by Will Wight
Impressive, yes, but inconvenient.
Calder sensed The Testament like a second, simpler mind tucked away inside his own. It had a purpose, and it yearned to fulfill that purpose: to guide and protect them as they sailed the Aion. Somehow, it felt so eager that it almost fought Calder for control. He had never heard of a Soulbound Vessel wrestling its owner, but he had to admit that what he knew about Soulbound was largely academic. There was a stark difference between reading about Vessels and having one in his head.
His alliance with the ship may have started out uneasy, but they needed to smooth out that relationship if they wanted to survive the eldritch dangers of the Aion Sea.
Which brought them to the charts and maps on the table. They were a month into this journey, and Andel had guided them the entire way. At this rate, Calder would be relegated to a passenger on his own ship. He refused to let that happen, and Jerri seemed to agree with him.
If they were ever going to escape from the shadow of the Imperial officer, they had to chart their own course. Literally.
Jerri flipped her braid over her shoulder, running a finger along the map, tracing coordinates that Calder had provided. “And that would leave us...locked in ice, just south of the Fioran Reaches.”
Calder frowned down at his own piece of paper, covered in calculations. At the moment, they looked like meaningless scribbles. “That’s not right. If anything, it should abandon us on a stretch of shoreline outside the Izyrian jungle.”
Jerri shrugged. “Looking at the tides, I thought it would come out somewhere in Erin. Maybe we’re not moving as fast as we thought.”
The ship pitched lightly to one side, and an inkwell slid away in a suicidal dive. Calder snatched it from the brink, leaving only a few drops of ink to splatter next to his shoes.
Jerri gripped the table with both hands, face a shade paler than usual. It had taken her a week or two to adjust to the movement of the ship, and she still wasn’t fully accustomed to the constant rolling of the surf.
“We’ll get used to it,” she said for the hundredth time, giving him a tight smile. He returned it, feeling another wave of...not guilt, precisely. He had been an idiot, trying to break his father out in the way he did, but he regretted only his methods. And he hadn’t forced Jerri into anything.
He didn’t feel guilty, only responsible. The fact remained that she could have stayed back in the Capital, with a comfortable life and a family nearby, if not for him.
“Thank you,” he said, after a few more seconds pause. “For coming with me. I don’t know what...I’m glad I’m not alone.”
She took a deep breath to settle her stomach, then smiled at him. “Anywhere’s better than home.”
Jerri had made comments like that before, which Calder didn’t fully understand. As he’d heard it, her father had been a member of the Blackwatch who went missing in the course of his duties. Sometimes, she spoke of her father fondly, and other times as though she were glad to be rid of him. Likewise, when she mentioned her mother and the rest of her family at all, the very thought seemed to make her angry.
“You don’t miss it?” Calder said.
Jerri rubbed her emerald earring, an absent gesture. “My family can be...demanding. They know exactly what they want me to do, and how they want me to do it, and that’s the way it is. It takes dramatic gestures to get their attention, sometimes. They wanted to meet you, by the way.”
Calder had never imagined meeting Jerri’s family, taking his cue from her silence. She went home as seldom as possible, so he’d assumed he would never see where she lived or meet her mother. Now he felt a pang of regret that he might not get the chance.
“You told them about me?” he asked.
“Of course I did. I spent all my time at your house, obviously they would want to know everything about you. They were impressed when you joined the Blackwatch, though they were happier when you left.” She raised one hand to her ear again. “It’s something of a sore spot in my family.”
Calder could imagine so. Jerri’s father had died or vanished on duty as a Watchman, so it couldn’t be comforting to picture Calder sharing the same fate.
“Hold on. They know I was kicked out of the Blackwatch?” Calder asked.
“I told them you’d left, obviously. I skirted past the ‘why’ of it.”
“When did you have the chance?” Calder asked. They had boarded The Testament on the same day they were released from the Imperial Palace. Where had she found the time to fill her family in?
She looked at him as though it were obvious. “I went home to pick up my clothes. I had to explain where I was going, didn’t I?”
