Ship of Smoke and Steel

by Django Wexler

  The dredwurm has nearly halted, pulling itself forward only inch by inch, its head wrapped in a coruscating aura of brilliant blue. Berun’s mouth is open in a soundless scream, enveloped in a matching nimbus of scintillating energy, but he’s got it stopped. Aifin is still on his feet, golden sparks gathering around him, holding his remaining sword in both hands. I swing forward again, pushing through another ring of squirming, straining legs, only one segment back from the creature’s head.

  The eye. That red jewel. If the dredwurm has a weak spot, that has to be it.

  Then it all goes wrong.

  The dredwurm twists, folding itself nearly in half, with more agility than I thought possible. With its head locked in place, its tail comes around with lightning speed, striking Berun in the stomach with the force of a cavalryman’s lance. The long spike goes all the way through him, emerging dripping crimson from his back. With a flick, the dredwurm throws him off, his limp body slamming into the mushroom-covered wall and flopping bonelessly to the deck in a pool of gore.

  As his bindings vanish, the freed dredwurm rolls over, swinging me toward the deck. I have to leap free or be crushed, hitting the deck with a painfully hot flare from my armor. The thing’s tail comes around again, sweeping back toward Aifin. He dodges the tip with preternatural speed, but there’s nowhere he can go to avoid the length of the thing, and it catches him in the midriff. He folds up around it with an oof, and the monster slams him into the wall with a spray of broken pieces of mushroom.

  Meanwhile, its head turns in my direction, and it advances on me as I struggle back to my feet. Free to move, its spiked legs screech horrifically against the metal of the floor and ceiling as it drags itself forward. Around its three mouths, the smaller limbs reach out for me, tight nests of interlocking blades. In the center of that horrible shape, the eye, glowing a deep, malevolent red.

  Suddenly I know where I’ve seen that eye before. When I met Hagan, in the Deeps. The angel’s eye glowed blue, but otherwise it looked the same.

  The angel—

  The dredwurm isn’t a crab at all. However monstrous they look, the crabs are animals, with muscles, organs, and brains. This is something else, something animated by the same forgotten magic that powers Soliton.

  Rogue, Hagan had said. A rogue angel. He’d tried to warn me.

  Which means …

  Well, it means we’re all in the Rot.

  * * *

  Meroe is shouting my name, though she’s barely audible over the dredwurm’s screeching.

  “Get the others clear!” I shout back. Assuming they’re still alive. Aifin’s impact with the wall might have been cushioned by the mushrooms. Berun—I don’t want to think about Berun.

  Survive first.

  The dredwurm comes forward, and I step up to meet it, blades slashing. I manage to sever two of its spikes as others slash across me, held away by shimmering Melos energy. The pressure has already made it hot enough to hurt, though, and I back away, breathing hard. Armor or not, I can’t fight this thing head on.

  Which means, since it doesn’t show any signs of being distracted, that I can’t fight it at all. Rot, rot, rot. If Jack were here to get its attention, or Thora to pry its limbs away—

  If I’d told the Scholar to shove his offer up his arse—

  Focus, Isoka. You’re not dead yet. Neither is Meroe.

  I feint to the left, and the dredwurm follows the move, coming on slowly but steadily. It has no eyes, but it’s clearly able to see me. Or hear me, like the crabs.

  It’s an angel. No wonder my bursts of power didn’t hurt it. The thing must be solid, no guts or muscles or skeleton, like a statue come to life. It doesn’t even bleed.

  Hagan had stopped the angel, back at the ruined village. So where in the Rot is Hagan now?

  The thing lurches forward, backing me toward a corner. I parry a half-dozen slashing strikes, sever a spiked limb on the riposte, and feel another blade slam into my armor. Heat and pain shoot across my body. I see Berun behind my eyes, impaled and limp, blood spurting as he flies through the air. I’d been frustrated with his cowardice. For a moment, the image twists, and it’s Meroe I’m looking at, her body shuddering, the life draining from her eyes.

  Focus, Isoka.

