Beasts of Salt & Steel

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley,

Those iron beasts who scorched both land and tree,

But Above, the Trident forged through rains of fire,

And safe is our new home beneath the Sea.

⍦

I was shackled in a steamcart and headed toward death, but all I could think about was the color white and how I’d never seen it before.

Sure as slag was seeing it now, though.

Helm gleamed with it, from the cobbled milkstone bridge our convoy was crossing to the peaks and parapets of the city we were closing in on.

In the distance the spires of The Trident towered over everything else, taller than stacking all the buildings back home. Seemed it, anyway. Like someone standing at the top could touch the skydome if they reached hard enough.

I decided I didn’t like it, the color white. Felt empty. Something about it made my teeth sting.

The titan riding in front signaled to someone on the city wall and the gate at the far end of the bridge—an intricate thing, all gilded and gold—began to rise.

Helm’s streets were paved with seaglass cobblestones; sapphire and seafoam, aqua and opaque. It’d been four days since they came for me, long enough that the black sludge of Jetsam’s streets had dried and flaked from my boots. Disappointing, that. Would’ve rather liked to see Jetsam mud marring their ridiculous streets.

People stared as we passed. Suppose it was fair. Reckon I was a strange thing to behold, with my dark leathers and black hair, shaved off save for what was tied in a knot at the top of my head. A spectacle in a city where women wore white linen tunics and let their yellow hair grow past their navels.

I smiled at a little girl in the door of a shop. No sense being a cog about it, wasn’t her fault I’d be dead by Bloomtide. Instead of smiling back she whispered in the ear of the girl beside her, then they were giggling, pointing as I passed.

Others were laughing too, and a moment later I realized why.

I was a welder with a burned face. Melted skin like candlewax from forehead to cheekbone on the right side, and it was funny, couldn’t fault them for seeing the irony. Only a shite welder would end up torching their face. Didn’t matter that it hadn’t happened like that. First impressions stick.

Nobody had ever laughed at me before. Especially not in Bilge End, a derelict corner at the edge of town so infested with toxers and air-pirates that even the saltroaches tend to steer clear. Grow up in a place like that and people respect you. Fear you, anyway.

These people were looking at me like I was something slimy dredged up from the murky fishing trenches back home.

Something that felt a bit like pride surged in my chest, angry and hot. Slag the lot of them.

I could anchor a steamsub to the outside of Jetsam’s dome while strapped in a bubblesuit and patch a leak big as a spidersquid in total blackness, nothing but the sparks from my torch and the hiss of my air tank. Put a torch in my hand I could build damn near anything.

Anything, save for the task ahead of me.

But I wasn’t a slagging magician—no one could build them their tin balloon. Welders had been trying for a thousand years, and they’d been dying for their failure just as long. And always someone from Jetsam. Bred to die, we were.

Were you not educated at the universities in Fathom? I wanted to shout at the gawking crowd. Build your own brinydamn balloon.

Ark. Their own brinydamn ark. Suppose I had to get used to pointless pretense. I was in Helm now.

Several other titans fell into step beside the steamcart, sunbulb light glinting off their armor like whimsyfish scales. Their sunbulb was far brighter than ours, I realized, squinting up at the domesky. Bet it never flickered out after a leak, either. Bet they never even had leaks.

I went back to staring at the armor. I’d spent half the journey trying to figure if it was made of silver or platinum. Metal that fine never passed through my shop. For the best, really. Softer than a startled puffer, those metals, and half as dangerous, even hammered into a blade.

A thought occurred to me.

“Hey,” I called to the titan riding beside the steamcart. Four days travel and it was the first time I’d spoken to one of them.

The man gave me a sideways glance, all the acknowledgment he seemed willing to spare.

“At the Foundry,” I said, shouting above the rhythmic clanking of the steamhorses’ hooves on the seaglass street, “will I be given sturdy metal to work with or they expecting me to use that shite?” I nodded at his chest plate.

He looked down at himself and laughed—a sharp, brittle sound but still the closest thing to a smile I’d seen from any of them.

“Grand Welders are provided the usual materials,” he said, “the Trident doesn’t waste volcanore on welders who’ve never even heard of it, much less know how to use it.”

