“And would someone care to explain why we’re no longer in the material world?”
“No,” said Mako. Then, with his meaty hand still clamped on Brand’s throat, he turned to Rigger and Sage. “We’re trapped here until Mother recovers. The two of you keep your eyes peeled for any trouble. We’ve sent many an enemy to the Sea of Wine, and I’d hate for them to show up now.”
“If they do show up, there’s nothing we can do,” said Rigger, shaking his head sadly. “Without Mother, there’s no wind.”
“If there’s no wind, no ghost ships can come hunting us,” said Sage, trying to sound positive.
“They could have row-boats,” said Jetsam.
“I’m taking mother to her cabin,” said Mako. “We can do nothing but wait for her to sober up.” He turned toward Jetsam, and Cinnamon who stood nearby. “Take Brand and the dwarf below and place them in manacles. Ordinarily I’d keelhaul a stowaway, but the dwarf is plainly insane. I’m not going to punish a man for losing his mind.”
He tightened his grip on Brand’s throat as he brought his face close and smiled. It was a smile from a nightmare, saw-toothed and twice as wide as it should have been. “As for you, I haven’t figured out your game. I should just rip out your throat for helping conceal a stowaway.”
“Ma will tan your hide if you kill her dryman without asking permission,” Jetsam said as he guided the dwarf toward the hatch. “Remember how mad she got at Levi?”
“I’m not afraid of Ma,” Mako said. “But I’ll wait until she sobers up before deciding this scoundrel’s fate.”
He stepped back as Cinnamon moved forward and took Brand by the hand. Brand’s mouth suddenly puckered.
“You’ll go below and play nice or my sister will put a taste in your mouth that will have you cutting out your own tongue. Understood?”
Brand nodded.
Satisfied that Brand was neutralized, Mako walked toward Purity, unconscious on the deck where Bigsby had hogtied her. “Rigger, since she’s bound, use your power to guide her down to my cabin. Once Ma’s tucked in, I’ll see to it that this witch is stripped of her armor and properly disarmed.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” said Sorrow.
Mako raised his eyebrows. “With my mother incapacitated, I’m captain. The safety of this ship is my responsibility.”
“That is not in dispute, but I don’t care for your tone. I fear that you mean to abuse this woman in her helpless state.”
Mako’s face twisted into a snarl. “Choose your words with care. I’ve won’t stand here and take your baseless slander.”
“And I’ll not stand by as a defenseless woman is strip-searched by a lone man, no matter what his reputation.”
“I can help,” said Sage. “Though I assure you she’d suffer no abuse if Mako were alone.”
Sorrow nodded. “This is acceptable. But search her and bind her properly so that she doesn’t lose any limbs to gangrene. Gag her so that she may not speak. Don’t interrogate her until I can properly construct iron bands of negation to baffle any delayed magic she might seek to trigger with her words.”
“Good call,” said Sage. “There’s something strange about her. Her internal light is all indigo.”
“You can see auras?” Sorrow asked, sounding surprised.
“I see lots of stuff,” said Sage, shrugging.
“How long will it take you to construct these bands?” grumbled Mako.
“As long as needed,” said Sorrow, now kneeling next to Infidel. “It’s not something that should be rushed. Something that must be rushed, however, is treatment of this woman’s injuries. This wound on her temple will require stitches.” She looked up at me. “Drifter, take her to my quarters. Bring the hammer. Its light will prove useful.”
As the various Romers vanished down the stairs with their captives, I grabbed the Gloryhammer in my gloved hand. Not having any convenient place to carry it, I improvised and shoved it down the back of my shirt. I knelt and scooped Infidel into my arms. I lifted her as a groom lifts a bride across a threshold, although whatever romance the moment may have held was negated by the two inch gash on the side of Infidel’s head that gushed blood with every heartbeat. Praying that Sorrow could mend Infidel’s wound, I stepped onto the staircase and descended once more into the dark hold.
