The Dawnhounds

by Sascha Stronach

  “You fight?” she said. It was the first time she’d spoken since offering her name.

  “Sure,” said Yat. “We did hand-to-hand at the academy.”

  “So you fight like a cop,” she said. She smirked. “You don’t fight.”

  “I fight fine,” said Yat. She’d excelled at drills: her small size made it easier to get under the guard of the larger officers. They had a habit of underestimating her, and she had a habit of punishing them for it. She’d never been able to beat Sen, but nobody could do that. He told everybody he’d taught himself the Noble Drunkard Fist from a penny-manual. She wasn’t sure if she believed him, but she’d never seen the man lose a fight. She wished she’d paid more attention.

  “Show me,” said Cannath. She stubbed out her cigarette on the gunnel, and tucked it behind her ear. Yat took a deep breath, and lowered herself into first defensive stance, with her legs bent and her arms—

  The first blow hit her in the stomach while she was still squaring up. Yat saw it coming in the threads before she saw it in Cannath’s body: they concentrated together in her hips and shoulders, and sent a braid of power down her arm and right into her fist. It was like being hit by a train. Yat doubled over, and a knee caught her in the chin. Her teeth crunched against each other and she crashed back against the deck. She lay on the boards in agony, tasting the copper in her own blood. “Not fair,” she said between gritted teeth, “you didn’t let me—”

  “I didn’t let you, no,” she said. “And I’m your friend. Think on that.”

  A lot of folks on this boat wanted to be her friend, but they had a funny way of showing it. Cannath offered her hand. Yat wasn’t sure how she felt about this, but she took it and let the Northerner pull her to her feet. Their threads came together, and Yat felt the tension and a concentration to her threads: they were packed together tightly, ready to explode.

  “I’m going to hit you,” said Cannath, “and your job is to stop me. You ready?”

  Yat didn’t have time to answer before the second blow came at her: the magic concentrated in Cannath’s hip again, and Yat blocked high, ready for another punch. The knee caught her in her side. She saw the threads shift a half-second too late, and didn’t have time to stop the blow. She turned her body with the impact and let the worst of it go nowhere, but it still hurt like hell as it scraped across her ribs.

  “Better,” said Cannath. “The first time I died, it was because I expected him to fight fair; I never made that mistake again. The next time, I took the motherfucker with me. Use knees, use elbows, use teeth. You had a cigarette, didn’t you? Put it in my eye if you have to. Fuck, kill me: you already know I’ll be back. I died in Hainak, and I’ll be back for another lesson faster 'n you can spit. The only people who talk about honour are those who were already ahead—they want you to fight fair, because that’s how they win.”

  Yat didn’t need to read threads to see the woman’s rage, but she did anyway: they were incandescent inside her, so dense and tightly-tangled that it was impossible to tell one from the next. There was something else in there too: something fragile: a butterfly trapped inside the furnace. For a moment, as she looked, she heard something inside her head: the soft tearing of paper, or boots through fresh snow. Where have I heard that before? Something else too: the sound of machinery, a pressure on her shoulders, a single nail, not flush with the wall. Cannath paced back and forth across the deck. Her tattoos writhed. She stood up very straight, arched her head back, then took a deep breath of sea air. She looked like she was about to say something else, but Sibbi cut her off.

  “Easy, tiger,” she said.

  Cannath shot her what could charitably be described as a look. “Yes Cap’n,” she said. She stormed off, and Sibbi shook her head. She beckoned Yat to her, beside the steering wheel. They stood together, with Dawgar behind them and Hainak somewhere in the unseen distance.

  “It’s easy to become obsessed with death,” said Sibbi. She shifted her hands on the wheel, and her rings clattered against the wood. “Just because you can die doesn’t mean you should. You know what a hero is, Yat?”

  Her mind flashed back to Wajet, walking along the docks with her. What if the drake’s nice? He’d been building to something.

  “A hero,” she said, “is somebody who does what’s right, no matter what it costs.”

