Ship of Spells

Chapter 15 The Auctorus Circulaia

I was in the crow’s nest, working on a sketch of Kit.

She wasn’t thrilled, but she indulged me as she leaned out over the platform, one clawed hand holding the shrouds, her bright eyes scanning the choppy waters.

One of Worley’s swifts perched on her shoulder, and I was fascinated by the differences in their wings.

The bones and tendons, the feathers and the folds of her strong, supple, leathery skin.

They were like kindred spirits, and I wondered what it was like to fly.

“Have you ever been to Bilgetown?” I asked.

“Once,” she said. “Bad place. Stinks of shite.”

She looked back at me.

“They trade for wood.”

“Not treasure or gold?” I asked, and my mind ran through all the things a floating barge city could possibly need, like fresh water or grain or fruit or meat.

“Wood,” she said. “More valuable on the sea. They kill for it.”

“Kill?” My chest tightened. “You mean, like pirates?”

“Worse,” she said, then swung her elongated head back to the sea.

She was beautiful, I thought. A magnificent woman of sinew and skill, completely at home in the sky and the sea, sharp and tough and refined for her task.

We’d become begrudging friends since sharing a berth.

She’d been gone from her home as long as me, also alone until she joined the Touchstone’s crew.

Once here, she spent most of her time in the rigging, either mending or stitching or watching for sails, and had poured her heart into honing her fiber-art skills.

She was proud of her artistry and fulfilled in her magecraft. Suns, I understood her so well.

I was glad she let me sketch her. No, I was honored.

“Gap!” she cried and swung an arm toward the south.

“Gap!” cried a voice from below. “Gap, five degrees!”

And then the bosun’s three pips.

“Gap,” she said, and she turned her head to look at me, eyes shining. “Exciting the first time. Go.”

I grinned, tucked my journal into my sash, and climbed down the shrouds to leap onto the main.

The sea was rougher than I’d ever known as we skimmed the Sheets. The deck was wet and slick, and I was grateful I’d left my boots down below. Bare feet gripped the boards better than leather, and in this weather, a slip meant death if you went over the side.

Most of the crew had assembled on deck, and I turned to follow their line of sight. Five degrees off prow, and I narrowed my eyes, desperate to see anything through the dark, heavy cloud.

Sliver of suns while the corridor runs, said the Touchstone. Bring it here and bring it down.

Forge, she was remarkable.

Bring it down. Destroy it all.

When she wasn’t trying to kill you.

My runescars lit up as Thanavar strode past me, Fahr at his heel.

“Damnations,” growled the captain, and he pulled a compass from his coat.

“Devilish bad timing, sir,” said the mate. “The tip from Flogger’s Bay will be useless.”

“And it delays Bilgetown by weeks.”

Even though the sky was dark, and the Sheets loomed darker still on the southern horizon, there was a gap where sunslight beamed down to the ocean.

A gap in the Sheets meant a breach in the Dreadwall, and it was these breaches that had allowed Rhi’Ahr ships to sail between helms with ease.

Fahr had told me that the Touchstone closed them as part of their hels ’n’ holy commission.

I still didn’t know exactly how, but after the summoning of waters from the Bay of Hodges and the dousing of fires along the docks, I had no doubt they could do anything they set their minds to.

They had magik and seamanship in equal measure.

“Orders, sir?” called Smoke from the sunswheel.

The captain thought a long moment, and I tried not to notice that cursed smile playing with his lips. He slipped the compass back into his coat, and, for some reason, looked down at me.

“Have you ever seen the Dreadwall, Ensign Renn?”

Cold swept down from my ears, and I felt the weight of the crew at that moment, all eyes on me, accusing and dark.

I lifted my chin and clasped my hands behind my back.

“No, sir,” I said.

He turned back to the fore, studied the horizon.

“We have a duty,” said Thanavar over the roar of the sea. “But we also have a chaser. Once we’ve closed this gap, she can track what we need.”

“Even in the Sheets?” asked Fahr.

“Even in the Sheets. Isn’t that right, Ensign?”

Chasing in the Sheets sounded utterly horrible.

“Especially in the Sheets, sir,” I said.

Fahr rolled his eyes.

“Haul close and take us in, Mr. Fahr.”

The first mate turned to the wheels.

“Haul close, Mr. Oakum!” he called. “Take us in!”

