Chapter 53
The ship drifts on the starlight Current with no one at the wheel. On the deck, the crew lies in a circle like spokes, Kompis and Mingus at the hub, all asleep.
on the rail, legs swinging, one arm, the stump of the other wrapped in cloth. The black panther lies beside her, its tail twitching. The crow sits on the panther's head.
asleep. A cut opens on Rougeina's cheek. A bruise blooms across Vigolas's jaw. Drekk's knuckles split.
asleep. His lips are blue. Seawater trickles from the corner of his mouth onto the deck. He's drowning in a dream.
jumping down off the rail.
at the hub of the circle. His chest is rising and falling, fast and shallow. From under his back, from the planks themselves, black fingers are sliding out. Too many.
The Nightmares pour out of him onto the waking deck: a black tide of shapes, rising, growing, crawling toward the sleepers.
sickle in her one hand.
Kali fights alone.
She's everywhere, one-armed, sickle flashing, laughing, cursing, talking the whole time. "Left! No, other left! Get off the troll! He's mine to annoy!"
The panther tears into the swarm beside her.
The crow dives at Nightmare eyes.
Every Nightmare she cuts rises again from Kompis's shadow.
slashing one off Trollmage's sleeping chest.
turning their eyeless heads, listening, and moving straight for whichever sleeper's heart is pounding hardest: Vigolas, drowning, his pulse racing.
Too many. Kali is shoved back against the mast, the panther pinned beneath three of them, the crow down. The black tide crawls over the sleeping circle, toward Vigolas's racing heart.
bleeding, furious.
The panel is drawn exactly the same as the last, but there is no sound at all. No balloons, no SFX, nothing.
The Nightmares stop. They stand frozen over the sleepers, heads turning, lost. They can't hear the hearts any more.
A slight figure in grey stands on it, barefoot, one hand raised, the other pressed over her own ear. Lärka. Her face is tired and sea-burned, her clothes ragged from days on drifting islands.
LÄRKA · the Quiet · K-III TESTED · #6,617 · Bastion Five
mouthing silently in the Hush, wide-eyed:
She looks at the sleeping circle, at Kompis at its hub. She doesn't speak. She can't, not yet, not well. She steps down onto the deck.
A Nightmare lunges at Lärka blindly. She sidesteps without looking, the way she does, and her pale stiletto goes through its throat. It falls apart into black smoke. It doesn't come back. Without the sound of fear, it can't find its way home.
understanding, grinning savagely.
But the Hush is a cone, pointing forward from Lärka's chest. Behind her, outside it, Nightmares are still crawling over the sleepers on the far side of the circle, following Drekk's thudding pulse.
seeing it, frustrated. She can only face one way.
She looks at Lärka. She looks at her own one hand. She swallows something proud.
confused.
mouthing, almost embarrassed.
A long moment. Then she holds out her hand, the one she presses over her ear, palm up.
Kali's rough sickle-callused one and Lärka's pale cold one. A ripple of grey passes from one to the other, like frost spreading on glass.
eyes going wide. Inside her, for the first time, the silence Lärka has lived in since birth. It isn't empty. It's enormous.
Every time Kali has taken a sin, its owner went dark for the minute. Lärka's grey cone doesn't go dark. It's still there, still hers. A thing lent isn't taken. It's shared.
Two cones of silence, one pointing forward and one pointing back, meet at the middle of the deck, and together they cover the whole ship.
Inside, every Nightmare goes blind. The black tide stumbles, turns in circles, gropes at the air.
And in the middle of it, back to back, two women cut it to pieces: Kali, the loudest woman on the ship, one-armed, sickle flashing in a silent whirlwind, mouth wide open laughing without a sound; and Lärka, the quietest woman in the world, pale stiletto moving in small, perfect, economical strokes.
Nightmares fall around them like black snow and do not get up.
the frost fading from it. Sixty seconds up. Sound rushes back on her side of the ship: the ropes, the bell, her own ragged breathing.
lowering her hand. The last Nightmare dissolves at her feet. The Hush lifts. She flinches at the sound of the world coming back: the wind, the bell, Kali's voice. Still too loud for her. She's still learning.
Kali and Lärka, breathing hard, surrounded by smoke and sleeping bodies.
struggling for a word, any word. She points at Kompis. Then she taps her own chest, over her heart, twice. ba-dum.
Lärka kneels beside Kompis at the hub of the circle and puts her ear to his chest. Mingus, asleep across him, opens one eye and doesn't growl.
listening. The heart she taught herself to hear, the first heart she ever heard after her own.
ba…dum.
…………ba………dum.
looking up at Kali, white with fear. She knows exactly what a heart sounds like now, and what it sounds like when it's stopping. The second word she has ever spoken, cracked and small: