✥
A WEEK AFTER THE White Lady’s confrontation with Saverian outside Thelassa’s harbour, the Lady’s Luck entered the last stretch of her desperate voyage to the Celestial Isles.
Sasha wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and spat out what little bile she hadn’t already vomited over the edge of the carrack.
Gods, I hate this ship, she thought angrily. The trip across the Broken Sea to the flooded ruins of Shadowport had been painful enough, but this was torture. The Unborn crew clearly didn’t feel the effects of such things as seasickness – not even when the terrifying waves that surged across the Endless Ocean threatened to capsize the ship on occasions too numerous to count. She, however, had puked up her guts so often it hurt to breathe.
She wondered to what depths the dark grey water beneath her reached. Once or twice she’d glimpsed gigantic shapes surfacing in the distance, only to dive back into the water seconds later in gigantic explosions of spray that surely would have flooded the Luck had the ship been anywhere near them.
Perhaps worse than her seasickness was the sense of boredom. Her shipmates were not very communicative – with one unfortunate exception.
‘A beautiful morning, is it not?’ Fergus asked as he came to stand beside her at the prow. A tall, sharp-nosed man with a prominent widow’s peak, Fergus might be considered handsome and distinguished – at a distance.
Before you see the void behind his eyes. The emptiness where a soul should be.
The truth was, Fergus made Sasha’s skin crawl. He seemed devoid of human emotion, even more so than the Unborn around them. The difference, perhaps, was that while the Unborn had never developed to a stage capable of feeling, he had simply bypassed it completely. He was a whole man, except he lacked the parts that made a man a person. At one time each of the Unborn aboard the ship had been a baby girl. They had Fergus to thank for their unnatural existence, for it was he who pioneered the unholy creation of the White Lady’s handmaidens.
Sasha turned her back on Fergus, but it seemed he was unwilling to take the hint. Unwilling, or unable to comprehend her body language.
‘The Isles are only a few miles ahead of us now.’ The self-proclaimed ‘man of progress’ ran a long-fingered hand through his grey hair. His eyes always seemed to be calculating, analysing, stripping things apart and refiguring them. She remembered the snip of his scissors back in the tower of horrors in Thelassa and suppressed a shudder.
‘I told you not to talk to me,’ she spat. ‘You’re a monster.’
Fergus gave what for him passed as a smile – a slight twitching of his lips. ‘No, my girl, you are mistaken. These are monsters.’ He pointed at the handmaidens on the ship’s deck. ‘I am a man of progress.’
Sasha squinted across the endlessly rolling waves, hoping to spot land. Anything to give her an excuse to busy herself away from this sociopath. Fergus was a high-ranking member of the Consult, who governed the city in the name of the White Lady, and hence held seniority over Sasha, who was still confused about her own role aboard the Lady’s Luck. The Magelord had inexplicably taken a shine to her, magically fixing Sasha’s fractured ankle and giving her a living apartment in the Consult chambers. Fergus had personally requested she be part of the crew to travel to the Celestial Isles.
‘I hope there is yet something to be salvaged from these Isles,’ Fergus commented. ‘They were the greatest source of untapped magic in the known world. Who knows in what ways the Ancients may have desecrated them.’
May have desecrated them? They murdered hundreds of Dorminians here! Sasha wanted to scream at the man. Instead she took a few breaths to calm herself and wondered how Cole was faring down in the Shattered Realms. Knowing him, getting himself involved in ridiculous escapades and pissing folk off left, right and centre. She also knew that if there was anyone who could succeed in spite of all that, it was Cole.
She felt something being pressed into her hand and glanced down. It was a pouch; a small brown pouch. She glanced up to see Fergus’s thin face twitching in another mockery of a smile. ‘A little something for you. To help with your seasickness.’
Sasha untied the cord and peered inside. It was filled with a silvery powder.
‘I don’t need this,’ she said, thrusting the pouch back at him. But she didn’t thrust it all the way back, and as it hung from her twitching fingers she wanted nothing more than to tear it open and snort it all up her busted nose. And that bastard Fergus knew it. He was watching her as though she were a curious insect, dissecting her thoughts, her emotions. Her needs.
‘Very well,’ he said and took the pouch from her, stashing it in his coat. He glanced out over the water and his lizard’s stare lit up. ‘Ah-ha! I do believe we near our destination.’
Emerging out of the mist ahead was the dark outline of a coast. Even at this distance Sasha could sense that something was amiss. The air felt heavier, fertile, as though there were vast energies at work that could not be seen or felt or heard but which might manifest themselves in unexpected form at any moment.
The Unborn captain of the Lady’s Luck joined them at the prow, moving as silently as a ghost. ‘The Celestial Isles were torn from the heavens during the Godswar,’ said the handmaiden. It was unclear if the words belonged to her or if she were merely acting as a mouthpiece for her master in the City of Towers. Sasha had already witnessed the telepathic link the White Lady and her minions shared. ‘What you can feel is the raw essence of magic. The potentiality of creation. This place is dangerous – perhaps even more dangerous than the Swell. Even the local wildlife is touched by its aura.’
