Sargasso Skies by Allan Jones

“O h, great, Trundle!” groaned Esmeralda. “Nice going. Now we’re stuck!”
    Trundle was on the narrow seat in the stern of the skyboat, red-faced and puffing with exertion as he tried to reverse the treadles that worked the propeller. “How is this my fault?” he gasped. “We were blown in here by a cyclone!” The wooden treadles were locked solid. He peered over the back of the Thief in the Night . Their little skyboat hung at an alarming angle, caught up high in the rigging of a wrecked windship. A length of thick, tarred rope had wound itself tight around the propeller blades.
    â€œIt isn’t your fault,” said Esmeralda. “But I have to blame someone, and you’re nearest.”
    â€œMany’s the windship has foundered in this dreadful gyre,” Jack said, struggling to untangle himself from more rigging that had snagged over the prow. “I told you we might have problems getting safely past the Sargasso Skies.” He pulled himself loose at last. “It’s the graveyard of countless brave sky-faring vessels,” he said mournfully. “Why, I could sing you sad ballads of lost and missing windships that would make you weep!”
    â€œLater, maybe,” said Esmeralda, sliding down the steeply sloping deck. “What we need right now is a sharp blade to cut ourselves free.”
    â€œEven if we do, we’ll still be trapped in this awful place,” Trundle said, staring unhappily out over the mist-shrouded wasteland of the dreaded Sargasso Skies. The desolation stretched away in all directions under dark and brooding clouds. This was without doubt the gloomiest and most dismal place he had ever seen. The rotting hulks of doomed windships rose like dark phantoms out of the crawling and swirling mists, their forecastles like ruinous towers, their masts poking up like broken fingers, their rigging hanging like wind-blown spiders’ webs. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, the air was thick with the stink of rot and mold and decay.
    The sails of their gallant little skyboat hung limply from the mast, and their neat pile of provisions was now a higgledy-piggledy mess strewn down the length of the hull. The ferocious swirling winds that had dragged them off course had spat them out just as suddenly as they had sucked them in.
    And things had been going so well till then.
    They had sped away from the island of Spyre with two of the crowns of the Badger Lords safely stowed aboard and with clear instructions about the next stage of their quest:
    You must travel to the distant and sinister island of Hammerland and seek for the Crown of Wood among the steam moles!
    The steam moles! Little was known about that peculiar and secretive race. The mysterious island of Hammerland was far away from all the main habitations and trade routes of Sundered Lands, out beyond a terrible place called the Sargasso Skies. And that was a notorious death trap they had every intention of avoiding.
    â€œSteer well clear!” Esmeralda had told Trundle as the vast mist-shrouded reef of derelict windships and drifting debris had loomed up in the distance.
    â€œWill do!” Trundle had responded, shifting the tiller accordingly.
    Little did they know! The Sargasso Skies were at the center of a ceaseless swirl of turbulent winds. Before any of them had time to prevent it, the whirling winds had taken the Thief in the Night by the sails and had dragged her into the heart of all the miserable wreckage. Out of control and spinning wildly, the hapless skyboat had come at last to a sudden jarring halt, trapped like a fly in a tangled web of rigging.
    â€œWe’re never going to get out of here, are we?” said Trundle, shivering in the foul and chilly air. Although it had been clear daylight when the sky squalls had caught them, down here in the doldrums it seemed like perpetual night, the sky shrouded in a restless roof of dark clouds.
    â€œLook on the