by James Maxey
The oversized shirt hung to the middle of her thighs and her legs were bare. For a woman almost my age, her limbs were rather shapely; I was particularly struck by the superb design of her feet and toes. The Divine Author was also an excellent architect, though it could be that my thoughts were pushed in this direction by my stumbling attempts at movement now that one of my ‘feet’ was no bigger around than a coat button.
Gale climbed onto deck and wasted little time accessing the situation. A strong wind filled the remaining sails and pushed us forward. “Mako, take the wheel!” she barked. “Where’s Rigger? What happened to the mainsail?”
“Rigger’s hurt!” shouted Sage, as she cradled her brother’s head in her lap. “He pushed himself too hard and it’s all my fault!”
“We’re being pursued by Rott,” Sorrow said to Gale. “I advise that you take us back to the material realm. Perhaps Abyss can intervene to halt his restless advance.”
“And I advise you to go back to your quarters and wait,” said Gale. “A full span of daylight must pass between our jumps. We can’t make the journey back until nightfall.”
“Six hours to go,” said Brand, glancing down at a pocket watch as he emerged onto the deck. He was as sweaty as Gale, and his shirtless back was covered with scratch marks.
Suddenly, there was flapping overhead. I looked up to see Infidel and Menagerie coming toward me. “If we’ve got wind, I guess I’m done,” she said.
Bigsby didn’t approve of them quitting. He chased after them, shaking his fists, yelling, “I didn’t tell you to stop!”
Gale casually stuck out a leg to trip Bigsby as he ran past. She pinned him beneath her foot as she said, “Anyone want to tell me how this dwarf got on board?”
“Ah, right,” said Brand, running his hand through his hair. “You weren’t really yourself when I made introductions. This is my, uh, my... sister. Princess Innocent Brightmoon.”
I stopped paying attention. I’d already heard this conversation, and I happened to know that the true Princess Innocent Brightmoon was present and accounted for. Infidel landed, and I threw my arms around her. She hugged me back, though only for a brief instant. “Sorry,” she said, turning her face away, her voice catching in her throat.
“Are you crying?”
“Gagging,” she said. “You kind of stink. Like, seriously. Some of that dragon goo has seeped into you.”
Sorrow approached. “Indeed. I saw it – and smelled it – when I examined your leg. I’ll continue to repair your physical form while I can, but I fear you may not last much more than another day or two. The wood I crafted you from is rotting at an accelerating pace. I can replace bits as they fall off, but as the last fragments of the original binding decay, so too, will the enchantment fail.”
“Speaking of binding...” said Infidel, dropping the shaft of the Gloryhammer into her gauntlet with a rather menacing slap. “What have you done to my husband, Sorrow?”
“In fairness, I didn’t know he was your husband. He was merely a wandering spirit discovered at random by my soul-catcher. A lost soul was required to animate my golem. He didn’t reveal his true identity until later.”
“Because you wouldn’t let me write!” I protested. “For that matter, you could have built me with a tongue.”
“Conversations with lost souls are tedious affairs,” Sorrow explained.
“Stop saying I was lost!” I said. “I was following Infidel.”
“I knew it,” Infidel said. “I could feel you beside me. I never had any doubt.”
“The two of you should be grateful to me for making this brief reunion possible,” said Sorrow, crossing her arms.
I began to peel off my clothes. They fell apart at the seams as I tugged on them. “Tossing these rags overboard will help with my general ripeness. I’ll also dip back into the Sea of Wine to try to wash more of the stink off me; the wine didn’t hurt me before. Maybe alcohol will slow my decay. That was my theory in life, at least.”
“Cold also slows decay,” said Sorrow. “We can use the Jagged Heart to chill you after you return from your bath. The cold shouldn’t harm you. But let’s not fool ourselves. We’ll never completely remove Rott’s curse. Decay was built into your body from the start.” She looked down at her withered left hand. “Just like everyone else. Now that you two are reunited, I advise that you treat your remaining time together as brief.”
