“Don’t worry,” Darok said. “I have no intention of martyring myself, not that we could trust them if I did.”
“But, sir, aren’t you going to say anything?”
“Do you think that kind of poison deserves an answer?”
Alyster finished with the Lastlanders and told two of the men to take them below, out of the way. He had also released Kemay from the brig, after they had realized Jash Morender’s real purpose in sending them two prisoners. Darok stood at the rail and watched the galleys in silence, his officers by his side. Let’s see who breaks first.
The ship’s bell rang and the sun rose well above the cliffs, but there was no sign of Yerena. What the hell was taking her so long? He wished he hadn’t let her go. If she was beneath or beside the keel, would she be injured if he ordered the ship to come about?
“Captain!” Jash Morender called out. “Your indecision or fear won’t buy you any more time. If you do not respond to my offer, we are going to ram your ship.”
Ramming, of course. They weren’t going to risk boarding his Daystrider again. Darok smiled, cupped his hands around his mouth and answered.
“Daystrider’s hold is filled with hellfire,” he shouted back. “Made of pine resin, sulfur, oil distillations, quicklime and a few other substances. We will detonate it if you ram us, and we have enough to level this island. Anyone caught in the blast will be lucky to die instantly.”
The silence from Dreadnaught was delightful, despite some indrawn breaths among his crew. “I didn’t know we were carrying hellfire,” Rojer Halfcrow said.
“We aren’t.” Kaneth spoke out of the corner of his mouth, as if worried the Tureans might decipher the movement of his lips through a spyglass.
“You’re bluffing!” Jash Morender shouted. “If you have something so powerful, why haven’t you used it against us?”
“Because once your ships sink, they’ll block our way out!” For a moment Darok wished he did have hellfire, but it would have taken too much time to refit the ship with firespitters, and the mixture of volatiles was unstable. It was one thing to turn Daystrider into a fireship on his say-so, and quite another to send them all to the afterlife in an unplanned explosion. He was about to continue, to rattle Captain Morender’s crew a little more, when a shout rang out from one of the men.
“Sir!” He pointed over the rail. Darok saw Yerena and the blood drained from his face, leaving it cold and numb.
It has her.
Two of his men had crossbows but he couldn’t order them to shoot, not at a moving target that held Yerena like a shield. Think. His mind raced in circles. Think of a way to kill that thing, damn it!
He couldn’t. Sunlight flashed blindingly off Yerena’s splintered mask as she tore it away, and he hoped she was going to use the broken glass as a weapon—but what could it do that swords and knives hadn’t done? Then her voice pealed out in a scream.
“The hull!”
The hull? Torn between helpless fury and bewilderment, he could only watch as the creature hauled her on towards Dreadnaught. She didn’t shout out anything else, didn’t make a sound. What had it done to her? And what had it done to his hull?
“Take command,” he said to Alyster and hurried to the hatch. If he watched Yerena being dragged away from him any longer, he would throw himself overboard and swim out to her, for all the good that would do. “Pass the word for Grafe!” he shouted over his shoulder, then made his way swiftly through the cramped passages and down the steps to the hold.
The carpenter and his aides reached it soon after he did, and they had been practical enough to bring lanterns. “What’s wrong with the hull, sir?” Arnell Grafe said.
“That’s what we’re going to find out. Quickly.” He had to be topside, to counter anything Captain Morender tried next and to get Yerena back safely somehow.
They began looking through the hold, but the aides talked together in murmurs that they didn’t seem to think he heard, asking what on Eden they were supposed to be searching for, which part of the hull the leak could be in. What leak? Darok wondered. The hold smelled of damp wood and dried fish, and the thick overlapping planks of the hull were as solid as always.
His pulse drummed and he was growing more edgy by the moment, which made him wonder if he was inadvertently overlooking whatever Yerena had seen. Damn! What she had seen would obviously be on the outside of the hull. Of course there was nothing to see from inside.
