Ship of Smoke and Steel

by Django Wexler

  The gray motes curl around me, thickening into spinning bands of light that spin like a berserk gyroscope. The distant voices get louder, the susuruss of quiet whispers rising into a high-pitched mosquito whine that seems to bore right into my skull. And then …

  I can feel it, something vast and alien, turning its attention in my direction. The gray light mounds up in front of me, and before I can do more than blink it rushes inward like a striking cobra, streaming in through my eyes and mouth and ears. It’s spreading through me, investigating me, cataloguing me with the dispassionate attention of a naturalist dissecting a specimen. It’s gone in an instant, before I even have time to scream.

  It doesn’t speak. The communication is more basic than that, a feeling blasted directly into my mind, so strong it drives me to my knees:

  UNAUTHORIZED/REJECTED

  “… Isoka!… coming…”

  Blessed’s rotting balls in a vise. I surge back to my feet, igniting my blades. The green Melos light pushes back the darkness, fading the gray to wraith-like wisps. My heart pounds, but the familiar feeling of my power crackling through my arms helps me stay calm. I back away from the pillar, turning in a slow circle.

  Something has changed. Silently, one of the walls of the room had opened, revealing a long passageway stretching off into darkness. In the depth of that shadow, something glows blue.

  The glowing figure takes a step forward, and the ground shakes, sand jumping across the metal deck. It’s too big to make out, by the light of my blades, and I can only see fragments of it, sliding through the shifting radiance. Smooth, gray skin, like rock, big, bulky segmented legs surrounded by rings of waving, clutching human arms. Along its flank, a row of smooth, gray faces, living death masks with eyes that follow me and mouths open in an endless scream. High above, a faceted crystal that shines from within with pale blue light, a gemstone bigger than my fist embedded in the thing’s skin.

  It’s not a crab. I saw something like this when I was brought aboard, lining the edges of Soliton’s deck.

  An angel.

  UNAUTHORIZED/REJECTED

  It takes a step forward, shifting between me and the door, limbs stretching toward me like something out of a nightmare. I back away, closer to the pillar.

  Oh, rot.

  The gray light flickers. Something is moving, writhing, in the shifting mix of gray and blue and green. The motes fall inward until they’re nearly solid, shaping themselves into a man-sized figure. It grows more distinct as the angel advances, arms and legs and a head, clothes of a familiar cut, a face—

  It holds out a hand. Wisps of gray light lash out, wrapping themselves around the angel, and the huge thing freezes in place. The figure turns to face me.

  Hagan. It’s Hagan, though he’s warped and distorted, as though I’m seeing his reflection in a shifting pool of mercury. His eyes meet mine, though. When he speaks, there’s a crackling buzz like a swarm of wasps that nearly drowns out his words. Nearly, but not quite.

  “Isoka.”

  No. Not possible. Hagan is dead, dead, dead; I rotting killed him myself.

  I’m going mad.

  “Way.” He grimaces, as though each word costs him an enormous effort. “Way. Out.”

  Blessed’s balls.

  “The way out?” I shake my head. I can’t believe I’m doing this. “You know the way out?”

  He nods, with difficulty, and raises one hand. Gray light floods my senses again. For a moment there’s something at the back of my mind, a vast, complicated web of tunnels and decks, a map that’s far, far more intricate than I can comprehend. Then it’s gone, draining away. Hagan looks frustrated. He grits his teeth, and light shifts in front of him, forming a ball of gray. With a gesture, he sends it floating toward me.

  My hand comes up to catch it, automatically, but it passes through my fingers like they’re not even there. It hits me in the chest and sinks into my skin, without even a flicker from my Melos armor. It feels strange, as though someone had latched a thread around my breastbone and given it a gentle tug. When I look down, a gray thread emerges from my chest, leading off into the darkness.

  “Follow,” Hagan says.

  “I…” I shake my head. “This is impossible. Hagan—”

  The angel shifts, its twisted limbs grinding toward me. Hagan turns to it, and it freezes again, but the strain on his face is obvious.

