Children of Zero

by Andrew Calhoun

  It was only then that Saeliko allowed herself to take in the full extent of what was happening. She pivoted and instantly saw the colossal mass of metal hurtling through the sky just over the water. It looked like a steel bird. Its tremendous wings weren’t flapping; they were fully extended and rigid. She could tell the monstrosity was trying to turn, for it was angled with one wing down and the other raised at a thirty degree angle into the sky.

  The lower wing clipped the water. The body of the beast rippled violently. And then the whole thing came apart.

  2 COLLISION

  Few Saffisheen have ever chosen to leave the Order. Separation from the tribe does not become them. Strange, then, that two Saffisheen are plying the waters of the Sollian so very far from home. Not so strange, then, that they are together. Janx, the senior of the two, has proclaimed her continuing loyalty to your Holiness, but little is known of the other. It is hoped that Janx’s guidance and the bond of sisterhood between them will keep this girl in check, for we do not wish to know what a rogue Saffisheen looks like.

  ~ Kolva Tallep, from 32nd Report to the Empress on Maelian Activities in the Sollian

  2.1 SAELIKO

  Saeliko stood on the beach and underwent an existential crisis.

  The roots of her crisis could be summed up thusly: Up until this exact moment in her life, she had been a deist, not a theist. Her deism had been kept secret, of course, especially from Janx, but also from anyone else who thought to broach the subject. It wasn’t a very particularly hard secret to keep. It wasn’t often that a Saffisheen would be asked to explain her views on the Five Sisters.

  Yet she aspired to be more than just Saffisheen; she wanted to be a harker. In fact, she was already the de facto harker of the Epoch. She would have to let the crew officially vote her in at some point, but that was a mere technicality.

  Harkers had two roles. On a terrestrial level, the harker looked after the material needs of the crew. She made the final decisions on where to sail, when to proceed with maintenance, which opportunities to pursue, and so on and so forth. The harker’s second role was entirely spiritual. It was her responsibility to commune with the Five, thereby cultivating their wisdom and favor.

  In Saeliko’s entire life, she had never once encountered a credible piece of evidence to suggest that the Five Sisters existed. That didn’t necessarily mean that they didn’t exist. Rather, it simply meant that there was no evidence for it. Saeliko had to concede that it was entirely possible that each of the Sisters was at present watching over womankind but was utterly unwilling to interfere in her affairs. Why this should be, Saeliko had no opinions on the matter.

  This defaulted her to what she felt was a more reasonable position. She concluded that the goddesses – or at least one of them – had existed long ago, but had since ceased to exist. The evidence for their original existence was all around her. The fish in the sea, the birds in the air, the air she breathed. None of this could have popped into being out of nothing. The initial creation of the world had to have been done by an all-powerful intelligence. There was simply no other logical alternative. That much was plain to see.

  Hence the deism, but not the theism.

  Until now.

  Now her deism lay in pieces just off the coast of Butterfly Island. She, along with the crew of the Epoch, had watched a machine of the goddesses slam into the Sollian. For it was certain that no mortal could have built such a vessel.

  In a single, world-shuddering moment, Saeliko’s spiritual foundations morphed. The Sisters were real.

  “That’s a body,” Jren stated. She was standing next to Saeliko, hand on brow to block the sun, eyes squinting to pick out details at distance.

  The Epoch’s two dinghies bobbed up and down on the waves where the beast had struck the water and annihilated itself. Saeliko could just make out one of her crew – was that Brenna? – heaving something that definitely looked like a body out of the sea.

  Saeliko had wanted to be in one of those dinghies. She had been filled with a burning desire to see the wreckage firsthand and feel the presence of the goddesses in her hands. That would have been foolish. Somewhere in the jungle behind them was an ex-harker who was no doubt being consumed with thoughts of wrath and vengeance. And so she stayed on the beach. She also ordered five of her crew to keep their eyes fixed on the treeline.

  A body. She pondered the magnitude of this new information. Could it be one of the goddesses? Certainly not one of the Five. Maybe one of the Twenty-four? Micharek the Drinker? Saji the Thief? They were both mischievous and fond of mayhem.

