by Rin Chupeco
I forgot all about the dead rangers, the sea creature. All that mattered in that moment was Odessa; that in my panic I had nearly abandoned her. She’s drowning, my mind screamed. She’s drowning, and you have to get to her now!
I shook the undead free, latched onto the creature again. I shifted tactics. My attack shoved itself into its inky bloodstream, snaking past its diseased organs and something that might have passed for a heart, and slammed up into its eyes, corrupting the nerves there so that its sight was lost. It screeched, the sound loud despite being underwater, and its grip on Odessa slackened. I moved toward its arms, paralyzing as much of its root system as I could reach. The monster hissed, let go.
I made a grab for Odessa.
And then I was no longer underneath the lake, but in some dark, haunted place where I could see nothing but a faint blur I recognized as Odessa because of the colors in her hair. She stared back at a gigantic shadow, with flickers of strange blue lights sparking around it and a pair of cruel prongs on its head. A voice that was not a voice echoed through my mind.
Be satisfied. A divine power of the underworld has been fulfilled. You must not open your mouth against the rites of the underworld.
And then I was back in the water holding on to Odessa, the lack of air straining my lungs. A halberd sailed past me and cleaved one of the root-monster’s arms. The limb drifted away, spurting black bile, and its hold on the goddess slipped completely. I grabbed at Odessa and kicked my feet, pushing us both back toward the surface, with Noelle following behind.
I burst onto the surface, gasping, hoisting Odessa’s body onto the raft before scrambling up myself. All three of us lay sprawled against the bottom of the raft, gulping in air.
“Damn it, Noe,” I croaked out, gulping. “Who told you to follow me?”
“You gave no orders to remain on the raft, milady.”
“I nearly breathed in water when I saw that damned halberd swoop past my head.” I looked at Odessa, who was sitting up groggily. “Your Holiness?”
She shivered. I grabbed the cloak I’d discarded and wrapped it around her shoulders. “That was a scylla,” she whispered. “Not a siren. I’ve read about it in one of Mother’s books. It consumes drowning sailors, eats ships. I’m glad we didn’t bring the Brevity here. It could have been much worse for the rest of the crew.”
“Damn your mother’s books and the Brevity,” I said roughly. There was the scylla, but there had also been something else, the shadow I saw as soon as I grabbed Odessa.
“‘You must not open your mouth against the rites of the underworld,’” I muttered. What did that even mean?
She stared at me. “You heard it. You saw it. When you touched me.”
“What happened?” Noelle asked sharply.
It took a moment to realize that Graham was no longer on the raft. Miel and the other men were on one end of the raft, staring at Janella, who sat serenely on the other side.
“She pushed Graham over!” Slyp yelped.
“I did,” Janella said.
“What happened?” I demanded, rounding on Janella. “What have you done?”
“She pushed him,” Miel wailed, wringing her hands.
“I had to,” the clerk said. “Merika can’t stand it anymore. You think Gracea is cruel, Lan, but Graham is the worst of them all. He hurts Merika, and so many other clerks, and the Devoted look the other way. He was ready to leave you both here, if I hadn’t intervened; I could see it in his eyes. I didn’t even have to do much. Something in the water took him away.”
I swore. I believed Janella—but regardless of what he’d done, saving Graham was still the priority, even if I had to kill him myself afterward. “Miel, do not do anything to Janella unless she attacks again. I’ll be very much put out if something else happens while we’re gone.”
“I’ll make sure of that,” Odessa said, voice hard as steel.
Miel gulped. “Yes, Your Holiness, Bright Lady.”
“I won’t do anything else,” Janella said cheerfully.
We continued searching for over an hour, but the Seasinger was long gone, Miel still weeping, and Janella extraordinarily calm.
We returned to shore, and the rest of the group soon took up the search, the stronger swimmers taking turns diving, the others setting out on the raft to expand the scope of their hunt. I sat and watched them, too exhausted to move. I gripped Odessa’s hand tightly, refusing to let go. “I nearly—” If I’d been a few seconds later . . . if I’d allowed my fear to take over, Odessa would have . . .
