by Will Wight
If anything, the General’s grip tightened on her sword. “Captain, I could kill you and your friend from here. You’d have no chance to pull the trigger or to contact your Lyathatan. I haven’t done it already because my Guards would be in danger, but the longer this discussion goes, the more I’m reconsidering the risk.”
A standoff. Great. Calder hated standoffs. He always felt that he could talk his way out, but it somehow never worked out that way.
Before he could come up with any other ideas, a girl’s voice piped up from behind him.
“You’ve forgotten me again, Jarelys.”
Calder pulled Naberius back, keeping his gun in place, so that he could see both General Teach and the woman who’d spoken.
It was Bliss. She stood in a clear space on the deck, black coat brushing the wood, pale hair drifting behind her. Some of the Guards edged away from her.
“Bliss, step away,” the General said. “This does not need to involve you.”
Calder had another concern. “You were just aboard my ship.”
“That’s true.”
“How did you get over here?”
She unbuttoned two of her coat buttons and reached inside. “No one likes a man who asks too many questions.”
“That actually doesn’t explain anything.”
From her coat pocket, the Guild Head pulled a bone about the length of Calder’s forearm. A chorus of ominous cackling sounded from high up in the crow’s nest, as though a coven of dark spirits had started to mock him from above. In spite of himself, Calder glanced up. Nothing up there.
When he returned his gaze to Bliss, the bone was a full-sized spear of one piece, its haft yellowed bone, its head flattened and sharpened. She leaned forward onto the balls of her feet, holding the spear with one hand near the head and one farther back on the haft.
“Clear the deck!” General Teach shouted. “For your lives, get below!”
The Imperial Guards scrambled out of the way. One shaggy-furred man popped his dripping head up over the side, having climbed out of the ocean and up to The Eternal. When he heard the order, his eyes widened, and he leaped back into the sea.
“Go back to your ship, Calder Marten,” Bliss said calmly. “Take Naberius Clayborn with you.”
Urzaia didn’t need to hear anything else. He plucked the pistols from the Witness, tossing each of them onto the deck, and then threw Naberius over his shoulder like a sack of grain.
Teach bared an inch of her sword, and the force of its sheer bloodlust actually made Calder stagger backwards a step. He had to bend all his focus to close his senses, to not Read, simply to keep from screaming and hiding like a child. “Stay where you are!” she demanded.
Bliss closed her eyes briefly. When she snapped them open again, they shone with a pale light.
Roots twisted up from the boards, as though the wood had suddenly decided to bloom. The stalks flowered into leaves, then instantly burst into flame like a thousand candles flaring to life. The sudden heat flashed against Calder’s skin. They burned with impossible speed, ash and smoke rising into the air, twisting around Bliss in a double helix.
The power coming off of Bliss was, in its own way, even more frightening. She radiated an eternal Intent, an insatiable hunger for change, a hatred of the physical world and all its restrictive laws. If it had its way, that power would shred the rules of nature and scatter them like confetti, until the world flexed and moved and changed like the sea in storm...
Calder shook it off, focusing once more on keeping his senses shut. If the two Guild Heads clashed, death and madness meeting head on, he wouldn’t want to be anywhere inside a mile.
And this was the Aion, where unspeakable creatures were lured by power, conflict, and blood.
So maybe a mile wasn’t far enough. Say ten miles.
He turned to Urzaia. “Time to leave.”
The Izyrian didn’t need to be told twice. He also didn’t, as Calder had expected, immediately leap from one ship to the other.
Instead, he picked up Calder and tossed him over his other shoulder.
It was undignified and surprisingly painful, dangling with his face in Urzaia’s back. The man’s shoulder jabbed him in the stomach like a club, and when he got a running start along the deck, it was like being beaten in the torso with a sack of bricks.
The Head of the Imperial Guard shouted after them, but they were already in the air, Shuffles laughing as it flew alongside them.
Calder winced in anticipation of landing, clenching his stomach. This was going to hurt worse than any wound he had taken in the actual battle.
