Who: Biddie, Captain Petrotavich (NPC), Bertie Eden, Kathleen O’Wells (NPC) What:The last supper flight of The Winged Sandals… [Part I] When: December 22nd [backdated] Where: Somewhere real and somewhere less real. Rating: PG [indicators of upsetting events/violence]
Slava was dreaming.
It was a strange sort of dreaming, a dream that seemed to be split like the right and left page of a book. On the one side lay the ship, his ship, and its passive journey home. The sky outside the deck window was dark. The two pilots on duty was peacefully manning their posts. The engine hummed. They flew. This is right, he thought.
On the other side of the dream was - a feast. A deep, long room full of candlelight and scent. The dinner table was nearly as long as the room: a luxuriant stretch of tablecloth and gleaming dishes. Black-bordered plates and many flowers. He was, Slava realized dimly, seated at the right of the head of the table. A fork in his hand. In his mouth - what? A taste like pears and copper.
The co-pilot, Gersha, turned to speak with him. Slava answered back. The words were correct, easy, impossible to remember once they entered the air. Everything is alright, he thought.
Wine poured into his cup. Very dark, the wine.
xXx
Bertie woke up surrounded by the dead. 'Woke up' might not be the correct term, he realized--this had the same feeling as his night terrors, but he wasn't in his bedroom. Did that mean he was dreaming?
He didn't think he was dreaming.
He couldn't move, which made him something like a silent, passive witness, and not a dreamer at all. He saw ghosts, but they didn't ask anything of him, didn't seek him out to finish their business. They saw him, though. They looked out of strangely hollow eyes, and watched him as they passed. He wanted to speak, but there was grave dust on his tongue.
xXx
He was heading through the prime galley, towards the lower gut of the ship - and then he wasn't. Not completely. His feet were walking, his mouth tasted the cold-dry air mechanical air, his neck and cheek registered the cold air of a lifted ship, but those were merely parts in a play; Slava felt himself distant from the collection of those parts. He could feel his own heartbeat and yet it was as distant a shout in a different room.
Something is wrong, he thought.
xXx
Orpheus, Bertie thought, and felt the weight of a phantom lyre in his arm, the drape of long fabric around his knees. This was another ball, and he wore another costume, but his role had never changed.
The dead wore costumes as well, clothes and shapes that weren't their own. They were masked, and Bertie looked for a butterfly without knowing why he did so. She wasn't his Eurydice, but he felt she would be right there behind him, if only he could turn his head to look.
xXx
All the flowers in the room were white: white irises, white tulips, white narcissi. Their textures were the marked difference. Some were glossy as pearls, some crisp as frost or smooth as snow, and some had the glazed delicacy of translucent porcelain.
Slava's cup was empty. The guest at his left leaned over to laugh with the guest on his right; their laughter was polite, inclusive. Slava knew he was invited on the joke if only he could remember its wording.
He raised his wine glass, forgetting it was empty, then felt wetness meet his lip at the rim.
Everything is alright, he thought.
xXx
Something was burning. Bertie could smell smoke, faint and distant, and the air was dry and hungry. The dead didn't notice, but the dead never did. Bertie felt heat against his side, encircling his wrist. Zipporah's string. He couldn't look down to see if he wore it still, in this place.
It is not an easy thing, sometimes, for to separate the waking from the sleeping, the living from the dead.
Unmoored. That was what Zipporah had called him. Adrift. Like a ship.
Bertie wondered when he'd boarded an airship, and if anyone else could smell the smoke.
xXx
Something is wrong, he thought.
There was a hitch in his breathing - or what Slava thought was his breathing - and it was getting louder. Harsher. He tried to pin down the sensation in his chest, but it was like clawing for a coin in a tall bucket. He couldn't seem to reach.
The noisy breathing was growing more pronounced. It was nearly a wheeze now. It was the labored breath of someone fighting their way uphill or carrying a body down the stairs. The latter made him pause; it was not the sort of image he'd picture usually. Slava wasn't a morbid man.
He paused, one foot on a ladder low rung and one hand on clenched on the cold bars of the higher run - when did he reach the ladder, why was he climbing? - and tried to inhale deeply and calmly. He couldn't.
What's more, Slava realized, he didn't need to.
In that moment he realized the breath rattling in his throat was a hum.
He recognized the song a moment later.
xXx
The Dutch East India Company was said to have lost a ship that sailed on, unable to reach land, the crew unaware that they were all dead or simply unwilling to abandon the ship they'd died on. Ghosts were like that, attached to places rather than people, holding on to their physical memories.
Bertie couldn't tell whether the ghosts followed that rule on this ship or not.
The Flying Dutchman was an omen of doom, lit by ghostly light and heralding the demise of any ship whose crew that saw it. That story was of a tall ship on the ocean, but there was no reason to believe an airship couldn't go the same way, doomed to forever fly on, far above land that was ever out of reach.
Bertie wondered if he wasn't dreaming after all. He wondered if he might already be dead.
xXx
There were a dozen of them seated around the table, but there was room for more. He put his palm on the tablecloth and recognized the sturdy texture; rubberized cotton. The fabric was impregnated with it much like the airship gas cells. He wondered, briefly and with a creeping edge of hysteria, if there were sandbags tied to the chair legs.
