Six days later the Chaser’s lookout spotted the pirate ship and gave chase. It was just an hour after dawn on the seventh day that we finally maneuvered ourselves within firing range. Our larger guns fired first, but the Damme Boy was quick to respond.
Cannons thundered and smoke swept over the ship. I wiped my eyes with the back of my sleeve as I stood on the poop deck, struggling to hold three balewalls called across the Line: one low and narrow anchored on the rail and tilted aslant to protect the gun crews and, more importantly, the powder kegs on the quarterdeck, waist, and forecastle; a second to secure the number-six cannon in place after it had torn away from its ropes — its gun crew was hastily making repairs — and one around the magazine belowdecks, allowing only a single aperture large enough for the young powder monkeys to slip through with their cases and bags.
I could, possibly, use my final call to set up a balewall before the Damme Boy’s broadsides, blocking the carronades. The problem was finding suitable anchoring. A balewall angled from the Chaser’s hull across the 300 yards or so between the ships might be stable enough, but adjusting for the ship’s motion would be tricky. Lt. Guerin’s advice also lingered in my mind — to save one call for myself. And I should, I knew I should, but I just wasn’t certain I cared enough to bother.
The constant booming of cannon wasn’t helping my concentration or my nerves. Cold sweat ran down my face and sides as the Damme Boy fired again. Its display of gunnery was ragged and shameful compared to the Chaser’s smooth roll of fire, but its carronades were effective enough at close range. A ball hit the mizzen boom next to me and I flinched, feeling splinters strike me as the wood cracked and tore. Memories of the explosions that had torn apart the Vigilance Orderhouse and killed my brother’s family made me nauseous. Elsewhere on the deck, warning cries arose as rigging and sails were damaged, again echoing my memories of that terrible day.
Despite the apparent chaos, Captain Tancrède stood fast as a model of fearlessness, gauging wind and swell and keeping a close eye on the damage to both ships. I could barely hear him over the cacophony of battle: the cannons’ roar and the sharp snaps of musket fire, the rumbling of the trucks over the deck as the 32-pounders recoiled and were breeched home again, the shouts from the crew, and the crack and tear of balls hitting wood and sail. His lieutenants’ voices were louder as they passed along his words to the gun crews, exhorting them to concentrate their on the pirate’s hull.
I wanted to emulate Tancrède’s alert but fearless stance under fire, and it chagrined me that I kept flinching. I’d been braver than this, once. Besides, hadn’t I seriously contemplated ending it all myself, just a few months ago? I thought I’d wanted to die — but, I decided as a bullet hit a spar over my head and sent debris raining down into my hair, I’d much prefer a quieter and more peaceful means of death.
“Number-six cannon has been secured,” one of the ship’s children shouted, scrambling up to me. His bare feet were soaked with his crewmembers’ blood.
“Thank you.” I stopped maintaining on the wall around the cannon, then grabbed the child’s shoulder and pointed at a figure standing on the pirate’s deck. “Do you see that person braced against the foremast? That’s the Boy’s sentinel. Tell Lt. Guerin they would make an excellent target.”
The child nodded and ran off, dodging past the gun crews and a wounded man being carried below to Mister Clyve. I turned my attention back to the enemy sentinel.
If I could see them, they could see me. All it took was a discerning glance to perceive the pale and seething bale that stretched out from our bodies to maintain our calls. The Boy’s sentinel was protecting the carronades and had anchored a balewall on the decks and extended it to protect the lower sails and rigging. That was a luxury I didn’t have, not with the Chaser’s marines shooting from the tops. Any wall that protected them would also impede their fire.
The Damme Boy’s sail-protecting balewall vanished and a new one sprang up around the pirate ship’s sentinel. I nodded to myself — the marines had located their target, and that call swap meant the Boy’s sentinel was lower-ranked than I was, capable of maintaining only two calls at a time. Good to know. And as long as the sentinel was protecting their head behind a balewall, they wouldn’t be able to see the battle clearly.
Now the Boy was shifting sail, trying to break away from the Chaser. From where I stood, it looked as though the Boy’s hull had taken a battering. I had no idea whether the damage the Boy had wrought on the Chaser was incapacitating, but my sense was that we were still mostly intact. Even as the Boy’s crew ran up into its rigging, Lt. Peck bellowed out an order. I saw sailors running along the deck with grappling hooks while the helmsman pulled the wheel hard over. The hooks were thrown.
