by James Maxey
“Of course, madam. Quite wise of you.”
I was a little taken aback by the way that Gale was taking such a subservient role with Sorrow. Wanderers are known for their independence and freedom-loving nature. It seemed odd that the captain of a ship should be so obsequious. On the other hand, the one thing that Wanderers loved as much as freedom was money. Sorrow was no-doubt well compensated for building the Black Swan a new body.
If the rest of the world was no longer eager to hire the Freewind, I suppose I couldn’t begrudge Captain Romer for bending over backward to make her remaining customers happy, but at the same time it didn’t sit well with me. I’ve never treated a person differently based on the size of their purse. It mattered nothing to me if you were rag-picker or royalty. If you could tell a good joke and were generous enough to laugh at my attempts at wit, you were fit company to share a pint.
Perhaps it comes from having been raised by monks. Their vow of poverty took hold in me, even if their vows of faith, abstinence and chastity did not.
Sorrow concluded the conversation by giving orders about her meals. Captain Romer acknowledged them and left the cabin, thanking Sorrow for her business. Just as I learned a little bit about the captain by overhearing their conversation, I also think I learned a few things about Sorrow. It was easy to believe she’d been the daughter of a wealthy and powerful judge. I’m guessing she’d had a whole complement of cooks, maids, and butlers growing up. Perhaps she’d never been trained to be nice to the hired help.
Above me, I could hear Gale shouting out commands and Rigger responding. I was near the porthole. Perhaps due to my stillness, my wooden ears caught a whispered conversation that ensued as the sails rattled and flapped up the masts.
“I don’t like setting sail with an empty hold.” It was Mako’s deep voice. “You shouldn’t have been so dismissive of Captain Dare’s offer.”
Gale’s answer was much more difficult to hear. “It’s not enough that Levi betrayed us? Now you question my judgment?”
“I’m not Levi,” said Mako. “I’m just saying –”
“I know what you’re saying. But Dare’s splitting hairs. He won’t take a cargo of slaves, but he’ll gladly fill his hold with the shoddy food stocks the slavers purchase in order to feed their human chattel. We’ve sacrificed too much to engage in such compromises.”
“By your logic, any cargo in the world is unacceptable,” Mako said. “Most of the iron ore and the coal used to smelt it comes from mines worked by slaves. Are we never again to accept a load that includes steel? Every golden moon in the Shining Land is stamped with the image of a sovereign who supports the slave trade. Are we to refuse these coins for our future wages and be paid only through barter?”
Gale answered, but her words were lost as the ship groaned. The sails had caught the wind and the ship began to gently roll as she headed from the harbor. I wished I’d been above to see our departure. Clippers sport more sails than any other ship, making an impressive sight when all their canvas is unfurled. Also, I welcome all opportunities to expand my vocabulary, and the sailors I’ve known over the years have filled my head with terms like spankers, flying jibs and mizzen topgallants. I’d enjoy the opportunity to finally make sense of all the terms and figure out which of the thirty-plus sails was which.
Of course, from the sound of things above, I doubt that any of the Romers would have found the time to explain their jargon. A clipper this size normally set to sea with a minimum crew of twenty, and the Romers numbered seven – eight, if you counted Brand. Even with their magical talents, I imagine they had no time for a lubber like me to be wandering around the deck.
Further shouts drifted through the porthole, enough to catch Sorrow’s attention. She went to the small window near me and peered out.
“That didn’t take long,” she mumbled.
From the shouts above, I gathered that the Freewind had been ambushed the second it sailed from the harbor onto the open ocean. Out here, the rules that made Commonground a sanctuary no longer applied. I wanted to ask questions about the nature of the assault, the number of ships, how close they were, etc. At the very least, I would have liked to stand and look out the porthole. It was not to be. Instead, all I know is that the winds grew ever stronger. The sunlight through the portal brightened, and above the splashing of waves I heard a thunderous crack, like lightning splitting a tree trunk.
Sorrow chuckled. “Infidel’s not half bad with that hammer.”
