I rushed the wall, stabbing the silver. I laughed as my blade sank through the foil skin. Cutting through the mosquito’s metallic hide was no more difficult than cutting through the hide of a wild boar, something well within the scope of the blade’s intended purpose. In moments, I’d cut a flap in the side of the artificial insect. The mosquito didn’t protest as I pushed my arm through, followed by my head and shoulders. In another moment, with quite a bit of kicking and struggle, I’d worked myself loose of my silver prison.
But not quite free. I remained locked inside the golden cage. Worse, silver wires still hooked into my flesh. Tentatively, I grabbed the wire hooked into my left thigh. I took the knife and sliced the wire in twain.
Then screamed.
Then screamed some more.
It was the worst agony imaginable. It was as if a knife had been stabbed all the way into my thigh bone and was now twisting, digging at the marrow. I gritted my teeth to resist the pain, and tried to breathe deep breaths. In desperation, I retrieved the loose wire from the gilded floor and placed it back in contact with the length of silver line hanging from my leg. The metal ends flowed together. Instantly, the acute pain turned to welcome numbness.
I limped to the cage wall and slid down, my back to the bars as I struggled to catch my breath, until I remembered that I didn’t need to breathe. I was acting purely on instinct. Calmness settled over me. I looked out beyond my gilded cage, to the barrel chest in which this strange artificial heart was suspended.
Hmmm.
It struck me as curious that, having bound my spirit to this mosquito, she’d then sealed the mosquito inside a cage. I walked back toward the insect. In relative size, it loomed over me like an elephant. Viewed at this scale, the craftmanship was even more remarkable. I could now see the tiny bolts that fastened the leg joints, and the tightly coiled iron springs, far finer than a human hair, that powered the gold foil wings. The faceted eyes were made of glass lenses flickering with rainbows as I walked around them, gathering up the silver lines in my hand.
Sorrow’s powers were over gold, silver, iron, copper, glass, and wood. There was gold on the bars, the mosquito was largely silver, with iron springs and copper wings and glass eyes. The wood was the larger form, the golem itself.
What did it all mean?
This may seem like a curious statement from a ghost, but I really have never thought much about the supernatural. Yes, my life was awash in magic. My best friend could jump over buildings, I’d been raised in a religion where I regularly witnessed men editing reality with their words, and I hung out on a daily basis with shape-shifters and ogres. I had no propensity toward skepticism, but I also never bothered to try to learn any magical arts. None even intrigued me. The art of truthspeaking I found morally reprehensible; the art of deceiving was difficult to unravel from the art of driving yourself insane; blood magic was an excellent avenue for contracting hideous parasitic diseases; and elemental magic was a good way to draw the unwelcome attention of dragons. I followed few rules in my unruly life, but “don’t annoy dragons” was one I faithfully obeyed.
Zetetic had told Aurora he’d become a deceiver after studying forty different types of magic and finding all of them to be valid, even if the underlying premises contradicted each other. Aurora had protested that they couldn’t all be true. Her fundamental assumptions about the structure of the universe were completely contrary to the fundamental assumptions of Father Ver, for instance. She’d said that some things must be false if other things were true, and asserted that it couldn’t be both night and day at the same time.
“Unless the world is a sphere,” Zetetic had answered.
He’d also said, “All truth is local.”
I think Zetetic’s point was that magic works because people believe it works. Magic flows from human faith. Maybe I wasn’t well educated in existing systems of magic, but if all magical systems were just the product of the mind, could I create new one? It wasn’t as if I was completely ignorant of magical thinking. I’d spent years of my life with my nose wedged between the pages of books. I’d learned a lot of symbolism in my studies. Did my current prison have some symbolic significance?
The mosquito was obvious. It’s a widespread belief that blood contains the soul. Ordinary mosquitoes drink blood, so spiritual mosquitoes drink spirit blood. As for the cage, well, a cage is a cage. It holds creatures against their will.
