2.6. Someone New
A scream jolted Seth awake, and he knocked his stupid head on the sheet metal mattress frame above him. A thunderous timpani bang echoed through the vessel’s steelshod corridors, then another. “Seth,” someone roared. “Seth, can you hear me?” Oh, saints.
“I’m here!” His voice was still thick from his unplanned nap. “I—”
Another piercing scream interrupted him. A man in sturdy sky-leathers stumbled past the open door, a dagger sprouting from his eye. One step, two, and he fell flat on his back, staring sightlessly at the metal ceiling.
The dagger shivered, then with a carnal slurp ejected itself from the fresh corpse, blurring back up the hall. Hexentat magic. Seth rolled out from his sleeping spot, bumping the footlocker out of the way.
A second pirate came howling after the first, the self-propelled dagger stuck in his shoulder, a sword unsteady in his fist, his hair and jacket crackling with fire. This one clattered into the cabin, and Ofelia followed shortly after, saber bared. Smoke curled from between her lips.
The man flailed and wailed and burned, and when he swung his cutlass toward the girl, the fire made a noise like a filling sail and burned brighter. Ofelia brought her sword up to meet it and the beacon she’d made of her enemy shone in her placid black eyes.
Seth fumbled about for his fancy new sword. A leather-soled ankle sank into his solar plexus; he whoofed the air from his lungs. Okay, he was all-the-way awake again. He curled around the leg that had found him and wrenched; the burning man toppled to the floor.
He had just enough time to raise his charred sword-arm; then the tip of Ofelia’s blade slid neatly past his sleeve and punched through his throat. The corners of his mouth bubbled pink. The jet of blood that burst from the withdrawing steel was like a stage effect in its pressurized pop. He died, and slumped, and Seth kicked him away before he singed the fancy new holster Tiago’s gift was in.
Ofelia flicked the gore from her blade and produced a gray rag from her belt. “Hello hello, Mr. il Gutierre,” she said, as she wiped the curved saber blade down. “Nice assist.”
“No problem,” Seth wheezed, with the air he’d gathered.
“Saints, is that him?” Annalise shouldered past Ofelia into view. “Seth! Are you hurt, love?”
“No.” He sat further up. “No, I’m okay. I was—”
“Did you pick outta your cuffs, then?” Annalise crouched before him.
“They didn’t catch me. I just—”
“You what?”
“I kinda ran off,” Seth said. “But I think I used my—”
“You kinda ran off?” Annalise scowled. “You gave me a bleeding heart attack.” She dragged her executioner’s sword to her shoulder. “Stay right there and don’t get killed so I can come back and feckin’ kill you.”
Ofelia, echoing down the hall: “I think we’re all clear.”
“Stay,” Annalise repeated, and stomped out of view.
An auburn-bearded man in his mid-thirties edged past, his clothes roughspun, his hands cuffed at his front. A gun of piratical provenance was in his fist. “Afternoon,” he said. “Name’s Corbin. Cheers for the rescue.”
“Don’t cheers him,” Annalise called. “He’s on bleeding punishment.”
Corbin gave Seth an apologetic shrug and then he was off down the hall with the al Ydrises. Seth stood, fidgeting on his feet, then recalled that he was a grown man and had a sword, and followed the pirates’ erstwhile hostage out.
He stepped over a beheaded corpse and the shining pool of blood spreading from its stump. He shimmied past the sprawled-out legs of a guy with a cloven chest, the pale cap of his collarbone gleaming in the red mess. Behind a shut door, a dog held forth in a frenzy of barking. His head still throbbed with fervid tiredness. He felt vaguely as though he were moving through an evil dream.
He emerged into a cockpit full of brass instruments and patched seats. “I said stay, Seth.” Annalise stomped in through another doorway, as her daughter picked through the cockpit’s cabinets and shelves. Corbin, leaning on a wall behind them, acknowledged him with a tilt of the head.
“I can watch your corners,” Seth said. Annalise grunted and flapped a dismissive arm at him, and he saw the blood gleaming on it. The black blood. His heart skipped. “Have you been shot?”
“Fella with a popgun there.” She gestured to the hall behind them. “I’ll live. Small bore, no bone. We’ll dig it out the meat when we’re ashore. Right after I’ve given you a paddling, you bleeding chancer.”
“Healing circle first,” Ofelia said. “Paddling second.”
“No need.” Annalise swiped sweat from her face. “It’ll heal on its own. I can even use the arm all right, see? You know how many times I’ve been shot?”
“Seth, tell mother—”
“We’re getting the circle out and fixing you,” Seth said.
“Don’t you start.” Annalise stabbed her finger at him; it shook with the wince of her injury. “You get the dress-down, mister.”
“Honestly, mother, we’re four beads fuller now,” Ofelia said. “Not even Tiago could begrudge you.”
“You underestimate your brother’s begrudgery.” Annalise set her Verdugo sword aside and crouched by a corpse slumped in a rear seat. “You know who might have the key there, Corbin?”
“Wish I did,” Corbin said. “They kept me in the dark most of the time. Not sure who’s the honcho.”
Annalise indicated the man’s cuffs with a jerk of her chin. “You pick those, il Gutierre, you’re halfway out the doghouse.”
