Uishen showed him how to cast the line and what to expect when a fish bit. “Some unlucky bastards spend their entire lives trying to perfect their skills in what they call the fishing trade,” the ferryman said, rolling his eyes at the river and seeming not to notice Kherron’s three failed attempts to cast. “Who has time for that?”
Kherron grunted, finally finding some semblance of precision in getting the hook far enough away from the barge so it didn’t catch on the hull. Despite the familiar swinging motion, tossing a fishing line took far more delicacy than wielding a hammer. “Any amount of time is well spent if it means a man can hone his skills,” he said, glancing sideways to see if Uishen had noticed his small success. The ferryman stared at the sky, the wooden pole held loosely in his hands. Kherron leaned forward against the railing and let himself relax. “It takes more than a few attempts to carve a livelihood from any trade. Especially if one wishes to rise above his competition.” Kherron blinked, not having realized he thought this way until the words had left him. Perhaps it was the act of holding a fishing rod and resting against the Honalei’s rails, staring out at nothing but the wide Sylthurst’s waters, that brought this rare glimpse of philosophy. Though he’d never pondered it in such specific terms, what he’d said had held true for him throughout his life at the Iron Pit; he’d worked hard in his service, improving his metalwork to the point of being requested to take on certain pieces toward the end.
Uishen made a clicking noise behind his teeth. “Ah. But what if it doesn’t?” Forgetting the serenity of the rising sun upon the moving waters around them, Kherron turned to fix the ferryman with a questioning frown. “What if you can be the best at what you do without throwing away your life for practice and improvement? Without toiling like the rest of them through tradition for its own sake?”
Kherron swallowed, knowing the man referred to himself but unable to help feeling as though Uishen hinted at Kherron’s unknown abilities. “Then you could only call yourself a fraud. The title and the respect it receives are earned through experience.” Was that really what he believed? He’d worked his entire life as a bonded blacksmith—as a weaponsmith, even, when he was given the orders—and that title was as true as any he could have owned. But it had never garnered him respect, nor had his experience, which in most places was enough to call himself master and run his own forge with his own apprentices.
The ferryman slowly turned his head and raised an eyebrow, fixing Kherron with his amused gaze. “But if you have no equal, no rival in your successes, who’s to say you are not what you claim to be?”
These words filled Kherron’s belly with a heavy weight akin to shame, and he could not find a reply. For the first time, Uishen made sense, giving Kherron no reason to argue further. But the truth of the man’s statement, hidden behind such disruptive and irreverent reasoning, applied to every facet of Kherron’s life, even now. He could leave everything he knew of the anvil and the fire behind him; he did not need to be a blacksmith for these things to ring true. He traveled across lands unknown to him with only the knowledge of his destination, quite aware of the fact that he had no plan of action once he arrived and no idea what would be required of him then. And the driving force behind this insubstantial journey remained little more than a promise he’d made and the belief presented to him that he was the only one in all of existence who could fulfill such a purpose. Beyond that, Kherron possessed a relationship with lifeless objects which, so far, no one who crossed his path had seen before or could explain. He carried these skills with him, ignorant of their full potential and as much a fraud in being their master as he was in carrying the Sky Metal dagger at his hip and pretending he knew how to use it.
Uishen’s billowing laughter jolted him from his self-imposed humiliation, and he jumped in surprise. “What fool would ever think to squander a gold coin like this? On a catch that would cost him a fraction of the same to purchase?” He raised his arm, flicking his hand downriver as if he were introducing a nobleman instead of addressing his own folly. “I put the ridiculous notion to use, and I tell you, I have not once drawn in my line without dinner on my hook.” The ferryman smirked at Kherron then, as if he’d just delivered infallible proof to end their nonexistent argument.
Kherron stared at him, unable to think of a reply. The man was clearly mad, or close to it, but Uishen the ferryman and madness seemed to make fine companions; it had apparently served him well in his endeavors. His gaze dropped to the wooden pole in the ferryman’s easy grasp, and with the sun now fully shining upon the deck, he noticed for the first time the scars on Uishen’s chest.
