Shorefall

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  She stared at him, stunned.

  “No,” Crasedes said. “I am not like them, Sancia. I am not like them at all.” He slowly turned his head to look at Gregor. “Hello, Gregor,” he said. “It’s very nice to see you again.”

  There was a muffled, dreadful wailing up and to their right, and the ceiling and floors and walls all shook with a series of rattling bangs, one after another…

  And then the shriekers broke through.

  Sancia crouched and covered her head as the metal spears burst through the decks, hurtling toward Crasedes. She braced herself for the explosion, worrying that the shriekers might dovetail together, crack apart, and shower her in deadly shrapnel…

  But nothing came.

  She opened her eyes and looked up.

  Crasedes stood on the deck, his other hand extended up. Five shriekers hung just inches from his open palm, quivering in the air like kites on a tiny length of string, their tips so hot and burning, the moist air seemed to sizzle.

  He turned his black-masked face back to Sancia. “You really don’t know what you’re doing,” he said. He flexed the fingers of his hand, and the shriekers bent and collapsed around one point in the air, slowly warping into a malformed ball. “Do you?”

  “Scrumming fire them all!” shouted Sancia.

  She and Gregor raised their imprinters and opened fire, shooting lead slug after lead slug at him. But Crasedes was ready now, and he calmly flicked them away, one after the other, redirecting their flights so that they stuck to columns, decks, or the distant upper deck above them. Volley after volley of shriekers ripped down through the ship, pulled this way and that, and soon the ruin in the center of the galleon was like a giant firework display with hot metals colliding and erupting, peppering the decks and walls with vicious shrapnel.

  And through it all, Crasedes looked right at Sancia. His implacable gaze never left her.

  “She’s just going to kill you all,” he said. “You know that, yes?”

  Gregor tossed away his imprinter, unsheathed his rapier, ran forward, and leapt from the edge of his deck to plummet toward Crasedes, his sword raised high.

  “Hum,” said Crasedes, bored.

  Then Gregor just…froze.

  He hung in the air, trapped in that position with his sword raised high, mere feet above Crasedes’s head. Crasedes twitched one black finger, and the blade of Gregor’s rapier shattered like it was made of ice.

  Crasedes stared at Sancia, his black, empty eyes fixed on where she lay. “I must have Clef back,” he said. His tone was faintly chiding.

  “Get scrummed, you rotte—”

  He gestured again with one hand, and Gregor drifted up and turned over in one smooth, disturbingly abrupt arc, his arms and legs all fixed in place, like he was not a man but was rather a marionette being positioned in the air.

  But his face could move. And Sancia could see he was in terrible pain.

  She watched as the flesh on his arms and legs quaked unpleasantly, like vast, invisible hands were pressing upon him, shifting his body about.

  It’s his gravity. He’s…He’s adjusting Gregor’s gravity, isn’t he?

  Crasedes watched her with his empty eyes. “I do not wish to do this,” he said in his low, rumbling voice. “But I must have Clef back. Tell me where he is.”

  The air seemed to flex. Sancia watched in horror as Gregor’s face turned bright red. She could see veins in his neck, at his cheeks, and he began choking horribly, spittle dribbling from his mouth. She wondered if he was crushing all of Gregor’s organs, all at once.

  “I can’t harm you,” said Crasedes. “The construct’s seen to that—very clever of her. But him…I can harm him.” He cocked his head. “And I think we both know Gregor will recover. Wouldn’t you say?”

  Sancia stared at Gregor—or she made a show of staring at Gregor. With her right hand, she slowly started reaching for the imperiat.

  “Why?” said Sancia. “Why do you need Clef?”

  “Why?” said Crasedes. He sounded bemused. “For the same reason I made him. To fix the worl—”

  Before he could finish, Sancia reached into the box with the imperiat, found the lever that controlled all the scrivings around them, and shoved it as far as it could go—hopefully killing Crasedes’s influence, if not Crasedes himself, since he was basically just a giant scriving.

