Ship of Smoke and Steel

by Django Wexler

  I nod silently. Most mage-born, especially adepts, are noticed at a young age, when they do something clearly unnatural. The power comes to us when we’re too young to know any better, or to control what feels like a perfectly normal part of ourselves. I’d been lucky enough that I could lose myself in the slum, staying away from anyone who’d seen my occasional outbursts until I eventually learned enough control to keep myself hidden.

  “She saved my life,” Meroe went on. “Gigi told everyone I was ill. Do you have the crowfoot pox in the Empire?” When I shrug, she says, “It’s an uncommon disease in Nimar, but not unknown. It’s dangerous for children, but almost always deadly for adults who catch it. Gigi told everyone I had the pox, and isolated herself with me in one of the monastery towers. We lived there for nearly a year, servants leaving our food outside the door. All that time, Gigi tried to make me understand what my power was, and what it would mean if anyone found out.”

  “They would have killed you, I assume.”

  Meroe nods. “Mage-bloods are venerated in Nimar, and given honorable placements. Every Well except Ghul. A few weak touched and talents are apprenticed into a monastic order, but adepts…”

  “It’s the same in the Empire,” I say. “Ghul adepts are too dangerous to let live.”

  “I know.” Meroe shakes her head. “Believe me, I know. Do you have any idea how often I’ve thought of just … doing what Gigi should have done? I had a spot picked out, a tower in the palace with a hundred-foot drop onto hard flagstones. I even went up there a few times, but I never … I was never strong enough.”

  “It’s no shame to want to live.”

  She laughs bitterly. “Tell that to my father.”

  “He found out?”

  “I don’t know for certain. But”—she waves a hand—“it would explain how I ended up here, wouldn’t it?”

  I nod, and we lapse into silence again. Meroe stares at me, studying my face, and ventures a weak smile.

  “It doesn’t look … bad,” she says. “Almost pretty. South of Nimar, there’s a tribe who practice ritual scarification, and I always thought—”

  “I don’t care how it looks.”

  She cuts off, swallowing. After another moment, she says in a small voice, “What are you going to do now?”

  The meaning is obvious enough. Meroe can’t walk, nor can she defend herself against the crabs. If I abandon her, it’s the same as if I slit her throat, and we both know it.

  I’m not prepared to do that. I may still not fully understand why, but it’s time I accepted it. “We are getting out of here. Ahdron said nobody comes back from the Deeps, but there’s got to be a way back up. We’ll stay away from the crabs as much as we can, and I’ll kill them if I have to.”

  “What about the wilders?” she says. I frown. I recall Berun mentioning the term, but not the details. Meroe goes on, “People who ran away from Soliton’s ‘civilization.’ They’re supposed to live out here. Maybe they can help us.”

  “Didn’t Berun say they hate the people from the Stern?”

  Meroe shrugs. “I doubt Berun ever met one himself.”

  “If we meet any wilders, we’ll ask for help,” I say. “And if they get in our way, I’ll kill them, too.”

  She gives me an odd look. “You’ve done that before, haven’t you?”

  “What?”

  “Killed people.”

  It hadn’t even occurred to me that this might be new ground for her. I nod, a little uncomfortable. Rotting aristos.

  “Okay,” Meroe says, after a moment’s pause. “Can I make the obvious point that I can’t walk?”

  “I’ll make you a sledge, at least until we have to start climbing.” I glance around at the rolling, empty sand. “That’s the hard part. I’m going to have to go and find some supplies, and you’ll need to wait here for me.”

  Meroe blinks. I can see the fear in her eyes, just for a moment—fear of being alone here, hurt and helpless, easy prey for anything that happens along. Then, as always, she steadies, and gives a decisive nod.

  “All right,” she says, no hint of worry in her voice. “Can you help me to the water before you leave?”

  Blessed above. Sometimes I think this princess is twice as tough as I am.

  * * *

  I walk. And walk. And walk.

