Chapter Thirty-Six
Pearlescent was a graveyard. Most of the bodies Rae passed showed clear signs of violence, sometimes self-inflicted, other times visited upon the dead by another hand. A few of the bodies looked asleep, as though they had folded to the ground in the middle of their duties and stayed there. The only sign that they weren’t slumbering were the eyes. Their eyes hung open, black pits leaking ash, a wisp of smoke instead of pupils. Rae checked the first couple bodies, poking around for a living soul lingering in the flesh. Nothing remained.
“What happened to them?” he asked as he turned a young deckhand on her side, her mop of black curls flopping across the ruin of her eyes. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
—i have. The wraith’s voice was barely a whisper. keep moving. they’re gone. more than gone.
“But what is it? What aren’t you telling me?”
—chaos kills to the quick. sometimes death is a mercy.
“Demons,” Rae muttered.
—demons, the wraith agreed.
Rae moved through the corridors as quickly as he could, getting lost a few times, clambering over a makeshift barricade manned by more of the dead. Pearlescent shifted jerkily underfoot, sometimes rattling violently, other times swooping downward like a bird of prey. Rae swallowed hard against the bile that rose in his throat each time they dropped, grabbing for guideropes and shoving himself into corners to keep his feet. Loose debris and broken bottles rose off the deck to clatter like dice in a cup. The wraith moaned impatiently through Rae’s soul.
—you are wasting time, bouncing around like a child’s ball in this place.
“Rather not fall to my death,” Rae answered. A chest full of kitchenware slid loudly down the tilting corridor, bursting open on impact and filling the air with shattered crockery and bent forks. “Or get impaled by a thousand butter knives. Hardly a hero’s death.”
—you are far from a hero. you’re barely a wraithbinder. why do i have to keep reminding you of the power in our grasp?
“Can I . . . can I poltergeist this stuff?” He raised a hand to the broken pottery and flexed his will. Something stirred among the detritus, a brief moment when Rae thought the shards of plate and cheap dinnerware would bend to his will. Then Pearlescent shifted again, and the whole pile slid toward him, grinding against the decking.
—fool of a child. you’re not bound to this world. stop thinking like flesh and blood.
A phantom hand reached through Rae’s soul, gathering the loose tapestry of his spirit in its icy grip and yanking him through the veil. Rae’s body dissolved into a cloud of mist. The scattergun blast of broken plates passed straight through him. Their passage felt like a stiff breeze that chilled his bones, rather than crushing them into a bloody pulp. The plates crashed into the wall behind him with a deafening boom.
The wraith sniffed. Rae hovered over the deck, his body wrapped in a cloak of frost. All around him he could see the souls of the dead dropping out of the material plane, clusters of tightly bound light slipping free of the flesh to being the long, slow descent into Oblivion. This high off the ground, the shadowlands were nothing more than thin clouds and distant lightning. Pearlescent was much the same, though there was evidence of battle damage in spots, and thick shadows clung in the corners.
“This is better than tumbling around like an idiot,” Rae said.
One of the nearby souls flashed like a firecracker, its constellation of stars flaring into brilliant light. Something entered the world from inside it, growing to wrap the soul in shimmering green light. Antlers curled through the ether, and a cloud of spring-bright leaves drifted through the air in that direction.
“Hello, Estev,” Rae muttered. “What’s the fastest way to him?”
—straight damn through, the wraith answered.
Brushing aside his surprise at the wraith’s flippant response, Rae folded his attention into a tight fist and punched “straight damn through.” The walls of the windship lapped over his face like gauze. Only the dead gave him any resistance. The cords of sparkling light that connected corpses to their descending souls dragged at Rae’s passage, pulling him down. He shrugged them off, swerving side to side to avoid the rest. Estev’s flaring soul lay ahead of him, the dying crew all around, and the wraith hanging over his shoulder. For a moment, Rae felt like an arrow shot from a bow, sailing through a storm to its target. He reached the room where Estev stood and dropped back into the Ordered World.
Standing with his antlers down and muscular arms flexed, Estev faced off against the enemy. A dozen of the dead-eyed crew surrounded him, improvised weapons in their hands, lumbering closer and closer to the lifebinder. Their eyesockets were already empty. At a gesture from Estev, the wooden decking groaned and grew, dead planks becoming living wood in the blink of an eye. The growth was explosive. Wooden spikes corkscrewed out of the deck, each one piercing one of Estev’s assailants, branching through their bodies and lifting them off their feet, like grisly scarecrows. They screamed with one voice and then fell silent as living spikes burrowed through their skulls and blossomed in their lungs. The grim forest fell silent.
“Well that was bloody awful,” Rae muttered. Startled, Estev turned to face him. Another gesture, and the trees disintegrated, dumping the limp bodies of their victims onto the deck with a dozen sloppy thuds.
“I saw no other way. Where have you been?” Estev reeled the fae back into his soul, muscle and antlers disappearing like morning fog. “I take it you had something to do with all this?”
“No, no, I was in the rigging and—”
“The reason I ask,” Estev said, interrupting him, “is because these are wraithlocked slaves. Someone scooped their souls out from the inside, turned them into puppets.” He straightened up and adjusted the cuffs on his shirt. “And I am not aware of very many other wraithbinders on this voyage.”
