The Sin in the Steel

by Ryan Van Loan

  “Haven’t you wondered how I know your name? You did well, slipping into Port au’ Sheen unnoticed, but after that, you couldn’t help yourself, could you?” He shook his head and winked. “Your kind never can.”

  “I don’t know what you think I did in Port au’ Sheen, but the only Sin Eater I’m aware of there is the Harbormaster. You’re welcome to the bitch for all I care, but she’s there and I’m here,” I said.

  “Why are you prolonging the inevitable?”

  I shrugged. “I’m not—why are you?”

  “Your kind can’t stand much in the way of pain.” He licked his lips, shadows growing across his cheeks. “Not before your Goddess’s taint reveals itself. Is that what you want? Because if you won’t cooperate, I’ll force you to. Blood and Bone, woman!” He shook his hands at me. “I haven’t even asked you for anything yet.”

  “You’re desperate,” I whispered. “I can see it in you, buried just below the surface and working its way up like a corpse that just won’t stay dead.” My eyes flicked to the Shambles, which had begun to stir around him, perhaps feeling their master’s irritation.

  “I was like that once and it cost me dearly,” I said. “The problem with desperation is, it plays for keeps.” I took a deep breath and let it out, barely feeling my lungs move. “There’s no game here, Ghost Captain. I’m not playing. I’m no Sin Eater.”

  “Bullshit!” He jabbed a finger at me. “There is something on that island that Ciris desperately desires, but her lust will be her undoing. I’m going to give her everything she wants and then—” He paused, panting, and forcibly took control of himself. “So.” He inhaled fitfully. “Think again, won’t you? If you don’t do as I ask, I won’t keep you safe in a cage dangling over my pets.” He grinned that too-many-teeth grin.

  “I’ll cut you down and turn them loose on your flesh. And after I’ve exposed the lie in you, I’ll beach my ship on yonder island and let your friends feel the bite of the dead until the waves run red with blood. When I leave, there will be nothing left but sand. No plants. No animals. No people.” He straightened and the look in his eyes filled me with dread as he held up a glowing blue book.

  “Now you understand the stakes. You have until morning to change your answer.” His eyes fixed on the Archaeologist and she let out a small cry. “Both of you.”

  The Ghost Captain spun around, pulling his tricorne straight, and stalked away. As he did, his words swept through my mind, but the small part of me still listening caught on one. Friends? The islanders? Or—“Wait!” My cry pulled him up short. “What about my friends?”

  He glanced over his shoulder and sneered. “Don’t think that washed-up pirate or your hulking partner will rescue you, Sambuciña. They’re as good as dead, marooned on an island with cannibalistic savages. But if you care at all for them, you’ll give me what I want or else they won’t be dead.… They’ll be undead.” He marched off, Shambles following in his wake. Those below us began to moan softly, flexing bone and sinew menacingly.

  My eyes burned, but I managed to hold the tears back. That was a hill I was ready to die on and after a few torturous breaths the dampness dissipated. Eld … alive? My breath came out more like a sob, but I let it. Gods, I didn’t kill him. There’s still a chance to put this right. I didn’t kill him. The part of me that’d still been working shifted slightly and I felt my chest tighten fractionally. I didn’t kill him, but I did fail him. I forced myself to take another breath. Think, Buc!

  All right, I am a failure. Why? Why had I been making so many bad decisions? The thought hung there before the answer came. Because I’d let emotion blind me. That was one weakness I’d never thought to find in myself. Emotion comes slow to me when it comes at all, but doesn’t everyone dream about a better tomorrow? The very word is a promise, a fantasy, an intangible dream that could be any number of things. Anything but the present, or worse, the present’s corpse: the past. I’d dreamed of a better tomorrow for as long as I was on the streets, and the only memory I had before the streets was of a warm stone hearth and a song being sung. I can’t quite catch the melody, but it’s there and every bit as warm as that hearth.

  My dream had changed over time, a better tomorrow not just for me, but for my sister as well. For the girl who’d kept me from starving, fended off the children who grew faster and stronger than me, and never let me slip into the gutter even though the only blood we shared came from cleaning the cuts on my face. Fire had ended that fantasy.

