Child of a Hidden Sea (24 page)

A large vessel with a peculiar,
Y
-shaped mast caught her eye instead.

“Gale had friends here,” Parrish said, interrupting her. “Now we're in port, I'll go tell them about her death in person.”

“Do I have to come?” Sophie asked.

He shook his head. “I'll see if we can get a meeting with the intelligence office, in case the Tall know what's going on.”

“Will they tell us?”

“Gale hid Yacoura for them, remember?”

Calling in a dead woman's favors,
Sophie thought uneasily. It felt like spending money that belonged to her sister. “How will they feel about us looking for the Heart?”

“They'll understand that we're making a pretense of it. In the meantime, I'm not sure there's much for you to do.” He seemed to weigh his next words. “Bram, the cartography office on the Hilltop Academy is one of the finest on Stormwrack. If you are still trying to understand our geological history—” He waved at the seacharts, the rings of islands.

“Thanks.”

He turned to Sophie. “The academy also possesses a natural history collection.”

“Where?”

He pointed straight up one of the tidy little streets to a stone building with immaculately groomed parade grounds. “Perhaps Tonio can take you?”

Instead of agreeing, she turned to Verena. “What about you? Another duel?”

Verena shook her head.

“She should go with you, Parrish,” Sophie said. “You're meeting up with important spy types who knew Gale, right? Verena should get to know them, for when she gets the pouch imprinted.”

Parrish inclined his head, assenting.

They broke into parties, Parrish and Verena making for the residential district, Tonio leading them up the hill toward the academy, a brick building whose pilasters and cornices made it seem faintly Georgian. It was a short walk, but an awkward one—Bram was silent—still angry, Sophie thought. It was a relief when Tonio introduced him to a cartographer and the pair of them vanished up one of the academy's staircases.

“Aren't you going along to translate?”

“Kir Bram can make do in Fleet,” Tonio said. “He's picked up a lot of the language—and they're just looking at maps, after all.”

“He's a supergenius.”

“Garland—the captain, that is—ordered me to stay with you. I believe the natural history laboratory is this way.”

“We're not going.”

“No?”

“I'd be glad to, normally, but I have other things on my mind.”

Tonio looked uneasy. “Such as?”

She grinned. “Playing cop.”

“Captain said—”

“Captain Parrish isn't in charge, is he?” She led him back to the wharf, past a small squad of teens in red dress uniforms, kids from a rainbow of ethnic backgrounds, and then through a small park where old men and women were playing some variant on croquet.

“Garland should be in charge,” Tonio said. “Until certain matters are smoothed out.”

“Tonio, you seem like a smart guy.”

Good manners obliged him to answer. “Thank you.”

“So tell me. That storm, it could've drowned us all, right? We could have drowned. You, me, Parrish, both my siblings?”

“That's life on the Watch, Kir.”

“I don't know what that means.”

“
Nightjar
's crew is often at hazard. We keep our heads down as we can, but Kir Gale was in a dangerous business.”

“Until I offload all this onto Verena, my life's at hazard too.”

“That's true.”

“So we're already living dangerously. Why waste time?”

“Captain Parrish would take it amiss to lose two employers in a single week,” Tonio protested.

“Give me a break. He'd barely notice I was gone.”

He stopped dead, gaping at her. “Kir—”

“Sophie.”

“Surely you've noticed…”

“Okay, never mind, I'm sorry. That was unfair. He'd notice, obviously. I'm not saying he's heartless.”

“Heartless,” he repeated.

“He just lost his best friend, right? Or his partner in crime? He's in mourning. It's obvious he's shattered. I'm not on his radar.”

“I don't know radar, Kir—I mean Sophie, your pardon—”

She could feel her face turning red. “Why are we even talking about this? How Garland feels about me doesn't matter.”

The words seemed to open a little hollow in her gut, though.
How I feel about him doesn't matter either,
she told it.
It's all a big side issue. A distraction.

