“I’ll leave you, then.” She took a step back and then paused, considering him. “You’ll scoff, but I hope you succeed. You’ve piqued my interest, Scorio. If you survive your bloody-minded quest over the next seven days, I don’t doubt you’ll go far. Already you have accomplished more miracles than most Great Souls achieve in several lifetimes. Don’t throw your life away needlessly.”
“I don’t intend to.”
“Really.” Her gaze turned skeptical. “Good luck.”
And with that, she turned and departed her suite. Scorio watched her go, and only once the door closed behind her did he draw a deep breath. Her presence was unsettling, her intensity unrelenting, her amusement and interest weaponized so as to encourage him to imagine all manner of possibilities between them.
He was glad she was gone.
Rubbing at his face, he retreated from the railing and sat once more on the simple bench, waiting for the sun to set.
Closed his eyes and allowed Moira’s musky scent to fade away, the memory of her green gaze.
And once all was dark and still, he felt his simmering fury rise up, allowed it to become prominent and all-consuming once more.
Naomi. Leonis. Lianshi.
Despite what he’d told Moira, absolutely nothing mattered beyond avenging them.
Nothing.
Chapter 52
Scorio stood at The Sloop’s wheel for twenty-one fleeting sun day cycles without rest. The craft was alive beneath his feet, the deck thrumming with the channeled mana, absorbing the wind’s torque, the sails filled, the boom occasionally swinging back and forth as he tacked.
It felt similar to being trapped in Ydrielle’s prism. Scorio stood, feet planted in a wide stance, one hand on the wheel, chin lowered, eyes heavy-lidded, his huge Heart burning at a constant low ebb, his senses flung out ahead of him to track the vagaries of the mana.
Always he had taken mana formations as he found them, not trying to predict or understand its behavior. While running in the ruins he’d strained to simply be aware of the seams of Coal; while walking through the Ash Belt he’d fought to just walk with a saturated Heart. Whatever he walked into he accepted as inevitable, unremarkable.
But now he strained his senses forward and sought to divine into what waters his whale ship sailed. Copper was ubiquitous, buoyant, and lively, a thousand streaming eels of brazen metal endlessly interweaving and making its way north toward Bastion.
Only to part and reveal a mesa of Iron that would violently thrust The Sloop toward the sky, or a depression of Coal into which his craft would suddenly dive. Worse was when the mana grew discombobulated, Copper streaming through seams in the Iron, Coal pitting the mass, so that The Sloop jigged and rose, dropped roughly and veered.
It was a balancing game. Speed versus safety. At first, his impatience had caused him to go as fast as he could, only to slam into discordant mana banks again and again, like a regular ship slamming into breakers as it fought to outrun a storm.
The Sloop had strained, boards creaking and shuddering as the aerite bones had either sucked the craft down or thrown it violently toward the sky. It was eerie, how the sails could hang slack even as the mana changed; Scorio learned to disassociate speed from the smoothness of his passage.
But he was up to the task. His Heart was indomitable. It hung in his mind’s eye, a great and glossy sphere of the purest jet, burning endlessly with ghostly Iron flames. When the sailing was smooth, Scorio would divert mana into the compression tanks; these greedily absorbed the concentrated streams in a manner wholly unnatural. However they’d been crafted, it was clear their design had optimized their ability to soak mana as much as any Heart.
When the going got rough, Scorio would tap the tanks. At first, his instinct was to simply rise above whatever rough patch he’d sailed into, but soon he realized that he had to scan above and below before making a decision; he once released Iron to climb over a patch of Coal only to rise into an even denser Coal bank which had pushed down on The Sloop like a great leaden hand. Panicked, Scorio had released even more Iron, and The Sloop had wrestled its way up, its groaning and creaking rising to tortured heights till at last, it burst free into Copper.
From them on, Scorio checked above and below. Sometimes it was better to dive, sometimes to dive and veer or bank around columns and vortices. The more he sailed The Sloop, the more aware he became of the skies as a three-dimensional chess board, with optimum avenues of avoiding turbulence occasionally demanding that he rise then bank then drop then turn, following wormholes through the roiling clouds.
It kept him busy at first, the Farmlands endlessly rolling by beneath him, but somewhere along the way it began to feel rote; he navigated with his attention cast past the prow, maintaining a steady clip, and his mind wandered.
Undirected, it played with his memories like a child sorting through a chest of old-fashioned toys. Taking up one, turning it around, examining it, then rapidly losing interest and tossing it back amongst the others. But more and more his thoughts circled about his friends.
Trapping Naomi in that ruined hallway and coercing her to train him for a week. The joy and fear and relief he’d felt when he’d first espied Leonis and Lianshi walking arm in arm through the market. Their assaults on the Old Gauntlet. Riotous feasts. Bathing in their suite’s azure pool. Lianshi completely absorbed by her old diaries, Leonis boasting about his prowess at just about everything. Naomi’s tower in the ruins. Lianshi’s giddy excitement at exploring the Rascor Plains. Over and over, endless small moments, intimacies, exchanges, but most of all the sense that they were a crew, a team, that they would see these challenges through together, one step at a time, all the way to the Pit.
Davelos had said his friends yet lived. Scorio fought to not believe him, to accept that had been a desperate ploy. But what if they were being held in a prison somewhere? He couldn’t believe they were two years dead and buried.
He just couldn’t.
The Sloop’s path cut across from the Fiery Shoals to the Chasm over endless expanses of Farmlands. For a while, the Rain Wall was visible to port, a hazy line of gray in the far distance. It eventually fell away.
Day cycle followed night. Moira had provided him with a satchel filled with hard tack, cured meat, small wheels of cheese the size of his fist, and dark rolls of bread. He steadily consumed it all over the first dozen cycles, then subsisted on water for the remainder of the journey.
Time passed.
Scorio existed in a realm of roiling mana and painful memories.
His one, true constant, was his desire for vengeance. It prevented him from resting. From going slowly. From doing anything but thinking on Evelyn, her powers, her strengths and weaknesses, and how he might best defeat her when the moment came.
Finally, he entered the mouth of the Chasm’s valley. It narrowed, grew misty and dark, and for hours he sailed as if lost in the depths of a nightmare, the mountains barely visible on either side, the marshland below peopled by shifting shapes and winding rivulets, the sound of howls and harsh cries sifting up as he navigated between the brutal, ancient towers.
At last, the mist receded; The Sloop sailed out into the gigantic amphitheater-like valley enclosed on all sides by cliffs. The rivulets merged to form the twin rivers that rushed toward the edge of the distant Chasm.
Scorio studied the sky, seeking any sign of another ship, anything that could spot him. He dared not sail too close; instead, he went about halfway toward the Chasm so that he was still well hidden, then found a pocket of Coal into which The Sloop could sink. He inhaled as much of the rough mana as he could, causing the ship to lower even more, then leaped down into the hold, tore open the hull door, and dropped the anchor, leaping down right after.