The Deepest Ocean (Eden Series) (20 page)

But what other choice did he have? Did he want to spend the rest of his life thinking of Maree, wishing he had done something, anything, to find her?

He took off his boots and slid his legs out the window, then sat on the ledge and pushed off. The cold water seemed to swallow him up before he fought his way back to the surface and grabbed a piece of floating wreckage. It was a flat span of wood that left his legs in the water. He would have liked them out completely, because he kept waiting for serrated triangular teeth to close on him as he swam for
Bowhead
, but just half his weight sent water slopping over the wood.

A man thrashing nearby screamed for help, so Julean leaned sideways as far as he could and stretched out a hand to pull him closer. Then he let go and drove his fist into the man’s face. It hurt more than he had expected, and he thought what a fool he was to risk damaging his hands.

Not that he was likely to have any chance to perform surgery again.
Hurry!

He wouldn’t pass as a Turean for long, but he could delay discovery if he at least wore their clothes. He slid off the wood, treaded water and kept the unconscious body afloat just long enough to pull off the man’s neckscarf and sealskin vest. Then he scrambled back on the wood and put those on. He could only hope that his shirt and trousers didn’t look too obviously Denalait; thankfully, as the physician he didn’t need to wear a full uniform.

Lightning snaked through the sky. Julean swam as fast as he could towards
Bowhead
, aware that even a Turean vessel would be less dangerous than the open ocean in a storm. The galley loomed up ahead, its deck growing more and more crowded as pirates were pulled aboard. Julean reached into a shirt pocket and drew out a scalpel.

The blade was obsidian, which meant it would both break and dull easily, but it was wickedly sharp, with an edge that steel couldn’t match. He drew it across his left temple, just below the hairline.

He didn’t feel pain, just a line finer than a heated wire. Then blood trickled hotter and wet down his face, hopefully obscuring it for any casual glance. Still swimming, he tossed the scalpel away. He had no expertise in fighting and had even less intention of being caught with the kind of tool no pirate would have been likely to own.

He didn’t shout for help because he didn’t think his accent could pass as Turean, but stretching out a hand worked once he was close enough to
Bowhead
. Someone tossed him a rope, and Julean pulled himself up. He could barely see from the blood running into his eyes by then, but hands grasped his elbows and hauled him over the gunwale, so he let himself collapse on the deck with a groan.

“Take his legs,” a Turean said, and someone else moved to comply. Julean let them carry him below to what he guessed was the infirmary, though the place they lurched into was very different from his scrubbed-clean surgery on
Daystrider
. It was overcrowded, stifling and poorly lighted. Bootheels gritted on sand as they laid him down on a floor pallet. He blinked one eye open, but drying blood kept the other shut.

A man wearing a necklace of closed oyster shells squatted beside him and pressed a folded cloth to his forehead. Julean supposed he was in charge. His hands certainly looked stained enough for that to be the case, and his face was lined with exhaustion.

“Where else are you hurt?” he said.

“Isn’t this enough?” Julean whispered.

The physician snorted. “Scalp wounds always bleed a lot. If that’s all you’ve got, hold this cloth. There are men dying.” He got up and went to see to another man being carried in, a man who left a red trail in his wake where his left leg had been.

Julean was happy to do anything which would conceal his face, so he peeled off his vest and his wet shirt, then tore a strip to wrap around his head, holding the cloth pad in place. The physician worked fast, but there were so many wounded and injured men that he was clearly overwhelmed as he cauterized stumps, bandaged wounds, splinted breaks and poulticed burns. Julean felt an irrational urge to help him.

Two small boys who might have been the physician’s sons came into the infirmary balancing trays of clay cups and struggling to hold them upright as the ship rolled from the lash of the storm. The physician didn’t seem to notice that as he moved from bedside to bedside, holding his necklace over each cup and opening one or another shell so granules or powder dropped into the water. Julean held up his cup hopefully, but the physician gave him an exasperated look and passed him by.

Oh well
. He had his own small supply of drugs wrapped in several layers of waxed canvas in a trouser pocket, and he had taken an anti-emetic before leaving
Daystrider
. The water was salt, as he had expected, but he drank it down in gulps and hoped he wouldn’t die of kidney failure before he found out what had happened to Maree. He had a battered silver hip flask filled with drinkable water, but he didn’t dare use that up yet, especially not in public.

The air smelled of sweat and burned flesh, and to Julean’s disgust he noticed rat droppings among the sand on the floorboards. He forced himself to eat when one of the boys came in with a tray of food, since by then he was desperately thirsty from the seawater. The storm was in full force, which didn’t help his stomach either, and the only comfort was that if he did retch, it wouldn’t be taken as a sign of Denalait blood. Half the men in the surgery looked queasy, and soon the smell of bile thickened the reek further.

The Tureans nearest to him seemed to notice that too, and since they could obviously do little about the smell—the rain was hammering the windows—they talked to take their minds off it. To Julean’s dismay, he realized the infirmary was divided. The sickest men were on one side, where the physician could devote the most attention to them, while the ones whose injuries weren’t as bad were on the other, which put him in very close quarters to men who were neither comatose nor delirious from wounds. He lay down and closed his eyes.
Take no notice of me.

“—if you kill one of them sorcerers, his spirit enters the beast,” a Turean was saying glumly. “Like skinchangers, they are.”

“Don’t be a fool, Torril,” another man said. “They die like any other man. Or woman.”

“Shame their Unity doesn’t.”

“Osenn,” another said quietly, “that man in the corner. You know him? He’s not off
Rorqual
, and that looks like silver he’s wearing round his neck.”