S
ORROW’S LIPS WERE
pressed tightly together as I arranged Infidel on the bed. Sorrow removed her cape and hung it on the back of the door, then pulled the front of my shirt open. The Gloryhammer along my spine was powerful enough to push beams of sunlight through the gaps in the barrel staves that formed my chest. The gore on Infidel’s brow glistened with the illumination.
“Who knew you’d make such a convenient lantern?” Sorrow asked as she slid a towel under Infidel’s head. She went to the table in the corner and washed her hands in the basin. She then brought over the pitcher of water and a second towel and began to clean Infidel’s wound.
“As you may suspect, I’ve some experience tending to scalp injuries,” she said. “They always look worse than they are.”
It took only a moment to dab away the blood. Sorrow then produced a razor and scraped away a few fine hairs that extended down from Infidel’s scalp. She swabbed the area with clear fluid from a small bottle – vodka, from the smell of it. Infidel’s face clenched, despite her unconscious state.
“This wound isn’t so bad,” said Sorrow. “But I must work fast. She may wake soon. Move one step to your left.”
I did, as Sorrow turned Infidel’s head so that the light fell directly on the gaping flesh. I wondered for a moment if I was seeing bone beneath the gash, but it was all just amber on amber to my wooden eyes. Sorrow produced a silver needle that looked too large for the task at hand. I expected her to thread the needle, but instead the metal came to life, wriggling like a serpent, stretching and tapering until it was as thin as a hair before plunging into Infidel’s flesh. The silver filament rose and fell, rose and fell, moving through the torn skin as if it had a will of its own. In less time than it’s taken me to tell it, it reached the end of the wound and tugged itself tight. Sorrow dabbed her handiwork with a fresh corner of the towel and wiped away what blood had bubbled up during the procedure. Now that the skin was clean, no further blood seeped through. Infidel’s wound was neatly stitched together, the silver thread so fine as to almost be invisible.
Finished with her work, Sorrow turned back the bed’s linens and commanded me to place Infidel beneath them. With her injury turned away from me, my wife looked as if she was merely sleeping.
Going once more to the basin, Sorrow washed her hands. Without looking at me, she said, “You’re forbidden to injure me or in any way seek to take revenge. Should anyone attempt to harm me, even Infidel, you’re obligated to defend me.”
I nodded.
Drying her hands, she crossed back to the desk. She lifted one of my notebooks, my favorite one, actually. I used a lot of different materials for writing. Parchment, made of old animal hide, is fine to write on, but the pages are thick, so you don’t get many pages in a book. There’s also papyrus. It’s the cheapest writing surface available, just flattened reed mats woven together by river pygmies. It’s a pain to write on and it falls apart with use, but you can buy more than you can carry for the cost of a pint of ale. And then there’s paper; the Church of the Book manufactures this sacred material at a remote nunnery on the Isle of Apes. Supposedly it’s made of ground-up trees boiled in nun’s urine impregnated with spices. This seems an unlikely recipe, though Wanderers who trade with the island tell me that the fumes from the nunnery make their eyes sting five miles out to sea, so who knows?
Paper is smooth, white as cotton, and thin enough that a book barely an inch thick can have a hundred flexible, yet durable pages. Its main drawback is that it’s expensive as hell. The only reason I own so many notebooks made from paper is that most knights and priests of the Church of the Book own them. A steady stream of these people have flowed to Commonground over the years to kill the woman I love. They’d failed their quests, but succeeded in supplying me with good writing material.
The notebook on the desk had belonged to a church assassin who called himself Penumbra. He’d attacked Infidel with shadow swords, blades that could hurt her even when she was invulnerable. So it had been a particular pleasure to loot his backpack and find this notebook. It was sturdy, bound in black leather, yet compact, just five inches across and seven inches tall. It had fit nicely in my jacket pocket, and except for ten pages of coded notes at the front that I’d never figured out, the rest of it was blank. When I’d gotten it, I’d been so enamored that I vowed I would write something special within its pages, an epic poem, perhaps, or my own authoritative history of the Vanished Kingdom that would replace my grandfather’s famous book as the epitome of scholarship.
