The Drowning Eyes (7 page)

By the time she was maybe twenty or twenty-five, Tazir had learned that she needed to stop claiming she’d seen every type of storm they could stir up for the Jihiri Islands. There was always something bigger, nastier, and scarier waiting to come in from the east, and there was always something new that could go wrong while you tried to weather it.

But this—holy shit. Holy
shit
.

She’d seen smooth-sided banks of clouds like that before, back when she was still a kid working the sail on the
Sleeping Snake
. They’d run like hell from a wild hurricane while every Windspeaker in the islands worked like a mule to divert it from the most populated ports. Even now, flight was her general policy when clouds stood tall over the water and the air billowed so fast it made your ears pop.

It was Kodin’s policy, too.

“Damn you, Captain!” he roared after her. He was too big and stiff-kneed to chase her through the wreckage that lay between the tree line and the beach, but he was making a good try at it. “I did
not
plan on dying on this trip!”

“Then get back to the trees!”

“Not without you, I won’t.” He was huffing and puffing, unused to hurrying any farther than fifty feet.

Tazir wasn’t much better, but she kept going. The sand sucked at her feet, and the effort tied her stomach into a painful knot. Up ahead, Chaqal darted like a spider between flotsam and jetsam and rocky parts, using her arms as much as her feet. She was almost to the edge of town.

“Leave her!” Kodin shouted. “Get back here, both of you!”

“No!” screamed Tazir. “We have to get her out!”

“What is
wrong
with you?”

It was a good question. The wind-polished hulk of the storm was racing toward Moliki on a mighty wind that stung Tazir’s eyes and sent smaller pieces of rubble flying past her. It had begun to rain, thick droplets that smacked hard against her bare skin. Beneath the cloud, Tazir couldn’t really see
anything,
but that itself was certainly something to look at. You couldn’t really tell where the storm cloud began and the sea spray ended.

“Hurry!” Chaqal called, turning around to wave frantically at Tazir. “They’re here!”

Tazir stopped, her eyes wide and her nostrils flared. She couldn’t hear the beat of the oar drums anymore, not over the wind. “What do you mean they’re
here
?”

But Chaqal was already gone, leaping over a pile of splintered wood and canvas that might have been someone’s house once upon a time.

“Really?” Tazir yelled after her.
“Really?”

Once she got to the edge of town, it was easier going. Tazir was neither fast nor young, but
damn
did firm ground make a difference beneath her feet. She followed Chaqal through the maze of ruined houses on the edge of town, jumping over boards and bodies and gasping for air and—

She ran right into her quartermaster, nearly knocking them both to the ground.

“What the
shit,
” Tazir grumbled. “You don’t—”

And then she saw why Chaqal had stopped.

The stories about the Dragon Ships were like the stories about the giant marlin your cousin Bua’ka caught off Tobagawa last year. Giant, skinless warriors with three eyes or six legs; fire mages who could call a lightning bolt down with the snap of a finger; grotesque hybrids of humans and beasts that nobody had seen before—honestly, Tazir could listen to that shit until the sun came up.

But there was a reason the stories went that way. Nobody wanted to hear about a bunch of armored warriors—most of them around Kodin’s size—pouring out of a ship like it was a damned anthill. This wasn’t a sight to entertain you and keep your ass on a barstool for one more round. This was a sight to make you run.

“They’re gonna find her,” Chaqal said. “Come on!”

“Hey, now—”

But her quartermaster had already taken off, her braid whipping in the wind as she raced toward the square where Tazir had left Shina. The warriors gathered on the beach—one of them, Tazir could see, was wearing a high metal helmet with a grotesque face carved on it. He was pointing up at the city and arguing with a man who held his helmet at his hip.

Good. Let them argue instead of getting the hell out of this storm. The longer they did
that—

A roar—like thunder, maybe? Or a great wave? Or—oh, shit, that was one of those fireballs they’d been lobbing out at Kuhon, wasn’t it? A swath of the north end of town lit up in flames, and Tazir prayed they weren’t preparing another blast.

“Shina!” Chaqal screamed, picking up her frantic pace even more as she neared the marketplace. “Oh, no—”

Now, Tazir could see the kid—and her heart skipped when she realized that she was lying on the hard ground, her face bruised and bloodied and her body convulsing like she had a bad fever.

