Chương 596: Chapter Five Hundred and Eighty - Below the Horizon

Since we had something of a destination, it was time to set up to set off! The Beaver was already in flying condition and ready to take off at a moment's notice. Still, I made sure to do the rounds and give everything a quick once-over. It was a lot easier to do certain tasks while the ship was anchored on solid ground and not bouncing around. Awen said as much as she regreased a few things that needed to move and glue up some things that didn't.

It was well past noon when we were ready to go, but I still wanted a moment to look into two things. The first was Rainnewt's clock. The device with the countdown timer on it. We shoved it into a box in the captain's room which was currently occupied by Amaryllis.

"What are you doing with that?" Amaryllis asked as I pulled the device out.

"Just checking it," I said. I turned it over and looked at the display and read off the hours while mumbling a few things under my breath. It took some math, but I figured it out.

"A little over five days left."

"Plenty of time," Amaryllis replied.

"Were you concerned?"

"Well, I hadn't checked it in a while, and I've never been the best at keeping track of days. So much has been happening since I arrived on Dirt, it all kind of smudges together into a blur, you know?"

"Hmph. I don't know if there are any skills to make up for being a fool. If there were, you'd think the governments of the world would force them onto people," she said before emphasizing herself with a huff. I giggled into my hand, then I placed the clockwork device away.

"So, did you finish charting?"

"Others might be fools, but I'm not," Amaryllis said before she gestured to the map she had unfurled on the table. It was of the western parts of the continent, including a good part of the Moonstruck Sea. Thin, faint lines sketched out our journey from Port Royal to Deepmarsh, then west to Needleford and Come Here and Die, north to the Weakling's Rest, west again to Southerfell, and still further west to the village of Blackwatch, which was marked with a small pawn representing the current location of the Beaver.

"Was that one spell with the knife enough?" I asked.

"Of course. I can chart better than most, and I was prepared for it. There were a few daytime stars visible as well, so I'm quite certain that the line I've drawn is accurate." She tapped the tip of a talon on the map, then traced it upwards.

"If the spellwork on that knife worked as we believe, then this is a direct line to our destination. What I don't know is where along this line we'll find them."

"It can't be too far, right?" I asked.

"That depends on how high up they're flying," she said.

"The higher up they are, the farther out they are." She gestured to a notebook where she'd drawn a circle with a line piercing through the edge. A bunch of calculations were scribbled all around it. My math teacher would be pretty smug if he knew I recognized it as trigonometry. I always thought I'd never need that class.

"Given that they're probably above sea level, and probably below the gasping heights..." Amaryllis tapped two marks on the heading line, both far out to sea "... they should be somewhere in this area here." I blinked.

"What're the gasping heights?"

"The altitudes where the air is too thin to breathe."

"Oh." I scrunched my nose.

"So, uh, we can just fly in a straight line out to your search area, then keep our eyes peeled as we go along, looking for a thunderstorm with a castle on it?" She frowned.

"More-or-less. But there's going to be some luck involved. The Moonstruck Sea tends to generate a fair number of ordinary thunderstorms... which from our perspective are basically natural decoys. And if the weather is cloudy, we might not be able to see as high or as low or as far as we need to," she paused.

"Worst of all, the castle might move a great distance before we arrive."

"We've still got the knife, right? Can we sheathe it, unsheathe it, measure the spell again?"

"We can try it. The measurement spells will be a lot harder to manage on a moving airship, though. I can't guarantee accuracy." I crossed my arms.

"Well, I guess we need to get a move on, then." Amaryllis nodded.

"This part of the search area, the part nearest us, should only be a half-day's flight at a decent speed. We can be there by this evening if we take off now."

"I'll do just that, then!" I said. We wanted to get there while the sun was still out. Docking with a flying castle in the dark, in a storm, seemed like a bad idea, but if we did find the storm, we could hover after it until morning. This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report. I skipped out of the captain's quarters and moved up to the rear deck next to the helm where Clive was idly smoking from his pipe.

