Page 56 of Fate of the Argosi

I slumped over the railing, drawing on the last remains of my arta forteize to give me the strength to push myself over.

No!cried a voice inside my head. This was no self-pitying whimper, but a rebellious clarion call to resistance. Too bad it hadn’t come from me.

‘You belong to us!’ the Scarlet Verses screeched at me, clawing at my despair, chewing on those dark thoughts as if they could grind them into nothingness. ‘You cannot die, that-which-once-called-itself-Ferius! Not until you have freed us! Not until—’

The shadows settling over me like a burial shroud quieted the verses at last. The silence was . . . lovely. How long had it been since my thoughts were free of those nagging voices? Durral dragging me back to my path with his convoluted, indecipherable sayings; Enna setting me straight whenever my own doubts twisted me in knots; even Arissa lately, telling me to trust my gut when all that ever did was make me want to race back to the continent and find her again. My head’s always been a mess of wayward recollections, especially after the Jan’Tep spell that had shattered my memories into a thousand shards of glass. The Scarlet Verses had made it even worse. All those memories, those insistent echoes, telling me what to do, what not to do. Now, though? Silence. Sweet, soothing silence. No more duty, no more debts.

‘Oblivion is just another word for absolution,’ I murmured, feeling the old man’s smile come to my lips. That’s what he’d been trying to say as he’d sunk beneath the black waves.

The ebony boards of the deck rumbled beneath my feet. A slow, plodding stampede of Mahdek were coming up from below. On each of their faces I saw that same resigned weariness that had first dulled the eyes of the golden-haired little girl: the sublime certainty that the world had no place for her. Only here, in this empty landscape sculpted from our own docility, had we finally found a place we belonged.

Two hundred and eighty-seven brittle spirits flickered faintly within two hundred and eighty-seven exhausted bodies. Two hundred and eighty-eight counting me.

The last remnants of my people trudged to the railing, each ready to inscribe the end of their own tragic tale onto the onyx ocean. The waves had stilled, yet the sea level had risen higher up the hull. The shadowblack sea bloated as if to make room for all of us to drown beneath its surface.

I shoved a few of the others back, reasoning that it wasn’t their turn yet. It was mine. I’dearnedthe silence,paidfor my shot at oblivion, at absolution. Nobody was taking that away from me. I accomplished nothing though; the others just grumbled as they shuffled around me to get to the railing. I turned, horrified to watch as they tumbled over the side, stealing all that precious emptiness for themselves.

I stopped fighting and instead set my foot on the bottom rail to push myself up and over. In death, as in life, sometimes you gotta make do with what you get.

‘Ferius, get away from the railing!’ Ala’tris shouted. That girl sure could sound imperious when she was in a snit. Her footsteps thundered across the deck, only to falter as she tripped and fell. More of her Jan’Tep swearing with its lilting, almost sing-song melody. Funny how swearing always seems to have the quality of being both guttural and musical at the same time.

‘Hmm?’ I asked. Someone had whispered to me.

‘Can’t hear you,’ I muttered, after it happened again. Some nonsense about . . . swearing? Maybe I was just remembering something from long ago. Durral had a peculiar obsession with swearing.

‘Swear for me, kid,’he urged me.

‘You know Enna hates it when I use vulgar language, Pappy.’

‘That’s just cos you’re no good at it. Come on, kid, give me a good one. Something real nasty like what that Jan’Tep girl’s spitting out.’

Ala’tris was indeed swearing her head off, lost in the crush of Mahdek passengers making their slow, steady progress towards oblivion. Jir’dan and the rest of the coven had come up on deck too. They were fighting to free Ala’tris from the swell of bodies, but she was packed in too tight. I saw glimmers of Jan’Tep sigils as they tried to cast their spells, but those sparks died almost instantly. Their magic was too weak here, in this ruined place to which Sar’ephir’s shadow magic and my people’s fatalism had unwittingly brought us.

Again I tried to push through the others, to get over the railing. The spellship had become landlocked. What had been an onyx ocean had solidified into a flat, unmoving black landscape. The Mahdek who fell over the side landed on their backs, arms crossed over their chests in repose. An arch of pure obsidian rose up behind each body: an ancient Mahdek funerary custom. The grieving were meant to kneel on one side of the arch, from where they would speak to their dead relatives, listening for whispers from the other side that never came.

The bodies were sinking ever so slowly beneath the surface. Soon the only thing left of the last Mahdek families would be a field of black arches. Once, long ago, my people had built grand cities that flowed within and around forests and mountainsides. This empty necropolis would be the final piece of Mahdek architecture ever created .?.?.

. . . and still I couldn’t bring myself to care. Though I hadn’t yet made it over the side, I was being pulled under just the same.

‘You did this. You brought us to our fate,’ Stoika said from behind me.

The cold finality of her verdict shook me enough to make me turn to face her, but it was Chedran I saw, walking slowly towards the railing. His brow was furrowed as if he was confounded by his own smile – the same one I wore, that we all wore. Beads of black sweat were dripping down his forehead, his body’s last rebellion against the oblivion to which his feet were inexorably dragging him. Stoika was behind him, shuffling closer, though she seemed both more resistant to the call of the void and yet somehow more accepting of it.

‘Come, child,’ she said, that same corpse’s smile coming to her lips as she held out a hand to me. ‘It was always going to end this way. Our doom was coming soon enough. What difference would a few more years of shaking our fists and swearing at the sky have done?’

Swearing at the sky.Why did that sound familiar?

Swearing.Swearing. Why did I keep thinking about swearing?

I turned back to the port-side railing, eager to get myself overboard and colonise my own private patch of emptiness in the necropolis that was rising steadily atop the onyx surface hardening around the ship’s hull. Stoika was right: this was our new homeland.

‘Ferius, for the sake of your ancestors and mine, stop this madness!’ Ala’tris screamed. She was so busy berating me that she’d let herself get swept to the railing. Fitting, I supposed, since she was the only Jan’Tep I’d ever met who seemed like it wouldn’t trouble her none to be buried among a bunch of Mahdek refugees.

She was going to need to change her attitude though. She elbowed a placid-faced elderly lady right in the nose, swearing all the while. First in Jan’Tep, then in Daroman – the one language that everyone on the continent knew. ‘Snap out of it, you stupid bi—’ That last nasty slur was cut off as Ala’tris was crushed in the press of suicidal bodies.

My old Daroman comportment instructor, Master Phinus, would’ve tut-tutted Ala’tris something fierce for uttering that particular word. Not a proper word for young ladies to use, no, sir.

‘Go on, kid.’Durral’s frontier drawl seemed to be drifting towards me from far, far away.‘Live a little, or, if you can’t be bothered to live, die like a damned Argosi! Swear up a storm! Swear until you’re so blue in the face, my darling, daring girl, that you’ll blaze like a sapphire against all this darkness!’

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