A dark shadow engulfed the deck and Sasha glanced up to see a colossal eagle fly past, its wingspan wider than the ship below it. It screeched once and turned slightly, as if contemplating whether those on the ship might be prey. Evidently it decided not – or perhaps the unnatural presence of the Unborn disturbed it; either way it changed course and soared back towards the Isles.
Fergus steepled his fingers together and made a hmm sound. ‘An impressive specimen – and quite unnatural, of course. During the Age of Legends there was said to be a bird so large its shadow could encompass a town. A “roc”, I believe it was called. I’ve always wondered what would happen if one were to encounter a dragon in the skies. I suppose we shall never know.’
As they sailed nearer to the Isles, the strange feeling in the air grew stronger. Sasha heard a thump on the deck behind her and turned to see what she at first assumed to be a fish lying on the deck. On closer examination she saw that the fish was strangely shaped, with a large blunt head that tapered smoothly to the tail and unusually intelligent eyes. There was something unsettling about the animal.
Fergus bent down to examine it and murmured in delight. ‘My, my. A whale!’ he exclaimed.
‘A whale?’ Sasha exclaimed. ‘Those massive creatures I glimpsed a while back? They were huge. Bigger than a house.’
‘This whale is touched by the magic of Isles,’ Fergus said. ‘Not every such touch is a welcome one. It is said that a whale’s brain is close in size to that of a man, in relative terms. How fortuitous that one should find itself stranded here, and in such... agreeable form.’ His eyes seemed to light up as he stared at the creature. It didn’t flap as a fish might but rather lay there mournfully, as if it knew its fate. Fergus reached into his coat and withdrew an extremely sharp-looking knife.
‘What are you doing?’ Sasha asked, though the glitter in the man’s eyes told its own story.
‘I am going to experiment,’ Fergus replied. ‘I wish to see this animal’s brain for myself. The search for knowledge is never-ending. I am after all a man of progress.’
An hour later they finally got close enough to the coastline to begin looking for a place to dock. It was then that the bodies began thumping against the hull.
Sasha stared overboard, fresh bile rising in her throat. There were hundreds of them floating in the bay: the headless corpses of the Pioneers who had sailed from Dorminia with dreams of returning rich, or at least something more than destitute, bright in their minds. The fehd had slaughtered them all.
A sudden overwhelming need to blunt the horror seized her and her eyes alighted on Fergus. He had that shit-eating smile on his face already, as if he had known exactly how all of this was going to play out. She hated him for it, despised him.
But that didn’t stop her going to him and thrusting out a hand. He passed her the pouch of hashka without a word.
He doesn’t see people, she realized. He sees projects. Puzzles.
She had the cord half undone when a cry went up from the lookout. Sasha managed to avoid fumbling her precious cargo and stowed it in a pocket just as tiny shapes became visible on the coast. They were still too small to see in any detail, but seconds later she heard a sharp cracking noise and the decking just to her right shattered, fragments of wood and dust exploding into the air.
The Unborn beside the forecastle jerked suddenly. Black blood began to ooze out of her chest, smelling foul, causing the humans aboard the Luck to reel away in disgust or hold their noses. All save for Fergus, who merely watched with interest. The handmaiden didn’t seem unduly concerned by the wound, but there was another cracking sound moments later and her skull fell apart like a melon, rotting brains spraying the mast behind her.
Sasha threw herself to the deck as further cracking sounds split the air, one after another. Chunks of wood and flesh and rancid black blood were flying all around her. She saw several Unborn plunge over the ship’s railing and dive into the ocean, making for the Islands, trying to reach their assailants before the ship was sunk.
How are they are attacking us? she thought desperately. They’re hundreds of yards away! The sound of thunder shook the skies above and black lightning arced down from the clouds to strike the coast in a small explosion of stone and spray. The assault on the ship stopped momentarily. Sasha climbed back to her feet, wiping putrid gore off her face. The scene aboard the Lady’s Luck was utter carnage: dead and wounded crew were sprawled against crates, flopping on the deck or staring numbly down at jagged holes in their bodies. Though only a few of the Unborn had been destroyed, many were missing limbs. Sasha could see the ripples made by those that had leaped overboard still swimming towards the coast.
More lightning lit the sky, spearing down to strike the section of coast where their attackers had been spotted. The cloud of dust thrown up by the lightning made it hard to see exactly what was happening, but the cracking noises swiftly returned. Strangely, none of this newest wave of attacks seemed to target the ship.
Fergus ambled over. He appeared unhurt, and indeed mostly unmoved, by the madness playing out around him. ‘It seems we have an unexpected ally,’ he mused. He pointed up at the sky. ‘There is a mage in the clouds above. A mage, or some other being capable of summoning and directing lightning.’
Surely enough, more lightning forked down. It was answered by those below, a renewed burst of cracking, whistling shots sent up into the clouds.