  As she did so, though, she realized it would also kill everything that made the galleon float.

  Instantly the whole ship shook. Crasedes staggered back like he’d been punched in the stomach, then collapsed onto the deck. Gregor plummeted out of the air and slammed into the wood. The red maelstrom that marked Crasedes in her scrived sight faded until it was an evil crimson flicker.

  “An imperiat?” said Crasedes. He sounded immensely displeased—which made whatever part of Sancia’s mind that wasn’t mad with fear feel very, very happy.

  But he was not dead, she saw. He was wounded, or stunned—but he was still moving.

  “You thought it would kill me, didn’t you?” he said, still in that silky, even voice. “Oh, Sancia—didn’t you know that I designed that very tool?”

  The entire ship shifted to the right, and they slid down and struck the wall behind her. For a moment Sancia wondered if Crasedes was still doing something to the gravity, but then she realized: since the imperiat had just turned off all the scrivings that made the galleon function, it wasn’t sure how to be a ship anymore. Which meant it was probably now leaning in the ocean…and perhaps it would capsize at any moment.

  And though she didn’t mind the idea of trapping Crasedes Magnus at the bottom of the sea, she preferred to not be trapped with him.

  She scrambled forward, grabbed Gregor, and hauled him to his feet. “Come on, dumbass!” she screamed at him.

  They sprinted into a hallway at random, fleeing into the guts of the ship—all of which were quite dark now, since Sancia had just turned out the lights. She felt the incline below her feet increasing far too quickly for her liking. It was one of the most disorienting things she’d ever experienced in her life, clawing her way through this giant ship as the gravity heaved this way and that.

  “Sancia,” called Crasedes lazily after her, “just so you know, this really isn’t how I would’ve preferred things to go…”

  Sancia tried to ignore him—and to ignore the immense groaning, cracking, and shuddering that was echoing through the ship.

  The incline changed again—were they plunging into the sea?—but she kept feeling forward along the wall, then the railing of a stairway, fumbling through a door…

  She peered forward with her scrived sight for the hatch, but there was nothing—but of course there’d be nothing: she’d just turned off all the scrivings on this ship. There was nothing to see.

  Shit. I’m going to have to turn off the imperiat to find our goddamn way out of here!

  She clenched her teeth and stared back into the darkness. If she turned the scrivings back on, then Crasedes could pursue them, catch them, kill them…

  Then there was a snap from something in the depths of the ship, followed by a great sloshing sound, and suddenly Sancia’s feet and ankles felt very cold and very wet.

  “Sancia!” screamed Gregor. “Turn this damned ship back on!”

  “Shit,” said Sancia. She delicately felt for the imperiat and pushed the lever back down.

  Instantly, Gregor’s lantern turned back on. They were standing in water pouring in from the hallway behind them. Something shrieked and moaned and wailed in the innards of the vessel—the galleon apparently did not much like being turned off and turned on again.

  And Sancia guessed that the lexicon was struggling too. Lexicons had to go through a specific “ramping” sequence of arguments before applying the more complicated ones that let you actually bend the rules of reality. Ors
o always said it was a bit like plotting a sea course—before you did that, you had to agree on basic things, like what water was, and currents, and how the wind worked, and so on. Get the ramping sequence wrong, Orso had told her, and you’ll be setting sail not knowing how a goddamn wave works.

  That metaphor is a hell of a lot more troubling, thought Sancia as the ship groaned around her, under the current circumstances…

  She flexed her scrived sight and spied a little tangle of locking logic, just a hundred yards ahead. “There!” she cried.

  They ran forward. Everything shifted again, until they were suddenly having to run up a sharp slope.

  “Shit!” screamed Sancia as she staggered up a wall, clawing from hatch to door to hatch. She looked backward, and the hallway was slowly turning until it was a wet, gleaming chasm stretching beneath her. If they slipped, they might tumble down, bouncing off the edges and breaking their skulls, only to drown in dark waters at the very bottom.

