The Sea Taketh – David Guymer Read online

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  The Sea Taketh – David Guymer

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  The Sea Taketh

  David Guymer

  ‘Oh, ware the day the fishing folk come,

  To no barrier will they concede,

  Their lures will entice both the strong and the frail,

  And lo will the good fishes bleed…’

  ‘What is that ditty she sings?’

  Ingdrin Jonsson had no idea at what age humans considered their offspring to be competent adults, as per Artycle Nine of the Kharadron Code, but the girl was as winsome and waifish a thing as he could imagine, and so addressed his question to the father.

  ‘’Tis an old song, Master Jonsson,’ Tharril bellowed, his words timed to the rhythm of his oars and the crash of spray across his back. ‘Her ma sang it to her, as my ma sang it to me.’

  ‘It gives me the creeps.’

  ‘Any honest song should.’

  Jonsson clung grimly to the port gunwale as freezing saltwater sprayed his face. It was not like plying skyborne currents. His dusky beard stuck to his skin and to his light sky-captain’s leathers. He could taste the ocean on his breath. Holding fiercely to the slimy wood, he peered back into their star-speckled wake. The surface of the ocean bulged and receded, as though something vast and primordial breathed. Where waves crested, they caught starlight. Where waves sank, they folded under, taking that captive light back with them to the depths. The oceans were realms within the realms, forgotten by time, history and gods. Ancient magic dwelled there, unformed, untouched by hands mortal or divine since the formation of the aethyric cloud itself. With every precipitating crash against the hull, he was reminded of its elementalism. With every tug of current on the keel, Jonsson conceded a little more that he had placed his fate in the hands of a dark and unruly god.

  ‘They crave what’s within, ’neath flesh and ’neath bone,

  Sparing only the young…’

  Tharril was effectively enthroned in the wooden prow of the boat, an oar in each hand, controlling the boom of the lateen sail with a pedal-like noose of rope about his left foot. Beneath the bench there was a massive warhammer, and in his lap, a spear. Tharril and his folk were fishermen, but there were plenty of fish around Blackfire Bight that would consider a single-sail like this one small prey. Jonsson too was armed, a skyhook on a strap across his shoulder and a privateer pistol loaded in his holster.

  Thalia, the girl (Jonsson had also heard her father call her ‘spratling’ or oft times just ‘sprat’), sat against the starboard gunwale, across the centreline from Jonsson. A plaid net lay in sodden folds over her knees as she sang her ballad, extricating wriggling fish as long as her arm or longer. Silver, nightshade-blue and bone-white shimmered under starlight as they flapped and squirmed, only to disappear into buckets of cold brine. Jonsson watched as she pulled another fighter from the net. Smaller, this one, its tail barely reaching her elbow with her hand clamped expertly about gills. She tossed it over the side.

  The ocean accepted its return with a faint splash.

  ‘And when they grow old and grandchildren forget,

  That will be the day when the fishing folk come.’

  Jonsson wondered if he were paying Tharril and his girl too much to sail him out there, if they were just going to pursue a normal day’s take along the way.

  ‘Why do you throw back the small ones?

  ‘They are young,’ she replied.

  ‘But why?’

  She shrugged. ‘You just do.’

  With a grunt, as disturbed as much by the company of the odd girl as by her brute of a father, Jonsson pried his fingers from the gunwale and leant forwards. His chest of equipment had been stowed inboard.

  With exaggerated care because his hands were numbed with cold and shrivelled by salt spray, he worked the combination lock and lifted the lid. Unrolling the now-wet fleece packing, he assembled his zephyrscope and arktant.

  Bringing the rubber eyepiece to his eye, he trained it on the twinkling dot of Sigendil. The night sky might vary from realm to realm, and even within a realm, and with the movements of Ulgu-Hyish within the aethyric cloud, but the beacon star of Azyr was a fixed point in every sky. With one eye on the High Star, he manipulated the sliders on his arktant to account for the position of the local constellations.

