Against the Tide

by Tui T. Sutherland

  They all looked at the Kingray for a reaction to this. There was none. It continued to ripple quietly. Rollan found himself appreciating the fact that at least his spirit animal had a face. If someone bonded with a stingray, how would they ever know what it was thinking? At least Essix could use her face — and beak, and talons, and piercing voice — to make her emotions quite clear.

  “I don’t think a boat could keep up with the Kingray,” Abeke guessed. “You saw how fast it traveled. That’s probably part of the point — since only the Kingray knows how to get to Mulop, this way only a limited number of people can visit him at once.”

  Lenori nodded. “That does make sense. He’s a private octopus.”

  Rollan bit back a laugh. A year ago, racing through the streets of Concorba, surviving on scraps and arguing over nicknames with his former friends, Rollan could never in his life have expected to hear someone say “he’s a private octopus” with such grave intensity.

  “It should be the four of us,” Conor said. “The Four Fallen. That’s who Mulop wants to see.” He turned to Tarik. “You get the ship and the whales ready to leave. We’ll go get the talisman.”

  “No,” Tarik said, stepping forward with a determined expression. “I can’t send you all off into the ocean — into the entire wide-open ocean, to any of a hundred islands — with no idea of where you’re going or whether it’s safe. What kind of protector would do that? Hand you over to a giant stingray, with no way to find you if you don’t come back? If anything happened to any of the Four Fallen . . . if anything happened to any of you . . . it would — I couldn’t —”

  He broke off, shaking his head. There was a moment of strange quiet. None of them had ever seen Tarik so emotional.

  “Oh, Tarik,” Lenori said sympathetically. “You’re starting to sound like a worried father. I understand that you care about them; we both do. But they’re not ordinary children, and in this case they’re right. Mulop wants to see the Four Fallen.”

  “Well, he can see three of the Fallen and me,” Tarik said stubbornly.

  “Really?” Meilin challenged him. “Which one of us would you leave behind?”

  Tarik looked at each of them in turn, unhappiness written in deep lines across his face. Rollan could hear the unspoken question underneath Meilin’s. Who do you think is the mole? Which of us do you trust the least?

  After all this time traveling with Tarik, Rollan knew him well enough to know he would never answer that question. It would devastate whomever he chose, and Tarik was too protective to do that, even if he did have his own private suspicions.

  “We’ll be careful, Tarik,” Conor promised. “This is the only way to get the talisman.”

  “I agree,” said Lenori. She pushed back the folds of her green cloak and put her hands to her temples, closing her eyes as though she was trying to remember her dreams. “I’m sorry, Tarik, but in every one of my visions, I’ve seen all four of the Fallen — Jhi, Uraza, Briggan, and Essix. I’m afraid if any of them don’t show up, Mulop may decide not to help us. Can we risk losing this talisman?”

  “Isn’t it worse to risk losing Meilin, Abeke, Conor, or Rollan?” Tarik demanded. “Or all of them at once? Sometimes . . . sometimes I wonder if Barlow was right, Lenori. We ask so much of them so young. Ordinary or not, they are children.”

  Rollan remembered Barlow, the former Greencloak they’d met on their very first quest through the mountains of Amaya. Barlow didn’t like that the Greencloaks recruited kids, and he’d said as much to Tarik.

  Had Tarik been carrying that same worry around all this time?

  “Mulop is not dangerous like Cabaro or Dinesh,” Lenori insisted. “He’s friendly to our cause, and we should keep him that way.”

  “Besides,” Rollan pointed out, “the mole can’t betray us this time, because none of us know where we’re going. Right? That’s the upside of being a secret location — the bad guys can’t find it either.” He nudged Tarik’s arm.

  There was a sort of awkward pause, as if everyone else had been worrying about the mole too, but trying not to bring it up.

  Abeke nodded. “It’s really all right, Tarik. You’ve taught us well. We can take care of each other, and we’ll be back soon.”

  Tarik rubbed his face with a furious movement. “I can feel that this is wrong,” he said. “I’m no seer, but I’ve been in more than a few battles and there’s a sense you get when things aren’t right. Lumeo is anxious too. Don’t any of you feel it? I fear that something awful is about to happen.”

