A shriek, thin and reedy, tore through the groaning ziggurat. It was Nim-Rua. Her sanctuary, the small, enclosed space she used for weaving and rationing, was directly in the path of the encroaching mire.
“Batzal!” Her voice, usually soft, rasped with sudden panic. He turned from the porthole, sweeping his gaze across the main deck. The thermal brass hull, once a shield, now conducted the infernal heat, making the air thick and stifling. The floorboards, already warping from the sustained exposure, began to weep thin streams of mud. Not just a trickle anymore, but a network of fissures opening. The air shimmered with the stench of sulphur and wet clay.
The two Coral-Caste merchants huddled on a raised bench, their orange tunics spattered with silt. The elder wailed, “We’re sinking! We’re all going to boil!”
Yutika, her mouth pinned in a severe crease, had already moved to the central chalkboards. Her fingers, still adorned with a single, heavy ring she had refused to part with, tapped the numbers Batzal had meticulously transcribed. “The required deficit to achieve safe flotation,” she stated, dry amidst the steam, “is sixty-eight kilograms. To the decimal, Batzal.”
The calculation was accurate, verified by the tally on his slate. He had known this moment would come. The critical point. The threshold where the cork-wood structure demanded an expulsion. He looked at Nim-Rua, who was hauling a chest of woven reed mats above the slurry line, her thin arms trembling. A wet rattle caught in her lungs, echoing the creaks of the timber.
“Nim-Rua,” Yutika said, tapping the slate with her fingernail. “Her intake, her lung rot, the drain on stores… and her mass. Twenty-eight kilograms, Batzal. A liability. Mathematically, she must be the first subtraction.”
Batzal gripped his chalk. Nim-Rua. The only one who had believed in his designs when the Guild of Harbors declared him a madman. The only one who had worked tirelessly, her slender fingers knotting the cork-wood fibers, sealing the hull with him during the frantic hours before the flood. She was a constant, a loyal shadow. To cast her out… it was an equation he had never allowed himself to solve.
He strode to the slate, bypassing Yutika. His gaze traced the numbers: the remaining grain jars, the sealed water drums, the mass of the passengers, his own spare frame. He had accounted for everything. Every morsel, every drop, every breath. But not this. Not an eviction that severed his debt to the weaver.
“The current,” Batzal rasped, “is dragging us toward the Geysers of Vorlag. Lightening the hull is necessary, but shedding food depletes the labor needed to work the manual bilge pumps.”
Yutika scoffed. “And keeping a dying woman on board drowns the entire temple. Her coughing fouls the cabin, her hands hold no lines. The maps show a rift through the Vorlag field where draft must be shallow. Her mass, plus the water and grain she drains before expiring, sinks us all.” She gestured with an imperious sweep towards Nim-Rua, who had fallen to her knees, clutching her chest, a fresh bout of coughing wracking her frame.
“She hammered the seals with me,” Batzal said, staring at the bilge. They demanded this of him. They always did.
“Sentiment is a luxury we no longer possess,” Yutika retorted, her eyes hard. “You, of all people, Batzal, should understand. What is one life against the survival of many? Your own principles dictate this. The ledger demands it.”
Nim-Rua looked up, her knuckles grey around the storage straps. She understood the tally. The silence in the cabin stretched, punctuated only by the wet gurgle of the mud seeping in and Nim-Rua’s strained breathing.
Batzal closed his eyes for a fleeting second, picturing the meticulous blueprints of his life, his career, ruined by Yutika’s accusations. And yet, Nim-Rua had been there. A constant, unyielding thread of loyalty in a life that had otherwise unraveled. He would not sacrifice that. Not yet.
He stalked over to the storage area, ignoring the astonished looks of Kelus and Vintar. He hauled the primary water drum, a brass cask holding forty-five liters of boiled condensate. His boots slipped on wet silt as he dragged it toward the discharge hatch. Yutika dropped her chalk, her composure breaking into disbelief.
“What are you doing?” she shouted, lunging forward. “That is our freshwater supply!”
Batzal threw his shoulder against the latch. “The hull requires sixty-eight kilograms. I am balancing it.” He kicked open the hatch. The stench of boiling mud, rich with minerals, instantly filled the air. With a tremendous effort, Batzal shoved the barrel out. It vanished with a splash, the sound swallowed by the churning mud.
“Forty-five kilos cleared,” he said, throat dry. He seized a sealed zinc crate of pressed grain and dried tallow—another twenty-five kilograms. He shoved it across the slick boards while the elder merchant lunged forward, clawing at Batzal's sleeve before falling back against the platform. “That feeds us for two days!”
“It buys our draft,” Batzal said. He heaved the crate out. It too, disappeared. The splash muffled beneath the immediate lift of the pagoda. A shudder, then a slow, deliberate rise. The mud level slid down, centimeter by centimeter, dropping beneath the etched danger mark on the port. The gurgling ceased. The mud receded from the lower deck, leaving behind a steaming, slick residue.
He had done it. He had bought them time. He stood there, chest heaving, ignoring the trembling of his limbs. He had preserved his builder, even if it bankrupted their provisions.
Yutika, her face pale, walked slowly to the chalkboard. She picked up a piece of chalk, her movements precise, almost delicate. She erased the figure representing the water and food rations, then wrote a new, terrifying number. Her gaze locked on his, dead and hollow. “Two days of water remaining, Batzal. The journey to the High-Peaks is four. We float. Now we parch.”