The deck settled. The roar of water was endless, but the ship’s song quietened. Evanne kept playing, just as she had for the mimics, even though her fingers bled and her guitar strings smoked. The ship’s song settled and found its beat. It went from the trip-lunge of Evanne’s broken heart to the steady, ready rhythm of her remade organ. Steady. Certain.

  Then the floor surged beneath her, a sprinter on the starting line pushing for the finish. All the lights along the deck surged to luminance, brilliant as tiny suns. Dancing in the Storm’s nose hunted for daylight, the deck canting upward, spearing against the enemy vessel. Itikari metal sheared into Vehement, hooked, and caught. Rising like a hunter from the depths, Dancing in the Storm clutched the body of her ancient foe and broke into the lakebed above.

  Evanne hunched over her guitar, because the song was so loud now. So bright, hard like the desert sun she’d walked across. Angry, and awake, and alive again. They erupted through the churning, turgid torrent of the lake, climbing for the sky. The ship shook like a dog, the trappings of time falling in their wake. Daylight hit her, and she saw Hollyhead’s lake churning as fresh air came to her through the louvres.

  Evanne stood, still crying, but with happiness. She looked out at what they’d done. Felt warm. Then blinked. “Hang about. Is that the fucking Raven?”

  Chapter Forty-One

  The ground shook like a corrupt supplicant in Morgan’s throne room. The kind that knew they’d done something wrong, but tried to stare you down—the very queen!—and lie about how they were right. How they’d stolen the cow back, despite the bovine’s branding telling a different tale, or how their property line had always been just so, despite their neighbour’s goat milking shed being right amidst it.

  Something disturbed the earth from deep within.

  The queen staggered more than ran, Heser helping her, or her helping the guardsman, difficult to know. Pakhet loped ahead, and despite the armour lashed to her back, she made it look easy. Four limbs beat two on this kind of terrain, and she was built to a scale that saw fewer troubles from a ruckus.

  The lake, then: it shook too. The waves rippled, surged, and fountained over the shore. They’d be swamped for certain, so Morgan cast about for a better place to stand firm. There. A cliffside. The western bank of the lake had a small rise leading to a sharp drop. They could defend it, no risk of attack from the rear, and perhaps toss a few animated corpses over the side if it came to that. She yanked Heser’s arm, pointed, and he nodded.

  A ragged-gasp rush, a hurry up a shaking hill, the water already spreading at the grassy base. Her feet were wet, boots sodden right to the core, which didn’t speak well of the artisan who’d made them. She couldn’t remember his name, and that bothered her. Heser yanked her arm right back, her woolgathering holding them up. “My queen! Now is not the time to dick about. Excuse my language.”

  “Fuck the language. We should be running.” She shared a bared-teeth grin with him, and a last surge saw them climb the slope, stopping at the cliff’s edge. Blessedly, the drop-off was as steep up close as it had seemed far away. A mountain goat would struggle navigating the climb. What Morgan saw as she surveyed the drop to the water below made her eyes want to pop free of her skull.

  The water was dropping. Not a little but surging as if someone had pulled the plug from a bath. All manner of fish and lake plants lay exposed to the air. Water came and went, great surging waves, churning with muck and detritus, as often saving a fish as depositing a new one on the stony lakebed now exposed to air.

  “There’s something you don’t see every day.” The grey striped tiger perched on the cliff edge, haunch down, paws in close. “What do you suppose Evanne did this time?”

  “We don’t know it was Evanne,” Morgan lied. Why am I defending the rapscallion? She’s shown me nothing but attitude.

  “Perhaps she is getting the job done.” Heser couldn’t have known her thoughts, could he? It seemed he answered a question haunting the halls of her mind.

  “Perhaps. I suggest you see to your own chores. Attend! The dead come.” The cat started grooming a paw.

  Heser waved steel at her. “Are you going to help?”

  “I don’t want to deprive you of the fun.”

  He growled. “There is little fun to killing.”

  “Lucky for you, they’re already dead. Oh, look. Here’s one now.” The cat slipped out of sight. It was like a fading of the light, and then there was nothing where she’d been but air.

