Chương 57: 2.4. I Will Need to Moisturize After

Annalise held the stubby pencil out by its point. On the other end, into the nub of eraser, someone had inserted a slim wire, bent into a T-junction.

"Go on, boyeen." The falcon hopped across the fold-down table in the center of the carriage, talons clicking on the pale poplar wood. Its beak clacked shut around the wire.

"You got that all right?" Annalise prompted. Tiago nodded. The pencil's tip bobbed.

"Right. Page me, if you please." Ofelia tore a page of yellowy groundwood paper from the dedication of one of her finished novels, and placed it before her bird-brother.

"What'd you see, Sunshine?" Annalise asked. Tiago hopped and bobbed across the page. The lead skipped and wobbled, but managed to form four letters: SHiP"See anyone aboard?" Seth asked.

"Anyone moving?" Tiago shook his head. Annalise chewed the end of her vacant pipe.

"What's the sorta crew we're looking at for a ship like theirs, you reckon?" Tiago hesitated, then thumped his avian foot on the table. Tap. Tap. Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap.

"Ten." Annalise sat back and crossed her arms. They got so big when she did that.

"Much more'n that and I'd advocate for crashing the bleeding thing, but I reckon we can take ten. These things aren't cheap. We'll get a shake and a fair play to ya from Charlie for bringing this one home, sure."

"Did—" Seth started, then shut up as Tiago returned to his haphazard etching. ROPe"A rope," Seth repeated.

"Hanging down? You can climb it?" Shake shake shake.

"We need a rope?" Nod nod nod. He started scrawling again. A diagram this time.

"That's a mountain?" Seth asked.

"Tiago?" Tiago flapped a wing in agitation. Annalise rested a hand on his knee.

"He can't nod or shake when he's drawing, petal."

"Oh." Seth smacked his forehead.

"Of course. Sorry, T." Tiago's sketching paused. He stared at Seth.

"I like that," Ofelia said.

"T. That's good." Tiago shook his head rapidly.

"It beats Sunshine," Ofelia said.

"You're never sunny."

"That's the point," Annalise said.

"It's aspirational."

"So wait. Before you go back." Seth tapped a fingertip on the scribble." Is that a mountain?" Tiago nodded and returned to his business. A long lozenge shape appeared beside the mountain, and then a line connecting the two.

"That'd be the ship," Seth said.

"So what you need is someone who can climb a mountain, shimmy along that tether, get inside, and drop a rope to let in the rest of us." Tiago dropped the pencil in the middle of a clumsy attempt at a propeller on the lozenge's rear. Nod nod nod.

"Well, golly." Seth rubbed his chin.

"I wonder who everyone's thinking of sending up the mountain all by themselves to infiltrate the pirate airship." Three sets of eyes—two unlit, one avian—caught him in a nexus of meaningful looks.

"I can climb a rope no problem," Annalise said.

"A mountain… dunno."

"And I don't want to," Ofelia said. Annalise let a dose of motherly reproof into her voice.

"You're on the raid, Feeli."

"I'm happy to swashbuckle," Ofelia said.

"I'm only bowing out of the mountain. I'll take the rope. I've seen what all that rough climbing's done to Seth's hands." Seth glanced at his palms.

"What's it done to my hands?"

"Don't worry about it," Ofelia flapped the stiffness from a pair of keystone-thumbed swordsman gloves and opened the snaps on their wrist closures.

"Your lover surely doesn't care. Hers are like sandpaper." Annalise scoffed.

"Will you ever whist."

"It's not a moral failing, Mother. I simply pay attention to my cuticles. Especially in this dry air. Climbing a rope and murdering people with a sword will be fine." Ofelia pulled a glove on and clicked it shut.

"But I will need to moisturize after."

"Right," Annalise said.

"You got your chalk." Seth patted the canvas climbing bag clipped to his hip.

"And your rope." Seth held up one end of the sisal-hemp coil he'd fastened to his harness. Annalise offered a belt laden with pitons and a stubby steel wall hammer.