  “That’s just your worry talking,” Meilin said, shifting impatiently. Her hand went to the tattoo of Jhi, and she bit her lip.

  “Yeah, it sounds kind of like how I feel all the time,” Rollan tried to joke. He’d never seen the elder Greencloak so nervous. Usually Tarik was cool and collected — a force of calm even when things looked bad. If even stone-faced Tarik was scared, shouldn’t the rest of them be?

  “Have faith in us,” Conor said with a smile. He held out his hand for Tarik to shake.

  The Greencloak still looked unhappy and unconvinced. Slowly he took Conor’s hand. “Promise me you’ll be careful. Promise me you’ll come back.”

  “Of course,” Conor said.

  “We promise,” Abeke added, and Rollan and Meilin nodded too.

  Tarik sighed and dropped Conor’s hand. “Here’s the Granite Ram,” he said, handing it to Rollan. “I hope it helps you.”

  “And I have the Slate Elephant,” Abeke said, touching her pocket.

  “Don’t worry about us,” Meilin said. “We’ll be back soon.”

  Tarik reached up to his shoulder and gathered Lumeo in his hands, as if he needed something to hold on to.

  Abeke was already climbing down onto the stingray. Rollan couldn’t stand around like a coward any longer. He scrambled over the rocks until he could lower his feet onto the ray’s back. Like Meilin, he carefully leaned his weight forward, then stood up — and promptly slipped and fell right into the ocean.

  Meilin reached in and hauled him back out. “Idiot,” she said, but he thought he detected a note of affection in there.

  “Just testing the water,” he said. “Nice and warm. Much warmer than — ah, than the last time I got dunked.” That was in Eura, when that brutish walrus had stolen the Crystal Polar Bear.

  Conor joined them, crouching next to Abeke, who’d seated herself cross-legged. Rollan sat on her other side, as close to the middle of the ray as he could get. Its back felt weird and rubbery under his fingers, with an odd prickly texture when he swept his hand in the wrong direction, but smooth as skin in the other.

  It was also extremely wet. The Kingray was floating just below the surface of the water, and sank slightly as they each climbed on, so they were all partially submerged by the time everyone was on board. Seawater sloshed around their legs and soaked their pants.

  Abeke brushed her leopard tattoo with her fingers. “Uraza would hate this,” she said.

  Meilin glanced down at them, as if she was considering trying to stay upright for the ride. But finally she sat down as well, wrinkling her nose and wrapping her cloak up around her shoulders to keep it dry.

  The moment she was seated, the Kingray began to move, rippling forward and out into the open ocean.

  “Good luck!” Tarik called anxiously. “Please be safe!” Lenori was right; the elder Greencloak sounded more like a parent than a guardian. Rollan felt a strange tug of concern. He wasn’t sure if it was just Tarik’s worry spreading to him, but suddenly the sky seemed heavy above them. Why did this parting feel so final?

  Rollan waved good-bye as Dagger Point, Lenori, and Tarik rapidly shrank to tiny shapes behind them. He was surprised to realize how much he wished Tarik could have come with them after all. He tilted his head back to make sure Essix was still above them, following the Kingray, although he didn’t really need to l
ook to know that. He could sense her there, all the more keenly now that the experience on Nightshade Island had let him know what a giant empty hole would be left in his chest without her.

  The ocean flew past in a blue-green blur, with white sprays of water pluming on either side of them. From the ship, Rollan had looked out at Oceanus and thought it was a sunny, beautiful place. He didn’t know anyone who’d ever spent time playing or relaxing on a beach, but he’d heard that it was something the wealthy of Concorba would travel miles to do. He’d never understood that — why roll around in sand and deal with roaring, moving water if you didn’t have to?

  Seeing the beaches of Oceanus had given him a glimpse of the appeal. He’d now traveled across almost the entire world of Erdas, and these islands were possibly the most beautiful of any of the places they’d visited.

  But the view from the deck of a ship was quite different from the view on top of a giant stingray.

