A heavier silence reigned supreme this time around. Lucian had been very generous to indulge Kane, giving him more details than he’d asked for, but of course, Kane needed some time to piece it all together.
It was essentially what Kane had expected. Someone was dropping them into Hell, one by one, and telling them, “Best of luck surviving here with no guidance or direction or whatever— oh, and don’t forget to have fun!” And Lucian had been the very first victim.Someone, or something, was orchestrating this nightmare.
And the part about throwing on the clothes to feel sane… it somehow turned part of Kane’s jealousy into pity. Nobody else wore pirate outfits, meaning they’d likely found a way to do laundry with the galley chest’s bottled water since Tal had arrived. But Lucian had simply never stopped.
Kane looked down to see himself drumming a rhythm on his lap. Stop. Fidgeting. Kane. “Sucks to hear, man,” he managed to say. He’d never good at sympathy.
Lucian smiled. “Glad I could answer the question that’s been eating at you this whole time,” he said with a light chuckle. He drew his pocket watch from his cloak and snapped it open, peeked at it, then shut it. “I wasn’t only going to let you ask one question, you know. Just wanted to see where your head was at. And given you asked such an insipid, shallow, uninspiring, complete waste of a question… I’d say you’re doing fairly well.”
He lowered his chin. “Better than the others were when they arrived, at least.”
Kane ignored the part about their poor collective mental well-being completely, as that was currently the least of his concerns. Clearly, Lucian was more worried about when he’d be getting to bed rather than the volume of questions Kane asked, and Kane was not about to waste this new opportunity.
He spit out the first question on his tongue. “Wait, so, somewhere in there you mentioned ‘Limbo’. What’s that?”
Lucian huffed out his nose at Kane’s dismissal of concern. “Limbo. You know, the party game? With the low bar, and then you all—”
“Well, I know the party game, but I doubt you—”
“Ha! Yeah, I’m just messing with you.” The captain stroked at his goatee. “Limbo is what I believe this part of Hell to be called. Do you remember how Tal brought up Dante’s Inferno when I pulled out the map?”
“Uh…”
Lucian pulled the map out of his cloak, because of course he had it on him.
He plastered it down over the tea table, smoothing it out with his hands. “I know you can’t see it, but bear with me here.” He pointed to one corner of the map. “We’re here. You, me, us, the ship. All on this big red X that I’m totally not making up.” He dragged his finger inwards slightly. “And we’re trying to head over here. This shaded-in part of the map. Land.”
Before Kane could say anything, Lucian continued. “I’m sure you’re wondering where I even got this map.” He’d taken the words right out of Kane’s mouth. “In essence, it appeared on deck one morning, all dry and completely blank. As if someone had left it there for me. The pocket watch I use was there, too. I know it sounds stupid, but hey, everything down here is stupid down here to a degree.”
It did sound stupid, but at this point, Kane couldn’t help but allow some suspension of disbelief.
“You see, although there are books spread all around the ship, the captain’s quarters was the only room with books on magic. They’re old as hell, written in archaic script, and basically illegible, but eventually I was able to pick up a thing or two. And I found that the more magic I practiced and learned, the more I understood the inner workings of not only the ship, but of this world itself.”
Kane couldn’t help but frown. He hated hearing anything remotely adjacent to “comprehending the meaning of life” BS, and dearly hoped that wasn’t where this was headed.
“Anyways, I’m getting sidetracked. The map would have remained completely useless unless I’d learns magic first. And you see how we’re on the outskirts of the map? Ha, of course you don’t. Well, in Dante’s Inferno, Dante and Virgil have to work their way inwards through the circles of Hell before they can escape to Purgatorio and eventually Paradiso, i.e. Purgatory and Heaven. And they start their journey in the outer ring — Limbo.” Lucian traced a finger all around the map. “Where those who didn’t quite make the cut for heaven, but who weren’t evil enough for Hell proper, go to spend eternity.”
Ah. So they all might just be in some storybook version of Hell, because they’d been “categorically mediocre” in life. Just splendid.
Kane found his voice. “And all this hinges on you assuming that we weren’t really bad enough to just go to Hell regardless?”
