I stepped closer to him, but on the side away from the soul cage. “How old are you? As old as my great-grandfather Patrick?”
“I’m older than any dead man, and any that swim in the sea.”
“He’s not dead. In fact,” I said as I stepped closer, “he’s in his second century now, and feeling like he still has years ahead of him.”
“You’d not be thinking I was that young, now, would you?”
“He’s older than fine brandy,” I pointed out, concentrating hard, before producing an earthen jug. That was a trick it had taken years to master, making objects seem real in overspace, because interludes are short, long as they sometimes seem.
“That’s not brandy, not in an old jar like that.” Still, he cocked his head to the side.
“I wouldn’t know brandy. This is old-time poteen.”
“And I’m the mayor of Dungarven . . .”
“As you wish it.” I pulled the cork and presented the jug.
He did not take it, not immediately.
“I bring you a gift, and you would refuse it?” I asked gently. “Surely, you would not wish to waste good spirits.” I shouldn’t have made the punnish allusion, but the overspace elementals usually don’t catch them.
“You are a hard man with words, Captain Sean Henry, but you are drowning, and drown you will.” But he took the jug, and so heavy was it that it needed both his green hands.
In the moment that he had both of them on the jug, I lunged and grabbed the cocked hat.
The jug vanished, but the hat did not, and I held it, with both hands and mind.
The green eyes glittered, with a copper-iron heaviness and malice. “Clever you are, Captain Henry, clever indeed.”
“I only ask to keep what is mine, within mine, and nothing of yours.”
“So be it.” The merrow cocked his head.
Blazing blue flashed across me, and once more I was spin-soaring through darkness, gongs echoing. I almost thought of the gong-tormented, wine-dark sea, but pushed that away. An interlude in Byzantium would not be one I’d enjoy or relish, and probably would not survive. It wasn’t my archetype, even with the Yeats connection. Instead, I slip-slid sideways, letting the faerie dust that could have been air, but was not, swirl over my wings, as I banked around a sullen column of antiqued iron that was the gravity well of a star that could have shredded me into fragments of a fugue or syllables of a sonnet. The subsonic harp of Tara—or Cruachan—shivered through my bones and composite sinews.
Once more, I soared toward the shimmering veil that was and was not, resetting us on the heading toward the now-less-distant beacon that was Alustre.
And once more, the brilliant interlude blue slashed across me.
I stood under the redstone archway of a cloistered hall. The only light was the flickering flame of a bronze lamp set in a bracket attached to a column several meters away.
Before me stood a priest, a stern and white-faced cleric.
As any good Irish lad, I waited for the good father to speak, although I had my doubts about whether he was, first, truly a reverend father, and, second, good. His eyes surveyed me, going up and down my figure, taking in the uniform of the trans-ship captain, before he spoke a single word. “Your soul is in mortal danger,my son. You have sold it for the trappings of that uniform and for the looks that others bestow upon you.”
It’s truly hell when the elementals of overspace—or their abilities—combine with your own weaknesses. I swallowed, trying to regain a certain composure, trying to remind myself that I was in an interlude and that other souls and bodies depended upon me.
“With all your schooling and knowledge, you do not even know that you have a soul,” he went on.“Knowledge is a great thing, but it is not the end in life. It can be but a mess of pottage received in return for your birthright.”
Mixed archetypes and myths were dangerous—very dangerous in overspace interludes. “If I do good,” I said, “does that not benefit everyone, whether I know if I have a soul or not?”
“Words. Those are but words.”
Words are more powerful than that, but following such logic would just make matters even worse. I concentrated on the figure in friar’s black before me. “Truth can be expressed in words.”
“Souls are more than words or truth. You are drowning, and unless you accept that soul that is and contains you, you will be eternally damned.” His voice was warm and soft and passionate and caring, and it almost got to me.
“I am my soul.” That was certainly true.
“You risk drowning and relinquishing that soul with every voyage across the darkness,” the priest went on.
“Others depend on me, Father,” I pointed out.
“That is true,” he replied. “Yet you doubt that you have a soul, and for that your soul will go straight to Hell when you die, and that will never be when you wish.”
“I have also doubted Hell.”
“Doubt does not destroy what is. Denial, my son, does not affect reality.”
“Then, reality does not affect denial,” I countered. “If I have been good, whether I believe in souls or Hell or the life everlasting,my soul should not be in mortal danger. If I have been evil, then belief in Heaven and Hell should not save that soul from the punishment I deserve.”
“Are you so sure that you have been that good?” The dark eyes probed me, and the flickering lamp cast doubt across me.
“I am not sure that I have been evil, nor that you should be the judge of the worth of my soul.”
“Who would you have judge your soul, if you have a soul?”
Simple as it sounded, it wasn’t. The question implied so much more.
“No man can judge himself, let alone another,” I said slowly.“No being can judge another unlike himself, for the weight of life falls differently upon each.”
The priest stepped forward, and I thought I saw the ghost of wings spreading from his shoulders. The trouble was, in the dimness, I couldn’t tell whether they were ghostly white or ghostly black. “If you will not be judged, then you will be in limbo for all eternity, and that is certainly not pleasant.”
It didn’t sound that way, but it was better than Hell, even if I didn’t believe in Hell—at least not too much. “Well . . . perhaps I need more time to consider. You won’t have to make that judgment, and neither will I, or anyone else, if nothing happens to me right now.”
“So be it.” The father made a cryptic gesture.
There was a stillness, without even background subsonics or shredded notes from underspace filtering up. Then, blue lightning flashed, and, for a moment, I could sense and feel overspace. I had been slewed off course, as can happen in an interlude, particularly one that slips into the pilot’s weaknesses, but I banked and swept back toward Alustre and the ever-closer-but-not-close-enough beacon.
That was about all I got done because the deep swell of a pulsed singularity rolled toward us, like a black-silver cloud. With it came another sheet of glaringly brilliant blue.
Three interludes? That was the only thought I managed before I found myself standing in a dim room.A woman stood in front of me. From behind what was most noticeable was her hair, although I saw little of it, but what I did see was red and tinted with sun, where it slipped out from the black silk scarf that covered her head.
She faced two men in black. They sat at a round table that groaned under the weight of the gold coins stacked there, yet, with all that weight of coin, not a stack trembled. They looked up at me, and their black eyes glittered in their pale faces above combed black beards. They dismissed me, and their eyes went to the woman who had not even noticed me. The two looked almost the same, as if they were brothers, and I supposed that they were, in a manner of speak ing. The only thing that caught my eyes was that the one on the right wore a wide silver ring, and the one on the left a gold band.