Beneath Ceaseless Skies #120

by Doyle, Debra,

  “He wasn’t looking to steal,” Corwyn said. “Not yet, anyway.” She slid the symbols on the lock around, creating a new combination and letting the metal drink her sweat and the oils from her fingertips. “He was exploring.”

  Gwen sounded thoughtful. “But are we looking at a puppy exploring, or something else?”

  The lock changed with a small snap; Corwyn stood up. “Damned if I know,” she said. She was suspicious by nature—or had been trained to be so from such a young age that it amounted to the same thing. “Though, looking at how he came aboard, that’s an elaborate plan for thievery.”

  Gwen snorted. “Because we know nothing about elaborate plans.” She quirked her lips, considering. “I don’t want him getting near the trunk—I don’t care if Ioren swore nobody could get past that lock, there’s things in there nobody else needs to mess with.”

  Corwyn was pretty sure they oughtn’t mess with some of the things in that trunk, but she just nodded. And decided not to unstrap the box anymore from her leg while she slept. And wondered if maybe it wasn’t time to add a gun to the other hidden items on her person.

  * * *

  On the eighth day, the ship stopped moving.

  Corwyn and Gwen walked the deck through the still, cool air. Corwyn felt that if they were becalmed, it ought to be hotter, but she hated the heat, so it was just as well.

  The Captain looked irritated, though he did his best to smile at them reassuringly as they passed. The sound of their footsteps skipped flat across the glassy water, along with the ticking and pneumatic hissing of the clockwork sailors. Corwyn wondered if the salt air affected them, or if they had particular charms woven into their gears to prevent seizing up.

  “Captain!” Mr. Underwood came up from belowdecks, his granddaughter following him a step or two behind. “I need to have a word with you about Mr. James.”

  “Oh, yes, that’s his name,” Corwyn said. “I couldn’t remember for the life of me.”

  “Knowing you, you’ll forget again in ten minutes,” Gwen drawled, leaning against the rail to watch the scene unfold. Corwyn joined her.

  “—to her cabin! Had Mr. Quarrent not been there, he might have been milling around inside it when Larissa returned! I realize he’s not all there—”

  Gwen pushed away from the railing. “I believe I shall go and add our experience with Mr. James to the Captain’s store of knowledge. Wyn, you’ll be all right?”

  Corwyn waved her on, feeling absurdly relieved that it wasn’t just the two of them Mr. James seemed interested in. “Go on, I will endeavor to survive without your company.” Gwen started across the deck, with more bounce in her step than was strictly necessary, and Corwyn turned back to the water.

  The ocean lay like mercury, smooth and reflective; the air settled lightly on her skin. Corwyn let out a breath. Her knack was such that she spent most of her time moving, either looking for someone or scheming to do so. As kids, before they came to Mrs. Simcote’s, she and Gwen had always been scrambling to find food and a place to sleep, away from feet, fists, and people who meant to do them harm. Even at Mrs. Simcote’s, Corwyn had scrambled to learn and test herself, to refine her knack, all the while jostling back and forth with the other kids. She and Gwen made more plans, now, but they were usually made on the run. It was a good life.

  It meant, though, that Corwyn was rarely becalmed. And so she took long, deep breaths of the gauzy air, listened to the water lap delicately against the hull, and let the stillness soak into her bones.

  A few minutes later, Miss Tennyson joined her. “I take it Mr. James went into your sister’s room, too?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Corwyn said, minding her accent and not sighing. “And in yours, too, then?”

  “Well, not exactly. He was at the door when I arrived. Mr. Quarrent—Grandpapa insisted the captain station one of the clockwork men to my cabin, like a chaperone. And so Mr. Quarrent was blocking the doorway. Mr. James looked very disconcerted.”

  “Clockwork has that effect,” Corwyn said wryly.

  “It’s the way they move, I think,” Miss Tennyson replied.

  “And the masks,” Corwyn added.

  “True. They look so sinister, don’t they, even the smiling ones. You’d think they could be made with more realistic faces.”

  Corwyn didn’t think a clockwork man with a realistic face would be all that soothing, but she wasn’t interested in the vagaries of alchemical engineering. “Did Mr. James say what he was doing at your door?”

