Nethereal (Soul Cycle Book 1) (32 page)

“Not like the damned,” the stranger said. “True death cuts the silver cord and brings an end to Mysteries. I severed my life’s thread but gained one of gold.”

Fewer than two minutes had passed, and the dead man was already on about the sort of esoteric nonsense that everyone seemed to be spouting lately. “Never mind,” Stochman said. “Say your piece.”

The man's hand betrayed only the barest hint of movement before a titanic force whipped Stochman’s head to one side. The commander pressed cold, shaking fingers to the warm welt on his jaw. Though delivered by a human hand, the blow had felt like a rock falling from the peak and onto his face.

“You were told that your warnings were spent,” the stranger said. “Though I restore your mastery of the ship, never must you presume mastery of me. Mind this lesson, and all betwixt us shall be well.”

Stochman stared into his benefactor's emotionless face and nodded.

Elena sat at a metal table under a single light. The small arsenal laid out before her represented every type of sidearm in the ship’s inventory.

Teg slid a pistol forward. “Go ahead and break it down,” he said.

The girl took up the firearm. Though much smaller than Teg’s fifty caliber zephyrs, the .38 looked comically large in her delicate hands. Elena’s expression conveyed deep focus as she started stripping the pistol with slow, deliberate motions. Teg looked over her shoulder, giving instructions and occasionally guiding her soft fingers with his own callused ones.

“What are you doing?” Deim snapped.

Teg glanced at the doorway where the steersman stood frowning. “I'm putting her to work,” said Teg. “She's got to pull her own weight, same as everybody else.”

“But…guns?” Deim fumed. “She could hurt herself!”

Elena set the gun’s barrel, slide, and grip on the table. “They can’t hurt me.”

“You could accidentally hurt someone else, then,” said Deim.

Elena glanced at Deim. “I don't need these to hurt someone.”

Teg raised an eyebrow. “That a threat?” he asked.

The girl resumed her work. “Just a fact.”

Deim approached Elena as if treading on ice. “We're about to leave for the Fifth Circle,” he said. “Will you be safe here?”

“No one's safe here.”

“I'll stay if it makes you feel better,” Deim told her.

“You’re a cute couple,” Teg said to the girl, “but I’d ask Nakvin to run some blood work. You don't know where he’s been.”

Elena’s rose-colored eyes went wide. Deim stared at Teg, his nostrils flaring.

“What?” asked Teg. “It was hard
not
to see that little peepshow in your cabin.” He turned back to Elena. “You should be more careful with those cables.”

Deim usually shrugged off Teg’s jokes at his expense, but this time the kid trembled with a murderous rage he’d never seen before.

Jaren arrived just as Teg’s hand was inching toward the nearest gun. The captain leaned in the doorway and eyed the armory's three occupants. “Does it really take three of you to check and pack the guns?” he asked.

Teg shoved both hands into his pants pockets. “She's finishing the last one now,” he said.

Elena set the reassembled zephyr on the table. “It's done.”

Jaren nodded. “Nakvin wants us to meet her in the cargo hold in twenty minutes.”

“I'll be there,” said Teg.

“Deim, you’re with me,” Jaren said. “She’ll be here when we get back.”

The young steersman slunk after Jaren, keeping his eyes on Elena until the last second.

Nakvin stood at the back of the cargo hold looking over the faces of the men who were trusting her with their lives. Teg returned her look blankly, as if impatient to get started. Deim fidgeted. Sulaiman’s expression made her think of heavy storm clouds brooding on a dark horizon. Jaren favored her with a rakish smile and nodded.

Nakvin had chosen the hold because it was the second largest space after the hangar but was far more secluded in case something went wrong. Gibeah’s demons had ransacked the ship’s stores, leaving the hold clear except for widely spaced metal uprights and overhead winch mounts. Suppressing her fear, she turned to face the back wall.

“Stay on your toes,” she said. “I've never tried re-weaving the Circle like this before.”

