Nethereal (Soul Cycle Book 1) (28 page)

“What cause have you to raise arms?” Sulaiman asked. His rigid composure gave Teg the impression that a statue had spoken.

Stochman kept his gun trained on Jaren. “The Gen thinks he’s got the better of us because the Wheel only accepts the kid and his whore,” he said through lips twisted halfway between a sneer and a grin. “They’re scheming on a private channel.”

Sulaiman’s eyes seemed to pierce Jaren’s mind. “Even now you would sow deceit?” said the priest.

“You’re jumping to conclusions,” Jaren said. “Nakvin just needs time to work.”

“I disagree,” Stochman said. “What she needs is the proper incentive.” He cocked his revolver. “She has ten seconds to lift me aboard. Tell her.”

“Nice plan,” said Teg, looking at Stochman through his zephyr’s sights. “There’s only one problem. Anyone you kill will just get up again.”

Stochman grinned and pointed his gun at Deim. “I doubt he will. All that god-bothering has to count for something. How about it, priest?”

“The boy’s heart is pure,” said Sulaiman, “if not wholly his own.”

Mikelburg drew on Stochman, who just laughed. “All the gods that ever were can go fuck themselves,” Stochman said. His gaze darted between the pirates and settled on Deim. “We can shoot each other all day. I just have to shoot him once.”

Teg glanced at Deim. The kid looked almost as calm as Sulaiman, which was somehow worse than if he’d been panicking.

“You need Deim as much as we do,” Jaren said.

“Lucky for me, another Steersman is already aboard,” Stochman said. “She has five seconds to bring me on or start pulling double shifts.”

Jaren glared at the commander and said, “Nakvin, bring Stochman up.”

The next moment stretched into eternity. Teg kept his gun on Stochman, whose gun was trained on Deim. Between himself and Mikelburg, Stochman’s death was certain—not that it mattered. The commander twitched, and Teg’s trigger finger tightened.

The blue stud in Deim's ear flashed and chimed. Seconds later, he was enveloped in what looked like a tube of immaculately clear glass. An instant after that, he was shooting upward. Mikelburg went next.

Stochman was too busy muttering curses at the sky to see Jaren rush him. Jaren slapped the gun from his hand. It clattered over the ledge and vanished into the abyss.

Jaren smiled at Stochman and Sulaiman. “You two can wait here,” he said a moment before he was taken up.

“Bastard Gen!” Stochman raged.

“Your captain has broken faith,” Sulaiman said.

“Sorry,” said Teg. “It's for the best.”

Sulaiman did something that Teg would've thought impossible. As the final tube descended, the priest reached out and deftly plucked the blue stud from Teg's ear. The column of force enveloped Sulaiman, launching him upward in a streak of crimson and silver.

“You got my message,” Jaren said as he stepped from the airlift. “I’m glad I didn’t imagine yours.”

“My other gifts are magnified here,” said Nakvin. “It stood to reason that we could share thoughts at a distance.”

“I’m still wondering why we had to,” Jaren said. “Why didn’t you answer my sendings?”

Nakvin pointed to the mostly dissembled airlift console. “I used my stud for spare parts.”

“I’m just glad you brought me up first,” said Deim.

“You’re welcome,” Nakvin said. “I almost feel bad for Sulaiman, though.”

As if summoned by his name, the priest rose through the last open circle in the deck. Jaren’s eyes widened as the imperious figure strode toward him with the click of boot heels and the ring of mail. “Well met, friend,” Sulaiman said grimly. “Your cutthroat would have made me the fool, had he been quicker.”

“
Teg
was too slow?” Nakvin marveled.

Jaren met Sulaiman’s burning glare. The two of them stood silent for a long moment before Jaren spoke. “We can sort out our differences later. Right now, there’s work to do.”

“Truly,” Sulaiman said, “and you know not how perilous a work it is.”

“You’ve fought Gibeah before?”

A haunted look passed over Sulaiman’s face. “Hell holds worse horrors than the baals.” He suddenly broke eye contact and wandered a short distance into the hangar. “I see that Stochman also deals falsely,” he said, “or else he is blinder than his manner suggests.”

“What do you mean?” asked Nakvin.

“Are you all so witless?” Sulaiman asked. “This is no vessel for men. It is a cage for…” Trailing off, he turned and started toward the main hull.

“I think our hound’s caught a scent,” Jaren said.

“What about Teg?” asked Deim.

Jaren offered his stud to Mikelburg, who was fussing with the airlift console’s exposed guts. “Send this down to him,” he said.

