Over time, most of that had fallen away. It felt oddly like a loss.
Fear and excitement were gone, replaced with a butcher’s efficiency. Today’s fight was today’s work. I know what to do. I know what I control and what I don’t.
And while he always knew the possible costs, he’d had little time or energy to get worked up about it. There were things to do, things that would keep him alive.
Today was different. This was different.
He had nothing to do. He could only listen to the call of the overseer below his feet, keeping the slaves’ rowing tempo. Eighteen months ago, that insistent beat would have meant terror and torn calluses and burning legs and lungs and new manacle cuts and blood. It now meant only the passage of time.
He had none of the old careful mental cataloging of his arsenal of luxin weapons to decide what best would match this much available light, this enemy, this battlefield, this likely enemy tactic. He had no generals to consult, no messengers to hear out or to send out, no scouts’ reports, no orders to give, nor anyone who would listen to them if he tried.
As their galleon, the Golden Mean, shot across the waves, driven by both oar and wind, Gavin had no one to pick out of the enemy line and say, ‘That one shall be mine first.’
All there was to do was wait, powerless.
Gavin’s chest went tight as the rowers’ drums, pounding, pounding.
There should have been some kind of towering storm. There wasn’t. Today was the kind of day that makes landsmen romanticize the lives of sailors. The sun blazing overhead, the sea light and bright and clear and shallow. Blinding azure and turquoise and sapphire, Gavin guessed. And many other jewel colors denied him now.
He wished he could see them just one last time.
Under Captain Gunner’s direction, the ship was circling in toward White Mist Reef, following the sea demons following the great black whale.
The sea demons hunting the whale hadn’t noticed the little ship behind them yet, so it was a race against time to see if Gunner remembered correctly.
He was trying to remember the placement of a gap, Gavin never said aloud, from two decades ago. Gunner hadn’t been the navigator back then, nor the navigator’s boy. He’d been belowdecks, swabbing the cannons clean of burning embers that could ignite the next shot while it was being loaded.
Even if he remembered where the gap had been, there was no guarantee that in all those years the reef hadn’t closed.
Gunner swore that White Mist Reef was a barrier reef with several gaps in its great circle. But if they didn’t find one wide enough for the Golden Mean before one of the sea demons noticed them, they were dead. And the great tower of cloud hovering no more than a pace above the waves made it nearly impossible to see the gaps, if they were even there.
The great black whale breached fully again, avoiding another sea demon strike and coming down on its body instead, with a huge strike of its tail. There weren’t three or four sea demons now. There were more like six. Hard to tell from five hundred paces.
“Is that the gap?” Gunner shouted up to the lookout in the crow’s nest.
“No, sir!”
Gunner swore. He had good eyes, but White Mist Reef defied man’s vision. The barrier reef itself rose from the sea floor to within a few hands’-breadths of the surface of the water. Stubborn coral had tried to grow higher, and their bleached skeletons were sometimes visible in the troughs between waves, white tips on the great claws that would tear a ship’s soft belly open.
Driven by the cold currents blasting through the Everdark Gates into the warmer waters of the Cerulean Sea, the trade routes and currents and storm systems of the Seven Satrapies had always traveled clockwise around the coasts of the Seven Satrapies like a great wheel—or perhaps, having been created later than the currents, clocks moved storm-wise. So if the entire sea were an irregular wheel, here was the axle.
Gunner’s teeth were bared. He shouted every command, even to those close by. A chase at sea is a slow chase, and their boat, fast as it was, was no match for the sea demons and the whale. They only kept them in sight because the massive creatures were fighting.
There wasn’t much for Gunner to do. If he fired his guns now, he’d bring the sea demons’ attention, but if he left the gun crews to steer the ship himself, the sea demons might be upon them before he could return. So he dodged from one station to the next, checking and rechecking wicks and ordering adjustments to the trim and the wheel through hand gestures to his first mate, and then flying up to the forecastle to check The Compelling Argument again and again.
Orholam had disappeared not long ago, but now he was suddenly at Gavin’s shoulder, with a powder horn. “Nabbed it from the captain’s quarters,” he said. He pulled a musket ball pouch off the strap, though. “This, however, you won’t be needing.”
That’s right. The baffling musket of the Blinding Knife didn’t need to be loaded. It magically made its own shaped shells, turning light into luxin as if it were a drafter itself, only requiring a flint piece for the snap-cock jaws and black powder for every shot.
Gunner had blown an apple out of Gavin’s mouth at forty paces with this rifled-barrel musket.
“What about you?” Gavin asked. “What are you doing?”
For some reason, Orholam was stripping off his tunic, but he had no rations or water. “Terrible swimmer,” Orholam explained.
“Thought you said you were going to die. Are you trying to defy your own prophecy?”
“I told you the most likely thing. I’m just trying to do my part to make the less likely thing happen. But it ain’t really on me.”
“No, I imagine the sea demons have something to say about it.”
“Them, neither,” Orholam said. “My fate’s up to you. And my own poor swimming. You’ll have a chance to save me. But you won’t. I don’t blame you. You’re just not that man. Still, I don’t want to die, so you can’t blame me for trying.”
Gavin had no idea what to say to that.
“You know who they are, don’t you?” Orholam asked, as if they hadn’t been discussing his death.
“ ‘They’?”
“The sea demons. They’re you. Or what you would be if you only knew how.”
“They’re me? Well, fuck me, then.” He began checking the action of the musket. Twist here and pull? “Can you tell me how to kill them, or not?”
“You know, I thought your problem was a lack of honesty. But your lack of compassion is worse.”
“Compassion? For monsters?”
“They suffer, Dazen. For their broken oaths and cowardice, they have reaped unending centuries of isolation and madness and pain.”
“Glad to see you’re back to being cryptic. Kind of missed it,” Gavin said with a little shake of his head. “But what the hell are you on about?”
Karris, I’m spending my last day with fools and madmen and traitors, and I’m afraid I fit right in.
Orholam said, “They’re what happens when immensely talented and immoral drafters find an animal that’s trusting and easy to soul-cast.”
“They’re what? What?”
“The sea giants were gentle creatures, so deeply attuned to luxin that their very bones react to it, intelligent, and nearly immortal. And they’re now extinct, thanks to your predecessors. What’s a Prism to do to escape his own Blackguards and his mortality itself?”