She squeezed my fingers. She was taking this better than I was. “I’m all right,” she whispered.
In the end, we had to give up. Graham was gone.
“I’ll kill you!” Gracea shrieked, rounding on Janella.
“No,” Odessa said.
“She murdered my second-in-command!”
“What did Graham do to Merika?” Odessa asked softly. The girl in question shrunk back. I’d seen her face when we came bearing the news—her tears were not from sorrow, but from relief and joy.
“He did nothing! These lying, scheming women seek to undermine my—”
“Shut up, Gracea.” Air wrapped around the Starmaker’s form and she froze, suddenly immobile. Odessa turned to the other Devoted, many of whom had trouble meeting her gaze. “What did he do?” she repeated.
Poor Merika was trembling, but it was another clerk who stepped forward. “Merika wasn’t the only one,” she whispered. “The Seasinger preyed on the others, too. I—he cornered me and—with other women he was also—”
“More lies!” Gracea screamed.
“Miladies,” Holsett quavered, his face the color of ash. “We are not alone, miladies!”
Cathei’s specter was back. She stood on the edge of the lake, staring placidly back out at us, waiting. She was looking right at Odessa.
“Did he hurt you, too?” Odessa addressed the ghost.
A pause. A nod.
The goddess knelt upon the shore. Her eyes were closed, her breath coming in quick bursts, and her hands were pressed against the ground.
I sank to my knees beside her. “Odessa.” She’d nearly died. I felt nauseous, knowing how close I’d come to losing her. Stricken by the guilt, I almost didn’t realize what she was doing, until a strange sound made me look back up.
“Let us ask him,” the goddess said, without opening her eyes.
Out on the lake, ripples spiraled out from its center, like a disturbed mirror. The small waves grew larger, drew closer to where we stood watching.
A head lifted itself out of the water. We saw the top of Graham’s head, and then his eyes and his face and his shoulders, until he was now waist-deep, stepping slowly out of the lake to join Cathei.
But his eyes were blank and his face was pale, and the slight transparency of his form told us that he, too, had suffered Cathei’s fate. There were no traces of regret or anger in his expression; only a quiet, unforgiving hollowness.
“Graham,” Odessa said pleasantly. “These girls accuse you of unspeakable acts. Do you deny them?”
The ghost didn’t move. Slowly, it shook its head.
“That will do, then,” Odessa murmured, and under the moonlight her skin too, for a moment, took on the ghosts’ grayish cast.
I found Sumiko much later, sitting by the campfire with a bowl of tea in her hands. She looked up as I approached, startled by whatever it was she saw in my face.
“Help me.” Odessa had nearly drowned today, because I was too busy fighting my own demons. My hands still shook. If I’d taken longer . . . if I’d swum to the surface in my fright and had forgotten about her entirely . . . .
There was something wrong with me.
I sank to my knees before the Catseye. “Please,” I begged. “Help me.”
Chapter Eighteen
Arjun, Worm-Milker
AS FAR AS BOOKS WENT, it wasn’t all that impressive.
It was a dirty, ratty thing, some of the pages torn and d
og-eared, a far cry from any of the pristine tomes Haidee had lugged around for most of our journey. The goddess, however, looked at it like it was Inanna herself come to life.
“May I bring this with me?” Haidee asked.
“I have little in the way of possessions, but this I intend to keep, girl. Without that book, all I have are the memories, and they fade quick enough with age. But you be welcome to read and copy what you will from it.”
“Thank you!” Haidee said happily, flopping down onto the ground.
I moved to join her, but Sonfei laid a friendly, firm hand on my shoulder. “You and me, boy, we got business elsewhere.”
“What about her?” I protested.
“The girl’s been through enough. She wore herself out back at the Sand Sea with that impressive stunt of hers, and it’ll take time to get her full strength back. But I’m sure this is something right up your alley. Easy to do, for men like us.”