Good. Better than, actually. I knew my way round the usual materials better than anyone still living.

“I have heard of it,” I finally answered the titan, who shot me a look meant to shut me up. “Bunch of lads from Jetsam were recruited by the Trident when the volcanore mine was discovered cross the sea.” Recruited. Hawn would’ve smacked me for the euphemism. “Don’t think a one of them ever came home.”

We entered a large courtyard, ornate columns by the hundred and a floor of golden tiles. Behind us, four titans were heaving the massive whitewood doors shut, closing us in.

The people in the courtyard were dressed differently from the crowds in the street—gold and sapphire tunics with opal brooches in the shape of a trident. Ah. Rudders, then. Advisors to the Trident.

Our convoy stopped in front of a white staircase. One of the titans unshackled me and a woman in a gold tunic with long braided hair stepped forward, quickly putting three fingers to her lips before lifting them higher.

“Fruitful Ascension,” she said, her smile far too wide to be genuine.

She waited.

I glanced at the titan beside me, then back to the woman.

“I—oh. Fruitful Ascension.” I managed to gesture back without smirking.

Back in Jetsam you could get yourself gutted for gesturing like that. One too many dead welders and the Jetties made it mean something entirely different.

“Wick Brackish?” The woman asked.

It caught me off guard and I felt my jaw tighten.

“Wick Haven,” I said. Same surname every poor, parentless whelp is given when they show up on the crooked doorstep of Blackwater Haven. Not that a rudder from Helm would know.

A line appeared in the woman’s brow. “But—Hawn Brackish was your father, no?”

I had to clear my throat to find my voice. “Not by blood.”

I could forgive the mistake—even in Bilge End people had always assumed we were kin—but I couldn’t forgive his name on her lips, and the dagger in my boot burned against my ankle. Found myself wondering if I could take her tongue before the titans overpowered me.

“Well,” she sighed, her smile wide again, “a very skilled welder, anyway, that man.”

“Not anymore.”

Her eyes flicked to mine and it was a small comfort, the way her grin faded.

“Your helmaidens,” she said, quickly signaling to three girls on the bottom stair.

They bowed in unison without looking up.

“They’ll ready you for the ceremony,” her eyes slid from my scars all the way down to my sludge-stained boots, “as best they can. Should you need anything, have one of them send for me.” She bowed and backed away.

“And?” I called after her. “You are?”

One of the helmaidens made a small noise of surprise. Could’ve sworn she even smirked.

The woman’s smile was fixed in place when she turned back. “Rudder Mira,” she touched her chest, “of Prong Morgan.”

I hummed thoughtfully, making a show of being unimpressed. Prong Morgan. Leftmost prong of The Trident. Equal in prowess to Morrow, the rightmost. In theory, all three were meant to hold equal power, but everyone knew the central, Prong Martingale, was the bloodline that ruled League.

As I turned to follow the helmaidens up the steps I noticed an identical stairway on the opposite side of the courtyard, another trio of meek helmaidens posed similarly, as if waiting for another convoy to arrive.

Which—they were, I realized, of course they were. The other helmaidens were waiting for the Ascender.

Could always be worse, Hawn used to say about every unfortunate thing that came his way.

He wasn’t wrong.

Being named Grand Welder would be shite. But I’d rather face a thousand executions for welding them a failed ark than be the poor bastard forced inside of it, sacrificed to the flames of the apocalypse Above.

As I climbed the polished steps I glanced down at my boots. I’d need to find a place to stash the dagger. Or, rather, the scrap of paper hidden in the hilt. Hawn’s message. His last words. Still hadn’t figured what they meant, and I didn’t want to go to the execution stage in two tides still wondering. Not knowing.

I needed to know. And I was running out of time.

⍦

The note had arrived the day after Hawn’s execution.

Lyrics from the Ballad of League, hastily scratched on a scrap of parchment, rolled into a vial and fastened to the leg of a crooner. The bird had flown into the shop, muddy from the tunnels and looking downright irritated, as if delivering a note in Jetsam was a task better suited for reefrats and saltroaches.

Seemed a feat, Hawn managing to send a crooner out before they killed him. Had to be important, dying declarations and all that.

