Carnelia went above deck and brought back a bucket full of sea water, which she unceremoniously dumped on the floor. Tenebrae opened the valve. The blood became a thick slurry of clotted, viscous liquid. It drained away very slowly.
‘Ack,’ Tenebrae said. ‘Let’s take his body above, and then deal with this.’
Lupina came out of the mess, dandling Fiscelion.
‘It’s a horror in here,’ I said. ‘Take him away, please.’ Gods, the things that child has already endured. Either he’ll be traumatised all his life or the strongest soul to ever walk the earth.
Tenebrae lifted Ysmay by the armpits and dragged him toward the door, swinging both his and the engineer’s arses hallward. Once in the passageway, Carnelia, making a face, took his legs and they hauled him out and on deck. I followed them up.
The wind was brisk, and low clouds scudded across the sky.
‘Should we say some words for him?’ Tenebrae asked.
‘Put him overboard,’ I said. ‘I will say words. You two can finish cleaning up his cabin.’
‘That doesn’t seem right,’ Carnelia said.
I turned to her. ‘Will your eyes well up with tears? Will you cry for him, this man you didn’t know? This man we tore from his life? This man whose future we took from him? Will you weep?’
She blinked in response to the fury of my words. Carnelia looked at Tenebrae. ‘Over the side then, Shadow,’ she said, as Tenebrae filled a sack with empty metal shell casings and tied it to his leg. They hefted his body up and over the gunwale. It fell with a very small splash. They went back below.
I walked to the ship’s rail and looked over. His body had already disappeared, fathoms deep now, maybe. Food for fish, hair in a great blond swirl around his head, arms upraised, in praise of his descent.
‘Whatever gods greet you at your journey’s end,’ I said, ‘let them know I am sorry.’
I turned and went back below.
‘Well, now we’re truly fucked,’ Carnelia said, later that day, when it became obvious we needed to adjust course.
‘Ysmay has shown us all how to steer the vessel,’ I said. ‘We should have few problems with it as long as we don’t founder.’
‘Or run into any more Medierans,’ Tenebrae said.
I tapped the compass on the com. ‘We sail south, and west. We make sure, every day, to sight land on our starboard bow. The Typhon is a littoral, after all. Eventually, it will grow hot, we’ll pass Fort Lucullus, and then we’ll find passage into the Bay of Mageras.’
‘You make it sound so simple,’ Carnelia said. ‘We are not lascars! You are no captain!’
‘We are now!’ Tenebrae laughed. The man had an inexhaustible store of laughs. Mocking, joyous, bitter, snarky, grandiose, prideful. But this one I had not witnessed from him before – it held a joyous futility that sparked a smile in return from me. Indeed, what else was there to do? Either we gave up, or we became who we pretended to be. I had not fled my family and killed my fellow man to protect my son, only to give up now.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We are now. You wear a lascar’s outfit. Trust me, sissy. This will work.’ I placed my eyes to the Miraculous. ‘Go to your armatura. Spend time with your nephew. I will take the first turn at helm.’
Night was the worst. I was not willing to allow us to drop anchor for sleep, so needs be we stagger our rest periods. After three days, it seemed that I was on a haunted ship, one in which the whole crew was under some magical sleep. I saw my son at meals, even more infrequently than before, and comforted myself in the paltry fact that already I spent more time with him than many Ruman matrons did with their own progeny. ‘No child’s company until speech and reason,’ was a Ruman adage, and one that my father had adhered to.
But worse: the fear of grounding that darkness brought with it. At dusk, I made sure to set course in a more easterly direction, for fear the contours of Occidentalia would change and we go sailing, unbeknownst to whoever helmed the Typhon, into a spit of land jutting from the main body of the continent. This tactic meant that every morning, at first light, we must turn west, and sail full bore until we sighted land once more. In this way we zigzagged down the coast.
By turns we all gave blood to Typhon, save Fiscelion.
I do not know if that helped, but it was better to keep the daemon appeased than risk otherwise.
Day found night found day again. The fear of encountering other ships – Medieran warships, in particular – was worse than actually encountering them. An enormous destroyer was the first, possessed of five massive swivels; it we spotted long before they had a chance to spot us. And because, as was our wont, we kept the hatches closed while all were below, it was a simple matter for me to initiate the descent and submerge. I turned us shoreward, cut our speed, and kept the Miraculous trained on the enormous vessel. It did not notice us.
