Nethereal (Soul Cycle Book 1) (46 page)

Gelwin passed the case to a page standing beside his horse. The messenger hastened toward the ship and climbed the inset rungs to the hangar. When his head reached the level of the deck, Teg stepped forward.

“That's far enough,” the swordarm said.

The page stopped and extended his hand. Jaren bent down to receive the box.

Teg pivoted, and cursed as an arrow sprouted from his back. Jaren snatched the case from the page and kicked him in the face, casting him to the ground thirty feet below.

“Back inside!” Jaren ordered as he dove to the deck, pushing Eldrid with him. When no one moved he looked up to see Nakvin and Deim staring wide-eyed at something beyond the door while Teg backed away as if dazed. He was about to ask the reason for their fear when a chorus of screams from the field below froze his blood.

Jaren stood and saw the terror ascending the hillside. A billowing cloud like ink poured into water flowed up the slope, enveloping the horrified soldiers. Jaren felt its chill though he stood a hundred yards distant. A thick yellow mist preceded the miasma, accompanied by the mingled scents of gangrene and burning grass. The lancers tried to flee, but steep slopes and the hulk of the
Exodus
hemmed them in.

A volley of arrows flew from the trees and vanished into the fog, which rolled onward without slowing. Below the hangar, a mob of soldiers fought tooth and nail for access to the ladder. Others climbed their comrades’ backs like steps.

Teg rushed to the security console. The massive doors groaned in their tracks; drawing together slowly at first, but rapidly gaining speed. The closest man to the top had only ascended halfway when the hangar slammed shut with the empty resonance of a tomb. Jaren heaved a sigh of relief as the door silenced the chilling cries of men and horses.

Teg rejoined the others. “We're secure,” he said, “at least for now.”

“What about the secondary doors?” Jaren asked.

“They're up against the hillside,” said Teg. “Nobody's getting in that way.”

The captain turned to his crew. Nakvin and Deim still looked shaken. Eldrid returned his look with bewildered concern.

“What dread vision is this?” she asked. “You look as if you've seen your deaths.”

“We
have
seen this before,” Nakvin said.

The color drained from Eldrid’s face. “You have?”

“A whole squad of Guild Inspectors was guarding our ship Ambassador's Island,” said Deim. “By the time we got there, nothing was left but cold air and a sharp smell.”

“He followed us,” Jaren growled. “I don't know how, but he's here.”

Eldrid’s dark curls whipped as she looked to Jaren. “
Who
followed you?”

“Fallon,” said Teg, evoking a shudder from all four pirates.

“Quite right, Master Cross,” Vaun said as he stepped from the corridor. “The kost will remove all obstacles to the completion of his task—including you.”

Jaren took Eldrid aside when they reached the first intersection. Nakvin ran past them, heading toward the engine room with Teg close behind.

“Go to my cabin,” Jaren said. “Don’t stop running till you’re inside. Lock the door, and wait for me.”

Eldrid advanced a few steps before casting a stricken glance back over her shoulder. Then she hiked up her russet skirts and ran.

Jaren saw Deim sprinting toward him from the hangar. “Get us in the air!” he barked at the junior steersman before chasing after Nakvin and Teg.

Panic turned Deim’s dark eyes to live coals. “She needs me,” he said. “He’s waking up!”

Jaren grabbed his steersman by the lapels. “Gelwin’s men can’t even slow that thing down. Either we’re gone before it’s done with them, or we are
dead
!” He let Deim go and ran without looking back.

Soon, the corridor trembled as the ship’s drifters rose from their long slumber.
Deim got us off the ground,
Jaren thought,
but he can't fly us out of the Circle.
He reached the hallway outside the engine room to find Teg at the hatch and Nakvin catching her breath.

“What were you thinking, running off alone like that?” Jaren asked. “Elena's safer in there than we are out here!”

“Exactly,” the lady Steersman said between heaving breaths. “That's why we need to get inside
with
her.”

Teg must have had the same thought. He tried opening the hatch but winced and clutched his left arm.

“Let me see that,” Nakvin said as she examined the shaft lodged in Teg’s shoulder blade.

“How bad is it?” Jaren asked.

“The wound’s closing,” Nakvin said, her voice tinged with disbelief. “It’s pushing the arrow out.” She completed the process; removing the metal barb with a deft motion of her hand. Teg grunted in discomfort.