Lucian paused, eyes narrowing as if he were mildly affronted. “I don’t know anything about your life, Kane. But I won’t put myself on a pedestal and dole out your eternal judgment on some supreme being’s behalf. And if I can’t judge others based on facts alone, how can I possibly judge myself given all my internal biases?”
His response left a bad taste in Kane’s mouth. It sounded like a roundabout answer — the man wasn’t saying no, but he definitely wasn’t saying yes.
It didn’t matter. Kane didn’t need to know about Lucian’s life on Earth — no more looking back, right? Rather, he had to look forward, figure out how he’d contribute to their mission and eventually escape.
Which meant he’d have to equip himself with the tools necessary to be useful. “Esau said you don’t have any powers. How can that work, where the other three have supernatural abilities but we don’t?”
He hadn’t even quite pinpointed what their powers were yet. Esau could create and manipulate fire. And it seemed like Tal could move and block stuff with his mind. And Saul seemed to have super strength or something with the scimitar-swinging and nail-pushing, but Kane was still iffy on that one. Yet Lucian seemed completely ordinary, if not extremely agile and in peak fighting form.
A one-sided grin slid onto Lucian’s face, as if he’d been expecting Kane to ask this question. “Yeah, I was trying to get a read on you earlier. I thought I’d be the only exception, but four people is hardly an adequate sample size.”
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He leaned in, as if inspecting Kane more closely would help him get to the bottom of this. “Either your memories of your power in life haven’t come back to you enough yet, or you truly don’t have any powers. Perhaps you need t delve deeper into your past somehow. Either way, there’s no excuse for you not to be useful. You still have your dagger?”
My dagger? Kane thought. Apparently, no one else wanted the dagger from the grave chest from earlier, so that meant it was his by default.
“Yeah, I stashed it by my hammock in the crew’s quarters.”
Lucian nodded, then pulled it out from his cloak.
Kane’s eyes widened in incredulity. “When did you go through my stuff?”
“‘Your stuff’? This is all you own other than the clothes on your back, my friend, and it’s not even actually yours.” Lucian cradled the blade in his hands, inspecting it as if it were the most interesting weapon he’d laid eyes on in a good while.
Kane hadn’t realized it before, but in the red lighting of this cabin, the carvings on the wood-and-gold hilt looked more rudimentary than he’d originally believed them to be. Asymmetrical symbols that seemed hand-carved, like initials etched into a wall or tree. Meanwhile, the blade itself was smooth and simple, long and curved, rusty yet strong.
“A Russian kindjal,” Lucian said, his voice a touch lower. “This one seems to be from the early-mid 20th century. And it seems to have had great value to someone at some point.”
Kane frowned, leaning back in his chair. “What makes you say that?”
Lucian extended the dagger so that Kane could see, tracing a finger along the symbols etched into the hilt, which seemed to have actually just been letters in Russian. “This says ‘The further into the woods, the more firewood you’ll encounter.’ The owner of this blade was a real fighter, someone who valued seeking the truth. Maybe that’s what got him killed.”
Kane didn’t have much to say to that. The quote made no sense to him, and it felt weird to be receiving an item that would be better off as a family heirloom — not to mention he didn’t know a thing about the original owner. Sure, it was just a simple dagger, no big deal, but it had an aura that felt weighty, felt like it should be treated with more than a modicum of respect.
And when Lucian handed it to him, it felt heavy in his hands, too.
He swerved it through the air in slow figure-eights, getting used to the weight as Lucian spoke. “Methinks you should hold onto it. It’s the first weapon you used down here, so, you know, do it for the memories and whatnot. I keep my rapier on me for the same reason, although I do have a more useful flintlock tucked in my cloak for emergencies.” Without any sort of warning, Lucian abruptly pulled it out of his seemingly-bottomless cloak and lifted it into the air, causing Kane to nearly fall out of his chair as he ducked away.
The pistol was polished wood and dark iron, and looked straightforward enough — nowhere near as enrapturing as the rapier. Kane wondered why the captain hadn’t used it in the fight with the kraken earlier, before coming to the conclusion that severed tentacles were maybe less deadly than punctured ones.
Or maybe the guy was just a showoff.
Kane’s brain took a second to process this all before asking the important question. “So I don’t get a sword then? No gun either?”