These were nothing like the overlapping streaks of what must have been lashes on the man’s back. In comparison, those were thin and faded. Thick, banded cords of raised flesh wrapped around the ferryman’s ribs, encircling his belly and crossing over one shoulder. His left bicep, too, seemed almost an entire scar in and of itself, and Kherron didn’t understand how he could have missed this earlier. The light now lent these disfigurements both an unnatural sheen and darker shadows where the healed skin was particularly thick. They were not as random in design as those on Uishen’s back, but they were not uniform; it looked as if the man had been wrapped in hot iron cables and left alone until they cooled. The sight reminded Kherron that he did not, in fact, know anything about this man at all—nor could he pass judgement on what had led to Uishen’s particular brand of madness in the first place, if that was what it was—but he could not look away.
The ferryman had apparently lost himself in some distant reverie, his jaw slack beneath a vacant smile as he stared once more at the empty blue sky. He turned his head lazily to gaze at his passenger, then he finally seemed to notice Kherron’s intractable curiosity in his flesh. “Would you believe I’d tried to be a sailor at one point?”
Blinking, Kherron met the man’s gaze and felt the heat rise up the back of his neck. He hadn’t meant to stare or to offend, but the ferryman only smirked at him in amusement. Clearing his throat, Kherron shook his head and tried to keep his eyes from wandering past Uishen’s face. “You’ve given the impression you don’t particularly like sailing,” he replied, nodding toward the Honalei’s bow and the giant wooden waterwheel constructed there.
“Of course I don’t.” The man’s brows creased briefly, as if Kherron had insulted him by inferring otherwise. Then he chuckled. “Make no mistake, I love the water. And most of them are fine crafts, if you remove Honalei from the competition, obviously.” Kherron feigned deferment, dipping his head as if he agreed completely. No sailing vessel could in any way be compared to the Honalei, that much was certain. “It’s the ropes.”
Kherron raised his brows. “Ropes?”
Uishen removed one hand from his fishing rod and gestured to his torso with an open palm. “So many sails and so many ropes. All that rigging and tying to masts.”
“What happened?” It was, in fact, a prying question, but the ferryman had opened the conversation himself. Kherron rather thought Uishen had wanted him to ask.
“The captain sent me up to strike the Royals.” Kherron’s cluelessness must have once again plastered his face; Uishen cocked his head and closed his eyes, wiggling his fingers at the sky as if he couldn’t be bothered with such details. “The... the tiny little sails at the top. I could climb well enough. I just...” His eyes flicked across the sky, perhaps to find his memory there. “The crew never admitted how bad the storm was. Bunch of lying, spineless bastards, sailors. They’d swear the ocean was yellow if their captain told them to.” He glanced at Kherron and shrugged, as if he’d never cared for any of it. “So I didn’t fall to my death, obviously, but they left me hanging in the rigging until the storm passed. Then they blamed me for it. Almost lost my arm.” He briefly lifted and lowered his heavily scarred left bicep. “Shouldn’t have made it back to port. That crew was lazy, the captain was a fool, and they hadn’t prepared for anything. But they stripped my papers and banned me from the fleet.”
When t
he ferryman stopped talking, only the groan of turning shafts at the Honalei’s bow and the splash of the mechanized oars filled the silence. Uishen’s story had, for the first time, made the man sound lucid, discerning, and capable. Kherron could not help but sympathize with the man’s misfortune, hoisted upon him by fate’s cruel nature alone. And now that he’d heard the tale, the ferryman’s peculiarities did not seem so misplaced. It occurred to him that Uishen had succeeded in seizing his own perception of success—for an apparent madman who could not abandon life upon a swaying deck.
“Ropes,” Kherron grumbled, offering the man what little he could with grim-faced solidarity.
Uishen eyed him sideways, then smirked, jerking back his head in amusement. “Ropes.” When he grinned, Kherron returned the unspoken jest. “You won’t find any of those spoiling Honalei’s beautiful lines. No sails. A ship is always at the mercy of the winds and the skies. Honalei needs only the river. And the river’s never let us down.”
