Solatium (Emanations, an urban fantasy series Book 2) (45 page)

Distantly, I heard Williams saying something, but I lost track of it. I was drowning in the pain of being drawn on. It started as a trickle, then became a flood.

I became aware of an intricate conglomeration of trillions and trillions of tiny things. My knowing and controlling expanded to each and every one of them, and they all changed, just like that.

I woke up in bed, feeling sick.

Williams was sitting against the far wall. He didn’t look too good, either.

I looked out the window. The light had that golden quality that means late afternoon. Had I lost a few hours, or more than a day?

“Did she drain me?”

“Yes.”

I’d never heard “yes” sound so much like “I’m going to kill her.”

No wonder I felt so bad. It was like having mono and the worst-ever hangover at the same time. I lay there, struggling with my stomach, which really wanted to empty itself.

Not that it should have anything in it.

I tried to remember the last time I ate. The image of that morning’s breakfast filled my mind: a plate of greasy reptile-meat sausages laid over oatmeal.

Oh god.

I buried my face in the pillow and tried to think of something else. Anything else.

The bargain Williams had driven on my behalf came to mind.

“What’s fealty?”

“A service relationship. She’s your vassal. You protect her. She obeys you.”

“‘Vassal’ as in servant?” I stared at him, horrified. “You made her my slave?”

He shrugged. “Might keep her in line.”

“I don’t want to ‘keep her in line.’”

“Don’t worry about it. You can’t enforce it, anyway.”

“So? A lot of people take oaths seriously.”

“Counting on it.”

I lay there, not really believing it. It was ridiculous for someone like me to have a vassal. I mean, I was a vassal myself, basically. What Williams said described the relationship powers had to their Nolanders — we obeyed them, they protected us. Sort of. Sometimes.

I forced myself to take a few deep breaths.

Whatever
.

I could tell Mizzy to forget about the whole fealty thing the next time I saw her. There was no point getting into a knock-down, drag-out with Williams over such a temporary problem.

“So, did it work? Is she okay?”

“Yeah.”

I waited for him to expand, but he didn’t. Instead, he looked away.

I started to get a bad feeling.

“What aren’t you telling me?”

“Nothing. She’s fine.”

He still wasn’t looking at me.

He’s a god-awful liar. Even worse than I am.

I filed that one away for future reference.

“Does she look forty again?”

“Younger.”

“Is that why you’re so angry? ’Cause she gave herself a few extra years? If so, I’m sure it’ll be short-lived. If she could keep herself looking twenty, I think she would’ve been doing it before.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Williams. You keep this up, I’m going to freak out. What’s going on?”

“Nothing.” He stood and went to the door, still not looking at me. “Get some rest. I’ll have some food sent.”

Okay. It’s okay. I’ll figure this out.

“Fine. Tell the galley to leave out the poison.”

He gave an amused grunt and then left.

I lay back, staring at the bunk above me.

What wasn’t he telling me? Had Mizzy used my capacity to do something other than a youth-working?

Had she hurt someone?

That couldn’t be it. If that had happened, Williams would tell me. Tell me and berate me for being so stupid. He’d have done it the minute I woke up. Scratch that. He’d have woken me up early just to yell at me.

I wracked my brains, but I couldn’t think of anything.

Ida knocked on the door with some food, but I still felt sick to my stomach. I asked her a few careful questions, but I didn’t pick up anything strange. She just seemed relieved everyone was okay.

She helped me visit the head.

Eventually, I fell back asleep. When the Serhan dream woke me some hours later, Williams was there.

I leaned back against the rail, squinting. After several days recovering belowdecks, I found the bright sunlight overwhelming.

Mizzy was walking toward me across the deck.

I didn’t feel ready to talk to her. I mean, what do you say to someone you’ve enslaved? “Oops, sorry about that — let’s forget it”?

She stopped in front of me. She looked scared. And young. Younger than me.

I’d been wrong about the Marilyn Monroe comparison. She was even prettier than Marilyn.

I groped for a compliment, but she spoke first.

“I wanted to tell you I was sorry. I mean, I didn’t know. I just … I couldn’t find your capacity, at first, and when I found it, I thought … it was so strange. It seemed all wrong. Dead, almost. But there was a little place that seemed okay, and I started the working, and suddenly there was just so much. So much power. Like I was drowning.” She shuddered. “So I just poured it into the working — just kept putting it in until I could stop the flow.”

“Um …”

“I’m sorry it was so uncontrolled, and that I took so much,” she said. “If there’s some way I can atone, I’m yours to command, of course.”

“I don’t want —”

Williams’s hand closed painfully around my upper arm.

“She accepts your offer of service,” he said, and hauled me away.

He pulled me all the way down to the ship’s stern and backed me up against the rail.

