by Jay Lake
* * *
We called at Lost Port three days later. It was the easternmost of the Stone Coast cities, and marked with great, curious ruins both above and beneath the waves that I longed to explore. Instead, I kept to our cabin and waited out the short time at the wharf there. The captain swiftly put Prince Enero out to sea again, for this was a place with no profit in tarrying beyond the time required to discharge and take on cargo.
Once bound south by southwest on the open water, we soon found the Storm Sea living up to its name. We were far enough into the spring for the cold cyclones of winter to leave off, but still towering waves rolled across our course. Prince Enero was sufficiently powerful to turn into them, and large enough to ride them without much fear of foundering, but the experience was most unpleasant as a passenger. I could only imagine what would happen to a little vessel like Chowdry’s lost Chittachai in such conditions.
I told Ilona and Ponce I wanted to go outside and watch the racing water.
“Are you insane?” he demanded, clutching Federo close. Ponce had struggled down the interior passage from his cabin to ours this morning, after it became clear the stewards would not be setting out a morning meal.
Looking at my leathers to wonder how they would fare in a vigorous saltwater wind, I replied absently, “No, just fascinated.”
“The ocean trying to crawl through our little porthole every few minutes is not enough for you?” Ilona sat braced on her own bunk with Marya in her arms. Her complexion was much paler than normal, and she had to swallow several times before she could speak again. I wanted to comfort her. She continued: “You wish to go swimming in it, too.”
“A rage greater than mine fascinates me. The sea rages like a god itself.”
“Oceanus was a titanic.” Ilona moaned, and I wondered if she needed a bucket instead of comforting. Then she added, “I should think you’ve had your fill of such.”
Reluctantly, I put my leathers away. That mysterious economy of women had not provided sufficient rough weather gear for me to be out in this storm with any hope of protection. And they were right about the safety as well.
I was a mother now. I needed to think of such things. That thought in turn irritated me. “Well, at least I can go find something to eat,” I snapped.
Ilona tried to nod, then stopped, still looking more than a bit green herself. “If you don’t break your neck being tossed about in the hallway.” Her tone sounded as if she might consider that option preferable.
“It’s a passageway, not a hall,” I snarled, ashamed of my frustration, and went out looking for ship’s biscuits at least, or failing that, someone to argue with about their absence from our meager board.
* * *
Even after the storm had calmed the next day, the seas ran ragged and strange. I was permitted to go on deck without so much chaffer and watched the water foam purple and brown. These struck me as strange colors.
Twice the purser tried to chase me back to my cabin, but obduracy is a great skill of mine and I simply ignored him.
Finally one of the mates approached. He was tall, lithe, with skin a pleasant nut brown. One of the Sunwarders, I was sure from the lines of his face and the poise with which he carried himself, rather than some dockside hireling from the margins of the Storm Sea.
“Ma’am, passengers will be much safer out of this weather.” His Petraean was curiously accented, and confirmed my estimate of his origins.
I glanced up at the uneasy sky filled with streaming clouds. “I see no rain,” I said, though I knew that to a sailor, the weather meant the state of the sea as much as it signified anything about the air.
“I will be much safer if you are out of this weather.” He grinned, and I liked the shine of his teeth. “Should we lose you, I will be buried in reports for a week. Then there will be a captain’s mast to investigate the loss. Then there will be a funeral. Truly, I would be so much better spared all that unnecessary effort and expense.”
“Have you looked to our stern?” I asked him, though we were at the starboard rail of the main deck right now.
“I believe the rudder is still there,” the mate said politely. “Surely someone would have noticed by now had we lost it.”
“We are being followed. A ship set out from Copper Downs an hour or so after we sailed. It called at Lost Port as well. I have seen it twice today.”
The mate shrugged. “You cannot know this was the same vessel. Even if it was, what matter? Everyone who wishes to pass Cape Purna to the south coast of Bhopura or the islands beyond must set this same course we follow to Kalimpura. A following ship does not signify so much in a sea lane such as this.”
