“Stop it,” Gavin said. “Stop saying that.”
“Had you not been told it is death and evil and murder? It is eating you, destroying you!” Orholam said, eyes bright with fervor.
The Bitter Cob had made it to the edge of Rath Harbor last night before having to anchor. Once the sun rose, the portmaster would be out to assess taxes and to direct them to a berth. Gavin’s options for escape were rapidly dwindling.
No, that wasn’t true. There had never been many options. Once the portmaster came, Gavin had to go with the man or resign himself to Malargos custody. He would, doubtless, be their “guest.” Without drafting, he would be helpless.
Well, overawing one portmaster. How hard could that be?
Gavin left Orholam and jumped up on the gunwale. He could swim. Sharks and crocodiles swarmed to the carrion that inevitably washed into the waters of a great city—not least of which was the dead people who were disposed of in that old favorite way: tossing them in the river. Fishermen armed with harpoons hunted the sharks and crocodiles in turn, harvesting fins and skin and teeth. It was a rather smaller circle of nature than Gavin was comfortable with. Set against the perennial battle of nature versus man, swimming in a harbor like this was a big bet on the men.
Even if he made it to shore, dripping wet, dirty, emerging from the shoreline muck, he would then have to escape. Without coin sticks, without friends, without drafting. Gavin had been naked before and felt less naked than he felt now. He looked at the tranquil, trashy water below him and realized for the first time that he could drown in that.
Vulnerability sat hand in hand with Mortality. They beckoned Gavin to come.
“Tell me about the black luxin,” Orholam said, quiet, tense. Gavin hadn’t noticed his approach.
Losing my edge, to be startled like that.
“It’s a myth to scare young drafters.”
“You wish to be unflinchingly honest with yourself. Yet here you fail. It must have scared you terribly. Terrified you. Made you piss yourself. Made you run. But there was nowhere to run, was there? Of a sudden, the world was not as you’d believed. Did you see them?”
“Them? I have no—”
“You were a better liar when first Gunner pulled you out of the sea. Or is it especially hard to lie to me?”
“One would hope that it would be especially hard to lie to Orholam, don’t you think?” Gavin said lightly.
“Man’s first recorded words to Orholam were a lie, so no. Men lie to Orholam as readily as they lie to their wives. Show me your hands.”
Gavin got down off the gunwale. The sky was lightening, but there were still few sailors awake. They had privacy. Not that he wanted it. He showed the man his hands.
“Remarkable,” Orholam said. “As our mouths utter both blessings and curses, clean water and foul from the same well, so too your hands. You’ve drafted white luxin, too.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Gavin said.
“Hoo-hoo! A puzzle you are indeed! You remember drafting the black, but not the white?!”
“Quiet, dammit!”
Gavin had seen men whose hamstrings had been cut who didn’t fall so fast. The prophet simply dropped. Gavin bent over the man—
Who blinked up at him. Then stood, shaking his head. His eyes stuck on Gavin’s, and he stood, transfixed. He swallowed. Tried to speak. “You’ve come face-to-face with truth, and refused to see it. You’ve chosen cowardice when you had it in you to choose courage. You’ve chosen black instead of white. You’ve failed, Guile.”
“I’ve failed?! You sent me those dreams, didn’t you? Through some magic I don’t know, some kind of will-casting. You did this to me. You, and him.”
“Tread lightly, o Son of Am.”
“I’ll tread how I please! I didn’t fail. God failed.”
“Those two words cannot be put together in any way that makes sense.”
“God failed me.”
“Because an earnest prayer cannot be answered no?”
“Lies!” Gavin hissed.
“Then Orholam will give it to you plain: you keep up your lies, and you’ll be stricken blind.”
It was such a bizarre threat that Gavin was taken aback. “I already am blind.”
“Perhaps that much is true,” Orholam said. “He who refuses to see is no better off than he who can’t.” Then he hobbled away, carefully avoiding sleepers on deck.
Must have smacked his leg in his fall. Lucky I didn’t smack more than that.