"And your spikes." Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

"That might just be extra weight." Seth surveyed the stony shelf they stood before.

"Doubt I'll use them. It's nice and craggy up there. Should be a breeze." Air hissed out through the fetching little gap in Annalise's front teeth.

"Saints, Seth. Be careful."

"I'm climbing onto a pirate ship. Careful's getting a job bothering sheep." Seth dipped his palms in the bag of chalk at his hip and clapped, dusting off the excess in a chipper cloud.

"This is what I'm good at. My uncle used to take us all out to the Penrock Cliffs and give us ten minutes to reach the top or he'd leave without us. Those were the best days. This is a field trip. Trust."

"If they vent that envelope of theirs, it'll blow you off the rocks like a gnat," Ofelia said.

"Okay, uh. Hadn't thought of that." Seth fidgeted with the wall hammer, leaving the chalky ghost of his fingers on the tempered steel.

"Guess I'll take them." Annalise relaxed.

"Thank you."

"But I'll be very impressive regardless."

"I will throw my underpants at you, pet." Her big warm hand encompassed his back, shoulder blade to shoulder blade.

"I swear to St. Afra. Look away, kids." Her fingers curled protectively in. He stood on his soft leather tiptoes and met her descending lips. He only intended it to be a brief kiss for good luck, but when he edged back she let out a plaintive whimper. All the pecks he'd seen her lay on foreheads hadn't prepared him for the way Annalise kissed. Annalise kissed slow and deep and focused, like she was memorizing as much of him as she could reach. He stayed where he was and let her indulge.

"A note, mother," Ofelia said.

"Looking away doesn't work if you can hear it." Annalise hummed in annoyance and detached. Her lips tarried at his ear.

"I love you," she whispered.

"Come home to me."

"I love you," he whispered.

"I will." He planted a rigid climbing boot on the stony lip of the cliff face, and climbed, clinging to a column of stone, testing his boots and the chalked grit of his hands. Finding faith in both, he clambered upward, and when he reached an arête in the stone he swung himself out, over the void. Annalise whined and turned her face away, into the crook of her shoulder. Ofelia gave him the thumbs-up. A grin stretched his face as he let his body and brain do what they'd been grown to do.

The stone was cold and dense and good stone, he could tell. The edges he crimped, the cracks he wormed into. The breaking waves of a petrified ocean. The ancient sediment, the shells and fossils, returned his grip, as stable and sure as he was. And soon he was ten armspans up, and then twenty, and he remembered to call back down one more time before he was out of hearing.

"I'll send Tiago back down when we find them!" He waved a chalked-up hand.

"He'll lead you to the spot!"

"Okay!" Annalise's voice was halfway snatched away by the stretching distance.

"I love you!"

"You said that already!"

"Feck off!" Seth chuckled and found his next foothold. He let the rhythm take his forebrain over, then, and time flowed across him with the same swift intangibility as the eddies of montane wind. The muscle memory lengthened his limbs and strengthened his ligaments and showed him the way. And this great inhospitable stone was a pleasure-stroll, and the abyss behind and below him was an insubstantial factor to be canceled out of an eminently solvable equation.

The plateau he'd come from was gone, hidden by slabs of rock and curls of mist. He climbed into happy thoughtlessness, let instinct take over, let himself get lost. Tiago flew ahead, reeling back in cursive loops to ensure he was following. He remembered how the young warrior had answered an early question. How is it? Being an unlit? Fine. I like flying. The flourishes and filigrees of the falcon's passage showed how severe an understatement that had been.

But then Tiago was a severe and understated young man, when he was flightless and featherless. Seth almost wished he could read human features onto the bird's alien face, or words into its high, clear cry. He cupped a hand around his shout.

"I can tell you're having fun up there, you know!" A briefer, more jagged cry at that. Seth kept climbing. The clattering was the first sign of worsening weather. The pitons hanging from his belt clinked together like windchimes. Soon the wind was tearing at his reaching arm and whistling harsh across the pitted stone. Is that—ah, shit. He unbuckled the wall hammer from its clattering place on his leg and drove a piton home.

