“Really, Fernando, you have brought me here?” A Southern accent asked. “I understand that Triport is... more permissive than some, more civilized, countries, but a lady is simply not seen in a place such as this.”
“Exactly, my lady. And this is why we are here. I can keep your secret, and the Hourglass has a reputation for not looking too hard for secrets they would then have to keep.”
A dismissive sniff from the slender silhouette, and the bulkier one shrugged. “As you wish, then, and we can make this quick.” He took a swallow of his mug. “You have the cash?”
“I do.”
“Good Triport gold pieces, I mean, and not those Southwind platinum flakes. I charge a twenty percent fee if I have to launder foreign currency.”
“I understood a trade city such as Triport is reputed to be takes all currencies, but do not worry, your payment is in gold.” With that, she handed him a small, purse sized chest with a leather handle. It looked heavy.
Mr. Bulky took it and tried to open it. “Where’s the key?” he growled.
“Where are my documents?”
He grunted and reached into his large leather coat, handing over a plain scroll case. She opened it and unrolled the parchments inside.
“This dim light may hide subtle details.” She continued to sound disapproving. "How do I know these are of superior quality?”
“Because I am Fernando the Fabricator, and my work is as good as the original any day. You think I have the reputation I do for delivering shoddy work? These are a perfect match for the samples you gave me. Now, my key.”
The lady reached up to her neck and withdrew a necklace of ribbon with an iron key on the end. As she did so, her hood slipped back, leaving her silhouette in profile against the stage lights.
I memorized it, curious, as she redonned her hood and stood up to leave. The bulkier man turned back to the stage to enjoy the view.
Huh. I wonder what that was all about.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” I asked. “You really didn’t have to come.” Ramsey was green under his freckles.
“I’ll be fine.” He gritted out, hauling on his oar. I had the other one, and Ramsey’s friend Minnow, the silent fisher-girl, was working the rudder of a very small dinghy Ramsey had sweet-talked one of the fishermen into lending us for the day. It had not yet been cleaned from its last run and smelled like the inside of a dead shark, unless of course it had been cleaned and what I smelled was the ghost of a thousand fishes that had permeated the very wood. I took some comfort in the fact that even Minnow, veteran of the docks, wrinkled her nose at it, though the stink couldn’t have been helping Ramsey.
As arranged, he had met me outside the Lonely Lobster earlier, all excited about a scrap of blue cloth one of the lobster hunters had dragged up with his cage along with the nights catch. Water stained though it was, I recognized the faded silk, and then I got all excited too. I felt guilty about the way everything had gone down at the school, and even more so about leaving all the morning chores to Dwade, but where my robes were, my Talarian Sandals had to be nearby. I didn’t even dare hope that my daggers had also found their way into the bay.
Minnow directed us over to a rocky area of the bay too treacherous with reefs for the big ships. I kept peering over the side, fascinated by the closeness of the waves, their ever shifting color, the soft feel of the salt water that gently wrinkled my fingertips. Apprehensively, I rubbed my hands on my wraps, but my skin did not appear to be dissolving.
I relaxed into the motion of the sea, but the gentle bob and bounce of the boat was a plague to Ramsey. In spite of the fact that the rain seemed to be holding off until afternoon and the bay was a calm as I had ever seen it, he had already almost retched over the side twice, and was saved from feeding the fish only by his wisdom in having skipped breakfast.
We eventually drew up alongside an area of bobbing floats. Most of them were some sort of buoyant driftwood, colored occasionally with much faded paint and tied around with ropes or strings snaking down into the water. A dozen yards away the sea ended against a cliff face, above which I could see some of the stone buildings of the older section of the city. A boarox, tied off to some unseen railing, perched precariously on the edge of the cliff, unperturbedly chewing at its cud while it watched us row about.
“Ok,” Ramsey was looking intently at the floats, “Krazy Kay said his are kind of square and orange. I sure hope he means ‘used to be square and orange, but are now vaguely rectangular and mostly greyish brown’, because that’s what we’ve got.”
Minnow picked up her rudder and deftly snagged a nearby float, which she pushed over to Ramsey. Sure enough, it said “KK” on one side of what might, with a lot of effort, a little imagination, and complete color blindness, have once been an orange cube.
