The Colors of Magic Anthology

Expeditions to the End of the World

Red-faced and burly, Captain Crucias mingled among his noble passengers. Though he wore his best jacket-a black waistcoat with gold buttons and red Jamuraan appointments-he felt clumsy and common among these folk.

They sat like porcelain dolls all around him, poised on the iron settees he had bolted to the ship's deck. Most were enduring the week-long sea journey with Argivian aplomb-which meant complaints about cabin size, food quality, chantey lyrics, salt spray, fish smells, strong winds, daytime glare, nighttime murk, and full-time nausea. On this particular voyage, the high priestess of dissatisfaction was Madame Gheiri, more implacable and discontent than the sea itself. She took up a whole settee, around her arrayed the accoutrements of her discomfort-book, bumbershoot, shawl, crackers, and tepid tea. Her white silk camise and gray cashmere gown were complemented by a pudgy face in light green.

Crucias approached. "Are you feeling better today, my dear?"

"Must the ship bounce and sway so much?" she asked testily, her eyes like twin red daggers in the morning sun.

Crucias gave an apologetic smile and gestured expansively to the bright ocean all around. "The sea has waves, Madame Gheiri… "

"I'm not talking about the sea, " she gasped, clutching an ill-used handkerchief to her lips before drawing the strength to continue. "I'm talking about the ship. Can't you control your own ship? You have all these ropes and sails and anchors and things. Surely you could use them to smooth the ride. "

"We'll be reaching Argoth this afternoon, Madame. Then we'll anchor for the show, and your stomach will have a chance to settle, " Crucias said soothingly.

"My niece Elgia is so ill, she couldn't get up from her bunk this morning. She was hoping to meet a husband on this-this displeasure excursion!" she snapped. "But no young men… seven days of monotony… seven nights of seasickness! I tell you, there had better be some impressive explosions and definite signs of death and mayhem on the island, or I'll make my own cataclysmic battle right here!"

Crucias managed a rueful smile. "I assure you, Madame, when Mishra and Urza battle, there is plenty of death and mayhem for all." He took the better part of valor and moved on.

Yes, they would reach Argoth soon, and would anchor opposite the plains where the two brothers fought- where the whole world fought. There, Crucias and his roster of rich, arrogant nobles would drink wine and eat steaks and watch young men and women die. "Expeditions to the End of the World," he had dubbed them. It was Crucias's fourth such journey, and he hated them- war profiteering at its worst. He made a living exploiting human bloodlust and misery.

"Blast," Crucias muttered beneath his breath as he dutifully polished a dull patch of brass railing. "Privateering was better."

He lamented most of all the abuse of his beautiful ship. For twelve restless months after his daughter's death, Crucias had designed the corsair. He had sketched her out all day long and in his sleep. For the next ten years, he and his crew had built her by hand. It was a kind of practical mourning, an apology in wood and pitch for the life he had been unable to give his daughter. He personally had carved the figurehead into her likeness, had even granted the ship her name-Nunieve-and had sailed her into the wide ocean. She proceeded him always, a sweet child gazing bravely over the dark billows to bright and unimagined shores. Nunieve was a dream made real, designed to discover new lands for Kroog.

And then Kroog ceased to exist. Mishra's army swallowed it like a hunk of hardtack. No longer were there government commissions. No longer were there joint-stock companies. The winds of finance and politics died.

Dead calm. Captain Crucias and his newly built Nunieve were adrift.

He eventually took on Argivian cargoes, but Nunieve's hold was not designed to hold vast stores. She had been built for speed. The cargoes reached their ports, but Crucias lost coin with every crate unloaded, a monetary shipwreck. Desperate, he'd hired a crew of harpooners and laid in a store of hooks, lines, nets, and carving tools, hoping to pay for it all with spermaceti. They'd tracked and slain one whale, but the mess of dead meat hanging to port, the constant cloud of seagulls and sharks, the horrid inert bulk of something that had once moved with terrific and majestic grace through the water… Crucias would have sooner harpooned himself than another whale.

But Argivian nobles? Indolent, wealthy, bloodthirsty nobles? He had no qualms about harpooning them. As repellent as they were, they paid well, and they stood in long lines for the chance to see the world-ending conflict of Argoth. Another trip, and Crucias's debts would be paid off. Two or three more, and he and Nunieve could sail away to distant shores, never again to see Terisiare. Until then, he only hoped the war lasted.

"Let's pray there is enough mayhem and death for everybody."

