Chương 17: A prayer

I'm relaxing in a stalactited lagoon at Bina's, a pre-soak for our little viewing party, when an itch echoes in the back of my brain. Someone is praying to me. Florin, the Rogarth fellow, is on the roof of the taphouse again. He's sitting cross-legged, his face in his hands, hot tears trickling down his fingers, and he's praying. Not aloud. But I can feel it, like the heat of a struck match.

ma'am or irene or however you want me to call you please please watch over the sickbed of my mother bella whose time was growing so short even before i went, and me her caregiver and my sister with child there's nobody for her now and it won't be long, she's gonna go, and i think of her falling down to that place you shown us and wanna tear my hair out, my hands and my heart they shake over it, to think of her in that place, in that pain, and if there ain't room enough for her then put me there and put her here, for i was not a good person and i deserve it, i cheated and lied and killed caspar cartwright with the rest of them, but she is, a good woman a good mother all my life, please o please.

please. please. please. please. Ugh. This is the sort of thing I was worried might happen when I first agreed with Caspar's silly demand. How often have I made it clear to these mortals that they are strictly guests? If Caspar learned I'd heard this prayer and ignored it, what would he think of me? What would he think of me if I granted it?

Am I so desperate for my silly servant's approval that I slice a splinter off my precious attention to sit in the backseat of a feeble old mortal mind, in a small stuffy room that smells like sick, with dried flowers on a dusty windowsill, waiting out the declining hours? I will not answer that. I climb out of the cool waters of the lagoon and spin the violet silk of my sun dress across my body. My heels sprout and clack across Bina's flagstones.

In a shade-dappled mausoleum I find my hostess, her viewport already open in a fissure along the limestone wall. She senses my vexation as I sit next to her on a smooth granite grave bench. She nuzzles her head against my hip. I feel great gratitude toward her patience with me as my turbulent foray into human emotion continues.

"Did the bath help?" she asks.

"Hugely." I give one velvety antenna a scratch.

"Love you, little sis."

"Love you, big sis."

"Hel lo, my dears. Thank you so kindly for allowing me in." Saoirse sashays through Bina's demesne and perches on a headstone opposite us.

"Bean, I do adore your work. The little pops of decay. So lively." She coos in delight as she examines a weatherworn statuette, its face blasted smooth by age.

"Oh, this moss. Is this bryum?" Bina's so pleased to have Saoirse mooning over her, she overlooks the insidious spread of the Bean sobriquet.

"Yes, ma'am."

"I might suggest a nice hypnum for the level of shade you're working with in this crypt chamber here. Oh! Or a nice tooth moss. That could really drape." Bina droops.

"I like bryum."

"Well, it doubtless only matters to weird birds like myself." Saoirse sits delicately on a stone bench.

"Shall we peek from our Lady Inspector's eyes?" I'd prefer to be looking through Caspar, as is tradition, but I'll cede perspective. His internal monologue is stressing me out right now. Plus, if we're in Jordan's brain, I get to look through her eyes, which means I'll be able to get some good ogling time in on my warlock. Well, at some point, I hope. Right now all we're looking at is darkness, with a soundtrack of scraping wheels and a distant, atonal hum.

Jordan Darius remembers sleeping in a bathtub with her wrist shackled to the wall. She remembers waking up in the trunk of her car—her car! Its loss strikes her all over again—the darkness, the cramped space that made her joints burn. She reflects on all the different painful contortions this Cartwright jabroni has stuffed her into. She shifts feeling back into her bent leg. Her knee pushes into Caspar's ribs. At least he's stuck in here with her this time. See how he likes it. The shipping crate was Perry's idea.

Jordan was ready to join forces with her fellow warlock to rail against it, but Caspar just thinned his lips and went fine. Now they're trundling across the skydock on the flatbed of a luggage truck, listening to the tuneless musical stylings of Perry the mushroom man. Might be a pop single, might be a nursery rhyme; filtered through the plywood and their pilot's meager talent, it's impossible to tell. She nudges Capar with a foot.

"You reckon we're in for a fight?"

"Shush," Caspar whispers, and then: "probably." Perry swore to them up and down on the drive over that he had the perfect airship. Nobody ever onboard, luxe furnishings, a real vanity buy that the owner only ever used to impress chicks, never even left the dry dock. Perry also swore to them up and down that elephants are capable of psychic communication through the television. Jordan and Caspar have been further bonding in their exasperation. He's back to being her friend.

It's put her in a good mood, despite their cramped conveyance. Caspar carefully shifts so that his and Jordan's faces are close to one another. The noise of the engine should drown their voices out, Jordan thinks, but the man's nothing if not cautious.

