by Richard Fox
“Strong maybe,” the helmsman added.
The maita ripped the cage off the pole and carried it into the gloom. Fierce squawking broke out and a section of bloody cage wire landed in the sea just to starboard.
Crew stepped away from the inflated boat and took rifles handed down from a sailor in the conning tower.
The helmsman turned the wheel and angled the sub around another rocky islet stabbing up from the sea.
“What’s with the guns? Thought you liked the birds.” Sarah reached toward the sailor passing out weapons, but he shook his head vigorously at her.
“They’re not for the birds.” Illion pulled the bolt back on his rifle and examined the large-caliber bullet within. He locked the bolt forward and brought the stock up to his shoulder. “Turley spoke of some beast from your home world. Swims. Teeth. Eyes that go white when they strike.”
“A shark,” she said.
“Yes…shark. We don’t have sharks here.”
“Then what…do you have?” Her eyes darted over the water and she put her back to the conning tower.
“Marker!” The helmsman pointed ahead of them.
A wooden ship, its sails decayed, was wrecked against an island, the masts broken over jagged rocks, the hull cracked open like the dried skin of an old onion.
“There’s the Star Fortune,” Illion said. “Belonged to a Toiler nation that was wiped out by Slavers. Rest the souls of those aboard. No grave but the sea for her Islanders.”
Illion gripped the stock of his rifle with one hand and slapped two fingers over his knuckles.
“Back to sharks?” Sarah asked.
“Yes. Sharks. We don’t have them.” Illion nodded. “We do have red maws. And this is their breeding season.”
“Silence or you’ll summon the spirits,” said the helmsman as he chewed on the mushrooms stuck between his cheek and gum, his ketafik going pale red as his blood pressure rose.
“We’ve a charm, no worries.” Illion winked at Sarah. “Now, let me make something clear. These are bad waters to the uninitiated. As skilled as we are,” he said, motioning to the lifeboat, “these are still bad waters. If you need to—” he didn’t speak aloud the tragedy that would necessitate a lifeboat, “you’re the first in there, as you are our precious cargo.”
“Not that I know where to go…”
“I’m sure you’ll have as much company as that raft can bear, but northeast if you find yourself all by your lonesome. Now if you—”
A scream went up behind them and the sailors whirled around, rifles ready. Something hit the submarine and the aft shifted to one side, sending Sarah stumbling toward the water. Illion grabbed her by the collar and yanked her back.
What looked like a massive fin rose and fell in the mists.
“Get him inside and get that leg off him!” Illion shouted to a pair of sailors carrying another with a gash down his left shin. The sailor had a wadded-up belt in his mouth, stifling his screams. A bitter odor came off the wound and fizzing blood hit the deck as he was hauled up and into the ship.
Rifles cracked behind her and she whirled around. The “fin” was the head of a giant fish with barnacles dotting its red flesh. Its upper lip rose over the water, revealing rows and rows of needle teeth.
Illion shot it in the gums, blasting out a hunk of flesh. More rounds smacked into the barnacles and the maw twisted away.
A tentacle whipped out of the water and slammed onto the deck between Sarah and the helmsman. She tried to shout a warning, but Illion slapped a hand over her mouth. The tentacle wiggled toward the helmsman, who didn’t even turn around to see it.
He spun the wheel hard, steering the ship away from the red maw and stretching the tentacle out. He raised his left foot as the appendage thumped against the base of the wheel mount, then hopped over it as it slithered to his other foot.
The helmsman pulled a lever and the ship rumbled as the main propeller spun up. The tentacle went rigid then began flopping up and down against the hull.
Illion jumped forward and stomped onto the tentacle, pinning it to the hull, then shot it several times until it broke in two, the base section continuing to thrash. Illion kicked the rest off his ship, careful to avoid the barbs at the tip.
“That’s a bad omen if ever there was one,” the captain said. “Lose our cage. Attract a maw…” He looked at Sarah with hard eyes. “Haven’t seen anything like this since the Scouring.”