  “He said he thought it was the door to his cabin. I suppose being nearly drowned might have addled his wits.”

  “I wonder where he is now,” Corwyn said, glancing over her shoulder to where her sister and Mr. Underwood were still speaking to the increasingly beleaguered Captain. What was the Captain’s name, she wondered. Good grief. “I would expect Mr. James to be trying to clear his name.”

  “Oh, Grandfather was very upset,” Miss Tennyson said. “Which made Mr. James even more upset. One of the flesh sailors took him back to his room, and said he’d have the doctor slip him some laudanum to calm him down and let him sleep. Did you know Mr. James doesn’t sleep nights? The sailors say he wanders the decks.”

  “Really.” Corwyn turned her attention back to the view, no longer reveling in the still air, her head full of dark thoughts of thievery and trespass.

  * * *

  There was something in the water.

  Corwyn noticed it later that afternoon, far enough beneath the surface that she could only make out a long, dark form. “Now, what are you?” she whispered as it passed below her. She eyed it, leaning over the rail; it reached the back of the ship and disappeared around it. Corwyn settled back and looked astern.

  Gwen returned from the privy and joined her. “There must be something downright fascinating out there, judging by how much time you’ve spent looking today.”

  Corwyn could hear the grin in her voice but didn’t take her eyes away from the water. “Just wait. You’ll see.”

  Gwen shrugged, and Corwyn was struck for a moment at the grown woman standing next to her. Gwen’s face was the very first Corwyn could remember ever seeing—red hair, freckles, brown eyes, and the softly curved cheeks and nose of a kid. That was the Gwen she saw when she heard the name, and, in a way, the Gwen she saw when she looked at her, too. But sometimes, especially now that they were making their way in the world, she was startled by her sister’s sharper nose and leaner face; even the scars along her nose and cheekbones were unexpected, though Corwyn knew where each of them had come from.

  The light ripple as the form in the water came round the front of the ship pulled her away from woolgathering. “There,” she said, nodding toward it.

  Gwen had already seen it; she went still before suddenly leaning over the rail to get a better look. “The hell are you?” she asked. Corwyn shot Gwen a grin.

  “Can you tell anything about it?” she asked Gwen.

  “Only it’s long. Nine feet? Ten? Apparently there are limits to even my eagle eyes.”

  The thing passed directly below them again, and they leaned as far over the rail as they dared to peer at it. They fell back once it passed, out of breath, their boots thumping on the deck.

  “Whiskers like a catfish?” Corwyn asked.

  “Tail like an eel?” Gwen returned. “Water dragon, you think?”

  Corwyn shook her head, considering. “Those are Chinese—we’re more than just a bit away from China.”

  “It’s too small, anyway,” Gwen said, her eyes aimed upward as she thought. “And don’t they have legs? Hell’s bells, why didn’t we listen to Ioren more when he went on about all this sea stuff?”

  “Because he was so damned dull about it,” Corwyn said. The sailors on deck had spotted the thing now; the Captain and his first mate were talking near the other rail. The Captain had begun to look downright haunted. Mr. Underwood and Miss Tennyson stood near the middle of the deck; they had noticed the crew’s behavior but had not
yet traced it over the side of the ship. Mr. James was, presumably, still drugged asleep. Soon enough, though, everyone would be watching the creature in the water.

  “Maybe when Bilal reappeared, it brought things back with it?” Corwyn mused. The stories she’d heard of Bilal’s return had mentioned that the waters close to shore had been purple for months, as the bit of bright-red sea that had come back with the island mixed with the blue water of this world. Surely something must have lived in that red ocean. Or something had traveled away with the island and come back with it, changed by its time in the alien sea.

  “God in heaven, does every place we ever go have to be so damned weird?” Gwen asked.

  Corwyn didn’t answer. Whatever weird they didn’t carry around with them always seemed to end up directly in their path.[I like this, but given the somewhat formal feel I feel in the voice, I would rather avoid the split infinitive.]