Lucian grinned, waving a hand indifferently. “You don’t need those. You’ll be surprised what you can accomplish with a light melee weapon and some elbow grease. Plus, it’ll be way faster to learn.”
But Kane wasn’t having it. “Lucian. Listen to me. I don’t want to die. Give me a gun.” If an otherworldly monstrosity crawled onto the ship and charged at him, was he really better off chopping it down at point-blank when any sort of firearm could boost his chances of survival by a percentage greater than 0?
“We’re out of guns.” Lucian said it plainly, as if it wasn’t completely ridiculous.
“You’re telling me there are no guns of any sort on this entire pirate ship.”
“Yes.”
Kane stared at him blankly. Lucian stared right back. This guy looks so fucking slappable right now.
“Give me yours then.” Kane held out an open palm expectantly.
Quick as a fox, Lucian tucked his flintlock back into his cloak. “This is becoming unproductive. Kane, you have to trust me.”
At this, rage, white-hot and transient as a bolt of lightning, flashed onto Kane’s face. “Why the fuck should I trust you, Lucian? How do you think I feel, in this situation, where I wake up one day with no memories, no bearings, on a pirate ship in a sea full of blood? Am I meant to just blindly obey complete strangers who don’t even know what the fuck is happening, how the fuck they got here, where the fuck they’re going? Why the fuck should I trust you?”
It hadn’t exactly come out of nowhere. Perhaps he had been holding it in the whole time. He was breathing heavily by the end, distraught by the fact that he’d done so well at not having any sort of outburst only for it to come out like this, but it had been inevitable.
It had all ended as quickly as it had started too — Kane’s anger had simmered and then burst like a pot under pressure. He’d been so blind with rage that he hadn’t noticed what he’d been doing with his hands. This time, he wasn’t fidgeting.
He had raised the tip of the kindjal to Lucian’s neck.
Kane was surprised at himself. While he had a temper, he didn’t remember himself to be the violent type. But perhaps that was just another memory waiting to be uncovered or some bullshit.
Rather than disarming him as he’d done to Saul earlier, Lucian wore an expression that only incensed Kane further — mild disappointment, as if a child had had a temper tantrum over a cookie jar and threatened him with a spoon. He pushed the dagger away with the tip of his finger, as if it disgusted him.
“You should trust me because you have no better move right now, Kane. You’re stuck, so you play along with the guy that might be playing you until you’re actually capable of doing something about it. Common sense really, but you didn’t hear it from me.”
The captain sighed, pulling out his pocket watch again and taking a quick peek. “Look,” he said as he snapped it shut, “Let’s wrap this up. Saul and I will train you on how to use bladed weapons tomorrow, and if you’re an especially good student, perhaps we can look into getting you to learn some magic. No one else wants to learn, and it could be useful to have someone else around who’s able to read the map. Not to mention, self-defense or whatever, since you seem to care about that nonsense.”
Despite his ebbing yet persistent anger, Kane perked up at that. Who wouldn’t want to try magic? The other guys must have been crazy to not want to learn. Or perhaps they were having too much fun with their own powers. Lucky bastards.
“Fine. Sure. Whatever.” Kane would take whatever he could get. His outburst had been warranted but unnecessary, so now he looked like an idiot. Thus, he had to leave ASAP and sleep it off.
So he got to his feet. “Is there anything else?”
Lucian pulled out a leather sheath and slapped it onto the table. “Might work better for you than your jeans pockets.”
“Ah.” Kane snatched it up, sliding the dagger into it. A near perfect fit. Lucian was nothing if not prepared. But he wasn’t very deserving of praise right now. “Is that it?”
“One more thing.” Lucian leaned forward, the candle illuminating and deepening his features. “Take it slow and steady, man. I understand your pain, believe me. You’re doing alright. But nerves and a lack of self-control will get you dead.”
He stood in one fluid motion, looking Kane in the eye. They were the exact same height. “Capiche?”
Kane frowned. This motherfucker would bandy around nonchalant nonsense and follow it up with reassuring platitudes, and somehow expect it to form something coherent and worthwhile. It had only been a few hours, but Kane was already done with it. “Got it.” He spun on his heel and marched out, slamming the door behind him.