The engineer rubbed a hand over his bald head. “Sure,” he said, “if you’ve got a few hours. Sulaiman’s stunt burned out the tracking sensor, and the console’s rigged looser than a Byport doxy’s garters.”

Nakvin rested a hand on her hip. “I had to improvise,” she said dryly.

“Never mind,” Jaren said through gritted teeth. “Me and Deim will follow Sulaiman. Mike, get Nakvin to the bridge.”

“For a man who’s never seen an ether-runner, Sulaiman sure knows his way around,” Deim said as he and Jaren caught up with the priest.

Considering how the
Exodus
played havoc with direction and distance, Jaren had to agree.
Maybe the man really is following some kind of divine guidance,
he thought. But Jaren’s newfound faith wavered when he saw where Sulaiman’s god had led him.

“The officers’ lounge?” Deim wondered aloud.

Jaren grabbed Sulaiman’s arm before the priest could barge through the double doors. “What’s in there?” he asked.

The look on Sulaiman’s face gave Jaren a start. He couldn’t say whether the man’s emerald eyes burned with zeal or madness. “Nothing is as it seems,” Sulaiman whispered. “The walls echo with cries of anguish.”

Jaren’s confusion turned to fear. “I don’t hear anything,” he said. “Who is it?”

“A multitude, greater even than this cursed ark could bear,” Sulaiman said. “The baal seeks them. They’ll not escape him long.”

Jaren released Sulaiman and drew his rodcaster. “That’s all I needed to hear,” Jaren said. He strode through the lounge doors with Sulaiman beside him and Deim following behind.

The room smelled of stale ashes. Most of the tables and part of the bar were reduced to cinders. The floor-to-ceiling windows facing the entrance were smashed, but instead of a storm-wracked mountain vista, the empty frames gave on a web of support struts and girders.

Except for the middle one.

A monolithic figure stood before the hatch that the middle window had once concealed. What little of his flesh wasn’t girded in stout leather armor had the texture of pumice stone.

“Your foulness betrays your presence, Never-to-Rise,” Sulaiman said as he advanced from Jaren's left. “These freemen would take you to law on a charge of theft. I have come to serve sentence.”

Unlike Sulaiman, Deim didn’t offer Gibeah the courtesy of a warning. The steersman hastily made the signs of the Compass. A blinding electrical arc leapt from his hand and struck Gibeah’s back.

Sulaiman gave no indication of fashioning, but a sphere of crimson flame appeared in each of his hands. He hurled the fiery missiles, which burst against the demon’s armored hide.

So much for talk
, Jaren thought when he saw that his comrades had opened fire. He hefted his rodcaster and pressed the trigger.

The blazing heat that burst from Jaren’s gun parted around Gibeah like a wave breaking against rock. The broken stream struck the hatch, which incredibly seemed unscathed.

Gibeah loomed over Sulaiman, looking no more injured than the hatch. A heat haze wreathed the baal’s craggy face, and blue flames bled through his cracked flesh.

“Well come, drudge of Midras,” said the baal. “But this meeting is no device of yours.”

“That’s right,” Jaren said. “My bet’s on Zebel. Or didn’t your lackey tell you her daughter’s our friend?”

The baal turned his gaze on Jaren, who found his mind stripped of every thought by fear. “You think that Zebel’s blood is proof against my wrath?” Gibeah said, “I will delight in her screams when she sees your ruin.” The baal waved his hand, and a curtain of fire swept across the room, cutting off the exit.

Deim’s jaw dropped. “I didn’t even see him fashion that,” he said.

“What men attain through toil comes easily as breathing to Gibeah’s ilk,” said Sulaiman.

Blue fires flared behind Gibeah’s stony face. “You think yourself clever,” he said. “I will show you the depths of your folly.”

“I still say we shouldn’t have split up,” Nakvin said to Mikelburg as they traversed the ship’s stuffy, red-tinted corridors.

“J.P. said to get you to the bridge,” the engineer replied, as though Jaren were infallible.

Seeing that argument was useless, Nakvin followed her escort down the hallway leading to the bridge. The scarred doors opened, disgorging an elephantine demon into the hall. The beast issued a deep bellow that rattled Nakvin’s teeth, and lowered its knobby head to charge.

Mikelburg stood frozen before the demon’s onslaught. Sweat beaded on his bare scalp.

Nakvin sang a melody that soared above the thunder of the beast’s approach and checked it in mid-lunge. A second glamer woven into the song bolstered Mikelburg's courage. His hallowed zephyr tore ragged craters in the demon’s neck and shoulder. Nakvin ceased her song, and the beast fell lifeless to the deck.

