Even if what she felt for the shark was inappropriate, she didn’t care. It was all she had in the world—and she was all it had too. It would never lie to her or belittle her or decide it preferred some other Seawatch operative. Deep down she knew that someday it would not be enough, that she would want the same connection to another person as well, but for now the shark was all she needed.
Eat and rest. She gave it all her praise and satisfaction, trying not to let it feel her fear that those whales would find them before tomorrow. Whether her efforts worked or not, she didn’t know. The fin dipped beneath the water’s surface.
Yerena lurched a little farther inland and collapsed into a bank of thick sandgrass, which was likely to keep her as warm as possible under the circumstances. She tugged her gloves and flippers off, closed her eyes and was asleep.
There were only two places to put the woman—the brig or the cabin Yerena had left empty—so Darok gave her the cabin. The woman’s name was Lucee Colliten, and she said her husband had been the former master of the fortress on Lastland. From the hollow look in her eyes, Darok guessed he was probably dead. There wasn’t much reason for Tureans to keep Denalait prisoners alive for long, especially since those prisoners needed fresh water.
But to his relief, before nightfall they reached the island he had in mind. It was called Rosefall, and the breeze drifting towards them smelled sweet and thick, like a pudding made with petals. Though since he couldn’t see a single rosebush or tree through his spyglass—and since the island was supposedly uncolonized—he was suspicious at once, and thought gloomily that when their supplies gave out, the crew would have to be that much more careful when they went ashore. The scent might have been seductive if he hadn’t remembered how Yerena had smelled in his bed. Clean linen and rain and herself, warm and womanly.
He pushed her memory away and focused on finding the inlet that had been marked on the map. It led to a tiny bay sheltered from the wind, and Darok had the anchor lowered once Daystrider was well within the narrow inlet. The cliffs on either side were tall, but he didn’t feel hemmed in as he had in the Strait of Mists, nor was the inlet as twisted. When they stopped at the mouth of the bay, he had a glimpse of the ocean at the inlet’s other end, just narrow enough that he could raise a finger and span it.
He didn’t think the Turean galleys would try to ram them, especially since any such galley would be a target for most of the two-mile length of the inlet, but that only meant the Tureans were likely to try something different—perhaps an approach from the island itself, under cover of darkness. Once they found out where Daystrider was.
Which they already knew, as he found out just past seven bells, when the lookout blew his conch horn. He hurried up the steps and Alyster met him at the hatch. “Another rowboat headed this way, sir.”
Yerena? But he knew it wasn’t likely unless her shark was dead, and as the boat drew closer he saw a man plying the oars in weak jerky pulls. Half the crew was topside by then, and they gathered around as the boat drew level and the man climbed aboard.
He was in worse condition than Lucee Colliten had been, wrung out like a rag from exertion and thirst. Between sips of water, he told them his name was Gerall Kemay, and he had been a mason on Lastland.
“Helped build the inner wall, for all the good it did. They poisoned our well and got over the wall.” His head bowed as if he no longer had the strength to keep it upright. “Captain,” he said in a voice so hoarse he might have been drinking sand instead, “I was told to give you fair warning. Captain Morender—she says if you surrender, your lives will be spared and you will only be imprisoned until Denalay ransoms you. There will be no torture, she—”
“Look at me.” Darok didn’t trust any Turean leaders, especially when they spoke through a Denalait’s mouth. “Your story’s unconvincing enough without you not being able to meet my eyes.”
Through stubble, Kemay’s face darkened as though the deep smolder of the sunset was reflecting off it. “I was shamed, that’s all. Being let go when there were women down decks in that cage they call a brig. I asked to let one of them go instead, but that Turean bitch wouldn’t.”
“The question is why she let you go.”
“I told you, to give—”
“Fair warning, yes. I don’t believe that either. Even if this Captain Morender wanted to parley terms, which she hardly needs to do, why not send a pirate out here under a peace flag? She’s putting prisoners and rowboats into my hands instead, and I want to know why.”