“That's not—” Tonio swallowed, seeming to consider his words. “All right. Consider this: If you get killed, it might make the situation, with the Verdanii succession, worse.”

“Now that
is
a fair point.” They had reached a boardwalk that fronted the wharf, a stretch of restaurants and supply houses, orderly people conducting business in an orderly way. “What are the chances we can find a lawyer type?”

“Lawyer?”

“If I wanted to make a will, leaving all my alleged stuff on Stormwrack to Verena and everything else to Bram, would that be binding? Would the magic purse care?”

“You should be able to make a Fleet-valid will here,” Tonio said, brightening at the prospect of a safe bureaucratic errand.

“Genius!” she said. She had something else in mind, but there was a little time to kill. “Can you do that thing where you say ‘Charge it to
Nightjar
' and they go for it?”

“I'm the first mate.” This apparently meant yes: He found her a small law office and authorized the payment. It didn't take long to spell out what she wanted.

“Come back in a few hours to sign the documents,” the clerk said.

A couple hours.

Sophie felt an itch of pure cultural displacement; if she'd been home, she would have texted Bram now to see how he was doing.

What the hell. She pulled out her phone, texting:

I was a jerk. Sorry.

It gave her the usual reply:

Message will be sent when we return to service area.

“What are you doing?”

“It's a custom … like…” She twitched the ragged black scarf hanging at his hip, a memento for Gale. “I'm trying to make myself feel better about something.”

“Ah. You know, Kir, that taxidermy museum has a fine collection. Your Erstwhile recording device…”

“No! No, no, no.” She dragged the reluctant Tonio down the wharf, toward the ship she'd seen earlier. It had, as she'd hoped, come into port while she was pushing legal paper. “See that ship?
Ascension?
There's the flag of Ualtar.”

He looked at it with obvious distaste. “I'm surprised you recognized it.”

“I looked it up,” she said. “So … they don't seem damaged. They didn't come here because the storm hit them.”

“They could be bringing spidersilk to the Tall,” Tonio said. “The silk is used in inscriptions for shipbuilding.”

“It doesn't look like a freighter.” It was a massive ship, one that must have been put together with some kind of magic, because it didn't look remotely seaworthy. Its single mainmast towered above the deck, disproportionately tall, and it split into two arms, forming a
Y
. The rigging of its sails was segmented in a way that seemed familiar.

“Kir—Sophie, why are we—”

“Ualtarites do church,” she said. “I read it in Gale's protocol book. Every day, church at high noon, everybody welcome. They're the ‘anyone can perfect themselves' people, remember?”

He was aghast. “You can't mean to board her?”

“You bet I mean to,” she said. “I've had a genetic family for all of a week. And then these people killed the one relative who'd give me the time of day.”

“I won't allow it.”

“Ha. I'm in charge, remember? Come or don't; I know they're not your favorite people ever. I'm going.” Setting her camera to record, she paused at the gangplank, accepting a long veil from a surprised-looking girl before marching aboard.

A brief struggle played itself out on Tonio's face before he followed.

The Ualtarites were already gathered, kneeling on the foredeck in neat rows. Sophie took a spot at the back, shadowed by Tonio—who shot her a surprisingly angry glance as he folded himself into position.

A tall woman in a silvery cloak stepped out in front of the gathering, commencing the service. She spoke a language Sophie not only didn't know but didn't find familiar at all.

She propped her camera between her knees and imitated the listening pose of the true believers arrayed before her.

Observations,
she told herself. The Ualtarites were Caucasian, mostly, like the Tall. They were fair-skinned, but a few had epicanthic folds on their eyes … which was noteworthy, but probably irrelevant. Those congregants whose arms were bare had scars—patterned scars, so the injuries were made deliberately. Ritual scarring, maybe, to do with the faith?