I pulled out the maps of the bay’s currents that Ramsey had managed to procure. The best one had a tolerably accurate rendition of the local sea floor, with lots of little colored arrows indicating depth and flow. Unfortunately, it was directly contradicted by another map giving three different pictures of the bay along with many tiny arrows in colors which I think were meant to indicate the phase of the moon, or possibly the time of day. By combining both maps, referencing a pocket calendar and day book of Ramsey’s, making a lot of assumptions, and eventually forbidding Ramsey from coming up with any more explanatory cartographic theories, we had come to the conclusion that my gear was somewhere between Krazy Kay’s lobster trap and the cliff face with the boarox.
“Are you sure about this?” Ramsey asked me, for at least the third time.
“Sure.” I replied, while Minnow took the boat’s small anchor and began carefully letting it down over the side, doing her best not to tangle it with the sunken cages. “I go down there, look around for my gear, then come back to the boat and we all paddle home, only hopefully better armed and with pockets full of loot.”
“How long do you think you’ll be?”
I shrugged. “Until I see what the sea floor looks like, I have no idea how long it will take to search.”
Ramsey nodded, valiant, if still green. “Ok. We’ll be here.”
I flexed my hand with the waterbreathing ring, then, unsure of how you were supposed to do it, carefully stood up, and jumped out of the boat.
[Quest accepted: Lost and Found]
The water that hadn’t felt cold on my fingertips was suddenly and shockingly seeping into my clothes, invading the space between the cloth and my skin, dense and chilly. I let out a surprised whoop, which came out as bubbles, and then my mouth clamped itself shut against the salty infiltration.
Easy for you to say. I thought back, my lips locked against the press of the water. You’re not the one trying to override like four million years’ worth of instinct, here.
“Shut up!” More bubbles.
My lungs were starting to burn even as my skin chilled. It wasn’t as bad as the mountain-fed streams that irrigated the city, but I knew I needed to start moving around and generating heat before my muscles became useless.
I almost took a deep breath for concentration, was interrupted by the irony of it, and then finally just closed my eyes and put my palms together, and pretended I was back in the dojo. Control of breath is everything. Master Brandon intoned. Control the air that flows into your body, channel its energy, and control of ki will follow.
Just breathe.
I opened my mouth, inhaled, and s
ure enough, the water turned to air as it bubbled past my lips, and I felt the tiny aquamarine in my ring flash to life. The water tasted fishy and metallic, and for some reason I was surprised that I could smell it, damp and briny and green. I let out my breath in a slow exhale, the bubbles filtering past my face and tickling through my hair.
“Ok!” I said aloud. Though the water distorted the sound as it came to my ears, it did not interrupt my speech. “I got this!”
I opened my eyes, which stung just a bit from the cold, and pinwheeled my arms and legs forward, to no particular effect. In fact, I was slowly floating upwards. I waved them around some more, but only managed to turn a kind of somersault.
“Swimming is a skill?” I was annoyed too, mostly at myself. I had heard people talk about swimming, and no one had ever mentioned it was hard, so I assumed that if they could do it, of course I could do it too. On the basis, in retrospect, of no experience with deep water what-so-ever.
I pushed my arms back and my chest forward, like I was trying to walk, but there was nothing to push off of, no resistance; I was just floating free, unmoored. I had a grudging thought that perhaps I had been too hastily resentful of the oppressive tyranny of my old nemesis, gravity. Is there no such thing as absolute freedom, then?
Much swishing and churning later (and what were Ramsey and Minnow thinking of this? Could they even see me, under the shadow of the boat?) and I finally managed to get my hand on the rope. At least I’m not cold anymore. Once there, it was a simple matter to follow it, hand over hand, into the depths.
The water got darker as I went down. The relatively gentle current kept the sediment to a minimum, but my visibility was pretty compromised, not in the least by the fact that my eyes weren’t quite focusing like I wanted them to.
I finally reached the anchor at the end of the rope, resting on the rocky seabed. I swung my feet forward and down, and tried to stand up, but I started drifting gently upwards again. I exhaled as much of the breath as I could, sending a wave of bubbles upwards, but even so I couldn’t make myself completely un-buoyant.
What the heck? My body sunk when I was dead!
I took another breath, started floating upwards, and had to grab the anchor rope again to pull myself down. If only I had my own anchor.
Well, and why not? This time, instead of trying to walk away, I felt about for a nice sized rock, picked it up, and held it close to my usual center of gravity. Now that I was heavier, my feet settled onto the ground, and I was able to carefully move forward. Ha!
