37. THIRTY-SEVEN #2
Thyatira spoke with an authority that might freeze flame. “Where is the Azadonian?”
FANKALO
Fankalo had never been awoken by magic before.
Her Luck gouged at her, so sinister she thought she might vomit.
With a throaty gasp, her eyes flew open to the night-darkened planking of the ceiling over her hammock.
She could almost feel the inferno. Hear the screams. Taste the blood in the air…
Her magic had grown stronger. She wasn’t sure she liked it.
Her fingers scraped along the weathered wood beneath her hammock to snatch her cane, and she struggled against the netting to claim her feet.
Heart rattling, she peered through the night’s veil to search her door.
Mitek had finally moved back to his own bunk at the barracks.
Now she wished he hadn’t—he could run much faster than her.
She paused. The steady hissing of waves cascading against beach filled the peaceful darkness around her, so contradictory to her inner turbulence. Then she looked out the porthole, seeking Mount Vespeyan. It puffed its standard wisps of clean, white smoke. Demure. Serene.
A lie.
She closed her eyes and, despite her fear, leaned into her Luck. It imparted the impression of violence. The volcano… and black ships off the ocean. Both at once. An ambush.
They didn’t have much time.
The sulfurous air whipped her dark curls across her face as she limped and thumped her way across the deck.
She whistled to the nest’s night guard before signaling for him to sound the muster alarm, set into the island’s mountainside.
He scurried ahead of her with a nimbleness that made her curse her condition for the thousandth time.
Then she hobbled down the gangplank and onto the pier toward her Hands. Mitek’s barrack was closest.
Their headquarters in the Rollard isles housed a tenth of their growing numbers, some two thousand heads.
A number they had plans to triple. Most bunked in the same compound—ten long homes of bamboo and palm on the eastern side of the island, where jetting mountains and dormant volcanoes blocked the brunt of the western storms.
Limp and thump. Limp and thump. The painstaking minutes stretched. They seemed hours but couldn’t have been, as she reached Mitek just as the first alarm pierced the night.
“Mitek.” She sat on his cot and shook him.
“Brat?” he groaned. His fingers curled into hers.
Frowning, she dislodged them like she might an octopus tentacle. “Bad Luck, Mitek.”
“How bad, on a scale of—”
“Insides-turned-outside bad, Mitek.”
He groaned again as he rolled to his feet. “I’m up, I’m up.”
She stared out the darkened windows, nerves kicking up a cyclone inside her. Hardly two months had passed since the assault from the Ruxian child—Calver’s son.
Mitek rubbed at his eyes. “You don’t think—”
“I do.” Cul’Mon had finally discovered her, and decided she was worth the risk.
The rest of the barrack stirred around them as the alarms blared louder, spreading across the island.
Fankalo’s hordes rose from hammocks and cots with orderly obedience.
Mitek cursed and dove beneath his cot to retrieve his tanka.
She tipped back onto her feet, a hand on the frame of the cot for support. She was shaken, but certainly steady.
Mitek thought otherwise. He dropped the weapon mid-fasten and moved to her side like she might buckle at the knees.
She waved him off. “Get to Drogus. Have him sail all vessels around the south side. We’ll hold out on foot until we’re sure whatever’s coming for us has an ugly scar and a pet Ruxian.”
“And if that’s what it is?” Mitek’s face contorted in poorly veiled fury.
“If he wants me, he can come and get me. My thanks for his family reunion is long overdue.”
Mitek swore a string of curses the length of the room.
“Cul’Mon means to corner us. Between his ocean assault and…” She swallowed. It seemed ludicrous. Six years and never an indication of an eruption, but… “And Mount Vespeyan.”
His eyes narrowed.
“But if we bring the fight to them, he won’t expect us.
This is our chance to end this now. To keep him from Steila.
” To weaken Tera’thu enough that Calver doesn’t have to martyr himself at the coronation, she didn’t say.
“I need you to move between barracks to ensure the commanders have prepared their units for evacuation and battle.”
Mitek’s eyes darted to her leg. He shook his head. “Screw that plan. That’s what the fucking muster alarm is for.” Sure enough, the men were moving into battle stations to the chorus of yells and the patter of boots against dirt.
“You’ll still reach Drogus faster than me.”
“I’ll send a shratten messenger, Brat. I’m not leaving you alone for a second if that monster is coming within spitting distance.”