Sorrow took one last glance at me as she turned away. Then, she whirled back around, her eyebrows raised as she examined the staves of my barrel chest. “By the thirteenth nail,” she whispered, sounding dazed. But while her eyes were fixed and motionless, her hand was busily searching the folds of her cloak. She pulled out a small silver rod which melted in her grasp, flowing like mercury to coat her hand with a thin glove of precious metal. She gingerly probed my chest to wiggle free a black shard embedded in the boards. Her gauntlet instantly turned dark gray with tarnish.
“What is it?” I asked.
“A fragment of Rott’s tooth,” she whispered as she looked at the object, roughly the size and shape of a man’s middle finger.
“Yeah. He snagged me as I first went in.”
She produced a golden coin and coated the black shard with a thin layer of the precious metal. “Gold will seal it,” she said. “It can withstand corruption better than any other metal.”
“Funny,” said Infidel. “I thought gold was the chief cause of corruption.”
I almost asked what Sorrow intended to do with the shard, but decided I’d rather not know the answer.
“You should see to your bath,” said Sorrow, not looking at me.
Infidel assisted as I tied a rope around myself and slipped down into the wine. The ship was now moving at a good clip through the waves. The water buffeted me, and I climbed out mere moments after I went in, lest the current tear me apart. As I inched my way back up the rope, I watched with morbid fascination as pale white worms writhed free of the wood of my limbs. The wine had left them drunk or poisoned. They fell away, vanishing into the burgundy beneath me, leaving me filled with tiny holes.
I made it back to the deck, sodden with wine.
“How do I smell now?” I asked, as the dark fluid puddled around me.
“Just like you used to,” said Infidel, as she wrapped me in her embrace.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I COULD OPEN THE DOOR
WE LAY IN the bed, my coconut skull resting on Infidel’s outstretched arm. We’d been talking for hours with a lightness that might have struck others as curious given our greater circumstances. But our marriage was built first and foremost on friendship. We’d loved each other chastely for over a decade, separated by my cowardice and Infidel’s former powers. When she’d been as strong as a dragon, she’d been afraid to even hug me for fear of maiming me. My new wooden carcass was equally useless for intimacy. If our relationship had been built merely on lust, it couldn’t have endured the strange barriers fate had constructed between us. Fortunately, deeper bonds held us together.
So it was ironic that we were talking about falling apart.
“Fixing your leg wasn’t a problem. Why can’t we do that when the rest of you rots away? Can’t we just keep changing parts?” she asked, tracing my seed-pod ears with her fingers.
“I don’t know,” I buzzed, wishing I could whisper, or convey any tone at all. “Perhaps I’ll continue being a ghost. Or perhaps I’ll simply fade away.”
She swallowed.
I said, “When I first... died, I, uh, I had an... experience. It’s tough to describe. I felt like I was part of the larger universe. I felt like my... my energy had been concentrated in my old body, and now that it had been cut loose I was... dissipating. Spreading out. Like I was everywhere at once, a tiny part of everything. It wasn’t... it wasn’t scary. I felt at peace. I felt connected to something bigger than myself.”
“And you think that will happen again?” She stared up at the beams of the ceiling, then closed her eyes. “
It doesn’t sound so bad.”
“No,” I said. “But it doesn’t sound even half as good as staying with you.”
“I want you to be with me too,” she said.
“But what if I can’t? What if the next time I slip free from the world I don’t come back?”
“Then I’ll miss you and remember you,” said Infidel, stoically. “We face the same future as every other marriage. The day comes when one of the spouses is no longer around. When brides and grooms say, ‘’Til in death we part,’ they don’t know if they are making a promise for fifty years or fifty seconds. We just... we just have a little more information than most people do.”
This was another reason why I loved her. Underneath her swaggering bravado, beneath the mask of her daredevil grins, Infidel was a person who understood her limits. She’d always accepted there were some fights too big for her. Unlike Sorrow, she’d never decided to avenge herself against the father who’d wronged her, or declare war on the church that pursued her. She’d merely declared herself done with their madness, and carved her life anew.
