The Gospel According to Verdu (a Steampunk Novel) (The Brofman Series) (11 page)

As
The Poor Man’s Bounty
disappeared back toward the west, Chenda began to panic. Bobbing like a bread crumb waiting to be gobbled up by some giant fish, the girl who had spent so much of her life alone discovered a whole new and hellish meaning to the word. She swam a few strokes and quickly gave up as there was no land in sight, and she would just tire herself swimming toward nothing. In every direction there was water, and no hint of anything else.

She shook with anger at how foolish she had been with her trust. She should have listened to her instinct and evicted that tagalong from her boat straight away—before they were out of sight of the coast. She realized her gut had been right about Trygan, and he was bad news.

When her anger over her own foolishness had run its course, she realized she was still shaking. The water was chilly, and the rising sun did not promise to heat it up by much. She was cold, and she was stuck. At least the chattering of her teeth meant she would not be able to grind them in frustration.

As the minutes passed, her thoughts became harder and harder to collect. She searched the elements around her, looking for another ship near enough to call to, a bit of driftwood to climb up on, or any trace of land, but she found nothing useful. Even the seafloor was depressingly far below her.

The cold was a constant distraction. If her power had not been so recently depleted, she thought she might have been able to pull an air bubble around her to insulate her from the cool water. Or if she weren’t soaked to the bone, she might just have heated the water by calling some fire to her, but there was no way she could coax a spark to flair, and there was nothing to burn anyway. Even fully charged, she would not have been able to do either for very long.

She struggled for what felt like hours, treading water to keep warm and cramping in the cold when she stopped. When the sun was directly overhead, she knew she needed some reprieve from the chill. Releasing her power as slowly as she could, she slipped a cushion of air into the water all around her, separating her from the sea. It was agonizingly difficult to control the air as it struggled against the surface of the water. She pulled herself into a ball, her knees to her chest, trying to make the bubble as round and small as possible, hoping to use less effort and make the reprieve last a little longer. The lingering ache from the cold made thinking straight that much harder. Her concentration was as slippery as ice, and the bubble kept sliding away from her, and she was drenched in the chilly seawater before she could even start to get warm.

Some gift
, she thought.
I can’t even save myself.

The bubble was a bad idea. The water and the air were too much apart to be forced together the way she was pushing them. She had felt it on
The Poor Man’s Bounty
when she stared at the sky: the complete estrangement between those two elements, and how each disdained the other. Trying to force one into the other was using up her energy too fast. She let go of the bubble and changed position in the water.

It was a kind of torture to uncurl herself and float faceup on the cold, choppy sea, but she needed to try to survive her situation a different way.

Chenda threw away her previous thoughts about holding on to her power, and she tried something she had not dared attempt before. Lying on the thin plane where water met air, she channeled the opposing and repelling forces through her. She let the power to control the elements escape into the water and the air—not demanding of them, pushing them one way and bending them the other, but becoming one with them. Her body, in itself mostly made of these two elements, was the union of water and air. It was effortless, balancing between the forces. Her power ran giddily from her, and the absence of it left her feeling normal, like she was not a chosen one, was not freezing in the middle of an empty ocean, not hungry, or thirsty, or even tired.

She was a fulcrum balancing two equally fierce and powerful monsters. The water repelled the air. The wind lapped at the sea. The elements were fully diverted, leaving Chenda free of both. She was held between the two, touching neither and forcing nothing against its will. The only sensation was the glow of sunlight, which never minded water or air, warming her, caressing her aches, easing her mind. It was easy, and things had never been easy with her power. It was as though the elements were satisfied to hold her between them, communing with her stored energy and taking just enough from her to hold her in the sliver-thin and nearly endless boundary between sea and sky. She escaped into that boundary to gather her thoughts and contemplate how to get out of her current predicament.

