The water smelled different. Wonderful. Now what was he to do? Those men assigned to the oars were at their positions, but everyone else seemed to have gathered on the deck, and since Darok couldn’t give them any orders, the crowd seemed to be growing with no purpose other than to watch the end of the strait. Murmurs ran through their ranks.
“Captain,” Julean Flaige said quietly. “Behind us.”
Darok turned, dreading what he was going to see. Moving out slowly from behind a curve, on a course that would bring it straight to Daystrider, was another ship.
He yanked the spyglass from his belt, snapped it to full extension and put the end to his eye. The ship’s hull might have been carved from obsidian, and there was no name painted on its side. Nor did it fly any banners or sport a figurehead. The masts were white and the sails looked like cobwebs.
Darok wasn’t sure who first said “ghost ship”, but the words went through the crowd like an echo. He couldn’t deny that, because the spyglass showed no one on board the ship. The tattered sails stirred in the wind.
“No,” Yerena said.
He looked at her. “You’re sure?”
She nodded. “I can feel it moving.”
He could see it moving as well. It slid out completely from behind the jutting cliff, turning to point its prow towards Daystrider. It loomed like a castle, and he wasn’t sure whether the strait had grown narrower or whether the ship was just large enough to fill a good half of the channel. Daystrider couldn’t get past that, not unless it turned aside.
Ragged though the ghost ship’s sails were, they seemed to function just fine. It came on towards them, less than a mile away—and if it wasn’t insubstantial, it would soon slam into them.
Can’t go back. Can’t go forward. Darok shoved the spyglass back into his belt and drew a deep breath.
“I want this ship coming about,” he said.
Kaneth repeated the order in a shout, but from his expression, he knew how much more danger that put them in. If the wind flung the ghost forward—or if it sprouted oars—before Daystrider came about fully, the warship could be split like an apple. Darok remembered the wrecked cog lying at the bottom of the strait.
On the other hand, they could do nothing until they did something, and there was one more reason to come about.
He gave an order to Hevard Bleysey, the second lieutenant, and Bleysey went below to the arbalests. At the starboard rail, Darok looked down at the spread of oars far below, lashing the water. Since the oarsmen on the other side were rowing backward, the ship began to turn slowly on her axis.
The ghost ship came on, huge and unstoppable. Its tallest mast was easily two hundred feet, supported on a frame that far outstripped Daystrider in size. Darok went to the port rail. He saw spume gleam white under the moon as water parted for the ghost ship’s prow. Daystrider turned until she was perpendicular to the flint cliff, and one of the weapon-ports along the ship’s side thudded open.
With a thwang, an arbalest fired. A trident streaked over the distance between Daystrider and the ghost ship, trailing rope like a threaded needle. It bit into the black hull and stuck there, quivering with the impact. The rope pulled taut.
Easy part’s over.
“Take command until I return,” he told Alyster and swung himself over the rail. The hinged cover was just beneath, and he braced the soles of his boots on it. Before he could twist around and lower himself, the ship rocked and he lost his balance—but he grabbed the rope as he fell and hung from it, gasping. Yerena might be able to steer her shark away from a man falling into the water, but he still didn’t want to be anywhere near the beast in its element.
He pulled himself along the rope hand-over-hand, praying the trident would not come loose. The rope grew slack as the ghost ship drew closer, but he reached the trident moments later and climbed on it to pull himself up to the black rail. After the friction of the rope’s fibers, the hull felt cold as a corpse against his palms. He grabbed the rail, swung a leg over it and tumbled on to the deck.
Done. Now all he had to do was turn the ship so it slewed from its collision course and slid past Daystrider instead.
Maybe that would be easier than he expected. The deck was deserted, its boards bleached-pale and clean. Above him the spiderweb sails billowed in the wind, their strands whispering together.
In his peripheral vision he saw Daystrider continuing to turn, but something else moved at the other corner of his eye. He spun around as a shadow floated across the deck.