Captain Tancrède turned toward me and shouted. I couldn’t make out his words, but weeks of gunnery drills permitted me to guess what he wanted. I called a balewall and placed it horizontally between the ships, anchoring it from ship’s rail to ship’s rail, exactly where the boarding party was ducking through the lines and tossing out their grappling hooks. I must have guessed correctly, as he turned his attention away from me as soon as it appeared.
In moments, axe- and sword-wielding Chasers spilled onto the pirate’s deck, some daring to cross over my balewall and others making wild leaps at the enemy ship, grabbing rails and nets to scramble aboard. I found myself straining to see the fighting, feeling a peculiar pang of regret for my forty-nine years and standing orders to remain behind. If there were any glory in combat, surely it was in this sort of face-to-face melee, rather than the arbitrary hail of bullets and shot. I had some experience calling and wielding baleblades —
My thoughts slammed to a halt as the Line, normally indiscernible unless I specifically sought it out, burst across my vision like a sickly white explosion.
“Incoming!” I shouted, even though the instinctive cry would never be heard over the roaring mayhem of the battle. I released all my balewalls moments before the air ripped open and transients surged through the extradimensional wound in a vomitous mass.
The screams around me rose in pitch and panic, but I was preoccupied, my focus entirely on using my calls to re-weave the fissure that had been torn in the Line. Feeling resistance, I risked a quick glance across the battle and discerned, through the gunsmoke, the Damme Boy’s sentinel surrounded by baleglow as they struggled to hold the Line open. This was no accident. But opening a breach was an abominable tactic for any sentinel to use, even a pirate.
The transients — grotesque scrabbling insectile creatures that ranged in size from as small as a shoe to as large as a wolf — poured through the breach and onto the decks of the Chaser, attacking the wounded and dying and searching for the hatches down to the surgeon’s cockpit.
I grit my teeth, shaking sweat out of my eyes. Somebody was shouting for the crew to regroup. I ignored the noise, looking for an opening. There! I shouted my calls, brutally thrusting bale through the wound in the Line to stitch it shut again. With a visceral jolt I felt the resistance end, the enemy sentinel either satisfied by the damage they’d wrought or distracted and losing their call. The breach snapped shut and I released my calls with a gasp.
Transients swarmed over the deck, pursued by hands who’d scrambled down from the rigging and away from their gunnery stations to protect the Chaser from the new threat. I stretched balewalls over the hatches and gangways to seal off the lower decks. Sailors shouted for assistance as they slashed at the malformed creatures with knives and spikes and battered them with belaying pins and shot. A cadet howled as one of the creatures sank its claws into his wounded leg. Then pistol shots cracked as the marines began methodically picking off the creatures, blowing their twisted bodies into a pale balemist that seeped back across the Line. I heard Guerin shouting orders and was glad she still lived.
Straining, I set up another balewall around the largest mass of transients and shouted at the top of my lungs: “Come to me! Stay over here, away from the front of the ship!” The front of the ship — there was a term for it, but at the moment I couldn’t recall whether it was fore or aft or bow or stern. It didn’t matter; nobody was listening to me.
Frustrated, I folded my third balewall smaller and smaller, crushing the transients until they collapsed into raw bale or voluntarily fled back across the Line. I found the next largest clump of transients, but they were circling a fallen sailor who was screaming. I couldn’t crush them without crushing the sailor as well.
Then, with a sharp bang, a huge transient burst up through one of the skylights. I cursed — I hadn’t thought a transient intelligent enough to open one — and then paused. Why would a transient come up here instead of scuttling down to where the wounded were being treated?
The thing was shaped like no transient I’d ever seen before, though — it was formed more like a sentinenl’s balesteed, vaguely horse-shaped and capable of bearing a passenger. Except this balesteed had a real horse’s skull where its ephemerous head should be, and as it pranced across the deck, it mercilessly crushed the invading transients under its glowing bale hooves and between teeth of bone and bale.
“What in….” Confused, I searched for the line of bale that must be linking the balesteed to its caller. Had the hellish steed been called across by the Damme Boy’s sentinel, or by some hitherto unknown beck working on our own vessel? But there was no controlling link to be seen. As far as I could tell, the balesteed was moving under its own volition … which was impossible, because balesteeds were summoned constructs. Which meant … this was some sort of free-willed transient?
