Green and purple afterimages lingered, confusing my eyes. Broad shoulderblades and a mountainous ridge of vertebrae blocked my view, covered in tattoos of abstract and narrative scenes, interrupted by cured hide and leather strung sparsely across a torso the size of my kitchen counter back home.

  I ran into Strength from behind. His punitive elbow thrust backwards, but I saw it coming this time and scampered (yes, I'm sorry to say that I scampered) out of its path. Constitution thunked through the fading starlight mirror behind me.

  Sea wind blew, salty and cold and harsh. It whipped my robes immodestly, and flattened my mini-mohawk. Strength's was, apparently, unaffected. What protected it from these hard gusts while mine bent like a wavy tube man? Surely Strength used product in there, right? Or was it just the sheer fortitude of his keratin?

  Beneath my besandaled feet were broad, sturdy planks of wood, polished flat running with sea-spray. They were so wide, I wondered if they hadn't just sort of shaved off the edges of the biggest tree I had personally ever seen in my world... the world above. No, scratch that, two worlds up. I guess?

  Shivering, I reached to pull tight a raincoat that wasn't there.

  The floor beneath me angled downward, gravity coaxing me toward an ugly rift beyond which it angled much, much more steeply downward. A tremendous wave battered the building--no, I had to remind myself, it was a ship, just the size of a sideways skyscraper--sending a deep growl through the lumber and metal superstructure. I felt a swirling disagreement in my stomach, and felt a powerful temptation to flee to the side and lean over. I bolted, but was caught by Constitution's gauntlet snapping shut around my robe.

  "Don't do it, hon," she exhorted. "We don't want a man overboard in this weather."

  She had an excellent point.

  "I need air," I said.

  "Is all the air in world," said Strength. "More than enough for little guy like you."

  Someone approached us, leaning forward to compensate against the angle of the deck, foot sliding on the wet planking.

  He was broad shouldered, with the physique of a man who had worked hard for the shape he was in, a body that would inflate like a safety vest the second it made landfall. He wore a dark navy coat trimmed with silver.

  The gears in my mind ground to a halt when I realized he had a short-clipped red beard, and wore his hair in a buzzed mohawk, half an inch long. Red like Strength's, and like mine, but maybe not naturally. A scar was tattooed from his forehead to cheek, crossing over his eye. Other than that, he didn't have much facial resemblance to Strength.

  "You're the help?" He had a rough voice, and the confusion was evident. He hadn't expected a towering strongman, an ironclad woman, and whatever I was. The realization hit him so hard I felt it, like splash damage to his brain. "My lords!" he almost gasped, and knelt.

  He stared at the deck streaming with water and began to speak almost too rapidly to make out, like one word, or one of those languages that Teo had once described as "agglutinative" which string everything together:

  "Blessings-upon-the-Six-the-aspects-of-highest-one-whose-name-is-on-our-lips-and-in-whose-light-may-we-stand-forever."

  “Amen,” I tried to say, but burped instead.

  "Rise," said Strength.

  "Welcome, my lord and lady," he said, standing, then bowing again. Sea spray splashed over him and soaked his head. He did not seem to notice. "You have brought with you a familiar," he said with a nod to me. "Or some kind of..." he squinted. "Herald?"

  "I'm Wisdom, man," I snapped, the queasiness shortening my temper by, well, about a hundred percent. "Psshh."

  He glanced to Strength, not actually verbalizing "For real?" but strongly implying it. Unwilling to offend anyone, he moved on. "Lords, I am First Mate Yorc of the Barbaric. Or I was. She's going down. Hit by a sliceberg when we tried to navigate the Treacherous Mile. We're a merchant vessel, you may have attended our launch last week...?" He looked hopeful, and let the moment linger for just a little bit too long. "No, my lords are busy seeing to things beyond my ken, surely. We carry cargo and souls to Strongmont. I fear neither may see dry land again. The fore section is sinking fast. The breach is great, and growing. The lower decks are filling up fast."

  "Lifeboats?" asked Constitution. My mind was reeling trying to keep up. Not with the story, but the idea. Yorc? Did that mean something? Was it code? Was he some symbolically important part of Arthrem's inner workings? An emotion? An internal, biological process? So far, he just seemed like some dude.

  "Not enough," he said, involuntarily waving to the sides of the boat. Sailors in loose white shirts shouted and fussed over pulleys and ropes, where men and women piled onto wide, flat dinghies. A scattering of the brightly marked craft was being carried out in all directions by the waves, topped with people waving and weeping. "The berg nailed us right in the mid, dashed a good few of 'em in the impact."

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  The harsh spang of metal giving way struck my ears and made me jump backward, almost into Constitution's arms. A cloud of wooden debris exploded into the air, showering the water and the escaping craft, and causing the gulls and vultures to reel and shriek.The doomed front half of the ship slipped a full two feet, twisting to the right side. I couldn't, and can't, remember if that's starboard or port, and the ghost of Teo's disapproval haunted me.

  "Those poor people," breathed Constitution. "We'd better get moving."

  Strength's shoulders jerked. It might have been a shrug, or just an itch. "Where is cargo?"