"When I was a kid," he whispers, "I wanted to be a pilot so bad. I used to go to the arcades after seminary and play the simulators for hours. Chewed through my allowance. Drew aerostats in all my notebooks."

"What stopped you?"

"I signed up for the militia and checked the box for sky force. They saw how big I was, and they said 'trooper.' So a trooper I became. Turns out dreams didn't really come into it."

"I hear that. And they taught you medical?"

"They did. I had in my head I was going to patch people up and never shoot a gun. But, y'know. Dreams."

"Say one thing about the warlock gig." Jordan adjusts her elbow so it isn't pushing on the crate.

"Dreams sure come into it these days." I'm still tapped into Caspar, just a little, so I sense the question he wants to ask. He's wondering if Jordan feels the same way he does: that he prefers his sleep now to his waking hours.

"Uh huh," he says instead.

"Have you ever done what you wanted?" Jordan asks.

"Ever been your own man?" Caspar considers the question for a few seconds before answering.

"Came back and wanted to patch people up. Use what I'd learned. Had a good couple years of that."

"Sure. But that was keeping the duty going. And now you're doing Irene's bidding."

"Seminary said life on Diamante is duty. Plenty of time to address your own wishes in Heaven."

"Oh, sure. Yeah, I got a whole checklist. Scream, writhe. Maybe try some melting on the weekends." The warlocks allow themselves some near-silent laughter at that. They lapse into silence again. Perry keeps crooning.

"Never just serving ourselves." Jordan breaks the quiet.

"Neither of us. And now we're warlocks. And we never will." They jolt to a halt and the engine cuts off. Caspar kills whatever response he had. A mechanical whirr sounds as some piece of docking machinery engages and the warlocks brace against the side of the crate as it's lifted jerkily into the air. The minuscule light they got from the cracks in the plywood goes out, and the box sets down with a dull metallic echo. Cargo hold, Jordan reckons.

As if from a distance, muffled through the fuselage, they hear Perry mid-conversation with someone. No clue what's being said. Come on, you wastoid, Jordan thinks. Spark those nerve endings together long enough to get this shit done. Her palm finds her gun. Nudging into Caspar's hip as it is, he surely feels the motion, but there's no reaction anymore, no reproach. I glance at Saoirse. She gives me a tranquil smile back.

"Is he doing okay out there?" I ask.

"Perry?" Saoirse shrugs.

"Who can say with these funny little mortals." Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. A minute of dizzy anxiety and inaudible mwop mwop voices. Then a laugh like a chattering autogun and it's finished. Jordan lets out a breath she didn't realize she was holding. A few minutes of silence. Only Jordan's breath and her comrade's. Then a grinding tremor and an engine roar, and Jordan's stomach drops as the floor goes unsteady and fluid. They're in the air.

A utilitarian beep and Perry's tinny voice warbles from outside the crate.

"All stowaways, this is your captain speaking. We have just completed a completely fucking sick heist that a couple of Debbie Downers thought we would fuck up, and this vessel has departed Chamchek drydock. We're looking at sunny skies and a beautiful view of the Montane ocean if you'd care to leave your little box and move about the cabin. Should you require assistance, you can come kiss your captain's ass and tell me how it taste. Thank you for flying Air Perry, where we told you so." The intercom clicks off.

Jordan and Caspar shove the splintery lid off their hiding place and emerge into a dusky cargo hold, lit by a cherry-red emergency light. A metal grille catwalk and a tight spiral staircase later they emerge into an open, airy fuselage, surrounded by a saturated gradient of radiant blue horizon: the sky above and the Montane below. Behind them, the shining brass of Chamchek recedes into a lumpy alloy on the strip of coast, its ribbon highways secreting from it like arteries across the distant saw-grass.

Perry sits before a bright carnival of consoles, its dials and readouts and fly-by-wire joysticks. Jordan gets half a headache just looking at all that stuff, but she's sure Caspar's probably drooling over it. (He is, yes. He'd also like a hat like Perry's.)"Hot damn, mushroom man." Jordan pivots on her heel to take in the ambience. The place is done up in white marble and saffron drapery, colonnaded and carved to look like an old Cantosian forum.

The smells of lemon oil and fresh linen press down against the usual aerodynamic tang of fuel and machinery.

"You weren't kidding about the digs."

"You think this is fancy? Check the master suite out." Perry jerks a thumb to a double-door with the gates of the Kingdom wood-burned across it.

"That's where the magic happens." Jordan scoffs, but she can't deny her curiosity. She pushes down on the little cherub-wing handle and swings the door into the master bedroom and there's an ass sticking out from under the king bed. An ass and a hairy calf. Jordan vaults into the ornate room and seizes the leg before it can shift all the way under the bed apron. There's a high, lacy scream. With a vicious yank, the inspector pulls their stowaway out into the day.

