Nethereal (Soul Cycle Book 1) (4 page)

These claims of innocence weren’t outright lies. Nor were they the whole truth, but a grey market operator who wanted to stay in business took the proper precautions. Freigh’s wrinkled face and hoary beard testified to his career’s longevity. He did his double-dealing on the fringes where an almost current Guild license and feigned forgetfulness appeased the authorities more often than not.

Freigh knew he belonged to a dying breed. He had no idea how close to death he was.

Early in the
Sunspot’s
current voyage, her master had started to wonder if the troubles besetting his ship were worth the scant profits. He never expected much loyalty from crew or passengers, but both groups were suffering record attrition.

Freigh had inklings about the cause of the desertions, but he kept his own counsel. He mistook inhibition for prudence when in truth fear kept him from acting. His reluctance defied years of experience which told him that not all ether lore is superstition.

Only when the cost of training a new engineer’s mate put the ship in the red did Freigh face the truth. Like it or not there was a jinx on board, and he knew who it was.

The cargo master had alerted Freigh to the steady decrease in warm bodies aboard since they'd picked up Vaun Mordechai. The reporting officer had gone missing that night. They hadn't even been in port.

The captain was still tempted to dismiss the correlation as coincidence, but something about Mordechai was just plain wrong. He’d almost turned the passenger away at their first meeting, only to falter before the blank expression frozen upon that horrid porcelain mask.

Freigh took some consolation from Mordechai’s solitary tendencies. The man mostly kept to his cabin, unless one believed the reports that had him wandering the halls like a ghost.

Left with no alternative, Freigh decided to act. He marched up to Mordechai's door and stood there gathering his courage. At last, indignation trumped his dread. He was master on the
Sunspot
, and he wouldn't hesitate to inspect a cabin aboard his ship for fear of an eccentric recluse! His eventual knock was soft and brief.

The challenge went unanswered. Freigh turned to leave, but faint whispers filtering through the door gave him pause. Mordechai was the cabin’s only listed occupant. He should’ve been alone.

The steel hatch swung inward, pulled by a black arm that faded into the darkened room. Sterility replaced the corridor’s usual sour funk. Such cold spilled out that Freigh thought he stood before an open airlock. But no stars burned beyond that door.

The captain fancied that he peered into a mausoleum, disturbing a crouching corpse wrapped in a hooded grey cloak. Freigh saw with mounting fear that the passenger was without his death mask. Mordechai’s empty grey eyes were open, seeming like the lifeless facsimiles of a doll rather than the lights of a soul.

“The voyage has been cancelled due to lack of hands,” Freigh blurted. “I’m sure you can find alternate transport to Tharis.”

Mordechai said nothing. Dread brooded about him like a winter mist.

Freigh pulled the door shut so hastily that it slammed against the frame with a resounding crash. Again overcompensating for a misstep, the captain slunk away to the main corridor. Then he ran.

The master of the
Sunspot
awoke from a dream in which the wails of his crew filled the omnipresent blackness. Coming to himself in his darkened quarters, he breathed deeply to slow his racing pulse. The air tasted fowler than usual and chilled his sweaty skin.

Life support’s on the blink.

Something else struck Freigh as odd. It took him a moment to notice the silence. The only sounds he heard were those he made: his rapid breathing; the drumming of his heart; the whispering of sheets as he sat up in bed. There should have been other noises—the low humming of the engines, at least. It suddenly dawned on him that the
Sunspot
was no longer moving.

Before he could rise to check on the steersman, the captain noticed a faint noise. He paused to listen. The sound was unintelligible at first, but as he concentrated Freigh thought he heard raspy, excited whispering.

“…
Said—reaching—once—mutilation—responsible
…”

“…
See—stolen—restored—condemned
…”

The source of the muted chatter eluded Freigh and doubled his resolve to quit the room. He stretched out his left arm to light the bedside lamp, unaware of the bitterly cold blade thrusting out to block him. Screaming in pain, Freigh tore his hand away from the icy metal.

