The Farthest Shore (Eden Series Book 3) (27 page)

No, whoever controlled the kraken had to be a Denalait too.

So the only question was whether the person had joined the Tureans voluntarily. Kovir considered that while he gave the shark her head, but decided against it. Operatives in the field were always made aware of Seawatch agents who had disappeared, but he hadn’t been given any such information—and if any trainees had been able to link with abyssal squids, they wouldn’t have gone unnoticed in Whetstone for long.

On the other hand, the person might have been taken by the Tureans before he or she could join Seawatch. Trainees were always selected young, when they were most malleable, but that adaptability and impressionability could just as easily have been used by their enemies. Which made his task simultaneously easier and more difficult. He’d be facing someone who might be young enough to reach, not to mention curious about Seawatch—but who’d been raised by Tureans and who was probably loyal towards them, sickening though that was. Even if the two of them could talk, he would have to be very careful what he said.

Still, at least the person was physically in the same place as the kraken, so when the shark caught its scent and followed the trail he would find them both. That was far better than searching for a galley which didn’t exist.

He kept his touch on her light, just enough to feed his memories of the kraken into their link so she knew what they needed to find. She swam in steady, widening arcs that carried them away from
Checkmate
, and despite the layer of grease he wore beneath the watersuit, gooseflesh prickled his skin. It was too dark to see anything, and he didn’t have a knife any longer.

The shark tensed. Kovir slipped into her mind. The night ocean was full of scents and whispers, but she could easily discern the ones she recognized. Her tail flicked and she swam, head turning from side to side occasionally as she made minute adjustments to her new course.

Good.
Kovir let her feel his pride. He might not have been given the largest or even the most easy-tempered shark, but when it came to hunting, she was superlative.

He put his mask on and stayed half in her mind to gauge how far they were from the kraken. She closed the distance much too fast for his liking, and he realized the kraken had been closer to
Checkmate
than he’d expected.
Trying to reach the Tureans
. He had to make certain that didn’t happen.

The smell was pungent and putrid, a mixture of the kraken’s flesh both healthy and rotting, but as the shark veered away, guided by instinct to circle her prey, something bumped Kovir’s leg hard and was gone. Startled, he jerked his foot up, then felt down from knee to flipper. Everything was intact, but he didn’t need any more reminders that there were other hunters in the water.

He couldn’t see the kraken any more than he could see the other sharks. He considered his options and decided there was only one thing to do. And if Captain Juell had been wrong about a submersible, it would be the last thing he would ever do.

“Stay calm,” he said to the shark, “and don’t worry about me.”

He swung his leg over her dorsal and slipped off her back.

She was swimming so fast she was gone at once. Kovir floated alone in a sea darker than the night sky, completely disoriented. He couldn’t even feel the kraken’s huge body anywhere near, since he was buffeted on all sides by rocking water. None of the solid shadows displacing the water touched him yet, but that could only be staved off so long. He knew all that saved him was the unfamiliar smell of his suit and the coat of grease he wore beneath it, plus his refusal to show fear. His pulse was only a few beats above normal, and he wasn’t flailing about desperately, so he was doing as little as possible to draw the sharks’ attention.

It was the kraken’s attention he needed, or better yet, that of its controller.

“I’m here to talk!” he shouted. Raising his voice proved to be more difficult than he had expected, because no one in Whetstone was so undignified as to yell. “Whether you know it or not, you’re one of us—not just a Denalait but part of Seawatch!”

Another shark bumped into him from behind, not in a collision but as if to test the consistency of his flesh. Kovir jolted, salt splashing into his mouth. The shark was gone immediately. He spat, then shouted out again, but ice coiled in the pit of his stomach, and nothing happened in response to his calls. The splash of waves all around him—and of large powerful bodies moving through those waves—drowned out his voice.

In that moment he knew he was out of his depth, and not just literally. He’d been so accustomed to having a shark on his side that he hadn’t thought of what it would be like to be in the water with a dozen of them, none of which had a connection to him. He hadn’t thought about it because he hadn’t been able to see them, because he had been single-mindedly focused on finding the kraken and because Seawatch had taught him never to be afraid.