As if him standing beside her would keep her from becoming Cul’Mon’s next breeding material. Fankalo rolled her eyes. “Breathtakingly romantic as that is, Mitek, I—”
He grabbed her palm and pressed it against his bare chest. His heart was beating so ferociously she could feel it from her fingertips into her elbow. His dark eyes bored into hers, his usually perfect hair disheveled.
A burning stone dropped into her stomach. Preservation help her. He wasn’t joking.
“You are not invincible,” he growled.
Fankalo yanked her hand away, but couldn’t turn from his heated gaze. “Do what you must, then.” Damn it, Mitek. She knew that look, and Mitek knew very well the things she wanted and the things she didn’t. It took every fraction of her control not to say, ‘Don’t make this mistake.’
She didn’t have to. Mitek blinked first. He turned. “We’ll get you armed in the warehouse.” With a lurch which tore a pinch of her heart with it, he made for the door. “I’m just glad that bastard didn’t break the limb that shoots.”
Fankalo screwed her eyes shut. Close off a wound and it would heal. Reopen it, leave it half-covered, stick her fingers in it ten different ways, and it would not. She hadn’t asked for this; his feelings were his problem, not hers.
And there was a battle to be won.
The Ghosts’ barracks came alive with activity despite the depth of the night. Monthly drills had prepared them for such an event, and they executed their evacuation swiftly. A rolling crack, like distant thunder, rumbled from beyond the rise, but there wasn’t a cloud to be seen.
As Fankalo exited the barrack at Mitek’s side, the palms around them groaned and swayed.
Then the ground beneath their feet swelled and fell with the grace of the sea.
Mitek tucked his arm beneath her elbow—not that she needed it.
She had the bleeding cane. Commands crescendoed around them.
Her men quickened as the ground crested and dipped into its rightful place.
“We are still on land. Aren’t we?” Mitek asked.
Another tremor shook the earth. She imagined it chasming beneath them, swallowing them whole. “Not for long.”
They made for the Rapture. The Ghosts boarded their respective ships in less than ten minutes from the first muster.
They loaded nothing but their weapons and the distortion materials from the Dreiden warehouse.
They were so well practiced in this drill, Fankalo didn’t have to give a single command.
The water of the cove where the Rapture sat at anchor was usually mirror-still.
Now, waves batted against the hull. Drogus greeted her there.
Beneath the burgeoning dawn, his face seemed more lined than it had in previous weeks.
Their geologist, a pale man with jowls like a hound’s, stood beside him. Drogus must have summoned him.
“How long do we have?” she asked.
The geologist shrugged and waved a hand in circles. “When following the natural course of things, these sorts of tremors will begin days or even weeks before a magmatic eruption.”
“And if it’s not erupting as a matter of the natural course of things?”
Mitek, finally catching on, swore loudly. “He could do that?”
Yes, her Luck pressed. And worse. “We’re about to find out, aren’t we?”
“What else would cause an eruption?” the geologist scoffed.
“A weapon.”
If Drogus hadn’t been frowning before, he certainly was now. “Awaiting your authority, Captain.”
The caliginous pulse of bad Luck grew heavier against her with every heartbeat until she was nearly suffocating.
There was no time to waste. “First, we put a league between us and Vespeyan’s base.
” Drogus would have their signal scouts relay orders to the other vessels.
“Then we maneuver to seize. Once we get a better handle on the Tera’thians’ numbers we can—”
The explosion was so loud, it shook the very seabed.
It brought Fankalo to her knees. She clapped hands over her ears as the deck vibrated, then shot back to her feet.
Unstable as she was, she would only be seen standing in the face of fear.
Shocking plumes of black smoke emanated skyward from Mount Vespeyan into the fading stars.
Screams punctuated the sulfuric air. She could hardly hear them past the ringing in her ears.
The clouds pulsed outward until they obscured the sky and billowed towards them like a midnight storm.
She let her hands scream for her. They wouldn’t be able to signal between ships if they were surrounded by the fumes.
They wouldn’t be able to breathe.
Her thoughts did not move as fast as the flames that came next.
The mountain belched glowing debris in every direction.
It barreled into the ships amidst bellows and cries.
They hadn’t been fast enough. There was no need for sound—no need for signals.
All ships moved toward the now glowing horizon in disarray.
Firstlight silhouetted innumerable inky dots on the horizon. Another great crack sounded as two of her ships careened into one another in the chaos.