After a long night working with Johann on the flux engine – he had insisted that the elemental gate was far too small to supply enough flux to move an entire ship, and rebuilding it had taken all night – I woke to a strangely uneven rocking motion, the ship turning momentarily to one side for half a second before lurching back on course. Between the waves and the odd torquing motion, I found reason to rapidly rush to the railing, donating some share of the previous night’s dinner to the fishes of the sea.
Rebuilding the arcane engine and enlarging its gate appreciably had given me a better understanding both of how it specifically worked and also of thaumaturgy in general. Arcane flux engines are more complex because they utilize a pair of elemental gates rather than a singular gate; flux, unlike heat, has two polarities. Johann was eager to answer all the questions that he could and seemed to be learning new things along with me; evidently, he hadn’t been encouraged to experiment as a student in Vindobona. Teaching me thaumaturgy inspired him to experiment, up until the point where he was tired enough to drop his athame across the exposed lead of the open flux engine.
The lighting sparks generated by the unmediated animosity between the two flux gates – and rapid heating of the athame under the passage of arcane-generated flux in the combat between them – nearly set the ship on fire, and that tempered Johann’s desire for further experimentation that night. We closed up the rebuilt arcane engine, leaving it charged with fighting vigor.
Evidently, after Johann and I had called it a night, Vitold had felt comfortable enough with flux-related mechanics to connect the engine with flux cables to the actuators, and the actuators to the gears. This was a surprise to me, as flux engines are extremely rare within the Golden Empire and were not covered in our training as mechanics within the Imperial Army.
After stopping the arcane engine, I told Vitold he needed to synchronize the drive chains better, or perhaps better yet use a single central wheel on both ends with the one by the engine driven by all the actuators instead of two separate sets of actuators driving two separate sets of gears.
Vitold’s response was to tell me he couldn’t send a single main drive chain directly through the mast. I gave him authorization to disassemble anything he needed for parts to get a proper rigid linkage on the wheels we’d turned into main gears.
Until he did, we would be dead in the water. The acolyte was asleep and the wind was once again trying to blow us back to Venice, so sailing didn’t seem to be an option. Some of the men who had been on sea-going ships before seemed to think there was some trick that let one sail into the wind. I assumed that had to be some variety of tightly controlled wind magic, kept as a secret by sailing masters; our weather-witch’s magic was less subtle, though dependent on her mood, attention, and wakefulness, all of which were depleted by an infant of several months.
Having failed to find Katya anywhere on deck or below, I looked up, knowing by that point that she tended to gravitate to the heights for better vantage whenever she could. Unsurprisingly, I spotted a few strands of red hair blowing in the wind over the crow’s nest. I waved up at her; she waved back at me merrily but made no move to come down. As captain of the cavalry, she was in charge of reconnaissance, and she’d decided that meant she was in charge of the heights of the ship.
***
I had tea, eggs, and toast by way of a late breakfast. The tea was cold, the toast nearly stale, and the eggs fresh. (The fresh eggs were courtesy of the hens we’d brought – rank having its privileges, Captain Rimehammer had ordered the cook to save some for me.) Thus nourished and preferring to stay out of the way of the retrofitting of machinery, I took a perch near the aft end of the ship, sitting next to a very morose-looking Lieutenant Ragnar Rimehammer.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
He sighed heavily.
“Is it about that blonde woman?” I elbowed him in the ribs.
“Her name is Bianca,” Ragnar told me. “It means white. She was born with white hair.”
“Maybe you’ll see her again,” I said.
He fished a copper coin out of his pocket and pitched into the waves with a splash. Motion swirled beneath the waves as the Swedish lieutenant stared blankly.
“Well, she does have lovely blonde hair as an adult,” I said. “Not so far from her natal white. Makes the name easy to remember.”
“Too easy,” Ragnar said. “I think I love her.”
A splash sounded and out of the corner of my eye, I saw a wet mass of brunette hair duck below the waves. “Well, you could go back to Venice,” I suggested. “Sooner or later. Maybe after things calm down.”
Several flashes of yellow light flickered under the water. Ragnar shook his head. “After that spectacle? All of Venice felt that earthquake. And Bianca, she can’t just leave. Not with her family in the state it’s been in.”
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A blonde head emerged from the water and then the upper half of a woman’s torso, very partially concealed by wet strands of hair.
“Hello, men,” said the blonde mermaid, waving with a copper coin held between two of her fingers. She bobbed in the water, demonstrating a certain level of buoyancy that pulled my eyes to the waterline like a flux-charged magnet.
Ragnar looked up, then shook his head. “I’m seeing things,” he said, standing up and turning around. “I should go try to catch some sleep while the boat isn’t rocking too much.”
“Hey!” The mermaid waved with both hands, bobbing vigorously.
My eyes tracked the bouncing for a moment, then turned upward to meet the mermaid’s eyes. “I’m afraid he’s a bit out of sorts,” I said, apologetically. “He usually doesn’t ignore women like that.”