“You told them the truth?” Calder asked, astonished. “You told your mother that you intended to run off with me, after I was booted out of the Blackwatch and destroyed an Imperial prison?”
“That wouldn’t bother my mother,” she said dryly. “She doesn’t have the brightest view of the Empire. To her, that made you sound roguish.”
Calder resolved to meet Jerri’s mother.
“Besides,” Jerri continued, “I didn’t say that I’d ‘run off’ with you. That would have a different implication altogether, wouldn’t it?”
She smiled at him and rested a hand on his arm, and his pulse picked up.
At that moment, Andel cleared his throat from the half-open door.
Calder spun to face him. The Imperial officer was standing with his hat in one hand and the door in the other. Sweat rolled down his face, and he fanned himself with the wide brim of his hat. His suit, usually pristine white, was damp with patches of sweat.
Still, he showed no expression. “We have a situation on deck, Marten. You should come take a look.”
The more decisions Andel made for Calder, the tighter his authority would stick. Calder had to put a stop to that now. “I’ll come when I’ve finished here, Andel.”
“Suit yourself,” Andel said. “You’ve got about ten minutes before the ship burns down around you. Spend it however you’d like.”
He bowed his way out, pulling the door shut behind him.
Calder shared a look with Jerri. It was muggy and warm in the cabin, but not oppressively hot. Certainly nothing that suggested a fire.
Andel had been sweating.
In its cage, Shuffles began to laugh. It was covered up by a blanket, under which it slept most of the day, but it woke whenever danger was imminent. Its chuckles were deep and rich, the laughter of a cruel giant.
Together, Jerri and Calder rushed up onto the deck.
More than a month into the Aion, Calder had seen things he would never have imagined back at home. A finned monstrosity just beneath the waves, weaving its careful way around the Lyathatan, raising its spiky mouth above the water for long enough to hiss spitefully. A storm during which water rained up from the ocean and into thirsty clouds. An island that slid away, shy, whenever their ship got too close.
So when he opened the door to a faceful of oven-hot sunlight as bright as an alchemical flare, Calder felt a fresh round of familiar panic. Maybe this time, the Aion was revealing its full fury, and they would finally confront the wrath of something ancient and inhuman.
Jerri gasped next to him, clutching his arm with a hand edged in spidery tattoos. At her touch, he turned his gaze to the sky.
A constellation of flames danced over the ship, just out of reach of the mast, too bright and white to look like ordinary fire. They weren’t traditional tongues of flame, either. Pyramids of fire drifted in stately laps overhead, spinning around cubes, spheres, twisted nests, and undulating snakes. This fire could take on any shape, it seemed, except the natural.
Calder stared for a few seconds before he noticed the pattern. The bright, geometric clouds of fire were not moving randomly, but cycling in some complex formation that kept them orbiting the ship. As The Testament moved, the flames followed effortlessly.
Calder extended his senses, Reading. He caught a whiff of Intent from the fire—alien, distant,
curious, and almost joyful—but most of his attention was focused on the ship.
A ship did not experience emotions like a human being, not even an Awakened ship. Its understanding was slow and limited, more a sense of purpose than any actual thought.
But as far as it could, The Testament panicked. It did not like fire. Taut lines suddenly felt as though they quivered with tension, the seamless deck frozen in panic instead of calm and placid.
The ship wanted, more than anything, for Calder to make the fire go away.
In the cage, the prisoner—Urzaia—lay on his back with his arms folded under his head, apparently asleep. Eight, the grim man with the shield strapped to his back, alternated his gaze between Urzaia and the lights overhead. One-eyed Nine had stripped to the waist, his scarred back glistening with sweat, and he stood with his head tilted up to face the sky.
“Is this usual for the Aion, Navigator?” Nine called back, only seconds after Calder stepped out of the door.
