Nethereal (Soul Cycle Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

out the pain and focused on Deim’s chant. Most folk considered such devotions eccentric at best. Even Jaren, whose ancestors had deemed piety a virtue, saw no use in petitioning obscure powers who’d long since abandoned the universe—if they'd ever existed at all.
    When anyone asked, Deim said that faith was worth holding onto, if only because the Guild said it wasn't. In Teg’s opinion, a young man of twenty-five should’ve outgrown such boyish fancies, but he respected the steersman’s commitment to something larger than himself.
    The droning chant ceased, replaced by silence. “You done in there?” asked Teg. He peered through the slit and beheld the face of a goddess. The sight didn’t surprise him. Thera Souldancer’s grey-winged image had adorned the steersman’s back since early childhood when Deim’s late father had inked it there.
    Teg saw Deim finish his meditation, rise, and snuff out the candle that stood its lonely vigil in the shrine’s alcove. Its sweet pungent scent wafted through the door, which opened wide a moment later to reveal the steersman standing in its frame fully dressed.
    “After you,” said Deim, fastening his belt with a talisman resembling a giant lizard’s eye in amber—another heirloom that cast doubt on the Cursorundas’ taste in art.
    Teg preceded Deim down a narrow tributary channel that slanted away from Melanoros’ flat peak in a wide spiral. The path intersected the bed of an underground river that had once issued from a chimney on the hill’s west face. Teg imagined how the falls must have looked plunging down the vertical shaft eons ago. The water was long gone, but the hidden cavern it had carved out made a perfect hangar for the Shibboleth .
    The ship looked just as he’d left it the night before. Of course, he’d been delirious from shock at the time. Its black crystalline skin flowed in a series of graceful curves; the main hull flanked by a pair of forward-swept wings.
    Teg noticed that the sound of Deim’s trailing footsteps had stopped. He looked back to see the steersman gawking at the ship with an idiot grin on his face. Deim’s pride was obvious, if unearned. He never tired of telling how his great grandfather had laid the hull with Jaren’s father in the last days of the Gen resistance.
    To hear Deim tell it, his ancestral ether-runner had singlehandedly won a lost war. Teg knew better. The frigate was too small to trade broadsides with capital ships and too heavy for dogfights. More credible was Jaren’s account of its service raiding enemy convoys—a role the ship still served long after its builder had fled to Tharis. That the Shibboleth had flown a black flag longer than any other pirate craft wasn’t an idle boast.
    “Hoping she’ll be yours some day?” Teg asked in a tone that left no doubt the question was rhetorical.
    Deim’s smile remained as he faced the swordarm. “She already is,” he said before rushing past Teg and up the aft boarding ramp.
    Teg ascended the ramp at a less hurried pace, savoring the lightning scent of ether. Once aboard, he headed for the small room directly aft of the bridge that the crew simply called Tactical. The chamber featured a six-sided conference table made of the same black alloy as the ship's hull. There Jaren presided over meetings of the senior crew, consisting of himself, Nakvin, Deim, and Teg, who entered to find just such a meeting underway.
    Before taking a seat, Teg studied his fellow officers’ positions. Rank followed a flexible pecking order that varied with the business at hand. Jaren always sat at the head, but his seconds-in-command followed a complex rotation. Deim was co-owner of the ship and nominally Jaren's partner in financial matters, but Nakvin outranked him on the Wheel. Teg, the only senior crewman to have begun as a hired hand, technically answered to the other three; but even the captain deferred to him when weapons were drawn. Outsiders might have called the arrangement