She heard sounds inside the infirmary on the deck below, but it was only an apprentice grinding herbs in a mortar. Arvius’s quarters were a few steps away, and she opened the door without bothering to knock.
He sat in a chair before his desk, his back to her. Thick tallow candles had burned to half-mast and nothing seemed obviously out of place. Perhaps he had fallen asleep sitting up. He always works too hard.
Then she walked around the desk and saw his face. White twigs of coral, slender as a baby’s fingers, were growing where his eyes had been.
Chapter Three
Into the Strait
No one needed charts or compasses to tell when Daystrider turned her prow towards the sunrise, though as yet no one had asked Darok why. Alyster guessed the purpose of their change in direction, because, as he put it, “there’s nothing else east unless you want to beach her on the headlands of the Tooth”, but Darok knew he had to call his crew together and make it official. He weighed the right time to do so, and what to say.
He also noticed that Yerena spent most of the day on the deck, though she kept to herself unless someone spoke to her, and few men did. Her strange appearance and stranger profession meant no one was quite sure how to treat her. Arter Sharald, the master-at-arms, was in the habit of greeting her with a cheerfulness so determined it seemed feigned, but Darok guessed what was behind that. Arter had four children, which meant four marriages or apprenticeships to arrange, so he evidently hoped Seawatch would take on the responsibility in at least one case.
Darok could not imagine ever doing so with a child of his own, not if that child was cast in the mold of someone like Yerena. She was so coldly controlled and aloof, although when she smiled, a lot of the ice melted out of her face. But she hardly ever smiled. If he had to choose between children who were happy and children who were Weapons of Denalay, the decision would be easy to make.
He soon learned why Yerena’s parents had done the opposite. That morning she was seated in her usual place by the starboard gunwale, on a water cask lashed to the side of the ship. It was a cool day, and the grey cloak was wrapped closely around her. She was the only person on deck who didn’t seem to be gainfully occupied, but she didn’t seem at all bored either. She’s used to living inside her own head, he thought as he went over to her.
It was the first time in four days he had spoken to her—not because he had been too busy, but because she was so unobtrusive and self-sufficient there seemed no need for it. On the other hand, he didn’t want her to think he was avoiding her, not when all their lives might depend on her in the strait.
“We’ll be there in four days’ time,” he said. Yerena was not the sort of person with whom he could make casual conversation.
She nodded. “Once we’re in the strait, I’ll stay on deck until we leave it. Or when I need to go to the head.”
Darok didn’t mind her staying on watch like a slightly more animated figurehead, but collapsing in exhaustion wouldn’t do anyone any good. “It could take three days or more to sail through the strait, and that’s if all goes well. Can’t you just use the shark to see whatever’s in the way, so we can plot a course to avoid wrecks under the water?”
“I intend to, Captain, but that fog…it can’t be natural. We should be prepared for other unnatural things, and this is the only way I can be prepared. I can stay awake for three days. The shark’s going to be awake all that time too, since its only options are swimming or sinking.”
Darok raked a hand through his hair. “All right. No second thoughts about our route, I hope?”
She shook her head. “I just wish I’d read more about the strait in Whetstone. Arter says there’s a ghost ship called The Devil’s Runner which prowls the mist.”
“If every tale of a ghost ship were true, we’d have enough vessels for another fleet right there.” Whatever the secret of the strait, he didn’t think it was anywhere near as simple as a ship sailed by dead men, but something else piqued his curiosity.
“So Seawatch encouraged you to read?” Somehow he’d had the impression Seawatch had built a lot of walls between her and the outside world. At least illiteracy had not been one of those barriers.
Yerena looked up at him, her eyes widening. Both were the same clear hazel, but the darkly tinted skin around her left eye made it seem fractionally lighter than the right, and contributed to her unusual appearance.
“Seawatch taught me to read,” she said. “No one in my family could.”