But then—it was just those lyrics.

Four lines. Dragons in the Valley, iron beasts, Trident forged, new home beneath the sea.

A child’s song the whole of League grew up singing, from the shit-stained alleyways of Jetsam all the way to the great arching halls of Helm.

Trident propaganda, Hawn always called it. Indoctrination cloaked in a nursery rhyme.

It brassed me off, the note did. I didn’t want to be angry with him, but why were those his last words to me? Why not goodbye? Why not run, because you could be next? It made no sense.

Nearly drove myself mad with it in the weeks that followed. Lying awake with those lyrics tumbling round my head like river rocks. Lost time during the day, too, stood in front of the workbench, staring off as I laid waste to some half-soldered tankard with my forgotten torch.

There had to be more to it, I’d decided, but the longer I stared at that brinydamn scrap of paper the less sense it made.

Eventually, I'd set it aside. There were orders to fill, a shop to manage. A mouth other than my own to feed.

I'd told Hawn not to take the kid in—we’d managed the shop just fine, the two of us. Nothing to do for it now, though.

Fill the orders, manage the shop. Keep Silver alive.

The days and weeks after Hawn’s death marched on, and soon ten tides had passed.

By the time Goldentide arrived I’d all but forgotten Hawn’s strange note.

Maybe if I hadn’t forgotten I would’ve seen it coming.

The morning it happened, Silver woke me in the dark, early hours.

“Titans,” he whispered, “four of them, asking for you. I had to let them in, they were gonna break the door—”

I hushed him and dressed quickly, dawning horror creeping in my gut like an Icetide frost. Nearly a year since Hawn’s death meant another Naming Day was upon us. Time for two more sacrificial lambs to be announced. One to Ascend. One to build.

That was when I remembered the note, tucked away in my wardrobe. I slipped it into my dagger’s compartment. Tucked it into my boot.

There was a sword in a sheath on the floor, but there’d be no point. Even if I managed to take out all four, more would come.

I found Silver cowering halfway down the steps. Wanted to shake my fist at Hawn’s ghost. What the slag was I supposed to do with the kid?

Shortly after Hawn’s death, the Windlass girl had come by to offer condolences on behalf of her kin. Brenna was her name. Apprenticed to the weld shop in Skeg Row. She’d knelt down on the shop’s floor, hand on Silver’s smudged cheek, and said come by the shop if there’s anything you need…

Far as I could see, sweeping one weld shop was the same as sweeping the next.

“Go to the shop in Skeg Row,” I said to Silver, “tell them what’s happened. They’ll take you in.” I put my hand on his head as I passed. I’d never shown him affection before, and I had the distant thought that maybe it would’ve done us both some good if I had.

He didn’t ask what was happening.

He knew.

The shackles the titans put round my wrists were cold and poorly made. Ironic, that.

They were leading me out the shop door when Silver called after me.

“Build it good,” he shouted, “so they let you come home.”

I smiled at him, wide as I could manage. Gave him a nod I hoped was reassuring.

Then I let the titans lead me out into the muddy street where the convoy was waiting.

My throat had gone dry and my palms were prickling but I wasn’t about to give them the satisfaction of my fear.

I kept my back straight, kept my head held high. Just as Hawn had when they summoned him to be Grand Welder ten tides earlier.

⍦

They brought me to a large room, tiled from ceiling to floor with colorful stones. There was a wide doorway on the far wall where curtains of white linen billowed lazily, offering glimpses of the balcony beyond.

In the middle of the room there was a large, square pit of steaming water, flanked by massive milkstone pillars.

A bath, I realized, nearly laughing. It was as big as the weld shop.

After washing, I was given fresh clothes—newly tailored, by the look—and the helmaidens gathered my old ones. To burn them, probably.

“Wait,” I rushed over, “the boots—I’ll keep the boots, please. They were a gift.”

It was a lie but it worked, and as soon as they took their leave I retrieved the dagger from the boot and Hawn’s note from the dagger.

The floor’s tiling was cracked in the far corner, the fissure large enough to conceal the blade. Once I’d slipped it in it was near invisible unless you knew to look.

