began cranking it around. Omar climbed the uneven deck to her side and lent a hand, forcing the winch over and under, and with each turn he felt the Finch lurch a short distance to starboard. Then the engineer shoved a lockbar into place beside it and waved him back. “We’re good. Thanks.”
He followed her back to the cockpit and watched as the glacier rose in short hops and slips up toward their feet, until at last the Finch banged down against the hard ground.
Morayo squeezed past him again, this time to unlock the hatch and let a torrent of freezing air into the cabin. She jogged outside and Omar followed, and he saw that she meant to lash a pair of ropes from the gondola to the nearby columns of ice. The spires had been thrust up from a crack in the glacier, each one stabbing the heavens at a different angle, and half of them had been sheared off by the screaming wind.
He worked quickly with her, squinting into the howling winds that sprayed his face with needling ice crystals. Snow dust swirled across the ground and the blasted spires shuddered like prisoners in fear for their lives. Overhead he saw an angry maelstrom of white mists and gray clouds colliding and warring for mastery of the skies, and bolts of lightning danced from one thunderhead to another, rumbling like the bellies of hungry gods.
With the lines secured, Omar climbed back into the cabin behind Morayo and slammed the hatch shut. He blinked. The sudden transition from the freezing noise of the outside world to the warm stillness of the airship was like stepping into a stolen corner of paradise.
He took a moment to catch his breath while watching the women slump in their seats to glance at their dials and flick their little switches. The Finch ’s engine chugged on, its propellers still spinning swiftly but not powerfully outside, only fast enough to fend off the elements.
“Now,” he said, “would you please tell me what’s happened? What’s gone wrong?”
Riuza sighed. Morayo laughed. “Nothing’s wrong,” the engineer said. “We just hit a little weather. Just a little squall over the mountains. It’s nothing, really, it happens all the time. Welcome to Europa, Mister Bakhoum.”
He exhaled slowly and glanced back at other men, who nodded at him sheepishly.
“So this is normal?”
They nodded again.
“And will probably happen again?”
They nodded again.
“Ah.” Omar swallowed and straightened up. “All right then. Good. Then I can make us a nice hot breakfast now. Where’s the stove?”
He made them a heavy Espani breakfast of sausages and red potatoes while Morayo explained that the gunstock in the cabin wall connected to a harpoon gun outside that they had modified to fire their emergency anchor down into the ice or rocks to stop the Finch from blowing about in a storm, which happened rather often near the Pyrenees.
After they finished eating, everyone trooped outside into the freezing ice wind to inspect the Finch ’s hull and check the lines. Omar followed Morayo, marveling at the young woman’s ability to notice tiny dings and scrapes in the outer walls of the gondola through the blinding snow gusts. She shouted over the wind to tell him that the ice did this or a rock did that, and which were superficial, and which she would spend the day hammering out or welding over. With the lines secure and the engineer’s repair plan ready, their last task was to follow the steel cable from the harpoon gun across an uneven sheet of ice to find the emergency anchor.
Peering through his blue-tinted glasses, Omar spotted the anchor hooked under a block of ice that rested on the glacier like a boulder. Staring down at the device, he despaired at the thought of having to chip the anchor free of the ice using hammers and shovels, and he wondered if he might convince the others to leave the task to him alone so that he might make short work of it with his blazing seireiken.
But Morayo slipped around him, yanked a pin from the anchor’s base, and the long jagged arms of the anchor slid neatly back into its central shaft. The engineer stood up and shoved the cold anchor into his arms. “Here. Thanks.”
Omar trekked back to the ship and reloaded the anchor into the harpoon gun, and then went inside to winch the entire steel cable back onto its spool, a job that took nearly half an hour of continuous winching. But when that was done, he was free to flop back down into his narrow crevice between the apples and the toilet, and for the first time in two days he couldn’t imagine a more restful place to be.
After a short break, he turned to Kosoko, whose mood had improved considerably since the landing and was now reading a small leather-bound book, and Omar said, “If the weather is this rough in the winter, why don’t you make your expeditions in the summer?”
The cartographer snorted. “In the summer, the warm air off the sea mixes with the cold of the glaciers to make storms so violent that they would shatter this ship like kindling before we got anywhere near the Pyrenees. In the winter, all of the air is cold and thus more predictable. This isn’t rough weather, Mister Bakhoum. This is the calm season in this part of the world.”
Omar nodded slowly. “I see.”
“We learned that the hard way three summers back.” Kosoko returned to his book. “Don’t worry. If anyone is going to get us all home safely, it’ll be Captain Ngozi. You can trust in that.”
Chapter 5. Death march
Riuza let Morayo fiddle with the Finch all day long, and the little engineer spent as much time outside banging on the hull as she spent inside banging on the pipes. The men were also called out for a bit of work breaking up the ice under the Finch and hauling the freezing chunks and shards inside to refill the engine’s boiler. The bits of ice bobbed in the warm tank for a moment or two before melting away and Omar marveled that something as simple as steam was driving the huge propellers of the airship. As night fell, he resumed his cooking duties to prepare a traditional Mazigh tajine of lamb, apples, olives, raisins, and almonds with a dash of cinnamon and pepper from the tiny spice kit that Morayo kept hidden in an overhead locker.
As darkness fell upon the frozen wastes of the Bayonne Glacier, Omar noticed the tiny flickering light bulb in the center of the ceiling. Frowning, he jerked his chin at it and said, “I thought those lights needed sunlight to power them?”
“Sunlight is just one way to make electricity. Another is wind,” Riuza said. She had tilted back her pilot’s seat to create an uncomfortable-looking recliner to sleep in. “And there is plenty of wind out there right now.”
The howling gusts outside shook the cabin, and there was a continuous tinkling sound of icy granules peppering the windows from all sides.
“So, is there nothing alive out there?” Omar squinted into the dark window, but could only see his own reflection in the glass. A sharp gurgle in his belly made him wince.
“No, nothing alive here,” Kosoko said. “Plenty of dead folk, though. If the wind lets up enough for the aether to settle, we should see the southern migration tonight.”
Omar jerked away from the glass. “Migration? Of the dead?”
“It’s not a migration,” Garai snapped. “Animals migrate to find better seasonal habitats. The dead have no habitat. And you call yourself a scientist!”
“Then what would you call it?” the cartographer asked. “Hundreds of souls all moving south together. Just like birds or fish.”
The naturalist rolled his eyes, pressed his hand to his belly, and burped. “Don’t be stupid, Kosoko. It’s probably some sort of pilgrimage. These barbarian souls must be looking for their afterlife or their gods or something.”
“So you don’t know?” Omar asked. “You’ve never investigated this migration?”
Garai slipped his hand inside his belt to pull his pants away from his stomach as he shifted in his seat. “Of course not. I am a scientist, sir, not a priest. Natural philosophy has been the bedrock of Songhai scholarship even longer than in Marrakesh. I don’t concern myself with matters of religion. So until it becomes possible to study aether and ghosts in a controlled manner, there is no place for it in the natural sciences.”
Omar smiled and turned back to the window. “Interesting.”
Within the hour, the small light bulb overhead flickered dimmer and dimmer, and then faded completely to leave the cabin in utter darkness. But a pale glow fell on the ice outside and Omar peered out across a vast plain of