“Sure,” I said sourly, already dreading it. If it was as easy as he was promising, the liar wouldn’t have used it as leverage for both the book and escorting us for part of our journey.
“Arjun?” Haidee asked, as we were leaving.
“Yeah?”
“I really—I’m glad you’re here. I thought I was going to—that I might have—” She paused, eyes shiny.
“I’m still here,” I said, trying not to sound too gruff. “Damned if I let some half-assed pirates kill me.” Sonfei chuckled. “And Haidee . . .”
“Yes?”
But I’d hesitated already, not sure how to tell her, and gave in to cowardice. “It’s nothing. I’ll see you later.”
“Every twenty-eight days, we be hunting for water,” Sonfei said, as we stepped out of the tent. “As you see, the great dying ocean to the east’s too far away to take our fill, and we can take nothing out of the Sand Sea but food. So we need alternatives, see?”
“If you say so,” I said, still apprehensive.
“We set up camp in this area for a very good reason. Close to the harvest of the Sand Sea, yes, but also because a few thousand paces to the east is the breeding ground for deathworms.”
“Not sure I want to know where this is going.”
“The deathworms do not often stray from their territory, which is good for us. They also be having the unique ability to take the scant moisture from both the air and the ground and transform it into water. They store it inside one of five large sacs in their bodies.”
“So you kill deathworms for their water.”
“Well, ‘kill’ is not being the right word, exactly. Deathworms live for hundreds of years, and the older they get, the larger the sacs. But deathworms do not breed frequently. To kill one would be a waste. The younglings do not hold as much in their sacs as their elders.”
“So. What exactly do you . . .”
“We milk them.”
“What?”
“We milk them.” He sounded pleased. “With the right kind of incision, we extract the water without harming them.”
“And you . . . want me . . . to milk them. . . .”
Sonfei waved a beefy hand at me. “The procedure requires an experienced touch, a deft hand. But the deathworms, you see, are very drawn to fire. Like moths to a flame, as an old saying once went. But we do not have many Firesmokers among my men. Certainly no one who could breathe blue fire.”
I’d gone very still. “You want to use me to lure in your deathworms?!”
He beamed. “Now you get it.”
“How big are these creatures, exactly?”
“The average we see is maybe fifty, fifty-five feet long.”
He should have led with that! “You’re not making me do this. I’m not going to be bait to a fifty-five-foot-long worm just so you can all milk its pee or—”
“No milking, then you and your goddess walk the rest of the way without help from us. No rigs to borrow. No provisions. I offered the pretty goddess an early chance at my book as a token of good faith, but now I will have to go back and tell her the deal is over, and you will have to manage not just the hot sun and no food for your trip, but also her ire.”
I gritted my teeth. It occurred to me that perhaps we should have asked about the chore he’d proposed before accepting the deal. “How dangerous are we talking here?”
“Almost no danger at all. My men are very rarely fatally wounded.”
“That’s very comforting to hear.”
“It is,” the man said happily, ignoring my sarcasm. “The deathworms spend two days at their breeding grounds before they set off again, so we are on a very strict schedule.”
“Everybody owes me everything from now on,” I growled, stomping off after him.
He had to be shitting me.
“You’ve got to be shitting me.” I stared at the extremely large, extremely wriggly worms frolicking in and out of the sand hundreds of feet away. They had no eyes and they were grossly corpulent, each looking like it was about to burst out of its thin, slightly transparent skin. Grotesque ringlike constrictions ranged down their lengths, making them resemble a piece of mechanika screw, if mechanika screws were alive and disgusting.
They did have a mouth; small in proportion to the rest of them, but filled with circular rows of sawlike teeth. They paid no attention to us, more concerned with breeding and laying eggs or whatever the hell things called deathworms were wont to do out here. I watched one lazily bury half a dozen eggs in the sand and shuddered, trying not to imagine what their babies looked like.
“Gorgeous, aren’t they?” Sonfei asked me proudly, like some doting father.
“Veritable beauties, one and all.”
