A Mirrored Woman on the Bow

Riding a singing ridge requires three things: clean wind, sound copper wedges beneath your hull, and enough vanity to believe the glass won't eat you alive. I had the wind, and my copper wedges were humming a steady, low b-flat against the vitrified slope. My vanity was in peak condition.

The gale coming off the northern flats smelled of ozone and hot quartz. Every gust carried clouds of green crystal grit that pinged against my goggles like handfuls of river gravel. Below my skiff's outrigger, the dune dropped forty cubits in a sheer, iridescent curve, glittering where ancient fusion fires had turned whole mountains into emerald mirrors. If I drifted three inches too far to port, the acoustic pitch would spike from a hum to a shriek, and the vibration would crack my timber keel to splinters before I could haul the mainsail.

I leaned back hard on the steering yoke, tasting salt and powdered lime.

"Sing a little louder, darling," I told the ridge. "We're taking the outer rim."

I kicked the port dampening wedge with my heel. The metal slid forward two notches into its housing, swallowing the high resonance and letting the runners glide over the ringing crest on a cushion of clean friction. The speed kicked my stomach into my throat. The skiff surged forward, runners whistling, the silk-weave mainsail snapping tight as we caught the thermal updraft above the great salt trough of Kauhale.

That was when the bowsprit began to gleam with the wrong kind of light.

It wasn't the green reflection of the sand or the white glare of the twin suns overhead. It was violet, shivering like grease poured over hot water. The light gathered, folded in on itself, and suddenly someone was sitting cross-legged on my forward spar.

She wore robes made of woven starlight that didn't flutter in the sixty-knot gale, and she looked down at my deck with absolute disgust.

"Your sailcloth is coarse," she said. Her voice didn't fight the wind; it simply overrode it, clear and pure as a struck bronze bell. "And there is grease on your deck planks. Fetch a linen towel."

I hauled on the tiller to keep from flipping us into a glass crevasse. "Who the hell are you, and why are you standing on my boom?"

"Sitting," she corrected, not bothering to look at me. She adjusted a fold of her shimmering sleeve with two fingers. "Standing on a spar at this velocity would be uncivilized. Furthermore, I am Hinanui. You may lower your head, though I suppose you need both eyes to keep this dreadful crate from sliding into the abyss."

"I am currently trying not to die, Hinanui," I shouted over the howling glass. "Which makes your opinion on my sailcloth somewhat irrelevant. Jump off or hold the tether."

"Jump off?" Her dark eyes turned toward me, gleaming with liquid silver around the pupils. "Mortal, kings have thrown themselves from battlements merely to catch the perfume of my hem. You are currently hosting a goddess of the upper mirages. A polite man would offer wine."

"A polite man doesn't have sixty pounds of green crystal scraping the varnish off his hull," I snapped.

Before she could deliver whatever haughty curse she was preparing, a sound tore through the canyon that had nothing to do with wind or glass.

It was a harsh, rhythmic clanking—heavy iron treads grinding through crystal crust with the subtlety of a falling cliff. The vibration hit my soles through the deck boards, a flat, ugly mechanical thud that fouled the harmonic hum of the dunes.

Two miles back along the ridge crest, the iridescent surface exploded into a plume of white powder.

A clockwork dune-crawler breached the slope like a predatory iron beetle. Its hull was armor-plated bronze, studded with acoustic horns that swept back and forth across the horizon. As it climbed, six articulated legs churned the singing glass into useless gravel, killing the desert's natural tone with a deafening rattle.

"Ah," Hinanui remarked, tilting her head. "Lāhulu's trackers. They are remarkably persistent for machines built without a soul."

"Trackers?" I hauled the mainsheet, hauling us into a hard starboard drift to break our silhouette against the crest. "Those are siege-crawlers! What did you steal from the usurper?"

"I stole nothing," she replied calmly. "I merely retained my own crown jewels and insulted his mother's lineage. Both were thoroughly deserved."

"They're painting us with an acoustic pulse!" I yelled.

The lead crawler's top horn flared with an eerie violet glow. A split second later, a sonic pulse ripped across the air. The sound didn't travel as noise; it came as a physical hammer, violently warping the light between us.

Where the pulse grazed the dune fifty paces ahead, the solid glass shattered into millions of razor shards, collapsing the ridge into an avalanche of glittering dust.

"Hard to port!" Hinanui said, pointing.

"Port is a sheer cliff!"

"Do you want to argue geometry or do you want to live?"

I didn't answer. I threw my entire weight against the yoke, slamming the port dampener all the way down. The skiff slewed sideways, runners screeching on the verge of the broken ridge. But we were losing momentum; the drag from the shattered surface was bogging our keel, and the crawler was already pivoting its secondary horn toward our stern.

"Hold your sleeve out!" I yelled at her.

"Excuse me?"

"Your starlight robes! They catch light, don't they? Flare them into the sail!"

She glared at me, looking offended to her core, but she raised her arms anyway. The fabric of her robe snapped open like the wings of a heron, catching the brutal glare of the midday suns and refracting it into a blinding sheet of solid heat-shimmer.

The sudden thermal burst hit the underside of my silk mainsail like a furnace draft.

The skiff leapt forward. The runners lifted clear of the jagged rubble, skipping across the air for three terrifying seconds before slamming back onto solid glass. The secondary blast from the crawler struck the empty slope behind us, detonating the terrace we had occupied half a heartbeat before.

"Crude," Hinanui said, smoothing her gown as if she hadn't just saved both our lives. "Yet surprisingly effective."

"Don't get cocky," I gasped, wiping sweat and glass dust from my forehead. "Look down."

A deep, subterranean thrum reverberated through the keel. A second, larger crawler had burrowed beneath the glass sheet ahead of us. Before I could reef the sail, the entire dune ahead gave a sickening groan and fractured from rim to base, opening a jagged, yawning chasm right across our flight path.