by Mel Odom
Chastened, Shang-Li stopped what he was doing and looked up at Red Orchid. “Are you all right?” he asked.
Pain turned her face pale and made her features look azure in the blue light. The unintended echo of the Blue Lady’s appearance left Shang-Li slightly unsettled. He almost expected the Blue Lady to talk to him and tell him it was all a trap, that they were wasting their time while she closed the net around them.
“I’m fine.” Red Orchid stretched a bit on the prow, then became still again. “Becoming so small is hard. I feel more trapped than ever.”
“It won’t last long.” Amree took the figurehead’s hand and squeezed it gently. “I promise. No longer than we need take to get from this ship to ours.”
Red Orchid nodded and they continued.
“Gently,” Amree admonished Shang-Li.
“I know.” Shang-Li set the pry bar and began again. He worked at the figurehead, but couldn’t help feel that the task was taking far too long to do.
“What’s wrong with her?” Shang-Li stared up at the figurehead mounted on Swallow. Since they’d disconnected her from her original ship, Red Orchid hadn’t spoken.
“The toll of moving her was higher than we’d expected.” Amree floated in the water before Red Orchid and worked with various things she had from her craft.
Shang-Li didn’t know what the items were that the ship’s mage used, but he knew they were things a ship’s mage used to put strength and power into a craft. He felt the surge of something that emanated from Amree’s efforts, and he knew it was stronger, more focused, than anything she’d done aboard Swallow before.
“She had to … diminish herself to fit within the figurehead.” Amree took a black pearl from her pouch and held it in her hand. When she closed her hand, her fist glowed with purple light that bathed Red Orchid. “She’s never done that before.”
During the swim back from the ship to Swallow, Red Orchid had finally stopped speaking and seemed unable to hear. Even while getting hung on Swallow, she hadn’t uttered a word.
“Is she going to be all right?” Thava asked.
Amree shook her head irritably. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like her. Maybe more of her remains within the ship we left behind. Maybe she wasn’t able to squeeze all of herself into the figurehead.”
“Wouldn’t she have known that?”
“She doesn’t know what she is either.” Amree sounded discouraged. “This is new for both of us.”
“Perhaps all she needs is time.” Kwan Yung leaned over the railing over the prow and peered down.
Shang-Li looked at the inert figurehead and Swallow’s only partially repaired broken hull, and he thought about the increasing strength of the Blue Lady’s visits. “Unfortunately, time is the one thing we don’t have.”
Another salvage crew swam toward Swallow.
“This can’t be good.” Iados turned to face the approaching group. “They started out after we did.”
Yugi, the young lookout, swam at the forefront. He was excited and out of breath as he coasted up close to them and stopped. “We found Grayling.”
Grayling was nestled in a canyon that was hard to see while swimming. Broken merchanters, warships, and fishing boats littered the ocean floor under the canopy of strange trees. Tentacled creatures hung like obscene fruit from the branches of the trees. When anyone ventured too close, the creatures launched their tentacles and pulled their prey in to them.
Shang-Li and the others battled the creatures and drove them back from the trees nearest the canyon. Even in those depths, the blue light coming from the land chased away the gloom after a fashion.
The first ship lay on her side. Shang-Li took some of the glowing coral Amree had created from her kit and held it to shine around the vessel. Barnacles covered her stern but he found part of a name. He used his dagger to clear away the barnacles and found:
Wavecutter.
“Do you know her?” Iados asked.
“A merchanter,” Shang-Li said. “She was in the documents we researched. She went down a few years after Grayling.”
“Shang-Li.” Thava called from ahead, waving her glow-stone to get his attention.
Shang-Li swam over to her and saw a few fresh corpses lying on the ground near another ship. They’d been savaged by predators and most of the soft parts of the bodies were gone.
“They haven’t been down here long. Not long enough to have come down with Wavecutter.” Shang-Li swam to one of the men and held the glowstone closer. Crabs and other small carrion feeders scuttled away as he turned over the body.