Taking a deep breath, Kherron returned his gaze downriver and tried to hide his incredulity. The ferryman had indeed appeared sensible and of sound mind—until he’d spoken of the Honalei as if she too were of flesh and blood. And how did one ignore the unsightly mass of tangled ropes that did, in fact, hang in chaos beside the cabin wall?
“Loro said she made the straightest line to Eran’s Crossing,” he said, submitting to what pride the ferryman took in his barge anyways. Men clung to whatever truths they could maintain, and he did not wish to expose Uishen’s as anything else.
“I’ve never heard Loro lie,” Uishen replied with a nod, frowning lightly downriver in an apparent attempt to mask his satisfaction.
“He didn’t tell me why, but I’d say it’s the wheel.”
“And the oars,” Uishen corrected. Kherron swallowed a chuckle. The man acted like a child when it came to the barge and his avant-guard use of traditional devices.
“Where did you get the idea?” It seemed a leading question, and while Kherron was indeed curious, he also found himself wanting to encourage the ferryman’s pride in what he’d done. Especially after a tale such as the man had just delivered. He felt a remarkably surprising kinship with Uishen, knowing the man had been betrayed by those he’d trusted and abandoned, left to fulfill his dreams on his own. It did not matter whether or not they were sane or if the stories they told themselves were true.
Uishen raised an eyebrow, frowning at the question as if only an ignorant child would not know the answer. “The only source I trust.” He pointed to his own head, then gave his temple a light tap. “Honalei was born in the same way as using gold for bait, though she spent far more time as the butt of nasty jests.” He smoothed a loving hand over the starboard railing, as if the purple barge had cried out in shame and only he could soothe her. “I spent years looking for men smart enough to accept the work I offered. I drew Honalei’s design myself, no detail of her unexplored. Finally, Loro found me. He knew Honalei’s beauty and precision before she existed, and Ralc joined us. You might say she has three fathers.” Uishen smirked. “Only three men who understood the vision of her potential.”
The sagacious nature of the ferryman’s speech belied the absurdity of its contents. While Uishen insisted the tradesmen who had turned him down had done so in ignorance, Kherron thought it much more likely that they’d written the man off as purely insane and had not wished to waste their own time. Still, no one could say that Uishen’s outlandish invention was in any way a failure.
Loro indeed must have found something in Uishen and his plans to lead him to work with the ferryman. While Kherron recognized a fellow victim of fate in Uishen, he found it difficult to imagine the man had many redeeming qualities before he’d built the Honalei and could boast of both his and the barge’s success. Then he wondered what Loro had seen in Kherron to inspire the same generosity, and he took one hand from his fishing rod to reach for the black dagger sheath at his belt.
A silver flash breached the surface of the water downriver, and Uishen lurched forward against the railing, nearly toppling over the side until he raised a knee to brace himself against the hull.
The sudden movement had alarmed Kherron more than it should have; he realized this when he found he’d grasped his dagger, unthinking, and pulled it from its scabbard. Standing open-mouthed at the Honalei’s siderail with a Sky Metal dagger in one hand and a wooden fishing rod in the other made him feel a complete fool. His embarrassment grew when Uishen threw his head back and roared with laughter. The man had managed to slide the sole of his foot up against the siderail, using this as leverage to keep from spilling into the Sylthurst while he fought to keep his own fishing rod grasped in both hands.
“The big ones are hungry today,” the man shouted, grinning in excitement. A huge splash erupted before them, and Uishen jerked again against the siderail. “Quick, Kherron. Bring me the empty spool.” His hair swung wildly about his head as he turned briefly to nod toward the wooden box on the deck.
Caught up in the apparent urgency and completely inexperienced in such matters, Kherron leaned his own rod against the rail and jumped to do as he was told. He thought it odd that Uishen would call him by name for the first time now as he rummaged through the contents of the box. Perhaps the man had forgotten to maintain his aloofness in his enthusiasm. He grabbed what seemed to be the aforementioned empty spool; nothing else could have fit the description any better. But it boasted a collection of spinning sections and levers he did not recognize, seeming more like it belonged in the jumble of Uishen’s miscellaneous junk than that it might offer any currently relevant purpose. The ferryman exploded in laughter again, and Kherron hurried to his side.
