The Deepest Ocean (Eden Series) (9 page)

He wiped his forehead with the back of one hand. The other seemed best not too far from the hilt of his longsword. When he glanced up, the highest lanterns were invisible except for the diffuse penumbral glow they cast. He’d climbed to the crow’s nest earlier that day to see if that helped at all, but it was more disturbing to look down and see nothing but shifting clouds, as though the nest itself had become detached from the ship and was floating on an insubstantial sea.

It didn’t matter. They had already traveled for over a day and a half, not much longer to—

Something sighed against the back of his neck, raising fine hairs but drying the sweat on his skin. He turned, his pulse beating fast, but instincts honed over twenty years were faster and he looked up to see the sails beginning to swell.
Wind again, finally. And in the right direction!

Too easy
, said a voice that sounded like Yerena’s.

The sails puffed like cotton bolls and a ragged cheer rose from the few men on deck. The wind picked up, running cold fingers through his hair. Alyster came up from the lower deck, evidently waiting for an order to ship oars, but Darok said nothing. He was suddenly aware that he could see the lanterns high overhead, could see the bottom of the crow’s nest a hundred feet above on the mainmast.

“Ship oars and drop anchor,” he ordered.

The oars were drawn in and a chain went clinking over a pulley as the anchor was lowered. Darok didn’t know what the new danger could be, but if something in the strait wanted them to go forward at all speed, he was going to stay exactly where he was until he figured out what was going on.

A sharp
clang
rang out from the ship’s stern, a sound Darok had never heard before. He turned as Kaneth Strave hurried along the deck.

“Sir, it’s the anchor,” he said. “They paid out all the chain, but it hasn’t landed.”

What?
Darok raised his voice to a shout. “Down sails!”

The men hauled on lines and the sails folded in masses of damp canvas. Above them the moon shone down like a great bowl filled with silver light, and even without the lanterns, Darok would have been able to see everything around them.

Half a mile ahead, beyond the crumbling edge of a cliff, was open water.
The Iron Ocean.

“That…that can’t be right,” Alyster said. “We’re nowhere near the end of the strait yet.”

Was it real? Darok remembered the compass needle turning aimlessly. Or could the measurement of time be distorted in the strait, just as the measurement of direction had been? He turned to Yerena.

She shook her head before he could ask her anything. “We’re still in a waterway. But whatever is before us, it doesn’t feel like part of the strait.”

“What do you mean?” Darok said. The men were listening, and he doubted they would be very convinced or reassured by something that simply
felt
wrong. How could she be so logical and sensible at one moment and then go by feelings at another?

“It smells different.”

Darok glanced at the strait ahead of them in time to see a fin slice through the sea. The shark turned in a wide arc just before the end of the strait, moving silently through water that glimmered with broken reflections of moonlight. Then the tip of its tail flicked hard and it headed back towards
Daystrider,
away from the Iron Ocean—what looked like the Iron Ocean—at speed.

The water smelled different. Wonderful. Now what was he to do? Those men assigned to the oars were at their positions, but everyone else seemed to have gathered on the deck, and since Darok couldn’t give them any orders, the crowd seemed to be growing with no purpose other than to watch the end of the strait. Murmurs ran through their ranks.

“Captain,” Julean Flaige said quietly. “Behind us.”

Darok turned, dreading what he was going to see. Moving out slowly from behind a curve, on a course that would bring it straight to
Daystrider
, was another ship.

He yanked the spyglass from his belt, snapped it to full extension and put the end to his eye. The ship’s hull might have been carved from obsidian, and there was no name painted on its side. Nor did it fly any banners or sport a figurehead. The masts were white and the sails looked like cobwebs.

Darok wasn’t sure who first said “ghost ship”, but the words went through the crowd like an echo. He couldn’t deny that, because the spyglass showed no one on board the ship. The tattered sails stirred in the wind.

“No,” Yerena said.

He looked at her. “You’re sure?”

She nodded. “I can feel it moving.”

He could see it moving as well. It slid out completely from behind the jutting cliff, turning to point its prow towards
Daystrider
. It loomed like a castle, and he wasn’t sure whether the strait had grown narrower or whether the ship was just large enough to fill a good half of the channel.
Daystrider
couldn’t get past that, not unless it turned aside.

Ragged though the ghost ship’s sails were, they seemed to function just fine. It came on towards them, less than a mile away—and if it wasn’t insubstantial, it would soon slam into them.

Can’t go back. Can’t go forward
. Darok shoved the spyglass back into his belt and drew a deep breath.

“I want this ship coming about,” he said.

Kaneth repeated the order in a shout, but from his expression, he knew how much more danger that put them in. If the wind flung the ghost forward—or if it sprouted oars—before
Daystrider
came about fully, the warship could be split like an apple. Darok remembered the wrecked cog lying at the bottom of the strait.

On the other hand, they could do nothing until they did
something
, and there was one more reason to come about.

He gave an order to Hevard Bleysey, the second lieutenant, and Bleysey went below to the arbalests. At the starboard rail, Darok looked down at the spread of oars far below, lashing the water. Since the oarsmen on the other side were rowing backward, the ship began to turn slowly on her axis.

The ghost ship came on, huge and unstoppable. Its tallest mast was easily two hundred feet, supported on a frame that far outstripped
Daystrider
in size. Darok went to the port rail. He saw spume gleam white under the moon as water parted for the ghost ship’s prow.
Daystrider
turned until she was perpendicular to the flint cliff, and one of the weapon-ports along the ship’s side thudded open.

With a
thwang
, an arbalest fired. A trident streaked over the distance between
Daystrider
and the ghost ship, trailing rope like a threaded needle. It bit into the black hull and stuck there, quivering with the impact. The rope pulled taut.