Seven years later, no pen of mine had ever marked the notebook, though Sorrow had now filled another ten pages with her looping, elegant script. Turning beyond the last page she’d written anything on, Sorrow cut a blank sheet loose with the razor she’d used to shave Infidel’s temple. She folded the paper into a long, tapered wedge, flattening it out, then turned toward me. It looked a bit like an origami snake that had been stepped on. She stood on tip-toes to place the paper sculpture between my gaping coconut jaws, then used silver thread to sew it into place, or so I assume. I couldn’t see what she was doing, obviously, but the sound of a silver needle punching through paper and coconut husk has a rather distinctive rasp within the confines of a hollow skull.
When she was done, she stepped back and said, “You may now speak.”
“Really?” I asked. If I’d had eyebrows, they would have shot up. I
could
speak! Sort of. “Is that me?” I said, cringing at hearing the words. “I sound... funny.”
“Don’t be ungrateful,” said Sorrow. “You’re making words without lungs, throat, palette, teeth, or lips. You have only a paper tongue that vibrates to approximate the noises you would have made in life. You should be amazed at the cleverness of my craftsmanship, not critical.”
“I sound like a squirrel playing a kazoo,” I protested, though no tone of protest came through. I could neither shout nor whisper; all the sounds coming from my paper tongue were of roughly the same volume, which wasn’t terribly loud. On the other hand, if anyone had come aboard the
Black Swan
with a squirrel that played a kazoo, I would have paid money to see it. Perhaps Sorrow was right; the fact that I could make recognizable words at all was a thing worthy of note. When had I become so jaded?
“I saw the letters on the beach. You’re Stagger. These are your notes.”
“Yes,” I said, then nodded toward the bed. “And this is my wife. Will she be okay? Why hasn’t she woke up?”
“Infidel was sound asleep when the ice-maidens attacked; I could hear her snoring in the cabin next door. Her body was already primed for slumber. It’s too soon to worry.”
“It’s never too soon to worry,” I said. “And It’s not just her I’m concerned about. According to the Black Swan, she’s pregnant with my daughter.”
“The Black Swan is a manipulator of the highest order,” said Sorrow. “I would place no faith in what she says unless there’s a written contract involved, and then you should read every last word of the fine print.”
“Now that you know who I am, will you set me free?”
“You’re valuable to me,” said Sorrow. “I invested a tremendous amount of time and effort in creating a soul-catcher. I’m not prepared to throw that away. Besides, you were an unbound spirit when I found you. It was only a matter of time before you faded away to nothingness. You can last much longer now that you’re embodied again.”
“You said I would burn out.”
“It’s true. Your life energy isn’t infinite. But this was true before you were captured as well. For now, it is to the benefit of both of us that you occupy this form.”
I wasn’t certain of this. I’d enjoyed my freedom as a ghost, the ability to flit around as I pleased, my thoughts instantly translating into movement. On the other hand, this new body did have a tongue. I desperately wanted to talk to Infidel.
“Fine,” I said, crossing my arms. “Having a body again, even this clunky wooden one, isn’t completely unwelcome. But from now on, I’m not your slave to boss around. I’ll work with you as an equal partner.”
She snorted. “You’re in no way my equal, ghost.
You
are the echo of a drunken tomb-looter whose life’s work amounts to a few hundred pages of barely legible notes.
I
am a master of fundamental materials, driven to remake the world. A century from now, you will be completely forgotten, while I will be remembered as the woman who freed humankind from the authoritarian clutches of a wicked church and ushered in a new age of enlightenment and equality.”
I laughed, or tried to. My paper tongue turned it more into the sound of sneezing.
“Are you amused?” asked Sorrow.
“For someone smart, you’re remarkably ignorant of the word ‘hubris.’”
“This would apply to me only if I felt confidence in excess of my capacity,” said Sorrow. “I assure you, I never fail at my goals.”
“You have a self-inflicted hole in your head that’s killing you,” I said.
She frowned. She looked ready to change the subject. Glancing back at the maps spread on the desk, she asked, “Do you know where to find the Witch’s Graveyard?”