Hush (Dragon Apocalypse) (8 page)

Gale shook her head. “Five percent isn’t a serious offer. Forty percent is the lowest I can go. The safety of my family is paramount. I’ll not risk their lives for petty sums.”

“And the fee should be paid whether or not we see combat,” said Brand. “Sage is capable of spotting enemies long before they spot us, giving us an edge on evasion. This is a valuable service. We shouldn’t be penalized for being good at our jobs.”

“If she’s so good, why didn’t you see these Skellings coming?”

Gale frowned. “She took note of them. It’s my own fault for not believing they would attack in Commonground. Here, all Wanderers are sworn to come to the defense of other Wanderers.”

“And yet they didn’t,” said Infidel.

Gale gave a weary sigh. “These damn slave wars are ripping the very foundations of Wanderer society to shreds. I’ve blood relatives on at least a dozen ships in this port. That none would come to our aid is a heavy burden. And further proof that defending you against attacks will be a burden that falls completely on my immediate family. A twenty-five percent bonus paid up front would be the absolute bare-bones sum I could consider fair.”

Before Infidel could make a counteroffer, I was distracted. Something was crawling on my right hand. The sensation of being touched was unnerving after my weeks of intangibility. I stretched out my arm and spied a large silver mosquito perched upon my knuckles. I froze, paralyzed by the strangeness of the moment. I was no entomologist, but could any bug be agile enough to alight upon something with no more substance than a cloud? The sensation had to be an illusion. He must be flying in the spot my hand occupied, and it was only my imagination that I could feel him.

It was a fine theory and I might have convinced myself if the creature’s wings had been moving.

Shaking off my paralysis, I brought my hand closer to my eyes. The mosquito wasn’t a living insect, but instead a finely constructed bit of jewelry, with a body of silver and legs of jointed copper wire. Its delicate wings were formed from gold leaf so thin it was translucent. The mosquito had glass eyes that served as tiny mirrors, reflecting my ghostly visage as we stared at one another.

“I... I’ve seen you before,” I whispered.

To my utter astonishment, my phantom breath fogged the delicate wings.

The mosquito didn’t react.

I swallowed hard.

After I’d died, when Infidel had first returned to town, she’d fought an undead giant. The unliving thing had been sewn together out of a two or more corpses, a patchwork monstrosity with inhuman strength in its misshapen limbs. The giant had given Infidel quite a beating, but she’d eventually pounded it to pulp, using its own torn-off arm as a club. When she’d dismantled the torso, she’d found a small cage, and within that cage was a glowing mosquito. This one lacked the inner radiance, but how could it not be the same creature? How many magical mosquitoes were there flying around in this town?

“Wh... what are you?” I asked. I felt certain that some higher intelligence was gazing at me through those glass eyes.

The thing answered me by doing a little dance back and forth. A tongue like a tiny corkscrew worked itself out of the construct’s mouth. I shook my hand to throw the thing off, but too late. The mosquito sank the corkscrew into my skin, and all my frantic hand waving failed to loosen it. I watched as a bead of ruby ichor rose around the tiny hole augered in my wraithful flesh. I reached out with my other hand to tear the insect loose.

Before my fingers could close upon it, the mosquito placed its mouth against the small pearl of blood that sat upon my knuckle. Nearly microscopic jaws snapped open, and a glass pipette thrust down into my ghost blood, drawing the bead up into its belly.

The jaws clicked shut. The noise was too faint to truly hear, but in my imagination it echoed like the lonely clang of dungeon doors.

I recovered my wits sufficiently to flick it with my fingers. The blow tore the insect from my skin. As it tumbled, the tiny mosquito spread its wings and took flight. I was none the worse for wear, save for a small smear of blood where the creature had feasted. I watched it buzz a drunken path across the deck, unseen by the assembled Romers. I cast one last glance at Infidel. Though my instincts were to stay at her side, I threw myself into the air, narrowing my eyes to concentrate on my ever-accelerating target. I didn’t know why it wanted my blood or where it was going. Despite my normally inquisitive nature, I honestly didn’t want to learn. I had to stop this thing.

