by A. C. Cobble
“It’d be close,” muttered Ainsley. “I think we could, if we didn’t have to drop sail and turn before running into that mess. Is it… Will it be as bad as it looks?”
“Worse,” remarked Sam. “This storm is not natural. It’s…” She trailed off, unsure if what she was feeling was correct, unsure she should tell them if it was. “Put your men at stations, Captain, for combat if we can catch them, for the storm if we cannot. Let’s clear the forecastle. Until we get through this, no one but me should be up here.”
Duke and the captain both stared at her expectantly.
She sighed and explained, “I believe that storm is a reflection of the shroud. It’s a simulacrum of the barrier between our world and the underworld. There are things I might be able to do which will offer us some protection but not complete protection. Anything I try up here will be dangerous to the others.”
“Hells,” breathed Ainsley.
“We could turn around,” suggested Sam. “We achieved our mission back on Imbon. After what we saw of that volcano’s devastation, we can assume the natives are all dead. This isn’t necessary. Your father, Duke, would encourage us to turn around. He tasked me with assisting you, protecting you from the supernatural. I’m not fulfilling that pledge if we proceed.”
“Captain,” asked Duke, staring ahead, “will the crew sail into those clouds on your word?”
“Not for their current pay, m’lord,” said the captain, subdued, her white-knuckled hand gripping her pistol.
“Tell them I’m offering a bonus,” suggested Duke. “Ten — no, twenty times their annual compensation on return to Enhover. When we get back, any man or woman who wants out of their contract may leave. If anyone wants to stay, they’ll do so at double their current rate.”
“If we’re going to do this, I need time,” warned Sam. “I need to get some things from the cabin. Then do your best to make sure no one interrupts me.”
Duke nodded and glanced at Ainsley. Pale-faced, she nodded, turned, and began issuing orders and promises to the crew.
“We don’t have to do this,” said Sam once the captain was out of earshot.
“You’re right,” acknowledged Duke, “but we both want to, don’t we?”
Despite the tension, despite the looming wall of darkness they were approaching, she laughed. “Better to be crazy together, I suppose.”
He offered her a wan smile.
His mother. Sam knew he was thinking of her. They were so close, and he couldn’t force himself to turn back. He didn’t know what she had done, what the king had told Sam in confidence, but even so, he had guessed that Lilibet was hiding somewhere in the lands ahead of them. It was true. She was hiding — and walking the dark path. Twenty years of sorcerous knowledge obtained in the fount of the practice.
Sam couldn’t turn back. She and Duke both sought the same thing, the same person, but for different reasons.
“You’d best get to it,” he said. He paused then leaned close. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
She shrugged.
“Ca-Mi-He,” he guessed.
She cringed.
“Tell me,” instructed Duke.
“How did you… Ah, it doesn’t matter,” she muttered.
She found herself nervously touching the scar in her side where the dagger had wounded… no, killed her. She’d been bound to the spirit, not through ritual and pattern, but by something more primal. She’d died, and the spirit had used the connection to save her. It had ridden her back from the underworld.
Approaching Ca-Mi-He’s sorcery, she could feel the connection was there still, still pulsing like a thin tether, holding them together. The great spirit had fashioned the wall. She could feel it. She could feel her connection to it, but she couldn’t explain that to Duke. Not now.
Instead, she said, “The wall was formed with sorcery, of course, and not that of the dark trinity. There are no other spirits powerful enough to control something like this.”
“What is it, Sam?” questioned Duke. “What are we sailing into?”
“It’s part of the shroud, bleeding through to our world,” she explained. “A reflection, but something more, I think.”
“And what will that do to us when we sail in?” he asked.
“My presence will offer some protection,” she said. “If the great spirit recognizes this vessel has a connection to me, to it, then we might gain a reprieve from the worst of the storm. I need to bind myself to the Cloud Serpent, to infuse a part of me into this airship, to trick Ca-Mi-He into granting us passage.”
“Hunh,” mumbled Duke.