  ‘Can you hold this thing steady?’

  ‘Ha!’ Tharril barked, rowing.

  ‘Bokak,’ Jonsson swore, as a sideswipe wave spoiled his measurements.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Thalia asked.

  ‘Taking a position, girl.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because!’

  ‘I thought Kharadron lived in the sky.’

  Jonsson sighed. ‘Aye, girl, we do, seeking our fortunes on the aether winds.’ He leant across the open chest and winked. ‘But every now and again, some careless soul drops something.’

  ‘You are looking for treasure?’

  ‘It won’t look for itself.’

  The girl sniffed, with the iron rectitude of the very small. ‘No one takes from the sea.’

  ‘Good. It’ll still be there then.’

  ‘No one takes from the sea.’

  ‘What about these.’ Jonsson nodded towards the nets and buckets full of splashing fish.

  ‘That’s what the sea gives.’

  Her deathly earnestness brought a snippet of a smile to Jonsson’s face. ‘A sour face like that aboard an aethership is almost always a sign of something trapped in the ear. Very serious if left untended.’ He reached out as though to tug on her ear, but then pulled his hand back with a flourish at the last moment, presenting her with a copper comet and a toothy grin.

  She frowned.

  ‘Hah!’ said Jonsson, slapping his thigh. ‘Would you see that? Somebody raised this girl right.’ He passed one hand over the other, the copper coin disappearing. Then he unfurled the palm of the crossed hand to reveal a larger, golden coin. The girl’s eyes lit up, as if in reflection. ‘A quarter-share, from the aether mints of Barak-Thryng, girl. Legal tender under any of the six great admiralties.’

  ‘Take the coin, spratling,’ grunted Tharril. ‘Afore he makes it disappear again.’

  Jonsson winked as the girl scraped it off his palm.

  ‘What’s that?’ she said.

  Jonsson followed her gaze down.

  ‘Now that,’ he said, patting the hard object that lay safe beneath the second layer of fleecing, ‘is something that will really amaze you.’

  Jonsson’s heavy boots thudded to the ocean floor. His legs bowed, his shoulders bunching, the monstrous pressure of the sea bottom crushing down on the weak points of his armour. The rigid plates of the deep-sea-adapted arkanaut suit creaked like a metal pipe being squeezed by a gargant.

  ‘Oh, ware the day the fishing folk come.’

  He turned on the spot, ponderous as an armoured beetle. His headlamp sent a speckled beam into the pulverising blackness. Bubbles issuing from the seams in his armour and the rings of his air hose – a mile of collapsible metal flexing from the back of his helmet towards the surface – cut up his light. Every one was a tiny mirror held up in the completeness of the dark.

  ‘Ingdrin Jonsson isn’t afraid of the deep!’

  He lowered his skyhook warily.

  Almost nothing lived at these depths.

  He knew of the merwynn and the kelpdarr, fiercely isolationist and protective of their territories,
but even they rarely plumbed beyond the sunlit layer. The great beasts that preyed on such folk, lurkinarth and kalypsar and the like, prowled the richer waters of the coastal regions and shipping lanes accordingly. The ocean floor was a desert.

  Spiny encrustations of rose-coloured coral glittered everywhere his lamps passed.

  There was nothing here.

  Bracing himself against the awesome weight of water on his shoulders, he thumped down to one knee. Bubbles and silt puffed up around the armoured joint, but the cloud stayed compact and low. With his beams angled tight to the opalescent reef around him, he ran his gauntlet over its surface. He had never seen a mineral like it. His light seemed to be trapped by the structure of it, spreading outwards through veins of denser crystal. Piece by piece, the reef lit up, and street by colonnaded street, the turrets and spires of a drowned city was lifted out of darkness.

  ‘Tromm…’ he breathed, bubbles squirming through the gaps in his mask.