“Hmm.” I did not share his confidence, but then, I did not share his expertise, either. Instead, I gave him a slap on the shoulder with my good arm and returned to my cabin to sulk and sew the day’s bell to my silk, and to Marya’s.
Mother Vajpai and Mother Argai had come visiting. Mother Argai was still weak, but the confusion had left her mind to be replaced by a smoldering resentment at what the Quiet Man had done to her. We had not yet discussed her attacker’s fate in any detail, but she knew I had dispatched him.
“The officers do not like me to be outside,” I announced, shaking off the spume I’d accumulated there.
Mother Vajpai glanced pointedly at the deck, which in this moment was rolling through an angle that would make walking difficult. “I cannot imagine why. Or does the management of kettle ships also figure among your many talents?”
“Sadly, it does not.” I lowered myself to my bunk and braced there with my good arm. Once reclining, I managed my position so my bad arm faced the cabin rather than risk being banged against the wall. Or bulkhead. “So if a sudden plague should take the crew, someone besides me shall have to see to our rescue.”
“You are a sudden plague,” Ilona said, almost giggling. That warmed my heart. She laughed so rarely that I ignored the lighthearted insult in favor of the obvious humor and smiled at her. And it was good to see her looking less bilious than the day before.
So we passed an hour, in easy banter and a certain amount of twitting, while fussing over the babies, who did not like the ship at all and seemed to be distracted from their misery only by constant attention.
No one really cared to broach the hard subjects yet. Decidedly including me. The voyage was long, and promised to continue rough. Bread, cheese, and meat had been handed out this morning in lieu of either short commons or a full breakfast from the kitchens.
We ate, we chattered, I fed my restive children again, then passed them around to be held and dandled. Finally, it seemed time to introduce more difficult topics. I slipped my remaining short knife from my right sleeve.
“There is something I need to show you,” I told them, though my eyes went to Mother Vajpai.
I could almost hear the several sarcastic replies forming, but they all realized I was serious. “Watch,” I said, reaching to slice a small notch in the oaken post of my bunk.
It was like slicing butter.
Ponce had no idea of the significance of what I’d done, and Ilona appeared puzzled, but both Mother Argai and Mother Vajpai were astonished. Neither bothered to hide their reaction.
I flipped knife across the cabin to Mother Vajpai, timing the toss to the roll of the ship. She was a Blade, and had no trouble catching it. I nodded. Mother Vajpai put my edge to the iron coaming around our cabin’s hatch. A curl of bright metal shaved off.
She handed the weapon to Mother Argai, asking as she did, “What is this?”
“The blade was heated, then quenched in the blood of a god,” I replied. “As was its mate, which I unfortunately left behind in the Red House.”
“You left something like this behind?” Her tone was somewhere between appalled and astonished.
“At the time I was somewhat distracted,” I answered snappishly. “And besides, I did not realize just then what I held in hand.” Though by then I probably should have.
Mo
ther Argai had declined to further vandalize the cabin in the name of proof, but instead was studying the blade carefully.
“Which god, if I may ask?” Mother Vajpai now looked very thoughtful. “Not your ox god, surely.”
“Blackblood, who was giving me some trouble at the time.” Now I wondered at his motives, and especially so in sending Skinless after me there at the end. Seeing me off? Or watching to make sure I left?
Was there a difference?
Mother Vajpai sighed. “Only you would stab a god who was giving you ‘trouble.’”
“Only Green would think to try to stab a god at all,” Mother Argai added.
“It was never so simple as—” I broke off. Small point in defending myself. Especially since they were essentially correct.
“At any rate,” said Mother Vajpai, switching back to Petraean, “I implore you not to test this blade against anything important, such as the steam kettle or the plates of the hull.”
