by Fire
She left the cabin after Julia fell asleep. It was a cool night on deck, a crescent moon sailing high in clear skies above the grounded Amaranth. Half a mile away across the valley, the Folly was burning. A crewman followed Mir’s eyes and said, “The captain ordered her fired once we cleared out the magazine and the gas bombs. Not about to leave any trace of that contraption for the scavengers. They’re welcome to the bodies, though.”
Mir nodded, only half-listening. “Why do they stay? Shipseeds, I mean. They could just... fly away, out into the universe. Why don’t they?”
“Not something I’m keen to talk over with an outsider, miss. You and your friend already know too much. No offense.”
“None taken.”
They watched the flames for a while.
“Sharpe says the Amaranth is in love with him. But that’s just an analogy. It has to be. She’s alien, as alien as anything can be.”
“He loves her, that’s for sure. And that’s no analogy, miss.”
She took her leave, wandering, feeling the Amaranth knitting herself back together. The pain was gone. In the calm, she could sense Sharpe’s confusion, his unrest at Julia’s words. She remembered the quick, professional motion of his hands as he checked her harness before the running battle, the cheerful obliviousness to social graces when they’d met. The odd blend of abstraction and focus. And she understood with sudden clarity that he could fly like a god precisely because of how he imagined his relationship with his ship.
But it was imaginary. It had to be. The Amaranth was using him. It didn’t matter that he loved her for it, would do anything for her because of it, would hold on even as she threw him away—
A half-dozen blank booklets, a lie, and an armed lightning siphon.
“Damn you, Madeleine,” she whispered.
Somehow her walk had ended at the door to Sharpe’s quarters. She knocked before she could think better of it.
“Miss Mir?”
“It’s funny,” she said. “I still can’t think of you as Elias.” She pushed past him. “I wonder if your ship bothers with names. I don’t think she does. Temporary things, names. You can give them, take them away. Then one day, you can’t remember what was there before.”
“Mir—”
“Shut up. Just don’t say anything, and maybe this will be all right.”
Then she was kissing him, and even as heat rose deep within her, she knew he had no idea why he was kissing her back.
Morning broke. She disentangled herself from Sharpe and left him still drowsing.
Julia was waiting for her in their quarters. “That was foolish,” she said, not unkindly. “Whatever comes next will only be more difficult. What were you thinking?”
“I thought we had something in common.”
“And?”
“You told me you wondered what sort of person I’d be when I stopped falling. So do I.” She washed in a bucket of tepid water and changed, strapping her sheathed knife to her left wrist and holstering her hold-out pistol at the small of her back. “But I’m damn well certain I’m not Elias Sharpe.”
The Amaranth flew southeast on a bearing for Cadela.
“Creel might have someone waiting for us,” Mir said. “He might have already gassed the city.”
Sharpe grimaced. “Creel or not, we have deliveries to make. And there’s a Company outpost there. They won’t be easy prey.” He rubbed at his temples. He had yet to complain aloud of his headache, but he didn’t need to. Mir had the same one. The touch of the Amaranth was growing diffuse, fading, leaving behind an impression that Mir was always on the verge of remembering something. Presumably, Sharpe felt the same. His denial could not last forever. Neither could his guidance of the Amaranth. Even now, the ship’s flight seemed less sure.
Abelard had noticed. He took care never to turn his back on Mir or Dogwood. He sat now by the altimeter and thermometer, eyes fixed on the columns of quicksilver, thinking. He still wore the revolver with which he had boarded the Folly, and Sharpe had not asked for its return.
So perhaps Sharpe’s denial was not total, after all.
I can kill him, or die, or go mad, Mir thought. And if I do murder him, I’ll be left bound to this ship for the rest of my life. I’ll have traded one mistress for another.
The shadows shifted on the deck. The ship was turning. Mir cringed, fighting sudden vertigo and a flare of pain.
“Captain?” Dogwood asked.
“I’m trying an experiment,” Sharpe said, voice tight. Another slow turn, this time in the opposite direction.
A fresh spike of pain sank into Mir’s skull. All right, she thought, forget your own choices. Focus on Julia’s.
“If I gave you the booklets,” she asked Julia quietly, “what would you do?”
But it was Dogwood who saw through the question to the implication. “Mir, it isn’t that simple. We can continue the ruse with variations, keep playing the powers against one another until they’re exhausted, but I cannot do it alone. You need to repair the seals, position yourself as a traitor willing to sell the contents—”
“You’re on Lemuria’s side.”
“In a way.”
“Well, I seem to be too, or at least the side of the airships. But I don’t remember making a choice, and that scares the hell out of me.”
“Did you ever make a conscious decision to serve the Lady of Situations?”
“Exactly.” Mir raised her voice. “Captain Sharpe? We need to talk.”
