“What in the world were you thinking, Aesir?” I hissed.
I hurried after him as he left MacGregor’s Anchor. Darkness had already fallen outside. I’d forgotten how quickly night swallowed up Pelaeia, especially towards the end of the year. A cold wind pinched at my cheeks, blistering at my skin. I had to set a swift pace just to catch up with Aesir’s longer legs; as I did, I grasped at his flesh and blood arm, trying to slow him down.
Aesir turned a bleary, bitter expression upon me. “Chief is plannin’ the wake,” he said. “Ye’ll be goin’ to Old Pelaeia. What else do ye want, Blair?”
I had to resist the urge to throw my hands into the air. “You don’t know my aethermancer!” I told him. “You have no idea who she is or whether she’s trustworthy. Why would you—”
“Who bloody well cares, Blair?” Aesir demanded. He tugged his arm free of my grip, staring down at me. “What’s the worst she’s gonna do? Make the mountain scream louder?” He laughed incredulously. “Ah’m tired ae this graveyard. Ah’m sick tae death of it—if it doesn't kill me, livin’ in this shadow, it’ll turn me intae Hamish.” He pressed his hands upon my shoulders, forcing me to meet his eyes. “Look at me, Blair. Either Old Pelaeia goes, or else ah go. Elsewhere, ah mean. Anywhere else.”
There was an unmistakably desperate look in Aesir’s eyes. At first, I thought it had to be new—but as I thought back, I realised it had always been there, lurking quietly beneath the surface.
From high up on the slopes above, a wandering scream drifted our way. We turned our heads in unison, watching as flickering werelight echoes winked into life in the misty ruins above. Tormented screams filtered down upon the wind, eerily familiar; the echoes still sounded exactly as they had over a decade ago, during those sleepless nights I’d spent in Old Pelaeia’s shadow.
The encroaching night was already bitterly cold… but the chill that raced down my spine had little to do with the temperature. I drew in a shuddering breath and looked back at Aesir. “You’re going to have to walk into Old Pelaeia,” I said. “You should never have agreed to that. It wasn’t fair of Chief Crichton to ask it of you.”
Aesir spun away from me with a disgusted noise, tearing his eyes away from the haunted slopes. “Don’t tell me what ah should an’ shouldnae be doin’, Blair,” he said. “No yer call tae make.” He paused, with his back to me. “If Dougal wanted tae go to Old Pelaeia, ye’d have said yessir an’ got outta his way.”
My heart twinged painfully at the fresh mention of Dougal. I tried to find words to respond—but my mouth worked soundlessly instead. I knew that he was right.
“Ah don’t want ye to treat me like ye treated him,” Aesir added. “But don’t ye go actin’ like him, either. Ye’re no ma uncle, Blair. An’ a good thing that is, too—we wouldnae get along, otherwise.” He started down the snowy street, once again. His boots crunched on the thin layer of snow. “Ah’ll see ye at the Rose, first thing in the mornin’. Echoes won’t bother us durin’ the day. Figure ye don’t want tae meet ‘em at night, when they’re real upset.”
I helplessly watched him go.
A light dusting of snow drifted on the cold winds. A wave of distant screams rippled across the mountainside. I crammed my hands into my coat pockets, forcing myself to stare at the moaning ruins. I knew it was only the beginning of Old Pelaeia’s nightly death knell.
The native clanfolk walking through the streets ignored the wails. They’d lived here long enough that their faces remained cold and hard… but none of them had the stomach to look up at the ruined city as the echoes of their loved ones cried out for mercy.
Footsteps sounded from behind me; a hand came down on my uninjured shoulder, and I realised belatedly that Lenore had left the pub to come after us.
“Still good with people, I see, Captain,” Lenore observed.
I reached up to rub at my face. “That was sarcasm, wasn’t it?” I asked. “I just want to be certain—since I’m doing so well with nuance tonight.”
“That was sarcasm,” Lenore assured me, with a straight face. “And what exactly are you doing in the morning?” Clearly, she’d heard at least the tail end of my conversation with Aesir.
I looked up at the haunted slopes and sighed heavily. “Something very stupid,” I replied.
* * *
None of us slept well as Old Pelaeia was slaughtered again. The first few hours were the worst: Shrieks of fear rose and fell with the wind. But the screams were punctuated by periods of sudden, eerie silence, as echoes met their temporary demise. Inevitably, they always rose again to repeat the awful pageant.
The Imperium had gutted Pelaeia and left it to die in the dark. Now, the Imperium was dead—but Pelaeia still begged for mercy.
