Unfettered III

by Shawn Speakman (ed)

  She tore open the tube before her doubts could stop her. “Captain,” she whispered. “This is Thasha Isiq. Can you hear me?”

  She held her breath. She heard the hum of the wind in the ratlines, the groaning of timbers, a tarboy’s cough. Nothing else. She shot a glance at her cabin door and tried again.

  “Captain Rose, please answer me, I’m begging you, I—”

  “What are you about, girl? And why the devil are you whispering?”

  It was his voice, his unmistakable rumble—or was it? Something in its tone or timbre had changed, dried out.

  “Speak up, girl.”

  “Captain, excuse me, but”—Say something, anything, stall for time!—“how are you feeling today?”

  “State your purpose or be damned to you!” barked the man. “We’re navigating a reef, and I am not your blasted valet!”

  That was the Rose she knew. Still, that voice . . . Thasha bit her lips. If I’m wrong, if he’s just one of her servants—aya Rin, it’s all over.

  This much was clear, though: if it was Rose, he would not answer a second time. Thasha blurted: “She’s going to kill me, I can feel it. Kill me, or let me die. Please, Captain, you’ve got to help me. There’s no one else I can trust.”

  In the long silence that followed, she heard him breathing. She could almost see him there, stock-still among hundreds of busy sailors. She could feel his mind at work.

  “That creature in the stateroom,” he said at last. “She’s holding you prisoner?”

  “Yes.”

  “Against your will?”

  “Of course! What other kind of prisoner is there?”

  Now Rose himself was whispering. “Her kind, that’s what. Her puppets. We’re surrounded by them. The whole ship is infested.”

  Relief drenched Thasha like a waterfall; she was no longer alone. But then she thought of Ramachni: She will sense me, and things will be worse.

  “Captain Rose, there’s no time. Get me out of here. Please.”

  “Out of the stateroom?”

  “Out of her clutches! Out of this trap!”

  “She’s doing all of this for you, isn’t she?”

  “For me?” hissed Thasha. “Like hell, Captain! She’s doing it to me.”

  “And you want me to spring you? I can.”

  “Do it. Bless you. Do it now.”

  “Of course,” said the captain, “I will ask a favor in return.”

  A tiny sound made Thasha whirl. Someone was turning the doorknob.

  “Anything!” said Thasha. “It’s yours, I promise, I swear on my mother’s soul! Just get me out of here.”

  The door flew open. Erithusmé stood there, blazing with fury, her hand outstretched.

  “Step back from the speaking tubes,” she said.

  “There’s only one way,” said Captain Rose, “and that way is—”

  “Did you hear me, girl? Stand aside!”

  “—shipwreck.”

  The world heaved. Six hundred sailors cried aloud. Through the timbers, the rudder chain made a sound like galloping horses as Captain Rose spun the wheel. The Chathrand lurched to starboard, rolling on her beam-ends. Screams followed—the bending screams of men in free fall—and then the thumps and splashes as they struck rails, rigging, open sea. One particular, ear-splitting cry rose above the others:

  “REEF! REEF! BRACE FOR—”

  The ship struck. Thasha and Erithusmé were flung like dolls through the cabin door and across the stateroom, and her dogs followed in a chaos of howls and collisions and snapping legs that made Thasha scream aloud; she felt the hull shatter like an eggshell, heard the sea rush in, felt the pressure in her ears, saw Marila and her father and Hercól and Fiffengurt maimed and bleeding against the walls. The stateroom doors against which Thasha lay were bending, bowing, the water had already reached them, was about to smash through them like the Gods’ own battering ram, the portside window exploded, the salt water blasted across the chamber, and then Erithusmé raised a hand and said, “I yield to you, idiots,” and the world was still.

  She is falling, slow as a feather, empty as a husk. She cannot speak, can scarcely move; even to turn her eyeballs within her head taxes her strength. The medium about her feels like water but is not; she is breathing it, and dry. The light is slate gray and somehow inverted, as though it reveals not by reflection but negation: a chisel scraping away. Ten yards to her right lies the colossal Chathrand, keel shattered, spars and rigging furred with some kind of hoarfrost, drifts of ashen sediment upon the deck.