  The Scholar said this was a power I had, too. Even if he’s mad, even if his notion about the spirits of the dead is insanity, maybe he was right about that.

  Maybe I can use it.

  I try reaching out to the dredwurm. I can feel my heart pounding, blood rushing in my ears, my armor crackling and spitting with power. The strange gray energy is there; I can feel it, even see it—tiny motes, coursing through the dredwurm like blood. But no matter how I strain, they don’t move.

  Hagan had spun ribbons of the gray light to wrap around the angel. I try to remember what it felt like, watching him.

  The dredwurm lashes out, and I take another step away. My back comes up against the wall, my armor pressing into the mushrooms. Green lightning crackles across them, leaving scorched, blackened trails. The puffballs burst into phosphorescent shards.

  Nowhere left to run.

  I try to remember what it felt like in my dreams, the dead watching me, the hovering motes of gray.

  Something shifts, a tiny break in the flow of gray light. The dredwurm halts for a moment, its movement stuttering, like a clockwork toy with a stripped gear. The light from the red gem flickers.

  I reach out again, as though this were a dream, straining to hold on to that sense of unreality. It’s a strange, transient feeling, a state of mind that will disappear if I look at it too closely. Like making two people overlap by crossing your eyes. I can see the flow of energy through the dredwurm, a ludicrously complex pattern of gray light that animates it, moves its limbs, drives it to kill. As I thought, it’s not alive, not really. It’s a machine made of magic and stone, and it has gone horribly wrong.

  I don’t think I could understand the structure of the thing in a thousand years of study. Fortunately, fixing something is never as hard as breaking it. I reach out, take hold of the delicate filigrees of light, and pull.

  It doesn’t give way as easily as I thought it would; size and strength are deceptive in this weird twilight world. But whatever I manage to do brings the dredwurm to a halt, its limbs stretched and stiff, vibrating with its need to tear me to shreds but unable to move. Its red eye pulses with light.

  Carefully, like a performer walking with a spinning plate balanced on her nose, I step forward. I feel my mind wobble, my control over the strange energy slip. The spiked limbs of the dredwurm move fractionally toward me, then halt again. I take another step, right up against the thing’s head.

  Its jewel-like eye is level with my face. I raise my blades, Melos energy flickering. Still moving slowly, I pull my arms back.

  Then I strike. One blade goes in above the eye, the other below it, driving as hard as I can into the rogue angel’s tough flesh. The sudden movement topples me from my perch, makes me drop the plate, and whatever control I had over the gray energy vanishes. The dredwurm’s limbs close in around me, points scraping against my armor, heat blooming across my back as though I were being roasted over a fire. I ignore it, forcing my blades around in a circle, carving away the flesh beneath the eye. The creature grows frantic, ripping at me, and I hear the sizzle of burning skin. I scream.

  My blades meet with a fat spark of Melos power, and the eye comes free. It falls, hitting the deck with a metallic clunk. The dredwurm goes still at once, dozens of limbs freezing in place. I carve one out of the way as I pull myself back, gasping. As soon as I’m free I let my armor drop, the air cool as clean water against my abused skin. I can smell myself, burnt cloth and burnt flesh, and my back is a mass of agony.

  I’ve had worse. I clench my teeth as I bend to retrieve the eye, feeling skin stretch and crack, and then look around for the others.

  * * *

  I find Berun first, by the splash of red he left when he hit the wall. He’
s lying facedown in a pool of blood. The dredwurm’s tail has left a sizable hole in his stomach, and I can see right into the torn purple mess of his guts. The air stinks of blood and shit.

  But he’s not dead. Not yet. Bubbles of blood burst around his mouth as he breathes weakly.

  He was only here because Meroe asked him. Because I told Meroe to ask him. I’d thought—

  Rot, rot rot.

  “Meroe! Where are you?”

  I turn and find her hurrying across the room. Before I can stop her, she wraps me in a hug, the pressure painful on the skin of my back. I hug her anyway.

