Child of a Hidden Sea (37 page)

She had never been so tempted to skip her safety stop.

But that's silly,
she thought;
if the iguana kills the octopus, it can capsize our rowboat easily enough.

Instead of making for the surface and risking the bends, she unhitched the lockbox from her dive belt, keeping an eye on the seas below as she gathered the bulk of its long strap, the one that had gone around the dead woman's chest, into a clump within her fist.

She waited, lockbox in one hand, dagger in the other, and an eye on her dive computer.

She had seven minutes left when the iguana swam past her, shreds of cephalopod in both fists and a thoroughly vicious expression on its face. It surfaced, presumably to breathe, and then undulated toward her. The knife wound was bleeding freely. The red stream it left behind it had attracted a half dozen sharks, the biggest of them no larger than Sophie's arm.

Sophie spread out, extending the hand with the dagger toward it, holding the lockbox behind her, letting the bunched length of its strap float free.

Come on, come on.

The iguana-man looked to be unimpressed by the threat posed by the dagger. He gestured with a shredded tentacle:
Gimme
.

Sophie gave the box a push, letting it go.

It was near neutral buoyancy—didn't sink, didn't pop surfaceward like a cork. It was behind her, and she had the little dagger, which iguana-man had to know was ridiculous, but all she wanted was for him to consider how to get past her for ten or twenty seconds.

Come on,
she thought again.
Please.

A swirl, behind her, and the iguana-man's expression changed. Surprise, anger, and then a sort of weariness played over his features. He put his head down and bulled forward in the water, charging, not at her but past.

The otter who'd grabbed the lockbox by its strap was determined, fast, and far more agile than either her or the iguana-man: it shot, bug-eyed, past Sophie, making for the heart of the raft.

Sophie watched them go, checked the time. She'd have until the monster caught the otter and realized the inscription wasn't inside the lockbox. Would it be long enough?

Hope so—I'm all out of tricks.
She tried to feel out the injury to her right leg. Something in her thigh had definitely gotten pulled. The knee had gotten a good twist, but she could bend and straighten it. The resistance as she moved through the water made her ankle shriek with pain. She tried to feel the bones, but it hurt too much to manipulate the joint.

A wash of movement—the raft itself had swayed.

Here's hoping it doesn't tear the whole otter farm apart,
Sophie thought, shutting off her light and swimming, slowly, for the rowboat. Tonio was there, ten feet up, as he'd been when she first hit the water.

She gave him a shaky two thumbs-up and checked the timer on her dive computer.

The final minutes of her stop passed with cruel slowness, but the massive lizard man didn't come back.

She kicked once with her good leg and let herself rise to the surface.

“Monster dead?”

“Nope,” she said. “He's chasing an otter—thinks it has the Heart.”

“But you do?” Tonio asked.

“I sure hope so,” she said wearily. Clawing open the velvet bag, she found an oak dowel about nine inches long, wrapped in wire and covered in blue spellscrip. That sense of power rolled off it again; it was like holding a stormcloud, or something like a missile.

“
Bene.
We'll throw it in that rowboat with the skeleton as soon as we get back to the ship.”

“Not a chance,” she said. “I have plans for this damned thing.”

“Plans?”

“Presentation is everything,” she said, as the raft heaved and the Bonaparte gulls leaped into the sky, shrieking in outrage.

Moving as one, she and Tonio grabbed for their oars.

CHAPTER
23

She stepped aboard
Nightjar
and promptly collapsed—the ankle wouldn't bear her weight. Parrish caught her, lowering her to the deck and feeling the joint.

“It's not broken,” he said. “I'll have Richler—our medic—look at it.”

“I need my stuff first,” she said.

He picked her up, carrying her to his cabin.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Monsters,” Rolling to her side on the bed, she pulled her trunk close and fumbled it open. “They had shackles. Does that make them slaves?”

“Yes.”

“Poor bastards who didn't have a chance to say no. Lassie killed one, a while ago. The other killed Lassie, just now.”

“And you?”

“And me what?”

“Did you kill it?”

“No! At least, I think he should be okay.”

