6-2
At least the cowboy had been simple. Not simple as in stupid, but simple as in straightforward: he was a man who wanted power and loved violence, and that was about all there was to him. Vyrsa was just as powerful, if not more so, a perfect marriage of a Pretension centered around agility and acuity with some extremely strong joinery-magic. But she wasn’t a violent woman, and that was upsetting.
Why did Sara’s captor have to be so damned chipper?
One thing was clear: the five of them couldn’t afford for things to go the way they had in Ruthven’s palace. If they tried to make an escape attempt that went loud, there would be no surprise turncoat to help them, and Vyrsa had already proven that she wasn’t going to be defeated by any of Qi Zhen’s tricks. They’d do it silently, with perfect planning and under Vyrsa’s nose, or they’d do it not at all. Therefore, there was no point in trying to plan. For the first few days of her captivity on that rolling white-washed prison, she simply observed everything that she could.
Vyrsa Valiente’s ship, the Bottlenose, had once been a pleasure-yacht, belonging to some gulf-state oil billionaire or distant cousin of the house of Saud who happened to be a few miles too close to the Furati coast when Scrapyard came for him. It brought Sara more than a little bit of much-needed joy to know that the billionaire in question was almost definitely murdered shortly after. Not that the ones who had replaced him were much better.
They were definitely soldiers, Vyrsa’s crew. Their costumes, ragged linen and leather boots, were meant to give them the appearance of VOC men, or maybe expatriates from Leedsrealm, but the disguise fell apart upon any kind of extended observation. They had American accents, liked American foods, and spoke with the wretched arrogance of American soldiers. It was an open secret that the occupation government in Furat was supporting one side of the naval war for the Halmahera Sea, so they were easily explained. Less so was why they allowed Vyrsa to command them.
Vyrsa forcing Mr. Shaw–Lieutenant Shaw, he would have insisted–to keep Sara and Zahra together was but the first sign of the constant friction between captain and crew. Amongst so many soldiers, Vyrsa alone had the attitude of a pirate. Leadership was natural to her, but it was the charismatic leadership of a bandit chieftain, not the rigid command of a naval officer. Part and parcel of that charisma was the fact that she was nice. American soldiers were never nice, not to people they saw as deserving of their ire, which was to say, Arabs, prisoners, and Arab prisoners most of all. Vyrsa had been unfailingly polite to Sara even as they were locked in a duel to the death, cheering her on with genuine admiration whenever she took the upper hand. Vyrsa never missed an opportunity to grant comfort and clemency to the prisoners.
Vilena, for instance, was allowed to take her yard time above decks during the night instead of during the day. When Sara’s cellmate requested halal rations, it was Vyrsa who reminded the crew that they actually did have some, and by her tone it was obvious that she was the one who had made that happen in the first place.
Not that it made Sara dislike her any less. That a scorpion changes its venom to kill painlessly does not make it any less deadly. She was working for the Americans, after all, lending them aid with one hand even as she handed out niceties with the other. Maybe she was trying to change the organization from the inside, hah.
Of course, that they were on the same team did nothing to change the resentment that Vyrsa’s sailors felt for her. Even that veneer of kindness was too much for them, a mustard seed’s worth of energy wasted on the subhumans. They so badly wanted to be allowed to beat and abuse her and her sister, and the fact that Vyrsa wouldn’t let them was like having one arm tied behind their backs. Vyrsa’s heart had already been compromised, but that rift between rapacious cruelty and feigned gentleness was something that could be exploited.
The other thing Sara carefully paid attention to was her surroundings, the environment of the Bottlenose. There were six decks, so far as Sara could tell, though only three of them were ever open to her. The prisoners spent most of their time in the lower deck, just below the water-line. This had once been the crew quarters, but crew and passenger had been inverted, leaving it to serve as a prison. The bow section contained row after row of cells, sixteen in total, to fit perhaps as many as forty prisoners, with a cafeteria and kitchen placed amidships. The back half of the lower deck, and the deck beneath that, were a mystery: but sound suggested that they held the great diesel engines and other such machinery.
