“Good to know.” I keep looking around, just in case.
She leads me to a large cylindrical structure, like half a barrel embedded into the deck. It’s several stories high, and the rusted holes in the sides have been patched with scrap metal and fabric. A small door at the bottom stands open, and Erin reaches it, then steps aside, gesturing for me to enter first. Beyond is warm, musty darkness, and I blink as my eyes adjust.
The interior of the cylinder is a single large space, full of a bewildering array of chests, cabinets, desks, and dressers. It looks as though the Scholar has grabbed any furniture that might be useful to keep things in, in some cases stacking them on top of one another in unwieldy arrangements. The desks are covered in … junk, pieces of broken tools, metal fragments, sections of mushroom, and organic debris that must have come from dead crabs. There are bones, as well, human skeletons both fresh and yellowed with age.
One set makes me pause for a moment. They’re dry and brittle looking, but still recognizably wrong, twisted and deformed. Limbs bifurcate where they should run straight, or twist into spirals. A skull bulges like it struggled to contain something growing within. Another, so small it might have belonged to an infant, has two extra eye sockets. These bones look older, but …
“You’ve seen something like this before, haven’t you?”
The Scholar is coming down another spiral staircase, this one wrapped along the outside wall of the building, leading up to a second level that’s half rusted away. His cane raps on each step as he descends.
“In the Deeps,” I say, cautiously. “There was a village, all ruined. The bodies there looked like this.”
“I’m not surprised,” he says. “I wish you could have brought some back for study. You can never have enough bones, I say.” He reaches the bottom of the staircase and gestures at his bizarre collection with his cane. “Thank you for accepting my invitation.”
“You said you had something interesting to tell me.”
“I do.” He smiles, and pushes his glasses up his nose. “And I have reason to think you might be willing to listen, which is more than I can say for the others.”
“What others?”
“Our oh-so-wise officers.” He snorts. “Zarun and the Butcher can’t decide if they’re going to rut or kill each other, Karakoa can’t see past the next hunt, and Shiara cares only about herself. Whereas you, you have been asking questions.” He cocks his head. “At least, your princess has.”
“I don’t—” I begin.
“Don’t play stupid. These things get back to me, you know. And there’s nothing wrong with asking questions, at least as far as I’m concerned. Some of the others might not take such a benign view if they knew what you were really after.”
“We’re just … curious.” I shrug. “We live on this ship, but we don’t understand it at all. And mostly no one seems to want to.”
“Curiosity is difficult,” the Scholar says, tapping his way closer. “Better to fight out your little feuds, hunt the crabs, and try to forget about it, especially when the answers aren’t easily forthcoming.” He stops across from me, beside the desk full of bones. “You’ve been thinking about what I said at the audience.”
“A bit,” I admit. “We know there were people on Soliton generations ago.”
He taps the desk. “These bones are two hundred years old, give or take.”
“But there was almost no one here fifteen years ago. Sometime before that, there must have actually been no one, except maybe the Captain.”
“Very good.”
“So something wiped everyone out.”
“Exactly.” He gestures at the bones and other artifacts with his cane. “And I can tell you this. It wasn’t the first time. I’ve found fragments from a half-dozen generations. Never much, but enough to tell me people were here, and then that they weren’t. Over and over.”
“And? What happened to them?”
“I can only guess.” The Scholar sighs. “So few things get written down.”
I chuckle. “Meroe was complaining about the same thing.”
“And has she found any answers?”
“Not really.” I shake my head. “Why are you telling me this? Just because I like to ask questions?”
“Oh no.” He beckons. “Come upstairs. There’s more to the show.”
Another set of stairs, my legs groaning in protest, keeping pace with the Scholar’s slow ascent. The second level of the tower is set well above the first, and covers only half the circular space, with a ragged-edged drop looking over the floor below. The stair reaches a landing and then continues upward, through a hole in another, more intact floor, the opening currently blocked off with a cloth.
This level, apparently, is where the Scholar actually lives, inasmuch as there’s a large bed shoved against one wall like an afterthought. A table beside it is piled high with dirty dishes, which look as much like archeological specimens as some of the debris below. The rest of the space is devoted to more tables, all covered in carefully arranged trash.
“Arin, dear,” the Scholar says. “Go and help your sister fetch water.”
There’s a yawn from the bed, and a girl in a long white robe sits up, kicking back the sheets. She’s identical to Erin, except that her hair is loose instead of braided. When she sees me, she looks interested, but not alarmed. The Scholar says nothing while she puts on shoes and troops down the stairs. Only when she’s out the door does he turn back to me.
“You don’t trust your … servants?”
“Erin and Arin are very dear to me, and I would never question their loyalty,” he says. “But I wouldn’t want to upset them unnecessarily.”
“What exactly are you planning to show me?”
“Just this.” He walks to one of the tables and raps on the wood. “What do you see, Deepwalker?”
I look. The thing on the table is like a rope, if a rope could be woven of steel strands. It’s coiled around several times, and roughly severed at both ends. The individual fibers untwist at the cuts, opening out like a flower into smaller and smaller filaments, until they reach the limit of vision and become a vague fuzz.
“Metal rope?” I ask.
“Look closer.” He sounds oddly eager. It makes me want to leave this place and not come back, but I bend down instead, squinting.
Movement, inside the thing. Tiny sparks of gray light, streaming in both directions, a twisting flow that follows the spiral of the fibers. And I realize what the rope reminds me of—Shiara’s necklace, the night of the Council meeting, only much larger.
My face must have given something away, because the Scholar is smiling in quiet satisfaction. He touches his glasses again, and his hand is shaking very slightly.
“You can see it, can’t you?”
“See—” I look from the rope to him and back. “What is this thing?”
“It’s a piece of the ship, from one of the support pylons.” He takes a step forward, cane tapping. “You can see it. I could tell the night of the Council meeting. I suggested Shiara wear that necklace; it’s another fragment, a weak one, but—” He shakes his head in wonder. “And if you could see that then you’re stronger than I am, much stronger. Finally. Finally.”
“Slow down.” I take a half step back, and make a conscious effort not to summon my armor. “You can see those lights, then?”
“You were a gang enforcer, back in Kahnzoka. They’re already telling stories about you. And you’re a Melos adept. You killed people, didn’t you?”
“I—” My head is spinning, trying to follow him. “So what if I did? Here on Soliton you—”
“I don’t care about the morality. Leave that to the gods.” The Scholar’s glasses reflect the lanterns burning around the room, tiny bits of light shining in his eyes. “Afterward, you dreamed about them, didn’t you?”
My throat seizes up for a moment. My mind goes to Hagan, and I swallow hard. “How could you know that?”
“I dreamed of the first person I killed,” he says. “She was nothing to me, a street rat who tried to knife me in an alley. I didn’t mean to hurt her, but she came at me, and…” He waves his hand, as though to dispel the memory. “I thought she was haunting me.”
“No such thing as haunting,” I say, automatically. “Dead is dead.”
“Not entirely.” He takes a deep breath, calms a little. “You—we—can touch a Well no one else can. The Lost Well, the Well of Spirits. Eddica.”
18
Eddica. The first Well, the Well of Spirits. Lost, according to some; a myth, according to the Blessed One.
A month ago I would have said the priests had the right of it. Now …
“No one can access Eddica,” I say. “There hasn’t been even an Eddica-touched in the history of the Empire.”
“I suspect your illustrious rulers are lying to you about that, as about so many things.” The Scholar shrugs. “Eddica is real enough. But rare, now, and so subtle that even those who have it usually don’t know it’s there. Only on Soliton does it become obvious.”