What follows is “Lonely Girl”, the prototype chapter I wrote for The Poison Sky, Book I: A Philosophy of Air. This is not a chapter of the actual book, and many of the details depart from the story as it now exists.

What matters here depends on why you’re reading this. If you’re reading for entertainment, or to learn something of my story’s world, awesome! Have fun aboard Lonely Girl!

If you’re a writer trying to understand this as an example of a story prototype, understand “Lonely Girl” as an outtake from my world before I started thinking about it seriously. It has airships (of course) and it gives some sense of the time period and technology. It also introduces some key points of tension and mystery. In short, it represents an early attempt to express the mood and world of the story, written years before I began working on the novel.

Enthusiastic reactions from friends suggested this was a project worth pursuing.

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Lonely Girl

Before his feet had cleared the deck, he knew he was dead. Dead of the knife wound, dead of the fall, dead of the churning, acid, poison gas, it made no difference. At the end of all, he was dead of foolishness.

A captain should have known better, been better prepared. He had banked too much on the weight of his authority and still more on his ship’s strength of arms, bristling as she was with bowmen, trebuchets and ballistas. So outmatched, the only sensible action for the poor windraker and her crew was to submit to arrest and accept their fate. He had neglected to account for a senseless act of desperation. His dying solace, thin comfort though it was, lay in the knowledge that within seconds the windraker, her Windlander captain, and her entire crew would share his fate.

Strangely he felt no remorse, no panic, no pang of self-pity. Even the sharp pain of the blade, slid so expertly between his ribs, almost certainly puncturing his lung, faded into dreamlike obscurity. He looked down at his feet, which were in fact above his head as he plummeted earthwards, at the receding wooden undersides of two great hulks suspended beneath two still greater balloons: his last command, the terrible stormchaser Tobias’ Glory, sidled up beside the ponderous windraker Lonely Girl.

Could it have been but an hour ago that he first spotted his assassin? The bowsprit watchman had screamed the word, waving to larboard and well below the Glory. The captain grabbed his spyglass, followed the indicator, and there she was: a massive freight vessel, sails engorged and trim, her balloon at moderate flutter, cruising five hundred feet below them. She weaved between the rising, puffy columns of acidic sursum clouds. Such a course, so close to the sursus as to be termed suicidal, could be consistent with nothing but a shipment of contraband. They had seen the Glory and were hoping to slip beneath her notice.

No quarry so laden might offer resistance or pretend escape. A windraker could offer little fight were she running light and fully armed, but this creeping skyship, so obviously full of cargo that she moved with little speed and less grace, was nothing more than a plum to be picked.

“To arms.” He intoned quietly to his first officer, leaving the necessary shouting to the chain of command. In less than five minutes, the stormchaser’s crew had fitted her for battle. Ballistas and trebuchets were loaded, bows were notched, a boarding party stood by. The captain ordered the main-mail – the fine, chain mesh that defended his ship’s balloon – lowered to half-stay: protecting the balloon, but not the ship deck. In combat, the mesh would usually be ordered to full-stay, effectively screening the crew against inbound missiles, whilst providing thin exit slits through which an effective offense might be waged. But the mail inhibited the trebuchets, which would be most effective against the freighter in any case of treachery. Were an entire company of bowmen hidden below the windraker’s wooden deck, the catapults would flatten them. Were it necessary, a handful of bolts from the ballistas could then obliterate the honeycombed fabric of the balloon.

And that is exactly their fate. The fools.

Some minutes thereafter the Glory pressed down upon her victim, squeezing the windraker between her own hull and the impenetrable barrier of the sursus. At the captain’s nodded command, his first officer raised a bullhorn to his lips and cried the age-old imperative: “Heave to and rise!” Though part of the wooden deck below was hidden by the windraker’s balloon, the captain could make out a number of interesting details.

For one thing, the ship was flagged as a Windlander. This meant little enough: a great many commercial vessels were so designated, regardless of origin. But a commercial freighter this far out of shipping lanes might indicate something. He also noted the lack of weaponry. She had a couple small catapults, enough perhaps to dissuade a lightly-armed pirate. No match for a stormchaser. 

What caught him most, however, were two individuals staring back at him and engaged in earnest conversation. From the subtle signals well known to all airmen, he could discern that these were captain and mate, disputing their predicament. The captain – quite clearly the captain, though in no habiliment to designate her so – was a flame-haired woman of small stature and no great many years. Her muslin tunic billowed in the wind, but she seemed unaffected by the cold. Her mate’s skin was of deep olive hue – most probably a Farlander. He towered over his commander but seemed to accept her judgment with an accustomed meekness. These two, the captain thought, present an enigma indeed!