  The sparkling, glassy turquoise waters turned out to be teeming with life, and it was even more visible to Rollan with the extra-sharp eyesight that came from his bond with Essix. Countless fish in every color of the rainbow swam below them, including several of the large silver ones that Rollan remembered seeing in the fish traps they’d waded past in the harbor of Xin Kao Dai. None of the sea life seemed afraid of the Kingray; many of the fish came close enough for Rollan to touch, if he wanted to risk leaning over the side to try.

  One school of thin lemon-yellow fish darted by, each of them as long as his arm. Far below them, on the sandy ocean floor, Rollan spotted a huge starfish with stubby teeth-like ridges along its five arms; it glowed the same amber color as Essix’s eyes.

  As long as he remained seated, it was easier than he would have expected to stay on the Kingray. Rollan had half imagined that he’d go flying off the minute it moved, but they sped along smoothly. It was almost no different than sitting on a floor, apart from the wind rushing through his hair and the water spraying his face.

  He had a strange flash of a memory — something he hadn’t thought about in years. In it, he was very small, and his mother was there. She’d set him on a scrap of red-and-gold carpet and then pulled him around the room like it was a sled, faster and faster, whirling and laughing. He remembered her laughing face, eyes shining at him. He remembered giggling until he fell off the carpet, over and over again.

  That must have been one of her rare good days. He hadn’t thought he had any happy memories of her.

  Much good it does me, he thought savagely. She’s the Devourer’s slave now, controlled by the Bile. Even if I did want my mother back, I couldn’t have her.

  He felt something brush his knee and looked up into Meilin’s eyes. The wind had flung away the cord she usually used to tie up her hair, and now it flew in a wild dark cloud around her head. When he’d met her, he’d been struck by her beauty, but now when he looked at her he saw so much more — her unbelievable fighting skills, her intelligence, her sharp humor, her steely strength.

  I’m glad it was me that Essix chose, he realized. I’m glad it was me, and I’m glad Jhi chose her.

  Meilin touched his knee again and tilted her head, as if she’d seen some of his struggle in his face, but she didn’t want to intrude by asking.

  “Nothing important,” he said, answering her unspoken question. “Just . . . thinking about Aidana.”

  “Maybe there’s a way to set her free,” she said. “If there is, I promise you we’ll find it.”

  He nodded, not quite ready yet to let himself hope. His gaze shifted back to the water, where he could now see a coral reef not far off to their left, bright pinks and purples and oranges in the shapes of strange frozen plants. The whole thing shimmered with the movement of hundreds of sea creatures, darting in and out of the small holes or crawling along the outside of the coral.

  “Look,” Abeke said in a breathless voice. She pointed to something swimming up ahead of them — lots of somethings, parts of them surfacing and submerging as they swam.

  “Sharks?” Conor asked nervously.

  “No,” Meilin said, cracking her first smile since Nightshade Island. “Seals.”

  The Kingray sailed smoothly right through the pod of seals; they parted to let it by as quickly and neatly as street urchins scattering before a carriage in the city. Sleek brown heads popped out of the water to watch them go by. Rollan grinned at the curious, almost puzzled expressions on their whiskered faces. Their eyes were huge and brown and surprisingly human, a lot like the baby orangutan’s. Most of them had rolls of fat under their necks like double chins, making them look even sillier.

  With a twinge of guilt, Rollan thought of the seal hunt they’d witnessed with the Ardu in Arctica. These seals looked smaller and sleeker than those, gleaming like oiled wood under the water. They’d understand, though, he told himself. They have to eat to survive too, just like the Ardu hunters.

  Three of the seals — the smallest and therefore perhaps the youngest and the bravest — followed the Kingray for as long as they could keep up. They kept darting under the Kingray and popping up on the other side, then flipping their tails to splash the riders and ducking under again.

  “They’re trying to play with us,” Abeke said, delighted.

  “They kind of remind me of Lumeo,” Conor said. “Or some of the puppies we had when I was a kid.” He waved at the closest seal and it whacked the water with one of its flippers, its eyes sparkling mischievously.