  “Oh, gods, Isoka, I thought you were going to die. I thought we were all going to die. That thing just—It just stopped—”

  “I’m fine,” I say, which is a lie. “Meroe, Berun’s alive. You have to help him.”

  “He’s…” Meroe looks over my shoulder, down at the dying boy. She swallows hard. “I … I don’t know.…”

  “You can do it.” I pull back, putting my hands on her shoulders, looking into her eyes. “You saved me. You can save him.” She has to. It was a mistake to come here, my mistake. He shouldn’t have to pay for it.

  “You don’t understand, Isoka.” She pulls away from me, drops to her knees beside Berun. “It’s not the same. This is … too much.”

  “Try.” My voice is tight. “Please.”

  “It might not work.”

  “He’s dying.”

  “It might…” She swallows again, and nods. “I’ll try. Find Aifin.”

  I clap her on the shoulder. Aifin is on the other side of the room, lying in a heap of broken mushrooms. When I reach him, I’m glad to find he doesn’t seem too badly injured, though he’s not conscious. I check him for broken bones, and when I don’t find any I pull him out into a more comfortable position and leave him for the moment.

  The black bulk of the dredwurm is starting to dissolve, falling apart into loose black ash. I limp past it again, back to Meroe’s side. Her hands are on Berun’s body, and they’re sticky to the wrists with blood.

  “This is … not going to be easy,” she says. “You just had broken bones. I need his body to rebuild.…” She shakes her head. “I don’t know if I can.”

  “You can.”

  She looks up at me, smiles, and then turns to the dying boy with fierce concentration. Light gathers around her hands, a weird, glittering purple. Ghul light. The Forbidden Well. I suppress the inground urge to step away.

  The light flows into long, looping strings, from Meroe’s hands into Berun’s wounds, like she’s working on a loom. There’s a hum in the air, and a sharp metallic scent stronger even than the smell of blood. Berun’s hand twitches.

  Then he lifts his head back, dripping blood from his nose and forehead, and gasps for breath. Meroe scrambles out of the way as he rolls over, trailing strings of gore. He takes another deep breath, and I can see the wound is shrinking, new pink flesh spreading from the ragged edges like frost closing over a lake.

  “It worked!” I grab Meroe’s shoulder. “It rotting worked!”

  I see her face. Her eyes are very wide, with tiny pupils. She shakes her head minutely.

  Berun sits up, in spite of his shredded stomach. His head is distended, bulging on one side, hair parting around a dome of expanding skull. Something shifts in his shoulder, the bones changing, a pointed growth stretching his skin like a tent. It splits, and whorled bone issues forth from underneath, wet and red with torn meat. One of his legs starts to shiver, and sprouts feathers.

  Berun starts to scream.

  The sound he makes is barely human, and it gets worse as the Ghul energy Meroe has unleashed churns inside his body. Parts of him start to grow, muscles bloating, skin coming apart like rotted lace. His fingers are melting where they touch the deck, becoming pseudopods that stretch outward like the blind roots of a plant. One of his eyes is wide and terrified, while the other is changing, pupil splitting over and over until there are a hundred black dots in a sea of white.

  “No,” Meroe is saying, over and over. “No, no no no no no no—”

  She’s screaming to match Berun. Maybe I am, too. I drag her away, back from this bloated, spreading monstrosity she’d created, a mound of bulbous flesh that gets bigger by the second, with Berun’s terrified face still visible in the center of it. I see his ribs, grown into barbed spikes, tear their way out, then dissolve into white goo. There’s nothing left but flesh, a spherical ball of flesh, growing outward fast enough that for a moment I’m afraid it will engulf us, engulf the whole ship, the world—

  Then it explodes, painting the walls with blood.

  20

  “I’m afraid,” Arin says, “that the master is occupied.”

  “This is important.”

  “He can’t be disturbed.”

  “Tell me,” I snarl. “Would it disturb him to have to clean bits of his bed warmer off his front step?”

  It’s a nasty thing to say to a girl who doesn’t deserve it, but I’m not in a forgiving mood. Arin—she really is nearly identical to Erin, apart from the way she braids her hair—keeps a stoic expression, but she can’t hide the flush in her cheeks. It must be hard, being an iceling and having your skin show the slightest blush.

