She rummaged in her
pocket until she revealed a large silver coin.

“Flip it in the air and catch it.”

Nita obliged, sending the coin ringing
through the air. Lil darted her empty hand in and snatched it, then
tipped the hand over and dropped it into Nita’s hand.

“That wasn’t so… wait…” Nita stared at her
hand. The coin Lil had dropped wasn’t a large silver coin, it was a
small copper one. “How did you do that?”

“Lot’s of practice doing things I ought not
be doing,” Lil said, clipping the silver coin out from between two
fingers and swapping it for the copper again. “But we don’t do that
anymore. Much.”

They made their way to the door of a tall,
sturdy building near the rear of the town. It was something of an
unspoken rule in the larger cities of Rim that if only one building
could be built on solid ground, it would be the hospital, and this
was no exception. One of the handy parts of it being a mining town
was the fact they had all of the equipment and expertise to carve
out a nice, wide notch in the mountain to build something that the
town couldn’t afford to have slip down the slope and into the ocean
on a blustery day. The hospital was three stories tall and took as
much of a footprint as the mountain was willing to offer, such that
the left side and the entire rear wall were physically touching the
stone. Its design was a good deal more stable than most of the
other buildings in town. Even those who made their homes in the
houses sitting on wooden platforms would agree that they were
little more than temporary, and thus little was done to them that
didn’t have clear utility. The hospital actually had things like
decorative shutters, painted doors, and outdoor lanterns.

The overall quality and impressiveness of the
building was also why any of the town officials who needed to meet
with outsiders tended to use the hospital and its offices to
conduct business. It is hard to convince someone to invest in your
town when the conference room sways with the breeze. At the door
waited a portly man with a wide smile on his face. He was well
dressed, with a matching jacket, slacks, and vest, along with a
heavy overcoat and a pocket watch. He’d made the unfortunate
facial-hair choice of connecting his mustache to his sideburns,
which became more unfortunate once his slide into middle age had
cost him the hair on the top of his head. If nothing else, it made
him distinctive. One glance was all it took to confirm that he was
the mayor, a man named Lester Wilshire. Nearly every visit to Lock
began with a visit to him.

“Captain West, it is glorious to see you
again. I tell you, sir, it is brave air-goers like yourselves who
have kept our fair town alive. We were withering away before your
trade revitalized us, but leave it to the crew that downed the
dreadnought to turn a blind eye to the potential wrath of the fug
folk rather than ignore those in need.”

The crew members let their minds wander as
the mayor lavished praise upon them, making at least three more
references to the dreadnought and its demise. Though they’d fought
against the dreadnought primarily because it was trying to destroy
the
Wind Breaker
after they had robbed a warehouse, the
fortunate side effect was an instantaneous reputation across the
continent as doers of the impossible and champions of the little
guy.

The captain shrugged off the unwanted praise.
“Yes, that’s fine. We have matters to discuss. And Nita here, I’m
sure, is eager to see to what you’ve got so she can have a bit of
shore leave.”

“Of course, of course. Amanita the intrepid
engineer. My assistant, Matthews, will take you to the, er, the
item in question,” said the mayor.

The degree to which the people of Rim feared
defying the fug folk was truly astounding at times. The mayor or
those like him would talk all day about how horrible the fug folk
were, and laud those who would defy them, but when there came a
chance for their own act of defiance, they would trip over
themselves to make it clear that
they
had no intention of
breaking any of the long-standing policies. That this disposition
could persist even in Lock, where almost every citizen was already
suffering the greatest punishment the fug folk could levy upon
someone, spoke volumes of their mythic status in the minds of the
people.

Matthews stepped out from within the
hospital. It was clear in moments that he was a miner. Certain
characteristics of the profession were unmistakable, and Matthews
had them all. Despite obvious attempts to correct the issue, his
fingernails weren’t quite free of grime. He had a subtle stoop to
his walk, as though the fact that there was a rough stone ceiling
an inch from his head was, at best, a rare departure from the norm.
His skin had an almost ghostly pallor, and most sentences ended
with a stifled cough. That said, he was dressed nearly as nice as
the mayor and had a closely cropped beard and head of hair that
suggested he took his appearance seriously.

“This way please,” he said, not waiting for
introductions.

Matthews paced along the front of the
hospital and onto a narrow but well-maintained ledge of stone. The
platforms that held the rest of the town extended outward from this
ledge. The captain stepped inside the hospital with the mayor,
leaving Lil and Nita to follow Matthews to their task.

“See what I mean about no one paying me no
mind?” Lil said. “The captain gets this whole ‘you’re so great’
speech. You’re ‘the intrepid engineer.’ The best I get is a
nod.”

“I’m sure if the captain hadn’t cut him off,
the mayor would have had something to say about you,” Nita
said.

“You’re sure of that, are you?” Lil said
doubtfully. “Hey, Matthews. You have any idea who I am?”

“You’re part of the
Wind Breaker
crew,
I assume.”

“He assumes. See that?” Lil said, more
pleased to have proved her suspicions than displeased at not being
known. “I’ll bet you know Nita though, right?”

“I should hope so. I’m supposed to get her to
fix the pump for shaft seven,” Matthews said.

Lil gave Nita a wide “I told you so”
grin.

“I’m glad you’re taking this in stride. I
wouldn’t have imagined this would be a smiling occasion,” Nita
said.