She had, for at least the moment, found a way to survive the sea, but she was getting farther behind Fenimore with each passing moment. She sensed her environment with her power and noted the passing dips and ridges of the seafloor below as she passed, She drifted along with a fairly strong current, but her sense of direction in the in-between place was a bit shaky. She thought she was moving in a general eastward direction, which was at least somewhat the right way, but she doubted she could travel all the way to Tugrulia on the current. She toyed with the idea of just falling asleep, if she was not already. She figured that if she broke her hold on her balance between the elements, she would slip back into the water, or more precisely, the water would fill in all around her, and the cold shock would wake her up again, thus restarting the whole process of escaping the cold.

She indulged for a moment by thinking of Fenimore, and how much she missed him. She worried over where he was and how he was coping. Had he gotten as far as the Tugrulian coast yet? Was he on land yet? She counted the hours and guessed that he would not make it to that dreaded country for another day or more.

She also thought about Verdu. What shape was he in after so much time in the hands of the emperor’s men? Had he been treated cruelly? Had it been weeks? Months? She wished she knew, and then felt the old ache of knowing they should never have left him behind. She thought about how they had all been when they were together: secure in their friendships, true companions, loyal to one another, unique and united.

Through their time together, she started to believe in herself as much as Verdu did. He had told her the people had been waiting for her to appear and set things right. They whispered of the coming of the Pramuc, sang songs in praise of it. Now, separated from her friends, all she could think was,
Some savior I am
. As best she could figure, she had freed exactly no one from the yoke of the empire.
In fact
,
she thought
, it’s
my
fault that Verdu is now captive there. How many in the resistance have forfeited their lives because of me? So many heads on pikes . . .

She looked back on all that she had seen and all that, she felt in her heart, she had caused, and she could not count the atrocities. For the people who’d waited for her, she led them only from hope to suffering. Why didn’t they realize she was a fraud?

It seemed only like moments to her, but when she opened her eyes and pulled herself from the in-between place, all was dark. The shock of the change was almost as sharp as the bite of the cold water as she dropped back into the sea. She gasped as her thoughts scattered and her muscles seized with cold.

She heard what sounded like a child calling, “Papa! Papa!” and some other indistinguishable words very close behind her. She jerked herself around and saw a long metal boat slicing silently through the water. There was a small boy, perhaps six years old, maybe a little older, shouting from the rail to someone she could not see.

“Help!” she called. Her voice cracked with dryness, she coughed and tried again.
“Help!”

Others appeared on the deck of the fast ship. The men were first, followed quickly by a number of children of various ages and a few women. The boy who had called for his papa gesticulated wildly in Chenda’s direction. She could see the men squinting into the darkness, looking for what the boy was trying to point out. She could tell from their faces that they did not see her, and could not hear her weak shouts. Splashing around, she hoped she might get their attention, but the darkness was too thick, swallowing the sounds. She thought about reaching out with her power and pulling the ship to her, but it was a big boat, and rather far away, and she was not sure she could do it while shivering in spasms.

Then it hit her: if she could not push the boat closer to her . . .

She grabbed at the water around her with her power and imagined a geyser. A second later she shot into the air in a froth of seawater. She landed just short of the ship. The sound of that giant splash, and the subsequent swish of the displaced water against the hull, would be hard to dismiss. She called again as her momentum carried her under the surface of the sea, her voice gurgling up in bubbles from below the surface. Bobbing back up, she saw the ship drop its sails and come about. Chatter in a language she did not understand filled the air as a rope with a ball float on the end splashed into the water just past her. She thrashed closer to the rope, feeling through the water with both hands and her mind. When her fingers touched it, she clutched it for all she was worth.

“I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” she yelled over and over until she finally felt tension on the line and her body being pulled toward the ship. She cackled with relief as several hands grasped her and pulled her from the sea.