A deep blue glow limned the curved, charcoal grey sword held by a cloaked figure standing to the left of the bed. When Freigh's eyes adjusted, he saw that it was Mordechai. The passenger’s pale mask leered at him in a sterile reprimand.

“Leave me!” the captain begged, clutching his frostbitten palm. “Leave, and take whatever curse follows you!”

“We were agreed,” Mordechai said with the harshness of air venting through a hull breach. “I was to accompany you to the world circling Thera’s star.” Somehow, his icy voice grew still colder. “You have broken your word.”

“By Elathan’s eye!” Freigh gasped, his voice trembling. “Go. Please go!”

The cold blade vanished into Mordechai’s cloak. The indigo nimbus faded, plunging Freigh’s chamber back into pitch darkness.

“Mordechai?” Freigh dared to whisper after several moments had passed. When no answer came, his right hand crept over to turn on the bedside lamp. The mellow circle of light that touched all but the farthest corners showed that he was alone.

Freigh remained in his bed, rocking slowly and nursing his shriveled hand. Yet his wound was a trifle against his unspeakable relief at the monster's departure.

His consolation proved short-lived. The muffled chittering resumed, emanating from the lightless corners. Freigh clenched his eyes shut and longed for his nightmares’ return as cruel laughter burst from the shadows.

Teg arrived outside Deim’s quarters at dawn and rapped his knuckles on the door twice. He stepped back and waited in the tunnel, his patience thinning by the second. Eight hours had passed since Deim Cursorunda’s last turn at the Wheel. In Teg’s thinking there was no cause for him to still be asleep, no matter that Deim had made the run to rescue him.

Muttering a curse, Teg approached the door again. This time he gave three harder knocks at longer intervals.

The matte grey door slid open an inch. Through the crack Teg saw a smooth, olive-skinned face. “What time is it?” Deim asked groggily.

“Fifteen minutes after you should’ve been up,” said Teg. “Senior staff meeting’s in ten.”

Deim’s hand brushed unruly black hair from his eyes. The only one visible through the cracked door had puffy dark circles under it. “Go and tell Jaren I’ll be right there.”

“Think I’ll wait here,” said Teg, suspecting Deim would crawl back into bed if he left.

Deim shuffled away from the door but left it ajar. The hiss of running water sounded from within, followed by a flurry of general rummaging. Soon thereafter another sound issued from the room—one that held complex emotional associations for Teg.

Deim’s soft chanting filtered into the tunnel. Most of the atonal song was foreign to Teg, but the act it accompanied wasn’t. Right now, as he did each day, the junior steersman was kneeling at a small shrine carved into a corner of his rock-hewn chamber. Deim’s morning prayer stirred up memories of Teg’s brief childhood on Keth, where his mother had once practiced a similar observance.

Teg stretched muscles grown stiff from a night on a hospital cot and felt a stab of protest from his lower back. He tuned out the pain and focused on Deim’s chant. Most folk considered such devotions eccentric at best. Even Jaren, whose ancestors had deemed piety a virtue, saw no use in petitioning obscure powers who’d long since abandoned the universe—if they'd ever existed at all.

When anyone asked, Deim said that faith was worth holding onto, if only because the Guild said it wasn't. In Teg’s opinion, a young man of twenty-five should’ve outgrown such boyish fancies, but he respected the steersman’s commitment to something larger than himself.

The droning chant ceased, replaced by silence. “You done in there?” asked Teg. He peered through the slit and beheld the face of a goddess. The sight didn’t surprise him. Thera Souldancer’s grey-winged image had adorned the steersman’s back since early childhood when Deim’s late father had inked it there.

Teg saw Deim finish his meditation, rise, and snuff out the candle that stood its lonely vigil in the shrine’s alcove. Its sweet pungent scent wafted through the door, which opened wide a moment later to reveal the steersman standing in its frame fully dressed.

“After you,” said Deim, fastening his belt with a talisman resembling a giant lizard’s eye in amber—another heirloom that cast doubt on the Cursorundas’ taste in art.

