Welcome aboard, Madame Seer, Rusk said, finally. This will be quite the long voyage for you, I’m thinkin’. Though you and Master Parry may comfort each other against my presence, I s’pose, if ye’ve a mind to.
Then vanished, leaving she who termed herself Clione Attesee to roll her wave-coloured eyes up and faint—and it was only Jerusalem Parry’s memory of what deck hitting skull felt like, along with the speed it leant him in catching her, that saved her from a similar fate.
She hung in his arms, soft and limp, rounded in highly intriguing places; he stared down at her, baffled, wondering what came next.
What am I to do with you? Parry thought. Whatever are we to do, with each other?
No reply came, however. So he toted her back to his cabin and laid her in his bed, as Rusk had once done with him—then withdrew, unlike that rapine-inclined picaroon, so she might sleep her fear-trance off alone.
***
Parry walked the deck until morning, disturbing his crew, a fact he took pride in. Through a process of trial and error, he had found it best to allow them to make a fear-object of him, if only to prevent them destroying themselves in useless attempts to take his place. In the time since Rusk’s demise, he had put down three mutinies already, for though the memory of their former master’s passing was enough to dissuade most of the older generation from underestimating their new one’s power, the steady shifting of balance between those hands engaged under Rusk and those he’d signed on himself seemed doomed to eventually oblige Parry to prove himself once again whenever they began to see him an obstacle to their own upwards passage.
What none of them understood was that although he had never coveted his current position, now that Rusk’s curse was in place, Parry would kill without a second thought to keep it—a man barred from shore needed to keep himself afloat, after all, and he had no compunctions over harshness where treason was involved. One early fool, idiot enough to fall upon him in his repose, he’d accidentally atomized with an undirected blast—the touch of a stranger’s hands on his neck-scar had been enough to catapult him back into unhappier days, and he’d struck out without thinking. Others he’d given to the shark-were’s kin or swung from the yard-arm in Navy style, as a tribute to past training.
None had joined Rusk under-hull, however, for Parry did not care to risk populating his entire ship with dour phantoms, not when the company here was already so uncongenial. So things continued, with Parry knowing himself despised and avoided by all except Captain Rusk’s leering fragment, of whom he could well-stand not to be reminded on quite so regular a basis.
(Miss Attesee, now: she did not fear him, not as yet. Though time might teach her otherwise.)
At length, Parry sat down on the fo’c’sle cross-legged and laid a protective circle ‘round himself before sending out his spirit, that his body be left undisturbed. Then, reaching deep into the hex-bag, he ended up winding his dead witch-mother’s hair in its frail red braid ‘round one hand like a rosary, while at the same time rolling Rusk’s false ivory eye ‘tween two fingers of the other—victory’s spoils turned fetish, sweet as any battlefield prize.
Power, Parry had learned (the hard way; he knew no other), was nothing at all without self-governance; a cracked gun-barrel, apt to explode when fired. It must be ordered, aligned properly with the secret lines of force that ran this sphere along its celestial track . . . and here those came now, blazing up at every compass-point, illumining a different world. A waking dream, wherein all things—however unlikely—became possible.
Was this what his mother had felt? he sometimes wondered, though he doubted it, given she’d had so little faith in her own powers as to shop him to the black-coat God-botherers the minute he proved educable. Then again, illiterate herself, Arranz Parry set great store by book-learning, and the Cornwall Church certainly had books enough to spare. At the time, however, he would have fought tooth and claw to stay with her, running barefoot through the marsh—did so, ably enough for his size, ‘til some bull-sized farmhand-turned-sexton carted him away, screaming. And he had never seen her again, not before the day they pulled him from his studies to see her swung, telling him his blood put the lie to his vocation. How he had resented and denied her, all those intervening years, in his pursuit of a parson’s collar—cursed her, even, a thing he now sorely regretted.
On the one hand, she was his mother, and he would always love her fiercely, no matter how he tried to do otherwise; on the other, she did worship the Lord of Horns, and made no claim to the contrary. But in a witch-hanging country, perhaps that had been as much effect as cause.
Up through the holes of his own skull Parry boiled, fine as smoke, to spread himself from bow to stern. Saw the silver cord that bound him to that meat-sack he normally wore stretch out behind, infinite extensible; saw the spark-knit chains linking him to the Salina, as well as those linking Mister Dolomance—unseen below-decks, lurking somewhere in the ship’s guts, just as he would once have ridden the ocean floor’s murky currents—to him. Not to mention the gross mechanics of Rusk’s curse, twining in and out of his shucked flesh like a swarm of soot-worms, blackening his coronal light with limitation: fatally incurable, the same as life itself.
Inevitably, however, widening his perceptions thus showed him what he’d rather not see, as well as what he sought: Solomon bloody Rusk himself, leant up against the mast with arms crossed, staring down at Parry’s back as though he yearned to lay one hand between its shoulder blades.
Be off with you, sir, Parry told him, lips unmoving. Take yourself elsewhere. Your presence is neither required, nor welcomed.
Ah, ye’re a hard one, Jerusha. Surely I might do ye some small service in this enterprise, given it ensues we’re of similar make?
How so, pray? What I know I learned, through hard study; you never dreamed you might share your family’s gift for sorcery, not ‘til you saw the Salina’s hull at close range.
Yet your Salina was my Bitch once, Master Parry, and I know she has not forgotten me. What keeps me from resuming my post, if you leave her behind?
That not a man aboard could hear your orders, even were they inclined to obey?
Well, there is that. I’ll attend your return, then, shall I?
As you please.
Raising hand to forelock, the ghost turned away, upon which Parry closed his eyes and sank downwards through dark fathoms, great blooms of fish wheeling like starlings from his path on every side—seeking for some trace of Miss Attesee’s vanished vessel, the Nymph. And soon found it, as though some lodestone charge pulled him there, currents drawing him on both swift and steady, imbrued with a briny musk that made his theoretical nostrils twitch.
Time soon fell away under-ocean, so Parry had no true sense of exactly when he finally saw a mass of drifting scraps before him resolve into a scuttled brig, open-broke and upturned. Part of the prow still remained, blazoned in gold with what looked from this angle like H-P-M-Y-N, deformed to reverse through water’s heavy lens. Around him, the blue-black swam with drifting corpses, torn and bleached, many entangled as though fighting; at his left hand, two men had their teeth sunk deep as fight-pit dogs’ in each other, purple-haloed in blood too cold to dissipate.
Had it been battle that had done this, he wondered, or a mutiny? Some ship-wide outbreak of madness, or another sort of infection entirely?
Parry saw no craft in it, one way or the other, just as he’d seen none in Miss Attesee herself—nothing beyond that vague flutter of power that some without witch-blood seemed to carry unawares, developing through various schemes to scry palms and dowse water, or t
he like. But he had been fooled before in such matters, as Ankolee Rusk had remarked during his first bout of curse-made land-fever, her spirit hanging over him as he sweated a sickbed-full of bloody sheets.
Amazing, how ya can know so much and so pitiful little, all at the same time, she’d scoffed, when he voiced his doubt against her diagnosis. But then, ya never do trust nothing an’ no one, even ‘fore Solomon’s curse take hold.
I’ve not had much cause to, madam. Least of all where that half-brother of yours is concerned.