She swung her legs out of the hammock opposite the direction of her vomit and tried to stand, but the deck rocked, her knees buckled, and she reflexively tried to catch herself with an arm that wasn’t there. She sprawled across the planking like a dropped jelly-floater, gritting her teeth against the white, sharp pain where she’d banged her stump. Perhaps she ought to just lie here for a moment, catch her breath, and gather her strength.
And then what? She was certainly no physical threat to Kantelvar. She was not going to be able to overpower the ship’s crew, lock them all in the hold, and sail this ship back to San Augustus by herself. Persuading Kantelvar to turn back from the culmination of sixteen centuries of obsession did not seem likely, either.
She wanted Jean-Claude to rescue her, but Kantelvar had said Jean-Claude was dead.
No.
But what if he was telling the truth?
No!
But Jean-Claude never would have let this happen to her. Over his dead body, he would have said. He was her oldest and dearest friend. He had raised her, served her, protected her against the whole world. Why? She was not his child, his blood. Because of her, he’d never taken a wife. Because of her, he’d never had children of his own. Because of me. And now he was gone. A flush of sweltering grief filled Isabelle’s chest and boiled up behind her eyes, forcing out tears as no physical pain could. And in the dry tinder of her soul, anger sparked a flame.
Kantelvar, I will kill you for this. I will see you dead.
But how?
Something inconceivable.
Isabelle carefully, stiffly, picked herself up and searched her surroundings. From a set of hooks on the ceiling hung several glass bottles with tubes dangling from them, just like the ones Kantelvar had poked into Marie’s arm. Each was filmed with a thin residue of saints only knew what concoctions, and there were bruises on her arm where clearly needles had been. Had he been keeping her alive or asleep? Where in the world was this ship?
She wobbled to the porthole. It was amazing how unbalanced she felt without her right arm. She leaned against the cabin wall, sucking down deep drafts of thin air, and peered out through the thick glass, but there was no sight of land, only endless banks and shoals of clouds.
She tried the cabin door and found it locked. Damn! But what else did she expect?
She shivered. Outside the heavy blankets in the hammock, she’d been left with nothing but a light linen shift that was insufficient for this cold weather. She retrieved a blanket and a strap from the hammock, draped the fabric over her shoulders, and tried to belt it at the waist, another process frustrated by her lack of a limb.
Breaker’s blight! If only she still had her wrist. She couldn’t quite bend far enough to use her stump for a brace or lever on the buckle. Stretch! A hair-raising tingle raced down her neck as her mind sent commands to muscles that were no longer—there.
An invisible, intangible force pressed the belt buckle to her waist. What’s more, she could feel the metal against her nonexistent wrist. She gasped in astonishment and let go with both … hands? The sensation vanished. The belt and buckle fell to the floor.
Isabelle looked down at her left hand, open in front of her, and her stump. She hadn’t imagined that. It had really happened. She had touched the buckle with a hand she didn’t have. She had heard tell of soldiers who had lost limbs but retained some sensation from those truncated appendages, an itchy foot on a missing leg, or a trick elbow on a missing arm. Phantom limbs, they were called. What if this sheath, this quondam metal, or whatever potions Kantelvar had fed her from those vials, somehow made those sensations real?
What if this is sorcery? Kantelvar’s blood ciphers had claimed she was l’étincelle, that she had the power to animate the inanimate. But how could that be? How could she have gone twenty-four years without manifesting any sorcery at all? Had it been dormant all this time? It was true that some sorcerers needed prodding to awaken their powers. Her father’s methods were well founded even if his application of them was needlessly cruel. Might it be that bonding with this strange metal had been enough to rouse hers from hibernation?
Or was it just a property of the metal itself? Kantelvar needed Isabelle to live in order to complete his plan, but he had cut her arm off anyway. He must have been confident of her survival, which meant he must also have been confident in his surgical technique, which included the metal sheath. That suggested it was an operation he had done before, perhaps the same operation that was performed on clerics having their limbs replaced with clockworks in the ceremony of Exaltation. That would explain how Kantelvar and other priests who wore quondam prostheses controlled them.
But she didn’t have a prosthesis, just a stump, yet she’d pressed the buckle to her belly.
Exactly what caused this phenomenon was a question for later. Right now the only thing that mattered was whether or not she could exploit it. Isabelle knelt and extended what would have been her right arm to the buckle. Just push. Nothing happened. She closed her eyes and tried to remember what it felt like. A tingle down her spine and along her arm. The cap on her stump hummed with a vibration she felt deep in her bones. Out at arm’s length, the ghost of her wormfinger twitched.
Her wrist brushed the buckle. Yes! She held on to the sensation and bumped the buckle around the floor, trailing its strap. She used the front, back, and sides of her invisible, intangible limb. That’s it. That’s the way. She opened her eyes and almost lost it, but she could feel its presence, its shape in the air.
Like a kitten obsessing over a shiny button, Isabelle swatted the buckle around the cabin until she was satisfied she could do it on a whim. It was too bad she had manifested a phantom wormfinger instead of a whole ghostly hand, but this phenomenon seemed to be taking advantage of her body’s memory of its missing flesh, and it could not remember sensations it had never experienced … unless it could be trained to imagine that sensation. She knew what it felt like to flex the fingers of her left hand. Could she imagine that on the right?
She closed her eyes and placed her phantom palm on the buckle. Imagine a hand there, a thumb jutting out, four fingers spreading. An electric shiver raced down her neck to the stump of her shoulder. She felt more than heard a buzz like a thousand ants tiptoeing across the metal surface. She pushed past the distraction. Imagined her hand closing on the button. Don’t think about flexing, just … flex.
The buckle budged. The weight of it pressed against her imaginary fingers and thumb. She lifted. Abstract muscles contracted though there was nothing for them to pull against. The buckle came off the floor. The tingling burrowed deep inside her and settled into her bones. A faint light leaked in through her eyelids.