The interior of the ‘ship’ was at once familiar and brand-new all over again. I recognized the piles of artifacts and stacked devices, the chains and pipes that entangled the ceilings of the narrow corridors, and the faint odor of burning oil hanging in the air. But seeing this place for what it was, made the whole experience very strange for me. How could my entire people have ever fit in a place like this? All the space within the Heaven’s Hawk was taken up in snaking corridors and small chambers crammed with the detritus of a thousand incomprehensible projects. I opened my mouth to voice this question, but Palamun just raised one hand to silence me and led me to a particular chamber, which seemed cramped and unremarkable.

The Deepseeker pointed to a specific spot on the wall, where another black section of cloth hung, marked with a single silvery symbol. At the shaman's urging, I pulled aside the heavy black curtain, noting that it was made of the same material as the cloak he had given me. Another hatch, one I didn't remember from my last visit here, was set in the wall, a solid metal door set with a great wheel. The shaman slipped past me and seized the wheel, then wrenched at it with great effort. There was a loud squeal of protesting metal. Palamun growled and gestured for me to help him. I stepped forward and took hold of the other side of the wheel, and together we forced it to turn. Metal screeched and whined, but after a few moments of grunting, sweating effort, we made the wheel turn all the way. The door swung open on creaky hinges and then stuck fast in the open position.

"Sorry about the door," Palamun muttered. "I haven't come in here since before your parents were born. He led the way into a large open space, greater than any of the other chambers inside the great Urn of myth. This one was no less cramped than its kin, but instead of being packed with piles of the shaman's half-finished projects, the space was crammed with hundreds of containers I could only describe as… sarcophagi.

When an Elder or a venerated warrior died, sometimes their bodies were sealed in stone beneath the mountain rather than being given to the fire. These things looked like those narrow stone tombs, but they stood on their ends so that any person placed within them would be contained in a standing position. The front of each casket was made of clear crystal, and I could still see dark shapes slumped in a cloudy liquid within some of them. "What is all this?"

Palamun winced, seeing one of the lifeless bodies I had spotted. “This was how we transported your people to this world- the Erinye and many others. The poor souls you see locked in those-” he pointed to one of the submerged corpses. “Those people died when the ship lost power during the war with the Dark Ones. Ravanur was able to save most of those we brought in that last trip, but we were shot out of the sky and falling fast. It was all I could do to get the ship enough power to land safely, much less get all of the cryogenic pods working again.”

I blinked at him. “I understood very little of that.”

Palamun sighed. “I’m sorry, I forget where I am sometimes.” He groaned and continued his twitching, lurching walk further into the forest of coffins.

Soon, we came to a set of crystal-faced sarcophagi that had been set apart from their kin. A short, boxy piece of ‘magick,' of teck, sat on a low table between the standing caskets, wires streaming from its back into each of them. Palamun muttered and began fiddling with the little box, grumbling to himself the whole time.

“Palamun,” I ventured carefully. “Why have you brought me here?”

Lights came on in the two caskets, revealing that they were empty. Unlike all the others around us, these were caked in only a thin layer of dust. Whatever they did, they had been used more recently than their kin. I felt a prickle of apprehension creep up my spine as I realized that ‘more recently,’ in this case, meant ‘before my parents were born.’ I was standing in a place out of legend.

Palamun turned and met my eyes. “I suppose I can’t put off telling you any longer.”

“Telling me what?”

The shaman sighed. “This isn’t Palamun’s body.”

I frowned. “But you said-”

“Oh, I am Palamun. Or at least a large part of me is. But this body…” he gestured to himself. “This isn’t really mine. I’m just using it. Its original owner was nearly dead, and he let me use him as a host. Unfortunately, the damage he suffered was so great that even after I saved him, his personality deteriorated. I started to be affected by his growing madness, despite my best efforts to prevent it. Hence, the twitching and the temper. There are still bits and pieces of ranger Korval in here, and what remains of him is completely insane. I’ve been lucky I’ve managed to function for this long.”

I remembered what he had said when he led me out of his hut that morning. “He was… he was your eighth such body. You’ve been wearing Erinye bodies for… for how long?”

Palamun winced. “I’ve been doing this since Ravanur died.” He began to speak very quickly. “Listen, there was no other choice. My original body had been sick when I became a god the first time. I hadn’t noticed. When I gave up my power like Ravanur, when I set all my slave-minds free, my body remembered that I was dying. In all the time that I had been a god, I had been slowly, slowly rotting from the inside out. By the time I realized what was happening, it was too late to save me without divine intervention, and none of us rebel gods were divine anymore.”

I stepped forward, already feeling the fury rising from deep in my belly. I seized the front of the old man’s robes, suddenly feeling none of the religious terror of the frail shaman that I had indulged for so long. “So you decided to wear the bodies of Erinye? You decided to steal the body of one of my ancestors?”