Smoke threw his weight into the wheels, spinning them hand over hand over hand. The Touchstone yawed hard as the rudders turned her nose sou’east and the sails caught the wind. With each pitch of the ship, we rocked toward the narrow blue shaft of sunslit sky that was the gap.

Fahr leaned in to me.

“Especially in the Sheets,” he murmured. “Fogging idiot.”

“And you get to train me,” I said, all cockiness and pride.

“Throwing myself overboard at first light.”

“I’ll toss you a raft,” I said. “I believe Buck has a few left.”

He grinned and shook his head, then strode back toward the pup.

I would never bed this runaway son of a king, no matter how fetching or fair.

Still, we could spat and spar like the best of lovers, and the crew would boil with envy.

I wouldn’t let politics on the Ship of Spells rattle me. I wouldn’t let myself care.

Stay cold, Smoke had said. Stay detached. I could do that better than most. But suns, I was more alive than I’d ever been, and it was all because of this ship and the man who loved her.

We made the gap by noon, and I remember vividly the sensation of leaving open waters for the corridor of unstable magik.

Perhaps a quarter league wide, it was a passage due south made up of two parts, or “halls,” as they were called.

The Hall of Sheets and the Hall of Silence.

The Hall of Sheets was ominous, with typhoon storms and hurricane winds on either side, whereas the Hall of Silence cut through the ocean’s version of a desert, where the air was so heavy with magik that sailors drowned in their own breath.

Fortunately, the gap itself boasted fair wind and smooth seas, but now, as we entered this weather-made canyon, I found my eyes lingering on the last slip of open water until all around us was storm.

Massive walls of black cloud roiled upward into the singular slice of blue sky overhead, and the roar of the flanking Sheets was deafening.

For our part, sailing was clear and smooth, and we ran on full canvas as if we were on the open sea.

Still, I couldn’t shake a sense of foreboding, as if the sides of this oceanic corridor could collapse at any time upon us.

Indeed, it could, for the very existence of gaps was due to the weakening of the Dreadwall, and I wondered why anyone of sound mind would accept a commission like this.

It took us half the day to pass through the Hall of Sheets, and I spent that time working with Fahr on wielding the chimeric.

It was harder than expected, and I knew it was because of the struggle between instruction and intuition.

I’d always suppressed wylde magik in favor of Arcana—what the Navy called training—and it felt strange to be asked to trust my instincts and reach for it now.

I wondered if it were the Rhi’Ahr way. That only added to the strife, however, along with the howling Sheets, the sliver of blue, an unsettled crew, and the promise of Dreadwall at the end.

“Can you feel the patterns, Blue?” Fahr shouted over the wind and the snapping of the sails. “Really feel them? You can’t direct them unless you know them.”

I spun my right arm, complemented with a flat, outward-facing palm with my left. Runes crackled as I made a shield, but it wasn’t what he was asking for.

“But this is how the runes connect,” I said.

“It’s not.”

“That’s what they taught in Berryburn Yard.”

“They also taught you knots and guns,” he said. “I thought you wanted more.”

I released a puff of breath. He had asked for an Auctorus Circulaia, a “knitting together,” a spell of creation that was similar to a bind.

Binding was all in the position of the fists.

Fist clenched. Fist open. Hold, bind, release.

But an Auctorus was about the fingers as well as the hands and the arms. Fingers crooked.

Fingers extended. Fingers touching. With their fingers, mages drew the patterns in the rune-laced air.

If we drew them correctly, the world echoed like the strings of a harp.

“Make music, Blue,” Fahr said. “Play a bind chord and make it sing.”

My right hand spun, drawing, drawing. The patterns sparked. I could see them in the air. It was all there, right there, at the tips of my fingers…

The shield pulsed as chimeric burned it into the dark sky.

“Lean into it!”

I growled and pushed the pattern, feeling the chimeric burn my arms next, but the runes sputtered without result. I had chased Rhi’Ahr ships across an ocean. I had stopped cannonballs in their course. Why couldn’t I cast this?

I didn’t understand the magik. I was out of my depth.

I flung the shield, and it burst from my palms across the choppy waters, illuminating the storm clouds like lightning, but it sputtered and died before it did anything more.

I stomped my boot on the wet, wooden deck.

“I can’t,” I growled. “My hands!”

“It’s not your hands,” he said. “It’s your head.”

I swear I could have killed him in that moment. I could have spit daggers from my eyes.

