Chapter 37: Stochman
broods at the edge of the frozen battlefield, blaming Jaren for the losses
leading to the wretched state of his command.
The thin man in black appears, slaps him for insolence, and offers to
restore Stochman’s command over the Exodus.
Teg has Elena help out in
the armory, while Deim protests. Teg
teases the couple, but before Deim can avenge his savaged prude, Jaren
interrupts and drags both men to a senior crew meeting outside the ship. At the meeting, Navkin opens the gate to the
Fifth Circle.
Vaun slinks through
the ship, accessing hidden compartments that he compelled the shipwrights to
build while he was hiding on Caelia Station.
Inside one, where preserved bodies of the dead are mounted, the thin man
in black, Fallon, greets him with a warning.
Fallon will attack the ship to restore it to Mithgarder command. Vaun can help or stay out of the way.
As a fan of Ecclesiastes, I was delighted to see the imagery
of the silver cord as a representation of a man’s life (see Ecclesiastes
12:6). However, this is not the
first time the imagery is mentioned, as Navkin mentions a silver chord in
Chapter 4 in the context of manipulating prana.
This will become more relevant as the mysteries in Nethereal are revealed.
Here, though, it also serves to illustrate two points. Fallon is no longer among the living, and he
draws upon another power source than prana.
Unless a new power is revealed later, this other source must be the
soul-corrupting Teth. In fact, Fallon is
revealed to be a deathless kost later in this chapter, which marks another
example of the Koschei the Deathless
myth appearing in Puppy works. (John C.
Wright and Larry Correia have both used the myth.)
Fallon remarks that the Souldancer was supposed to sleep until
the end of the voyage. Even more Thera
imagery collects around Elena. Also of
interest is a group known as the Occult Divines, or the Black Well Friars,
which suggests that there might be a Teth-centered version of the Arcana
Divines.
***
Chapter 38: Jaren and his crew trudge through a desert
toward the river. At Sulaiman’s behest,
they make camp at nightfall. Teg worries
that the local fauna is hunting them.
Sulaiman worries instead about Gibeah’s death curse.
A Guild courier from
the Exodus lands near Stochman’s
camp. His sailors board the ship and fly
it to the Exodus. Fallon greets them, telling them to capture
Elena and kill everyone else on the crew.
Stochman proceeds through the empty halls, haunted by his fear and the
flickering lights. They find a pirate
mechanic unplugging cables from Elena and kill him, but not before the last
cable is freed from the screaming girl.
***
Chapter 39: Stochman
has seized control of the Exodua, although his command is crippled by Elena’s
unplugging. To assuage his nerves, he
orders the butchering of the pirate crew, dismembering each man before dumping
the parts on the ice below. During this
war crime, the crew captures Elena.
Perceiving that she might be the key to restoring the proper functioning
of the ship, he attempts to befriend the girl, but his frustrations compel him
to turn to the lash instead. Mordechai
stops the beating as the masked necromancer wishes to talk to Elena. She tells Mordechai that she has no answers
for him. Mordechai continues to ask
questions about her being half-souled.
Instead, Elena tells him that she is a composite-soul, built out of the
fragments of many living souls, including Mordechai’s. The necromancer understands Elena’s purpose,
as composite-souls are created to retrieve a soul from the Nexus.
Teg climbs a tower by
the river to light a beacon for the ferryman.
On the way, his greed triggers a water trap when he takes a medallion
from a treasure horde.
The Nexus is where souls went before the Nine Circles was
built, as mentioned in Chapter 25. Once
again, Nethereal doesn’t reward
careful reading so much as demands it.
Stochman reveals himself to be a materialist and a
rationalist. His worldview is
fundamentally unable to grasp the spiritual struggles around him in Hell. Thus his fear continues to grow, only to be assuaged
by cruelty as that is the last thing he can directly control. I am waiting for Stochman’s impending and
inevitable punishment for the war crimes of his command. Every part of his butchery of the pirates was
calculated to increase suffering.
Elena’s stoicism and past as a living science experiment
places her firmly in the Rei Ayanami character mold. Just how old is our mystery girl? She has been described as a late teenager,
but her soul contains part of Vaun’s, and, from earlier, whatever the Guild did
to extract that piece from Vaun was done at least five generations in the past.
Vaun is now Mordechai again.
This transformation has been teased for a few chapters now, and portends
future cruelties worse than Stochman’s butchery.
