Maledictus Aether (6 page)

I look back to the beast, and
it clambers up to my neck, pressing its scaly head against the skin
there.

“
My father
had one of these, then?”

“
Oh, not exactly. His was this animal that was brought
from
landside that mutated
with the ages. Think hawk, but with teeth, claws, and a wailing
shriek,” he tells me, and I wince. “Honestly? The thing gave me
nightmares for a month when I first retrieved it.”

I watch the Captain stand,
frowning.

“
That still does no
t
answer my question very well, Captain,” I state, and here he
laughs, patting his hand on a large leather-bound tome sitting on
the desk.

Seriously, how did I miss
it?

“
What does the lizard have to do with learning to be a
pirate?”

He gestures to the book, and with a
sceptical look shot his way I walk over, taking
the creature from my shoulder and placing it on the desk. It sits,
watching me expectantly as I regard the book.

“
He’s your
hands-on example of the creatures that sail these skies – the kind
of mutation landside animals go through when we bring them to the
skies,” he states, and I look to the creature.

“
He i
s perfectly
normal,” I comment, and the pirate laughs again. Reaching for the
creature, he presses a finger at the beast’s shoulder blade just
enough to annoy it slightly, and almost reluctantly the creature’s
back arches as a fifth limb, one I could not see unless I would
have known of its existence, unfolds from its back and stretches,
showing off a translucent membrane.

“
Wings,” I spit out, and the creature pulls away from
beneath the pirate’s touch, looking almost irritated – if a lizard
can even
be
irritated. I look to the man,
pointing a half-hearted finger to it. “The beast has
wings
.”

“
It also has
a bite that could pull your hand off,” he states with a shrug, and
pats the tome again. The lizard crawls over to where my hip touches
the desk and begins crawling up my back, as if trying to escape the
older man as it settles on my shoulder. I mindlessly stroke its
head while I divert my attention to the book. “Quick question: are
you a devout?”

I laugh lightly, shaking my
head.

“
I ha
ve never read the
Bible, never mind looked at one long enough to be able to pick it
off a shelf,” I reply, and he nods. “Actually, the majority of what
I have said and done in life has probably bought me a ticket to
Dante’s hell.”

He nods
knowingly;
the way only a man who has said and done things of equal heresy
could hope to understand.

What? I am no saint – and I ha
ve never claimed such. If it helps, I apologise for
misleading you.

Alth
ough, for the
record, it should have been obvious with the way I so quickly
decided to take up my father’s legacy.

“
Consider this your very own version of the Bible,” he
states, patting it, and I nod, looking from him and back to the
book. “In it, you’ll find the information of
everything from the history of Sky Piracy to
your little friend the
lizard
. For the first
week, I want you to pour over every word of this tome – I’ll answer
all your questions at the end, so write them down
somewhere.”

“
Alr
ight,” I nod,
agreeing – as they are fairly simple instructions. “Is there
information about Tier and that deity you mentioned
yesterday?”

“
Lad, there’s
everything
you need
to know about piracy,” he informs me, throwing an arm over my
shoulders. I look back at him, nodding, and Orin slinks down to my
arm to avoid his on my shoulder, shooting him an irritated look.
“Afterwards, I’ll instruct you on the hands-on material on being
the best pirate the sky has ever seen.”

I nod as he retracts his arm,
letting the lizard crawl back.

“
I’ll stop by
around noon to show you around the ship,” he states, and with
another nod he excuses himself, slipping through the doorway and
shutting the door – leaving me with a heavy book and a lizard with
attitude problems.

I look to the creature, and it
watches me impassively, blinking lazily.

“
Might as
well get started, right?” I ask it, and set it back down on the
desk. It sits there as I sit, watching me, and crawls back onto my
shoulder the moment I turn my attention away from it.

So I let it be, focusing more on the
information at my disposal – I have always been
one for learning, even about things that did not quite interest
me.

I pour through the tome for that week; as if
it is a religious text, I will
admit. From cover to cover, writing my questions and notes down in
the same notebook I used to decipher my father’s
journal.

The first thing I learn is of
the Aerodynamic Service Solution – or A.S.S – when they opened the
Sky Trade Treaty with the major powers of the world. They revealed
the technology at hand that could lift major cities to the skies as
landmarks, and created the first flying airships.

When the Forces found that this would benefit them for
military power, they attempted to close off the trade and outlaw
airship travel. As a result, men and women who had worked for the
A.S.S before the company was forced to shut down made airships in
secrecy, and launched into the skies as the first of the
Sky Pirates, raiding Fleet ships and
taking the goods and the ship.

This is what sparked the
modern-day struggle against the Fleet and the pirates, that has yet
to be resolved after over two centuries of the battle – as the
Fleet dishes out bigger and better weaponry, so too do the pirates
get more and more ingenious, bolder.

There were a few attempted cleansings, clergymen and popes
sent up to the cities to convince the men and women to come back
landside, to close their ports – only to
realise that these people had turned their backs to
their faiths, embracing a whole new concept of the world born in
the sky, what people call the Devil’s worship back
landside.

This concept is what they dubbed
Ecillya
, a
belief that fortune, destiny, life, death and journeys are all
embodied by a spirit, or a deity. It then mentions how this deity
is sometimes represented within the physical world, through a
person – and sometimes even a creature born in the
Skylands.