I slid Hawn’s note into the waistband of my breeches. Wasn’t about to go anywhere without it.

There was music playing in the distance and I wandered out to the balcony, following the sound. Stood there for a long moment, thoughts coming and going like the soft breeze.

There was a small noise behind me. Someone clearing their throat.

I turned. It took a beat to realize why I recognized the person standing there.

“Brenna Windlass?” My mind short-circuited. “Why are—are you—?”

She nodded like I’d actually asked a question. “Seems Jetsam will lose two of its own this year. Can’t say I fault the idea, Bilge End’s gotten far too crowded, could do with a good culling.” A short sigh. “Rather wish it wasn’t us, but. Here we are.” She shrugged, like the idea of burning alive was nothing.

I just nodded. I didn’t quite know what to do with that.

“Mind if I join you?” She asked, gesturing vaguely. “Our robing rooms share the terrace, but if you’d rather be alone…?”

I was still processing when I realized she was backing away because I’d taken too long to answer and she thought that—

“NO!” I said, loud enough to send a flock of crooners to the sky if there’d been one. “No. I mean yes, you can join.” I groaned internally.

Thankfully, Brenna didn’t turn around and go back the way she came. Instead, she hummed thoughtfully before joining me at the balcony’s edge.

She looked nothing like she did back home, where her long hair was always tied up in a cord, her cheeks smudged with ash. It was strange seeing her like this, wearing a shimmering dress that clung to her like molten silver. They’d braided her hair in the usual Helm fashion and it looked a lighter shade of blonde. Maybe it was just clean.

They’d done something to her eyes, too. Rimmed them in silver to match the dress. Brought out the blue. Rare thing for a Jetty to have blue eyes.

“Did you take a long swim in the tub, too?” She wiggled her eyebrows when she asked.

“Not long enough.”

She threw her head back when she laughed, and there was something nice about the delicate swoop of her nose.

It wasn’t a secret she was pretty. Everyone in Jetsam knew she was pretty. We’d lost customers when she’d started apprenticing in Skeg Row and Hawn had blamed her looks. He’d probably been right.

Thing was, Brenna wasn’t all that good at welding. Rumor had it she was right as a rig with a sharkspear in hand, but for some reason she’d turned down a fishing apprenticeship and taken up the torch.

Probably why they were choosing her to Ascend. Unpleasant truth, that. A Jetty welder who couldn’t weld wasn’t worth shite to League. Waste of resources.

Slag them all. She didn’t deserve to die like that. Above and alone. I’d never seen her without a smile on. Never an unkind word. She deserved better.

I kept stealing glances at her dress. Couldn’t help it. I’d never seen material like that before.

She caught me looking. “I requested a dress of reefrat fur,” she said, “thought it would be nice to pay homage to our city.” The corner of her lip twitched.

“You, um. You look…” good? nice? beautiful? “like metal.” Slag it all, I was a cog.

Brenna laughed softly.

“I just meant you’re shiny,” I said. “That your dress is shiny, you’re not—sorry, I just meant—”

“I know what you meant,” she smiled. Then, after a moment, “And you look inky.”

I looked down at the black boots they’d given me. The taut black breeches. The black shirt, sleeves rolled to reveal the tendrils of black tattoos curling down my arms.

“Ridiculous, isn’t it?” She asked, looking out across the city, which had begun to grow rowdy. People singing ballads in the street, bells ringing, Naming Day banners flying. “All this pomp and circumstance?”

She’d been smiling not a minute earlier—the memory of it was still there on her lips, but it was fading and the effect wasn’t unlike a setting sunbulb.

“Did the currant berries stain?” She asked.

Some part of my brain snapped out of it, dragging the rest of me to attention.

“Wh—huh?”

“You were staring at my mouth."

“Oh—no, there’s no—sorry, I didn’t mean to stare."

She wasn’t smiling—not exactly, but the suggestion of it was dancing in her eyes.

I turned round, leaned back against the parapet. Not to hide my scars, I told myself. Just to keep her from noticing my warm cheeks.

But there she was, looking at me like she could read my mind.

Nothing to do but chuckle. She was about to laugh at me, rightfully so. Might as well beat her to it.