He stopped where he was, trying to herd his milling thoughts together and make them proceed in straight logical lines. Yerena must have seen something dangerous for her to scream a warning, but there wasn’t time to check the outside of the hull. The Turean galleys had first priority. He went to find Arnell, intending to tell him that the problem was on the outside.
He found the master carpenter beyond one of the bulkheads, staring perplexed at what looked like an antler embedded in the hull. Arnell tapped and then scraped it with a fingernail.
“It’s coral.” He frowned. “Unity knows how it got there, but we could carve it out.”
Darok thought someone beside the Unity knew what the coral was doing there. He took the lantern and opened all the panels, then held it up high to see more of the hull.
Arnell drew his breath in and pointed wordlessly at the coral. The spot he had touched slowly budded another pale prong. Here and there, more coral sprouted from the hull like the heads of cave worms, the lack of color all the more striking against the dark planks. A fragment of wood between two white fingers crumbled away and fell beside Darok’s boot.
“This,” Arnell said with the calmness of disbelief, “this is going to weigh us down.”
“This is going to split the hull apart,” Darok said through his teeth. Arnell reached down and clutched his effigy as if holding on to a lifeline.
There was no way to carve or cut or hack out so much coral, and as fast as they did so, more would grow from the outside—especially since the coral seemed to sense their presence. In the end, the hull would only fall to pieces that much quicker, being chewed from both sides. Darok stepped as far back as he could and looked around.
More fingers of coral pushed their way through the thick wood, dividing as they grew. It was like being lost in a winter forest, beneath twisted white branches. Another wedge of wood, pinched off, fell to the bottom of the hold, and the soft thud broke his stunned shock.
“Everyone out!” he ordered, and took the steps up three at a time. At least the damage to the hull ended the waiting, ended the bluffs and preliminaries.
That ends it all, actually.
“Captain,” Quenlin said. “A word?”
Jash and her officers had been speaking in low voices together, and he heard one of them ask urgently, “Why a Voice of the Unity? It has to be a trick.”
“Of course.” Jash drummed her fingers against the rail, and Quenlin stifled an urge to roll his eyes. That was what came of being too underhanded; she expected her enemies to treat her in the same way. “But if she’s an assassin, she’d have to be damn good to take us all on. Good or suicidal.”
“She could be an Iternan.” The first lieutenant turned to spit into the water, narrowly missing the nearest boatload of prisoners. Nausea tickled the back of Quenlin’s throat. He’d pit his own power against anyone in Denalay, but Iternan magicians were another matter entirely, even if they were rare as fish feet in other lands.
But as the woman in red and gold rowed closer, Jash put her spyglass to her eye and lowered it with a sigh of relief. “She doesn’t look like one of them. All right, Lorad, cast off.” The man nodded and leaned over to saw through the ropes that held the nearest boat.
“Captain.” Quenlin’s irritation strained against Seawatch courtesy. “May I have a word?”
Jash looked irritated too, but she stepped away from the others. Quenlin braced himself and spoke calmly. “When the Voice of the Unity comes aboard, may I speak to her alone?”
“Why?”
“I’
ve never asked your motives, Captain. I just want your permission.”
“Which I’m not likely to grant. You’re both Denalait down to your bones, no matter whose deck you stand on. Whatever the two of you have planned together, it won’t happen.”
Quenlin had expected that, but it still filled him with a crawling dread—not her response, but the only thing he could say to counter it. On the other hand, did he want Jash to think of him as the kind of person who could be treated as powerless and pushed aside? No, of course not.
“Captain,” he said quietly, “I have raised a greatshark and it is on its way here. I will remove all restraints from its mind if you don’t allow me to speak to—to the Voice, and it will be disoriented and angry enough to attack anything in its path.”
Jash’s face was expressionless and again she said nothing, apparently waiting for him to continue. Quenlin wondered if she realized the sheer power of the behemoth he had dredged up. “The white death’s teeth are the length of a man’s finger. The greatshark’s teeth are the length of a man’s handspan. It could bite a killer whale in half. But I’m holding it back, and I’ll continue to do so as long as you let me speak to her.” That should put a stop to the assassination plans no doubt brewing in her head.