I need to get away
. He reached out for his shark’s mind, to guide her back to him.

A swift surge of water pushed into him and the kraken’s arm followed. Before he could recover, it curled around his body. He fought to be free, but even the slime covering its skin and the smoothness of his watersuit made no difference. The huge suckers on the undersurface of the arm, each wide as a dinner plate, clamped against him with crushing force and the arm lifted him clear of the water.

“Haven’t you wondered why there aren’t people like you among the Tureans?” he shouted. He wore thick sharkskin gloves, but they would have no effect on the tentacle even if he clawed at it, and he deeply regretted giving Captain Juell his knife. All he could do was keep calling out, hoping against hope he would be heard. “Haven’t you wondered why they don’t trust you? It’s because you’ve got the same talent I do, and you shouldn’t be alone—”

The arm pulled him down so fast he had no time to do anything other than suck in a single breath. The water closed over his head.

Blind and deaf now as well as helpless, he made one last reach for the shark—not to draw her closer for help but to send her away, back to
Checkmate
. At least that way Captain Juell would know what had happened to him. Instead, the fury that roared back at him through the link overrode everything else, and he knew she wasn’t going anywhere.

As the arm pulled him closer, she darted in. Kovir couldn’t see her, much less maintain the link, but the water turned to a snapping, thrashing chaos. Not that it mattered, because everything beneath his ribs burned, and the huge beak had to be only a few feet away. His heart felt swollen in his empty chest, pounding so hard he thought it would burst.

Light flared in the water before him, enough to illuminate the kraken’s huge eyes. Kovir’s vision went yellow-white. In the dark, the brightness was all the more intense, blazing painfully down into the depths of his head. He felt the shark twist to get away and realized she was just as blinded. His teeth were clenched, every muscle in his frame and all his willpower fighting the urge to breathe, and it was a battle he lost. Water rushed into his nose and mouth.

The kraken’s arm hurtled up, and when he coughed and gasped reflexively, he did so in the air. Too drained to resist any longer, he sagged over the thick arm and sucked in breath after shuddering breath, well aware he could be dragged beneath the waves again. He had never come so close to drowning before.

When the arm lowered, though, it set him on something wet and solid and mercifully still in the open air. Fireflies filled his vision, the aftereffects of the light that he realized was a defense mechanism—in the depths of the abyss, the sudden glow would be just as shocking and disorienting—but the arm loosened and slid away.

Shivering, he touched the shark’s mind. She was more startled than hurt, and now that he was calmer, he soothed her as well while he felt around with a gloved hand. The kraken’s skin was stretched tight over something much harder, something that sloped up into a cylinder.

The submersible
. He reached out, groping, and his fingers closed over the mouth of a hatch.

Ralcilos kept watch on the quiet deck, glancing at the hourglass every now and then, but he watched Miri out of the corner of his eye as well. She had asked whether she could sleep in her cabin, but he had told her to stay at the stern with everyone else who wasn’t on duty, because he wanted her where he could see her. Something about her made him suspicious.

He tried to think what it was. Nothing obvious, just her…nervousness, perhaps? She was jumpy, although it could be because she really was out of her depth. She’d told him how she had stowed away—and she did have an impressive scar to show for it—but why would a stowaway be given a cabin if the captain disdained her so much he’d made her scrub the deck?

For that matter, it was also odd that the captain had figured out she was half-Turean. Ralcilos could see her resemblance to Jash, especially the full mouth and the widow’s peak that emphasized the shape and symmetry of her face—but that was a resemblance to Jash, not to her father’s people as a whole. It wasn’t as though she was an Iternan or a Bleakhavener, with the kind of facial markings that would tell anyone where she hailed from. Nothing else about her was Turean, from her clothes to her accent to her name, so it was strange that the ship’s captain had discovered that about her so easily.

