The Hanged Man

by K. D. Edwards

  It was like he was in shock. Nothing I said would matter. So I used the one tool left between us—the one that always cut both ways. I pulled our Companion bond open and let my emotion sing through it. It was not something I could do often, but when it worked, it was an emotion so complicated and layered it was nearly a soliloquy. It expressed the concept of Companion. It said brother. It said ally. It was nearly the type of connection that existed between tallas.

  And then there was no space between us as Brand crushed me in a hug. He moved so quickly that my muscle memory almost performed a counter-attack. I finally relaxed, and buried my face against his shoulder, and let the world turn around us.

  “We don’t fight,” he said fiercely. “We don’t fight.”

  “We don’t fight,” I said back.

  After another few seconds, we parted, though our hands slipped to a wrist hold, still connecting us. There was another few seconds of that, of that satisfaction, then Brand cut a glance at Addam.

  “He looks pretty fucking smug,” Brand said after a moment.

  Addam blinked.

  “You know,” I said, “we haven’t even talked about that stunt he pulled at the Chained Roc. Giving Sherman help. Sherman was a bad person. He stole from Corinne.”

  “It’s like Addam is judging us,” Brand said.

  “We help plenty of people who deserve our help,” I said. “Sherman didn’t deserve our help.”

  “I know,” Brand said. “What the fuck is up with that shit?”

  Addam sighed. “I would have you remember that you went easy on him, too. You never even demanded the thousand dollars back.”

  Brand and I exchanged a look. I was reassured both that he’d forgotten about that too and that Addam thought I wasn’t above turning that young man upside down and shaking our livelihood out of him.

  I squeezed Brand’s wrists one last time before letting go. “And if you stop coming here because you think I disapprove, I swear to the gods, I will organize a fucking car pool.”

  “Whatever,” he said. He ran his forearm across his eyes. “Okay. Let’s get this done.”

  The docks grew narrow and sparse, the further north we went. The water on either side of us was not clean. It was black and oily, filled with trash and body-shaped flotsam. In its final stretch, as a gray mist thickened in front of us, we passed a quarter mile of floating debris. The debris was barely recognizable as ships. They’d been burned to the waterline—either the site of an attack or, possibly, a sign of the Hanged Man protecting his own special real estate.

  Finally we came to . . . I wasn’t sure how to describe it. A barrier, of sorts, though more mental than physical. It affected each of us differently. I simply recognized it; Brand and Addam were influenced by it. They both stopped and looked behind them, as if ready to turn and retreat, without even questioning the impulse.

  It was not so easy to mess with my mind, though.

  Filling my limited collection of sigils for a field action was always a bit of a gamble. I had eight slots that allowed the potential for thousands of spells, everything from aggressive and defensive magics to stealth and psionics. I did my best to balance the load for all occasions, sometimes with more success than others.

  I pressed my fingers against my thigh. Under my pants was a round sigil threaded through a leather strap. I connected with the spell—taking a second or two longer than direct touch would have allowed—and released it.

  A sensation not unlike carbonated soda hissed and sizzled across my senses, and then I had Clarity.

  “Don’t move,” I told Addam, who had begun to walk in the other direction. “You’re being influenced. The ship is behind mental wards.”

  “Shouldn’t we go back to shore?” Brand asked, haltingly, fighting the words.

  I held out my hands toward them and extended the protection of my spell. The magic washed over them in stops and starts, leaving them blinking, facial muscles twitching. Brand ground his palms into his eyes, and stared around him with fresh acuity.

  “Motherfucker,” he pronounced.

  “I’m glad I thought to bring a spell like this,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest and staring at the mist in front of us. It was a backup plan, in the event Addam’s Antitoxin spell failed. “I knew we’d be encountering ghosts. But not something quite like this.”

  I took a few steps forward and drew the toe of my boot across splintered, rough planks. It was like dragging a finger through a cloud—insubstantial but real, with a sort of damp resistance. In that approximation I felt the basis for the magic: water. The spell was anchored to wards powered by the churn of the surrounding ocean.