“You could be lying.” Her voice was flat as a stone floor, and less revealing. “Even if you weren’t, the water here isn’t deep enough for a creature so large to attack us.”
“Here? No, of course not. So as long as you spend the rest of your life here, you’ll be fine. I can’t say what the greatshark will do then. Probably go south to warmer waters, like those around Crypthouse and Scorpitale.”
A muscle tightened in her jaw, and Quenlin knew he would pay a price for that later. If there was a later after she clashed with the Denalaits, and if he couldn’t escape.
She beckoned two of her men over. “Wurane, Leff. Take that whore down to his cabin and stay with them both.”
Quenlin bit down on any protests he might have made. An unprivate meeting wasn’t good, but it was the best he could expect from Jash. He went to his cabin first, and kicked away a fragment of broken glass on the floor before he pulled two chairs out.
Leff opened the door without bothering to knock and strode in, looking around as if to make sure Quenlin hadn’t spent his time building a boat that could have been shoved out through the narrow window. Finally he called an order to bring her in, and Wurane came in, gripping Lady Lisabe’s elbow to propel her forward. She limped a little, favoring her right foot, and Quenlin thought it was strange to see her wrists bare except for the ropes that bound them.
“Sit down,” he said as Wurane went to the door and Leff took up position by the window.
Lady Lisabe seated herself, but Quenlin remained standing behind the other chair. “How did you secure a private meeting?” she said. “Well, for some definitions of private.”
“I raised a megalodon.”
Her eyes closed briefly. “And I thought Captain Juell was insanely reckless.” Then her eyes opened again, and she cocked her head to one side. “I also thought those were extinct.”
“Most are. I searched for months before I found one—and I had help from killer whales. Not that it matters.” He rested his elbows on the chair’s back, leaning his weight on it. “Why did you come here, Mother?”
It was a good thing, Lisabe thought, that she had been separated from her son for eighteen years. She hadn’t stopped loving the boy, but the man before her felt half a stranger. She settled back in her chair, ignoring ropes and Tureans alike.
“Two reasons,” she said, “and the first is a purely personal one. I wanted to know why you did it.”
Whatever he had been hoping she would say, that evidently wasn’t it, and his face set in sullen lines. “If you don’t understand, I can’t explain.”
“My dear, it’s because I don’t understand that I need you to tell me.” For her to carry out her final duty, it was not strictly necessary to learn her son’s motives, but she had traveled two thousand miles and put herself in the hands of people who wanted her dead, so perhaps she would be forgiven a few moments’ digression. “Were you treated so badly in Whetstone?”
Quenlin straightened up, his lips drawing back from his teeth. “I can’t believe you have the gall to ask me that. You abandoned me to a place—”
“Because the children of the highest and most powerful in Denalay should be treated the same as the children of the grubbers in the fields.”
“—where I was systematically indoctrinated and manipulated—”
“It must not have been very effective manipulation if you’re here now.”
“—where I wouldn’t have any future other than being Seawatch’s pawn—”
“No doubt you prefer a future where you’re Captain Morender’s pawn.”
“Shut up!” He shoved the chair forward and it slammed into the table. Lisabe raised an eyebrow and studied the battered piece of furniture, as though she were a deaf woman who had just noticed the slight tremor of the impact, but behind the mask she told herself to stop needling him. She had always enjoyed that kind of verbal fencing, but this was neither the time nor the place. Nor the person. He was her son.
She gentled her voice as much as she could. “So the answer is…you did it because you hate me or Seawatch or both?”
“Don’t flatter yourself.” Quenlin was still angry, that much was evident, but what filled his voice was the icy, controlled disdain he would have learned in Whetstone. Did he have a temper as a little boy? Lisabe couldn’t remember.
“It was because I hated Seawatch that I went to Skybeyond,” he said. “I’ll give you that. But it’s not why I defected.” She grimaced involuntarily, and he saw her expression. “Don’t like the word, do you?”