I managed only a few hours of fitful sleep before I abandoned my bed. The air was even more frigid than I remembered it; then again, I had once spent nights in Pelaeia next to a crackling hearth, rather than in my quarters aboard the Rose. My breath billowed out in pale clouds with every shivering breath. Every scrape and bruise on my body ached stiffly.
I dressed as quickly as I could, swaddling myself several layers deep. Finally, when I ran out of clothing to add on top, I donned my hat and opened the door to the main deck.
An eerie stillness had swallowed the world outside of my cabin. Frost had crept across much of the Rose in the twilight hours. A deep muffling mist made it difficult to see more than ten feet away. The rigging creaked; lanterns swayed. The wind moaned… though it was hard to tell if it was only the wind.
The rest of my crew were even more uneasy than I was; they spoke among themselves in unusually hushed tones, as though worried they might draw the attention of the echoes in the gloom above us. The newer people on board had never been to Pelaeia before, and had therefore never heard the howling at night. Mr Billings, in particular, kept shooting terrified glances at the mountain, as though expecting the screams to return at any moment. I buried my troubled feelings about Pelaeia beneath years of practice, doing my best to display an outward confidence as I performed my morning rounds.
Eventually, after a miserable eternity, the faint light of dawn crept across the mountainside.
The sombre mood slowly evaporated with the mist. A pillar of smoke drifted up from an exhaust pipe on the main deck, carrying with it the smell of breakfast. My crew’s niggling fear gave way before their hungry stomachs; even existential terror was no match for the promise of a warm meal. I briefly considered nipping down to fill my own stomach before company arrived—but just as first light broke upon the horizon, a single figure headed up the gangplank.
Aesir MacLeod had bundled up against the weather; his grease-stained jumpsuit was gone, replaced by homespun wool layers and a large, eclectic greatcoat. Given our conversation the evening before, I was expecting Aesir to be miserable and hungover—but he was instead bright-eyed and unnervingly cheerful.
“Blair!” Aesir called out buoyantly. “There ye are! Hope yer ready for an adventure!” His long legs ate up the distance between us in several strides. As he came closer, I noticed his red-rimmed eyes—but I knew it was best not to comment on them.
“Aesir,” I greeted him, with a tired nod. “You’re rather, er… punctual.”
Aesir looped his arm around me in a way that made my injured shoulder protest. “We’ll want as much daylight as we can manage,” he said, as I gritted my teeth against the pain. He paused next to me, searching through the other people on deck. I didn’t realise just what he was looking for, until he said: “Where’s yer aethermancer, then?”
“Below deck,” I replied. I wriggled out of his grip with great difficulty, rubbing gingerly at my shoulder. “Most of the crew is still… waking up. Would you like some tea or coffee?”
“Coffee,” Aesir sighed. He said the word with the same sort of reverence most people used for the Tuath Dé. “Don’t get much ae that in these parts.”
“This way,” I told him, nodding towards the stairs below deck. “She’ll join us in the galley.”
Aesir raised an eyebrow, as he followed me down below. “She?” he asked politely.
I glanced his way suspiciously. Aesir’s expression seemed perfectly innocent—but he’d used the same tone with Lenore, just the night before.
“I did mention that previously, yes,” I said warily.
Aesir grinned. “Wasn’t quite masel last night,” he said. “Must’ve forgot that wee detail.”
I paused in the corridor, with a sinking feeling. Miss Lenore Brighton had been a poor subject for Aesir’s flirtations. Miss Hawkins—a Legionnaire-trained aethermancer with a silver sword—was even worse.
“Aesir,” I said warningly, “I know I don’t have any right to tell you what to do—”
“But yer gonna try,” Aesir mused idly.
“—but please believe me when I say you want as little to do with Miss Hawkins as humanly possible,” I finished.
Aesir shot me a sideways glance. Perhaps he’d picked up on the worry in my tone. He considered this, long and hard. Finally, he nodded at me.
“I believe ye,” Aesir said.
I sighed in relief.
“—that you want as little tae do wae her as possible,” he added.
I palmed my face, stifling a groan. It was clear there would be no reasoning with him on the subject. Perhaps, I thought, Aesir would change his mind as soon as he saw Miss Hawkins and her pale, somewhat terrifying appearance.
I conjured up an image of the woman in my mind… and shook my head in despair. I kept forgetting what a pretty face Miss Hawkins had, in light of the complicated emotions her silver sword instilled within me. Strip away the stern expression and the aethermancer’s foci, and you were left with a rather charming young woman, with a straight-backed posture and a cute little button nose.