She turned to him and offered him a grim smile. “I’ll get my materials from the cabin, and Duke, I’m going to need some of your blood.”
A hush had fallen over the deck behind her. The crew still worked frantically. They still adjusted the sails, still carried powder and shot to set it beside their weapons, but no one spoke. They had strapped on armaments and offered their hopes to the spirits. There was nothing else to say.
It wasn’t silent, though.
Ahead of them, the constant growl of thunder filled every moment with the promise of violence. The cloud bank, dark gray, nearly black, frothed with menace. Lightning burst with each beat of her heart, casting a ghastly glow beneath the surface of the impossibly large storm clouds.
The sailors didn’t need her to tell them it was unnatural. They’d spent years at sea, decades in many cases, and they’d seen their share of brutal storms. Nothing like this, though. No one had ever seen anything like this and lived to tell of it.
It hadn’t deterred the Franklin’s Luck, though, and it wouldn’t deter her.
Their quarry sailed just five hundred yards ahead of them now, and within minutes, it would be sailing directly into the storm. Five hundred yards. Tantalizingly close. Another hour and they would have had them. But at five hundred yards, they couldn’t risk veering off course for a chance to use their cannon. The speed they would lose in the maneuver could put them out of range, and it’d be impossible to regain that momentum quickly enough to keep track of the other airship in the massive storm.
They had their deck guns which could be swiveled forward, and it was possible they could fire on an arc and strike the other airship with the three-inchers, but the small shot would do nothing to stop the Franklin’s Luck. Any holes they blew in the sails would be insignificant. Any damage they did to the structure of the airship would be unnoticeable. Perhaps they could kill a person or two, but even with the spyglass, no one had been able to identify who was in charge. They could be killing royal marine hostages just as easily as the enemy. From the distance, there was no discerning between captor and captive. From what they could see, the crew of the other airship never looked back. They just went about their tasks, holding the line due south.
Sam drew a deep breath and settled her feet on the deck of the airship.
Around her waist, she’d tied a line of hemp rope and secured it to the rail. She’d spent the last hour scratching chalk symbols and phrases in ancient Darklands along the top of the gunwale. At her feet, she’d laid a spiraling pattern painted in a mixture of that chalk and blood from both her and Duke.
She’d taken as little from herself as she could and got the balance from him. She had to stay awake, alert. Duke had suffered the effects stoically. Last she’d seen, he was lying in the captain’s cabin recuperating from the bloodletting, drinking potions from her rucksack and, she suspected, no small amount of grog.
That was probably for the best.
The blood of kings had power. She’d taken his and hers and bound them to the airship. It wasn’t a perfect binding, and she knew in time it would break down, but she hoped it lasted long enough to get them through the storm and find safe harbor. Inexorably, they were tied to the fate of the airship now until the binding was broken. If it went down, they would go down. The crew may have some chance of survival, but she and Duke did not. She’d gambled it all on her ability
to protect them from the storm.
Her ability and Ca-Mi-He’s reluctance to destroy her. She was tied to that spirit like she was to the airship, and she suspected if her soul departed this world and passed beyond the shroud, she would take Ca-Mi-He with her. She was pretty confident of it but not certain. And she had no idea if the great spirit itself would feel the connection and hesitate, but the pull of the Darklands, the path to Ca-Mi-He, was inescapable for her now. No matter the risk, no matter the danger to her and the others, she had to continue. She had to see where this path led.
“You’re sure about this?” called Captain Ainsley from the stairs to the forecastle, her eyes wide on the towering mass of ferocious weather in front of them.
Sam glanced over her shoulder and nodded. Yelling to be heard over the growing roar of the storm, she advised, “You’d best strap yourself down, Captain.”
Captain Ainsley nodded, her tri-corner hat flapping on her head like the thing meant to take flight. Her hips were still adorned with her paired pistols, but what she meant to shoot with the things was a mystery.
“Captain…”
“You mind the sorcery. I’ll mind the sailing,” shouted Ainsley. Then she pointed ahead.
