The Deepest Ocean (Eden Series) (5 page)

She stopped when she saw the intense, speculative look on Captain Juell’s face. He didn’t seem to be studying a map as much as planning to draw a completely new one.

“No,” he said. “I don’t propose we go south at all. I want to take the Strait of Mists.”

Yerena wasn’t sure she had heard correctly. The Strait of Mists? The one no ship had ever passed through?
The strait separated the mainland from Dragonstooth, largest of the Denalait islands, and the thick permanent fog filling it was rumored to be the breath of dragons as well.

“If you and your shark can guide us through it.”

Without thinking, Yerena passed her tongue over dry lips, then felt annoyed at herself. Licking her lips when she was nervous was a habit she’d struggled to break, because giving any indication of weakness was wrong. She swallowed hard and imagined all her fears being forced down into the pit of her stomach, well away from her face.

“I’m not sure we can.” As far as she knew, Seawatch had never sent an operative into the strait, because there were more productive ways to die. “No one who’s entered the strait has come out again, have they? I have no idea what we’ll be dealing with, and even if a shark can navigate it successfully, a ship may not be so fortunate.”

Captain Juell nodded. “True. It’s up to you. I won’t take the strait without a guide.”

Yerena thought of everything that hung in the balance.
Everyone
. “If we don’t take it, if we sail south instead, there may not be anyone left alive by the time we reach Lastland. Is that right?”

“Yes. But it’s not the only reason I want to do this.”

“What do you mean?”

“You heard what Lady Lisabe said at dinner, that new ships are going to be designed and built in the near future. I won’t stand in the way of progress—and I doubt one person could do that anyway—but I want to keep
Daystrider
for as long as possible. If she can sail the strait and reach Lastland in time…” He breathed out, and she was close enough to hear that too. “Well, I might stave off her decommission for that much longer.”

Yerena had followed the discussion at dinner with interest despite not having anything of relevance to contribute. But if she had been asked what people like Darok Juell would do once their ships were obsolete, she would have shrugged. There would be newer and better vessels in the fleet, so surely he could find work on those instead?

It hadn’t occurred to her that his ship meant so much to him, and yet his voice was as quiet and warm as if he was speaking about a person whom he cared about deeply. As if he was joined to it, like she was with the shark.

She tried to imagine how she would have felt if Trawter had ordered her to attack another shark, one linked to another Seawatch operative. To kill a swift hammerhead or a fierce tiger or one of the lovely long-finned threshers with their tails that could knock a boat over with one slap, to kill a shark that someone else needed and trusted. The thought made her heart clench painfully. She would have done so, of course, or at least tried to—Seawatch could tolerate failure but would never countenance disobedience—but she would have hated every moment of it, and would have wanted to die herself afterwards.

Now she might have to do something similar to Darok Juell. His ship wasn’t a living creature but it obviously meant a great deal to him, and she could no longer be indifferent to her duty.

But maybe she wouldn’t have to do it
.
If they passed through the Strait of Mists, they would be approaching Lastland from a direction the Turean pirates didn’t expect.
If they succeeded, she wouldn’t have to destroy his ship or risk harming her shark—and best of all, he wouldn’t know about the order she had been given.

That’s a few too many ifs…

“And there’s another reason I want to take the strait,” Darok said. “I think you can keep this a secret. The Admiralty outfitted a ship to look like
Daystrider
and she was sailed to the naval shipyards. She departed with a lot of pomp and circumstance, taking the exact route you mentioned.”

“But that won’t fool any pirates who get close enough.”

“Oh no, but it wasn’t meant to. The Admiralty knows there’s a Turean spy on the Greater Horseshoe, so they fed him this bait.”

So the false ship would be sailing south. Both Lastland and the Strait of Mists were due east, as the albatross flew. Yerena was cautious by nature, but hope flared like a small bright flame as she saw what was likely to happen.

“That might draw some of the Turean galleys away from the blockade,” she said.

“Exactly. Even if it doesn’t, the false
Daystrider
will be sadly destroyed in one of those freak storms.” He sighed and shook his head. “That will set the pirates’ minds so much at ease.”

“We’ll take you through the strait,” Yerena said, and only realized once she said it that she was smiling.

“I thought you would.” He grinned back, a spark of amusement warming his eyes and deepening the laugh lines, fine as woodgrain, at their corners.

His smile was so open and easy that Yerena felt her mouth straighten, the muscles of her face settling back into their usual poised stillness. She wasn’t used to people who displayed their emotions, and she had to be careful not to do the same thing. It was a relief when he rolled the map up again.

“May I take you to your cabin?” he said.

Jash Morender met with her captains in a cabin topside of
Dreadnaught
, but two of the people invited were not captains. Quenlin Fench was present, seated at the foot of the table, and no one looked at him.

She could understand that. When Quenlin had first ridden into Turean waters on a whale’s back, he had been a fascinating anomaly, and then there was the fact that he had abandoned their enemies. The brightest and best of Denalay, and he wanted nothing to do with that land. Jash had imagined a dozen different uses for him at the time.

None of them had panned out. Quenlin wasn’t the vanguard of a wave of more defections, nor were his peculiar talents very useful so far from Denalay. He could not send his killers two thousand miles away and still expect to control them easily, nor did Jash trust him enough to let him go with them. Worse, when the captain of the aptly named
Masterless
fell overboard in what Jash felt sure was a drunken stupor, folk whispered that Quenlin had murdered him somehow. Shadows in the sea became spies who could carry men’s words to a Denalait’s ears. He was becoming a liability, and she knew he knew it.

At least he had the good sense not to dress like one of them, because the captains would have taken that as an insult. Instead he wore black-and-white skins over fine silk, making him an odd hybrid of seahunter and aristocrat. He didn’t carry a blade, but she supposed he didn’t need one when his real weapons were nearly thirty feet long.