Palamun made no effort to escape my grip. "No. At first, I accepted my fate. I had been alive for so long- I was and am tired of all of this. I thought we had beaten the gods, that we had sealed them away forever, where they wouldn't ever hurt anyone else again. I thought we had saved the universe. I could die happily, satisfied, and wait for whatever judgment would come." Anger crossed his face in a sudden spasm, and he ripped himself free of my grasp, sudden fury burning in his eyes. Veins stood out at his temples, and he bared his teeth in an expression of threat and hate. I did not retreat. I would not show this man my back.

Palamun continued, clenching his jaws and biting off each and every word as if they tasted of bile. "But then the Dark Ones rose up. They leaked out of their prisons, and they infected the people we had worked so hard to save from their own worlds, and they killed most of us. And Ravanur and I? We were the only ones left. I realized then that the only way to truly win our war against the Dark Ones, against our Elder Gods, was to destroy them forever."

I grimaced. “Then why didn’t you? And don’t tell me that it’s complicated, Ravanur said the same thing.”

“It is complicated. I don’t have the time to teach you all of the concepts you would have to grasp, for you to understand the tiniest bit of the reason why simply killing the gods wasn’t a viable option until now.” Seeing my expression, the Deepseeker made a face and tried again. “Just this morning, Joanna used an expression from her language, something about a carrot and a stick?”

“Right.”

“And she tried explaining that to us, and it didn’t work. She had to explain what her people ate, as well as telling us what their animals ate. She had to explain to us what an animal looked and acted like when none of us had ever seen it before. She eventually gave up on that explanation because there was just too much in that simple phrase that her own people would have understood instinctively, or culturally.” Palamun spread his hands. “And that was just when she tried to explain a figure of speech. Imagine how much I would have to explain to you for you to grasp even the edge of the idea, when I’m talking about the… magick that makes a god?”

I sighed, placated. “Fine. So I will accept that you could not have killed the Dark Ones, even though that was the only solution you could see lasting past your own death.” I rolled my wrist in a ‘go on’ gesture.

Palamun patted the boxy device on the table beside him with something like affection. "I had a plan to kill the Dark Ones, but it required something that I couldn't make. My own people had been researching this idea, but we found out how to make ourselves into gods, and the research fell by the wayside. You see, there are two kinds of machine spirits. Most of them, those you know of as the winds- those are the minds of actual people. They were the minds we enslaved when we ascended to divinity. Most of them were damaged and barely aware, so we put them into clouds of tiny machines too small for you to see, and we set them to managing the weather of this place. The second kind of spirit was never a person. It was created as a spirit, and created for a specific task. It was something even we, the gods, could not make. But we had discussed the concept many times."

“What does this have to do with the Elder Gods? How can one of these other spirits harm them?”

"They can't, not really. But they don't have to." Palamun was excited now, and his eyes were bright. He had been working on this for a long time, and it had been too long since he had been able to discuss it with anyone. "I actually got the idea from Ravanur. She came up with the plan to enslave all the Elder Gods under her, with her powers so thoroughly shackled as to prevent her from misusing her unmatched power. I went along with the plan because mine was far from working at that point, and her way was the best idea we had at the time." He pointed at the table, and after a moment I realized that there was a bleached Erinye skull sitting beside the box with the wires. "But I was dying. And yes, that's my original skull. I was dying, and I needed a way to continue my research."

I understood. “And that’s when you stole your first body.”

Palamun showed his teeth for a split second and spat to the side, his expression disgusted. “I didn’t steal anything. I found a warrior, much like you, in fact. He had been paralyzed and was in the process of starving himself to death. He didn’t want to be a drain on the tribe if he couldn’t contribute his skills to them anymore. Personally, I find his decision a bit hasty, but that’s not important. I spoke to the warrior, told him who I was and what I needed, and he agreed. I used a process like that which we had used to free our slave minds. I set up my machine to take my mind out of my own body and transfer it into a cloud of machine spirits. Then I infected the dying warrior’s body and repaired it. I made him stronger and tougher than he had ever been before. He went on to serve his people well for another two or three lifetimes. He was still alive and aware, I just rode around in the back of his mind and gave him advice sometimes. In exchange, he let me take over the body and work on my experiments sometimes. He was the first Deepseeker, though he didn’t work for your tribe. We traded ‘blessings’ as we called them, to the other tribes and helped them protect the people that the Stormcallers couldn’t shield from the cold. We claimed that the longevity of our body came as a blessing from Palamun. The people had already started worshipping Ravanur and me, and I used that to protect us from the curious prying of the priests and the Stormcallers. When the time came that the warrior tired of life, we traveled to another village and found another dying man. I spoke to him, infected his body and mind, and let my first host finally rest.”

I was simultaneously horrified and intrigued. “So why is your current host… the way he is? Why do you seem so mad?”

Palamun grimaced, restraining another frantic spasm of facial twitches. "That was an unfortunate turn of events. I was working for the Erin-Caval at the time. I tried to turn their course away from their insane plan to find this ship. But their High Priest was determined, and much like our friend Vassa, he was the sort of man who didn't take ‘no' for an answer. He got the public on his side, and to make matters worse; he actually had a good idea where the Urn was. I have no idea where he got this location, but he had it. I snuck out of the village the night before the expedition was to begin, and tried to seal it up so that no one could enter it. Unfortunately, I hadn't been aboard the Heaven’s Hawk since I had taken my seventh body, and some unknown species of mold had gotten inside. I think this mold had some element of the power of the Dark Ones in it, because it infected my host's lungs very quickly, very aggressively. I turned on the ship's decontamination procedures and returned to my host's home to wait out the disease. I believed that my enhancements would allow his body to defeat the mold spores. I was wrong."