There i
s the one the
Captain’s already mentioned before, Anketin, the goddess of the
future and destiny; then there’s Aebrea, the god of fortune and
luck – and one that hinges of a pirate’s success, I read; Ilnor,
the god of life and creation; Airn, the goddess of death and
destruction; and finally, Ylos, the god of journeys and travel –
the one that pirates believe preordain whether not your journey
will be made in success or vain.

From there, it elaborates on the concept behind the
mutation of the animals brought to the
Skylands. As I read this part, I glance from the tome
to Orin, always faithfully on my shoulder.

The hypothesis remains at this: the air’s density and
quality – ripe with ozone and lack of oxygen – affects the
creatures in such a way so that their bodies adapt to their
environments, evolving the way human
s have over the centuries as we have adapted to the world.
Some become able to fly, like Orin, as if their genes have taken a
step back in time to a day and age where many more things could
fly. Others do stranger things, like change their shapes completely
or their colour, and others do things that cannot be
explained.

Finally, near the end of the
week, I reach the part about Tier.

I believed it to be an island in the sky when I
first heard of it, but I could not
have been more wrong.

It’s a
battleship
, one that
came about before its time, and was launched by the A.S.S just
before their closure. A handful of men and women, escaping the
Fleet, were smuggled onto the ship prior to flight and made their
homes on this ship. As the pirates came about, they took on the
trade and turned their sanctuary into a mobile safe house for the
outlaws.

There, pirates would stow away their treasures, docking for
weeks at a time while the battleship sailed the skies. When the
ship was found by the Fleet barely half a century ago, the
battleship’s pilots instructed the pirates to sail away and to
never look back, before they pulled the airship – the S.S.
Alitis Gladio
, according to the tome – further into the sky,
to altitudes not a soul could survive at. The ship is, presumably,
drifting along as it rides the currents of the wind, its engines
long-since out of power and its pilots long dead, frozen in a metal
tomb.

Among the list of men and women who left the
Alitis
behind is two people: a man named William Watkins, age
forty-five, and his fifteen-year-old son, Cephas Kennedy
Watkins.

When that information reaches
me, I have to pull away and pace, the lizard on my shoulder getting
agitated with my movements. I leave it on the hammock, returning to
my pacing as I try to grasp the concept.

My father was
born
in the sky and
was forced to go landside, if I keep to my own deductions – I do
not trust them, though, as I have never met my father (but, as the
information piles up, I wish with all my heart, however mechanical,
that I could have had one moment with him for all these
questions
.)

No wonder he itched to be back in the
sky and piracy runs through my veins. He was
surrounded by it!

I stop pacing suddenly, the
lizard looking up from his perch on the ropes cautiously.

“
I wonder if
the Captain has a logbook with the names of every pirate to date,”
I muse to the creature, and it watches me impassively. I reach for
the scaly animal and put it on my shoulder, pulling the door open
and hurrying off down the hallway.

It i
s a long shot, my
idea, but if my hunch is correct – well, then I have a few hard
questions for the Captain.

The deckhands I pass nod at me
as we cross paths, I returning the gesture, all the way topside and
to the activity happening above, ensuring our flight remains
seamless.

I walk over to the Captain’s
quarters, knocking twice with my knuckles and ducking underneath a
plank of wood being carried by one of the pirates. He shouts his
apology at me, continuing on his task just as Captain Davis opens
up, looking at me with mild surprise on his features.

“
I wasn’t
expecting you, Kennedy,” he admits, gesturing for me to walk in. I
do so, and he shuts the door again. “What can I help you with – did
you finish the book?”

“
Every last page,” I say, and his eyes
wid
en. “That is not why I am
here though, Captain; I was wondering if you have a logbook with
the names of every Sky Pirate who ever lived. Does such a thing
even exist?”

He nods, holding up a finger as
he walks over to one of the bookshelves dominating the room while
telling me to sit on one of the couches. I do so, waiting anxiously
as he runs his fingers over the spines of the tomes lying in wait
on the shelf, frowning to himself.

“
You’ve found the list of known people who
left Tier behind, didn’t you?” he
inquires, and I nod. “To answer one question I feel you’re itching
to ask, Tier is just a nickname for the S.S.
Alitis Gladio
, in reference to a specific weapon on board – or so I’ve
heard. Also,
Alitis
is a bit of a mouthful.”

He pulls out a book from the
shelf, nodding in affirmation as a broad smile stretches across his
face, holding it at arm’s length a moment. Afterwards, the Captain
walks over to me and offers me the tome, sitting on the opposite
couch while I flip through the pages.

I find the glossary of names,
finger running down the page as my eyes devour the list of names
under W.

Cephas Kennedy Watkins; William
Watkins; Thaddeus Watkins; Lazarus Watkins; Mordecai Watkins; Fylan
Watkins.

The last is dated for the exact date when the
Sky Pirates came to be, and some of
these are clearly brothers, as the margin seems to indicate. I turn
to the page for my (supposed) ancestor, Fylan, and read what it
says.

The history of this man unfolds
in front of me, from where he was born, where he died, who he
married, his children to his life as a pirate. From there, I go to
his sons’ pages – Mordecai and Lazarus – and follow that lead to
Thaddeus, William, and a third son that is only mentioned, never
given a page. I assume that this third son didn’t become a pirate,
and was left out.

That leads me straight to
father’s page, which offers me some more insight on his past.

“
He had a sister?” I inquire as I read, three whole pages
given in my father’s
honour.
His whole life is written here, plain as day, for me to
indulge.