There was no answer—at least none that Julean heard—and another man muttered something about getting the physician to take a closer look as soon as he was done with the more badly wounded. Sweat broke out on Julean’s skin. He couldn’t make the mistake of underestimating them again. If he lived through the night.

All talk died as the ship tossed and pitched in the storm, but Julean knew the men near him were still awake and aware of his presence. If he tried to leave, it would confirm their suspicions and they would raise an alarm before he could slip out.
Unity
, he thought, echoing the word a Turean had spoken in mockery. It was enough of an effort pretending to be asleep without thinking of how to escape as well.

Unity
. He couldn’t bring himself to plead, not when his entreaties after his wife’s disappearance had gone unanswered, so the single word was all the prayer he could make. The infirmary grew quieter as the drugs the physician had administered started to take effect, and Julean realized he might have been fortunate
not
to receive any. He could imagine himself lying sedated and helpless as Tureans around him began to suspect who he was, searched his clothes and cut his throat.

Unity
, he thought for the third time.

On the other side of the infirmary, a window exploded inward with a shatter of glass and a thrashing flurry that sent bloodstained feathers into the air. Everyone started, and the men closest to the window cried out. A great bird trapped and dying within the ring of broken glass made no sound, only struggled in jerky motions with broken wings. Julean’s heart jumped in his chest as he rose.

“An albatross,” one of the men closest to him whispered, but none of them were looking in his direction now. On bare soundless feet, Julean slipped out of the infirmary.

Not three seconds after he was outside, he heard a loud, startled exclamation. He hurried along the cramped passageway—narrower than those on
Daystrider
—towards the hatch. The galley would be searched the moment they suspected a Denalait was on board, and there was only one safe place he could be even halfway certain of.

In a storm, the hatches would be locked down, but no one was near them. Water trickled around the edges of the one he reached, and he almost slipped on the tilting deck as he flipped the hasps back. When he pushed the hinged cover open, a cold deluge of mingled rain and seawater slapped his face and made him gasp.

Potential for hypothermia
, said his mind.
It doesn’t matter
, said his heart. He hurried up to the deck.

She struggled wildly, which only threw up a cloud of mud from the seabed and made the water murkier. The surface wasn’t so far above her, because she saw sunlight beyond the water, but her lungs burned and her pulse throbbed like a fist pounding the insides of her temples.

Then a huge shape blotted out the light and the shark lunged at her, jaws gaping open. Her last remaining air became a soundless scream of bubbles as multiple rows of teeth pierced her watersuit effortlessly, sinking into her flesh. And all around her, the waters turned to blood.

A shake to her shoulder brought her eyes snapping open and for a dazed moment she wasn’t sure where she was. Then Darok’s arms went around her, pulling her up from the bunk, and she held on to him as tightly as if she would slip back into the water if she let go. Her heart hammered, but she was no longer so afraid.

Belatedly, she realized he was sitting on the edge of his bunk and holding her on his lap. Her face was pressed against his shoulder, so she turned her head just enough to talk, grateful he didn’t ask her what was wrong.

“I didn’t mean to disturb you,” she said, when she was certain she could speak normally again. “I hope I didn’t scream.” That might have woken everyone else nearby as well.

“No, you didn’t.” He stroked her shoulders.

“It was just a nightmare.” She didn’t want to tell him anything more, partly because she knew he distrusted the shark, but more from caution. Once she had made the mistake of confiding in another Yerena about the nightmare, and within days, everyone in Whetstone had known about it. Such a weakness, as her mentor told her, should have been privately corrected or at least hidden, rather than being made public knowledge.

Darok’s silence was comforting, though, and she started to relax as he smoothed his palm down her back in slow warm touches that could have lulled her back to sleep, given enough time. He didn’t have any bone-deep familiarity with Whetstone’s ways and customs, but for the first time she felt that might not be such a disadvantage, because he wouldn’t think the dream meant there was something wrong with her, nor would he use it against her. She wondered what he
would
do instead.

“I was drowning.” Just remembering it made her shiver. “Something was holding me down below the surface so I couldn’t swim. Then the shark…bit me.” That hadn’t been a curious, exploratory nip which would have taken off just a limb, either. “I thought it was trying to swallow me.”

His hand went still on the small of her back. “I see.” He held her shoulders, moving her away just enough that she knew she wouldn’t like what he was about to say. “Yerena, could this rogue Seawatch operative control your shark?”

“No,” Yerena said at once, more in shocked denial than because she’d fully thought about it. Forcing down her emotions, she made herself consider the question.

“No.” She felt relieved that her voice at least sounded calm and certain—and that it was too dark for him to see her face. “You need contact to establish a link that strong.”

“But he’s had contact with your shark. Through the orcas, I mean.”

The skin on the nape of her neck prickled. For the first time she wondered how the rogue operative had managed to control a killer whale pack. Impossible for even Seawatch to net four whales and drag them back to Whetstone for him to bond with them, so he had to have met the whales in the open ocean. That meant either he had been on a ship which had risked its safety to chase killer whales, or he had learned to form a link without his being physically present.

When she had first learned to make the shark do what she wanted, it had been in a training pool and she had knelt on a step just above it. She had to lean over, submerge her arm and make the unfed, untamed shark—only a week old and already longer than she was tall—veer away from her.

She tried to imagine doing the same thing through a proxy, using another creature’s senses to detect the presence of the shark she needed to subdue, watching it through another set of eyes and making a leap from mind to mind, perhaps just instants before the shark could tear into the intermediary she’d used. Not easy. But impossible? She wasn’t sure.

“I don’t think that would work,” she said slowly. “For one thing, it’s difficult to link with a shark that’s panicked because you’re trying to kill it.”
Or at least it
should
be difficult
. “For another, if he could do that, the shark would be dead by now.”