What about the materials? Gold was easy. It symbolized perfection and wealth, but also greed. Was I trapped by a golden cage because I was greedy? At first I shrugged off the notion. Money never meant a damn thing to me. But were there other aspects of greed I was overlooking? Certainly, booze had been a weakness in life. I’d been more than willing to steal it, and when I wasn’t stealing it directly, I was stealing other people’s possessions and selling them to keep the precious elixirs flowing.
Of course, before I could ever escape my golden cage, I had the more immediate problem of losing these silver wires running through me. Silver commonly symbolized purity and innocence, but also sagacity and lies. Old men with silver hair are respected for their wisdom; smooth liars are said to have a silver tongue. The children of wealthy men are said to be born with silver spoons in their mouths.
It’s impossible to think of wealthy men and not think of King Brightmoon, ruler of the Silver Isles. If he wasn’t the wealthiest man alive, he was certainly in the top five. The moon is often associated with silver. The most common coin in the world was a small disk of silver ringed with gold, minted by the king’s treasury, and commonly called a moon. Infidel, King Brightmoon’s daughter, was named Innocent, and she has silver hair. I respect her for her purity and innocence, despite knowing that the woman I’ve grown to love is merely the adult mask of a damaged child.
Could the silver somehow represent her? Was I trapped here by my love for Infidel?
It seemed at once self-evidently true and also obviously false. I had no evidence the silver mosquito had been designed to capture me; I had the impression it had been looking for any old ghost it might find. I was probably over-thinking this.
But could over-thinking lead me toward a magical art?
All the magicians I’d ever known had spent their whole lives in the study of a single concept, elevating it in importance above all else. I’ve witnessed some pretty amazing results; Ivory Blade, for instance, and his somnomancy, rending the veil between the dream realms and our own to give life to nightmares. It was a little late for me to start studying dreams, or to seriously puzzle out the aspects of the various elements that bound me like some amateur alchemist. But I’d spent my whole damn life trying to understand myself.
If all truth was local, could I somehow understand myself so fully that I could alter my local truths and be free?
I chuckled ruefully.
“Great,” I said, my voice tiny in the vastness of the wooden barrel. “I’m placing my hope in Staggermancy.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
SEA OF WINE
“W
AKE
!”
commanded
S
orrow.
I lifted my coconut head, feeling groggy. Had I been sleeping? Had my shrinking to explore the silver mosquito and golden cage been only a dream? The room was now dark. How long had I been out?
“Rise,” said Sorrow, just as the ship shuddered strongly enough to throw her from her feet, slamming her into the oak door. The room had seemed immaculate before, but the impact was enough to raise dust hidden in the crooks and crevasses of the wooden beams and planks. Sorrow coughed, raising her hand to cover her mouth. “We’re under attack!”
I stood, trying to make sense of the noises coming from every direction. The whole Romer family was shouting at once. A dog was baying as if there was a full moon. The timbers of the ship groaned and popped. Above all this, I could hear a woman’s voice shouting. It wasn’t Captain Romer; whoever it was had a thick accent I couldn’t quite place. The only words I was certain she’d shouted: “...Ivory Blade!”
Sorrow braced herself against the door as she climbed back to her feet. “You’re not to try to communicate with anyone. You’re forbidden to write! Beyond these restrictions, take whatever actions are needed to defend this ship, its crew and its passengers!”
I nodded, acknowledging the command. I glanced toward the desk and the overturned bottle of ink. I clenched and unclenched my fingers. To be expressly forbidden to write must be the ultimate tonic for writer’s block. If a quill had been thrust into my hand at that moment, I could have written volumes.
Sorrow threw herself onto the desk, stretching across it to reach her bed, tossing aside a pillow. She drew a yard long shaft of pitch black iron from between the mattress and the wall.
“If we face who I believe we face, a sword will prove mightier than a pen. Fight with all the savagery you can muster. Infidel’s life may be at stake.”
She handed me the iron shaft and I saw that it was indeed a sword, no doubt forged by her own fingers and drawn to a razor-sharp double-edge.
