She had it right, he had to admit.
A nd then there was the morning two weeks from land, nothing around them but endless ocean, when the sails suddenly appeared. Twenty or thirty of them, diaphanous white triangles blown by the same steady wind the Slipfin hitched. They came over the horizon behind them midmorning, and by the midafternoon they cruised right by the league clipper. But the sails were nothing human made. They trailed beneath them long tendrils of aquatic life, ribbons of yellow and blue, splattered with sparkles along the entire long length of them. Melio could not shake the feeling that each shimmer was an individual creature attached to the tendrils, passengers that watched him as they flapped in the current, as casual as so many Agnates passing them in their pleasure crafts.
There was the doubled sky at night. Above, the constellations he knew. Below, beneath the undulations of the waves, another universe of glowing orbs. They were not reflections from the sky, as he thought at first, but shone with their light from somewhere far below. He knew that the stars below were living creatures, which made him wonder if the stars in the sky might be likewise. Creatures of some vast ocean he could not comprehend.
And there were the deep whales. He had heard tales of them, but seeing them was another thing. They appeared in a pod off a way to starboard. They looked, from the middle distance, like a series of rounded granite boulders, save that they bobbed with the seas. One broke off from the rest, dipped below the surface a moment, and then rose and came toward them. The enormous wedge of its head pushed a billow of water before it. Just before its nose would have hit the Slipfin, the whale dove. Its tailfins stretched wider than the Slipfin was long. When it submerged, the surge of water it pulled down tilted the boat with it. The upsurge of water from the fin sent a wave over the boat, drenching all on board. Melio clutched a safety rope, laughing uncontrollably at the bizarre beauty of it. He was starting to understand the way Geena lived.
The way Dariel must have lived when he grew to adulthood among these people.
The trials to come should have daunted him, but for some reason they did not. It was not that he thought they would pass through the Range, survive a run-in with the sea wolves, or possibly find one young prince in a foreign land that he knew nothing of. Just the opposite. It was the fact these things seemed so out of the reach for four small people in a relatively small boat that heartened him. They should fail. They would fail. There was no way they could not fail. With that established, he could go forward without struggling with expectations.
D ead calm. The third week in. Just as far from land as was possible. Near where the Range might well have begun. Instead of that roaring tumult-stillness. It just came upon them while nobody was paying attention. Melio did not feel the boat’s constant rocking stop; he just realized that it had when he awoke that morning. It was not even the lack of movement that woke him. It was the silence. No creaking of boards, no murmuring off somewhere in the ship’s innards, no whistle of wind or slop of water against the hull, no tinkling from the bells high up on the mainmast.
They all gathered on deck and stared at the breezeless sky and the mirror-flat surface of the water and the ghosts of limp cloths where the sails should have been. The Slipfin sat as if stuck in a sea of glass.
“When did this happen?” Clytus asked.
“Didn’t you notice?” Geena responded.
“Nah. I was deciphering what I could from league manuals in the bridge back room. I set the course and stepped away from the wheel, stuck my nose in the books. Don’t know how long for, but when I looked up this calm was on us. Couldn’t have been more than a few minutes,” he said, but none of the confidence of the statement was in the voice making it.
Geena jumped up onto the port railing. She stood there, balanced above the water. For a moment, she looked like she was going to leap down onto the hard surface of the once-was-water and go running across it, playing. A few seconds standing there, however, took the jauntiness out of her posture. “Passing strange,” she whispered as she climbed back down to the deck.
Kartholome had heard of a league fleet becalmed for nearly a month during an early crossing, but that had happened so long ago the tale had the feel of legend. He seemed more disbelieving than any of them. “I’ve never seen a stillness like this,” he said. “It isn’t possible. We’re supposed to be in the Range now. The Range of the Gray Slopes, for the love of light. This isn’t possible!”
“Shhhh,” Geena said, and Melio was glad she did. A voice should not, he felt, speak loudly into such stillness.