“I swear to you, it wasn’t me!” Rae said. “I was in the stormnest, and apparently I fell asleep. When I woke up, I could see the edge of the Eye, and then Ensign Collins climbed the rigging and attacked. He tried to throw me off the side of the ship!”
“Well, as much as that doesn’t sound like something Ensign Collins would do, I have to admit that it’s consistent with the actions of the rest of the crew,” Estev said. “Someone has done something to them. I just wish I knew who. Or what.”
“I can see their souls,” Rae said. “There’s something twisted through them. Like a disease, or a virus.”
The lifebinder flicked a hand, and a halo of glowing leaves surrounded his head, the flickering moss-green light matched in his irises. He scanned the corpses, seeing more than was reflected in the material plane. “There’s more Chaos in this attack than there is Death. A strange admixture of realms. I don’t know what to think of it.”
—demons among the dead, the wraith answered, though Estev couldn’t hear. Rae cleared his throat and repeated the words. Estev looked up at him, then nodded.
“Yes. Rassek Brant.”
“How? How is he here?” Rae asked. “We’ve been in flight for days! How did he get aboard?”
“A question for another time,” Estev said tensely. “This was a coordinated attack. Where are the others?”
“La and Mahk are on the afterdeck. Or they were when I looked earlier,” Rae said.
“Looked earlier?” Estev asked.
“With the wraith. Most of the crew are dead. This place is closer to Oblivion than you would believe.”
“I’ve learned to believe a great many things,” Estev answered. “Most importantly, to never underestimate feral mages. I’m sorry I never knew your father. He clearly trained you well. Let’s get to the afterdeck. The captain will likely be there, and the stormbinders responsible for keeping us aloft.” Estev dismissed his fae and started for the door. “Not falling out of the sky is my number one concern. Do you have that damned sword?”
Rae nodded, touched the burlap package slung across his back. Estev nodded.
“Good. I get the feeling we’re going to need it before this is all over.”
Ascending the narrow ladder and coming out of the iron-barred hatch that led to the afterdeck, Rae and Estev came out just as one of Pearlescent’s stormbinders pitched over the railing and disappeared into the swirling clouds. Rae was in the lead, having muscled his way past Estev in his urgency to reach Lalette. He skidded to a halt, staring after the mage’s pinwheeling form. Rain beat against his face, and the winds howling across the deck nearly deafened him. Estev blundered into him.
“What in hell is going on here?” Estev stared after the falling stormbinder, then swept his gaze across the afterdeck.
“I was going to give up on the two of you showing up,” the captain said. He lounged next to the complicated control panel that steered the windship, the buttons to his tunic undone to mid-chest. The exposed skin was rough and red, as though it had been recently burned. Aristocratic to a fault, the captain always struck Rae as a man uncomfortable in his own skin, as though the inconveniences of mortal life were beneath his station. Standing in the middle of the deck, the storm whipping around him, and his uniform in a state of complete disarray, he looked instead like a rogue dressing the part of a windship captain. He was in the act of peeling off his gloves when Rae arrived. He finished this, tucking them into the wide leather belt that hung loose around his waist, then rested his hands on the brace of flintlocks that looped across his chest. The captain smiled jaggedly.
“Name yourself, monster,” Estev spat. “What knots have you woven through these innocents?”
“‘Innocents.’ That’s rich. This man ordered the death of hundreds, including the dozen or so who tumbled from the gangway of this very ’ship when we cast off from Oesterling. ‘Innocent.’” The captain, or whatever spirit inhabited him, spat the word. “No one I have leave to touch can claim that name, not by a long shot. Including you, lifebinder.”
“I have never claimed innocence, demon,” Estev answered. He drew the fae into the world, his shoulders heaving as the life spirit filled him. “But I’m an angel compared to you.”
“There’s no reason to insult yourself,” the captain said. “Angels are worse than either of us. At least we work for something. Heaven’s justice is rarely for the good.”
“I’m not the one who just threw our stormbinder over the rails,” Estev said.
“Speaking of which, what’s keeping us aloft?” Rae asked. He looked into the main rigging, where the zephyr should be. Other than the whipping storm and the driving rains, the sails hung slack.
“Such a smart lad. You do your father proud,” the captain answered. “Nothing is keeping us aloft. We are crashing.”
“You’ll die! We’ll all die!” Rae answered.
“That was the plan,” the captain said. His face split into a jigsaw of fissures, the wounds crawling across his face in a trail of embers that burned through his flesh. For a heart-stopping second, Rae recognized the wound. Not the face, but the wounds. He had seen the same wounds, in the form of scars.
Rassek Brant. But how?
Estev took a step forward, his antlers pointed at the possessed captain’s chest.
“You’ve destroyed enough, Rassek,” Estev growled. “I’m going to put a stop to that.”
The man, or husk of a man, waved at him dismissively.
“Threaten me if you like,” the captain said. “I’ve struck my blow.”
Then he fell to the ground. Dead.
Above them, the sails collapsed against the rigging. Pearlescent heaved forward, carried along by momentum, but now in gravity’s merciless grasp.
They fell from the sky.