  Now I dreamed of a better tomorrow for everyone who wasn’t born with a full stomach and coin in their pocket.

  That Kanados Trading Company bitch had come along and offered to give flesh to my dream. To turn it into a goal. Dreams are of the ether, but goals have more substance. They can be made real. I defy anyone who’s longed for something so hard and so long that it physically hurts—twisting the stomach into knots, burning the chest, and choking the throat—to not lose their mind when that moment arrives. When all you’ve known is pain. And yet. And yet, the promise of it is so sweet that it’s worth the agony. I’d let that sweetness overwhelm and consume me, and I’d forgotten the lessons that came with the agony. No more.

  “No more.”

  “What?”

  The Archaeologist’s question pulled me back to reality. Eld is alive. I can still save this. Hope surged through my veins, warming me and giving my words of warning a moment before the lie. Don’t fuck this up. I could save this, but I had to be more careful than before, more thoughtful, and I couldn’t let my emotions run away with me. I hadn’t even realized I’d had emotions, but now that I knew they existed, at least a few of them anyway, I could control them. Had to control them. Above all else, if I was going to change the tide, I would have to be absolutely ruthless. I felt my mouth twitch.

  “You realize we’re fucked? Why are you smiling?”

  “Because,” I whispered, “‘a change of breeze is but a wave away.’”

  And I’m a hurricane.

  36

  Eld stared past the foliage and out to sea, where the Ghost Captain’s ship rode high in the water. Where Buc had gone without him. He’d tried to keep up, but something had caught him in the side of the head and brought him to his knees. His memory of the events was foggy at best. He remembered Buc shouting that they had to save the woman. The Archaeologist. Then Chan Sha had asked him something, but what she asked was a blank, though he recalled the surprise in her voice. The next moment he’d found himself lying in the sand and if Chan Sha hadn’t appeared in front of him like a street performer, he would have been run through by the Shambles’ blades.

  What hit me? He reached and stopped just short of the jagged cut beneath his hairline. Who? He’d fought to his feet then, and carried on, working mostly on instinct as others fell around them. At the end, it’d just been him and Chan Sha, fighting back to back; then the islanders’ charge overwhelmed the Shambles and sent them back to their unholy graves. But the attack had come too late and Buc had disappeared aboard the ship.

  Buc. They’d been through a lot together, but this easily eclipsed everything else that had come before. Before, he’d been the one leaning on her while she quietly mocked him—well, maybe not so quietly—but in her way, she’d protected him when he overstepped. Turn and turnabout. Now their roles were reversed and the thought of her sailing alone toward the lurking ship left a bitter taste on his tongue. He took a sip of water from the broken brown nut in his hand, but it did little to wash away the taste of failure. The last time, he’d lost every man and woman who relied on him and now, alone again, he’d lost her. His throat burned and he blinked back tears. What would you do now?

  “Are you going to stand there all day?” Chan Sha asked from behind him. “I chose this tree to take advantage of the sea breezes, but that only works if you’re not blocking them.”

  “I’m standing watch,” Eld said quietly. He turned beside the tree and caught Chan Sha smirking at him. “I shouldn’t have left her out there alone.
”

  “You’ve a one-note mind, don’t you?” the pirate asked. She stood up from the palm frond she’d been lying on and stretched, showing peeks of olive oil–colored skin through the tears in her sun-bleached shirt. “She’s not alone. She’s got the Archaeologist with her and she said the woman knows how to kill the Ghost Captain. I’d bet a pretty coin your girl is plotting the best way to slit his throat as we speak. And to do that will require skullduggery. You being there with those wide shoulders would only get in the way.” Her eyes hardened. “Now, are we going to talk about that parley or not? You gave your word.”

  “Aye, in a bit,” Eld said, turning back to the sea.

  “Listen, you big oaf,” Chan Sha growled. “You think you’re the only one what’s taken losses? You didn’t lose anything. Your little woman’s still alive. That rotting fucking bastard sank my ship and took my crew down with it. Every woman and man on board. Dead.