  “Go,” he says.

  I don’t need to be told twice. I edge around the angel, which remains motionless as a statue. When I reach the door, I pause and look back. Hagan is still there, outlined in glowing gray, watching me.

  I have to say something. I can’t just …

  “Hagan. Are you—”

  “Isoka.” His voice is harder to make out, the distortion louder. “Listen. Anomaly … coming. Danger. Garden.” He grows louder for just a moment. “Find Garden. Or die.”

  The angel shifts again, trying to turn around.

  “Go!”

  I back through the doorway. An instant later, the metal slides shut in front of my nose, leaving an unbroken expanse of wall. It’s just me and the dead village, alone in the dark.

  * * *

  For a while I just sit, among the ancient corpses, and stare at the wall.

  What in the Rot was that?

  Hagan—except it’s not Hagan, because Hagan is dead—stopped an angel from tearing me apart.

  But the last time we met—I can’t believe I’m even thinking this—I put my blade through his skull. So I can’t imagine he’d be well-disposed to me, if he were still hanging around. Which he’s not.

  And then there’s this … thing in my chest. The gray thread stretches out of me and curves off into the dark, shifting slightly as though with an intangible breeze but always pointing in the same direction. I’m supposed to follow it, which makes even less sense than anything else. If Hagan is here, how in the Rot does he know the way back to the Stern?

  I never even asked. That thing, that presence, rooted around in my mind, and apparently didn’t like what it found.

  But—

  I put my head between my hands and groan, fingers digging into my hair. No matter how many times I go over it, it doesn’t make any rotting sense.

  Maybe I am going mad.

  Eventually, I have to get up. Meroe is waiting, unprotected. That thought gets me worried enough that I hurry through my preparations, grabbing what I need from the wreckage of the village before heading back the way I came.

  When I finally get there, Meroe is asleep beside the pool. I kneel to check on her, worried, but she just seems cold and exhausted. I’m tired, too, but after what happened inside the wall I don’t even think of sleep. I’m not sure I could pass another quiet night in this place.

  Instead, I get to work on my supplies. I brought one of the larger crab shells from the ruined village, a few of the long, flexible dried mushroom poles from the buildings, and as many intact scraps of fabric as I could manage. Being a Melos adept, fortunately, means never being without a handy cutting tool. I start slashing and tying, and by the time Meroe wakes up I’m nearly finished.

  “Good morning,” I tell her. “Or whatever it is.”

  “Morning.” Meroe yawns, sits up, winces, and puts her hands on her leg.

  “How do you feel?”

  “About the same.” She takes a deep breath. “Better, now that you’re back.”

  “We’re getting out of here.”

  “You found something?” Meroe looks at my project and frowns. “What happened?”

  “It’s a long story.” And how in the Rot am I supposed to explain that a boy I murdered turned up to give me a helping hand? “I found a ruined wilder village, and I think I might know how to get out of here. This”—I gesture—“is to help me bring you along.”

  Meroe looks at the crude construction, tilts her head, then laughs. “I get it. It’s like a sled.”

  “More or less.”

  I’ve lashed two long poles to the dish-sh
aped crab shell, which is large enough for Meroe to sit in. When I take the poles in hand, I can more or less drag the whole contraption across the sand. It’s not elegant, but it’s easier than carrying her.

  I hand her a couple of other poles that I’ve cut to roughly the height of her armpits. “You might be able to use these for crutches, too. I don’t know how far we’ll have to go.”

  “Very thoughtful,” Meroe says. “You’re practically an expert at this.”

  I bark a laugh. “Believe me, I’m making it up as I go along.”

  We have only the one canteen between us, and I don’t know when we’ll find more freshwater, so we both drink from the pool until we’re squelching. Meroe puts the rest of the half-cooked crab meat in the shell, then climbs in herself, and I pick up the poles.

  “What can I do to help?” Meroe says.

  “Just don’t move too much.” I shift my grip until I find something comfortable. “Here goes nothing.”