The bed thumps on its claw feet and spills one of the endtable lamps to the floor with a chiming ceramic clatter. Archbishop Paul Tilliam blinks up at her. Tight in his left fist, a boxy black something, with a wire trailing off it. Switched on.

"Please," he stutters.

"Please, no."

"Fuck my fucking life." Jordan pulls Tilliam violently to his feet. The fluffy robe he's belted into falls open, revealing far more body hair than Jordan cared to see this afternoon and further ruining her day." Caspar," she roars.

"In here."

"Sister. Sister, please. Let's let's let's not be hasty about—" She snatches the box from his hand.

"What the fuck is this?" Caspar is over her shoulder, his revolver trained on Tilliam. He goes rigid as he recognizes the man in his crosshairs.

"Oh, no." Tilliam gives him a shaky, sickly smile.

"Blessings, brother. How about—""Transponder." Jordan drops the gadget to the floor and thumps the heel of her boot into it. Five vicious stomps and it's pulverized.

"That's a fucking transponder. We're made."

"Perry!" Caspar bolts from the room.

"Perry, we need to change course and floor it. Full burn. Every thruster." Jordan rounds on Tilliam.

"Who else is here?" He gawps.

"Uh. Nobody." Jordan spins him around and hurls him against the wood-paneled suite wall. She and thrusts her. 45 into the nape of his neck.

"I am going to paint with you, shitbird."

"Do you—" He tries to summon some of that television brimstone bluster.

"Do you know who I am, sister?"

"I fucking well do, Archbishop." She clicks the hammer back.

"I'm going to love it. Who else is here."

"Corinne." His voice deflates back to a squeaking whimper.

"Corinne, come out, please." A hardwood closet door slides open and a pale, spindly woman in a matching robe, her eyes stained with running mascara, stumbles into the suite. Archbishop Tilliam's wife is perhaps one of the most beautiful people on the continent. This is not her. Jordan keeps the gun on Tilliam as she reaches into the closet the lady emerged from and pulls another robe out of it. She slides its cloth belt out and pushes it into the woman's manicured hands.

"Tie him up. Go." The woman hiccups a sob.

"I'm sorry," she says, nonsensically.

"I'm sorry."

"Shut up and tie the motherfucker up." Jordan pushes her further into the suite.

"You gonna tell me you don't have practice? Caspar!"

"Yeah." Steel-riveted tension in his response.

"What's it look like out there?"

"Radar signal. Someone on our course."" Fuck." Jordan stands in the doorway while the teary woman trusses Tilliam and then storms back into the fuselage.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck." She repeats it with every stomp back to the cockpit.

"Can we outrun them?"

"On a pleasure cruiser?" Perry shakes his head.

"Nah."

"You dipshit." Jordan knocks Perry's captain hat from his head.

"You stole Archbishop Tilliam's goddamn airship?" Perry scrambles for his fallen cap.

"I didn't think the motherfucker would be on it!"

"That's an interceptor." Caspar points at a bleeping instrument. A red diode drifts gradually from its edge.

"Once that's centered, they're on us. Only good news is they can't just blow us out of the sky if they want to retrieve the archbishop. They're gonna take out our engines and they're gonna board."

"You're the flyboy. You know the crew that thing's gonna have?"

"Fits around two dozen droptroops." Caspar's mouth is a grim, lipless line as he pulls his revolver out and checks the cylinder.

"Turn the autopilot on and find cover, Perry." He herds Tilliam and his woman friend to the cockpit, then joins Jordan in the fuselage, where she's methodically piling the pewlike furnishings into place to form a long line of cover. We are fucked, she thinks. The ride is finished. To Caspar, she says: "We wipe these guys out and take their ship if they knock this one's thrusters out. Right?"

"Right." Caspar's despair is hyperlegible on his careworn face. Jordan grabs his shoulder.

"Our goddesses are with us. Faith, all right? Faith and strength."

"Faith and strength," he repeats. My fingers have dug deep enough into Bina's bench that they've cracked the stone. I've fractured my knucklebones; I barely feel it.

"You're my brother, Cas." She presses her forehead to his.

"First true brother. Wherever we go, it's together."

"Yes," Caspar says, and then the rolling chatter of distant gunfire and the airship lurches. Tilliam's ivory pleasure yacht hovers in the air like a useless cloud. A sleek black shrike-shaped interceptor descends upon it. Ropes like spider filaments lash from one ship to the other. Hard men and women in tactical black shells scuttle across the surface of their paralyzed target, rigging outer hatchways with breach charges. A radio countdown and the doors explode inward, peeling metal and splintering wood.