There were further cracks. Finally, Sorrow turned away with a shrug. “That’s that,” she mumbled. The shouts from above had a decidedly celebratory tone. I had the feeling we weren’t being chased any more.
Sorrow settled at her desk. She opened a page of a fresh notebook and a new bottle of ink. As I tuned out the noise above deck, I heard the faint scratching rhythm of her quill racing across paper, trapping thoughts into words.
Lulled by this familiar noise, I dropped into memory. Since becoming a ghost, I’d not slept or dreamed. I never grew weary. I had no eyelids to close if I wished to sleep. But now, my wooden body felt, well, wooden. Heavy. It possessed a gravity that weighed down my thoughts. I was lulled by the sound of waves washing against the hull as we swayed across the sea. The muffled shouts of Romers in the rigging sunk into my seedpod ears, sounding not of this moment, but of some long distant past. Murmurs layered beneath whispers lay beneath the pulse of water, like a heartbeat, my heartbeat, so familiar after such a long absence.
Thus, for the first time in death, I found myself perched upon the precipice of sleep...
...then, slowly, I drifted free. My ghost fingers slipped loose of my knot-root hands as if they were oversized gloves. My legs twitched and came loose of their wooden counterparts and it felt good to wiggle my toes freely once more. I craned my neck, pulling free of my coconut mask. I was loose! I rose, my spirit spilling from the boundaries of its wooden cage.
Then I stopped short.
Silver wires still jutted from my phantom flesh.
I grabbed them and tried to yank them free.
Something yanked back, hard and fast, and I was pulled into the wood, into the barrel chest, shrinking ever smaller until I was tiny enough to be fit into the golden cage, then smaller still as I passed into the belly of the silver mosquito.
Though I must have been no larger than a flea to fit in such a compact space, I felt whole. And, indeed, I still looked whole; the curved silver surface of the interior of the mosquito’s belly reflected me perfectly. I looked just as I had when Infidel and I escaped the spirit realm after confronting Greatshadow. I was wearing the black boots and pants Zetetic had conjured for me, as well as the ridiculous red velvet cape, though it was now mostly in tatters. I was bare-chested; in the spirit world, I’d given my shirt to Infidel to replace her own shredded clothing.
I touched a jagged hole in my belly. This was my fatal wound, inflicted by my own knife.
And of course there was the knife.
I reached under the cape to my hip where the bone-handled knife was slipped into my belt. The knife was plain looking, simple, but elegant in its match of form and function. It had been my grandfather’s hunting knife; the blade was eight inches long and sturdy, with a pattern in the metal almost like fingerprints, where the steel had been folded in on itself a dozen times as a skilled blacksmith had worked in carbon to temper the edge. The hilt was a single length of yellowed bone; only after death had I learned this was dragon bone. The natural magical resonance of such beasts had trapped my soul within the weapon.
I was a ghost imprisoned in the belly of a jeweled mosquito. But how many ghosts had knives?
I rushed the wall, stabbing the silver. I laughed as my blade sank through the foil skin. Cutting through the mosquito’s metallic hide was no more difficult than cutting through the hide of a wild boar, something well within the scope of the blade’s intended purpose. In moments, I’d cut a flap in the side of the artificial insect. The mosquito didn’t protest as I p
ushed my arm through, followed by my head and shoulders. In another moment, with quite a bit of kicking and struggle, I’d worked myself loose of my silver prison.
But not quite free. I remained locked inside the golden cage. Worse, silver wires still hooked into my flesh. Tentatively, I grabbed the wire hooked into my left thigh. I took the knife and sliced the wire in twain.
Then screamed.
Then screamed some more.
It was the worst agony imaginable. It was as if a knife had been stabbed all the way into my thigh bone and was now twisting, digging at the marrow. I gritted my teeth to resist the pain, and tried to breathe deep breaths. In desperation, I retrieved the loose wire from the gilded floor and placed it back in contact with the length of silver line hanging from my leg. The metal ends flowed together. Instantly, the acute pain turned to welcome numbness.
