The Wind Merchant Read online

  A nebulous, floating sphere of Energy ten yards around exuded brilliance and danger, casting a green light all around it. It was the most beautiful thing Ras had ever seen, and also the saddest.

  Ras knew he had found Framer’s source of Energy: a Convergence. Aside from The Origin of All Energy, Convergences were the only things capable of putting off raw Energy onto the wind. The difference between the two was the Origin’s Energy emanated from the ground, while a Convergence was composed of the absorbed essence of any man, woman, or child with an Energy sensitivity who got too close to a potent amount of the resource.

  In the last years that humanity spent on the ground, Convergences had obliterated densely packed city populations, causing those sensitive to Energy to erupt, destroying city blocks and continually adding new sources of Energy to the wind. The higher levels triggered the less sensitive to follow suit, forcing the depopulated world to erect what defenses they could. And just when it seemed everyone that could succumb to the curse was gone, the next generation proved Energy sensitivity to be genetic.

  Ras sometimes wondered if Knacks took up lives as wind merchants as a penance for The Great Overload, or just because they didn’t want to be around cities. Regardless, the irony was not lost on anyone in Atmo that Knacks now sought Energy in survivable quantities to keep the world running.

  Nobody knew where the first Convergences came from other than they arrived shortly after The Clockwork War. Most considered them a weapon of The Elders—a parting gift after they failed to subjugate humanity.

  Ras guessed his insensitivity to Energy was the only thing saving him from the same fate as the poor souls from the wrecked ship, and for once he didn’t mind being a Lack.

  The high Energy readings from the canyon made more sense now. He estimated the Convergence put off a Level 8 rating if not a 9, which required a guild-approved license to sell the haul because collecting such Energy-rich air was extremely dangerous.

  But not to Ras, for whatever genetic fluke.

  A smile crept across his lips. He was going to be a hero, and better yet, a rich one.

  Convergences usually flitted about on the wind, necessitating that wind merchants find new collection spots. Whether something was beneath the clouds destroying Convergences or they were simply being blown out of The Bowl, Ras wagered he was looking at Verdant’s last fuel source.

  This Convergence wasn’t going anywhere, and nobody would be fool enough to risk flying through the canyon to find it. Verdant could relocate to Framer’s Valley and have enough Energy to run indefinitely.

  He would need proof, though. The amount of Energy Verdant would need to burn just to move was more than the benefit of hovering over any vagabond Convergence. But if he could show them a partially filled tank of Level 8 or 9 wind, then maybe—just maybe—he’d be able to convince them that this one was stationary. He could both save his home city and ensure nobody ever called him a Lack again.

  He made his way to The Copper Fox, grappled to the railing, and with a little effort hoisted himself up to begin repairing the second engine and patching the balloon.

  It took a few hours and several salvage trips to the wrecked airship, but at last The Copper Fox was in mostly working order. Ras flew it near the mouth of the cave, lowering the collection tube. The sensor read Level 9, but all Ras required was a sample. Even that would be worth a small fortune.

  He mashed down the collection button. He didn’t know if harvesting too much would destabilize or dissipate the Convergence, so he decided to only fill his collection tank up to ten percent.

  “Seven...eight...nine...ten!” Ras pressed the button to stop collecting.

  Nothing happened.

  Twelve...thirteen...Ras’ eyes went wide with horror. “No-no-no-no-no!” He ran down to the hold to shut off the valve at the collection point himself, but the rusted old valve wouldn’t budge as he had never needed to stop Energy from entering the tank before.

  He moved to shut down the generator powering the collection unit. It stopped, thankfully, but the vacuum process had already begun, and if he broke the tank or pipes, he would only release an unstable Convergence into his ship.

  Thirty-four...thirty-five...

  Ras bounded out of the hold and slid down the collection tube. A horrendous screaming noise assailed his ears, as if a choir had been set on fire. His stomach knotted and heart plummeted as he watched the perfect sphere of Energy start to fluctuate in shape.