Martyr
was a word that Verdu particularly liked. It flowed off the tongue, he thought. He liked it in all three languages in which he was fluent. In the hours and days following his writing binge, he felt fairly certain that martyrdom was his destiny, and he was remarkably comfortable with that. The punishment for his crime against the empire, preaching the return of the Pramuc, was predictable to the point of being passé. A few times he even wondered how his head would look on the pike, thinking once that he hoped the cut from the executioner’s blade would be nice and high; he hated the thought of his head flopping askew on a too-long stub of neck.

He marveled at his own morbid thinking. For a while, he considered how easy it was to give up his whole life now that it felt so complete. It hardly mattered to him, locked away as he was in a cell with his body broken and no hope of a pleasant future, what happened to him next. In that reality, he was complete in his peace.

Expecting the end to come for him soon, he enjoyed each tray of food delivered to his cell as if it were a last meal. It hardly mattered that the fare was the same every evening. There was no fear for him about
The End
, or what came after, not that he really understood what
after
would be. He’d never had the chance to ask Chenda if she knew what heaven would be like, but he had little doubt that one existed. Having witnessed the proof of the gods, he felt free to extrapolate on the possibilities of an afterlife.

His only hope now was that heaven held copious amounts of frozen sweet coconut cream. Something sweet, any sweetness at all, would be rapture. It had been almost three months since he had tasted his last bit of sugar: a sweet bun made by his
Brofman
crewmate Kingston. Oh, how he ached for a bit of Kingston’s cooking—a bowl of meaty stew, a slab of buttered toast, eggs poached in tomato soup, or a mouthful of his special oatmeal drizzled with syrup.

Verdu’s delicious daydreams kept him well distracted and passing the time until the door to his cell opened. A footman trotted in and placed a luxurious chair next to the wobbly table, flicked a bit of dust off the arm of the chair, and scurried back out the open door. Verdu, sitting openmouthed on his cot, stared at the fine chair; he glanced back at the open door and the man coming through it, Nameer Xa-Ven, adviser to the emperor.

Nameer looked around the room, as if seeing it for the first time. It had been weeks since the adviser had last stood before Verdu, and he was little changed from how Verdu remembered: exquisitely manicured beard, severe and expensive clothes, every inch a Tugrulian aristocrat. Verdu, cracking a smile, said, “Ah, Councillor, do come in. It’s been ages since your last visit.”

Nameer did not reply, but sat in the fine seat, still eyeing Verdu as he lay crumpled on the bed. He took a small, elegantly bound book from within his robes and laid it on the table. “You’ve been rather busy, it seems. Perhaps it was for the best that I had not come to disturb you.” He waved a hand at the rickety chair opposite him, inviting Verdu to the table. Without taking his eyes from Verdu, Nameer spoke toward the dark, open doorway: “Guards, leave me. Let the door stand open and wait for me at the bottom of the stairs.”

Curiosity got the better of Verdu, and he leaned toward the table. He could see writing impressed in gold leaf on the spine. Tiny writing. As he shifted away from the bed and hobbled to the table, he read the beautiful little Tugrulian words:
The Gospel of the Return of the Holy Pramuc as Told by the Companion Kotal Verdu
.

He blinked hard and dropped to the seat at the table. Realizing his mouth was still agape, he closed it and looked quizzically at Nameer. He nodded at Verdu, gesturing to the book encouragingly. “Go on, take a look,” he said, his voice neutral and expression unreadable.

It was all a little too civil for Verdu. He had imagined this moment several times, and had expected to be dragged out of his cell and executed. Perhaps even beheaded right there on his cot. Seeing Nameer in his cell, a calm and poised visitor with this forbidden writing casually tossed on the table, confused him.

He opened the book and read the forward by Pranav Erato and smiled a little. The text had been reproduced by hand in beautifully looping script, carefully executed, a tiny work of art. He read a few of the sentences on each page and recalled each word and turn of phrase as his own. No changes. No corrections. No interpretations or embellishments. Word for word, it was entirely what he had written, but it so much more. The little book was simply the most beautiful and moving thing Verdu had ever held.