It hadn’t occurred to Darok that her family had been deprived of an ability he took for granted. “Were your parents poor?” It was an intrusive question, and he knew that at once. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”
She shrugged one shoulder. “They worked hard, but there was only so much they could do under the circumstances.” He thought the words were carefully chosen, deliberately detached. “They didn’t know a skilled trade or own their own land.”
Everything she had said about her family was in the past tense, Darok noticed, which implied their circumstances had changed. Of course, because she had joined Seawatch. He wondered if either they or Yerena regretted the decision, but he doubted she would allow herself to feel regret.
He felt he’d asked her enough for one day so he took himself off to the lower deck for the daily drill with the arbalests. Each side of the hull had twelve hinged ports, but whoever had designed those had been optimistic. Daystrider only had eight arbalests, because those were scaled up to a size where they could shoot tridents and crowclaws rather than bolts.
The men tied ropes to the projectiles so they could be hauled back on board, and Darok checked them for both speed and accuracy as they put the arbalests through their paces. “Sir?” Jaesen Bevers looked up from a winch he was turning to renock an arbalest. “That beast isn’t nearby, is it? Don’t want to hit it, is all.”
“I doubt you will,” Darok said. Yerena might lack warmth, but she didn’t seem to have any deficiency of common sense, so she wasn’t likely to keep the creature anywhere near the ship during drills. He ordered the angles of the firing platforms to be adjusted so the tridents could pierce a hull below the waterline or drive through men crowded on the deck of a Turean galley.
The drills were satisfactory, but the amount of supplies on board was not. True, Daystrider had only been out of port five days by then, so nothing was running low. But the route he had originally planned to take would have brought the ship to two Denalait ports before they entered the Iron Ocean, whereas now they would have to go out of their way to fill the water casks. Either that or capture an enemy ship, he thought before he remembered that no Turean vessel needed fresh water on board.
He could deal with that later. What came first was the barrier no ship had ever crossed.
“Gather the crew,” he told Alyster on the morning of the fifth day.
“All hands on deck!” The order rang out, and Darok stood on the quarterdeck watching as his crew swarmed down masts and came up from the hatchways to stand in ranks before him. It was at such moments that the uniforms of the Denalait navy came into their own, from the deep indigo jackets of the common sailors on to the blue of the midshipmen, lightening in color as their rank increased. The small crowd before him looked like a wave flowing smoothly up a beach.
Everyone was there except the two lookouts stationed the night before and the man who had to remain in the crow’s nest, a conch horn tied around his waist. Yerena rose, keeping well clear of everyone else, and Lady Lisabe stood on the other side of the crowd. Darok decided that if Julean did not appear, it would be the good doctor’s last voyage aboard any ship of the fleet, but he climbed up to the deck last of all.
“Men,” Darok began, “you know our destination. But before we reach pirate waters, there’s a small test for us, something to whet our appetites before the main course. We’re going to sail through the Strait of Mists.”
No one made a sound, though surprise and apprehension showed clearly on their faces. Above t
hem the rigging swayed in the breeze, sails bellied out and wood creaking, the sounds of a good ship as familiar as his own breathing.
“If we don’t reach the Iron Ocean as soon as possible, there’ll be nothing left of our people on Lastland,” he said. “But more importantly, the pirates will have won. And they don’t win, not against Daystrider.” Some of the men nodded, and Darok was pleased at their pride in their ship’s reputation.
“So we’ll sail through the strait, because there’s nothing in it which can stand before a Weapon of Denalay.” He raised his voice; this was the part they would like. “For every day we spend in the strait, the rum ration will be doubled, and once we leave it, we’ll strike the pirates like lightning out of a clear sky. For Denalay and for the Unity, forever!”