  He landed inside the cave and tried to pull the tube away from the Convergence, but the sphere pulled the tube back.

  Within moments, the Convergence collapsed into Energy on the wind to which Ras was completely blind.

  He knew without a shadow of a doubt he was now the richest man in Verdant. He also knew he’d just sunk her.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Floating City

  Calista Tourbillon successfully evaded the security guard on all three of his rounds. The echoing clunk of the deadbolt securing the University library’s heavy double doors signaled her glorious newfound solitude.

  She celebrated at an appropriate volume.

  While most students were packing up for the term and heading home to await notice of their grades, she decided to prolong her first year away from home for as long as possible.

  Peering from behind one of the dozens of dusty bookshelves, she confirmed the guard’s exit. She liked old Samuel, even though he had discovered most of her hiding places, forcing her to enact more and more elaborate plans for staying after hours.

  Clutching a book to her chest, she lithely skipped barefoot down the hardwood aisle, long red hair flowing behind her. Freedom. She loved the spacious vaulted ceilings and stained glass windows that spilled in various colors of light along the path to her destination.

  In the back corner of one of the reading areas, a particularly appealing golden swath of light bathed her favorite overstuffed armchair. She greeted the old friend, then pivoted and fell backwards over the upholstered arm into the well-worn seat. Dust plumed and danced about lazily in the rays as her hair draped over the armrest, nearly gracing the floor.

  She closed her eyes tightly, fighting a headache. It clawed at the back of her mind, demanding her attention, but she wouldn’t let it spoil this perfect moment like it had so many others.

  Slowing her breathing, she whispered to herself a countdown backward from five and imagined securing heavy locks and chains on a metal door keeping the monster at bay. …three, two, one…peace. Satisfied with the result, she cracked open the book, savoring the scent of the old paper.

  She adored all things antique, or at least anything that had survived the move to the skies. Books contained stories of the land before The Great Overload, stories of adventures, dashing knights on quests and fair maidens locked up in towers. She related to the plights of the latter far more than she liked to admit.

  The whole of Verdant was a prison as far as she was concerned. The flying city was her inescapable island, and her only consolation was having access to a library whose books she hadn’t already read a dozen times.

  She wasn’t ready for that window of opportunity to shut.

  The stories in those dusty tomes did little to slake her thirst to see the world. All of it. Not just above the clouds, but the forgotten realms, the places nobody spoke of anymore for simple lack of remembering or reverence.

  The longing to explore had embedded itself during her first and only airship ride when she was five years old. Her family had just moved to Verdant under doctor’s orders and she spent the next fourteen years cooped up in a basement due to her headaches.

  Traveling beyond that basement, even if it was a five minute skiff-ride away to the University, had been a dream come true. Her parents’ one condition was that she must remain indoors as much as possible, which Callie found acceptable, given the size of the library. The University was her favorite part of Verdant, since it was the city’s only structure directly transplanted from before the launc
h of the Atmo Project. She loved wandering its halls, pretending she lived with everyone else on the ground by walking where they walked.

  She softly hummed one of her mother’s little melodies as she flipped through the pages, finding her secret bookmark. One chapter remained unread and as much as she pleaded with the librarian, it was strictly against University policy to let a book stay loaned out over break. Granted, it was a history book and part of an incomplete anthology, but a girl had to have principles, and completing a book once begun fell well within those bounds. Plus, she needed as much research as she could get on The Origin of All Energy for the book she had begun writing.

  Her eyes soaked up the descriptions of multi-wheeled vehicles called trains. She had difficulty understanding why they gave way to four-wheeled vehicles called cars, but understood that they mostly resembled the ground-bound skiffs she saw zipping about the streets of Verdant.

  The jangle of heavy keys at the entrance sent her heart racing. Barely a page completed and her time was up already. It wasn’t fair. She had half a mind to try to sneak the book out, but she knew theft would lead to sleepless nights, and an eventual tear-filled confession to her father. She prided herself on being a storyteller, but drew the line at flat-out lying.