  “So we don’t have a bit. We have right now.” She rolled her shoulders and clenched her fists. “I could have taken his head off at the shoulders on the beach, right there and then. He was bent on his purpose, distracted. Then you two fools had to come charging in like some heroes out of one of those cheap novels they sell on the streets for a scrap of copper. It’s a wonder the twerp didn’t get her head taken off at the shoulders.”

  Anger, slow-stoked and buried deeply enough that he hadn’t fully realized it was there until now, shook the soreness from Eld’s body. He didn’t feel tired, only ready. And angry. Gods help me. Bad things happened when he let his temper get the best of him. An image of another man’s face, drawn taut, with blood coursing from smashed lips, flashed through his mind. Seetel’s lips had been twisted in a superior sneer when the duel started. Bad things. His hand fell to his side, but he’d left the rusted cutlass on the beach, so he crossed his arms to keep from reaching for Chan Sha.

  The movement attracted her attention. She looked at him and froze. Her breath hissed through her teeth. She looked past him and then her gaze flitted back to his face and she swallowed audibly.

  “Might be I’m overwrought,” she said finally.

  “Might be,” he said. He wanted to say more, but his throat was clenched tight.

  “We both are,” she said carefully.

  “Agreed.”

  “Then let’s both take us a couple of deep breaths and come sit down in the shade and work this out,” Chan Sha suggested. Her eyes stared right into his as she moved away slowly, every muscle in her body taut as a wire. When she sat, she kept her feet and legs in front of her so she could move if she had to. “Neither one of us is going to help that gir—Buc—by standing around wishing things were different. We’ve got to play the hand we’ve been dealt.”

  Eld felt his chest expand with his breath and he took in more air until his lungs couldn’t manage another scrap before he let the air out slowly, allowing the coals within him to lose some of their fierceness. Two more breaths and he could work his jaw without pain. This was Buc’s territory, dealmaking, but with her gone, it fell to him. Chan Sha matches Buc wit for wit. He’d never thought of himself as stupid, far from it, but two years with Buc had given him an appreciation for genius. There was intelligence and then there was Buc. And Chan Sha was in the same league as Buc. He was facing veteran shock troops, and all he had were some light cuirassiers of doubtful experience. But then, that was all the Burnt had had when they’d faced him and—

  We’ve got to play the hand we’ve been dealt. The pirate was right, so he buried his doubts along with the rest of his anger and sank down onto the beach beside Chan Sha.

  “Okay,” he said, resting his forearms on his knees. Sunlight lanced in through one of the openings in the palm fronds overhead, illuminating Chan Sha in a beam of light that made her braids shimmer in the dust mote–filled air. “Let’s talk.”

  * * *

  “You are a mule of a man,” Chan Sha hissed. The sun had shifted hours ago and her features were bathed in shadow. “How many times must we go over this?”

  “I told you on the beach, I’d help you get off the island,” Eld said. They’d been over it a dozen times, but the repetition seemed to be getting to Chan Sha, so he kept steering the conversation back into the loop. One thing he’d picked up from Buc: needle someone and they’ll slip up; needle someone in the right place at the right time and they’ll dance to your tune without ever hearing the music. He wasn’t sure he was capable of finding the soft spot in Chan Sha—the woman was hard as nails—but he might get her to slip up. “I’m not going to promise more until Buc is back.” He nodded toward the sea. “And I’m going to get her if she’s not back in the next hour,” he added.

  “How?” Chan Sha asked. “My boat was sinking more than floating when I washed ashore. We’ll need good daylight to see what holes need to be plugged if we want to make it past the breakwaters. And that means they’ll see us coming long before we reach them, assuming the dead bother to keep watch.”

  “That’s why I wanted to float the fucking thing hours ago!”

  “Aye? When you were wobbling on your feet with either eye crossed?” Chan Sha shook her head. “We were past the brink of exhaustion, Eld. Nothing to be done.”

  “There’s something to be done now,” he muttered. “But not without Buc. Until then, you’ll have to deal with me.”

