by Lani Lenore
She didn’t respond to him. The Scourge walked behind the table that was scattered with maps and dust and bones, and sat down in the skull chair. She tried to ignore the way she felt his gaze on her skin, but he was staring at her so hard she thought she might melt like the lone candle that was suffering here.
“I wish I had more to offer you. I’m afraid I wasn’t quite prepared for company.”
Still, she didn’t say anything. She was too miserable to put on a show for him. He observed her for a while longer before he spoke again.
“Come now: can’t we have a civil conversation? Don’t you want to ask me any questions? You seem like the type. An inquisitive young girl, discovering the unknown – the forbidden.”
She snapped up at that, suddenly alive. She was so used to everyone avoiding her questions that she couldn’t believe he was offering to accommodate. She didn’t care if he was only going to slit her throat afterward. This chance wouldn’t get by her.
“Why won’t you stay dead?” she asked.
A little smile emerged behind his collar. “You cut right to the heart, don’t you? I suppose that’s what all beautiful girls do.”
She didn’t favor him with a response, only stared at him to prove that she wasn’t going to back down.
“I’ve spent a long time in the darkness,” he said finally. “I thought it was a dream. It didn’t occur to me that anything was even amiss until this time. I had no memory of death. I only remembered waking up with a sense of failure and a rekindled hatred. No one mentioned it to me, afraid of the prospect alone, I suppose. A man who keeps returning from the dead to seek revenge – who wouldn’t fear that?
“Beyond all the years I’ve been in this world, it wasn’t until this time that something changed.”
“What did change?” she asked, looking at him raptly.
“It was a haunting vision, yet so close I thought I might touch it. I was drifting in the darkness and the strangest notion of an old memory came back to me. I saw an apparition. It was beautiful, ethereal. It was a girl in a white dress, with long golden curls. I couldn’t tell whether she was a child or a woman. She seemed stuck somewhere in between. She led me to a door, and when I opened it, I saw the answer to everything.”
A door? Yes, she had also seen a door. She had opened it to see Rifter’s memories. While she could accept that, the other part of what he said was shocking to her. A girl in white? An apparition in the darkness? He had meant to say that it was her. She had led him to the door?
She didn’t want to believe him.
“You’re lying,” she accused.
The man shook his head, his dark locks swaying limply. “I can’t lie to you. I told you that.”
She watched his face, trying to decide, but he was impossible to read. He was a perfect liar with unquestioned honesty.
“When I saw you at the Tribal camp, I was caught,” he went on. “You’re the reason I lost my arm. I was looking at you when I should have been paying attention to the fight.”
Wren’s natural instinct was to apologize, but she held it back.
I shouldn’t feel sorry for that.
The Scourge smirked as if he knew what she was thinking. He paused and took up a pipe from the tabletop, stuffed it with tobacco and lit it. She watched him blankly until she realized what she was seeing. He had used both of his hands to maintain the thing. The question hadn’t quite formed in her mouth before he was speaking again.
“It doesn’t really matter,” he said as if addressing the question that was still on her mind. “Instead, you might ask me what’s going to happen next. Aren’t you concerned about that?”
“No,” she said, holding her head a little higher. “I know what will happen. Rifter’s going to come here, just like you want, and he’s going to kill you again. This time, it’s going to be for good.”
She wasn’t sure where her gall had come from. Maybe it was her anger instead of her confidence that had led her to say this, but when the Scourge stood up from the table, stepping around to approach her where she sat, she wondered if she had been too bold. Wren drew herself up a little tighter.
“I’m sorry,” he said to her apologetically, “but you assume that Rifter is the one who deserves to have this world. Have you really given him much thought beyond his attractive face? How do you know that he isn’t the villain in this?”
“He doesn’t kill on a whim. He doesn’t want control just to see others suffer.”
“Is that right?” he asked. “I have never attacked anyone who didn’t either attack me first or threaten me outright. It’s true. I’m not the ruthless and terrible man that you think I am.”
He thought he could fool her? She had seen it for herself. She had noted the way he’d attacked the natives when everything had been so peaceful, just to cause a bit of havoc. He had set half the world on fire, just so that he could get at one boy.
“This is his world,” Wren said resolutely.
“Is it?” the Scourge asked, then hummed thoughtfully.
He was trying to confuse her. She wasn’t going to fall for it, but there was a flicker of doubt in her mind.
“Do you know what makes Nevermor such an interesting place? It’s tucked away. Nothing else has any bearing on it. Not earth, not heaven, not hell. The only ones who have any sway here are the Rifter and myself. And why?”
He didn’t give her the chance to speculate.
“Who cares? All that matters is that I kill him and get it back for myself.”
Get it back? Had he just claimed that he was here first? That was not what she had seen in the memories – or had it been? They weren’t clear in her head anymore.
“There is one thing you ought to know above all else: he started this. I’m going to finish it. This time, I know exactly how to do it.”
“How do you know you can kill him?” she asked, interrupting. “You always come back. Why won’t it happen the same way with him?”
