The Ravens' Child

A SkyPunk story by Arveliot 

Wind funnelled snow-white mists into a chasm between the isles, rivers of fog that fell into a maze of broken islands. Its momentum in the slipstream kept the boulders and islands churning in a blanketed maelstrom that would never settle and never stay the same. Even from miles away, and safely ensconced in the bridge of the ship, Clarissa could hear the roar of colliding boulders, and the groan of breaking rocks. 

And into this storm of stone the Ravens' Child descended.

"Still a chance to back away," Captain Locklear said. The captain was standing in front of the bridge, almost close enough to touch the massive window that took up most of the ship's bow. His left hand rested on the pommel of the sword at his hip, and his right was holding a pocket watch. The only sign of his nervousness that Clarissa could see was the thumb of his left hand slowly rubbing the metal guard of the sword. He turned to look back, and smiled. "Though that door is closing fast."

It wasn't Clarissa he looked back at. Above and to her right, Tonya held the Child's wheel in a grip so steady iron might have envied it. "We'll make it, captain. All I needed was sleep, coffee, and smoke," she replied, and gestured to the lidded mug floating in the air next to her.

Clarissa grinned, seeing the mug drift in a slow spiral a foot away from Tonya's head. She found herself envying the ways the crew of the Ravens' Child used the microgravity beyond the inner isles.

"Mercy and Leslie are already standing by on the top deck," the captain said, pointing straight above his head. "They have signal flares and smoke canisters aplenty, and the Banshee's prepped. Anita's in engineering, fire's been over-stoked to give you as much power in the propellers as the Child can give."

The captain smiled, shifted his googles up onto his forehead, and tied his scarf in place. "I'll be up top, directing the others and keeping watch. Tonya Hughes, the bridge is yours."

Tonya nodded solemnly.

The captain marched off in that awkward walk of someone wearing boots with magnets set into the soles. He reached the door, turned back, and added, "I will take crashing as a personal slight. Run my ship on the rocks and we stop being friends."

"That's cruel, captain."

"Don't hit the rocks, then," the captain said. But he was smiling as he stepped through the door and shut it behind him.

Tonya twisted in position and turned her head towards one of the nearby speaking tubes. There were several here, all long steel tubes that connected to various places on the ship. Clarissa recognized the one Tonya had turned to as the one leading to engineering. "Anita, how's the engine?"

"Purring happily. I'm going to run her pretty hot for the next few hours. She should keep up with anything you put us through," a voice shouted back through the tube.

"Glad to hear it," Tonya said. She pushed one of the brass levers forward, and her eyes rested on a nearby set of dials. "Increasing to two-thirds speed, prepping peripherals for frequent, intermittent use. And Anita, don't be bashful about any kind of engine trouble. Captain threatened to end our friendship if I crashed his ship."

"I have to second that," Anita replied through the tube. "Spent a good lot of my waking life working on this engine. You break it, I'd be mighty upset. Wouldn't even let you eat the cake at my birthday."

Clarissa, in the meantime, decided to step up to the window, to see as much as she could. She leaned over the rails in front of the massive window, and tried to look to her left. "Are those pirate ships still following us?"

"Corsairs, kid," Tonya replied. "They're called corsairs. Pirates wouldn't try to take on a ship like the Child. And that's something I'll ask the captain in a minute, once he confirms he's on the top deck."

"Is it something you need to know to take us through the Ruins?" Clarissa asked.

"Yep. If those three are riding our wake, we'll have to take ourselves into the Ruins a fair bit faster than any of us are comfortable with," Tonya said, and she set her gaze forward.

Clarissa turned back, and looked back at the Ruins. Tiny islands, rubbed smooth by centuries of wind and water, churned in the white rivers of mist like chunks of meat in a stew. This close, a few miles away and drawing nearer every second, the Ruins nearly devoured the rest of the sky for as far as Clarissa could see. Ahead of her, instead of the endless blue, there was only streams of mist and the islands they wound through.

"Tonya," the captain's voice came through the pipe. "Those corsairs are spitting so much smoke you'd almost worry their ships are on fire. They're moving to try and gain on us."

"Well, that answers my first question," Tonya muttered. Louder, and facing the speaking tube, she said, "I'll have to run us into the mists at cruising speed, Captain."

"Reckon I oughta be freaking out a lot more than I am," the captain replied. "But that'll keep them out of cannon range until long after we're in the Ruins."