Over the past few weeks, the Champions had learned the precise extent of Calder’s inexperience. Namely, that he knew next to nothing about the Aion Sea. Eight seemed to trust that they would get where they were going, or else he didn’t care where they ended up so long as Urzaia never escaped. But Nine blatantly pretended that Calder was an expert Navigator, asking his opinion on weather patterns or the mysterious behavior of the haunted sea.
The man may have been mocking him, but Calder got the impression that Nine was trying to extend him a measure of respect. To treat him as the man he would someday become, perhaps. It still made situations like this uncomfortable.
“The sea is full of surprises,” Calder responded. He shot a glance over at Andel, but the man wasn’t laughing; he was staring straight at the deadly fires.
Nine grunted, raising a hand to shade his eyes as one of the shapes dipped close to his face. He didn’t flinch back from the heat, as Calder would have done. Perhaps Champions couldn’t be burned.
Nine’s braids swayed as he shook his head. “What do you think, Eight?”
“I’m watching the prisoner,” Eight responded shortly.
“Fine,” Nine said, “I’ll take a turn, but we run into some sort of Elder-spawned sea serpent later, it’s yours.”
Eight said nothing. He continued standing with his arms folded, shield on his back, looking between Urzaia and the fire in the sky as though he thought his prisoner had engineered this somehow, as part of an escape attempt.
For his part, Urzaia began to snore.
Nine lowered one hand to pull the hammer from his belt, raising the other hand. He closed his eye for a moment, smiling a little.
And the hammer changed.
After only an instant, the Champion held more than just a tiny claw hammer. The steel seemed to stretch and swell, forming a blunt head of steel, its hilt becoming a shaft of solid shadow. In half a second, it was the size of a sledgehammer. He didn’t raise the weapon, but left its head leaning against the deck.
That was impossible. No one fully understood Awakening or the powers of a Soulbound, but there were a few rules. For one thing, an Awakened object changed shape only once: during the Awakening process. Most Readers believed that the phenomenon had to do with the physical structure changing to align more closely with the invested Intent, but regardless, the Awakened object could not be reshaped afterwards. A claw hammer couldn’t become a giant weapon of war any more than any hammer could spontaneously grow in a carpenter’s hands. It was ridiculous, the kind of mysterious ‘magic’ that came from folk tales.
Yet if anyone could do the impossible, it ought to be the Champions.
Jerri’s grip tightened on his arm, urging him to explain. “He shouldn’t be able to do that,” Calder said.
She shook her head. “Not that. Look.” She nodded up at the geometric flames above the ship.
The grand orbital procession had practically frozen, each shape simply spinning in place instead of dancing and weaving around one another. The lights sat anchored, as though waiting.
The Intent in the air sharpened, like one giant, invisible eye had turned all of its scrutiny onto the Champion called Nine.
“He’s drawn its attention,” Calder said, fear bleeding into his voice.
Jerri managed to frown at him in confusion without taking her eyes from the spectacle in front of her. “Attention? Attention of what?”
Calder wished he knew.
But there was a second Intent, opposing the first, that emanated from Nine. Something edged, and cold, and a little morbid, like a condemned convict’s manic laughter as the noose tightens around his neck.
The shadows on the haft of the hammer crawled like a nest of snakes.
Only a few seconds after he’d drawn his hammer, Nine let out a tightly controlled shout. And a hundred lashes of shadow whipped out from his upraised palm, each snapping into the center of a flame like frogs’ tongues taking flies. The sky darkened noticeably under the canopy of shadow for a second, as though the sun had blinked, and then the shadows retracted. The hammer was just a hammer again, and Nine tucked it away into his belt.
Most of the flames had simply vanished. The temperature dropped into the sudden chill of a spring breeze, the light darkening from the white of a flare to typical afternoon brightness. Only five or six chunks of fire remained, bleeding sparks and wobbling drunkenly like an injured horse.
Nine scratched the stubble on his jaw, looking up at the fire. “Huh. Thought I got ‘em all.”
A silent shriek sounded in Calder’s mind, desperate and pitiful at once, like a child with a papercut. He managed to shout a wordless warning before the unseen force retaliated.