“Got it.” Seth hurried to Corbin, eager to be useful. He lifted them, and they clinked. And he made eye contact with the man, and saw the tension in his jaw.
His dog. They’d kept it alive. They’d scolded it, but they hadn’t kicked it.
Seth seized Corbin’s arm as the gun rose. He wrenched the barrel away from his ear. Whether Corbin had intended to hold him at gunpoint or blow his brains out, he’d never know. He bore Corbin to the ground, and the gun shrieked a shrill ring into his ears and tore across Annalise’s side.
“Fucking saints,” Annalise barked, spinning around and clutching her hip. “Twice?”
Seth was attempting to apply some sort of chokehold to the thrashing Corbin, with no training to speak of. Ofelia’s boot sank swiftly into the man’s gut and he sprawled; the al Ydris daughter was upon him, sword point a fingerspan from his face. “You fucking dare move,” she hissed. “Give me a reason.”
“it glanced, girleen. Hold your water.” Annalise hauled her Verdugo sword back into her fist.
Seth clambered out from his grapple with Corbin. “You are getting circle-mended on the ground.”
“Fine. Fine. Fair enough. Bit ridiculous otherwise, at this point.” Annalise gingerly patted her perforated side and winced. “Right, then, Mister Corbin. Who the bleeding fuck are you?”
Corbin il Mandrak coughed and spat a glob of pinkish spittle onto the sheet metal. “Just take my hexis, Verdugo. Do what you’ve got to.”
“In due time,” Annalise said. “I came to rescue you. If that’s banjaxed, I’ll at least understand why.”
Corbin slumped on the rear side of a cockpit seat. “They came asking me to come back. I said yes. They didn’t kidnap me.”
Ofelia kept her sword trained on him. “You’re not a shepherd, then.”
“I tried,” he said. “But no. I’m not a shepherd. Nor a nobody. I’m Corbin il Kolossi. Red Corbin. I’ve killed—” He smirked. “I don’t even know how many Legion lapdogs I’ve killed. Two dozen at least. I’ve burned stormships with their howling crew aboard. I’ve feasted on the riches your crow king leeches from the continent. I hid like a coward and I retired to scrape a half-life out of Shipfarrok chalk, but I never once bowed to any Verdugo or saluted any Exark. And I’ve beheld the world from Heaven, and I’ve seen it one last time. And that’s enough.”
“This is a confession, then, Corbin?” Annalise asked.
“Aye, it is.”
“You could’ve kept your mouth shut,” she said. “Had me well fooled.”
“And then done what? Wander back down to the sheep and the stillness? Pretend I’m alive?” Corbin sighed. “I wanted to be someone new. Isn’t that the saddest thing you ever heard? Someone new. As if you could bear yourself. As if you could come back without going away first. There’s no going straight. You think so, and then you walk long enough, and you see that you’ve been a few degrees off. And now you’re crooked for miles.” He stood and brushed his knees off. “They said I belong here. That I was fooling myself otherwise. They were right.”
“What about Soya?” Seth asked.
“I love her.” Corbin shrugged. “But not enough. I thought it might be. I thought it was. But when that ship broke cloud cover, and I heard the thunder inside it, I woke up from a five-year coma.” He turned to the horizon. The bright sky bisected his pupil as he stared out the window. “You’ve killed the men and women I spent the best and freest years of my life with. I’d sooner go with them than with liver spots and crooked knees and the endless fucking sheep of Sheepfuck.”
Annalise paced behind the pirate, sword shouldered. “Do you love your people, Corbin?”
“Some of them.”
“Do you repent your crimes against them?”
Corbin gave this a soft, derisive laugh. “Some of them.”
“Do you give praise to Hundred Saints, and to the Sorcerer General, and the deathspell beneath which he shelters us?”
“No,” Corbin said. “I reckon the Sorcerer General can go fuck himself, in fact. Give Soya my dog and tell your pale army you killed the scourge of the Kanjir skyways.”
“I will,” Annalise said, and then there was the sound of rushing air and a dark shadow lashed across Corbin’s throat, and his expression barely had time to change—a widening of the eyes, a parting of the lips—and then it froze forever as his head tipped from its housing.
Annalise shoved the body forward with her boot to keep the arterial fountain away from her. It sprayed a fan of red across the misty sky.
She turned from the corpse with a look of vague distance on her face, as if she were judging the clouds for a coming rain. “Go rouse my son, il Gutierre. He’ll know how to fly this thing overland and sink it down.”
“Tiago’ll be running on fumes after his Darkness,” Ofelia said. “There’s a manual in the pilot’s room. We could do it ourselves.”
Annalise scraped the blood from her boots on the pilot chair’s firwood saddle. “He’ll be sour for days if he doesn’t get the chance to steer the ship. Go, Seth. Feeli and me will clean the stiffs up.” She shot him a dagger-edge glare. “And don’t fucking run off anywhere else.”
Seth’s legs wobbled with vestigial tiredness. “I won’t. I swear.”
“Are you all right, Seth?” A frantic fear blunted the poniard of Annalise’s displeasure. “Saints, are you hurt?”
“I’m—” Seth tried to think. “I think I used my Darkness. I think I’ve found it.”
“Saints and seraphs, really?” Elation looked odd on a face as normally staid as Ofelia’s. “What is it?”
“That bit…” Seth hesitated. “That bit I’m still working out.”