For two days the impossible continued. No wind stirred. No ripples moved on the surface. No fish darted in the water, or flew above it, or sailed across it. No motions or sounds in all the world other than the ones they themselves made. The silence in particular grew in intensity. Melio had never experienced a silence like this one before. The lack of noise made them all shy of making any sounds. Each scuffing of a foot on the deck or the thrumming of fingers on the railing, a cough at night or a clearing of a throat: they all seemed like an affront to the emptiness that was the world. A sign that would betray their existence to something that should not know of their existence. They spoke only when they had to, and then only in whispers. Melio always felt ill at ease afterward.
On the third morning a fin broke the surface-the dorsal of a gap-mouthed shark. It moved with an eerie slowness, as if it worked at a different pace from the rest of the world. It seemed to carve not through water but through the thick syrup the water had congealed into. Watching the shark for the better part of an afternoon, Melio felt the Slipfin to be akin to whatever tiny creatures that behemoth sucked into its gaping maw. Just as vulnerable. Just as still in the water, waiting for the mouth that would engulf them, boat and all.
By the third night they had had enough of it. Gathered together in the captain’s cabin, they ate their fill from the rich stores. More to the point, they got drunk. They filled the small room with more noise than they had heard in days. Awkward, forced humor. Boisterousness with a slightly mad edge. Kartholome drank his warm ale from a languid stretch of glass that no doubt was intended for finer things. Geena raided the league’s stores. She shared around a flask of something with an aniseed tang. None of them could name the liquor in it, but it went down.
“If it keeps on like this,” Clytus said, “we’re not going to get to die fighting sea wolves.”
“It’ll be boredom that takes us,” Kartholome quipped.
Geena drank from the flask, closed her eyes as she processed the taste and potency of it. Still doing so, she said, “I’ll not abide that. I made a pact a long time ago with the afterdeath. I’m not going to it quietly. A howling death I’ll have. None other.” She slapped a hand on the polished wood of the table.
Kartholome rose abruptly and went outside. They could hear him shouting out across the water, damning the calm and insulting the wind for cowardice, calling the waves craven. He returned and commenced to drink more.
Melio’s gaze drifted up from the ring of familiar faces and moved across the walls. Leagueman walls, decorated with their sparse sense of nautical gentility. He could not see it well from where he sat, but there was a mural at the far end of the room, painted right onto the smooth wood panels. He had studied it before. A league brig plied a sea filled with carnage, the bodies of leviathans thick in water stained crimson. Sea wolves, Kartholome had confirmed. The painting brimmed with details. Individual leaguemen and Ishtat on the deck of the brig. Harpoons caught in midair. A sea wolf pierced through a grasping tentacle, just one of many. Seabirds circling in the air above. Melio knew that detail to be true. The biggest brigs had their own contingents of birds that made the ocean crossing with them.
Despite the details, Melio could not quite believe the scene. The sea wolves themselves had no shape that he could credit. They looked like whales and squids and sharks all cut into pieces and floating in a wave-heavy stew together.
“What do they want anyway?” Melio asked. “The
sea wolves, I mean. Why attack ships? Nothing else does that. Not even deep whales.”
“Nah, they just come and take a look, near to sinking in the process,” Clytus said. “You know how much we’d have made if we were whalers? If we’d taken that big bastard and dragged him back to Tivol?”
“The four of us? Not possible.”
Clytus guffawed. There was a comment to go with it, Melio could see, but Clytus kept it in. “So, do they have a taste for man flesh or what?” Melio asked.
Kartholome warmed to the question. “Leagueman flesh, I’d say. The league and they are enemies. Always have been. Just like in the painting you’ve been eyeing. Before they had the skin, the league lost a lot of ships to them. Even a brig went down once. Disappeared. None lived, but everyone believes it was sea wolves that took her. Long time ago, this is, but the leaguemen know how to hold a grudge. Once they came up with the skin they-”
“What is the skin? Do you know how it’s made?” Melio accepted the flask from Geena. He drank with the help of her finger, which tilted the flask up to lengthen his measure.
