Dok, on the other hand, was vulnerable. His captors had muffled his powers, and the guards they’d placed around him were inward-facing, to keep him from escaping. Without the Windcaller, passage through the Bittergale was impossible, and the conspiracy would fail. If that didn’t work, he might seize the key and toss it into the Gloom.

With these thoughts in mind, Jean-Claude acquired a rope and harness of the kind the aeronauts wore when they were knocking around the hull of the ship. He ascended to the main deck. His only consolation for the unbearable cold was that with bulky clothes came a greater level of anonymity. With his girth covered and his eye concealed under a hood, he dared venture up on the main deck in daylight.

If you could call it daylight. Behind him the Solar was barely two hand spans above the cloud horizon even at midday, so that every upright thing cast long shadows along the deck. The dome of the sky was gray and dead, as if all the color had drained south for the winter, and a dreadful churning noise like the rumble of a rockslide rolled down constantly from the north.

Some way ahead of the Potencia—distances aloft were always hard to tell—the sky ended in an immense vortex of wind-borne ice, snow, and debris: the Bittergale.

The sheer scope of it beggared Jean-Claude’s imagination.

It stretched up from the Gloom, carrying with it streaks of lightning from the Galvanosphere. It stirred the Miasma like a witch’s cauldron, drawing the noxious brew into itself, and it reached so high into the sky that it seized the uppermost clouds and dragged them screaming by their tails into its maw. It stretched out to devour the horizon on either side.

Jean-Claude turned from the Bittergale’s snarling menace. He could not linger on deck. Everyone not needed for steering the ship and keeping it clear of ice was huddled below, but those who remained would surely notice if he did not immediately make himself busy.

He shuffled toward the back of the ship. Ice rained down around him, kicked loose by topsmen from the spars and rigging. Even more men scraped and shoveled it off the deck.

He passed two safety launches athwart the ship and just forward of the wheel. If he could get Dok into one of those and launch it, they’d be adrift in a freezing sky in a tiny boat in the middle of deadly winter. It was a terrible plan, but it was the only one he had. Conditions would only get worse from here.

Unfortunately, the marines in charge of keeping uninvited guests out of the cabins remained at their posts, or at least as close to their posts as could be managed whilst sheltering behind crates and barrels.