Page 95 of Ship of Smoke and Steel

Suddenly I know where I’ve seen that eye before. When I met Hagan, in the Deeps. The angel’s eye glowed blue, but otherwise it looked the same.

The angel—

The dredwurm isn’t a crab at all. However monstrous they look, the crabs are animals, with muscles, organs, and brains. This is something else, something animated by the same forgotten magic that powers Soliton.

Rogue, Hagan had said. A rogue angel. He’d tried to warn me.

Which means …

Well, it means we’re all in the Rot.

Meroe is shouting my name, though she’s barely audible over the dredwurm’s screeching.

“Get the others clear!” I shout back. Assuming they’re still alive. Aifin’s impact with the wall might have been cushioned by the mushrooms. Berun—I don’t want to think about Berun.

Survive first.

The dredwurm comes forward, and I step up to meet it, blades slashing. I manage to sever two of its spikes as others slash across me, held away by shimmering Melos energy. The pressure has already made it hot enough to hurt, though, and I back away, breathing hard. Armor or not, I can’t fight this thing head on.

Which means, since it doesn’t show any signs of being distracted, that I can’t fight it at all. Rot, rot, rot. If Jack were here to get its attention, or Thora to pry its limbs away—

If I’d told the Scholar to shove his offer up his arse—

Focus, Isoka. You’re not dead yet. Neither is Meroe.

I feint to the left, and the dredwurm follows the move, coming on slowly but steadily. It has no eyes, but it’s clearly able to see me. Or hear me, like the crabs.

It’s an angel. No wonder my bursts of power didn’t hurt it. The thing must be solid, no guts or muscles or skeleton, like a statue come to life. It doesn’t even bleed.

Hagan had stopped the angel, back at the ruined village. So where in the Rot is Hagan now?

The thing lurches forward, backing me toward a corner. I parry a half-dozen slashing strikes, sever a spiked limb on the riposte, and feel another blade slam into my armor. Heat and pain shoot across my body. I see Berun behind my eyes, impaled and limp, blood spurting as he flies through the air. I’d been frustrated with his cowardice. For a moment, the image twists, and it’s Meroe I’m looking at, her body shuddering, the life draining from her eyes.

Focus, Isoka.

The Scholar said this was a power I had, too. Even if he’s mad, even if his notion about the spirits of the dead is insanity, maybe he was right about that.

Maybe I can use it.

I try reaching out to the dredwurm. I can feel my heart pounding, blood rushing in my ears, my armor crackling and spitting with power. The strange gray energy is there; I can feel it, even see it—tiny motes, coursing through the dredwurm like blood. But no matter how I strain, they don’t move.

Hagan had spun ribbons of the gray light to wrap around the angel. I try to remember what it felt like, watching him.

The dredwurm lashes out, and I take another step away. My back comes up against the wall, my armor pressing into the mushrooms. Green lightning crackles across them, leaving scorched, blackened trails. The puffballs burst into phosphorescent shards.

Nowhere left to run.

I try to remember what it felt like in my dreams, the dead watching me, the hovering motes of gray.

Something shifts, a tiny break in the flow of gray light. The dredwurm halts for a moment, its movement stuttering, like a clockwork toy with a stripped gear. The light from the red gem flickers.

I reach out again, as though this were a dream, straining to hold on to that sense of unreality. It’s a strange, transient feeling, a state of mind that will disappear if I look at it too closely. Like making two people overlap by crossing your eyes. I can see the flow of energy through the dredwurm, a ludicrously complex pattern of gray light that animates it, moves its limbs, drives it to kill. As I thought, it’s not alive, not really. It’s a machine made of magic and stone, and it has gone horribly wrong.

I don’t think I could understand the structure of the thing in a thousand years of study. Fortunately, fixing something is never as hard as breaking it. I reach out, take hold of the delicate filigrees of light, and pull.

It doesn’t give way as easily as I thought it would; size and strength are deceptive in this weird twilight world. But whatever I manage to do brings the dredwurm to a halt, its limbs stretched and stiff, vibrating with its need to tear me to shreds but unable to move. Its red eye pulses with light.

Carefully, like a performer walking with a spinning plate balanced on her nose, I step forward. I feel my mind wobble, my control over the strange energy slip. The spiked limbs of the dredwurm move fractionally toward me, then halt again. I take another step, right up against the thing’s head.