The second found us making the passage between islands into the Bay of Mageras. Not truly an ambush, but definitely a patrol of some sort.
It was day, and suddenly Carnelia was yelling for me to wake.
‘Get up! A frigate fires upon us!’
I woke to bedlam. My sister’s face was wild. Fiscelion screamed somewhere in the ship. The Typhon rocked sideways and both Carnelia and I took steps toward port to steady ourselves. Tenebrae yelled something indistinct from the command.
Seeing I was awake, Carnelia bolted back to the nav. I raced after her, my bare feet painful on the grating of the Typhon’s flooring. A calm settled on me and I pushed the noise and pain away. Entering the command, I saw Tenebrae peering into the Miraculous.
‘They make chase. Carnelia, can you take the swivel?’ he asked, his voice pitched upward, full of tension.
‘We haven’t taken off the gun shroud this morning!’ she said.
‘Do that now!’ he said.
‘Submerge,’ she answered.
‘They are right behind us. In full daylight. And it is shallow here. I fear—’
‘Uncover the gun, Carnelia,’ I said, taking it all in very quickly. ‘Cut away the covers if you must. But do it now!’
She frowned. But she moved to obey.
‘Full speed,’ I said to Tenebrae.
‘I am already there, Livia,’ he said.
‘Let me see.’ I pushed him away from the Miraculous and swung the contraption about. We were in a channel, and there were different gradations of blue in the water ahead that from experience indicated to me varying depths. Without a lifetime of experience, I did not have the confidence to submerge here. There were too many unknowns.
‘Vary your course, two points off port, two points off starboard,’ I said. It was not much but all I could think to do. ‘I will address our pursuit.’
‘But—’
‘No time,’ I said. Reaching out, I snatched the longknife he wore at his hip and ran to the fore of the Typhon.
I wrenched the door to the armamare and munusculum chamber open and raced down into the cold darkness. For a moment I felt a panic threatening my strange calm, but my hand found the shutter of the daemonlight lantern and the space became illuminated.
Moving to the rear of the chamber, I yanked open the munusculum breeches, sliced my palm with Tenebrae’s knife, and blooded the munitions. The infernal contraptions smoked and glowed. The stench of sulphur and the despair of the damned filled the space. With no ceremony I hefted by main strength, one by one, the pair of munuscula into firing position, closed their breeches and triggered their release.
From without, a great boom sounded. It was not the Typhon’s deck gun. It was further away, distant. Our ship shuddered and pitched over. I fell against the bulkhead.
There was a silence. The Typhon righted itself.
I returned to the command, breathless.
‘She still follows!’ Tenebrae yelled. It was quiet now; Fiscelion had ceased his wailing. So Tenebrae’s voice boomed in the stillness of the chamber.
‘The munusculum are re—’
There was another great
boom. Tenebrae tensed, looking into the Miraculous.
‘The mine detonated! Yet the frigate still churns the waves,’ he said.
‘There is another,’ I said. ‘Wait for it.’
Nothing.
‘She slows,’ Tenebrae said. ‘She’s become wary.’
Carnelia returned to the command, breathless. ‘The gun’s free. I go to my station.’
She disappeared into the rear of the ship. Soon, the ratcheting sound of the swivel moving on its trucks reverberated through the length of our vessel. Another distant boom sounded. The Typhon shuddered.
‘We are fast, and with very little profile,’ Tenebrae said. ‘But she will strike us eventually if we do not outrun her, outgun her, or submerge.’
The pomp of our deck gun shivered our vessel, the despair of Hellfire washed over me. And maybe, maybe in that instant, the daemonic influence of munitions washing over me, I made my decision.
I found Lupina and Fiscelion in our cabin. ‘Give him to me,’ I said. The dvergar woman looked at me dubiously. ‘This is not a request,’ I said.
She handed him to me, reluctantly. I took him, held him close to my chest, and quickly raced out of the cabin and to the back of the ship.