She threw the knife back at me as both Ponce and Ilona winced. I snatched it out of the air, letting the hilt slap firmly into my hand and trying not to wonder what this oh-so-strange blade would have done to me if I somehow had caught the weapon on the wrong part of the spin.
“Show-off,” muttered Ponce. Despite the better weather, he was looking as miserable as Ilona had the day before.
I still could not say if the blade was a blessing or a curse. None of my companions had any advice to offer, not even Mother Vajpai, from whom I’d hoped to find some wisdom.
* * *
Aboard ship, I began composing a letter to Chowdry. Or a series of letters. I wasn’t sure which. Perhaps it did not matter. In many of the most important ways, my fellow Lily Blades knew me far better than he or almost anyone else. On the other hand, Chowdry was the only person who knew me well and also had a foot planted firmly on each side of the Storm Sea.
His experience and mine shared curious echoes that went beyond any obvious connection.
Besides which, writing to Chowdry was in a sense writing to Endurance. I wasn’t sure any of the gods could read, for all that so many of them were fond of dictating scripture, but surely if any god could not do so, it would be the ox god. In Seliu, I wrote,
Weather continues rough here. Most everyone but me is miserable. So far they have not all needed to throw up at the same time. This is a great help with the children.
I am of the opinion that our vessel the “Prince Enero” is being pursued. If you have occasion to do so, I would take it as a great favor if you could direct someone to inquire of the Harbormaster’s office which vessels weighed anchor the same afternoon of our own departure. As a practical matter, it will be weeks before this letter can reach you, and the reply just as long, but it would ease my mind to know.
I commend Ponce back to you. He is devoted to the children, and perhaps too devoted to me, but this will pass. I am a fit woman for no man at all, as you know of my history. At some point I may have to speak sharply to him.
He has also made a shrine to Endurance in his cabin. I do not know if the little ox statue carved of horn is a votive item of your devising or something he had found in the Dockmarket, but it seems to focus him well. I may yet pray before it myself, just to be sure, though I do not suppose the god will hear me so far from his home.
Do not stint the stone temple, and I hope your compound knows more peace in my absence than it ever did in my presence. Should you require aid of the sort represented by the Lily Blades, call at the Bustle Street Lazaret and ask for Salissa; or failing her presence, Laris. I do not believe Mother Iron and Endurance have much cause for jealousy between them, and each of your followings might profit from common cause with the other.
I wished I’d thought of that last before I’d departed. It might have been good advice to give out in my final days in Copper Downs, had I been able to fit such a conversation in between my busy schedule of murder, arson, and funerary rites. Once again, I wondered how ordinary people lived their lives, when no one was lurking about with an intent to kill them.
Later, I went back on deck to see that the sky and sea had calmed with the coming of night. We were far from any shore, so that every horizon but the north was that slightly wavering line the ocean makes for itself in the absence of rougher play. North was obscured by retreating clouds that threw lightning about, the last of the storm we’d been weathering almost since setting out.
Had I truly left the storms behind?
* * *
The next three mornings I learned that the answer to that question was emphatically no. Prince Enero ran against seas as high and rough as the first day’s, maybe more so. Our fourth day at sea, I stared out the port awhile at the spray, with occasional breaks to see racing walls of water ranging again in color from cinnamon to violet.
It was as if the entire ocean had been made into some great stew.
The children were wailing, strapped into a pair of sleeping boxes because it was too dangerous to have them out. No amount of soothing had helped, so finally we’d just let them scream in hopes they’d tire themselves into sleep.
Ilona, bent over a bucket again, groaned.
“This is not natural!” I finally said, shouting over the wailing of my miserable babies. Ponce had been insisting on that point for the last two days, until he’d eventually locked himself in his own cabin, crying with fear.
“No,” she gasped. “It is not. You’ve made this crossing three times?”
“Never like this.” Ponce had been right. I wished I’d used kinder words with him.