“Are there more?” Sarah pointed at a slick of blood in the water.
“No, you injure one and it keeps others away. They don’t want to be eaten either,” Illion said.
“Hold on, something eats those things?”
“Pinch,” the helmsman said, and a cliff face loomed up out of the fog that poured through a small opening at the base. The pilot steered straight for it.
“Ha-a-a…” Sarah shrank toward the deck as the submarine sailed through what felt like a tight fit, but she noted there was extra space upwards of several yards on either side of the ship.
A deep chill flowed over her and her teeth chattered. A mountain loomed up out of the mist straight ahead, its cliff faces wavering in the fog. It looked more like a dreamlike threat in the mist, but it was still there.
The helmsman spat his mushroom chew out into the sea. He did not change their direct course toward the mountain.
“Illion,” she said, tugging on his gold belt. “Illion, it’s coming right for us.”
“That it is.” He flicked the safety on his rifle and breathed a sigh of relief as the heavy darkness in the abyss loomed ever closer.
“We’re going to crash!” She jumped into the lifeboat and it slid to one side, catching on the lines securing it to the deck.
The fog was so thick, she almost couldn’t see her hands as she struggled to untie the moorings.
“No! Michael! Daniel!” She ducked into the lifeboat as the fog went dark as the abyss…and nothing happened.
She looked up as the fog thinned, the bright smudge of the sun becoming visible a few moments later. She sat up in the lifeboat. To the rear was the same dark mass in the fog, with grey tendrils swirling where the submarine had passed.
Illion leaned over the side of the lifeboat and looked her over.
“She didn’t mess herself. You owe me ten shillings!” he called out to the helmsman, who responded by raising one hand, thumb and forefinger pinched into a circle.
“What…what was that?” she asked.
“Our home’s last little trick for unwanted guests.” He put one leg up on the side of the life raft and set his rifle over his lap. “If I tell you how it’s done…the Queen may not ever let you leave.”
“I’m good with keeping promises.” Sarah got out of the lifeboat. “But why tempt fate or the Queen’s mood, right?”
She put her hands on her hips and pursed her lips. “But why? Why have an obstacle you can just sail through?”
“You pass through the Pinch and come right out with that ahead of you…what do you think an uninitiated captain would do?” Illion asked.
“Hard to port or starboard, sail around it,” Sarah said.
“And right into the shoals that’ll rip out the bottom of your ship.” Illion smirked. “There’s a reason we’ve never had unwanted guests. Most never even try to sail in here. Those that do wreck before they ever get close.”
“The Slaver or King’s navy never tried to come here?” she asked.
“Damn airplanes.” Illion spat on the deck. “Weather keeps them from flying overhead and seeing much. And then…this isn’t the only submarine in the Queen’s service. But we’re surrounded by Islander nations. They keep the riffraff out.”
“What keeps the Islanders away—besides the sea monsters and navigation hazards?”
“The mists are haunted, of course.” He winked at her. “Every Islander knows that.”
“There.” The helmsman pointed ahead and the pulse of a lighthouse shone through the fog.
“Ah…h
ome,” Illion said, handing his rifle up to a sailor. “Now, Mistress Clay, there’s a bit of a detail I haven’t mentioned yet.”
“What’s that?”
Shackles and chains landed on the deck between them.
“We don’t have…guests, but we do bring in prisoners. The Queen asked that I not disturb public order by waltzing through her streets with a returned operative that no one knows or recognizes. Begs too many questions.”
“So am I a guest or a prisoner?” She held up her wrists.
“Bit of both, part of either.” Illion put the cuffs on her. “Now don’t think you can slip out of these and just put on our face with your star magic and get away. The dialect we speak to each other’s a might different than the King’s tongue. One word out of your mouth and you’ll be known—even if you wear the true caste. I say this to stop you from doing anything rash while you’re our guest…or non-guest. We’ll see.”
He bent down and fastened the shackles to her ankles.