I couldn’t help noticing, either, how heads turned as we walked towards the galley. The Iron Rose has always had an abundance of women on board, and several of them seemed to appreciate Aesir’s tall form and cavalier smile. Martha and Navi interrupted their existing conversation for a giggle as we passed; Martha wiggled her fingers at the younger MacLeod, and he tossed them both a wink.
To be fair, I had spent the morning expecting some manner of looming disaster. But I can’t say that the problem of MacLeod the Younger’s rugged charm had ever crossed my mind.
Physicker Holloway was the first to greet us as we entered the galley. The hobgoblin had traded in his waistcoat for an itchy-looking woollen sweater with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. Sailor’s ink and peppered scars wove sleeves of their own on both of his thick forearms. Holloway looked up at us from the goose-necked coffee pot. As his eyes fell upon Aesir, a flicker of somewhat stunned recognition skipped across his broad face. Aesir was his own man… but the ghost of Dougal MacLeod was clear upon his features, even so.
“Some coffee for myself and Mr MacLeod, if you wouldn’t mind?” I asked the physicker.
Holloway inclined his head and poured two cups, walking over towards us to offer them out. He hesitated in front of Aesir, looking at him with uncertainty.
“I’m… very sorry for your loss,” Holloway told Aesir softly.
I saw the struggle behind Aesir’s face as he heard the words. At first, I worried that he might make a point of his lingering grudge with Dougal, right then and there… but he swallowed the words and simply nodded. “Thank ye,” he said. Then: “Fer the coffee, too.” He smiled and swiped the cup from Holloway.
I commandeered one of the nearby tables and sent one of the gunnery ladies to find Miss Hawkins. If we’d been back in the Imperial Navy, we probably would have dined in my cabin, to maintain a separation between the officers and the crew.
Then again, if we’d been back in the Imperial Navy, I never would have been a captain at all.
Some of the crew did shuffle aside, in order to give us some privacy—inasmuch as the area could provide any privacy. Physicker Holloway produced a tin cup of coffee for me, then went to secure us some biscuits and marmalade. The invigorating tastes and scents were nearly enough to dispel the sense of foreboding that still hung over my head. I’d barely finished my second biscuit, however, when Aesir suddenly stopped eating, with his biscuit halfway to his open mouth.
“Good morning, Captain Blair,” Miss Hawkins said from behind me.
I turned, drowning my dreadful sigh with hot coffee.
Miss Hawkins stood perfectly upright this morning—if the pale woman still suffered any illness from her direct brush with Unseelie aether, none of it now showed in her manner. The dark veins had all disappeared, replaced once more with the bright, uncanny blue of a normal aethermancer. Her crisp, militaristic clothing was comparatively dark, though I could see where it had greyed in places over time. Her bob of neatly kept silver hair and dishwater grey eyes stood out starkly against her otherwise sombre attire.
Miss Hawkins had layered herself for the weather with a borrowed jacket and heavy boots—though I noted that none of the gunnery ladies had offered her any knitted accessories. She wore none of her foci that I could see, but there was absolutely no mistaking her for anything other than an aethermancer.
“Miss Hawkins,” I greeted her back, vaguely uncomfortable. I rose to make formal introductions—but I was a bit too slow.
Aesir swept to his feet and stepped between us, offering out his mechanical hand. “Aesir MacLeod,” he introduced himself. “What a pleasure it is to meet ye, Miss Hawkins. Blair mentioned yer research… but he somehow forgot tae mention how pretty ye were.”
Miss Hawkins blushed. The bright red colour was painfully apparent on her cheeks. I had a moment of dissonance, as I tried to square the deadly sword I knew she carried with the way she fumbled through her response.
“I… er… well, I’m sure that isn’t the sort of thing which often comes up in conversation,” Hawkins stammered. She reached out to take Aesir’s hand—only to realise an instant later that it was made of something other than flesh and blood.
For just a moment, I worried that I might witness a repeat of my first cringeworthy introduction to Miss Hawkins. But even as I watched, her features lit up with a strangely transcendent delight, and she gave a wondering gasp.
“My goodness,” Miss Hawkins breathed. “That’s… what a construct! The fingers are fully articulated? And there’s barely any leakage from whatever aether source it’s using. This is… well, it’s a piece of art, isn’t it?”
“So the ladies tell me,” Aesir said cheekily. But there was an uncommonly pleased tint to his voice that I hadn’t heard as he’d flirted with Lenore. He turned his hand in hers to face his palm upwards, allowing Miss Hawkins to examine the prosthetic’s fingers in more detail. “Ah made it masel, actually.”
Hawkins glanced up at him sharply. “You did?” she asked. The surprise in her voice soon bled into outright awe. “It must have taken forever! And… you worked one-handed, as well?”
