The whole ship boiled like a kicked ant bed. Aeronauts scurried up the rigging, everybody hustling hither and thither to make the ship ready for combat. Gun crews cleared their deck and made their weapons ready. The great cabin was broken down and stern chasers dragged into place. Everything that might topple, shatter, catch fire, or explode was lashed down and locked away. Isabelle commanded the overhaul. Djordji and Marie pitched in. Even Rebecca was kept busy with the rest of the powder monkeys, spreading sand on the decks and running gunpowder up from the magazine.

The activities left Jean-Claude, who had about as much aeronautical use as a bag of wet feathers, sitting on the quarterdeck, as out of the way as it was possible to be, with Sagax Quill and Hailer Dok, the former having no skill at ships and the latter having no use for hard work.

“Don’t you fear. I sings up the winds when the need rises,” Dok said, leaning back against the bulwark.

No one seemed inclined to conversation, so Jean-Claude hunkered down to the point where if he tilted the brim of his hat just right, he couldn’t see the sky sloshing around. He pulled Keelmate Gephardt’s journal from his pack. Not that he expected it to show him anything new, but having a dead man to talk to was better than no one at all. He put on his spectacles and opened it to the last written page.

There was an equation and a drawing of the glass spiral with the rusted wire accompanied by the words Tested dynamic coil in proofing chamber. Twenty-five cycles. Coil degraded. Aether penetrating alchemical glass?

Jean-Claude imagined that written on a memorial plaque. “Aether penetrating alchemical glass?” Death was a banal scriptwriter.

Jean-Claude flipped back to the previous page. There was more math, another drawing, and the words Assembled dynamic coil. Distillate of rarefied lumin gas ~.01% impure. Try galvanic inducement. Fed Bosun Whiskers.

There were pages and paged of similar entries. Gephardt was the sort of man who could walk into a clock shop and all the merchandise would set itself to him. Anyone who had watched his daily routine once need never do so again to know exactly where he’d be. Had someone used that knowledge to surprise him?

A whistle in the wind caught Jean-Claude’s attention. A thin, cold breeze came aboard and whispered by him, carrying music heard as if from behind a closed door.

Hailer Dok stirred. His eyes rounded as the wind coiled around him, rustling his hair and tickling his ears. It was a whispering wind, the kind Windcallers used to talk to one another across the deep sky. Dok popped to his feet and hurried to the poop deck.

Jean-Claude clambered after him. Who was talking to him, and what did they have to say? Were there more Gyrine around here? The last thing Isabelle needed was more surprises.