Beneath Ceaseless Skies #120

by Doyle, Debra,

  “Delia will be sorry she missed this,” Mr. Underwood murmured.

  Poor Miss Tennyson, banished to her cabin. “Is she a romantic?” Gwen asked, not taking her eyes from the diminishing forms in the sea.

  “Morbid,” Mr. Underwood replied.

  They stood there, silent, until the pair disappeared from view, waiting for the wind to come back.

  * * *

  Corwyn sat in her cabin, trying to read. It wasn’t her favorite pastime, but she’d taken to carrying a book with her on trips because, as Mrs. Simcote had pointed out, sooner or later she got bored and fidgety and got herself into trouble. The book was good, an adventure set out West, but she couldn’t shake the idea that something was wrong. Well, something was wrong—the ship was still becalmed—but she had the feeling that was part of a larger wrong. Too many things didn’t make sense, and maybe some folk had to live with questions that were never answered, but the Teachouts rarely got that lucky.

  She was lying in her bunk with her feet propped up on the wall, but when she heard the splashing sounds just outside her porthole she pulled her legs down under her—the thigh wound was healing, she noted—to stand on her bed. She reached up toward the porthole to haul herself up to see out and so was completely unbalanced when the ship was rammed.

  She stumbled backward out of her bunk, arms pinwheeling, and landed on the floor. She wondered if it was called a deck when it was in a cabin as she scrambled to her feet, casting around for her boots in the swinging light and shadow of the lantern above her bed. The door slammed open; she saw something that looked half-dead, with dark eyes and pale skin tinged yellow-orange by the lantern light, shadows caught in the gill-slits along its sides. It was man-shaped but had catfishy whiskers and too many teeth to fit properly in its mouth.

  They stood staring at each other, then Corwyn lunged for the shelf by her bunk and the creature grabbed for her with webbed hands. She turned, pistol in hand, and shot it in the head even as it recoiled from her.

  “Corwyn!” Gwen’s voice was muffled by walls and the ringing in her ears. Corwyn made out the sound of running above her cabin, then a thud like a door being forced. She heard another gunshot as she maneuvered around the sticky, black blood oozing from the dead thing’s head. Shouts from above, screams from down the corridor, and a smell of salt water tinged with metal began to fill the cabin when Corwyn found her boots. By the time she’d tied them, Gwen was at her door.

  “Nine hells, Wyn, answer when I yell your damn name!” She spotted the corpse. “I wouldn’t have thought your crap-ass pistol could have done that.”

  “Close range,” Corwyn said. The ringing was receding. “And don’t poke fun at my gun.”

  “Mine was a girl,” said Gwen. Gwen never liked killing women, though it had never stopped her. Corwyn had no such qualms. “Come on. We need a better look.”

  The deck was chaos: sailors, flesh and clockwork alike, ran past them; creatures of many different shapes swarmed. Not all of the things were man-shaped: some of them resembled eels; some walking fish and some frogs. Most were a mix. Corwyn glanced over the rail and saw other things just under the surface of the water, some surrounding the ship and some rushing toward it.

  “Hold on!” Corwyn shouted, grabbing the rail. The ship rocked again as the creatures rammed it. People, and some of the monsters, went skidding across the deck; Corwyn and Gwen hung on grimly as their feet jolted underneath them.

  “They could sink us if they all rammed us together,” Gwen mused. “What the hell are they doing?”

  “Keeping us off-balance,” Corwyn said.

  The creatures used teeth and claws on the flesh sailors. The crew were largely unarmed, and the clockwork sailors, being heavier and harder to move, were faring better on the whole. Gwen grabbed a flesh crewman as he scrambled past her with a length of wood studded with hastily hammered nails. He would have nearly brained her with it, but Gwen got hold of his arm before he could rear back. “Where are your weapons?” she yelled.

  “Overboard!” he shouted back, and Gwen let loose with an oath that brought into question the parentage of a number of divine beings, then handed the sailor her knife. He headed aft, where most of the creatures were still more or less contained; Corwyn thought he’d have been better off with his piece of wood, but the knife probably made him feel better about his chances.

