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The Lopen has spent the weeks since Hexi eating, climbing, and swinging in hammocks with the Thaylen sailors, picking up a few words of their language and gaining a new respect for the trade. He knows from those nights of stories that you do not *sail* a storm — you hang on and you hope. The strange weather circling Akinah is something different. Something primal under his skin warns him this is a bad idea even before the sky darkens, and Rua swims beside his head in skyeel-shape and grins through it. Turlm — six daughters back home, eats with his mouth open, always shares his booze — shouts that he should go below. Lopen calls back that he will not melt, and grips the rail.

The Wandersail runs the storm stripped of most of its rigging, looking, Lopen thinks, like a skeleton without flesh. But she is special. Fabrial pumps will bail her no matter how much water washes the deck. Attractor-fabrial stabilisers shift weights about *inside the hull* — fabrials built into the hull — to keep her from capsizing. At the captain's order the oars come out, used here for fine positioning, and the bagged oil is rigged over the side to bleed and keep the spray flat. The crew calls it *heading* the waves: hold her stern-on to the wind, crack the breakers across the bow, slip the ship sideways enough to spiral her steadily inward. The lone stormsail looks too small to do anything; the sailors swear it will work. The captain stands square in the wind and yells her orders into the gullet of the storm, and the men take it with grit.

Lopen has never thought a storm could look like this. The lightning makes the water glow transparent and crashes whole froths of it skyward; horizon-wide it is majestic and horrifying at the same time. He pulls himself along the railing to Vlxim, the day's helmsman, who is bald like Huio and plays a mean mouth harp. They one-up each other on bad weather they have seen — Vlxim has rehearsed for a highstorm crossing in this very ship, has been through one once, and brags about mountain-sized waves; Lopen counters with the place where Everstorm met highstorm and the rocks ran like water and broke against each other in waves. *Enough*, the captain bellows. *I don't have time for you two to compare sizes.* Lopen salutes her, but he can see she does not get bragging — it isn't about looking good, it is about telling the other fellow you aren't afraid.

A wave knocks his feet out and he laughs through it. He whoops as the ship climbs walls of water and crashes through their crests like Punio cutting a crowd. Then Turlm gets caught by an unexpected wave and washes clean off the deck into the black. Well, Lopen had already decided he wasn't having that. He bursts alight and Lashes himself overboard after him, drinking Stormlight until he glows underwater, and finds Turlm in the current. He has practised this on scouting runs the past few days; Lashings work fine in the deep, and Stormlight obviates the need to breathe. With Rua pointing the way — direction is hard to read in dark water — he hauls the sailor back over the rail, sticks him to the deck so he cannot wash off again, and hands him off to Fimkn, a man with a medic's background and the same complaint Lopen has about being told to boil his bandages. Turlm laughs uncontrollably, joyspren spinning around him like little blue leaves, and grips Lopen's hand in thanks — the Bridge Four hand, not the Radiant one. A replacement is already on station before Lopen has un-Lashed Turlm; the crew had been ready to lose people. *Not on his watch.*

Back up on the quarterdeck, Lopen takes the captain's permission and Lashes one of her feet to the boards so she has one perfectly steady foot to brace from while the other moves. She asks, dryly, why he had been sliding around like the rest of the deckhands earlier if he could have done that all along. *Didn't seem sporting*, he calls back over the wind. *You keep us going straight; I'll watch the crew.* She turns to her work. He has to trust she is keeping the spiral.

He keeps Rua watching the water as well. After splashing through wave after wave, the spren comes zipping back as a long-tailed skyeel and points: a dark shape running alongside them in the depths. One of the things Leyten and the Windrunners had failed to study on earlier flights, the things that had fed on their Stormlight and drained them. Lopen cannot judge its size — the depth makes that impossible — but Rua is certain. The previous accounts had said the creatures preferred to hang in cloud, indistinct, and only struck from behind once a Radiant turned away. It probably cannot do anything to him up here on the deck. He files the danger anyway: if he goes back in the water for another sailor, that thing draining him underwater would finish him. He would have to die working out new one-armed Herdazian jokes for the afterlife. He wonders briefly whether the things are kin to Chiri-Chiri; this one looks far larger and somehow blobbier.

A long while later Wvlan loses his footing. Lopen catches him before he goes over, pulls them both against the rail, and sticks them there as a wall of water washes past. He gets to his knees as the spray drains off, and notices the dark shape in the water directly below the hull — keeping pace.

Then the Wandersail punches through one last wave and the wind stops. Lopen wipes his eyes. The wind and waves still wheel in a ring behind them; the sky stays dark, but the water inside the ring is calmer, more sapphire than the green-black of the run-up. Klisn — a card-partner with an excellent sense of humour and no patience for Huio's jokes — exclaims that it is just like *the centerbeat*, and an awespren bursts around him. Lopen agrees. He sends Klisn to fetch Cord, who has been kept safely below for the duration, and climbs the steps to un-stick the captain from her deck.

He stops at the top. The captain and the helmsman are staring out across the strange calm. Something is emerging from the fog. An island, ringed by enormous stone spikes that rise out of the ocean like a sea-built wall — with a single huge gap where a dozen or more of them appear either to have been knocked out or never set. Through the gap the waters smooth eerily. The island inside is small enough that Lopen reckons he could walk its perimeter in an hour, and at its centre he can make out what look like city walls and a few intact structures. *Well*, the captain mutters, *hie me off to Damnation. It's actually real.*