On the night he'd first seen Nunieve, there had been mayhem aplenty.

Drunk, with blood on his knuckles and in his teeth,

Captain Crucias staggered back through the cobbled streets of Sumifa. He made his way down dark canyons of shops and houses, their shutters bleeding golden illumination into the night. The light painted him tigerlike. He liked the connotation. Gold and blood and man-eating cats: it summed up his life.

He'd wanted things to be different, had hoped to distinguish himself aboard a Yotian war galley, but a liaison with an admiral's daughter in this very city had ended any hopes of that. He still saw the girl every year or so, but for five years he hadn't seen the inside of any ship but a rover or a brigantine. In that time, he had risen to his own captaincy-as a privateer. Knuckles and teeth had won him his ship, Backstab, and persistent work with the cutlass had won him a small fortune in gold. Tonight's fight had been another battle in defense of that fortune. The thief who thought he ought to have some of Crucias's gold now lay bloodied and bruised in a tavern alley.

Mayhem had not been the life he'd planned, but it was the one given to him, and it suited him well enough. At the very least, he would not get bored. He'd be fighting and drinking and wenching until the day one of his vices killed him. The life of a privateer was blessedly short.

Captain Crucias neared Backstab, dark in its moorings. His head reeled from drink and fisticuffs, and from- "What is that hellish noise?" It was a high keen, like the wail of a cat being crushed in a vise. Crucias shook his head, wondering what poor sod was getting it from what other poor sod. He plodded up Backstab's, gangplank, and the sound grew only louder.

"Blast."

Crucias stepped onto the deck, gritty and in need of holystoning. Several figures slouched in rope coils or on folded sails along the dark rail, most of them drunk and sleeping. One was awake.

"Oye, Biggs. What's that ruckus?" Crucias growled.

The man shrugged. "Woman came by. Said she had something to give you. I let her in your cabin. She left. Half an hour later, there's this bellowing."

Crucias reflexively raised hands to shield his ears. "How long has this been going on?"

"Hour, maybe. Hard to say. No moon tonight."

"Worthless-" Crucias hissed at Biggs.

Clenching his bloody fists, Crucias stomped unsteadily toward his cabin. He flung back the door. The wails paused for only a moment and then continued with renewed vigor. He had known it would be a baby, known even who the mother must have been, but to enter his inner sanctum and find it violated by an-an invader! The child's screams raked across his drink-jangled nerves.

"Blast it, child! Hush!"

Grabbing a jackstraw, Crucias lit a hand lantern and stalked into the room. He cringed under the auditory assault and crouched as he walked, as though expecting attack. This was supposed to be his private cabin-heavy furnishings, padlocked trunks, blunderbusses, cutlasses, rum casks, cigars-a man-place. But all of its grim grandeur was despoiled by that delicately woven basket and its pink bundle of blankets and the tiny hands waving like tender anemones in the air.

"Blast!"

Crucias stalked to the basket, lifted the glaring lantern, and stared down at that shrieking face. He had expected to despise the child-a thing wet at both ends and smelling of sour milk-and to be sure, she was not a beauty in her screaming fury. But there was such loneliness and fear in her cry. Alone in this strange place, her screams unheeded for hours, her mother gone, and only growling, glaring seamen all about… Crucias saw something of himself in her, not just in the form of eyes and lips that were undoubtedly his, but also in the desperate anger of a creature forsaken.

The child's spastic kicking dislodged a slip of paper folded beside her swaddled leg. Crucias gently lifted the note and unfolded it. The handwriting was that of the admiral's daughter who had cost him his sea career. He read:

"She is yours. I cannot raise her. "

Crucias's brow furrowed. "And I can? An outlaw? A privateer?" He scratched his head. "I'd have to start all over. I'd have to settle down. I'd have to stop fighting for nothing and start fighting for everything. "

The baby let out a wail so forlorn that Crucias instinctively set down the lantern and note and gently raised her in his arms. His hands left trails of blood across the pink blankets. She clutched at his cloak, wet with sweat and spilled ale, and quieted.

"There, there, Darling. There, there. "

The baby tugged on his buttons, struggling to claw closer.

"Blast. "

Half the crew abandoned him that very hour-those sober enough to heed the yammering. A quarter more deserted in the deep of morning.

A female on a ship was bad luck. A female baby on a ship was preposterous.

