Chapter 26: Unable to sleep, Teg mulls over the
nightmares that have grown more frequent since the Exodus arrive in the Nine Circles. He finds clarity through alcohol. Startled by a loud noise at the bar, Teg
fires two shots. Investigating his
handiwork, he finds two shots in Crofter’s body, center mass, however the newly
deceased is still conscious. Navkin, in
her role as doctor, confirms that Crofter has no heartbeat or breath.
Stochman walks the
bridge, plotting out how to regain control of the Exodus from Jaren and his
pirates. The thin man in black appears
before him, and offers to help Stochman so that Jaren won’t upset an agreement
with the lord of the Eighth Circle.
Odd that it is noise and not the lightning-struck souls
flying past the Exodus’s windows that startles Teg. If the dead are rising, will Craighan and the
scouting team return?
Once again, Nethereal
takes inspiration from the Inferno. In Dante’s poem, souls are punished for lust
in the Second Circle by storms that whip them through the air to be pelted by
rain and lightning. Nethereal’s Second
Circle has the damned enduring the same punishment, although it never stops to
ask any soul its sins. Since Stochman is
chasing his desire for authority over Jaren, it will be interesting to see if
he will suffer a similar fate.
The thin man mentions a deal with Lord of the Eighth Circle,
a tithe, and that the Souldancer courts Jaren’s underlings. It is clear that the Arcana Divines have
their own agenda and that their cooperation with Jaren will be revoked if he
works at cross-purposes to their plans. Also, Souldancer is one of Therea’s titles. Perhaps talk of her abandoning the universe
is premature.
***
Chapter 27: Navkin returns to the Wheel to discover that
the Exodus has come to a stop in the
eye of an infinite cyclone. She starts searching
for the next gate. Jaren talks to her
about the motives of the makers of the Nine Circles as well as how Navkin’s new
abilities allow her to find the gates.
The gate to the Third Circle opens, and Navkin follows a winged being
through. The Exodus emerges above a massive battlefield, where
two might hosts hack into each other with enough savagery to cause the air to
rain blood. Jaren orders the Exodus to leave.
Navkin sets the ship into motion, but not before the ship is boarded by
intruders.
What’s a pirate story without a “repel boarders” action scene?
While we’ve known that Navkin had something special about
her, saying that the Nine Circles are her home was a surprise. In the mold of the three chapter revelation pattern that description much of how Nethereal paces out its exposition, the next two chapters develop Navkin's relation to the Nine Circles even further.
There is a danger to reviewing books, especially with an eye
for details. It is too easy think up a
just-so-story to force the book into a preconceived idea, regardless of the
evidence. At best, it is an embarrassment
to the reviewer, at worse, it leads to silly hash tag harassment like the fujoshi who recently castigated J. K.
Rowling because she ruled out their favorite imagined romantic couple. In my case, I am sorely tempted to say that
the Third Circle in Nethereal is
patterned off the Fifth Circle of the Inferno. Both realms feature widespread battle atop
rivers, Styx for the Divine Comedy,
blood for Nethereal, where the
wrathful rend and tear at each other.
However, the next couple of chapters cast doubt on the ideal that the
Third Circle of Nethereal host an
eternal battle, instead, it may be the site of one of many brush wars between
Circles. While previous Circles have
mapped to their counterparts in the classic Inferno,
others have been unique to the setting. Places
like Limbo have no theological counterpart yet revealed in Nethereal’s mythology, thus their absence. The yin
of Thera and the yang of Zadok drive
the mythology, which also shapes this version of Hell to fit. Thus I am not convinced that mapping Nethereal to the Inferno in this instance is useful.
***
Chapter 28: Teg sneaks through the ship’s halls towards
the armory. Chimerical beasts, of a different
form from those seen on the forest world, fight the Exodus’s crew and each other throughout the
ship. As the way to the armory clears,
Teg runs for it, but is captured by a monster who forces a tube down his
throat. Using his freezing blade seen in
Chapter 5, Vaun cuts Teg free. The crew
in the armory use a salamander flamethrower to clear the halls of the invaders.
Jaren and the bridge
crew listen to the fighting outside the secured hatch, complete with the
scratching of claws against the walls.
The scuffle intensifies until a human-like knocking could be heard on
the hatch. Jaren opens the door, and the
surviving crew takes refuge on the bridge.
Of a crew of 90, only a third still live.
A messenger of Ball
Gibeah knocks on the window before phasing through the hull. He demands the thousand souls in the cargo
hold. Navkin screams in defiance at the
messenger, who recoils from her in horror.
Naming her as Zebel, consort to Baal Mephistophilis, the messenger
laughs as demons join him on the bridge.
There are certain revelations in this chapter that, when
paired with myth, throw open some of the mysteries of Nethereal. I will wait until they are revealed in the
test before discussing them.
Mephistophilis is known to those familiar with the legend of Doctor Faust as the
devil whom Faust makes his contract with.
Gibeah is the site of a particularly gruesome Biblical atrocity,
described in Judges
19, which led to battle. When faced
with his own impeding rape and murder by a crowd, a man sends out a concubine
in his place. In the morning, he finds
the woman dead, butchers her corpse, and sends the pieces to the tribes of Israel
as a summons to war. The resulting
battle was a two-sided slaughter that ended in genocide. Zebel might be a reference to the famed
wicked queen Jezebel, who
contested with the prophets over who was more powerful: God or Baal.
Navkin’s oddities now are attributed to an infernal origin
as she bears the silver eyes of Zebel.
Yet she also looks like depictions of Thera.
Teg’s attacker reminds me of the facehugger of Alien or the trilobite of Prometheus, although in human form.
***
Chapter 29: Jaren and the full complement of the Exodus’s crew wake up in the middle of a sandy
desert. Stochman immediately confronts
Jaren, blaming the Gen captain for the demons stealing the Exodus. Jaren points out that with the ship gone, he
has no need for Mithgar’s sailors. He
then checks on Navkin, who is treating the living members of the crew. When the demons attacked, she used her new
Hell abilities to move the crew away from the Exodus. Now 90
able-bodied crewmembers, dead and living, surround them in what appears to be a
different Circle. Jaren starts plotting
how to reclaim the Exodus.
Later, raiders
overwhelm the Exodus’s crew and march
their captives away. The few lucky
enough to hide, including Navkin, Deim, Teg, and Vaughan, regroup and resolve
to rescue Jaren and the other captives.
The dead in Hell keep their minds, desires, and memories,
even as the normal demands of a body, like breathing, no longer affect them. But
after Pirates of the Caribbean, the
idea of an undead pirate crew amuses me.
Like those pirates, nothing can harm the dead in Hell, except for the
venom of Navkin’s bite and her blade.
