Dark Shores

by Danielle L. Jensen

  Marcus’s gaze moved to where Teriana sat cross-legged on the quarterdeck. She appeared freshly scrubbed, her ebony skin gleaming in the sun. The older woman, Yedda, knelt behind her and was finishing a series of elaborate narrow braids that pulled Teriana’s hair back from her face. It was a different style than she’d worn before, showing off her cheekbones and large eyes, which were currently a shade of deep blue, probably because she wasn’t looking at him. Yedda, who he had discovered was Teriana’s deceased father’s elder sister, saw him watching and whistled in a way that made his cheeks burn. Teriana looked up, but he turned away before she could catch him out. He’d spent the better half of the morning picking her brain for details on the continent where they were headed, and he wasn’t sure he could take any more of her sarcastic comments.

  Teriana got under his skin to the point where he wasn’t certain whether he liked her or hated her, or whether it mattered at all. She was brash, insufferable, and had a tongue fouler than most of his men. But she was also tough, seeming to take everything that had happened to her in stride. The only time he’d seen her truly crack was when her mother had turned her back on her. Marcus knew what that felt like—to be not good enough. To be abandoned. It was why he’d lied to Teriana and said she’d used up her chance to visit her mother. He’d spoken to Tesya in the wee hours before Valerius had come to retrieve her, and she’d refused to acknowledge that she had a daughter. It had seemed better for Teriana to hate him for being cruel than for her to suffer that.

  A whistle from the lookout overhead caught his attention and, shading his eyes, Marcus made out a pair of rocky islets in the distance. Crossing the deck, he climbed the stairs two at a time and made his way to where Teriana stood at the helm, deep in conversation with Yedda.

  “Last chance to turn around and go home, handsome,” the old woman said, giving Marcus a wink.

  Teriana made a noise of exasperation. “We’re at the edge of the doldrums. Those rocks there mark the current that will take us through. But once we’re in, there’s no turning back, am I clear? The only way out is the xenthier stem.”

  Marcus lifted his head to eye the full sails. “Winds look strong to me.”

  “Aye. They’ll be strong right up to the point they abandon us entirely.” She crossed her arms. “And you didn’t answer my question.”

  She’d explained the Maarin route through the Sea of the Dead to him before, describing the thin river of current that meandered through the pockets of deadly calm that had captured more than their fair share of Empire ships, dooming the crews to starvation or worse. The navy captains of his fleet had argued intensely against entering the doldrums of this deadly region of the Endless Seas, calling it suicidal, and it had only been the Senate’s deep pockets full of gold and Cassius’s deep pockets full of secrets that had caused them to agree to the plan. And the only reason Marcus had agreed to risking his men was because he knew the lengths that Teriana would go to protect her crew. She wouldn’t sail them in if there were no way out.

  “You know my feelings on retreat.”

  She rolled her eyes. “All right, then.”

  Turning the wheel, she rested her chin on it, eyes fixed on the nearing islets. “The captains of your fleet must keep to the center of the current. They must not attempt to alter course or to turn around, or they’ll be caught in the doldrums. If one of them falls off course, no one else may stop to assist them, or they’ll be lost as well. You could lose the whole fleet to a singular error, you understand?”

  “Yes.” He understood the lives of his legion hung on the nerve of the captains of those ships, which was why his men would be watching like hawks for any deviation from Teriana’s orders.

  The Quincense drove toward the pair of islets like an arrow, the only sounds the creak of the rigging and the splash of the surf against the hull.

  “Last chance,” she murmured.

  Marcus didn’t bother answering, his eyes fixed on Teriana’s hands, her knuckles blanched from how tightly she gripped the wheel.

  “Lower the sails!” She turned her head to look at him, expression unreadable as she added, “Drop the anchor.”

  The anchor rattled down, the ship losing momentum as they entered the gap between the two islets, coming to a halt at the midpoint.

  “Mark the path.”

  No one spoke as one of the Maarin sailors tossed a bucket of what appeared to be crimson dust onto the sea, where it floated on the surface. At first it appeared nothing was happening; then the dust began to move, catching in an invisible current and marking a narrow pathway west.