Crucias agreed. It had seemed reasonable enough that first moment, as the poor, lost creature quieted to his touch. It seemed much less reasonable when she awakened, hungry and implacable, an hour later. She couldn't make headway on crackers or jerked beef, and ale was out of the question. She needed milk. She needed a mother. So, still bloodied and half-drunk, Crucias marched her back up the streets he had descended, in search of the admiral's daughter.

A bloody privateer lugging a shrieking infant through downtown streets at three in the morning was not the sort of spectacle Sumifa allowed.

Crucias was jumped by a patrol of armsmen. Half a dozen fists ended his objections. He and the baby were hauled to the constabulary. The soldiers charged him with kidnapping and threw him in a cage with a couple of drunks. One of them turned out to be the man Crucias had beaten bloody earlier that night. There was no repeat of the fight, though. The fellow saw him and pretended to be more drunk and beat up than he was. Crucias was glad-the armsmen had been none too gentle in bringing him in. They'd treated the child little better, letting her kick and scream in her basket in the corner while they went about their business. He shouted to them to find her some milk, to see if she had dirtied herself, to fetch the creature's mother, to do something to stop that blasted howling!

Eventually, the constables did fetch the admiral's daughter. She entered, still young and defiant in her blue Jamuraan dressing gown, a cloak over her shoulders and an outraged father over the coat. The night Crucias had first met this woman, her skin seemed white as ivory. Tonight it seemed like a shade of ice.

She took one look at Crucias, spat on the floor, and said, "The girl is not mine. She is not anyone's. I doubt this man is a kidnapper. I doubt he is anything at all."

Crucias flung his hands out of the bars, imploring. "How can you say that? Can't you hear her crying?"

White-mustached and red-faced, the admiral pulled his daughter back. "My daughter would not truck with cutthroats-"

"She trucked me three times that night," Crucias interrupted.

"— and I resent the implications that dragged us from our beds-

"Come now, Admiral. You must have known of the pregnancy. How can you care so much for your daughter and so little for your daughter's daughter-?"

"Forgive us," one of the armsmen was saying as he ushered the two away from Crucias. "And you-shut up. See if you can't get this brat to shut up, too."

Crucias had never broken out of jail before. He'd been in dozens of them and had never reason to escape from any. But tonight, the child left him no choice. He couldn't bear her cries a moment longer. When the armsman returned to upbraid him, Crucias wrapped the man in a stranglehold, stole his keys, tried each until the lock opened, and departed.

He had never broken out of jail before. Even if he had, he would never have snatched a screaming baby en route. But, once again, the child left him no choice. She was as alone as he. She was as desperate and terrified as he. They were more than father and daughter. They were soul-twins.

Impossibly, stupidly, Crucias fled with her and the basket. He fled, armsmen hot on his tail, through the streets of Sumifa. At the wharf, he lost his pursuers long enough to wrangle one cow out of a herd on an adjacent ship. With curses and lashing fingers, he drove the noisome beast up the gangplank of Backstab.

It was tough sailing the brigantine out of dock. His crew was reduced to only five seamen, five drunken and utterly reluctant sailors.

After all, Backstab now hosted two females-a baby and a bovine.

"Blast," Crucias noted to himself as he milked the one to feed the other. This baby was going to change everything. If she was going to survive, if he was going to survive, she would change everything.

Soon, he found himself at sea with her-with her and a cow and no crew. In cowardly collusion, the five had taken one of Backstab's longboats and rowed back to Sumifa.

It was impossible for a single man to sail the brigantine. It was impossible for Crucias to man sails and rudder and pumps all at once. It was even more impossible that he should do it while caring for this child, and caring for the cow that fed her. They were all doomed to drift and die, he was sure.

And yet, somehow, looking at that beautiful, sad, abandoned face, he knew he would do it. He would do the impossible. He would stop fighting for nothing and start fighting for everything.

It was quite a scene. The battlefield stretched out in the near distance, and a group of sapphire skinned mer-folk had gathered for the afternoon's entertainment in a cluster off the port side. The nobles on the boat had gotten up from their settees to stand along the rail and watch in awe.

The island of Argoth was wide and gray in the afternoon light, reaching arms out to encompass the eastern horizon and threaten Nunieve. She lay in deep waters beyond the harbor where Mishra's war crafts crowded. Against the shoreline, their masts and spars formed a forbidding thicket. If man or machine had remained aboard any of those ships, Captain Crucias would have done well to prepare for a quick departure, but every ounce of muscle and mechanism was currently engaged inland.