He smiled at her question – the humoring smile of an adult who knew so much more than the naïve child he was listening to.
“You don’t understand it yet, but you will. And he will. Then I’ll kill him and his own, and that will be the end of it.”
“You won’t be able to kill him,” she insisted – because she wanted to believe it. “He’s stronger than you are, and you know that!”
Wren felt herself getting angry, coming alive and out of her lethargy. No matter what Rifter had done to her, she didn’t think he deserved death for it. She still had faith in him. She wanted him to overcome his enemy whether she was at his side or not.
The Scourge gave her that same daunting look. “I’m sorry, my sweet, precious Wren, but you’re wrong once again. I have more than one advantage over him this time. He will fall.”
He considered her regretfully, looking into her eyes as if she was a dear friend that he was betraying by his actions.
“It’s a shame you have to join him,” he said, “but I’ll tell you now that it isn’t personal. Not with you.”
He stepped closer, and Wren didn’t like the way he was looking at her. There was a gleam of hunger in his eye. Was it for her blood, or something else? Was he going to kill her now, not even give Rifter the chance to save her? Show him her corpse when he arrived? She would never get to tell him goodbye – wouldn’t be able to make things right with him. Her brothers would be here without her. They would all forget her. She’d only be a name etched on the cave wall in the dark.
No!
With a burst of energy, she shot up from the chair. Wren didn’t know if she would be able to get away from him, but she had to try, knowing that her life depended on it. She threw her weight into him, shoved him, and managed to dart past.
The man had let her get by him. He could have grabbed her, but he hadn’t even tried. He let her get to the door.
The door of the cabin wasn’t locked and Wren thrust it open, pushed through and dashed up the steps. She didn’t stop, even when she saw th
at the deck outside was deserted. There was only one hope for her, and even though it would probably mean death, it would be better than being the Scourge’s pawn in a fight against Rifter. She would dive into the sea and take her chances at swimming back to the island. Anything that happened beyond that would be a kinder fate.
Wren made it to the rail and gripped the edge, preparing to pull herself over it – but froze abruptly with her fingers digging into the side. It was not a mass of dark water she was about to drop down into.
Below her – far down below – there were trees and rocks, the icecaps of a frozen mountain. The ship was not on the water. It was hovering hundreds of feet in the air.
She couldn’t believe it. The ship was flying! There was no possible way – and yet it made sense. This was how he had done it. A flying ship had allowed him to bomb the island. She had seen it moving across the sky the night that the forest burned.
Wren gasped when she felt a hand on the back of her neck, gripping her hair. It didn’t hurt, but it was effective in pulling her back. She moved with it because she had no choice, and the Scourge tilted her face up to look into his gleaming blue eye.
“It won’t do you any good to jump,” he said. “Not yet. You’ll wind up with a worse fate than them.”
Them? He was looking down over the edge and Wren followed his gaze. Her body grew cold when she saw what he was looking at. There were bodies hanging from the sides of the ship, dangling by their necks. They were the bodies of natives and pirates, of the Scourge’s entire crew, bloody and fresh. It explained why he was alone on board, but why?
He’s evil. Must there be a reason? Is there such a thing as what he is? He has no feeling – no soul.
He turned her around to face him, pressing her back against the railing.
“What do you think of it?” he asked darkly. She guessed that he was speaking of the way the ship was floating on air. “Unexpected, isn’t it? Impossible? It’s taken me a long time, but I’ve finally learned that the impossible is not so out of reach as it seems.”
He gripped her shoulder to hold her in place and closed his eye. She saw his brow furrow in strain as if he was concentrating very hard, and then she saw the change.
Behind him, dark puddles began to form from the shadows in the cracks of the deck, and then they began to rise up before her eyes. The shadowy forms turned into men, and when he finally opened his shining blue eye once more, there was an entire crew of featureless shadow-men on board. He had summoned them up out of nothing, but she knew what they were.
Nightmares. Mimics. He had called an inhuman army to replace his human crew. Had he killed them to take their shadows? Was this how he had an advantage over Rifter? It was because he had learned to control the nightmares – the darkness – or was it the flying ship?
“Back to the cabin, my girl,” he said, ushering her along. “We have more to talk about.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
1
The Rifter and his Pack traveled to the high mountain. It was near dusk when they reached the base and they journeyed on into the night, though none of them had much to say. This was a dire time – for the land and also amongst themselves as a group – and they could all feel it. It was as if they knew they were marching off to death, but still they went.
They followed their leader to the end.
The boys kept their eyes open as they moved up the mountain pass, but there were no signs of the pirates that had invited them here. Even more suspicious than that, there was no indication that anyone had come this way recently. The trail wasn’t worn through the snow, and the only thing that reached out to stab them was the cold wind.
The Pack was nearing the halfway mark on the way to the peak when they all collectively began to have second thoughts.
“I knew it,” Mech said, speaking out first. “It’s a trick.”
“You did not know,” his twin rebuked him.
“But why?” Sly asked thoughtfully. “It seems so pointless. What could he hope to accomplish by bringing us here?”