  Pakhet wasn’t wrong. The first shambler made it to them, lurching, arms out at Heser. He stabbed his steel into the ground, picked it up, and tossed it over the cliff by brute strength. It clattered out of view, armour and weapons rattling all the way down.

  Morgan observed the slope leading to them. She counted twenty enemy at least, and more emerging from the trees to the west. Another made it to Heser, and the guardsman drew steel from earth and beheaded it almost absently. It didn’t slow down, so he walked about it, severed its spine, kicked the head over the cliff, then shoulder-barged it after its skull when cutting the spine had little effect.

  She cleared her throat. “I feel there is a more efficient way. They do not respond to your mortal blows.”

  He gave her a narrow-eyed stare. “Do you want to do this?” After a pause: “My queen.”

  “I’m merely providing an observation.”

  He grunted, shook his head, and turned back to the next two approaching. Despite their unhurried manner, they made good time, never having to pause for breath or find their bearings. An army of these would be a marvel, and for a dark moment she wondered if there was space in her coterie for the dread arts of necromancy.

  A wash of humid air came from her back with an accompanying slop and gurgle of water, and she turned. For the second time in as many minutes her eyes wanted to pop free of her skull, but this time it was trying to make sense of what was there. She saw a wall of metal covered in lake fronds and other gunk, which was surprising in itself. The wall was a part of a larger mass, a hulk of a thing that could house her whole keep within.

  She took a step back, but didn’t scream, because what was the point? The giant structure, a ship of some sort it must be, was on a crazy angle. She borrowed the gleam of Heser’s steel and put some of it in her glare, straightened her shoulders, and stepped toward the edge.

  Below, the rocks of the lakebed parted as an even bigger vessel surfaced from an ancient tomb. The prow was speared through by the smaller vessel she’d first seen. The size of it confounded her for a moment, because surely no human could make something so grand. It stretched longer than the entire length of Ravenswall, perhaps further than the nearest farmlets. The top deck was a ruin, of course, but she could make out lines where the streets of a whole town lay bare.

  The shaking of the ground seemed the least of her worries. “Heser!”

  He tossed a corpse over the edge, joining her for a moment, whistled, and said, “It’ll keep.” Then he was back in the fracas.

  Morgan turned an incredulous stare in his direction. “It will not keep. It is a giant ship coming from beneath the very earth!”

  “Does it have a sword at your throat?” He removed the arm of a corpse that obliged his point by swinging a blade at his head. “No? Then it’ll mind.”

  “We can escape,” she said. “We can hop aboard.”

  “Not a bad idea,” he conceded. “When it draws near, we jump.”

  He dispatched five more corpses in the time it took the deck to draw near, the other ship now towering above, pierced through as it was. Or was it embedded in the larger hulk? A problem for another time. The ship approached, but it looked too far to jump. “We will not make it.”

  Heser joined her again, and she saw the strain on his face now. Sweat, a flush, but a tight-lipped mask hiding any discomfort. “It is of no moment. Come.” He bulled through the three corpses before them, dragging her with. “Now, I will throw you.”

  “You will nooooo—” Her words trailed into a shriek as he grabbed her by the middle, then lurched toward the cliff’s edge. Now this was a time for screaming, and she did not disappoint as he hurled her across the gap. She pinwheeled, arms flailing, heart fit to burst, and slammed into the side of the ship with a force that knocked the wind from her.

  She slid and scrabbled for purchase. Morgan gripped a slippery frond, anchored to the hull of the vessel, and climbed. Hand up, a breath, teeth gritted, then her fingers found a ledge, and she hauled herself up. She found herself on a ruined deck, now some height above Heser and his melee. “Jump, guardsman!”

  He glanced up at her. “My queen, they will simply follow. They will climb, as you did.” He saluted her with his blade. “Find Evanne. Save us all.” Then he turned his back on her and faced his doom.

  Morgan’s mouth opened, closed, and opened again. “For pity’s sake, jump!” He didn’t respond, blade an arc of glittering death. “Your queen commands it. You must jump, Heser.”