Instead, her head went to one side. “Mm.”

“What?” Came out a bit defensive, that.

“I’ve not seen you smile before. Wasn’t sure you knew how.”

“Oh. I do,” I said. “Know. How.” Prize idiot, I was.

“I’m glad.”

A timid cough drew our attention to the open doors of my robing room, where one of the helmaidens was standing.

“They’ve rang the bells,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper. “It’s time.”

⍦

Last Ascension Day what was left of the ark had returned melted and charred. Every year, the same.

Except last year it was Hawn who’d forged it. Hawn who had to pay the price.

​​They’d televised his execution the usual way. Grainy images of the courtyard in Helm, projected onto the domed skies of all five cities.

They’d given him the glass helmet, same as every other Grand Welder before him. Shackled to a chair, a great globe around his head, filled just to the nose with seawater.

Cruel thing, the helmet. Most people panic and swallow as much of the water as they can. Enough to uncover their nose. And it works, for a time. Until the saltwater roils their hollow bellies and comes back up. They die drowning in their own sick while the crowds laugh and cheer.

Hawn didn’t swallow the water. His face turned purple inside the globe, vessels popping, bloodbursts blooming in his wide eyes.

I’d watched from the doorway of his shop in Bilge End, eyes on the flickering sky and fingers going numb round the hilt of the dagger I barely knew I was strangling.

Get on with it, I’d thought. End it, don’t give those slagging cogs the entertainment they’re looking for.

He’d started shaking; small tremors at first and then great shudders. Seizures, maybe. Wasn’t entirely sure what drowning entailed. Finally, his hands clenched in their shackles—once, twice, and he was gone.

A small voice came from the shadows across the narrow alley. “What do we do now?”

Silver. Hawn would’ve flayed me for letting him see.

“Shouldn’t have watched that.” It came out like a growl but I couldn’t muster a shred of softness.

Not when they were still projecting images of Hawn’s limp body in the sky. Someone in the crowd threw something at him. Something that splattered black against his still chest. The people in Helm cheered louder.

“They’re laughing at him,” Silver said, and this time there was a quiver to his voice. “He’s dead and they’re having a laugh—”

“They’re not laughing here,” I said, firm and final.

A moment later I realized it was true. All of Jetsam had poured into the muddy streets to turn their eyes skyward, but the city had gone silent, the only sound the ever-present hum of the generators in the distance.

⍦

The Naming Day Ceremony was always held on a small island across the turquoise lagoon surrounding Helm. There was an ampitheatre there, built right into the milkstone. Took up most of the island.

It looked bigger in person. Bigger and bigger as the boat drew ever nearer.

Helm loomed behind us, its polished white turrets glowing amber beneath the setting sunbulb.

There was a large steamferry anchored at the end of a whitewood dock, a line of people waiting to board. It stretched all the way down the dock, up the winding milkstone stairway carved into the cliffs, and disappeared through a door in the side of Helm’s outer wall.

The audience, I realized. Everyone in Helm.

A trumpet sounded from one of the Trident spires, joined by a second trumpeter, then a third. Heralding the ceremony with a rousing rendition of The Ballad of League. Probably had the whole of Helm feeling downright patriotic.

I shook my head. To think they’d put Hawn through all this.

My eyes caught on something at the top of the highest spire and my pulse skipped.

There it was.

A thick cable, visible even from the lagoon, stretching up and up and up. Disappearing into the dimming, dappled sky. Odd, seeing it in person. Odder still to think it wasn’t just a projection on a domesky that would shut off in several hours time, letting the rest of us forget until next year.

My pulse skipped again. Thought I’d been brave til now but maybe I’d just been in shock.

There was a whitewood dock identical to the one at Helm’s edge, but our boat bypassed it and headed straight into the mouth of a small cave. Blue flames flickered from sconces along the cave’s wall. Our boat slowed.

We pulled up along a flat rock and I could see a stairway just beyond. Someone helped me down, or maybe I climbed out myself. Things had begun to go fuzzy. My pulse had picked up again, and this time it didn’t slow.

Everything that followed came in flashes.

Blue flames lighting the stairway.

Being surrounded by titans and helmaidens in the damp, dark wings of the stage.