  Gwen half-turned after him, straining in a familiar way. “Go on,” Corwyn told her.

  “What are you going to do?”

  Corwyn felt her knack pressing against the back of her skull, making a knot in her stomach. “I’m going to get into trouble, and then scream for you to come get me out of it.”

  “So our usual plan, then,” Gwen said with a grin, and then she was gone, lightning fast away to dance with the mayhem.

  * * *

  The times Corwyn hated were the times she didn’t know who she was looking for. There were times her knack left her a clear, shining path; other times it ignored her. But many times it yanked her along like she had a leash attached to the front of her head, and she never knew if she’d be brought up short in front of a living, shattered person or just the bodily remains of one. It was not a comforting way to live.

  She worked her way around the fighting, squirming through spaces between, staying in the shadows, shooting occasionally when she needed to get something out of her way—the creatures of the deep could take a punch, but they were just as vulnerable as anyone else to a bullet in the knee. Belowdecks she went, and found herself drawn into her own cabin, where the man she’d been looking for was kneeling next to the dead thing Corwyn thought might be his son.

  The drowned man looked up; he was crying. And laughing, which gave her pause.

  “I told her to leave this ship alone,” he said, cackling like the witch who had lived on 34th Street when Corwyn and Gwen were kids. “I knew as soon as I saw the lock on your sister’s trunk—but you all have such marvels, and she must have them for her hoard... it is the nature of her kind, they are greedy beggars, and she would have a clockwork man, and that trunk, and whatever might be in it—”

  “So you’re going to kill us all for a clockwork man and a trunk full of clothes?”

  The man laughed again, wet and choked and scornful. “That’s not a lock for a trunk of clothing, Miss Teachout. And no one is supposed to die. You are supposed to be frightened. You are supposed to be grateful for your lives, and carry back the story of the sea serpent to your homes—she wants the stories as much as she wants the things.” He sagged, shoulders and chest, toward the bloody dead body by his knees, but he never broke Corwyn’s gaze. “It worked before. I told her it wouldn’t work this time, but listening is not in their nature.”

  “Ain’t no plan works forever,” Corwyn said. “She had to learn that sooner or later.” She took a breath of the saltwater-bloody air. “Look, we ain’t set on killing you lot—” Well, likely she could still talk Gwen down, anyway—”Go swim out to your dragon and tell her this was more than you bargained for, and we can go our separate—”

  The drowned man shook his head and smiled at her, either pleased or pitying; Corwyn couldn’t tell which. “Oh, no. You’ve spilled her blood, Miss Teachout. She’s coming. She’ll be here soon, and she will rend your bodies and eat your souls.”

  “So you’re saying she don’t listen, and she’s got herself a flair for the dramatic. All right. Let her come.”

  She left the room at a walk, but she picked up her pace on the steps to the deck.

  * * *

  Gwen could never hide from her.

  Not that she was trying to, but Corwyn emerged onto the deck of the Leucosia into a writhing mass of chaos that could have hidden an elk, and only her near-constant knowledge of where her sister was got her under, around, skirted and ducked to the place where Gwen was dumping an either dead or unconscious something-or-other overboard. And still Corwyn’s clothes and arms were spattered with blood and black, sticky, not-quite-blood when she arriv
ed.

  “Any of that yours?” Gwen asked, grabbing her arm and yanking her into a darkened corner near the pilot’s house.

  “No,” Corwyn said. “And it appears you and I have turned a train robbery into a blood-feud.”

  Gwen sighed, irritated. “Ain’t that just us all over? And they keep on coming.”

  A sudden chill breeze over her sweaty neck and forehead stopped Corwyn’s answer. “There’s wind,” she said. And then the ship rocked violently with a hollow booming, knocking them both off their feet. “Hell and damnation,” she said as Gwen hauled her up, but then she heard it: for a moment, every being on the ship paused as the uncanny wail of the water dragon echoed around them.

  “Hell, hell, hell,” Gwen swore, peering over the rail.

  “It seems she eats souls,” Corwyn told her, feeling she was keeping an admirably mild tone, considering their circumstances.

  Gwen snorted. “I guess it’s a good thing ours are so black and withered, then.”

  The fighting began again with an almost-literal crash.

