“I suppose it would,” Gavin said, uncertain where this was going.
“Magnificent critter, she was. We named her Ceres, said the whole sea must be hers. She followed us half a week while Captain scouted the reef, and seemed well-nigh content to hold back, until we tried to shoot the gap. Then she boiled the seas with her fury. We’d been expectin’ it. Plan was to distract her with the shock and sounds of the rafts blowin’ up in the waters ’round us. The gun captain was a fool, though. Didn’t set the fuses right. Got the timing wrong. Wouldn’t listen when I told him. So when it all went to shit, I pushed him out a gunport and took charge. I walked our shots right in a line to the last raft, heavy-loaded with black powder. Six hundred paces out. My timin’ never been so good. Ceres came up from beneath and just as she lifted that raft up inta the air in her jaws . . . My shot hit the barrels of black powder.
“For half a minute, I felt like a god. Everyone cheered. And then I felt ashamed. I watched that great beauty bubble and bleed and sink with her jaws all blown four directions, and the other dark ones stopped their circlin’ and came fast to their dead sister. They tried to prop her up in the water. I swear, they grieved. And I knew then that what I done was wrong. I knew I was acurst. Been runnin’ from Ceres’s vengeance ever since.”
“Why did you come back?” Gavin asked.
“A man gets tired a runnin’, Guile.”
Gunner disappeared then, and left Gavin and Orholam bewildered on the forecastle. “It’s not a death sentence,” Orholam said. “Well, not necessarily.”
“Shut up,” Gavin said.
Gunner reappeared. He tossed the Blinding Knife to Gavin. Orholam immediately began helping Gavin tie the long blade to his back with the very ropes he’d been bound with moments before. Gavin didn’t even think to ask why.
“Well, look at that,” Gunner said. Inexplicably, his bright mood had returned.
“Land ho!” a voice called from the crow’s nest. The sailor hadn’t even fully climbed the rigging to get in the nest, the clouds had parted so suddenly.
It was a bright spring day.
The sound of the surf rushing through the teeth of the coral came to them.
“Behold,” Orholam said. “White Mist Reef.”
“We go down fighting,” Gunner announced.
“ ‘Old age hath yet his honor and his toil’?” Gavin quoted.
“Old farts always did like them lines,” Gunner said. “ ‘Though much is taken, naught abides.’ ”
“I don’t think that’s how that—”
A shout rang out from the crow’s nest: “Creature, hie!”
“Critter? What critter?!” Pansy called from the wheel.
Gunner and Gavin cursed in concert.
“Reef ho!” the lookout shouted. “And . . . a spout? A spout! It’s a whale! A great black whale!”
“Aha!” Gunner said. He danced in a little circle, then waggled a finger in front of Orholam’s face. “So much for that, eh? Sunk by a sea demon? Everyone knows whales and the dark ones won’t tolerate each other—hair goat, a whale here means there can’t be no—”
“More whales! A full pod, sir!” the lookout cried.
Gunner laughed aloud, delighted. It was an infectious sound. “A pod! That means they’ve driven away the—”
“No. Wait.” The lookout’s voice dropped so low Gavin could barely hear it. “No, that’s not possible.”
“Report!” Gunner shouted. “Damn your poxy orbs! Report!”
“Sea demons! Three—maybe four sea demons. Closing on the whale, fast.”
The news settled on the crew like a burial shroud.
“Permission to go unchain the oar slaves, Captain?” Orholam asked, breaking the silence. He muttered. “They won’t stop rowing, I can promise you that.”
Gunner didn’t answer him, still stunned by the news.
Orholam said quietly, “They all die regardless, but it’ll give ’em hope. It’s no small thing to give a man facing his doom.”
“Permission denied,” Gunner said, snapping back into action. “You!” he shouted at a man. “Get me a pack. Stuffed with rations and water and brandy. Much as you can carry. Get back soonest. Gun crews! Stations! Gunports open!”
The rattle of commands didn’t stop. The reef was beyond the battle unfolding before them, and the wind was suddenly hard in their sails.
Gunner spared Gavin and Orholam a single look, if only to usher them off to one side as his gun crew came onto the foredeck. “Looks like you get to see a Compelling Argument for your own selfs, after all!” He patted the cannon and winked at them, his black mood unaccountably vanished.
“Some of us survive?” Gavin asked Orholam. Of course, it was superstitious nonsense, prophecy. Of course it was.
But when his fate flies from his own hands, a man takes comfort where he can.
“Oh, aye, some of us,” Orholam said. “Gods have always been fond of prophets and madmen.”
“And emperors?” Gavin suggested.
Orholam said, “I don’t see any of those here.”
Chapter 23
“You strike me as decent and fundamentally honest,” Kip said, staring not at the Keeper but at the mechanism filling the great white oak tree towering above them.
“Thank you,” the Keeper of the Flame said.
“Fundamentally honest, but you’re not being honest now,” Kip said, as if merely clarifying.
He pretended to ignore her, examining the Great Mirror. He’d never seen such an odd collision of materials. Nested metal frames on three axes were supported by limbs that had obviously been grown for the task, and the foliage itself had been husbanded so as to leave gaps for the light to come in and go out.
Kip had held suspicions that some things in the natural world were shaped by luxin as much as human drafters were. The extinct atasifusta trees were the most obvious candidates, but sea demons were said to be deeply entwined with magic, too, and his Night Mares said there was a special feel to giant elk, giant grizzlies, giant javelinas, and certain other animals. Certainly this tree was larger than any white oak he’d ever heard of.
She spoke up. “Perhaps you misread my discomfort. This entire area is virtually aglow with chi. Unless you and all your friends wish to get the same cancers that are killing me, we must keep this very brief.”
The Keeper was once more ensconced in her golden armor and veils, so Kip was studying her more covertly: heeding her vocal inflections, her stance, where her feet pointed, her crossed arms, her chin tucked as if he’d go for her throat. For all that she’d said she would answer their questions, she had secrets here she was protecting.
“You’ve survived ten years of working with chi constantly. Are we to be fearful of dying after a quarter hour?” Kip asked.
“Chi is as unpredictable as a mad old bull, my lord. It’s wisest to stay out of the corral.”
Around him, the Mighty shuffled uneasily amid the verdant low underbrush of the old-growth forest here so oddly atop a palace, complete with mossy boulders and fallen tree limbs dissolving into the ground to feed mushrooms.