INTERLUDE: BEACON OUTPOST

The world-sphere of Talvi 21.11.08.05.04

They lit every corner of the statue room before finally entering it in force to examine the find.

“There's something…off about these,” Nils said, examining the statues.

“Look human enough to me.” Jac Deragian opined. “Round ears, no pointy chins...human.”

“Yes, but...I...can't you see it?”

Deragian and Vanda looked at the statues, at each other, back at the statues again, and then back to Nils.

“I see nothing strange about them,” Vanda said. “Well, other than that they're buried twenty fathoms below ground in what appears to be a natural cavern on Talvi.”

“They’re very…lifelike...” Deragian acknowledged.

That was the problem Nils was having. The statues were exquisite, to the point of being almost too good. If they weren't perfectly still and unyielding, he might even have taken them for people. Their eyes had an organic, authentic quality that no sculptor should have been able to capture. The conviction that the inanimate figure would blink and look at him any second now was almost revolting, and if it had actually done so, he might well have fled screaming back to the whispering Shades outside. They at least were a terror he vaguely understood.

“Fascinating...” Vanda said. He had picked up the box. And was turning it back and forth with a rapt expression.

Nils spared him a glance. “What?”

“The box is magical. Powerfully so.”

“Enchanted?”

“Impossibly...yes.”

“What's so impossible about an enchanted box?” Nils demanded.

“You don't know magic at all? The Laws?” asked Vanda.

“Remind me.”

“Well, magical enchantments wear off over time, and they wear off faster if the object in question is intricate or highly worked. A light spell cast upon a pebble from the river might last for a year or so.”

“Yes, yes,” Nils waved a hand. “And?”

“And yet this is a crafted wooden box with knotwork and brass decorations, and still it feels strong,” Vanda explained. “For it to feel this strong, an absolute master enchanter would have had to charge it within the last hour or so. Yet it has been more than an hour since the miners first found this place, and I am the only mage among us. Furthermore, the walls of this chamber are natural rock, with no sign that any living thing has been here before us.” He looked up. “As I said. It’s all quite impossible.”

“Impossible means...valuable?” Nils asked. Vanda considered the question.

“Yes. Academically, beyond valuable. But I assume you mean fiscally?” When Nils nodded eagerly, he issued a faint smile. “The Observatory will pay us a bounty for it.”

“How big a bounty?”

Vanda named a figure that would comfortably cover the costs of the entire expedition with change left over to buy a sixth ship.

After a moment of stunned silence, Nils found his voice again. “That seems...expansive.”

“The Laws date back to the Elvish Empire, and are very well tested,” Vanda said. “The only known exception to them is the will of the Crowns themselves…”

“...Oh.” Nils gave the box a look of newfound respect.

Vanda nodded, widening his eyes and raising his eyebrows. Then his hand glowed with the energies of a casting.

“Come on, my beauty...show me your secggrraaaaaAAAAAGH!!!!”

The navigator's voice became a plaintive wail as his fingers suddenly closed convulsively around the box. He fell on his back and began to writhe, shrieking at a desperate pitch that froze Nils and Deragian to the floor. Neither of them had imagined that a mortal throat could produce such agony.

Blue streamers of energy poured from Vanda's nose, mouth and ears. His eyes slammed open in stark horror and contributed their own energy to the stream, which flowed down his arm and into the tiny artifact he was clutching. Before Nils or Deragian could muster the wit to do anything, his flesh shrunk against his bones, as if he had starved to death in only a handful of seconds. His shriek choked and died and he collapsed.

His hand disintegrated in a shower of gritty grey particles, but the box hung in the air, its surface now lit by bright green runes which pulsed with the rhythm of a heartbeat. Only when Vanda had been reduced to a disintegrating skeleton in pristine clothing did it finally drop to the floor, and the runes went dark. It bounced, rolled, and fetched up against Nils' boot. Stunned and unthinking, he stooped and picked it up, deaf to Deragian's desperate cry of “Don't!”

As he did so, the runes lit again and he froze, but nothing worse happened.

“It...must have been the spell.” he said, breaking the silence. “O-or, or a protection of some kind. Make a note of that, Jac. Don't...don't cast anything on this.”

Deragian gave his employer a shocked look, then turned his attention back to their navigator’s desiccated remains.

“I'll...Winter's tits, Mister Civorage, I think I can remember that one.”

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> “The third law of magic is this: the relationship between the strength and duration of enchantment an object can retain, and how much that object has been shaped by mortal intention, is inverse. This is known as the Law of Refinement.” —The Initiate’s Guide to Magecraft

THE AIRSHIP CAVALIER QUEEN

Above the world-sphere of Haust 11.06.03.06.03

Jerl found himself with very little time to dwell on their loss, nor to rest. With no navigator or helmsman, it fell to him to plot the ship's course and fly it himself. They made excellent time, however. Despite being torn off and half-buried, the port engine seemed to be working well, though with half the usual number of blades per engine and with its makeshift keel the ship's handling felt different, more sluggish.

“You've picked up some wounds too, haven't you darling?” he asked the ship, running a hand over the controls and fancying he could feel the Queen shiver at his touch, like a cat rubbing against the hand that stroked it.

Fully a third of the crew were dead, between reclaiming her from the impound in Long Drop and the battle with the nornfey. Normally, the Queen's deck bustled with men checking the rigging, cooking their rations, splicing ropes, sewing damaged patches of gas bag, or just sitting, eating, talking and drinking. Usually there would have been dice games, jokes and songs. Today, nobody had the morale for anything more than doing their job and reflecting quietly on their own survival, and on those who weren't so lucky.

Jerl flew numbly, thoughtlessly. He’d lost two of his closest friends in the span of hours, and only the task of getting to the Thundering Hall and finally, maybe getting some help was keeping him upright.

Eventually though, his aching feet and leaden arms made themselves impossible to ignore. He grabbed one of the riggers at random, gave the startled man a basic lesson in helmsmanship, showed him how to follow the course he’d set, made it absolutely clear that he was to be roused immediately if anything unusual happened, and staggered into his cabin.

There was still a blood stain by the door and up half the wall, and the door to Amir's room was rocking back and forth on its one remaining hinge: the elves had smashed the lock to get in. He felt a stab of deep grief as he saw the stacks of literature that filled the cabin around Amir's small bed.

He was still standing and staring in when there was a knock from the open door behind him. Derghan raised a bottle of something and gave him a ‘may I?’ expression.

Jerl waved him in.

Neither man said a word as they went through into Jerl's cabin and shut the door so as to have a barrier between themselves and that bloodstain. Jerl opened the padded travel case and picked out two of the crystal tumblers from his father's set that he saved for special occasions, embossed with the ship's name and figurehead—a bare-chested wench with a feathered cap, a pistol and a sabre.

No toast was spoken, they just poured the drink, touched glasses, and knocked back a finger's worth of Derghan's home-brewed whisky.

“...All this over a bloody box.” Derghan grumbled, eventually.

“Why didn't they just buy it off ol’ Gebby?” Jerl agreed. “He'd have sold it for half a brass.”

“Bastards.”

They drank to that. Several times.

“I wanted to apologize.” Derghan told him, after about the fifth glass, when Jerl's head was full of the fuzzy warmth of good alcohol.

“To me? What for?”

“Fer tellin' yer not to shoot that whoreson Civorage when we had the chance.”

“Nah. Derghan, mate. You were right about that. They'd have caught us.”

“Except they fuckin' well went an' caught us anyway.”

“No way to see that comin’. No way to see any of this comin',” Jerl objected. “We just got fucked in the arse by fate and that's it.”

He sighed, swallowed the latest drink, and lay back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling where a square of fabric from the ship's old sails still hung. “All I ever wanted was the quiet life. You know? Just me, and my friends, and my ship, sailing the Worlds, making money, drinking good booze an' leaving a lot of good stories behind us.”

“An' satisfied wenches,” Derghan chuckled. “Don't forget the wenches.”

“Speak for yourself,” Jerl replied.

“You should try it sometime. Better a paid squeeze than no love at all…” he trailed off, made a bitter noise, and knocked back a hefty slug of strong liquor. “Fuck it all. Sin…”

“You really loved her, huh?”

Derghan stared miserably into his empty glass and poured himself a new one. “...You ever really look into her eyes?” he asked.

Jerl shrugged. “I mean…not really?”

“Ithfey eyes. Fuckin’ mesmerising. I swear they changed, minute by minute. A little more pink, a little more green, or a little more blue…fuck.” He heaved a huge, shaky breath. “I wanted to hear her stories. I wanted to know who she was in her past lives. But she never…opened up, you know? She never let anyone in. Even though she wanted to. I could feel it. But she never did.”

“And the one time she did, I went and interrupted it,” Jerl apologized

“Not your fault.” Derghan swirled his whisky. “Mind you, Amir was no open book either.”

“Nor are you,” Jerl pointed out. “You’ve been with me since we first put engines on the Queen, and I don’t know shit about Clan Vargur or where you’re from or anything.”

Derghan was silent for a long moment. “Well…we get through all this, I’ll put that right,” he said eventually.

“Only if you want to, mate.”

“Yeah, I want to. Sin was right about leaving unfinished business and, well. If I’ll follow you into shit like that back there, you deserve to know who I am, eh?”

“Thanks. But for now, let’s drink.” Jerl raised his glass, which Derghan refilled. “To the moment. And to those who can't be here to enjoy it with us.”

“And to those who still are. May they live to see another one,” Derghan responded solemnly.

“Too bloody right.” They drank. Jerl refilled them this time.

“To Amir. Wish you were here, mate.” Derghan said.

“Amir at-Bezwi! The cleverest man I’ve ever known.”

“An' to Sinikka. I hope ye grow up somewhere peaceful, lass.”

“Aye. To Sinikka Nerissith. May we live to see her again.”

Derghan's sad smile faded at that. “Twenty years...” he said. “I'll be near sixty.”

“And she'll be knockin’ on for twelve thousand,” Jerl pointed out.

Derghan shook his head. “Not the point. Even if she was the same person after reincarnating, an’ she won’t be, that's twenty years I wouldn't get to spend with her,” he said. “An' we get precious few, don't we?”

“That's not what counts, though. What counts is how much life you get out of them. I bet you and I can squeeze more life into sixty years than most elves squeeze into an age.”

“You really believe that?”

Jerl nodded firmly “Ever since Dad was taken. You've got to enjoy what you have while you have it because tomorrow it could be gone.” He frowned when Derghan stared pensively into his drink. “What?”

“You think it's that simple?” Derghan asked. “Just live for now?”

“It's worked for me so far.”

“Then why are we takin' the box to Yngmir? Why not just…pitch the bloody thing overboard right now, chuck it out of the worlds? Surest way to make sure Civorage and his lot never get their hands on it.”

Jerl paused. “Well, cause...well Amir pleaded me to. And he always gave good advice. And I promised to, I guess. And I keep my promises to my friends.”

“Even to dead friends?”

“Especially to dead friends.”

“That's not exactly livin' in the moment is it?” Derghan observed.

“...I suppose not.”

“So, I know ye think o' the past.” Derghan said. “How often do ye think o' the future?”

Jerl shrugged “Not a whole lot I can do about the future, is there? It comes when it comes and I'll deal with it then. Aside from things like putting some money aside for emergencies, what can you do?”

“So ‘yer not completely impulsive then.”

Jerl frowned. “Are we gonna run aground on a point any time soon?”

There was a pause, as Derghan swirled his whiskey. “My old man thought a lot like you.” he said after some time. “He used to tell me 'Boy, tomorrow any ol' thing could happen, so just you worry about makin' it through today.' Used to call the other clan elders all kinds o' things when a moot was called. He thought they were bein' a bunch of ol' wives gatherin' to talk about every damn thing under the sun rather than jus' getting on with life.”