  Magic is metaphor, and I knew the metaphor that would work best. It would come with a cost, though. I had seven spells left and was loathe to waste any more outside battle. But I needed what was in my gold ring. I needed Fire.

  I swiped a thumb across the ring, sending a hot flush shivering through my muscles. I gathered Fire into Clarity, and pushed it out like a needle of flame.

  The result was both physical and dramatic. Magnesium-bright threads webbed the air in front of me, burning into the magic protecting the battleship. I kept my focus tight and narrow—not to shatter the barrier but to burrow through it, to make a mouse hole slip of an entrance: something easily overlooked and easily repaired, to cover our trail.

  I felt my spells break through into whatever lay ahead of us. Pulling the magic back into me—while still affording Brand and Addam a circle of Clarity—I studied the wisps of smoke in the air.

  “Come on,” I said quietly, and stepped forward in a straight line. The tunnel I’d made wasn’t entirely physical, but I felt the tug of resistance along my head, making the hair on my neck stand up.

  The grayness around me thinned and I emerged onto a clean, swept dock.

  And before me was the battleship.

  Six stories of painted metal; a monstrosity of hull and antennae, with massive guns jutting from it like bone spurs. I knew it would be big, but this was . . . It was a floating city. It filled up so much space that the stern and bow were lost in the haze of distance. The sheer scale was so large that the idea of searching it blew fuses in my brain.

  “Rivers below,” Addam swore. “How?” He said it like there were several paragraphs of subtext squeezed into the single word. How would we find what we need? How did it get here? How does the world not know the Hanged Man has it? How did he come to own it?

  “How did this just . . . just fucking vanish from human history?” Brand said. “A country doesn’t just misplace something this huge. This isn’t spare change in a fucking sofa cushion.” His gaze sharpened, somewhat hungrily. “And look at the size of those guns.”

  I had an image of Brand chiseling away at bolts with a screwdriver, which only got clearer when he added, “How much do you think they weigh?”

  “I am very uncomfortable with that question,” I said.

  “Ninety-six tons,” Addam said.

  Both Brand and I stared at him.

  “Okay,” I said slowly.

  “Quinn . . .” Addam pressed his lips together angrily. “I know many details of this ship.”

  “That’s a good thing,” Brand said.

  “I am beginning to see the layers of his subterfuge. He told me he wanted to do an essay on the North Carolina. For his tutor. He encouraged us to use an Eidetic Memory spell, so we would remember details, and so I could help him afterwards. At the time, it was very logical. He made it sound very spontaneous and . . . logical.” He closed his eyes. “Oh, Quinn. Quinn, what have you been playing at?”

  “So you know the layout,” Brand said. “You can help us get around.”

  “If the layout is the same as the North Carolina, yes. And since Quinn arranged that visit, I would suspect the layout is, indeed, similar.” His voice was so thick with accent I almost missed a couple of the words.

  “Look,” Brand said. “He may have gone about it wrong, but he’s done a good thing for us. De
pending on how wrong things go—and trust you fucking me, they’ll go wrong—he may have given us information we need to get out in one piece.”

  Addam, after a chilly moment, dipped his chin.

  I went back to the question Brand had raised, before he got distracted by the idea of sticking a ninety-ton gun in his back pocket. “Addam, you said this ship was lost at sea, right?”

  “Not long after it launched. In the 1940s, on its way to the Pacific theater during the humans’ World War II.”

  “Define lost,” Brand said.

  “It sank in a storm, somewhere between Pearl Harbor and Asia. There were no survivors. Nothing remained—no record, even, of the exact location it sank, though many people have looked for it since.”

  I stared up the metal gangplank. Everything in eyesight was clean, though old. Spots of rust had turned stretches of metal into brittle lace. The deck was even—the ship did not list. “It doesn’t look like something that was translocated from the ocean floor,” I said. “How big a deal was the disappearance of this ship?”

  “Very big.”