Seated on a crate, Kemay stared up at him. “I—” He started to rise, only to freeze in midmovement as a dozen men around him drew their weapons, and he sank back. “You think I’m one of them? Pull up a bucket and I’ll show you how much I can drink before I spew my guts up. Or if Lucee managed to reach you—and I’m guessing she did, because you said ‘prisoners and rowboats’—she’ll recognize me.”
Which would confirm that either both of them were loyal Denalaits or both of them were Turean spies. Darok wondered if that was why Jash Morender had sent him both those people. Surely not.
Kemay went on. “And if you think I’m armed, have your men search me. To the skin, if that’s what it’ll take—”
Darok lost what little patience he had left. “That’s enough. Take him to the brig.” He had enough problems already without having to deal with newcomers whom he couldn’t trust. “Give him half-rations and water.”
The master-at-arms ordered the men back to their stations, and Darok drew Alyster over to the taffrail so they could speak as privately as possible. “What do you make of this?”
Alyster shook his head. “Assuming he’s telling the truth, I don’t know. Is this Morender trying to exhaust our supplies that much faster by sending us her prisoners to feed and water?”
“There’s another possibility. Either one or both of them is carrying some contagious disease.”
“Unity.” Alyster clearly hadn’t been that suspicious. “Well, Julean could…” He stopped.
“Exactly. Wilyerd could examine them, but what if there aren’t any signs yet, or he misses them?” Darok pushed his hair back from his forehead. What the hell was he going to do if the Tureans sent yet more prisoners to him? At some point they had to run out of rowboats.
Alyster’s chuckle was dry and humorless. “The Tureans aren’t far now. Kemay didn’t mention any blackfins towing him to us, but he doesn’t look strong enough to have rowed for long. They can’t be more than a day away, probably less.”
Darok went back down to his cabin and tried to get what little sleep he could under the circumstances. Naturally, the lookout’s horn woke him again towards dawn. He’d crawled into his bunk in most of his clothes in preparation for that, so he only buckled his sword-belt and allowed his steward to help him into his coat. “Coffee,” he said, thinking he had to be growing old if he didn’t wake up all at once. Still, perhaps it was Yerena approaching, so he hurried up to the deck.
She woke with a jolt, disoriented and afraid. Sandgrains were embedded in her cheek, and when she brushed them away they left dozens of tiny indentations in her face. Most of her skin was still damp and wrinkled beneath the watersuit, because she couldn’t risk sleeping naked on a Turean island.
What bothered her far worse than the discomfort was a nightmare which made her wish for the old familiar dream of drowning. She had seen the shark ringed on all sides by nets. Men in boats surrounded it, the boats trailed weighted nets, and it was too badly wounded to fight. There was no escape.
She reached out through their link like a hand groping blindly through darkness. The shark’s open, uncomplicated mind meshed with hers, and she felt nothing out of the ordinary. It hadn’t been hurt, let alone trapped. It was safe, at least for the moment.
Pulling the flask from inside her suit, she drank the last of the water and got to her feet. In the distance a rooster crowed. She headed towards the north of the island, where the land ended in a steep dropoff, and the sun started to
warm her as she climbed partway down that cliff. No one could see her unless they crept out to the edge of the cliff and looked down.
She sat on a shelf of rock and leaned back. When she slipped into the shark’s mind like a key into a keyhole, she began to search the waters around Rainstone methodically, keeping the shark only a dozen or so feet above the seabed as it moved in widening circles. Her hearing had fused with its own, but she heard none of the sounds of whales hunting. She didn’t bother relying on sight for a warning, because by the time they were in visual range, it would be too late to do anything except flee.
What she needed the shark’s sight for was to find a shipwreck.
The search took hours. The rotting skeletons of fishing boats lay half-buried in mud, but she needed a ship, and one that was still intact. The wreck she finally found was half a dozen miles from Rainstone, but it was large even for a war galley, lying on its starboard side. Almost hidden in sludge and sand, gold coins gleamed, scattered beneath the wreck like fishscales.