He poured the last dribbles of whisky out into their glasses. “Turns out there's such a thing as a fight ye can't win no matter how hard you fight, Jerl. An' you only get into them by not payin' attention to tomorrow. If ye spend yer whole time takin' in the view, might be you won't see the men with guns who're after your coin. It turns out that if you just shrug your shoulders an' say 'any ol' thing could happen tomorrow' then any ol' thing does happen tomorrow cause yer stupid arse went an' blundered into it.”

He raised the last glass. “So, let's drink to livin' in the moment but for tomorrow, aye?”

Jerl needed a long moment to absorb this, a moment made longer by the alcohol fog in his brain.

“I...yeah,” he agreed eventually. “Let's drink to that.”

----------------------------------------

He woke up with a hangover, of course, but not the worst he’d ever had. A splash and drink of cold water chased the worst of it away, and though the sight of the blood stain still in the main room of the cabin lowered his spirits again, when he opened the door and caught a blast of cold air in the face it blew the last of the drink's influence out of his brain.

Clearly, a third crewman had been given some basic instructions about keeping the ship steady and left to it. He seemed more than grateful to pass the wheel back over to the skipper, who grabbed the sextant and set about figuring how far off course they were. He was quietly surprised and gratified to find that they had strayed by only about a hundred miles.

Spying Marren slouched atop a pile of furs sewing together the damaged strip of envelope, he called out.

“Mister Marren!”

“Aye, skipper?”

“How're you holding up?”

Marren shrugged and indicated the bandage around his upper arm. Jerl could sympathize. “We've lost some good lads. Got some mates I won't get to share a drink with when we make port.”

Jerl nodded. “I know. Pass the word, everyone's on double pay for this month, this isn't what you signed up for.”

“’Preciate it, boss...” Marren pushed his needle listlessly through the canvas, then set it aside. “Wanna know what I think? Unvarnished?”

“Always.”

“You're doin' a good job. Don't let the back o' your head tell you any different. Me an' the twins'd’ve been dead if you hadn't come for us. The lads all feel the same, even if we miss our mates. We’re with you all the way.”

Jerl paused, awkwardly, then cleared his throat and nodded. “Thank you, Andony.”

“Right. Double pay then?” Marren managed a weak laugh. “I'll pass the word.”

“Carry on, Mister Marren.”

“Aye aye.”

Marren tugged his forelock and began to tour the deck. Jerl allowed himself a moment of contemplation and then, with a small, sad smile he grabbed the control to angle the ship's nose down towards Haust.

----------------------------------------

The Thundering Hall was built by the Herald Yngmir himself, and easily one of the grandest structures in the Worlds. Equal parts fort and library, it was big enough for an airship to fly under its steep gabled roof, and thus dominated the top of the flat slab of rock upon which it was built.

Around it, as far as the eye could see, was glacial outwash haunted by lonely boulders and shallow meltwater channels. From the air, the landscape was brown and desolate, but haunting rather than ugly. Yngmir had specifically chosen the site for its isolation, days away from any storm-clan's territory.

The advent of airships had rather reduced this solitude, but it was still far removed from the cares of the world, and a haven for people whose sole interest was in expanding their own knowledge and that of men and Fey across the Worlds through book study, philosophical conversation and scientific research. Indeed, the Hall was where the principles of scientific methodology had first been proposed and where the ethanol combustion engine had been invented.

To Jerl's eyes, it didn't look much like a center for learning and intellect so much as the feast hall of some ancient chieftain. Inside the thick stone beacon-capped walls, the path from the front gate passed between no less than three pairs of bearded statues, each progressively more imposing than the last, which guarded the great doors. Housing, bookbinder's workshops and all the other industry necessary to keep the Hall's occupants supplied had sprung up as almost an afterthought outside of the walls.

The result was that the Hall itself, despite its incredible size, was now rather smaller than the town around it. Indeed, if anything it was an inferior feat of engineering than the dam and levies that kept the population in drinking water while channeling away the storm floods. There was even, in concession to the changing times, a landing mast and ground grew for airships, and a fuel distillery.

There were no airships currently present, however, and the Cavalier Queen was flagged down to the mast as soon as Jerl signaled their desire to land. Ropes were thrown, threaded through sturdy steel rings anchored in the rock of the valley floor, and the Queen was hauled safely down.

Rather than deflate the bag entirely, Jerl ordered for it to be reduced to the point of neutral buoyancy, and went ashore with Marren and Derghan.

A tribesman who might have been Derghan's cousin met them at the bottom of the gangplank. “Heimar's clan,” Derghan said quietly, referring to the tattoos. Jerl nodded.

“Well met, Heimar's son!” he exclaimed jovially, stepping off the ramp and clasping the man's forearm. “Jerl Holten, of the Cavalier Queen. This is my rigging chief, Andony Marren, and my engineer, Derghan of-”

“Vargur's clan,” the Heimar interrupted. “Thought your mob were all dead?”

“Aye, and that makes me the Vargur chief,” Derghan replied, clearly nettled at the short attitude.

The other clansman frowned at him, then gave the slightest of bows before returning his attention to Jerl “Ronar Heimarsson,” he introduced himself. “What's your business at the Hall, captain?”

“I need an audience with the Herald,” Jerl told him.

“Need, is it?” Ronar issued an amused blast of air through his nose “Most people seek or request.”

“I need,” Jerl said, firmly. “And I think he'll agree once he sees what we've brought to him.”

“He doesn't have much or patience for visitors who waste his time,” Ronar warned.

Jerl pulled the box from his pocket, and was struck by how painfully bright the runes above its surface were, even in the light of day. Ronar's lips parted slightly as he stared at it in bewilderment.

“I very much doubt that we'll be a waste of his time,” Jerl said. “Is my request granted?”

“A—…yes. As much as I'm able to,” Ronar agreed, looking a little stunned. He delved into a pouch on his belt and handed Jerl a square bone token stamped with a rune. “Show that to the guards at the great doors.”

“My thanks.”

“Will you be needing any fuel or to offload any cargo, captain?” Ronar asked.

Jerl glanced at Derghan, who nodded. “We're down to our last ten barrels.” he said.

“Then that's a “yes” to both questions, Ronar Heimarsson.” Jerl said. “We have a cargo of furs, alcohol, fabrics and pottery from the Winter Bazaar.”

“Aye, you'll find buyers for those.” Ronar told him. “We, ah...can also offer some repairs. Seeing as it seems like you’ve been through a rough spot, and all…”

“Thank you, yes. Repairs and resupply. Andony, you have my ship until I return. Just get repair quotes for now, but bring some decent victuals in for the lads. Under no circumstance is the bag to be deflated.”

“Right you are, skipper.” Marren nodded sharply and jogged back up the ramp, shouting orders to begin emptying the hold.

Ronar stepped aside and gestured with a hand “Then if you'll follow me, captain, I'll escort you to the gates.”

----------------------------------------

People got out of their way as they went, and stared. Clearly an airship was still a rare and special sight at the Thundering Hall.

The town was busy despite its small size and isolation, and seemed to have a higher than average fey population, all gray-skinned, white-eyed storm elves. Unusually, in fact, human and elf children were playing together in the streets, and they passed a small group of boys who were daring a tall, red-haired human lad to collect from a steaming pile of fresh horse manure and throw it at a nearby Oneist preacher.

Judging from the expressions with which most of the crowd were regarding the proselytizer, this pending act of mischief would probably prove popular. Clearly, he was deeply disliked.

“Church of the One don’t have many friends around here, it seems,” Jerl commented.

“You a Oneist?” Ronar asked.

“Not me.”

“Good. Bastards tried to break into the library and burn it a couple days ago.”

“You’re joking!”

“I wish. Whole mob of ‘em, rushed the gates and the front door with firebombs in hand. We lost three guards.”

“That bein’ the case, how come that prick’s still free to shout at everyone?” Derghan asked, turning to look back at the preacher.

“Herald’s orders,” Ronar said. “Yngmir says that dissenting voices must be heard no matter what.”

Derghan frowned. “Even after that? They killed people and tried to burn his library!”

“Even after that,” Ronar agreed.

“I would’ve thought he’d come down on them like a fucking landslide!”

Ronar chuckled. “Only somebody who’s never met Yngmir would assume that.”

“He’s a pacifist?” Jerl asked.

“Not exactly. Let’s say…he has a higher-altitude perspective on things.” Ronar smiled grimly as there was shouting and a small cheer from behind them. Clearly the horse manure prank had gone ahead successfully. “He likes being challenged.”

“Arson and murder is a bit more than a challenge!” Derghan pointed out.

Ronar just shrugged. “You’ll understand once you’ve met him.”

“Any advice?” Jerl asked.

“Mhm. Surest way to make him like you is to truthfully speak your mind rather’n kiss his feet. And the surest ways to make him dislike you are to have a closed mind, or lie to him.”

Jerl grunted and nodded, taking that in. “Thanks.”

“Knowledge is free in the Thundering Hall.” The way Ronar said it sounded like a mantra.

They were nearing the Hall’s gates now, and Ronar stopped at the bottom of the long stone steps that led up toward them. “Just one thing, gentlemen. I know trouble when I see it. Even without our own recent problems, your ship’s battered and your crew’s grieving and short-handed. And that box, whatever it is, radiates power like nothing I’ve ever sensed. And you bring it claiming you need to speak to a Herald. Just how much trouble are you in?”

“Lots. And it’s very likely not far behind us,” Jerl told him, levelly. “Some damn powerful people want this thing, including the Oneists. We’ve got nowhere else to turn except the Herald, now.”

Ronar looked him in the eye for a long second then stepped aside.

“...Thank you for your honesty. Go on up.”

The gate guards gave them no trouble—it seemed that Ronar's company was enough for them, and they waved Jerl and Derghan through. The noise of the town dropped away the moment they were inside the Hall's outer wall, leaving them in a quiet oasis where they got their first chance to truly appreciate the scale of the building and the statues that guarded it. The men and women in rugged wool clothing wandering the grounds were utterly dwarfed by it all.

“You know...if a human had built this, you'd have to assume they were -” Derghan began, quietly.

“-Compensating,” Jerl chorused with him, nodding. “Yes.”

They began the walk to the front door. From the air the distance from gate to door had not seemed large, but on the ground the illusion was dispelled. It was just small in comparison to the Hall itself. It was a grand sight, one that Jerl had always wanted to see in person, but now he was acutely aware of the weight of the box in his pocket, and of just how much they had sacrificed to bring it here.

“He'd damn well better have something useful to say.” he muttered.

The guards at the front door were three clansmen and a storm elf, who was apparently the leader. “Business?”

“We need to speak to the Herald.” Jerl told him, showing the chip Ronar had given them.

“On what business?” the elf repeated, barely glancing at it. Jerl reached into his pocket and then became aware of a series of subtle but menacing noises as the human guards put their hands to their weapons.

Jerl was beyond giving a shit. “Point those bloody things somewhere else,” he said, and withdrew the box from his pocket.

The sheer audacity of this seemed to have the intended impact: the guards glanced at one another in confusion and dismay, but settled down. The elf hadn't moved, but was regarding the box with fascination. Jerl decided to drive the nail home.

“I've flown here from two worlds up to deliver this. Two of my best friends and a third of my crew are dead because of it. Between the Oneists, the Clear Skies and the nornfey it seems like every vicious whoreson in the Worlds is after this thing, a fact which may be explained by the fact that our late friend suspected it was made by the Crowns themselves.”

He drew himself up to his full height and projected an aura of impatience as he looked the lead guard dead in the eye. “So. I need to see the Herald. Please.”

----------------------------------------

The legends about the library of the Thundering Hall simply did it no justice at all. Most of the Hall’s cavernous interior had been given over to floor after floor of book and scroll cases, all fully laden. The only clear space was down the middle, where a wide avenue cut a swathe through the otherwise dense stacks. It seemed odd for that much space to go unused, when the rest was if anything overcrowded, but Jerl had heard the legends about how big Yngmir was. Presumably he needed that avenue to get out of the building every so often.