  There was nothing for it but to wait. The sailors in the two dinghies would need time to search the surface of the water. It was a shame the beast hadn’t wrecked itself closer to shore where the water was shallower. As it was, the bulk of the machine – whatever had remained intact – had slipped beneath the waves and into the depths. Even if the Epoch had been equipped with a diving bell, Saeliko highly doubted she could find volunteers to make the descent. Let alone any trepidation they might feel at venturing into what would now be a holy site on the seafloor, there was also the matter of sharks. Butterfly Island and its neighboring sister islands were notorious for them. If there were bodies in the water, they would come. Cutters, greys, pointerheads, white fins, and worst of all, the big shimmer sharks. The shimmers were relentless when they smelled blood.

  Time slipped by, the boats continued to circle in the water, and darker hypotheses began to formulate in the Saffisheen’s churning mind. Had her mutiny triggered the wrath of the Five? Janx had always been sincerely devout, only to be ousted by a faithless qarlden. And at the very moment Saeliko and the crew turned against Janx, a divine intervention – of sorts – took place. Could that have been only a coincidence? Was the Epoch going to be cursed by whatever and whoever the dinghies dragged in?

  Or maybe the goddesses were coming to aid Saeliko in her new role as harker.

  “They’re coming back in,” Jren told her.

  “Yes, I have eyes, thank you.” Saeliko watched the crew row toward the shore. The relatively short journey seemed to take an eternity. When the lead dinghy got closer, she could see Brenna leaning over the front of the bow. Her deep voice called out, discernible even over the constant rhythm of the surf.

  “Lofi!” she bawled. “We need Lofi!”

  As it happened, the surgeon was standing close to Saeliko. “Go get your tools,” the qarlden ordered in a quiet but commanding voice. Lofi ran off without a word.

  When the dinghies were nearly ashore, Saeliko could see she had been mistaken. They hadn’t pulled one body out of the water; they had pulled out at least half a dozen. Mohdheri sat on the stern seat next to a strange-looking black-skinned fellow who was either in pain or in shock. Behind Mohdheri, the diminutive Cassami was holding steady a black-haired woman who was vomiting over the side of the boat.

  These did not seem like divine beings.

  The bow of the first dinghy ploughed into the sand in the beach. Two women, Brenna and a slender Kalleshi sailor named Amba, jumped out first. They immediately spun around and began pulling out a bedraggled man dressed all in orange. Saeliko had never seen anything like it. It wasn’t that he was wearing an orange tunic with matching orange trousers. The entire ensemble was a single item of clothing that ran from neck to feet. Poking out of the collar was a grizzled face of olive skin and white and black peppered stubble, topped off with a heap of hair that flopped around in matted coils.

  And then she saw why Brenna had called out for the surgeon. The man’s left hand was completely gone, ripped off at the wrist. Someone had tied a strip of leather tightly around the man’s forearm and wrapped a wad of cloth at the end of the stump to staunch the bleeding. Nevertheless, Saeliko could tell from his pallor that he had already lost a lot of blood. It was something of a testament to his willpower that he hadn’t feinted.

  “Water’s fucking crawling with shimmers,” Brenna reported. Amba was nodding as if to confirm the sto
ry. “This one’s lucky he only lost a hand. We had to beat the shark off him with our bloody oars.”

  “Bring him to me!” Lofi ordered, slightly out of breath from her run. She was carrying a rolled up leather carrying kit with her various implements tucked inside. “Lay him down by the fire over there.” She pointed to the missing hand. “Someone go get me the cautery.”

  Saeliko turned her attention back to the water. The second dinghy had hit the sand, and now all of the survivors were being dragged onto the beach. Including the shark victim Lofi was tending to, there were eight of them in all. Strangely, there was only one woman. Saeliko wondered if that had any significance.