The shark swam around the decaying hulk, nosing into any holes that looked large enough and disturbing an eel that shot away in a streak of green. Well done, Yerena thought, amused. Let’s—
A sharp click snapped in her ears, a sound so high-pitched it was almost painful, like a steel wire drawn out finely to the breaking point and beyond. A tremor, deep and instinctive, drove through the shark’s body.
They’ve found us.
Just below the hammock in which he slept, Quenlin knelt beside a thick mat of woven palm leaves. His cupped hands were filled with what might have passed for rock-salt crystals if not for the gleam from near-prismatic surfaces. He scattered the fragments of broken glass over the mat, then stripped off his black-and-white leathers and the shirt he wore beneath them. Carefully, his teeth set, he lay down on the mat.
Even the scar tissue covering his back wasn’t thick enough to completely cushion him. A hundred small teeth bit into his flesh, and the nerves beneath took fire. The pain made it that much easier to free his mind from the torture-rack as he reached out to the whales. His plans had been temporarily postponed when the whales had towed the released prisoner’s boat, but Jash had promised him a purse of gold if he brought her the shark’s head.
And Jash always lived up to her promises.
Quenlin kept his contact with the whales light as the touch of fingertips, just enough to see the end results of their echolocation in images behind his closed eyelids. A silent sea opened up before him. Since water couldn’t echo any sounds, it was completely transparent, but rocks looked like three-dimensional shadows, and fish streaked away in all directions from the killers. A shoal of fleeing tuna made him think of a handful of dying leaves tossed on a fall wind.
Then a large shape veered away from a wrecked ship, a shape moving fast enough to shimmer with scattered echoes. The killers turned in that direction at once, clicking fast. Quenlin saw their prey from three separate angles, more than enough to tell it was the white death. A shark that size, prowling in Turean waters, could only be Yerena’s.
The killers homed in on it.
Fearing a trap, Quenlin held them back a little but kept the shark in sight as it put on a burst of speed. He had no fear of losing it, because the killers could swim faster. The shark circled Rainstone, moving nearer as the shore gave way to sheer cliffs. Quenlin let the whales begin to close the distance between them, though he kept them away from the cliffs. He was suspicious of the way the shark swam parallel to those, so close its fins all but scraped rock.
Then it rose abruptly to the surface and something about its shape changed, though it moved too fast for him to see exactly how. He held a killer back just enough for it to lift its head from the water. Yerena was seated on the shark’s back. Of course, she had dropped off the cliff to join her overgrown pike.
Quenlin let the killers loose, and wished for the first time that he was with them.
He had hated many things about Seawatch, but most of all he’d loathed being compared to Yerena Fin Caller. There had always been a subtle but bitter rivalry between his mentor and hers, so naturally he and Yerena had been weapons in that battle, and he knew from the start that he was more talented.
Except Yerena was more subservient, and that was shoved in his face over and over. Each time he rebelled, his mentor told him he could be the best Seawatch had ever produced, if he could only show he was superior to her with regard to obedience and duty as well.
Eventually he started thinking of her as the perfect puppet, someone who made up in slavishness what she could never have in skill. Half of him despised her and the other half longed to fit into Seawatch as easily as she did. Until finally he could no longer bear the crushing pressures of Seawatch—like being at the bottom of the ocean, with thousands of tons of water pressing down on him—and he decided to appeal to a higher authority, the highest in the land.
That was the end of any future he had in Denalay.
Now, almost two thousand miles beyond the borders of the land he had left, that land would not let him be. He wondered what might convince Seawatch to retreat. Jash had wanted the shark’s head, but she had said nothing about Yerena’s, and he felt sure Seawatch would recognize that if it was salt-preserved and sent back to them.
Letting the killers feel all his hope and hunger, he urged them on.