“We’ll be focusing on this one.” He jabbed a thumb at the largest deathworm, flopped on its side and enjoying the hot bake of the sun on its flesh. “This one, we never been able to milk before. Even the strongest of our Firesmokers couldn’t attract its attention. But with your blue fire, I have much hope. Imagine how much water it be accumulating by now.”
“You guys willingly drink whatever comes out of that?”
“It is clean water, and our Mudforgers do good work taking out any impurities.” He grinned. “Afraid?”
“Quaking in my boots, but what choice do I have? What do I gotta do? Wave till it sees me?”
“You must travel out into the sand and give it a friendly poke with that blue fire of yours. The hotter the flame, the more in love they be. How fast are you at running?”
I stared at him. He broke into loud, boisterous laughter, and the men and women around him followed suit.
“I kid. I be accompanying you on one of our little boats, and help lure it back onto more solid ground, where it cannot slide around as easily. My men will take care of the rest from there. Wave your blue fire around to attract its attention as I drive.”
That didn’t sound too hard. “Fine. Let’s get this over with before I change my mind.”
The other deathworms paid no attention to us as Sonfei drove his rig over to the creature, still lolling about in the quicksand-like ground. He drifted the vehicle closer to its side, and I smelled the faint stench of bracken and salt that I had often associated with the retreating Salt Sea.
“We are ready,” the man said, revving the engine experimentally. “Smoke it in. Wave the fire around. It will see you soon enough.”
Grumbling, I concentrated, willing the Fire patterns around me as hot as I could make them, and raised my arm. Blue flames flared out from the end of my wrist like a torch.
The deathworm did nothing at first, only made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a sniff. And then a curious, tiny cheeping sound not in keeping with its large frame. Then more snuffling.
It moved fast, too ridiculously fast for its bulk. One minute I was standing with my arm raised, feeling like the biggest idiot in the desert; in the next it had inclined its round fat head and had made a beeline for my stump, its circular saw-shaped teeth gunning for my outstretched limb. I had the presence of mind to snap my arm
back before it could take the whole of it off.
Sonfei hit the pedal and sped away the next instant, but the deathworm was having none of that. It barreled after us, with no sign of its previous lazy dawdling, and was actually gaining on us.
How the hell could something without legs or feet move so goddessdamned fast?
“Its body is made to glide effortlessly through the sands,” Sonfei shouted over the wind back at me, and I realized I’d screamed the question aloud. “Quite a masterful inventor, Mother Nature is. Keep those blue fires aloft, boy, or it’ll lose interest and we’ll have to do this all over again!”
“I’m not doing this all over again!” I shouted back, clinging to the edges of his boat as I watched the deathworm behind us gain momentum. To my mounting horror, I watched those rows of teeth expand and warp, the mouth now large enough to swallow a person whole. “Are you sure your boat can outrun it?”
“I am eighty percent confident!”
“All I’m hearing is you’re twenty percent sure we could die!” The monster was drawing closer and closer. I swore I could smell its fetid breath, could see the hideous rasping of its sagging folds over the sand as it squirmed nearer—
The boat hit the bank of the shore hard, sending the whole thing plus us flying through the air. I called out every curse I knew and invented some new ones in the process, while the madman behind the wheel let out a joyous froth of laughter and revved the engines in response. “Hold on!” he yelled back at me, but I had already sunk down to the rig’s floor, blue flames gone, and was just clinging on with all my might.
We landed with a bone-rattling thump maybe fifty feet from where we’d lifted off, and continued with a series of progressively softer and less noisy thumps until we finally shuddered to a standstill. I’d slammed my jaw against the side of the boat at that first thud, and the stars hadn’t completely left my vision when I heard the other men let out cheers.
I staggered up and saw that the deathworm had been swimming too fast to stop itself from hitting the sand embankment as well and was lying halfway out of the Sand Sea, its tail swishing as it tried to find its way back in. The solid ground had rendered it immobile, though, and the other Liangzhu had already surrounded it.