I craned my neck to look around him. Mizzy was still standing where we’d spoken. She was watching us with an expression that clearly said,
Who are these crazy weirdos?

I looked back at Williams. “What’s your problem?”

His eyes narrowed, and he got right down in my face. “You will not release her from service. Not ’til we get where we’re going.”

I just stared at him. All I had to do was say a few words to Mizzy. This wasn’t something he could control.

He rubbed his forehead as though I gave him the world’s biggest headache.

“You’re new to this,” he said. “Just take my advice.”

“Look, I’m motivated by my values. You’re motivated by what Cordus wants. He wants me alive, and I’m usually down with that, so we’ll be in agreement. But not on this. I don’t want to stay alive by doing something I think is indefensible.”

You might think that little speech would win me some respect, but he looked at me like I was a three-year-old who’d just demanded for the twenty-seventh time that her dead goldfish stop being dead.

“She has to travel with us anyway because Gates said so,” Williams said. “If her oath to you makes her a little less dangerous along the way, great. Take advantage of that. You can let her go when you reach the ice men. They’ll —”

He glanced up, over my head, then did a double take, his eyes widening. He grabbed me, stuck me under his arm like a package, and raced toward the bow. When we reached Mizzy, he dumped me on the deck, and knelt beside me.

I looked back.

A huge column of dark water was rising behind the ship, chasing us and closing fast. It was wider than the ship’s beam and taller than the mast. Inside the column, pale things were moving. I couldn’t really make them out.

“Ribbons,” Mizzy murmured.

“What do they do?”

“Engulf. Consume.” Her voice was weirdly flat and distant.

I looked around desperately for Rykthas. She’d been propelling the ship this morning. We needed to go a hell of a lot faster.

My eye finally picked her out. A crewman was helping her up off the deck. I realized we weren’t moving. The thing must’ve broken her working.

The water column bellied up to the ship’s stern and began curving up and around. It took a second for me to realize it wasn’t touching the ship. There must’ve been a barrier around the whole thing, like a huge bubble.

“That you?”

Williams nodded. Then he grabbed my hand, and the invasion and the pulling and the pain started.

I felt his barrier. Nothing fancy, this time — just compressed nitrogen — but very, very large. Just maintaining a barrier that big was hard, but there was also this incredible weight pressing on it. So heavy. It took every ounce of focus to keep the barrier from buckling.

The water column moved around the ship, leaning on the barrier all the way.

As it came closer, I saw what was inside — endlessly long, fuzzy ropes of something or other, coiling languidly, delicately. It looked like tinsel. I searched for a head, eyes, some sort of organization, but there was nothing.

The column stopped amidships, leaning and leaning. It was pressing on the center of the long side of the barrier — the weakest part.

So heavy
.

We were so focused on the pressure we didn’t notice the small opening being drilled at deck level — not until a thick shaft of water with a string of tinsel inside reached out and tagged the bare skin of a passing crewman. The man screamed and collapsed in a seizure. The water shaft thickened rapidly as the hole in the barrier got bigger. Within seconds, it engulfed the man and sucked him out into the column.

We isolated the hole in the barrier and knitted it up, but too late.

Now it became a game. We tried to find the holes being drilled, but the barrier was so big and the holes started out so small — just a gap between atoms. It took a lot of attention, and then the whole column would lean on us harder. Every time we focused on the pressure, a shaft got through and someone died.

One of them must’ve been the ship’s barrier-worker. I hadn’t realized he’d been helping, but when his contribution vanished, god did I feel it.

As though from far away, I could hear Rykthas ordering everyone to get below.

The pressure became unbearable. I pushed back against it, and twenty new holes appeared.

Then Terry stepped out in front of me.

He was holding something roundish and dark, like an avocado. He was smiling ruefully, like it’d been a great party, and he was sorry to go, but it was getting late. Somewhere nearby, Mizzy was screaming his name. Then some small, metallic thing fell from his hands and stepped into the thick rope of water and ribbon I’d let through just for him. He disappeared into the column, and I put everything I had into hardening the barrier. There was a violent concussion, and the ribbons’ column went white inside. Then it collapsed, cascading over the dome of my barrier in an avalanche of frothy, pinkish bubbles.

I sat on the bunk in Williams’s cabin, holding Mizzy’s hand.

She’d cried and cried, had told me all the things I didn’t want to hear — how sweet Terry had been as a baby, his favorite color when he was seven, the first time a girl broke his heart. She might’ve looked younger, but she’d helped raise him, just as she had Ida. She’d known him for every single day of his twenty-eight years.

I listened. It was the least I could do.

I knew it was Williams who’d made the decision — Williams who’d understood Terry’s intentions, Williams who’d allowed the ribbon in to take him. But it felt at the time like I was doing it, and I couldn’t shake that feeling now.

And why should I? I might not have been in the driver’s seat, but Williams couldn’t have done it without me.