We backtracked the way we came, and climbed to the next deck. It was smaller than the one below us, but still the length of a city block.
High up, against the bulkhead of the signal tower, were fresh, colorful flags, preserved against age. They flapped in the sea breeze.
Addam pointed. “Those are the captain’s quarters. At sea, he would have slept in a room by navigation, but he would have used this larger space for meetings and office work. It may be worth our time to look there.”
Brand went over to the metal door. Hatch? I think they called it a hatch. The hatch looked like it would open directly into the cabin. But the handle wouldn’t move. “No rust,” he said, running his finger along it. “I think this is a personal record for us. We went five whole minutes without breaking things. Rune, make us a door.”
“Allow me,” Addam said instead, touching one of his sigils. I saw how he snuck a look at me and Brand before focusing on the lock. Whatever the spell was, it surrounded the locking mechanism in a semitransparent bubble of light. The light flashed bright for a second, and bits of metal spat and bounced off its interior, quickly turning to red dust, which burned away in fat embers. When Addam released the spell, there was a clear hole where the lock used to be.
“Something I’ve been toying with,” Addam said. “My boyfriend, I’ve come to learn, is not very impressed with flowers or candy.”
“That’s so fucking cute,” Brand said. “You’re impressing him with a new stealing spell.” He scratched his chin as Addam tried to hide a pleased smile. “I wonder what would happen if you stuck the spell on someone’s face.” Addam stopped smiling.
I pushed open the door, which now swung free. The room on the other side wasn’t large, but it was nicely decorated. A thick oak table was bolted to the floor. Scissors, brushes, and bottles of black ink were scattered across the place settings.
I put a finger on a piece of paper. It was a handwritten letter, riddled with dark blots that completely obscured whole lines or phrases.
Addam and Brand flickered away, and the past settled over me.
Six men were sitting around the table, sifting through mail. One of the men had a chaplain’s collar. A light lunch was laid out before them— mostly fruits and salad, nothing hot. A good choice in tropical heat.
One of the officers said, “Why’d the Old Man ask us to meet in here? Is something wrong?”
Another man came through the door, snapping everyone to attention, which he waved off. He had a piece of damp paper in his hand. Even through the ghost memory I smelled the antiseptic sting of mimeograph ink. “Plan of the day,” the man said, and put the paper down.
He dropped heavily into a seat and tugged cigarettes out of his breast pocket. Only when he was sucking his first lungful did the other officers pull out their own cigarettes and light up.
“Captain coming, Exec?” one of them asked. “Why’d he want to see us?”
The exec tapped his cigarette against an ashtray bolted to the table. “One of the MAAs reported in. Strange fucking stuff. I think the heat’s getting to people.”
“Strange stuff?” the chaplain repeated.
“One of the enlisted men had to be sedated. Ran through his berth last night screaming about a monster. And one of the engineering team says a couple of their guys haven’t reported in. That’s why the Old Man wanted us here.”
Everyone stopped what they were doing. They exchanged looks with each other, and then waited, through an exhale of smoke, for the exec to say more.
“What does that mean?” the chaplain finally asked. “Haven’t reported in?”
The memory faded out, back to the present, back to Brand’s fingers on my forearm. I said, “They were looking into disappearances. People have gone missing. Let’s go further up the tower. You said the control room is here?”
“Navigation,” Addam corrected.
We went back onto the deck and found a steep metal stairway to the next level. Even two flights up, the signal tower still loomed several stories above us. It was capped with antennae and searchlights, all of them outsized and ancient, from an era before everything shrank to pocket-sized.
“Any chance you brought your fancy drone with you?” I asked Brand. “Might save us a climb.”
“Fuck off,” Brand said, which meant he hadn’t thought about it and was pissed at himself.
It would needle him if I didn’t drop it. So I said, gleefully, “What about those headsets? You must have thought to bring those sweet expensive headsets with you.”
