Then another thought struck her—Maybe the first of all hierophants doesn’t just have power over the gravity of objects. Maybe he also has control over the gravity of thoughts.
Her skin broke out in a cold sweat. I have got to get the ever-living hell out of here. But how?
Then she noticed movement behind him, from the fragment of the deck she’d just come from—and she had an idea.
“I think…” she said slowly.
He watched her, his black-shrouded body as still as a statue.
“I think…that I am going to have to think about it,” she said.
He didn’t react at all. He just stood there, his body facing her.
“I think it would be best if…if you let me go,” said Sancia. “You need to let me go, so I can think about this, and decide on my answer. And I know you’re going to let me go, of course. Because I am from Tevanne, where plenty of powerful people say many admirable things about saving or fixing the world, but…when they finally have to do it, suddenly there’s a change in the melody of their speech.” She looked at him, the moonlight shifting on his shoulders. “And surely the first of all hierophants isn’t like them—are you?”
Crasedes watched her, his visage implacable, unreadable. She started to think that he was not a person but rather a totem or a token that was being moved about in the world by something…else. Something perhaps on the other side of reality—if that even made sense.
“No,” said Crasedes.
Sancia waited for more.
“No to…what?” she asked.
Crasedes did not move.
Then Gregor popped out from behind a column across the gap in the ship, and fired his imprinter espringal.
Crasedes didn’t even look away from her. His right hand shot out behind him and he snatched the lead slug out of the air like it was a butterfly flitting through trumpet vines. The movement was so unnatural it seemed like it should have dislocated his shoulder.
She stared at him, stunned.
“No,” Crasedes said. “I am not like them, Sancia. I am not like them at all.” He slowly turned his head to look at Gregor. “Hello, Gregor,” he said. “It’s very nice to see you again.”
There was a muffled, dreadful wailing up and to their right, and the ceiling and floors and walls all shook with a series of rattling bangs, one after another…
And then the shriekers broke through.
Sancia crouched and covered her head as the metal spears burst through the decks, hurtling toward Crasedes. She braced herself for the explosion, worrying that the shriekers might dovetail together, crack apart, and shower her in deadly shrapnel…
But nothing came.
She opened her eyes and looked up.
Crasedes stood on the deck, his other hand extended up. Five shriekers hung just inches from his open palm, quivering in the air like kites on a tiny length of string, their tips so hot and burning, the moist air seemed to sizzle.
He turned his black-masked face back to Sancia. “You really don’t know what you’re doing,” he said. He flexed the fingers of his hand, and the shriekers bent and collapsed around one point in the air, slowly warping into a malformed ball. “Do you?”
“Scrumming fire them all!” shouted Sancia.
She and Gregor raised their imprinters and opened fire, shooting lead slug after lead slug at him. But Crasedes was ready now, and he calmly flicked them away, one after the other, redirecting their flights so that they stuck to columns, decks, or the distant upper deck above them. Volley after volley of shriekers ripped down through the ship, pulled this way and that, and soon the ruin in the center of the galleon was like a giant firework display with hot metals colliding and erupting, peppering the decks and walls with vicious shrapnel.
And through it all, Crasedes looked right at Sancia. His implacable gaze never left her.
“She’s just going to kill you all,” he said. “You know that, yes?”
Gregor tossed away his imprinter, unsheathed his rapier, ran forward, and leapt from the edge of his deck to plummet toward Crasedes, his sword raised high.
“Hum,” said Crasedes, bored.
Then Gregor just…froze.
He hung in the air, trapped in that position with his sword raised high, mere feet above Crasedes’s head. Crasedes twitched one black finger, and the blade of Gregor’s rapier shattered like it was made of ice.
Crasedes stared at Sancia, his black, empty eyes fixed on where she lay. “I must have Clef back,” he said. His tone was faintly chiding.
“Get scrummed, you rotte—”
He gestured again with one hand, and Gregor drifted up and turned over in one smooth, disturbingly abrupt arc, his arms and legs all fixed in place, like he was not a man but was rather a marionette being positioned in the air.
But his face could move. And Sancia could see he was in terrible pain.
She watched as the flesh on his arms and legs quaked unpleasantly, like vast, invisible hands were pressing upon him, shifting his body about.
It’s his gravity. He’s…He’s adjusting Gregor’s gravity, isn’t he?
Crasedes watched her with his empty eyes. “I do not wish to do this,” he said in his low, rumbling voice. “But I must have Clef back. Tell me where he is.”
The air seemed to flex. Sancia watched in horror as Gregor’s face turned bright red. She could see veins in his neck, at his cheeks, and he began choking horribly, spittle dribbling from his mouth. She wondered if he was crushing all of Gregor’s organs, all at once.
“I can’t harm you,” said Crasedes. “The construct’s seen to that—very clever of her. But him…I can harm him.” He cocked his head. “And I think we both know Gregor will recover. Wouldn’t you say?”
Sancia stared at Gregor—or she made a show of staring at Gregor. With her right hand, she slowly started reaching for the imperiat.
“Why?” said Sancia. “Why do you need Clef?”
“Why?” said Crasedes. He sounded bemused. “For the same reason I made him. To fix the worl—”
Before he could finish, Sancia reached into the box with the imperiat, found the lever that controlled all the scrivings around them, and shoved it as far as it could go—hopefully killing Crasedes’s influence, if not Crasedes himself, since he was basically just a giant scriving.
As she did so, though, she realized it would also kill everything that made the galleon float.
Instantly the whole ship shook. Crasedes staggered back like he’d been punched in the stomach, then collapsed onto the deck. Gregor plummeted out of the air and slammed into the wood. The red maelstrom that marked Crasedes in her scrived sight faded until it was an evil crimson flicker.