  He decapitated another corpse, then turned clear eyes to her. “I must protect the thing I love with all my heart.”

  She tried to jump then, to get back to him, but something held her back. Morgan howled and spat, turned in fury, to find the gentle jaws of Pakhet holding her cloak. “He will die!”

  The cat didn’t say anything, but her eyes were soft and very sad as she pulled Morgan from the edge. The ship beneath them moaned like whale song, sorrowful, and headed for the clouds.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Tarragon was tired. Not, ‘Oh my, I’ve had a day’, tired, but, ‘Merciful Three, I am nearly dead’, exhausted. Her glitter didn’t sparkle as it should, her luminance a glint rather than gleam. I’ve pushed it too hard. I’ve been running and fighting for so long. I don’t remember when I last slept. And I was tortured, too.

  She almost felt Helio’s smile, nearly heard his voice. That sounds like an excuse, soldier.

  “It’s an excuse, but a good one.” The tunnel she was in didn’t care, just batted her words back with a slight reverb.

  The reverb went on longer than it should. Tarragon frowned, put a hand to the curved wall beside her, then pulled it back. The wall shook, a gentle vibration that felt like an Itikari stardrive coming online. But that was impossible, because she wasn’t in an Itikari ship. She was in the ship of her ancient enemy. The very one that killed Dancing in the Storm.

  She picked up her pace, despite her feet feeling flat, her knees wobbling, and her wings drooping. She had to get out of here, into the open, and somehow find a way back to Evanne. She had an idea that the maybe-Vhemin might have found the control centre for Dancing in the Storm, way down below, and turned it on. And that would be bad, because she wasn’t a fairy. Fairies could handle the radiation cascade from a semiconductor capacitor once it was engaged. A maybe-Vhemin? Difficult to know. An all-the-way Vhemin could live on the poisoned, radioactive plaguelands. Could Evanne?

  Why she’d turned the stardrive on was anyone’s guess, but there was no mistaking the gentle, insistent rumble.

  Then the floor became the wall. Tarragon tumbled, only slightly put out because she didn’t have far to fall and besides, the pipe was round. The wall could be the floor without inconveniencing anyone.

  Then the floor/wall/whatever really shook, and then it lurched, a staggering amount really, as it sought up. And Tarragon thought: Oh, my. Dancing in the Storm is alive.

  She ran. She ran and ran, never mind the fatigue, and ran some more. The Century Charm was definitely moving up, creaking and groaning all about. The pipe before Tarragon snapped open, sheared off as a girder passed through, giving her a glimpse of chaos. The room outside was on fire, which she ignored because she was a fairy, jumping the gap with a tiny flutter to carry her the distance. The pipe heated up, also fine, but the air was getting thin, which was less fine.

  It didn’t help her exhaustion any.

  If I could just find a Three-damned sword! She wanted to scream with frustration. Escaped from a Vhemin interrogation cell, survived a city blowing up, near drowning, assassins, the desert, a misfiring temple, and now this, all without a blade in hand. It defied belief.

  She was nearing the ship’s hull. The pipework took a hard left, the sounds behind her growing deader by degrees as she entered the insulating layer that safeguarded souls from arclight fire. The pipe she used as a corridor must have carried reactant back in the day, but here it carried not even a cobweb. She could feel the rads around her, the echoes of a bygone time, quickened no longer, but deadly to Bigs even still.

  The rads would keep her safe. I don’t want to be safe. I want to be with Evanne. She gave a tiny scream of frustration, and just like that, the hull before her cracked open with the agonised cry of breaking metal. Outside, muddy water and daylight. She lunged for the gap, wiggling an arm in and damn the risk, but it wasn’t wide enough to let her through. Tarragon pressed her face to the sharp, jagged seam, eyes hunting, seeking. She saw the expanse of Dancing in the Storm laid out below her, all the way to the conning tower. It stood like a weary soldier, hatches battened down, a few broken and wide. Rock and silt covered the deck, water still sluicing off and into the lake below.