By tradition, the crew chose the location for the duel, and so Mir and Sharpe stood back to back on a flat-topped mountain above a broad plain. The wind climbing the slopes carried the scent of olive trees, and Mir thought of that first night in Cliff’s End.
Sharpe’s crew—or the Amaranth’s—waited well to the sides. Nobody wanted to catch a stray bullet. Dogwood and Abelard stood nearer. If they had noticed the absurdity of having seconds in such a duel, neither remarked on it.
“Why didn’t you just shove me over the rail?” Mir murmured.
He shifted against her shoulders. “Why did you sleep with me?”
The part of her that had seen in Abelard a convenient weapon woke and produced the answer he wanted: “I had the Amaranth in my head. That’s all.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“I don’t know what I believe. Are you... happy, Sharpe?”
“Yes. Yes, I am.”
“I don’t know if I would be.”
Sharpe’s first officer spoke: “Duelists, walk for the five-count, turn, and fire.”
Mir’s grip tightened on the revolver. It was big for her hands. She would be slow to cock the hammer for a second shot. Not that the second shot would matter.
“She chose you,” Sharpe said, so softly he might have been speaking to himself. “I’d almost hoped it was the Ladyhawk. But she chose you, and I don’t understand why.”
Mir took a deep breath. At the first officer’s shout, she began to walk.
“One. Two. Three. Four. Five.”
She turned and fired over her opponent’s head.
A moment later, she realized Sharpe had done the same.
From the sideline, Dogwood began to laugh. “Oh, this is a first. Are you really both bent on dying nobly? Is that the best you believe you can do? Mir, love, Lemuria has work for you. Do you imagine you were chosen in idleness?”
“Maybe,” Mir said. “But I don’t plan on starting like this. If you want Sharpe dead, you can do it yourself. I’m done with other people’s killing.” She paused. “I can’t help but notice a distinct lack of gunfire. Why is that, Dogwood? Is it because you know what would happen next?”
Silence.
She turned back to Sharpe. “Dammit, Elias. I don’t want this. Can’t you see that?”
He dropped his revolver. He wasn’t even looking at her. All his attention was on the grounded Amaranth. Calling to her, maybe, and listening to the silence. He’d killed for her once, Mir realized. She wondered what had chang
ed.
She had another option; another way out.
“Abelard,” she said. “I killed the Windhover. I killed Caldwell. I set a lightning siphon in the magazine. When I saw Dogwood and the others on board, I panicked. I thought the collateral damage would be worth it, or maybe I just wanted to save myself.... When I found you, I wasn’t just looking for survivors. I was making sure none of them were enemies.”
His eyes flicked between her and Dogwood.
“It wasn’t her,” Mir said. “Think, Abelard. I can show you what I was carrying. They’re just blank booklets. Bait for a trap. I was Madeleine Lewis’s decoy. Her lightning rod.” She tossed her revolver aside. “As it were.”
“Mir....”
“You swore an oath. You swore by Lemuria and the Bolide.”
“So I did,” he said slowly. “So I did. But you’re not afraid to die, are you? It’s what you want.”
“Abelard,” she began, realizing her mistake, “I—”
He drew and shot Sharpe through the head.
For just a moment, she met Abelard’s eyes. Part of her wanted to see triumph in his face, or closure, or even righteous anger. But she could read nothing there but disappointment and revulsion.
Then the full weight of the Amaranth crashed through Mir’s mind, and darkness fell.
Why me? Mir asked.
An image of the Windhover burning.
That’s not an answer.
Her own voice came back, shifted beyond the range of sound: I thought we had something in common.
What, that we’re killers? Sharpe loved you. Loved you. Do you know how rare that is?
Again: I thought we had something in common.
I don’t know what to do next, Mir thought into the void. I’ve lost my Lady. More than lost her. If Dogwood pushes me, I don’t know how far I’ll go. What I’ll do, who I might do it to.
Something like warmth, like an affirmation. An image of fine tendrils spreading beneath Lemuria, reaching through the dark, and the world above changing. All the world a garden of shadows tended by the Engineers, themselves grown monstrous strange, and all culminating in the new mountaintop where a shipseed would sprout and bloom and cast off into the night, leaving the world a gray and fading memory of life.
Your lifecycle, Mir thought. To move on, you have to consume this place. And you could. So why haven’t you?
More images: rivers, mountains, waves breaking on white cliffs. The embassy in Lycen in its splendor, caught in the fire of the rising sun. Then a sense of Sharpe and his delight in the world, or in what the world could be. A portrait not of the face but of the man. Then another portrait of another captain, and another, and another—
I see it, Mir thought. You like it here. You like the people. You even like the damn scenery. I guess this is the first time you’ve had another species to talk to. Or that could talk back. I wonder what the odds are on that. Low, I think.
Amusement, perhaps, or doubt.
Oh. You don’t know what to do next either.