In front of Crucias's pestering passengers lay the Argoth plains-what had been immemorial forest only a year ago. There the titanic armies of Mishra and Urza clashed. Atop shorn tree trunks and shredded vines, soldiers swarmed like insects. Yotian warriors gleamed in the sunlight amid Mishra's defenders in black-ant armor. Among them moved clay automatons, maggots tearing into whatever flesh presented itself. Men charged and fought and fell and died.

"They are really killing each other, aren't they?" enthused one codger between sips of red wine.

"Yes, " Captain Crucias answered flatly. "Six months ago, you would have seen them killing only forests. Now you get to see them killing each other. "

Madame Gheiri's face had flushed healthily once the anchor was down and the war was unfolding before them. "You say they fight at night, too? They will be fighting all through supper and on into the evening?"

Crucias' face was grim. "Anymore, yes. They'll fight certainly through supper, and probably until they can see only by the light of the bombs they drop on each other. "

"Splendid. " She was at last pleased with some aspect of the journey. "It will be glorious to watch the fires and flares under a starry sky. Perhaps my niece Elgia will at last feel well enough to come on deck. There must be plenty of eligible bachelors on that battlefield. "

The codger giggled in delight. "I can hardly imagine there will be any left after this evening's show. " He took another sip, and his lips were limned in red as he said, "I suppose if they run out of men, there'll just be more arriving on ships. "

"Look at that dragon engine, " Crucias said, wanting to divert his own attention from the massacre.

A massive mechanism waded into combat. Its steely tail scythed through charging lines of mortal flesh. Men counterattacked, spears jagging into the air. The artifact dragon spread wings of titanium mesh and drew them inward. Spears and men both tumbled in twin cyclones.

Ornithopters darted like dragonflies and dropped bombs among the toiling armies. Smoke and dust and body parts bounded up in violent clouds from the explosion. Moments later, the popping reports reached Nunieve. These blasts were dwarfed, though, by a huge explosion in the center of the battlefield.

"Ah, did you see that?" asked Crucias. "That pillar of black smoke rising now into the sky?" His speech was interrupted by a thunderous boom, the combined ignition of hundreds of bombs. The soundwave echoed out over the glassy sea and riffled the sails of Nunieve. "One of Mishra's titans has stumbled into a trap. I'm told that Urza's army digs gigantic pits, large enough to swallow a dragon engine whole, and then they line the bottom with bombs and cover it. When the time is right they lure a machine onto the spot. That must be what you just witnessed. It fell and ignited the bombs and-ah, see, there,… it's climbing out!"

Something emerged from the base of the rising smoke cloud. The gigantic mechanism did not so much climb as crawl. Misshapen and trembling, the titan clawed onto the blasted plain. Its legs were gone below the knees, and riven sinews of wire and plate dragged across the torn ground. It heaved itself along, above Mishra's shrieking, retreating forces. The sound of its shearing gears reached Nunieve. With a terrific groan, the titan collapsed atop its own mired men.

An excited cheer went up from the noble passengers, and more than a few raised appreciative wine glasses to toast the machine's demise. A ravening boom caught the cheer and swept it away amid dying screams.

"Well, Captain," said Madame Gheiri, "despite a week of tortures at sea-everything short of sea monsters and scurvy-you have certainly delivered the promised entertainment of this voyage."

"Enough mayhem for you?"

"Enough, for the moment. The clamor of it all has even elevated the bouquet of this rather vulgar wine you serve. Bathed in the glow of bombs and the sound of falling titans, the supper fare might even seem palatable!" She laughed lightly.

Another column of smoke had gone up since she began speaking, this one in the woods behind the battle lines. After rising through curtains of moss and continents of leaf, the soot was broadly spread. Wind drew ash and a putrid scent across the gunwale.

"They're burning the dead from yesterday's battle," Crucias noted.

"I do hope the wind shifts," said Madame Gheiri distastefully. "I'm getting bits of ash in my wine-"

She was looking down into her glass, picking at an offending particle, when the blast went off.

First came only a searing light, a bright yellow-white that split the center of the battlefield. It seemed to Crucias that the island actually jumped. The land looked unreal, only a vivid painting on canvas, and even now the canvas tore in half and admitted the blazing sunlight. That's what it seemed-that there was a second sun hidden behind the isle, a blue sun, and it was burning through the fabric of reality. A vast ring of dirt and bodies and machines leaped up around the blinding blaze. The blast carved a deep well in the center of the island, pulverized rock and man and machine-flinging them up in a brown bowl all around it. The next moment, the bowl doubled in size, then quadrupled. Forests that had withstood even the onslaught of Urza and Mishra stood no longer, laid down like blazing jackstraws. Mounds that had lain round and solemn against the bright sky disintegrated in the face of the swelling sphere of force.

