CHAPTER ELEVEN
Repairs on the Swift were taking longer than Captain Hink Cage had hoped for. Not because the men were slacking. Guffin, Ansell, and Seldom were working as quickly as they could. And quite to Hink’s surprise, so was Mr. Hunt, who proved to be a ready hand at all levels of repair he put his effort toward.
“Ever work a ship, Mr. Hunt?” Captain Hink asked as Cedar crimped the seam to align the rivet hole in the tin skin envelope.
“Not an airship.” Mr. Hunt hammered the bucktail of a rivet into place. “But I worked the yards as a young man.”
“Hup,” Guffin called. He tossed a hot rivet off the small forge and up to Mr. Ansell, who sat the other side of the rip tight as a bug in honey. Ansell caught the rivet in an iron cone, then plucked it free with tongs.
Cedar waited for Ansell to set the rivet before hammering it down tight. Cedar leaned back against the rope rigging that let him latch and crawl about the curve of the ship like a man climbing a mountainside.
“I didn’t need more than a year before I decided the sailing life was not for me,” he said.
The Swift had taken more than one shot to the main envelope, and it had taken a good part of the day to mend those tears. They were on the last rip, placing a patch more than doing any final work. The thin sheet of patch metal should be enough to hold her against the winds just so far as to Old Jack’s.
“What life did you go looking for, Mr. Hunt?”
Cedar was silent as he pounded another rivet down tight. “The university. Teaching.”
“You’re a long way from that sort of living,” Hink said, shouldering the pulley line to force the strut of the fans into place so Mr. Seldom could set the bolts proper again.
Cedar stared up at the wedge of sky above them, then back at the mostly black walls. “Yes, I am.”
“Don’t sound displeased about it,” Hink grunted, setting his heels to hold the line.
Neither of them spoke for a bit while Hink held muscle on the propellers for Mr. Seldom, and Mr. Hunt hammered another rivet into the patch.
Finally, Mr. Hunt spoke. “There’s things about this life I’d never had in the university. Not all of them bad.”
“Funny how things work out that way sometimes,” the captain said.
“So it is,” Cedar agreed.
“That’s it, Captain,” Ansell hollered as he hooked the iron cone to his belt rig. “She’s as tight as we can make her.”
“Then tell Molly Gregor to fill the bags. We’ll be dragging sky within the hour.”
“Aye, Captain.” Ansell clambered down the outside of the ship, unlatched his harness from the ropes, then dropped a good six feet to land beside the ship.
Hink just shook his head. Man was unafraid of heights or the falling from them, and seemed most alive anytime he was executing some high-wire stunt. Mr. Ansell was a man born to walk the skies.
“About time,” Mr. Guffin grumbled as he got to work on packing gear and setting the small forge to cool.
Mr. Hunt lowered himself down the side of the ship to the ground, then unlatched gear. He might not be as sure-footed as Ansell, but he still moved like he’d been crawling over airships all his life.
Moved through the rocks and tumble like he was born to them too.
Only other sort of man Hink had ever seen be quite so comfortable in every environment he fell upon was the native people.
He didn’t know if Mr. Hunt carried native blood in his veins, though his coloring leaned toward it far more than Hink’s own yellow and blue.
Cedar glanced off, suddenly still as the stones around him. His hands were held out to the side as if the wind told things to his fingers that ears and eyes couldn’t know.
A slight movement in the distance caught Hink’s attention. The wolf, Wil, coming this way. It had something in its mouth. Looked like a goat.
The wolf stopped. Cedar wasn’t watching the wolf. He was watching the sky.
Hink heard it. The hard chug of propellers pushing over the range. Sounded like she was working against the wind. Maybe against the rain.
It could be raining out there and windy enough that the rain couldn’t fall into this hole.
Captain Hink hoped he was wrong, but they wouldn’t know the flying conditions until they put their nose over the edge of this rock. And they weren’t going anywhere until they were sure that ship out there was gone hunting different ground.
Hink waited. Even Mr. Seldom stopped tinkering with his tools near the fans and leaned back so he could catch a gander at the sky.
The buzz faded off, growing faint, then coming in and out of hearing like she was threading peaks, the echo of her engines soon too quiet to stir the silence.
“Mr. Seldom,” Hink said. “Tell me we have wings.”