  The door to the conning tower stood open, and in the shade, hiding from the light, were mimics. Guardians still, not freed from their task. No time for pity. Between the soul-bound guardians and Tarragon, a shambling mess of undead men and women were clambering onto the deck from the western side, slow and steady as they came, no rush about it. Amidship was what looked like Queen Morgan, looking unqueenly indeed as she wrestled with Pakhet. The giant tiger didn’t look like she was that taxed, her attention cast back to the conning tower.

  From which strode, guitar in hand, Evanne. Tarragon bounced in glee, clapping in excitement and joy. She’s alive! My love is alive! She tried to wriggle into the breach again, then froze as the light was blotted out.

  A Feybrind jewelled eye stared in at her. Just a metre or so separated them, the thickness of the hull, and there was Dancing Stars, lips pulled into a snarl. “I see you.”

  Tarragon pulled back in fright, then squared her shoulders. “I see you too. How did you get out there?”

  “I ran away.” The voice was wry, but falsely so. Whatever magic the ancients gave the collar at her throat, it wasn’t good at irony. “Just like you’re trying to.”

  “I’m not running away. I’m running to.” Tarragon beamed. “And there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

  “Huh.” The Feybrind vanished, and a moment later the sound of clanking metal and scraping rust. A hatch, perhaps? The tunnel about Tarragon shook, then clanged like a bell, which wasn’t great because the fairy was inside it. She collapsed, dazed, still exhausted and nothing left in the tank really, then got an arm beneath her. Up, soldier. Fight’s not done.

  The tunnel whipped up and down as if someone was shaking it like an aerosol can. Tarragon hit the roof, the floor, each wall, the roof, the floor, the walls again, and so on for long enough to bite her lip, her tongue, bash her nose, feel blood gush, bang her forehead, scream in rage, have that cut off as she hit the roof again, then collapse to the let’s-call-it-the-floor. Light of a different sort broke into the tunnel. Tarragon gasped, trying to get away from that end, because the Feybrind was right there, those jewelled eyes hungry rather than hard, but something was wrong with her arm, and her knee was wonky, and her wings were a crumpled mess.

  The Feybrind snared her from within, pulling her into a Big corridor. Sure enough, the traitorous hatch was above them, a rusted metal ladder leading to it. The pipe Tarragon had been in was clearly marked RADIATION DANGER in what passed for wasp-bright yellow-and-black after an age of time. A sword—for Bigs, not Tarragons—lay in its scabbard on the floor.

  Requiem. Dancing Stars hadn’t drawn it, no doubt having intel on what happened to non-humans who tried that, but had used the magic weapon as a crude crowbar to open the pipe. Well, that sucks. I wonder how she got Requiem. Are the dead her servants?

  Dancing Stars held Tarragon up to eye height. “You were saying?”

  “I misjudged,” the fairy admitted. “What now?”

  A half-smile broke across the Feybrind’s face. “You get your wish. We’re going to meet your friend. Then we’re going to torture you.”

  “Wait, what? Why are we doing that?” Tarragon blinked in confusion.

  “She has the ship.” Dancing Stars’ smile didn’t widen, but it looked like she wanted it to. “My ship. She will give it to me, or you’ll die.”

  “You could just talk to her. Without the torture!”

  “My way is easier. More honest.” The Feybrind gave Tarragon another shake for good measure, then held up a wire cage. “Remember these?”

  She tossed Tarragon inside the torture jail cage, which sucked a lot, but she was too tired to do much about it. If she could have a few moments to gather herself, she could bust out again.

  But Evanne didn’t have a few moments. Not from Feybrind ‘justice’.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Evanne hurried as fast as the busted-up dais would allow. The mimics clustered around her, some tall, some foot height, and all leaning in. She didn’t feel threatened, more … protected. As if they shared her concerns and were hanging around to help out.

  “Hey,” she addressed an armoire. “Are you guys hanging around to help out?”

  “We like the music. You make the music for us, and for the ship’s heart.” The armoire had a voice like finely sifted, sun-warmed sand. Easy, gentle, and calm. Definitely unsuited to a murder box.

  “Is that a yes?” Evanne glanced around. “You guys are hard to read without faces.”

  “Will you make more music?”