Nethereal (Soul Cycle Book 1) (34 page)

“They who raised the tower set cunning wards against the living and the damned.”

Jaren turned to Nakvin. “Can you get us to the top?”

A distant look came over Nakvin’s silver eyes. After a moment she shook her head. “There's some kind of resistance. It gets stronger the closer we get to the water.”

“The tower stands on the border with Despenser's realm,” Sulaiman said. “He will not yield it even to secure your custom.”

Teg stepped forward. “I've got this one, boss.”

The wind off the water turned Jaren’s hair into a flowing red banner. “Are you sure you can make it alone?” he asked.

“Most of the work would fall to me anyway,” said Teg. “It’ll go faster if I only have me to worry about.”

Jaren nodded. “Light that beacon and get back down here. No side-trips.”

Teg produced his ether torch and pressed the ignition. The rose-colored flame blazed with the scent of a distant storm. “No problem,” he said. The he turned and walked toward the tower's iron-paneled gate.

Sleep eluded Stochman, though for the life of him, he couldn't say why. He’d left the squalor of a freezing camp for the comforts of his conquered ship. The pirates were slaughtered to a man, leaving him master of the
Exodus
from Wheel to hold.

The commander certainly wasn’t losing sleep over frustrated vengeance. He’d taken his due and sweetened the prize by waiting for each brigand’s corpse to reanimate before butchering him beyond recognition.

Every pirate not claimed by the shadow had received the same treatment.
Except for one,
Stochman thought: the mechanic who'd died beside that strange girl in the witch's room. For reasons unknown he’d required only a single death, which was a shame considering how much trouble he’d caused. Navy techs had restored the lights, but the prana siphon only gave the engines enough power to float. He knew the girl was the answer—and an even worse problem.

In lieu of sleeping, Stochman decided to oversee disposal of the pirates' remains. These were heaped in the hangar and thrown overboard. Any who did rise would be trapped on the frozen mountainside.
And let them rot there forever.

Stochman paced to and fro before the great hangar doors while his officers shoveled bundles of human meat into the sky. Scarlet pools dotted the pearly deck, and the commander stepped carefully to avoid soiling his boots. He should have felt secure; should have slept like the dead, but despite his exhaustion he found no rest.

So instead, he continued pacing—walking slowly back and forth across the slaughterhouse he'd made of the hangar.

Despite Sulaiman's warning, Teg used an abridged version of the Formula on the tower doors. He had reasons besides efficiency for wanting to enter alone. The scrabbling-padding-flapping sounds had started again when he’d neared the tower, and Teg didn’t know which was worse: the noises' return or the fact that no one else could hear them. Right now he needed some privacy to collect his thoughts.

The massive iron-paneled gate was locked, but the mechanism was old and crude. Teg noted the large square panel that framed the keyhole. The black metal bore a stylized relief depicting a full moon glowering down on a secluded glade. The huge wolf standing in the middle was the clearing's most obvious occupant, but Teg soon picked out two more figures: a bat hanging from a gnarled bough and a rat peering from the bole of a willow. The creatures’ dead iron eyes seemed to stare at him no matter how he turned his head. As soon as the lock was sprung, Teg threw open the door and rushed inside.

Teg found himself in a large round room where the air was still and cool. He breathed a heavy sigh and inspected his surroundings.

The tower’s first floor struck him as unremarkable. Brass lanterns dangled from chains, shedding mellow light. The inner walls were of the same bluff sandstone as the exterior, and sunbaked brick lined the floor. Besides the iron-jacketed main door and an archway giving on a staircase, the room's only other feature was a wide circular fountain in its exact center.

Teg scanned the cobbles at his feet for pressure traps as he approached the earthwork basin. Leaning against its raised lip, he peered into the shallow, fresh-smelling water.

This can’t be what it looks like
, he thought.

Not until cool wetness kissed the tip of his nose did Teg realize that he’d drawn so close to the pool. By then he knew that he'd stumbled upon the richest wishing well in existence. Countless gold coins gleamed in the hanging lanterns’ light, resting under mere inches of water. There weren't just coins, but golden rings, chains, and pendants as well.

Moved by a sudden greed that seemed to arise from beyond himself, Teg plunged his hand into the fountain and withdrew an intricately engraved medallion. He knelt at the basin's rim and held his prize up to the guttering lamps; turning it in his hands to view every detail.

The shock of cold water spilling onto his legs woke Teg from his daydream. The pool was rapidly overflowing. A pair of loud metallic thuds rang out, and he saw that a lattice of thick steel bars had slammed down over the suddenly closed front door. Across the chamber, a bronze gate slammed down to seal off stairwell.

No sooner did Teg realize what was happening than he was on his feet, sloshing through water already ankle-deep.

Stupid!
He cursed himself.
You got greedy, and it made you careless.

There’d be time for self-loathing later. At the moment, he had to focus on escape. The choice of exits was easy. Even if he managed to pass the barred front gate, it would mean saving himself at the cost of the mission. No, onward and upward was the only way.

