Finding the object was not as easy as the warchief hoped. Nothing worth doing ever was.

  He pointed the warjunk south-southwest, and ordered the rowers to begin. The thump of the portals opening was followed by the splash of oars hitting the water, and the vessel turned laboriously from the shore to the open ocean. Half his crew had been left behind at the smoldering village, keeping his investment safe.

  He should have stayed. A warchief didn’t leave a conquest half-finished. He couldn’t quite explain the urge that sent him out over the horizon that early afternoon. He only knew that he needed to see what had fallen. These were the instincts that led him to the islands ripest for plunder, the ones with fat tribals begging for a slaver’s whip.

  Now this instinct pushed him to find the fallen star. A line of white cloud pointed downward for a time, guiding him in the general direction, but it faded once he got into open sea.

  “Sheath oars, half sail!” he barked.

  His crew took up the cry, and there was another thump of wood as the oars were pulled into the vessel and the portals were closed behind their waterproof seals. The sails, like the crimson fins of exotic fish, unfurled, and the wind took the warjunk out to sea. Behind him, the island that was home to the Mele receded, and he was left with the glittering ocean.

  Anhchoi stood on the deck and watched his crew work. The crew pulled the catapults from firing position and lashed them in the center of the deck. They picked up the unfired clay pots of sea fire and took them below, to the lacquered hold at the aft of the ship, where they would be held fast on racks until they were needed. The rest of the crew busied themselves on the sails, the rigging, and so on. They knew their jobs. They needed Anhchoi’s presence for his stern discipline. For what he represented.

  But what was that?

  These decks had been teeming with people before the war. They all knew some of them would be lost. That was inevitable. But what Warlord Chuichan had been offering...

  Anhchoi turned his thoughts away, but he could see the scorch marks on his deck where a pot of sea fire had shattered, consuming three of his men in a thump and blossom of orange flame. A slice in the railing, still unrepaired, where the first boarding hook had bit in. A hideous brown stain in a slight dip, where the blood had pooled as the deck turned red. He’d made peace with potential losses, but that had been predicated on winning. On Zhao-Chi becoming what it should be: the greatest of the nations.

  Instead of being broken and shattered. Cast to the winds.

  Anhchoi wanted to retreat to the captain’s quarters, but he wouldn’t. In the face of so many dying so recently, his men needed to see him. They were his responsibility, and it was the poor captain who shirked that. So he stayed out on the wind-whipped decks, occasionally calling out unnecessary orders, and let his men feel the peace of being truly looked after.

  When the sun turned the sky to blood, Anhchoi ordered the sea anchors dropped. The men threw the reams of folded canvas over, the braided ropes securing it to the ships groaning with strain. When both fore and aft anchors were deployed, Anhchoi retired to his quarters.

  The chamber was small, with barely room for three people, but it was the largest one on the ship. Anhchoi opened the single portal, allowing the salt breeze to come in. He took off his sandals, and all but a single one of his blades. Then he climbed into his hammock, and listened to the men above decks sing their nightly songs. It did his heart good to know their spirits hadn’t been broken. The sea swayed under him, and the hammock swayed with it, lulling him to sleep.

  ***

  Anhchoi woke just as the sun was beginning to rise. The air was chill, snapping him to wakefulness immediately. He threw aside his single blanket, and dressed, pulling his sandals on and buckling his blades on his person. When he emerged out onto the deck, he was greeted by Baolong, his cook, putting breakfast on the table.

  “Victory be with you, warchief,” Baolong said. He was always so formal.

  Anhchoi sat at the table. It had been set up on the forecastle of the ship, with the best view of their destination. The air was cold and the breeze light. Anhchoi knew that would mean his rowers would be spending their sweat well that day.

  “And to you, cook.”

  The cook set a clay plate—old and chipped, but good enough for Anhchoi—in front of his warchief. The plate held a good breakfast: a single fish, a few dumplings, a salty clump of roe, and a bit of noodles.

  To his courier, standing unobtrusively by his shoulder, Anhchoi said, “Is Wondao ready?”

  “Yes, warchief. Waiting for your order.”

  Anhchoi waved his hand in annoyance. He despised cold dumplings, and wanted to eat them while they were still hot from the oven.

  The courier ran off and returned with Wondao, one of the catapult crew leaders on the ship. Anhchoi knew exactly which device was his—the second fore on the port side—and could easily lay out Wondao’s list of most impressive achievements. By the standards of the civilized nations, Wondao was a giant, though he would have been a smaller specimen among the tribals. Unlike them, his body was not a wreckage of fat either. Wondao was a son of Zhao-Chi, and as such, he worked. His body was like a coil of rope, collections of muscle shifting and bunching with every movement. He wore simple breeches and an open shirt with a rough half-cloak and hood for bad weather. He was barefoot. Bronze bracelets clacked at his wrists, and he carried a bronze-headed hatchet on his belt.