  The bodies of her friends are falling beside her: a mangled, soundless snow. Hercól’s back is broken. The admiral’s eyes are gently closed. Marila’s hands grip the timber that has been driven through her chest.

  She lands in silt. Marila, at twenty paces, is the next to touch the earth. But even as she lands, her form changes, melts. She is no longer Marila but a writhing spirit, a shadow in a stream. The creature turns to Thasha, arms outstretched. Landing, the others too cast off their human forms, and all begin to glide in her direction, their eyes mere empty sockets, their mouths like gashes with a knife.

  Thasha is gripped by a terror beyond anything she has ever known. With all her strength she fights the rictus that has seized her body, but only manages to turn her head a few inches. It is enough: a wide sweep of the slate-gray land opens before her—jagged, desolate—and from every direction the shadow-creatures are flowing and billowing toward her. They have one will, one need, like a people dying of thirst who have discovered a spring. But that spring is Thasha, and it is the warm blood in her that calls to them.

  The first shadow clutches at her arm. Voiceless, Thasha screams; her flesh is blistering with cold—and with that scream, her rictus is gone.

  She tears the sword from her belt and strikes. The creature breaks, scatters like oil in water. But before her eyes it begins to recover its shape. She leaps away; it follows. And now the others have surrounded her, ring upon ring. She whirls and slashes, but they are too many, they are infinite, and even cut to ribbons they manage to grip and bite and suck at her, and the cold seeps into her bones.

  The sword slips from her fingers. Her death will be a useless one, in silence, in bitterest exile. She spits a curse—but why go out cursing? Seventeen years was long enough, life had been rich enough, after the Red Storm and the Nelluroq Vortex, the war with the rats, the cities of the dlömu, the glass spiders with their webs of crystal, the ogress at the bridge of ice, the boy who had loved her, sworn he’d always love her, touched her awed and humbled but with a heat like the sun—

  She drops to her knees. The creatures fall on her like insects. They are drinking now, drinking her life. But even as her eyesight fails, she sees him: Captain Rose, massive, furious, charging from the broken hull of the Chathrand, his beard flowing wild about his shoulders, swinging his terrible axe. Behind him comes a woman Thasha has never seen, ancient as the hills but tall and strong. In her hands is a length of fabric, and it is red—blood red, furnace red, the only thing with color in this blighted land.

  From the time that follows, only one image survives: Captain Rose lumbering against a savage wind, teeth gritted, unstoppable. He is holding Thasha against his chest. The red shawl is about her, whipping like a flag in a gale. All around them are the shadow-creatures, numberless, famished, but they fear to touch her now, and they have no interest in Rose. The ancient woman staggers after them, bone weary, falling behind.

  “Eyes open.”

  Thasha blinked. A candle. A natural yellow candle, sputtering a little as though from damp. Rose was holding it near her face.

  “Ouch!”

  Hot wax had dripped on her neck. “Good,” said Rose. “You feel pain. That means you’re all the way back, if the mage spoke the truth.”

  Thasha sat up. She and Rose were deep in a cave. It was wet and dark, but against one wall a campfire burned atop a mound of sand. Thasha sniffed: weed, brine, shellfish.

  “Where are we?” she as
ked.

  Before Rose could answer, a low booming filled the cave. Thasha looked wildly around. The cave was tunnel-shaped, slick-walled, and astonishingly long. Miles away to her left it ended in a round mouth, bright and pale blue, like a spring day glimpsed through the wrong end of a telescope. The booming sound came from that way. To her right the tunnel ran on into darkness.

  Thasha was naked, draped only in a careworn woolen cloth. She hugged it around her, but it was wet and ragged; in fact it was coming apart.

  “You’re cold,” said Rose. “Crawl up by the fire.”

  Thasha dragged herself up the mound of sand. The cave, she saw now, was flooded to within twenty feet of where they stood. The booming sound came again, and now she knew that it was surf.

  Captain Rose was in full dress uniform. “You look so—healthy,” she said absurdly. “Your clothes are almost new.”

  “I should hope so,” he grumbled, examining a cuff link. “You buried me in these.”