They were led straight down the central aisle by a balding, aging human who had been hastily summoned to greet them, had stared in astonishment at the box, and promptly agreed that they absolutely must see Yngmir at once.

“And you say you acquired this thing at the Winter Bazaar?” he asked.

“Yes, though the runes only appeared night before last,” Jerl said. Derghan had gone entirely silent as he craned his neck to try and take in the whole immense building.

“Could you venture a guess as to what caused them to light?” the scribe asked. He had introduced himself, after being prompted, as Sevjin Jerelsson. Clearly, he had none of the hangups most Haustian clansmen did about wearing his intelligence openly to be seen.

“The hag elves performed some kind of sacrificial ritual,” Jerl told him. “We interrupted it, so I don't know exactly what they were intending. A blast of lightning struck my friend as she was holding the box, and it lit up like this.”

“I...assume your friend is not with you?” Sevjin inquired, delicately.

“She's an elf. But you're right, we're going to miss her for a few years.”

“My condolences, captain. For all your losses.”

Jerl nodded his thanks. “It was my friend Amir at-Bezwi who convinced us the box should come here.”

“Amir?” Sevjin turned, anxiously.

“You knew him?”

“Knew? Oh! Oh…” Shock and sorrow flashed across Sevjin’s face as he read Amir’s fate in Jerl’s own expression. “Yes, I...I knew him quite well. I...won't be alone around the Hall in mourning him, if he has passed.”

“He stayed here?” Derghan asked.

Sevjin removed his spectacles and wiped the corner of his eye. “He joined us at just ten years old,” he said, simply. “I had the pleasure of mentoring him, before he departed for the Observatory. It...yes, it absolutely makes sense that he would have wanted to bring this here. I am glad you are honoring his wish.”

Not for the first time, Jerl cursed Amir's reticence to talk about his own past. “It made sense,” he said.

“Besides,” Derghan added, sadly. “Ol' Amir never led us wrong. I'd have trusted him if he said we had to fly Outside to get rid of the fuckin' thing.”

Sevjin simply nodded, the bump of his larynx working up and down as he swallowed back his grief. They walked on in silence for a few minutes, climbing up a small flight of stairs to where a great tapestry-hung wooden wall separated off about a third of the Hall from the rest. Not a wall, Jerl realised—doors. Enormous double doors big enough to fly the Queen through, with a smaller set in the base, scaled for humans. Sevjin knocked, and waited.

There was a pause, and then a voice unlike any Jerl had heard before.

“Come.”

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INTERLUDE: BEACON OUTPOST

The world-sphere of Talvi 05.12.08.05.04

“Permission to speak freely, cap'n?”

“Aye. What?”

Jac Deragian set aside his tankard as his first and second mates sat down opposite him. It was the middle of the shift, and the halls were full of the sound of pickaxes and the trundle of carts taking precious ore to the surface. A good time for talking quietly without being overheard.

“It's about Mister Civorage, sir,” the first mate said. His name was Harl Kutler, and Deragian had worked with him for years. The man was an excellent barometer for the general feeling of the whole crew. His eyes flicked up from Kutler's face to check on Nils Civorage, who was still safely at his table over in the corner of the living cavern.

“Yeah. You don't need to say it, Harl,” he murmured. Something about the rapt expression that came over Civorage's face whenever he studied the mystery box was deeply troubling. He had seen men stare at their first-born children with less love. Every so often Civorage would tear his gaze away to scribble in a notebook.

“The lads are getting...on edge,” his second mate, Ergen, said. “With what happened to Mister Vanda...”

“You weren't there, Ergen,” Deragian said. “You don't know what happened to Vanda.”

“We all heard the scream, Cap'n,” Harl told him. “No escaping it in these tunnels.”

Deragian sighed. Morale was sinking like a ship with a torn bag, he could feel it. The problem was, he couldn't think of a way to stop it.

“We're past half way,” he said, by way of reassurance. “We're all getting paid enough for this job to say farewell and get on with our lives, aren't we? We just have to tough out two weeks. We can do that. We've toughed out worse.”

He knew he sounded less like he was reassuring them than himself. It seemed to work anyway.

“Yeah. Two weeks.” Ergen muttered. “We've got the supplies, we can put up with weird for that long.”

“And besides, where we gonna go?” Harl added, bitterly. “Nothin’ but shades outside.”

“Good man,” Deragian told him, finally finding his confidence as a captain. “You just make sure all the lads understand that, aye? Get their heads down and their minds on the job, and tell them to tally off the days on the wall if they have to, I don't care. We can hold together until then.”

“Do us a favor, Cap'n?” Harl asked him.

“What?”

“See if you can talk Mister Civorage into starin' at that thing somewhere else? If he did it out of sight somewhere, it'd do less harm.”

Deragian thought on this. “Yeah. I'll see if I can do that,” he agreed, and both men relaxed slightly. That was a sign that getting their crumbling sponsor out of sight and out of mind would help their morale situation too. “Hop to, gents. I'm relying on you.”

“Aye, skipper.” Harl said. They jumped up, looking considerably more motivated, and left him alone.

Deragian finished his lunch of small beer and vegetable soup with crusty bread in thoughtful silence, thinking over how to phrase his request. Once done, he shook out a stiff click in his neck for courage, and shuffled over to his employer's table.

Nils was surrounded by paper, much of it covered in copies of the runes off the box's surface. He was turning the item back and forth in his hand and in the dim half-light of the cavern the magic danced in eyes that had lost their shrewd edge in favor of rapt, childish wonder. He looked up when Deragian sat next to him and smiled.

“Beautiful. Worth the whole trip,” he said by way of a greeting. “See?” he touched a finger to one of the runes, which swirled around his touch and then flowed along and around the box's surface as he dragged it, the other runes shuffling to make room.

“It's...making the lads nervous, Mister Civorage,” Deragian told him, gently. Nils didn't seem to hear him at first, but just as Deragian was about to repeat himself he returned his attention to the conversation. “Hmm? Oh, the men. Why?”

“Well...what happened to Mister Vanda, sir.”

“So long as nobody casts a spell on it, they'll be perfectly fine.” Nils waved his free hand dismissively. “Look at me! I've been studying the thing ever since we found it and I'm perfectly fine.”

Deragian decided to hold his peace on that score. Nils had the puff-eyed look of somebody who wasn't sleeping enough. His mustache clearly hadn't been waxed in some time, nor had he apparently shaved in several days. There was a crazed, restless quality to him now.

“Be that as it may, sir, the lads are, uh, low on morale,” he said, deciding to go with the blunt option. Again, there was that slight delay before Civorage caught up with the conversation.

“Morale? Oh. No good reason for that, but I suppose in this cave the last thing we want is low morale.”

“No sir. Not with two whole weeks still to go.”

“Two weeks? I had lost track.”

“Yes, sir.” Deragian replied, neutrally. He cleared his throat as Nils turned his attention back to the box, and was struck by the irritated look this earned him. “I was, uh, wondering if you might be amenable to some more privacy, sir?” he asked. “Away from the noise, where the lads won't disturb you.”

“Or be disturbed by me?” Nils asked, and for a second the sharpness was back in his eye, but again it faded as he turned back to studying the box. “You're right. I should have some privacy.”

He fell silent again, still engrossed by the runes. After a while, Deragian risked a cough. Nils seemed to start like a man who had just felt the sensation of falling as they were dropping off to sleep.

“Shall I help you move your desk and papers, sir?” Deragian asked him. Nils blinked, as if unable to remember who was talking to him, then clarity returned again.

“Oh. Yes. Thank you.” He stood and slipped the box into his pocket and for the first time in days its unsettling, eye-twisting light was gone. The moment it shut off, his focus seemed to restore itself. “Good thinking, Jac. I'd forgotten the need to keep the men happy.”

“Don't mention it, Mister Civorage. Just doing what you pay me for.” Deragian picked up Civorage's chair, ordered two of the miners on their lunch break to bring the table, and calmly agreed with Nils all the way up the passage until they reached the first limit of the whispering, where a side passage had been mined, following a seam that had turned out to go nowhere.

The moment he was sat down, Nils produced the box again, and lost himself in it.

It was warm in the mine, but Jac Deragian shivered as he returned to spread the good news. With that done, they might just get to see daylight again without anything going seriously wrong.

----------------------------------------

> “The Crowns, who created and constrained magic, are necessarily exempt from the Laws. This is known as the Null Law. For example, the Crowns have granted a limited exemption to their Heralds, who are instead limited by different constraints and may thus perform feats of magic beyond any mortal working.” —The Initiate’s Guide to Magecraft

THE THUNDERING HALL

The world-sphere of Haust 12.06.03.06.03

The voice wasn't loud, but it had a large quality to it that left no doubt that the throat from which it had issued was definitely not human. Sevjin opened the door and beckoned for Jerl and Derghan to precede him.

Yngmir was actually something of a relief. He was still colossal, but not quite as big as the architecture had suggested. In fact from a distance he seemed almost normal sized, and only the sheer distance between his desk and the door betrayed how huge he really was. The desk was as big as the Cavalier Queen’s hull, and Yngmir was writing in a ledger atop it with a pen carved from a young pine tree. He was bearded and long-haired, with swept-back pointed ears that gave him a streamlined, wind-blown look, and was wearing a purple-trimmed red tunic and black trousers with leather thigh boots that must have spelled genocide for a whole herd of cattle. If not for his size, he might have been mistaken for a wealthy elfish trader.

Sevjin bowed, and Jerl and Derghan copied him—a formal and respectful but not obsequious bow from the waist. The Herald regarded them with a slight frown.

“Who are these, Sevjin?” He asked.

“I'll let them introduce themselves, Herald.” the old man said. He indicated stairs to their left where they could climb up to be level with the giant's desk. As they climbed, Yngmir carefully wiped his pen and placed it to one side.

“Well met.” Yngmir greeted them once they were at the top.

“Well met, o Yngmir.” Jerl replied formally. “I am Jerl Holten, Captain of the Airship Cavalier Queen, and this is Derghan of Vargur's Clan.”

“A pleasure to meet you, captain. Please, what business brings you?”

Jerl swallowed to wet his suddenly dry mouth, and produced the box. The Herald did something totally unexpected—he recoiled.

“Crowns!” he exclaimed. The box flew from Jerl's grip and impossibly seemed to grow until it was proportionately just as large compared to Yngmir's own hand as it had been to Jerl's. It smacked into the giant's palm with a thud that Jerl felt through his boots, and the herald studied it closely. “Where did you get this?”

Jerl coughed. “One of my crew got it as a...souvenir, in the Winter Bazaar. He was killed for it, and we've had a hard fight bringing it to you.” Yngmir looked up from studying the box and looked him in the eye. Jerl found he couldn't look away, and almost seemed to get lost. The Herald's eyes seemed to have a depth to them that he could have fallen into.

“Who killed him?”

“The Clear Skies. Or the Oneists. It wasn't really clear who the men who killed him worked for, but they are both involved.”

“Why did you bring this to me?”

“My navigator and friend, Amir at-Bezwi, convinced me that we should.”

It seemed almost as if a pressure on the back of his head went away. He rocked back on his heels slightly, and glanced aside at Derghan, who likewise seemed to have just been released by the same gentle force.

“Amir...he is dead. I saw it on your face when you spoke his name.” Yngmir closed his great eyes for a second. “I will mourn him.” he declared. Then he looked back at them and the sensation of pressure returned. “What did he say to convince you?”

Jerl recounted the conversation at the Cooper's Coin, more clearly than he had thought he could remember it. Word for word, in fact. The words seemed to flow from him without any conscious involvement on his part, and he watched astonished as his body seemed to relive the conversation without him. Yngmir simply stared at them, soaking up every detail. Again, the sensation of pressure vanished when Yngmir looked away and studied the box.