Rudder Mira offering me a goblet of blackfruit cordial. Drinking it. Slag my pride. Might be the last time I tasted cordial.

The colors of League were everywhere, from the banners that hung on every wall to the gowns and waistcoats the audience had adorned themselves in. Burnt orange for Reef, plum for Fathom, brown for Driftwood, pewter gray for Jetsam, sapphire for Helm.

One flag, five colors. Like were all in it together.

Glass focalators had been fixed atop the rotating sconces, focusing each flame into a bright beam that the stagehands flashed around the open theatre, much to the delight of the crowd.

The bright blue beams shone into the alcove, making everything strange and surreal.

Brenna Windlass stood in a similar alcove across the stage, her silver dress flashing every time the beams caught on it. She looked nervous.

The music was building. Harps and trumpets, louder and louder.

Just then a troupe of players in wildly colorful costumes burst from a trapdoor beneath the milkstone stage.

Of course. The reenactment.

It went on for ages. Bizarre thing, theatre. Grown men in flying harnesses, flapping metal wings strapped to their arms. Some contraption beneath their chin giving the illusion they could spit fire. The audience gasped and cheered.

They told the whole story. How peaceful life was in the lush Valley. How there was no warning before the iron dragonships came. How hot the fires were. How much death. How much ruin.

How three of the wealthiest families from the Valley joined together to start a new civilization. A colony nestled safely beneath the waves of the Last Sea.

I asked for more blackfruit cordial at that point.

In the final act, a trio of players dressed in golden tunics stood centerstage and recited their closing monologue. A flowery reminder of why The Trident builds an ark each year. Why one brave soul must go Above, and why we must keep going Above, until the day the ark returns with the Ascender alive and well. Until the day we can go home.

The players exited, and the applause was cut short by an echoing clang of symbols.

The sunbulb went black, the only light now coming from the blue beams. Suddenly, high above the ampitheatre, similar beams appeared. More and more, giving the dome a strange, glassy appearance. A great shadow passed overhead and the audience strained in their seats to watch it go by.

My heart stopped. Their dome was made of glass, and with the blue beams lighting the black water above us we could look straight up into the sea. It wasn’t a shadow that’d passed overhead, it was a whale.

I forgot myself for a moment. Felt my jaw drop. It was slagging impressive.

The orchestra launched into Ballad of League one last time, and as the stagehands focused their beams on the dome, words began to appear. They’d been painted right onto the glass, it seemed, visible only when the blue light was on them.

Lyrics to the same song the orchestra was playing. The same song the giddy audience was singing. The same brinydamn lyrics from Hawn’s note.

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley,

Those iron beasts who scorched both land and tree,

But strong the Trident forged through rains of fire,

And safe is our new home beneath the Sea.

Something niggled in the back of my head. They were the same lyrics from the note—almost. But something about them was different.

I glanced around—the titans and rudders were all watching the sky—and pulled the note from the waistband of my breeches. In the dim light I could barely read it, but there it was—the third line. Hawn had written Above instead of strong.

He’d written it wrong. But Hawn had lived sixty-five years in League, he knew that song like he knew his own name.

Something on the note glinted in the blue light. I held it up. Squinted at it. Just then one of the beams swiveled our way and—

For a moment I was certain the floor had collapsed beneath me. Swallowed me whole.

There, on the tiny scrap of parchment Hawn had risked everything to send me, was a message only visible in blue flame.

They’re lying about Above.

There was a pounding in my ears that had nothing to do with the ballad’s drumbeats. A roar that had nothing to do with the audience.

On stage someone was introducing themselves as Rudder Cannon, of Prong Martingale. Someone across the way was pushing Brenna onstage.

“Without further ado,” Rudder Cannon was saying, “it’s my honor to name Brenna Windlass as this Ascension’s Grand Welder.”

The roaring in my ears grew louder. Louder still.

Nothing made sense. They’d just named Brenna. Why was I here?

They’re lying about Above.

Then someone was pushing me from behind, shoving me onstage beneath the blinding lights.

“And Wick Haven,” Rudder Cannon said, his voice booming, echoing up and up and up to the glass sky, “as this year’s Ascender.”