My mouth went dry, but I forced myself to look away. Whatever the implications of its appearance, it was killing transients, and I was wasting time. I let my third balewall slip away and constructed another balesteed to crush the Linecrossing parasites. A good idea is a good idea, after all. My own creation was comforting in its ghostly familiarity — no solid bone skull replaced its inchoate head, and a proper umbilicus of bale linked it to me. Together, the two steeds danced death across the deck as the ship-to-ship battle raged around them.
“The first balesteed, the one with the skull, wasn’t mine,” I finished, standing at attention. “Which means there must be another sentinel on board, sir.”
Captain Tancrède listened impassively, one arm in a sling, his face still black with powder and dirt.
After the majority of the transients had been destroyed, the skull-headed balesteed had slipped away through the same partially opened skylight — which led down to the captain’s quarters — that it had appeared from. I’d spent the next hour hunting down the rest of the alien parasites and banishing them back across the Line, while the Chasers stayed well away, making repairs and securing the Damme Boy. Once I’d felt reasonably certain the ship was secure, I’d returned to the captain’s cabin to search it, only to find it already occupied.
Tancrède had demanded my report at once.
“The Damme Boy’s sentinel was killed during the boarding action,” he said after I finished. “I saw her body myself. Could she have summoned that thing?”
“I don’t think so, sir. She’s the one who opened the breach, and it was helping us.”
Tancrède grunted.
“Someone in the crew, then. Are there steps you can take to detect a hidden sentinel?”
“Not unless they’re actively supporting a call.” I grimaced. “That’s why Imperial law demands that all sentinels be licensed and identified as early as possible. Otherwise, we’re easy to miss.”
“One of the young hands, maybe? A first manifestion?”
“It’s possible but unlikely, sir. A newly manifesting sentinel may inadvertently send out a call under stress, but that steed was skillfully shaped, and I’ve never seen a sentinel incorporate a physical object like a skull into a construct before.”
“Soldier!’
The marine guarding the captain’s door looked inside, saluting.
“Convey to Mister Cutter and Lieutenant Guerin my compliments and tell them I would be pleased if they would step into the cabin at their earliest convenience.”
The marine saluted again and closed the door. Tancrède started scribbling on a piece of paper without dismissing me, so I waited, straining to hold my tongue. I wanted to ask about the battle and his injuries, but I had a strong feeling that neither question would be considered appropriate under strict naval protocol.
A minute later, Cutter was in the cabin, saluting and greeting the captain. Five minutes later, Lieutenant Guerin entered and tendered her salute, as well. Both bore an assortment of burns and bandages from the battle.
“Mister Cutter,” Tancrède said, “do you have any idea who owned that horse skull that so recently cavorted along our deck?”
“Yes, sir.” Cutter hesitated. “I believe so, sir.”
“Please pass their names to Lieutenant Guerin. Lieutenant, if you would be so kind as to bring those hands to my cabin as quickly as possible.”
With a chorus of “aye aye, captains,” the two left. I stood still as the captain studied me.
The horse’s skull … yes, it could have been the same skull I’d seen weeks ago. That flash I’d seen in the ocean, while the ship had been becalmed, could have been some kind of … balehook, perhaps … designed to draw the skull back to the ship. But why would a sentinel choose to incorporate a skull into their construct? I wondered if I could do that; combine bale and material objects. I’d never thought to try.
“You are certain it was a construct?” Tancrède pressed, as if reading my mind.
“It looked very much like a balesteed,” I said, cautiously. I hesitated, then added, “It made me think of the Bone Mare, a folk tale in Cislunar, up north. There are … I understand there are also horse-headed spirits in the Chevachèchen tradition, but I don’t believe they looked like that. Although I’ve only seen one such image.”
He pursed his lips and began writing again.
The dead-horse dancers were quickly rounded up and brought to the cabin, some injured but all alive. Captain Tancrède questioned them while Guerin, Cutter and I looked on. All of the hands admitted to having shared in the purchase of the skull and confessed that they’d technically broken the ship’s rules by celebrating the end of their indenture, but they were also adamant that they weren’t sentinels and had never seen any manifestations of bale on the Chaser except the previous sentinel’s and my own. At last Captain Tancrède dismissed them with stern warnings about unauthorized celebrations and a week’s suspension of their ration of grog. I thought the punishment unduly strict, considering the celebration had been permitted by the officers, but I supposed he’d had to do something about it once it officially came to his attention.
“You said the balesteed vanished belowdecks?” Tancrède asked, when all of the men had left.