Infidel nudged aside a loose barrel slat on my chest and peered into the darkness.
“So it’s costing you energy to animate this body?”
“That’s what Sorrow says. I don’t really feel any different.”
“But you could be free if you weren’t trapped inside that silver bug?”
“Actually, I’ve been able to slip out of the mosquito. Now I’m trapped by the golden cage that forms this body’s heart.”
Infidel stared into the center of my chest for several long seconds.
“I could open the door,” she said.
I didn’t hesitate for even a second. “The best moment of my life was the moment I opened my heart to you. Do it.”
For a fleeting instant, I regretted the words. We were messing with magic neither of us understood. But it was too late to protest as her slender hand slipped into my hollow chest and found the cage. I heard a tiny click as the door opened.
Infidel carefully withdrew her fingers. “Did that do anything? Are you free?”
I didn’t answer. Though I’d heard her, once more I had shrunk down within my enchanted body, becoming a tiny homunculus standing beside the silver mosquito, staring at the open door of the cage.
I walked to the lip. Through the slats, I could see Infidel’s chest pressed next to mine, her white and silver armor gleaming in the faint light cast by the Gloryhammer, which was floating the corner, draped with a sheet to soften its glow.
I stepped out of the cage.
Instantly, the silver wires that pierced my spiritual body fell free. I was once more a full-sized phantom floating above the bed. The room seemed subtly different from the one I’d been in mere seconds before. For one thing, the room now possessed color. The bruise on Infidel’s brow had a blue tint rimmed by a jaundiced yellow. The quilt we lay upon was a patchwork of a dozen faded green hues. The air in the room had been mostly dead to me before, but now smelled of wine, mixed with a shore at low-tide.
My wooden body lay completely limp. Infidel shook its shoulder. “Stagger?”
“I’m okay,” I said. “I’m here.” Of course, she didn’t hear me.
“Stagger?” she asked again, staring desperately into my pecans as tears welled in her eyes.
I flew back into the wooden body, shrinking as I approached the cage. I stepped through the open door and the silver wires snaked to life and jabbed into me once more. I turned and found the cage door remained open. Was I now able to come and go as I pleased?
For now, I was more focused on the coming than the going. I felt my life force move into every fiber of the rotting wood. My coconut skull shifted on my shoulders as I brought my gaze to hers.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m still here.”
She hugged me tightly, as her tears came in earnest.
She regained her composure a moment later. “Good,” she whispered. “Good. Because... I know you can’t stay forever. But... but I don’t want you to go yet.”
Before I could tell her I wasn’t planning on going anywhere, the door to our room swung open.
“I’ve finished preparing the bands of negation,” Sorrow said, poking her head around the door. “Do you want to take part in the questioning?”
“Don’t you knock?” Infidel asked, propped up on one elbow to look over me. “What if we’d been naked?”
“He is naked,” said Sorrow. “Just come as you are. Gale says she’ll be ready in fifteen minutes.”
Infidel had never taken off her armor since the fight. We hoped that the magic that kept it immaculate would protect her from any lingering death juice that might seep from my pores. When I rose from the bed, I couldn’t help but notice I left behind a faint outline of sawdust. There were tiny things with tiny jaws within me, grinding me down. This is true of all men, I suppose. I remember the same feeling from ten years ago, when I’d first noticed how much hair I was leaving in my comb.
At the end of the hall, Sorrow stood in the main hold. Purity was tied to a simple wooden chair. The left side of her face was bruised where I’d clocked her. She’d been stripped of her armor and dressed in one of Gale’s night gowns. Her arms were bound behind her; her feet were tied to the legs of the chair. Surrounding her were several concentric circles of iron stretching out to a full five feet around her. I saw no signs of torture, but Purity stared at the floor with an empty gaze, as if all will had drained from her.
I was curious as to what was so important that Gale wasn’t here already. It seemed like a good time to test my powers now that my heart cage was open. I leaned against the wall, crossing my arms as if I was merely waiting. Satisfied that my body was propped up sufficiently, I abandoned the cage.