Nakvin felt grateful for Vaun’s absence. It wasn’t just that she loathed him. She’d worked with plenty of people she disliked, but his behavior around Elena had been outright threatening. Unfortunately, she seemed to be the only one who harbored misgivings about the masked man—except perhaps Sulaiman. Jaren had meant to invite Vaun on their little outing, but he’d vanished after his expulsion from the infirmary.

The implications were both comforting and troubling. On the one hand, Nakvin wouldn't be burdened with Vaun's presence. On the other, she wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on him.

“Not to interrupt,” said Teg, “but we can only stand on our toes for so long.”

“Shut up unless you still want to walk home,” Nakvin said. She found the resolve to continue only by reminding herself that the sooner her job was done, the sooner she'd be back.

Nakvin willed all doubt from her mind. She studied every line of the glossy ceramic wall and held the image in her mind's eye. Simultaneously, she conjured a mental picture of the spire that Sulaiman had described to her, along with its exact location relative to the
Exodus
.

Mentally reaching out to the Circle as though hell itself were an ether-runner, Nakvin overlaid the image of the tower upon that of the wall. The bulkhead turned milky and translucent, evoking unpleasant memories of her first gel bath. The gelatinous mass began to sag under its own weight. If it fell, no one would escape in time.

Only the discipline of two human lifetimes allowed Nakvin to regain her focus. The vision of the tower slammed into place with the surety of a steel vault, and the collapsing sheet of slime vanished as though it had never been. A doorway to a distant shore stood in its place.

“That was touch and go for a second, wasn't it?” Teg asked.

“I wasn't sure I could do it,” Nakvin said between panting breaths.

Deim turned and stared at the gate. “And I thought things couldn’t get weirder,” he said.

Nakvin tried to focus on the gate. It was like looking at a drawing of paradoxical angles. The floor, ceiling, and side walls ran over a hundred yards from the forward bulkhead and abruptly ended; not at another wall, but in a framed landscape under a sky the color of an old bruise. In the distance a vast body of dark water rippled against a sandy shore, and jutting from a promontory overlooking the beach stood the tapering cylinder of a sandstone tower.

“Is that the place?” Jaren asked Sulaiman.

The priest nodded. “Never could I forget that shore, though I love it not.”

Jaren checked his ammunition one last time before starting forward. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get this over with.”

The others fell in behind Jaren without a word. Nakvin was the last one through. When she looked back, the hold was gone. The barren shore stretched to the horizon.
We fought one baal to get the ship back,
she thought.
Now we’re bribing another one to get back home.

Somehow she doubted the process would be so straightforward.

Vaun Mordechai strode down an access corridor two decks below the main hold. There, brushed steel plates concealed the pipes and cables that elsewhere cluttered the walls. Others would find it impossible to tell one panel from another, but Vaun did just that. Pressing his hand against the smooth metal in a way that only he knew made the panel slide open. Unlike Nakvin’s arcane method, shaping his surroundings required nothing more than thorough planning.

The secret door gave on a small antechamber leading to a series of hidden rooms. Vaun had arranged their construction soon after coming to Caelia on the captured
Sunspot
. The station’s ignorance of his presence had allowed him to alter several work crews’ plans. In this way, the shipwrights had unwittingly assembled Vaun's suite of rooms at the intersection of their sundry work sites.

The room just past the antechamber featured a work table in which Vaun took great pride. He’d fashioned it himself from four large slabs of concrete decking intended for the hangar. Together the sections formed a single surface that proved highly durable and easy to clean. But the crowning touch was the central support, which Vaun had crafted at great effort and personal risk. A human corpse—specially preserved and reinforced—knelt beneath the central corner of each table section; the concrete slab resting on its bent back and upthrust arms. When the table was fitted together, the four crouching figures were positioned back to back in a perfectly symmetrical pillar of once living flesh.