  After a few false starts, my rigged-up travois actually works fairly well. The most difficult part is coming down the shallow slope on the face of each dune, where the thing has a tendency to slide and tug me sideways, but I learn to walk a little faster to get ahead of it. I don’t ignite my blades, the better to see the tiny thread of gray light. For Meroe, it must feel like we’re hiking through the darkness with no guide at all, but she doesn’t question me.

  Not on that subject, at least. After a while, she says, “You were telling me about yourself, the other night, before I fell asleep.”

  I grunt, hoping responding in monosyllables will keep her from getting too interested. But she persists, and I have to admit that talking is easier than trying not to think at all. So I end up going over my life story, one little piece at a time. I leave out some of the details, and my capture by the Immortals and the aftermath, but that still leaves Meroe with a thousand questions.

  What’s hardest for her to understand is how mage-born are treated in the Empire. Things in Nimar are very different, apparently.

  “Why would you have to hide being a Melos adept?” she says. “With that kind of power, couldn’t you find a job better than a ward boss?”

  I shrug, as best I can while holding the poles. “Mage-born owe their lives to the Emperor’s service. According to the Emperor, anyway, and since he’s got the army his is the vote that counts. Mage-born from the noble families get trained and serve in different ways, according to their talents. For them it’s supposed to be a great honor. If you’re a commoner and they catch you young, then you might get adopted by a noble family or sent to the Legions. But if they think you’re too old to be trained properly, then their only real use for you is as breeding stock.”

  “You’re not serious,” Meroe says.

  “Of course I’m serious.” I can’t keep a bit of venom out of my voice. “You think the rotting aristos care what happens to a commoner? They stick you in a room, rape you until you get pregnant, and then take the kids away to be raised as their own. It ‘improves the noble bloodlines.’”

  “Gods,” Meroe says. “No wonder you hate them.”

  I shrug again, uncomfortably. It’s not that I don’t hate the aristos. It’s just that it never occurred to me that there was any other way to feel. How else is an alley rat fighting over scraps of rotten fish supposed to feel toward people who live in manicured gardens and eat hummingbird tongues? A specific reason seemed somehow superfluous.

  “In Nimar,” Meroe says, “any position is open to anyone who passes the examinations for it. It doesn’t matter who your parents are.”

  I snort. “I’m sure a lot of nobles’ daughters end up as fishwives.”

  “It’s not perfect,” Meroe concedes. “But we can’t afford to waste mage-born as ‘breeding stock.’” She shudders. “You’d have taken the examination and been given a high position.”

  “What if I didn’t like what I was given?”

  It’s Meroe’s turn to shrug. “If one of your fishermen decides he doesn’t want to be a fisherman, what does he do?”

  “Sell his boat and try his hand at something else, I suppose.”

  “What if he’s no good at it?”

  “Then he starves, or goes begging.”

  She shakes her head. “That doesn’t sound very efficient. Wouldn’t it be easier to figure out in advance what he’s best off doing?”

  “So does that mean you had to take an exam to be princess?”

  “No.” She goes quiet. “It’s different for royalty.”

  I don’t get the chance to enquire about this, because the gray thread I’ve been following suddenly twitches, the far end rising so it slants upward. It gets more vertical as we keep moving, and ahead I can see one of the big pillars. It looks like every other one that I’ve seen, flecked with rust and crusted with shelf mushrooms, but with one important difference: a broad, flat stairway spirals around it, vanishing upward into darkness after a couple of turns.

  If Hagan’s gift is to be believed, it must connect to the network of stairs and bridges in the Center, which leads ultimately back to the Stern. A way out. I let out a long breath, not sure if this makes the “Isoka is going insane” theory more or less likely.

  One immediate problem presents itself, though. The stairs don’t come all the way down to the level of the sand. The bottom step is about eight feet up, just high enough that I can’t touch it with my arms outstretched.

  The sight of the stairs makes Meroe suck in her breath. “You knew this was here?”

  “Sort of,” I mutter, staring at the inconvenient gap.

  “So how do we make the stairs come down?” Meroe says eagerly. “Is there a secret switch or something?”