'''Mayhem," Crucias gasped out.

The whole island disappeared. It was gone, down to a mile below the waterline. Titans, dragon engines, ornithopters, warriors-all gone. The ocean would have poured into the void except that even now, the advancing wall of the sphere pushed it back. The merfolk observers darted off trying to stay ahead of the crushing mass. Water piled into a great mountain that ringed the flash. Already, Nunieve's bow strained upward on the swell. The child-shaped figurehead stared into the bright flash of the end of the world.

"Weigh anchor!" Crucias shouted.

He took a step toward the capstan but got no farther.

The deck pitched-stealing his feet from under him. Nobles and crew tumbled amid bolted settees. Blood-red wine hung in weird arcs in the air as the ocean sucked its belly away beneath the passengers. Then they were rising. Wine spattered groaning planks. Nunieve crawled up the wave. Foaming water scraped the very clouds.

Roaring, Crucias clung to the leeward rail. Through black water, he glimpsed the ocean bed, horrifically close as the ship heeled away from the slope. He was sure Nunieve would capsize and kill them all, but the welling flood yanked the anchor chain tight and brought the hull upright again. With a visceral jolt, the anchor pulled free of the ocean bottom. Nunieve mounted up the wave. Nobles tumbled from the port side. Crucias could only watch, heart in throat. They would all be dead soon enough.

There was mayhem and death enough for everybody.

The ship bobbed corklike up the wave. Through the wall of water, the blast glared. It had grown only more intense. It gleamed brilliantly through half a mile of turgid brine. In moments, Nunieve reached the foamy peak, a region where wind and water and fire were mixed. Crucias couldn't tell up from down, light from dark.

They were over the crest, in winds that tore the masts down as they had the trees, in the bowl of the blast. Sea-water rushed to fill the crater where Argoth had been. Nunieve sailed pell-mell down the concave slope. It followed the bright interior of the new sun awakened on Dominaria.

That was the last any of them saw. The eyes of every person on deck burned from their skulls. Blindly, they clutched to the mad ship as it coursed down the wave, toward the roaring foundations of the world.

"Sit, Daddy. Aren't you thirsty?" Pretty and small at nine years old, Nunieve sat on the twilight verandah. A Jamuraan tea service rested on a platter before her. Steam rose brightly from the dark brew. "It's getting cold." Nunieve wore her best dress, what she called her tree dress because she got to wear it only when they were on shore, where the trees grew. At sea, she was garbed in a waistcoat and pantaloons, like any good captain's son.

The captain himself stood before her. No longer a privateer, Crucias had become a respected freighter captain. As fair, hard-working, and reliable as the sun itself, Crucias was among the richest sea captains on the continent, and he had only Nunieve to thank. Just now, Crucias did not heed his daughter, though. He looked past brickwork and riling grape vines, down to the sea, wide and black beneath the setting sun. Crucias blinked toward it, mesmerized. He had just come off of it and could hardly wait to get back. To him the sea was life, and the land was death-

"I can't wait forever, " Nunieve insisted.

Crucias smiled, shaking his head. "I'm sorry, Darling. I'm just distracted tonight. "

She poured tea into a cup for him, and then one for herself. "If you're worried about tomorrow, I'm not. You said the chirurgeon was the best on three continents. He'll know what to do. "

"Yes, Darling, " he agreed, kneeling and taking her hand. It was small and fragile in his palm, like the body of a sparrow. "Yes, he will know what is wrong. "

She nodded sagely, lifted a cup to her lips, and took one scalding sip. The porcelain swooped away, and a troubled tremor began in her chin. He thought he saw a tear form, but it never emerged, and she swallowed the tea. A look of relief crossed her face. She smiled. "It tastes delicious from these new cups. "

"You don't have to drink it yet if it is too hot, " Crucias said, taking his own experimental taste. He grimaced.

"Or if it is too bitter." He set the teacup down on the tray.

Nunieve still held hers in dainty fingers. "No. This is the first time I've had a tea set, and the first time we've been on shore in a year, and I want to enjoy it all." She took another sip.

"You're a good, brave girl, Nunieve," Crucias said. "A good, brave girl."