Jaren grabbed the white silk of Nakvin’s sleeve, and the arrow clattered to the deck. “We don't have time for this!” he said. “You need to get on the Wheel and get us out of here.”

“That's suicide. If we go back, we might run into the kost!”

“What’s a cost?” Teg asked, filtering the word through his Kethan accent.

“That’s
kost
,” Nakvin said. “It rhymes with
washed
.”

“What are we?” asked Teg. “Does it rhyme with
tucked
?”

Jaren glared at his Steersman. “If you know anything, now’s the time to share.”

“Just fairytale stuff,” Nakvin said, “like the kost who hid his soul in a jewel.”

Teg's brow furrowed. “Why would he do that?”

“Because it made him practically unkillable,” Nakvin said flatly.

Deciding that the time for valor had passed, Jaren tried the engine room hatch, but the wheel wouldn’t budge. “The door's locked!”

“Oh, obstinate youth,” said a voice like a freezing waterfall.

A gaunt blond figure in black business attire emerged from the corridor. Jaren had the rodcaster in his hand before his foe took another step. His trigger finger tightened, but invisible hands tore the massive gun away and sent it skidding into the darkness.

Fallon slowly shook his head. Jaren couldn’t help but stare into the abyssal wells that served him for eyes. “Here is ignorance beyond instruction,” Fallon said as he approached, and the cold of deep winter preceded him.

Jaren’s thoughts froze as the kost advanced, but the groan of hinges roused his wits.

“Hurry!” Teg shouted from beside the open hatch. Nakvin bolted through the door, and Jaren raced after her. Teg came last and sealed the entrance to their hazy, rose-colored refuge. “I doubt anything's coming through
that
,” he said.

“What about the others?” Jaren asked.

Nakvin laid her hands on her hips. “'What about
Eldrid
?' you mean.”

Jaren glared at her. “
No one
on board is safe until we stop that thing!”

“
Stop
it?” said Teg. “We barely
got away
from it!”

“There has to be a way,” Jaren said.

“Sure there is,” said Teg, “but we don’t have it. Your rodcaster's out in the hall somewhere, and I'm unarmed. Plus, judging by the fumes that thing gives off, I bet it could drink Nakvin's venom like a cordial.”

“Can you convince him to leave?” Jaren asked her.

“My glamers were written for the living,” she said. “They worked on some of the Freeholders, but Fallon’s a whole other kind of dead.”

“What about Workings?”

“Offensive Workings are Deim's department.”

“All right,” Jaren said. “We still have a chance if there’s enough ether. You two—”

Jaren was cut off by a deep rumble that grew until it shook the hatch and the wall around it. Rending metal screeched above the tremors. At last the whole bulkhead buckled and gave way. A voice—like Fallon’s but greatly magnified—emanated from the dark cloud that obscured the corridor. “Hear me,” it roared like an arctic wind blasting across desolate tundra. “I will kill you: every one.”

Fear washed over Jaren. He stood transfixed, staring helplessly into the roiling black miasma. Two even darker points larger than head lamps marked the source of his mortal dread. Jaren wanted desperately to look away, but he lacked the power even to close his eyes. His mind rifled unbidden through a list of his greatest fears, but the sight that emerged proved far worse.

The black cloud parted, revealing the darker points to be empty eyes in a massive head that reminded Jaren of the skulls frozen into certain shunned cliffs on Tharis. Unlike those fossils, the monstrous form looming out of the darkness still bore ragged flesh. Rows of vertebrae poked out at intervals between scales the color of old bruises and the size of roofing tiles. Some of the scales and bones seemed partially petrified, as though they'd lain long in the silt beneath a prehistoric river.

The ancient beast fixed its eyeless gaze on Teg. Its maw opened, showing long rows of teeth like splintered human femurs. “You wear the baal's colors,” a chilling voice thundered from the decayed depths below. Fallon stretched his torn lips in a reptilian mockery of a smile. “I grant you the boon of preceding your liege in death.”

“Elena,” Nakvin whispered.

Fallon's cavernous jaws yawned even wider. A deafening inrush of air stirred the black fog and hinted at the ponderously huge frame hidden behind it. The dead beast's serpentine neck reared back, and fine tendrils of sallow mist flowed from between its jagged fangs with a familiar acrid scent.

I can’t believe it ends like this,
Jaren thought. The sheer extravagance of his death replaced fear with bleak amusement.