Everything is alright, he pleaded.
A cool hand touched the back of his, then took hold of his wrist. He stared at it uncomprehendingly before following hand to arm to shoulder to the face at the head of the table. It smiled at him and he thought: God help me.
"Everything is alright," she said.
xXx
The pain came on suddenly, but it wasn't new--Bertie thought it must have been there all along, and he'd only just noticed it. Sharp, tearing pain in his chest, which he reached for before he remembered that he couldn't.
His hand passed through where his chest should begin, as though he were a hollowed-out tree, crumbling and decaying, filled with mushrooms.
He wanted to look down, and was very glad that he couldn't.
xXx
"You've a choice to make," the woman told him. There was no plate setting in front of her, Slava noticed. Not even so much as glass of water or a bread roll. Perhaps that was why she looked so hungry.
"What choice is that, madam?" he asked politely.
"The only one truly left to you at this point, I'm afraid." She nodded at his glass. "Do you like the vintage?"
He glanced down at it, then back at her. The firelight played in her eyes in the same way it glanced off the black wine. Dimly, Slava remembered a line from boyhood lessons: the wine-dark sea. It came from - Homer, maybe? Yes, that was it: Achilles and the Iliad. It felt awkward to remember it now, although he'd loved the stories once. The line had always struck him as very odd; unlike the Odyssey, the Iliad was a land-locked saga. The ancient Greeks had passionate imaginations.
The thought of Greek brought back the memory of masks, melting candles and lights, the waltz, the figure stumbling towards them –
xXx
Bertie supposed he ought to be more afraid, but the only fear that haunted him was the same one from the night terrors, after the masquerade. The loss of memory, or consciousness. The awareness of missing time.
That was what his nightmares were about, the ones that didn't wake him frozen in place to watch flames lick across the walls and ghosts stagger through the shadows. He'd swooned at the ball, and Zipporah had said that he couldn't be woken, even with smelling salts. He had the nagging feeling that he hadn't been able to return because he'd been somewhere else.
Orpheus in the underworld, he thought again, but he couldn't remember it, and that was the fear that lingered. The blackness. The stolen time. The empty space between one moment and the next.
I've fallen out of time, he thought. One of the ghosts looked at him through hollowed-out eyes and smiled. He realized that he knew her. They’d met before.
She'd been dead then, too.
xXx
– the tilting floor, walls, a siren screeching through the hold. A wide-eyed ensign barely half his age, rushed past. Slava felt his own eyes track the man's - boy's - panicked, ugly stumble with calmness.
Something is wrong, he thought. The silent words clasped him in iron coils. This is wrong.
His mouth moved without Slava's direction. "This is justice."
The words were English, the inflection empty of anything remotely Russian. The voice was –
xXx
Something shook loose. Bertie blinked, and he was somewhere else, standing behind a chair at a banquet table, the room gray with shadows set against stark black and white.
Time lost. You walk between the worlds, Zipporah had said, but Bertie had never truly seen this one.
The dead were feasting. Bertie didn't look at their plates, into their cups. He looked at the woman sitting in front of him but he couldn’t see her face.
He didn’t think he wanted to see her face.
xXx
–polite but firm. Her Russian was as neatly carved as a native's. "Are you alright, Captain?"
Yes, he thought. Then realizing he could speak here, he repeated: "Yes. Apologies. I was - somewhere else."
"I'm aware," she said. Unconcerned. "We've never had a proper introduction, Captain, but I'm afraid there's even less time for one now. My fault entirely. It took longer than I expected to get away."
"Away?" he asked.
"From London," she answered obligingly. "I could hardly host this dinner in town, you understand. Especially with all that awful business in the paper."
Newsprint ruffled through Slava's mind. "You mean the killings."
"Those killings, yes," she said. He wondered at the delicate emphasis on those. "There's far too much of such business in London lately. Cities breed violence like wood breeds ash, wouldn't you agree?"
The mention of fire sparked off another memory: a photograph, the office in St. Petersburg, then London and a building on the other side of the street, a metal wrought logo, a strongly built young man stepping out and holding the door the for someone after him, roses in her hat.
MPC. Captain Archibald Curtis.
"You're MPC," he said. The damned krapiva. "You're with MPC."
"You had it right the first time," she said. He'd had someone point her out, casually, at the masquerade. A vivid orange costume and mask. His cousin, Gersha said. They say she looks like the grandmother. Slava had wondered at what nymph or deity her garish satin was meant to invoke.
Modern Prometheus. Why name a company after a figure whose ultimate reward for innovation was eternal suffering?
For the first time, Slava forced himself to look around the table and name each of the faces. He named each face and their place on the ship. Co-pilots, navigators, the chief rigger, both helmsmen, some senior mechanics. Any two of the group held positions important enough to be able to sabotage the flight. Together they could control the ship. Did control the ship.
He knew suddenly that this was precisely at why they had been brought here. Taken and held as much as they had been haunted in the time since the masquerade.
Everything is wrong, Slava thought.