Sasha’s heart was already hammering in her chest, and when she spotted the huge vessel ghosting out of the mist around the side of the coast it almost burst. This new ship was unlike any she had seen before: a metallic, angular behemoth the colour of a leaden sky. The Lady’s Luck was perhaps the finest vessel in the Trine but even the White Lady’s flagship was small and primitive in comparison to this.
‘We must flee,’ announced the captain. ‘The fehd have not abandoned the Isles. We cannot survive a confrontation with that ship.’
The Lady’s Luck was brought around with all haste and the sails hoisted as they turned and fled the approaching vessel. Surprisingly, it didn’t immediately attempt to give chase. Lightning tore through the sky behind them and Sasha saw the fehd warship outlined in black fire.
The mage is attacking the ship. He’s trying to slow its advance.
They sailed at full mast, knowing that if the pursuing ship caught up with them they were all doomed. Somehow they lost sight of the fehd vessel and in the early evening the captain announced that it was not evidently giving chase. Sasha was halfway through her pouch of hashka by then and so when the harsh croak of a crow interrupted the stillness of the night, she didn’t immediately make the connection. All she could think of was mighty magic being unleashed, of harsh words being tossed at the most powerful woman in the world. Of her sister, Ambryl, sacrificing herself to ensure her younger sibling survived. Somehow everything connected in her delirium and the identity of their unexpected ally dropped like a stone in her hashka-addled mind.
‘Thanates,’ she whispered.
The crow fluttered down out of the night sky and landed on the deck. The bird began to glow and change shape and then he was standing before them: a tall man sporting a black overcoat, tattered and torn in a hundred different places. The red rag he had once worn to cover his missing eyes was gone, stripped away by the White Lady during their duel. In their empty sockets burned black fire.
There was a moment of stunned silence and then one of the Unborn leaped at Thanates. He raised a gloved hand and she was flung overboard, plucked off the deck and dumped into the churning waters below like so much flotsam.
The grim wizard took a step towards the crew. He smelled of black powder, and ash, and death. ‘Servants of Alassa,’ he snarled. ‘Where is your mistress?’
‘Protecting her people,’ replied the ship’s Unborn captain. ‘You are not welcome here, Crow.’
Thanates laughed, an ugly sound like a bird’s caw. ‘You misunderstand. I do not ask your permission. Your mistress and I have unfinished business. She had me flogged and hung from the walls of her city. She even stole my memories. Now I am here for vengeance.’ The wizard raised a fist wreathed in black fire.
‘Wait.’ Sasha stumbled forward, falling to her knees and scraping them painfully on the deck. ‘You were fighting the fehd. Why?’
Thanates paused. ‘The Ancients murdered hundreds of innocents here. A wizard-king of Dalashra does not allow an injustice to pass without answering in kind. This I remember. You, servants of Alassa, will now answer for the crimes of your mistress.’
‘Wait,’ Sasha said again. ‘You know me. I’m Sasha. Davarus Cole spoke of me.’
Once again the mage hesitated. ‘Davarus Cole? Ah. The child of murder. You are the girl he professes to love.’
Love? No one could possibly love me. Sasha blinked desperately, willing away the hashka-induced fog clouding her mind, knowing this was one her one chance to avert a catastrophe. ‘He said you were a good man. We are not responsible for what the White Lady did to you. We came to these Isles seeking magic to help combat the fehd.’
Thanates grimaced. ‘I thought to do the same. The Ancients will allow no one close. The weapons they carry reach further than any bow or cannon.’
Unexpectedly, Fergus cleared his throat and raised a thin hand. ‘Excuse me. Allow me to posit you a question, if I may. Does a thirst for vengeance outweigh a duty to mankind?’
Sasha stared at Fergus. The man’s eyes glittered. There was no fear, no sense that he understood how close he was to magical evisceration. Only curiosity at yet another mystery to untangle.
The self-proclaimed wizard-king of Dalashra frowned. ‘Speak not to me of duty. A king’s duty is always first to his people.’
Fergus nodded. ‘Then your duty must be to put aside your vendetta against my mistress and help us fight the fehd. For if you do not, all of humanity is doomed.’
The black fire surrounding Thanates’ clenched fist flickered and died. He scowled. ‘Easy to say. Alassa cares nothing for duty. Deepest of all her desires is to be a saviour. That was what drove her rage as much as the loss of our child: the denial of her wish for us to unite the Congregation and the Alliance. Instead, we doomed it.’
‘You can still save us,’ Sasha whispered. ‘You and the White Lady. Please. There’s no one else.’
For a long time, silence reigned. Thanates stared around the ruined deck as though he could see the damage wrought by the fehd. ‘I have learned of what the Ancients did here. The bodies. I do not care for it.’
‘So you’ll help us?’ Sasha pleaded.
Thanates gave a heavy sigh. His jaw set, and he stared seemingly unseeing at the sky, until finally he nodded. ‘You must arrange a meeting between us. I cannot promise we will not kill each other. But if Alassa and I are able to put aside our hatred, I will tell her of my time in Dorminia and an individual fehd I grew to know well. His name was Isaac.’