She still wasn’t fast or young, but she made a good effort at catching up to Chaqal when she saw that.

“Hurry!” called her quartermaster, who was kneeling down by the kid’s unconscious body. “She’s—oh, she’s in a bad way, Cap!”

“I can see that,” said Tazir. Her breath came in ragged gulps. The flames had never been far off, and they weren’t getting any farther.

“We’ve got to
do
something!”

“Like this?” Tazir might not have been much of a runner, but you didn’t stay married to Mati Yukali for four and a half years without learning to hoist a passed-out bitch up on your shoulders.

She grunted as she got a firm grip on the kid’s arm. Shina was thrashing real good now, her eyes flickering open and closed with the eyeballs rolled almost all the way back into her head.

“Should we stick something in her mouth?” said Chaqal.

“Will that help?”

“I don’t know!” her quartermaster squeaked. There were tears in her eyes, and her lip trembled.

“All right, all right—let’s get out of here,” said Tazir. “Help me drag her.”

Chaqal put an arm under Shina’s shoulders, and the two of them sped back through the wreckage of Moliki. Behind them, Tazir heard another thunderclap, another roar of flame and smoke—and shouting. Were the raiders shouting at them?

“Hurry!” Chaqal said.

“I’m hurrying!” Tazir was wheezing from keeping up with the younger woman. Shina swung between them, her body twisting and her lips murmuring formless sounds. The wind had picked up, and brought with it a grey haze of salt spray that chilled the skin and put fear in the bones.

Kodin was already on the boat by the time the three of them made it to the beach. He grabbed Shina by the shoulders and hauled her up into the
Giggling Goat
so Tazir and Chaqal could crawl up the side.

Despite the driving wind and the freezing spray, the sea was weirdly calm. Tazir didn’t have time to ponder why. She and Kodin didn’t waste half a second getting the
Giggling Goat
the hell off its moorings and away from the harbor—there was no sense in waiting for the warriors from the Dragon Ships to take notice of them.

“Here it comes!” yelled Kodin as the oncoming storm sucked all the light out of the sky around them.

“No shit!” Tazir yelled back.

They said nothing else for a minute or two as they sailed the
Giggling Goat
as far east as they could as fast as they could. Whatever Shina was doing, she wasn’t doing it to the east: east was good. East was—

Tazir felt the deck shift under her as the ocean rose up beneath the
Giggling Goat
.

She looked at Kodin. Kodin looked at her. For a moment, they were light on their feet, frozen in time, most
definitely
going to die. Behind Kodin, rolling down toward the harbor mouth, Tazir saw the peak of the wave rising high above the wreckage of Kuhon, a flat grey knife already edged with foam.

“Oh, fu—”

Everything went rolling across the deck as they came down the rear side. Tazir grabbed on to the railing and prayed to ancestors she hadn’t thought about in years. She prepared herself for the smack of water against her skin, for the sea in her nose and her mouth and her eyes—but instead, she felt the deck rock and still beneath her.

For much too long, she clung to the railing with her eyes shut, ready to hit the water. She opened her left eye first, then her right, then blinked. The storm was still there, still spitting cold grey mist and bitter wind at her, but the water around the
Giggling Goat
was as calm as it had been before the wave struck.

She had never seen a rogue wave hit a town before. She guessed she’d always expected it to be—oh, she didn’t know, maybe louder? More—with the spray and the wind and the crash of water on rock and wood, that kind of thing.

Maybe she was just too far away to really take it in, or maybe the air was hazy. Either way, all she could see was a hulk of grey water spilling over the shore of the harbor, spilling into town, picking up the flotsam and jetsam like hot broth picks up your noodles when you pour it in the kettle.

And then—when the wave retreated, pulling most of Moliki into the sea with it—
then
came the expected noise. The pops and cracks and groans all kind of mashed together with the sound of the water pouring back into the sea.

“Well,” Kodin said. He was standing next to her now, staring at the destruction with his eyes wide and his jaw slack. “Fuck.”

Tazir nodded, fishing in her sash for her pipe. “Too bad Shina’s asleep,” she said as she knocked out a wad of damp, stinking ash. “Be good for her to see she can get shit done when she needs to.”