With haste he looped the braided tether through its hollow and tied himself to the mountainside.

"Tiago!" He pulled a second spike and set to sinking it.

"I think they're venting the storm!" Tiago turned back toward him, and then an invisible fist of gusting wind sent the falcon spinning. He flew forward in desperate perpendiculars and flagging spirals. Seth looped the tether around his waist and leg, and fell back, his upper half detaching from the stone.

"Fly to me!" He had to bellow it over the gust.

"I've got you!" A soft missile dived through the unquiet air and collided with him, sending him teetering on his tether. He strained back upright, feeling the burn of exertion in his abdomen, and flattened himself once again against the stone, sheltering the falcon in the thick shearling fabric of his coat.

"Saints and fucking seraphs." He caught as deep a breath as he could from the howling tempest.

"This is all coming from one stormship?" Tiago croaked in his hidey-hole and fluffed the crest of feathers on the back of his borrowed skull. Seth tucked his chin and willed the tension out of his joints and waited. The pitons were holding; the tethers were tight. His heart departed his throat and slid back into place.

"Guess we wait it out?" Tiago nodded.

"It occurs to me," Seth said, over the whipping wind, "that in your current state you can't be sarcastic at me. And you can't stride off if I get sincere at you." The falcon glared up at him, but falcons glare all the time.

"So I guess I need to thank you. For getting my head out of my ass. And Annalise's, too. And for being… hmm. I'm trying to decide how mortified to make you."

"Skrr," Tiago said.

"Probably the first true friends I've made in my life. You and Feeli and Annalise." He unclipped his canteen from his harness and moistened his dry throat.

"First to offer anything without a debt slip to go with it. And I know you're saying don't get comfortable, shitass. We just keep you around for the food and the infiltration. Something like that." Tiago croaked again as if to say shitass?

"But that's all right, too," Seth said.

"Whenever I used to see people be mean to each other in that way you and your family have, the way that isn't mean at all, I wished I had that. And I guess I do now. And none of it would've happened without you and Ofelia allowing it. So thank you." The wind shrieked past them, and over them, and then it was a fading echo funneling through the antediluvian stone. Seth released his grip on the spike and let his weight onto his tether and the thin soles of his boots.

He chalked his hands and clap the tension from them.

"All right, man," he said.

"Free to fly." Tiago's claws scrabbled and scratched as he dug himself out of Seth's jacket. They bit tight into his shoulder, and then he was off, threading back into the sky.

"Ow," Seth called at the fan of departing tailfeathers.

"Dick." He eased the tethers out and wound them round his waist. He left the pitons where they sat, to rust as records of his ascent. Onward and upward he went. His next handhold was a big beautiful jug, broad as a bucket. He was ready to reach when Tiago landed atop it. The falcon made smug eye contact with Seth and dropped a dollop of bird poop on the ledge. Seth laughed.

"You think I need that thing?" He eyed past the jug to the next part of his route, a peeled-out fissure. Not as obvious, as fine an anchor.

"Check this out." He coiled in close, jiggered his boot's soft leather toe out of the crack he'd wedged it into, pumped his feet to find his momentum, and then burst outward into a thin-air dyno, body leaving stone and sailing past the shat-upon handhold. An alarmed squawk sounded from his avian observer. Seth snagged himself on the long vertical crack, and whooped as he dug in like a tick. Spiky joy in his blood. He pretended at a sudden loss of composure and reeled a leg out. Tiago screeched again.

"Just fucking with you!" Tiago clattered his beak. Seth tightened back into the mountain and laughed deliriously and scuttled up the crag. He crested the slab, hauled himself onto its surface—then caught himself and dropped back. He'd been floating so freely in the climb's euphoria, he'd forgotten the job he was here to do and the stealth it demanded of him. With cat-burglar care he winched himself back up, peering over the limestone rim into the ravine beyond and the great dark shape that hung within it.

There, lashed to the rocks, floating in the day-haze and the low clouds like a slumbering leviathan, awaited the pirate stormship.