  “Try again,” said Sibbi. Her sweet little-old-lady smile was infuriating.

  “Okay,” said Yat, “a hero is somebody who fights against the darkness.”

  “Ooh,” said Sibbi, “‘fight against the darkness’. I like that. Very poetic. Closer, but no.”

  “Well then,” said Yat, “why don’t you tell me?”

  More damned riddles. Why couldn’t these people just say what they meant?

  Sibbi grinned. “A hero,” she said, “is a young man—and it is usually a man, though not always —who is very impatient to die loudly. They want everybody to look and say ‘what a hero’ and to be remembered. They read too many stories and get this idea in their heads that death is noble, and beautiful, and glorious. A hero is impatient to die, and in their impatience they have a habit of taking ordinary folks down with them—after all, death is glorious, and beautiful, and that means killing is too. Whether they succeed or fail, a hero is defined by death, and that’s why I don’t let heroes on my ship. I’d rather teach my people how to live.”

  Cannath was on the foredeck, checking some ropes. Yat tried not to look at her, but the quiet storm of swearing was hard to fully ignore.

  “The wound is still raw; she lost the god who sent her back,” said Sibbi. Of course she could sense I was thinking that. Magic, or just intuition? What doesn’t she know? “The wheel keeps turning without tiger, but it’s different—you lose a little of yourself to the other side every time you come back. She’s an old friend, and I break the rules for my friends—I never break them for myself.”

  “Well,” she said, then paused and cocked her head, “she’s a relatively old friend.”

  “Just how old are you, anyway?” said Yat. The question had been bothering her for a while, and it didn’t seem like she could keep her thoughts to herself anyway.

  “That’s not a question you ask a lady,” said Sibbi, “but you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  She tried to read the woman’s threads, but she wasn’t getting anything—she could see broad strokes of emotion, but nothing revealing. More damned mysteries. She didn’t know how much of all this she believed, but the crew definitely believed it: they treated Sibbi more like a shaman than a captain. Once Yat had seen it, it was hard not to. They kept their gaze low around her, and never raised their voices, and followed her orders with real fervour.

  Her face still stung. There was blood between her teeth, and beneath her tongue. She hated how they treated her: poking and prodding with little questions, shuffling around the edges. Everything was sideways, in metaphor and innuendo: Gods and magic and song. She was much more willing to believe than she had been a week ago, but there was something else going on: something more real, with spies and guns and missing ships. Every question led to more questions. She didn’t know magic, but she’d thought she knew—at least—how to fight. The pain in her jaw seemed desperate to prove her wrong. She needed to shut it up. She swallowed some blood, and started to walk towards Cannath.

  Sibbi didn’t move, but the threads of the ship turned towards Yat. They were tense, and coiled.

  “Hey,” shouted Yat, “hey, you!”

  It wasn’t just the ship paying attention now: the crew were backing up, some of them looking concerned. That was fine: an audience would be good. Her heart hammered in her chest. This was a risk, but her last risk had worked out. She stopped right in front of Cannath. She looked bored, leaning against the railing, but her threads told a different story: she was coiled like a spring—so tight she was about to snap.

 
“You taught me a trick,” said Yat. She was louder than she needed to be. It could’ve been for the sake of performance, but a lot of it was nerves. “Let me teach you one.”

  The crew were moving closer now: far enough to avoid getting caught up in it, but close enough to jump in. The ship itself—Sibbi in charge, curious but cautious—seemed to turn itself towards them. A row of snapdragons grew out of the gunnel beside her, and she reached down and touched one. She focussed on it, and pushed its threads upwards, through the deck and through the mast. She gritted her teeth and hauled a tiny piece of energy from the mast into one of the rigging-vines, and felt—far above—a flower bloom. The effort set off a stabbing pain somewhere between her eyes, and behind her nose. She took a deep breath, and turned to Cannath.

  “Can you climb?” she said.

  The crew’s laughter was so loud and sudden that she almost jumped. It didn’t help with her headache at all.

