Nethereal (Soul Cycle Book 1) (14 page)

Jaren’s eyes showed more white than green. “What other ship?” he asked.

“A hauler. Old one, too. It's got our Guild Master by the ass.”

Jaren bared his teeth in a lupine grin. “The best cure for an itch you can’t reach is to scratch somewhere else,” he said. “Let's give Malachi some relief.”

Malachi raced through the courier’s darkened halls. The cries of his men assailed him from every direction, but he kept running for the hold. He could have stayed to help fend off the shadows that moved and whispered and struck when men’s backs were turned, but all would be in vain unless he dislodged the plague ship.

Malachi nearly forgot to activate his robe’s aura before entering the airless hold. He prepared for the worst but met no opposition. Wasting no time, he charged into the boarding tube’s rusted maw.

The Master was only mildly surprised to find no one aboard the ancient hauler. Certain that Peregrine would seize the chance to attack, he made for the bridge with all haste and found the hatch crudely cut from its frame.
The Enforcers made it this far at least,
he thought.

The wheelhouse was pitch black and cold as winter. Malachi fashioned a light and recoiled at what he saw. A figure in a frayed grey cloak sat cross-legged atop the Wheel. All three Enforcers lay sprawled before the dais like prostrate supplicants; their heads split in two.

The cloaked steersman raised his head. The glow of Malachi’s lesser Working pierced the shadows of his hood, revealing not a human face; but an expressionless, bone-white mask.

Malachi excelled at recognizing deviations from the Guild’s worldview. He began the motions of the Compass before his mind registered the anomaly, but his wits caught up in time to increase the Working’s potency threefold. Though any steersman would have discerned the Master’s lethal designs, the thing on the Wheel remained still.

A jet of fire that made a salamander's flame seem a spring breeze roared from Malachi’s hands. The Enforcers’ heads melted to glowing slag, and their supposedly heat-proof skin shriveled and flaked. The figure on the Wheel remained unchanged, as though rejected by the fire’s purity. The black eyeholes of his mask regarded the Master impassively.

In Malachi's reckoning, his foe had graduated from
misfit anomaly
to
brain-torturing paradox
. No Guild doctrine could exhaust the aberration he’d witnessed. “What is this
thing
?” he asked the surrounding darkness, his voice trembling for the first time since adolescence.

If the dead calm at the eye of a storm had a voice, it spoke then. “Tell me,” the abomination mocked. “Do five generations suffice for the Guild to forget their handiwork?”

Through the boarding tube and down the hauler's corridors, the sound of a grappler impact came clearly to Malachi’s ears. The noise almost distracted him from the grey-bearded man who came running out of the dark behind the Wheel.

“Help me!” the wild-eyed fellow begged Malachi. “He doesn’t kill them!”

The masked figure rose, drew an indigo-haloed blade from its cloak, and ran the raving greybeard through. Malachi felt caught in a nightmare as he watched the dying man’s skin turn bone pale. The victim’s last halting breaths sounded almost like hushed cackling. Instead of limply sliding from the blade, his body seemed to lose substance, becoming translucent as it darkened. Deranged whispers issued from the shadow that remained, and Malachi recognized the dead man’s voice.

“Join us,” said the thing on the Wheel. “Gather in the dark with us, and laugh with us immortally.”

Malachi once again made the signs of the Steersman's Compass. Like the great ships ruled by his Brotherhood, he vanished into the ether.

The raid wasn’t going as Teg had expected. Most couriers carried around fifty men. This one held only half as many—a number he knew because all of them ran screaming toward him as soon as the boarding tube opened. Even stranger, the guildsmen weren’t charging the pirates. They seemed to be fleeing something worse. “There’s room for them in Elathan’s Vault,” Teg told his men in defiance of superstition. “Hold the airlock.”

In the thick of the slaughter, Nakvin sent a curious message: “The prison transport’s moving again.”

Teg’s throbbing foot sharpened his tongue. “You deal with it. My hands are full.”

“Sure,” Nakvin said. “I’ll detach the grappler and leave you without a fallback position.”