Ralcilos could understand Miri losing her nerve and confessing what she was, but if she’d lied about that, she could have lied about a great many other things. And at first he had been so intrigued at finding a half-Turean on board that it hadn’t occurred to him to wonder why exactly she had bargained to save the lives of half the crew.

That she was half-Turean he didn’t doubt, because he’d seen her drink seawater with no distaste and no ill effects afterwards. But it was starting to seem likely that she had compromised loyalties, and that he couldn’t tolerate from anyone.

A soft rumble echoed through the deck, a sound vibrating through the boards almost as deeply as a seaquake. Everyone at the stern roused, but Miri was up first, as if she hadn’t been sleeping at all. Ralcilos waited for Larl or Orvec to shout to him from below, but when there was no sound he went over to the stern. Exactly three hours had passed since he’d given the engineers an ultimatum, he noticed.

“Is that what I should expect to hear?” he said to Miri.

She nodded. “But it takes a little time for the ship to move.”

“How do you know?” Given how secretive the mainlanders were about the workings of their new ships, he wouldn’t have thought they would confide anything to a half-Turean. One more mark against her.

“I’ve lived on this ship. I know how long it takes to start the engine up.”

Ralcilos had to admit that made sense. “Well, how long does it take?” he said, gesturing Cuyven and Liggar to join him.

Miri shrugged. “Perhaps half an hour.”

If that was how long an inevitable delay took, it was bearable, but the silence was not. “Hold the deck,” he said to Kaig. “We’ll make sure everything’s in order below.” And if the delay lasted longer than half an hour, he would be tying more than one noose.

He climbed down with a lantern in one hand, listening intently. The sound grew louder as he neared the engine room, and when he was only a few yards away from it, he called out for Larl or Orvec. Neither of them answered.

The door of the engine room was open, and Ralcilos stopped at a distance and an angle where he could see just inside. Even in the poor light, the stains on the floor were visible.

“Bring the captain here,” he whispered to Liggar and drew his knife with his free hand.

Liggar slipped away. Ralcilos motioned to Cuyven to move to the other side of the passageway and the two of them waited in silence. Shadows within the engine room moved, but no one emerged. The machinery seemed to be working steadily, and waves of heat washed over them, so he was soon sweating as much from that as uncertainty.

Empty-handed, Liggar appeared at the end of the passageway, and before he crossed the distance between them, his face told Ralcilos what had happened. “He’s gone?”

Liggar nodded.

In that moment, Ralcilos knew how he had been tricked. “Bring Miri,” he said.

Chapter Eleven

Endgame

It’s a book of blood.

Kovir knew he was being fanciful, which was something his mentor in Whetstone had warned him against once or twice. But either nearly drowning had put a crack in his usual composure, or the inside of the submersible was such that he couldn’t have looked at it blankly and dispassionately anyway.

He stayed close to the hatch, because no matter how many Dagran sharks were out there in foreign waters, the submersible was much more disturbing. He’d grown up in Whetstone, which was underground, so he wasn’t afraid of small, enclosed spaces, but this was far from the familiarity of clean worn-smooth tunnels through rock.

There was nothing mechanical or even metallic in sight, except for the floor. The surface of the walls and the roof folded over and over on itself, like the pages of a book if those pages had been blue. Veined, he realized when he dared to take a closer look, and they glistened with what felt like a clear jellylike substance that he supposed prevented them from being damaged or drying out. It was like a chamber of horrors.

All right, stop that,
said a voice that sounded sterner than his mentor would have been.
Don’t exaggerate.
If he survived long enough to go back home and be debriefed, that kind of talk wasn’t likely to make anyone in Seawatch proud that he’d dealt appropriately with the experience.

He pushed his mask down below his chin and looked around. Coral protruded here and there, giving off an odd luminescence. He couldn’t imagine anyone living here for so much as a day, but it occurred to him that Seawatch would be very interested in some of the modifications to the submersible. The coral was just one of those, because he’d never seen anything like that in Whetstone.

“In here,” a voice called, echoing.