  Finally they came to the hatch, which now opened up into the sky. Sancia slammed a bare hand against it.

  <…oooooooooh something’s very wrong,> said the hatch.

  Sancia shouted at it.

  She packed enough commands into the sentiment that she overpowered the hatch. She shoved it up and open, and she and Gregor crawled out onto what normally would be the port side of the hull—but she wasn’t sure if it counted as port anymore, since it was now pointed at the sky.

  They crouched, clinging to the slippery hull. The air was terribly smoky here—apparently some part of the galleon had burst into flames, bewildered by the experience of being turned off and then turned on again.

  “Air-sailing rigs!” screamed Gregor.

  They struggled to pull out the little parachutes. Sancia barely had time to reflect on the irony of it: she’d used a version of this rig to break into Gregor’s waterfront once, years ago, where she’d accidentally destroyed a lot of merchant house property. Now the two of them would be using it to escape after having destroyed a piece of merchant house property that was astronomically more expensive than the waterfront.

  They laid out their chutes, grabbed the bars with the scrived plates, and turned them on. Instantly they were ripped through the air. Sancia screamed as she struggled to hang on—her hands were soaking wet—but then she saw their tiny little fishing boat emerging ahead from the spray and the dark waves and the smoke from the galleon. Her heart swooped a little at the sight.

  We’re almost out! Almost out!

  But then they lurched, very, very sharply. And then they began to drop.

  Sancia realized what was happening right away. The scrivings in their air-sailing rig only worked because they were close to the lexicon in the galleon. But the galleon was sinking—and as it was inundated with seawater, the lexicon within would inevitably fail.

  Which meant the air-sailing rigs would stop working as well. So the two of them would plummet into the sea.

  And this was what happened.

  She and Gregor tumbled into the waves about a hundred yards from their fishing boat. Together they tossed away their chutes and started treading water.

  “Drop your gear!” bellowed Gregor. “Drop everything and just stay afloat!”

  “I am!” said Sancia. She released her espringal, the imprinter, and her rapier. The only thing she kept was the box with the imperiat.

  She looked back at the galleon, which lay sideways in the waters like some kind of vast sea monster. What had happened to whatever crew was left, and to Gregor’s mother? Could they have made it to the shallops?

  “Right,” said Gregor, breathing hard. “Now. We’re going to swim together, and if we want to rest, then we can lay on our backs so that uhhh watch out!”

  “Huh?” said Sancia. Then she felt the enormous swell of water behind her, and she and Gregor were both thrown forward, away from the galleon, and were sent tumbling head over heels through the waters.

  For a moment she was sure she would drown—she had never been a very good swimmer—but she fought her way to the surface, broke free from the waters, and took great, heaving breaths of air.

  “Sancia! Gregor! Is that you?”

  Sancia started screaming “Yes!” the instant she heard Orso’s voice. Apparently the immense wave had shoved them closer to their fishing boat. Exhausted, she and Gregor kicked and swam through the dark waters. It was hard not to panic—every time she thought they were close to their boat, it seemed to get shoved away—but finally Orso and Berenice reached out with a long pole intended for picking up striper pots, and she and Gregor latched on and were hauled in.

  They climbed aboard and lay on the floor of the boat, gasping for breath.

  “What in hell happened?” said Orso. “Did…Did it work? Did you stop it?”

  Sancia shook her head. “N-No,” she coughed. “No. He’s…He’s back. He’s back.”

  “Oh my God,” whispered Berenice.

  “But…how?” asked Orso. “It’s not even midnight yet. How could it be done?”

  “Because he knows how to scrive time,” said Sancia. She sniffed and spat—and then she remembered.

  They might still come away with something from this: she’d taken all the parchments with the instructions for how to scrive time.