I limped to the cage wall and slid down, my back to the bars as I struggled to catch my breath, until I remembered that I didn’t need to breathe. I was acting purely on instinct. Calmness settled over me. I looked out beyond my gilded cage, to the barrel chest in which this strange artificial heart was suspended.
Hmmm.
It struck me as curious that, having bound my spirit to this mosquito, she’d then sealed the mosquito inside a cage. I walked back toward the insect. In relative size, it loomed over me like an elephant. Viewed at this scale, the craftmanship was even more remarkable. I could now see the tiny bolts that fastened the leg joints, and the tightly coiled iron springs, far finer than a human hair, that powered the gold foil wings. The faceted eyes were made of glass lenses flickering with rainbows as I walked around them, gathering up the silver lines in my hand.
Sorrow’s powers were over gold, silver, iron, copper, glass, and wood. There was gold on the bars, the mosquito was largely silver, with iron springs and copper wings and glass eyes. The wood was the larger form, the golem itself.
What did it all mean?
This may seem like a curious statement from a ghost, but I really have never thought much about the supernatural. Yes, my life was awash in magic. My best friend could jump over buildings, I’d been raised in a religion where I regularly witnessed men editing reality with their words, and I hung out on a daily basis with shape-shifters and ogres. I had no propensity toward skepticism, but I also never bothered to try to learn any magical arts. None even intrigued me. The art of truthspeaking I found morally reprehensible; the art of deceiving was difficult to unravel from the art of driving yourself insane; blood magic was an excellent avenue for contracting hideous parasitic diseases; and elemental magic was a good way to draw the unwelcome attention of dragons. I followed few rules in my unruly life, but “don’t annoy dragons” was one I faithfully obeyed.
Zetetic had told Aurora he’d become a deceiver after studying forty different types of magic and finding all of them to be valid, even if the underlying premises contradicted each other. Aurora had protested that they couldn’t all be true. Her fundamental assumptions about the structure of the universe were completely contrary to the fundamental assumptions of Father Ver, for instance. She’d said that some things must be false if other things were true, and asserted that it couldn’t be both night and day at the same time.
“Unless the world is a sphere,” Zetetic had answered.
He’d also said, “All truth is local.”
I think Zetetic’s point was that magic works because people believe it works. Magic flows from human faith. Maybe I wasn’t well educated in existing systems of magic, but if all magical systems were just the product of the mind, could I create new one? It wasn’t as if I was completely ignorant of magical thinking. I’d spent years of my life with my nose wedged between the pages of books. I’d learned a lot of symbolism in my studies. Did my current prison have some symbolic significance?
The mosquito was obvious. It’s a widespread belief that blood contains the soul. Ordinary mosquitoes drink blood, so spiritual mosquitoes drink spirit blood. As for the cage, well, a cage is a cage. It holds creatures against their will.
What about the materials? Gold was easy. It symbolized perfection and wealth, but also greed. Was I trapped by a golden cage because I was greedy? At first I shrugged off the notion. Money never meant a damn thing to me. But were there other aspects of greed I was overlooking? Certainly, booze had been a weakness in life. I’d been more than willing to steal it, and when I wasn’t stealing it directly, I was stealing other people’s possessions and selling them to keep the precious elixirs flowing.
Of course, before I could ever escape my golden cage, I had the more immediate problem of losing these silver wires running through me. Silver commonly symbolized purity and innocence, but also sagacity and lies. Old men with silver hair are respected for their wisdom; smooth liars are said to have a silver tongue. The children of wealthy men are said to be born with silver spoons in their mouths.
It’s impossible to think of wealthy men and not think of King Brightmoon, ruler of the Silver Isles. If he wasn’t the wealthiest man alive, he was certainly in the top five. The moon is often associated with silver. The most common coin in the world was a small disk of silver ringed with gold, minted by the king’s treasury, and commonly called a moon. Infidel, King Brightmoon’s daughter, was named Innocent, and she has silver hair. I respect her for her purity and innocence, despite knowing that the woman I’ve grown to love is merely the adult mask of a damaged child.