Uishen snatched the item away and attached it deftly to the end of his rod. Then he clutched one of the attachment’s levers and cranked it up and down. Grunting with the effort of holding the shuddering rod in one hand and maneuvering the incomprehensible mechanism in the other, the ferryman gritted his teeth and whispered through them, “Slowly. Slowly, and I will have you.”
Another splash sounded, this time directly at the Honalei’s hull. Kherron turned toward the sound, horrified to see his fishing rod had disappeared over the railing and into the Sylthurst’s swift current. He could not predict whether Uishen would be more furious for having lost the rod or the gold coin tied beneath its hook, but he expected the man to berate him all the same.
Uishen roared, heaving mightily on the line Kherron couldn’t believe hadn’t yet snapped. Then a massive, scaled body, glistening in the sunlight, rose from the river’s surface and dangled against the hull. Shrieking in triumph, Uishen returned his other hand to the rod and lifted, his elbows slamming into the siderail as the gigantic fish thrashed, thumping against the barge. Finally, the ferryman hoisted his catch onto the siderail, where it writhed and flapped, most of its body still extended over the water. The creature slipped under the man’s grasp, and Kherron couldn’t tell which of them would gain the upper hand. He watched the struggle, awestruck, until Uishen let out a cry of pain.
“Cut it,” the man shouted, one of his elbows raised awkwardly as if he tried to avoid an unseen danger. “Cut the line!”
Then Kherron noticed how close the fish’s mouth was to Uishen’s right hand, though the man’s hand was empty and he pinned the creature to the railing with his body and his other arm. Drawing his dagger, he finally realized the thin nettle twine had wrapped around Uishen’s forearm in the struggle, squeezing horrifyingly white lines into the man’s flesh. Swiftly, he stepped toward them and slid the blade as delicately as he could with such urgency between the fish’s wide, broad lips and Uishen’s hand.
The second the line was cut, the fish bucked and thrashed again. Its thick tail whipped out against Kherron’s hand, and to his horror, the Sky Metal blade flew from his grasp and disappeared soundlessly into the Sylthurst.
At the same moment, Uishen roared again and heaved the massive creature over the siderail. He shoved it away from him, nearly throwi
ng it to the deck as one might clear a cluttered table with the swipe of an arm. Then he pounced upon his catch, laughing wildly and wrestling with the huge fish as if it were trying to eat him for dinner and not the other way around.
Kherron watched the comical scuffle with nothing remotely akin to amusement. He couldn’t quite believe what had just happened; he’d saved Uishen’s arm from the strangle of nettle twine and had lost his weapon—to a fish. Of all the encounters he’d already had and those yet in his path on this journey of his, he’d been bested by their future meals.
He had only a few seconds to feel foolish before the river rose up before him on the other side of the Honalei’s railing. If they’d been sailing on the ocean, no doubt he would have thought this merely a cresting wave. But rivers did not swell and lift like this, nor was Kherron a stranger to the sight.
The water took the same form it had in the river by Torrahs’ cottage, the day Kherron had saved Dehlyn from drowning. Like that day, the watery hand now had no owner—no angry face within its ripples to attack him as it had at the waterfall. Gazing at the churning mass within the Sylthurst, which now towered over him and cast a wavering shadow across his face, he wondered if he’d been wrong to think the objects awakening around him were in fact coming to his aid. The column of water now was large enough to drown him on the Honalei’s deck, and he did not have enough control to know that he could stop it.
With a splash and a noise like muffled coughing, the river’s fist opened and sprayed upon the deck of the barge. The Sky Metal dagger clattered to the wooden planks, followed by a few extra thuds. Kherron gaped at the churning pillar, then a voice hissed across the deck.
Secret of Dehlyn (The Unclaimed Book 2) Page 10