  The structures were of coral and lime, as if grown out of the reef itself, the lustre of nacre gleaming from monuments and domes. There were high towers. Great bridges. Palaces. Walls. Statues of what looked like aelves stood sentry over squares and gardens, armoured in opulence in pearl and shells and mounted upon monstrous piscine steeds. For all its obvious former glory, however, the place was a ruin. Pallid, light-shy vegetation strangled the life from the great works, the camouflaged wings of bottom-feeding rays rifling through the debris that littered the grand avenues.

  ‘Aighmar.’ Jonsson stared over the coral-lit city with something like reverence. ‘Lost city of the Deepkin aelves. I found it.’

  ‘Their lures will entice both the strong and the frail.’

  Jonsson gripped his skyhook and looked back. His helmet could not freely rotate about his shoulders. It took a moment.

  ‘And lo will the good fishes bleed.’

  Behind him again.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  He plodded around another half-circle, bubbles exploding from his helmet’s seals as he cried out in alarm. While his attention had been fixed on the lambent city of the aelves, the blunt nose of something gigantic had emerged from one of the larger hollows in the reef. Jonsson did not see much. A dull flash of cartilaginous teeth. A silvery ripple of gills. Then there was an explosion in the water, spined fins seething, monstrous grey muscle writhing, and the beast was surging from its lair towards him.

  He reacted on a hair-trigger. It saved his life.

  In a storm of bubbles, the heavily adapted aether-endrin bolted onto his shoulders pushed him up and back. Shudders ran through the water as the beast’s jaws crashed shut on the effervescence where he had just been.

  Jonsson got a horribly good look.

  The beast was as long as a short-range gunhauler, grey as battle-damaged iron. Its eyes were glassy yellow knotholes of alien hunger.

  With a powerful stroke of the tail, it twisted into Jonsson’s bubble trail, dorsal blade-fin carving the water as it closed the distance, fast. Jonsson swung his skyhook between them and fired. The harpoon launched in silence, a red cloud billowing from the side of the monster’s snout.

  The beast thrashed in pain and fury, almost ripping the skyhook, still tethered to the harpoon by a taut length of steel chain. Jonsson pulled the release bolt before the gun was ripped out of his hands and the chain twanged off towards the wounded creature. Jonsson drew his pistol from its thigh holster. He had no expectation that it would fire under water, but it was all he had left.

  The monster jerked about the middle, gnashing at the chain that its own movements flicked tauntingly over its head, missed, and drove its head through a coral wall. The reef crumbled around it, blood fountaining as the coral worked the harpoon embedded in the beast’s snout like a well pump, and something in its animal mind said ‘enough’.

  It swam away, churning a thin river of red with its tail.

  Jonsson let out a relieved breath.

  That had been an allopex.

  ‘You have the best bad luck of any duardin born, Ingdrin Jonsson,’ he told himself.

  He had never heard of an allopex hunting alone, and a school of them could bring down a krakigon.

  ‘They crave what’s within, ’neath flesh and ’neath bone.’

  With a snarl, he swung his pistol towards the source of the voice, twisting his head prematurely so that he was looking into the back of his helmet. He almost laughed when he realised. It was the air hose. That girl, Thalia, must have been sat near the inlet, singing. He gave the base of the hose a rap as his boots sank inexorably back towards the ocean floor. ‘Nothing to fret over,’ he said loudly, hoping that his voice would carry back up. ‘Just like I promised.’

  But when he started towards the ruins of Aighmar, he did so quickly.

  There was blood in the water.

  One night and another day later, Thalia had a knife in her hand, blood as far up as the elbow.

  She sighed, opening the ghoulish bream from mouth to tail and emptying its guts into a pail. She enjoyed filleting. Normally. She liked the sliminess of the fish in her hands. She liked the smell, the sound of the brothing pot bubbling inside, waiting for the tailfins and the heads, listening to the hens in the back patch clucking their goodnights.

  She squinted across the shingle to where the sunset was slowly turning the ocean an amethyst-tinged red. The water was placid, as still as the brass mirror that da had never removed from ma’s dresser. It looked bigger to her somehow, swollen. Waves lapped at the pebbly promontory, like the village cat at the fish juices on her fingers.

