Sailing the Silver Void

The fog closed behind them and the Pale Fang’s crew waited. No commands were issued. None were needed.

The Bone Devil went first, hands folded, expression somewhere between politeness and hunger. Veyer came after it, blade low, the aether-silk cloak ripping one slow wave along its length like a flag finding wind. Pea did not stop to talk; he climbed the rigging of the skiff and tried to find a target through the fog. There was nothing yet to shoot — only silence.

Bow

The Devil did not stop walking.

It crossed the deck in long unhurried steps, ignoring the minions who tried to stop it, and went forward — toward the bow, where Kith-Commander Zar’rekh held the line with her dragon handler at her shoulder. Zar’rekh saw it coming. She did not move.

Embrath dropped from the masthead and breathed fire down its spine in a long red column. The fire did nothing. Bone Devils do not, as it transpires, mind fire. Embrath pulled up sharply, smoke streaming from her wings, and the Devil did not so much as glance at her — only dispatched Githyanki crewman after Githyanki crewman without breaking its unhurried stride.

Cabin

Kaymos, ever fascinated by the contents of a captain’s cabin, ignored the sounds of battle leaking out of the fog and climbed to the stern windows of the Pale Fang. He prised them open with a dagger and began to haul himself through — only to feel a large hand close around the scruff of his neck and pull him bodily into the cabin.

He had a heartbeat to take it in. Charts spread across the table. A parchment of half-finished orders. An open silver-and-bone cylinder. The shards of a broken greatsword laid out beside them. The hand that had hold of him belonged to a giant of a grizzled Githyanki, and the giant’s other hand was already moving. Kaymos went back out the window the way he had come in, with rather more force, in the direction of the reef.

He did not, on the way out, get a good look at the parchment, but he got a good look at the cylinder.

That was enough.

Kaymos clambered back onto the deck of the skiff — bruised, furious, and calculating. He got himself into a position above the broken windows where the Commodore could not quite see him without turning, and he sent Fizz through the gap. Fizz was small and Fizz was iridescent and Fizz was, increasingly, something more than a drake. He flew low through the cabin in a zigzag — between the Commodore’s elbow and the desk, under the lamp, around the back of the chair — and he came out the same window with the bone cylinder gripped in his foreclaws.

The Commodore turned. The Commodore swore in Gith. The cylinder was already gone.

Rigging

Pea worked from the topmast.

He had found a perch in the crosstree and he had not come down. From up there the deck of the Pale Fang was a slow grey clock face beneath him and every Gith on it was a number. He worked through them at his own pace.

Drav, the boarding marshal, tangled Tink in the rigging and called for his remaining crew to hoist. Tink, twisting, was hauled like a fish into the lower yardarm and left there, swearing in a register he usually reserved for failed solder joints. Drav reached for a halyard to do the same to the Bone Devil — to lift it clear of the deck and out of the fight, and so to protect his captain.

This was, on Drav’s part, a mistake.

Sharp claws made short work of the halyards. The Bone Devil came down out of the rigging beside Zar’rekh, and the contract closed its grip on the next clause: the captain.

Zar’rekh’s poise changed. It became pure defence — parrying those claws, drawing the fight further onto the Pale Fang, away from the skiff. The conclusion was clear to everyone watching. The only question was how long she could keep the Devil’s attention.

The Commodore

The thuds from below deck were not loud, but the combatants topside paused a heartbeat at the sound. The remaining Gith crew glanced nervously at the cabin door, and the cabin door opened.

Kith-Commander Vael of the Third Expeditionary stepped out into the silver light of the void and the fog-thinned afternoon. He did not hurry. He surveyed the deck in silence, assessing each threat methodically.

He turned to the Watch.

“You are not in my orders,” he said. His voice was calm, almost conversational. “But here you are. Yield me the cylinder and the ship, and I will let you leave. You have my word as an officer of the Third Expeditionary.”

Veyer answered him. Not in Gith this time. In Common. Two words, the kind of two words that close a negotiation before it has properly opened, and the Commodore looked at her for a long moment and saw whatever it was he had needed to see. He reached down and plucked a sword from one of his fallen crew.

He was very good. He was very calm.

A brutal, merciless flurry left Veyer unconscious on the deck. He turned without breaking stride; three measured paces and Princess was a heap of broken metal at the foot of the foremast. Tink, hanging in the rigging above, made a sound that was not a curse and not a cry but something between. The Commodore tossed the blade aside, plucked another from the deck, tested its balance, and took two more steps. Fizz came in low to harry him. The Commodore’s blade was very fast. He skewered the dragon with casual ease.

Kaymos went very quiet then, and very dangerous, and the Commodore did not have time to enjoy what he had done.

Veyer was back on her feet — a timely potion, helping hands — and the Watch closed in.

It took longer than it should have. But they killed him, and he fell with the borrowed sword still in his hand, and as the breath went out of him he said something that none of them were sure, afterward, they had heard correctly.

*The order is already filed.*

It was only then — distracted as they had been by the captain and then the Commodore — that the Watch noticed the helmsman.

He had crept the long way round, through the coral and the muddy waters of the Styx-bleed, and the first sign of him was Lindon being shoved hard from behind off the bow of the skiff. It was a desperate move and doomed from the start. With the Watch’s full attention on him, the helmsman managed to get the skiff perhaps sixty feet before succumbing to the volley of arrows, spells, and bullets that followed him across the silver.

Aftermath

The Pale Fang was theirs. The last echoes of Pea’s revolver rolled away off the jutting coral.

Embrath circled twice and landed on the foredeck. She did not attack. She did not flee. She walked the length of the deck with her wings half-folded and stopped at the place where Thessek had fallen, and lowered her head to the planks for a long time. When she lifted it again she went and curled herself in the warmth of the cabin doorway, and closed her eyes.

She had, it appeared, decided to stay.

Princess lay broken at the foot of the foremast. Tink crouched beside her with a wrench in one hand and parts in the other and the kind of focus that does not look up. Kaymos sat on the bow with the cylinder in his lap and the still form of Fizz across his knees, and watched the fog finish thinning, and said nothing at all.

The Bone Devil watched all of this from the railing, hands folded, expression unchanged. The contract, after all, had been satisfied. It looked, from the railing, like something that had not yet decided what to do with the rest of its afternoon.