  * * *

  On the ninth day, in the morning, Corwyn re-sealed the box with the gray, waxy stuff the boy had given her for the task. It stuck to her fingers and smelled terrible as she gingerly filled the indentation where the old seal had shrunk, careful not to crack it, before placing the box on the shelf next to her bunk to dry. Then she changed the dressing on her wound. It was healing well enough, though the skin was puffy and she figured the bruising would be bright for weeks. The scar was going to be impressive: bigger than the one on her side from that Jersey Devil when she was thirteen—which until now had been her pride and joy—but harder to explain. People knew what a Jersey Devil was, but she wasn’t even sure what that thing had been that had wrapped around her leg and begun to chew.

  “It will protect you from the songs,” the boy had said beforehand, the muted sound of the waterfall behind his voice. “Its venom will enter your blood and keep the voice at bay.”

  “I thought that was the box’s job,” Corwyn had said.

  The boy shook his head. “Nothing can contain it completely,” he said. “The box can keep it muffled enough to protect others, but it will want you to set it free. If you carry the box, you must be immune.”

  Corwyn eyed the rough mess of scar on the boy’s arm. He was young; too skinny, too pale for a Bilali boy, and he looked haggard—like the young mothers Corwyn remembered from when she was growing up, trudging back from the market with three kids in tow and only half a bag of food. But there weren’t any kids here, just a temple made from a cave, with a long stone box atop an altar, a bed in a far back alcove, and a pool here at the front, filled with... things. Things with teeth and venom. The boy went to the pool, reached in, and pulled one of the grayish, bug-eyed creatures from the water.

  The cave was cold. “Are you leaving here, once I’ve gone with it?” Corwyn asked as the boy crossed back and sat on the floor in front of her.

  “No,” he said. Since Corwyn had come in, soaked from the waterfall, he had not smiled or frowned, raged or argued—he’d merely done, wearily, what Corwyn asked. But now a wide, giggly-cheerful grin stretched his face out, lighting his brown eyes. His teeth were crooked. “That’s not the only voice, you know. The rest of them will still be here. And so I’ll be here, too.”

  Corwyn had held her breath and gritted her teeth as the boy placed the thing on her leg. It wrapped itself, cold and clammy, around her thigh. She let a small, screechy wail pass between her teeth as the animal began to chew, then let out her breath and took another through her nose. It was a bit to get used to, but the thing, as the boy had said earlier, had a numbing agent in its spit; the initial pain eased off quickly.

  Even now, she could feel its teeth gnawing her flesh.

  * * *

  The water dragon—that’d do for a name—swam past this side of the ship again; the sound of the water rushing outside her open porthole pulled Corwyn out of her woolgathering. She wondered, fleetingly, if the thing in the ocean and the thing inside the temple were related, at least by place of origin, or if they were monsters from this world that people had only just managed to notice.

  And then she heard a sound. It was loud, nasal, unearthly—the sort of noise you got from a long Swiss mountain horn, mixed in with the noise from one of those big Australian pipes. Coming from outside the ship.

  Corwyn quickly finished the dressing, then climbed onto her bed to reach the porthole. That position, hitched up off the bed with an elbow and a grip to one side, wasn’t exactly ideal, but she could see the water dragon—because of course it was the water dragon, what the hell else would make that sound?—hauling itself partway out of the water and howling.

  In the yellowy-blue light of the morning, the water dragon was colored gold. It didn’t look like a Chinese water dragon; it did indeed look like a catfish, one with whiskers and big black eyes, and very long teeth. It balanced, like a dolphin, on its tail, its front fins still partway in the water and paddling, then leaned its head back and howled again.

  It was a sight to behold, all muscle and noise and streaming water; Corwyn marveled at it for a moment before her sense caught up to her. She dropped back on the bed, stepped off awkwardly, and knelt on the floor to paw through her rucksack. She hadn’t heard gunfire, so nobody above had shot at it. She did hear running footsteps headed past her room and into the cabins on both sides. She rummaged in her bag and came up with pants and a shirt, her mind running questions: planning to attack the ship? Planning to mate with it? All that howling, something was surely bound to happen, and the heart-pounding fear detracted a bit from her sheer delight at wearing pants again.