  She inspected the woman first, guessing she might be their leader. She was lying on her back in the sand, blood seeping out of several scrapes across the left side of her temple and from a little cut on her lower lip. Other than superficial wounds, she didn’t look worse for wear. The Saffisheen squatted down beside her. Am I looking at a goddess? Is this really what they look like? It seemed doubtful. On the other hand, the person didn’t look like anyone Saeliko had ever seen before. To start with, her clothing was curious – brown trousers that looked too thin and tight to be of any practical use and a blue top that had no laces or buttons. She had no shoes on at all.

  Saeliko was less interested in the clothing and more interested in the girl’s face and skin. Dark and round, she almost had a Qomari face. The skin tone was different though, more soft-hued. And the black hair was too black and too straight to be Qomari.

  The Saffisheen squatted down in the sand, reached forward and grabbed a handful of black hair. The woman gave a surprised yelp but otherwise didn’t move. Saeliko let the long strands of wet hair run through her fingers. Then she moved her hand to the woman’s face. She grabbed her jaw, thumb and index finger framing the woman’s mouth. Saeliko bent over so that her own face was directly over the face of this strange new creature. Deep brown eyes looked back. There was fear in those eyes. A whimper escaped from her lips.

  “Who are you?” Saeliko asked. At first there was no response other than scared surprise. Saeliko searched for any signs of the divine and found nothing. At least not until the woman spoke. In a soft, timorous voice, the woman spoke a language completely foreign to Saeliko. It sounded like no language that she knew of. Well, that’s decidedly unhelpful, she thought to herself.

  “Turn her over.” This was Cassami. Saeliko remembered that the sailor had been fixated on the back of the woman’s neck.

  “Let’s see what she’s got,” Saeliko said. She roughly pushed her over until she lay on her stomach. She pulled the long black hair aside and saw the rectangular patch of black skin. No, not skin. It was something attached to the skin. Like a parasite, but woman-made. (Or goddess-made.) But it wasn’t natural. Nature didn’t build in straight lines. She touched it, gently at first and then with more force. Impossibly, it felt as hard as metal but somehow flexible.

  “What is it?” Cassami asked. Saeliko just shook her head. She didn’t have a clue. But here, too, the disconnect was plain to see. This fragile looking stranger that fate had deposited so ungracefully on the sands of Butterfly Island looked nothing like what Saeliko imagined a goddess should look like. The divine were not half-drowned, wounded and vulnerable. Nevertheless, the evidence was right there on the back of her neck.

  “What about the others?” Saeliko inquired.

  “Sorry?”

  “Do they all have this . . . thing . . . on the back of their necks?”

  Cassami shook her head. “Just one, I think.”

  “Who?”

  “That one.” Cassami’s finger picked out a man lying on his back. He also had darker skin, but more tawny than the woman’s. Actually, he looked Maelian. He also looked to be unconscious.

  “Is he wounded?”

  “Don’t think so. Didn’t see anything wrong with him.”

  “So why is he unconscious?”

  “Sorry, qarlden. No idea.”

  A gut-wrenching scream pierced the air. Saeliko didn’t need to look to know what was happening. Somewhere near the beached Epoch, a few sailors were no doubt holding the orange-suited man down on the ground while Lofi applied the cautery to the stump where his hand used to be. Ugly work, but it had to be done. The screaming continued unabated until it stopped quite suddenly. Again, Saeliko didn’t need to look. He had blacked out.

  She left Cassami to watch over the maybe-a-goddess-maybe-a-fragile-girl sprawled in the sand and hiked over to Ollan, who was giving water to one of the two black men pulled out of the water. “Walk with me,” she ordered as soon as she was close enough. As always, Ollan did as he was told without asking any questions.

  She led him away from the shoreline and away from the rest of the crew. She stopped after she was sure they were out of earshot. “Thank you.”

  “For?”

  “You know what for. You were the first one to act when Janx made her move. You and Shen.”

  “We think you’re a more reasonable wager than Janx.”

  “A more reasonable wager? Not exactly a ringing endorsement of loyalty.”

  “No offense.”

  “Some taken.”

  “Shen and I are Lavic,” Ollan pointed out.

  “I noticed.”

  “On a Maelian ship.”

  “Well, technically, we’re raising the red, so we won’t be Maelian anymore.”

