A Daughter of No Nation

by A. M. Dellamonica

  “Does Krispos have the hard copies?” Playing Q-and-A with the memorician was useful only once she knew what she was looking for.

  “Of course. They’re about animals and plants; I knew that much of your specialty, anyway. Sylvanna’s rather plagued by such suits.”

  So there’s a big potential benefit to you, back home, if you get me established in the court system. “I’ll look at them right away,” she said, rising.

  He toasted her with his teacup and she found her way down to the hold. Krispos was murmuring over one of the transcripts; she picked up another, one he’d already read, and pretended to ignore his glower as she left with it.

  Then, before heading back up, she ducked into her cabin, writing a quick note on the messageply: CLY IS SUGGESTING I START UP A STORMWRACK CSI UNIT IN FLEET.

  She was putting the page away when text appeared, so neatly lettered it might have been machine printed: To do what?

  Sophie scratched out: REVERSE-ENGINEER FORENSICS, TRAIN EXPERT WITNESSES, PUT HARD EVIDENCE BEFORE PERSONAL TESTIMONY, THAT KIND OF THING.

  She was putting the page away when more text appeared: HOW DOES THAT GET YOU BACK OUT TO DOING PRIMARY RESEARCH? OR FIGURING OUT WHAT/WHEN STORMWRACK IS, NOT TO MENTION WHETHER HOME’S GONNA GO KABLOOEY?

  Sophie: JOB = SALARY + PERMISSION TO SAIL PLACES/STUDY THINGS WITHOUT GETTING STOMPED BY GOVERNMENT OR ACCUSED OF SPYING.

  Bram: YOU’VE BEEN ACCUSED OF SPYING????

  Sophie: NO.

  NOT YET, ANYWAY. She added: THINK: IF WE HAVE HELP GATHERING HARD INFO RE STORMWRACK, IT’LL HELP US INVESTIGATE THE LINK BETWEEN HERE AND HOME. BETTER THAN GRABBING WHATEVER FACTS SLIDE PAST US.

  Bram: YOU’D HAVE MINIONS?

  Sophie: WOULD HAVE TO, I THINK.

  Bram: THAT WOULD HELP. THIS IS COOL, SOFE—CONGRATS.

  Sophie drew a little happy face on the sheet of magical paper: C GAVE ME CASE FILES. I’LL UPDATE YOU SOON.

  Bram: KTHXBAI.

  She laid a hand on the page: the illusion of texting made home and her brother seem very close by. Then, when no new words appeared, she picked up her transcript and headed back for the ladder up to the main deck.

  CHAPTER 9

  There was something like cheating in the way they spent the next few hours creeping up on the little sailing ship, using the illusion provided by the convex to keep it from realizing they were closing the gap. It was like watching a cat hunt an unsuspecting bird, the slow predatory creep upon an entirely helpless target.

  Still, these people were suspected of killing the crews of half a dozen ships.

  As the chase stretched, Captain Beck busied herself with preparing to board and search the target, talking the teenage sailors through a maneuver that would bring the ship into a sweep alongside the other craft. Sawtooth had two older cannoneers, taciturn men as muscled as Nightjar’s Krezzo, tasked with firing at the ship once they were within range.

  Cly, meanwhile, drilled his half-dozen young duelists on boarding tactics.

  If either Cly or Beck was concerned about taking on a ship that was allegedly full of murderers, using a crew of young recruits, it didn’t show. Sawtooth was massive compared to the ship they were pursuing; she had numbers on her side, even if those numbers were largely inexperienced.

  Zita was up drilling with the other duelists, so there was nobody but Krispos to talk to Sophie. Together they made a study of their target—she was maybe twenty feet long, with patched, greasy-looking sails. Looking through her telephoto as they got closer, Sophie counted six crew. Unless there was someone below, there were only four guys and two women aboard, all busily engaged in catching every breath of wind. They might not know Sawtooth was closing on them, but they wanted to leave her behind.

  The ship was riding high in the water—whatever she had been stealing from the ships she’d sunk, she wasn’t carrying any heavy cargo at the moment, Sophie deduced. The crew looked weary, unhealthy, even starved. If these were pirates, they weren’t successful ones.

  Why were they raiding ships at all? And how?