  It was true: she remembered him laid out on the forecastle, his red beard combed out straight over that smart blue jacket, and how she’d wondered at the time whose job it was to groom and dress a corpse before it was given to the sea.

  All her memories were returning; the puzzle was nearly complete. But she recalled nothing of the escape from the shadow-creatures, the journey through that silent hell.

  “How long did you carry me?” she asked.

  Rose was whittling a bit of driftwood. “Time is fickle in that place: it flows fast or slow, according to laws the living cannot grasp. Have you worked out where ‘that place’ was, incidentally?”

  Thasha warmed her hands. “I think so,” she said. “I saw that place before, when I fell into a coma. I think we were in Agaroth.”

  Rose snorted. “Agaroth,” he said. “The Border Kingdom, the No Man’s Land between the living and the dead? You’re not the first to survive a glimpse of it, girl. Many of the living are given a taste of Agaroth, when ill or mortally wounded. And yes, I carried you through Agaroth, through that endless twilight, to reach this cave.

  “But that is not where we began. All your arguments with the mage, all your charades aboard the false Chathrand, occurred where the real ship lies to this day: far beyond Agaroth, in the Land of the Dead.”

  Thasha leaned closer to the fire. A part of her had known it already.

  “Hercól, Marila, my father—”

  “Dead souls,” said the captain. “Random ghosts, drawn to the bait of your living blood, then snared by Erithusmé. She forced them to serve the illusion, but it was your mind she sifted for the details—faces, voices, habits, tics.”

  “But I’m not dead!”

  “Of course not,” said Rose. “If you were, she could not even attempt to return you to the living world. And the mage had sworn to see it done. Why was that, girl? What in blazes did she owe you?”

  Under the shawl, Thasha passed her hands over her body: shoulders, chest, stomach, hips.

  “Rent,” she said. “Seventeen years of rent.”

  The captain squinted at her. Then he rose and walked a few yards away and knelt by a dark pool. When he approached the fire again, three spiny crabs were wriggling on his stick. He thrust them into the flames.

  “I don’t suppose,” said Thasha, “that you’d lend me your coat?”

  “You could not touch it,” said the captain. “My coat dissolved years ago in the embrace of the sea. And you should not be ungrateful for the garment you have.”

  “This ratty thing—”

  “Is what remains of a great cloak of protection. Erithusmé wove it for you to ward off the ravenous dead.”

  Thasha gasped. “That’s what she was doing? All along? That was the work she had to accomplish? I thought—”

  “That it was something foul, something selfish?” Rose laughed his old gleeful laugh. “Don’t be in a hurry to hate yourself, girl. Yes, that shawl was her task—but she never meant to finish it. She wove six or eight inches one day and unraveled them the next. And all those dead souls: their faces were supplied by your memories, but their orders were to keep you placid, passive—sedated, in a word.”

  “You were different, though.”

  Rose nodded. “The Chathrand had ghosts aboard before she found it, and one of them was mine. When she cast the spell that kept you in limbo, I felt its tug, and played along. I guided a false ship through dream reefs, barked orders at phantoms playing the part of my sailmaster, my lieutenants, my boys. But I could break free of that fantasy. I was myself.”

  Thasha’s eyes were moist. Felthrup, you broke free too. You helped me. Were you real? Did she kill you?

  “Wrecking the dream-ship tore her illusion to pieces,” Rose went on, “but still she tried to delay. She claimed she lacked the strength to bear you back to the living world. She was not pleased when I scooped you up and set off. I stole her last excuse, you see. I made her keep her promise to return you to life.”

  “And die herself,” said Thasha.

  “Her body had been destroyed by a pack of sorcerers,” said Rose. “She delayed her death by seventeen years, skulking about in your mind. You owe her nothing.”

  Thasha looked up at him and shook her head. “You were dead already, when I let her return, use my body, work her spells a final time. You didn’t see what she accomplished. Everyone owes her, Captain. Every living soul in Alifros. She saved the world.”

  “Fah,” said Rose.

  “What do you mean, ‘Fah’?”

  “Never mind, I am a cynic. Let us say she saved the world.”