Crucias awoke to a sea storm. The deck rolled in long, deep swells. Shudders ran through the planks. With each sway of the ship, shattered masts scraped along the gunwales. Metal shrieked. Wood moaned. Severed lines lashed the deck. Rain battered the captain's back.

"Blast."

Whether it was day or dark, he could not have told. The flash that had destroyed Argoth had destroyed his eyes, as well. He didn't need eyes, though, to know that most of his passengers and crew were dead. The cupric smell of blood filled the air, and a septic scent told of spilled guts and corpses. Aside from his own groans, Crucias heard no other human sound.

But he lived-if this could be called living. Blind, battered, sick aboard his own ship, Crucias lived. He could not man the pumps alone even if they remained intact, could not clear the deck, could not even see land or star to find safe harbor. Perhaps there was no land to see. Argoth was gone, its ravaged foundations somewhere in the sloshing depths below. The armies of Urza and Mishra were gone, too. Perhaps the blast had sunk Teresiare itself. Perhaps there was no safe harbor in the world anymore.

A wooden bucket bounded noisily across the deck toward Crucias. Blindly he lifted a hand over his head. He could only guess its course. There was a stunning sound, and the taste of blood, and he slumped again.

He had placed too much hope in the chirurgeon, the best on three continents. The man knew about the application of leeches, the uses of phrenology, the manipulation of pressure points on the foot and ear to relieve tensions in distal portions of the body, but the wasting illness that ravaged Nunieve was not localized anywhere, on ear or foot or body. It was the doom laid on beautiful things by whatever dark and jealous god equated mortality with misery. Her illness was not a thing of body but of soul, a curse laid on her because she would otherwise have been perfect.

The chirurgeon had had no answers for them beyond herbal balms and the insinuation of copper fibers under the skin. Crucias had followed his advice assiduously, and Nunieve had borne the painful brunt of these "treatments" with the same courage she had borne the scalding tea. She was a brave girl, not only by nature but by necessity. She saw acutely that her father needed her to be brave.

They lingered there, in that vine-strewn villa above the sea, so Nunieve could wear her tree dress and wander the bazaar. Her eyes gleamed with the bright flap of trader's tents, and her neck and fingers shimmered with the jewelry Crucias bought her. The money he spent was legitimate coin, and the adornments he bought reminded of the bounty of the sea-pearl and mother-of-pearl, nautilus shell and abalone, shark tooth and starfish. At first Nunieve gladly received these gifts and wore them everywhere. Slowly, though, she ceased to enjoy them. The shiny things only drew more notice to the taut lines of her throat and the thinness of her wrists.

One day, she refused his purchases. Instead, she turned about to find something of equal value in an adjacent stall-something for him. "Buy these, Daddy. You have been wanting a new set of knives for your carving projects," she said.

Shadowed by the slate roof of the smithy, Crucias smiled. "They are too expensive, Darling."

"No more expensive than the pearls you wanted to buy me," she replied. Nunieve laid hold of his hand and said gently. "You don't need to buy me all these things. I know that you love me."

"Good girl, Nunieve," he said through a choked throat. "Always know that I love you."

Crucias awakened, weeping into the teeth of the storm. The bucket lingered beside him and delivered a fresh blow with each roll of the ship. He flung it angrily away.

There never had been safe harbor for him, not when his daughter turned to a skeleton before him. Not when his nation ceased to exist. Not now. Had he been on land during that blast, he would surely have died, but this couldn't be called living.

The vessel heaved sluggishly beneath him as it lolled up one edge of a wave. Its bilge must have been filling. Between rain and sloshing waves, it could only be filling.

Then rain hardened into biting hail.

Growling, Crucias crawled across the battered planks. He groped for handholds. Ripped sailcloth… knotted lines… splintered spars… a cold, cold arm-

In the midst of pelting hail, he paused. His fingers held an arm in a sleeve of lace. He tried to speak but found his throat was fit only for screams and roars. Hoping against hope, he followed the lacy sleeve to a shoulder rill and past it to a collar. He pressed his fingers into the fallen woman's neck but felt only flesh as cold and still as meat in a cellar. There was no pulse.

The roaring hail grew voracious across his back.

He took a moment more to pass his hand over the woman's face. Madame Gheiri.

"Mayhem and death," he hissed. "Mayhem and death."

Miserable, Crucias crawled onward. Hail sliced into the back of his neck and the crown of his head. He clawed along the stumps of the shattered rail to 'midships and clambered over ironwork settees. There were three more bodies between him and the ruined hatch. He did not stop among them but only swung down into the hold, away from the lacerating skies.