  Corwyn was not immediately and intimately familiar with whatever weapon she happened to pick up, like Gwen was, but Gwen could teach the things she learned from her knack. Thus Corwyn, despite Gwen’s disdain for her choice of weapon, used her pistol to work her way through the fishy children of the drowned man and the sea monster, though with the nagging feeling that she was missing something. Something important would come to her if she could just take a minute to think about it. She shot a frog-faced creature and another one with a human face and catfish eyes, then found a halfway quiet spot to reload fast.

  Her right leg was making its opinion of the situation known—it was stiff, it hurt, and it was surely not responding as fast as she needed it to. A thing that looked like an eel if you squinted the right way darted into her alcove by the mast and yanked her arm. Cartridges scattered across the deck; she was off-balance; her bad leg, overtaxed, let go under her. She could feel the thing’s breath on her neck, and possibly the tips of its teeth. It smelled of salt and brine but also of unwashed human flesh and something odd; not quite sulfur, not quite stagnant mud, but just as unpleasant. Its breath wheezed in and out over her ear.

  She slammed the butt of her pistol into the side of its head. It staggered and let go of her arm, then came toward her again—she put out the foot on her bad leg and tripped it up. It still lunged for her, but she straddled its body, pinning its arms with her knees. She considered her knife but decided against it as she didn’t know how tough its flesh might be. She scrabbled some cartridges, reloaded the pistol, and shot the eel between the eyes. Gore spattered across the deck, into her face; she got up and wiped her eyes with a sleeve. Blood pooled underneath the body from another wound. And a good thing, she thought, because she’d never have pulled any of that off if it’d been stronger.

  That was enough. Time to see if she could climb.

  Corwyn shoved her pistol into her trousers and started hauling herself up the rigging toward the crow’s nest. It was slow going but uninterrupted; nobody seemed to be looking up. The muscles in her bad leg were loose and wobbling in a fairly nerve-wracking manner as the wind pushed and pulled at her. She was not above cursing the thing she’d been hoping for not five hours earlier, particularly when it kept her from imagining herself falling to the deck, and so she swore softly and hauled herself up farther.

  The water dragon rammed the ship again.

  Corwyn got her arm and left leg hooked into the ropes but still swung out over the deck and then back into the mast with a head-jarring thud as the ship rocked. “Yeah, all right,” she muttered, arranging herself somewhat more securely. This left her with only one arm free, but right now it didn’t seem like she needed more.

  The setting sun sparked off the choppy water. Purple and black spots floated in front of Corwyn’s eyes from the glare, but she saw the crew and passengers fighting as best they could. Miss Tennyson was using one of her grandfather’s rifles as a club. Mr. Underwood lay on his stomach on top of the pilot’s house, picking the creatures off with another rifle. Gwen, knives in hand, spun and danced with—or on—the chaos. She was frightening; it was beautiful.

  The wind smelled sharper, now, skimming cold across her neck like it was bringing a storm with it. Out over the water, she saw large black clouds pulling together behind the dragon, who watched, unmoving, surrounded by more of her children. Maybe Gwen could make that shot, but it was out of Corwyn’s range. God in heaven, that was an astounding number of spawn. Surely the drowned man couldn’t be her only mate; he wasn’t that old and that was just too many kids. They could just keep coming. And even Gwen would get tired eventually.

  A shout from below snapped Corwyn’s attention back around—Mr. Underwood, a group of things closing in on him.

  Corwyn knew what she would have to do, suddenly; the idea falling into her head whole, along with a sense of inevitability and relief. And irritation.

  “Hell and damnation,” she hissed, fumbling around one-handed for the icy box in her pocket. The movement made her swing a bit more; the box slid from her fingers as she pulled it out, but she kept her grip by gritting her teeth and pretty much willing the thing to stay in her hand.

  The box shone, glowing with its own light and also, Corwyn thought with a bitter whimsy, her dreams. She sighed and began working at the seal with her thumb. It didn’t take as long to break as she had expected, but then, she likely oughtn’t have been surprised that it wanted to open. The wax sucked ineffectually at the seam as she pried the lid up.