  Speed read. There was a creak of the heavy door and what sounded like two sets of boots clattering louder as they approached. She ran her finger along the page, giving it more a glance than a thorough read. If she was caught, she was caught, but that only meant she’d need to read more quickly.

  “Callie!” a familiar voice bellowed.

  Daddy. She tucked in her legs tight, hoping the wingback would sufficiently hide her.

  “I locked her in here, she should be around somewhere,” Samuel said, erasing any pride Callie had in her subterfuge abilities.

  Another two pages down, five to go.

  The footfalls grew louder as her pulse raced. The invention of typewriters, the predecessors to modern airships, the first discovery of relative time, The Clockwork War and—the last two pages were torn out. It seemed she couldn’t find a single book that contained information on The Great Overload. Her frustration only fed the monster that wouldn’t stop charging the door the way it did in her nightmares.

  The wingback chair tipped backwards. Callie let out a yelp, tumbling onto a rug in a most unladylike fashion and rolling into the legs of her father. Looking up through a mess of red hair, she saw her father’s offered hand. “Time’s up.” Callie sheepishly accepted, and he hauled her small frame up with little effort the way he always had.

  Samuel waited for her to relinquish the contraband. She gave the elderly guard her most pitiful look, but he just sighed and shook his head. He didn’t understand he was taking the last vestige of fresh material she would see in the next three months.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Samuel,” she said, placing the book in his aged hands.

  “At least you don’t get drunk and fall off the clock tower,” he said. “I’ll take playin’ hide-n-go-seek any day.”

  The pounding in Callie’s head suddenly intensified and the room spun wildly. She began to sway.

  “Callie?” Mr. Tourbillon asked. He knew the dizzied look on her face and reached out his strong arms for her in a practiced motion.

  The mental door holding back the pain finally gave way as the room disappeared into blackness.

  Verdant wasn’t particularly far from Framer’s Valley but it was the longest flight Ras had ever endured.

  Underneath the cloud level, Ras discovered a far less dangerous path that didn’t involve the main canyon. He took a tunnel offering the promise of daylight out of Framer’s, and he desperately wished he had known of the path earlier. The Copper Fox was hobbled despite his best efforts to get it back up and running.

  It wasn’t until Ras had set his course above the clouds that the chill of the wind announced the new tears in his clothes. His threadbare outfit would need another set of patches, but such details felt frivolous.

  Hours later Ras caught a glimpse of the floating city of Verdant glittering on the horizon. The sun peeked through its modest skyline, setting the clouds ablaze in a brilliant orange. It already looked as though the circular, ten-mile-wide city hung a little lower in the sky, but Ras hoped it was just his mind playing games with him.

  Maybe Verdant didn’t rely on this particular Convergence, he thought. Maybe if I bring the load in front of the city council they’d know how to turn it back into a Convergence. It was unlikely, considering the creation process of Convergences, but he hoped ignorance of some special process might be his salvation. The city wouldn’t fall immediately as long as the emergency Energy balloons beneath the city weren’t depleted, but he didn’t know how long the city’s reserves would last.

  Ras queued up The Copper Fox behind several wind merchant vessels waiting to have their hauls appraised at The Collective’s Energy refining station. Even though The Collective was the closest thing to a universal government in Atmo, the wind merchant guild had no jurisdiction over any of the fourteen remaining sovereign cities—but it was illegal to enter Verdant’s borders with a full haul of Energy lest the city suffer repeat of The Great Overload.

  He hated selling to The Collective after every haul. Mr. Planks, the frail collections officer, took full advantage of being the sole Energy buyer in The Bowl after the city of Merron fell eleven years back in a sky pirate attack.

  Planks and his assistants had never come aboard The Copper Fox when Ras said the hold was empty, but the man had a nose for Energy. Knack sensitivities manifested themselves differently to different people. Some saw Energy in green swirls, others tasted or smelled something out of place. From the way he would scrunch his nose upon each inspection, Ras guessed the latter.