  Rollan twisted to watch the seals vanish under the water as the Kingray pulled away from them. He wondered if he and his friends would survive long enough to see a day when they could just enjoy a place like this — the sunshine, swimming with the seals, the warm water. He could almost, but not quite, imagine what it would be like if they didn’t have the darkness of the Devourer hanging over them and the weight of Erdas’s future in their hands.

  “Are we slowing down?” Conor asked.

  Rollan dipped his fingertips in the ocean and watched the ripples flow past. “I think so,” he said. He squinted up in the direction the Kingray was swimming. “Does that mean that’s where we’re going?”

  They all turned to look at the island that was coming closer and closer. Rollan had expected something majestic and weird for the home of a Great Beast — an entire palace made of seaweed, perhaps. But this was a perfectly ordinary-looking island, perhaps a bit more rocky and bare than the other ninety-nine that made up the Hundred Isles. There was nothing extraordinary about it at all.

  But this was clearly their destination. The only landing spot was a crescent-shaped cove with a white sand beach; tall cliffs of rock made up the other sides of the island, knobbed and pockmarked and rough like a coral reef. The Kingray gradually slowed more and more until it floated solemnly into the cove and flared to a stop in shallow water.

  “This is it?” Rollan asked the giant stingray.

  “Where’s Mulop?” Meilin demanded. They could see pretty much the whole island from where they were, and there was certainly nothing that looked like a giant octopus.

  The Kingray, predictably, did not answer.

  “I guess that’s our cue to start looking,” Conor said cheerfully. He rolled off into the waves and splashed over to the beach. Two reddish-orange crabs the size of Rollan’s hand saw Conor coming and scuttled away sideways into their holes. They vanished just as Briggan appeared from Conor’s tattoo and bounded onto the sand. The wolf shook himself vigorously and started galloping up and down the beach like a puppy finally let into the sunshine after a rainy day.

  “Maybe Mulop is underwater?” Abeke guessed. She scooted off the Kingray, peering into the sapphire blue sea as she jumped in. Apart from the clouds of sand kicked up by Conor as he’d gone ashore, the water was clear enough to see the ocean floor for a long way in each direction. Nothing there looked like a giant octopus either, or like the entrance to a giant octopus’s secret
lair.

  Rollan felt a flicker of intuition stirring in his brain. He looked up at Essix, soaring overhead, and felt it again, even stronger. They were close to Mulop. But they wouldn’t find him down on the beach — they had to climb up the rocks to the cliffs and search there, as odd as that seemed.

  Nobody argued with him, though, when he and Meilin reached the sand and he told them what he’d felt.

  “All right,” Conor said. “Let’s climb.”

  “Are you going to wait for us?” Meilin asked the Kingray. “Float there unhelpfully like a wet piece of silk if the answer is yes.”

  The Kingray stared impassively at her, rippling quietly.

  “That better be a yes,” Rollan said. “I really do not want to get stuck here.”

  Essix came soaring down and landed suddenly on his shoulder. Her talons gently squeezed and she nibbled at his hair with her beak.

  “Can you help us find Mulop?” he asked her.

  She clacked her beak and he felt it again, like something physically tugging him up the rocks. He followed the sensation, leading the way up until they reached the top of the island cliffs. There were no trees up here, nothing but a flat tabletop of stone and a view out to distant green-and-white islands.

  Except for one thing: a great wide hole in the stone, yawning and dark like an open mouth.

  Rollan immediately regretted having that thought. Because the only thing to do, the obvious thing to do, was to climb down into it.

  He pulled out the Granite Ram, remembering Tarik’s worried face as the Greencloak handed it to him. “I’ll go first,” he offered. He slipped the talisman around his neck and swung his legs into the hole. It wasn’t a straight dark shaft after all; he immediately felt a ledge below his feet, and then he saw boulders strewn about all the way down, and light glowing at the bottom.

  As he climbed down, the Granite Ram helped him leap lightly from one boulder to the next, keeping his feet even as the rocks became wetter and more slippery. It became brighter and brighter the farther down he went, and soon he realized that there were other holes in the walls, allowing sunlight to filter into the cavern.