“If I knew, I’d not be here,” Kartholome said. “I’d be sipping lemon liqueur from a cliffside estate in Manil, with two redheaded whores named Benda and Fenda.”
“He’s partial to redheaded whores,” Geena explained. “An experience he had as a lad, see. Give him enough drink and you’ll hear more about it than you want to know.”
“Anyway,” Kartholome continued, “what I’m saying is that I’d be rich, is what. Nobody knows how they make it. Could be a process the Lothan Aklun clued them to. Wouldn’t surprise me. It’s the only thing that made the mist trade possible.”
The mist trade? Melio mused. He never calls it the quota trade.
“So,” Melio asked, “should we ever get moving again and come up against these sea wolves, will the skin protect us or won’t it?”
“That’s right,” Kartholome said.
“Which?”
“It will and won’t. You were there when we bought and loaded the harpoons. You didn’t think we were going whaling, did you?” He held up a hand to stop Melio’s response. “Let me finish. You asked a question. Let me answer it. Once the league had the skin, their big ships were safe. Little ones not so much, but the big ones could sail as they pleased. The sea wolves just can’t grasp the stuff. They slip off it. Tentacles and beak and teeth and everything. So the brigs just slid on by. That’s all right if you’re two hundred feet above the water. But when you’re down low like we are… that’s a different story. They’ll jump clear out of the water and smash down on the deck. They’ve got these tentacles with grippers all up and down them. They get one of those around your leg and you’re heading for their mouth. Beaklike, the mouth is. Ugly thing so sharp it serrates the flesh like two curved knives angled just so. You maybe should have asked more about them before you signed on for this trip.”
Melio, remembering that he did not always like this man, met his gaze without humor. “You knew all that and you still came.”
“There’s more,” he said, after a long draft of ale. “The league wasn’t satisfied with just being able to get across untroubled. Spiteful bunch, they are. They took to slaughtering the beasts whenever they could. Harpoons. Those big crossbow bolts of theirs. They even threw out barrels of pitch and set seas full of the wolves alight.”
“They still do that?”
“On occasion, I suppose. Did it for generations. Never did any good, though.”
Kartholome dabbed at the moisture at the edges of his lips. For some reason this prompted him to flash a sly smile at Geena. She responded with a finger gesture threatening his manhood with an unfortunate break. They did that every now and then. A game, Melio assumed.
“I haven’t made a scientific study of it,” the pilot continued, “but I don’t think so. What I heard is, it never changed things in the slightest. The league got tired of the effort. Now they just sail through them.”
“As we’ll do as well,” Clytus said. “Might have to tack a bit, but-”
“ ‘Tack a bit’?”
The brigand, thickly muscled, masculine-featured in a blocky, weathered way, tried to shape his large hands into a demonstration of the maneuvering he had planned. He looked like a bear trying to explain the use of a pottery wheel.
Kartholome chuckled. He started to say something but found it too amusing to put into words. Geena flicked a spoon at him. He found that hilarious as well. He got up, coughing out an overflow of humor as he headed back on deck.
Geena reached across the table and patted Clytus’s hand with a solemnity that-on her-could only be in jest. “I’m sure the wolves have never seen the likes of how an Outer Isle brigand tacks. They’ll wet themselves.”
This sat a moment in the room before the dubious humor of it got Melio wagging his head. Geena slid her chair toward his and leaned into his shoulder. Clytus began to explain that it was not just tacking he had in mind. There was… He stopped midsentence. Melio turned, ready to nudge him back into it and feeling it best he get Geena’s head off his shoulder. He caught sight of Kartholome.
The man stood framed in the door. The blood in his face had drained out of him right along with the good humor he had stepped out choking over. His eyes searched the room without actually focusing on anyone.
Geena started to say something. Stopped. It was Clytus who asked, “What?”
Kartholome said, very softly, “Come outside.”