  The first mate blanched. Like, actually. He winced and all moisture left his mouth when he started speaking again. "In the secure holds, below."

  "What about the passengers?" I demanded. After all, that was the only priority, right? Who cared about what the ship was carrying. Inanimate objects could be collected later, if it really came to that. At least, I assumed. And if it couldn't, how did it rate against getting these people off alive?

  Strength looked at me like I was equally inanimate, a noise made by something that no more deserved his attention than the wind, the water, the clouds did. I did not even see the consideration of an answer cross his mind.

  "Wow," I said. “I feel so valued. As a coworker.”

  "Lords," said Yorc, "there is something else." He glanced back to the fissure between the now almost completely separated front and back (prow and stern? Fore and aft? Ugh, I'm so sorry, Teo). Plumes of smoke and screams issued from that grisly divide, straight out of Dante's Inferno. "There were sightings of others down there."

  "Yes?" asked Strength, losing patience. "Be going on...?"

  "Dwellers?" asked Constitution.

  The sailor nodded, slowly. Then shook his head. "Aye, lords. Maybe. Didn't see 'em myself, but... one of my topdeck riggers saw 'em. Swimmin’ in the flood decks and…" His throat would only squeak and creak now. "Carryin' off...."

  "Oh, for crying loud," said Strength, and back handed the sailor. He pulled his punch, that much was clear, but the man still reeled backward, nearly falling over into the fissure. "Get together yourself." First Mate Yorc shook his head, blinked hard. Constitution clanked over and put a hand on his arm, steadying him.

  "Easy," she said. "You with us, sweetie?"

  He blinked away the vision. "The things they saw," he said. "No. Yes, sorry. Aye-aye, my lords. I'll see to the launches. Thank you and sorry." He wiped his palms over his eye sockets. "Okay. Yes. If you see the captain down there... be careful." He spun on a heel, and ran to help the crewmen working at the crane, which announced a severe breakage with the sound of a crack and the spinning of flywheels. He was already dragging a sailor back onto her feet by the shoulders.

  Constitution approached Strength to confer. I invited myself, my knees still a little unsteady on the never-stationary floor. "Well," said Strength. "Is first dungeon for you, no?"

  I stared at him hard. I possibly even glared at him. A huge risk, I know. Opportunistic birds shouted for us to hurry up from above, eager to pick through the wreckage for food once the meddling humans had gotten out of the way.

  "You think this is a...do you mean dungeon? Or like, dungeon dungeon?"

  He glanced at Constitution and angled his maces outward. "This guy. He speaks in the riddles."

  "He always did," she replied.

  "Yes, is dungeon," continued Strength. "Our Big Man on the outside. He get into, ah..." Strength half-scrunched. "Shenanigan. Then, lights go red." He pointed back over my shoulder, narrowly missing my head with the thorny club. "Then, dungeon appear. We solve. You were there, you saw arrow from sideways archery bow."

  Now who was speaking in riddles? I was going to make him explain himself. I fully intended to. I didn't care how strong he was. But I made the mistake of paying attention to what he was saying, and turned my head to look where he'd pointed.

  Behind us, across miles of thrashing waves and winds howling through these "slicebergs" (a word too silly to be taken seriously, which I'd made a mental note in all mental caps to bring up later) was a--well I'm not sure what you'd call it, because I'd never seen anything like it before.

  It was a giant shape in the sky, dark because it was backlit by the setting sun, making its edges gleam. I guess it was like a stacked series of trapezoids, like a wide triangle if you squinted, which you would, and I did, because of the aforementioned setting sun in my eyes. To say it hovered there risks suggesting movement. It was entirely stationary, like somebody plopped a ziggurat in the sky. Small lights blinked red in the way that aircraft's do. No, that wasn't it--it was more like the red alert orbs in the auditorium.

  "Wait. That's where we were?" I asked. "How does it just float there? Is it magic?" I turned back for my answer just in time to see Strength's broad and only lightly armored back disappear into the smoke as he jumped--quite intentionally--into the rift between the ship halves.

  "He just-!"

  "Yeah, he does that," said Constitution. "Let's see where we can help, here."

  "What are we going to do?" I asked. "We don't have a rescue boat."

  She straightened. "I can't just let them die."

  "Yeah, but like..."

  "Come on."

  We rushed, as well as a huge woman in a hundred pounds of armor and a seasick guy wearing sandals can rush, to the thingy. I say the thingy, because I'm not a ship guy, and they have a term for everything. There's a whole nautical vocabulary I didn't know. But something was different about this ship.

  "Where?" I asked.

  "Follow the screams." The thingy was a truncated stairwell that took us below the topdeck. The passage was cramped, open-air on our right side and lined with a light railing of cured wood. This was more a suggestion than an actual safety measure.

  I'd been on a boat before. Technically, anyway. There was a canoe or kayak during summer camp in middle school. I remember it well, because there's a difference between canoes and kayaks, and they got on our case whenever we'd say the wrong one. My main takeaway, however, is that mild trauma of correction, and I utterly blocked out the distinction. I think I remember some kind of paddleboat adventure when I was really little, but the details are lost to time.

  The Barbaric was a lot bigger than a paddleboat.