Clarissa forced herself to breathe as she stood and waited. The seconds dragged on, as if time itself was reluctant to fly them into that deadly maze. The tense silence stretched on into minutes, listening to the muffled whirl of the Child's propellers as they pushed the ship towards a maelstrom of mist and stone.

Clarissa noticed Tonya move out of the corner of her eye. She turned around and saw the pilot had taken a small sphere and let it drift in the air beside her head. The sphere was clear glass, with some kind of coloured oil that slowly drifted about inside. It was tied to her wrist by a string, though the string hung with a fair bit of slack.

"One more navigation tool through the Ruins," Tonya explained to Clarissa. Her hands returned to the wheel, squeezing it in a slow, rhythmic pattern. Clarissa suspected Tony was doing it more to steady her nerves than fly. "Because there's so little gravity this far from the inner isles, the only time this globe will move is when we're right close to a big rock."

"How close?" Clarissa asked.

"Too close," Tonya replied quietly. "Too close."

The crack of a sudden explosion jarred Clarissa's frayed nerves, and she jumped so hard she nearly pulled her magnetic boots off the floor. She grabbed onto a rail, and looked out the window. "What was that?" She cried out.

Tonya had already turned to the speaking tube. "Captain?"

"One of those Corsairs is firing stick rockets," the captain replied. Another two explosions sounded in rapid succession just as he finished. In a muffled voice, Clarissa could hear him shout, "Leslie, get on the Banshee! Put some flak in their path."

"We going to make it without getting into a fight, captain?" Tonya shouted into the speaking tube.

"Calmoori stick rockets are wildly inaccurate at this range, but I'd rather not depend on good fortune," the captain replied, the cool professionalism in his voice an immediate relief for Clarissa's jitters. Though the next words he spoke set her back on edge. "At your discretion, give us as much speed as you can."

"Aye captain," Tonya answered, her childlike enthusiasm sending a shiver of terror through Clarissa. The Child's pilot shifted to the speaking tube leading to engineering, and she shouted, "Anita, overrun speed! Engaging peripherals for additional power. Give me everything you've got for three minutes!"

"Three minutes at overrun, aye!" Anita shouted back through the tube. "Better get friendly with that shovel, Yannick!" Clarissa's hands tingled, and she rubbed them together, remembering the pain of having spent a shift shovelling fuel into the Child's furnace.

Another staccato of explosions sounded from somewhere behind them. Clarissa had to take a slow breath to steady herself, and was unprepared for the howl of the Child's massive cannon, as the Banshee rocked the ship as it screamed its fury into the sky.

"Flak rounds are smart," Tonya said to Clarissa, as the quiet hum of the propellers changed. The sound turned deeper and louder, fiercer, as if the ship itself were only just starting to wake up. "Flak rounds create a cloud of shrapnel and embers, nasty stuff to sail through. Might even break the rockets if they try shooting through it."

"That is smart. Like you've all been in scrapes like these before," Clarissa said.

"Not so much, in my case," Tonya replied. "Not like Mercy and the captain, spending years in Volante's navy as Corsair Hunters. I only signed on a few years ago. Used to race. Windlasses, skimmers, and the like. Made my fame and fortune racing a slip through the Shardwall, that stretch of small islands between Calmoori and Olencia."

"You raced slips?" Clarissa asked. She had only read about slips; barely more than a lift bag, an engine, and a chair. Days long races where it was often a question if anyone would make it to the finish line at all. Only madmen, and the most daring, would even consider it.

"I didn't just race slips, kid. I was a champion," Tonya said.

Clarissa's seesawing nerves settled considerably, hearing the confidence in Tonya's voice. Even the approaching maw of the Ruins didn't frighten her quite as much as they had before, and the second roar of the Banshee didn't frighten her as much.

"Captain!" Tonya shouted into the speaking tube. "Are we going to gain a little breathing room?"

"They're veering wide," the captain said, his voice as steady as the thrum of the engines. "Slow us down as late as possible, and we should stay out of rocket range. They might try cannon shots at us, but at this range they'd just be wasting iron. Mercy's on standby with smoke, and I'll pull Leslie as soon as I think I can spare him."

"Aye, sir," Tonya said, and she fixed her sight and attention back on the rivers of flowing mist the Ravens' Child was about to ride.

This close, Clarissa could begin to see the currents, as mists as white and thick as snow flowed over and around bare rock. The exposed stone was as smooth as any river bed, and the churning flow looked as wild as rapids.

