Moon rubbed his face. He hadn’t really expected anything else, but they had all just agreed to die here, and it felt wrong. It felt like failure and surrender. But he didn’t see another way. “All right. That’s settled.” He let his breath out in resignation. “We can’t let the Fell get to this place, whatever it is.”
Floret lifted her head. “The fire weapon.”
Miserable, Chime leaned against Moon’s shoulder and said, “I really don’t want to burn or get eaten, so will you promise to kill me before that happens?”
That was just another weight on Moon’s sinking heart, but he put an arm around Chime and hugged. “Yes.”
Lithe huddled in on herself. “Me too, please.”
Moon could tell he was going to end up killing everybody except Saffron, who was the only one he wouldn’t have minded killing. “Let’s figure out what we’re going to do, first.”
Saffron shrugged. “With the kethel guarding the deck, we can’t get out there with the fire weapon.” She added reluctantly, “So… we use it in here?”
No one seemed happy about that idea. Moon didn’t think it would accomplish anything except suicide. He said, “We need to set the sac on fire. If we set the boat on fire, even with the oil, I’m not sure it’ll do that.”
Chime sat up. “The boat will come apart, and the section that’s not attached to the sustainer will fall on the sac. But the Fell could just cut a hole in it and push the boat out.”
Shade set his jaw, grimly determined. “We just have to get the oil and the fire weapon outside the boat. Maybe I could say I wanted to talk to the progenitor, and get out on deck with it.”
“But you wouldn’t have time to do anything,” Floret pointed out. “You’d be carrying casks of oil and a groundling weapon. That kethel would flatten you as soon as it saw you.”
“We don’t have to go out on deck,” Lithe said suddenly. “We can cut a hole in the bottom of the boat.”
Now that was an idea. Moon said, “We could drop the oil onto the bottom of the sac, then shoot the fire weapon into it.”
Forgetting about their impending deaths, Chime looked excited by the prospect. “There are cutting tools onboard.”
Saffron said, “But what if the Fell realize what we’re doing? If the kethel feels the vibrations through the wood—“
Chime shook his head. “This wood doesn’t vibrate much at all. I noticed that when we first came aboard and slept on the floor. Even with all the groundlings walking around.”
Shade added, “None of you felt it up on the deck when I was climbing around under the boat.”
Lithe said, “And I doubt it would ever occur to the Fell to think that we’d do something to kill ourselves. They’re not exactly good at seeing from anyone else’s perspective.”
Floret agreed. “They’d think we were trying to escape. That might work to our advantage.”
She meant the Fell might prepare for Raksura escaping out of the hole in the boat, but not for oil and fire. If they could set a kethel on fire, it would be even better. Moon said, “Let’s get started.”
The first obstacle they encountered was the hull of the flying boat.
They had found some cutting tools during their first search of the cabins, and Moon thought that the small saw would be all they needed to cut through wood that seemed so light and fragile.
While Floret and Saffron kept watch, and Lithe tended to the wounded, Moon, Chime, and Shade went to the stern hold, where the bottom hull of the ship flattened out. They brought a couple of the lamps to light the area, and the soft glow of the spelled illumination was more than enough in the low-ceilinged space. They moved bales of supplies aside, Chime used ink from Delin’s store to mark out a square large enough to dump an oil cask through, and they got to work.
But the rounded blade of the saw, sharp as it was, could barely be forced through the wood.
After Moon and Shade working together managed to cut only a few fragments out, Moon said in exasperation, “I thought Niran was afraid the Arbora’s anvils would break the hull of the Valendera. This stuff is like iron.”
Chime grimaced. “Blossom was in charge of the repairs to Niran’s boats, and she said it turned out to be a bigger job than she thought at first. Now I know what she meant.” He used his claws to pick apart a chip. “I think an anvil is the only thing that would go through this. It’s not like wood from an ordinary tree. It’s all woven through with some sort of fiber. I wonder if they get it from the sea bottom.”
Moon leaned over to look. Chime was right: the outside appeared to be wood, but the inside was more like a thick leaf, shot through with a fibrous web that must make it extremely strong. Shade picked up another chip to examine it, and Moon said, “It makes sense. These boats travel so far, they’d have to be tough.”
They looked at each other in dismay. Chime admitted, “We can still cut it; it’s just going to take longer than we thought.”
Shade set the chip down. “But we were all worked up to kill ourselves today.”
They stared at him. He winced. “I was trying to make a joke. It didn’t work?”
Chime snorted, half in amusement and half in despair. Moon gave Shade a push on the shoulder. “Help me look for something to sharpen the saw.”
They took turns, working in teams of two, all the rest of the long day. Lithe tried using her magic to heat the section they wanted to cut through. It seemed to help a little, but Moon honestly couldn’t tell whether it was their imagination or not. They had to sharpen the saw frequently, and Moon began to worry that it would break. There were others onboard, but none as well-suited to the task as this one, and if they had to use another it would take even longer.
They weren’t cutting the wood completely through, leaving the outermost membrane intact to keep the cut piece from sagging and revealing their activity to any Fell that might be climbing or flying below them. It would make pushing the piece out a slower process than Moon would like, but this way was safer.
By that night everyone was exhausted and could barely force themselves to eat. Moon’s head was pounding and his stomach revolted even at the idea of bread and water. He would have thought it was a lingering effect of Russet’s poison, except that all the others clearly felt the same way. The only ones who were breathing well were the wounded; the healing sleep seemed to protect them from whatever it was.
“It’s the air,” Lithe said, wearily wiping her face. “It’s turning into a poison. The sac has to let in some fresh air, or we’d all be dead by now. But there must be too many Fell inside it.”
“Will it help if we block off the holes in the boat?” Saffron asked. There were small perforations at points in the sides of the hull, to vent the cabins.
“I think that might just kill us faster,” Lithe admitted.
They kept working through the night.
Moon woke suddenly, finding himself slumped over on the deck in the main cabin. His head felt clear for the first time in two days, and the pain in his temples had faded to a dull ache. Shade and Lithe sprawled nearby, stirring in their sleep. Saffron, leaning against the wall near the door and technically on guard, sat up blinking as if she had just woken. It felt like late morning.
Moon tasted the air; it was distinctly fresher, even under the Fell taint. “They must have opened the sac,” he said aloud.
Saffron stumbled to her feet. “We’re still moving.”
Maybe enough dakti had died off that the rulers had decided to let in some fresh air. Maybe we’re almost there, and they opened it to send out scouts. There was no salt scent in the air; it was impossible to tell how close or how far away the sea was.