Charts in the Dust

Why would an imperial skiff risk a vertical climb through the dead thermal zone beneath Santa Eulalia without hailing first? The muffled clank of grappling irons answered before Vasco could reach the end of the gangway. He needed the chart-maker and her folios aboard the Esperanza inside two minutes, or the arbalests below would pin the frigate against the cliff until the weakening limestone gave way beneath them both.

"Tiago," Vasco called over his shoulder, stepping onto the terrace's moss-slick flags. "Keep the starboard trim-wheel notched down. If the skiff catches our lower strake with a grapnel, slip the stern line and drag them off the lip."

"The port fender is taking a beating against the rocks, Captain," Tiago shouted back through the speaking horn. "The stone is chewing our timber faster than their bolts will."

"Let it chew. Hold the hover."

A heavy iron quarrel hummed over the balustrade, striking the archway above Vasco's head with a crack that sprayed lime chips across his shoulders. He ducked into the observatory's vaulted vestibule.

Inside, lamplight caught clouds of chalk dust floating in the stagnant air. Stacks of vellum folios, brass compasses, and wooden map cases sat tied in rough bundles across long walnut trestles. Behind a heavy desk anchored to the floor by iron brackets stood Ysabel Armenta. She wore a stained leather field coat with grease smudges across her cheek, ramming a thick roll of parchment into a wax-sealed tin canister.

"You took twenty minutes too long on the approach, Tenreiro," she said without looking up from the latch. "The wind-shear off the eastern ridge shifted three points south at midday. An apprentice navigator could have read the pressure drop on the barometer."

"An apprentice would have had four imperial quarrels in his throat five seconds ago," Vasco said, seizing two of the largest map valises. "Move. An armed scout skiff just grappled the lower apron."

Ysabel did not reach for her coat. Instead, she leaned over the desk, driving a brass pin through a wide grid chart spread across the blotter. Her fingers were ink-stained and blistered from compass screws. "The master triangulation log is still in the dry press. I am not leaving thirty years of drift measurements for imperial conscripts to burn for hearth kindling."

"The conscripts brought iron plate and heavy arbalests, Armenta. They are not looking for firewood."

"Then help me crack the wheel."

Ysabel threw her weight against the cast-iron turnstile of the dry press, spinning the threads until the felt plates parted. She yanked the thick, calfskin-bound master triangulation log free and jammed it under her arm just as the floor beneath them dropped three inches in a gut-wrenching lurch. Vasco caught her sleeve, dragging her clear of the collapsing table.

The low hum of the observatory's foundation prism wavered, dropping an octave into a sour, metallic grinding noise. Loose chalk pebbles broke free from the ceiling vault, clattering across the trestles. In the courtyard outside, boot heels scraped against broken flagstones.

Vasco pressed his back against the stone pillar beside the tall window slit, peering out into the terrace.

Three imperial marines in blackened cuirasses had hauled themselves over the terrace rail. They carried heavy arbalests on back-slings, but their hands held long-handled iron sledges and crowbars instead of boarding cutlasses. They ignored the open archway to the archive. Instead, they moved directly toward the freestanding stone turret at the terrace's western edge—the housing for Santa Eulalia’s auxiliary quartz signal-relay.

"They aren't coming for the folios," Vasco muttered.

Ysabel stepped up beside him, clutching the sealed tin tube against her ribs. Her breath caught as the lead marine swung his sledge with two hands, burying the iron head into the copper-banded housing of the relay prism. The casing split with a screech. A pulse of violet light sputtered into the gray air, and the humming foundation beneath the courtyard died entirely.

A hairline fracture raced across the terrace flags, splitting the stone between the turret and the observatory entrance.

"They are blinding the sector," Ysabel whispered, her voice tightening with sudden fury. "That relay synchronizes the upper beacon at Monte Sombrio with the grand spire in Corveira. Without the pulse line, the whole northern corridor loses its trim."

"Monte Sombrio dropped ten minutes ago," Vasco said.

"Because this relay stopped pulsing five days before it fell! The drift was not an accident."

A second marine raised his sledge, bringing it down against the quartz core. The crystalline prism shattered into a shower of purple sparks, collapsing the local lift field. The outer ledge of the terrace sagged ten feet downward into the mist with a dry roar of tearing shale, taking the turret and one of the marines with it into the abyss.

The two surviving soldiers spun toward the sound of the frigate’s idling grav-fans. The marine nearest the archway unslung his arbalest, while the second marine grabbed the imperial skiff’s taut grapple cable, preparing to lash it to the observatory's stone sill and winch their gun platform up to point-blank range.

Vasco gauged the updraft whistling between the cliff and the hull. In the archway's shadow hung the heavy lead counterweight box used to balance the archive's external hoist. He kicked the retaining latch free.

The three-hundred-pound iron-sheathed box plunged straight down the stone gutter, snagging the imperial grapple line in mid-drop. Weighted by the falling ballast and caught in the vortex of the cliffside wind-eddy, the cable snapped taut like a bowstring, slamming the second marine against the parapet and dragging the skiff's iron hook hard into a crumbling fissure where it wedged fast.

"Run for the plank!" Vasco barked, shoving Ysabel through the low side-door that opened onto the boarding ramp.

Ysabel scrambled through the doorway, clutching the tin cylinder and the heavy calfskin master log in her arms. Vasco scooped up the remaining brass map canister from the desk, turned on his heel, and followed her onto the exposed gangway.

Wind howled through the widening gap between the cliff and the hull. The Esperanza groaned against its mooring cables, its wooden hull plates shuddering as the destroyed terrace relay altered the air density around the landing ledge.

Below them, on the scout skiff's prow, the fourth imperial marine was frantically winding his cocking lever, struggling to clear the fouled grapple line before the dying lift field dragged their skiff down with the ledge.

"Tiago!" Vasco yelled, grabbing the frigate's bulwark net with one hand and hauling Ysabel over the rail onto the main deck. "Full throttle to the port fan! Cut the stern hawser and get us off this wall before the rest of the rock slides!"

Ysabel landed on the cedar deck planks with a heavy thud, her charts clutched tight against her chest. She looked back at the falling terrace, where the dust of the shattered quartz prism drifted away into the void like purple smoke.

"They did not come to salvage anything, Vasco," she said, her voice shaking as she stared at the empty stone ledge. "The empire is deliberately dropping the high towns."