“Is there something I can help you find?” he asked. She was digging through the contents of her trunk, coming up with one of the glass test tubes she'd brought for sampling.

“Would you have a scrap of rabbit fur, something like that?”

He opened one of the smaller drawers in the great wooden chest, coming up with a handkerchief-sized pelt, with soft ginger hair and stripes reminiscent of a chipmunk.

“Thanks.” She had found the packaging from her battery charger.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Wishing I'd brought a dye pack,” she said, coming up with a pristine plastic bag, the kind that zipped shut, the kind they required on airplanes now for your toiletries.

“I don't understand.”

“I'm packaging up the ransom.” She carefully took a handful of the polystyrene packing peas and poured them into the test tube. A few stuck to her hand, a few fell into the bed, and a dozen bounced to the floor. They clung to the lip of the jar, inside and out. But she got a quarter cup where she wanted them and closed up the jar, dropping it on the bed beside her.

Parrish watched all this without comment.

“Don't look at me like that,” she said. “We have to give it up, right? We can't leave Bram to rot on Issle Whatever it is—”

“Issle Morta,” he said. “I didn't say we should.”

“You hated it there, didn't you?” She slid Yacoura into the zipper bag, along with more of the little peas. Not as many as she could cram in—she didn't want it to be so pressurized it would pop at the first good squeeze—but enough to give the whole package the consistency of a bean bag. She zipped it shut, squeezed out the excess air, rolled it in her hand. Yes, that was about right. Then she took the scrap of fur and polished up the makeshift pillow until there wasn't a smudge on the exterior of the bag.

Finally she wrung out the wet velvet satchel the Heart had come in, sliding the zipped sandwich bag inside.

“The Ualtarites won't care how the Heart is presented to them.”

“Do you know what static electricity is?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“When it's dry and your hair stands up, and crackles,” she said. This whole idea suddenly seemed silly. Like so many things, it was clear in her head and sounded dumb when she articulated it. “Or you spark someone in the winter by touching them?”

“Of course,” he said.

“What about Hansel and Gretel?” she asked. “Do you have that story? Two kids, lost in the woods, following a trail of bread crumbs home?”

“They tell it on Verdanii,” he said. “The insidious stepfather makes the mother renounce her children, that one?”

“More or less,” she said.

“I don't understand.”

“Bread crumbs.” She pinched a spoon's worth of the peas and flicked them at him. One caught in his curls; a few bounced to the floor and several of the rest stuck to his shirt, held there by static. “They're clingy, see?”

Parrish picked one out of the crook of his elbow, tried to set it aside. It clung to his fingertip until he blew it away. His gaze returned to the Heart of
Temperance
in its velvet bag.

“They'll open it,” she said. “They'll want a look at their prize.”

“And your crumbs will end up…”

“Everywhere.” Sophie rolled up, trying to stand—and then half collapsing back onto the bed with a little groan.

“You should stay off that ankle.”

“I'll take some ibuprofen. I bet you have a crutch on board somewhere,” she said.

“I'll have it brought,” he said.

“Here,” she said, handing him the bag. “Don't pop it.”

They went up on deck, her hopping, he seeming to restrain himself from the urge to steady her.

“Put it in the boat with the skeleton—carefully,” she said.

Tonio slid down a rope, laying the velvet bag in the skeleton's upturned hand. The bones curved around it, gently, not squeezing. The rotten, algae-crusted rowboat filled with water, sinking from view.

“So that's it?” Sophie said. “Bram's got his get out jail free card?”

Parrish nodded. “Issle Morta will release him.”

He's okay, he'll be okay.
A wave of relief, and profound gratitude.
Thank you, Cly.

“So, what now?” Sophie said.

“Now,” Parrish said, “you see the medic while we set a course for the Fleet.”

CHAPTER
24

Sometime over the four-day sail to the Fleet, Sophie realized she'd fallen in love with
Nightjar.