When they landed, he found that he was right.
~~~
The second void transmission caught Jerri while she slept.
She woke to an icy wind, and a feeling like thousands of ants crawling over her skin. Her eyes flew to the back wall, and for an instant, another pair of eyes stared straight into hers.
Jerri threw a fist forward, hitting nothing, flailing like a child in the darkness. She cast her mind out to her Soulbound Vessel, trying to contact her earrings. They would be in the drawer next to the bunk.
But this wasn’t The Testament’s cabin, it was a prison cell. And her earrings remained where they always were: locked on the other side of the island, out of her reach.
The eyes vanished, replaced by the familiar gaping darkness, as though the world ended in the back of her cell. If she walked back there and didn’t stop, she got the feeling that she would fall off a cliff and never hit the bottom. Faint lights writhed and twisted in the shadows like tortured stars.
She rolled from the bed and tried to collect herself, prepared for the voices. They were different each time. Sometimes she heard spidery whispers, but other times...
“HAS THE HEART ARRIVED?” the voice roared from the void.
She flinched back, hoping that no one outside the prison would hear. That could lead to awkward questions. “I’m doing just fine, thank you for asking. And yes, the Heart arrived just recently.” Anyone with any sensitivity to Elder forces would have felt the Heart the instant it landed on the island. In this case, that meant she was likely the only one who’d noticed.
“WE ARE PLEASED.” A shadow whipped out within the void, snuffing out a lone light. It looked like a frog’s tongue taking a fly. “FORCES CONVERGE. WHEN YOU FEEL THE HEART’S POWER WAX, USE OUR GIFT.”
Jerri glanced around her cell, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. “Gift?”
Something about the size of a fist hurtled out of the void like a comet, forcing Jerri to duck. It crashed into the bars with a clang of metal on metal, falling to the ground.
She leaned over, afraid to touch it. On closer inspection, it looked like a tight collar of braided black metal.
“HOLD IT AND CALL OUT FOR HELP, BUT ONLY WHEN THE TIME IS RIGHT.”
Jerri brushed the back of her fingers across the dark metal, testing it. It was such a bitter cold that it stung her skin, but she’d heard that was normal for objects transferred through the void. She tucked it into a corner of her blankets, hoping it would warm up with time.
“Will this free me?” she asked.
“POTENTIALLY.” The void began to shrink back into itself, dragging the unnatural chill with it. “WAIT FOR THE POWER OF THE MOTHER’S HEART. WAIT.”
Then the void finally closed to one black point and winked away.
After she had collected herself, Jerri called out. “I expect you heard that.”
“I can’t believe the guards haven’t shown up already,” Lucan responded, from the other side of the wall.
“I expect the voice only sounded loud to us,” she said. “Out of this room, they would have likely heard nothing.”
“That makes no sense. If a voice sounds loud to us, then it’s loud to everyone.”
Though he couldn’t see it, she smiled into the darkness of her cell. “Only one of the many mysteries the Elders have shared with us. Imagine if our Readers could craft messages that only
certain people could hear.”
“That doesn’t appear to be the case,” he pointed out. “I could hear most of it clearly. If you could actually tailor it to a specific listener, then why didn’t they make it so that only you could hear the message? Or did they specify a radius...”
Lucan trailed off, murmuring to himself. That was fine with her—she left him to it. Her own father had taken advantage of her curiosity to induct her into the Sleepless in the first place, and if she could pique the interest of a few others, then she would have repaid him well. Especially if one of those others was a Consultant.
She laid back on her cot, but her mind rushed too fast to let her get back to sleep. What would happen if she tried to use the gift now? Would it do nothing, or would it simply allow her to break free and fail to fulfill whatever purpose the Sleepless had intended? Shouldn’t she test it? What if she needed to use it at the appropriate time, but it didn’t work?
