The Potencia lurched and groaned, waking Jean-Claude from a fitful half-sleep. Once, in his army days, he’d slept through an artillery barrage, but his side had been the one delivering it. Being on the receiving end was considerably more harrowing.

Bells rang and pipes sounded for some kind of maneuver. Jean-Claude dragged himself out of his niche to have a go at the chute. It was only then he realized the hailstone bombardment had stopped. He stood rapt, listening to the benign creaking of the hull, waiting for another almighty bang, but even the howl of the wind had faded. They’d made it. Somehow against all good sense they’d made it through the Bittergale.

He stole out of his hiding place and peeked out a gun loop on the turvy deck. It was full night outside. Even so, to starboard he could see the inside wall of the Bittergale. The wind whipped by with a receding howl.

Out the larboard side of the ship, in the distance, a great dark smear, barely more than a smudge against night, stretched left and right as far as the eye could see: the Craton Auroborea.

He focused on it with his clockwork eye. A landscape of high cliffs and narrow fjords curved away at a distance even the quondam prosthesis could not make out. Beyond the coastal bluffs, jagged mountains loomed.

Isabelle would love this.

Voices from above warned him of officers coming his way. The beaten-down clayborn aeronauts rarely talked, but their saintborn masters almost never stopped.

He’d just gripped the ladder that led up into the hold when his clockwork eye suddenly opened from inside Ivar’s eye socket. No missive appeared to him this time, just a flat plain under a gray sky. Marie scooted to his right, but Jean-Claude could not follow her for the whole of Ivar’s attention was fixed on … Quaestor Czensos? Jean-Claude barely had time to register the apostate cleric when he jabbed Ivar with his staff.

A snap of galvanic fire lit up the inside of Jean-Claude’s eye socket and the eye went completely dark. He reeled and bumped against the ladder, barely holding himself upright.

The officers descended the companionway forward of his position. Jean-Claude swallowed his gorge and scrabbled up the ladder, his feet slipping from several rungs. Fortunately the officers seemed too engrossed in their own conversation to notice him.

He huddled in a crevice out of sight in the hold, and tapped on the clockwork eye, trying to get it to wake up, to signal Ivar. To his dismay, it merely rattled around in its cage. What could have caused it to fail? Back in his academy days, he’d seen artifacts like this shot with cannons and not take a scratch.