Even with the increased weight on its back, the shark flashed through the water at what Yerena knew was its top speed. Terminal velocity. She’d heard that term somewhere, but she wished she hadn’t remembered it, because “terminal” was another word for “fatal”.
And the whales were gaining.
Her free arm tightened around the huge smooth rock she clutched to her belly, a chunk of granite larger than a melon, and she craned her head back to look. One fin was less than half a league behind them, closing the distance faster than she would have thought possible, although the other two lagged just behind it. Was that a sign they weren’t working closely together? She couldn’t tell.
The only advantage she had was the one she’d seen when she’d looked down from the cliff an hour ago, looked down at the woman in the water. The wind had died, so the Rainstone fisherfolk would have dipped their sails and taken their masts down. She pointed the shark towards the cluster of tiny boats in the distance and it swam with desperate speed.
The distance between it and the fastest killer kept narrowing. A hundred yards, then fifty. Like an obsidian knife poised for sacrifice, the black fin would slice through them in minutes.
The fisherfolk had seen them by then, and men paddled frantically to get out of the way. Yerena guided the shark to the far end of the scattering line of boats, to one with a single man in it. His oar spun and thrashed the water as she dared one last look behind. The killer whale was so close she saw the white teardrop behind its eye.
Jump.
The shark’s muscles bunched. It burst free of the water in a glittering spray and while it didn’t rise high—it was injured and tiring—the leap carried it over the boat. And at the highest point of its trajectory, Yerena threw herself off its back.
The shark’s heavy grey-and-white body fell. The boat rocked with the wash, and the fisherman’s scream was the last sound she heard before she plummeted into the sea. Water rushed past her as though her suit didn’t exist, and the rock she carried pulled her down far faster than she could have dived. Her lungs felt as though hot towels were wrapped tight around her chest.
Above her a dark shape eclipsed the sunlight shining down through churning water as the startled killer braked its forward rush. Now it had two targets, and one was easier.
She was still sinking rapidly through gelid water when the whale dived down at her. If not for her mask she might not have seen the pale flash of its belly, but that was warning enough. The rock slipped from her arms and sank. She kicked out with all her strength and rose through the water. The killer’s jaws snapped shut where she would have been a moment earlier had she been sinking
, where it had expected her to be.
Before it could twist around and swim after her, the shark was on it. Yerena’s lungs burned in the constricting vacuum of her chest and her heart hammered in her ears so loudly she couldn’t hear anything of the struggle below, but cold training kept her mind clear despite fear and breathlessness. She had to get out of the water before the other two killers were on her—and the black oval of the fishing boat was just overhead.
She dug her hands into water, kicking hard. Bubbles spilled from between her teeth as she began to lose the struggle not to breathe, but her head broke the surface. Dead fish floated all around her as she gasped for air. Just a few feet away, the fisherman gaped at her.
Then he swung his oar down in a vicious arc aimed at her skull.
She flung her right arm up reflexively. The oar slammed into the flat of her forearm so hard that her vision blurred. She bit down on her tongue and her sight cleared. Her arm was numb, a dead weight attached to her shoulder, and the fisherman standing in his boat staggered from the impact himself. He lifted the oar for a second time.
She pulled her knife with her good hand and flung it at him.
It wasn’t weighted to be a throwing knife, nor did she have the kind of skill needed to skewer him through the heart. But he flinched back instinctively when the knife flew at him, and his foot turned on the slippery haul of fish in his boat. With a shout he fell backward, half in the water and half out of it, and the boat rocked again as his weight came down across its gunwale.
The numbness in her arm gave way to what felt like a rush of red-hot needles. Teeth clenched, Yerena grabbed the boat’s opposite side as it lurched in her direction, and forced her right hand to close over one of the thwarts as she struggled to lift her leg into the boat. Her muscles strained like ropes stretched to the breaking point, but one leg was aboard, and she shifted her weight, pulling the rest of her body out of the water.
The Deepest Ocean (Eden Series) Page 19