  Violence again, she thought. Parrish had said life in the Fleet was safe, but here she was on the periphery of another fight.

  It’s not as though anyone expects me to participate. The thought wasn’t as reassuring as she would have hoped; from time to time, she found herself checking her pocket for her key ring and the little canister of bear spray.

  As the hours crawled by, the skinny captain got visibly edgy about his failure to lose Sawtooth. He and one of the others had an argument, gesturing over a bundle on deck. The crewman protested, furiously … right up until the captain smacked him. Shoulders sagging, he took out a long knife, opened the sacking, and cut out—

  “Oh God, that’s a heart, a human heart.” Her gorge rose even as she took the shot.

  Cly said, “Are you certain?”

  She nodded and showed him the frame.

  “How soon can we close?” he asked Beck.

  “Not long,” the captain said, considering it. “That’s their lives, then.”

  “What?” Sophie said.

  “Using human remains in an inscription is a capital crime, unless the subjects volunteered for use,” Cly explained.

  “How do you know they’re using the heart for magic?”

  “Why else would they be mutilating a body? They plan to work an intention against us.”

  “You mean the heart will be some kind of battle thing?”

  “Attack or defense, yes.”

  “Why are they running if they can sink ships?”

  “Their first two victims were barely bigger than bumboats, and the captain of Drifter, the derelict you found, was known to be a drunkard,” Cly said. “She’ll show her teeth, all right—she’s desperate. We’ll knock them out, no fear.”

  “I don’t know that I am afraid,” Sophie replied.

  “Nobody thinks you’re a coward,” Cly said. “You keep your head in a crisis.”

  With that, he returned to his duelists.

  Feeling nettled, Sophie continued to scan the boat. Small ship, small crew, no booty to speak of—well, they could be stealing something light but valuable, like diamonds—and they had a spellscribe.

  What had the targeted ships been carrying?

  “They’re making for the islet,” cried a crewman from the crow’s nest.

  The other ship wasn’t just making for the peaked scrap of land, it was all but running itself aground on its shores.

  “Ah.” Beck grinned. “Hoping to abandon ship and vanish into the forest? Why not? We’re hours behind, aren’t we?”

  “Send them into a panic,” Cly said, with perceptible satisfaction. “Drop convex.”

  The shimmer surrounding Sawtooth turned to steam; the bow of the ship sliced through. Sophie felt a warm kiss of sauna against her cheeks.

  Shouts of consternation arose from the small crew of the bandit. They threw themselves into furious action. The captain ran the length of the deck, scattering something grainy into the water. The ship itself began to thump, as if it were a drum. The rhythm was a pulse: ba-dum, ba-dum. Fist-size bubbles the bright green color of algae rose from the ocean around the ship, thousands of them. They pulsed, ever so slightly, in time to the beat as they drifted toward Sawtooth.

  “Does anyone recognize this intention?” Beck asked.

  A chorus of “No, Captain!”

  She looked to Cly, who shook his head.

  “Finish this before the foam accumulates,” he said.

  Beck nodded. “Cannons one and two, fire!”

  The cannoneers had been forming sandspheres; by now, they each had a tidy stockpile. Sophie was reminded, again, of kids building up to a snowball fight. The taller of the two hurled blasts of fire at the ship’s mainmast. One found its mark, exploding the wood to matchsticks. The other cannoneer punched two tidy holes in the hull, right at the point where her hull met the waterline.

  She began to take water.

  The ba-dum, ba-du
m got faster; the greenish bubbles foamed like a pot aboil. The two ships were now perhaps fifty meters apart.

  “Surrender and prepare to be boarded.” Beck’s words boomed out over the water.

  “What do you think?” Zita had come up on deck next to Sophie. She held a flat, wide sword—would that be a cutlass?—whose blade appeared to be made of a wafer of inscribed bone or tusk.

  “Looks like a last stand to me,” Sophie said.

  The water around the sinking ship began to heave. Figures belched up from it: human shaped, white in color, with no features except bloodred eyes. Were they made of sea salt? They looked a little like department store mannequins.

  “Salt frights!” someone shouted.

  One of the “frights” wedged itself into the gap where Sawtooth’s cannon had holed the hull. Its face stared out from the patch like a carved mask on a wall. Its mouth yawned open and, with convulsions that looked very much like it was vomiting, it began to heave salt water back into the ocean.

