The crew spent their days in silence. The
Cike commander Tyr was good at being invisible. In this state, he did not need to eat or sleep. Absorbed in the shadow, shrouded in darkness, he hardly needed to breathe.
He found the passing days irksome only due to boredom, but he had maintained longer vigils than this one. He had waited a week in the bedroom closet of the Dragon Warlord. He had spent an entire month ensconced under the floorboards beneath the feet of the leaders of the Republic of Hesperia.
Now he waited for the men aboard the
Tyr had been surprised when he received orders from Sinegard to infiltrate a Federation ship. For years the Cike had operated only within the Empire, killing off dissidents the Empress found particularly troublesome. The Empress did not send the Cike overseas—not since her disastrous attempt to assassinate the young Emperor Ryohai, which had ended with two dead operatives and another driven so mad he had to be carted off, screaming, to a plinth in the stone prison.
But Tyr’s duty was not to question but to obey. He crouched inside the shadow, unperceived by all. He waited.
It was a still, windless night. It was a night heavy with secrets.
It had been a night like this one, so many decades ago, when the moon was full and resplendent in the sky, that Tyr’s master had first taken him deep into the underground tunnels where light would never touch. His master had guided him around one winding turn after another, spinning him about in the darkness so that he could not keep a map in his head of the underground labyrinth.
When they’d reached the heart of the spider’s web, Tyr’s master had abandoned him within.
Tyr had never resented his master for leaving him in the darkness. Such was how things must be. Still, his fear had been real and urgent. He had lingered in the airless tunnels for days in a panic. First had come the thirst. Then the hunger. When he tripped over objects in the darkness, objects that clattered and echoed about him, he knew they were bones.
How many apprentices had been sent into the same underground maze? How many had emerged?
Only one in Tyr’s generation. Tyr’s shamanic line remained pure and strong through the proven ability of its successors, and only a survivor could be instilled with the gifts of the goddess to pass down to the next generation. The fact that Tyr was given this chance meant that every apprentice before him had tried and failed, and died.
Tyr had been so scared then.
He was not scared now.
Now, aboard the ship, the darkness took him once more, just as it had thirty years ago. Tyr was swathed in it, an unborn infant in his mother’s womb. To pray to his goddess was to regress to that primordial state before infancy, when the world was quiet. Nothing could see him. Nothing could harm him.
The schooner made its way across the midnight sea, sailing skittishly, like a little child doing something that it shouldn’t. The tiny boat wasn’t a part of the Nikara fleet. All identifying marks had been clumsily chipped off its hull.
But it sailed from the direction of the Nikara shore. Either the schooner had taken a very long and convoluted route to meet
with the
Tyr crouched behind the masthead, spyglass trained on the schooner’s deck.
When he stepped out of the darkness, he experienced a sudden vertigo. This happened more and more often now, whenever he had waited in shadows for too long. It became harder to walk in the world of the material, to detach himself from his goddess.