  I have to give her credit. The fear is obvious in her eyes, but she manages not to flinch. After a moment, she turns away, closing the door behind her. I start a mental count. I’ll give it a hundred before I start tearing the place apart.

  The door opens again before I get to fifty. The Scholar is waiting, cane in hand, adjusting his spectacles as though the sight of me is a surprise.

  “Deepwalker,” he says. “You’ve returned. Come in.”

  He steps aside, and I stalk past. I pull the dredwurm’s eye out of my pocket. The surrounding flesh crumbled like the rest of the creature, but the jewel-like eye remained intact, still shimmering with a faint red glow. I slam the thing on the nearest table and turn to the Scholar.

  “I got your rotting trinket.”

  “I see that.” He raises an eyebrow. “You don’t seem pleased. And you gave poor Arin a fright.”

  “Arin can go to the Rot. Which is where we’re all going, if I believe you. You knew what the dredwurms really are, didn’t you? That’s why you wanted this thing, for your rotting experiments.”

  “I suspected, yes,” he says, calmly. “I haven’t had a specimen to study, for obvious reasons.”

  “We thought it was a crab, not a rotting angel!” I take a deep breath. “Berun, one of my pack, is dead. Some of the others are … hurt.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it.” He shrugs. “But I hardly see how you can be angry with me. Crab or angel, you knew the dredwurm was dangerous, and you and your pack chose to take the risk.”

  “Because you wanted a trophy!”

  “It’s not just a trophy, as you know.” He reaches out for the eye, and I pull it away. “It may be the salvation of everyone on this ship.”

  “You’re going to take me to the Captain,” I say.

  “That was our agreement.”

  “And I’m going to get him to turn this ship around.” Even if I have to put a blade to his throat. Anger flares inside me, as hot as powerburn.

  “As to that, I make no guarantees. But it’s possible you will have greater success than I have.” He starts across the floor of the tower, cane tap-tapping. “Meet me at midnight, where we held the Council audience. I will guide you from there.”

  “Why not now?”

  “Mundane reasons,” he says. “I will have to adjust the rotation of the guards, to ensure you will not be found.”

  “Fine.” I stuff the eye back into my pocket. “I hope the Captain stays up late.”

  * * *

  The Upper Stations are still buzzing with packs trading information about the dredwurm. I wonder if Zarun has woken up yet, and if he’s realized what happened. The mushroom I dosed him with should only have left him groggy, which would be easy enough to write off to wine and a bu
sy night.

  When I arrive, Jack and Thora are sitting in the common room of our quarters, roasting something in a pan. Thora is staring intently at the fire, but Jack bounces up, indecently cheerful.

  “Fearless leader,” she says. “I perceive that you have gotten an early start on the day!”

  “More like she didn’t actually finish the night,” Thora said. “I hope you ended up somewhere good.”

  “I was with Zarun,” I say.

  Thora looks up at Jack with a grin. “Told you. That’s two bottles you owe me.”

  Jack heaves an exaggerated sigh and puts a hand on my shoulder. “I believed in you, Deepwalker.”

  “Were you betting on who I would rut?”

  Jack blinks, as though the thought that I might object had never occurred to her, then puts on a shifty look. “Possibly.”

  “And what did you put your bottle on?”

  “That Princess Meroe would get her dainty fingers into your underthings before our illustrious clade master. I’ve seen the way she looks at you.”

  I suppress a powerful urge to punch her in the face. Instead, I turn away and head for my bedroom.

  “Do you know what’s going on with the others?” Thora says, her attention back to her cooking. “I haven’t seen anyone else today.”

  “No idea.” The words are a growl as I push through the curtained doorway.

  Thora’s not stupid. We won’t be able to keep what happened from her for long. Berun is dead—my mind helpfully supplies an image of his screaming face, disappearing inside a mass of bulging, tumorous flesh—Aifin is hurt, and Meroe …