“It has been tampered with,” he observed. Jerl decided to pre-empt whatever mesmerism the Herald was using this time.

“The Hag elves did that. They boarded our ship, killed Amir and stole the box. We recovered the box from some kind of ritual site they had set up, but lost Sinikka—our ithfey companion—during our retreat.”

“Describe this ritual.”

“A fire pit with four statues, mockeries of the Crowns, around it, fighting over a ring. There was dancing and chanting and drumming. Four hag elves threw themselves into the fire just as Sinikka killed the shaman directing it all and picked up the box. Some kind of lightning shot from the statues and hit her. She told me later that it fatally wounded her, but that’s when the box lit up,” Jerl summarized. “The really weird bit is, there was no human mage orchestrating and channeling it all. The shaman was a nornfey.”

“In violation of the Law of Form?”

“Apparently.”

Yngmir’s brow furrowed deeply at that. “What happened next?”

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

“We retreated to my ship. Sin stayed behind to fight off the pursuit while we got away. We came directly here after that.”

There was a long silence. Yngmir's giant hand cupped his chin and he regarded the box with a troubled expression, head cocked on one side.

“Nils Civorage was there,” Derghan said. Yngmir looked sharply at them: that feeling of pressure returned for just a second, and then was gone.

“Troubling.” He laid the box down and it promptly returned to its normal side with a rush of displaced air. “Most troubling.”

He turned, and leaned on his elbows on the desk, looming over both Jerl and Derghan. “Do you feel entitled to an explanation?” he asked.

Jerl tried to meet the gaze of eyes that were each as large as his head. “I have heard knowledge is free in the Thundering Hall, “ he said. “Besides, a lot of people died to bring this to you. I think they are entitled to an explanation.”

Yngmir blinked slowly, and then stood up. His chair turned out not to be an actual chair, but rather a whole living tree that had been carefully encouraged to grow in the form of a seat. “Well said.”

He stretched, then turned across the room toward a titanic drinks cabinet. “Have you examined the runes on the box at all?” he asked as he produced a decanter of epic proportions for himself, and what, when he set it down on the desk, turned out to be a drinks cabinet on a human scale, not dissimilar to the one in Jerl's quarters with its strapping to hold the drinks safe in violent weather. A reservoir’s worth of what smelled to Jerl like whisky was poured into a glass that he could have tread water in. That decanter must have contained the annual output of an entire distillery.

“I have not.” Jerl confessed. He decided to take advantage of the hospitality and poured himself a drink, despite the faint hangover twinge that the Herald's booming voice was doing nothing to soothe.

“That is just as well. Examining them drove Civorage quite insane.”

“I've never heard of him bein' crazy before.” Derghan said.

“Some forms of insanity are easily missed,” Yngmir said, savoring the whisky's nose as he spoke, before sipping it. “Fervour, focus, ambition, zeal. I suspect he was at least a little bit…overly driven, even before he found the box. Who else but a madman would want to spend five weeks on Talvi during Eclipse, after all?”

“This isn't the same box, though?” Jerl asked.

“No. And its appearance is troubling. All of these were meant to have been locked away when the Worlds were made.”

“Was Amir...right? About it being a Word of Creation?”

Yngmir paused. “...Yes.”

“So they are real. Sin was convinced they’re not.”

“Your friend shares a belief common among elfkind. A lingering echo of the old empire. But indeed, the Words were spoken before fey and Heralds were woven into being, and thus we never heard them spoken. But they are real, and powerful beyond understanding. They are the power to alter a facet of reality itself.”

Jerl reached for his pipe. “Do you mind if I...?” he asked.

“Not at all.”

They sat in silence for some time, as Yngmir stroked his beard and turned the box this way and that to study it. It was Derghan who broke the quiet.

“I have questions,” he announced.

“And I shall answer if I am able. You deserve that much.”

“Well...what do the runes on it mean?”

“Ah!” Yngmir looked pleased. “A fascinating subject. They are the language of What Came Before.”

Both the humans in the room looked at each other with a confused frown.

“What Came Before?” Jerl asked. “Before what?”

“This.” Yngmir announced, spreading his arms and gesturing at the Worlds in general. “The sun, the roil, the worlds, and everything upon them. Only the void is more ancient.”

He leaned forward onto his elbows again. “What Came Before was dying, you see. Doomed. Not by some curse or impending calamity, but just by the simple fact of how it worked. Like a clock winding down. So the Crowns built these Worlds as a refuge. A place where they could live, and perhaps one day even wind the clock again, as it were.”

“So who made What Came Before?”

Yngmir’s soft intellectual chuckle shook the room. “That, as I understand it, was a matter of some debate. One which the Crowns continue to this day. Lady Haust believes that nobody made it, it merely was.”

“If there's a creation, doesn’t there have to be a creator?” Derghan asked.

“You echo our lord, King Eärrach. But who or what created the creator?” Yngmir countered “Either you have an infinite chain of creator and created stretching back to infinity, or else you have to conclude that something, somewhere was the First. Heralds and elves know for a fact this creation is not the First, as we were present at its birth. The Crowns claim they too were not the First, and I believe them. It is my lady Crown’s opinion that What Came Before was first, and I find her rationale compelling.”

“Okay…” Derghan scratched at the shaved side of his head. “But how do you know the Oneists aren't right and the Crowns aren’t lying about that?”

Yngmir smiled benevolently at this. “You impress me, Derghan son of Vargur.”

Derghan seemed nonplussed. “I do?”

“I tend to awe people,” Yngmir told him. “It is a rare man who will continue to ask probing, potentially offensive questions and challenge my opinion once given.”

He stroked his chin some more and chuckled, a sound like giant rocks knocking together deep in a cave. “But in answer to your question…I have spoken to the Crowns. I am as certain of their existence as I am of yours. And for them to exist, there must have been a world for them to exist in, so I may infer that they speak truthfully of What Came Before. The One may exist, but it has not yet revealed itself to me, and I have not yet found the words of the preachers sufficiently compelling. So, for the moment, I reserve judgment.”

“And let the Oneists preach, even if they attack your library with firebombs.”

Yngmir sat back and crossed one leg comfortably over the other. “Which is more damaging on the grand scale? The work of a few hooligans, or the suppression of thought itself?”

Jerl cleared his throat, eager to get the conversation back on track. “So, those runes do have a meaning then?”

“As much meaning as any letter. The runes appear when the box has been charged with magical energy, and they spell out a warning, a reminder to Crowns and Heralds that these boxes are layered with protections. To those who know how to read it, they reveal the dangers, and the secret of opening.”

“Why? And why keep it in the worlds at all where somebody could accidentally dig it up? Why not leave ‘em out in the void where nobody would ever find them?”

“I do not know. The Crowns do not divulge their full plans and reasoning, even to me. Perhaps they foresaw a future need for the Words, or the possibility that new Crowns may arise to replace them in time, and they will have need. Perhaps they simply made an error.”

“So what is the secret?” Jerl asked.

“To open the box, you must know what it contains.”

“That's all?”

“You must know what it contains,” Yngmir stressed. “Not suspect, or guess. It will not open unless held by one who knows for a fact exactly what is inside.”

He rattled the box at them. “We know this contains a Word of Creation. But we do not know which one. We do not even know how many Words there are, so deductive reasoning is useless. Thus, the box remains closed, and quite impenetrable by any physical means. And as for magic, it will destroy anyone who attempts to tamper with its enchantment.”

Jerl’s frown deepened. “So…how did Civorage open his?”

“I do not know. That is the most troubling thing. It ought to have been impossible.”

“You can’t even guess?”

Yngmir shook his head. Whatever answer he had, he never gave it: instead, they were interrupted by frantic, heavy knocking on the door. “Come?”

An acolyte burst into the room, wild-eyed and breathing heavily.

“Herald! There's a whole fleet of airships!” she exclaimed.

Yngmir launched himself to his feet, frowned in calculation, and then tossed the box to Jerl. Catching it was tricky as it changed size in mid-air, but Jerl just about managed to juggle the thing to his chest.

“You should return to your ship.” the Herald declared.

----------------------------------------

Jerl was getting tired of running. The desperate flight for their lives in the Cronewood had left his legs feeling stiff and sore anyway, so having to run at full tilt down the length of the Thundering Hall in Yngmir's striding wake was unwelcome.

Trying to keep up was futile. Yngmir did not dawdle, but strode down the length of the hall with purpose, easily outstripping Jerl and Derghan. The great doors at the far end opened for him at a gesture and the wind rolled in, sending acolytes scurrying to recover blown papers.

Weather had swept down the valley during their conversation, shrouding the Hall in silvery cloud that pin-pricked Jerl's face with tiny, icy raindrops as he emerged. Standing by Yngmir's ankles, he looked up to see the Herald raise flat palm to brow and peer down the valley.

Jerl did the same, and felt something cold and ugly crawl up his back at the sight of a wall of airships.

“Shit...” he breathed. There must have been thirty at least.

“I can hear them...” Derghan said. “Listen.”

Jerl did so. At first he heard only the shouting and ringing bells of the town raising to alarm, but then behind that commotion he picked out one steady, familiar note. The drone of alcohol-burning engines turning at full speed, driving the gas bag against the wind.

“They really want this box,” he said, and passed the telescope to Derghan, who looked through it and whistled.

“And they are willing to challenge a Herald for it,” Yngmir rumbled as a squad of men in chainmail rushed up onto the hall’s lawn and formed a shield wall. Jerl looked and smiled slightly as he saw the Queen straining against the ropes and ready to fly. He was going to make Marren quartermaster after this.

If they survived.

“Exactly how mighty are you?” Derghan asked.

“Mighty. But so is cannon shot.” Yngmir scowled and glanced behind him. “And even if they cannot destroy me, they can hover beyond my reach, bombard my people and burn the hall.”

“You think they will?”

“They have already gone farther than I would deem sane by coming here in force. I put nothing beyond them, now.”

Derghan handed the telescope back to Jerl “I think that's the Ring of Eternity in the middle, boss.” he said. Jerl looked. He had to agree. The Oneist flagship was the largest airship ever built, and rather unmistakeable. She was vast, large enough that the Queen could have fit on her weather deck like a cockboat. He was still examining it when there was a flash from the Ring’s prow, and an orange glow that grew larger and brighter at an astonishing rate—

“Down!” He threw himself in the dirt. Derghan was an inch behind him, but Yngmir was slower to react. The shot missed him by only feet as it shrieked over his ducking shoulder and burst against the Hall with a splintering crash and a burst of flame.

“No...NO!” Yngmir darted to the wall and began to try and smother the flames, beating at them desperately, but a second shot hammered into the roof and spread fire everywhere. Some of the quicker-thinking acolytes begun to flee the building, carrying whatever books and scrolls as they could take in their arms.

The Herald backed away from the structure as a third burning cannonball burst and a tortured section of roof gave up and fell in, scattering burning beams and tile among the dry papers of the library. Jerl had never imagined that in all his life he would see a demigod weep openly. He was still staring in wonder when Yngmir turned on him with a strange, savage expression and pounced. He had a sudden, irrational moment of terror as he thought that in his rage and grief the Herald might blame and crush him, but instead he and Derghan were scooped up and held firmly but not uncomfortably in Yngmir’s palm.

“I cannot defend it!” Yngmir mourned as he carried them. He stepped over the Hall's wall and into the town, and though he rushed to carry them back to the Cavalier Queen, he didn't step on so much as a chicken. “A generation ago it would have been safe here. But they are insane! They would burn the Worlds down to have that box, and I cannot guard it.”

He put his left hand on the roof of a house and vaulted it. Another fireball arced overhead. “Take the...the fucking thing and throw it out of the Worlds. If they would do this to have it, they must be denied.”

Jerl had to shout over the screaming and alarm bells. “Where is the nearest gap?!” he asked.