“Not one I’d want to have associated with my only child’s memory.”
“A maternal streak, Mother? How unusual.”
“Maternal, no.” There hadn’t been much time to play with her son and tell him bedtime stories after she’d been honored as a Voice of the Unity, though since her son had qualified for Seawatch training only two years later, her maternal nature or lack thereof hadn’t seemed relevant. “But I always wanted to be proud of you, and I heard so much good from your instructors in Whetstone.”
Some of the fury ebbed from his face, and Lisabe didn’t know whether to be pleased that she’d made her son happy, or rueful that he was so easily flattered. But she had been easily flattered too, each time she heard how talented her boy was, how swiftly he mastered mental techniques other students took years to learn. She hadn’t considered the consequences of that, hadn’t imagined he would eventually consider himself deserving of something better than a life as a Seawatch operative.
“Why didn’t you come to me, if you had a grievance against Seawatch?” she said.
“I tried to, in Skybeyond, but they said you were away on business. So I went to the Unity instead.”
“Go on.” Lisabe tried not to look at the Tureans, who were both listening intently. What Quenlin was saying should have remained between the two of them—or better yet, between none of them—so she could only hope for some discretion.
He pulled out the chair, the legs scraping across the floor, and sat down. “I think that says it all.”
“That’s why you defected?” The official word from the Council was that Quenlin had been struck insane from his unauthorized intrusion into the presence of the Unity, which was why nothing he said could be believed, but he sounded more or less sane to Lisabe. She had also wondered if some of the less tender practices in Whetstone had affected his mind—the black room, for instance—but Yerena seemed quite normal, and she was far less talented.
“I can take being ill-treated, Mother,” Quenlin said. “But when the entire foundation of our lives—”
“Don’t say any more, my dear.” She tilted her head towards the Tureans.
A look of disgust curled his lip. “You’re so invested in it,
aren’t you? Seawatch’s methods of controlling animals are low enough—we turn them into emotional parasites who stay close in hopes of the next petting. But what you’ve fed to all of Denalay is worse.”
“What we’ve fed?” Contempt edged her voice in response, despite all her good intentions. “Point out one lie the Council has ever spoken.”
“Why haven’t you told anyone exactly what the Unity is?”
“Why would anyone need to know?”
Quenlin leaned back. “That, Mother, is why I left. So I could finally tell the truth.”
“Oh, Quenlin. To sacrifice so much for so little.” Lisabe sighed. “My poor boy, the good citizens of Denalay have heard it all before, every wild theory there could possibly be.” Her voice took on a light, parroting tone. “The Unity is a creature so bizarre no one could imagine it, much less describe it. The Unity is some kind of intelligent device from another world. The Unity is a trapped star that once fell from the sky. The Unity doesn’t even exist. You think any of those would have been new?” She smiled. “And if the Council of Eyes and Voices had learned you were trying to spread a more original rumor through the populace, why, we’d do the same, except we’d use more convincing stories by far.”
Quenlin smiled back. “But what you’re most afraid of, Mother, isn’t that I’ll tell our people. It’s that I’ll tell the Tureans.” In the silence, he went on. “That will give them one more reason to keep fighting. One more reason—and a damned good one—for wanting their freedom and independence. That’s not something you can counter with subversive agents and conflicting stories, is it?”
The shark drifted through the sheltered waters of the bay, tail moving in slow reflexive twitches every now and then. Other than that and the rhythmic flex of its gills, it was motionless, inert. It felt very tired. The pain was gone, replaced by a dull numbness after nerves and brain were overloaded and something deeper than both told it not to fight any longer.
It hadn’t fully fed in a long time. Unlike that of most fish, its blood was warmer than the water that surrounded it, stoked by an inner fire that demanded more fuel. Ordinarily it would have swum out from the bay in search of sea lions or porpoises with their fat-rich meat, but it didn’t feel hungry. Its senses, an exquisitely honed prey-detection system, were beginning to give out one by one.
The Deepest Ocean (Eden Series) Page 23