  “Climb?” said Cannath. “This is your first time at sea, huh?”

  Yat pointed to the flower.

  “Five gold ox says I can get that before you can.”

  That shut them up. Cannath stuck out a calloused hand. “You’re on,” she said. Yat didn’t wait to shake it. She took off. The main-mast was secured to the gunnels on either side by a dense mycelium shroud. Same stuff they used to brace construction in Hainak. She leapt onto the underside of it, and began to climb. The mycelia connected with the mast somewhere above the pub roof, and she realised why so many of the crew hated the placement: short of climbing up on top of the pub, this was the only way up the mast.

  A sudden weight on the shroud almost threw her off. She didn’t turn around. The trick to climbing was momentum: you kept moving, and the movement turned into more movement. The mast had climbing pegs jutting out every few feet, but that wasn’t fast enough —she knew Cannath was already gaining. The woman was faster than she looked, and there was something implacable about her. For the second time in as many minutes, Yat pictured her as a train and wondered whether she was about to get run down. At the connection point between mast and shroud, she leapt. She snatched at a peg, wrapped a loose grip around it, kicked out hard with both feet and let her body swing pendulum-like out over the deck. At the furthest point of her swing, she pulled down hard on the peg—hauling herself upward—and let go.

  For a moment, she hung in the air. She could see her goal: two pegs up, a solid nine feet. She reached out for it and—

  The whole mast swung towards her as the ship crested a wave. She smashed into it face-first. Her nose and her eye sockets and all the bones in her face went white-hot with pain, and for an awful second, the world went black. She felt herself falling backwards, and could hear the shouts and groans of the crew below. She pistoned both arms outwards, managed to wrap them around the mast. Another lurch of the ship swung her around it, and the wet wood filled her forearms with splinters. She cried out, and felt her grip break. She was falling, falling and—

  In that place beyond sense, she knew the ship was alive, and alive for a reason. The mainmast thrummed with power: it had a direct line to the heart of the ship. The blindness suddenly cleared, and she was in mid-air, a good six feet from the mast and falling. She reached out into empty air, and—

  a vine snapped out towards her, like a striking snake. She grabbed it, and swung. Cannath was almost at the top: she grinned, as though she could already taste victory. Yat had been in freefall, but that’s how momentum worked: the vine took her down a little, then swung on its axis and pitched her up through the air. It wasn’t going to last her long: as the vine wrapped around the mast, there was less of it for her to use. She swore and—at the apex of her swing—let go. She threw her legs behind the swing, and hurtled through the warm sea air. Cannath was reaching for the flower now. Yat was again too far from the mast to grab it, but she knew it could grab her. She pulled at its threads, and the flower itself grew as it blossomed through the air towards her. She plucked it from the air in front of her, and tried to grab its vine and—

  missed. She tried to make it grow, but she was falling too fast, and out of control. She screamed as she plunged towards the deck and—

  hit softness. She looked down and saw a flower bed, suspended in the air by a series of vines. It lowered her down, then sent her stumbling as it disappeared into the deck timbers. She didn’t know who’d made the flowers, but she had a sneaking suspicion that if she turned around she’d see Sibbi looking smug again. Yat stood up staggered out in front of the crew.

  “L-lesson,” she said, “lesson one. Momentum. Momentum is uh, important. When you’re moving, you keep moving. Little swing turns into a big swing. Use your body to make the little swings: hips, knees, feet. You keep moving, you stay moving.”

  She put the flower behind her ear. Her head was still ringing, but it seemed like something a winner would do. She bowed. Cannath was climbing down now, muttering to herself. She let herself down onto the roof of the pub, then sat on the lip of it, legs dangling.

  “I’d call you a cheater,” she said, “but I guess I had that one coming. Sailors don’t swing around, girl; I hope you’ve figured out why.”

  She nodded. “Yep,” she said, “but also, you owe me five ox.”