  Soliton is a ship. A big ship, but still. There has to be an end to it, doesn’t there? An outer hull. But if there is, it’s invisible to me, far beyond the tiny circle of light thrown by my Melos blade. After a while I dismiss the magic and let my eyes adapt, walking by the light of the moving stars.

  I keep my course as straight as I can. I should be able to follow my footprints in the sand to return to Meroe, but I’m still wary. There are two red stars, neither moving much, that hang directly behind me. Hopefully, when I turn around, I can just walk toward them.

  Eventually, something huge looms out of the shadow, blotting out the stars as I come near. I approach slowly, wary for crabs, but nothing moves. It’s a metal tower, a dozen yards across at the base. I imagine it stretching upward to the Center, narrowing as it rises, supporting decks and platforms and bridges. A few shelf mushrooms grow around it, but there’s no sign of a ladder or stairs. It’s just possible I could climb it, but not for long enough to make a difference, and I’d never get Meroe up.

  At the base, there are large chunks of fallen mushroom lying on the sand, dried and desiccated. I pick one up, curiously. It weighs almost nothing, but it’s far too crumbly and brittle to be of use building a sledge. The tower itself looks too solid to carve a piece off of.

  Something moves, inside the pillar. The specks of gray light flow steadily upward, denser here. They seem to well up from under the sand, as though the pillar were a giant siphon drawing them skyward. When I touch it, I feel … something, a faint tug and a whisper that quickly fades away.

  Looking over my shoulder, I see one of my two guide stars has started to move sideways, crawling slowly across the darkness. I pick up a couple of the larger chunks of shelf mushroom and head back along my footprints.

  I relax a little when my pool comes into view, with Meroe a darker lump beside it. She sits up as I return, and I drop the bits of mushroom on the sand.

  “Welcome back.” She’s huddled tightly in on herself. “Did you find anything?”

  “Not much.” I indicate the mushroom. “I’ll try a different direction tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” Meroe says, with a slight smile. “How will we know when that is?”

  “After I get some sleep, then,” I tell her. “How are you feeling?”

  “My leg hurts,” she says. “No worse than it did, though.” She hugs herself a little tighter. “I’m cold.”

  “I thought of that.” It’s chilly down here in the dark, a wet, stygian cold that starts to creep in as soon as I stop moving. “Give me a minute.”

  I snap one of the pieces of mushroom into a few smaller bits, and arrange them in a rough pile. Half an hour later, I’m still trying to get my makeshift campfire going, holding my Melos blade near enough to it that green lightning arcs and pops. Wisps of smoke rise, now and then, but it won’t catch, and eventually I slump back in defeat.

  Meroe, sitting next to me, gives me a sad smile. “It was a good idea.”

  She’s shivering. I take one of her hands, and she looks at me questioningly. Her fingers are like ice.

  “Lie down,” I tell her.

  She does. I prod her onto her side, and lie down next to her, pressing myself up against her back. I feel her stiffen slightly, then relax.

  “Better?” I ask, after a while.

  “Yeah.” She gives a little giggle. “Your breath is tickling my neck.”

  “Sorry.”

  Another silence. I think she’s fallen asleep, but then she says, “Will you tell me something about yourself, Isoka?”

  I feel myself tense up. “What do you want to know?”

  “Anything.” She yawns. “I talk about myself
a lot. I just thought…”

  Another pause.

  “If you don’t want to…,” she says, worried.

  “I have a sister.” I don’t realize I’m speaking aloud until the moment after I’ve done it. Pressed together, it feels like the two of us are alone in the universe, a tiny bubble of warmth and life in the middle of cold, unfeeling darkness. “Her name is Tori. She’s four years younger than me.” I pause for a moment. “We used to sleep like this, when it got cold and we were on the street, or squatting in some rattrap. Whenever it snowed, street kids would freeze to death. We’d find them in the mornings, just like they were asleep, only turned blue. They were always smiling, and I thought it wouldn’t be a bad way to die. But when I slept with Tori, I was always warm. I used to joke that she had a belly full of hot coals.”