"The current is your guide in the Ruins," Tonya said, with one hand on the positional lever for the peripheral propellers. "The mists don't flow through the rocks, only around them. Exactly the way you want to."

"Have you done this before?" Clarissa asked.

"Only once," Tonya admitted. "In a much smaller boat. But the general principle's the same. Follow the current, don't hit the rocks."

"The Corsairs have given up the chase," the captain reported. "Leslie's in position with a smoke launcher."

Tonya smiled and turned her head to the engineering tube. "Reducing speed to half, running peripherals to slow us down. Nice work down there, Anita."

Tonya then flung several levers, and pushed the large one beside her until it clicked three times. The thrum of the engines quieted to a relaxed drone, and the ship seemed to sigh in relief as they slowed down.

The ship cut through a wisp of mist, which left water running in tiny lines across the window as the wind wiped the glass clean again. A second wave struck the window, then a third, and an eerie hush fell over the ship. As if the thick, misty wash of air was muffling the sound of the propellers.

"We're in the Ruins now," Tonya said. Clarissa could see the older woman was fingering one of the ribbons holding back her hair, a long blue strip of cloth with a number one stitched in gold thread. "Never run the Ruins as a race, but that's only because they don't run a course through here."

"But why would you fly through this, especially if it wasn't a race?" Clarissa asked.

"To prove it could be done. I'd heard rumours some smugglers were hiding caches of deadgrass here. I wanted to prove that they could. And prove I was good enough to take someone else's slip in the Shardwall," Tonya said, as she steered the ship directly into the sweeping currents, following the thin streams of moving white mist they could see.

Surprisingly, Tonya was staring carefully at the ball floating beside her head as she flew, her eyes focused on the liquid inside. "Nothing big nearby, no reason to play with our orientation," Tonya murmured to herself, barely loud enough for Clarissa to hear. "Something up ahead, and it has to be big. Nothing close enough otherwise."

The mist was thick enough that Clarissa didn't even know how far into it she could see. Everything was now just swirling white. But Tonya looked unperturbed, and didn't even slow the ship down any more than when they first entered the Ruins.

"Reminds me of when that typhoon swept through the Shardwall during the Raer Bowl," Tonya said. Clarissa could see the pilot wasn't actually looking at her, but was busy glancing from one nearby dial to another. "Couldn't see past the water on your goggles, had to navigate through the way the wind felt on your face. Not my favourite race, not by a long shot. But my last one."

"Your last race? Why did you stop?" Clarissa asked, partially to distract herself from her worries.

"I got what I needed. A purse large enough to win the race I'd always been running," Tonya said to Clarissa. She turned to the speaking tube, and spoke again. "Captain, I could use some smoke. Straight ahead."

A moment later, a small canister came whistling into view, billowing a stream of bright orange smoke. The canister was swept along by the winds, and a few moments later it and the smoke it spat were lost in the mist.

"Good," Tonya said quietly. "Nothing ahead for a bit. Just hold steady. Something will tell me when it's time to turn."

They drifted into what looked like a sea of white, and water ran in streams along the domed window at the bow. To Clarissa, only the hum of the propellers told her they were moving forward. She fidgeted nervously, and tried to recall the last thing Tonya had said to her. "You mean you won enough money on your last race?" Clarissa asked. "What did you need the money for?"

"You're a monastery kid," Tonya said in reply. "Have you ever worked at one of the floating farms?"

"The tiny isles near the Core," Clarissa recalled. "We all do."

"That might be a shift," Tonya muttered, still staring at the window. She glanced back at Clarissa for moment, and asked, "Did you ever meet a man at the Ferella Ranch by the name of Effran Hughes?"

"Effran? He tells the best stories. He made that place my favourite work assignment. He'd bake these cookies, they were always amazing, and he'd tell us stories about the wonderful places around the endless sky. It's so sad, whatever happened to his wife," Clarissa blurted out, the words tumbling out on a rush.

"Yeah, it is. I haven't seen them since I dropped them off, three years ago. Rather wonder if you know what the Monastery does with those tiny farmstead isles," Tonya said, but her gaze was focused on the little glass ball floating beside her head. Something about what she saw made eyes widen in surprise. Her head swerved forward, her eyes sharp and intent on the swirling grey blanket washing against the window. A moment later she began pulling several levers, laughing under her breath.

"Gravity doesn't lie, and neither do the winds," Tonya crowed in triumph, and Clarissa could feel the ship turn sharply to the right. Clarissa watched out the left side of the window, and screamed when a wall of rock appeared in the mist, passing out of sight as the ship flew past.