More than one. The shadows were everywhere, dark clots moving independently of anything else, but as he stared at them, he saw the patterns in their movements. They hauled at sails and clambered through the rigging. One of them seemed to be busy whipping something tied to the mast, whipping another shape that twisted and writhed.
Darok shuddered involuntarily and headed for the helmsman’s wheel. That was all that mattered. At all costs he had to stop the black iceberg from touching his ship.
“Captain?” Yerena’s voice came from behind him.
His heart nearly stopped for the second time since he had boarded the ship. He turned, half-expecting that was another illusion, but she was pulling herself up the port side with a rotted mooring rope, and looked altogether too sodden to be a wraith of any kind. He grasped the rail and held out his free hand, but she shook her head and hauled herself up on her own.
“These could hurt you.” She held up her gloves, and they gleamed wet in the moonlight, made of some grey hide. Sharkskin. He knew what that would feel like—smooth as enamel when stroked one way, sharper than a field of broken glass when touched another. Not that it was likely to help against shadows.
“I didn’t order you to come with me,” he said.
Her brows lifted a fraction. “My duty is to guide and to guard you.”
He wasn’t sure how much guarding she could do, but there was no time to debate it, so he led the way to the wheel. Yerena followed, leaving a trail of water behind her, and the shadows continued their work as if the two of them didn’t exist. Whatever had been tied to the mast was still being whipped, he noticed.
He stopped before the wheel and paused. The wheel on Daystrider was made of royal oak and carved with the signs of the compass—north to north-north-west—but the signs on the ghost ship’s wheel were symbols he had never seen before. Doesn’t matter, as long as I can make this ship turn aside.
He grasped the spokes of the wheel. Nothing happened.
What the hell? Darok tightened his grip and tried again, then half-crouched, socking one elbow against his hip to give himself as much leverage as possible. He pushed with all his strength, teeth clenched. The wheel didn’t turn so much as a fraction of an inch.
Yerena crouched to inspect the back and sides of the wheel. “It looks as though it turns, Captain—”
“Not for you.” The speaker might have been at the bottom of a well, his voice echoing with hollowness. “Not for anything human.”
Yerena turned, sodden skirts clinging to her legs and threatening to trip her up. Something swayed out from behind the ship’s bone-pale mainmast, and at first it seemed to be just another shadow.
Then footfalls thudded as it came towards them. She took a step back, wishing she was in the water. Don’t show you’re afraid.
The figure wore patchwork pieces of armor and a battered iron halfhelm. Atop that was a raven with wings spread, obviously dead and looking as though it had died in that position. Its beak gaped open as if screaming to be released from the helm’s grip on its claws.
“You’ve done well, done very well to come so far.” Nothing was visible beneath the helm except for a point like a single eye, glowing brighter than phosphorus. “The ones that do, they join my fleet.”
Yes, a ship that size would be the flag of its fleet. Yerena dared to glance at Daystrider, but she knew the ship couldn’t risk sailing forward. The shark’s senses, more finely honed than any human’s in the water, had turned it aside from wh
at looked like the end of the strait.
Darok drew his sword. “Was that the purpose of the fog? To make the strait into some kind of…testing ground?”
Instead of answering, the captain of the ghost ship pulled his own steel. Yerena’s heart jumped into her throat in what felt like an attempt to escape her body. She’d thought Darok was tall, but the captain of the ghost ship outstripped him in height and wore armor as well. And none of that mattered if he wasn’t even human.
“Stay back, Yerena.” Darok moved out from behind the wheel, half-turning to put the side of his body to the ghost ship’s captain. “Or better yet, get off this—” He stopped.
Yerena saw what he saw, and her mouth went dry. The shadows of the ship’s crew drifted across the deck to join their captain, but other shapes appeared. A glasslike form projected upright from each shadow, moving as the shadow moved.
“What the hell?” Darok said.
“They’re becoming real,” Yerena whispered. The closer the ship was to…to wherever they were from, the more real they were, and not human either.
