Seablood

by Cameron Bolling

  She needed a boat. As a child, she built tiny structures and floated them down the river of her village, chasing after them along the riverbanks, but she never built anything large enough to fit a person. Even when she turned the raider wagon and the wagon’s roof into a pair of boats, she already had the structures before her, she just waterproofed them. She carried the rubber in her bag still, the same sort she used to make the wagon roof float across the lake. With a large enough structure, she could do the same again. But what could she use?

  Building a small boat or even just a raft required more time than she wanted to spend—a day or two at least, depending on how easily she managed to get the materials. It didn’t have to be terribly fine or even watertight between the slats of wood—she had the rubber to take care of that. But none of that changed how many trees she would have to cut down or how many trips up and down the beach it would take to lug the wood. Any faster plan was a better option simply in the interest of haste.

  As long as it could make her float—and for long enough to reach the thing out in the waves—it would work.

  She dropped her supplies and unclasped her cloak. Balancing on her prosthetic, she tugged off her boot and sock, then went down to the water with the rubber.

  Brisk wind whipped her hair and the loose folds of her clothes about her. Cold water crashed around her foot; she nearly jumped away from its touch, startled by how frigid the water was despite the weather being so sunny and warm. It sent nipping chills through her toes.

  She waded in a few more steps and then stooped, unfurling the rubber. The edges fell into the water, but the droplets ran right off in beads, leaving the material with hardly even a damp coating to it.

  Streams of water coursed across its folds—filling the valleys and swirling around the peaks—as she dipped it lower in the water. Left to its own fate, the material floated, but barely—certainly not enough to support a whole person on top of it. As she put weight on the surface and submerged the center of the sheet, it resisted for a moment. A dozen bubbles skirted out from beneath it, racing for the junction between the water and the sky where they disappeared. Oleja watched them.

  She pulled the rubber into the air and shook off the loose water. Draping it over one fist, she clamped her other hand around her wrist, then slid the hand free. A bubble of air filled the pocket.

  Stooping low to the waves again, she pushed the air pocket beneath the water. It resisted her push—and strongly—forcing its way back to sit atop the water.

  Again, she lifted the rubber and looked it over. She had an idea—one that she hoped was good enough to be worth risking her life on.

  Back on the shore, she ran about, gathering driftwood from the sand. Tor seemed eager to help, but equally eager to take the sticks she laid out in a pile and run off with them to play in the waves. Oleja spent just as much time chasing him as she did gathering wood, but the chase was only yet another game to the coyote. Once she got a fire started, however, he seemed less inclined to snag the sticks from the pile.

  While the flames grew, she took a long, flat piece of iron from her bag and tossed it into the center of the blaze. On a flat rock next to the fire, she laid out the sheet of rubber, folded in half once.

  As the flames grew, the iron began to glow. Oleja took a pair of tongs from her bag and reached into the flames to remove the red metal. Next, she moved to crouch by the rubber. Careful to avoid damaging the material or her exposed flesh, she seared the edges together to form a large pouch.

  Several times throughout the process she had to return the rapidly cooling metal back to the flames to let it reheat, but slowly she worked her way around until only an opening about a foot long remained unmelted.

  Oleja held up the pouch, pointing the opening skyward. One end brushed the sand, and the other rose to the height of her stomach. She shook it a few times to separate the sides and allow air within. Keeping it upright, she seared the remainder of the edges, all but a slit of an inch or two in length. Ensuring the rubber around it was cool, she put her lips to the hole and blew many heavy breaths into it. When the pocket looked to contain enough air, she pinched the opening and reached for her tongs again.

  She seared the last bit carefully, making sure the metal didn’t touch her fingers where they clamped the rubber just beneath it. A sizzling drop of water hit her finger and made her flinch, but she kept her grip until the last bit of the pouch was seared shut.

  Laying the air pouch in the sand, she sat down carefully atop it. It held her weight and did not burst. Attuning her ear, she listened; a faint whistle came from somewhere on her rubber cushion.

  No good.

  After locating the leak, she seared it closed, and repeated the process to find three other air leaks. Finally, after patching the last of them, she found the pouch airtight at last. Then came the true test.

  It floated in the water without her on board, at least. Waves swept below it, making it rise and fall with the crashing of the foam on the sand. She pushed it out away from the shore until the water lapped at her knees and then, all at once, flopped down onto it.

  The wet rubber squeaked under her, but it held her up and kept her from sinking below the water’s surface. That was all she needed.

  She lay on the thing for several minutes but felt no loss in air, so she returned to the shore. There, she went through her stuff. She emptied her quiver and put it back over her shoulder with only half a dozen arrows, and picked up her bow too. Everything from her bag she dumped into one heap on the beach. Scraps clattered into the sand in a great crashing mess. She packed a few things back into the bag—the things that would be least harmed by the water, and which seemed most useful, as well as her tools, some of her water supply, and the jar for the seablood. Picking through her rations, she ate a quick snack as well. She didn’t know how long she would be out there at the odd outcropping, but any food she tried to pack would be destroyed in the water.

