Darius Bronzeway's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Darius Bronzeway climbed through the split hull of the sky-ship before the fog could close around it again. The wreck sat wedged in a cliff shelf, tilted hard to port, its brass railings green with salt. Talon rode his shoulder and dug in his claws. Six weeks ago Darius had stood on a rooftop in Vendetta Row and watched a floating island appear above the clouds for four seconds. Every crew sent after the Ashveil had vanished. He meant to be the first to come back, and this ship was the closest anyone had come to returning. He swung down into the captain's cabin. Water sloshed against a tilted desk. A brass spyglass lay cracked on the boards. Talon shrieked once, sharp, the same warning Darius had ignored twice before and paid for twice. He froze. A gear whined in the dark corner. Something small stepped out from behind an overturned chair, brass-plated and knee-high, one eye glowing blue, the other a dim orange coal. It raised a bent arm that ended in a broken telescope and pointed the tool at his chest like a weapon. Darius set his pack down slowly and showed his open hands. The little machine's leg dragged. Its shoulder plate hung loose. It kept its post between him and a scorched brass journal chained to the desk. "Easy," Darius said. "I'm not your captain. I'm not the ones who left you here either." He crouched to its height. Talon stopped screaming. The scout's blue eye flickered, held on him, and lowered the telescope an inch. Darius read the maker's stamp on its chest plate. Pip. He said the name out loud, and the orange eye brightened by a shade. He unhooked the journal and opened it on his knee. Half the pages were burned to lace. What remained was a captain's hand growing less steady by the entry. Compass will not lie still. Crew counts eleven at dusk, nine at dawn, no bodies. We saw the towers up close. They are older than any city we know and they are still being built. Below the last line, a broken compass had been pressed into the page as a bookmark. Darius lifted it. The cracked needle swung, ignored the ship's iron, and settled on a bearing above the clouds. It held there while he turned in a slow circle. He closed the journal and buckled it into his pack. He lifted Pip under one arm; the scout weighed less than he expected and did not resist. "You're coming with me," he said. "I need what you saw." Talon lifted off his shoulder and cut a clean line through the cabin door toward open sky. Darius followed with the compass in one hand and a damaged clockwork under the other. The expeditions had not been killed by the crossing. They had been killed by what they found, and the compass was still pointing at it.