***
Chapter 40: Teg
escapes the water trap, only to be mauled by shadow beasts when he lights the
beacon. He awakens in the care of Navkin
as the ferryman arrives. Each person
pays the toll, except from Deim, whose Thera zealotry causes him to try to
force his way past. The ferryman refuses
to yield. To break the deadlock, Teg
pays a second price.
In the Inferno,
the River Styx is the Fifth Circle, surrounding the City of Dis. To cross it, Dante and Virgil are ferried
across by Phegyas. Here, the river is
used as a boundary between the Fourth and Fifth Circles, which requires a
ferryman to transport one across for a price.
Navkin offers two coins, a traditional fare offered in Greek mythology
that echoes to this day in pennies on a dead man’s eyes, but the ferryman
refuses. Each must give up something
dear, except for Jaren, whose Gen ancestors have paid a price in advance. Sulaiman gives up his prosthetic, Navkin, her
Steersman’s robe, and Teg, a pistol so impressive that it would make Jayne
Cobb weep to part with. Deim refuses
to pay. As in the Greek myth, without
payment, the ferrymen will not transport him across the river. Teg offers a medallion of sentimental value
in Deim’s place so that Deim will not be left behind.
Jaren’s price is of special interest as we have yet to see
the Gen or any of their allied races in Hell.
The damned have all been men, even though many of the souls met hail
from a time where the other races still lived in the Middle Stratum.
***
Chapter 41: The ferry takes Jaren’s crew past flotsam
islands overwhelmed by drowning men to a stone castle on the other side of the
river. Dead men then usher Jaren into
the presence of a stout man dissecting a walrus, Despenser, the lord of the
Fifth Circle. The baal greets Jaren’s
crew with who each of them are, their motives, and their bargaining chips. He announces that he is allied with Baal
Mephistophilis and cannot accept Jaren’s payment as the treasure aboard the Exodus belongs to Mephistophilis. To ensure prompt delivery of that treasure,
Despenser offers safe passage through and out of Hell in exchange for an
oath. The pirates swear the vow, and
Despenser offers his assistance in recovering the Exodus.
The drowning men fighting over flotsam is reminiscent of the
wrathful in the Inferno’s Fifth
Circle who fight each other on the surface of the Stygian marsh. Navkin never looks deep into the water, so we
never see if the sullen are choking at the bottom of the sea. Resonances with the Inferno have been selective.
Whenever the depiction of hell fits with the tropes of pirate
adventures, the depiction appears in Nethereal. Thus Jaren and his crew brave the jungle
vestibule with angry natives, the fierce storm with windblown souls of the
Second Circle, and the river Styx boundary filled with a Sargasso Sea of
flotsam and shipwrecks. But where Dante
and Virgil confer with philosophers, listen to whiny adulterers, or wallow in a
blizzard of slush, Nethereal replaces
these sections with deserts, lakes of fire, and attacks on stone fortresses.
Teg is revealed to be poisoned by the shadow beasts’
bites. Despenser offers treatment, if
Teg will remain but for a few moments after Jaren’s departure. As the shadow beasts are another
manifestation of Gibeah’s death curse, Chapter 38’s conversation between Teg
and Sulaiman was a slick piece of foreshadowing.
Fallon is revealed to be equivalent to a lord of the Second
Circle in power.
***
Chapter 42: Using envenomed fangs, Fallon hunts down
demons and devours them.
Despenser teleports
Jaren and his crew, minus Teg, back to a secret compartment aboard the Exodus.
There, they run into Vaun, who walks out of a freezer filled with the
bodies of Jaren’s men. Jaren demands a
reason not to kill the necromancer. Vaun
points out that, for the moment, his goals align with Jaren’s, and he will help
Jaren retake the Exodus and kill
Stochman. Jaren relents and agrees to
the help.
Jaren, Navkin, and
Deim creep through the ship towards the bridge.
A loud commotion distracts them.
At the center of the noise, they find Teg, who is now in Sulaiman’s
body, complete with a restored arm and curses towards the demons who will
inevitably betray any deal made. They
continue to the bridge, where they use glamers and Workings to set the sailors
against each other. During the fight,
Jaren storms toward Stochman, eviscerating the officer before shadows consume
the Mithgarder’s soul.
Fallon’s fangs are similar to Navkin’s. Could Navkin be a kost? Also, as Teg now has a second body, is he now
dead?
Vaun is back, as if that name is a mask worn for the public, only to be dropped when the Teth adept's plans and cruelty are laid bare.
The competition between Navkin and Vaun over who gets to be
Elena’s parental figure starts in this chapter.
Both have unique (and sinister) connections to Elena, Vaun through a
shared soul and Navkin through her shared resemblance to Thera and Zebel.