More importantly, when would the Heart’s power rise? If it wasn’t in the next day or two, then the Consultants would inevitably find the black metal stashed in her blankets. They didn’t inspect her possessions every day, but when they did, they were surprisingly thorough. She had hid a few innocuous items—a handful of splinters from her meal tray, a napkin, the broken tine of a fork—all over her cell, just to test, and they were always gone after inspection. There was no way she could hide something as obvious as the iron gift for long.
After a few minutes, Lucan called her name. “Jyrine, something’s coming. Do not say a word. You won’t hear anything, but your life may be in danger.”
“Are you communing with Elders?”
“Not a word, I said. This is bad. She may just kill you on principle.”
“Who—”
“Quiet. She’s here.”
Jerri heard nothing, but she felt another wave of cold crawl over her skin. This wasn’t the same sharp, bitter cold as the void transmission, but the clammy, shivering cold of lifeless flesh. She felt it in her mind, in her connection to the Elders that she’d had since she was a little girl. It was cold loneliness, followed by the warm promise of rebirth.
The Heart of the Dead Mother. It was coming here.
~~~
As they traveled toward the Gray Island, they kept Naberius gagged and tied to the mast.
Calder found it very entertaining, though Andel didn’t approve and Petal kept a safe distance. It didn’t pay off in anything except personal satisfaction until the second day, when a column of slate-gray cloud appeared on the horizon.
It looked almost like a hurricane locked into place: a swirling wall of dark gray fog and cloud, raised like a barrier between them and the rest of the sea. Even after years of sailing the Aion, he’d never seen anything like it.
“What is that?” he asked no one in particular.
Surprisingly, it was Petal who answered, inching her way closer to him as she spoke. “That’s, ah, that’s the Gray Island. It’s why they call it that. Gray, I mean. It’s a wall of mist, or maybe fog, and it stays up all year-round. Surrounds the whole island. Nobody knows how it was done, and some alchemists…in the Guild, I mean…some alchemists try to duplicate it in their labs, and they can’t.”
Having said her piece, Petal scurried off.
The Gray Island. It was impressive, he had to admit. Not the most intimidating supernatural sight he’d seen on this sea, but certainly worth the visit.
Now what is it for, I wonder? The Consultants obviously weren’t trying to hide the island’s location: they would invite anyone with enough marks to their island any time of year. Some chapter houses handed out free maps. So what did all that mist actually accomplish?
He was still at the wheel when he saw Naberius’ eyes snap open, staring straight at the Gray Island. The Witness shot to his feet, lunging in that direction.
Calder hopped off the stern deck and made his way over, reaching out a hand to Read the Chronicler. As soon as he sensed the cold, clammy influence on the man, he moved his hand back.
“That song!” Naberius cried. “Do you hear the song?”
No doubt. Naberius sensed the Heart of the Dead Mother.
“All hands on deck!” Calder shouted.
Andel spoke up from the nearby folding table, where he was idly shuffling cards. “We’re all here, sir.”
“What have I told you about shouting, Andel?”
“That you like it.”
“That’s right. Don’t take that from me.” The others gathered around Andel. Foster hopped down from the mast, Petal scurried up and sat on a crate nearby, and a distracted-looking Urzaia looked toward the horizon and fiddled with his hatchet.
“Where is she?” Calder asked.
Urzaia pointed straight to the island.
Naturally.
Andel clapped his hands together. “All right, everyone, let the twenty-third official crew meeting begin.”
Calder sighed, pulling up a folding camp chair to the table. “I was hoping we could talk off the record, Andel.”
“Rejected,” Andel said. “Foster, take notes.”
Foster grumbled under his breath as he switched out his shooting-glasses for reading-glasses. Petal handed him a pen and a sheet of paper.
“Please describe the situation for the record, Captain.”
Calder couldn’t see why they didn’t just talk about it. He never consulted these logs for anything. But Andel enjoyed the formality, and it wasn’t worth fighting about.
