Retribution Falls - Chris Wooding [117]
Anything to avoid going down there, into the Boneyard.
Crake and Jez were with him in the cockpit. He needed Jez to navigate, and he wanted Crake to help figure out the strange compasslike device, which nobody had been able to make heads or tails of yet. He’d banished the others to the mess to keep them from pestering him. Harkins and Pinn had been forced to leave their craft behind again, since it was too dangerous to travel in convoy, and they were insufferable backseat pilots.
“It’ll be dead reckoning once we’re down in the mist, Cap’n,” said Jez. “So keep your course and speed steady and tell me if you change them.”
“Right,” he said, swallowing against a dry throat. He pulled his coat tighter around himself. He wasn’t sure if it was the hangover or the fear, but he couldn’t seem to get warm. He twisted around to glance at Crake, who was standing at his shoulder, holding the brass compass in both hands. “Is it doing anything yet?”
“Doesn’t seem to be,” said Crake.
“Did you turn it on?”
Crake gave him a look. “If you think you know a way to ‘turn it on’ that all of us have missed, do let me know.”
“We don’t need your bloody sarcasm right now, Crake,” Jez snapped, with a sharp and unfamiliar tone to her voice. Crake, rather than offering a rejoinder, subsided into bitter silence.
Frey sighed. The tension between these two wasn’t helping his nerves. It had been slowly curdling the atmosphere on the Ketty Jay ever since they returned from the ball at Scorchwood Heights.
“Where’s all this damned mist coming from, anyway?” he griped, to change the subject.
“Hot air from vents to the west blowing over cold meltwater rivers running off the Eastern Plateau,” Jez replied absently.
“Oh.”
The conversation lapsed for a time.
“Cap’n?” Jez queried, when things had become sufficiently uncomfortable. “Are we going?”
Frey thought about sharing his idea with them. He could offer to cut them loose and go his own way. Wouldn’t that be the decent thing? Then nobody had to go down into the Boneyard. Least of all him.
But it all seemed a bit much to try to explain it now. Things had gone too far. He was resigned to it. Easier to go forward than back.
Besides, he thought, in a rare moment of careless bravado, nothing clears up a hangover like dying.
He arranged himself in his seat and released aerium gas from the ballast tanks, adding a little weight to the craft. The Ketty Jay began to sink into the mist.
The altimeter on the dashboard ticked steadily as they descended. The world dimmed and whitened beyond the windglass of the cockpit. The low hum of the electromagnets in the aerium engines was the only sound in the stillness.
“Come to one thousand and hold steady,” Jez instructed, hunched over her charts at her cramped desk. Her voice sounded hollow in the tomblike atmosphere.
“Crake?”
“Still nothing.”
They’d puzzled over the compass for most of the day, but nobody had been able to decipher its purpose. The lack of markings to indicate north, south, east, or west suggested that it wasn’t meant for navigation. The four needles, which seemed capable of swinging independently of one another, made things more confusing. And then there were the numbers. Nobody knew what they meant.
They’d established that each pair of number sets corresponded to a different arrow. The pair of number sets marked 1 matched the arrow marked 1. Each number was set on a rotating cylinder, like the readout of the altimeter, and presumably displayed the numbers 0 to 9. The upper set of each pair had two digits, allowing a count from 00 to 99. The lower set had the same but was preceded by a blank digit. All the numbers except this blank were set at 0.
Frey had the sense that this compass was vital to their survival in Rook’s Boneyard. They were in danger until they could work out what it did. But right now it didn’t seem to be doing anything.
Frey brought the Ketty Jay to a hover when his altimeter showed they were a klom above sea level, down among the feet of