There was an itch at the back of Jean’s neck; the same eerie sensation he had felt before in the presence of the Falconer, and when the magi had tormented him and Locke in the Night Market of Tal Verrar. Patience and Coldmarrow were deep in concentration.
“Ah,” gasped Locke. “Ah!”
A metallic taste grew in Jean’s mouth, and he gagged, only to discover that his throat had gone dry. The top of his mouth felt as raspy as paper. What had happened to his spit?”
“Hells,” said Locke, arching his back. “Oh, this is … this is worse than cold .…”
The timbers of the cabin bulkheads creaked, as though the ship were being tossed about, though all of Jean’s senses told him the Sky-Reacherwas plodding along as slowly and smoothly as ever. Then the rattling began, faintly at first, but soon the yellow alchemical lanterns were shaking and the shadows in the room wobbled.
Locke moaned. Patience and Coldmarrow leaned forward, keeping his arms pinned, while their joined hands intricately wove and unwove the silver thread. The sight would have been mesmerizing in calm circumstances, but Jean was far from calm. His stomach roiled as though he had eaten rotten oysters and they were clamoring for release.
“Dammit,” Jean whispered, and bit on his knuckles just as he’d promised. The pain helped drive back the rising tide of nausea, but the atmosphere of the room was growing stranger. The lanterns rattled now like kettles on a high boil, and the white flames of the candles flared and danced to an unfelt breeze.
Locke moaned again, louder than before, and the thousand silvery points of light embedded in his upper body made eerie art as he strained at his ropes.
There was a sizzling sound, then a whip-like crack. The alchemical lanterns shattered, spraying glass across the cabin along with puffs of sulfurous-smelling vapor. Jean flinched, and the Bondsmagi reeled as lantern fragments rattled onto the floor around them.
“I’ve been poisoned a lot,” muttered Locke, for no apparent reason.
“Help,” hissed Coldmarrow in a strained voice.
“How? What do you need?” Jean was caught in another shuddering wave of nausea, and he clung to a bulkhead.
“Not … you.”
The cabin door burst open. One of the attendants who had carried Locke on the cot stomped down the stairs, discarding his wet cloak as he came. He put his hands against Coldmarrow’s back and settled his feet as though bracing the old man against a physical force. Shadows reeled wildly around the cabin as the candle flames whirled, and Jean’s nausea grew; he went down to his knees.
There was an uncanny vibration in the air, in the deck, in the bulkheads, in Jean’s bones. It felt as though he were leaning against a massive clockwork machine with all of its gears turning. Behind his eyes, the vibration grew past annoyance to pain. Jean imagined a maddened insect trapped inside his skull, biting and scrabbling and beating its wings against whatever it found in there. That was too much; bludgeoned by awful sensations, he tilted his head forward and threw up on the deck.
A thin dark line appeared beside the vomit as he finished—blood from his nose. He coughed out a string of profanities along with the acidic taste of his last meal, and though he couldn’t find the strength to heave himself to his feet, he did manage to tilt his head back far enough to see what happened next.
“This is your death, effigy. You are him,” cried Patience, her voice cracking, “and not him!”
There was a sound like marrow bones cracking, and the three candle flames surged into conflagrations large enough to swallow Jean’s hands. Then the flames turned black—black as the depths of night, an unnatural hue that caused actual pain to behold. Jean flinched away from the sight, his eyes gushing hot tears. The light of the black fires was pallid gray, and it washed the cabin with the tint of stagnant graveyard water.
Another shudder passed through the timbers of the ship, and the young Bondsmage at Coldmarrow’s back suddenly reeled away from the table, blood pouring from his nose. As he toppled, the woman who’d been on the quarterdeck came through the door, hands up to shield her eyes from the unearthly glare. She stumbled against a bulkhead but kept her feet, and began to chant rapidly in a harsh unknown language.
Who the hell is steering the ship?thought Jean, as the sickly gray light pulsed with a speed to match his own heartbeat and the very air seemed to thicken with a fever heat.
“Take this death. You are him,” gasped Coldmarrow, “and not him! This death is yours!”
There was a sound like nails on slate, and then Locke’s moans turned to screams—the loudest, longest screams Jean had ever heard.
4
PAIN WAS nothing new to Locke, but pain was an inadequate term for what happened when the two Bondsmagi pressed him down and squeezed him between their sorceries.
The room around him became a whirl of confusion—white light, rippling air. His eyes blurred with tears until even the faces of Patience and Coldmarrow bled at the edges like melting wax. Something shattered, and hot needles stung his scalp and forehead. He saw a strange swirl of yellow vapors, then gasped and moaned as the silver needles in his upper body suddenly came alive with heat, driving away all concern for his surroundings. It felt like a thousand coal-red flecks of ash were being driven into his pores.
Stabbed, he thought, clenching his teeth and swallowing a scream. This is nothing. I’ve been stabbed before. Stabbed in the shoulder. In the wrist. In the arm. Cut, smashed, clubbed, kicked… drowned… nearly drowned. Poisoned.
He cast his memory back across the long catalog of injuries, realizing with some deeper and still vaguely sensible part of his mind that counting inflictions of pain to take his mind off the infliction of pain was both very stupid and very funny.
“I’ve been poisoned a lot,” he said to himself, shuddering in a paroxysm born of the struggle between laughter and the hot-needle pain.
There was noise after that, the voices of the Bondsmagi, and Jean—then creaking, moaning, slamming, banging. It all went hazy while Locke fought for self-control. Then, after an unguessable interval, a voice penetrated his misery at last, and was more than a voice. It was a thought, shaped by Patience, whose touch he now instinctively recognized in the word-shapes that thrust themselves to the center of his awareness:
“You are him … and not him!”
Beneath the hornet-stings of the dreamsteel needles, something moved inside Locke, some pressure in his guts. The quality of the light and the air around him changed; the white glow of the candles turned black. Like a snake, the force inside him uncoiled and slid upward, under his ribs, behind his lungs, against his pulsating heart.
“F-fuck,” he tried to say, so profoundly disquieted that no air moved past his lips. Then the thing inside him surged, frothed, ate—like tar heated instantly to a boil, scalding the surface of every organ and cavity between his nose and his groin. All of those never-thought-of crevices of the body, suddenly alive in his mind, and suddenly limned in pure volcanic agony.
Stop oh please oh please stop just let the pain end,he thought, so far gone that his previous resolution was forgotten beneath sheer animal pleading. Stop the pain stop the pain—
“You are him … and not him!” The thought-voice was a weak echo above the cresting tide of internal fire. Coldmarrow? Patience? Locke could no longer tell. His arms and legs were numb, dissolving into meaningless sensory fog beyond the hot core of his agony. The Bondsmagi and everything beyond them faded into haze. The table seemed to fall away beneath him; blackness rose like the coming of sleep. His eyelids fluttered shut, and at last the blessed numbness spread to his stomach and chest and arms, smothering the hell that had erupted there.
Let that be it. I don’t want to die, but gods, just let that be the last of the pain.