Mikelburg pulled ahead, leapt over the hulking carcass, and rushed through the door.

I may have overdone it,
Nakvin thought.

There was a muffled explosion and a thud, followed by a troubling silence.

Nakvin stole onto the bridge. Mikelburg lay slumped beside the door, reeking of burned wool and brimstone. Gibeah's clown stood in the shadow of the Wheel, gesticulating gleefully.

It’s an early version of the Steersman’s Compass,
Nakvin realized. Arrovet’s chanting and gestures were difficult to read, but he clearly meant to loose a greater Working.

Simpler than the Compass,
thought Nakvin,
but slower than a song
. Her own Working manifested as a burst of earsplitting sound that battered the baal's man to his knees.

Arrovet lifted his head and sneered at the woman who'd spoiled his grisly work.

“Leave the ship,” Nakvin said, adding a greater glamer to the command.

Gibeah’s man frowned in confusion. He touched a hand to his ear and his fingers came away bloody. With a feral snarl, he drew a long thin dagger from his doublet and bolted forward.

Caught off guard, Nakvin had no time to draw her own blade. The two Factors locked arms in a desperate struggle—Arrovet doubling his grip to force the dagger into his victim, and Nakvin exerting all her strength to deter him.

“
The shorter, the better
,” Teg had advised her about knife fights. Nakvin racked her brain for a quick way to end the struggle. Looming on its pedestal before her was the Wheel, which had accepted none but Deim and herself.

I hope Jaren’s distracting Gibeah,
Nakvin thought. She ceased her physical struggle and reached out with her mind. The curved blade plunged toward her throat.

Arrovet somersaulted backward as if plucked from the deck by an invisible giant. Nakvin fought to keep her concentration despite the shallow cut on her neck. She’d been forced to draw the fabric of the Fourth Circle onto the ship; then use it to move her foe to the Wheel. The effort proved too much, and Arrovet crashed down upon the railing.

For a moment, Gibeah's man lay bent over the rail. He almost fell to the deck before he pitched backward onto the Wheel.

Arrovet staggered to his feet. His feather-capped hood had fallen back, revealing an eggshell-pale scalp tufted with thin downy hair. He raised one hand to wipe a runnel of blood from his mouth and smiled.

Go on, smile,
Nakvin thought, remembering the Wheel’s lustful overtures and trusting that Arrovet was too weak to resist its seduction. When the dais began to glow with sharp white light, she knew that Gibeah’s man had felt the Wheel’s call—and had accepted.

Arrovet giggled at what must have been his first taste of the
Exodus’
vast power. His broad grin dissolved into a look of euphoric bliss that defied his hellish surroundings.

Nakvin meant to retrieve Mikelburg’s gun, but a chorus of wet sucking and snapping sounds halted her in mid-motion. A pale, ropy knot of tissue lolled from Arrovet's lips, which she at first mistook for his tongue. As the mass emerging from his mouth continued to grow, she realized that the man was suffering an oral prolapse of all his internal organs. The look of ecstasy never left his twitching face.

A scream welled in Nakvin's throat but perished on her lips. Before she gathered her wits enough to look away, Arrovet's inverted anatomy had been compacted into a fist-sized ball. When she dared to look again, all that remained of Arrovet was a faint stench of bile and blood.

A swarm of black and gold motes streamed from Gibeah's mouth like flies made of cinders. Deim leapt in front of Jaren an instant before the buzzing cloud took him. The ember swarm vanished as it reached the young steersman, funneled into the talisman at his belt.

“A useful bauble indeed,” said the baal.

“It gets better,” Deim said as the amber eye loosed a thin silver beam. But his riposte struck the demon without effect.

Jaren ground his teeth. The baal’s extreme heat tolerance made the rodcaster useless, and Deim’s Workings fared even worse. Only Sulaiman’s fire seemed to check Gibeah, perhaps due to its divine origin. Jaren drew his zephyr, hoping that the blessing would be good for more than just morale. He squeezed off a shot at the demon’s center of mass.

A small, dark hole appeared in Gibeah's breastplate. The room went quiet for one breathless instant as a spot of blue empyrean liquid flowed from the wound.

Gibeah burst into motion, his speed convincing Jaren that he’d only been testing his foes. He struck Deim to the floor with one hand and grabbed the zephyr's barrel with the other. Though the baal flinched when he grasped the blessed steel, his touch reduced the gun to a corroded ruin. Gibeah’s free fist struck Jaren across the face, and the deck rushed up to meet him.