“Oh… it’s mostly just spare parts,” Aesir said, with badly veiled pride. “Trial an’ error, y’know. More, uh, error’n trial. But ah suppose ah worked it out eventually.”
I cleared my throat uncomfortably. “Er,” I cut in. “As I was… about to say. This is Miss Hawkins—an aethermancer, obviously, and currently our passenger aboard the Rose.” I looked between them warily. “Miss Hawkins, this is Aesir MacLeod. He’s our late outflyer pilot’s nephew, and the reason we’re being permitted to enter the ruins of Old Pelaeia.”
Miss Hawkins’ smile faded very slightly. “I… see,” she said softly. “I’m very sorry for your loss—”
Aesir pulled his hand back with a heavy sigh, shaking his head. “Let’s no, Miss Hawkins,” he requested tiredly. “Ah’ll be gettin’ it fae everyone fer weeks. Ah’d rather talk about yer equipment, if y’please.”
Hawkins looked away. I caught again the flash of fresh grief on her face, and I knew she’d been hoping to commiserate somewhat. But she nodded slowly. “I can explain some of the theory if you like, Mr MacLeod.”
Aesir smiled warmly again, as though someone had flipped a switch inside him. “Ah’d love tae hear it,” he said. “Here, have a seat—”
A pale movement caught my eye, several feet away from us. Strahl had settled himself at another table. He had the wretched appearance of someone who hadn’t slept a wink. Between his weariness and his grey washed hair and eyes, he looked positively ghoulish. Still—Strahl glanced towards Miss Hawkins more than once, and I knew that he had decided to continue his watch on her as a potential danger.
I excused myself from the table—not that either Aesir or Miss Hawkins particularly noticed my departure amidst their animated discourse—and moved to approach Strahl.
My bosun kept his eyes upon the two people I’d left behind, even as I sat down in front of him, sipping at my coffee.
“I’ll need you to accompany us into Old Pelaeia,” I said quietly. “If you’re not too tired, that is.”
Strahl stiffened at the suggestion. It was hard to tell, exactly, but I thought he might have gone a shade paler at the idea.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Strahl said.
“I’m going,” I told him, speaking the words into my cup. “She’s going. And she’s bringing Unseelie aether with her.” I paused grimly. “You’ve killed aethermancers before. If she’s lying, and she decides to do anything untoward in Old Pelaeia… I’ll need your expertise.”
“I killed that aethermancer with Syrene’s help,” Strahl muttered flatly. “And Syrene isn’t setting one single root of hers in those ruins, Cap’n.”
I considered him over my cup. Most people would have been frightened to try and kill a Silver Legionnaire… but Strahl wasn’t most people. The day I’d first met Strahl, he had been set to be hanged for the murder of a powerful aethermancer—and the idea of his own imminent execution hadn’t bothered him terribly much.
It seemed highly unlikely to me that Strahl was any more frightened of dying on a silver sword than he had been of dying at the end of a rope. But there was, nevertheless, a strange, uncharacteristic fear behind his eyes.
“You’re not afraid of Hawkins,” I said softly. “What are you afraid of, Mr Strahl?”
Strahl swallowed heavily. He looked away, unable to meet my eyes. “Those ruins,” he whispered. “They’re… I shouldn’t walk there.”
A horrible thought occurred to me, then. Pure, nauseating terror snapped at my spine, and I straightened in my seat.
Strahl had probably been a high-ranking officer in the Imperial Army. It had never occurred to me, though, that he might have been involved with Pelaeia.
“Did you… were you here when it happened?” I whispered hoarsely.
Strahl snapped his eyes back up to mine. “No,” he said. “No, I was elsewhere.” He sounded dimly bewildered by the assumption. “But I was important enough to…” Strahl shook his head, suddenly haunted. “I should have tried to stop it. I should have known to stop it. It’s not right for me to set foot there.”
I let out a long, awful breath. “Must be nice,” I said. “Having the choice to walk away.” I shrugged bitterly. “I don’t have that choice, Mr Strahl. Someone’s offered a little bit of peace to Old Pelaeia. I’m obliged to try and seize that. Stewing in my own guilt is just self-pity, compared.”
Strahl flinched at the words. He looked away, ashamed.
“If you’re too tired to join us, I’ll find someone else,” I said.
I sipped my coffee in silence, watching Aesir and Miss Hawkins discuss theoretical aethermancy only a few tables away from us.
“I’ll need to put some gear together,” Strahl finally replied. “When are you venturing out?”
“As soon as possible,” I said. “Aesir says the echoes get more active at night… so we’ll want to be back before sunset.”