“Yes, Captain.” I glanced around, wondering if it were hiding somewhere in the very room where we stood.
“Then it may still be on board. Find it and get rid of it. The skull, as well, should you find it discarded somewhere. The hands are prone to superstition, and they’ll be nervous until it’s gone.”
“Yes — aye aye, sir.” I made an awkward salute, still not certain when saluting was required and when it was superfluous.
“And please inform Dr. Clyve that I’m ready to receive the surgeon’s report.”
Outside, everyone on the ship was busy repairing damage from the battle, cleaning weapons, tending the wounded, rebuilding the cabins and mess halls, and taking care of countless other tasks that I couldn’t begin to comprehend. Feeling out of place, I climbed alone down to the orlop deck, where the wounded were groaning in Dr. Clyve’s cockpit and sailors were pulling the ship’s furnishings back out of the hold. After passing along the captain’s orders, I began searching the ship’s dark, stinking corners a second time.
It shouldn’t be easy to hide anything in a ship that was only 145 feet long and 38 feet wide, I thought when I was done. I’d even checked all the places the hands had hidden rum and guests while we’d been in port — well, all of them I’d found, anyway. But there had been no sign of the thing in any of them.
Resigned to reporting failure, I headed back up, where I found a group of sailors huddled together. As I approached, their eyes shifted warily toward me and then beyond, as though searching behind me for someone more important — a lieutenant, perhaps, or the boatswain. The carpenter’s young assistant, Janelle, jumped to her feet as I approached and walked away, touching her finger to her lips as she went.
Mystified, I held my tongue and realized the group was loosely clustered around the captain’s skylight. Voices drifted up from below — Captain Tancrède and Lt. Peck.
“…Yzyrche and other demons from hell,” the lieutenant was protesting.
“I am sure Sentinel Saint-Cloud is both competent and trustworthy, despite the locals’ superstitions. The breach today was closed quickly and with minimal fatalities.”
“By a monster!”
“Perhaps it takes a monster to fight other monsters, Lieutenant. Either way, I have no reason to believe that it was our sentinel’s monster.”
“A sentinel is a monster. Sir.”
“If you ever want a command of your own, Mr. Peck, you must avoid setting your religious views before the Royal Navy’s requirements — or the unity of the ship’s crew. You may have promised your soul to Kyrchye, but you promised your service to the Navy.”
“Aye, sir.” Peck’s tone sounded brittle. “But Saint-Cloud’s already —”
“This discussion is at an end. I need you back at work overeeing the repairs to the Damme Boy. Do not make me reconsider which of my officers should take our prize back to Adrahan.”
“Aye, sir.”
I stepped backward, feeling the crew members’ eyes on me. A monster. My cheeks were hot.
“Sentinel?”
I started and turned, feeling a twinge of guilt. The young middy, Cutter, was striding toward me, and the small group of sailors gathered around the skylight dissipated like mist before the sun.
“Good evening, Cadet. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“That queer horse-thing….” He regarded me meaningfully, then gave a quick glance to each side, toward the abruptly busy hands. “Would you call it a bad omen?”
I dropped my eyes. Weather worker. Bugaboo. Monster. The Navy was steering me into very strange waters indeed. But at least, I thought, lifting my gaze back up again to meet the boy’s, I knew one soul willing to help me navigate those waters.
“I would not, Mister Cutter,” I said, trying to make myself sound more confident than I felt. “Two things suggest to me that it was, in fact, a very good omen.”
Cutter’s eyes sparkled.
“I see. And as the ship’s expert on such matters, might you tell me why you believe it to be a good omen?”
I was aware of the many ears stretching in our direction and considered what Master Caraby had told me about the charms dangling on my cabin door. I took a deep breath and spoke as clearly and confidently as I could.
“First, the apparition appeared in the shape of a horse. Not only are horses important symbols in the Chevachèchen tradition, as I understand it, but the Bone Horse is also an important figure in Cislunar, where I was born. And second, the, er, the balehorse was protecting us, crushing the transients the Damme Boy’s sentinel had summoned. I am inclined to regard the apparition as a ship’s guardian, of sorts … perhaps it means the Chevachèchen spirits are pleased with us.” I hesitated, thinking of what Lt. Peck would say if he heard my words. Well, Yzyrchye could take Lt. Peck; I sought to preserve ‘the unity of the ship’s crew,’ as Tancrède had put it. “The breach would have been much worse had the thing not been there to protect our ship.”