The mists dissipated to just the hint of grey in the distance but still occluded the skies. Ahead were docks where Islander-style construction vessels, more submarines, and even a few wooden ships were moored. A sloped wall made of earthen bricks rose behind the docks, and antennae and long-barreled air defense guns dotted the ramparts.
Tyr moved around the docks, but she couldn’t see where they were heading.
“One last bit,” he said, holding up a dark felt sack just big enough for her head. “Protocol, my apologies.”
“What am I going to do?” She raised her cuffed hands as high as the chain attached to the line between her ankle shackles would allow, then bent her head forward.
Illion put the hood over her, then grabbed her by the elbow.
“We’re home, lads!” Illion called out. “Make ready to dock.”
****
The cart Sarah was chained to rumbled over cobblestones, the jostling and the dark hood almost enough to make her nauseous. She swallowed bile as her seat wobbled.
“Halt,” Illion ordered and her ride stopped. “She needs to see this.”
The hood came away and Sarah scrunched her eyes. She was in a cage just large enough for her on the back of a small handcart. A Slaver Tyr in breeches and sandals was chained to the poles in the front. A black leather mask covering his mouth was locked from behind. The Slaver breathed hard, not saying a word.
They’d stopped in a narrow street with rows of single-story houses on either side of the steep road, the walls covered in white mortar, the roofs comprised of dark shingles.
Two fat sacks that smelled of ambary flour were tucked into the space around her cell.
Illion knocked against the back of the rickshaw and the door to the nearest house creaked open. He spoke in a dialect that had some words in the Islander language, but the phonetics and grammar were lost to her.
An elderly woman wearing a thin shawl over her shoulders had come out, supported by a wooden cane. She limped over to Illion, then kissed his knuckles. He stroked her face, then lifted her chin up to Sarah.
Instead of the face of an old woman, she had the smooth skin and gentle features of a girl. The hand gripping the cane was stunted and malformed, like it had stopped growing when she was a toddler. As she looked up at Sarah, her jaw worked from side to side and she spat.
More emerged from the house, Hidden boys and girls tall enough to be adolescents. All were deformed, with milky blind eyes or dead muscles in their faces. Some had wisps of hair on their scalps and one girl had a distended jaw that drooled constantly.
“My god…what happened to them?”
Illion hefted the bags of flour out of the cart and gave them to another sailor who brought them into the house. The captain took a small bag from his back pocket and shook it. The malformed Hidden lined up behind the first girl with the hunched back.
Illion shook a handful of red hard candy into his palm and gave one to the hunchback, then the rest slowly filed forward.
“The blighted happened to us,” he said, using the Hidden’s name for the Tyr outside their own caste. “The final war between the Slavers and the kingdom, it ended in nuclear fire.”
Sarah pressed the back of her hand against her mouth.
“We learned…we learned what fallout,” he said the word roughly in English, “does to Tyr. The trade winds blew radiation from the Slaver lands—courtesy of the kingdom’s bombs—through some of our islands. Your doc-oh-tor tells us that we’re unusually susceptible to…some sort of language in our bodies being rewritten by the poison. Adults…maybe nothing. Maybe a bad growth takes them in years. But the growing children…” He tousled the hair of a boy with his nose mashed to one side of his face.
“Every ship captain adopts an orphan house. It is part of our ways now,” Illion said.
“I’ve never seen DNA degradation like this before,” she said. “We weren’t allowed to study you all so deeply…”
Illion shook out the last of the candy and gave it to the smallest child in the back of the line.
“I don’t understand what you said, but your doc-oh-tor promised treatment for them. Can he do this?” he asked.
“He would need…I’m not sure. I’m not that kind of a scientist,” she said. “How many,” she looked up and down at the dozens of similar houses, “how many Tyr were hurt by the fallout?”
“Too many.” Illion clicked his tongue at the Slaver, who grunted, lowered the poles, and pulled the rickshaw up the hill.
“Hood,” Illion said, flapping it against the bars.
Sarah grumbled again.
****
“Get that off her,” a woman Tyr said.