In Typhon’s Bower, the great engine pulsed when I entered. Its malevolence was palpable. The warding keeping the daemon bound emitted an evil illumination as I approached. The ship shuddered once again with Hellfire. Caught in the magnetic power of the Typhon’s dynamo, I could not tell if it was our guns or the Medierans’.
Fiscelion turned his eyes on the glowing wardwork, drawn to the point of precium, the concentric snarls and skeins of silver threading in whorls down to a glowing mouth.
I took my son’s hand and dragged the knife across it. He screamed and writhed in my grasp. From behind me, Lupina shouted, ‘No!’
I placed Fiscelion’s hand on the mouth of the Typhon.
The engine began to smoke and shimmer. The thrumming pitched higher. The sensation of doom both increased and lessened all at once. Fiscelion’s cries pitched toward unbearable. Lupina forcefully took Fiscelion from my grasp. The screaming diminished even as the sensation of speed grew.
I was alone in the room. I fell to my knees. At the edges of my awareness I could hear Tenebrae whooping and Carnelia calling out in joy and distantly felt another percussive boom of Hellfire.
I remained that way for a long while, on my knees in front of the daemon drive.
I did not cry.
We passed into the Bay of Mageras without further incident, having outpaced the Medieran frigate. It became procedure to stay submerged as much as possible to avoid detection from the enemy’s ships in these waters.
Carnelia and I remained on edge. The remarkable speed of the Typhon due to the precium of Fiscelion’s blood continued for days. We made amazing time, passing Aurelia and Mammon’s outflow at dusk one evening, witnessing its giant cannons and thousand twinkling lights reflected on the waters and wondering if it was held by Ruman forces or Medieran. No flag flew from parapets, spires, or wharf and we dared not get closer.
Mountains appeared first as a discolouration on the horizon and disappeared in the distance, grey and framed by our wake by the end of the next day. We spotted scores of Medieran ships and spent only moments every day not submerged. The waters became deeper, there where the mountains’ skirts plunged into the sea on rocky cliffs. We kept the peaks within view on our port and soon they took on the gunmetal-blued appearance I’d come to know of the Eldvatch mountains as we came around the cape. The mountains gave way to lower land, eaten away by marsh and finally, one bright morning, we passed a port with no Medieran ships and hazarded a quick exploration. It was a small coastal village, and almost every pier and wharf had half-sunken barges and derelict ships moored there. On nearing the shore, no wharf master greeted us, no gunship found us in the bay. Seagulls wheeled and banked overhead, making their lonesome cries on the heights. No bell rang, no stevedores hollered work songs. No drunken lascars sang bawdy songs.
We tied to the end of a pier, and I left Carnelia on board with the deck guns uncloaked, should any Medieran vessel surprise us – she was to fire the remaining swivel to alert us while we were ashore.
Tenebrae and I – not dressed as captain or lascar, surely, but in our civilian garb – walked to the end of the pier. A pack of wharf dogs ran away from us, yipping, as we approached. No fires sent smoke heavenward.
We went up one street, into a rough tenement neighbourhood. The seagull-threaded silence was uncanny.
‘There,’ Tenebrae said. He pointed. An old man sat smoking, his chair leaned back against the wall. ‘Hey, old timer,’ Tenebrae said, as we drew near.
‘Yessir, a-yessir,’ the man said. Sunken-cheeked, he gummed the end of his corncob pipe. I could not tell his exact stature, since he was in a semi-reclining position, but his oversized hands indicated he had some dvergar blood.
‘Can you tell us where we are?’ I asked. ‘The wharf was empty.’
‘A-yassum, a-yassum,’ he said. ‘That it is.’
‘And this place is—?’
‘Wickerware, ma’am, where the baskets come from,’ he said.
‘The Hardscrabble!’ I said, before I could stop myself.
‘A-yep, ma’am, the very arse-end of it,’ he said.
‘Where is everyone?’ Tenebrae asked.
‘Fled north, seeing as them beaners are all over Mageras and on the march now.’
‘Beaners?’ Tenebrae said.
‘Them Medierans,’ the old man said.
‘And you remained? Why did you not flee with them?’ I asked.
‘I’m old, ma’am, and full of sleep. And rum,’ he said. ‘This here’s my home and these hands ain’t much good for digging, no more, up there at Dvergar silverlode. Don’t care much for the Rumans, anyway, beg your pardon.’