Affirmation.
I could leave you blind, Mir thought. I could even kill you. There’s a case for it. There’s a case for destroying every single one of you.
Silence. Then, in an echo of Dogwood’s voice: I wonder who you’ll be when you stop falling.
Well, Mir thought, there are worse foundations for a partnership. I guess we’ll find out together.
She came to herself in Sharpe’s bed. Her bed, now. The Amaranth withdrew from her awareness, the gesture somehow respectful.
We’ll talk later, Mir thought. This isn’t over.
A final, fading affirmation, and she was alone.
Or nearly so; Julia sat by her bedside, offering a glass of water.
“Thanks.” She drank. “Sharpe?”
“He’s under a cairn. There’s no digging a grave in bare stone. I doubt he even knew what happened.”
“Abelard?”
“He murdered Sharpe in front of his crew. There was nothing I could do. I’m sorry.”
“So I could have killed their captain, and that’d be fine, but Abelard does it—”
“There’s a line between a duel and cold-blooded murder, love. In any event, the crew would merely have obeyed you long enough to find a port and likely other employment. Now, however, they’ve seen that Sharpe wouldn’t take your life. They saw you trying to lay down your own, perhaps in penance, perhaps in fear of gaining something many would kill to possess. They’d have obeyed you, Mir. Now, I suspect they’ll follow you.” A thin smile. “That you simply could have killed yourself doesn’t seem to have occurred to them.”
Mir set the glass in an indentation on the nightstand and concentrated for a moment, calling on the Amaranth and peering out through their twin perceptions of the worlds. Go, she thought. Images of plains and rolling hills and then the desert by the eastern sea, and then the sea itself, the spreading blueness that reached all the way to Lemuria.
The Amaranth rose and banked.
Then she remembered something else, and the turn continued, becoming a circle.
She threw off the covers, donned her weapons and harness, and set out for the quarterdeck.
“Where are we going?” Julia asked.
“Lemuria. I have several canisters of dangerous chemicals to dispose of and a few questions that need answering.” First among them, she thought to her ship, is what you’re not telling me about our association.
The corner of Julia’s mouth quirked, and she began to object.
“No,” Mir said. “We’re going to Lemuria now. Come along or leave, but I’ve made my choice.”
Julia studied her for a moment. Then she smiled. “As you will.”
Most of the crew had gathered before the quarterdeck. Sharpe’s first officer—Adrian Collins, that was his name—was waiting at the helm, eyeing the instruments with ill-concealed anxiety.
“Relax, Mr. Collins,” she said. “I have the shipseed. You’ll teach me about captaining and everything the Engineers built around her. I know what I don’t know.”
He stood a bit easier. “Good to hear, Captain.”
She faced the crew and raised her voice. “We’re bound for Lemuria by way of Cadela. Anyone who wishes to leave at Cadela, tell me, and I’ll honor whatever arrangement Sharpe made with you as best I can. But if you come with me, you’ll be fighting the people who killed Traeger and harnessed the Folly.”
She hesitated, considering the coming crisis, the Amaranth’s images playing in her head: the change spreading from Lemuria, the work of the mad gardeners, the final expulsive burst of life.
“You might even have a chance to save the world,” she added. “And then, when that’s done, if you want it, you can have your shot at me. Sharpe’s dead. I don’t mean to replace him. I mean to do right by him, if I can. And by the other dead.” She stopped, aware that she’d run out of things to say. “Well? For the dead?”
It was a muted chorus, but it was nearly unanimous: “For the dead.”
“Good.”
Carrion birds wheeled far overhead, descending over the mountaintop. With a thought, she leveled the ship, its bow pointed back to the dueling ground. Collins grabbed for the helm and made some inscrutable adjustment.
“But now, we see to Abelard. I won’t leave the dead unburied. We can leave after the funeral. To your posts.”
The crew obeyed. Mir hid her relief.
Julia spoke from her side. “That was well done.”
“Thanks.”
Quieter: “Abelard may have saved my life, you know. Had he not done as he did, then I—”
“I don’t want to know, Dogwood. I truly don’t.”
A long silence. With reefed sails and Mir’s tentative feel for the Amaranth’s senses, they drifted slowly.
At last, Julia said, “You don’t remember your name from before the Lady found you, do you?”
“No. I was four or five. Just another gutter rat. This is the name I’ve got.” The ship tilted slightly
, feathering invisible vanes against a gust from another plane. Mir noted the sensation, tipped a mental nod to the Amaranth. “I’ll just have to make do.”
They buried Abelard beneath a cairn on the mountaintop a stone’s throw from Sharpe, the world spread out below the mountain and a hard blue sky above. It was a perfect spring day, and the weather held until twilight, when clouds began to gather along the Amaranth’s course, and the air smelled of rain and olives.
© Copyright 2020 Andrew Dykstal