  “Deal? You mean ‘parley’?” She sniffed at his expression. “Amongst pirates we call agreements, deals, or truces ‘parley.’ There’s an entire code attached to them. Parley generally comes with terms and conditions, and all you’ve done is promise me vagaries. You make no sense, Eld.”

  “I don’t have to,” he said. “Buc makes enough sense for the pair of us.” He fought the urge to look at the open sea. It was dark enough now that he’d be hard-pressed to see anything beyond the ship’s mainsail anyway. “You’ve gotten about all you’re going to get out of me, Chan Sha.”

  The pirate sat back, disgust writ large across her features. A moment later she leaned back in. “Even if she returns empty-handed, you’re going after the Ghost Captain.”

  It wasn’t a question, and in any case Eld didn’t have to give it much thought. If Buc … when Buc was back, she wouldn’t let the Dead Walker go. Even without the Kanados Trading Company’s “offer” to consider, the Ghost Captain had bested her twice and nearly killed her the last time. That sort of thing would have inclined a normal person to think twice before running the other way—Gods, that was what Eld wanted to do. But Buc wasn’t normal. No, she’d be calculating a way to slit the Dead Walker’s throat—if she hadn’t done so already. But if she has killed him, why hasn’t she come back?

  “Aye,” he said.

  “Then take me with you!” Her dark green eyes flashed. “The Ghost Captain’s already bested the pair of you with just a few longboats of Shambles. How many do you think he has on his ship? You can’t do this on your own.”

  “Buc would point out that you didn’t fare much better with a crew around you,” Eld said. Buc would have said that, but she would have used her words like a dagger to wound Chan Sha, while he merely stated the truth. “Why take you on? You held us in chains, tortured us, and came about as close to killing us as he has. By the Gods, why would we risk having you with us after that?”

  “The Gods,” Chan Sha repeated hesitantly. She glanced down at the sand and when she looked back up, her eyes were sharp, piercing. “You think you can kill one of the servants of the Dead Gods? We’ve a saying on the seas: ‘Don’t bring a pistole to a cannonade.’”

  “Aye, ‘fight fire with fire,’” Eld agreed. “What of it?”

  “You said it yourself: I’ve come as close to killing you as the Ghost Captain has.” A smile touched her features. “Haven’t you wondered why?”

  “Why?” Eld snorted. “Because you had the crew and we didn’t.”

  “No, that’s not it. Not it by half.” Her voice lowered and drew heat from some unseen source, and when she spoke, her words sent goos
eflesh down his sunburnt arms. “You have a pistole, Eld, when what you need is a cannon. Let me show you.”

  Cold sweat ran down the back of his spine. His heart pounded in his ears. He knew what Buc would say and he’d never doubted her. But. But they hadn’t done much more than fall from one failure right into another since leaving Servenza. Eld licked his lips and forced himself to think, but the answers spun past him so quickly that all he could do was grasp at them in a desperate attempt to find the right one.

  “Let me show you,” Chan Sha whispered. “And if she’s not back by morning, I’ll lead the rescue effort myself.”

  Where are you, Buc?

  37

  “I wasn’t sure about you,” I told the Archaeologist. She arched an eyebrow. “What?” I shrugged. “First I saw you, you were running from Shambles. Then when I step in to save you, you run right back to them.”

  “I didn’t run back to them—you pushed me!”

  “I did not,” I protested.

  “Did!”

  I studied her wide eyes in the moonlight, but if she was lying, I didn’t see it. I hadn’t pushed her, though. Eld and Chan Sha thought I did. I tried to recall the scene, but my recollection was of pulling her away, not pushing her closer. What wouldn’t I do to save myself? I nearly sacrificed Eld; what’s this woman to me? I tried to shake the thought away, but it clung with a multi-tentacled grip and eventually I gave over. Without kan to help me manage, my thoughts swirled around, leaving me grasping at eddies. I could control it, just, but that required enough concentration that I could feel the beginnings of a headache coming on. I didn’t think I’d done what they all thought I had, but it didn’t mean I wouldn’t have done it if I’d thought it would save me. And it didn’t mean I wouldn’t do it still.