Kovir jumped, lost his footing—since he still wore his flippers—and stumbled back before he could recover his balance, struggling not to touch the walls as he did so. His heart had been pounding hard enough from his near-drowning, but now it felt about to punch through his chest. He licked his lips, tasting seawater, and tried to speak normally.

“Who’s there?” His voice was a croak. “Where are you?”

“To your left.”

The voice was disconcerting, but he couldn’t just stand there. He hadn’t shut the hatch, since being in that place was bad enough without being trapped too, unable to breathe fresh air. But after a moment’s thought, he decided not to close it at all. Unless the kraken could close that itself, it would have to remain at the surface or drown its controller.

Trying to stay as far as possible from the folds in the walls and roof, he inched towards the left, squelching with every step. His eyes had adapted to the pale light by then, and he glanced to either side. No weapons in sight, unfortunately. He looked forward and stopped where he stood, outside a half-open door.

The hollow space had distorted the voice of the kraken’s controller, but now he could see it was a girl. For a moment, he thought the kraken was digesting her, since half her body disappeared into fleshy folds that continually moved around her. His stomach lurched. Far worse were the wet silvery threads draped everywhere, looking like strands of saliva—had the Tureans installed her in the beast’s stomach on purpose? She looked like a fly in a web.

He realized he was standing there with his mouth half-open and shut it.
Say something, fast
.

“My name is Kovir Stripe Caller,” he said, falling back on Seawatch protocol. A man always greeted a woman with her name, if he knew it. If he didn’t, or if he was speaking to another man, he introduced himself and waited for a response.

There was none, since the girl only looked at him with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity. Kovir reached out for something familiar and infinitely safer in comparison, his shark’s mind. She had recovered from the shock of the kraken’s luminescence by then and was busy driving off the other sharks in the vicinity.

He sank a little deeper into her mind, to make sure she was all right. The Dagran sharks were more numerous, but she was both larger and more aggressive than them, even the females, so they kept their distance. He disengaged, realizing that the girl hadn’t said anything to him yet.

“You’re supposed to tell me your name,” he said. Maybe she didn’t know that. “It would be Yerena.”

She kept looking at him, her eyes as wide and fixed as those of the kraken might be. He stopped wondering about the proper suffix for the controller of an abyssal squid, and started feeling uneasy. If she decided killing him was worth her own life, she could make the kraken submerge. The rush of water through the hatch would drown him, since he felt too tired to struggle past that.

To his relief, she finally spoke. “How did you get that mark down your face?”

Kovir reached up, wondering if he’d been cut and hadn’t noticed it. He stopped when he remembered he was wearing his gloves, and the girl raised a hand to indicate her left eye. Translucent strands moved as she did so, swaying gently, and she lowered her hand again to lie by her side.

“The tattoo?” He was on slightly more solid ground now, and her showing an interest in Seawatch customs was a very good sign. “All operatives get these once they’re bonded and completely trained. It shows you work for Seawatch and it shows what kind of shark you have. A stripe means a tiger, a tail means a thresher, a fin—”

“How old are you?”

It wasn’t polite to interrupt, but he supposed that since she had been raised by Tureans, she didn’t know any better. “Seventeen. How old are you?”

“Eleven.” She seemed completely intent on him, and he supposed she was too used to her surroundings to be bothered by them. “How old were you when you started working for Seawatch?”

“When I started training, I was seven.” He wondered how old she had been when she’d been abducted—was there a diplomatic way to work that into the conversation? “Most of us are around that age, but some new recruits get chosen earlier if they’re very talented.”

She stirred a little against the smooth ripples of the kraken’s flesh, tilting her head as if trying to look past him into the rest of the submersible. “Do you know where Kaig is?”

“I don’t even know who Kaig is. One of the pirates?”

“We’re not pirates.”

“You’re not them, Yerena.”

“Don’t call me that. My name’s Nuemy.”