Only shredded gore remained of the man’s features. Even if Shang-Li had once seen the man, he wouldn’t recognize him now.
“Someone’s alive inside!” a sailor called out.
The man lay on the floor of the captain’s quarters. He was human, in his middle years, and scarred from life at sea. He was pale, close to death.
Weakly, he held his hand up to ward off the brightness from the glowstone. His swollen tongue protruded from his cracked lips despite the water that surrounded him.
“Who?” he whispered.
“No one who means you harm.” Thava held out her empty hands but her great size still made her threatening to see.
The man glanced at Iados. “Devils? Come to fetch me to some pit and torture me?”
“No,” Shang-Li answered. “Where’s your captain?”
“Dead. Thirsted to death.” The man grabbed at a dagger near his hand three times before securing a hold. “Like all the rest of the crew. I think I’m the only one left.”
“We have water.”
The man laughed weakly but it quickly turned into a cough that racked his body. “We’ve got water too.” He waved toward the ship. “But we couldn’t drink any of it because of the curse on this place. Blasted spellplague,” the man said. “Keeps us alive down here, but fouls out water before we can drink it. Every mouthful you take is tainted with brine. Makes you sick.”
“We can get you a drink,” Shang-Li said. He reached into his bag of holding and pulled out a large bladder normally used to carry spice powder. It was airtight and contained some of the air Amree had created back at Swallow.
One of the sailors found an empty barrel, lined it with tarp, and tied it to the mainmast. Shang-Li pushed the bladder into the barrel and squeezed the air out. Huge bubbles formed and collected at the top of the barrel, then the space grew bigger.
Thava picked up the sick man and carried him to the barrel. Once he was inside, once he’d discovered the air pocket trapped inside, he gave a glad cry of understanding.
“Gods, let me drink,” he croaked. “All this wet around me, and me parched as a frog in the desert.”
Shang-Li handed over one of the bladders of water they’d brought with them. “Go easy with it or you’ll make yourself sick.”
The man took the water in his shaking hands. “I’ve been without water before. I know to pace myself.” Even so, his past experience didn’t help him now. A moment later, he emerged from the barrel and threw up. The bile formed a cloud in the water that immediately attracted a small school of fish to feed on the debris.
“My name is Kulher,” the man said a short time later. Looking better rested and more healthy, he sat cross-legged in front of Shang-Li. “This ship is Lysinda, named for the captain’s oldest daughter. We were a cargo ship until the Blue Lady decided to pull us under.”
“Do you have any idea why she picked you?” Iados asked.
“No.” Kulher shook his shaggy head. “We’ve run these waters for years. We knew to stay away from the domain of the Blue Lady, even though most of us were convinced she was a legend captains with ill luck blamed for losing their ships.”
“You saw the Blue Lady?” Shang-Li asked.
“Only for a moment, before the storm struck us, broke us up, and dragged us under.”
“How long have you been down here?”
Kuhler shrugged but shivered. “Long enough
for a lot of men to die from thirst.”
“Probably only a few more days than we have,” Iados said.
“We should have thought of the trick with the water barrel.”
“Unless you could have made air,” Thava said gently, “it wouldn’t have done you any good.”
“The ship’s mage died when the Blue Lady took us. We’d barely entered the water when a shark snatched him and bit his head off.” Kuhler looked forlorn. “I lost me a lot of good friends on this voyage. Men who have stood with me through bad times and hard times.” He paused. “I feel guilty for asking, but do you have a way to get out of here?”
“We’re working on it,” Shang-Li said.
“Why does she bother to bring the ships down if she’s not going to do anything with them?” Iados asked as he swam beside Shang-Li back toward Swallow. He flicked his tail in annoyance.
“The next time I see her, I’ll ask her.”
Iados regarded him. “You would, wouldn’t you? It would probably be the last thing you did before she killed you.”
