“It’s working,” said Orso, peering behind them. “Look.”
Sancia studied the dark horizon behind them. It now looked vaguely muddy, or misty. She couldn’t tell where sky started and sea began.
“Done,” said Berenice.
Again, Gregor turned the wheel, and the ship sliced through the water. “Now the tricky part,” he said. “We must come alongside the ship, and we must do so in the fog. Hopefully the fog will make the galleon slow.”
“To make it easier to catch up to?” asked Orso.
“There’s that. But if it churns up the water too much, then…Well. We will get capsized, and then chewed to pieces.”
Orso swallowed. “I see.”
“Yes,” said Gregor. “So, Sancia—please join me in the cockpit. I must know how fast or slow we need to go, and where the ship is.”
Sancia stood beside Gregor, one hand on the wall to steady herself. He brought the ship around in a giant loop until they approached the growing fog bank from the back end.
“Get ready,” he said. “And once we are in the fog, we must stay quiet. The crew will be on deck to watch for any obstacles, so they will be able to hear us.”
Sancia took a breath as they entered the wall of roiling mist. It was unpleasantly hot, not at all the cool mist she was used to. They sailed deeper and deeper in, and Sancia flexed her scrived sight, peering forward. For a while they saw nothing—her sight had its limitations—but then suddenly a giant, bright coil of silver erupted on the horizon, so huge and so intense the sight of it made her gasp.
“You see it?” whispered Gregor. “Point to it.”
She did so, sticking out her arm.
“Point to its bow, the front end,” he whispered. “Like your arm is a compass pointing north. I must know how fast it’s going.”
She did so. He adjusted his course, sailing alongside it, trying to match its speed. She whispered “Faster,” or “Slower!” and helped him adjust.
The giant ship grew closer, and closer. They felt and heard the galleon long before they saw it: the water around them began to pitch about, rattling their boat, and there was an immense sloshing of water from somewhere, like an island was rising from the depths of the sea.
“God, it’s big,” whispered Orso. “Holy scrumming shit, it’s big…”
Gregor piloted the little fishing boat closer to the galleon, Orso and Berenice gripping their seats tight as they rocked and shook in the waves. Then it emerged from the fog, a huge, towering, gleaming wooden wall that surged up like a building rising from the ocean…
“Imprinter ready,” he whispered back to Berenice.
Berenice stood, knelt, and shakily pulled out a very curious-looking espringal—an “imprinter,” an invention of hers and Sancia’s. And Sancia dearly hoped it would work well tonight.
The imprinter was like an espringal, but rather than shooting bolts, it fired slugs of lead that instantly adhered to whichever surface they struck. This in its own right was not particularly useful—but Sancia had engineered the weapon so it could engrave the slugs with sigils of your choosing just before you fired them, like a printing rig applying type for a book, which meant you could control the effects from shot to shot.
The greatest use they’d found so far had been anchoring strings: you fired one lead slug at one surface and a second at another. The slugs would stick and, upon being stuck, pull both objects together, usually very violently. And it was this last setting that Berenice was to use tonight.
She pointed her imprinter down and fired one slug into the port hull of their fishing boat. The slug adhered with a snap.
Sancia listened hard for a shout or a cry from the galleon, but there was nothing. Gregor turned the wheel and fought to keep the ship steady as a tremendous wave of seawater doused them. He nudged the boat closer, and closer, until they were nearly ten feet away from the galleon.
“Now!” he whispered.
Berenice planted her imprinter level on the hull of the fishing boat and fired at the galleon. The slug smacked into the hull and stuck fast.
For a moment nothing happened—and then, with a terrifying jerk, the scrivings sprang to life, and they were ripped across the waters until the two hulls kissed.
Sancia had to fight not to scream. She was sure that Berenice had fired a little high or low, and they were going to be tipped backward or forward and tossed from the boat—but they were not. Their ship creaked a little unpleasantly, but everything held together. They were adhered to the side of the galleon like a bloodfish stuck to the belly of a shark.
Gregor let go of the wheel and cautiously stepped away. The ship held fast. Then he and Sancia crouched and began to assemble their gear: espringals, imprinters, stunning bombs, lights, scrived rapiers, and adhesion plates.
“We will scale the ship,” Gregor whispered to them. He pointed up into the fog. “There should be a hatch over there that Sancia can break open. Once we’re in, you lot break away and trail behind us until the job is done. Got it?”
Berenice and Orso nodded, though both of them were plainly terrified.
“Good,” said Gregor. “When we’re finished, Sancia and I will use our air-sailing rigs to escape the ship and come to you.”
“Provided the foundry lexicon in the ship is still working,” said Berenice. “If not, they won’t work.”
“Then we will attempt to board shallops,” said Gregor. “Is that clear?”
“They nodded.”
“Good. Then we’ll begin.” He and Sancia fitted the adhesion plates over their hands.
“Good luck,” said Berenice. She reached out and squeezed Sancia’s shoulder. Sancia nodded, afraid that if she opened her mouth she might vomit.
Then she and Gregor approached the hull, activated their plates, and began to scale the side of the ship like builder ants crawling up a wall. Though the going was not exactly easy, she found herself wishing she’d had tools like this back in her thieving days: she couldn’t count how many times she’d worn her hands bloody trying to scale this or that wall.
Once they were about twenty feet up, she flexed her scrived sight and peered into the fog until she saw a tangle of locking logic floating in the gloom. She gestured to Gregor, and he followed her across the hull until they came to the hatch. She had to slide her hand out of one plate so she essentially dangled from the hull one-handed—she was intensely aware of the wide, churning ocean below her—but then she grabbed the hatch’s handle, and listened, and spoke to it.
The hatch’s locking logic was quite simple—obviously this entry point had not been considered a vulnerability—and soon she’d popped it open. She slipped through, gasping with exhaustion and terror, and slid over to allow Gregor to do the same. Then he shut the hatch behind them, and they were inside.