Cutter considered me a moment with his sky-blue eyes, and then gave a small, satisfied smile and a brisk nod.
“Thank you, Sentinel — I confess, I found its appearance startling, but I hadn’t considered the link to Chevachèchen traditions. I shall sleep better knowing the Chaser has its own guardian.”
“You’re quite welcome, Cadet,” I said, impressed by the twelve-year-old’s cleverness. He was going to make an excellent captain, some day. “As shall I.”
The sailors who’d been eavesdropping on us would undoubtedly tell their friends what they’d heard, and I felt certain Cutter would pass along my words to the other cadets, as well. Whether or not they were devout members of the Imperial Reverence, the majority of Chasers were likely to embrace the idea of a Chevachèchen spirit favoring their Chevachèchen-descended sentinel.
Even a sentinel who bore the name of a local monster.
Conversation in the wardroom that evening dwelt on a replay of the battle with the Damme Boy, speculations about promotions and prize money, and, of course, questions regarding the appearance of the skull-headed balesteed. I casually mentioned the idea of a Chevachèchen horse-spirit again, which briefly diverted the conversation to sailors’ superstitions before it veered back to battles again. That suited me perfectly. When at last the meal was cleared, I retired to my small cabin, where the wood-framed canvas walls had been set up once more and my possessions restored from the hold.
The top half of a horse’s skull gently rested in my swaying bed.
I nearly burst back out into the wardroom to demand to know who had perpetrated such an ill-conceived prank, but my common sense asserted itself before I could take the first step. I’d served on the Chaser long enough to know that none of the officers with whom I dined regularly would contrive a joke about a matter Captain Tancrède himself took so seriously. I cocked my head, listening, and heard nothing but casual conversation.
One of the hands had left it in my cabin, then. The other sentinel I suspected must be aboard?
I drew in a breath and lifted the skull off my blankets, unable to completely repress a shudder. Sun and salt had bleached the bone white and rough to the touch, and either time or vermin had worn away a few splinters around one eye socket and misplaced a few teeth. One of the bones around the nasal openings had been badly chipped. I revolved the skull in my hands. Nothing had been written on the bone, and I found no message jammed into any of the skull’s orifices. I sniffed it. The bone was dry and smelled like nothing in particular.
Puzzled, I set it on top of my sea chest and discerned. A bright presence flashed within its brain pan and I drew a sharp, startled breath, starting to step backward. Before I could, a thick length of bale whipped out of the skull’s eye sockets, wrapping around my wrists and mouth before coiling up over my head in long tendrils.
Panicking, I called a burst of balefire. For a split-second the air in the cabin grew very hot, and then my call was snuffed out before the unnatural flame had a chance to fully materialize across the Line. Stunned, I began to struggle while the skull rose on tentacular limbs of bale, bobbing in front of me as though gazing into my eyes.
More tendrils of glowing bale extended from the skull and slid into my ears. I tried to protest, my voice muted by the rancid gag wrapped around my mouth. The sensation of bale winding its way into my ear canals was disgustingly intimate, and in horror I wondered if the next balesteel would be wearing my skull, instead.
Saint-Cloud.
The vibrating whisper was familiar and I struggled harder, wracked with. This wasn’t a joke, nor was the thing before me any kind of conjured construct.
***, it whispered in Chevachèchen. Saint-Cloud. You ***.
I stopped struggling, staring at the unnatural apparition. After a heartbeat, the bale wound around me loosened, just a little.
*** *** ***, it said. *** *** Saint-Cloud?
Its voice was alien, but it had learned inflection, at least — I knew it had asked a question. I couldn’t understand most of what it was saying, but the fact that it was using my name, that it wanted to talk, incrementally eased my fears.
My thoughts skidded to a halt.
It wanted to talk.
I groaned against the gag, closing my eyes and tensing my whole body, as if I could somehow physically reject the nightmare that was hovering in front of me.
Transients couldn’t talk. The only things that came across the Line who could talk were gods.
At least, according to the New Theology, the heretical doctrine that had caused such an uproar that religious extremists were murdering sentinels. Had murdered my family.
***? *** *** *** ***?
“Wh—” as I started to speak, the bale slid from my lips, though it remained poised as if to gag me again at a moment’s notice. “—at do you want?”
Saint-Cloud, it replied, and this time I thought it sounded satisfied.