I grinned at his look, and grabbed the metal railings of the narrow stairway to swing myself up a step.
On the next level, an open door in the bulkhead led inside the structure proper. I stepped over the hatch’s high rim into a cramped metal hallway with three narrow doors.
“Sea quarters,” Addam said. “When the ship is at sea, the captain and the navigator sleep next to navigation.”
I didn’t need a gut instinct to guess bad things had happened in this tower. Whatever the Hanged Man had done, he would not have left the bridge untouched. Tactically, it would have been one of his first targets if he was looking to disable any sort of leadership or resistance.
The door to the captain’s quarters was literally a door—or at least a door set into a metal hatch. Through a glass pane, I saw a space no larger than a closet. It held a bureau, a single twin bed, and floor space that would only have fit the three of us if we’d stood in a group hug. A pack of unfiltered Camel cigarettes sat on the bureau, which had a raised rim on the top to keep items from skittering off.
I opened the door—and the grayscale past yawned around me.
A balding man was squeezed into a corner of the bed, his face pressed into the bulkhead. Metal rivets had left indentations on his cheek. The nails on his left hand were torn away, and the brown paint on the bed’s metal frame had scratches.
“We need to get below!” a voice barked behind me. “The master-at-arms has a plan to free the marines. It’s our only chance. You need to move, sir!”
“This is a dream,” the captain stuttered. “It’s a dream.”
“Fine,” the voice said, resigned, and I recognized it as the exec. “Stay. But we’re going to fight back.”
The door banged shut, and I was back in the present.
“What are you seeing, Rune?” Addam asked.
I didn’t answer directly—I just said what I was thinking. “So the Hanged Man landed on the ship in a storm. Or at least, he revealed himself during the storm. He was after someone. A young man called Pretty Boy. In that room below, the captain’s cabin, they said people were starting to go missing. But right now—here—something has already happened. They said there were people ready to fight down below.”
I turned in a slow circle, and walked over to an adjacent door. On the other side was some sort of conference room. Huge, unspooled maps covered a six-foot-wide table.
I looked back toward the hatch we’d entered through, at the midnight stars sparkling off the higher elevation. “We’re going the wrong way,” I said. “This is . . . it’s a story. The Hanged Man has preserved the story, like a trophy, and whatever happened in the end, it happened below, not here. He’d have wanted the story to last as long as possible—he would have enjoyed having people have to walk through all of it.”
“Like I said, the basement,” Brand said, and spat.
I walked back through the hatch, into a spray of salt air. There were stairs on both my left and right, and, right in front of me, a tiny platform fitted with something that resembled a chest-high fire hydrant, with two metal globes attached to arm struts.
“Magnetic compass,” Addam said, seeing my interest.
It was catching my attention: less like a twenty-dollar bill fluttering on the ground, and more like a too-slick stone in a flooded river you were attempting to cross. There was something important in front of me. Something I needed to see.
Swallowing, I walked up to the compass. It was clos
er to the something,but the pull was tracking . . .
Upwards.
“What are those structures?” I asked.
Addam grimaced at the knowledge that came easily. “Those platforms are Sky I, Sky II, Sky III, and Sky IV. They helped coordinate fire, especially against aircraft.”
“Beautiful view from up there,” I murmured. “Addam, can you use TK to lift me up?”
“No,” Brand said.
“Just the one right there. I’ll stay in eyesight. I think I need to see something up there.”
“If you remove your Clarity spell from me, I could do it,” Addam offered.
“I think I need to do this. I’ve always had a knack for sensing magic. Even without Clarity shielding you, I’m not sure you’d see what I’m seeing. Brand? Please?”
He gave me a long look. Then he bent over, pulled up his pants leg, and removed a gun from a holster.
I sucked in a breath. The use of guns was sharply, sharply regulated in New Atlantis—mainly because it would have evened the playing field in a magical firefight, and scions liked to be the only ones with an unfair advantage. “We didn’t get a pistol dispensation for this trip.”