  “And somehow it wound up here,” I said, and in the back of my head, I felt the first green shoots of a plan poking through the soil.

  And then a ghost ran through me.

  “Bloody HELL,” I shouted as my heart skipped a beat.

  Brand pulled a knife, and Addam had his hand on his sword, but neither saw the handsome young man stop on the gangplank, holding his hat to his head in an invisible wind.

  The ghost looked back over his shoulder with a terrified expression, seeing something through me that scared the shit out of him. He wiped the side of his hand over his gray and white forehead, and continued running up the gangplank.

  “Rune,” Brand snapped. “What is it?”

  “Ghost. One hell of a ghost memory. I didn’t even need to draw on my willpower to see it.” Curious, I looked up, raking my gaze across the visible deck ahead of us. I saw monochrome flickers as the past slid through the present, jetsam on an invisible stream.

  I’d extended Clarity to Addam and Brand, but had left myself uncovered. Experimentally, I stretched the spell back over me as well, and watched the staticky flickers vanish.

  “Can it hurt us?” Brand asked.

  “No. They’re just imprints. Memories. I’ve covered you and Addam with my Clarity spell, but I’m going to keep it off me. I may be able to learn something.”

  He didn’t look too pleased with that. “How long are we planning to be here?”

  “Not long. We don’t have a choice. The Clarity spell won’t last longer than an hour, maybe ninety minutes—less if there’s anything mentally aggressive on board.”

  “And the longer we stay, the greater the chance of detection,” Addam added. “I agree: we must move quickly.”

  The gangplank was wide enough for cargo, and made of metal covered in a rough surface, the better to keep footing. The ghost memories popped and faded like camera flashes ahead of me. I narrowed my gaze, to avoid being overwhelmed. It was unusually difficult. Ghost memories were normally not so forceful—they almost never affected me when I wasn’t trying to see them.

  The main ship deck was covered in teak wood. Before I could take in more of my immediate surroundings, two ghosts shimmered into view against the casing of an enormous, two-story gun. They had their hands cupped around cigarettes. A storm splattered gray raindrops across their bowed faces.

  “We better find a bar of soap before we go back below deck,” one of them said. The cigarette, shielded from the rain, was pooling smoke against his palm. “If they find out we copped a Lucky, they’ll keelhaul us.”

  “We’re fine,” the other said. “Not like there are gonna be bandits flying in this weather, right? Dunno why they bothered shutting off the smoking lamp tonight.” The man—nearly a boy—stiffened. He craned his neck forward and squinted. “Is that Pretty Boy?”

  “Who the heck you calling pretty?” the other cough-laughed.

  “No. Pretty Boy. Over there. You know him.”

  “Oh yeah. He’s weird.”

  They faded away. I turned and looked in the direction they’d been staring. Above me, the sky began flashing between past and present— yellow stars; a gray and white storm; yellow stars.

  About twenty or thirty feet away, standing in a metal archway that sheltered a stairway to the deck above us, was the same man I’d seen running up the gangplank. He was, indeed, a very pretty man. His hands were curled around the thick metal edges of the hatch. Even in grayscale, I could see how his fingers were white with the pressure of his squeeze.

  I moved closer to him—and saw a look of horror appear on his face. He stared past me at the sky. I heard a soft thump as something settled behind me, and I swear to gods, I felt breath on the back of my neck.

  “You promised you’d let me go,” the boy stammered, just as I was about to turn. “You promised you wouldn’t come after me.”

  “If it eases your mind,” a man whispered, “I shall hunt you last.”

  A hand latched itself to my shoulder. The past vanished as Brand shook me out of it.

  “I don’t like this,” he growled.

  I stared shakily at the bright constellations above me. The clouds were gone. I said, “The memories are so damned strong. They shouldn’t be this vivid.”

  “It’s creepy as fuck watching you sleepwalk into walls. We need you here, Rune.”

  “I’m learning things. This is important. I can hear conversations. That shouldn’t happen. It’s almost as if . . .” I trailed off.