A human Enforcer pulled the knife from his own belly and lunged at Teg.

“Are you still there?” Nakvin asked.

“Thankfully, yes,” Teg said after re-planting the blade in the man’s throat. “Something’s gotten into these bastards.”

“Just try not to miss any this time.”

“For the record, I didn’t miss any last time.”

“Well
someone’s
on that freighter,” said Nakvin. “Ether-runners can’t fly themselves.”

Teg ignored the affront to his professional pride and focused on the task at hand. When the heavy work was done, he ordered the airlock cleared and headed for the brig.
The prisoners had better be there,
he thought,
or I’ll shoot Malachi from a torp tube without killing him first.

Teg entered the brig to gruff cheers and scattered applause from twenty prisoners who stood reaching their hands through the bars. Only one remained silent, averting his wide and sullen face from his rescuer. “You have a mind to stay, Crofter?” Teg asked while picking the cell’s lock.

“You got a long memory,” the gunner said. “This is the perfect time to pay me back.”

“I've got all the time in the world for that,” Teg said as the cell door swung open. “What I don't have time for is talk.”

The liberated pirates poured from their cells, howling for joy and revenge. Crofter crept past Teg as if expecting a sudden blow. When none came, he scurried from the cell block. Teg shook his head and followed the others.

“I hate repeating myself,” Teg told Jaren. “So for the last time, the only bodies we found on that hauler belonged to three tin cans. And they were already slag when we showed up.”

Jaren paced back and forth across the courier's bridge. “So it was a decoy?” He asked. “Like the prison ship?”

“No,” said Teg. “Malachi pulled his death trap from a salvage yard. That hauler was still in service—ghost ship or not.”

Though he hated to admit it, Jaren knew that Teg was right. The provisions and personal effects aboard the
Sunspot
proved that she’d left port with a full crew. But judging by her neglected state, the crew had abandoned her weeks ago.

The mystery troubled Jaren less than it would have just a few days prior. It vexed him far more to be rescued by sinister forces that came and went on a whim, trailing the Void in their wake. Even worse, his dubious benefactors had probably aided Malachi’s escape. “It’s Ambassador's Island all over again,” he said under his breath.

Jaren approached the Wheel. “Are you absolutely sure that every inch of this ship is clear?” he asked Deim.

“The only place we didn't check was the hold,” said Deim. “I doubt Malachi's in there. Nothing that breathes could’ve survived in that vacuum this long, even with an aura.”

Jaren considered ordering the hold searched anyway, but it wasn’t worth the risk. The breach had become a gaping hole since the
Shibboleth
had dislodged the
Sunspot
.

The bridge doors parted to admit Nakvin, who’d just finished towing the hauler. A semblance of order had returned to her flowing hair. But dark circles underlined her eyes, which fixed themselves on Jaren. “Don't wear yourselves out looking for Malachi,” she said.

“You don't think he's here?” Jaren asked.

“He made off with the prison ship,” she said.

Jaren furrowed his brow. “How did he get over there?”

Nakvin's voice darkened. “I left the Brotherhood when I was a Journeyman,” she said, “but I learned enough to fear the Masters.”

“Kelgrun’s training methods must’ve changed,” said Deim, “I hated him sometimes, but I was never afraid.”

Nakvin cocked her head as though Deim were a child who’d asked where the ether was. “The Brotherhood is just that,” she said, “an exclusive fraternity. They don't hand out Masters' robes just for hearing lectures and logging flight hours. Even Masters might teach some Workings illegally, but they only share the best trade secrets with members whose loyalty is beyond question. ‘At one with the Guild; at one with the ether.’”

Teg spoke up. “They can enter the ether without a ship?”

“I think some of them can,” Nakvin said.

“Didn’t stop you from blaming me, though.”

Nakvin folded her arms. “Malachi still got past you. I’m just explaining how.”

Jaren sighed. “We’re not leading Malachi's backup much of a chase with a Guild courier and a moth-eaten hauler in tow.”

“Fair point,” said Teg. “Which one do we scuttle?”