“I didn’t call you,” I said, roughly. The bale around my neck tightened like a noose, but not so tight that it cut off my breath. Still, I suspected that if I spoke too loudly, or tried to scream, that noose might get much tighter very quickly.
***?
I struggled to muster my very limited Chevachèchen vocabulary.
“I no call you,” I hissed in that language. The bale loosened even more.
You *** *** *** speak *** *** *** the sea, and *** *** a ***….
The sentence kept going on, and I shook my head in frustration, unable to make any sense of it. The Chevachèchen I’d learned had been intended for simpler, more pragmatic purposes. Knowing how to order a drink in the language wouldn’t get me far in this conversation.
“Go away.” I’d learned that much, at least; it was a useful phrase in any language. Then, to be safe, another useful word: “Please.”
*** is *** me a *** ***. I am *** ***.
I stared at the suspended skull, struggling with despair. Should I call for help? Nothing but a wood frame and length of stretched canvas separated me from the wardroom … but even if the transient didn’t strangle me at once, there was little the officers outside could do against a creature formed of bale. There wasn’t much I could do, either, especially trapped as I was in its grip. The easy way in which it had broken through my attempt to pull balefire across the Line suggested it was far stronger than I was in terms of calls and dismissals.
As one would expect from a god, I supposed.
“You is … a spirit?” I asked, awkwardly. There was no other word for transient in Chevachèchen, and I wasn’t sure there was a word for god, either.
I am the *** Saint-Cloud *** *** ***. I *** *** *** *** you *** *** ***.
I swallowed again, feeling the muscles in my neck move against the slick, body-temperature bale.
“What … you want?” I asked, unable at the moment to remember the Chevachèchen verb for “to do.”
*** *** ***.
“I no understand — I no speak Chevachèchen.” Dammit, I’d learned to say that better, but I was having trouble remembering the rules of grammar right now.
*** you, *** *** *** *** Saint-Cloud.
What were the missing verbs it was using? They had to be important. Did it want to serve me? Possess me? Kill me? More bale tendrils slid around my torso while the skull floated before my eyes. I felt like I was being wrapped in a particularly slimy, unpleasant embrace, but it wasn’t holding me tightly, and I was starting to accept that I wasn’t in any immediate danger. This thing wanted to talk. And it had protected the ship earlier.
*** *** you, *** Saint-Cloud. I *** *** the sea *** *** very *** your *** ***. I want *** ***, to speak, *** *** , *** ***. I am *** you *** call me *** *** ***.
The sea. What about the sea? It had been thrown into the sea. No, the horse skull it wore had been thrown into the sea. And this thing had made a home in the skull. Had it crawled into the skull from the sea? Did that make any sense? I vaguely remembered seeing tendrils rising from the water in the harbor. But why would a transient be underwater?
Then again, why not? I supposed there was no reason why a transient couldn’t live on the bottom of the ocean. As far as I knew, transients didn’t breathe. But they did feed — on pain and on blood. Was there enough pain and blood in the ocean to maintain a transient’s existence across the Line? Why would it choose to stay underwater when it could easily go back home again?
Because it had been looking for me? Was that what it was trying to tell me? Borbeau had warned me in Adrahan that if I touched the Line, I might find something waiting for me there, and I wondered if he’d been right. Had I attracted the attention of something that recognized a Saint-Cloud?
“No,” I said, firmly in its language. I paused a moment to string my scarce few words together in what was undoubtedly an ungrammatical sentence. “Go away. No I want you. No I to be Chevachèchen.”
The thing burst into speech again, a torrent of words of which I could make out only one term in a dozen — me, you, spirit, Saint-Cloud, and had I just heard the word for sex? I took an unsteady breath, feeling nervous sweat dripping down my neck and under my arms.
“Go away. Please. No. Go away.”
The bale slowly slid off my neck and wrists. Relieved, I rubbed my neck, swallowing, and took a step away from the skull. Bale slipped out of my ears, and with my sentinel’s discernment I saw it compress itself back into the skull, which scuttled back to my sea chest on crablike legs.
“Thank you,” I said in Chevachèchen. Then I turned and left my cabin, barely making it to the officer’s head before losing everything I’d eaten.
My fellow warrant officers made sympathetic noises about first battles when I emerged, forcing another drink into my hands and giving me encouraging pats on the back while I thankfully tossed it down. But for some reason, when I looked around at their flushed, friendly faces, I couldn’t bring myself to tell them what was inside my cabin.