Not human. That’s it.
She tore off her gloves and thrust them into her belt, then ran to the side of the ship where she had climbed aboard. Behind her, steel clashed on steel, but she didn’t look back as she pulled her knife. She sawed through the mooring rope she had used to climb on board the ship, then hauled the length of the rope in. Too short.
She cut another rope. The ringing clang of blades came fast and hard, and the shadows were talking in voices like dead leaves rubbing together. Some spoke indistinctly but others muttered a mixture of words both recognizable and strange, though there was nothing ambiguous about the hate and mockery in their tones. The conviction crossed her mind that if she just paused to listen, she could make sense of their words.
No. I’m here to guide and to guard.
She shoved the knife back into its sheath and knotted the two ropes together, then hurried to the ship’s wheel. She looped the end of the rope over two spokes of the wheel, grabbed the other end and flung it over the ship’s rail.
A howl rang out and the shimmering forms of the ship’s crew loped at her. Yerena ignored them—ignoring fear was the first lesson Seawatch had taught her—and let her mind detach from its moorings, reaching for the shark instead.
She saw what it saw, the hulk of the ghost ship’s hull looming above like a thunderhead, with the jut of the ship’s rudder ahead. The shark lashed its tail and plowed through the water. Teeth the length of her finger closed on the end of the knotted rope.
Right.
The shark slewed right, pulling the rope with it. The wheel spun smoothly on its oiled hub, and even with her consciousness more in the shark’s body than her own, Yerena registered the deck lurching beneath her feet as the ghost ship began to turn.
A cold hand closed around her wrist, snapping the connection between her and the shark. Yerena twisted, and her skin was wet enough that the hand lost its grip. She backed away to the gunwale as the crew surrounded her. Their bodies materialized fast. Blood running through the fine glass tubes of veins looked dark in the moonlight, before those were covered in swathes of greyish flesh knitted by unseen hands. Rags appeared and spread to form clothing.
But as long as they were focused on her, they left Darok alone. She couldn’t see him past the crew’s bodies, but steel rang and clashed, the sounds coming too fast for her to follow. The crew still whispered, their mouths working as though they were remembering how to speak, but she was far too afraid now to feel any compulsion to listen to them.
Their weapons appeared, jointed spears and double-bladed swords. One man’s arm sprouted a hook, which would have been familiar if it hadn’t grown from his wrist along with his hand. He strode forward and swung his arm like a club.
Yerena hadn’t wanted to leave Daystrider’s deck to change into her watersuit, but now her soaked, heavy skirts caught at her legs as she tried to duck. She staggered off-balance. The hook slashed through her sleeve and carved a long shallow line across the back of her arm.
She nearly fell and only saved herself by catching the ship’s rail with both hands. Darok shouted her name, his voice hoarse and desperate, and the shadows of twisted blades came down at her.
She threw herself over the rail, and without a chance to dive, she hit the water with an ungainly slap. It knocked the breath out of her. She came up gasping, spat water and blinked her vision clear in time to see Daystrider—now fully turned with its prow pointing towards the ghost ship—seize the advantage and plunge forward. Oars pulled so fast that they turned water to foam.
Daystrider surged parallel to the ghost ship. At the last moment the black prow shifted a few degrees to the left—all it could turn in such a short distance—and the two ships’ hulls scraped together. Oars snapped like twigs before the men could pull them in, but it was a glancing blow, not the broadside collision which could have had the ghost ship overwhelming Daystrider with its colossal mass. Daystrider still rolled with the impact, and the ghost ship shuddered as well. Yerena clenched her fists.
To her relief, though, the near-collision must have been enough of a distraction for Darok to escape the ship’s captain. An instant later he flung himself—or was hurled—against the rail. Rotted wood broke away with a crunch, and he plummeted into the water, disappearing in the white froth of the ghost ship’s wake. The featureless prow entered what looked like the end of the strait and vanished.