  Everything else she left there in the sand—cloak, crutches, blanket, supplies, the map, the iron ore, the snow-water. She took off her armor and left it with her boot and sock. She kept her knife sheathed at her side.

  “You’re in charge of guarding all of this, all right?” she said to Tor. He wagged his tail and rolled in the sand, sticking his feet in the air and looking up at her. His tongue flopped out of his mouth and nearly covered one eye. Fearsome.

  After one last look back at the hills and the world of earth, she turned and dragged the air pocket back down to the water’s edge, to the meeting place between the two worlds. She stepped into the world of water.

  The chill never became less shocking no matter how many times she stepped into the waves. She ignored the currents of cold that seeped in under her skin; she had a while yet to be in the water, and succumbing to the cold now was only a sign of weakness. Whether she could swim or not, she had to go out there and get the seablood. For heroism. For her people.

  She clung to the cushion, holding it tight to her chest, and kicked through the water. Her waterlogged clothes weighed her down and made her feel as though she didn’t move at all, but every glance back proved that she swam farther and farther from the shore. Along with that reassurance, however, came a terrible sinking feeling in her gut that she wished never to feel in any truer capacity. She kept kicking.

  The sun beat down on her as the day wore on. Oleja’s thighs ached with every stroke, but she kept going, her fear of stopping and sinking down to whatever waited below pumping enough adrenaline through her system to overpower any will to take a break. Slowly, slowly, the outcropping on the horizon grew closer. Details began to come into focus.

  Pillars rose up out of the water, great forms breaching through the waves as they stood against the crashing power of the world of water. Several large ones lined the edges of the structure, joined by some smaller ones as well, many of which crumbled away. Atop them all rested a roughly rectangular platform, and above that sat walls and more levels. Standing tall over the rest loom
ed a tower of many beams forming a frame of sorts. As it rose higher into the air, the shape grew more warped, eventually bending off at a distinctly broken-looking angle and then ending abruptly.

  As she got closer still, more features of its construction became apparent. It looked to be of Old World make, a detail that confused her at first. Anything from the Old World fell into terrible disrepair, and the structures were nearly nonexistent in places where the weather beat more heavily down upon them. She had only come within sight of the world of water less than a day prior, but already she could tell that the weather here subjected the world to a harsh natural force. The waves themselves should have eaten away at the pillars long ago, snapping them in two and plunging the whole structure to the depths to be known only by the fish and whatever beasts lurked down there in the dark. But here it stood, still poking up out of the water.

  And she soon saw why. Patches of materials melded across the whole structure; gaps and old, worn sections had been mended with sheets of fresher metal stained by less rust and drifting green weed. The closer she got, the more the platform exploded into a myriad of colors and materials. The construction reminded her at once of her armor back in her village, the suit she pieced together of mismatched scraps. It seemed as though someone did upkeep on the structure, keeping it from its fate in the depths as they turned it into some shell of its prior self.

  And she didn’t have to wonder why. This was a trial site of the most important tradition in Ahwan, and the most important of the trials at that. This location housed the seablood, a material so meaningful to the people that they used its symbol as their city’s symbol. No wonder they kept the place from falling apart.

  When at last she reached the edges of the structure after no less than two hours of swimming, the shore lay as merely a hazy silhouette of rocks and hills in the distance. Only one trial remained before she returned to Ahwan to face the final trial. She could do this—whatever this was.

  She swam up to a lattice of smaller bars on one side of the structure and clung to them as if they were all that stood between her and a terrible, suffocating death in the dark depths of the world of water. Which they were. Her arms shook, numb from the water, the swim, and the tension she had held so tightly in her muscles while keeping her grip on the air pocket. Cautiously, testing the strength of the bars as she went, she hoisted herself up out of the water, dragging her floatation device behind her. At the top, she flopped down on the rickety metal platform. The beams and slats creaked and groaned beneath her. Water dripped from her clothes and hair and formed a puddle there on the metal.

  Many labored breaths passed through her lips, and only once they slowed did she sit up and look around. Only the wind stirred the debris about the structure. Waves crashing against the pillars below her filled the air with their rhythm.

  As quietly as she could, she climbed through the levels of the structure—which was in fact quite loud, as every footfall sent grating creaks running through the metal and all the way down the pillars into the water, no doubt. She left a trail of water droplets in her wake. With every level she went up, they seemed to be in greater and greater states of disrepair. She trod carefully over the floor with her bare foot, avoiding anything that looked sharp—which was most things. When she climbed up a ladder and nearly fell through the rusted floor at the top, she deemed her explorations complete and descended back down. Nothing moved or presented itself as a trial.

  Was she wrong in coming out to the platform? No, that seemed unlikely. Her map bore an image of the structure, and even if it didn’t, why else would someone bother to keep the structure repaired and standing? If it wasn’t absolutely crucial to Ahwan, the trials, and the seablood—or anyone or anything else—then why manage the upkeep?

  Back on the first level, she paced around, looking down at the water below. It wasn’t until she reached the third corner of the platform that she found anything noteworthy at all.

