by Vylar Kaftan
And that was the whole point of her existence.
“It is a superstition among the outgoing sailors that you make an offering to Selessi before every voyage,” he had explained to her (she recalled in a memory so dusty it might well have been the oldest she had). “Once you cross the channel and pass Widow’s Rock way out beyond the edge of the bay and the seals are all around, Selessi will hear you, and you offer her what you can to provide safe voyage. You take your trinket, your coin, your gem or other valuable, whatever you can spare to save your life and you say a prayer as you toss it overboard. So it has been for hundreds of years. How many sailors per ship? How many ships per year? Too many to count.”
Which meant that down below, far, far down below, there were fields of treasure waiting to be scooped up. And he wanted as much as he could get. He showed her his second, more prized lock box, this one with an air of reverence that he felt warranted an additional warning. “If I ever catch you even looking at this,” he said as he unlocked it with the second key on the chain he kept semi-swallowed, “I will hurt you.”
Inside were fistfuls of copper coins, silver bracelets, a couple of smell gems that he must have sifted from the sand. This was before he had her trade all of it, a couple of items at a time (not trusting her with any more), for bronze square-coins in the markets of Pelagar. He didn’t even trust Gasbray to fence the goods for him. “Now I cannot reach the bottom, although I have tried,” he said. “Some of these sailors are impatient and toss their offerings too early, and these I collect from the cliff’s edge. But the real treasure is way down below, and that, my beautiful girl, is where you must go.”
Said as he offered her the first tumbler of essence, back when he did everything outside their home; gather balloons, food, meet Gasbray on the beach, because she was still incapable of leaving that sweet pocket of trapped air.
“But why do you need this?” she asked, meaning the treasure.
“Look at me. This was an accident, me ending up like this. I used to look like you. I shall tell you all about it sometime, but the point is it can be undone, so I’ve been told, but it will cost money, vast sums of it for the guild specialists to undo all this, make me a man again. How else am I to get my hands on that kind of wealth lurking here at the bottom of the sea, eh?”
“What about Selessi? Won’t she be angry at us stealing from her?”
“Ha! Sailor nonsense, girl. Charkuna is the one true god, of that you can be sure, not some watery bitch demanding tokens for her protection.” Although after his second accident he was no longer so sure, but by then she was the one taking all the risks, heading out and down to strive for the bottom.
“The plan is this.” He pinched her cheek fondly. “We collect enough for them to restore the pair of us—”
“Why me? I’m fine already.”
“Do not interrupt me!” The pinch turned sharp and she squealed. “Silly girl. I will explain it all to you. You need some enhancements to allow you to reach the bottom, where the true cream lies. I myself could not survive those depths, and I have already evolved too far in a particular direction, as you can see. Any more would most likely kill me. But if you trust me, I can make it so you can swim further and deeper than anyone has ever done. Fear not, the guild can undo such things once we no longer have need of them, and by then we shall have accumulated enough on top of the required fees to live like king and princess for the rest of our days. Not bad, eh?”
It had seemed a brilliant plan back then. It still did.
So why these fresh misgivings? Did she no longer trust him? Why couldn’t she; her own father (most likely)? He would never do wrong by his own flesh and blood; he had no reason to. He loved her (in his own way) and she loved him, and that was all that mattered.
#
She scooped up a lovely scrimshaw figurine, a pouch of metal bits, a shrunken skull with marbles sewn into the eye sockets, an ivory comb, and an amber bead inside an empty ink bottle.
She re-gathered her catch, although blood from the pig-jackets had drawn a shark. Not a big one, but big enough. She flashed her spear and the thing vanished, but adrenaline from the encounter forced her to the surface to suck in a few heavy breaths. Something similar had caused her father’s second accident, and look how that had left him.
She collected her balloons and dived for the last time.
She noticed something as she navigated the barnacle-encrusted hatch leading back inside: a flash of silver among the green and white shells. A locket. She’d never seen it before and had no idea why she had noticed it now because she could tell it had been here a long, long time by the way it had become so in-grown that she had to tuck it sharply to free it, breaking the fine chain. She clutched the tiny locket in her hand, a simple latched thing that she unclipped and opened.
Inside was an engraving of a woman’s face, etched soapstone rubbed with ink. Plain and smiling. Valuable to someone, and probably more valuable than most of the junk she’d scavenged recently, so her father would be pleased.
He was in fact the complete opposite.
* * *
The second accident had been bad, although nowhere near as bad as the first.
A small orca hit from behind while he lingered on the cliff face sifting coins from the sand with his trusty sieve (so he explained to her once he could speak again). It was the large silvertail hooked onto his belt that did it, trailing blood everywhere. The whale thought the blood was his and nearly tore him open. He couldn’t exactly say how he managed to fight it off and return home, but when he bobbed up inside, blood everywhere, and she dragged him out of the water, he was white as bleached bone. There was nothing to be done; either he’d live or die, and it was just a case of waiting it out.
* * *
He held the open locket to his good eye, and when he recognized it the shark side seemed to spread. Everything human just dropped from his face.