“And know this,” Lady Lisabe said, her clear sharp voice cutting through the cheer that rose up. None of the crew wanted to show disrespect to her, so the answering thunder Darok had expected broke up and trailed off into silence. All eyes turned to her as she went on. “Why do you think a Voice of the Unity was sent to this ship? Not to bring the heathens to the path of light—not yet, anyway—but so you would all know the Unity never sends you anywhere its own most trusted servants will not go. Its blessing is upon you.”
Thank you so much, Darok thought. It was fine to bless the crew—that could only help, he supposed. He also appreciated her underlining the fact that she was perfectly willing to enter the strait, but the murmur following her speech was subdued, the kind of mumbled response any crowd might give a religious pronunciation, rather than the rousing roar a warship’s crew gave a captain they believed in.
Alyster was coughing in a transparent attempt to smother a laugh, so Darok glared at him until he recollected himself and dismissed the men to their duties. Yerena went back to her cask and seemed to be making herself as comfortable as she could on it, which Darok thought was more cozy than he felt. Whatever reason Lady Lisabe was on board his ship, that wasn’t it. The Unity wouldn’t expend someone so valuable just to set his crew’s minds at rest.
But what exactly did he know about the Unity?
The uncertainty gnawed at the back of his mind like a worm into a plank, and by afternoon he had had enough of it. In the past he’d confided in his brother when something bothered him, but Alyster was interested in Lady Lisabe—and according to him, the sentiment was fully reciprocated, which Darok really didn’t want to imagine. So instead he went to Yerena. At least he could be certain she wouldn’t repeat anything to anyone else on the ship.
She looked up as he came closer, her gaze cool and neutral, neither inviting him to stay nor making it clear he wasn’t wanted. Darok put both hands on the rail and glanced over at the water. It churned, reacting to the ship’s wake briefly before the surge broke up into a wave-pattern that always changed and always stayed the same. The pirates could be wiped out until the circle flew above every island, but what lay beneath the surface of the sea was a different matter entirely.
On the horizon, so distant it was like a fine dark border painted above the line of the ocean, was the southernmost edge of Denalay.
“Do you ever wonder…” He hesitated.
“About what?”
He took the plunge. “Well, about the Unity. I know what you’ll do for us—more or less—but the Unity doesn’t shower miracles down from Skybeyond, so what exactly can we rely on when we have its blessing?”
Yerena frowned, though she looked more deep in thought than annoyed. “I suppose we’ll get something that isn’t as obvious as a miracle,” she said finally. “Like an idea that comes to you when you’re thinking of something else, or a lucky find of some sort. Anyway, I’d rather have a blessing than not have anything at all.”
How were they to tell the difference, if there was no distinguishing a blessing from luck and coincidence? Darok didn’t say any of that, because he had a feeling it would come close to heresy.
“What do you think the Unity is?” he asked instead.
He half-expected her to look shocked and tell him not to meddle in mysteries or ask questions which had no answers, like a small child wanting to know how deep the ocean was. Instead she tilted her head a little to one side and her eyes became thoughtful.
She got up and stood beside him, smoothing the grey cloth at her hips. The dress was clean, just badly wrinkled, evidently being washed and dried with no press. Lady Lisabe had brought two servants with her, one a guardsman and one a maid who somehow saw to her needs despite being sick every day of the voyage so far, but obviously Yerena took care of herself.
“I asked my mentor that question once,” she said. “She told me the Unity is neither man nor woman, neither flesh nor aether, neither mortal nor god.”
“Ah. That makes it all so clear.”
Yerena actually grinned, though the amusement didn’t last long. “It’s a good thing you weren’t in Seawatch—you’d have been bent over a chair for that. She told me the Unity just is. Which is good, because the Unity can’t be compressed into small human dimensions or bound up in a stone statue.”
“Quite right,” a voice said from behind them, and Darok turned on his heel. Lady Lisabe stood a few paces behind them.
“The best way to deal with the matter,” she went on, as if both he and Yerena had been questioning her, “is not to think about what the Unity is, but what it does. It joined us together and liberated us from Dagran superiority. It gave us the most civilized laws and the greatest freedom in Eden. And it will bring the Farflung Provinces under Denalait rule. One land, one people, one Unity.”