Teg preceded Deim down a narrow tributary channel that slanted away from Melanoros’ flat peak in a wide spiral. The path intersected the bed of an underground river that had once issued from a chimney on the hill’s west face. Teg imagined how the falls must have looked plunging down the vertical shaft eons ago. The water was long gone, but the hidden cavern it had carved out made a perfect hangar for the
Shibboleth
.

The ship looked just as he’d left it the night before. Of course, he’d been delirious from shock at the time. Its black crystalline skin flowed in a series of graceful curves; the main hull flanked by a pair of forward-swept wings.

Teg noticed that the sound of Deim’s trailing footsteps had stopped. He looked back to see the steersman gawking at the ship with an idiot grin on his face. Deim’s pride was obvious, if unearned. He never tired of telling how his great grandfather had laid the hull with Jaren’s father in the last days of the Gen resistance.

To hear Deim tell it, his ancestral ether-runner had singlehandedly won a lost war. Teg knew better. The frigate was too small to trade broadsides with capital ships and too heavy for dogfights. More credible was Jaren’s account of its service raiding enemy convoys—a role the ship still served long after its builder had fled to Tharis. That the
Shibboleth
had flown a black flag longer than any other pirate craft wasn’t an idle boast.

“Hoping she’ll be yours some day?” Teg asked in a tone that left no doubt the question was rhetorical.

Deim’s smile remained as he faced the swordarm. “She already is,” he said before rushing past Teg and up the aft boarding ramp.

Teg ascended the ramp at a less hurried pace, savoring the lightning scent of ether. Once aboard, he headed for the small room directly aft of the bridge that the crew simply called Tactical. The chamber featured a six-sided conference table made of the same black alloy as the ship's hull. There Jaren presided over meetings of the senior crew, consisting of himself, Nakvin, Deim, and Teg, who entered to find just such a meeting underway.

Before taking a seat, Teg studied his fellow officers’ positions. Rank followed a flexible pecking order that varied with the business at hand. Jaren always sat at the head, but his seconds-in-command followed a complex rotation. Deim was co-owner of the ship and nominally Jaren's partner in financial matters, but Nakvin outranked him on the Wheel. Teg, the only senior crewman to have begun as a hired hand, technically answered to the other three; but even the captain deferred to him when weapons were drawn. Outsiders might have called the arrangement convoluted, but Jaren had let the chain of command develop as his officers worked together best.

Filling the empty chair across from Nakvin, Teg listened as she shared the fruit of her research on Temil. Her target had been a Guild Magus who’d developed a sudden interest in history: specifically, the time of the Great Purge. “Shan made several unlogged runs into former Resistance space,” she said. “After a few weeks he started up a small-time smuggling operation.”

“How’d we make him?” asked Teg.

“He used the same fence as us,” Jaren said.

Nakvin slid an obsidian plaque to the middle of the table. “These charts track the orbit of an unnamed asteroid. It looks like Shan stumbled onto an old Gen military base.”

Jaren picked up the plaque and scanned it. “You’re wrong about one thing,” he said. “This wasn’t a Gen base. From these notes, I’d say it’s a thuerg fortress.”

Teg raised his hand. “What’s a thuerg?”

“Nothing now,” Nakvin said. “They were a Middle Stratum race that fought beside the Gen during the Purges.”

“I thought
Gen
meant any nonhuman,” said Teg.

Jaren’s grip on the tablet visibly tightened. He seemed to stare right through it, emerald fire flashing in his eyes. “There were others,” he said, though Teg had to strain to hear it.

Facing his swordarm, Jaren spoke up. “In my father’s tongue,
Gen
means
our people
.”

“Were your people killed in the Purge?” Deim asked Nakvin. She and Jaren stared at the junior steersman as if seeing him for the first time.

“That's complicated,” Nakvin said. Her curt reply declared the subject off-limits.

“Getting back to current business,” Jaren continued, “Magus Shan robbed this grave. It’s all ours now that he’s in his.”