“Naberius has sensed the Heart. It’s clearly in that direction, which is the approximate location of the Consultants’ Gray Island. And now Urzaia feels the blond Consultant, Shera’s partner, in that location. Isn’t that right, Urzaia?”
He drew in a deep breath through his nose. “I can almost smell her from here.”
Petal shivered and edged away from him.
“So—” Andel began, but Foster stopped him.
“Give me a second. I’m not a Chronicler, I can’t write that fast. I don’t see why we can’t get Naberius to take notes.”
“Really?” Andel said. “You really can’t see why?”
Foster grumbled for a few more seconds until he finally caught up to the conversation.
Andel waited for his nod to continue. “We’re in deep water here. This affects everyone, so we’d like to hear everyone’s opinion. Petal?”
As much as Calder hated to take the time it took to consult the crowd, he had to admit that his Quartermaster was right. Landing on the Gray Island would affect everyone on the ship, for better or worse, and it would be best if everyone was willing to walk forward with their eyes wide open.
He instantly decided to act as though he had been onboard with the idea from the beginning.
Petal cleared her throat, fiddling with a bottled potion and peering out from under her hair. “Well...I think we should...at least try to get the Heart. Ourselves. The Consultants will destroy it, right? That’s...probably not good. I want there to be an Emperor. But I don’t want it to be Naberius, so...”
She shrunk into herself, apparently finished.
Calder was proud of her. That was the longest string of concurrent sentences he’d heard out of her this year.
“Well said, Petal.”
Andel pointed to Urzaia, who shrugged.
“The Consultant women owe me a fight. I will be collecting. That is all.”
“Simple,” Calder said. “Effective. Easy to remember. I like that philosophy.”
When Foster had finally finished writing, Andel turned to him. “And what do you think, Foster?”
Dalton Foster raised shaggy eyebrows. “Me? I think we should let the Consultants destroy the thing. It hasn’t done us any good in the past.”
“If they actually will,” Calder pointed out. It still seemed strange to him that the Consultants would go through such efforts to retrieve the Heart if they simply meant to destroy it when they got it back home.
“My turn,” Andel said, folding his arms. �
��I think we’re in way over our heads.”
Foster scribbled his words on the paper. “Good. That means we’re in our home port.”
“I also think that it will take more than the usual amount of effort to get any pay out of this.”
That was a good point. Of course, they still had Naberius. Maybe they could arrange some kind of a ransom...and then escape, alive, to spend it. That was the trick.
“However,” Andel went on, “I do think we need to make it onto the island. We’re in too deep to back out now, and I know we’d all like to settle once and for all what happened to Jyrine.”
Calder had been trying to avoid thinking of Jerri ever since the Gray Island appeared in the distance, though it was all but impossible. His wife could be on that island. Or perhaps her corpse was buried there.
Either way, he needed to find out.
He realized that the others were staring at him, and picked up the discussion. “I don’t trust Naberius. I don’t trust his sponsors. And I certainly don’t trust the Consultants. If it weren’t for Jerri, I would want to sail as far away from this island as possible and never look back. But if there’s even a chance she’s alive...”
The others didn’t even move, waiting for him to finish.
“...I’ve got to know. But I would like to escape the island and get home alive. For that purpose, I believe the Heart is indispensable.” He turned his gaze to Naberius. “We need something to trade for our freedom, and I don’t think anything less than the Heart of Nakothi will keep us out of the gallows.”
Everyone remained silent. Andel returned to shuffling his cards, which he often did simply to keep his hands occupied.
After a few moments, Andel fanned out a hand of cards, watching Calder over the tops. “It seems to me that we need advice.”
“That’s why I keep you around,” Calder said.
“You might say that we need someone to consult.”
I’m an idiot. A new possibility opened up before him—he’d been overthinking everything. “I’m a little ashamed that I didn’t think of that before.” He hopped up from the table and hurried back to the stern deck, already adjusting the ship’s position with his Intent.
Foster muttered to himself as he wrote. “Captain...jumps...to a conclusion. There. Meeting adjourned.”