“Maybe not quite,” Zarun says. “But we could use the meat.”
“Fair.”
The Garden provides grain, fruits, and vegetables in abundance, but it doesn’t offer any farm animals. The crew are used to a lot of crab in their diets, and there’s been grumbling since it ran out.
The crabs—a baroque variety of multi-legged, hard-shelled creatures—had always been a fact of life on Soliton, dangerous but valuable. Now they’re gone, and nobody knows why. Some people say they’re hiding, scared of us after the battle for the Garden, but I don’t believe that. Meroe thinks they’re going into hibernation as it gets colder.
A noise echoes across the ship, a gong-like sound followed by a long, metallic scraping. I look around, suspicious, and Zarun laughs.
“Iceberg,” he says. “Soliton just plows them out of the way.”
I give him a sour glare, which he ignores.
“If we keep heading this way much longer, it’s going to be too cold to come up on deck,” Zarun says. He looks up at the moon again, then over at me.
“If you’re asking whether I’ve figured out where we’re going, the answer’s still no,” I tell him. “We’re well off any map I’ve ever heard of.”
“You’re the one who claimed to be able to talk to the ship.”
“Apparently we’re no longer on speaking terms,” I mutter.
And that, unfortunately, is the crux of it. Since my confrontation with the Scholar, I’ve spent hours in the control room, trying everything I can think of. I can feel the Eddica energy flowing through the conduits, but when I try to reach it, the ship pushes me out again. UNAUTHORIZED/REJECTED, over and over.
Hagan hasn’t said a word to me since that day. I’m worried about him, if you can worry about a ghost.
But what worries me more is that the hourglass is running out. Kuon Naga gave me a year to return with Soliton if I wanted to save Tori. There’s still plenty of time to make it back to Kahnzoka if we turned around now—though the thought of another brush with the Vile Rot makes me shudder—but every day we’re going full speed in the wrong direction, and the ship remains stubbornly beyond my control.
The crew is starting to worry. Before, when Soliton was going around and around its slow circuit, it didn’t seem to matter where we went. Now, though, it seems to be heading somewhere, and no one is sure what will happen when it gets there.
“Well,” Zarun says, after I’m silent for a few moments, “I’ll leave you to your brooding.”
I give a grunt of thanks, and take a moment to admire him as he swings nimbly over the rail. He may be a ruthless killer, but he’s certainly easy on the eyes, and a good rut besides.
When I catch myself thinking that, I flush and look away. It’s just a thought. I’m allowed to have thoughts. The trouble is …
The trouble is that this, what I have with Meroe, isn’t like anything I’ve had before, and not just because she’s a girl. Back in Kahnzoka, I’d take Hagan to bed, or a good-looking boy I met at Breda’s, or one of Keyfa’s prostitutes. It was always just a rut, with no pretensions, no promises. Simple.
With Meroe … I don’t know. It’s not like it’s something we’ve talked about. But I’d rather bite my fingers off, one by one, than hurt her. So I’m working on it.
It would scare me, being so vulnerable to someone else’s feelings, except that I don’t seem to have any rotting choice in the matter.
Rot. Rot, rot, rot. I flop against the railing, metal cold against my skin, and stare down the Bow. Moonlight dapples the sea, and I can even see a few icebergs, drifting slowly past and bobbing in the wake of the great ship’s passage. Farther ahead, there’s only darkness, broken by—
—a glimmer of light.
* * *
The Council convenes on the tower the next morning.
These days, that means me, Meroe, Zarun, and Shiara. The journey up the length of the ship dissolved the packs and clades of the Stern, especially since so many of the pack leaders had died fighting to get us here. But old habits break hard, and Zarun and Shiara have a lot of accumulated respect.
Of the two, it’s Shiara who makes me wary. Zarun, I understand. I can even see through his brash bluster, a little, to the more thoughtful man underneath. Shiara is a mystery to me, elegant and perfectly attired in a silk kizen like a noble lady of Khanzoka, wearing a slight smile with no humor in it at all. Alone of the old Council members, she isn’t a fighter—her Well is Sahzim, Perception—but she has the loyalty of some of the crew’s most experienced and dangerous hunters.
Not that she’s caused trouble. On the contrary, she’s been perfectly cooperative since our flight to the Garden. But I don’t know what she wants from me, and that makes me worry.
Right now she’s peering through the telescope pointing at the horizon. After a moment, she straightens, moving back with delicate, careful steps. Her cheeks are red under the powder she uses on her face. The sun is well up by now, but it does nothing to cut the chill, and we’re shivering in the wind of Soliton’s passage.
“What is it?” she says.
She’s looking at me. They’re all looking at me. Even Meroe, who ought to know better. All I can do is scratch the back of my head and be a disappointment.
“I have no idea,” I tell them. “Other than the obvious.”
The obvious was that, far out ahead of Soliton, there’s a faintly glowing hemisphere of soft gray light. Last night, I hadn’t been able to gauge its size, and I’d thought it might be another ship. When morning came, though, it became obvious that the thing is much farther away—and much bigger—than I’d originally guessed.
“Is that Eddica energy?” Shiara says.
I give a slow nod. “I think so.” I can feel it, a tickle on my mind, even at this distance.
“And we seem to be headed right for it.” She raises one perfect eyebrow. “So it’s reasonable to guess that it has something to do with Soliton.”
“Reasonable,” I parrot. “But I’m not sure what we can do about it.”
“Make sure everyone’s under cover, at least,” Zarun says. “And that the doors are closed, in case the crabs go mad the way they did at the Rot.”
“Take a look at this,” Meroe says. She’s wandered over to the telescope. “At the edge of the light. Either there’s a really big iceberg, or that’s land.”
We take turns looking through the instrument. Sure enough, off to one side of the gray glow, pure white snow mounds up out of the surface of the sea in what looks very much like snow-covered hills. We look at each other for a moment, and Zarun says what everyone’s thinking.
“Maybe this rotting ship has finally gotten where it’s going.”
That’s the news that spreads through the crew, like fire over dry thatch. Wherever we’ve been heading, we’re almost there—my best guess is we’ll arrive by evening. Meroe and I do a tour of inspection, check the big doors on the first floor, the guards and food supplies. Hunters arm themselves and assemble in small groups, and the younger non-combatants are herded into rooms on the upper floor that’ll be easy to defend. To my surprise, there’s no panic, just an air of expectation.