The two decks above that were the ones which Sara was only allowed to visit for two hours each day, and then always with an armed sailor watching her. The yacht was shaped like a step pyramid, each rectangular section smaller than the last, except for the main and upper decks, where there were extended sections–in the stern for the main deck and bow for upper–that remained open to the air.
It was a place of absolute leisure, now converted into a killing machine. The swimming pool at the far back of the main deck had been emptied out and turned into a fighting position, surrounded by machine guns and full of ammunition and cover against attack. The garden—how rich do you have to be for your yacht to have a fucking garden?—had been stuffed to the brim with productive shrubbery, tomatoes and chili peppers and onions. The helicopter pad near to the bow was empty, but kept clean enough that it could still, theoretically, be used.
Much of the rest of those two decks had formerly been bar space and seats for lounging around, now dust-covered and abandoned. What Sara would have given for a half-empty wine bottle left unnoticed in a cabinet somewhere, but no. The sailors had already cleared out anything fun that was close at hand.
The alcohol, if they had any, was probably being kept indoors, in the parts of the ship Sara wasn’t allowed to access. The main pyramid of the yacht was four stories tall, the bulk of the ship’s volume, and the closest she was allowed to get to any of it was that they couldn’t stop her from looking in through the windows. From what she could see, the sailors had maintained a degree of luxury inside: every chair was lushly upholstered, and there was natural sun coming in from a skylight somewhere. All of the cables wriggling across the floor to attach to teetering stacks of comms equipment and sensors made for a beautifully brutalist contrast.
All of that information was well and good, except that it was missing one crucial thing: some sort of coherent plan. Sure, the rift between captain and crew was a weakness, but there was no second hand-hold that Sara could use to lever it open. She wasn’t going to convince the sailors to mutiny when they hated her to their very souls. She could steal some of the guns, maybe even commandeer an emplacement, but such violent means always ran into the stone wall of Vyrsa Valiente.
Vilena would have been the obvious choice for any subterfuge. Zahra was too inexperienced, and the two warriors were both so bombastic that the idea of either one sneaking anywhere was, frankly, kind of ridiculous. But the vampire could turn into mist, flit through the air vents, survey the entire vessel at once. An invaluable asset, hampered only by complete unwillingness to act.
The pirates weren’t stupid when it came to preventing their prisoners from coordinating. They had their yard time in shifts, never allowing the prisoners from two different cells to be up on deck at the same time. Nothing would have stopped Vilena from circumventing this rule by simply dispersing through the doors to talk to Sara. She simply didn’t. There was nothing to prevent her from doing so, no power the soldiers had could have stopped her, she simply lacked the will! The key to Sara’s quick escape was right there, but the key couldn’t be bothered to move itself the lock!
There were times when Sara just wanted to scream out the answer and hope that it would carry through the walls. It’d completely ruin any element of surprise and maybe get Vilena executed, but it would be worth it. Why? Why was she not doing anything?
…
Gilead sat with his back to the wall, in a bed with its blankets ripped away and scattered all across the floor, eyes burning as they attempted to maintain a vigil now thirty-six hours long and counting. He dared not fall asleep. He dared not dream.
Vilena was a constant pressure against his side, for he had not the strength to fully banish her, though after the first few rounds of thrashing she had retreated such that only her shoulder lay against his. She wasn’t supposed to be loving him. Beasts seeking redemption should associate only with men of good standing, or those on the same path; for to associate instead with men on the path to becoming beasts would be to endanger their own morality.
Dindrane hadn’t disappeared like she usually would; she’d been present, invisible to Vilena but not to Gilead, for some number of hours by then. Pacing near and through the locked door, praying on her knees, whispering into Gilead’s ear and beckoning him with gentle touches, but never gone. Like the sin burned into his flesh, never gone.
“Thou art a Pretender, and a Pretender of passing greatness,” said she. “A dragon inhabiteth thy breast, and thou needest only turn key in lock to set it loose. Now set it loose.”
