Page 103 of The Cradle of Ice

Graylin backed a step, watching it sail ever higher into the air.

“What alchymy is this?” Darant blurted out.

“Nothing but hot air,” Jace explained, clearly enthused. “Hotter than what surrounds it.”

Still on a knee, Krysh looked up at them. “It functions like a wyndship’s lifting gasses. Maybe we could employ such a method instead. Especially once we clear this warm rift and reenter the frigid dark. The colder the surroundings, the stronger such flame-heated air will lift.”

Graylin already identified many problems with such an endeavor.

Darant did, too, and proceeded to list them. “First, we’d need far more fabric than we have. We lost swaths of it during that battle.”

Krysh acknowledged that and made it more challenging. “If my calculations are correct, the balloon would have to be considerably larger than its prior size.”

“Unless we lightened the Hawk,” Jace countered. “Got rid of the cannons, the excess cargo, stripped the ship lean.”

But Darant wasn’t finished with his objections. “And how do you propose we fuel that warming flame? I assume it will have to burn continuously to keep all that air heated. And right now, we don’t have enough flashburn to fire up one forge, let alone warm a massive gasbag.” He pointed at the flicker of flames high above. “Knowing that, I should burn your arses for wasting flashburn just now.”

“We didn’t use flashburn,” Jace explained. He craned his neck toward Meryk. “What did you call it?”

“Whelyn flitch,” the Panthean said.

Krysh turned to Darant. “It’s the waxy fat from some great beast of the sea. You see it filling all their firepots throughout Iskar. The village had great reserves stored in ice caves.”

Jace nodded. “We performed some tests. It burns hotter than flashburn. And in its semisolid form, it’s lighter than the same amount of flashburn, but its flame lasts four times as long.”

Despite his own pessimism, a flare of hope warmed through Graylin. He challenged Darant, “Could you—maybe with Jace and Krysh’s help—find a way to use this flitch to fuel the ship’s forges?”

Darant rubbed his scrub of beard. “Maybe,” he drawled out. “If that sarding fat could be refined in some way, liquefied even. Or if I tweaked the forges themselves.”

Hope brightened in Graylin’s chest, only to be quashed by Darant.

“But do I have to remind you of the obvious?” the pirate warned. “We still don’t have nearly enough wood or fabric to make proper repairs. Even if I scavenged material from both sailrafts, we’d need far more.”

Graylin looked to Jace and Krysh to solve this dilemma, too. But the pair of scholars just glanced to each other, then down to the planked deck.

Another voice spoke up.

“I know where you can find all of that,” Meryk said.

* * *

A BELL LATER, Graylin crouched in the stern of a flat-bottomed skiff.

Ahead of him, Meryk stood braced at the bow, wielding a set of woven reins that ran out to a pair of orksos who were harnessed and tethered to the boat. The beasts humped through the waves as Meryk guided them along the shoreline.

“Where is he taking us?” Jace whispered, voicing Graylin’s nagging question.

The young man sat with Krysh and Darant.

Meryk had refused to tell them where they were headed, only assuring them it was important. Graylin craned back, noting the flames of Iskar in the distance, nearly lost in the mists. They must be over two leagues from the village by now. Worry nagged him. He hated leaving Nyx, but she had Vikas with her. Plus, before departing, he had sent Fenn with Kalder to join her at Meryk’s home.

Still, Graylin’s patience had worn to a razor’s edge. He shifted higher and called to Meryk, “How much farther must we go?”

Meryk glanced back over a shoulder and pointed past the bow. “We are here.”

Graylin leaned over the boat’s side. The stretch of shoreline ahead looked no different from the leagues they had passed. Then he spotted a tiny canal that cut through the sand and aimed for the ice cliffs. He only noted the waterway because of tiny flickers of flames near the base of the cliffs. He squinted enough to make out the source.

Two tall firepots flanked the canal, as if maintaining an eternal vigil.