They come with bullets and batons, with smoke bombs and flashbangs. They come with the expectation of panicky pirates or frantic extremists. They come, and our warlocks cut them down. Caspar's out of bullets in the middle of the first wave, barely a minute into the gunfight. He waits for the closest autogun to finish its cover fire and breaks from behind a chewed-up pew like a darting shadow.

A burst finds him, but his armor has grown more and more concealing and protective every time he's summoned it, and by now its segments have stretched piecemeal across his limbs. The bullets zing off his scutum; he slide-tackles his mark and nimbly severs her spine with a tearing claw. Then he's among the line, separating soldiers from their souls. A rifleman breaks cover; Jordan places a round between his eyes and blows a geyser of pink mist out from his molded helmet.

Perry curls next to her behind the cockpit wall, eyes squeezed shut, teeth gritted as the air whistles and the marble craters and shatters. They are glorious. My warlock is glorious. Caspar and Jordan kill seven boarders before the tactics have time to adapt and the tide to turn. But they do, and it does. My throat tightens with the first bullet that splashes through Caspar's thigh.

Before he's finished sealing the wound, another shot skids off his chest plate and wings his bicep, and he's sent staggering back into the fortified cockpit with Jordan and Perry and the hostages. The arm's bleeding won't stop; his system is pushing to its limit. His flesh ripples and twitches instead of sealing. The fog of fatigue curls through his brain. They're forced from the fuselage now, buttoned down in the cockpit.

The bulwark they stacked is taken; the rolling wall of gunfire has no more gaps to exploit or blind spots to strike from. Jordan's on her last magazine. They're moving the breachers into position.

"Let me talk to them." Tilliam is babbling.

"Let me out and I can get you out. There's still—" Jordan punches the archbishop in the mouth.

"No, no no no no." Bina's wings tremble.

"Irene. Tell me this isn't as hopeless as it looks." Before I can reply, Saoirse stands from the gravestone. Her smile remains unflappable.

"Bina, darling." She strokes my sister's flattened ears.

"It isn't."

"Are you gonna—""Yes," Saorise says.

"I do believe this is my cue." I hoped it wouldn't come to this. My warlocks are about to witness the one spell Saoirse teaches her disciples. The one they don't yet know they can cast, too. The one it's impossible to practice.

"Do it, Saoirse," I say. Saoirse shakes the tightness (and a maggot or two) from her arms as she limbers up.

"Back in a tick, darlings." Perry sits up. Jordan glances to him as another burst of autofire pushes her head down and sees him smiling huge. The vacant holes in his grin bleed anew. He rises to his feet. She grabs at him.

"Stay the fuck down!"

"Hail Saoirse," he says.

"Hail the Old Ones." A dry crunch. A wet squelch. Perry opens. Raw rosaceous meat, gleaming ropes of tendon and intestine. The shine of bone. A gurgling ripple as his ribcage blooms like a flower. Saoirse, queen of decay, emerges from his remains, a monarch butterfly from a carrion cocoon. Her manifestation's shimmering dragonfly coat sings a whirring chorus. A throat-stripping scream. The room strobes and crashes with a crackling ballistic chorus. It makes no difference. Fifteen seconds.

One human sacrifice gives a manifestation fifteen seconds in your world. It's about five seconds longer than my sister requires. Pieces of Perry slough from her slender legs as she steps from the stain he's reduced to. In a buzzing flicker, she stands before the nearest gunman and lays a finger on his heart. He distends, then erupts into riotous, colorful life. A cloud of amanitas bursts from his throat. His innards become cocoons become moths.

He folds in half; before his head hits the ground, it's cracked like an eggshell and hatched into a delicate heron, which takes panicky wing as the gunfire continues. A woman trying to take cover behind a pillar turns and is face-to-face with Saoirse. And then she's a chunky smear across the far window, fertilized instantly by leafy lichen that pushes through the gore to form a carpet of brilliant emerald green.

My sister flits from one servant of the Father to the next, into the interceptor and back, leaving a trail of newborn flora and fauna as she kills them, all of them, in the time it took you to read this sentence. With a playful flamenco flourish of her fungal skirts, she turns from her final victim and swans over to what's left of her servant. She lifts the largest piece of him.

"Sweet child. Pretty Perry." She lays a gentle kiss on the mangled meat in her hands.

"You have earned your place in my garden ten times over. Such beautiful things you will become." Her glance turns to Caspar and Jordan as her final second ticks down. They've stayed hunkered behind cover, frozen in terror and awe. Saoirse beams beatifically down to them.

"Ta-ta." Then she's sitting before Bina and me again, watching her Diamante manifestation fray and crumble to chalk." That," she says, "was a fabulous workout."