  I keep talking a while longer, and I feel Meroe’s breathing go slow and deep, her body relaxing. After a while I close my eyes, press a little tighter against her, and let myself drift away.

  12

  When I wake up, Meroe’s face is inches from mine. Her eyes are closed, her features calm, and in the strange moments after waking I feel an odd urge to kiss her. That’s enough to make me blink and come fully awake, and I prop myself up on one arm and brush sand out of my hair.

  She opens her eyes as I sit up, and groans.

  “And here I was hoping this had all been a dream,” she says. “Why is it only a dream when you really want it to be real?”

  “I’ve wondered that myself.”

  First we drink water, filling and refilling the canteen until we’ve both had enough, and then we eat a few more strips of badly cooked crab meat. I push Meroe’s dress up to examine her leg, and she does her best not to wince as I prod it gently. I have no idea if it’s set properly, but it doesn’t seem to be festering or swelling too badly.

  “Right,” I say. “Last time I went that way.” I gesture to where a few of my footprints are still visible, then turn ninety degrees. “This time I’ll go this way. Maybe I can find the edge of the ship.”

  “Would that be helpful?”

  I shrug. “It’d be something.”

  She nods, then looks away nervously. “Before you leave, can you help me with something?”

  “What do you need?”

  Her eyes stay fixed firmly on the ground. It takes me a second, but I get it, and I find myself grinning. “Oh.”

  She rolls her eyes at me. “Please hurry.”

  Through a combination of carefully averted gazes and loud humming, we manage to give Meroe a chance to piss without either of us dying of embarrassment. I get her settled back near the pool, and wave with as much cheer as I can muster.

  “Be careful,” she says.

  “You too.”

  “Don’t worry about me.” Sleeping seems to have restored her spirits, and she grins broadly. “If the crabs come for me, I shall disarm them with my rapier wit.”

  I smile back, with an effort, and start walking.

  Once again, I find two “stars” that haven’t moved in a while and use them as guideposts, in case something happens to my footprints. This time I find one of the massive pillars much sooner, with several dog-sized green crabs gathered around its base. I veer well clear, and though they freeze at the sound of my shuffling feet, they don’t follow me.

  Walking through an endless expanse of white sand gives you too much time to think. I think about Tori, in her Second Ward house, and wonder if she’s realized I’m gone yet. Maybe she’s worrying about me. Maybe Naga has already killed her, just out of spite, and all this is pointless. But no—if I do somehow take command of Soliton, he’ll need her to make sure I hand the ship over to the proper authorities. So she’s safe. Until he decides I’ve failed.

  I turn my mind in other directions. I think about Meroe, back at the pool, but then I worry about whether she’s all right. And I think about how we spent the night, and what she thinks about it, which is, frankly, confusing. I try to think about Zarun instead, but that’s just frustrating, and in spite of my best efforts Meroe keeps intruding. So in the end I try to think about nothing at all, just my boots brushing slowly through the sand, which works about as well as you might imagine.

  It’s with some relief, therefore, that I discover that there’s an end to the sand after all. I’ve passed several more pillars, but now the faint light ends at a wall of utter darkness, stretching up far higher than I can see and running perfectly straight in both directions. This can only be the hull of the ship. It’s so large and so featureless that it’s hard to gauge how far away it is. After another hour of trudging, the thing seems no closer, until I spy small discolorations at the base.

  As I approach, I can see that they’re buildings, of a sort. A collection of small huts and shacks, leaning against the massive wall of the ship for support. All of them have at least partially collapsed, and some are little more than piles of rubble. Not a promising site, but more than I’ve found anywhere else, so I turn my steps in that direction.

  Something catches my eye when I get close, faint movement in the sand. I freeze, watching carefully, and catch tiny gray particles whipping across the dunes. They look like the flows I can see inside Soliton’s pillars, and they’re converging on the village, drawn inward like they’re caught in a whirlpool.

  That gives me pause. I ignite my blades, the green light harsh after the near darkness, banishing the faint wisps of gray. Shadows dance as I move closer to the wrecked village. Down at the very edge of my hearing, the whispering voices are back, speaking words I can’t quite understand.