The ship was clean, very white, nothing out of place. And there was a recurring design motif … spiders. All their bolts and buttons had stylized spiders on them. The pattern on the priest's vest was a web.

Come to think of it, that's what the rigging in that
Y
-shaped mast looks like: a loose spiderweb.

Sophie had seen a shape like this during the storm, had glimpsed a ship out in all that blackness and thunder, a hull with an electrified branching
Y
reaching skyward.

She turned her wrist, filming the deck, pausing to record the unusual design of the ship against the background of the busy wharf. The
Y
-shaped mainmast, with the rigging between its arms. Its mainsail was woven in as a spider might weave a web into a break in the branches of a tree. There was a looseness to the cords; when the wind blew, she imagined, the sails would bell out extravagantly, more like a hot air balloon than a traditional rig.

She remembered the Verdanii ship they'd seen on Erinth, the one that seemed to have live trees as masts. It, like this split-mast ship, probably couldn't be sailed safely at home. No, the strain on the arms of the
Y
would be too much, and how could they navigate? Could it tack?

As the service droned on, she considered: What did magic mean, exactly? The ability to defy the laws of physics? To create little pockets of something—space, time, both?—where they didn't apply? Or to access other universal rules that twenty-first century science, at home, just hadn't touched yet?

The spiderweb sail ruffled in the breeze, gaily defying common sense and physics.

I wonder what Bram will say about this?
She shouldn't have let herself get drawn into arguing with him; it always made her miserable. But the larger question of what magic
was
would intrigue him. And it tied into the problem with the land masses. If this was Earth, whatever had happened to the continents almost certainly had been … unnatural.

Despite everything, she'd gathered a fair pile of observations about Stormwrack. It was random data, a clutter of facts, not enough yet to form a pattern.
Krill in a net,
she thought. Meanwhile Bram had focused on the geography question. That was always the way; she flitted around looking at whatever was shiniest, while he got down to work.

Well, he hasn't solved anything yet either
, she told herself.
And I can focus, I can. I'm supposed to be snooping around for Gale's sake
.

The sail caught her eye again. Spider ships, spider people. She would have bet there was some kind of spider tie-in to the religious ceremony she was sitting through.

Anansi's a spider god. Anansi's a trickster, though.
This service seemed overall too stodgy to be trickster worship. No whoopee cushions. She'd always imagined Anansi with a high-pitched giggle and a ready bag of practical jokes.

She flashed on Parrish, giggling as he traded bets with Tonio. And he hadn't been magicked into being good-looking, either. What had Verena said Gale called him? Monstrous. Overblessed by nature. Something like that.
Cute, fit, honorable,
she thought.

Stuffy, bossy, infuriating.

The priest had wound one of the worshippers 'round in what almost looked like mummy wrappings, and moved on to what appeared to be a sermon, speaking charismatically—still incomprehensibly, in Ualtara—to the congregation. Everyone listened, heads bowed, patiently on their knees. A few had white cords in hand, and were knotting and unknotting them as they listened. Tonio had a glazed expression, the face of a man waiting out something incredibly unpleasant.

Okay, what did she know?

First: Gale was killed—John Coine had said as much—because of this Heart of
Temperance
thing. They'd decided Gale would never give it up, so they got her out of the way.

So …
Temperance
. A deterrent. The ship that sank pirates, back in the day, which was why the Isle of Gold guys were after it.

But these Ualtarites weren't pirates. What did they want with the Heart?

The Ualtarites weren't upfront and in anyone's face about cooperating with John Coine. They were letting him do all the talking, take all the credit. They couldn't have known that Sophie would see their embassy guy. They'd whipped up a storm when
Nightjar
headed south, toward their homeland, and had driven them north.

What was it Parrish had said?
Temperance
was a key part of their century of peace—Cessation, they called it.

A ship that could sink anyone—freighter, pleasure craft …

Don't be silly. It's the government—they wouldn't sink yachts for the hell of it. Pirates, yes.