Strahl shoved slowly to his feet. “You’ve got an eye on her?” he asked me reluctantly.
I half-turned my head towards him and tipped my hat. “I’ll handle Miss Hawkins if she decides to attack the coffee,” I assured him wryly.
Strahl shook his head and turned back for the exit. As he left, I rose to rejoin the other two.
At some point, the solicitation on Miss Hawkins’ face had transformed to frustrated bewilderment. “—but you surely understand why Caliban’s Base Principle of Aetheric Equivalence applies to the situation?” she asked Aesir, with a hint of desperation.
Aesir held up one mechanical finger. “Actually,” he said, “er… no. No in the least.” He smiled sheepishly.
Miss Hawkins looked crestfallen. “I see,” she said. “I don’t suppose anything I’ve said in the last few minutes has made any sense at all, has it?”
“Ah’ll be honest,” Aesir admitted, “ye’ve been haverin’ since ye sat down. But ah loved listenin’ tae it.”
“Havering?” Miss Hawkins asked.
“Talking nonsense,” I informed her, as I took a seat at the table with them.
“Well… but…” Miss Hawkins went pink again as she looked at Aesir. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“Ye just looked so excited,” Aesir said apologetically. “Felt rude tae stop ye.”
Miss Hawkins wilted in disappointment. “Oh,” she said in a small voice. “It’s just that this expedition would have been… far simpler, with a second set of hands. I’m used to having help with the device.” She looked down at her lap. “I’m afraid I got ahead of myself. Given Mr MacLeod’s—”
“—call me Aesir,” the man across from her interjected, with a winning smile.
Miss Hawkins flustered again at that. “Er, yes, Aesir,” she corrected herself. “Given Aesir’s obvious skill at engineering, I’d hoped that he might be able to assist me. But I’m afraid that his understanding of aetheric principles is…”
I raised an eyebrow at Miss Hawkins, warning her about the foot she was about to insert into her mouth.
“…his understanding is more practical than academic,” Miss Hawkins corrected herself quickly. She shot Aesir an apologetic look. “Your work is… well frankly, it’s incredible. But I’m missing the shared terminology I would need in order to explain this device to you in such a short period of time. At the very least, I would need someone who can read classical engineering schematics—”
“—I’m terribly sorry to interrupt,” Mr Finch cut in. “This will only require a moment.” At some point during our discussion, my chief engineer had joined the crew in the galley for breakfast; now, he had appeared next to my chair. “Captain—thank goodness I caught you this morning! We are nearly out of tea—er, well, technically we have those bricks in the hold, but I checked them in a desperate moment, and they’re quite literally rotten. I was hoping to buy some proper tea in Pelaeia, but I’ll need whatever petty money we have left on hand.”
I turned slowly in my chair to consider my dapper chief engineer.
Mr Finch frowned at me. “...Captain,” he said warily. “Why are you all looking at me like that?”
* * *
“I fail to understand why it is you require my presence for this excursion!” Mr Finch hollered. He had to work to make himself heard over the wind, as Aesir’s flatbed salvage-boat chuffed its way up the slopes of Pelaeia.
“Because you’re a genius, of course!” I yelled back at him. “We require only the best, Mr Finch!”
The salvage-boat was larger than the four-person craft we kept on the Rose, but it only had one passenger seat. I held onto the side rail of the flatbed, while Mr Finch clung for dear life just next to me. Miss Hawkins’ equipment took up most of the space in the boat, crowding Mr Strahl against the side opposite to me and Mr Finch. Aesir had offered the sole passenger seat to the lady herself, in order to enjoy her ongoing conversation; he piloted the salvage-boat with a deft hand, seemingly immune to the existential dread that consumed the rest of the passengers on-board.
“But this is suicide,” Mr Finch quailed. He clutched at the back of Miss Hawkins’ seat, as though the stiff wind might blow him away.
“No,” Miss Hawkins assured him with quiet determination. “This is science.” Her grey eyes stared out over the approaching ruins with a critical eye.
“Does that make me a scientist?” Aesir mused, over the chug-chug of the boat’s engine.
“Why is he here again, Cap’n?” Strahl grumbled. His voice crackled with a tinny, mechanical quality as it filtered through his helmet’s chatterbox. His heavy armour rattled and clanked beneath the words.
“You heard Blair,” Aesir replied flippantly. “Ye needed geniuses.”
“Chief Crichton was very explicit on the matter,” I called over the wind. “Miss Hawkins is only allowed in Old Pelaeia so long as Aesir is with us. And he did volunteer.”
Miss Hawkins smiled gratefully at Aesir. I wondered idly if that smile had taken some of the sting out of entering the old city.
