Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1132: The Effect of the Reward

Simbady was waiting in the yard, standing in the good posture of a man who expected news.

“How did it go?” He fell in beside Rex as he came through the gate. “Is the chief interested in the suit? Did you get the honorary explorer title?”

Rex shook his head. “He isn’t going to purchase the suit.”

“Oh.” Simbady absorbed this. “Well. The Fjords Chambers of Commerce will notice it regardless. The ocean is a treasury — you said that yourself.”

He had said that. He had also walked into that audience expecting the Crown’s endorsement, a title, and a sum of gold large enough to finance the next prototype. He had spent the walk across the castle grounds rehearsing how to receive the praise.

“He gave me a book,” Rex said.

Simbady stopped. “What?”

Rex held it up. Plain cover, no gilding, no floral print. The thickness of a pamphlet. Even a minor noble handing out rewards found something heavier than this to press into a petitioner’s hands.

“That’s—” Simbady looked at it. Then at Rex. “That’s all?”

“That’s everything.”

“He shouldn’t—” Simbady’s jaw set. “Even I got twenty gold royals. You organized this entire expedition. You built the suit from nothing. You found the ruin. Twenty gold royals would be an insult and he gave you a pamphlet.” He stomped once, indignantly, and stopped himself.

Rex appreciated it. There was nothing to be done about the king’s decisions, and he knew it, and saying so would have felt like a lecture. He let Simbady’s anger stand on his behalf.

A guard materialized from the direction of the Castle District. “Your Majesty has arranged accommodations. Please follow me.”

“Thank you,” Rex said, and signaled Simbady to come along.

They had passed through the gate of the Castle District when Rex heard it — a sound like distant thunder made thin and crisp, a mechanical snarl cycling through some kind of rhythm. He looked toward the sound.

A black speck hung in the sky to the south. It vanished behind a roofline and reappeared, larger.

“Is that a bird?” he said.

He dismissed the thought as he formed it. No bird at that distance produced sound. No bird had that silhouette — too angular, no flex in the wings.

Simbady had gone rigid beside him. “It’s coming toward us.”

“An enemy?” Rex said. “In the king’s own city?”

“Relax,” the guard said, without looking up from his pace. “That’s Her Highness and her new toy. Takes some getting used to. His Majesty asked her to keep to the testing field, but she finds it too small for a full flight test.” A pause. “I think she’s showing off for him.”

Neither Rex nor Simbady said anything.

The black dot resolved into a shape. It crossed above them at maybe thirty meters altitude, its shadow sweeping the courtyard flagstones, and Rex saw it clearly: a metal construction the size of a small sailing vessel, bladed wheel spinning at the nose, a woman seated within the open frame with the practiced ease of someone on a park bench. The roar of it hit his chest like a fist.

It banked past the towers and arced back toward the runway.

A name surfaced from memory, unbidden.

Fan. The Society’s dreamer, the laughingstock, the man who had climbed a ramp in a cloth-and-wood contraption and dropped thirty feet into mud while spectators recorded his failure for later telling. Rex had resented him mildly — Fan’s ambitions had handed every critic of the Society fresh ammunition. After the crash, the derision had redoubled.

And now someone else had done what Fan had failed to do, and done it in iron, and done it with an engine, and done it so casually that the castle guard discussed it as a daily inconvenience.

Rex watched the plane bank a second time, the thin winter light catching the metal skin.

Something loosened in his chest and something else tightened in its place.

The guard left them at the Foreign Affairs Building. “I’m Sean,” he said. “When you’ve made your decision, come find me at the Castle District.” He turned and walked away before they could ask what decision he meant.

Simbady pressed his face to the window of the common room every few minutes, hoping the plane would appear again, muttering prayers to the Three Gods under his breath.

Rex went to his room, shut the door, and sat with the book on his knees for fifteen minutes without opening it.

He had turned over a catalogue of possibilities during those fifteen minutes. A customs guide. A veiled threat framed as civic literature. A job offer dressed in pages. Some administrative document he was supposed to sign.

He opened to the first page.

Physical law of buoyancy.

Any body completely or partially submerged in a fluid at rest is acted upon by a buoyant force, the magnitude of which is equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the body.

He read it twice. Then a third time.

Then he turned to page two, which was dense with formulas. Volume. Density. The arithmetic of floating and sinking — not as vague principles, the way experienced sailors carried them in their bodies without being able to name them, but as units. Concrete numbers. Given any object’s weight and volume, you could calculate with certainty whether it would float, and how far down it would sit in the water, and what force would be needed to push it deeper.

Rex was a man who had spent his career constructing devices to answer questions through experiment. He had never had the vocabulary to ask them beforehand.

His eyes moved faster.

The steel ships. The hydrogen balloons sold to the Fjords fleets. He had seen both and admired them and assumed they arose from some form of craft knowledge his island background had not given him access to. He saw now they had arisen from this.

Toward the middle of the book: a diagram of a craft capable of submersing itself, designed to operate at depth, to rise and dive under the pilot’s control. Hypothetical, the text noted — no such vessel had been built. But the formulas governing it were the same ones Rex had just absorbed.

The final page held a drawing.

It was a ship unlike anything recorded in the Fjords traditions of seafaring — a vessel that could sail on the surface or below it, hundreds of passengers, impervious to storms, capable of voyaging anywhere the ocean reached. The proportions were preposterous. The drawing was impeccably precise.

Rex set the book down.

He was simultaneously humiliated and electrified, which was not a combination of feelings he had previously experienced together. Like a climber who had scrambled to a summit in the reasonable belief that what lay beyond was more mountain — only to find that the slope descended into a vast, unwalked valley that contained everything he had ever wanted and stretched to a horizon he could not see.

He had a diving suit. The king could make a better one.

He had six months of buoyancy intuition. The book contained the mathematics for a submarine that could hold a crew of hundreds.

He sat with that for a long time.

The question was simple: what did he want the rest of his life to be?

He thought about Fan. He thought about the plane banking over the courtyard. He thought about the woman sitting in it as though it were ordinary.

He picked up the book again and began reading from the beginning.

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