Twilight had already surrendered to night before they returned from their last visit with the chirurgeon. Nunieve wanted more tea. Crucias was in a mood to refuse her nothing. Soon she sat in the same seat with the same Jamuraan tea set and the same tree dress as she had worn their first night on land. Once again Crucias stood, staring past grape vines and out to sea. Aside from the deep darkness nothing else had changed.

No, everything had changed.

"Daddy, don't be so sad," she said. "We'll be back at sea tomorrow."

"Yes, Darling," he said distantly. "We'll find another chirurgeon. A better one."

"We'll be back at sea tomorrow, so let's enjoy our tea tonight. This is my last night on land," she said gently, pouring herself some tea.

Crucias hurried to her. "Don't say that. We'll stay longer. We can stay here as long as you want."

"Oh, it's all right, Father." She was sipping the too-hot tea and struggling not to make a face. When she regained her composure she looked up at Crucias. "Don't be sad."

"But I am sad, Darling."

"Then don't be afraid."

"I am afraid. You are everything to me. My whole world."

"I'm not afraid, Daddy. Don't you be afraid."

He bent to embrace her. She melted into his arms and snuggled against his neck. There was a final, perfect moment as he held her. Then her last long breath left in a sweet susurration.

He breathed, too, a startled, trembling breath, as though he could draw her fleeing spirit into his body before it fled away forever.

Crucias stood. The Jamuraan tea set toppled and crashed to the ground.

She did not stir at the sound.

He lingered there, holding her, gazing out at the black, unseeable sea.

This ship had been his courage. He had not gone to sea again until he could take Nunieve with him. Now the ship was dead, and he nearly so. It was a ghost ship, ravaged first by economic necessities, then by jaded ill-use, and last of all by a blast that destroyed the very world. The same dark, inexplicable forces that had clawed from the blind earth to destroy his daughter had reached up from the black sea to destroy the ship that bore her name.

"I failed her twice," Crucias whispered bitterly to himself. "I lost her twice." He felt a stab of guilt for taking his daughter to sea, for turning her namesake into a barge for hauling human bloodlust and depravity. "I destroyed them both." There could be no more damning fate than that.

He was done. He had died in every way a man could die except in flesh. It could come in many ways now. Perhaps the ship would sink or capsize. Perhaps the storm would kill him with ice and tumbling debris and exposure. But all of those would only be doing the work Crucias should do himself.

"I destroyed her. I can destroy myself."

With a groan, he dragged himself up from the staved crate where he lay. He had no idea how long he had lingered there, lapsing into and out of consciousness. The ceaseless turmoil of wind and sea and the dizzy pitch and shudder of the ship had made sleep and dream indistinguishable. Trembling, he eased himself to the planks and crawled. A smashed barrel spilled pasty flour across the boards. A wet line snaked through the mess, and jags of shattered glass littered the floor. Uncaring, Crucias wormed his way toward the hold door. The staterooms and his own cabin lay beyond. There would be a very sharp knife in his desk drawer, one of the blades he had used to carve the figurehead. It would carve his neck shortly. But he did not think of that. He thought of her. In his mind's eye he could still see the lines of that sculpture, the face of his beloved child.

"She would not have wanted me to do this," he told himself as he reached the door out of the hold and hauled on the bar that held it closed. "She would not have wanted me to do any of this."

The bar was jammed solidly. Gritting his teeth, Crucias rose and kicked. The bar shifted upward. Another kick, and the thing had nearly cleared its bracket. "Nothing can be easy. Not even this." He kicked one last time.

A creaking groan began, and he shied back. Wood splintered. Something struck the door, and it split, spilling rubble out on him. A beam rammed Crucias's belly. A cargo hook struck his head. He would have spun away except for the debris that mired his legs. The landslide of wreckage continued over him, burying him to the waist. Crucias twisted, struggling to wrench himself free of the pile, but a jabbing pain began in his side.

The ache intensified, stretching out through his chest and into his neck.

"This is it, then," he thought bitterly and slumped down in the debris. "This is it."

"Sit down, Daddy. It's getting cold," Nunieve said the next morning. She was on the verandah overlooking the sea, red bricks and grape vines embracing her in the cool air of morning.

Crucias stood where always he did, though this time, he knew it was only a dream. "There was no next morning, Nunieve," he said sadly. "You died last night."

She shrugged, leaning over to pat a little metal seat beside her. "I just wanted to see if you would make it through."

"If I would make it through?"