Mr Finch shook his head incredulously. “Mad,” he muttered to himself. “You’re all stark raving mad.”
“And yet,” I observed, “here you are.” I pried one hand from the side rail, reaching over to clap my chief engineer on the shoulder. “Thank you, Walther.”
For all of Mr Finch’s quailing, he had ultimately chosen to come along. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised. Though Finch hadn’t fought on the front lines of the Sundering War, his crimes against the Avalon Imperium had been serious enough to earn him a theoretical summary execution. It took a special sort of courage, I supposed, to sabotage an empire from within.
Mr Finch gave me a stiff, careful nod. His gaze drifted past me towards the ruins, though, and he muttered a prayer (or a curse) to the Lady of Fools beneath his breath. As I turned to look upon the desolation, I felt inclined to join him.
The thick city walls of the lowest tier were only halfway standing. Those parts which hadn’t been shattered by Imperial bombardments were smeared with ash or half buried by snow. The main gate, a thick set of iron doors, had been peeled open like a can of sardines.
Silence descended upon the boat as we entered through the broken jaws of that gate. About ten feet past it, Aesir slowed the vehicle to a halt, staring at the blackened rubble that surrounded us. The Imperial fleet’s bombardment of the city’s upper levels had caused great landslides, burying swathes of less-fortunate districts beneath them. Shattered buildings poked through the snow in places, along with the carcass of a single burned-out ship. It was one thing to look at Old Pelaeia from below… and quite another to be there, drinking in the sheer scope and scale of the butchery.
I dared to glance at Aesir’s face—and instantly regretted it.
There was no pain there. Instead, where there should have been pain, there was only a terrible blank mask. The smile that Aesir had pasted on his face had died away, replaced by a hollow, empty-eyed look.
Some part of him, I thought, was processing the surrounding wreckage. But the greater part of him had simply switched off, unable to handle the sight of it.
Mr Finch shivered next to me. Miss Hawkins glanced from horror to horror, with her hands clasped over her mouth.
Strahl wanted to look away. I could tell, even with his helmet on. But he forced himself to take in the sight. I knew he was etching it upon his bones in the same way that I had done with the dark mountain’s silhouette, nearly two decades ago.
Even as I forced my attention back to the scene before us, though, my eyes fell upon the snow, and a spike of alarm shot through my spine.
There were footprints. Everywhere.
Dirt and snow were smeared across the half-buried street; every so often, I could see where a distinct footprint had left its mark. In fact, it looked as though a fresh conflict had happened just the night before.
...probably because it had.
Every hair on the back of my neck stood up at once. I couldn’t help feeling as though there was a presence nearby. At first, I wondered if it was just my imagination, reacting to the tableau in front of me… but then, the snow on the ground shifted, some fifteen feet away from me. A low rasping noise whispered across the wind.
Something I couldn’t see was slowly dragging itself towards me through the snow.
“We need to move,” I said, breaking our horrified silence. “Now.” The words sounded strangely loud in my own ears. My heart hammered in my chest.
Aesir turned to look at me—but the blank look on his face suggested that he hadn’t actually processed the words.
Slowly, a spectral figure formed within the whirling snow. It rose from the ground in wisps of blue steam—a piteous mass of warped aether-light, barely humanoid in shape.
It was missing the entire lower half of its body.
The others followed my gaze. Mr Finch let out a strangled, high-pitched noise. Miss Hawkins froze, briefly panicked. Aesir lost what little life was left in his expression. Wherever his mind had gone, it clearly wasn’t here.
That was a problem, seeing as he was our driver.
“Aesir!” I said—louder and more insistent, this time. “Move!”
Metal clanked—and Aesir cried out in alarmed pain. Strahl had reached out to slap him upside the back of the head with an armoured glove.
“Drive!” Strahl snapped, in his booming voice. The harsh order cut through that haze of choking fear that had gripped us all. Aesir sucked in his breath, lunging for the boat’s controls. We lurched forward with sudden speed.
The thing that had been dragging itself towards us quickly fell behind. There was no way that it could have kept up, given its struggling pace—but that hardly mattered. The hideous terror it had inspired stayed with us, long after it had dropped out of view. Strahl scanned the area around us as we sped along, searching urgently for signs of other echoes that might reach out for us with long-dead hands.
He found them, in spades. Shimmering wisps dotted the landscape before us. Some were more solid than others. The weakest of the echoes looked like wandering motes of light, but there were also vaguely shifting figures, coalesced from the dirt and the snow.
They were few and far between, but it didn’t matter. They had us surrounded.
Surrounded… but for what? The thought struck me suddenly.