“Just because that’s the way it is now don’t
mean it won’t change. I got a lot of living to do. Plenty of time
to notch up my belt with things worth doing. Until then I’ll spend
my time getting ready.”

The trio circled around the mountain until
they came to an impressively large, perfectly flat stretch of
stone. It seemed absurd that such a prime piece of real estate
would be completely vacant until one noticed all of the tracks and
tool marks on the ground. This was clearly a staging area for the
mines, and sure enough, not far from where the courtyard began was
the first of a series of precisely cut passageways into the stone,
some with cart tracks, others without. Matthews led them to the
third of the openings, by far the widest, and stopped just inside,
where the sun dropped away to blackness. There he grabbed three
helmets from hooks on the walls and carefully screwed fist-sized
canisters into receptacles in the back. He then grabbed three tags
from within a cabinet and pocketed one, handing one each to the
others.

“What’s this?” Lil asked.

“Everyone who goes in takes a tag. Everyone
who comes out puts it back. The number of empty hooks is the number
of folks still inside,” Matthews explained. With a twist of a valve
and the roll of a knurled knob, a bright blue flame sparked to life
behind a glass lens on the front of the helmet, casting light into
the darkness. “Watch your heads and watch your step. This shaft has
been out of use for some time. There may have been some minor
collapses.”

“I’ll keep my eyes open,” Nita said, donning
the mining cap and looking over the walls.

This was the first time she’d been in a mine,
but as the steamworks where she’d learned her trade had been bored
out of the side of a volcano, she felt strangely at ease surrounded
by tool-scarred stone walls. Lil was not quite so comfortable,
looking with concern at the retreating point of sunlight behind
them as they moved deeper inside.

“Something wrong, Lil?” Nita asked.

“I don’t like the idea of being anyplace
where there’s only one way out and it ain’t anywhere nearby. I
’specially don’t like it when that place has had ‘minor collapses’
and such, because I don’t much trust ol’ Matthews and me to have
the same idea of what counts as minor.”

“If it sets your mind at ease at all, there
are plenty of ways in and out of this shaft. It links to six other
shafts, each with their own entrance,” said Matthews.

“Still don’t do me any good with a mountain
sitting on my chest,” Lil said.

They progressed a bit farther, and the tunnel
opened out to reveal an excavated alcove that branched off into a
series of other tunnels. This section of the mine seemed quite well
made. There were even wooden doors separating carved-out rooms to
one side. Matthews stopped in front of one such door and pulled a
ring of keys from his pocket, searching for the proper one.

“What exactly are we meant to repair?” Nita
asked.

“We get most of our fresh water from springs
that run throughout this mountain. Unfortunately, sometimes those
springs pour right into a shaft. We keep the active shafts drained
by using pumps powered by the windmills, but there’s only so much
power to go around. This is easily our most productive shaft, but
it’s so deep we can’t spare the power to drain it. If we could get
one of the old steam-powered pumps going, we could probably double
our production.”

“And you folks can’t fix it yourself?” Lil
said. “Seems to me, what with you not having anything else to lose,
you’d start trying to figure out how the things work and just get
them running on your own.”

“It’s been tried,” Matthews said.

“What happened?” Nita asked.

He shifted his head toward the far wall of
the alcove and pointed a finger. They each turned. The combined
light of the three helmets revealed a room quite similar to the one
they were trying to access, though the word “room” couldn’t really
be applied anymore. It looked like a bomb had gone off, rubble from
the ceiling piled into the center of the room and the thick front
walls were blasted away.

“Same thing happens just about anytime
someone has a mind to work on something the fuggers built.
Sometimes they get it running, but never for very long. Once you
lose a few friends to faulty workmanship, you stop trying that sort
of thing. And in a mine, you can’t afford to have things exploding
or you might lose a whole shaft. We are hoping someone with a firm
expertize in boiler repair might be able to rebuild the pump
without risking another explosion,” Matthews said. He turned back
to the door and finally found the key. “There are also those in
town who hold out hope that if they walk the line and obey the
rules, they can get back in the good graces of the fuggers.”

“Good luck with that. We’ve had a lot of
dealing with the fuggers, and they aren’t the forgiving types. You
gotta do them a favor before they’ll so much as look at you,” Lil
said.

Matthews opened the door to reveal a
carved-out chamber large enough to fit half of the
Wind
Breaker
inside. About a third of the room was mounded with
equipment. Some of it was old and tarnished, some brand new. Mostly
it was a jumble of brass piping, with a few massive vats and
canisters standing tall in the center. The moment the door had
opened, a blast of wind had hit them, rushing out of a darkened
tunnel that branched off the main room. As they stepped inside, Lil
started sniffing the air.

“You smell that? I swear I’m getting a whiff
of fug in this place,” Lil said.

Nita sniffed. “Yes… I do get a hint of it
myself.”

“This shaft was dug down deep enough that we
punched through to a cave system. It must have an opening in the
fug, because the whole system is flooded with the stuff. Shutting
the door helps because it cuts down the cross breeze,” he
explained, closing the door. Sure enough, the wind settled and the
scent of the fug became much more tolerable. “We’ll have to get
some men down there to block it up and then try to clear the stuff
out, but there’s no sense going through the trouble if you can’t
get this gadget working again to keep the work area dry. Can you do
it?”