  “Hoist the anchor,” Teriana ordered once the dust had traveled a hundred yards or so from the ship. “And give our fleet something to follow.”

  The Quincense began to move, gaining speed, the ship no longer rocking on swells but running forward as though they traveled down a river, not across the sea. Marcus’s skin prickled with the unnaturalness of it. At the impossibility of it. “How?”

  Teriana’s eyes left the sea to meet his. “You Cel believe everything has an explanation, but that’s not the case. Some things just are. Xenthier. This current. And what you’ve seen is only the beginning, Marcus. It’s time for you to let go of the lies Mother Empire has whispered in your ear and start seeing the world for what it really is.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Inexplicable. Limitless.” Her gaze went back to the ocean. “Divine.”

  They exited the gap between the two islets, following the trail of red, and Teriana murmured, “Welcome to the Sea of the Dead.”

  22

  MARCUS

  About two miles after they’d passed the islets, the winds died.

  Not a slow death but a demise as abrupt as having one’s head severed from one’s shoulders. The air was still, close; and though Marcus could see for miles around, the sensation was claustrophobic, as though he were trapped in a box.

  Or in a tomb.

  The reason for the sea’s moniker became clear soon after the winds died. Half a dozen ships with limp sails dotted the horizon—ghost ships, Yedda called them—and countless more graced the seafloor to either side of the crimson path, the waters so clear and still that the wrecks seemed close enough to touch. Ships that had blown off course in storm winds or lost their bearings in the night, only to find themselves caught in the doldrums with little chance of escape. Such windless phenomena occurred closer to the Empire’s coastline, but they lasted a matter of days. Maybe a week. To be trapped in the Sea of the Dead’s doldrums meant eternity.

  “It’s a bad way to go.”

  He turned his head to regard Yedda, who had appeared at the rail by his elbow. “Dehydration? Once the initial stages of thirst pass, it’s actually a fairly peaceful way to go.”

  She chuckled. “Oh, they don’t often go from thirst, Legatus. Once they realize they’re caught, the Windless Madness takes hold. Most often they jump into the sea and drown themselves, but there are worse tales. Men slaughtering their own crewmates as they sleep. Cannibalism. Vampirism. Men who eat their friends down to the bone, surviving for months, even years, before they begin to consume themselves.”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “If no one ever escapes, how do these stories make their way out into the world?”

  “Oh, someone always escapes,” she replied. “Though whether they escape with their minds intact is another question.”

  “Why don’t they just lower the longboats and row?” Servius asked, having come up to the quarterdeck. “Seems to me they all die of laziness.”

  “How do they decide who gets a spot in the longboat?” Teriana spoke for the first time since they’d left the islets. “Maybe half the crew would fit into the boats of the average merchant vessel, fewer if you factor in the supplies they’d need to bring. Men fighting their friends, slaughtering each other for the chance to survive. It’s a madness, a chaos, that has no place anywhere other than the underworld.”

  “It could be done in an orderly fashion
,” Servius argued. “By drawing lots. Or volunteers.”

  “No, it can’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I’ve seen it happen.” She kept her attention fixated on the crimson path ahead of them. “If they catch sight of a Maarin vessel, they abandon ship to try to reach us, even though it’s impossible. The current is too swift, and we don’t dare try to stop.”

  Impossible or not, those deaths haunted her. Marcus could tell by the tension that sang through her body, the muscles of her bare forearms flexed tight enough that they stood out against her flawless skin.

  “Sometimes the longboats get caught in the current, but by the time they reach the mouth of the xenthier stem they’re empty of everything but bloodstains. Same with any ships.” She shook her head. “There’s madness in the stillness of these waters. It makes men and women not themselves.”

  Unease crawled down Marcus’s spine like a thousand stinging ants. “Check the status of the fleet,” he ordered.

  “No point,” Teriana said. “If they’re not with us, they’re lost.”

  Marcus had them check anyway.