There was no pattern in the way the echoes moved. They weren’t closing in on us. They were just… fleeing. And dying.
I had known that would be the case, on some level. But here on the mountain, seeing them lurch to ghostly life, it had been all too easy to forget.
I forced a few calming breaths into my lungs, letting the cold air sting me back to sensibility. I searched the cold snow around us and finally pointed. “Over there!” I called out to Aesir. “No footprints there.”
At first, I worried I might have to yell it again—but whatever sense Strahl had knocked into Aesir had yet to drain away again. Aesir wheeled the vehicle around at my direction, coasting us towards a stretch of pure, undisturbed snow.
Slowly, we came to a stop. The salvage-boat’s engine hummed beneath our feet, as distant echoes glimmered on the mountain snow.
“I thought you said they wouldn’t bother us during the day,” I managed slowly. I glanced at Aesir questioningly.
Aesir swallowed. “Ah didn’t know they’d be here in broad daylight,” he rasped. “Ah don’t… Ah’ve never came up here before.”
Miss Hawkins sucked in a breath. The sharp motion seemed to break the horrified spell that had come over her. “Echoes should be… less active in the hours opposite of their death,” she said. She tried to speak with authority, but her tone wavered on the words. “Though, admittedly, that does not mean inactive.”
I swallowed too. “They don’t seem upset at us specifically,” I acknowledged carefully. “I suppose this does still count as less active.”
Nothing was wailing at us, at least.
As it slowly became clear that no echoes would be springing into existence near our current patch of snow, Miss Hawkins unbuckled her seat’s harness and made her way to the nearest of the lashed-down crates that contained her equipment.
“Could you keep us steady please, Aesir?” Hawkins asked. “This equipment is… delicate. Mr Finch—would you be so kind as to help me for a moment?”
Strahl and I scanned the environs warily, while Mr Finch assisted Hawkins into a harness with a bulky aetheric battery, wired to a pair of burdensome goggles. Miss Hawkins armed her left hand with the foci I’d seen her use on New Havenshire’s docks, but she pulled a strange, clunky sort of glove onto her right hand and equipped a different device to her right forearm, just atop it. Several meters danced frantically upon her arm, until she made a few adjustments to settle them.
I looked out over the wreckage of the city. “In layman’s terms,” I asked slowly, “how does this work? What happens next?”
Miss Hawkins turned to face me, lifting up the heavy goggles so they rested atop her head.
“I mostly learned from someone else’s research,” she said uncertainly. “But… if we’re correct, then echoes are not actually individual aetheric disturbances.” Her foci hummed with aether. The inside of her goggles glowed against her pale hair, shimmering blue atop her head. “Echoes are the manifestations of a single, aether-induced traumatic cluster. Which does not preclude, of course, a trauma which involves only a single individual. But more often than not—”
I turned towards my chief engineer. “In layman’s terms, how does it work?” I repeated, this time to Mr Finch.
He blinked at me owlishly. “A single source of aether—like an aetheric bomb—can catch several people within its sphere of influence,” he translated slowly. “It is the aether which creates echoes, and not simply the… the individual deaths themselves. Thus, all echoes caused by a single source of aether would naturally be connected.” A hint of awe slipped into his tone, as though the concept had never occurred to him before.
“That is what I said,” Miss Hawkins noted, with a hint of annoyance. “Well… more or less.” She tapped the goggles atop her head. “This spectraetheric visor will allow me to see active aetheric activity which is normally invisible to the eye. The visor’s range is limited, but it should suffice for our purposes. The glove will allow me to pull on any active aether in order to gather a reading.”
“Like a compass?” I hazarded.
“Almost,” Mr Finch corrected me, this time without prompting. “Think of the glove as a longhorn, searching for particular frequencies.”
“And instead of chatter,” I said slowly, “it detects these… aether clusters?”
“Yes,” Hawkins agreed with a nod. “Every aether cluster has a nerve centre that holds the pattern together as a whole. We call that central knot a ‘fetter’. Pelaeia should have several fetters. This is our first practical test, so we’ll want the smallest fetter we can find.”
Aesir’s face had recovered a bit of its life, but he now looked at Hawkins with a hint of unease. “An’... what are ye gonna do wae that fetter when ye find it?” he asked her.
“Ideally,” Miss Hawkins said, “I should be able to dissolve the aether which underlies its construction, and release that which has been trapped within its net.” She looked uncertainly to Mr Finch, as though expecting another translation—but my engineer merely nodded. “It’s more complicated than that, of course,” Hawkins added. “But I’ve described the process as simply as I can.”