“Down the valley, straight through their fleet,” Yngmir warned. “But your ship is too damaged to flee against the wind. If you get the wind to your back and charge under them, you can break through and escape while they are turning.”

In a few more bounding strides they were back at the Queen, and Yngmir set them down on her deck. The crew paused to gawk at him, some pulling their hats off respectfully.

“Good luck,” he told them.

“Go save what you can, Yngmir!” Jerl replied. “It's been an honor.”

“And a pleasure, brief though it was. Farewell!”

Jerl turned to his friend and chief engineer as the Herald turned back towards the Hall, which was now fully ablaze and spreading fire into the town around it.

“Storm coming, boss” Derghan told him. “This is bad flying weather.”

“You're right, but so is Yngmir. We can't let them have this box. Derghan, I….Sin’s gonna be waiting in twenty years. You could still—”

Derghan did something Jerl hadn't expected—he laughed. “Fuck, Jerl, you're a hopeless romantic aren't you?” he shook his head and clapped a hand to Jerl's shoulder. “Her an' me ain't goin' to happen, now. Those bastards'll hunt us down until they've got their box or had their revenge for losin' it. Neither of us are hidin' from that. I may as well be here to help you get rid of it.”

Jerl nodded slowly, then looked around at the remaining thirty or so men who constituted his crew. “Offer stands. I'm taking what the lads died for and I'm going to chuck it through the closest hole to the Outside, or get shot down trying.” He swept his gaze across them, noticing just how tired they all were, and how many of them were bandaged and wounded. “If any man here wants to get off and fight the fire in town, you have my blessing.”

The crew looked sideways at one another, until Marren stepped forward.

“I think I speak for all of us when I say 'fuck that,' skipper. We're with you. Right lads?” he asked. There was a grim but united mutter of affirmation.

Jerl nodded. There was nothing more to say.

“Well what are you waiting for, then? Jump to!” he barked, and they threw themselves into their work. There was a shudder as the steel locking bar pinning the Queen to the ground released them and, freed from that restraint, she leapt into the air and began to turn with the wind toward the looming Oneist fleet.

----------------------------------------

INTERLUDE: BEACON OUTPOST

The world-sphere of Talvi 17.12.08.05.04

Nils Civorage wasn't in his “office” when Jac Deragian went to take him food and drink. It had become a daily ritual for him now. The man simply didn't remember to eat without prompting. Every man down in the mines was rank and smelly from weeks of hard labor and inadequate bathing and laundry, but Deragian would never have guessed that the worst stench would belong to their employer.

Civorage had at least not soiled himself in his frenzy, but that was about it.

Jac didn't bother knocking on the door, which had been put up more to keep the smell contained than for any privacy. He just opened it, tried not to recoil at the rank fug that rolled forth within, and then stopped. Civorage was not there.

He was standing there in mild surprise when a mine cart rolled past, coming back from hauling the latest load of spoil to the surface. “He's on the surface, cap'n!” one of the men riding it informed him.

Sure enough, Civorage was up in the freezing cold and dark, standing near the edge of the light cordon with his head cocked faintly to one side. He had one hand tucked comfortably in the pocket of his coat, while the other turned that bastard fucking box over and over, restlessly.

“Shh...” he said, as Deragian walked up behind him. “They're telling me what's in it.”

The whispering sounded just the same to Deragian as it always had. It set his teeth on edge.

“I, uh...brought your food, Mister Civorage.”

“You're a little senior to be playing tavern girl aren't you, Jac?” Civorage asked. It was like a sudden blast of the old Nils Civorage in a good mood.

“Uh…well, yeah. Guess I am.”

“None of the lads want anything to do with the stinking obsessed madman, am I right?” When Deragian just shifted uncomfortably, Nils issued a single amused breath through his nose. “Your silence says everything. I have rather let myself go, it's true.”

He turned around, and seemed...normal again. The frantic obsession was gone. His eyes were back to their old shrewd and smiling selves and even the malnourished lines in his face seemed shallower.

“All worth it,” he said. “You see?” he raised the box. To Deragian, it looked the same as ever. “Oh, silly of me. You can't read it.”

Nils raised the item and with deft, swift motions, dragged the runes around on its surface.

“I was beginning to fear that these shifting runes were just a red herring, a…trap, rather like the one that killed poor Vanda. But all puzzles have their solution,” he said. “And the trick to this one is very clever indeed. If not for the whispering, I would never have deciphered it. Moving closer to the surface was the key Jac, thank you.”

He turned away and gestured out into the darkness, where Jac could still just make out the sea of predatory shadows, standing patiently and muttering.

“They're perfectly loud, aren't they?” Nils asked. “If a man were conspiring in my ear at this volume, I would have no trouble at all in understanding him. So I thought, maybe they aren't muttering in Garanese. But nor is it Elfish, nor Craenen, nor Clansprek, Alakbiric, Yunei, or any other tongue I’d recognize. But then I noticed....listen. Listen closely.”

He moved the runes, and as he did so, the cadence and tone of the muttering changed. “See?” He moved them again, and again the whispering altered. “You see?!” he repeated with increasing mania dancing in his eyes.

“I hear it,” Jac admitted, though he didn’t want to. Civorage’s expression was terrifying.

“Now…listen closely.”

He turned the runes, twisted and shuffled them, slid and rotated them until suddenly, they seemed to snap into place and transformed from their standard sickly green to an eye-twisting, almost painful blue unlike any color Jac had ever seen before.

He flinched back from it and covered his eyes, but then…suddenly, horribly, it dawned on that now he understood. All of the tens of thousands of tortured souls out there were speaking a language. One he neither spoke himself nor had ever heard before, but impossible comprehension nevertheless settled in his mind like a leech, and he knew without understanding how that they were telling Civorage exactly what was inside that damned box.

Nils turned to him and his face split into a triumphant rictus.

In his hand, the box snapped open.

----------------------------------------

> “Magestone (noun): a small object (not necessarily a stone, despite the name) carried by human practitioners of magic to serve as a repository of energy. In accordance with the Law of Refinement, the most efficient magestones are gathered directly from nature and left unaltered. Though there is no intrinsic benefit to doing so, mages often prefer to collect “interesting” items such as crystals, skulls, and stones with natural holes through them.” —The Initiate’s Guide to Magecraft

THE AIRSHIP CAVALIER QUEEN

The world-sphere of Haust 12.06.03.06.03

Two blades per engine made the ship sluggish to respond, but the wind down the valley was behind them, and given that all they needed to do at first was to get as much speed up as possible, there was little to do but point their nose straight towards the Oneist fleet and spin the engines up until they were screaming.

A fireball from the Ring of Eternity shot past them as little more than a blurred line of orange which faded into a black river of smoke to starboard, uncomfortably close. They were charging straight down the barrel of its gun, and the men firing it didn't need to compensate for lateral motion. In other words, they were an easy target.

Rather than wait for them to reload and take a second shot, Jerl pushed the pitch lever as far forward as it would go, and men all across the deck shouted in alarm as they had to grab onto something. He had a fine line to tread. He knew exactly how swiftly the Queen would usually have responded, but now he pulled back and levelled her out much earlier than he ordinarily would have and still they only barely avoided losing their makeshift keel against the top of an erratic boulder. Her aim spoiled, the Ring of Eternity nevertheless tried another shot at them which detonated harmlessly among the glacial plain astern, and then returned its attention to bombarding the Thundering Hall.

Most of the bigger vessels continued to push doggedly up the valley against the wind, clearly intent on taking the town and tearing it apart until they either had the box or else were convinced it wasn't there. Three smaller, sleeker hulls peeled off from the pack however. It was a tricky maneuver they were performing, losing altitude and turning to go with the wind. An airship turned broad-side on to the wind was unstable, and violent maneuvers could cause the gondola hull to buck and shake, potentially casting the crew overboard. They would have the advantage once the maneuver was complete, so could afford to take the turn carefully and smoothly. Jerl just hoped that they had reacted slowly enough, and that the Cavalier Queen had enough speed up that they would make it to their objective before being caught.

“Marren!” he called, figuring that the man was effectively his second mate nowadays.

“Skipper!” Marren dropped from the rigging onto the deck. Jerl handed him the telescope.

Jerl flailed an arm in the general direction of the pursuing ships. “Keep an eye on them!” Marren raised the telescope, but before he'd even put it to his eye, he reached out to tap Jerl on the point of his shoulder.

“You'd better look at this yourself, skipper!” he said.

Jerl turned. Half the town was on fire now, but that would probably cease to be an issue in a few minutes. Mountainous black cloud was pouring over the hills at the head of the valley and bearing down on the Thundering Hall and every airship in the valley. It had the purposeful, ground-hugging look of truly violent weather, and Jerl fancied he could see funnels forming on the underside, promising to birth tornadoes. In the face of that, the entire Oneist fleet was aborting its advance on the town and descending to batten down on the ground.

Yngmir’s doing? Pure good luck? They were decidedly overdue for some of that, but somehow, Jerl doubted it.

“Think we can ride it?” Marren asked.

Jerl shook his head. “I've been in a storm like that one before.” he said. “It'll just engulf us, and when it does...if it doesn't smash us into a World, it'll blow us under one.”

“Pardon me for asking, skipper, but I thought we weren't expectin' to get away from these bastards anyway?”

“What do you mean, Marren?”

“I mean now's our chance to put some air between us and them and get rid of that damn box.”

Jerl looked back again. “Unless they're crazy enough to keep chasing.” he said. Marren looked through the telescope. Two of the pursuing ships were sinking to the deck, running up signal flags asking the third why it wasn't doing the same. Jerl suspected he knew what. “Bet you a brass that's the Make Your Own Fortune?” he offered.

“No bet,” Marren replied grimly. “Civorage must be fucked in the head.”

“Even Yngmir thinks so.” Jerl replied. He patted the Queen's controls. “Alright old girl. Last time we were in one of these you only had sails. Now you've got engines. Let's see what we can manage this time, aye?”

There was a hiccup in said engines. It was probably just Derghan swapping the fuel barrels, but Jerl had always been slightly superstitious about his ship. She was with him for life, he knew that.

“Alright, get topside, tell the lads we're riding the storm!” he ordered. Marren nodded and hauled himself up the rigging.

They flew in comparative silence for some time as Jerl desperately tried to navigate by what little of the sky wasn't being swallowed by the wall of angry turbulence behind them. They were, true to Yngmir's word, aimed straight for where the river ran right off Haust to first rain, then freeze, then hail and snow down onto Talvi below.

And beyond that, a rift in Talvi through which an object might be dropped out of the Nested Worlds altogether.

“'ware forward!” Somebody barked from above. Jerl returned his attention from the pursuit to where they were going and saw what the warning had been for—they were coming up on the edge cliff. He gripped the wheel and kicked the pedal to angle the engines slightly upwards. It would cost them some speed, but shooting out into edge turbulence without some up-thrust was always a bad idea.

One second there was land below them, and then it was gone, falling behind where it ended in a ruddy brown wall of stone. The Queen shivered alarmingly as she ran into the downdraft where Talvi's chill drew air down from the higher worlds. They lost altitude, but didn't enter the dangerous sink that they might have. With another jolt they were past the worst turbulence and Jerl opened up again.

Then the storm burst over the cliff above them. Just visible in its leading edge was the Make Your Own Fortune, which nosed down and dived as it cleared the cliff, putting some air between itself and the boiling clouds.

“Fuck me...” Marren muttered, watching the maneuver. Nobody with a shred of regard for their own safety would have dared such a stunt—the turbulence near the cliff could easily have forced the ship into the rock and splintered it.

“Well, if they're going to fly crazy, let's punish them for it!” Jerl cried, and span the wheel. The Cavalier Queen banked and nosed up as he turned back toward their pursuer.

“What are you doing?!” Marren demanded as he grabbed the wheelhouse. Similar shouts of protest echoed all over the ship.

