POV: nomad
Summary
Nomad finds a stone arch close to where he was buried and tucks himself into the cover it gives him from the worst of the rain and the occasional lightning. The flight in took forty-five minutes on Elegy's slow Dawnchaser; whatever he steals on the way out, he has to fly faster. There is nothing to do now but wait — the activity that has always grated on him most, since his whole strategy in life is to keep moving — and so he tries to use the rain on the rock as a kind of comfort and feels his strength returning under it.
The lights arrive in two minutes: a Cinder King prospecting fleet, at least a dozen ships, sweeping the area and then settling almost directly on top of his fresh grave. They start digging. Even from cover Nomad can see most of those present are Charred — and then he picks out the Cinder King himself walking the dig site, eschewing an umbrella, scanning the sky as if expecting trouble. The knight asks why the king is here in person and out in the rain. Nomad reads it the way he keeps having to read everyone on this world: not certainty, but caution. The tyrant cannot be sure the wild card from offworld is dead. So he came in person to make sure no one stole his harvest.
That changes Nomad's plan. He cannot fight. He still has no way to lance the boil on his soul; he is increasingly afraid he never will, that the locals' arcana cannot reach him at all. He has to get sunhearts without a confrontation. A possibility lands in front of him when a heavy supply ship sets down nearby, scorching the mud, and a worker swings open a vault-style door on its back. Inside the vault are bolted cabinets — a storage truck for the harvest. The worker trots to the dig. Nomad slips through the dark, climbs in, and tucks himself into the gap at the back behind the cabinets. He finds an old sack and works it into a passable Iriali wrap, mostly to put something between him and the world. He calls Auxiliary up as a flat sheet shaped like the front of one of the cabinets, painted with another row of fake drawers — a film-set false front from the Silverlight cinemas. He holds it in front of himself; from the door it should look like an extra-deep cabinet. The knight approves of this one; it might actually work.
Workers arrive, slotting sunhearts into the cabinets one by one and muttering to each other. They are nervous that the king is in personal attendance and has brought Charred along; one of them notes, quietly, that they will be running out of captives soon now that Beacon is gone. They fill the front rank of drawers and leave. The vault door slams shut with a heavy thump and the chamber goes black. Nomad dismisses Aux's false front, finds a crowbar, and pries open each drawer in turn. Five sunhearts — enough, he thinks, to get Beacon flying again. He bags them and turns to the door.
The door is locked from the outside.
He stares at it, having walked himself into the obvious mistake. Aux points out that a crowbar will not be the right tool here, and Nomad holds out his hand for the sharp implement Aux formed beneath Beacon's hull when he sliced the docking lock free. Aux declines. The slicing under Beacon, he says again, was not on his soul or his oaths — it was on Nomad's. The canker is Nomad's to push past; the forsworn weapon is Nomad's to summon. Nomad tries. It is not just for killing, he tells himself; it is to cut a door. He tries to recreate what he was feeling when he severed the bolts. He cannot — the Torment is pressing harder than it has in some time. He leans his forehead on the door, exhausted.
And then he watches the trick he has been playing on himself: even if he opens the door, what then? He cannot steal a Union ship out from under the king's nose without a fight. He cannot navigate without Beacon's authentication on it; he has only ever flown ships set up by his hosts. He has been telling himself that running farther will be enough. It is not enough and has not been for some time. He has been stopped — *frozen*, the Beaconite word — somewhere deep in himself for years, regardless of how fast his legs were moving on the outside.
The lock clicks. He spikes with panic and scrambles to put the cabinet front back up, too late, and the door swings open from outside. It is Zeal, alone, standing in the mud.