  Carved into the metal was a symbol—the spiral and two lines above, the symbol for Ahwan and for the seablood. Oleja’s heart soared. So she hadn’t come all the way out to the structure for nothing. The trial was there after all.

  Past the symbol, another carving scratched through the metal—an arrow, leading away from the seablood symbol and pointing to the platform’s edge. She followed it, her brow furrowing. Did the arrow point back to the shore? Why draw trial-goers all the way out there just to turn them back?

  She leaned as far out over the ledge as she dared, peering down into the expanse of blue below. Nothing seemed amiss there, or even vaguely suggesting a trial.

  Clambering down onto her stomach, she hung her head over the edge. For a moment, she saw nothing, but as she shifted her eyes higher up out of the waves, she spotted another symbol.

  There, on the large corner pillar of the platform, was the seablood symbol again, joined by another arrow. This one, set just below the curling design, pointed down. The arrow’s tip lay only a foot from the wave peaks.

  Oleja’s gaze drifted back down, down into the water, to the dark depths that swirled around the pillar. The sinking feeling returned at once and filled her to the brim. Her throat closed tight.

  The trial directions pointed her clearly where to go, and yet she wanted nothing more than to reject it and return to the shore. Surely the arrows pointed back there after all.

  But they didn’t, and she knew where the next trial took her. She had one material left to gather, and to reach it, she had to descend deep down to the abyss below the great world of water.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Fortunately, Oleja had plenty of confidence in her ability to sink.

  Of course, that didn’t mean she had any desire to do it. Descending down however far to the depths sounded worse than climbing a hundred icy mountains or crossing a thousand sun-scorched deserts. How would she get back up to the surface? And sure, she could sink—but how far and how fast did she need to go?

  Dozens of questions all swirled around in her mind like whirlpools in the dark water. She stood and paced around the platform again. Only scraps and pieces of debris littered the floor—some large, others mere shards of something more, but nothing that looked remotely useful in helping her swim.

  She gazed back to the shore. It sat so firm and safe on the horizon. She had come so far out of her element, and already she felt like she was drowning.

  Standing on the ledge that faced farther into the world of water, she stared out at the waves that brushed the sky. She had to get the seablood, or everything else she had done so far was for nothing.

  Two obstacles stood before her—getting down to the depths, and getting back up to the surface with the seablood. For starters, she needed to figure out a way down.

  Well, jumping into the water and letting herself sink could work, but she likely needed a faster descent. If she used something heavier—stone or metal, whatever she had access to on the platform—she could manage that. Then it just became a matter of how to hold that extra weight, as keeping it in her arms meant having no free hands to gather the seablood at the bottom.

  Sinking seemed to be the easier part of the loop, it was getting back up that posed an issue. As a kid, she had played in the river on especially hot days—usually in the shallower and slower-moving bathing pools that filled from the river, as they provided safer spots where she could avoid being swept away by the current while wading through it on unsteady legs. Even there, she remembered the feeling of sinking below the surface and clawing back for the air, waving her limbs as she tried to rise. The water always seemed determined to keep her, even when her body thrashed only a few feet beneath its bounds. However far down she had to go to get the seablood, she doubted the water’s hold on her would be anything less than deadly.

  She needed a way to float back up that didn’t rely on her own ability to propel herself—something like the rubber air pocket. But if the whole point of such a thing was to make her float, how would she get it down with her? She couldn�
��t just take her air pocket down to the depths—it kept her afloat. To drag it so far beneath the waves called for an immense force.

  A force she could apply through added weight. With enough stone or metal or whatever else, she could pull herself and the air pocket down to the seablood, and then use the air to get her back up to the surface. With some kind of harness and release mechanism, she could improve the concept further, giving her the ability to leave her hands free and not worry about holding onto the weights and air pocket.

  Oleja put a hand to her temple. The wind blew cold and sour about her, piercing her still-damp clothes. It was a completely absurd idea, truly. The risks were many, and all came with high stakes. But what choice did she have?

  Her movements back across the platform to the symbol-marked corner were reluctant and slow. The longer she waited, the longer she had to come up with some alternative—some plan that didn’t require sending her body plummeting into the dark depths of the water tied to a rock with only a vague and unrealistic hope that she didn’t die down there.

  But just the same, the longer she stalled was the longer her people waited in the canyon at the mercy of the eclipsers, and the longer she put off returning to become the hero of her village—the hero to destroy Itsoh. Delaying her actions only put off what had to be done. It only put off her destiny. She was Oleja Raseari, skyborn, and the will of all the great forces meant for her to best the Seablood Trials and become the hero of Ahwan, the vanquisher of Itsoh, the hero of her people. No amount of water could subdue the sky.

  Near the corner she found a large chunk of some sort of stone. Grey-brown, it looked to have once been smooth and fine, but now hollows and cracks pocked the thing, eaten away at by the elements no doubt. White growths protruded from the stone in patches. The whole thing rose to the height of her thighs, but despite its size she could roll it across the metal floor without too much difficulty given its rounded shape. Perhaps once a piece of a pillar, it had one final job to do—sinking, and pulling her down with it.