Mercy

Mercy's breath caught in her throat, and her body recoiled. As if every part of her body were crying out in horror at once.

The broken man floating in the middle of the room had voiced a request Mercy was expecting. It was made by a stranger, a man Mercy had never met and had no reason to care for. And his request had hit her hard enough that tears were welling in her eyes, and she had to wipe them away with her sleeve.

Worse still, she wasn't the one this request was made to. Vincent knew this Vicar, and cared for him. Seeing a friend like this would be enough to break anyone.

But Vincent's expression was cold and calm, and the hand resting on his sword didn't shake. "Do you have any preference?" Vincent asked softly. His voice was steady, the inflexion in his words betrayed no emotion. He might as well have asked how the Vicar takes his tea.

"A pistol if you have it. The brain hosts consciousness, death comes from interfering with that. Just be quick and effective," the Vicar said, and he smiled despite his condition.

Mercy gave a stuttering sob at the sight. Her hand clenched her sword, but she didn't look away. Vincent was facing this horror without flinching, and Mercy refused to let him carry this through alone.

"I didn't realize the despair was the worst part," the Vicar reflected aloud, with a rueful smile that might as well be a grimace. "Even agonizing pain gets rather tedious after a few days, and you find you're willing to make it worse just to wiggle your fingers. But the despair, knowing that this is my end and I have nothing to do but wait for it, that broke me."

Mercy's reaction was halfway between a laugh and a sob. She blinked away tears and took a deep breath to steady herself. And all the while, Vincent was as calm and as unmoved as if he were doing engine maintenance.

"From the forehead, towards the occipital bun?" Vincent asked as he drew his pistol. Mercy only understood half of what Vincent said.

"That will do the trick," the Vicar said. That man sounded more than relieved; there was a quiet, manic desperation in his voice. Mercy realized the Vicar was grateful, and eager.

Grateful and eager to die. "Vincent, shouldn't we try to help him?"

Vincent, still unnervingly calm, pointed at the Vicar's arm. When he spoke, it was smooth and clinical, as if he was reading from a textbook. "That's necrotizing tissue extending from his compound fractures. Cellulitis following the major blood vessels from the wound sites. If he doesn't have sepsis, it would be a miracle. The only place under the skies where we could save him would be at the Cathedral, the Monastery's inner sanctum at the Core. And he wouldn't survive the two-month journey."

Many of the words Vincent used were foreign to Mercy, including cellulitis and necrotizing. But sepsis, she knew from the navy's physicians. It was known as blood rot, to the Wayfarers. Alcohol so strong it could be lit on fire, tinctures made from bread mould, and bone saws were all used just to prevent its onset. No medicine under the skies, save the Monastery, could save someone who had it.

"Well put. I see you remember your lessons," the Vicar said. He tilted his head back, closed his eyes, and let out a contented sigh. "Aim true."

Vincent set his pistol a hair's breadth from the Vicar's forehead. It looked as easy for him as when he placed a tile while they played Ba'tal. His hand was astonishingly steady, like a statue. But Mercy glanced away from the gun, looked Vincent's eyes, and saw the same face he had worn when he took the Hood and destroyed a hundred-gun warship.

The pistol flashed, and the Vicar's head snapped backwards. A small burst of red shot up into the air, and the body began spinning. Like the second hand of a clock, the Vicar's head pointed at three, and drifted down past four, then five, until it passed a few inches from the deck, and made it's way back around.

Vincent's expression didn't change when the pistol's hammer swung down. The flash of light and the roar of the exploding powder only elicited a blink on his flint-hard, unyielding scowl. It was only when the Vicar's head passed around again, that he let go of the pistol and left it hanging in the air, to point at the Vicar as his head passed around.

The tide of emotions broke through as soon as Vincent let go of his gun. His hands began to tremble, and his mouth opened as if he were trying to relearn how to speak. When Mercy met his gaze, she could see the tears pooling around his eyes.

Vincent stepped back, his feet fumbling to find purchase against the metal sheet. He stumbled and tumbled backwards, drifting out through the open door. Mercy pushed hard off the floor to catch up and managed to grab Vincent by the shoulder once he was out of the room.

The contact was all it took to finally break Vincent's sorrow free. As soon as her fingers gripped his shoulder, he stopped and shuddered, and finally cried. He turned and struck the wall with his fists, over and over, until specks of blood and broken wood scattered into the air. Mercy let him do that, for just a few moments, before she wrapped her other arm around his chest. One more sob escaped him, as if she had squeezed it out, and she felt his head fall on her shoulder.

She shifted her other hand, rested it on the back of his head, and held him. They rocked in place, anchored by their boots clinging to the deck, as they rode out another storm.

*****

Eventually, like all storms pass, Vincent's sorrow and pain faded into something his thoughts could sail through again. Mercy wasn't sure how long it took, she had been too afraid for him to worry about small things like the passing of time.

Eventually, Mercy tapped Vincent on the shoulder and took a step back. She put her hands on his chest, to keep him at arm's length, and looked him in the eyes. "I have questions," she said. "And we are long past the point where I deserve answers for them."

"Agreed," Vincent said. He glanced over his shoulder, back at the door they had just passed through and cringed. "Just, not here. On the deck, in the free air."