"Yes, through the night," she said simply. Her smile would have seemed almost mischievous had she not been so sad. "Now, come and sit."

"Oh, darling, this is only a dream."

"Yes. In this dream, I always ask you to sit, but you never do," she replied scoldingly. "It's a dream, Daddy. You can do whatever you want. Come, sit with me."

"Yes," he said, releasing a grateful sigh. "Yes."

With elaborate decorum, she lifted the teapot and poured his cup to the brim. The brown liquid sent up a gentle fragrance. Her hands were small and tan above the white porcelain.

"I broke these cups last night, too."

"Yes," she said. The tea poured contentedly from the little pot. "But you made it through. I was afraid you wouldn't. I was afraid your life would end."

"It did, darling. It did," Crucias assured. This time the tea was not scalding or bitter. "You were my whole life and future. I tried to go on. I built a ship in your name, but she wasn't you. And I couldn't provide for her, either. She wasted away, just as you did." He shook his head and let out a rueful laugh. "When you died, darling, my world had come to an end. And when the ship I named after you died, the whole world came to an end in a great explosion that consumed everything. The ship was destroyed by the blast and the storms afterward. I was blinded and battered and buried in a pile of rubble."

She looked at him over her cup of tea. Her eyes seemed older, her expression grown-up despite her young face. "What did you do then?"

A look of perplexity crossed his face, and he lowered the teacup, only half emptied. "What did I do then?"

"Yes."

"Well, darling-" he laughed darkly, "-I died. That's what I did then."

Her look turned to one of consternation. "You died?"

He nodded. "I died."

"You were one of the last people left alive in hundreds of miles of ocean, and you didn't make it through?"

Crucias reached over to take her hand. "What reason did I have to live? If I had had a reason I could have done anything. I could have crawled out from under all this rubble. I could have braved the storms to clear the deck. I could have manned the pumps by myself and found some way to smell for land or listen for stars. If I had had you beside me, I would have had my whole world again, and I could have done anything."

"You have me." Her voice had changed, eager still but not young, the voice of a woman instead of a child. Her face was fading-her face and the verandah and the morning sea beyond. A pulpy darkness seeped through the fabric of dream, and only the woman's voice remained. "You do have me. I thought I was the only one left alive until you opened the hold door."

"Nunieve, you're only a dream," he said wearily, groping for her hands.

"I'm not a dream," she answered. She clutched his hands tightly. "And I am not Nunieve. My name is Elgia. I'm Lady Gheiri's niece."

"Elgia?" Crucias replied. Where am I? "I was dreaming," he said into the tangled darkness of the cyclone. "I thought you were my daughter."

"Call me what you will. I want you to get up. I want you to get this ship back under control. I want you to take me to land."

He shook his head and felt icy brine dripping onto his shoulders. "I can't. I'm done."

"What about all the things you just said? About pumping out the ship and clearing the decks and steering to land?"

"I don't have any fight left in me, my dear. I'm worn-out-battered, blind. There is nothing left to believe in-"

The answer was immediate: "Believe in me. I want to live. Isn't that enough? I want to live."

So like Nunieve. So strong and determined and brave.

"It wasn't enough for my daughter."

"It should have been," Elgia said, desperate. "It should have been enough."

So like Nunieve.

"Yes. It should have been. But out there is a monster, perhaps a god, that sees all the should-have-beens in human lives and makes them impossible. Call it what you will-fate or curse, hatred or caprice-but it remains, the implacable darkness."

"I can see, Captain. I was below decks when whatever happened happened. I can see, and I can lift and tie and pump and anything you need me to do. You just tell me what to look at, and I'll see for you. I want to live."

A new breath entered him. For the first time since his daughter had died, Captain Crucias really breathed. "I was Yotian, Elgia. My daughter was Yotian. There is an ancient Yotian belief that every person has many souls, that you can always be redeemed. At any moment, you can let go of the old souls that ruled you, let them fall into damnation and begin a new soul. That's what my daughter was to me. Whenever I was sure my life was over, she appeared and brought me back up into the light of heaven. That's what Nunieve was to me-my keeper of souls."

"Listen to me!" Elgia's voice was desperate. There was a loneliness and fear in her tone, the sound of utter abandonment. "I want to live! I want to live!"

Crucias smiled. He actually smiled. Blind and battered and trapped in the Sargasso of his old life-trading off a damned soul for a newborn one-Crucias smiled. "Then help me dig my way out of this mess, Elgia. I want to live, too."