"I could have shaved with that cut, Tonya," the captain said over the pipe, but he didn't sound unhappy. "Leslie's loaded the Banshee with the paint rounds, if you need to use it for ranging."

"Never was too good at the math for that, captain."

"Let me worry about that. Just ask me by the o'clock which way you want me to range."

"Aye, captain," Tonya said, staring at the window again. She frowned as she looked at it, then looked over at Clarissa. "Kid, does the seam look a little off-centre to you?"

Clarissa stared at the window for a moment, and shrugged in confusion. "What's the 'seam'?"

"It's the line on the window where the winds start pushing the water to the sides. If we were riding the winds dead on, it would be right in the centre of the window," Tonya said, and she glanced from the window to the glass ball and back. "Take a look."

Clarissa, already closer to the window, pointed her finger at the pattern the running water was making on the window, and could see the line. Distinctly to the left of the frame that ran along the middle, it also appeared to be shifting even further.

"You're right, and it's moving!" Clarissa exclaimed.

"Looks like I oversteered a bit," Tonya said, and she turned the wheel.

The line shifted again, snaking to the right. Clarissa watched it until it was hidden behind the frame, then turned around and held in her thumb.

"Not bad, kid," Tonya said, giving Clarissa a strange looking salute, a flick of two fingers off her right eyebrow. She held the wheel steady again, and the confident smile on the pilot's face only grew. "Almost starting to wonder what all the fuss is about with the Ruins."

"How do you know Effran Hughes?" Clarissa asked, when she found she could relax again. Walls of smooth rock, worn like the mountainsides of her home, were pushing past the mists on her right, but it looked to Clarissa like the mists were thinner, rather than that the Child was closer.

"Captain told you my name when you took passage with us, didn't he?" Tonya asked. "Tonya Hughes. Effran is my father."

"Oh, wow," Clarissa said. She thought back to some of the stories that old man had told her, and recalled more than one had been about some kind of race. She thought of one she remembered best, and asked, "Were you in something called 'The Drop'?"

"Oh, I remember that one. It's a windlass drop, where you plummet from one of those big Olencian Junks down to a wheat field with a one-tonne box. Meant to commemorate some kind of daring manoeuvre during some war, but the point is you have to get that box as close to a single flag in the middle of a wheat field as you can, as fast as you can." Tonya laughed, and smiled happily at Clarissa. It might have been a trick or the light, but her eyes seemed to glisten. "My first race. Surprised he remembers."

"He's doing really well," Clarissa said. "He's one of the people we ask to help orient newcomers. Some of them start out really bad."

Tonya frowned. "You ever heard of deadgrass?"

"Yeah. It gets talked about a fair but, but I've never understood much of it. The elders of the Monastery don't want us asking anyone about it," Clarissa admitted.

"There are a lot of stories about deadgrass. They're all sad," Tonya said. She frowned at the glass ball again, then turned to the pipe. "Captain, could you give me a range? Twelve o'clock."

"Stand by," the captain replied.

Clarissa held out her hands, and waited for the shot. She didn't have to wait long before the gun howled and rocked the entire ship, but the cannon wasn't what she was listening for. Just before the roar of the gun left her ears, less than a second after the gun was fired, she heard the small crack of the shot hitting rock.

"About twenty-four hundred yards," Clarissa said quickly.

"Wait, what?" Tonya asked.

"Twenty-two hundred sixteen yards, give or take a dozen feet," the captain said a moment later.

"Clarissa has us pegged at twenty-four hundred, cap," Tonya mentioned.

"Air density in the Ruins is thicker than even at the Core," Captain said. "All that mist. Not bad though, it would be twenty-four hundred eight, if we were still outside."

"So a mile and a quarter until we run around," Tonya said. Her right hand was on the large lever, her fingers undulating anxiously as she waited. "Now to see where the winds flow next. Kid, watch the seam carefully. Let me know if it shifts in about half a minute."

"Half a minute," Clarissa nodded. "What happens then?"

"The winds should start blowing around that rock we're heading for. Stay ready," Tonya said.

Clarissa watched the window, barely willing to let herself breathe, fearing she would miss it. Seconds passed with agonizing sloth, and she had waited so long that she was worried she imagined it when the pattern of the water on the window changed.

"It changed, but," Clarissa began to say. "It's not a seam, it's spreading in every direction."