Stepping from the dim passageway onto the deck, Melio thought a full moon must have risen, so bone-blue was the light. A pungent scent invaded his nose. It flared his nostrils as it pushed inside, a sea stink so heavy he could barely breathe it. As he stepped on the slick deck, he heard the sound. Not silence anymore but a hushed slithering, a moist friction of something all around the boat, a wet sound like an enormous tongue licking his ear: all of these at once. Then he saw what made the noise, and the light and the smell. The sea was in motion around them again. Only, it was not the water that was moving.
CHAPTER THIRTY
When he learned what the task would entail, Tunnel chose his tools accordingly: two mallets, each of them rectangular blocks of solid steel, with thick hardwood shafts wrapped with black leather. Leaving Avina, he carried one of them in each hand, a feat that few could have managed and that strained even his brawny arms and shoulders. He did not care. He was in a bad mood and did not mind if it showed. He did not like being sent away from Skylene, sick as she was. Nor did he plan to be away from the worsening turmoil of the city any longer than he had to. But the Lothan Aklun relics were part of the dance of power at play in Ushen Brae now. The league wanted them; Dukish wanted them. They all wanted to use them to gain Lothan Aklun powers, all except the Free People, who knew better. If the messenger had found what he claimed to have found, it needed to be dealt with fast, before it fell into the wrong hands.
Outside the gates of the southern end of the city, a small party waited for him: the vessel messenger himself, three youths true to the Free People, and a man who had recently left the Antok clan’s service. This latter was the only one of questionable loyalty, but he brought with him a prize that could not be ignored-one of this clan’s totem animals.
The antok was young, half the size of an adult, but it still stood a hulking bulk of muscle and hide and tusks. The harness on its back was not the standard issue-as usually younger antoks were not ridden-but was a crosshatch of thick leather cords and even thicker lengths of rope. Tunnel was not at all sure just how to mount it. The antok’s tender, Potemp, convinced Tunnel to secure his mallets along the beast’s side. “So they don’t brain anybody,” he said. Then he had each of them climb into the weight arrangement he thought best. This put Tunnel right atop the beast’s shoulders.
If he had not been in such ill humor, he might almost have enjoyed the vantage point it provided him as they set out at a canter. Tunnel-who was still a member of the Antok clan, even though he had broadened his allegianc
e to include all the Free People-had never ridden one of the beasts upon whose form his own gray skin and prominent tusks were fashioned. He rather liked the feel of it. Looking forward over the mount’s coarse hide, he watched the creature’s tusk jut into and out of view as his head swayed back and forth with his strides.
He is strong like me, he thought, but young. Just a young one.
They made good time the first day, seeing nobody on the road. What a land this is, Tunnel observed, so much of it empty of people. We should change that.
It was not, however, empty of reminders of the civilization that had once thrived there. The second day, they traveled a section of old track called the Bleeding Road. On each side, erected at regular intervals, stood the decrepit remains of the stakes the Fumel clan had been impaled upon. All of them: every Auldek of that clan for the crime of altering their quota slaves to look like them. To be children instead of slaves. The crime was a hard one for Tunnel to wrap his mind around, and the sight of stout spikes and the small piles of bones still at the bases of some of them, half hidden among the weeds, did not help. Auldek bones lasted a very long time. Strong as iron.
None of the small company chose to comment on the sights or the history behind them.
They reached the bank of the Sheeven Lek on the third morning. A little farther downstream the river broke into the main channels of the delta, but here it stretched wide before them, at the full breadth of its single channel. They turned upstream, and reached the site by the middle of the day.
It was a Lothan Aklun structure, all right. That much was clear from the strangely organic shape of it, the melding of the recognizable and the bizarre. The building stood near the bank of the river, shaded by trees but with a clear stretch of beach and a series of ramps leading from the water up to its riverfront side. The beams of the frame looked to be thick tree trunks, irregularly shaped and even knobbed at the base of chopped-off limbs. All this was clear on the framework, atop which the walls and roof of the place draped like a loose skin. Or so it looked from a distance, as they stood warily contemplating it.
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