“Rifles!” Jerl roared in reply. Marren paused, then nodded.

“Right, so you're crazy too,” he said with a rictus grin, then rushed below decks.

There was a sickening moment where it looked like Jerl had made a terrible mistake. The cliff was a blur to port, and when an eddy in the downdraught hit them they veered so close that a man hanging to the gas-bag's flank could have reached out and brushed it with his fingertips. There were shouts of alarm as a tree growing vertiginously out of Haust's five-mile flank clattered against their rigging and left leaves and broken twigs all over the deck. Jerl had to put all his weight on the wheel and brace his foot against the wheelhouse for good measure to turn them away from certain collision, but then they shot past an overhanging shelf in the cliff, the downdraught pushed them away from the wall again, and he was able to level them out, now only a hundred feet or so above the Make Your Own Fortune as it too pulled out of its hazardous descent.

In combat between airships, the ship at higher altitude had an advantage—its crew could fire into their enemy's gas bag and throw firebombs down onto it if they got close enough, and could deny a clear shot to the other crew. When the Fortune had dived away from the storm, Jerl had seen that this would be their only opportunity to fight back properly. He had deemed the hazardous dive a risk worth taking.

Men ran to and fro, handing out rifles and ammunition. Others hauled up the firebombs—little more than recycled gas bladder material filled with fuel and half wrapped in a pitch-soaked strip of cloth.

Seeing their ploy, the Make Your Own Fortune was turning hard, and both ships were still losing a lot of altitude. The Oneist ship was more agile with its undamaged engines and hull, but Jerl was an equal if not better helmsman, and had the advantage of altitude.

The crew fell into a firing drill. Every man wore a harness to tether them to the deck. By turns, five men would lean over the hull and aim, wait for the order to fire, release a volley, and then the next team would drag them back up on deck, lean over themselves, fire and so on through all three teams, reloading as they waited to fire again, while the fourth team ran up and down helping and tossing firebombs

“Ready!” Jerl called, twisting the wheel hard to compensate as the Fortune tried to slip sideways below them. “Commence firing!”

“First rank...FIRE!!!” Marren screamed. “HEAVE! Second rank...FIRE!!!”

Even with only five guns per rank, the result was still effective. Smokey puffs of the distinctive blue airship gas began to stream from every part of the Fortune's bag. She tried to dodge again, but with guidance from the bomb droppers, Jerl was able to stay above her.

There was a flare of light and one of the bomb men dropped his burning bladder of fuel over the rail, leaning over to watch it fall. He let out a whoop of triumph.

“Well hit! She's burning!” he called.

A fire topside spelled nearly certain doom for any airship. Jerl smiled a savage grin and spun the wheel to starboard, abandoning the Oneist ship to its fate.

“We got 'em!” he roared. There was general cheering, but it was doomed to be silenced instantly.

The storm, unheeded above, had been floating out in open air with nothing for its lightning to strike. The charge within its clouds had grown, and grown, and begun to quest downwards in search of an outlet, and the highest and most vulnerable thing it found was the good ship Cavalier Queen. Every man on board threw themselves to the deck and clapped their hands to their ears in response to the thunderclap as a jagged eye-burning white line connected the ship to the clouds above it. The starboard engine became a billowing greasy fireball and cut out.

With only one engine driving it, the Queen began to yaw hard to starboard, and the wheel became a blur that would have mangled the fingers of any man foolish enough to put his hand near it. Jerl could do nothing to correct their spin, and was forced to hold on for his life as the Worlds blurred around them.

There was a percussive noise, and the weakened, damaged port engine tore itself off and twisted away into the sky. They were now caught in the wind, without even sails to try and control their course. But the storm was not done with them yet. This time, the lightning struck the bag and the Queen wallowed in the air, mortally wounded.

Jerl dragged himself up to his feet, and turned the wheel experimentally. They had the rudder and elevators still at least, but the storm winds would overpower those. He looked up to see what last cruelty the wind had selected for them, and found himself staring into the deep, forbidding shadow under the landmass they had just departed.

“Ah, shit.”

----------------------------------------

He lit the lanterns around the wheelhouse, men pulled magestones from their pockets and activated them, and huddled down wherever it seemed they might have some protection from the crash. With light in their hands and whatever luck hadn't completely abandoned them, they might at least avoid the torture of becoming Shades.

There was nothing that could be done about the fact that they were crashing, though. The flames had spread across the whole bag, and dousing them was a futile fantasy. They had seconds at best before the fire ate through the flame-resistant material of the bladders and spilled their gassy guts into the air. Jerl aimed them for the ground as fast as he dared, quietly begging the Queen to hold together just long enough.

She did. They shot through the wall of darkness and all of a sudden the deck's every shadow was home to a twisted smoke mockery of the human form, watching them with black eyes that were incongruously impassive and emotionless when set in a face that was twisted in a frozen howl of mortal terror. Each man held up his shining stone to ward them off, and clung on.

They were within feet of the ground when there was a great ripping burst from above, and the Queen finally gave up. Jerl screwed his eyes shut, clung to the wheel, and prayed to die in the crash rather than be taken.

The midnight snows of Talvi rose to meet them and the Cavalier Queen buried herself in them. Jerl's last conscious memory was of his forehead surging forward to meet the wheel.

----------------------------------------

He woke up, which was a surprise, but he couldn't quite remember why it should be surprising. Stunned and uncertain of where he was he tried to move, and in a lance of agony from his right arm, recent history came back to him.

He had not been taken. Lantern stones littered the deck, but the gas bag itself was on fire, as was most of the ship. And his arm was broken.

Groaning in pain, he pushed the ship's wheel off himself left-handed, and groped for a magestone as he met the hungry stare of a Shade. It recoiled as he brandished the tiny glowing object, and he pushed himself to his feet.

Bodies littered the deck, and he breathed a sigh of relief that, although dead, it looked like most of them had been spared the grim fate of being Taken. Still in shock, he stumbled around the deck, trying to find any survivors…

He found Derghan below decks in a pool of light from some scattered magestones and the sparking engine controls. He had an arm-thick wooden spar impaled right through his gut, but when Jerl prodded him, Derghan stirred.

“...Hey.” He choked around a mouthful of blood. Jerl didn't know what to say. His thoughts were still too addled. He put a hand to his friend's cheek and wept. Derghan coughed again, put a hand on Jerl's shoulder. “Chuck it for me,” he said. Jerl nodded, still unable to find any words, and Derghan smiled, blinked, opened his mouth to say something else, and died.

In the end, he failed to account for half the crew, including Marren, and he spared a brief, futile moment of grief for the Shades the good airshipmen had become.

The box was still safely in his pocket. He rescued his maps from an encroaching fire in the cabin, and sat down to try and figure out—quickly, before the flames caught him—what direction he should head to find the nearest Rift, and how far.

Finally, there was some shred of bittersweet good luck. He needed only to go four miles, inwards further below Haust and deeper into the dark. He bound his broken arm in a sling, salvaged a cloak, his pistols and some water, strapped some glowing magelights to his chest, back and arms for all-round illumination and jumped down off the deck onto the snow below. Shades fled from the light he carried as he landed, and whispered at him in a language he couldn't understand.

He inspected the nearest one. The frozen horror on its face made identification a little difficult, but it wasn't anybody he knew.

“Well…I guess even your shit company at the end is better than no company at all,” he told it, checked his bearings, and set out into the snow.

He had barely gone a mile when the spreading flames finally found the fuel barrels, and spread the Cavalier Queen across the pitch black landscape in a thousand burning pieces.

----------------------------------------

He had never been so cold in his life. Rather than endure his teeth chattering, he spoke to the Shades that were stalking him.

“All I ever wanted from life,” he told them, “was to earn a living the slow and honest way. That's all. No crazy schemes, no piracy, no mad 'spend a month down here in the dark digging for precious metals and gems' scheme like Civorage...” He paused as the Shades abruptly and quite unexpectedly repeated the name “Civorage.”

“...Fuck me. Figures the evil bugger would have bloody Shades whispering his name….” Jerl muttered. “Where was I? Ah, yeah. The slow way. Tour the worlds, buy stuff cheap in one place, sell it on at a mark up somewhere else. Live the good life with my friends off the profits. Maybe die in my own bed, maybe in somebody else’s, maybe get stabbed in a tavern brawl, I don't know. Something clean. Not dragging my freezing arse through the Talvian snows with the most precious object in all creation in my pocket. Not with all my friends dead.”

He stopped, and rounded on the Shades, which continued to stare at him and gibber. “...Guess you never thought you'd wind up like this either, did you?” He addressed one, and felt a lance of grief go through him as he saw that it was the Shade of a little boy, still clutching the shadow of a soft toy. “You poor, poor sad buggers.”

He turned and kept walking. “I don't get one thing. One simple thing. Gebby would have sold this bloody box for two steel coins and a cup of ale. And we'd have been none the wiser. Congratulations, one man's greed sated and Civorage gets his hands on whichever Word is in here. The world's a little bit more fucked over but at least my friends get to go on living.”

Again he rounded on the Shades, and this time addressed what appeared to be a young woman, who stared blankly at him with tar-black tears running down her cheeks. “I mean come on! Why? Why shoot him?” he asked her. “Why impound the ship? Here! I have a script for you bastards!”

He stomped on through the snow, allowing himself to get good and angry as a shield against the cold. He put on a nasally voice to play the part of an imaginary interlocutor.

“Why hello, Captain Holten! I represent a private art collector who unfortunately was aggrieved to miss the opportunity to collect an object of interest at the Winter Bazaar.”

“Well, I'm terribly sorry to hear that sir, but I don't see what that has to do with my crew.”

“Well, Captain, it seems that the item in question was purchased by a member of your crew. My employer is very keen to add it to his collection and I was wondering if you could put me in contact with your man so that I might negotiate a fair exchange for it?”

“Oh, absolutely! I'm sure my navigator Amir will know who might have it. I bet it's Gebby, he's always picking up souvenirs.”

“I see. Do you suppose this 'Gebby' is likely to be willing to part ways with it?”

“Offer him a brass coin and he'll clean your boots too.”

“You're most kind, Captain Holten. Fair winds to you.”

“And to you, imaginary polite prick who doesn't kill all the people I care about!”

The world ended in front of him, and he had to throw himself backwards and land in an undignified sitting position that jarred his broken arm to avoid walking straight off the edge and falling out of the Worlds.

“That's how it should have gone. If they had any bloody brains. Or morals. Would that have been so hard?” He stood, and turned to look back in the general direction of where he thought the Make Your Own Fortune had crashed.

“Eh? Would that have been so fucking hard?!” he raged.

“Never pay for what you can take, Captain,” a smooth, calm voice replied.

There was a flash, and Jerl’s leg gave out beneath him in a sudden wet slap of agony. He collapsed in the snow with a scream.

There was movement among the crowd of Shades that had followed him and Nils Civorage walked through them, smoke still dancing from the end of his exquisite dueling pistol. He didn't appear to be holding any source of light, but the Shades did something Jerl could never have imagined, and bowed as they got out of his way. “Although in this case, you are right: Your way would most certainly have been cheaper.”

He holstered his pistol and extended a hand, and Jerl's pocket tore as the box shot out of it and smacked into Civorage's palm. Jerl went for his own gun, aimed it, and paused as he saw a faint light among the snowdrifts. Civorage glanced up and smiled slightly. “That won't work, you know,” he said.

Jerl shot him anyway. A Shade stepped in the way, and Civorage smiled as the shot disintegrated harmlessly inside the thing's translucent body.

“I did tell you,” he said. “But, I know you well enough by now to know that you don't give up. Are you going to try again?”

“Waste of time.” Jerl muttered, though he didn’t lower the gun, yet.