At last the first officer’s order was answered by action. Lonely Girl let out sail, expending her headway and settling to a crawl. The whine of heat pipes answered to a shouted order and slowly, like a great, fat beast rising from slumber, her balloon stretched taut and the freighter began to rise.

“Match her speed and ascent,” the captain directed, “but keep us above her and maintain an advantageous firing position.”

His directions were followed by his men, of course, with mechanical precision. All men, mind. He didn’t hold with this recent fad of introducing women into the service. Leave that kind of liberalism to the Torramen, he told anyone who would listen. His airmen, carefully picked and trained and drilled by the captain himself, struck through with the fear of God (or the captain, whichever), unencumbered by distractions, were among the best in the Al-Makra fleet. That they toiled in the prosaic work of interdiction — rather than waging glorious war — betokened the sad curse of these damnably peaceful times. But there were encouraging signs, too. Unrest among the Farlanders was (what politicians called) worrying. It had led the admiralty to extend patrols and be on the lookout…for contraband, to be sure, but more importantly for arms.

As Lonely Girl rose to meet him, the red-headed diminutive stared levelly back at the captain. Even at this distance he couldn’t help thinking that she looked quite pretty. Though her tunic floated in the wind, it didn’t quite hide her figure, nor did her tight leather breeches. Her red mane had been tied back into a casual ponytail, so that loose strands whipped round behind her in a crimson halo.

The hallmarks of an able ship’s commander manifested themselves in the orderly, clean-swabbed deck, in the unhurried yet efficient traffic of the crew. Her vessel’s main-mail remained stowed, an indication she had no stomach for a fight. To be sure, if indeed she carried drugs or weapons or other illicit material, she knew how to keep her cool about it. 

Now at altitude, both ships hundreds of feet above the stacked and puffy sursus layer, the first officer ordered Lonely Girl to prepare for boarding. This she did in direct and sensible fashion, reefing her corona of sails.

“Number one,” the captain directed his first officer, “you will lead the boarding party. Signal when secure.” The first officer nodded crisply, and moved to join the boarders. As this was a friendly boarding, at least so far as one might yet term it, the procedure was straightforward enough.

A light ballista fired a weighted line across the windraker’s balloon, near enough the crow’s nest that its occupant could snag it with a long hook. Which he did, the captain observed, with great facility. The watchman in the crow’s nest made the line secure and a second line, terminating in a steel ring, was slid down the first. Of course there were more aggressive ways to effect a boarding when required, but no such tactics appeared warranted for the moment.

Now securely connected on both ends, Glory’s ballistamen turned a crank, which turned a spindle, which pulled the line and slowly brought the two vessels to within a narrow hundred yards. Now a mated pair, the ships sailed southerly together, the smaller stormchaser still mindfully atopships her neighbor. All was quiet, but for the rush of wind, the creak of wood, the squeak of the protesting spindle. Archers stood ready, as did the weapons teams, the captain, the boarding crew. And still the little redhead stared levelly back.

The first boarder, a third lieutenant named Bale, slid down the line in a leather harness (a “diaper”, according to the proper form of airmen) straight to Lonely Girl’s crow’s nest. He kept his cutlass in its sheath, landed neatly atop the platform, engaged in a few curt pleasantries with the watchman, then grabbed the second line — the one ending in the steel ring — and proceeded to clamber down the standing rig-lines towards the deck. His was an expert hand, and though supported by nothing, with hundreds of feet of sky below him and poison cloud below that, he rounded the balloon’s fat girth in a space of seconds then presently alighted on deck alongside the captain and mate. Again the pleasantries, the line made fast and a further line extended from Glory to Girl.

The web was complete. A gondola was attached to the two lower lines. The first round of boarders, the first officer and four men, sailed across in more comfort than any combat situation could have afforded. For several minutes as the boarding progressed, the captain and his opposite number stared at one another, until the former began to suspect he was being mocked, that indeed hers was the will driving the confrontation rather than his own.

With this thought he broke the connection, snubbing the penetrating gaze, but instantly regretting the action and feeling somehow he had lost something intangible and irretrievable. “Mr. Prost, signal Number One and inform him I will be headed aboard as soon as he signals secure.”

This did not take long. In four quick intervals, twenty of the Glory crew crawled the windraker, her deck, her rigging, her bowels. No sign of trouble, they signed. No sign of contraband.

With a guard of four more men, the Captain entered the gondola, leaving his Number Two in command. While they winched him across the empty expanse, his gaze swept the deck again, the balloon, the rigs. Again he found the little captain staring at him as though she had never moved, and again he felt an uncomfortable twinge of uncertainty, as if he had missed some important detail.