The boy would be up on deck any time. Then Antonius would follow Gavin like a puppy. Though he wasn’t stupid—he’d certainly proved that in convincing the sailors to go to Rath—he was ignorant. He had no idea that his family hated Gavin. No idea that his uncle had become a god, that Gavin had killed him. No idea that Gavin had stymied his cousin Tisis’s entry to the Spectrum. Either he had no idea about any of these, or he didn’t care.
But hoping that Eirene Malargos would share her nephew’s lack of concern was a bridge too far.
Might Eirene be turned into an ally? She was known to be fiercely protective of her family, prone to anger and jealousy, but scrupulously fair in her business dealings. Never broke her word, but went out of her way to crush those who broke their word to her, whether in business or in bed. She’d held her own family to bad business deals they’d made with others, even when she could have used her burgeoning power to overturn them. In short, a woman to be feared and admired. She was exactly the kind of person to remind Gavin that not all power was magical. If Gavin could survive her rage… no. He’d injured her family too many times.
If he were still a Prism, it would be one thing, but now? What exactly did he bring to an alliance?
“What were you talking with the godmonger about?” a voice asked, low. Gunner.
The crew had found a cage in the hold, last used to carry a cheetah from the edges of the Verdant Plains. They’d tied the cage down on deck and stuffed Gunner in there, after giving him a good beating. His eyes were swollen to slits. Gavin had stopped them before they killed him.
“Don’t talk to me,” Gavin said. “I’ve had enough with crazy men today, and the sun isn’t up yet.”
“Gunner ain’t crazy,” Gunner said. “Gunner’s mad! It’s differnt.” He chuckled to himself, but quietly. He was obviously in pain.
Gavin looked to the city, aglow, catching the first rays of the rising sun. The city had grown around a massive fortress on the hill overlooking the Great River Delta. Long ago, Oakenshield Fortress had become Castle Guile for a single generation and then as the family’s fortunes had waned, it became Corinth Castle, then Rath Skuld. Now it was simply known as the Castle. During Taya Oakenshield’s time, it had extended two great walls like legs down to the harbor so that it couldn’t be cut off from supplies. Later wars and lulls between wars had seen walls built out farther from those original walls, the original walls plundered for their stones, the new walls demolished by a Blood Forest army, and the original walls rebuilt.
The city’s petitions to the Spectrum to rebuild the wider walls after the Blood War was finally over had been turned down time and again. Andross Guile had been at the center of that denial, preaching peace through mutual vulnerability—for others, as always. Of course, the army this city had to worry about now wasn’t Blood Foresters but Blood Robes. The enforced vulnerability of the city was another thing that wasn’t going to make a Guile popular with Eirene Malargos.
More worrying was how anyone in power felt about the way Gavin had ended the Blood War. It had been bold, bloody, and effective. To a younger Gavin, the only thing that mattered was that it had worked. He wasn’t likely to find allies here.
Gavin looked around the ship. The Bitter Cob indeed.
“You give me that rifle, I’ll punch a hole in that portmaster for you,” Gunner said. “One shot, no tricks. From here, they wouldn’t even think it came from us. They’ll be looking on that ship for the shot’s original.”
“Origin,
” Gavin said. “And what the hell’s Rifle? Family name?” Men named weapons all the time, but that wasn’t a language he was familiar with.
“A rifle. Not a name. It’s the spirals inside the barrel. Knew me a smith was working on the idear. Worked real good, but you had to cast your musket balls perfect, file off the seams, make exact globes. Don’t think this one shoots globes. That smith’d give his dick hand to see my girl here.”
He ignored Gunner. In the distance, the portmaster boarded another galley half a league west. The shore was half a league north. A long swim, the last few hundred paces covered in scum that was likely sewage. It wasn’t simply gross. Gavin had known good swimmers during the war who’d gone through muck like that to return from scouting. A day later, they were fevered and shaking. Three days later, dead.
“That’s half a league,” Gavin said. “Gotta be close to two thousand paces. Those boys kicked whatever sense you had left outta you.”
“Two shots, maybe. No more’n three.”