There were lobster traps everywhere. I found Krazy Kay’s, which was currently empty, and pointed my face against the current towards the shadowy bulk of the cliff face. Then, as carefully as if I were searching out booby traps built by homicidal goblins, I began picking my way amongst the rocks and lumps of reef, looking for the fluttering blue of my wraps or, even better, the glint of my daggers. It took me less than a minute of trying to squint through the underwater twilight before casting a Light spell on my anchor rock...
[Daily Mana Cast: 1/3]
...by which I discovered that everything on the seafloor is about the same shade of silty brown. I sighed.
“Patience, young grasshopper.” I quoted back at Voice. “Revenge is not had in a day.”
By carefully quartering the seabed and peeking amongst every rocky crevasse and hole-riddled outcropping of coral—jumping excitedly at every waving anemone, flutter of seaweed, and flashing sardine—and perfecting my mode of locomotion (which was: throw anchor rock / light source forward as if I were in a tree-stump pitching contest, hang onto it at the apex of the throw instead of letting go, and let the momentum of it trail my body along behind like a streamer), I eventually made my way to the cliff face. For my efforts, I had a scrap of silty brown cloth which might, once cleaned up, prove to be part of my robes, and a thin length of silty brown leather that I knew, even before being cleaned, was part of a Talarian Sandal.
And yet the rocky cliff loomed before me, the boom and hiss of the light surf pounding against the vertical length of it high above, the base decorated with boulders detached from its heights long ago. If I had read the map of the currents wrong, my gear could be anywhere in the bay, but I was sure I had interpreted a flow that led directly from here. How my gear could have got here was another guess entirely.
“But why would anyone need to dispose of it in the first place? It was pretty darn lost to begin with.”
I scowled at a nearby crayfish, sitting on top of one of the lobster traps and casually munching on the bait it had somehow pilfered from inside. I don’t even want to think about someone else looting all my gear. Then this quest becomes twice as impossible.
From in front of me came a darting school of sardines, fleeing two or three sleek jackfish about the size of my hand. Off to my right, the shape of a couple of lurking barracudas menaced toothy jaws at the jackfish, but did not pursue, seeming content for now to simply reign in terror over all their surroundings. And over me. I had had a moment of adrenaline pumping, I’ve-got-to-get-out-of-here-right-now panic when I first saw the barracudas, but Voice had pointed out—with annoyingly calm rationality—that I could not possibly outswim them, and if they wanted to eat me they probably would have already, so I may as well see if they came over and attacked and deal with it then. They hadn’t.
“They’re probably just not hungry.” I told the placid crayfish, ignoring Voice’s excited monologue. “They’re probably full, stuffed to the gills on the last adventurer that came down here.” The crayfish continued to stare at me with bulbous, unblinking eyes, nibbling on its bait, feelers waving gently in the current, pointing towards the open ocean.
And yet there was a flow to the water. I did my throw/lunge/leap movement again, causing the crayfish to disappear backwards in the blink of a tail flick, and put my hand out into the cooler stream coming from behind the boulder. The slow current flowed through my fingers, wavery and distorted, like a heat shimmer over the dunes in the desert.
[Perception check: Success]
I stuck out my tongue and tried to lick the current. All I could taste was salt. “How do you know? The temperature
difference isn’t enough to prove it’s fresh.” Or account for the heat-wave effect. I frowned.
I peeked around the boulder, and where I had expected solid rock or perhaps impenetrable rubble, I saw instead the opening to an underwater cave, leading deep beneath Triport.
Chapter Nine
It wasn’t hard to wiggle my slender frame into the sea cave. Waving anemones and spiky black sea urchins greeted me in the cool(er) current, and I had to watch where I put my feet in my heave/lunge/leaps. The light from the surface did not filter through the narrow entrance, making my rock the only illumination for the monochromatic world around me, save for the slight phosphorescent twinkles of the cave wall flora, faint as stars. I went forward, slowly, the ethereal blue of the entrance fading behind me as the cave opened up into a larger space. I followed the current; it seemed to be coming from between a mass of interlocking stalactites and stalagmites that formed a barrier to an egress on the far wall. Above the jagged formations, two stones caught the light from my own rock and glimmered yellow in the gloom.
Gemstones? I wondered, and then they kindled to life.
I tried to leap backwards as the pupil-less eyes narrowed and focused on me, and the previously immobile stone stretched and flexed like a living thing, the stalactites suddenly become fangs in a grin bigger than I was.
“I am the Beast Beneath the Waves.” the face in front of me announced. “Who seeks to trespass in my caves?”
I closed my mouth and swallowed to clear my throat: the unexpected tang of saltwater broke me out of my trance.
For A Few Minutes More Page 13
