Beyond the Fog

Chapter 4: Green Fire

The fire went up the mast in one line, the way a fuse goes, and left no char behind it.

From the main yard it spread into nothing, and then the nothing bellied and filled and took the pull, and Dean understood he was looking at a sail. Green where it was thickest. He could see the mast through it, and the cloud lid through that, gray and even, the same gray it had been for four days.

He could see the deck through his hand.

He looked at it as long as he could spare. The spokes under his fingers were iron and cold and he could feel the cold. Past the second knuckle his hand was the color of a lamp seen through wet canvas; under the color there was bone, and the bone was lit green from the inside, and the fire did not burn.

He'd had three seconds of panic when it started. It came up through the soles of his boots and out of his mouth as a noise he was glad no one was aboard to hear. In the middle of it he did the only thing that mattered, which was nothing.

He had not let go.

The noise that had been in his skull since he took this body had gone quiet. His head was clearer than it had been in four days, and the clarity was not a comfort.

Whether he got the hand back when this was over, and the body with it, went on the pile with all the rest. The pile was getting tall. He stopped adding to it and looked at what he had.

The ship was in his hands. The weight of the rudder came up the spokes; the drag of the hull came up through the deck; the water went by the plates at a rate he could not put a number to and could feel in his teeth. Something in the rigging pulled when she heeled. He did not know the names of half of it. He knew the feel of it, which was more than he had had that morning.

"She doesn't need a crew," he said, out loud, to the fire. "She needs a man at the wheel. One."

The sail above him was not the only one. Forward of the main, other canvas that was not canvas was coming up out of the yards, and the yards were squaring a point or two with no hand on a brace, and the jibs were trimming, and somewhere aft a gaff topsail he had never seen set was filling. The air above the deck was a mess of cross-currents coming from three directions and arguing about it. The sails took one pull out of all of it anyway.

The Unhomed stopped drifting.

Four days of a hull going where the water sent it, and now there was a drive in her, and a bow wave, and a noise from the rigging that had nothing to do with wind. He got a hand on a spoke and turned it.

Weight came back at him. Real weight — the rudder biting, the sea shoving back on the blade, two hundred meters of ship arguing and then agreeing. The bow swung. The wake bent behind them and began, slowly, to curve.

He looked past the bow.

The wall of white had not moved. He had known that before he looked, the way you know a thing in your teeth. It had been there when he came up the ladder and it was nearer now, and the near part of it was not the part that had been nearest before.

"Come on," he said.

Not enough. He could feel the speed of her through his palms and he could feel the fog and he did the arithmetic twice and got the same answer both times. A long turn on a long hull, and the fog very close and very wide.

The brass tube stood at his right hand, waist high, with a flare at the top like a speaking trumpet. He had taken it for a stanchion for four days. It spoke.

"Captain." The voice came up the metal, small and sharp, and he knew it: the carved goat's head that sat on the chart table below, the one that had been talking at him since he came aboard. "Captain, we are coming up on the limit of the real. We are going to fall into the Veil, and we need—"

"I'm doing it!" Dean shouted. His own voice came back at him off the sail, wrong and hollow. "If you've got something that helps, say it. If you haven't, save your breath."

The tube went quiet.

He thought that was the end of it, and he put his eyes back on the fog, and then the tube spoke again, and this time there was nothing in it at all. It could have been a man reading a label.

"Good."

Dean looked at the tube.

"Good. Good."

For the space of two breaths the whole arrangement went thin — the fire in his arms, the fog, the planks under his boots, the ship. All of it flat, like scenery seen from behind. He had made his peace with a door that opened onto nothing. He had not made his peace with being encouraged.

Then the sea changed, and he had no room left for it.

The mist came from the edges inward. It did not roll in the way weather does. It came up out of the water in sheets, fine as gauze, and it did not drift — it spread, fast, covering the chop around the hull and then the water past the rails and then everything, and the wall ahead of him was no longer the only fog in the world.

The light went down. Nothing passed in front of it. The gray overhead stayed gray and shut, and the sea under it simply got darker.

Then the lines.

They came up out of the water all around the ship, thousands of them, close-set and hair-fine, black, each one breaking the surface and spreading its black out from where it broke until it met the black beside it, and then there was no color left in the water at all, near or far. The Unhomed went through it and left a white seam behind her that closed up again.

Off the port bow something was standing in the mist.

He looked straight at it and it was not there anymore — only the gray, and the shape of what the gray was doing where it had been. Farther off another came up. Then two more.

He stopped looking. He kept his eyes on the water ahead and his hands where they were, and he did not decide to do that; he found he had.

"We are in the Veil," the goat said.

Its voice had gone a long way off. He had to strain for it, and under it, when he strained, there was something else — a low murmur, many voices at once, talking just under the level of words. Whether that was coming up the brass or out of his own skull he did not have the attention to spare.

"We are in the Veil," it said again, "but she has not gone all the way down. While there is power in her she holds her heading, and while she holds her heading there is a way out. Until she sinks into the Deep. Captain. Hold the wheel."

"I've lost my bearings," Dean said.

His voice came out with the fire's crackle in it, like something speaking from a cellar. He heard it and did not care.

"I had one mark, and it's behind me now, and above me, and on both sides of me."

"Instinct, Captain. Yours is truer than any line a chartmaker ever drew."

He did not have the breath to argue with a carved head. He had enough to be reckless, which was a different thing and had served him before.

So he went back for the last honest thing he had.

Before the mist came he had stood on the stern platform and felt the swell come up under the starboard quarter, one long lift after another with a slow even run in it, and the wind had come from two directions and then a third before the water got confused. That run was still in the sea somewhere. A swell like that did not come out of a closed place. It came from open water with room to build it.

He took the wheel in both hands, found the spoke he wanted, and brought it over as far as it would go.

The Unhomed screamed.

There was no other word for it and he never found one afterward. It started somewhere forward and low and went the length of her, timber and iron and rigging all at once, a sound like a nail drawn down a plate the size of a church, and it did not stop when the turn began. It went on while she came round. The deck heeled under him and the black water went past the rail fast and close, and the mist swung across the bow and tore and streamed, and the fire in the sails streamed out green and thin, and the whole ship made her arc in the dark like something being dragged off a hook.

Then the mist ahead of him thinned and let a shape through.

His first thought was rock, and his second was that rock did not stand a black funnel up out of its middle.

She was smaller than the Unhomed and lower in the water, and her hull was white. She carried no sail at all. She had a bow wave, white and breaking on both sides of her stem, and her stem was pointed at the same patch of black sea his bow was pointed at, and she was not coming round.

Dean held the wheel and looked at her.

"Oh, you have got to be shitting me."

The distance was down to seconds. He had the wheel hard over and it was not going to be enough.

He had counted on the water being empty.

There was another ship.