Timing my movements with the roll of the deck so I could brace myself as it lifted and fell, I shrugged out of the woolen robe I’d been wearing and began to don my fighting leathers. My left arm was still a bruised mess, though the numbness and the pain had both given way to an unceasing tingling that was almost worse. Like hearing someone whistle tunelessly, without end, until you wanted to break their jaw and sew their lips together.
Ilona would be no help, however.
“Who are you going to fight?” She took several deep, whooping breaths and wiped a string of bile from her mouth as the cabin shifted from a steep angle to the port all the way to an equally steep starboard angle. An assortment of shoes, rattles, and other small objects flowed back and forth across the deck in a cacophony.
“The weather.”
Not even my new, god-blooded blade could cut into the heart of a storm, though I did wonder what would happen if I tried to slash, say, the wind. Could I split a raindrop?
It mattered little in the moment. I wanted to speak to the captain, whose acquaintance I had not yet made. Even the mate I’d met had not given me his name.
“Watch over them,” I told Ilona.
“Uhnnn…” was all the reply I received. It would have to do.
* * *
The inner passageway led to a compartment forward that in kinder seas served as the passengers’ mess. Supposedly the captain kept a table there, but we had yet to see a formal meal service.
Wooden rails were bolted to the walls for exactly such times as this. I staggered with my right hand always braced, keeping my injured left arm close and protected, until I’d worked my way down the passage and through the forward compartment. A breezeway beyond included laddered steps leading up to the bridge.
Unfortunately, the breezeway was intermittently being filled with tons of seawater. When the ocean wasn’t leaking in through the hatch and window frames, the wind was doing its best to make up the lack by forcing the rain against everything.
Again, I would have to time my progress to the swells and the ship’s corresponding rolls. To have the hatch to the breezeway undogged when one of those waves broke over the deck would court disaster. At the least, I would leave a terrible mess behind me.
So I took my time and counted off how long between the floods. Even the weather has patterns. It is truly not so different from fighting an opponent who overmatches your strength and reach. You watch for her patterns
of movement, and shift your own into the little valleys of opportunity that open between the peaks of her effort.
Likewise with the storm. My most significant impediment was my damaged left arm. I could not use both hands to quickly undog the hatch, exit, and clamp it shut once more.
I practiced instead. As soon as the next surge broke and began to drain away in a rush of dripping white foam, I undogged the hatch. Counting off the time I took to do so, I simply secured it once again without turning the bar and opening it.
About fifteen seconds by my reckoning.
We were seeing the big waves every minute and a half or so. Fifteen seconds to undog, perhaps fifteen more to move the lever one-handed. Open the door, step out. Another ten seconds. Close the door. Close the outside lever one-handed. Fifteen seconds. Dog the hatch from the other side. Another fifteen seconds. I was over a minute already before I could begin to scramble up the ladderway to the bridge, and that assumed I made no mistakes, or did not slip.
Why am I doing this?
Self-doubt in the moment of action was such a rare thing for me that I surprised myself in asking the question. I already knew the answer, of course. This storm was unnatural. God-raised or cursed or some such. I was the only person aboard who might even hope to call on any countervailing force. And we could not simply sail into this for weeks. Even the mighty kettle ship Prince Enero would founder.
The next wall of water broke outside. I began undogging the hatch while the wave still pounded on the wood, metal, and glass of the compartment’s forward bulkhead. One of our own Stone Coast ships would already have broken beneath this assault, I realized.
I opened the hatch and stepped out. Foaming salt water was ankle-deep in the breezeway, and the wind shrieked like a demon out of the nether hells. I turned and one-handed pulled the hatch to. Drop the lever, flip the dogs one by one. Move, move, move, don’t bother to count, because the storm will do it for you.
The deck rolled beneath me and I glanced up to see another wave rising. It was like staring at a wall. I wasted precious seconds watching the sea raise that giant hand against me, then began scrambling up the bridge ladder as the next great inrush of the ocean broke against Prince Enero’s port railing.