“Well I guess if all else fails, we might freeze to death,” Finn said disgustedly.
“There has to be a reason,” Toss said, trying to show support. “What could he gain from calling us away from where we were? That’s the only reason he’d bring us here if it was a trick – to draw us away.”
“True,” Nix agreed. “He was close enough to take Wren. Why didn’t he just attack us back at the camp?”
“Too many Tribals?” Mach suggested.
“As if that means anything to him,” Nix sneered. “No, I think he had something else in mind.”
“We’re back where we started then,” Sly said. “Why the mountain? Especially since he doesn’t appear to be here.”
Rifter heard what they were saying, but he believed that his enemy was here. He had no proof, and his senses weren’t as clear as they’d been before, but he knew his enemy was here. He knew!
“He’s here,” Rifter said, looking toward the mountaintop, desperate for a sign. “I know he’s here.”
“You know, or you think?” Finn asked.
“Finn’s right,” Nix said. “You’ve been looking for him for days and you’ve found nothing. He was so close to us just today, and you didn’t know.”
Rifter didn’t like the sound of that. “Are you questioning me again?”
“Your senses aren’t clear,” Nix argued, but his voice was calm. “Your head isn’t either.”
“He’s here somewhere!” Rifter shouted angrily, unwilling to be wrong.
The rest of them stood by silently, seeing no need to dispute it, but Rifter was aware that they all doubted him. Why? Had he led them astray that many times? What had changed? He had half a mind to send them all away right then, but he was too wounded to say anything at all.
They stopped there to rest a moment and Sly took his scope, setting the lens so that he could peer through the darkness.
“Wait a minute…” Sly stopped suddenly, and his loss for words made the others turn. “So that’s what Calico meant when she said ‘flying vessel’… She wasn’t talking about Rifter at all.” He lowered the scope and offered it up. “You’ll want to look at this.”
Rifter took the scope from him, putting it to his own eye.
“Look above the peak,” Sly instructed him, but even after Rifter had directed his gaze there, all he saw was the dark.
“I don’t see anything.”
“You don’t see that?” Sly asked, disbelieving.
Rifter scanned the mountain peak for signs of activity. He didn’t see whatever Sly saw – nothing at all that looked like a disturbance had been made.
“All I see is darkness.”
Sly stared at him and the rest could practically hear the churn of the gears inside the boy’s mind.
“You’ve been made blind to it,” Sly said, understanding. “That’s why you couldn’t find him when you were searching. That’s interesting…”
“What are you talking about?” Rifter demanded with his usual irritation.
“Try harder,” Sly said, forcing the scope back into his hands. “Look past it.”
Rifter stared into the sky again, unsure of what he was supposed to be looking at. He scanned the night, but still saw nothing except the dark, as before. He was just on the verge of lowering the scope and breaking the damn thing when he noticed a large spot in the sky where there were no stars. He stared at that, trying to look into it as if it was a black hole, and then the truth was revealed to him.
Then, he wondered if he believed it himself.
He could see the Desdemona there, floating in the sky, held up only by shadow just as if it was riding on the ocean.
What? Rifter saw it, but he didn’t understand. How could it be?
It doesn’t matter.
Rifter nearly dropped the scope. He wanted to take off directly to the ship, but Sly caught his arm, holding him back.
“Please, Rifter, let’s give it some thought.�
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He’s there. He’s right there and he has Wren. He’s waiting for me. Rifter’s heart was speeding up, his thoughts pulsing with anger and hate.
“Rifter…”
He closed his eyes and tried to push the darkness back down. It was only for them, even though he didn’t feel that he owed them any favors.
Just a bit longer. Just a bit.
“We’ll make camp,” he said finally, sighing out his aggression. He felt more at ease. “We’ll give it some thought.”
2
They camped there on the side of the mountain, avoiding fire even though it was cold. Each of them had looked through the scope and seen the shadow of the ship looming over the frozen crest, showing faintly in the moonlight.
Every boy had the same question on his mind: how best to deal with getting to it, but the paths of their thoughts kept coming back to the same place.
The Scourge’s prediction through Fang had been correct. No matter how many Rifter had brought with him, this fight was going to come down to the two of them – the Rifter and the Scourge. It came back to what they had known – to words they had heard so many times before.
As it had begun, so would it end.
Rifter was too quiet, smoldering within himself. The rest of them knew that he would do something irrational if they didn’t call him back, but in this case, there wasn’t much else they could do. Rifter was the only one who could handle this. There was no other plan.
“It seems that the Scourge kept his promise,” Sly said finally. “There’s only one way to approach this. He wants you alone, Rifter.”
“Best to go in the night when he can’t see you coming,” Nix advised. “You can handle a few pirates without us. Fight him or not, get the girl and bring her here. We’ll wait. If you want to go back after that to deal with him, that’s your business.”
“It can’t be that simple,” Finn complained. “It doesn’t make sense. A flying ship? This can’t be all there is to his plan.”
“Maybe not, but we’ll just have to be ready in case of anything,” Nix told him.
“Is that good enough?”