Jaren thought for a moment. “Deim will pilot the courier,” he said. “It’s the first installment of what Malachi owes us. Nakvin will take the
Shibboleth
, and you'll both tow the hauler between you.”

Nakvin rolled her silver eyes. “I just manned the Wheel through a firefight. Now you want me to navigate that Bifron minefield with a derelict in tow?”

Jaren knew that taking the
Sunspot
meant increased risk, but he couldn’t resist the urge to maximize his gains from Malachi’s defeat. Besides, the hauler’s possible connection to Ambassador’s Island raised questions that Vernon seemed well placed to answer.

“I can’t trust anyone else with the job,” Jaren told Nakvin. “Let’s get underway before the Guild catches us bickering.”

“Welcome back, Mr. Peregrine,” Vernon said when Wald showed Jaren in.

Jaren shuffled into a cramped office lit as dimly as a Stranosi restaurant, but which smelled of synthetic fibers instead of zesty foods. Since the project supervisor probably could have claimed any room on Caelia, he supposed that Vernon liked his offices small and dark. In fact, Vernon’s Mithgar Navy connections and odd speech raised the possibility that he actually hailed from the First Sphere’s ancient Stranos region.

Vernon stood. Underlit by the lone desk lamp, his face appeared even more corpselike. “You performed admirably,” He said. “Please extend my congratulations to your intrepid crew.”

“I will,” Jaren said. “But I’ve got some questions first.”

“We will gladly assume responsibility for the damage your ship sustained,” Vernon said with a dismissive wave. “Repairs are already underway.”

“It’s not the
Shibboleth
I’m curious about,” said Jaren. “There’s a lot I can’t explain about the hauler we towed in. You seem like the man to ask.”

Vernon’s gaunt face took on a jovial cast. “What gave you that impression?”

“Two vanishing acts I saw in the last few days,” Jaren said. “First a man who says he works for you disappears an Enforcer squad at Ambassador’s Island. Then a hauler crew decides to bail out with no gear or provisions, but their empty ship turns up to save me from the same guildsman who ran the Island sting.”

Vernon uttered a bemused grunt. “How did the hauler aid your escape?” he asked.

“It rammed the courier’s hold.”

“Is that all?”

Jaren thought for a moment. “The courier was only carrying half the normal crew for its size,” he said.

“Did the guildsmen behave strangely in any way?” asked Vernon.

“They’d been whipped into a panic before we came on board,” Jaren said. “I don’t know if it was the hauler, but something scared them enough to try boarding
us
.”

Vernon cocked his head to one side. “Are you familiar with the concept of Teth?”

“Besides the ninth letter of the Gen alphabet?” Jaren asked, unable to keep from chuckling. “Isn’t Teth what the Void’s supposed to be made of?”

“Teth is more than prana’s opposite,” Vernon said. “Midras’ cult held it to be the very stuff of evil, which could corrupt even a just man. The priests of Thera went further, claiming that the descent of the Well’s light reveals and guides the paths of all creatures. The inexorable dimming of that light—the flow of Teth—is the engine of fate itself.”

Jaren’s amusement turned to disbelief. “So you’re telling me that evil has a will of its own, and it sent a ship to pull my ass out of the fire?” He shook his head. “Skip the mythology lesson. I’m just asking if you arranged the hauler.”

“I assure you Mr. Peregrine,” Vernon said, “that neither I nor any agent in my employ aided your operation beyond our initial material support.”

“That’s all I wanted to know,” Jaren said.

Vernon resumed his seat and gestured toward the empty chair facing his desk. “Now that your curiosity about my role in recent events is satisfied, perhaps we can discuss your role in Project Exodus.”

Jaren sank into the plush chair and set his boots on Vernon’s desk. “I want to see the shipyard,” he said.

“Of course,” Vernon said. “Your request must be cleared with the foreman. Please allow us time to make arrangements.”

“Sure,” Jaren said. “Get me my father’s notes while I wait.”

“You’d better come and see this,” Teg told Jaren, who’d been awakened by the mercenary’s knocking.