Ugly yellow-green fumes blasted into the domed chamber, instantly filling the confined space. Jaren realized that he and his friends were
no longer within
that confined space. Somehow he, Nakvin, and Teg were standing in the corridor behind the undead behemoth.

Fallon seemed not to have noticed his prey's absence. He allowed the noxious vapor streaming from his gullet to dwindle and finally cease before sweeping the yellow fog with his hideous head in search of his victims' remains.

The devouring cloud parted to reveal a slight young woman in a white dress.

“Elena, no!” Nakvin cried.

The girl seemed not to hear. She advanced on the monster as if walking in her sleep. To Jaren’s astonishment, Fallon recoiled.

Teg started toward Elena, but Jaren held him back. The mercenary shot a frustrated look at his captain, who only shook his head.

The girl stood before the towering beast. Her rose quartz eyes stared straight ahead, open but unseeing.

In his effort to restrain Teg, Jaren had forgotten about Nakvin. She was moving before he noticed, and despite her crewmates’ screams of protest she kept running until she reached Elena's side. The Steersman took the girl in her arms, and they both folded to their knees.

Fallon’s tattered maw twisted in what Jaren could only call a smirk. The kost raised a foreleg like a gnarled tree over the huddling women.

The knowledge of what was about to happen sickened Jaren, but he couldn’t turn away. Elena blinked like a waking sleepwalker and looked upon Nakvin with sudden recognition. A single tear coursed down her cheek as she said, “Mother.”

Jaren barely glimpsed the joy and pain on Nakvin’s face before Fallon struck. Yet it wasn’t his claw that hid her from sight, but the light that shone forth from Elena. The prana that Sulaiman had drawn was a candle against the sun by comparison. The engine room and the hallway were instantaneously washed out in a blaze of purest white. Oblivion followed.

Nakvin felt her sense of self ebb as the Well’s power suffused her being. A bliss unlike any she'd known flooded into her soul, threatening to dissolve it.

All at once, Nakvin understood Ydahl's fear of Elena. The servants of the Void were terrible, but immersion in the depths of the Well was unendurable. Prana saturated her every cell, filling it to bursting with life. The sensation was breathtaking, but the danger behind the euphoria was even greater. She realized in one horrifying moment that the Well didn't have to stop at
filling
her. It could make her substance overflow—accelerate the growth of her flesh grotesquely beyond normal limits. In her blissful agony, Nakvin tried to find Elena; to make her stop the torrent of light, but she saw only brilliant whiteness and felt a searing ache in her eyes as their retinas were continually burned out and regenerated in rapid succession.

Amid her sweet torment, pity replaced Nakvin’s fear of Fallon. For a creature of the Void, exposure to such absolute radiance would be torture beyond imagining. Just when she felt ready to burst into incandescent flame, the light in all its awful beauty vanished.

Teg's vision cleared before Jaren’s, so he reached Nakvin and Elena first. The two women lay motionless on the deck, huddled in each other’s arms. Teg called their names and got no response. Taking Elena’s vitals would just waste time, so he checked Nakvin. She was breathing. He gently shook her.

Nakvin's silver eyes slowly opened. “Fallon?” she asked in a barely audible whisper.

“He's gone,” said Teg. “Swallowed enough prana to move ten million tons faster than light.” He glanced at Elena. “She saved us.”

Nakvin rose to her knees, took her daughter's hand, and gently kissed it. “I'm so proud of you,” she said. The girl didn’t stir.

“Is everyone alright?” Jaren asked in a wavering voice.

“Help me,” Nakvin said, threading her arms under Elena’s.

“She’ll be fine here,” the captain said. “It was a mistake to move her last time.”

Nakvin didn’t look at him. “You’d hate to lose your precious battery,” she said. “The wall’s torn down. I’m taking her out of this prison.”

Teg wordlessly touched Nakvin’s shoulder, prompting her to let go. Then he took Elena in his arms and carried her from the ruined chamber with Nakvin at his side. Jaren stood still as Elena’s cords brushed against his feet.

Not until Jaren had been alone for a while did his numbness give way to a tide of emotion. He stood in the rubble of the engine room, trying to puzzle out how he’d lost control.

“Hello?” Deim's voice suddenly cut in from nowhere. Jaren was still so disconcerted that it took him a moment to touch the sending stud in his ear. “Go ahead, Deim.”