Easy part’s over.

“Take command until I return,” he told Alyster and swung himself over the rail. The hinged cover was just beneath, and he braced the soles of his boots on it. Before he could twist around and lower himself, the ship rocked and he lost his balance—but he grabbed the rope as he fell and hung from it, gasping. Yerena might be able to steer her shark away from a man falling into the water, but he still didn’t want to be anywhere near the beast in its element.

He pulled himself along the rope hand-over-hand, praying the trident would not come loose. The rope grew slack as the ghost ship drew closer, but he reached the trident moments later and climbed on it to pull himself up to the black rail. After the friction of the rope’s fibers, the hull felt cold as a corpse against his palms. He grabbed the rail, swung a leg over it and tumbled on to the deck.

Done.
Now all he had to do was turn the ship so it slewed from its collision course and slid past
Daystrider
instead.

Maybe that would be easier than he expected. The deck was deserted, its boards bleached-pale and clean. Above him the spiderweb sails billowed in the wind, their strands whispering together.

In his peripheral vision he saw
Daystrider
continuing to turn, but something else moved at the other corner of his eye. He spun around as a shadow floated across the deck.

More than one. The shadows were everywhere, dark clots moving independently of anything else, but as he stared at them, he saw the patterns in their movements. They hauled at sails and clambered through the rigging. One of them seemed to be busy whipping something tied to the mast, whipping another shape that twisted and writhed.

Darok shuddered involuntarily and headed for the helmsman’s wheel. That was all that mattered. At all costs he had to stop the black iceberg from touching his ship.

“Captain?” Yerena’s voice came from behind him.

His heart nearly stopped for the second time since he had boarded the ship. He turned, half-expecting that was another illusion, but she was pulling herself up the port side with a rotted mooring rope, and looked altogether too sodden to be a wraith of any kind. He grasped the rail and held out his free hand, but she shook her head and hauled herself up on her own.

“These could hurt you.” She held up her gloves, and they gleamed wet in the moonlight, made of some grey hide.
Sharkskin
. He knew what that would feel like—smooth as enamel when stroked one way, sharper than a field of broken glass when touched another. Not that it was likely to help against shadows.

“I didn’t order you to come with me,” he said.

Her brows lifted a fraction. “My duty is to guide and to guard you.”

He wasn’t sure how much guarding she could do, but there was no time to debate it, so he led the way to the wheel. Yerena followed, leaving a trail of water behind her, and the shadows continued their work as if the two of them didn’t exist. Whatever had been tied to the mast was still being whipped, he noticed.

He stopped before the wheel and paused. The wheel on
Daystrider
was made of royal oak and carved with the signs of the compass—north to north-north-west—but the signs on the ghost ship’s wheel were symbols he had never seen before.
Doesn’t matter, as long as I can make this ship turn aside.

He grasped the spokes of the wheel. Nothing happened.

What the hell?
Darok tightened his grip and tried again, then half-crouched, socking one elbow against his hip to give himself as much leverage as possible. He pushed with all his strength, teeth clenched. The wheel didn’t turn so much as a fraction of an inch.

Yerena crouched to inspect the back and sides of the wheel. “It looks as though it turns, Captain—”

“Not for you.” The speaker might have been at the bottom of a well, his voice echoing with hollowness. “Not for anything human.”

Yerena turned, sodden skirts clinging to her legs and threatening to trip her up. Something swayed out from behind the ship’s bone-pale mainmast, and at first it seemed to be just another shadow.

Then footfalls thudded as it came towards them. She took a step back, wishing she was in the water.
Don’t show you’re afraid
.

The figure wore patchwork pieces of armor and a battered iron halfhelm. Atop that was a raven with wings spread, obviously dead and looking as though it had died in that position. Its beak gaped open as if screaming to be released from the helm’s grip on its claws.

“You’ve done well, done very well to come so far.” Nothing was visible beneath the helm except for a point like a single eye, glowing brighter than phosphorus. “The ones that do, they join my fleet.”

Yes, a ship that size would be the flag of its fleet. Yerena dared to glance at
Daystrider
, but she knew the ship couldn’t risk sailing forward. The shark’s senses, more finely honed than any human’s in the water, had turned it aside from what looked like the end of the strait.

Darok drew his sword. “Was that the purpose of the fog? To make the strait into some kind of…testing ground?”

Instead of answering, the captain of the ghost ship pulled his own steel. Yerena’s heart jumped into her throat in what felt like an attempt to escape her body. She’d thought Darok was tall, but the captain of the ghost ship outstripped him in height and wore armor as well. And none of that mattered if he wasn’t even human.

“Stay back, Yerena.” Darok moved out from behind the wheel, half-turning to put the side of his body to the ghost ship’s captain. “Or better yet, get off this—” He stopped.

Yerena saw what he saw, and her mouth went dry. The shadows of the ship’s crew drifted across the deck to join their captain, but other shapes appeared. A glasslike form projected upright from each shadow, moving as the shadow moved.

“What the hell?” Darok said.

“They’re becoming real,” Yerena whispered. The closer the ship was to…to wherever they were from, the more real they were, and not human either.

Not human. That’s it.

She tore off her gloves and thrust them into her belt, then ran to the side of the ship where she had climbed aboard. Behind her, steel clashed on steel, but she didn’t look back as she pulled her knife. She sawed through the mooring rope she had used to climb on board the ship, then hauled the length of the rope in.
Too short.

She cut another rope. The ringing clang of blades came fast and hard, and the shadows were talking in voices like dead leaves rubbing together. Some spoke indistinctly but others muttered a mixture of words both recognizable and strange, though there was nothing ambiguous about the hate and mockery in their tones. The conviction crossed her mind that if she just paused to listen, she could make sense of their words.