Aesir nodded slowly. I had the impression that he’d understood more of the previous explanation than I had, for all that he wasn’t an academic. There was still discomfort on his face, but it was tempered with the benefit of first-hand knowledge. More than anything else so far, that gave me hope that the woman on this boat with us might truly mean well.
“I’ll need you to take us out slowly, so that I can get some readings,” Miss Hawkins told Aesir gently. “By definition, we’ll have to get rather close to the echoes, but… they don’t seem hostile so far.” Her brow knitted with worry, and I knew that she had picked up on Aesir’s distress. “Will that be all right, Mr MacLeod?”
I had never before seen Aesir MacLeod look any less all right. But he flashed a weakly flirtatious smile at the aethermancer. “Only if ye call me Aesir,” he reminded her again. “That’s very important.”
Hawkins coloured beneath the shifting blue light of her goggles. “Very well then, Aesir,” she mumbled sheepishly. She pulled the goggles down to hide her eyes, and Aesir’s lips twitched with satisfaction. At least, I thought, the banter gave him something else to focus on.
Hawkins wasn’t able to sit in the passenger’s seat, with that bulky pack on her back, and so she relinquished the seat to Mr Finch. She clambered into the flatbed with the rest of us, holding her arm out over the side of the salvage-boat to take readings as Aesir drove us back out into the once-populated areas of the mountain. As we went, she called out numbers to Mr Finch, who scribbled them down clumsily, clutching a pencil between his gloved fingers.
It wasn’t pleasant, driving so close to the echoes—but just as Miss Hawkins had predicted, few of them paid us any real heed. I tried to detach myself from the understanding that these vague blue wisps had once been living people. I focussed instead on the dry, overly-complex explanation that Miss Hawkins had offered for their existence. These were not people, I thought. They were a scientific phenomenon. A cluster of aetheric reactions.
But though the echoes did not scream at us in the daylight, we soon discovered that they did whisper.
As Miss Hawkins directed us towards a distant blue shimmer, I heard a woman’s voice upon the wind, crackling like a broken signal from a longhorn.
“…it’ll be awright, my sweet,” she murmured. “Yer mama’s got ye. It’ll all be over soon.”
The whisper hit me like a blow to the chest. My mind blanked, and in between blinks, I found myself on my knees, still clinging to the rail above me.
I couldn’t see Strahl’s face, behind the helmet he wore. But his straight-backed posture folded slightly against those words, as though they were an anchor pulling him down.
Miss Hawkins had an aethermancer’s iron will. She held her arm out before the flickering wisp of light as we approached it, checking the readings on her meters. But she soon moved us onward again, shaking her head against the wind.
Echoes were not the only thing we found on that mountain.
I should have expected the bodies. I knew no one had dared the old city long enough to collect them. Most of them were mercifully caked in dirt and snow, but some were sheltered enough by the debris that I could make out their features. The cold had preserved them unnaturally well, even after two decades.
The bodies were mostly too small to be fully grown northern men—but I should have expected that too. Between the Tithes and the rebellion, Pelaeia had already lost most of its fighting men at the time of the attack. These echoes would be mostly women, children, and the elderly.
Miss Hawkins paused us several times—sometimes directly in front of an echo, and sometimes in front of nothing at all. But as the day waned and the sun dipped further down in the sky, I began to sense her frustration.
“It’s gettin’ late,” Aesir observed finally. His eyes tracked the sun with a sharp-edged wariness. “We’ve got tae start back.”
“We could always come back tomorrow,” Mr Finch offered carefully. The sights and sounds of Old Pelaeia had been no more kind to him than the rest of us, and I was surprised by the implication that he intended to join us for a second time.
“No,” Miss Hawkins said softly. “It won’t matter.” She slumped back against the railing, cradling her stiff right arm.
“What do you mean, no?” I demanded. “You said this would work. You dragged us all the way out here, when none of us wanted to face this—”
“I know!” Miss Hawkins said. Her voice took on an awful, miserable edge, and I knew suddenly that the reality of the mountain had got to her after all. “I… I know,” she said again, more softly this time. There were unshed tears beneath the words, trapped halfway in her throat. “The readings are just too weak. There’s aether lingering everywhere here. I can barely get a signal against the background noise.”
“Oh,” I whispered. My stomach sank into my boots and curled against my toes.
“You’re saying it’s impossible, then?” Strahl asked, in a stiff voice.
“No,” I said, with bone-deep trepidation. “I don’t think that’s what she meant.”
“We…” Miss Hawkins sucked in a steadying breath. “We need a stronger aetheric signal—”
“We need to wait until nightfall,” Mr Finch translated, in a horrified whisper.