  * * *

  Time seemed to stand still as the fleet meandered its way through the Sea of the Dead, the only marker of change the sun overhead and the ghost ships they passed. Servius and Gibzen were working the men hard to keep them distracted, but a thousand push-ups wouldn’t be enough to drive away the eerie sense of wrongness that had stolen over the ship. Marcus watched how his men’s eyes went to the stranded vessels, heard the distinct lack of banter among them, and felt their uneasiness like it was his own.

  It was his own. Because he had brought them into this. They trusted him, would follow him anywhere, and while it had been easy to agree to this mad plan back in Celendrial, now he wondered if it had been a different sort of madness that had driven him here.

  As they ventured deeper into the Sea of the Dead, there were more and more ghost ships dotting the horizon, clusters of them sitting to either side of the path. The current pulled them close to an ancient vessel, the sails in tatters and the bottom nearly rotten through. Walking to the rail, Marcus leaned over, eyes searching the deck as they passed, but it was empty. No bleached skeletons. No abandoned bottles or cups. No sign the vessel had ever had a crew at all. The rigging swayed with the motion of the ship, a piece of metal striking the mast with each swell.

  Clank.

  Clank.

  Clank.

  The sound echoed in his skull, seeming to grow louder and louder, and he shook his head to clear it, then made his way to the quarterdeck. The stowaway, Bait, was standing next to Teriana, the two deep in conversation, though Teriana’s eyes never left the path.

  Pausing at the top of the stairs, Marcus eyed the younger man. Taller than him but gangly as a colt, the Maarin boy had curly hair that stuck out from his head like a black halo, the shifting waves of his eyes currently a deep indigo, shifting quickly to a turbid green as they landed on Marcus. “What do you want?”

  “Answers. Why are there more ships the farther we go into the doldrums? How do they get here if this path”—he gestured outwards—“is the only current?”

  “It’s not the only current, you idiot,” Bait responded, causing Marcus to grind his teeth. “There’s a deeper current created by the xenthier that draws the sea toward it, pushes it out the other side.”

  In their discussions prior to their departure, Teriana had told them the Maarin sailed their ships directly into the genesis stem and were deposited by the terminus off the coast of the southern continent of the Dark Shores, reversing the trip through a genesis in the deep north that returned the ship in a terminus off the coast of Sibern. The ledgers Cassius had taken from the various ships confirmed this circular pattern of trade, but the word deeper struck a chord of unease in Marcus’s chest. “Exactly how deep is it?”

  “About a mile.” The boy smiled, his teeth gleaming white against his dark skin, even as Teriana let out an aggrieved sigh.

  “I told you I’d talk to him about this, Bait.”

  A rutting mile? He’d expected a few feet. Maybe something only reachable at low tides. Something … Something … “How—”

  He was interrupted by a piercing shriek.

  “We’ve got a live one off the starboard side!” one of the lookouts shouted.

  “We’ll talk about this later,” Marcus said, pointing a finger at Teriana before returning to the main deck to join Servius, who was standing at the rail, a spyglass in his hand. His skin, normally a deep brown, was blanched pale.

  “Shit,” Servius muttered. “Shit.”

  “What is it?”

  “Look for yourself.”

  Taking the glass, Marcus peered through, swearing under his breath at what he saw. The vessel wasn’t weathered like most of the others—was probably sailable. Or would be, if the corpses of the crew weren’t all hanging from the rigging. Another shriek filled the air, and Marcus jumped despite himself as the corpses began to dance, their limbs tied to lines like rotting marionette dolls.

  He panned the deck, searching for whoever was making that rutting-awful shrieking sound, his gut twisting as he caught sight of a naked man tugging on the lines with wild fervor. The sailor’s skin was burned red and covered with lesions, and when he turned, the contents of Marcus’s stomach threated to rise.

  The man’s face was covered with deep scratches, and his eyes were nothing more than bloody sockets.

  “The Six protect us,” Marcus heard one of the Maarin crew members mutter as they drew closer, everyone on deck taking a collective step back as the survivor leapt onto the railing and scuttled down the length like a deranged monkey, shrieking as he went.