  Scuffling noises and hurried thumps came from Gwen’s side of the wall; Corwyn yanked her boots on, slid the box from Bilal into her trouser pocket, and headed out to Gwen’s door, which she opened without knocking. Gwen was grimly stomping into her own boots.

  “They’re going to shoot it,” she said.

  “I don’t know as I can blame them,” Corwyn said, climbing onto Gwen’s bunk and hauling herself up to look outside: the water dragon’s head was now barely above water. She dropped back down and crouched before the trunk, moving the symbols delicately, then spitting on her fingers before she twisted the mechanism. The lock popped; she and Gwen began arming themselves. Heavy, fast footsteps came up the corridor; Corwyn caught a glimpse of Mr. Underwood and the Captain through the half-open door as they turned into the stairwell. “Who’s going to play sharpshooter?” she asked.

  “Underwood. He was a rifleman in the army during one war or another.” Gwen checked her rifle over and began to load it. Corwyn methodically filled her rucksack—made specially with padded pockets and compartments—with her instruments: astrolabe, ionization appliance, compass, locating mechanism, spyglass, electromagnetism scale, the three glowing rocks from their trip to Arizona, a dowsing pendant, a birch wand, and the things she and Gwen didn’t have names for but knew how to work. In a manner of speaking. She secured her knife in her boot and her pistol on her hip as Gwen finished loading her own pistol and holstered it.

  Lighter, running footsteps sounded in the corridor.

  “I did not know Mr. James could move that fast,” said Gwen.

  “Come on. Let’s see what’s happening.”

  When they came on deck, they found the drowned man hanging on Mr. Underwood’s arm, yanking him back from a rifle braced across a tripod. Two clockwork sailors were moving to grab the drowned man, who was pleading a mile a minute: “Please, you cannot do this, please do not shoot her, she means you no harm, she just wants me—”

  “Why does she want you, then?” Corwyn asked.

  The drowned man’s face lit with hope. “She’s my wife. She’s calling for me.”

  Without thinking, as she banished the alarming images his admission brought to mind, Corwyn asked, “And how did that happen?”

  “She saved me.” The drowned man turned from Mr. Underwood, who looked on with a decidedly nonplussed expression, and took Corwyn’s arm in one cold, oddly flabby hand. “She saved me from drowning. But there was a storm, and we were separated�
��she’s looking for me. She took the wind away to catch you, to find me. I’m what she wants. Please, please do not kill her.”

  “Will the wind come back? If you go to her?” asked Gwen, her tone suspicious.

  “Now, wait a moment,” said Mr. Underwood. “He’ll drown out there.”

  “She keeps me safe,” said the drowned man. “She’s... suited me, to my life with her. I’ll be fine. And yes, she can return the wind to you as soon as she and I are reunited.”

  Another strange, nasal call echoed flat over the glassy water. Corwyn looked at Gwen, who gave a small, one-shoulder shrug. He wasn’t telling the whole truth, for certain, but the sun was going down; soon they wouldn’t have light enough to shoot the dragon.

  “You aren’t her captive?” the Captain asked, speaking slowly.

  The drowned man drew himself up straight and said, quietly, “I love her, Captain.”

  Corwyn thought, but did not point out, that this was not exactly an answer to the question; that said, the man did seem determined to join his hulking bride in the water. Whatever else Corwyn was, she wasn’t one to stand between a man and his lover, however... unique that lover might be.

  Apparently no one else on deck was, either. They all stood back, and the Captain, the crew, Mr. Underwood, and the sisters held their collective breath as the drowned man stripped to his waist and bare feet, revealing the gills along his sides and the webbing between his toes. This left Corwyn disturbed but not certain that it was the gills or the webbing that bothered her. The drowned man climbed onto the rail and balanced for a moment, smiling broadly at the water dragon before diving over the side with barely a splash.

  The group moved to the rail and watched as the drowned man swam to his lady-love. The dragon had receded into the water until only her eyes and top of her head showed above the surface. The water darkened as the sun set; there was enough light to see when the drowned man reached her, smiling still, but not quite enough for Corwyn to be certain that the dragon’s whiskers stroked his face, or if, when he dropped his head, he actually kissed one of them. The pair swam away together, the dragon doing most of the work.