“She hasn’t killed us yet. I remain hopeful about that.”
“Or foolish without just cause,” Iados growled. “She may be busy with other things, or we’re so insignificant she doesn’t care. Maybe she derives pleasure from watching her captives thirst to death in the ocean.”
Shang-Li showed his friend a lopsided grin. “You’re such an optimist.”
“Well, down here the glass would always be full, wouldn’t it?”
“She said she planned to break away from here. So whatever the Spellplague has wrought also binds her to this place.”
“She has a very big cage,” Iados commented. “Still, once you know where the walls are, size doesn’t matter. You’ll still feel the confinement.”
Shang-Li swam deeper to examine the other shipwrecks. The goods aboard Lysinda would stand them in good stead for days, and the salvage potential seemed enough to finish making repairs on Swallow. He focused on finding Grayling, wondering if the presence of Wavecutter harbored some hope of finding the ship in the tangle of dead ships lying in the canyon.
He found two other ships, Garnatok and a slave ship that had dozens of skeletons in her cargo hold, but not Grayling. As he approached the next ship, Yugi called out to him.
“Shang-Li! Over here.”
Heart pumping a little faster, Shang-Li told himself not to get his hopes up. Even if Yugi had found the ship, chances were good that everything aboard her-including the precious books-were ruined.
Upon first sight, Shang-Li’s hopes diminished. The ship lay broken in two, and much of her starboard side was ripped away. Not even much remained for salvage. Still, he landed on her broken hull, took a fresh grip on his spear, and freed the glowstone from his bag.
“Is this it??” Yugi asked as he came to stand behind Shang-Li.
Shang-Li held up the coral so the light played over the prow where the ship’s name was proudly displayed. The paint had faded over the long years, but it was still legible: Grayling.
“Yes.”
“All this for books?” Yugi asked. “Truly? That’s the only treasure you want?”
Cautiously, Shang-Li shined the glowstone down into the hold. Things moved below, but they were fish and other scavengers, nothing large enough to offer him much threat.
“It is,” Shang-Li replied. “You’ve seen my father, and you know that he serves the Standing Tree Monastery. They don’t search for treasure.”
“I’ve heard that they don’t turn it aside when they find it neither,” another sailor said.
Shang-Li didn’t argue the point. The monastery was self-sufficient but they did a lot with what they were given. When the monastery did well, the villages around them prospered as well.
“No gold aboard this ship?” the sailor asked.
“She was an explorer.” Shang-Li stepped over the side and swam down into the hold. The lighted coral barely held back the darkness. “The only gold she might have been carrying will be in the captain’s strongbox and perhaps in the pockets of her crew.”
“Could be worth a look.” Two of the sailors split off and swam toward the ship’s waist where crewmen slept.
“If an air pocket remains aboard this ship, I want to know about it,” Shang-Li said. “And don’t open anything that could be watertight. We can’t lose those books.”
He swam through the darkness, usually only able to see a few feet in front of him. The darkness seemed to magnify the darkness, make it appear to be larger and deeper than it actually was. He went through the cabins one by one. All of them were open and flooded. He had to swim down to enter the ones on the starboard side and up to enter the ones on the port side because Grayling lay on her side.
Sand had filtered in as well and provided a layer of lighter coloring in the shadows. Eels slithered across the sand and bared the wood in places. A squid squirted away into hiding.
Bayel Droust’s cabin was easy to recognize once Shang-Li got there. A fine powder of sand had drifted over the writer’s tools and ink bottles, but they looked otherwise unharmed.
Shang-Li put the glowstone on the edge of the overturned desk behind, gathered those things, and put them into his bag. He couldn’t imagine Droust leaving the items behind out of choice.
He found an oilskin bag that felt like it contained a sheaf of paper Droust would have used to send letters. But under a tangle of loose clothing, another oilskin pouch held a stack of what looked like books or journals.