The mermaid sank down into the water, down to the level of her lips, blowing bubbles. “That’s kind of you, but I’m not a woman,” she said. Her head disappeared in a quick somersault, a flash of scales and fins showing for a moment before the blonde head perked back above the water, followed by the uppermost six inches of her chest.
“Yes, I see. You don’t have legs,” I said.
She frowned. “Yes,” she said sullenly. “And legs are the best part. They’re very tasty.”
“You mean they look nice?” I asked. I had heard of attractive women being referred to in culinary terms before.
“Yes,” she said quickly. “I meant they look very nice.” She pouted.
“Don’t feel sad, you look nice, too,” I said. “Besides, it’s okay if you don’t have legs. My woman is missing one, and she’s still beautiful to me.”
“Really?” The mermaid perked up, wiggling and jiggling upwards until her belly button showed.
“Really,” I said.
“Would you like to come for a swim?” she asked.
I demurred; we spoke for a while. I had many questions about boats and sailors and the sea, and so did she; she’d seen our ship when it was below the surface, and there were many things about ships that she didn’t understand.
Then Katya called down that she saw sails. A few moments later, the mermaid’s eyes suddenly widened and she dove forward under the water, swimming under the ship and out of view. I stood, looking up to the crow’s nest, where Katya had set down her spyglass and shouldered her rifle, which was braced, ready, and pointed in a direction not very far from me.
I waved up at her and she put the rifle down, setting it back in a piece of canvas fastened to the inside of the crow’s nest.
----------------------------------------
My climb up to the crow’s nest took longer than I had expected. While I had climbed trees before, trees do not wobble with the waves, and the motion of a mast with the rolling waves can be amplified by the leverage of its height.
I wanted to discuss the sails that Katya had sighted; Katya wanted to discuss the mermaid. As Katya felt much more strongly about the subject of the mermaid and I had no information about the sails she had sighted, we talked about the mermaid and I reassured Katya both verbally on the subject of my fidelity and nonverbally on the subject of the sufficiency of her physical endowments. (From prior experience, I knew explicit verbal reassurances on the subject of Katya’s visible insecurities would imply that I had taken notice of the mermaid’s generous proportions.)
After this reassurance process was complete, Katya talked to me about the sails she had sighted while I put her prosthetic arm back on, securing the metal chest plate that provided the necessary bracing for the mechanical limb.
There had been three ships, with pointy triangular sails that looked unlike the large square sails that our ship had; and they were sailing with the wind, coming closer quite quickly though not quite directly at us, lined up in a file front to back. She took her spyglass back out, looking for a minute until she found them; following the direction she pointed the spyglass in with my own gaze, I saw a trio of ships heading directly toward us, spaced in a wide triangular formation with the point at the back.
“They weren’t headed exactly in our direction before,” she said before I could comment on the inaccuracies in her previous description. “Only partly moving in our direction. And they were lined up in a straight file front-to-back before, too, not abreast like they are now. They have changed direction and formation.”
While I could think of innocuous reasons why ships might shift direction, I found this development cause for some concern. Even in a rural farming village in the hinterland of the Golden Empire, I had heard of pirates; during the war with the Sultanate over Wallachia, news sheets regularly brought us stories about innocent peaceful merchants and fishermen of the Golden Empire captured and enslaved by the cruel pirates funded and supported by the Sultanate.
This then justified special tax levies in support of further development of railroad lines and the construction of the Golden Empire’s first pair of purpose-built warships. Designed to match the state of the art of French naval technology while optimizing maneuverability and stability, they were built on a novel circular hull, able to move in any direction at command by the use of any two out of their six firebox-powered paddlewheel engines. The use of six separate arcane engines (paired with six supplementary coal-burning furnaces for higher-speed maneuvers) would ensure the continued operability of the vessels even after taking substantial damage, as in principle they could continue to operate effectively with any pair of opposed paddlewheels.
These warships remained under construction for roughly three years and remained “in sea trials” in the Cimmerian Sea for the remainder of the war while the Sultan’s piratical navy continued to dominate the entire Axine Sea outside of the Cimmerian Strait. No pirate would have ever voluntarily approached them, as their profile was so distinctive as to be entirely unique – the most visible part of their superstructure was their central elevated artillery battery, the smokestacks for the supplementary coal furnaces having been built sideways in order to try to maintain clear lines of sight.
However, my ship simply had a pair of square sails. While its bronze ram attested to some military purpose in its construction, the bronze ram was not visible above the waterline. Pirates – or well-armed merchants more generously supplied with space in their cargo holds than with moral scruples – could easily mistake us for an easy target.
In fact, since at the moment we were dead in the water, our sails furled and Vitold’s rowing-engine currently under construction, we likely qualified as an easy target, as we were completely stationary – anchored with our nose pointed against the wind. I had already learned firsthand that it was difficult to control the direction of a ship moving backward.