“Aye, Sir. Your compliments to the Captain, the glass is dropping quickly, and you don’t like the looks of the weather.”

Lathyk nodded satisfaction, and Aplyn-Ahrmahk headed for the quarterdeck hatch just a bit more swiftly even than usual.

Lieutenant Lathyk’s sense of humor might leave a little something to be desired; his weather sense, unfortunately, did not.

The wind had increased dramatically, rising from a topgallant breeze, little more than eight or nine miles per hour, to something much stronger in a scant twenty minutes. The waves, which had been barely two feet tall, with a light scattering of glassy-looking foam, were three times that tall now, with white, foamy crests everywhere, and spray was beginning to fly. A seaman would have called it a topsail breeze and been happy to see it under normal conditions. With a wind speed of just under twenty-five miles an hour, a ship like Destiny would turn out perhaps seven knots with the wind on her quarter and all sail set to the topgallants. But that sort of increase in so short a period was most un welcome, especially with the barometer continuing to fall at an ever steeper rate. Indeed, one might almost have said the glass was beginning to plummet.

“Don’t like it, Captain,” Lathyk said as he and Captain Yairley stood beside the ship’s double wheel, gazing down at the binnacle. The lieutenant shook his head and raised his eyes to the set of the canvas. “Don’t usually see heavy weather out of the south west this time of year, not in these waters.”

Yairley nodded, hands clasped behind him while he considered the compass card.

As the acting commodore of the squadron keeping watch over the Imperial Desnairian Navy’s exit from the Gulf of Jahras, he had quite a few things to be worried over. Just for starters, his “squadron” was down to only his own ship at the moment, since Destiny ’s sister ship Mountain Root had encountered one of the Gulf of Mathyas’ uncharted rocks three days before.