It worked. I flew free once more, ghosting through the wall into what I thought was Gale’s room. Only instead of Gale’s room, I found I was in the bunk room that Mako, Rigger, and Jetsam shared. Mako and Jetsam stood together next to their bunks, their ears pressed to the wall.
I worked where I’d gotten turned around and flashed through another wall and found Gale speaking to Brand. I’d obviously caught them in mid-conversation.
“– unforgivable,” she said. Gale was dressed once more in her captain’s garb. Her long heavy coat looked uncomfortable in the sweltering confines of the room, but I had to admit she was an imposing figure in her full uniform. The padding gave her broad shoulders, adorned with gleaming brass buttons. Her buccaneer boots made her feet look heavy and solid, as if nothing in the world could push her over. Her hair was pulled back into a tight knot. Her eyes were hard and emotionless. She was standing with her hands behind her back, her posture rigid and formal.
Brand was seated on a low stool before her. He hung his head, looking like a scolded puppy.
“You’re fired as my dryman,” said Gale, in a calm tone.
“How about as your lover?” Brand said, managing a grin.
“Love was never part of our relationship. I’ve physical cravings. You satisfied them adequately, and were compensated for your trouble. It won’t be difficult to replace you.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think you mean that.”
“Are you saying you’re a better judge of my true feelings than I am?”
“I think I might be, yeah,” he said. “I mean, I knew when you first laid eyes on me that you wanted me for more than just my skills at haggling. But I didn’t enter your bed because you offered me a job. I took one look at you and knew I was in the presence of a true woman, a creature of the world. I’ve looked into the eyes of many a young naïf and found them to be nothing but shallow pools. Your eyes were oceans, and I’ve loved swimming in your depths. I’ve come to know your soul, Gale.”
Captain Roamer sighed. “Yesterday, I might have found such flattery charming. Now, it only adds to the evidence that you’re nothing but a silver-tongued scoundrel. Bringing a stowaway onto my ship? What were you thinking? I’d have tossed you into the
Sea of Wine already, but I can’t help but be curious as to what your game is.”
“Bigsby’s my brother,” Brand said, shrugging his shoulders. “I couldn’t just leave him.”
“Don’t you mean sister?” Gale said sarcastically. “I’m not ignorant of Silver Isle politics. King Brightmoon has no son named Steadfast. And Bigsby’s been selling fish in Commonground for longer than Princess Innocent has been missing. If you must lie, why lie so clumsily?”
Brand sighed. “Look, if I want to lie, I swear I can come up with a more plausible yarn than this one. I can’t tell you what my game is because there is no game. I’ve just been reacting to events that even I find difficult to believe.”
Gale crossed her arms. “Go on.”
“Here’s the simple truth,” said Brand. “Bigsby is my brother, though we’ve never met before two days ago. My real name is Brand Cooper. I’m the son of Perfect Cooper, founder of the Cooper Barrel Works.”
Gale looked skeptical. I was a little dubious myself. Half the barrels in the Shining Lands were made by Cooper Barrel Works. Perfect Cooper was a very wealthy man.
“My father is quite old,” said Brand. “Five years ago, he fell into a seizure while on the toilet. We found him barely alive. He survived, but was a changed man. He was too weak to walk for almost a year. He couldn’t even talk for over a month, but when he did regain his powers of speech, oh, he told me quite the tale.”
Gale tilted her head. “And now I suppose you’ll tell me a tale.”
“My father has worked hard to live up to his name. He’s famous throughout the realms because the quality of his product is unmatched. I was raised with the same eye toward perfection. I was trained in both body and mind to be flawless. But in the grip of his malady, too weak to lift his limbs, Father confessed that he’d been a fool to demand perfection from mere human flesh. He told me of his greatest shame; almost thirty years before I’d been born, his first wife had given birth to his first son. The child had been born with stunted limbs. His wife had died during the birth, and father had ordered the midwife to smother the baby. He couldn’t bear the thought of the Cooper name being attached to a dwarf.