  And with that, the tension lifted. She could feel it, physically: the threads tugging at her as they whirled around on the wind. She reached out with her threads and linked herself up to it. The wave hit her, but she was ready for it. Her anxiety wasn’t stopping her now: the rush of energy was making her strong. She was drawing from the ship, and letting it support her. She could feel the flowers, and the vines, and the ants. She could feel tea leaves resting in the bottoms of cups, and beetles chewing their way through the wood. The warm evening air blew through her hair, and she smiled. Cannath had gone back to dealing with the ship’s ropes, but she seemed truly calm. She whistled as she walked amongst the stays, taking them one-by-one in a clenched fist, then giving each a small tug and smiling when it held true. They’d jumped into the wind to reach Dawgar, and it was still blowing a howling easterly—they’d managed to turn at port, and with luck they’d have it behind them all the way to Hainak. As they sailed into the setting sun, for the first time in a long time, Yat felt good.

  As the days onboard flew by, Yat had been spending more time in the crow’s nest. The mainmast had a strong connection to the rest of the ship, and she practised moving magic up and down it. At least once, she startled a sailor by causing a flower to bloom right in front of him. The sailor with the bullring had seen, and laughed so hard they almost fell overboard—Yat learnt their name was Rikaza, that they were neither a man nor a woman. Several of the crew were like them: some through alchemy, some through dress or custom. Rikaza was older than Yat had first assumed as well: they were small with age, but cheerful and easy company. They were the strongest of the crew, and tended to get the heavy-lifting work: Yat watched them as the magic moved through them, big thick lances of energy that were less like threads and more like scaffolding.

  They had a special nose-flute with notches carved into it so they could play it with their ring in, and they’d play on-deck at night, after their shift, to keep the others company. The instrument made a reedy, haunting sound that sounded like the wind rolling through a hole in the world.

  Another sailor would sometimes play the viol: a very tall, very thin Easterner called Iacci with large hands and bags under his eyes. He’d played first chair in the Orchestra Fenatza, before the city had destroyed itself with an ancient buried dumbtech bomb. Fenatza was a crater, and Iacci refused to call anywhere else home, so he’d taken to the sea. It was a story she would become familiar with: over the last decade, Sibbi had been collecting strays. Before that, it was hard to tell what she had been doing but it didn’t sound like charity.

  Yat caught Iacci after lunch one day, kneeling over a small hole in the wall, his lanky frame bent triple. She’d gotten hers
elf two black eyes from the stunt on the mast, and she looked a little panda-like. He turned to her and frowned.

  “Mousy,” he said. His voice was rich, deep, and heavily-accented. “There is a little mousy here. We cannot have the mousy, for he will eat the food.”

  He shook his head, then straightened up as far as the roof would let him. “Tell the captain we must have a cat,” he said. “I tell her this, she does not listen. A cat is good luck, and he will eat only the food we want him to eat.”

  Yat held back a laugh. She’d known enough cats to cast doubt on that. She thought back to the moggy who came to her house: always hungry, even when she’d just fed him.

  “You go to Sibbi,” he said, and waved one of his pale, spiderlike hands at her. “I will watch for a mousy.”

  Some of the crew wouldn’t talk to her, but many would, and Rikaza was happy to grease the wheel a bit; they took Yat throughout the ship, introducing her to Xidaj—the deep-voiced Ahwari man who she’d seen speaking to Sibbi on her first night—Ken-Set-Xor—a tiny woman, another ex-roof rat she vaguely recognised—Hestos and Hestas—twin sisters from Dawgar, who used to work in the pirate king’s private dance troupe—and dozens of others. Very few of them had started out as sailors, and their stories started to blend together: they hit rock bottom, and the crew of the Kopek found them and hauled them to safety. Xidaj was on the foredeck when they found him, checking the sight of an immense rifle. The barrel was almost nine feet long, and he rested it on the gunnel while he worked. He took out a small knife and twiddled with something behind one of the lenses, and didn’t notice them until Rikaza cleared their throat.