“Where did you find this?” he said as quietly as she’d ever heard him say anything. His hand shook.
“Just outside the hatch.”
“No,” he said, but not to her. Maybe to himself. Then: “How?”
“But isn’t it valuable?”
“Junk.” And he shoved it in his mouth so roughly he cut his fingers on his teeth. One swallow and it was gone, and when he flapped her across the face, the slap so loaded that he could barely control it, the blood from his knuckles dashed up the wall. “Who told you to go snooping around here? The cliff is where you look, and nowhere else, do you understand me, girl?” She danced away from him and in his rage he spilled over the side of the tub. He half-settled against the floor, howling. “You come back here!”
She shook her head and he seemed at a loss.
“Charkuna mark you, disobedient whelp!” He eyed the cold water at the bottom of the room, a plan forming. “Suit yourself. You stay here then while I go outside.”
“Where are you going?”
“If I see you leave here the pain will be worse than anything you could imagine. Do you hear me? You stay here otherwise I feed you to the sharks.”
He let the downward slope of the room drag him to the water, and when it caught him he sighed in pleasure. But there was madness in his eyes, and he raised a warning finger at her. “You stay right there until I return.” And he vanished.
But where could he be going? He almost never left since the second accident. And what about that locket had enraged him? She had to know. It could have been a trap, one of his loyalty tests; he could be waiting just outside to spring on her the moment she disobeyed him, but the risk was worth it. He made threats and turned nasty on occasion, sure enough, but he needed her more than she needed him now, so no chance he would do anything irreparable to punish her.
At least, anything more than he already had.
She lurked inside the shadow of the hatchway, studying the ocean bed outside, knowing it so intimately now that she could have told if he was hiding there. Seeing nothing she eased out, expecting him to
strike at any moment, but when he didn’t that presented another problem: where had he actually gone?
Something large had kicked up a cloud of sand to the right of the outcrop she faced. Had to be him. Ever since the second accident he clung to the bottom on those rare occasions he did venture out, lacking the nerve to leave himself exposed in the open water. She climbed up the outcrop to peer down on the far side and saw him creeping along the alleyways of the ocean bed towards Pelagar, so maybe it was more business with Gasbray, for some reason.
But no, now he took a new path. She followed, nimble as a fish, darting from cover to cover while he blundered mindlessly ahead. The struts of the main pier loomed through the sediment and he made for the base of them, for one in particular, and she settled into a bed of seaweed to watch. The sand here was littered with trash tossed from above; bottles, shoes, an overgrown accordion. And something else, a shapeless twist flapping in the current. He made for that. His bulk settled down before it, blocking it from view as he worked. An octopus sidled close and he flashed at it, his fist tight when he did so she knew he held something in it.
Then he was done, but heading somewhere else instead of back home. She followed again, knowing she could always outrun him and so she was in no danger of being caught out unless he actually saw her, and she had to know what was going on here, sensing something important without knowing the true shape of it.
He seemed a tad aimless, as if lost or looking for something. He found a pocket of sand and dug with one of his tentacles, his hand still clutching whatever it was he had come for, which he then buried. He placed a rock on top of the sand and drifted backwards, studying his work. Satisfied, he turned for home, and so did she, swimming so fast it wasn’t until her vision began to blacken as she dashed through the hatchway that she realized she had forgotten to take a single breath.
* * *
It had happened like this:
(Was this a memory of him telling her this? No. Maybe?)
He was a grade two supplicant serving the fourth year of his apprenticeship on one of the guild’s harvesting rigs out by the Vent. Nothing exceptional there. Rig labor was equal parts slaves (prisoners, mostly, given the dangerous nature of the work) and guild members of varying degrees of expertise, him being towards the lower end of that scale but still far enough removed from the riskier elements associated with harvesting.
He assessed samples... or no, he managed the diving globes? Yes, that was it. The prisoners, they were lowered in magically reinforced globes to take initial samples of the rainbow-colored effluent billowing from the Vent, and he was charged with directing them during their descent using levers and pulleys greased with magic.
(Why was there a woman’s voice attached to all this? If this woman had been the one to explain it all, then who was she?)
Something had happened. A globe had burst, or a chain snapped, or a sudden upsurge from the Vent rocked the boat. He had tumbled overboard, or a rope snagged his leg and yanked him off. The water was thick with effluent, the essence that formed the very base of all the guilds’ powers, and when he plunged into it, it had filled his mouth, his nose, his ears, his eyes; and the millions of fish and turtles and seabirds and even sharks that followed every plume of essence, feeding off it, when they swarmed him in sudden interest the essence took every living thing and scrambled them together, so that when the crew hooked him and pulled him back aboard and pounded the water from his lungs, the cancer was already eating away inside him.
She imagines a hospital bed, him in bandages, still a man, pulling his waistband down to find a crab’s leg sprouting from his hip. But that was just her imagination. She hadn’t been there to see that, of course (because how could she have?), but the dangerous glee she took from his imagined howl of terror was real enough.