Her eyes burned with a fanatical fire as she spoke the last words, and if Darok had entertained any thoughts of asking further questions, he would have changed his mind in a hurry. Neither he nor Yerena said anything, and after what felt like an hour, Lady Lisabe turned away and went to the hatch. Darok watched her go, her red robes swirling in the wind. It occurred to him there could be figureheads in more places than just the prows of ships, but there was no way to confirm or deny such a theory when it came to the Unity.
Yerena leaned back against the rail so there was as much distance as possible between herself and Lady Lisabe, but her face was composed as always. Darok decided the conversation was probably best conducted elsewhere and began to mentally formulate an invitation to dinner, trying not to make it sound either like a command from the captain or something more intimate. He wasn’t attracted to Yerena. Other than the hazel eyes above high cheekbones, there didn’t seem to be much about her to catch his attention, and in any case she was a Seawatch operative. But he did like talking to her.
Something rose from the waves just behind him. In his peripheral vision Darok caught one glimpse of sleek grey hide, but the shark slid beneath the water as he spun around. The movement was so smooth that if the water had been perfectly still, he doubted there would have been any ripples on the surface, and the wide powerful body was gone so fast he could have believed he had imagined it, if not for the hammering of his heart.
He took a quick pace back from the gunwale. “Is that going to be so close at all times?”
Yerena’s tone sharpened to match his. “It’ll have to be, when we sail into the strait. And I think it sensed that I was startled.”
“We’re not in the strait yet, and I don’t want it nearby. What if it’s in the way when we’re carrying out weapon drills?”
“I know when those are performed, and I monitor its whereabouts during those times.”
“Well, what if someone falls overboard and you’re not right there to keep it away? I don’t want to have to check in with you if I want to swim, either.” He knew the reason behind his irritation was the fact that he’d been startled—the shark had unnerved him far more than Lady Lisabe could—but it wasn’t easy to get himself back under control.
“All right.” Yerena folded her arms. “It’s leaving, and I’ll keep it at a distance until we reach the strait.”
“Thank you.” Darok regretted his
earlier short temper. “I’m afraid sailors don’t get along with sharks—never have and never will.”
“Most of the time sharks leave people alone, whether those people are sailors or not.”
“I believe you. It’s just the few times they don’t leave people alone that worry me.”
One corner of Yerena’s mouth twitched, and she sat down on the cask again, folding her hands in her lap. “You know, when they bite, it’s usually out of curiosity.”
Darok chuckled. “Oh, really? If a dog took a chunk out of your leg, would the dog be angry or rabid, or would it be wondering how you tasted?”
“Sharks aren’t dogs.” Yerena gave him a withering look. “They aren’t afraid of much else in the sea, so when they see something new, naturally they’re curious. It’s not their fault they don’t have hands and have to use their mouths instead.”
He supposed it wasn’t their fault their mouths were full of razors either. “You like that creature a lot.”
She nodded, the momentary annoyance fading. “It means everything to me.”
“Then why do you keep calling it it?” Darok could understand people calling the Unity it, since the Unity wasn’t male or female, but surely that didn’t apply to sharks. “Don’t you know its sex?”
“Of course I do—it’s a male. Seawatch wouldn’t have given me a female.”
Darok wondered what Seawatch did with females. Soup, maybe? “Why not?”
“Females are larger and tougher, so they dominate the males. If I’d been given a female, I might have had to work that much harder to make her do what I said.”
Whereas to a male, she fitted into the shark pecking order in one way at least. For the first time he had a glimpse of the amount of research, planning and resources that had gone into making the woman—the operative—who sat before him on a water cask.
“But I didn’t need to be told it was a male,” Yerena said. “I’ve seen its claspers.”
The Deepest Ocean (Eden Series) Page 5