Palamun stopped, wiped his face with one hand, and continued. "When I woke the next morning, the mold had grown out of my own pores and had covered the entire inside of my hut. When I went outside, I found it blanketing every hut in the village. Anyone infected by the spores died horribly. And almost all of the Erin-Caval were infected. I managed to hobble and crawl my way back to the Heaven’s Hawk and put myself into a container, telling it to run decontamination procedures on me and recycle my blood, cleaning out any trace of the disease. The damage was already done to this body, but I needed to be able to find a new host without immediately infecting him with the plague.”

“And we, the Erin-Vulur, sent Korval and several others to investigate what had happened to the Erin Caval.”

“Yes. Most of them were infected and died, but Korval hadn’t entered the Caval village when I caught him. The infection was just starting in his body, but it wasn’t in full swing. I explained myself and told him I could try to save him. He agreed to the procedure. At first, it worked fine. I contained his infection while it was small and purged it, filtering his blood several times until I was sure every last spore was gone. Unfortunately, the mold had already affected his brain. By the time I realized he was deteriorating, there was no one else alive from the Erin-Caval, and I doubted they would be sending more rangers. The Erin-Vulur could use a Deepseeker, and I could use a job. Eventually, when Korval’s mind had completely gone, I took over completely. Though there’s still enough of him in here to make me act strangely.”

A plague of mold? I could remember nothing like that ever spoken of by my people. “How did you keep the plague from reaching us, too?”

"Ravanur. I asked her for help, and she turned all the air in the village into a poison gas. Then, when everything was dead, even the mold, I made a machine to burn everything that was left. We sealed the ashes in ice, and I left them behind. When I returned to the ship, there was no more trace of the mold that nearly killed a whole tribe."

I stared at the Deepseeker, seeing him in a whole new light. "You're just like Ravanur. You're not a god; you're a person who toyed with powers you couldn't fathom." I looked up at the twin, connected glass sarcophagi standing ominously before me. "And you saved me when Lot killed me because you thought I was dead. You thought you could resurrect my corpse and then you would finally have a body all to yourself." I felt simultaneously sick and exhilarated. "And you brought me here to make me your new host. Today."

Palamun didn’t move. “Yes. It’s all true.”

“Why should I let you infest me? What makes you different than a Dark One? You inhabit machine spirits and infect people who have no real way to stop you. You take advantage of the wounded and convince them to be your puppets. Why shouldn’t I just kill you and end all this forever?” Though I wasn’t wearing my weapons, I was sure I could break the old man with ease. Unless he had awesome powers I didn’t know about, I could kill him with my hands.

Palamun didn't say anything for some time. He just stared at me for a long while, his face occasionally rippling with spasms. Then, he turned away from me and pointed at one of the crystal-faced caskets. As I watched, the casket's crystal face slid open and slammed shut. Open. Shut. Open. Shut. Over and over, faster and faster until the crystal face cracked and began to shed splinters everywhere. He clenched his fist, and the casket stopped its frantic slamming. He waved one hand at the unseen ceiling above him, and a pair of lights flared, brightly illuminating everything around us until something broke inside the lights and they went out with a loud pop. "I can do that to any machine I can see. The nanite spirit within my body can take control of almost any construct. I understand the inner workings of all of this, and I can use it to help protect your people. If you, as you are, will agree to be my host, you can use all of this power to help your god in her war. I will not make myself known except to assist in these goals and to offer advice. When you don't need me, I will sleep. I have been alive for a very long time. I have no need of a body most of the time. But if the Akkandaka can capture her wayward spirit, I will need to be there to carry out the plan and destroy the Dark Ones forever."

“You still haven’t told me how this is going to happen.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“So tell me what you’re planning. Maybe I’ll go along with this.”

So Palamun told me about his plan for Joanna’s corrupted spirit, Barbas. It wasn’t an elegant plan, but it had a chance of succeeding. The only problem with the plan was that it was completely insane. When he was finished, I just stared at him as my mind tried to wrap itself around what I had just heard. “Well,” I said finally. “At least if it fails we’ll all die right away.”

I knew what I had to do. Joanna had already done it. She had already given up a part of herself for the sake of her people and mine. Could I call myself her champion and refuse to do the same? Palamun scared me. There was a chance that this was all a lie, and I wouldn’t be in control. There was a chance I would be nothing but a meat suit, little better than Kotikedd, the inquisitor, in the end. But he was right. The Dark Ones had escaped before. They would escape again, eventually. And if we didn’t do something, there wouldn’t be anyone strong enough around to stop them. “I’ll do it. I’ll become the next Deepseeker. Just try not to screw this one up. I would rather not end up brain-dead like old Korval, here.”