  She blinked herself awake, realising that she had been about to nod off. Right there on the porch step, her chores unfinished. She shook her head. The air was thick. Her eyelids felt like honey.

  Stifling a yawn, she found herself facing in a direction that she had scarcely given a moment’s consideration to before today. The inland road. It was the way to Toba Lorchai, the greatest city in all the realms next to fabled Azyrheim itself, or so her da had told it. Da had never been there though. Neither had she.

  Jonsson had gone there.

  Thalia had slept all night and most of the morning, but the Kharadron had been packing his chest into his strange metal caravan, pushing a clinking pouch into da’s hand and been disappearing up the inland road almost as soon as they had drawn the boat up onto the beach.

  ‘A black wind in his sails,’ da had said that night.

  A sudden shriek from the direction of the water snapped her head up.

  The sound lingered on the air for a moment before being abruptly silenced. She strained her ears, but could hear nothing but the crash and tumble of waves on the shingle. The tide was in too high, washing about the boat sheds and net stores. The sea was too red. Brown-and-white kelp bobbed with the action of the waves like bodies.

  ‘Da?’

  She bent down to deposit the un-gutted fish back into its bucket as an arrow thudded into the porch post in line with where her eyes had just been. She looked back at it, quivering in the split wood, and gasped, too shocked to scream.

  A woman with a dripping shortbow stood waist deep in the shallows, buffeted from behind by pliant waves. At first glance she might have passed as human, but she was not human. Wet robes the colour of an ocean under moonless skies clung to a slender physique, fish-scale armour cladding her forearms and torso. Her face, shoulders and midriff remained bare, her skin as pale as a dead fish’s eyes. Thalia thought her beautiful, but it was a haunting, pitiless kind of beauty, the sort that would drive mere mortals to distraction and despair.

  The woman nocked another arrow to her bowstring. She raised her bow to draw, sighting down the shaft. Thalia noticed with horror that she had no eyes. Just smoothed, perfect skin over shallow sockets.

  From the first shot to now it had probably been about a second.

  Thalia did scream th
en. She screamed and she ran.

  Da would have wanted her to go inside and bar the door. That was what he had always told her to do when the dead and the drowned came. But that was not what she did.

  The second arrow whipped past her face, splitting the wood nearer the bottom of the porch post, as Thalia leapt onto the loose stones and tore towards the pier.

  Set at the lip of the promontory at the outskirts of the village, the pier served both as a wave breaker and as a mooring for a dozen one- and two-berth boats on its leeward side. It was also where da and the others would sit out and drink beer when the nights were warm.

  She started to hear noises as she got closer.

  Shouts. Metal.

  Fighting.

  ‘Da!’

  She sped around the last cabin, a third arrow thudding into the corner boards at her heels, and saw it.

  The jetty speared outwards into the still, swollen water, a zigzagging half-bridge of wood, forested with masts and lines. Eight women and three men – most of the adults in the village – were there on the boardwalk, hemmed in by an ever-circling tide of lissom warriors wielding two-handed swords. Like the bow-woman they were sightless. Like the bow-woman it did not seem to matter. The village had always prided itself on being well-armed, and had been taught by harsh necessity how to use its weapons well. But they were accustomed to fighting off the seasonal deadwalker floods, enemies that could not flow around a cudgel or a spear-thrust like seaweed in the currents of a passing fish. These warriors seemed almost to be dancing rather than fighting, the huge blades in their hands willing partners instead of tools to be directed.

  Old legends, myths and songs skipped through her mind. Frightful tales of the dark ocean and hungering aelves.

  ‘Deepkin…’

  Thalia picked her da out from the fighting.

  Her heart almost stopped beating in relief.

  Her da was as broad across the chest as the keel of a boat, browned by sun and sea, and caulked with scars. He could lift Thalia in one hand and cousin Rollin in the other, and throw them both, squealing, off the end of the pier. He was a champion, the god-king of her world.