  Idling forward and stopping again, Ras came close enough to hear bits of Mr. Planks’ routine sales pitch to the pilot in front of him. “Have you considered swapping your scoops to Helios engines?”

  “—The price of fuel is well worth the peace of mind knowing you’ll never have to worry about dropping out of the sky,” Ras recited, finishing the sentence in an affected nasal tone, then covered his mouth when he realized Planks could probably hear him. The whole system was rigged. Scoop engines allowed an airship to fly free, powered by the Energy it encountered on the wind. The idea of buying the ability to fly from anyone was preposterous until The Collective built the monstrosity called The Winnower to act as a filter over The Origin of All Energy. After all, with no way to test Energy sensitivity that didn’t render the test subject debilitated one way or another, neutering The Origin was “a necessity.”

  The platforms outside each city ferried the raw Energy captured by wind merchants to Derailleur to keep up with fuel production.

  The Collective’s stated goal was to reduce the level of Energy to a livable quantity so man could return to the ground without fear of exploding, which was all well and good, until the process began choking the cities that ran off scoop engines.

  But luckily for Atmo, The Collective just so happened to build a new type of engine designed to utilize the fuel created by The Winnower after it processed the raw Energy, rendering it harmless. It was obvious to most that The Collective attempted to make the new system more palatable by naming the new engines after the man who created The Atmo Project: Foster Helios, Sr..

  The whole Helios Engine propaganda campaign played off the fears of parents by painting a picture of children as precious little time bombs.

  Two cities rose up against The Collective, and both nationalities were branded as sky pirates and hunted down on sight by the fleet still equipped with the weapons from The Clockwork War.

  Verdant was one of the final holdouts about swapping its engines from scoops to Helios, but whether the city’s stance was a matter of principles or finances, Ras didn’t know.

  The Copper Fox took its turn in front of Mr. Planks, who didn’t bother to look up. “Have you considered swapping your ship out for an entirely new
one?” The gaunt, middle-aged man chuckled sharply, then sniffled and rubbed his nose. “What’d you collect?”

  “Nothing I can sell,” Ras said.

  Mr. Planks sneezed.

  “Bless you,” Ras said in too polite of a tone. “Collection system got gummed up after I hit a cliff in Framer’s.”

  Planks surveyed The Copper Fox. “Just one?”

  “C’mon, Planks. I don’t have anything for you. Just mark it zero.”

  Planks exaggeratedly swooped the circle on his clipboard. “It’s quite charitable of you, continually saving the rest of The Knack List from humiliation.”

  Ras smiled in mock amusement, half wishing he could tell Planks to take a look in his hold and see exactly where he belonged on the list, but if The Collective took his supply, they wouldn’t give him anything for it besides grief. “Thanks.”

  “Guess we can’t always have a Veir at the top,” Planks said.

  “Are we done?”

  “We were when I saw you fly up.” He scrunched his nose, then reached up to feel a small amount of blood before wiping the rest away with the back of his hand.

  Ras said his goodbye by jamming his throttle forward. The ship lurched, backfired, then puttered toward Verdant, lacking the dramatic effect Ras intended. He tried to ignore the hearty laughter coming from the crew of the collection station.

  Thanks to the beating The Copper Fox had taken back in Framer’s, the usual ten minute trip to the docks lasted an hour, giving Ras a long, hard look at his home city. He always thought Verdant looked like a gently rotating ship’s wheel, with docks for airships at the edges, followed by traders, merchants, and stores with main avenues along the eight spokes. Other business and offices made up the next layer in, then homes, and at the very center stood Verdant’s University, which tripled as the capital building and a park for children.

  With everyone living more-or-less on the edge of Verdant Park, families spent time together and had enough isolation from the fringe trades if they desired, although there was less and less business as of late. Travel to the city was notoriously difficult because of the mountain passes, and with a dwindling Energy supply, fewer merchants included Verdant in their trade routes.