  Brand growled again and squeezed my shoulder.

  “It’s almost as if they’re reinforced,” I said. “As if the memories have been anchored in place.”

  I blinked and looked around me—at the real around-me. The gangplank took us near the stern of the ship. It was covered in guns. I barely had the vocabulary to describe the sheer variety in them—massive main guns with four gigantic barrels, three times the width of Half House; smaller gun mounts at the side of the ship; large machine gun—like installations so big that the shooter sat in a metal seat that swiveled around like a videogame cockpit. It seemed a very American thing to do, putting the gangplank here, among all these weapons: to welcome visitors by asserting how badly they could be fucked up when they stopped being welcome.

  Many of the guns were twisted, the blackened stumps so freshly destroyed I could almost smell the sulfur and cordite. That was not natural. No rust or age—they were preserved in the moment of their destruction. It stank of stasis magic, but worse. Stronger. Stronger than any Stasis spell I’ve seen.

  I couldn’t think of many good reasons to freeze parts of a scene like this—a drop of death preserved in amber. While heightened emotion created fuel for magic, you didn’t need to go to lengths like this to create the fuel. It would have happened naturally, without mucking with the imbued memories.

  Addam went over and kicked at rotting canvas. “This covers the main guns, normally. Protects them from saltwater erosion. When the guns are used, they blow the covers off with compressed air.”

  Brand made the connection immediately. “The guns were uncovered. Which means they were used. And they didn’t have time to tidy the fuck up afterwards. And over there—see. Something blasted the hell out of the antiaircraft guns.”

  I turned in a circle. The amount of deck on the stern was large and relatively open, maybe half the length of a soccer field. A clear area nearest the tip was scorched black, the teak charred to flake.

  The present blinked gray, and I watched as the storm-swept deck filled with panicked men racing around. On the now uncharred stern was a very small plane, barely bigger than a car. A pilot was scrambling into the seat, while a team undid the plane’s tethers.

  I heard the whistle of a huge weapon, and then a fantastic explosion of light filled the sky. Not an attack—the ship had fired flares. In the sharp relief of their resulting light, the plane took off. It moved like a catapulted toy.
>
  Gunfire. Behind me. The ghost of bullets and screams.

  I turned and saw pinpoints of light against the mid-deck tower.

  There was another whistle—but a different sound. Not human guns. Magic. A surge of magic, shaped like a comet, launching itself from the tower.

  It collided with the catapulted plane, which exploded in a huge fireball.

  I closed my eyes and shook myself into the present. Brand’s hand was back on my shoulder.

  “What are you seeing?” he demanded.

  “An attack. There used to be a plane there. There was fighting on the tower—that tower there—and when the plane took off, someone used Fire to destroy it.”

  “Was it the Hanged Man?” Addam asked.

  “Maybe? But there’s no storm.”

  “The storm where they said the ship sank?” Addam asked, confused.

  “Yes. The sky is clear. They launched flares, and I could see stars. But I saw a scene earlier where the Hanged Man landed on the ship in a storm—or at least I think it was the Hanged Man. Which means whatever happened did not happen quickly. Not if a storm came and went.”

  “Look at the deck,” Brand said. He pointed to the ruined guns, and the charred area where the plane had been, and the wide area around us. “Parts of it are swept. Are there any wards that would keep it this clean?”

  “Some of the damage is frozen in a type of freaky strong stasis magic. And there could be wards to prevent much of the corrosion and rusting. But wards that keep a deck swept?” I shook my head.

  “So we may not be alone,” Addam summarized.

  “Let’s go back that way,” I said. “To that tower.”

  “That’s where navigation will be,” Addam said. “And the captain’s sea quarters. It’s called the signal tower. It would make sense for the portal we’re looking for to be there—it has the best view.”

  “Yeah, because real bad guys love fucking exposing themselves in penthouses for the view,” Brand said. “That’s a myth. I’ll bet every cent Rune has that we’re going to wind up in the fucking basement.”