The cutter was another Tallon ship, built sixty years earlier and initially purposed, Parrish told her, to carry mail in the Mirrorsea. The Fleet courier service had purchased her for Gale and she had bought it back from them over the years. She was seventy-two feet long, with hull timbers made from something called gasper spruce—Sophie scratched up a small splinter to take home as a sample. Her deck was pine, creamy wood polished to glowing.

A crew of twenty-five sailors, about a third of those women, kept the decks shining, cleaned the portals of Erinthian glass and devoted themselves in a host of ways to keeping her spotless and, more important, immaculately seaworthy.

They were all of them in a state Sophie would have described as unsettled. Little wonder, with Gale's having died. It seemed clear enough, though, that they trusted Parrish to see them through the transition to … well, to working for Verena, presumably.

Sophie had spent plenty of time on research ships over the past six years, almost as much as she had on land, and though she'd always been aboard to dive, she would have called herself a decent sailor. She had a strong stomach and a good sense of balance. She knew how to read a chart and had believed that she understood the rudiments of navigation, with or without the benefit of GPS.

But she had never been aboard a sailing ship that didn't also have a motor below and a ton of diesel fuel aboard; a ship with no radio, radar, or satellite uplink, no refrigerator, no antibiotics, not even a DVD player. The idea of being completely dependent on the resources aboard, from the fresh water in the hold to the books in the meager library, was both exhilarating and humbling.

She pestered Tonio to acquaint her with
Nightjar
's masts, sails, and rigging, and with every lecture she realized how little she had truly understood.

Parrish hadn't been belittling her when he sent her below during the storm. He'd been right. She knew a boom from a jib, understood what it meant to reef a sail or to lower it entirely, but the knowledge had never sunk deeper than her skin. She had to think everything through before she came up with the right answer. Sometimes she'd hesitate for only a breath when Tonio quizzed her.

On a sailing ship, in bad weather, that second could spell disaster, just as it could in diving or mountain climbing or caving.

She limped around learning what she could, observing the crew, asking a thousand questions, and ignoring the small voice within that kept pointing out that she didn't need to know any of this, that she was eventually going home to the cushy technological safety nets of the twenty-first century. As for her growing sense of attachment to the ship—it was pointless. All she could do was consider trying to get one of her own, one day, at home.

Gale may have had money and houses, but if she had any treasure worth inheriting, Sophie thought, it was this—this trim, beautiful boat and the freedom to explore.

Nightjar
was fast for her size, averaging, she judged, about 250 nautical miles a day, maybe more if pushed to her limits. She had been inscribed, as Gale had, to be a bit forgettable, just a hair beneath the notice of casual observers.

It was afternoon when they made first sighting of the Fleet, a forest of spars and sails, white and gray bristling on the horizon, with small dots wheeling above. Over the next few hours they clarified, becoming an orderly procession, a great flotilla, thousands of ships strong.

Sophie's previous glimpse, weeks before, hadn't prepared her to be in and among this incredible number of ships, for the spread of the Fleet—it was as impossible to hold it all in one's gaze as it would be to look at all of New York at once—or for the variety of ships. Most resembled, at least vaguely, old time sailing ships, craft straight out one of C. S. Forester's
Horatio Hornblower
novels, wood-hulled, stout machines built with elegance and economy of the pre-industrial age.

But the further to the fore
Nightjar
sailed, making for what Sophie couldn't help thinking of as a downtown core, the more exceptions she saw. Most remarkable may have been a low-riding gray structure, as big as an aircraft carrier, at the head of the Fleet.

Is that
Temperance
?
Sophie wondered. She was sailing into the pre-twilight sun; she couldn't get a good look at her.

They passed bigger, increasingly strange ships, craft that defied physics and common sense as the Ualtarite ship,
Ascension,
had, craft that had to have been worked with magic to make them seaworthy. One appeared to have a hull woven of wicker. Another had no sails, but appeared to be bound to the ocean, or drawn forward through it, by tens of thousands of blue, wire-thin threads. As
Nightjar
sailed past, Sophie saw one of the threads slacken momentarily. A long, eel-shaped creature broke the water. It was bound to the ship by the thread, which snapped it short like a dog who'd run out its leash.