  The sound that emerged was not what Corwyn would have termed “singing.” It was a bit like the sound the water dragon made but more familiar; not as alien. It resonated, was certainly a voice, even if that voice was in no way human. The song seemed to wind its way up around the sails and masts of the ship, then wafted down like mosquito netting around the Leucosia and the surrounding ocean.

  For a moment, Corwyn worried that it might not work on the sea-things, or their mother. Then the fighting drifted to a stop. Everything flesh on the ship looked upward toward the source of the song. The clockwork sailors paused, as well, awaiting orders. The creatures in the water poked heads out, drew closer to the ship, and listened. The ones that could, climbed aboard. The ones that couldn’t got as close as possible.

  She climbed down to the deck carefully, holding the box aloft. Everyone watched her—or, rather, the box—with jaws slack, eyes wide, as she moved through the crowd. She placed it on a barrel near the stairs that led below, holding her breath as she took her hand off it, but nobody moved toward it.

  “Keep an eye on this, please,” she said to the clockwork man nearest her. “Don’t let anyone touch it, and keep it open.”

  “Yes, Miss Teachout,” he said, his voice nearly lost in the song.

  Corwyn raced down the stairs and into her cabin. The corpse was gone. She slipped on a long streak of watery blood that swept across the floor to the door, but kept her balance well enough to get to the bed and her rucksack. At the bottom of one of the pockets was the rest of the sealing wax. She kneaded it in her hands then pulled two globs off, working them in her fingers as she shoved the rest into her back pocket.

  She retrieved the box and made her way, followed by the clockwork sailor, to where Gwen stood, entranced, among the monsters. Strands of hair blew across Gwen’s eyes as the wind picked up.

  She carefully filled Gwen’s ears with the gray wax, then took a step back. “Can you hear me all right?”

  Gwen blinked, tilted her head, and spoke just a bit too loud. “Yeah. I can still hear the song, too, a little—but it ain’t bad. That was good thinking,” she said. “You got more of a plan?”

  “It ain’t one I like, but yeah.”

  Corwyn gave Gwen half the wax and the two of them—she didn’t quite trust the clockwork men to have the delicate touch needed—set about finding the rest of the crew and passengers and plugging their ears.

  Two of the clockwork s
ailors were missing. Mr. Underwood was dead, as were a half dozen flesh members of the crew. Two of the men were wounded and unable to walk. The doctor was blood-stained but not bad off. Miss Tennyson had a lot of long, bloody scratches along her arms and legs and a nasty gouge out her left cheek. She had staunched the bleeding with ripped bits of skirt and seemed fine, which made it plain she wasn’t. The Captain claimed he wasn’t wounded; Corwyn had her doubts, but she wasn’t going to rip the man’s shirt off to prove herself right. Once the song from Corwyn’s box was muffled and her plan laid out, they set about getting the ship ready to sail, moving between the tranced monsters like cautious dancers.

  Corwyn and Gwen took Miss Tennyson and four of the remaining clockwork sailors to toss the dead creatures overboard. Corwyn secured the box in an alcove near the helm and tried to ignore how her wounded leg didn’t hurt. It felt decidedly odd, almost like she was walking on a dream of a leg as opposed to an actual working limb. She was half-afraid it would dissolve underneath her like mist; she found herself using it more tentatively than she had when it was aching.

  It was full dark when they had all finished. Corwyn stood with Gwen at the rear of the ship, facing the ocean and the creatures looming in it. She could feel the rest of them behind her, as well as the eyes of what was left of the passengers and flesh crew, in the itch and tickle between her shoulder blades.

  The box was still singing; she didn’t dare close it. Her thumb rubbed at the ragged edges of the broken seal as she thought over all the hopes she’d tried not to have, the dreams she’d avoided looking at; all of them centered on this one small thing and what it could have meant for them.

  “I hope this works,” Gwen said.

  “Me, too. Dammit, Gwen, I wish I didn’t have to do this.”

  Gwen’s face was sympathetic, but all she did was shrug. Corwyn’s hopes pulled at her a little, but she threw the box as far out over the water as she could. It sang as the shadows swallowed it; it sang, distorted and waterlogged, as it sank.