SKY OF PAPER: AN ASIAN STEAMPUNK FANTASY

CHAPTER 45

A runner was sent aft, where he gave the all-ready into the voice tube. The ship's captain high above in the command tower sounded the departure bells. Shortly, the hull began to creak and rattle, straining against the steam engines as they came to full power, lurching us forward ever steadily. The ship seemed anxious in its departure as it scraped against the ground, pummeling trees and foliage under its bow. We found ourselves in such a hurry that the engines were premature in giving the vessel forward momentum as Lai in the ritual room below, had not yet completed his task of lifting the bow into the air. But I had little doubt in his skills, as almost instantly the ship began to float into the currents. 

Moments later, a familiar voice was heard crying out from within the fog.  

"Ai! I know you’re there." It was Masa, Ai's brother, beckoning from below. "Please come back to us. Father says he forgives you. I know you‘re not a traitor."

Masa was certainly with the general's party and there was no doubt that he was now a part of Rui Nan's Air Navy, one of many chienkuu ko in service to General Fung's military. Still, to hear his voice sounding in the distance was a shock that Ai was assuredly not prepared for. 

I watched as she froze, while a brief expression of disbelief flashed suddenly upon her face. She then lowered her listless gaze. 

"You shouldn’t listen to him," I said. “Especially if he’s joined your father.”

"He's lying." Though it was obvious that hearing her brother saddened her, I sensed a hint of admiration as she spoke of him. "Even though he's calling out to me, he has no sincerity in his voice. He's calling my name only because Master Lu... our father ordered him to. I know my brother, and I know what he truly wants for me. He wants me to run. He wants me to stay away, to stay as far away as I can possibly go."

"You can tell that, just by hearing his voice?" Kassashimei asked.

"Of course. We're siblings are we not?" She turned her head away in a vain attempt to conceal her emotions. Her voice wavered slightly. "Please, keep at your duties. We‘re not in the clear just yet."

I nodded, and Kassashimei and I turned our focus back to the task at hand. Just as we had shaped the flames the night before, we pushed and pulled at the surrounding clouds, making sure to obscure our escape.

However, even as I kept to my duties, an icy feeling of guilt gripped my chest. I‘d seen something that very few had ever witnessed. Ai, in all her elegance and gentle pride, had faltered and shown me herself in a fleeting moment of weakness. Though I knew it was not my place ask, I wondered what regrets, or perhaps what shame she carried secretly with her. 

We left the Eastern Kingdom that day in much the same way that we’d left Rui Nan. We’d become a ship of outcasts, carrying the exiled from not one, but two separate countries.

The Eastern Kingdom was a nation four times the size of our homeland. But because of its history of ceaseless civil conflicts, the country was never stable enough to carry a sizable military. Unrest amongst neighboring clans and border raiders had left the citizens of the Eastern Kingdom in greater poverty than any nation in the world at the time. It was because of this that General Fung was able to conquer the king's territory in only one short month. Though his surprise attack was ruthless and unrelenting the rest of the countries of the world, concerned with their own domestic affairs and hiding behind a curtain of ignorance hardly paid any notice of the actions of one tiny island nation. Why would anyone care about the ambitions of one unimportant, impoverished country conquering another?