  A pump?

  “That’s a heavy intention for such a small vessel to bear,” Cly observed, as the rest of the salt frights began to follow the drifting array of greenish, pulsing bubbles toward Sawtooth. “The frights are defending the ship.”

  “Why bother?” Zita said. “They can’t know we’re understaffed. Scripped or no, six starved sailors can’t hope to take on Sawtooth.”

  “They’re dead for using the heart, right?” Sophie said. She was shooting pictures even as she spoke, taking frame after frame of the figures. “And for killing those other ships’ crews?”

  “And frightening, too. All capital crimes.”

  “What have they got to lose?”

  “Run out the plank and prepare to board,” Beck ordered. Two of the cadets had raised a hatch next to the rail; instead of a way into the bowels of the ship, it had concealed a trampoline, stretched hide covered in dense, bright-red spellscrip.

  “Steady, cannon one,” Cly said. “Bailor, bring me crossbows. One heavy, one light.”

  One of the crew scrambled to comply.

  “Zita, you know this weapon, don’t you?”

  “At this range, Your Honor—”

  “Come, give it a try,” he said. “You’re spoiled for targets.”

  The girl slipped up beside him, taking up the smaller bow and straining to load it.

  “There,” Cly said, picking one of the approaching salt figures. “For the eye.”

  Zita swallowed, drew on the golem, and sent a bolt wide.

  “Keep trying,” he said. “The rest of you, ready with blades.”

  With that, he raised his own bow and took a long, slow breath. Ignoring the salt creatures, he sent a bolt directly into the throat of the bandit ship’s captain.

  Sophie let out a shocked yelp as the captain of the other ship went down, thrown backward by the force of the bolt, dead so instantly he didn’t even twitch as he fell.

  “Surrender yourselves,” Cly called to the other ship as its surviving crew—who looked young, suddenly, young and aghast and terrified—dove for cover. One tried to thin herself behind the smoking stub that was all that remained of the mainmast. One dove below. A third ducked behind a water barrel.

  A blast of fire behind them made everyone jump.

  It was the cannoneer up in the Sawtooth crow’s nest. Greenish bubbles had adhered to his skin, coating him in a slick foam. He had fired a blast straight down, barely missing the trampoline. The wood deck erupted into flames.

  “Fire on deck!” Beck said. “Port watch, put out that fire!”

  Cly lowered his bow, making a tutting noise deep in his throat. “Sophie, can you see what that spellscribe is up to now?”

  She raised the camera again. “No.”

  Cly caught the other cannoneer’s eye and flicked a finger at the boy hiding behind the barrel. He lobbed a stone at the barrier, shattering the wood, which began to smolder and burn.

  By now Zita had got a couple crossbow bolts into the salt creatures scrabbling at the edge of Sawtooth. They leaked when punctured, as if they were contained in sacks. A few of the bubbles had gathered on her wrists and forearms.

  The young man flung himself out from under the remains of the barrel, running for cover, and Cly shot him neatly in the chest with a crossbow bolt.

  “I won’t give you another chance,” Cly said reloading. His voice carried over the crackle of fire behind them. “Be reasonable. You’re outmatched.”

  The other cannoneer punctuated this with a twin blast to the deck, which hurled another of the bandits into the water.

  That was when Zita turned on her heel, swinging her sword at Sophie.

  Definitely a cutlass, she thought, as she let herself fall backward. The blade whisked overhead and then Cly was there, parrying with the crossbow, the blade meeting wood with a dull thunk.

  Sophie scrambled backward, trying to take in the whole deck at once. The seaweed bubbles that had been blowing up over the Sawtooth decks seemed to be concentrating on this part of the ship.

  Whatever the reason, they were thickening around them like a fist. Many of the recruits had bubble-shaped splashes on their flesh; they looked disoriented, and a few had begun to brawl.

  Not gas, Sophie thought. It’s absorbed through the skin.

  There were no bubbles on her yet.

  I’m not a threat. They’re massing on the people with weapons.

  She had a sudden vision of Cly dicing his way through the ranks of confused teenagers.