“Indeed. And you're a smart man! I assume you're thinking you can bide your time, wait for an opportune moment. That won't work either. No, take my advice and just blow your brains out. You wouldn’t want to become a shade like your father, would you?”

He raised the box and moved the runes around on its surface with deft, rapid motions, cocking his ear to listen. “I've won, you see.”

As he did so, the cadence of the Shades’ whispering changed and shifted: somehow the random babble became even more maddening. Jerl’s arm was shaking and…

And he was so…tired. In so much pain. So cold. Amir was dead. Derghan was dead. Gebby, Marren, Villo and Toren, Tarruk, Padrig, Vando, all the rest…

The only people he had left now were his mother and sisters, and they’d never know what had happened to him. Maybe they’d hear a rumor about the attack on the Hall, but…they and Sin’s next chal and all the ones ever after would live in the world Nils Civorage made.

What even was the fucking point, now?

He pulled the trigger. Another bullet shriveled away inside a Shade’s body, and Civorage didn’t even glance at him. At last, the fight went out of him, Jerl’s strength failed, and his hand dropped into the snow, along with his head.

“Where the bloody hell is that...?” Civorage grumbled to himself, then sighed and began to fiddle with the runes again. His fingers obviously knew exactly what they were doing, but something was tripping him up. He poked and twisted at the box, listening intently to the shades until abruptly he smiled and stroked the runes a certain way and they went a dazzling blue in his hand.

“Hah! Wha-? Oooff!”

This last had been in response to the sudden shining of light from behind him and the sound of footsteps in the snow. With a cry of fury, Andony Marren thundered out of the dark and tackled the most powerful man in the worlds in his gut. Civorage flailed desperately as Jerl's missing crewman punched him off his feet, but it was futile: together, both men went tumbling over the edge, and Civorage's last wail of despair and failure echoed down, down into the endless silent void.

The box thumped into the snow just a couple of feet in front of Jerl, and its runes went dark again.

“Marren...shit.” Jerl blinked stupidly at the hole they’d disappeared into. Then, with tremendous effort and no small amount of pain, he dug his good hand into the ice and dragged himself toward the cube. The world was draining away around him, his vision was going dark at the edges, and he felt so utterly cold, so broken…but he had to know. It seemed…important, somehow. Futile, senseless and empty, but important.

After four agonizing heaves, the box was in reach, and he sighed at it. “So, the question is, do I jump in with you, shoot myself, or bleed to death here in the snow?” he asked it, and picked it up. He rolled awkwardly over to throw it into the rift, and paused as the runes lit up blue.

He blinked, and listened to what the Shades had to say.

The box snapped open in his hand.

----------------------------------------

INTERLUDE: THE AIRSHIP MAKE YOUR OWN FORTUNE

The world-sphere of Talvi 22.12.08.05.04

“Cast off!” Jac Deragian bellowed, and he felt his ship surge beneath his feet as the ropes that had held it down while they inflated the bags were released and left behind. At long, long last they were away, and Jac was certain that there wasn't enough money in all the Worlds to convince him to return.

Not that he needed to. With the pay from this contract he could retire to somewhere nice and warm on Sayf where there was no such thing as Eclipse.

He suspected, though, that no matter how warm it was, no matter how many long lazy days in the sunlight he enjoyed and no matter how much wine he drank, he'd never quite be free of the little shard of ice that had settled in his gut and tugged at him whenever he glanced at Nils Civorage.

The man had walked among Shades unharmed. And they had bowed and stepped aside for him. Jac didn't know what kind of power could provoke such deference from the mindless Taken, but he knew he wanted nothing to do with it. Not when he had worked out the whispered riddles that had opened the box. Exactly what kind of darkness it contained he didn't want to contemplate. He was going to leave Civorage to enjoy that power and good riddance.

He buried himself in his work so as to avoid Civorage, but the fact was there was little for him to do. The crew were all just as relieved as he was to be under way, morale was as high as it could go, and everyone was working perfectly. All of which left him with no excuse when his employer finally waved him over a few hours after they had taken off.

“We're running well.” Civorage commented. Jac tried to ignore the box he was still turning over and over in his hand.

“The lads are glad to be back in the sky.” He replied.

“Glad to be out of the dark, you mean. I feel very much like I shall miss it now.”

“They’ve…not had the same experience as you did. Sir.”

“Well. To celebrate, I have invited the other captains over for dinner. I've been saving a bottle of Urstlend Regent, twelve oh-four.” Civorage said. “Very good vintage. Unless there is anything truly pressing, I think it only appropriate that you be present to celebrate our accomplishment.”

Jac nodded glumly, seeing no good way out without offending the man whose good graces he still needed to cultivate at least until he was paid. “Of course, Mister Civorage”

Most of the rest of his day was occupied by the delicate maneuvering involved in bringing two airships sufficiently close together for a man to cross a plank between them, safely harnessed to the rigging.

Word had spread about Civorage’s communion with the shades, and the other four captains seemed just as wary and scared as Jac felt. They exchanged tense greetings and small talk as they came aboard, and all carefully avoided the subject of their dinner and the man hosting it.

There was no avoiding him forever, though. Eventually, they had to dutifully knock on the door to Civorage's quarters and enter. True to his word, Civorage had a bottle of sparkling wine on the table, cooling in Talvian ice…right next to the box.

A round of small talk and congratulations, made all the easier by genuinely excellent wine, did do a fair bit to relax Jac. He couldn’t quite shake a gnawing tension in his belly that returned whenever he glanced back at the table and saw the box squatting there, but for a time he began to hope and think that maybe they were just in for a nice meal and nothing more...

Until Civorage stood and tapped on his glass with a knife.

“Gentlemen. To wealth and success!” There was a round of agreement and the chime of glass on fine glass. “In fact, it is that very subject I'd like to discuss. You all will have heard about this, of course.” He nudged the box and the runes on its surface flashed at his touch. “I won't disturb you with the details of what it is, but suffice it to say that I...well. I have had an epiphany.”

The captains were all wearing carefully neutral expression now, and Civorage smiled at them. “Gentlemen, my entire strategy to date has been misguided. It occurs to me that while I have been grubbing wealth out of the ground and squeezing coins out of cargo my whole life, I have rather badly been missing the point, and blinding myself to the fact that the real wealth is right between our ears.” He put a finger to his temple and flashed a small smile.

Jac wanted to speak, but for some reason found that he couldn't. He hoped it was just nervousness.

“The mind, gentlemen. The mind. Everyone has one. And, all along we have made our wealth by tapping it, in an oblique way. We win the loyalty of our crewmen with coin, keep their morale up with confidence and discipline, but that is just…mm!” he shook his head and made a hungry face. “That is just the surface. The waters run so very deep, my friends. Deeper than I ever guessed.”

Civorage was prowling around the room now, his hands animated and his eyes ablaze. “The basic rule of commerce is sell the customer what they want,” he continued, in a softly delirious voice. “Isn’t it obvious then that they’ll pay the most for what they want the most? But what do people truly want?”

He was sermonizing now, gaze distant as though watching something in a different world and a different time only he could see. “Value. The one longing that gnaws in every human heart is to matter, somehow. Don’t we all want to make our mark on the worlds? If we can’t actually live forever, can’t we at least build something that does? There is the hunger, my friends: there is what we can sell them: We can sell them completeness.”

Jac, through a desperate effort of will, managed to grunt. Nils shot him a briefly irritated look and Jac felt something fall away from him, as though the merest glance had been enough to…to…

His thoughts felt fuzzy. All he could do now was…listen…

“I have seen the shape of the mind, gentlemen. And it contains…something like a valve,” Nils continued. “When the valve is closed, we are alone, lost in the woods with a thousand branching paths ahead of us that all look the same. The dark closes in and we cling to whatever trinkets and scraps of purpose we can find. But when it is opened…”

He let out a shaky, manic breath. “...When it is opened, we belong. We flow outwards to join in something so much bigger, so much more…beautiful. All the hardships fall away. Loneliness, worthlessness, the agony of decision, the absence of purpose…all of them are lies, gentlemen. Lies of our own making. They blow away like smoke on the breeze, when we just let go and become one with the higher calling. What more precious service could we ever offer?”

Jac could take no more of this. It wasn’t that the words were wrong, it was the intent that sickened him. Civorage was talking about spiritual rapture as though it were a gold mine he intended to plunder. It was profane.

He tried to stand up and leave. He wanted to with all his will, but his body would do nothing more than stare slack-jawed and listen. Nils sat down again and leaned forward, and Jac’s traitorous body wouldn’t even tremble in fear at the unhinged thirst burning in those blue eyes.

“Imagine it!” Nils wasn’t talking to them any longer, but congratulating himself. “Thousands of people begging me to do their thinking for them. Bending the knee and bowing their heads, and flocking in droves to pay for the privilege of surrender. All I need do is convince them.”

He smiled, and picked up the box: it opened in his hand again. “Allow me to begin by convincing you, gentlemen...”

Jac Deragian's last conscious thought before Nils unmade and replaced him was to wish the bastard had at least left him the freedom to scream.

----------------------------------------

> “I saw a smiling one, once. You know how they usually have that fear face? Well, this one didn't. He looked...happy. That one was scarier than all his mates put together...” —overheard in the Broken Baron inn, Gideon's Reach, Enerlend, Eärrach

THE UNBROKEN EARTHMOTE

The world-sphere of Talvi 12.06.03.06.05

Time.

The Word of it, the shape of it, the knowledge of it. Perfect, complete understanding of the flow and weave of time flowed out of the box and into Jerl’s very soul. All of time unrolled itself like a tapestry before him, and he saw, felt, was the knowledge that past and present were…nonsense.

There was no past, nor future. There was no forward or backward but rather depth and breadth and height to time, and yet none at all at the same time.

There was no present. “Now” was a fiction, a useful nonsense. Like zero, it did not really exist, even though it made perfect sense.

It was all far more than his brain should have been able to handle, It should have driven him insane. Instead, it all made a perfect kind of sense, as if he'd just got the joke. The Word held him stable, and allowed his fragile, crystalline consciousness to float high beyond time and survey its completeness.

He focused on the alternatives and the could-have-beens.

Here, Jerl saw himself taken by the Shades to leave his father grieving. Here, Amir had introduced Jerl to Yngmir in person. Here, Civorage’s expedition had been a ruinous failure and the worlds spun peacefully onwards without him.

Then there were the pocket moments, unreachable via normal causality. There, Sinikka and Derghan's love was a nightly source of loud and vigorous noises from his or her cabin: There, Gebby somehow find the willpower to turn down the pretty merchant girl at the Winter Bazaar and picked some other bauble. In one miraculous jewel of an impossibility, Civorage came to his senses, re-buried the box and never spoke of it again…

Jerl saw all their possibilities, not so much like a man standing on a hillside surveying a river delta, but more like walking around a card table, seeing the hands and possibilities on the table, and being given the choice of which one he wanted to pick up and play. All he had to do was choose a moment...

“You are fortunate,” a voice told him.

He opened his eyes, and became aware of the Shades retreating as soft white light washed over him. Perspective shifted, understanding faded, and Jerl…forgot. The Word’s power receded, leaving him stranded in the normal flow of time like a fish in a dried-up lake. He was just Jerl again, dying slowly and painfully in the snow.

The speaker was a slight, feminine figure clad in diaphanous blue cloth. Her skin was icy pale, she wore a simple platinum twist in her silver-white hair, and her eyes glowed a perfect uniform chilly blue from corner to corner. As she stepped light and barefoot through snow, she left tiny pockets of freezing mist in each footprint.

She smiled at him as she reached his side and smoothed her skirts delicately as she knelt beside him. “Or skillful and tenacious, which I think I prefer.”

“I...would bow.” Jerl said. “But I can't stand.”

“I don’t like being bowed to anyway,” Queen Talvi told him, and touched her hand to his cheek: her fingers were, surprisingly, merely cool. “Besides: You have earned my respect.”