Out he stepped onto the windraker’s long, broad deck, an expanse with three times the area of the battleship he commanded. He noted the quiet efficiency of the crew as those not engaged in the ceaseless task of keeping the great craft aloft catered to the whims of his boarding team, exposing papers, manifests and cargo. “Sir,” piped up the first officer, “the windraker Lonely Girl flagged and out of Hellpont, bound for Far Harbor. Captain,” here the slightest tone of mockery, “Laurna Gile, commanding. Manifest shows mostly Windland wine, barley and rye flour from Larrowland, an assortment of raw ores.”

“Passengers?”

“None of note, sir. The usual merchants and businessmen, some minor Torraman politician says he’s on holiday.”

Laurna Gile, the little lady captain advanced on him. He had six inches on her and at least six stone, but her presence filled the space between them like expanding sursus gas, every bit as lethal, as poisonous, as explosive. His distant judgment of her looks had been passably accurate. Close at hand, he decided, she was indeed pretty, if not exactly beautiful. Skin sun-kissed and freckled, eyes clear and green, hair an almost comical shade of red. Her figure was toned by hard work and discipline: shapely, yes, but undeniably strong. He shifted fractionally, self-consciously aware of his manhood stirring. He began “Captain Gile —”

She cut across him, impatiently, in the mellifluous accent of the Windland nation, “Explain yourself, Captain. We’re running heavy and short on fuel, and haven’t time to be put about by officious prickery.”

He hadn’t ought to have been surprised by the coarseness of her language. No matter her sex, she was an airman and no mistake: a brother of a rough fellowship who knew politeness made less headway than brute force. Still, such a word, coming as it was from such a young and rather pretty face, reminded him uncomfortably that his own prickery might be improperly betraying his thoughts at this very moment.

He brought himself about, tutting a little as to an errant child. “Captain Gile, your vessel was discovered running absurdly low on the leeward side of your alleged destination…”

She rejoined hotly, juicily sucking on the rounded vowels of her accent. “There was a storm three days ago. Perhaps you noticed it? And we were blown off course. Low on coal, we naturally laid low to the sursus. Perhaps the Captain,” and here her derision inflected incrementally higher than had his first officer’s, “can suggest another way to conserve fuel short of dumping our cargo?”

The Captain remained even-keeled. It took more than a bit of verbal sparring to rock him. Besides, she wasn’t wrong about the storm, for there had been a significant gale as she described. That it might have thrown her off course could not be discounted, nor that a decision to lie low would naturally follow, were supplies indeed running low.

He turned to look at the sursus layer, rising in puffy towers hundreds of feet below them. “You were running dangerous low, with all that stacking. One wrong move and you’d have killed yourselves…and spoiled all that wine.”

“My crew know their business.”

“I suppose they do.” He ventured a measured, reassuring smile, which Laurna Gile did not reciprocate. He felt a fool, but why? He had spotted a craft in an unusual place, flying in an unusual way. He had investigated. But something about this slip of a girl made him feel wrong, errant. As if his years of experience and expertise melted before her green stare.

“Number one, fetch the men.” As the mate stepped to, he caught a word from Bale, the third lieutenant who had begun the boarding.

“Pointless voyage, hauling a crapload of Windlander wine.” the lieutenant chided the olive-skinned first officer of Lonely Girl.

Maybe that’s where I made my mistake.

Windland wine was cheap, the cheapest swill in the Archipelago and popular only with the rabble. The grapes were farmed on the rocky, open plains of The West Winds where ample sun boiled up a sugary potion appealing only to the least sophisticated palate. Their own island, Twelve Towers, seat of the Al-Makra family, made the only true vintages in the whole of the Archipelago, complex and subtle, traded everywhere and prized for extraordinary craftsmanship. No surprise, therefore, for any Towerman, even as base-born a fellow as Bale, to level a wisecrack at such cargo. But then he thought…

“Number one…”

“Sir?”

“Mr. Bale’s quite right. Terrible long journey for a hold of bad wine. Maybe we should check it hasn’t gone sour.”

He studied Captain Gile’s reaction. She narrowed her eyes slightly, though in trepidation, resignation or anger, he couldn’t have guessed.

“Beg pardon, sir?” inquired his first officer.

The Captain wasn’t going to lose the staring match this time. Grey eyes fixed on the green, he enjoined in even tones, “Take a couple of Captain Gile’s men, go below and fetch a wine cask.”

This they did, the two first officers heading to the hold.

“If you’re thirsty, Captain, I have wine in my quarters.” she said.

“I wouldn’t care to impose,” he replied.

She didn’t smile, but she wet her lower lip with her tongue, just barely. Then she whispered, loud enough so only he could hear. “I think you’re lying. I think you’d like to impose very, very much.”