Could the silver somehow represent her? Was I trapped here by my love for Infidel?
It seemed at once self-evidently true and also obviously false. I had no evidence the silver mosquito had been designed to capture me; I had the impression it had been looking for any old ghost it might find. I was probably over-thinking this.
But could over-thinking lead me toward a magical art?
All the magicians I’d ever known had spent their whole lives in the study of a single concept, elevating it in importance above all else. I’ve witnessed some pretty amazing results; Ivory Blade, for instance, and his somnomancy, rending the veil between the dream realms and our own to give life to nightmares. It was a little late for me to start studying dreams, or to seriously puzzle out the aspects of the various elements that bound me like some amateur alchemist. But I’d spent my whole damn life trying to understand myself.
If all truth was local, could I somehow understand myself so fully that I could alter my local truths and be free?
I chuckled ruefully.
“Great,” I said, my voice tiny in the vastness of the wooden barrel. “I’m placing my hope in Staggermancy.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
SEA OF WINE
“WAKE!” commanded Sorrow.
I lifted my coconut head, feeling groggy. Had I been sleeping? Had my shrinking to explore the silver mosquito and golden cage been only a dream? The room was now dark. How long had I been out?
“Rise,” said Sorrow, just as the ship shuddered strongly enough to throw her from her feet, slamming her into the oak door. The room had seemed immaculate before, but the impact was enough to raise dust hidden in the crooks and crevasses of the wooden beams and planks. Sorrow coughed, raising her hand to cover her mouth. “We’re under attack!”
I stood, trying to make sense of the noises coming from every direction. The whole Romer family was shouting at once. A dog was baying as if there was a full moon. The timbers of the ship groaned and popped. Above all this, I could hear a woman’s voice shouting. It wasn’t Captain Romer; whoever it was had a thick accent I couldn’t quite place. The only words I was certain she’d shouted: “...Ivory Blade!”
Sorrow braced herself against the door as she climbed back to her feet. “You’re not to try to communicate with anyone. You’re forbidden to write! Beyond these restrictions, take whatever actions are needed to defend this ship, its crew and its passengers!”
I nodded, acknowledging the command. I glanced toward the desk and the overturned bottle of ink. I clenched and unclenched my fingers. To
be expressly forbidden to write must be the ultimate tonic for writer’s block. If a quill had been thrust into my hand at that moment, I could have written volumes.
Sorrow threw herself onto the desk, stretching across it to reach her bed, tossing aside a pillow. She drew a yard long shaft of pitch black iron from between the mattress and the wall.
“If we face who I believe we face, a sword will prove mightier than a pen. Fight with all the savagery you can muster. Infidel’s life may be at stake.”
She handed me the iron shaft and I saw that it was indeed a sword, no doubt forged by her own fingers and drawn to a razor-sharp double-edge.
“Make haste!” she cried.
I threw open the door and lumbered into the narrow hall. All the cabins were open and the Romer girls were sitting in their bunks, looking only half awake. The last door in the hall jerked open, revealing Captain Romer’s quarters. Gale leapt into the hall, her tangled, sweaty hair fastened behind her neck with a scarlet ribbon. In the shadows of her cabin, I could see Brand’s blond hair bobbing as he struggled to pull on his boots.
Gale hadn’t bothered with boots; she was barefoot in her cotton britches, and her billowy blouse was only tied together across her breasts. The captain bounded up the stairs to the deck in two leaps, drawing her cutlass. I gave chase, though my bulky form slowed me in the tight hall. I nearly fell as the ship lurched once more. The timbers didn’t so much groan now as scream.
I emerged behind Captain Romer, who’d skidded to a stop on a deck slick with frost. It was night, as I’d guessed. Every lantern that hung in the rigging had gone dark, their flames extinguished beneath ice at least an inch thick coating everything in sight. Of course, “in sight” was somewhat limited by the pale fog that hung in the air, narrowing the world to a circle about twenty feet around me. The only light came from Captain Romer’s cutlass, which gave off an eerie phosphorescent glow.