  “You know what I mean. Anyway, yesterday, we were outnumbered and broke. Today, we’re still outnumbered and broke, but our chances of rectifying the latter just went up.”

  “You’re in it for the money then?”

  “You misunderstand me,” Ollan countered, shaking his head. “It’s not about the coin. Look, I have no problem with Maelians, and I definitely have no problem with most of this crew. You and Janx could have just as easily put a sword through me after you pulled me out of the sea a year back.”

  “The thought crossed our minds.”

  “I know it. I owe you my life. But I’m not thick in the head either. I know the tides of magnanimity come in, and they also go out.”

  “You want out?”

  “No. Not now. I said I’d follow you, and I will. But I figure I ought to be honest with you, too. There will come a time when I’ll be forced off the Epoch, dead or otherwise. When that time comes, if I’m still breathing, it’s going to be a whole lot easier if I’m not poor.”

  “What about fame and glory? Don’t you want women and men to tremble at the very mention of your name? What if I told you that we could be masters of the Sollian and make rich women bow at our feet?”

  Ollan paused for a moment. “Have you ever heard of Skillins the Butcher?”

  “Of course.” Everyone had heard of the Butcher. She had terrorized the Auburn Coast and damn near brought the Lavic trade guilds to their knees. “She harkered the Black Whisper.”

  “That’s right. What about Mad Talia. Heard of her?”

  “Yes. Way before my time though. About a century ago. Insane by all accounts. Had a predilection for wearing people’s faces after she killed them. What was her ship? It had a Lavic name. Something like Otylyaks. What does that mean? Wanderer?”

  “Otyll-arks,” he corrected her. “It’s hard to translate, but it’s more like drifter. What about Cadezla and Zoffin? You know them as well?”

  “Sure, I know Cadezla and Zoffin. They harkered the Gristle and the Carroch. Look, Ollan, I appreciate that the Lavics have had a rich history in piracy, but I’d appreciate it if you could come to your point soon. If you hadn’t noticed, I’m having a busy day.” She waved a hand at the line of rescued strangers still lying and sitting on the beach.

  “Rikol.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Rikol the Silent.”

  “Okay, her I’ve never heard of,” she admitted.

  “Skillins, Talia, Cadezla, Zoffin, they were all hunted down and killed. Not a one of ‘em lived past thirty-five. They shined brightly for a while,
and their names made people piss their breeches. But what good did it do them in the end? Now, Rikol, she’s a different story, a story only told by a few old women with long memories in beer houses that have seen better days. You see, Rikol wasn’t flamboyant, and she didn’t have much of a reputation. Townsfolk were none the wiser when she stepped off her ship and walked through their streets. She preferred it that way. Her and her crew captured a few big ships. They even took down a Lavic treasure barque. And then, just at the height of her career, she disappeared.”

  “Just her?”

  “The whole crew, along with the ship.”

  “Storm probably took them.”

  “That’s what people thought. At least, that’s what they thought before a few crew members popped up in Lavanthene. After a good bit of torture, they fessed up. Turns out that Rikol ordered the ship to be scuttled, but not before they divvied up the treasure and agreed to go their separate ways.”

  “Where did Rikol go?”

  “No one knows. Every now and again, rumors emerged. Some said she had her own jungle kingdom, others said she bribed her way into legitimacy back in Lavanthene, that she became a member of the Council. Doesn’t really matter though, does it?”

  “So you’re saying that if you had a choice between sailing under Mad Talia and Rikol the Silent, you’d choose Rikol the Silent.”

  “Every time.”

  “Which means you also think that I’ll become Mad Talia, or Skillins. You think I’ll die chasing fame.” Saeliko looked at Ollan’s blue eyes with her green, carefully gauging his reaction.

  “Maybe you will, maybe you won’t, but history isn’t on your side.” The even tenor in his voice indicated he was unperturbed. “I grant you, you’re smart, and you’re Saffisheen. Those two points of fact alone will take you – take all of us – a long way. We’ve also got time on our side. We can take a few prizes, plunder a few towns, before the colonial governments start to take much notice. I reckon we can make a fair bit of coin before we have to start dealing with hunters.”