  The village is full of corpses.

  The people who lived here have clearly been dead for a very long time. For the most part, the bodies are practically mummified, reduced to skeletons wrapped in dried-out skin and dressed in shredded rags. None of them are intact, not because of the passage of time but from the manner of their deaths, which is gruesomely clear. Several large shells, bleached white, lie among the villagers. One crab’s corpse is half-covered by the ruin of a demolished shack, as though it were killed while wrecking the building.

  There are people who live in the Deeps, then. The ones the crew called wilders. Or were, at least, until the crabs came for them. I walk gingerly into the village, blades ready. Nothing moves. There’s no sign of living people, or living crabs for that matter. The shacks themselves seem to be made of long, spongy poles, which I guess are dried mushrooms of a more useful species, along with a few little bits of fabric. Not sturdy, but how sturdy do they need to be, here inside Soliton?

  The skeletons, up close, are … strange. The bones seem twisted in places, not broken but grown into strange new shapes. One body has what looks like a third arm, fixed bizarrely between its shoulder blades. Another skull has bone spikes growing from it. A foot seems to have … blossomed, each toe stretching into a twisted corkscrew shape that looks like it was trying to become another limb.

  Closer to the great wall of the ship, there’s a faint flicker of movement, gone before I can focus on it. My lip twists, but I extinguish my blades, counting quietly as I give my eyes time to adapt to the dark. The gray light emerges, gradually, flowing stronger here, mounding up into silent, shifting waves like a torrent of water spilling through a river gate, converging on one of the shacks. Once I’m sure there’s nothing moving beyond the strange lights, I approach, my power tightly coiled.

  Two human skeletons lie under the dead crab, bones scattered. People fought and died, down in here in the dark, and no one ever knew. I step over them carefully, edging around the big shell and smaller, scattered pieces, following the intangible flood of gray.

  The shack backs against the wall of the ship itself, the huge metal barrier that stretches off into the dark. But here, at the back of the shack, there’s a hole, a square about as tall as I am. A smaller dead crab lies there, a spearpoint emerging from a hole in its shell. The gray specks rush over it, cresting like a wave over a rock.

  I’m not sure exactly what
I’m looking for. There are useful materials in the village, but …

  I step through the hole. The white sand of the Deeps gives way to metal floor, without the patina of rust and decay that covers the rest of the ship. There’s a chamber here, inside the wall, a large cube-shaped room lit only by the flickering gray of that intangible light. Apart from a scattering of sand, it’s empty.

  No. Not quite empty. My eye follows the gray motes, which converge on the far side. There a semi-circular pillar runs from floor to ceiling, like half a pipe stuck to the wall. The flow of gray stuff rushes into it, pulled upward and out of sight, like what I saw in the pillars outside but much brighter and more powerful.

  Beside the pillar are two more corpses. They sit side by side, one grinning skull on the other’s shoulder, their hands entwined between them. This place’s last defenders, perhaps, who retreated here when the crabs came. They don’t look like they died fighting, and I take a few steps forward to get a closer look.

  “… soka…” The voice rises from the faint babble, stronger than the others. For a moment I think I’ve imagined it. “… Isoka…”

  Rot. I turn in a slow circle, just to confirm I’m alone.

  “… hear … it’s…”

  “H … hello?” My own voice isn’t as strong as I intended it to be. But rot, there’s no one here. I grit my teeth and take another step forward, bringing me within arm’s length of the pillar. “Is someone there?”

  No answer. The gray motes swirl around me, my legs making eddies in the flow as they rush onward. I reach down to touch them, and they swirl around my fingers like smoke.

  “Isoka.” The voice is definitely stronger.

  “Who’s there?” Then, without really knowing why, I ask, “Hagan?”

  The voice could be his. And—rot, that was a dream. I killed Hagan, and dead is dead.

  I raise my hand, and brush my finger against the pillar.

  Something moves.

  * * *

  Perhaps not my most brilliant idea, all told.