* * *

“She’s saying something,” a voice said—Kodin’s voice. “She’s—”

A coughing fit shook Shina’s rib cage, startling her back into consciousness. She was somewhere dark—damp, wet, noisy. It was raining. Her chest hurt. Her head hurt.

“Hey,” she said. “Where—what, huh—”

“You’re fine,” Chaqal said. “We got you up here safe.”

“What did—” Shina realized she was panting, gasping for air. She wondered if she’d drowned and been pumped back again. “Who—”

“You’re back on the ship,” Tazir said. “We got out before the storm hit, and it pissed out after that little display of yours.”

“Huh?” Shina sat up. She was, indeed, belowdecks. “Display?”

“The big wave?” Chaqal asked. “The—you don’t remember that?”

Shina stared ahead, blinking. “No,” she said. “What—did I sink them?” she asked.

“Sink them?” Chaqal laughed. “Sure, you sunk them. There’s nothing
left
.”

A smile tugged at the corners of Shina’s mouth. “Really?” she asked.

“Yeah,” said Tazir, handing Shina a less rotten banana. “You wanna go up and see it?”

Shina had never wanted to be one of those people who gloat over the destruction they could do by calling up a storm. But, considering all that had happened, she wasn’t too disgusted with herself for letting Kodin haul her up to the
Giggling Goat
’s top deck.

They were drifting across the harbor in a light wind that Shina did not recognize. You could still tell that the storm was there, an unnaturally heavy fog that hung around the wreckage of the port town and the trees of the jungle above it. But it had finally spent itself, finally found its target.

And it had destroyed it.

If you knew what to look for, you could tell the Dragon Ships had once floated these waters. Shreds of red-striped sail clung to pieces of wreckage; pale-skinned corpses mixed with the flotsam that had already lined the stricken harbor. To the south a little ways, the brightly painted remains of a carved dragon’s head stuck out of a raft formed of rags and splinters.

Shina realized she was smiling—and she didn’t really feel bad about it.

“Not bad, eh?” said the Captain.

Shina’s smile went thin at the edges as she turned to face her. “I’m not sure what I did,” she said.

“That makes two of us.” Tazir lit her pipe and took a few long puffs. “We were trying to make it to the lee of the island when you picked the damn boat up fifty feet in the air. Heard this rumble like—like—” She waved her hands in a circle in front of her face. “Shit, girl, we didn’t think there’d be anything left of the harbor.”

“And you all got me out?” Shina looked behind her—the quartermaster hadn’t yet come back on deck.

“Barely.” Tazir puffed on her pipe.

Shina looked out at the deep grey water of the harbor, rippling quietly in the mist. This didn’t feel real. She bit her tongue, but this wasn’t some cruel prank her mind was playing on her. She’d sunk the Dragon Ships.

And the icon. She’d—she didn’t really have a
plan
for the icon from here. She’d drowned the people who had it, and that was a start. But what now?

“How deep do you think this is?” she asked, watching a scrap of sail sink beneath the waves.

“I don’t know,” Tazir said. “Out here, I’d say ten fathoms. Up in the edges it gets down to about three at low tide.”

Shina’s face fell.

“What?”

“Oh, it’s—” She cast her eyes over the harbor. “It’s going to take days to find the icon.”

“Wait,
what
?” Tazir took a step back.

“The icon,” Shina said. “The statue I was telling you about.”

“The one they rip out your eyeballs for!” Tazir looked Shina up and down. “You actually wanted to—”

“To bring it back,” Shina said, nodding. “So we can—so our elders can have their power back.”

“So they can
rip the eyes out of your head
!” Tazir balled her hands into fists. “Are you—are you fuckin’ serious?”

Shina stared at the Captain in silence. “Yes?”

“You’re insane!”

“You—you saw what happened here,” she said. “You saw how many people died because I couldn’t—because we couldn’t see the consequences of what we’d done.”

“But it wasn’t your faul—”

“I don’t care whose
fault
it was!” Shina’s voice came out louder than she expected. “All right? I don’t
care
if
you
think I killed those people! It’s not—”

“But look at the lives you saved,” she said. “Look at
our
lives, kid!”

“Don’t tell me whose lives to look at, Captain,” Shina said. “Not until innocent people are dead because of something
you
did.”