  She reached into her pocket, but she felt nothing but mush. She pulled it out, and moaned at the sight of the liquefied pulp of parchment sticking to her hand. It must have fallen to pieces in the ocean water.

  She tossed it away and swore, furious. “And we have nothing.”

  “M-Maybe he won’t survive,” said Orso desperately. “Maybe he’s trapped in the galleon. I mean, look at it—it’s sinking like a stone!”

  “Is it?” said Berenice, staring back at the wreckage.

  Gregor and Sancia sat up and stared at the sight that confronted them.

  Impossibly, the galleon seemed to be slowly righting itself, tipping back over to stand upright in the seas.

  Or…is it being pushed?

  “Someone get me a spyglass,” she said hoarsely. “Now.”

  Orso handed her one. She set it to her eye and peered at the dark form of the galleon, rising up out of the waters. She strained her eye as she studied it…and then she saw him.

  A small black figure, hovering just at the stern of the massive boat, slowly pushing it upright, moving this immense vessel as if it were no more than a toy.

  “Sancia,” said Gregor quietly. “Is…Is that…”

  “Yes,” she said. “Let’s get the hell out of here. And find a way to contact Valeria.”

  Gregor took the wheel. Their sails caught wind, and they started back for Tevanne.

  “To tell her what?” asked Berenice.

  “That we failed,” said Sancia. “That Crasedes Magnus lives once more.”

  10

  Ofelia Dandolo tried not to tremble as she disembarked from the ruined galleon, walked down the rope walkway, and stepped aboard the little Dandolo caravel.

  The caravel’s crew didn’t bother to hide their shock and dismay at the state of the vessel. She couldn’t blame them. It had been over ten years since anyone had successfully sunk a merchant house galleon. They were supposed to be invulnerable—but this one looked like it’d been put through some kind of monstrous lumber mill.

  “Will…Will anyone else be joining us, ma’am?” asked the captain of the caravel. He shot a look back at the creaking, smoking galleon.

  “Most of the crew has already removed themselves to safety,” she said faintly. Her eyes trailed up into the dawning sky until she spied a tiny black fleck floating high, high above the galleon. “And if anyone else will be joining us, Captain…I don’t
think we need to wait for him.”

  “P-Pardon, ma’am?” said the captain.

  “Never mind. Let’s just go.”

  They retracted the rope bridge and sped away, back toward Tevanne.

  Ofelia walked to the prow and stared out at the open sea. She remembered Gregor’s face, his posture, the way he’d pointed his weapon at her…

  I would rather risk a life of damnation, he’d said, and save her, than abandon her and stay with those who first damned me.

  She watched the dark waters flying by below the prow of their boat.

  Is that what he thinks of me? That I damned him?

  He had it all wrong, she thought. He had no idea.

  But I didn’t. I saved him.

  There was a distant series of popping sounds from somewhere behind them.

  And I gave up so much to do it…

  The pops grew to a tremendous creaking and crackling. Ofelia and the crew looked back, alarmed, and watched as the galleon quickly sank into the seas. It was like watching an island suddenly plummet into the depths.

  “I kept it up as long as I could,” said a low, rich voice behind her. “Hopefully it won’t cause you any more issues than it already has…”

  There was a spasm of nausea in her stomach, and she slowly turned to find him standing at the prow next to her, staring out at the open ocean before them, the blank, black eyes of his gleaming black mask fixed on the horizon.

  “M-My Prophet!” she said. “How did you get here?”

  He slowly turned to look at her.

  “Quickly,” he said.

  She was unsure what to say. How strange it was to hear the voice that had whispered to her for the past three decades emanating from this figure, dressed in black carnival clothing, standing on the deck with his hands clasped behind his back. To see him here, alive, alert, and real—and to see the works he could do—was something she was still struggling to comprehend.

  He turned very slightly to look back at the galleon, or whatever bit was still visible. She felt her skin crawl. If only she could see some hint of his eyes…