Break the Chains

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Cracked Thorn Steading appeared like a festering sore on the horizon. The township’s red-painted roofs, crammed into a split in the cliffside, made it look as if the town was bleeding out across the desert sands. Pelkaia stood alongside her first mate, Coss, on the foredeck of the airship which had once been named the Larkspur, now rebirthed as the Mirror, and watched the township slide into focus. She squinted against the wind and put her eyeglass up, scanning until she found the sandstone jetty the city used to perform its executions.

Figures moved beneath the glaring sun, little more than smudges of silhouettes.

“This’ll be a close ’un, captain,” Coss said.

Pelkaia nodded and slammed her eyeglass closed against her thigh. Coss didn’t need the glass to see what was afoot, that man could see an ant fart at a hundred paces. Although he couldn’t move selium gas to save his life, he could see minute selium particles trapped in eddies of air, and how they bent around a body. He was useless for manipulating the selium bladders which gave the airship lift, but he was brilliant as a lookout. And as a spy. Not a day went by Pelkaia didn’t bless the stable sands she’d scrounged him up out of Kalisan.

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