“Make haste!” she cried.
I threw open the door and lumbered into the narrow hall. All the cabins were open and the Romer girls were sitting in their bunks, looking only half awake. The last door in the hall jerked open, revealing Captain Romer’s quarters. Gale leapt into the hall, her tangled, sweaty hair fastened behind her neck with a scarlet ribbon. In the shadows of her cabin, I could see Brand’s blond hair bobbing as he struggled to pull on his boots.
Gale hadn’t bothered with boots; she was barefoot in her cotton britches, and her billowy blouse was only tied together across her breasts. The captain bounded up the stairs to the deck in two leaps, drawing her cutlass. I gave chase, though my bulky form slowed me in the tight hall. I nearly fell as the ship lurched once more. The timbers didn’t so much groan now as scream.
I emerged behind Captain Romer, who’d skidded to a stop on a deck slick with frost. It was night, as I’d guessed. Every lantern that hung in the rigging had gone dark, their flames extinguished beneath ice at least an inch thick coating everything in sight. Of course, “in sight” was somewhat limited by the pale fog that hung in the air, narrowing the world to a circle about twenty feet around me. The only light came from Captain Romer’s cutlass, which gave off an eerie phosphorescent glow.
Before us, on their knees, were the frozen bodies of Jetsam, Mako, and Rigger, Gale’s three sons, their faces locked in silent screams beneath a sheen of ice. I’d seen this magic before. Aurora had frozen more than her share of unruly patrons at the Black Swan, and the magic seldom proved fatal. Victims of this spell were simply shocked into unconsciousness by the sudden blast of cold, then held upright by their rigid ice exoskeletons. As long as they were freed before they suffocated, the three Romers would likely survive.
I could no longer hear Menagerie howling. I spotted a lump curled on the deck behind Mako’s bulky form that might have been a frozen dog, though it was difficult to tell given the fog, the dim lighting, and the limits of my monochrome vision.
We were surrounded by at least two dozen women. At first they appeared to be frozen just as the Romer boys were, since they were coated in ice. But, at a second glance, I saw that the ice was instead shaped into armor and swords. They were plainly conscious, staring at us with narrowed eyes, their breath coming out in gusts of fog. Their lips and cheeks were very dark; beneath their semi-transparent armor, none of them were clothed. It struck me as a rather uncomfortable way to go into battle. Not that they were going into battle just yet; they were merely standing, ice blades at the ready, as if waiting for a command.
“Captain Romer, I presume?” said a woman’s voice from just beyond the fog.
“What have you done to my sons?” Gale demanded.
“They are not yet dead,” the voice answered. Slowly, from the fog directly before us, a trio of figures emerged. In the center was a woman also in ice armor, but unlike the others, her ice was pale white rather than clear, concealing her body. She wore a cloak of white fox pelts, and carried a sword made of jagged, bubble-filled ice in the shape of a crescent moon. I’d seen this particular ice before; it was the same substance that tipped the Jagged Heart.
Flanking the woman were two creatures like nothing I’d ever seen. My years of association with Menagerie had given me a decent knowledge of scores of beasts from lands I couldn’t dream of. Somewhere in his travels he’d encountered rhinos and cobras and wolverines, or at least gotten hold of their blood. But given Menagerie’s fondness for big, toothy predators, I can’t believe he wouldn’t have added the monsters before me to his arsenal if he knew about them. They looked like a cross between a gorilla and a grizzly bear, walking upright, with snow-white pelts, long arms ending in dagger-claws, and gaping jaws filled with fangs.
I was vaguely aware of the Romer sisters climbing the stairs behind me. Sage was clever enough to bring a lantern with her, which greatly improved the lighting, though not my sense of dread. The pale light made the riggings look ghostly.
Infidel hadn’t put in an appearance yet. Had something happened to her? Or was she just taking her time getting dressed?
Captain Romer studied the woman in the white fox cloak. “Who are you? You obviously want something from us. State your demands.”