Give Gunner this, the man never doubted himself. It had been something they’d had in common, once.
Gavin didn’t have to make it all the way to shore here. There were river barges and the rowing galleys favored for transport up and down the Great River all throughout the delta. With the sun coming up and dazzling the eyes, it was possible Gavin might not be seen.
And there weren’t only sharks and crocodiles in this water, right? Gavin recalled hearing something about friendly river dolphins. Maybe that had been a myth, though. He’d heard they were pink. Friendly pink dolphins?
Right, those sounded real.
“ ’Ay. Fukkelot,” Gavin said. The man was waking, not far away. “And the rest of you.” He didn’t raise his voice, and he held a finger to his lips. He didn’t want Antonius hearing. “This here’s my musket. As some of you know, I paid all my magic to get it. I got nothing now, nothing but this. Time was, I would have demanded your service. Now, I just ask. If I ever done you a good turn—” He couldn’t help it. ‘If I ever done you a good turn’? It was a formulation to make him seem more like them, to fit in. Dissembling was as natural to him as drafting had been. “Hold on to it for me, would you? Don’t want nothing else. No share. You know I pulled my weight when it was time to pull. You know that without me cutting those lines free, we’d still be on the oars. I can’t compel you to do this thing, and I wouldn’t if I could.” Well, there was another lie. Harmless, though. “Hide this musket from the boy, and from the Malargos woman, and from my father, and from this one.” He nodded to Gunner. “Time comes, if I can, I’ll repay you a hundred times. But I can’t carry it with me.”
“Wa-wa-why not?” Fukkelot asked.
“Because,” Gavin said, giving his best devil-may-care grin. He always gave that grin when he was terrified. “I ain’t a good enough swimmer to carry it with me.”
He tossed the rifle to Fukkelot while the sailor cursed in appreciation and Gunner cursed in frustration and Gavin’s own throat swelled with trepidation.
It was stupid, but it was simple: stay and let what would happen happen, or risk crocodiles and sharks and sewage. Sewage shouldn’t be so bad during flood season, right? Or did that make it worse? Gavin stood on the gunwale, balancing without even touching the lines. He turned to the prophet, who was still watching him with burning eyes from across the deck.
“Orholam,” Gavin said, “do I have your full attention?”
“Always.”
“Good.” He cracked his neck right and left. “Because fuck you.”
He dove into the water.
Chapter 43
The water was warm and buoyant. That was Gavin’s first warning. Now that he was in it, swimming a stroke that one of the Guile house slaves had taught him long ago in a different life, he remembered that the confluence of the Great River and the Cerulean Sea caused odd currents and warm spots throughout the Great Delta—and that the sharks didn’t like the freshwater coming from the river. On the other hand, the crocodiles didn’t like the saltwater. Crocodiles were much more likely closer in to shore. So Gavin would be giving both kinds of predators a chance at him.
And yet. There was something of that old blue peace here in the sea. Better, of course, to float on a narrow blue luxin skimmer. Better to feel the sun like a caress on the skin, the water a cool counterpoint. Better by far to be able to see the blue. He felt the briefest pang of loss, and then pure, unadulterated rage washed over him.
Limbs cutting smoothly through the waters, he suddenly wished that a shark would come. He wanted to fight. No, he wanted to kill. He wanted the terror of almost dying and the mastery of killing, of triumph.
Insanity.
He headed straight in, not pausing to look behind. He shed the encumbrance of his shredded tunic and trousers to give himself every chance at speed. He saw a river galley ahead and swam for it. He was a faster swimmer than he remembered. Perhaps the leaner muscles of rowing were better suited to the task than the bulk he’d developed from shooting a skimmer from a dead stop in the water to flying across the waves. That was a freedom he would never feel again.
The river galley started moving when he was still two hundred paces out. Its inertia should give him a chance. He kicked.
No damn sharks. Please no damn sharks.
Water was streaming through his beard, causing a drag he’d never felt in his clean-shaven past.
Let them be blind to me, just for a little longer.