He thought of his ship. He thought of the people trapped here with him in this real-dream, and the unreal waking state of a dozen bodies moving aboard the Winged Sandals. Slava thought of what such a dozen could do. Would do. He thought of Homer and Prometheus and, in a sudden bite of inspiration, of Pandora. Who came to Epimetheus as punishment for his brother's actions. What did the gods care if the Prometheus was already bound and hurt for the sake of his crime?
Slava remembered the figure begging him silently amidst the music and clever lights. The man had been a headless ruin, but still whole enough to beg. Did Epimetheus beg? Did he plead for all the evils to go back in the jar, to rewind a bad decision, to have a chance to shout that he had not done the crime, he hadn't been there, he didn't known they'd burn, he didn't know, he wasn't -
Be honest, the witch had told him. But even sitting at what he well suspected was the last meal of his life, Slava could not admit to believing what he suspected.
"What happens now?" he asked finally. It was a question for a priest, not this - this chert[2].
"Now?" She smiled, and was lovely. "Now you may finish your wine, your food. There's dessert, too. And then, if you choose so, we'll have conversation."
"This is a conversation."
"No, this is negotiation," she said. "Bargaining."
"What is there to buy off a dead man?" Men. There were forty-nine men aboard the Winged Sandals. "What could you want?"
"Information," she said. Her nails - pale and hard as glass - drummed against the table. They sounded like nails going into the coffin lid. "I know your principal owners, of course. But there are supporters, silent investors, notable...friends. I'd like to know who they are, Captain."
"So that you may tear their heads off?"
She wasn't upset by the question or the tone. Not Pandora, Slava thought. Pandora's actions were born of curiosity, not malicious intent. She'd been led. Slava didn't think this woman could be led anywhere. Dragged maybe, if you had chains and arms strong enough. If you could get close enough and avoid the teeth. And if you could be assured that she would never ever escape those chains and come looking…He stared at her hands.
"Did you do it yourself?" Slava asked. "His head, did you - "
"Yes."
Slava didn't ask how or why. "And you want my help in unleashing the same on others. After you've killed me and my men." "But not your families," she said mildly. "Not the workers at your factory, not your engineers. Not your friends. Well. Not all your friends. I want the snake heads, Captain."
"Yet you'll still kill us."
"No, that was your employer." Her Russian really was quite good. "They killed you, Slava. When they sent a witch and a demon to burn my people, my work, to shoot my son - you and your people were dead the moment that decision was made. Everything else since then has simply been…" She made a little moue with her clay-pale mouth. "A lingering aftertaste."
"You're going to kill forty-nine people and compare it to a mouthful of olives?"
"I'm going to let forty-nine people die," she said with gentle correction. "Don't be distracted by the inevitable, Captain. Your time here is plentiful but not limitless. For one thing, you're almost out of wine. The names?"
"Do you swear to take only the - " He struggled for the right word. How did you pick a term for men you were selling to a butcher?
"Only the heavyweights," she offered. "There don't need to be any additional sacrifices."
Aside from us. Slava fought not to look around the table again. Otherwise, he would begin to scream and he was afraid what screaming would sound like in this beautiful unreal room. Instead, Slava nodded. "Who are they?"
The woman tilted her head in question.
"The ones who are on the ship in our place," he clarified.
"I think you know already know the answer to that, Captain. At least one of them has been visited you quite frequently, I'm told." The woman's brown eyes reflected light like an animal. "She was so sure she'd made an impression."
God forgive me. "Will they take the others like they took us?"
She looked kindly amused at the suggestion. "I wouldn't concern yourself with it."
He wondered how such a tactic would translate on land. Would men walk out of their warm beds into the maw of December? Would they wade into the Neva, step in front of horses, drink lead…There seemed no limit to the possibilities of what the dead could force on the living. The deathless dead, Slava thought.
The thought returned myths to his mind. Not Greek this time, not foreign but intimately familiar: a scrap of childhood. Not Prometheus or Pandora, he thought. Not even Persephone with her throne in hell. Not a myth, but a skazka [3].
"Are you Koschei?" he asked.
She smiled. It was remarkably, horrifically friendly. "I went by Budska when I lived in your country. Or Nadezhda sometimes. Mostly I prefer - "
She stilled suddenly and all the air in the room froze with her. Slava’s grip on the wine glass hardened involuntarily into stone. Every guest around the table was similarly arrested, frozen by their hostesses’ sudden - what?
Surprise, Slava thought. He felt an echo of the feeling in his own chest and believed it genuine; what did it take to surprise a spider in her own web? Inexplicably his gaze drifted over and past the woman, to the shadow standing quietly behind her chair.
A strange trickle of hope, or something nearly warm enough to match it, rose in Slava’s chest. He tried to raise a hand towards the shadow, no, towards the young man - but his hand would not obey.
His hostess suffered no such trouble. Slava watched the bones of her face swim up through thinning skin like a ship coming out of fog. The hollows of her eyes and cheeks deepened into black caverns, the pale hair turned into loose, brittle straw. The fine hands thinned, knuckles cracking, splintering.
What turned to look at the young man could’ve been the gift of an unkind grave. When she spoke, knives and snow filled the room.