Sam turned to watch as the Franklin’s Luck began to be buffeted by tumultuous gusts of wind. The sails whipped frantically, and the ship bounced, as if being drawn over a rocky shore. In the dark wall ahead of the airship, a spiral appeared, spinning into a vortex, and a tunnel formed, lit by crackling lightning. Sam could feel the electrical charges raising the hairs on her arm from a quarter league away.
The sails on the Franklin’s Luck fell, as if becalmed, and like it was drawn forward by invisible ropes instead of wind, the airship was pulled into the churning vortex. The crew aboard the airship stood stock still, watching and waiting as they were dragged into the belly of the maelstrom. As the airship entered the conflagration, the twisting clouds closed behind it, sealing it inside, presenting an impossible wall of storm to the Cloud Serpent.
Unnecessarily, Sam yelled over her shoulder, “Hold on tight!”
Moments later, they entered the darkness.
A powerful gust of wind slapped her across the face, jolting the forward progress of the airship, stalling it in midair, but another arm of air caught them from behind and shoved them forward. Like jostling through a crowd, catching shoulders and elbows of those who did not appreciate being passed, they continued forward in staggering fits and starts, the frame of the airship creaking alarmingly beneath their feet.
The wall of clouds loomed above them, blocking out the sun, the bright blue sky behind them belying the terrible mass they were facing. Like a pit fighter taking a shot to the body, the airship was buffeted to the side, jolted and thrown on the temperamental wind. Above her, she heard a spine-tingling rip and glanced up to see a flap of sail tear loose.
“Drop the sails!” screamed Ainsley, her voice a tiny whisper above the storm. “Drop the sails, or the whole damned mast is going to crack!”
A blinding blast of ball lightning exploded around the airship, bolts of raw energy crackling two dozen paces away on both sides of them. The thunder from the lightning rattled the wood of the airship, and for a brief moment, Sam worried the deck was going to simply shake apart.
The lightning blazed around them, unceasing. Her hair stood on end, and heat bathed her skin from the unrestrained energy. She blinked, but the afterimage of the first explosion was seared into her vision, half-blinding her. She could hear nothing except the concussive rumbling of thunder. Then, bitter cold assailed her, blown away by bursts of hot lightning and returning like a wave against a shore.
She felt spirits lingering in the clouds around them. She felt the spirits drawing closer to the airship. The space between their world and the underworld was thin, frayed in this place. The spirits could seep through and exist within the storm. It was a reflection almost strong enough to serve as a bridge. The wracking wind and crackling lightning were inconveniences, dangers that they might survive, but the spirits would clutch them and, howling with rage, drag them to the other side of the shroud.
Sam felt cracks forming as more of the shades pressed against the barrier, seeking to burst through, seeking her and the crew. The wall between the worlds flexed and shuddered. She could feel it, recognize it, from when she’d met Ca-Mi-He before.
Grimacing, Sam realized that with no intervention, those spirits would scour the airship, ripping the souls from the crew. The meagre protection she’d tried to invest into the airship with Duke’s blood and her designs would be fruitless against the raw presence of the underworld. If those spirits came unabated against them, there was nothing she could do.
Cursing and realizing that she had no choice but to play her last card, she drew Ca-Mi-He’s tainted dagger from behind her back and slashed it across her open palm, sawing deeply through the flesh. Blood spurted from the painful wound, whipped by the wind. It sprayed across the deck of the airship in front of her, twisted and carried in droplets over her body and into the sky.
Kneeling, she slid the dagger back into the sheath behind her back and wiped three fingers across the deep laceration. On the wood of the deck, she traced Ca-Mi-He’s symbol over and over again. She used her blood, tainted with the great spirit’s presence, to draw its symbol on the deck.
It was sloppy and imperfect, but immediately, she could feel power fill the pattern. The great spirit, present in this world and the other, loomed over the airship. Ca-Mi-He had been nearby, she suspected. Its power was what drove the strength of the storm.