“Do you want to have this conversation?” he asked. “We can have this conversation. Go ahead and have this conversation with me, Rune.”
“Do you at least have a—” I started to say, before he pulled a silencer from one of his ammo pockets and began attaching it to the gun.
“Stay in my line of sight so I can cover you,” he said.
Addam touched one of the sigils on his belt. His hands began to waver, and he held them out, palms up, like an offering. The magic jumped to me, and for a half-second all of my internal organs felt like they were floating as the spell stabilized.
“Up I go,” I said, and used the Telekinesis—TK—to lift myself off the ground. It wasn’t pretty—I flopped a bit, like one of those dancing dashboard figures. But Telekinesis was more versatile than Levitation, and could be used aggressively as well, which was why Addam preferred it.
I rose through the windy salt air to one of the metal catwalks at the top of the Sky Tower. As I approached it, the power of barely restrained memories surrounded me.
I lifted myself above the platform railing, past it, and then down to the metal walkway. The moment I made contact, the past washed over me again, but with a scope that staggered me.
My entire field of vision—the entire stretch of deck at the rear of the ship—was filled with bright gray afternoon.
Two stories down, men sunbathed on the teak planks, or sprawled in the shade of gun mounts. There were over a hundred of them—dozens and dozens of kids barely old enough to buy alcohol, even in the American rules of that era. The juxtaposition of their ease on this ship, on this massive weapon of war was . . . surreal. Awful. I’d heard once that warships used teak wood because it absorbed heat, sound, and shrapnel. They were tanning on top of military logic, the same planks they’d bleed on.
This was a curated memory. A powerful, powerful curated memory. To do something like this? To tie off a single memory and share it with others? In such astonishing detail? I could smell coconut tanning oil.
It was only as I started looking around that I saw the man.
On another sky platform in front of me, off to the side. He wore black trousers and a black shirt. A huge silk cape rushed around him, fastened over one shoulder. It should have looked ridiculous, but it didn’t; it should have seemed anachronistic, but it wasn’t. It was the perfect fit for a modern-day nightmare.
I was pretty sure I was looking at the Hanged Man.
Even more strangely, he was not from my present, but nor did he have the gray coloring of the distant past. I felt time—the actual current of time—grow thin and stretched as our moments of observation overlapped.
As I tried to pull myself back to the present, the Hanged Man stiffened. He slightly—just slightly—turned his head to the side. I caught a hint of a strong chin, and a thin, sharp nose.
He raised a hand, and the ghost of a spell streamed outwards. The world shuddered and flooded with color—the gray afternoon bled into a blue sky and a burning yellow sun.
He said, “I feel you.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and called on my willpower to resist the pull. I was stronger than this. I was my father’s son. I was heir to a throne of the Arcanum, and I would not be any memory’s slave.
The Hanged Man said, louder, “Look at how you flutter. Like a match flame held behind rice paper. I can almost see your outline! When are you, little flame? Are you enjoying my great act?”
It was at that point that Brand slapped the shit out of me.
I put a hand against my stinging cheek and blinked at fake stars and real stars and the sound of waves. I was still on the Sky Tower, and it looked like Brand and Addam had levitated to reach me.
“Did you even try pinching me first?” I asked. “Even once?”
“You seemed agitated,” Addam said behind Brand, and he looked like he wanted to slap the hell out of something too. “I do not think this is healthy, Rune.”
“No, it isn’t. It really isn’t.” I licked dry lips. “But I’m learning some things.”
Like why the Stasis spells were so strong. I hadn’t caught on, at first, because it was a type of magic no one had experience with. It was forbidden. It was on a very, very short list of magic that would get you killed in New Atlantis. No one—Arcana or otherwise—was allowed to interfere with time.
And yet here was time magic. Bolstering the Stasis spells on the ship. Preserving this theater.