  I give her a withering look, and her enthusiasm fades.

  “Oh,” she says. “Well. We could…” She trails off.

  “I’m thinking,” I growl, letting the travois fall and going over to the pillar.

  The shelf mushrooms, much as they look like a stairway, aren’t strong enough to support my weight even briefly. I tear a couple away from the metal, then fling them aside. If I put my arms up and jump, I can almost reach the step, but not quite. And that doesn’t help Meroe.

  I turn back to the pillar. Its face is smooth, apart from patches of rust, and I can’t get much of a hold on it. But …

  “Meroe,” I say. “I’m open to ideas.”

  “If you could stand on my shoulders, then you could probably pull yourself up,” she says. “But if I could stand up properly, you wouldn’t have had to drag me all this way.”

  “I think I can get myself up there,” I say. “But then what?”

  She looks at the poles I’ve been using to pull the travois, and her brow furrows.

  “It might work,” she mutters to herself. “And what have I got to lose, other than falling onto my broken leg?”

  I give her a dubious look.

  * * *

  Step one: get Isoka up onto the bottom stair.

  I summon my Melos blade, lighting up the sand with shimmering green, and apply it to the metal, pouring in as much energy as I can muster. It takes about ten minutes of steady pressure, but when I’m finished there are two notches carved into the metal. I wedge my boot into the foothold, then reach up for the handhold, hauling myself up. From here, the first step isn’t so far away, but reaching it requires a back-wrenching maneuver, pushing away from the pillar and grabbing the edge in one motion.

  Now I’m hanging from my palms, my feet dangling, and all I have to do is pull myself straight up with the rusty edge of the step cutting into my fingers. No problem.

  By the time I crawl onto the step, I’m sweating freely and my biceps are trembling. I lie on my back for a moment, focused on breathing.

  The canteen nearly hits me in the face, and I grab it out of the air. Meroe throws up the rest of the supplies and I set them all aside. She’s sitting just under the step, with one of the poles I used from the travois in her hands.

  “Ready?” I ask he
r.

  “Probably not,” she says.

  “If you can’t hold it, just fall,” I tell her. “You can try again.”

  “And again, and again. Until we starve to death.” Meroe grins and lifts the pole. “Just don’t drop me.”

  The pole is long enough that when she raises her arms I can grab the end. I haul it upward, hand over hand, and Meroe uses it to pull herself to a standing position, her good leg underneath her.

  Step two: get Meroe up to the bottom stair.

  Step two is going to hurt.

  Meroe grips the pole, squares her shoulders, and then reaches upward and starts to climb. As soon as she puts her weight on it, I know this was a bad idea. I struggle to maintain my grip, the edge of the stair digging into my arms, and try hard not to scream.

  Meroe climbs, hand over hand. One of her legs kicks free, the other secured by the splint. It’s only a couple of feet between us, but it feels like the gulf between worlds. A few seconds stretch into an eternity of pain.

  Her fingers brush the back of my hand. I don’t dare let go of the pole, not yet.

  “Grab my wrist.” The breath required for speech is almost too much. Meroe nods, pulls herself up one more hand’s width, and her fingers close around my wrist.

  I let go of the pole, which falls to the sand below, and grab her hands. Now she’s dangling from my grip, with nothing to brace her legs against, and my arms are already screaming in agony. All I’ve got to do is unwedge my feet, sit up, and lift her up over the edge. No problem.

  When I finally pull her up, I collapse backward, and she falls on top of me, dead weight. We lie there for what seems like hours, damp with sweat, gasping for breath. My arms are trembling, with all the strength of wet noodles.

  Meroe’s head is on my shoulder. I can feel her body pressed against me, the swell of her breasts, the triple-time slam of her heart. Beads of sweat roll from her hairline down the dark skin of her cheek.

  “You’re pretty strong,” I murmur. “For a princess.”

  “Told you … I wasn’t … useless.” She rolls off of me, flopping on the step with her arms spread. “I also bake a mean quiche.”