CHAPTER FOUR

AN EXCEPTIONALLY UGLY BIRD

T
HE MOSQUITO DOVE
over the edge of the railing. I gave chase as it flitted above the stinking tide. The bay of Commonground emits an open-sewer aura under the best of conditions, but since the tsunami churned up the muck it’s been especially gag-inducing. The mosquito was barely a foot above the water, darting around pilings and between boats and their anchor chains with an agility that would have shaken me if I’d been a bat or a bird. I ghosted through these obstacles as if they weren’t even there.

The fact that this mystery bug had touched me meant that I could touch it back. I gave it a good swat with my right hand. It darted to avoid the blow, but the tip of my middle finger managed to clip its wing, sending it into a tail spin as it neared the hull of a boat. To my chagrin, it passed straight through the tar-impregnated wood without leaving a scratch.

I flew into the ship’s hold, spotting the mosquito easily in the pitch black interior, despite the jumbled maze of barrels and crates. The thing was glowing with an internal magic that my phantom eyes could easily track. At any rate, even if I hadn’t been able to see it, I could have followed the high-pitched buzz of the mosquito’s golden wings.

The mosquito zipped out of the hold, then shot strait up, disappearing though the pier above. I emerged onto a boardwalk crowded with bodies. Now that night had fallen, the denizens of the city were out in force. Cutthroats and whores stumbled groggily along the pier, searching for breakfast at a time when law-abiding men sought out supper. The area was crowded with ramshackle shacks slapped together by river pygmies, who cooked plantains, turtle eggs, and crabs on charcoal grills stoked to ruby heat. Dark amber rum with a whisper of coffee was the beverage of choice for this clientele, and I felt a pang of longing as I caught a whiff of the much cherished elixir.

I lingered for a fraction of a second, distracted by the aroma, and spotted faces of former friends among the crowd. Ol’ Scummy Stone was sitting on a bench, drinking from a silver flask he’d won from me in a game of darts. Scummy was in his sixties and had survived for decades in this rough-and-tumble town using the same strategy I’d employed, which was to be obsequious enough that no one had reason to kill you, but not so pathetic that you aroused actual hatred. Further down the planks I saw Rose Thirteen; by this point she’d had twenty husbands, but her name had gotten locked down after she botched the job of poisoning husband thirteen and had to finish him off with a hatchet in the door of the Drunken Monkey Saloon. Her hair was streaked with gray now, but she still had the same lushness of figure that had caught so many men in her orbit. Despite her propensity toward murder, she was welcome company on a night of drinking, since she knew more dirty jokes than a sailor. She was also Commonground’s only competent seamstress – she’d mended the pants I’d died in.

If the mosquito had meant to distract me by tracing a path through places and faces familiar to me, I’m vexed to confess that it succeeded. It had put a hundred feet between us as I paused to reminisce. I caught one last glimpse of the tiny beast as it zipped into Big Blue’s Bug and Bun Barn at the end of the pier. I flew after it, but the second I entered the restaurant I lost focus. My mouth watered as I caught sight of plates full of yeasty fried dough stuffed with bananas and lemon spiders. Unfortunately, for a ghost, concentration equals movement. For the briefest second, the mosquito vanished from my mind and I found myself stalled in the middle of the bug barn, stirred to hunger.

It took only an instant to shake off my reverie and zoom out the back wall, but it was too late. I couldn’t spot the mosquito amid the chaos of lights and bodies, nor hear its faint buzz beneath all the laughter and shouts. Outwitted by an insect!

The creature had been heading due east when it first took flight. There wasn’t much left in that direction. Once, Bigsby’s fish house had been the central feature of that area, but the tidal wave had left nothing but slanted timbers thrusting up from the water. I wondered if Bigsby would rebuild, assuming he was even alive. Between the volcano erupting, the tidal wave, and the avatars of Greatshadow burning everything in sight, the population of Commonground wasn’t what it used to be.

Flying over the barren water, I noticed a dim glow on the shore no more than a mile distant. This was no funeral pyre or bonfire; I guessed it to be the faint, flickering light of numerous candles.