Inwardly he fumed, hoping it didn’t show, but fearing very much that it did.

At length, her first officer and another returned carrying between them a small cask, his own Number One following behind. It was a heavy burden and the two stumbled to the nearest suitable resting place: the throwing basin of one of their small catapults. Seeing this, it was Captain Gile who broke the staring match. She huffed angrily.

“You there! If you’re going to turn that weapon into a bar, at least lock it down!”

As she stormed over to the catapult, the Captain smiled, triumphant with having won this latest confrontation. He watched her engage a safety lever on the catapult, ensuring the cargo would not be inadvertently flung overboard. Then he followed her over to discover if perhaps this final hunch had any merit.

“Open it.” he instructed.

She turned back to him, suddenly more flustered and imploring than he had yet seen her. “Captain, please. This is our cargo. We’re low on fuel, behind schedule and likely to pay a fine when we get in. We can’t afford to lose what little income we’re likely to have.”

The Captain pursed his lips, pretending to think, but inside he felt a surge both of triumph and of bile. This wee bitch had had the best of him at the start, but now he’d regained his footing. He felt sure he was on the verge of confirming his suspicions, thereby claiming both a moral victory and perhaps a good share of prize money. “I’m afraid there is danger in trading with Far Harbor, Captain. And a price to be paid. Open it.”

She nodded to her mate, the big Farlander, who fished out a peg and mallet. He raised it and struck a three-quarter inch hole in the end of the cask.

Out of the hole poured a stream of fine-grained black sand.

The Captain stared at the sand quizzically. What the devil was this? It looked rather like dirt, which made no sense. Perhaps it was packaging around some contraband. What was entirely clear, however, was that it wasn’t wine. Whatever the full answer, he felt the surge of triumph. It was the last good feeling he would ever have.

Big as he was, he would never have imagined she could do it. With his eyes trained on one discovery, he had missed another: Laurna Gile had pulled out a dagger and stabbed him between the ribs before he knew she had moved. Her small stature situated her perfectly for an upward thrust, so that she had likely found not just flesh but vital organ. But more surprisingly still, little as she was, she single-handedly pushed him back over the gunwale, off her ship, and tumbling into the abyss below.

Having plummeted two hundred feet, he hoped he would witness his belated revenge before vanishing forever below the deadly sursus. A missile did indeed fire, but in the wrong direction: something smoking passed from the deck of Lonely Girl towards Tobias’ Glory. A futile gesture, since his Number Two would immediately unleash an unholy storm of retaliation on the pretty little Windlander. Such a waste.

Then, fire. Such a sudden fire as he had never seen before. An exhalation of such heat and light and flame and smoke that he could feel it even over the wind and the distance. In an instant, it consumed the Glory’s hull, sending shards of wood and burning bodies in every direction. The flames pushed against the Lonely Girl and she rocked violently, but the Glory was no more. The mighty stormchaser, her crew of seventy, her mighty weapons, all now just a flaming wreck suspended beneath a burning balloon.

Then he was in the clouds. Like all seasoned airmen, he had had his narrow scrapes with sursus clouds, choking in the gas, catching an occasional burn when he ventured too close. Once, when a nipper, he had fallen from a yardarm when his ship was on close maneuvers and swung full into the mist for several agonizing seconds. It had been painful, but no worse than a bad sunburn. Still, he never forgot and ever respected the lethal clouds thereafter. All that was nothing compared to this.

A second after entering the clouds, his skin was itching, burning. Seconds later he was on fire. He thought longingly of his ship above, the lucky, doomed crew who had perished in a simple – if inexplicable – fire. They were dead now and at peace, while he choked as acid raked his throat and lungs, scorched his scalp, blistered his eyes. A moment later, he thought he heard a crash and saw a flash of crimson light through his tightly shut eyelids, together with a wave of warm air. For a fleeting second he remembered to think of his wife and children.

Then suddenly the blaze receded. He was still in agony, but wind like a balm kissed the festering blister that had been his skin. In his torment, he thought it a kiss from Laurna Gile, though he knew that was absurd. His reason was failing. With a mighty effort, he forced open his eyes. He could barely see, barely form a thought, but knew he was where no man had ever gone and returned, tumbling heels over head below the sursus.

Dead or no, he consoled himself, he would know the answer to the greatest question in the world. He would see, if he could just master his eviscerated eyes, what lay beneath the clouds. Summoning what was left of his sanity, he focused his blurry, crazed vision. He spun end over end. And there indeed was the underside of the sursus layer. He had but to await the next tumble. And then there it was. He spun and looked down.

It’s true. Dear God, it’s true.

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