She had insisted so many times, and each denial cost Gilead some amount of his remaining strength. His stomach felt liable to upend its contents, and he squeezed shut his eyes as he shook his head. “Nay, nay, nay. Not here, not here. That venom would bring woe over weal unto me, and I have had weal enough for a lifetime…”
Vilena stirred, cupping Gilead’s cheek as the tears streamed down it. “Venom? Did you say venom? Do you mean your dragon venom? What about it?”
“Aye, indeed,” Dindrane said softly and with downcast eyes. “The Saracen and the child might be wounded. But thy lack of trust in my commands doth only betray thee thy fallen state. Trust in God, my love, not thine own judgement.”
Agony, agony, every word from Dindrane’s mouth was a further agony. “Is that the Lord’s will? No, no, I will not allow such injury befall them. I am not Abraham and Sara is not Isaac!”
“What a playwright thou art, Gilead, that thou hast already cast thine own role,” Dindrane said. Her eyes moved quickly below their lids, but she remained otherwise in place, beatific in calm. “What if Samson had afore his task quailed, lest there be an Israelite child somewhere in that Philistine temple?”
“That’s right,” Vilena said. “You’re not, this isn’t a Bible story, you’re my Lilya, you’re alive, you’re a person, you’re not a monster.”
Lilya. Oh how Gilead loved that nickname, and how hearing it spoken filled his heart with dreadful sorrow that dragged him most of the way to restful sleep. Another sign of his sin. He fought to remain awake, slamming his fist into his thigh to eke a little more pain from a swiftly numbing body.
Vilena seized his wrist, holding him in place.
“Slay the Old Man, seize the throne, these things I see, but what do they betoken? How am I… How? How am I to succeed where so many others have failed?”
(“The world is full of big and impossible things, Lilya,” Vilena said. “You will never defeat them on your own. The world is too big for that. We take one step at a time.”)
Vilena mumbled something in Gilead’s ears, but it was not her whose advice he sought. It was Dindrane’s. And indeed, in merely being asked the question, something had shaken loose. Her eyes opened again and her face was rendered fearsome with anger. She drifted across the room, scowling all the while, and then bent down before Gilead. He yearned to rise up and meet her, both physically and spiritually, but her presence pinned him in place until she was centimeters from his face.
“I have given thee strength,” she hissed. “Use it.”
Gilead fell asleep.
…
“My name is Marwa. You?”
Sara, too, could not sleep, (much like her sworn champion albeit for much more prosaic reasons.) She stared at the door of the cell, running her fingers through Zahra’s hair as the little girl tried and failed to slip away in her lap. And in that hazy half-presence, she had almost entirely forgotten that her cell was shared by three rather than two.
“Huh? What?”
The last of those who had been taken captive aboard the Bottlenose was a complete enigma, even by Sara’s standards: and Sara was a woman who, in her more introspective moments, had to admit that she could be fairly enigmatic. She barely spoke, and then only to communicate what was purely necessary. “Could you move, you’re blocking my view” was the longest sentence Sara had heard out of the stranger.
Viewing was most of what she did. Staring distantly into space, as though in profound concentration or, perhaps, like she could see through the walls of the cell, past the ocean, and was watching distant vistas with keen insight. About the only thing that could be determined about her was what was visible in the cut and quality of her clothing: she was local, Tidorese, and rather wealthy.
“My name,” Marwa repeated, “Is Marwa Sibuea.”
“Sara Ajami.”
“I’ve been trying to figure out what they’re doing, where the ship is going. We’re not useful as hostages, are we?”
“The ocean, it all looks the same to me.” Sara saw an opportunity; who knew when Marwa was going to stop talking again. “Are you a Pretender, then?”
“I am. I’m also an islander.”
“Right, you would know the ocean, I suppose. Any conclusions?”
Marwa shook her head. “They’re patrolling. Back and forth in a lazy loop. Not sure why.”
Damn it all. What was even the point of Pretenders if they were all a bunch of useless idiots? Sara sighed, looking down at her sister, eyes closed even though she was very clearly awake. One day at a time.
“Well, if you learn anything useful, just let me know.”