‘So the silverlode in the Eldvatch is now working?’ I asked. If my father had lived, he would have been happy, since he had a large interest in it. He would have been displeased and petulant, however, at this current turn of events.
‘If it ain’t yet, it will be soon. Neruda set his teeth to it,’ the old man said.
‘Neruda is the leader of the dvergar now?’ I asked. Fisk had written some of the man, back when we both had Quotidians and the blood to make them sing.
‘A-yep,’ he said. ‘He’s a real firebrand, too, that one. Sent a century of Rumans packing, crying for their mams,’ he said.
‘News from New Damnation?’ I asked.
‘Last I heard, Rume had some folks there, they’d fought off the ’Derians,’ he said.
‘At the fort there?’ Tenebrae asked.
‘A-yep,’ he said, nodding.
‘New Damnation is reachable by the Big Rill,’ I said to Tenebrae. ‘And the river there is ample deep enough for the—’ I waved my hand, indicating the wharf. I did not want to say the Typhon’s name in this man’s hearing. I probably had already said too much. I couldn’t imagine that this old dvergar remained behind solely because of stubbornness. He would talk. And judging by Tenebrae’s glance at me, he had come to the same conclusion.
‘Thank you, sir,’ Tenebrae said.
‘How ’bout something for my troubles,’ the old man said.
‘Of course,’ Tenebrae said, and withdrew some copper denarii. ‘And let me offer you some free advice. You might be old, but you’ll never get any older when you cross Rume.’
The man cocked an eye at Tenebrae. ‘Been hearin’ that since I was a pup. Might be true. Same could be said for the beaners.’ He looked around. ‘Thank you for your advice. Lemme give you a tad: this here’s the Hardscrabble, son, even if it is its arsehole. And the Hardscrabble don’t give two shits which way you bow. It’ll eat you up, anyway.’
Tenebrae frowned. I placed a hand on his arm. ‘We know where we are, now. Let us go.’
Back on board the Typhon, we found Carnelia breathless and stir-crazy. She only settled once the Typhon was awa
y, and Wickerware distant behind us.
The next day, after sailing through the edges of stinking marsh and swampy glades, we found the ruins of Harbour Town and the outflow of the Big Rill. There were Medieran frigates in the bay, swarmed with smaller ships – troop transports by the score, skiffs, baileys, scows, trawlers plying the waters – it was a bustling but chaotic sight.
‘This could be to our benefit,’ Tenebrae said. ‘There.’ He turned the Miraculous and stepped away, beckoning me to look. ‘We wait until night, use the armamare to perforate that big bastard, and in the firestorm and confusion, head upriver.’
‘I’m worried about the Typhon. I know the Big Rill’s deep enough for us – barges have a deeper draught – but will we be able to submerge if we come on Medieran ships?’ I said.
Tenebrae thought for a moment. ‘We have a very large gun. I don’t think it will be an issue. We’re safer there than out here, with these frigates and warships.’
Fisk was somewhere ahead of us. Up the Big Rill. If we could make it to New Damnation, and Marcellus and his legions. Or beyond, to Bear Leg – my father’s town! – we could find him. He could meet his son. I could feel his embrace once more and the world, for a moment at least, could be right again.
I don’t know if I was in my right mind, then. All the desperation distilled into an instant and I made the choice.
‘Draw back, out of the bay. Out of sight. We’ll rise to surface, go on deck, take air. Wait for dusk, while there’s still light,’ I said. ‘Then we’ll blow that warship and head upriver.’
I let blood to appease the avaricious daemons that lurked inside and loaded the armamare with Tenebrae’s help. I did the same for the munuscula, should any ship follow us upriver. I said a prayer to the seven gods I knew of, to Ia, to the numen, and whatever household gods that might bless ships of the sea, despite their infernal dynamos.
We took air, and stood on the deck. Fiscelion, his hand healing well though still swaddled in gauze, toddled about and gave me kisses, my betrayal forgotten. Lupina watched me closely, as if I was a danger to my own son – but it was no use telling her that I acted for his benefit alone, not hers, not mine, not Carnelia’s. That was why she was his perfect guardian. She may even have been aware of my motives, but some recalcitrant part of her could not countenance me being cruel to be kind.
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