The floating shapes of flame struck Nine like half a dozen bolts of orange-white lightning.
The Champion ignited. He roared, pain and anger and shock all mixed into one cry. The heat from his body flared again, sending another wave of heat passing over Calder.
Andel ran for the barrel of seawater they kept at hand for scrubbing the deck, but Calder had a faster plan. He dropped to one knee, pressing his hand against the deck.
A rope shot out from a coil nearby, wrapping itself around the burning Champion. He grabbed on, no doubt intending to tear the thick strand apart, but Calder was faster. With a mental effort, he used the rope to hurl Nine over the railing and into the sea.
The flames blazed brighter on Nine’s body as he soared through the air, but he landed with a heavy splash. Calder had no way of telling if the man was alive or dead, or if he would have the presence of mind to stay afloat, but it was better than watching him burn to death.
Eight shouted at the sight, and for the first time, he took his gaze entirely off of his prisoner. He stared at the geometric flames in the sky, slowly removing the shield from his back.
The fiery lights returned to their dance, spiraling around one another in a slow orbit. Either they didn’t see Eight as much of a threat compared to his partner, or he hadn’t attracted their attention, but they seemed to ignore him.
Wind spiraled around the shield, carrying with it the icy bite of winter.
In seconds, frost coated the shield, and snow swirled around Eight’s entire body. The few remaining flames froze in their tracks; once again, the hostile Intent in the atmosphere congealed. The invisible eye had returned, watching the Champion.
When the fires struck again, just as they had with Nine, Eight was ready for them.
The lights crashed down like orange lightning, but the bald, pale man was even faster. His shield blurred, and six sprays of campfire sparks shot out from him like geysers.
He’d swatted all of the flames from midair at the same time. Faster than Calder’s eyes could process, he’d struck at least six times.
So this is a Champion, he thought. He wondered how much it would take to hire one for his crew, but quickly dismissed the thought. If he couldn’t even afford to dig himself out of debt, how could he support a warrior like this?
The sparks fell to the deck,
taking with them the heat and the unnaturally bright light. In fact, the air on deck was still being cooled by the blizzard Eight carried on his shield.
Before Calder, Jerri, or Andel could say a word, Eight had already stripped his Vessel off his arm and tossed it down. Without a second’s hesitation, he ran to the railing, obviously prepared to vault over.
Calder couldn’t help a certain sense of smug self-satisfaction, seeing that. He’d actually thought faster than the Champion.
Under Calder’s control, the rope ladder drifted up the side of the ship, carrying Nine’s body. The burned, one-eyed man smiled weakly. “Why’d you do that, Captain? I had ‘em.”
His head lolled as he passed out, and Eight grabbed him before he could fall back into the sea. He threw his partner over his shoulder like a sack of grain, turning to Calder.
“He needs rest,” Eight said. Calder expected him to finish the statement, but he never did.
Jerri ushered him forward, toward the cabin where Andel usually slept. “Lay him down here. Andel won’t mind sleeping below for a while, will you, Andel? We have two passenger cabins down there, though they’re a little cramped at the moment.”
“My ship is always open to you,” Andel said, adjusting his collar. As frustrating as it was to hear Andel refer to The Testament as his ship, it was still gratifying to imagine him below, tucked in among the cargo.
Eight hadn’t even waited for Jerri to finish speaking. He kicked the door open, laying Nine down on a bunk. Jerri rushed down the ladder for some wine, and Andel headed into the cabin to see to his belongings.
They left Calder on deck, which he didn’t mind. He needed a moment.
His hands trembled with excitement, and he opened and closed his fists, trying to work out the excess energy. A strange expression had been carved onto his face, and he couldn’t tell if it was a smile or a rictus of fear. His stomach roiled, almost as though he were seasick, and his thoughts moved too fast for him to catch up.
From the appearance of the dancing lights to Eight carrying Nine inside, not three minutes had passed. Calder had endured too many emotions in too short a time to even understand them all.