The hood was yanked away and Sarah blew at a strand of hair over her face. She was on a stool in a dank, musty cell, a bright light overhead.
A Hidden in dark-green body armor stepped back from her. Gold lines formed hexagons on the armor and flexed as he moved—a graphenium weave, technology centuries beyond the Tyr’s capabilities. He turned away and Sarah glimpsed a battle rifle slung over his shoulder that looked almost identical to standard Bahadur-Getty issue for its security personnel.
A Tyr woman stood just outside the light, her athletic frame covered by a dark skirt that came down just below her knees, over trousers and tall boots. Her long-sleeved top looked like an old-style military uniform with a high collar. Her hair, done up over her head, was dark but run through with grey.
“With whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?” Sarah asked.
“I am Keesla,” the Tyr said. “Your advocate before the Conclave.”
“I take it I’m in trouble, what with the chains and—”
“And being a member of the outer caste that has come to destroy all Tyr, if Turley is to be believed.”
“He is.” Sarah rubbed the cuffs on her wrists. “Illion and the others must have told you what happened to King’s Rest.”
“And the massacre on the Azure Islands.” Keesla stepped a little closer, but Sarah still couldn’t make out her face. “Turley said your people were vicious, impossibly cruel…but many of us didn’t believe him.”
“Can I see him? He’s here, yes?”
“He’s on a mission that only he can do right, according to him.” Keesla stroked her chin. “But you are the one that sent us the warning from Vinica City…”
“Yes, unless you have another human spy that’s been feeding you information for years like I was. I don’t know who you are in all of this, Keesla, but I have been on your side—all the Tyrs’ side—along with my husband and son for years. Turley needed his computer memory core updated? Done. He needed a shipment of anthracite coal from a specific mine in the Arctic Circle? I got that sent to the post of his choosing. Early warning about the Corporation’s arrival? Me! That was all me, Keesla. Now how about you stop treating me like some low-level King’s Shadow that you snatched off the street and treat me with a bit of respect for what I’ve done for you?”
The guard at the door put a hand on
a billy club, but Keesla calmed him with a small finger wave.
“My, my,” the Tyr said, “you hide amongst my kind for a few years and you think you know us. You think the Hidden are like the rest of those blighted by the idea they’re blessed by gods? False gods, at that. You expected a hero’s welcome in this most sacred of places?”
“Turley should’ve taught you about humans.” Sarah held up her cuffs. “Some of us are patient to a fault—I suspect Turley is one of them. I, on the other hand, was taken away from my son in the middle of an attack, and I have no idea where he is, who he’s with, or even if he’s hurt. Same with my husband. Can you tell me anything about my family, Keesla? Let’s have information go both ways, yeah?”
Keesla clasped her hands behind her back.
“Your son…is under observation. He slipped away from the team that was protecting him, but we’ve reacquired him. He’s with an un-Blooded male and a young Blooded female. Curious that they’re traveling with him, as he’s suddenly become a Toiler,” Keesla said. “They’re in a refugee column moving out of King’s Rest.”
“Blooded girl…why that little—” Sarah’s face contorted with anger. “That little tramp found my son again. It’s Lussea Pyth, isn’t it?”
“I’ll see if we can get her name.”
“It is. I guarantee it’s her. How she managed to track Michael down in the middle of all that chaos…but he’s safe?”
“Until he’s within arm’s reach of you again. Safe as can be, otherwise.”
Sarah breathed a sigh of relief.
“Your mate…we’re less sure of. An extraction team sent for him hasn’t reported back, and there was a human caste attack on the airfield where the Shadows had him…” The Tyr woman raised her chin slightly.
“How bad was the attack?” Sarah asked quietly.
“King Menicus was killed. Which is a complication we don’t need. He was a known quantity. Prince Riktan is a bit more…difficult to predict. We don’t know if your mate is alive or dead. If he’s alive, he’s likely with General Fastal…and it was your husband that conned him back into active duty, wasn’t it?”