  He stopped a respectful distance from the table and offered a curt bow. “Morning, warchief.”

  “Sit. Sit and eat.”

  Anhchoi didn’t wait until Wondao’s ass had touched chair before he devoured the dumplings. Still mostly warm, the fish packed inside retaining the delicate flavors Baolong managed to coax from them. The warchief looked up at Wondao, who was enthusiastically devouring everything on his plate. It would be the best meal he’d have until it was his turn once again to breakfast with the captain.

  “You have my ears, Wondao, for as long as this breakfast takes. Use them.”

  Wondao nodded, and stopped shoveling food into his maw. Then he began to speak. He didn’t have many concerns, but the crew seldom did. These breakfasts did more than let his crew bring him their concerns, they allowed Anhchoi to predict them. He knew, in broad strokes, what a catapult crew leader’s life was because he had spoken to them all. He’d led his own catapult crew many, many years ago, on Chuichan’s ship, but those days were gone. Now, he had to look to the future, and so he did.

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  When breakfast was over, the courier and cook took away the plates and food, and two deckhands removed the table and chairs and returned them to their nightly storage. Breakfast for the crew—usually little more than fish stew with noodles, bolstered with whatever fruit or vegetable they could find—was finished, and the men were working. Anhchoi ordered oars out, and the Kwailoon moved inexorably toward where the star fell.

  “Land!” shouted Waifun, the lookout perched on the mast. He pointed ahead, shouting again.

  Anhchoi squinted, shading his eyes from the afternoon sun. Soon, he could dimly perceive a narrow black line on the horizon. An island, but it appeared to be a small one. He cursed the luck that had Makani off his ship when he needed her. She knew every tribe in the sea; she would know if one was there.

  “Eyes sharp for signs of tribals.” He didn’t have to enumerate: outriggers, lines of smoke, all the things that betrayed a tribal village on that nameless spit of land. Anhchoi wasn’t overly concerned. Even at half manpower, his warjunk was a match for a village—though depending on how many of their priest-witches were pretending, that victory would be costly. Anhchoi wasn’t certain he had the stomach to lose more of his men. He fidgeted, toying with his long mustache.

  “None!” called Waifun.

  Anhchoi nodded, his heart slowing into the steady thud of men working the oars.

  “Close enough to kiss the shore,” he said to Kwandok.

  The helmsman nodded, the leather hood he wore over his head falling down far enough to cover his eyes. Kwandok looked blind, but he never was, and there wasn’t a more steady hand on the wheel than his. His left arm was traced with a livid white scar, a souvenir of the lost battle. It would never fade away.

  Anhchoi walked to the bow of the ship, peering at the island. There were so many of these tiny bits of land that no one ever used. That the tribals couldn’t see their potential was no surprise, but that no one from any of the nations had taken them was. Or, perhaps, once a man was used to the fruits of civilization, he had no need to live like an indolent primitive.

  The Kwailoon swept in close around the island, and Anhchoi ordered all the men not actively working the sails, steering the ship, to hunt the shallows for whatever fell from the sky. They leaned over and peered into the crystalline water. The light had died, making it hard to see, save for a few reefs, and this time the warjunk dropped anchor: a colossally-heavy structure of bone bound in leather.

  Anhchoi went to his quarters, but he couldn’t sleep. The star was beneath him. Somewhere, at the bottom of the shallows, it was waiting for him to find it. He put his blades back on, wrapped his cloak about him, and returned to the deck of the ship. Topside, a skeleton crew kept the ship running. A few murmurs passed between them as Anhchoi stepped onto the deck.

  Once again, he found himself wishing for Makani. He didn’t realize how much he relied upon her until she wasn’t there. In many ways, she was the reason he was doing what he was doing. Without her council, without her helping him understand, he might never have gone west. He would have found another nation, perhaps Song-Lao or Wailao-Gen, and offered his ship and crew. He would have lived the rest of his life as a junior captain, called “warchief” only in jest.

  “A full hold buys more respect than an empty one,” she’d said. And she’d been right. Though Anhchoi’s first thought had been to lick his wounds, he crossed the Sunset Sea to take what he wanted.

  Had he not listened, he wouldn’t now be searching for a star.

  He stayed on deck until daybreak, surprising his courier and cook with his presence. They served him, and he ate with Kwandok, who fortunately didn’t have much to say on the status of being helmsman. When the light fully dawned, the warjunk went back to work, crisscrossing the area, the men peering downward, until finally:

  “Warchief! A glitter!”