“You’re at war with yourself, Blue,” he said. “The chimeric fights to override the Arcana you’ve been taught, and your instinct fights them both.”

At war with myself. He didn’t know the half of it.

“The chimeric clearly has its own laws, but no one in Oversea has wielded it like this before, so it’s all new. You’ll just need to find your place.”

That is your course to chart, Thanavar had said, as Navy and privateer. Like threading a needle but using two threads.

There was a whistle from the sky, and I looked up.

A swift swept through the canvas, weaving between the sails like a honeyfly in a field of blooms. Worley popped through the hatch, and I watched as the bird settled onto his finger, its wings flapping madly until he cupped it in his hands.

He kissed the top of its little head and turned to trot back down to the great cabin.

“He still boggles me,” said Fahr. “Speaks to those birds like I’m speaking to you now. He can send them anywhere in the Northhelm, as long as he can picture a map.”

“Life on the Ship of Spells,” I muttered. “Even the birds know what to do.”

“Don’t worry, Blue,” said Fahr. “You’ll figure it out.”

“I need a drink,” I said.

“Well, we have an open bottle in the wardroom,” he said. “I’ll pour. You drink.”

I pulled on my gloves and followed him down.

I’d been in the wardroom a handful of times.

Buck swung in his bunk, reading a leather-bound pocket book by candlelight, laughing quietly to himself.

The carpenter, a dworgh named Ben Kobe, sat cross-legged on the floor, meticulously scraping char from the barrels of his many pipes.

He was roughly the same height as Smoke, but slimmer, with a neatly trimmed beard and dark hair pulled off his face in a knot at the nape of his neck.

Echo and Smoke were at a small table, a fierce game of Able Whacks between them.

To my surprise, Smoke pushed a chair out with his foot. I took it.

“How is it going, Ensign?” asked Echo.

I folded my arms across my chest and glared at him. He quickly looked down at the cards in his hands.

“Oh, stop blubbing,” said Smoke. “It’s not like we need a chaser to close a gap.”

“I’m not blubbing,” I muttered.

“Blub, blub, blub.”

Fahr slid up a chair and passed me a cup. I stared into it, wishing for whiskee instead of rum.

“Thanavar was right,” Fahr said. “The chimeric leans into wylde magik, and that makes it dodgy.”

“Dodgy?” asked Echo.

“Unpredictable,” said Fahr.

“Well, it is a natural form,” said Echo. “You homani like to order the runes, organize and categorize them as if you can better control them that way.”

“Arcana,” I muttered. “The Navy way.”

“Indeed,” said Echo. “But we fauns have practiced wylde magik for centuries, without the books and academies of the Empire.”

“Bollycocks,” said Smoke. “Magik is magik. It’s all learned somewhere.”

“The mages at Berryburn Yard said wylde magik is for witches,” I said.

“The mages at Berryburn Yard are ninnyhammers,” said Smoke. “They’d fog a duck if the Navy asked ’em to.”

Echo tsked and turned to me.

“‘Witch’ is simply a belittling term for a wylde,” said the doc. “Your mother did well for herself as one, yes?”

I shrugged.

“Where’s she now?” asked Fahr.

“I left when I was twelve. She could be dead or serving in High Temple for all I know.”

“She could be dead and serving in High Temple for all they’d know,” said Smoke.

Fahr laughed. “Well, you may owe your new magik to her,” he said.

“I owe her nothing,” I said. “She was heartless and cruel, and I’m glad to be gone.”

“Blub, blub, blub,” said Smoke.

They said nothing more, and I regretted my outburst. Once again, my true alchemy had reared its ugly head. I had stomped all over a perfectly normal conversation with my big-mouthed boots, and this time, it wasn’t my mother to blame.

Finally, Echo sat back.

“Well, we’ll be in the Hall of Silence tomorrow,” he said. “You spinners should get some rest.”

“Sliver of suns while the corridor runs,” said Smoke. “My lads are on dawn watch, so I’ll catch me snores now.”

He downed his cup and pushed away from the table, humming to himself about suns and runs and witches and wine. He glanced at Echo.

“Coming?”

“Someone has to tidy the cards.” And he flicked an ear.

Fahr nudged me with his elbow.

“Join me back on deck? No work, just a last night of normal for a while.”

I downed my drink in one go. If the Hall of Sheets was normal, I dreaded what the next few nights would bring.

We left the wardroom, making our way through candlelit holds as I followed him up to the main.