For long there was nothing but the bleak and wild murk of stormclouds, before at once the behemoth warship was upon them.

  The mottled gray darkened swiftly, like the surface of the ocean moments before a great whale’s breaching. Roskvir spun the wheel hard to starboard, heaving down the lever to ascend, and the swift’s frame creaked and popped in its struggle to rise.

  In seconds the wind-piercing tip of the Tanngnjostr’s island–long gas envelope was barreling past below. Leaning his whole weight into the controls, Roskvir edged just clear of the massive ovaloid’s oncoming path — but then their vessel faltered in its climb higher away, as if caught by a snare. Wood groaned as some invisible force dragged back down the prow, overpowering the thrust of the strained engine.

  The helm redoubled its resistance, and the tide turned against Roskvir in his fight with the wheel. Drifting back to port, they first leveled off parallel to the great beast below, then angled downward, sinking back onto a collision course. Roskvir pulled the altitude throttle past the label reading ‘never exceed,’ with no effect on their trajectory.

  They were caught in the vortex of the Tanngnjostr’s passing, he realized. The swift’s engine would be nothing against the undertow.

  He bellowed a wordless warning, unable to release the controls lest their vessel spiral faster out of control. His voice was all but lost to the howling winds, but the soldier Kerauna struggled up through the hatch nevertheless, perhaps alerted to the danger by the turbulence. Even as she did, the swift’s groaning widened into a terrible splintering-snapping, as the keel at last began failing completely in the shear of the galeforce slipstream.

  “Ship is lost!” he cried. “Come to me—”

  But the altitude throttle snapped off in his hands, sending him stumbling backward. At once the swift veered sharper downward, and he was thrown against the wall of the pilot’s shelter.

  Kerauna lost her footing as the vessel swung, and Roskvir slid-leapt toward her, away from the useless helm. But she fell decently well against the near-vertical deck, using her boot heels to slow her downward slide long enough to catch his outstretched arm. Together, they continued sliding down to the portside railing then beneath their feet.

  “Go now! You, me, jump now!” he shouted. “Hold me!”

  The Tanngnjostr rushed toward them, as their own airship fully capsized even as it broke apart. But lightning cracked within the clouds, flashing behind the storm’s layered veils, and in that brief light he made out the riggings spiderwebbed over the Tanngnjostr’s envelope.

  Then a final rending crunch broke above the din as their swift tore in two, and Roskvir leapt.

  Crimson wings lit the darkness, as midair he extended his sjael for no longer than the barest moment. Just to break their fall, he ignited his fire, and held Kerauna tight as they fell through the storm’s violence from the fragments of their vessel.

  Beating back with great burning feathers, he broke their momentum as much as he might, all while steam hissed away in vanishing ribbons under the pelting downpour. They landed hard against the envelope. But the impact stopped short of breaking bone, even if it knocked the breath from both of them.

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  A few dozen yards down the sloped expanse, the remains of their swift smashed into the Tanngnjostr much harder. Its still-separating halves disintegrated there into splinters and shards against hardened-cement fabric. But even so near, the collision was muted to Roskvir, overwhelmed by the roar of the storm and the engines of the warship beneath.

  With his sjael gone, he and Kera began to slide once more, then down the rain-slick envelope’s downward slope. But before gaining much speed, they slipped over the first hempen cables of the rigging, and his skinned fingers found purchase on the net’s uppermost lines. Kerauna was quick to react as well, trading her embrace around his torso for her own handholds on the cable.

  There Roskvir tried to regain his bearings, even as he reeled in the battering surges of wind, rain, and adrenaline. Shifting reaches of gloom obscured almost all, but when they cut through brief pockets of thinner mist, or when flashes of lightning brightened silhouettes beneath the darker clumps of cloud-wool, he spied familiar outlines below. Enough to plot a route down to the exterior catwalks that led inside.

  “That way!” he shouted to Kerauna, where she clung to the ropes beside him. “We go. Find there… way down. We go down… to ship part. Where we find them…”

  At once, hardened determination seemed to replace Kerauna’s own reeling discombobulation. After squinting in the direction he’d indicated, she simply started down the rigging. As if undaunted by the dozen near-misses they’d just survived, nor the prospect of enemy soldiers she’d soon encounter.

  Nor the close crash of thunder, all around.

  * * *

  Kera dropped onto the catwalk from the last rungs of the rope ladder. But as she landed, her legs gave way, and she collapsed to her hands and knees on the thin metal grating.

  Each of her limbs quaked from overexertion like rendered fat, all while the ship beneath her seemed to buck and roll, as if lost to the stormwinds just like their swift. Pure adrenaline steadied her perilous descent down the rigging, but planted again on a solid surface, she felt somehow in greater danger of falling overboard. She retched, clinging to the grating for dear life.

  But then Roskvir dropped down from the rope ladder after her, landing on his feet with perfect balance.

  “This ship — gods above — what…?” She coughed out the dregs of sour spit.

  Squatting by her side, Roskvir took her arm and raised her back to her feet.

  “Still, is still. Your legs…they still think, of on swift. You will feel soon — is still.”

  ”No—“

  But to Kera’s surprise, she managed to remain upright. Once he’d said it, in fact, it was obvious the twisting and plunging had been an illusion, an afterimage left by the swift’s turbulent flight.

  The great warship they’d boarded was so massive, in fact, it cut through that raging tempest as if drifting through the calmest doldrums.

  She quavered then with deepening horror, rather than exhaustion.

  She’d thought they’d been blown off course, before their crash, when she’d caught her first glance of the vessel’s full berth. She’d thought they were about to collide with a mountain.

  The implements of war brought to field by Roskvir’s people were as islands or mountains, indeed, before anything so demure as a mere ‘warship.’ They destroyed smaller vessels in their vicinity without even meaning to do so, or noticing that they had. But rather, through the sheer size and force of their presence alone.

  A bulkhead door at the end of the catwalk let out a low metal groan as Roskvir disengaged its pressure seal. Dragged back to reality, Kera followed him into the airlock as if an automaton, where warmth and bright artificial illumination bathed her shivering skin.

  “Are now you… able? Ready?” asked Roskvir.

  Kera forced herself to nod.

  “Good. Look at… down, much as can. Your skin… not is… impossible, that could… be one of my people. Not many that way. But likely, no one stop us. If they talk you, I will say, you… not feeling well.”

  He pulled open the interior door of the airlock, and peered into the passage beyond.

  “Okay, empty ahead. Stay to me close. No way back now, but through.”