“What are we learning?” Brand demanded. “The Hanged Man killed lots and lots of people. The end. What do we get out of knowing that?”
“I need to see just how many people he killed. I need to see everything the Hanged Man did here.”
“Why?” Brand demanded again, in genuine exasperation.
“Because there are limits to what even an Arcana can do without consequence. And understanding how close he came to those limits is knowledge. And knowledge informs tactics.” That was one of Brand’s favorite lines.
“Let’s get back down,” Brand said, ignoring me. “We’re exposed up here.”
Addam used Telekinesis to float all three of us off the platform and back down to the magnetic compass.
“We should leave,” Brand said, once we had our footing. “You know that, right?”
“We need to at least try to find the portal. If we can’t do it within the hour, yes, we’ll leave. I promise. I just need to see more. I need to understand what happened.”
Brand bit down hard on his teeth and glared at me, then threw his arms up in the air. “I am fucking mad at you again!”
So I said the one thing I knew would calm him down. It was one of the dirtiest tricks we played on each other, and it always worked.
I admitted I needed help.
“Can I hold your arm while we walk?” I said. “It’ll keep me grounded. Don’t worry, not your knife arm.”
Brand watched my face sullenly. “As if I throw better with one hand than the other.” But he looked a little mollified, and held out an arm to me.
BELOW DECK
As we went back to one of the lower decks, Addam said, “I would feel better if you told us what you are seeing as you are seeing them.”
“Up there? I saw sunbathers. Men sunbathing.”
“That’s why you froze up for five minutes?” Brand demanded. “You are fucking shameless.”
“And I saw . . . Well, I saw Lord Hanged Man,” I said. “He was watching the sunbathers. It looked . . . It looked like he was in a different time than both me and the sunbathers. I think . . . I think he comes back and watches these memories a lot. He called it his great act. And that says something.”
“Wait a fucking second,” Brand said. “You saw Lord Hanged Man? Does that mean he saw you?”
“It was a ghost memory,” I said.
“You said that it means somet
hing, that he comes and watches these memories. What does it mean?” Addam asked.
“I don’t know yet. But . . .” I trailed off. “Consequences. I need to get a better understanding of what happened here, and then we need to consider the consequences. Let’s go downstairs.”
Addam said he knew the way to a hatch that led to the galleys, which he explained were the main ship kitchens.
On the way to the below-deck hatch, I saw more flickers of ghost memories. I saw sailors repairing cargo nets. I saw sailors dying their hats in a bucket of blue dye. I saw sailors smoking, and laughing, and living under the heavy regard of a tropical sun. And the closer we drew to the entry point to the lower decks, the darker the memories got. People running. Shouting. I think I saw someone roll across the deck on fire, but the image came and went like an eye blink.
A ghost sprinted through me. He was running up to the exec, who shimmered ahead. The ghost said, “Bedsprings are down, sir. Techs say they can’t be repaired. We’re blind.”
“Then we punch every direction at once,” the exec spat. “Let’s get the bird in the fucking air first.”
It was night again—or at least a darker shade of gray. The two men went over to a group gathered around a gun. The gun was big enough that the person firing it was secured in harness netting.
“Light it up,” the exec shouted.
The man with the most colored bars on his chest turned to the team and barked, “I Division! Find us an enemy!”
The gun shot a round into the sky. Flares attached to parachutes exploded to life in the sky above me, turning night into day. Smoke rose—thick enough that the men started using hand signals to coordinate through their coughing.
The next thing I knew, the huge guns on the side of the ship were blasting a salvo. The force of their trajectory was so powerful that the entire ship seemed to move sideways—an optical illusion as the rounds actually flattened the ocean waves.
Brand’s fingers pressed into a cluster of nerves at my neck. I shook myself back into the present, to his worried expression.
“They didn’t know what was happening,” I said. “They didn’t know where the threat was coming from. He toyed with them. He made this last.”
The Hanged Man Page 15