  “I saw her walking behind us. I think”—Thasha squeezed her eyes shut—“she reached out her hand, the way she did when she was conjuring.”

  “A final spell?” The captain shrugged. “Plausible enough. There are wheels in motion that way”—he gestured at the distant cave mouth—“which I cannot account for. There is also this.”

  Rose fumbled in his pockets, and at last produced a damp, creased envelope. Within was a single sheet of paper: Thasha’s own travel stationery, in fact. She turned it to the firelight.

  I wanted to return with you, Thasha Isiq. I have left you an unfinished Alifros, a world still bleeding, a world in flames. One menace we defeated together; others you must face without me, with your strength and fine intelligence, and that quiet force I never mastered, which they say is stronger than hatred, binds the wounds of the soul.

  Tell Ramachni that if I had ever had the talent, I should have danced with him. And seek your own lost partner, if he still cares for you. And think of me when you dance.

  Rose snatched the sheet from her hands and tossed it in the fire. Thasha shouted in indignation, groping for it, but the letter was gone.

  “What the hell did you do that for?”

  “Her orders,” said Rose. “No trace of her is to leave this place. Besides, you’ll be swimming.”

  Swimming? Thasha glanced at the flooded cave, the bright window beyond. Rose pulled the crabs from the fire. “Eat,” he said. “You don’t have long.”

  “Are we back in my world, then? Back in Alifros?”

  “Eat and stop talking.”

  At her first bite Thasha found she was famished. She ate like a wild dog, cracked the shells with her jaws, burned her lips. Rose watched her, bemused.

  “Your world is right there.” He nodded again at the cave mouth. “But you’re not in it yet. This cave is an anomaly: what Erithusmé called a flaw in the code. Living humans can come or go from it only with the help of an . . . escort, if you like. I was your escort from death’s kingdom. To enter the living world, you need a plane shifter, a traveler, the kind of being that moves naturally between worlds. Cloud-murths, fire weirds, mirror-sprites, selk. She had to reach out to them, ask their assistance, while she sat there knitting your shawl.”

  “Did she find one?”

  “She claimed not—said the living world was too far for even her magic to reach it, from those depths. But she did follow us into
Agaroth, and that is closer to the daylight. That gesture you saw, now: perhaps she alerted those who care for you, and they took up the search for an escort?”

  “How could they? Why would a creature like that do them a favor?”

  “We’ll know soon enough, I think,” said Rose. “Someone has entered the tunnel. Don’t you feel it?”

  Thasha shook her head, but she stopped eating all the same. In life, Captain Rose’s instinct for the approach of strange powers had been uncanny. In death they appeared much the same.

  He sat down beside her, and for the last time she felt his physical presence, real as any large, aging heap of a man. They gazed in silence a while at the glittering cave mouth.

  “I promised you a favor as well,” said Thasha at last. “What is it? What do you want?”

  Rose opened his mouth to speak, but then his eyes narrowed.

  A young woman, not at all human, was wading toward them, rising from the sea. She was exceptionally beautiful. Her skin glistened as though with iridescent scales. Her hair was long and white, and her arms and legs flexed in too many places, in fact everywhere, like tentacles. Her clothing seemed a veil of milky light.

  “Horrible girl,” she said, “are you ready? Get up.”

  Thasha jumped up. Rose too lumbered to his feet, chuckling. “A sea-murth! I should have guessed. One of you took a shine to a tarboy of mine, didn’t you? A rather unusual tar—”

  “Say his name, puss-toad captain of theft and disease, and I will swim away and leave the girl here to die.”

  “All right, all right! She’s forgotten him anyway, what do you care?” Then Rose frowned, straightened his spine. “Is that what the murths think of me?”

  “You stole from us, raided our reefs,” she said. “We tried to kill you. I am glad someone did.”

  “Ah, well.”

  Thasha took a cautious step toward her. “I know you,” she said. “You’re Klyst. I remember: you followed the ship. But I can’t recall what I did to make you hate me.”

  Klyst spat at her feet. “Liar,” she said.

  Thasha rubbed her temples. There was still a gap in her memory after all. Right at the center of the puzzle, the place where the hammer had struck. The place where the boy—