Thistle in the Sky | #NONC2022 | ✔

Chapter Three

Gravity loosened its hold the moment Farah popped the hatch leading out onto the top of the Ariomma. She took a moment to check that her magnetic boots were active before crawling onto the envelope and standing cautiously. Her steps stuck fast. Everything else, from her clothing to her arms, slackened like they'd forgotten that the ground was supposed to pull; the rules of physics became irrelevant in the magic-infused air out here at the edge of the world.

This was the essence of the Tideless. Oceans circled the flat world's fringes, hemming in the continent at its center. The water behaved more or less normally along the coasts. Scholars suspected terrestrial life forms—especially people—acted as lightning rods for it, absorbing it when they were young and suffering the consequences for the rest of their lives. Out here, there were no people.

The result was stunning. The sky in the Tideless was always clear: a vast, blue dome that arched overhead without any sign of a horizon. Farah never knew whether there was one; the view here stretched to a half-kilometer on a good day. The air was breathless. And all around her, the ocean took to the sky. Columns and blobs of water—some with fish in them—sparkled in the sun and mingled with the foggy clumps of clouds, merging and unmerging from the ocean below in a slow-motion waltz that lasted days. These were the waterdrops, in sailors' terms. They kept the ocean from pouring off the world's edges, but made sailing an airship out here akin to guiding a water one between shoals. Safe if you knew what you were doing, but only if you paid attention.

The sun was not the only thing that made the waterdrops around the Ariomma twinkle. Most were filled with fish of every colour, swimming up and down the columns, or around the spheres that hung suspended in the sky like huge raindrops that had forgotten how to fall. Some spheres were small as a merchant's tank, others longer than the Ariomma. Their surfaces rippled constantly. Fish with long, frilled fins dove in and out after ephemeral insects, themselves as incorporeal as the clouds. More daring fish came further. Farah finished clipping her safety line to the rails that criss-crossed the Ariomma's envelope, and grabbed the rusty garden edger from its hook inside the hatch. She could see at least four suckerfish clinging to the Ariomma's envelope, and one of her jobs was to dislodge them.

Sky-whale suckerfish were two feet long and stubborn as leeches. It was probably half an hour later that the last one got annoyed enough with Farah's prodding to release its hold on the ship, wriggling off into the Tideless in search of some other solid surface to cling to. Farah returned the edger to its hook. She checked her supplies again, then trudged towards the nose of the ship in search of the tear she'd been sent to patch. It took several passes to locate it. Contrary to the last watchwoman's report, it was not a tear at all. Farah recognized the finger-width holes as the work of a vampire crab, which, like the suckerfish, had mistaken the ship for a living entity. She hooked her feet beneath the safety rails in order to stay sitting beside them as she set to work.

The captain didn't come. After a time, a rattle and clinking from over the side of the Ariomma announced the separation of the gangways. The curve of the Nectamia's envelope rose beside Farah less than a hundred ticks later. She tensed. The thoughts of the crew buzzed at the edge of her ability's range again, and for once she didn't want to hear them. It was a relief, then, as the Nectamia stopped rising and pulled away. Its full body came into view as it retreated, carrying the crew's thoughts out of range once again.

The captain still didn't come. Unwilling to return to the claustrophobia of the ship, Farah finished her task and moved towards the stern of it, where the airflow of its flight was calmest. It was here that Kaz came to find her an hour or so later, when his watch ended. Farah remained on her back as he approached. He found her here often, one arm hooked beneath a safety rail and both her boots planted to limit the effort of saying down. This close to the envelope, at least, the magic-canceling properties of the airship's skeleton returned some semblance of gravity. Farah could respect—however begrudgingly—whatever engineers had developed an alloy that could offer such protection.