Mercy nodded and followed him as she shuffled across the deck towards the stairs. Vincent climbed the steps with all the vigour of an elder Wayfarer suffering under the pull of one of the great isles. He looked weak and brittle, as if any real effort might shatter him again.

But the open air of the deck seemed to reinvigorate Vincent, and he stepped into the breeze and let it pull at his coat. He closed his eyes and took a long, slow breath. "Where would you like me to start?" he asked.

Mercy frowned, both relieved and surprised by his candour. "Let's start at the beginning. The childhood you never talk about, I'm beginning to see why. You're a child of the Monastery, aren't you?"

"I am," Vincent admitted. "For my own safety, I never shared that. Treaties with the great nations protect the Monastery. But that doesn't always protect the members in good standing from criminals, corsairs, gangs, or nobles who think their staff can keep a secret. And being cast out, I might have made a tempting target."

"You were cast out, by the Monastery?"

"I was. When I was fifteen, they dumped me on the streets of Vol Ayre with a tiny bit of money. I think they expected me to spend one night on the streets, and come running to the nearest Parish to beg them to take me back," Vincent said, the bitterness in his voice warring with the grief. He glanced back down the stairs and sighed. "The Vicar was the most vocal backer of my excommunication."

"So what you did to the Victorious, you were just protecting your people? Your real people, hoping they would take you back?"

"Mercy," Vincent said, and the expression on his face was so pained she might as well have stabbed him. His next words were so thick with emotion, it was a wonder he managed to say anything. "You are my people. The crew of the Hood were my people."

Something in those words pulled at Mercy heart. Part of her wanted to cry, part of her wanted to kiss him, part of her was terrified of everything that might come after. "Thank you," she eventually said. "I didn't know how much I needed to hear that. But you need to tell me what the box is. You upended your life for it, gave up your ship and your people. And as it turns out, so did I."

"Are you sure you want to know?" Vincent asked solemnly. "Some things, knowing them, the responsibility it puts on you redefines your life. It becomes the wind, sets your course for you, takes you where it requires."

"It already has," Mercy insisted.

"True," Vincent agreed. He took a deep breath and continued. "What I'm about to tell you is a secret the Monastery doesn't tell most of its own membership. In fact, unless your story about the Raven clan is true, no one outside the Monastery has ever known this."

Mercy nodded and waited.

"This ship was carrying a specialized container we just call 'the box'. It uses magnets created by electricity to hold its contents inside. It contains a power source, though not as you understand it," Vincent said.

"A power source? Like coal or fuel pellets?" Mercy asked.

"No. Every engine in Volante, Olencia, every one under the sky couldn't make enough power in a century to match what was contained inside the box. And what we see out here, these ruins." Vincent gestured with his arm out at the sky, where the broken shards of a Grainglove still drifted in the wind. "This is what happens if the box is broken."

Mercy felt like she had been dropped into one of the ice storms in the far skies. "No, that's..."

"Impossible? We have proof aplenty," Vincent said. There was nothing bitter in his voice, nor any humour. He sounded empty, dead, lost. "This is the ruin of Grainglove, an island so large it would take seventeen days to walk from top to bottom. All the blasting powder under the sky couldn't have cracked Grainglove in half. Let alone shatter it like this."

Mercy looked out at the sky, at the slow drift of each island as it rode the currents of wind and mist. Her own hands still stung from the small cuts she earned anchoring their ship to the isle in the storm. The buck what she had pulled out from a clump of dirt on that same island was still somewhere near her sleeping bag. And the raven's nest she had taken from a tree that clung to a rock barker larger than the lift balloon now above her head, was still in a drawer.

"The Monastery made a bomb? Your monastery is making weapons? What were you doing with this, this bomb that could destroy Volante, Olencia, Idlewinds?" Mercy asked. "You could rule everything under the sky with this power. Or destroy everything."

"All the Monastery would have to do, to end us all, is not lift a finger. That box isn't a bomb, it's a power source. Though the semantics are a cold comfort to the people who lived on Grainglove. This ship, though, and it's cargo, were destined to a place the Monastery calls 'The Shield'," Vincent insisted.

"The Shield?" Mercy asked. "And what do you mean, the Monastery could kill us all without lifting a finger?"

"There's another story I learned as a child. A little poem. The Shield drifts beyond the sky, past the air where auroras fly. Without it to gentle our star's light, the sky would wander the endless night."

"Auroras? Gentling light? What does any of that mean, Vincent?" Mercy asked

"Without the Shield, solar winds would wash the sky into the void," Vincent said. He pointed to the sun, then out at the sky. "Remember, the sun is an explosion. And along with that sun is the force of that explosion washing out through the void. The Shield uses the energy inside that box to block the worst of the wind, gentling it so that the pull of the isles keeps the air around us. Without it..."

Mercy shook her head, her thoughts screaming at her as she warred with everything her life knew to be true. She drifted limply in her boots, not sure if she should laugh, cry, or scream. "I don't, I don't know how to believe it," she said finally.

"I can show it to you," Vincent said. "We're fairly close. But I'll need to take some of the equipment from this ship we're on. And..."

Vincent dabbed at the tears in his eyes with his sleeve. "I'd like to give them a funeral."