George Martin - Songs of the Dying Earth

“But the east Pompodouros almost certainly will not be on our way,” said Shrue.

“Aye, Master,” said Shiolko, “but as you say, if you won’t be wanting transport back to here, we can drop the Brothers on their way — and only for an additional eight hundred terces from each of them for my inconvenience. And that tall, tall fellow there, that is Arch-Docent Huǽ from Cosmopolis University…he’s been waiting nineteen months now in that cardboard shack you see there…and he cannot complete his thesis on the effect of antique effectuations on working-glass gloam-mine gnomes unless he visits the city of fallen pylons across the Melantine Gulf. I will charge him only a modest surcharge of fifteen hundred terces for that detour. And then, near the back of that group of orphans, there is Sister Yoenalla, formerly of Bglanet, who must…”

“Enough!” cried Shrue, throwing up his hands. “You shall have your seven thousand five hundred terces and your ossip and your emulsifier and you may load the paying menagerie as well. How long until we can sail?”

“It will take my sons only the afternoon and night to load the necessary viands and water flasks for the first weeks of our voyage, Master Magus,” grunted Shiolko, showing only the slightest flush of pride at his success. “We can sail at dawn, should the treacherous sun choose to favor us with one more sunrise.”

“At dawn then,” said Shrue. He turned to reason with Derwe Coreme but the woman was already choosing the six Myrmazons to accompany her and giving the others instructions about their return to the Myrmazon camp.

And thus began what Shrue would later realize were — incredibly, almost incomprehensibly — the happiest three weeks of his life.

Captain Shiolko was true to his word and Steresa’s Dream lifted away from its docking cradle just as the red sun began its own tortured ascent into the deep blue sky. The galleon hovered for a moment like a massive wood-and-crystal balloon some thousand feet above what looked to be the entire population of Mothmane Junction turned out to watch its departure, and then Shiolko’s eight “sons” (Shrue had already noticed that three of them were young women) shook out the canvas sails, the captain engaged the atmospheric emulsifier at the stern — which thickened the air beneath the sky galleon’s hull and rudder sufficiently to allow it to make way and to tack against the wind — and, following Shrue’s directions after the diabolist had consulted his little box holding Ulfänt Banderōz’s nose, set the ship’s course south-southeast.

All forty-six of Shiolko’s original customers as well as Derwe Coreme and her Myrmazons, Meriwolt (still in his robes), and Shrue himself then pressed to the railings of the mid-deck or their private stateroom terraces and waved to the shouting crowds below. At first, Shrue thought that the thousands of Mothmane Junction residents, peasants, shopkeepers, and rival sky galleon workers were roaring their approval and best wishes up to the voyagers, but then he saw the low morning sunlight glinting off arrows, crossbow bolts, rocks, and a variety of other things flung up at Steresa’s Dream and he realized that the first departure of a sky galleon in more than two years was not an occasion held in unalloyed affection and approval. But in a few moments, the galleon had gained several thousand feet in altitude and, after first following the River Dirindian south for a few leagues, banked off southwest above the wooded Kumelzian Hills and left Mothmane Junction and its muted roars far behind.

For the next several days and then weeks, Shrue’s and the ship’s routine blended into one.

At sunrise each morning, the diabolist would rise from his place in the double hammock he shared in the comfortable suite with Derwe Coreme and — even before meditating according to the Slow Discipline of Derh Shuhr — Shrue would scramble up the manropes to the Gyre’s nest near the top of the mainmast and there use Ulfänt Banderōz’s guiding nose to take a new course reading. That course would be checked via the nose box several times during the day — Captain Shiolko was a master at making the slightest adjustments — and for the final time, by the light of the binnacle (when one of Shiolko’s male or female sons was at the wheel), just at midnight.

Steresa’s Dream itself was one of those rarest of avas in the later Aeons of the Dying Earth — a machine with complicated machinery inside it — and on the first day of the voyage, Captain Shiolko proudly showed off his beautiful ship to Shrue, Derwe Coreme, robed Meriwolt, and many of the other interested passengers and pilgrims. Shrue immediately then understood that the tiny crew of eight “sons” could manage such a complicated craft not due to the usual reason — magic — but because the huge sky galleon was largely automated. Controls on the quarterdeck at the rear of the ship (which was Shiolko’s private preserve unless the captain specifically invited a passenger to come up) or other controls down in the aft engine and steering compartment helped reef and furl the sails, shift and shorten the countless ropes and lines, move ballast as needed, and even calculate wind and drag and mass so as best to move the ossip phlogista through the maze of pipes that honeycombed the hull, masts, spars, and sails themselves. The emulsifier machine so fascinated Shrue with its magickless glows and throbs and safety devices and arcane gauges and bone-felt spell-less vibrations that often, when he could not sleep, he came down to the engine and steering compartment to watch it all work.

The sky galleons had been built for passenger comfort and even those paying the fewest terces found themselves in comfortable surroundings. For Shrue and the other high-paying passengers, it was sheer luxury. The diabolist’s and Derwe Coreme’s stateroom at the third level near the stern had a wall of crystal windows that looked out and down. Their double-sized hammock rocked softly and securely in even the worst night storms. After Shrue had checked their course and done his Discipline rites in the morning, he would wake his warrior roommate and the two would shower together in their own private bath. Then they would step out onto their private balcony to breathe the cool morning air and would go forward along the central corridor to the passenger dining area near the bow where there were crystal windows looking ahead and underfoot. The sense of vertigo in these glass-bottomed lower rooms faded with familiarity.

On the fifth day, the Steresa’s Dream passed east out of known territory. Even Captain Shiolko admitted that he was excited to learn what lay ahead of them. Over wine with Shrue and Derwe Coreme late that night, the captain explained that although his sky galleon was built as a world-traveler, Shiolko’s wife Steresa, while she lived, so worried about dangers to her husband and children that, in his love and deference to her, the captain had stowed away his impatience to see the farthest lands and satisfied himself with transiting passengers to known (and relatively safe) destinations such as Pholgus Valley, Boumergarth, the former cities on the Cape of Sad Remembrance, and towns and ports in between. Now, said the captain, he and his sons and the brave passengers and the fine ship that Steresa had loved and feared so much were outward bound on the sort of voyage for which Steresa’s Dream had been designed and built centuries before Shiolko or his late wife had been born.

After the first week, Shrue had become impatient, eager to rush to the Second Ultimate Library, sure that KirdriK had been bested and eviscerated somewhere in the Overworld and that even now the Purples were returning to Faucelme’s evil band, and he’d urged Captain Shiolko to take the galleon high up into what was left of the Dying Earth’s jet stream — up where the wind howled and threatened to tear the white sails to ribbons, where ice accumulated on the spars and masts and ropes, and where the passengers had to retreat, wrapped in furs and blankets, to sealed compartments to let the ship pressurize their rooms with icy air.