  Marcus’s pulse roared in his ears, heart galloping in his chest even as his breath came in too-fast pants. “Someone get me a crossbow,” he ordered.

  The sailor must have heard his voice, because he paused in his progress around the ghost ship, sightless eyes turning in their direction. “Dance!” he screamed. “Dance, little puppets. Dance! Dance!”

  Gibzen appeared at his arm with a crossbow, and Marcus jerked it out of his grip. Loading the weapon, he aimed it at the sailor.

  “Long shot. Wait until we’re closer,” Gibzen muttered.

  “No.” Marcus let the bolt fly, swearing when it passed to the shrieking man’s left.

  “Dance! Dance! Dance!”

  Sweat trickled down Marcus’s back as he loaded another bolt, took a deep breath to steady himself, then let it loose.

  It punched into the sailor’s chest, knocking him back and onto the deck. A mortal wound, but he kept up his chant, somehow managing to catch hold of one of the lines, sending the corpses into a frenzy of motion. “Dance, little puppets! Dance!”

  “Set it on fire,” Marcus ordered. They were nearly alongside the other vessel now, only twenty yards between them, and his eyes skipped over the gore on the deck. Strange messages painted in blood and the damned sailor who just wouldn’t shut up and die. “Burn it!”

  Rattled or not, his men were trained, and in moments bolt tips wrapped with burning tar–soaked cloth were flying into the dry deck of the other ship. Into the mast. Into the sails, lighting them up like paper.

  The Quincense passed the vessel by, but Marcus leaned over the rail to watch the other ship slowly turn into an inferno, sparing the rest of his fleet the sight. They had enough haunting their dreams.

  As did he.

  * * *

  Darkness fell, and though it hid the ghost ships and the endless stretches of calm ocean from sight, that somehow made everything worse.

  The red dust the Maarin used to mark the path glowed faintly, the effect otherworldly and strange, his men frequently stopping in their exercises to stare blankly at the crimson current, Gibzen and Servius hoarse from ordering them back to work. The brightly lit fleet trailed behind them, signal horns regularly sounding to ensure everyone was accounted for.

  Through it all, the Maarin sang.
Marcus could only pick out a few words, but the melody was haunting, the voices of the men and women echoing across the decks and out over the water.

  Whether it was the light or the sound Marcus wasn’t certain, but their presence seemed to wake the ghost ships floating in the darkness. Wails of agony and despair floated over the waters, cries for help and for mercy, but it was impossible to know exactly where they were coming from, and even if it were possible, there was nothing Marcus could do to help. The worst was the weeping of what sounded like a female voice, great ragged sobs that seemed to come from all directions and none, inescapable, making Marcus want to shove cotton into his ears. Knives into his ears. Anything to drown it out.

  Sometime in the darkest hours before dawn, Teriana abandoned the helm to Yedda’s care and approached him. “We’ll be there by midafternoon,” she said. “So I suppose we ought to discuss the specifics.”

  Sweat rolled down Marcus’s back, his skin icy, and when a shriek echoed across the seas he jumped. “One does not,” he said between his teeth, “just sail into a stem located a mile beneath the ocean surface.”

  “No,” she replied. “One doesn’t.”

  “You lied to me.” He had no right to level accusations at her about truthfulness, but that bloody incessant weeping was fraying on his nerves. Turning to the sea, he muttered, “Would you shut up and die already!”

  When he refocused on Teriana, she was staring at him with unease. “Keep it together, Marcus,” she said. “The survival of my people depends on you being alive, so I really don’t need you jumping overboard to silence the voices of ghosts.”

  The weeping was growing louder, hurting his ears. “How do we reach the xenthier?”

  Wiping her hands against her trousers as if to clear them of sweat, she said, “Madoria needs to open up the seas for us to reach it.”

  His head was throbbing, each wail and shriek sending sharp jabs of pain into his skull. “You’re going to ask a god to open the seas?”