Nion Vates had no weapons at all, but Jash knew he was nowhere near harmless. Nothing mattered to him as much as his faith, and he was disturbingly good at getting ordinary, sensible people to fall under his sway. Still, she could hardly blame them, considering what had happened to the Denalait armada after Nion had given a sacrifice to the gods of sky and sea.

She had offered him a place on
Dreadnaught
both to keep him under some semblance of control and to win over the Vates clan, who held Copperstone and Hag’s Hill and Myrrh Isle. That had worked, but Jash was often reminded of how differently she and Nion saw the gods. To her, they were entities which could be approached for businesslike transactions—give a gift and receive a storm—but to him, they seemed to be cosmic puppetmasters using people to serve their own ends. Not that it mattered. No matter how devout her men might be in the fane, they knew who made the better captain.

The best captain, of all those seated at her table. She wore no finery and no jewelry either, but twin shortswords hung from her belt and most of the people present had seen her fight with those.

Her aide filled their goblets. The wine was from Scorpitale, dashed with spices and served with an iron ring in the bottom of each goblet, and the captains drank to their victory, drank to freedom in the islands and drank to a sea without end, a vision of the plentiness and prosperity that would be theirs someday.

Then the goblets were empty and Jash told them her news.

“The fortress on Lastland has walled its gates with stone, and there are too many defenders on the battlements.” Her men could have carried the catapults off
Dreadnaught
and the slopes of Lastland were rich in rocks, but getting close enough to the walls meant being within arrow range. “We need subterfuge instead.”

“How d’you mean?” Stamat Corving frowned. “They wouldn’t take in anything from you.”

“I wouldn’t take in anything from me,” Jash said dryly. “No, I had the Honeycomb in mind.”

The Honeycomb was the south face of Lastland, where the cliffs dropped away almost vertically into a foaming sea and were riddled with hollows. Above, the fortress crouched like a stone beast, but the wall to the south was undefended. Jash had once sent two men to climb up the Honeycomb, because if they could reach the southern wall, they could—

That was as far as she and they had gone before long slender arms, black in the moonlight, burst from the stone holes and seized the men. The arms were twelve, twenty, thirty feet long, unjointed and slick and sinuous. One of the men had time to scream before he was pulled into a hole in the cliff face, and neither of them came out again.

Jash had no idea what lurked inside the Honeycomb, but the Iron Ocean was home to all manner of beasts. Or the Denalaits could have brought that monster with them, leaving it to grow fat on whatever it could snatch from the air.
And the sea
, she thought when she saw waves frothing into lower hollows.

On the other hand, a beast that devoured men might find coral less palatable, and she would rather lose
that
than throw away more Turean lives. She listened as her captains argued against any assault on the Honeycomb—what scared them most, she knew, was that no one had seen the body of the beast within the rock, only its arms—and finally one of them asked how she planned to do it. He was Veck Ithane the Shellhand, who commanded
Rorqual
. A double-bladed axe rode his back.

“I’m glad you asked.” She turned to her aide. “Pass the word for Arvius and the creature.”

“What creature?” Grihan Vates said in a low voice to his cousin, but Nion only fished the iron ring from his goblet and stared through it with eyes so unfocused he might have been trying to see the future. Not for the first time, Jash wondered about his sanity. She had the goblets filled again while the captains waited, but as the wine levels sank she knew Arvius was taking entirely too long to obey her order.

If he had let the coralhost go, she would have him keelhauled. He’d done his work as competently as he did everything, sawing the man’s skull open, then removing and discarding what was no longer needed before transplanting the brain coral into the cavity, but he’d hated every moment of the process and had told Jash so. She had retorted that if he wanted to be the kind of physician who took fine oaths and felt compelled to treat her enemies with kindness, Denalay was only two thousand miles away. “You’re free to start swimming at any time.”

A knock on the door was followed by one of Arvius’s apprentices, who pulled off his cap at once. “Captain, sir. Last I saw Master Arvius, he was going into his quarters. I called outside his door but he doesn’t answer.”

“Where is
it
?” Jash said, struggling to keep the tension from her voice.

“Went for a swim, sir. It’s coming aboard.”

Jash supposed the surgery had been a success if the coralhost was well enough to swim, but before she could say anything, her aide’s eyes widened. Since he stood just outside the cabin, she couldn’t see whatever was in his line of sight as he tore off his jacket and held it out.

The coralhost walked past him to stand naked and dripping in the doorway. Jash heard one of the captains rise out of his chair and Quenlin choked on a gulp of wine. She got up too, but unhurriedly, as if she had expected such an appearance all along.

The lack of clothes showed no changes about the coralhost’s body—at least not on the surface. The head was another matter entirely. Gills slit the surface of the neck. Obviously the coral did not want its container to come to any harm, and now that vessel would be fine beneath the waves. The shaved head and the sutures along the healing incision looked grotesque, and a nub of coral poked its way out of the forehead, pale as new horn.

“As you all can see,” Jash said, desperately aware that she had to make this seem normal, “I have created a coralhost, and it can breathe underwater…all the way through the Honeycomb. The sunken passageways aren’t likely to be guarded, except by the beast.” She spoke directly to the coralhost for the first time. “It’s large and tentacled and it eats men. Can you kill it?”

“I can kill anything.”

“Then do so, but when you enter the Honeycomb you’ll take poppy juice with you, all we can spare. Some of those passages will lead into the fortress. Once you enter it, keep yourself hidden and sweeten their water supply. Pull their banner down when you see the effects taking hold, and we’ll come over the battlements. Do you understand?”

The coralhost nodded, turned and left. The aide, who still held his jacket in one hand, swallowed hard and closed the door.