But the galley began moving, and within moments, it was no longer perpendicular to him. He cut the angle, but ended up only even with the riverboat, and then behind it.
And then it pulled away, and left him exhausted.
But he’d come to some sort of channel. He saw buoys to either side. He treaded water for a minute. When he looked back, the Bitter Cob was in the distance. But the oars were out, and it was turning toward him.
Oh, hells.
But another river galley was sweeping through the channel, from farther out. It would pass fifty paces south of him—so he swam back toward the Bitter Cob. In another minute, he saw he’d miscalculated, or the river galley was turning, because it was headed straight for him. It was going to hit him.
He started to swim off to the side, when he saw a fin and a dark shadow, that way. He turned, heart in his throat, and saw another to the other side.
It was too late to move either way now. The galley was on top of him, sending out little sprays to each side of the bow as it cut the water.
Gavin took the deepest breath he could, and flipped around, his feet pointing toward the hull, and dove backward. The hull slapped against his feet even as he sank, but he absorbed the shock and pushed off it, using the hull’s force to propel himself deeper into the water.
He arched his back as he sank, hoping he’d made it deep enough not to be crushed by the rest of the hull or ripped to shreds against barnacles. He flipped over, opening his eyes, ears full of water, pressure on his chest. The monstrous shadow was passing above him. It was impossible to tell exactly how far away the hull was.
There was good news, if you could call it such. There were no barnacles on the hull. Of course, it must be a riverboat. Easier to keep clean and moving fast.
It meant he could surface, and if he misjudged, it wouldn’t be his death by scraping and infection. Though if he shed blood in this water, the sharks were close.
He kicked, and felt his hand brush something rough and muscular. He barely saw the shape as the shark’s shadow disappeared into the murk. He lost a bit of air. One chance at this.
A bank of oars went down on one side, agitating the water. A sharp turn. It slowed the boat at just the right moment. Lungs afire, Gavin swam hard for the surface, nearly cracking his skull against the last edge of the hull as it passed above him.
He shot out of the water and clawed for anything, blinded by the spray of water.
His fingers caught in something, but his left hand pulled free immediately. He held on by his right hand
alone, body dangling and then pulled through the waves. He almost lost his grip before he was able to slap his left hand up into the net as well.
He blinked and coughed, trying to get his bearings. His legs were still dragging in the water and his hands were holding on to a thick net, the individual ropes cutting into his fingers as he tried to support his entire body’s weight on their narrow cords.
The net wasn’t empty. There was a tiger shark in it. Alive. One of Gavin’s hands was right by a pectoral fin. The other was stuffed nearly into its gaping, gasping mouth. Gavin’s weight was holding his hand away from those rows of razory teeth, but one thrash—
The shark thrashed.
Gavin dropped his hand and his body spun. With the motion of the boat dragging his body through the water, he couldn’t stop his momentum. The other hand got twisted painfully into the net. He almost cried out.
Then, being dragged backward, he almost cried out again at what he saw. Four fins in the water—no, six. All following the boat. Being dragged like this, he was the bait. And the boat wasn’t traveling nearly as fast as the sharks could swim.
He saw blood course down his extended arm. It wasn’t his. The shark in the net above him had been harpooned. With Gavin at the net’s lowest point, he became the path for the blood to course into the water. He was no expert on sharks, but he had seen them in frenzy—and it all started with blood.
“Blood’s drawin’ ’em, Kleos. See if you can get another before we get to the freshwater!” a voice called out above Gavin on the deck.
He heard the heavy breathing of a fat man on the deck above him, audible even above the hiss of the waves, and he could just see the tip of a harpoon bobbing in and out of sight.
Gavin almost called out to the man. But he knew how he looked. He looked like an escaped slave. Most mariners would claim him as the bounty of the sea, and immediately put him back on an oar. Without papers to prove he wasn’t a slave, there would be nothing he could do except try to convince them to ransom him—to whom? Would Karris hear about his plight before his father would? Would the men believe that the Prism himself had come to their boat, or would they dismiss it as the ravings of a madman?