  She’d been wearing a fleece jacket when she came up on deck. She took a second to grab it, fighting her way into the sleeves and pulling the drawstrings of the hood tight over her face, covering as much skin as possible. The crossbow bolts had fallen to the deck and she scooped up a pair of them.

  “Zita,” Cly ordered. “Stand down. Stand down immediately!”

  The first of the salt mannequins was pulling itself up onto the fighting deck.

  Nobody aboard Sawtooth had died yet, as far as Sophie could tell. The kid officers were brawling with each other. Cly had flung Zita across the sword-fighting ring, depriving her of her blade in the process. Now he decapitated two of the monsters with a great, salt-spraying swing of his arm. He was gripping the rail with his free hand, looking white-knuckled and a little wild-eyed. Green bubbles were breaking against him, one after another.

  “Stay back, child.”

  “You have to get it off your skin,” she said, pointing to the residue.

  “Understood.” Instead, he stabbed another salty boarder.

  If he recovers, we’ll probably be okay. There aren’t that many of them. If he doesn’t … well, he’s a killing machine. All these cadets.

  Taking a deep breath, Sophie bolted toward the trampoline.

  She ran a straight line toward the smaller ship—commit, commit, commit!—and jumped, thinking about where she wanted to land. On the deck, next to that hemispheric steering wheel.

  “Flex your knees…,” but the landing was as gentle as if she’d been in an elevator.

  The foam of bubbles rising from the seas around the small ship changed direction suddenly, making for her.

  Spells are textual, she reminded herself. Destroy the text, destroy the spell.

  She hit the deck running, skirting two cannon-blasted bodies, eyes open for spellscrip. “Text, text, text,” she was muttering under her breath.

  Instead, she saw a human heart.

  It was mounted within a coral structure that appeared to be the ship’s wheel, a dome-shaped growth, bone white in color. Portions of it had been sanded smooth and the writing was there, deep within, protected by sharp edges and spiny growths. The heart was nestled in a carved-out chamber near the top, its arteries connected to outcroppings in the coral structure, and pumping. It was covered in slick green slime—algae, Sophie thought.

  She drove one of the crossbow bolts into it—not cleanly, or even with special force, but the ungainly move was nevertheless enough to pierce one
of the ventricles.

  The timbers of the small ship groaned—screamed, really—as if giant hands were bending them. It jolted and they listed to port. She heard a series of crystalline pops and wasn’t sure if that was the green bubbles or the salt monsters.

  Someone grabbed her from behind.

  She kicked at the guy, a little feebly. It was all a bit like her self-defense class, suddenly, except that the guy wasn’t padded. He wasn’t playing, either, though his intent seemed more desperate than murderous.

  She tried to swing him into the coral, failed, and fumbled for her bear spray. Could she shoot him without giving herself a blast in the face?

  “No!” she said. “No, no!” Her instructor would be so proud.

  The man tightened his grip as the judder of the trampoline rang through the air.

  Suddenly Cly was aboard. He landed beside the mainmast and cut a bloody furrow into the midsection of the surprised bandit there. He whirled as she fell, found another, kicked him flat to the deck, then stabbed him in the chest.

  Then he addressed himself to the guy still grabbing for purchase at Sophie’s hoodie.

  “Take,” he said, “your hands off my daughter.”

  The man let her go as if she were hot, turning chalk white and putting his hands in the air. He had a bloody nose.

  The captain of the ship hit him, she remembered.

  Cly held out a hand to Sophie, helping her up, and then retrieved a handkerchief from the deck, cleaning red blood and algae bubbles from his blade.

  He looked at the guy with an air of pleasant anticipation.

  “He’s surrendered,” Sophie said. Her voice was shaking. “Cly, he’s given up.”

  The man backed up to the rail. Cly strolled after him, bringing the point of the cutlass up to his chest, then coming in close, wrapping his hand around the thin neck and beginning to squeeze.

  “Cly, stop! What’s wrong with you? He surrendered!” She grabbed for his arm, which was iron.

  He turned, regarding her as if from far away. The expression—or lack of one—on his face raised the hairs on her neck.

  They froze there, the three of them, the bandit thrashing and gasping, Cly looking at her like a scientist staring down a microscope, Sophie bone-chilled and realizing: Oh! Oh! This is what the Verdanii wouldn’t say.