At her touch, Jerl’s pain vanished and warmth spread through him, beginning in his heart and washing away the sickening agony of the gut shot. The broken bones of his arm painlessly united and were strong again, and even the biting chill of the wind and ice faded, leaving behind only a crisp, comfortable chill.

“I doubt I deserve it,” Jerl said, “but...thank you.” He accepted her hand and stood.

“You are most welcome,” Queen Talvi replied.

“You knew I’d be here?”

Talvi inclined her head yes. “Don’t forget, we sealed this Word away, once,” she said. “When Civorage’s hubris became evident, we retrieved it, and spoke it, and searched time for the best course of action.”

“And…this was it?” Jerl asked, looking down at the remarkably large patch of crimson where his own blood was still frozen around his boots. And beside it, the pit into which a good man had thrown himself to rid the worlds of a truly evil one.

“Everything you have endured the last few days, the deaths of your friends, the loss of your ship, witnessing the nornfey ritual, the burning of the Thundering Hall…all is as we foresaw. And it was all necessary, for you to understand what you face.”

Like an apologetic mother, she reached up to tidy his collar and brushed some snow off his shoulder. As she did so, Jerl’s clothes mended and cleaned themselves. “I am…sorry…that you had to go through all this, Jerl. I am sorry that the burden falls on you. I am sorry that it must fall on anyone. But what we foresaw made it quite plain that the best hope for all the worlds now was for this moment to come to pass, and for Time to find its way into your hands.”

Jerl glanced down at the box. He could have focused and seen for himself but…he believed her. This was a tremendous power he held. One he guessed the Crowns would never have given to anyone otherwise.

“What will you do now?” Talvi asked him.

Jerl shrugged. “I just want my friends back,” he said.

She smiled. “That is...a very pure wish, Jerl Holten. I am glad.”

He bowed his head. “Would it disappoint you to learn that I'll want revenge afterwards?”

“Not at all.” She shook her head. “Vengeance is no less pure of a desire. I leave it to your own conscience to decide whether it is a less noble one.”

Jerl nodded, and looked around at the dark, and the shades. “I…suppose I should come up with a plan. Figure out what to do and do it.”

“There’s no rush. You know better than anyone that we have time, don’t we? And you must surely have questions…”

Jerl paused, but she was right. With this...he could ask every question there possibly was of her. If he wanted. But there were only a few that stood out.

“...If I went back far enough, I could save my father,” he said. “And that’s before Civorage ever found his Word. I could prevent it from ever happening. But why is every branch I see down that path even worse?”

Talvi’s frozen blue eyes went soft with pity. “Because you have been entrusted with incredible power, Jerl. Far more than anyone, mortal or immortal, really ought to have. If you use it unwisely, you will break everything.”

“Then why did you choose me?”

“We did not. Time itself did. Call it fate, destiny, or perhaps the will of a higher power, when we went seeking answers, you were the answer we found. We don’t know why, any more than you do.” She shook her head. “But you are a genuinely humble man, with humble ambitions, and qualities we admire. Though I’m pleased to say there are many such in the worlds. Perhaps in time, you will find others and entrust them with power too. You will need allies if you are to defeat Civorage.”

“I could do that right here and now, by just blowing my own brains out.” Jerl indicated the rent in the worlds and the endless void beyond. “He’s gone. If I’m gone too...no more Words in the minds of men.”

Talvi shook her head. “No. To you has been granted Time. He found and seized Mind. With that power, death cannot claim him. He is no longer bound to flesh, as you are. So long as he has thralls…”

“I see...” Jerl sighed, and looked down at his hands. Strange, that he should feel so warm while sitting in the snow next to Winter herself.

Another question occurred to him.

“Why these?” He indicated the watchful Shades. “What are they for? Why build a world where this can happen to...well, to a child?” he indicated the one with the soft toy.

Talvi gave the child-shade a look of immeasurable regret. “Not everything is as we wished it to be,” she said, softly.

“Can’t you save them?”

She shook her head and replied cryptically. “Power constrains.”

“Can I?”

“I don’t know.” She turned back to face him. “Perhaps you have freedom we don’t, Jerl. Perhaps you can find a way. I don’t know. But I will not say it is impossible.”

Jerl sighed. That wasn't what he’d wanted to hear, but it was still more grounds for hope than he’d had before. “That'll have to do.” he said.

“Are you sure you don’t have any other questions?”

“My lady…” Jerl watched the fog of his breath dance on the air in front of him as he thought about his reply. “All I ever wanted is a simple life. And even if I get it, the questions I have…I’d never have a simple life again if they were answered.”

“You choose happy ignorance, then?” Talvi asked.

“Is that so wrong?”

A goddess shrugged at him.

Jerl nodded, feeling oddly reassured. He looked around at all the devastation and suffering that lay about him, and took a cleansing breath of frozen air. “I should be going,” he said, and drew upon the power again. The Word was waiting for him to speak it and truly claim its power.

Talvi nodded. “Very well. Farewell, Jerl. Will we meet again, on the path you are choosing?”

Jerl surveyed his options. There were many where he and the Crown of Winter were reunited, but…

Now he looked at it, he saw clearly that the best thing for himself and everyone was to set aside the full extent of his new gifts. To see all possibilities was maddening, tantalizing, impossible. He was beginning to understand how the Crowns might have made mistakes, as they tried in vain to pursue all the gleaming gems they could see from their perspective.

And if Civorage had tried to hold on to the full power of a Word, then he must be utterly mad by now. Such an inhuman perspective would quickly erode even the most stable of minds. No, Jerl needed something...lower. He needed to not know exactly what each decision would lead to. He needed to still be, fundamentally, mortal.

And that, for better or worse, meant living in the moment.

“I don’t know,” he said, and felt right as soon as he said it. “In case we don’t...it has been an honor and a privilege, my lady.”

“Then before you go...” Talvi stretched up on tiptoes to give him a motherly kiss on the cheek that felt as comfortingly cool as the unused side of a pillow. “When you see Bekhil, remind her again from me that I love her, no matter what,” she requested.

“Uh…who?”

Talvi merely gave him an infuriating little smile, and turned to walk away through the snow. The shades scattered from her path, and Jerl watched until her light faded from sight and he was alone again. Only the shades remained, and they watched him from the edge of the magelight with the same empty-eyed hunger they ever had. Poor bastards.

Jerl nodded and took a deep breath. There was nothing left for him here, so he searched his memory for the moment he wanted, found it, looked down at the open box in his palm…

And spoke the Word of Time.

----------------------------------------

THE AIRSHIP CAVALIER QUEEN

Near Long Drop City, Alakbir Earthmote, the world-tier of Sayf 09.06.03.06.03

“Derghan wants to know when we'll land. And I'd bloody well like to know too, nay?”

Jerl smiled. The sun was warm, the Queen was creaking gently in the breeze, and he had just heard a voice he’d never thought to hear again.

“Jerl? You asleep?” Sinikka asked.

“Just enjoying the moment,” he replied lazily. “You should try it sometime.”

“I'll enjoy the moment when we're out of this fucking heat,” Sin retorted, sitting on a barrel of Cloudtreader Whisky. “They still haven't called us to land?”

“Any second now, I promise you that.”

Jerl opened his eyes, stuck his pipe in his belt and stood up, then gave Sinikka a big, surprising (and quite damp considering how sweaty she was) hug. “Good to see you again.”

“I didn't know half an hour meant so much to you—where are you going?” she asked, following as Jerl stepped down off the Fo’c’sle and walked the gangway towards the wheelhouse.

“You'll see. Gebby! Great to see you mate, you're looking well! You looked like a dying man last time I spoke to you!”

The Queen's helmsman blinked at his captain. “Uh...I did?” he asked.

“Sort of. Hey, didn't you buy a box or something at the Winter Bazaar?”

“Uh, aye, actually I did. Puzzle box of some kind, I can't get it to open.”

“Great! Give you a brass for it.” Jerl offered him with a smile

Wh-? A whole brass?” When Jerl simply smiled and nodded, Gebby shrugged and opened his satchel. “Alright!”

As he dug in his coin pouch, Jerl glanced over the side and looked down, and smiled when he saw exactly what he was looking for.

“Here you go skipper. You sure about this? I only bought it for three steel…”

Jerl smiled and tossed him one of the pentagonal brass coins. “Absolutely sure,” he said, taking the box. The moment it was in his hand it tried to snap open. “Stop that!” he ordered: it locked itself again with a click.

“Wha–?” Sin frowned at the box, confused.

“Don't ask.” Jerl said.

He tossed the little wooden cube up and down in his hand once or twice, smiled as Amir emerged on deck to see what was going on, then turned, wound up, and threw it overboard with all his strength while aiming high and outwards toward the gap far below them. If his aim was true, it would fall out of the Worlds. He really, really hoped his aim was true.

Sin, Gebby and Amir all exchanged puzzled expressions as Jerl smiled the widest grin he’d found the energy for in days, and dusted his hands off.

“Green flag, Gebrahin. Bay twelve.” he said.

“Uh...?” the helmsman asked him.

“Go on, jump to! And wipe that silly look off your face!” Jerl laughed. Gebby blinked at him a second longer, then shook himself and took the wheel.

Jerl turned to Sinikka, who was regarding him with the same wary expression a woodsman might wear if they stumbled into a glade and found a deer reading a newspaper in a high-backed chair. “Derghan could probably use a hand fuelling up, and I know he'd be glad of your company,” he said. “And it's cooler below decks! Perfect match! Amir! I missed you, mate!”

He clapped his friend on the back, hugged him close, and walked him toward the Fo’c’sle, ignoring the way Amir turned back to give Sin with a look of utter bewilderment, and the way she shrugged helplessly before heading below. “Could we maybe talk about a chap called Mister Bellarn?”

“Bellarn?”

“Bellarn. You know, hangs around with two other chaps, uh…”

“Coven and Sterval,” Amir nodded. “I know him. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, he's going to be waiting for us on the dock,” Jerl said. He sat down and glanced at Long Drop City. Sure enough, the green flag above bay twelve was raised. He nodded—history was unfolding as remembered.

“I hope he isn't!” Amir exclaimed. “What makes you say that? Bellarn is bad news!”

“Oh, I know. I already received it.”

Amir took off his kufi and ran a hand through his hair. “...Jerl, have you been at the Feyleaf?” he asked.

“Hmm, that's a good idea. Too bad we’ve run out.”

“Uh? No, I'm just asking when you're going to start making sense.” Amir pleaded.

Jerl smiled his widest and most smug smile. “About two hours from now,” he promised. “When we're in the Chart and Charter. But first...you know how to contact the Street Rats, right?”

“Well...yes. Since you ask.”

“Good man. Ask them to have somebody keeping an eye on us at the inn.”

Amir inclined his head on one side and viewed him askance. “...Why?” he asked. “I mean, what's in it for them?”

“Oh, somebody's going to impersonate them and try to kill us under a coin truce,” Jerl predicted. He folded his arms and his smile got a little wider. “Think that'll give them a reason?”

“How could you possibly know something like that?” Amir asked.

“I promise, all will be explained in due time,” Jerl assured him “...Hah. Time. But we don't have long enough right now and I need you to trust me, otherwise things are going to go badly for us.”

Amir frowned at him a moment longer, then finally nodded. “All right. But I'll hold you to that promise.”

“Of course.”

“Well...I shall go write that letter then.”

“Before you do, what's Bellarn's first name?”

“Uh? Oh. Uh…Arthir, I think.”

“Perfect, thanks! Pass the word round the crew to get their stuff together ready to disembark would you? They’ll try to impound us.”

“Jerl!” Amir protested.

“Bet you ten brass!” Jerl replied, relighting his pipe. Amir blinked at him helplessly, then finally shook his head and bustled off.

Jerl smiled and blew a smoke ring that vanished astern in the wind.

This time, things were going to be different.