Treading water—and feeling the stinging pain in her arm for the first time—Yerena watched in fascination as the rest of the ghost ship passed into the open ocean and was simply gone, swallowed up by nothingness. Then the ocean was gone as well. It disappeared like the colors being washed out of a canvas, and another jagged turn of the strait appeared in its place.
But the fog had dissipated and Daystrider’s forward movement stopped. That might have worried her if she hadn’t guessed the reason for it—the anchor had lodged in the bed of the strait. It was normal again.
Water slapped the base of the flint cliff, breaking up in glimmers of black and moonlight, and she didn’t see Darok at first. She would have used the shark’s senses to search for him, except she heard the splashing as he swam towards her. The shark was circling them both, but it wasn’t until she saw Darok that she realized why.
He had been using the broken section of rail to stay afloat and when he shoved it towards her, she held on to it as well. Water plastered his hair to his forehead and diluted the blood trailing from a gash at his temple, but more of it welled up, dark as ink in the moonlight. Yerena didn’t know whether there were more wounds she couldn’t see—and Darok was gasping too hard to speak—but there was more than enough blood in the water. The shark would probably not attack her, but it had no familiarity with him.
He knew that as well as she did. He clung to the broken rail, his head turning to follow the shark’s dorsal fin as it traced a narrowing ring around them.
“Captain,” she said. He didn’t seem to hear her. “Darok.”
He glanced at her then. The muscles of his jaws tensed and his throat worked as he swallowed, but at least he hadn’t panicked—yet. The shark was only thirty or so feet away from them, close enough that the water it displaced pushed up against Yerena’s body in surges, and the fin gleamed like polished iron. Darok’s fingers clutched the rail in a death grip.
“I know this is easier said than done, but don’t be afraid.” She shifted closer to him. “Don’t look at it. Look at me and keep your breathing slow.” One or two of Seawatch’s operatives had learned—after days in the black room—to regulate their heartbeats, but the best she could do was control her respiration and hope that would bring her pulse into line. Since the shark could detect a heartbeat when it was close enough, that was a skill worth learning.
Oars bit into the water on either side of Daystrider and the ship began to move towards them. Darok turned his head to watch it.
You won’t reach it in tim
e. “Move up beside me,” Yerena said, keeping her voice as calm as if they had been playing cards.
“I don’t want you to be hurt if that creature decides to—”
“I won’t be.”
He was so near that she saw individual hairs in the stubble covering his jaws, blue-black in the moonlight. Slowly he moved closer until his legs touched hers, and when his chest pressed against her breasts she felt his heart hammering. He was afraid—it was obvious in the intent, unblinking way he looked at her—but at least she had distracted him.
“You lost your sword,” she said.
“No, I know exactly where it is.” The strait’s water was cold, but his breath felt warm and slightly tickling against her face when he spoke. “In that bastard’s gut up to the hilt, not that it seemed to make much difference to him.”
The shark still circled them in a way that was half corralling them in and half waiting for any further sign of weakness, but she was too used to it to be afraid. Calm, beautiful one. Her breathing settled into a pattern of deliberate inhales and steady exhales, so she felt as if she were floating in a tub of soapsuds. Even the pain in her lacerated arm, which stung worse from the seawater, was distant. She sent her placidity out to the shark in a slow soothing tide. No hunger, no prey, nothing here. Go now.
The circle broke. The fin dipped like a warning flag being lowered. The shark’s sleek body disappeared beneath the water, and she sensed it heading further east along the strait, searching for the open ocean and the better hunting there.
Darok sighed, relaxing against her, and as her mind returned to its moorings, Yerena was aware of the solidity of his body pressed to hers. He was tall enough that his unshaven cheek touched her hair when his head bent forward, and a drop of blood fell from the edge of his jaw to skin left bare where her dress had been torn.
“Thank you,” he said. “I’ve never used a woman as a shield before.”
The Deepest Ocean (Eden Series) Page 7