The Burning White (31 page)

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?”

“Throw himself into a whale? Come on.” Through curiosity or desperation or madness, drafters had will-cast almost every kind of animal—but soul-casting was another level entirely.

“No, no. Whales are far too willful, and too smart to trust men.”

“Nobody’s ever successfully soul-cast themselves,” Gavin said dismissively.

“Depends what you mean by ‘success.’ ”

Thinking you could do magic better than anyone else had ever done it before? That attitude wasn’t exactly uncommon among drafters; it must be nearly ubiquitous among Prisms.

Good thing I’m not like that.

“This can’t be true,” Gavin said. “Of all people, I would know if it were.”

“You? You don’t even know how a Prism is made!”

“Made? You mean ‘chosen.’ ”

“Time’s up,” Orholam said, his eyes perhaps sensing some change in the sea demons that Gavin’s did not. “It was a pleasure to pull the same oar for a time, Man of Guile.”

The old prophet stepped over and spoke to Gunner in hushed tones.

Gunner nodded. “Guile! You sees in lightsies and darksies, yes?”

Black and white? “Yes, Captain,” Gavin said.

“Up ya go. To the next.” He moistened his lips, peeved. “To the next. The
nest
. Fawk! Maybe you kin see what others cain’t.”

So Gavin slung the gun-sword over his back and began climbing the rigging. He’d regained enough strength for this, anyway.

But he wasn’t even all the way up to the crow’s nest when he saw something alarming.

“The whale!” he cried. “The whale’s turned. It’s headed straight this way!”

Gavin hauled himself into the crow’s nest and flopped in awkwardly.

“Ten points a-port!” Gavin shouted. “Twelve hundred paces out!” He was pretty good at distances, but it was a guess.

Almost as soon as he’d called it, Gunner cut to starboard. It was nice that a whale had been distracting the sea demons. But in the old tales, whales themselves had been the death of many a crew.

On the sea, no stranger is your friend.

And then Gavin saw it. “Gap!” he shouted. “Four hundred paces!”

But it was as if the sea demons themselves could hear his puny cry.

“They’re turning!” Gavin shouted. “A thousand paces out now!”

Below him, Gunner was standing on the barrel of The Compelling Argument again, looking forward, though this time he had the fore skysail stay in his hand to keep his balance. He hopped down, and his hands became a blur on the whirling gears and pulleys. But Gavin could see that the great cannon was aimed wide of any of the sea demons.

“Captain—” he began.

But the roar of The Compelling Argument obliterated all else. The concussion made its own ring on the waves below it, and the sound and pressure knocked even Gavin backward, luckily into the crow’s nest.

He pulled himself to a seated position in time to see a great explosive shell hit the water hundreds of paces to port from the sea demons. Water geysered around the impact.

Most impressive. Gavin would have applauded the sheer power of the thing if there weren’t seven monstrous leviathans bearing down on them at this very—

Four. Four leviathans bearing down on them. What?

“Three of ’em peeled off, Captain!” Gavin shouted. “Headed for where the shell hit!”

That was it. Sea demons felt vibrations in the water. A distant cannon blast above the water was certainly felt, but an explosion
in
the water must have doubled or trebled its volume to those creatures.

“They’re steaming hot!” Gavin shouted. “Four hundred paces. Our gap’s in a hundred!”

“Whale ta port!” someone shouted below.

And so it was.

Like some kind of damned sheepdog loping easily alongside them, the whale was boxing them in, holding them tight to the reef. The open sea out beyond it was no option now.

“Cap’n!” the mate Pansy shouted. “We gotta swing wide!”

“No!” Gunner shouted, not even looking up as he cranked The Compelling Argument low to port.

“We’ll not make that tight of a turn!” Pansy shouted.

“No!”

Orholam’s balls. Gunner was gonna shoot the whale. Why was he going to shoot the whale?

As the big gun finished coming around, Gunner hopped up on its barrel.

“You’re right!” he shouted to the whale as if they’d been conversing. “Fine! Damned if you ain’t right!”

Swinging the boat wide was the only way they could make the right-angle turn to shoot the narrow gap in the reef. But the great black beast wasn’t allowing that.

Gunner shouted, “Eight points port, on my mark, then full starboard on my mark. Got it, mate?!”

“Aye, Cap’n! Eight points port on mark, then full starboard on mark.”

But Gunner had already disappeared below, bellowing orders to his gun crews.

Gavin threw a curse at the whale. This great, stupid fish might as well have been Andross Guile, hemming them in, denying them any real choice, making it look to any observer like they’d willfully rammed their own ship into the reef.

“Gap in seventy paces, Captain!” Gavin shouted. “Two sea demons at two hundred! Coming full speed in!”

The damned whale had disappeared.

Thanks, buddy. Stayed just long enough to get us killed, didn’t ya?

But the water here wasn’t deep enough for it to dive out of sight, and Gavin found it again quickly, veering out toward open sea.

Even as he threw one last mental curse to it, it veered back, straight toward the gap in the reef itself.

No, not at the gap, but on an intercepting course with the two remaining sea demons, who were flying like twin arrows at the
Golden Mean
—the interception point just happened to be right at the mouth of the gap.

The gap in the coral between the open sea and the protected lagoon inside was wide enough for the ship to pass through in ordinary circumstances: approached dead-on, with sails stowed, maneuvering by oar and with polemen on the decks. Normally, even in this light midafternoon chop, with care it would be perilous but possible.

But cutting a right-angle turn, under full sail and full speed? A single wave, a single untimely gust of wind could blow them into the teeth of the coral on either side.

There was nothing else for Gavin to say. Gunner could see it all for himself now. He was standing again on the barrel of his big cannon, dancing from one bare foot to the other because of the barrel’s heat. But there was nothing comical in the utter concentration on his face, looking at that gap, and the oncoming sea demons, and the whale streaking in from the side. He’d readied the orders.

Now it was just a matter of timing, and Gunner was the best in the world at that.

“First mate . . . mark!”

“Mark!” she shouted, her hands spinning the wheel and then stopping it precisely.

The ship began to angle wide—but not wide enough!—and bleeding off speed—too much!

Gavin tried to calculate. The whale was maybe going to reach the sea demons just before they reached the ship, but where would the collision take them? Would the whale intercept both of the sea demons, or only one? What waves would crash into the boat?

Out only another hundred paces, the other sea demons had doubled back. Even if the whale took out both of the first two of them, if Gunner didn’t get the ship through the gap in the first attempt, those others were going to demolish them.

Sailors on deck were praying, muttering, waiting with their hands on lines for their orders. Orholam had now stripped off all his clothes as if preparing for a swim. He saluted Gavin with a flagon of brandy and drank a deep draught. Crazy old bastard.

On the sterncastle, the first mate’s forehead glistened with sweat, stance wide, knuckles tight on the wheel. She had all the look of a grizzled veteran who was terrified despite being a grizzled veteran.

Gavin looked up. The gap yawned before them, but there was no way they could make the turn.

“Reef the main now!” Gunner shouted. “First mate, now! Starboard oars, stop! Port oars, double-time, now, now! Second mate, on my—mark! Mark! Now!”

In quick succession, the first mate spun the wheel hard in toward the reef; the mainsail went half; and the starboard oars stopped, dragging water, creating a pivot point while the port oars kept pulling. A rattling chain drew Gavin’s eyes to the rear.