She’d drawn the great spirit to them, using the connection in the dagger and in her blood. It was a gamble. She had no idea what the great spirit would do. Would it be angry at her call? Would it bring their airship down with the same twist of the sorcery that powered the storm? Could even Ca-Mi-He do anything about the spirits that were pressing the barrier? Would it take her and shove her through the shroud to them? She didn’t know if Ca-Mi-He would help them or hurt them, but she had no choice but to lay her cards down.
It was a desperate choice, but the only one she had. The protection she’d placed upon the airship was keeping the lightning and the worst of the wind from them. They might make it through the wall of clouds if it was not too broad, but she couldn’t protect against the spirits. There was nothing she could do when those awful shades slipped through the cracks in the shroud and took them. She whispered a hope to Ca-Mi-He and, with her blood, kept drawing its name.
There was a swelling in her mind, cold pressure, the sense of an impossible, immense presence. The sense of the spirits clustered on the other side of the barrier fled. They simply vanished with the flexing of Ca-Mi-He. The shroud settled, unstressed by the battering pressure. It shifted and moved away, as if shoved from the proximity to their world.
The storm tossed the airship like a child’s toy floating on a spring-swollen stream, but the threat of the spirits was suddenly, entirely gone. The spirits in the underworld, at least. Ca-Mi-He was tethered to the pattern she’d drawn in her blood. When she wiped it away, the spirit would be free to leave, no longer called to her, but she was afraid to release it before they passed the thin piece of the shroud. She was afraid to hold the spirit longer, as she was certain it could snuff out the candle of her life the moment it decided to.
Torn between risking the spirits on the other side of the barrier and Ca-Mi-He’s presence, she clutched the rope that was tied around her waist, kneeling on the deck of the airship. She didn’t know what to do.
“Sam!” cried Duke, stumbling up next to her. “It’s so… so cold. What have you done?”
She could only shake her head. He was right. It was cold. She was cold. It felt like ice was creeping up her arm, freezing her physically, mentally. She turned to Duke but could not speak. The cold was engulfing her, a smothering embrace from the great spirit. She knew now Ca-Mi-He would not tamely answer the call of a mortal woman. She hadn’t bound it, and she had no prote
ction. Ca-Mi-He was going to take her to where she’d originally found it. It was going to take her to the shroud.
“What have you— Ca-Mi-He?” he gasped. He lurched toward her, falling to his knees and clasping her with his hands. “You’re freezing, Sam!”
She couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. She felt herself drawing away, as if the spirit was tugging her soul from her body.
Then, warmth suffused her, and Duke grabbed her head and turned it so he looked into her eyes. He looked, but he was not looking for her. He was looking for Ca-Mi-He, feeling for that awful spirit that he’d felt before.
The warmth spilled from his hands into her face, into her body. She shivered, helpless, held between the grip of the spirit and Duke. He snarled, and she knew he meant it for the spirit. He was… he was pushing it away, somehow. The warmth began to grow, not a trickle coursing through her, but an enveloping sense that filled her body, that forced out the cold.
The storm raged around them, but the spirit was fleeing. At least, for now.
“I think it’s—” began Duke, but his eyes widened and his cheeks bulged out. He turned away from her and coughed. Bile spewed from his throat, spilling across the bloody drawings she’d made of Ca-Mi-He’s name. Duke tried to speak but couldn’t, as tremors wracked his body, and he heaved again.
She stared aghast at the pool of sickness obscuring Ca-Mi-He’s symbol drawn in her blood. What the frozen hell did that mean?
The Cartographer X
He wiped his mouth and staggered to his feet, the deck of the airship rocking like it was on a storm-tossed sea. All around them it was black, sporadically lit by brilliant bursts of incandescent lightning. Heat and cold lashed him in waves, and any thought he’d had that they might be able to follow Franklin’s Luck through the storm had vanished the moment he’d stepped onto the deck. His stomach felt like an ale shaken in a jug, frothy and bubbling with pent-up explosive force.