Restlessness drove Vaun to pace across the room. After untold decades and light years of lonely searching, the object of his quest was literally within reach. His only rivals were a cambion Steersman and her petulant apprentice—both of whom vied for his prize while being necessary to his escape with it.

Vaun laughed bitterly under his mask. He knew that the great powers had abandoned the universe long ago, but sometimes he pondered the existence of a dissolute deity who remained for the sole purpose of dispensing ironic punishments. Vaun fretted over ways to discreetly remove all obstacles between himself and the girl, but inspiration eluded him. The resulting vicious circle of thought left him more out of sorts than ever until an idea for a new experiment struck him.

Vaun was always eager to find new and exciting uses for others’ mortal remains. Such raw materials belonging to the
Exodus
crewmen who’d been mauled beyond recognition by Gibeah's minions occupied a walk-in freezer off the main room. Vaun was striding toward this freezer when the two table sections nearest him heaved forward with a sonorous groan and crashed to the metal floor.

Vaun turned to see the first pair of patchwork bodies standing side by side; leering at him with a malignant awareness not their own. Before they could advance, Vaun sent the forbidden power that coursed through him into the two preserved corpses that remained beneath the table. The second set of cadaverous twins cast off their concrete burdens and arose at his whim.

Vaun perceived the battle’s dual nature: fought visibly by the two pairs of ghoulish automatons, and invisibly by the wills that moved them. Whichever puppeteer gained control of one additional corpse would take all.

Whoever Vaun’s foe was, the thrice-damned grave robber was skilled. His adversary wheedled for control, employing subtlety and cunning to slip the animated husks from his grasp. Vaun countered skill with sheer power, battering his opponent's link to the cadavers with a raw flow of Teth.

All four corpses turned at once against their maker. They shared the same malevolent expression, but their formerly glazed eyes gleamed with hideous triumph.

“Enough!” Vaun’s sepulchral voice echoed. The Void poured through the ragged tear in his soul, filling the room with a sallow golden glow. The four corpses froze, their pallid skin rimed with hoarfrost. The cadavers imploded like deflating leather balls, withering to blackened clumps of frozen flesh.

“Hold!” cried a voice that, next to the pallid light, was the coldest emanation in the room. “Well met, Vaun Mordechai! I yield!”

The bilious glow retreated. “Come forward,” said Vaun.

A lanky blond figure in a dark suit of clothes appeared. Vaun marked that he looked human; possibly a few generations removed from Gennish blood. But like his own shell, the stranger's manlike shape hid something far more terrible.

“You are the one called Fallon,” said Vaun.

The thin figure smiled and removed his smoked glasses, revealing black sockets. Seeming empty at first, they actually brimmed with shadows. “You may name me as such, if you wish,” the creature mused. “I have outlived such conceits.”

“A kost,” said Vaun, “one of the deathless dead.”

“You are wise,” Fallon said. “I confess that I thought us of a kind.”

“Do you still hold that opinion?”

“Our contest taught me my error.”

“Then you, too, are wise,” said Vaun. “I presume the reason for your trespass to be equally so.”

“Plainly shall I tell you, as a brother,” Fallon said. “I am set as watch and ward over this vessel. The Gen would turn the ark from its course and deliver its wealth into unworthy hands.”

“What concern is that of mine?” Vaun asked.

“Well do I know how the brigands confound your desires.” Fallon said.

“What of my desires?” demanded Vaun.

“Know you of the Black Well Friars—the Occult Divines?” Fallon asked with a knowing grin. “Though once I erred, now I descry your true nature; and your reck for the woman-child.”

“What do you propose?” Van asked.

“The Souldancer was to sleep till journey’s end,” said Fallon. “The pirates’ use expired with her waking. I would forge a pact with you, that one's increase might enrich the other,”

“And refusal shall provoke your enmity,” Vaun guessed.

“Your assent is naught to me,” Fallon said. “The Gen and his stalls have gone. As a courtesy are you counseled that I shall drive the remnant from the rails. Your discretion will be welcomed. Your aid recompensed.”