Shang-Li felt the shape again with his hands to reassure himself of his immediate conjecture. He smiled in the shadows and couldn’t wait to get back to Lysinda’s water barrel to confirm his suspicions. As he shoved the bag into his own, he noticed a shadow on the wall in front of him.
Someone had followed him into the room and now stood in front of the glowstone. The light played over a naked blade.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Shang-Li shook his arms and his fighting sticks dropped into his waiting hands as he turned. A Shou man wearing the tattoos of the Nine Golden Swords lunged into the cabin and thrust his spear at Shang-Li’s chest.
Shang-Li turned sideways, and the spear slid by less than an inch away and thudded into the wall behind him. Taking a step forward, Shang-Li whipped the stick across the man’s face, then snap-kicked the warrior in the groin.
His opponent dropped to his knees, gagging and spewing a cloud of bile into the water around him. Shang-Li went forward and hammered the man at the base of the skull. The Nine Golden Swords man slumped slowly through the water as he lost consciousness.
Outside in the main hallway, the passageway was taller than it was wide with the ship on her side, and there was precious little room to maneuver. He chastised himself for allowing the salvage crew to get separated. He’d known the area wasn’t safe, but it had seemed safe enough.
Three more Nine Golden Swords warriors blocked the way he’d come. Their weapons reflected the orange light from the coral he’d left in Bayel Droust’s cabin. Without a word, they started forward, filling the passageway.
Shang-Li backed toward the other end of the ship. Stairs led up to the top deck. A shadow crossed his field of vision and he dodged back just as the attacker waiting outside the cargo hold thrust his sword into the hold.
Shang-Li slid his weapon into the man’s sleeve and jerked his arm above his head. He blocked the sword with the other fighting stick. Setting himself against the underside of the deck, Shang-Li pulled with all his strength.
The Nine Golden Swords warrior came through the hold and slammed into the opposite wall.
Shang-Li ripped free his fighting sticks and propelled himself through the cargo hold as the three other men charged his position. Darkness above filled his peripheral vision and he turned swiftly as he swam.
Thava stood on the ship and held her battle-axe across her thighs. “We have guests,” the paladin announced.
“How many?” Shang-Li put his fighting sticks away and dr
ew his sword.
“I’ve spotted at least a dozen.” Thava smiled grimly. “But you can subtract two of those.”
“I counted five inside. One of them is down but not finished.”
“It appears the Nine Golden Swords were more fortunate than we were after the storm.”
“Or the Blue Lady spared them,” Shang-Li responded, then he concentrated on staying alive as the surviving warriors boiled from the hold.
Despite their bristling blades and zealous nature, the Nine Golden Swords warriors weren’t used to fighting underwater. Shang-Li took advantage of his swimming ability and shoved himself into a long dive over their heads.
The unexpected move caught the men by surprise and they ducked back, but not before Shang-Li slashed through one man’s sword shoulder to disable him. By then Thava had leaped from the ship’s side and crashed into the other three. They fell, bowled over by her armored size and weight.
Thava kicked one of them in the head to render him unconscious, then clove another man from crown to the nape of his neck. The remaining man ran for his life but he didn’t get far before the paladin brought him down with a throwing axe. The flat of the blade crashed into the back of his head and he crumpled.
“What do we do with the ones that still live?” Thava asked.
“If I had my way,” Iados said as he stepped from the brush that hugged the canyon wall, “we’d slit their throats and have done with them. Let the Blue Lady’s little beasties fill themselves up on them for a while and buy us some time.”
Thava shot him a look.
“Except that I know that isn’t your way,” Iados went on.
“And it never will be,” Thava vowed.
Iados sighed. “I must admit, I sometimes long for the simpler days before I became your traveling companion.”
“You’re fortunate that I saved you from yourself.” The paladin recovered her throwing axe.
“So what then does wise Bahamut say? Do we take these men as prisoners?” Iados gestured to the fallen Nine Golden Swords warriors.
