On Discord Isle Read Online Free PDF Page B

someone else has to, and today that someone is you. I’ve used up one pistol by going to the head. The other’s still loaded. Do you understand?”
    She held Allen’s frightened eyes. He nodded nervously, and she twitched her head toward the kitchen. The younger Mechanist slid from his bench, stumbled, hit the deck, climbed to his feet, and then ran through the portal into the kitchen.
    With nothing else to do, Natasha walked over to where he’d left his books and drawing equipment. The texts were written in Perinese, and concerned the arcane subjects of physics, construction, and aether science. Natasha paged through them, bored. The books weren’t entirely beyond her, sky piracy required a certain understanding of such subjects, but they weren’t exactly interesting.
    Loud cursing and a clatter erupted from the kitchen. She ignored it, taking up both Allen’s charcoal-stick and his copy of The Mechanics of Aeronautical Flight, and amused herself by writing obscene jokes in the margin of the text, complete with illustrations. Minutes passed and the activity quickly paled; she found herself taking multiple pages worth of borders to draw a particularly complex scene she’d once been part of in a Salomcan brothel. Natasha snorted at the memory and paused in fond, somewhat incredulous, remembrance.
    Thick dark smoke started to flow into the mess hall. Natasha shut the book and rested her chin on one hand, drumming the fingers of the other on the table. He’s taking forever in there. She was hungry, but now that she was awake and sober she wanted to be up, she wanted to be moving. Objects at rest tended to stay at rest, and any time she wasn’t visible to the crew was time that they could slack, could forget themselves and their purpose, could even forget her .
    I’ll eat later. Natasha stood and left the mess hall, just as a flickering red-orange glow appeared in the kitchen, accompanied by soft weeping and the smell of something burning. She made her way to the stern stairwell, then up through the aft hatch and onto the outer deck of the Dawnhawk .
    Bright afternoon sunlight greeted her, the wind a soft breeze playing with her hair. Today was sunny and warm. Around her the airship hummed, nothing seemingly amiss. The exhaust pipes puffed steam up to join the clouds while the propellers spun lazily. The current watch went about their duties.
    Natasha nodded to herself. Then she stopped as one small detail of the scene caught her attention; the propellers. Last night they’d been on course for a northeastern-running aetherline. They should have reached it hours ago, negating the need for powered flight.
    That’s odd. There was something else as well. Something intangible. She glanced about the deck, where the current watch tended to their tasks, both halves of the crew working in harmony.
    Natasha blinked. No one was fighting, even passively. The propellers were strange, but she felt pleasantly surprised at the change in the crew. Good. Maybe Fengel’s worthless lackeys are finally coming around. Fengel’s crew were competent, more or less, but slow and weak. When she had agreed to work with her husband, she’d also vowed silently that they’d do things the proper way, or not at all. It appeared that they were finally taking the hint.
    Still, why are we running on the engines?
    She glanced around for any obvious answer. Nothing seemed out of order, but she did spy Lucian Thorne up near the bow. He’d do. Natasha stalked up to talk to the airship’s first mate.
    The man irritated her. He was competent, capable, and loyal; at least to Fengel. To her he was merely polite, though he always seemed to execute the orders she gave. But Natasha was positive that he worked actively to undermine her command.
    Lucian was watching something out beyond the ship while several crewmen coiled ropes and hammered a small wooden crate shut. Natasha strode up to the first mate with her mouth open, prepared to deliver a withering