Which, indeed, it was. There were hundreds of slender tapers thrust into a circle of raked beach sand, forming a spiral pattern. I flew higher to better perceive the design and found myself mesmerized by the snail-shell shape, unable to turn away.

Within the center of the whirl of light was a familiar figure. Sorrow Stern knelt on the beach, laying gnarled bits of driftwood together into a shape that bore a vague resemblance to a man. Its legs were splintery remnants of a mast split by lightning. Its arms were thick branches of dark teak, the fine grain looking almost like muscle beneath a thin coat of damp sand. For a head it possessed a large coconut still in its husk, given a jagged mouth by a machete chop and what could pass as eyes formed by two oval pecan shells. The twin iron nails that held the false eyes to the surface glinted like irises in the candlelight. To the sides of the head were curled tamarind seed pods that served as makeshift ears.

For the first time I saw Sorrow free of her hood. She’d stripped off her cloak and wore a bright red dress that left her shoulders bare. It looked more appropriate for a ballroom than a beach. She was smaller without the cloak, with a figure best described as girlish, but I found her age a mystery. The left half of her body was withered, the limbs supported by iron braces, but her right half looked young and strong. Her head was shaved, adding years to her appearance. Her scalp was dotted with dark studs, some of which flashed as they caught the candlelight. I found myself drawn in along the spiral, fascinated by the bumps on her head. They looked, for all the world, like the blunt heads of nails. There were half a dozen, one gold, another silver, another rusted iron, one green copper, one that might have been glass, and the last with the appearance of polished wood.

She stood, lifting her hand straight up as if she were reaching for me as I hovered overhead. I heard a buzz and the silver mosquito flashed toward her fingers, alighting gently on her outstretched palm. She knelt once more, opening the barrel chest of the driftwood man she’d built, revealing a small cage of golden wire. She opened a tiny door and the mosquito crawled inside.

“Wandering spirit, thou shalt roam no more,” said Sorrow, her voice deeper than what should have come from her slender throat. “By thy blood I bind thee to this body of wood. Thy soul shall be its soul.”

She shut the door to the cage.

Long ago, before arriving in Commonground, I worked on a fishing vessel in the Green Straights, where swordfish are caught with hooks of tempered steel fed out on long weighted lines. I’d had the misfortune of running one of those hooks through my hand, the point slipping between the bones of my little finger and ring finger, just beneath my knuckles. I’d been beaten by professionals, during my years at the monastery, but nothing quite prepared me for the pain as the weighted line played out and snatched me overboard.

That same pain now seized me in every pore. I felt invisible hooks slip into my mouth, scraping across tooth and tongue and bone. Hooks pierced my eyes and ears, slid into my neck bones, tangled in every rib. I thrashed against the unseen barbs that tormented me, beating the night air with my ghost limbs, to no avail. Fine silver threads appeared all around me, connecting my wraith-form to the driftwood man. With a sound like fingernails dragged along guitar strings, the lines all went taut and reeled me in.

For a moment, everything went black.

When I opened my eyes again the world was painted in shades of amber. My limbs felt numb and heavy. I could barely turn my head... and yet, to my surprise, I did have a head to turn. I was a physical being once more, my body cold and stiff, but undeniably present. I raised an arm that felt weighted with iron and brought it to my face. With my monochromatic vision, I could make out the gnarled remnants of the base of a mangrove tree, with five finger-length roots jutting out. Such was the resemblance of the root to a hand that I imagined I could close the fingers into a fist, and as I thought it, it happened. I felt the friction of finger against finger, felt the damp grit that coated the limb grinding into wooden flesh.

Sorrow loomed above me. Unlike the rest of my monochrome world, she looked crafted from a rainbow, a being of pure energy swirling within the translucent flesh of a woman. Her voice was thunderous in my seed-pod ears:

“Ghost, you are bound to this body of wood. It was alive once, but devoid of spirit, as you were alive once, but are devoid of body. I give you dominion over this form for a time, ’til decay and entropy reduce this shell to dust, and the last spark of your animating spirit fades from this domain. Until you meet this final death, you are my property, and shall obey my commands.”