And that was the first accident.
* * *
She had to wait another day before she could investigate.
“Be safe,” he called as she headed out with her spear.
She headed to the hiding place first, because whatever was at the base of the pier it had been the thing he buried that mattered.
She pushed aside the rock and dug. Found it straightaway.
A silver locket and chain. The same as the one he had swallowed. But different. This one contained a bubble of glass with a baby’s tooth inside. She recognized it. No idea how, but she did. Then a flash of memory sharp as broken shell: her holding this thing inside a pudgy hand much smaller than the one she had now. Her stomach shriveled. This explained more than she had wanted it to. She hadn’t been expecting anything like this.
She returned to the base of the pier, where bodies dropped and thrashed against the surface far above as children leapt from the railings on a hot summer day.
The thing was a skeleton furry with growth and wrapped in seaweed and shreds of what had once been clothes. A leather satchel over one shoulder held it pinned forward against the sand, an anchor of sorts. Inside were eight or ten large rocks. Enough weight to suit a particular purpose. A single leather strap easily thrown off if this had been some kind of accident or administered violence.
Her lungs cried out and she kicked up. Her head broke the surface and she looked up to the wrought iron balcony high above, and seeing it like this, in these circumstances, something finally came loose, an invisible splinter of glass finally worked from a foot after days, weeks, years of agony:
she remembered waking in bed (her real bed, in a real house, not the dank thing she lived in now) as something enveloped her and lifted her clear, carried her towards and out a window, stinking of brine, and there had been a woman screaming. Lanterns flashing by, a cry of alarm or disgust from someone, then the hollow thud of misshapen limbs on boards, the rusty old paint smell of the railing as she went up and over, the fall, the splash, cold, cold water all around, then darkness. Nothing else beyond that. Buried so far back it came before the beginning.
And this woman pinned here, her mother, a casualty of all that. The lone anchor point between two worlds. He had known that and had tossed aside one locket to cut the link, because one in isolation was meaningless. Together they told a story, and he had made two mistakes: being a bit too careless in disposing of her locket, and leading her directly to her mother’s. Each compounded the other. One mistake on its own and she never would have known, but he’d shown her they mattered, and that had been enough for her to remember.
* * *
Gasbray’s eyebrows rose. “How much?” he said, repeating her question.
“Yes. How much does it cost to undo his transformation?”
He whistled. “A lot. How much does he have?”
“I don’t know.” Clearly not enough, not yet.
Gasbray rolled his shoulders uncomfortably. “He and I have an arrangement, you know. This is not the kind of matter he would appreciate me discussing with you.”
“How much to undo me?” she said.
He winced at that. “Well....”
“How much?”
Dark suspicion now hardened into something tangible. Was she the trade he had mentioned in a moment of sloppiness? Gasbray cleared his throat, looked away, a good man at heart wanting to tell her something she wasn’t allowed to know; probably promised money to play by her kidnapper’s rules. He shrugged and mumbled a figure that sounded made up.
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
He flinched at her tone. “These are not questions you should be asking me. You should be asking your father.”
“He’s not my father,” she said; no, she snarled. “He’s some pathetic thing who stole me from my mother and she drowned herself. I hate him, and I hate you too for helping him.”
That stung him. “I had nothing to do with any of that.”
“He never planned for me to be made good again, did he? The money was for him and him alone.”
“Please, I—”
She turned to leave, and he danced around his counter to grab her wrist, but there was
nothing malicious in him, just a man who considered himself decent enough being squeezed into a nasty corner. “Do not do anything foolish,” he begged. “You know how he is. If you say any of this to him he will kill you.”
“What do you care? He’ll still pay you. After all, I’m surplus once I’ve done my bit.”
“Stuff the money!”
The words stopped her.
Gasbray wiped sweat from his face. “He was my friend, from before. That is why I have helped him. The money is neither here nor there. Then he threatened to spread lies about me to the guild, anonymous letters pertaining to certain past indiscretions that would see my license and membership stripped, if I told you. You see?”
Pathetic, duplicitous, but she needed allies. Right now she had none. Still, one thing nagged her. “Why wouldn’t he pay to have me fixed, too?”
“It would take too long to gather the necessary wealth, and he figures he has already waited too long. Besides.” He stroked his upper lip sadly. “The guild has need for oddities, anomalies to be probed and studied to advance the art. The Code forbids direct transmutation, as he has done to you, but you would be considered a useful... gift... by some. A way to reduce a quite breathtaking price. After all, you are no more to him than a dog taught a useful trick. Might as well get something for you when you have outlived your purpose.”
Her lack of surprise told her some deep part of her had always known the truth. But still, it was unforgivable, all of it, and while she had tolerated all the nastiness because she believed he loved her in his own way, the lack of anything of the sort, even the intrinsic bond of blood (which would have counted for something, no matter how miniscule) meant she now had a very clear idea of what she had to do.
“I don’t know how much we already have, but if it comes up short for what I need to be fixed then you have to help me with the rest,” she said. “It’s the least you could do for me.”