The water was up to Teg's knees when he reached the bronze door. Predictably, it had no visible lock or latch. The cast figures of serpents and mermaids laughed at him through a scum of corrosion. The scratches marring those bronze faces told Teg that many of the tower's unwanted visitors had met tragic ends under their mockery. He also guessed that none of them had carried splinterknives.

Teg reached as high as he could and sank his humming blade into the door. The water would carry him upward, and he couldn’t waste time fighting the rising tide while he worked.

“She’s Elena Braun, daughter of the station’s head shipwright,” said Lt. Wald, a female officer who’d been stationed at Caelia.”

The confirmation unnerved Stochman, recent events notwithstanding. They’d taken Braun's daughter alive, though “alive” was a loose description of her condition. “What’s been done to her?” he asked.

Wald ran a hand through her short blond hair and sighed. “I don’t know. She’s always been strange. But no one dared to ask her father, and she hasn’t said a word since we found her.”

Stochman leaned back in his captain’s mess chair and steeped his fingers. He considered himself a rational man who eschewed the metaphysical speculation required to unravel such puzzles. Yet he perceived a relation between the sockets in the girl’s back and the power shortage, which had coincided with the last cable’s extraction.

Nevertheless, a solution was needed if he and his men ever wanted to leave the pit the Gen had pitched them into. The quest for that solution brought Stochman to the brig, where the girl was interned for lack of a better option. Though the drab steel walls had never housed another prisoner, the air smelled even staler than in the rest of the cursed scow.

Two partitions made of metal bars emerging from perpendicular walls formed the girl’s cell. Stochman unlocked the door, rolled it open with an unexpectedly loud clang, and stepped inside. “It’s rather lonely here,” he said. “Perhaps you’d like new quarters?”

The girl didn’t say a word. She sat huddled on her cot, facing away from him.

“Was the mechanic your friend?” he asked. “I hope you don’t blame me for his death.”

Several moments passed with no answer. The commander picked up a cable that had lain useless on the deck since his technicians had given up reattaching it.

“Do you know what’s happened to the power?” he asked.

Braun’s daughter didn’t even seem to be breathing.

“You have fascinating disfigurements,” Stochman said. “Are they painful?”

The girl drew her knees up against her chest and wrapped her arms around them.

“I haven’t slept, you know,” he said. “Not since I regained command.”

The stupid trollop just stared at the wall of her cell, never deigning to look at him.

Stochman’s patience finally ran out. He'd had enough of pirates and demons; of the cold and the dark and whatever this creature in a pretty girl's skin really was. He was done with decorum; done with decency. It was time to get results.

“What did the scum do to you, bitch!?” Stochman railed as he whipped Elena's bare back with one of her own cords. “Are you their insurance—some kind of dead man switch?”

Again, the improvised scourge came down. The girl flinched, but held her tongue.

“Why do these cables go right through you when we try to plug them in? Are you doing that?” Another, harder lash elicited a faint whimper that made Stochman grit his teeth in satisfaction. “You were their doxy, is that it? A hole for each of them? Tell me I’m wrong!”

A hand gripped Stochman's wrist like a vise, halting the cable in mid-stroke. “Leave her be,” said a voice as pitiless as a moonless winter night.

The commander wheeled. Standing behind him—and still gripping his trembling fist—was a grey-cloaked figure in a stark white mask. “Vaun Mordechai,” Stochman hissed. “I thought you scurried off with the rest of Peregrine’s rats!”

“Thank whatever powers you wish that I did not,” the masked man said. “You’d have found boarding far more difficult in my absence.”

Stochman sneered. “So you're a traitor
and
a freak.”

Mordechai relaxed his hold, and Stochman yanked his wrist free. His smile faded when Mordechai pulled back the hood of his cloak and removed his false porcelain face. Stochman beheld a hard, ashen countenance under a bristle of light brown hair. But he hardly noticed those features once his gaze met Vaun's eyes. They were iron grey and grim, but most terrible of all, they were dead.
No
, Stochman realized.
They're
not
dead. But they're not alive either. What the hell
is he
!?

“The young lady and I have much to discuss,” Mordechai said.

Stochman had expected the mask’s removal to temper Vaun’s sonorous voice. It didn't. Fighting the shaking fit that threatened to unman him, he stumbled out of the cell.

Mordechai stood amid a tangle of cords that ran in from the hall, passed through the bars, and ended at the foot of the cot where the girl huddled. Her blank sockets shone like misplaced eyes whose gaze Stochman couldn’t meet.

Mordechai moved to Elena's bedside and knelt to examine the whip marks. “You’re safe now,” he said.

“He didn't hurt me.”

“I'm sure there was no damage,” Mordechai said. And indeed, the angry red welts were already fading from her ivory skin. “Still, the pain must have been considerable.”

Elena said nothing, but emitted a pathetic sniff.

“I have long hoped that we two might speak at length,” Mordechai said. He paused, awaiting the girl’s reply.