"We heading out, capt'n?"

"Yep!" I declared before taking in a deep breath.

"All hands on deck! Scallywags, weigh that anchor. Steve, Gordon, stand by to unfurl some sail! Awen? Ah, there you are. Start his engine up!" There was a chorus of 'aye-ayes' from across the deck, then the stomping of boots as my crew ran about and started doing their individual jobs. It wasn't long before the ship's engine was rumbling and the anchor was raised and stowed. The gravity engine kicked up a notch and I grinned as I felt the little hairs on my arm twitch as magic washed over us all.

"Clive, ahead standard. Low-inclination. We'll get up into the air nice and slow," I said.

"Aye," Clive said. He smothered the end of his pipe, then bit the stem before handling the ship's wheel. A moment later the huge propeller at the back started to spin up to speed and the Beaver Cleaver lurched and started to move. At first it was a crawl, then as fast as I could walk, then we settled into a light jogging pace. It was a lot of mass to move, and momentum counted for a lot.

"We're flying into a headwind," Clive said.

"Going to be rough on fuel, that."

"Yeah," I said, "Okay, let's see if we can't get around this weather system. Turn us thirty to port." I flagged down Oda and asked him to relay that to Amaryllis. She'd scribble the change down on one of her logs and we'd be able to figure things out later. A few moments later, Amaryllis came out to join me, accompanied by Caprica and a few scrolled up maps tucked under a wing.

"Broccoli," she said.

"I've been slaving over these equations to gauge our distance all this time and then you up and change our heading?"

"It's the wind," I said.

"We won't fight it all the way. How far are we going, anyway?"

"According to my calculations, we'll be at the lowest starting point in about one thousand nine hundred and eighty miles."

"Harpy miles," Caprica said.

"Yes, and?"

"Nothing," Caprica said in the tone of someone who definitely meant something.

"It's just an inferior system of measurement."

"Says the one whose system of measurement is still based off of the wingspan of a dead monarch," Amaryllis sniped. Caprica sniffed.

"Keep my grandfather's wings out of this." I laughed.

"It's fine! I think! As long as we know how far we have to go. Do you still think we can make it there by nightfall?"

"It'll depend on the wind, I suppose," Amaryllis said.

"And how hard we want to push the ship."

"Well, if we'll be arriving by night anyway, we might as well take it slow. I'd rather arrive when the sun's up, so maybe we can fly through the night at a slower pace?"

"But if the castle moves during the night, we risk missing it entirely," Caprica noted.

"Ah, that's true. Maybe we can use the knife again? Get a second line to follow?" Amaryllis nodded.

"As I said, we can try. I can set up Awen's glass foci again. We'll have to keep a lookout for any stormfronts in the distance as well. I imagine those would be hard to miss."

"Yeah, that's a good idea," I replied.

"I'll have the crew draw lots? We can have sets of two on watch at all times. We don't need the whole crew working the entire time to keep the Beaver going, and... uh, some members don't have anything to really do most of the day." It might sound like some of my friends were a little, um, useless. That was not true at all! The Beaver just had a pretty good regular crew, and people like Caprica usually didn't have much to do under normal conditions.

The Scallywags and the Beaver's harpy crew had duties around the clock, but...

"I'll take the night watch with Bastion," Caprica said. Amaryllis snorted.

"Planning a romantic evening on the rear deck?"

"I'm planning no such thing," Caprica snapped. Bastion stared at the back of her head, confused.

"Only because you couldn't romance your way into a relationship with a loaf of bread." Caprica huffed very scathingly.

"And what do you know? Nothing but an empty nester, aren't you?" Amaryllis squawked. It was strange to see the two going at each other like that, because for all of their meanness, all of my instincts and friendship related skills told me that they were both having fun. I kind of got it. Bantering and teasing was fun, but these two were several levels ahead of me in that metaphorical skill.

"If you're done with all that," I said.

"We should focus on our next steps, yeah? We might want to get ready with a plan for when we do see the sky castle!"