The Buyer of Plagues stood on the bedar’s deck, a merchant’s slate in one hand and a piece of chalk in the other. The pirate captain lying on the deck was bound at hand and foot, the cable that tied his ankles snaking over the ship’s starboard side. The Buyer smiled at the sobbing man, and spoke. “My sister’s navigator, Indah.”

The six men on the port side hauled on the cable, and the pirate went over the starboard side with a shriek. The men on that side paid out the rope until its prisoner was somewhere under the bedar’s keel, and then they began to sing. Port and starboard heaved in rhythm, the old Kasirutan shanty singing of home and gold and foreign girls, sweating backs heaving to and fro as the pirate was sawed against the ship’s keep and the broken shells of the barnacles beneath. They sang for twenty verses and had started a second time when they finally sawed through.

The port-side men had the bigger piece left when they pulled in the line. The Buyer stepped forward to kick it into a human shape again, and the first breath of the resurrected pirate chief was a scream. The Buyer waved the crew toward a fresh coil of rope and chalked another mark on the tablet.

“My sister’s bosun, Rakti…”

The grace of the Lifegiver is inexorable, even when the subject would much rather not be revived. Unless a gift explicitly allows a subject to resist it, it takes inevitable effect.

Godbound, Sine Nomine Publishing