  The call came from the rails. One of the catapult men, calling and pointing. Anhchoi ran to where he was and squinted to see that they were just on the far side of the reef surrounding the island, and it looked like the seafloor gave way right around there, plunging into the blackness of the depths. Anhchoi squinted, hunting for the sight that spurred the man to call out.

  “What? What did you see?” Anhchoi demanded. The crewman quailed with the attention of the warchief on him.

  “A shape. The sun hit it, and it glittered, like bronze but...but more. Then,” he shrugged.

  Anhchoi glared up at the sky. Clouds were scattered, but they were thick and towering. They could plunge any area into twilight as they moved. No one else had spoken, but this man had been sure enough.

  “Bells in the water!” he called.

  The crew scrambled to obey the order. Using the crane, they heaved both great diving bells into the salt with heavy splashes. The bells were made of wood, waterproofed with heavy coats of lacquer, darkening their skin to obsidian. The crane let out enough rope to drop them to varying depths, one higher than the other. Each one trapped air, giving divers a place to catch their breaths without having to come to the surface.

  “Waifun! Jinkao! In the water!” Anhchoi ordered his two best swimmers into the blue.

  They nodded, stripping down before plunging in. Over the side, Anhchoi watched the silhouettes of his men descend to the seafloor. One stopped at a bell before continuing. A shape lurked at the bottom of the water, but from Anhchoi’s perspective, it could have easily been nothing more than a stone. He paced the deck while the divers explored whatever it was.

  Jinkao surfaced with a shuddering gasp. “Something down there, warchief. Metal, sure as a man’s days.”

  Waifun popped above the water halfway through Jinkao’s assertion. “Metal!” he confirmed. “Much as I seen!”

  “Cables, divers, get whatever-it-is attached to the crane!”

  More splashes heralded a half dozen of his crew leaping into the water. Men topside threw the ends of cables to them, braided ropes with impressive strength, tipped with clamps made of lacquered bone and leather. The divers took the end and descended to the object. Anhchoi saw them as fish, flitting about a volcanic rock, returning to the bells for gulps of air. The other ends of the cables were secured to the crane that occupied a large part of the aft of the ship. It was designed to convey whatever it picked up to the central part of the deck, where the opening to the cargo hold lay. Now, Anhchoi wasn’t certain what he would do with this metal object once he pulled it from the depths. He wanted it topside. Show the men that he was the warchief who had captured a fallen star and taken it with him. No other captain could say the same.

  One by one, the divers surfaced, gasping. Their clasps were in place. Indeed, Anhchoi felt a subtle shift in the way the warjunk sat on the water, the weight of the object pulling it ever so slightly off kilter. The crane creaked, the webbing of ropes leading up to the arm straining. The divers separated, most swimming to the hull to catch hold of the rigging the other crew dropped, but not yet pulling themselves back onto the ship.

  The men on deck worked the wooden crank, their broad backs glistening as the handle strained round and round. The crane was perfectly able to move catapults, even multiples, if placed on a single platform, but it had never moved anything like the object at the bottom of the sea.

  “Backs into it, boys!” Anhchoi called to them.

  They turned their grunting into something approaching a song. Each time the crank was turned was an expelling of sound, of pain and power, only to be brought in as they moved the handle upwards for another pass. Anhchoi watched the rope come out of the water, inch by inch. As the complex net of cables grew closer to the object, it spread out, describing the dimensions of the shape with the lines of waterlogged rope.

  Anhchoi leaned over the side. Yes, it glittered. The shape was coming into view as well. From above, it looked like two halves of the same semicircle, placed on either side of a central hub that extended both in front and behind it. The water tried to hold onto the object, but with a splash, let it go. The next pull of the crane was a shock, the object suddenly lighter now that it wasn’t pulling up an entire layer of water.

  It was gold, and to Anhchoi, looked like it could have been a carved figurine of giant proportions. It was about the size of an eighth of his ship, but the mass was distributed about, making it much lighter than it initially appeared. As the crane hauled free of the warjunk’s shadow, the sun hit it, throwing glittering rays everywhere. Anhchoi squinted, turning partly away, unable to take its glory.

  The object appeared to be a stylized animal, though what kind he couldn’t imagine. The outstretched semicircles could have been sails, and the forward part looked almost like some kind of head. But instead of a mouth, it had a geometric shell, something like the beak certain fish possessed.

  “What is it?” one of the men breathed.

  “Skyborn,” Anhchoi said. The nations were dotted with ruins, and though none looked like this, it could only be one thing. A skyborn artifact, fallen from its home among the stars. Anhchoi felt a swelling in his breath. From defeat to this. A way to avenge Chuichan. A way to carve his own path.