Tonya glanced at the glass ball, as it began to drift away from her. "Rakefire Muckspout!" Tonya cursed, and she swung several of the small levers at once. She then pulled the big lever hard towards her, and turned to one of the speaking tubes. "Swivel propellers on overrun! Prep for main propellers at overrun in six seconds!"

She then moved her head to the other tube, and shouted "check clips!"

The ship pushed against Clarissa's legs. Hard. The unnoticeable pull off the tiny islands was replace by sudden pull on her body that felt like her body had been replaced by magnetized lead. Her knees buckled and she clutched the rails as the ship tilted its bow up.

As Clarissa hung on, the mists parted and a wall of rock was all she could see out the window. The bare rocks looked as if they were falling, rushing from the top of the window to the bottom, until the ship tilted up and she could see mist straight ahead again. The ship surged to life as the main propellers began to thrum again, and Clarissa let out a sigh of relief as weightlessness returned.

But one quick glance at Tonya revealed that the pilot wasn't finished. She was switching levers in rapid succession, and her face warred between grin and grimace. She turned to the speaking tube, and shouted, "Brace! Aft powered turn, with a sixty degree rotation counter-clockwise!"

Clarissa somehow noticed, even as her heart started pounding, that the globe tied to her hand was being pulled up in the air.

The ship swung violently again, and the rocks below shifted into view on the right side. Then something shoved her back, nearly knocking her over despite her magnetic boots. The swirling mists drowned out the rock a moment later, and the water flowing across the window grew so thick they might as well be underwater.

"Now this is what we live for!" Tonya cried out, as the ship tried to throw Clarissa into the side of the hull. She actually stumbled, her feet coming off the deck, and she clutched the rail so hard her shoulders ached from the effort.

It only took a few seconds more, before Tonya pushed the large lever away, and flicked the other switches again. "Returning to cruising speed. You two okay down there?" she called out to engineering.

"Engine's happy," Anita said lightly. Clarissa was amazed at how easily the engineer had taken that last maneuver. "Yannick's going to research curse words when we finish, though. Says you deserve the effort."

"Everything right as blue sky up there, captain?" Tonya asked through the other nearby tube.

"Lost a smoke barrel, and Leslie misplaced his lunch off the side," the captain replied. "We fly this route again, I might make vomit coloured shirts our uniform."

Tonya laughed as she took the wheel in two hands again, and stared at the window. "Wasn't expecting the rock to be quite that big, or having another one that big so close.

Clarissa nodded, panting. She tried to relax by taking slower breaths, but the best she managed was a frightened, somewhat manic laugh. "That was," she began to say, unable to finish the thought.

"Feels good, don't it?" Tonya asked.

"That's a description. Like calling the sky green," Clarissa muttered.

"Try something Leslie made once we're clear of the Ruins. Food tastes better after some real excitement. Everything's better," Tonya smiled wistfully as she spoke. "Guess it's the reason people take deadgrass. However you get it, the rush and the high ain't something you can deny yourself easily."

"What is deadgrass?"

"It's a drug. Crippling addictive. My parents were both users," Tonya said. "Dad recovered from it better, actually managed to kick it, but mom didn't manage. Least not until I got them to the farm."

Clarissa nodded, beginning to understand. "But the Monastery doesn't make people pay to come to the farms, do they? I know they're a place to get away from things like deadgrass, my teachers were willing to tell me that much," Clarissa said, gently. She was worried about Tonya's still glistening eyes, and the hands on the wheel had a distinct tremor to them. How much of that was excitement, she couldn't know.

"It ain't free, but the monastery only asks you pay what you can. Half a rusted copper would have been enough for them. Even booking passage on the Child was reasonable, considering the tensions between Volante and the Calmoori. The part that I spent every copper I made in those races, and the money my Dad managed to earn while keeping me and mom afloat, was paying off the debts that piled up from being hooked on deadgrass.

"Oh, I'm sorry," Clarissa said.

"Don't be. Should be thanking you and yours at the Monastery for having those farms. Mine is one more sad tale of deadgrass, but that tale ain't over. Misfortune's a hard wind, but learn to fly in a hurricane and there's nowhere beneath the blue you can't go," Tonya said.

Clarissa nodded, only barely hearing Tonya turn to the pipe and ask the captain to launch another smoke canister. But the ship's pilot had fought it, and as she hummed happily to herself and turned the ship gently to follow the rolling mists flowing between the islands, Clarissa wondered if Tonya's story had something to do with the ship's name.