Kovir had all the patience in the world when he worked with his shark, but he wasn’t so used to dealing with another person—especially someone so much younger than he was. In Whetstone, that would have made her a trainee compared to him, so she would have been much more agreeable and respectful as a result. As opposed to trying to drown him and then contradicting him, which was like adding insult to injury.

He told himself to remain calm, because he couldn’t fight her into changing her mind or her loyalties. Maybe getting closer to her would be a good idea. He didn’t want to touch the kraken’s bare flesh or the liquid threads hung about her, but it felt strange to keep such a distance between the two of them. Besides, he had his watersuit to protect him.

So he paced slowly and carefully into the small room, aware that she was watching his every step, and knelt beside her. “That’s a Turean name and you’re Denalait.”

“That’s not true.” Her response was immediate and firm. “I was raised in the islands. I’m not one of you.”

Kovir didn’t mind arguing when he knew he was right, but their time grew limited. He looked around and saw some sort of sealed flasks within reach—no, they were pods, as organic as the rest of the submersible. Of course.

Picking one up, he shook it just enough to slosh the little liquid inside, then pried it open and took a sip. “Why isn’t this seawater?”

Her lips tightened, and he knew she’d understood. “I’m Turean by heart,” she said finally. “Even if not by blood.”

How poetic. Kovir guessed her captors had taught her that one. “Did you choose to grow up in the islands? Did you choose to be Turean?”

She glared at him. “Did you choose to be a mainlander?”

“No, because I’m Denalait by blood. But if you never made a free choice about which side of the battle to fight on, how can you say you’re Turean by heart?” He set the pod back down. “Don’t tell me the Tureans never treated you differently, because I know they did. They had to. They had no choice, because they know as well as I do that you’re Denalait by birth and by blood. Like I was telling you out there.”

The muscles in her face had tightened as he talked, the look in her eyes smoldering, but the last thing he said made her frown instead. “You were telling me?”

“Yes. I yelled at the top of my voice.”

“I didn’t hear a word.”

“Then why did you stop trying to kill me?”

Her right hand jerked up. He froze, which was a good thing, because the blade between her fingers jabbed the inside of his thigh. The knife was short, but he was close enough that she didn’t exactly need much reach and he felt the sharp point through his watersuit. If he had thrown himself back to get away, that might have been enough for the blade to rip cleanly through his watersuit and probably take the blood vessels in his thigh with it.

“I didn’t stop,” she said.

Kovir stayed motionless. He could have grabbed her arm and wrenched the knife away—tired though he was, she had arms like bird bones—but he remembered the shark’s dominance displays.
Never show you’re afraid.
Though even his shark’s teeth had never come that close to his groin, and everything there seemed to be trying to shrink in on itself.
Stay calm.
If she had really wanted to kill him, he’d have drowned out there and would probably be eaten by now.

He waited for what felt like an hour, breathing with deliberate slowness so his rapid pulse would ease as well, and finally she took the knife away. He crushed an urge to slump in relief.

“Your tattoo,” she said. “I saw a woman with one of those. Long ago.”

Kovir swallowed and managed to speak. “Her name would have been Yerena Stripe Caller.”

Nuemy blinked. “Is everyone you know called Yerena?”

“Everyone who isn’t called Kovir.”

He thought that was rather witty, especially for someone recovering from a nasty surprise, but she just stared at him. “In the islands we don’t need to share names. We each have our own.”

Kovir wasn’t sure how to reply to that. People had their own names in the rest of the mainland too, but he liked the system in Whetstone, because he could take one look at people there and know what they were called, not to mention what kind of sharks they had. It was predictable and made sense. But he supposed she was indoctrinated in Turean ways. Even if she wasn’t, it was hardly the time and the place to make her familiar with Seawatch’s customs.

“Go on with what you were saying,” he said.

Nuemy’s face had a distant look that reminded him a little of the focused concentration he saw on other operatives when their minds fused with their sharks’ senses, though in her case he guessed it was because she was starting to recall her past. Perhaps that was also her mind reaching for something unfamiliar.

“That woman asked me to play a game,” she said.

Kovir almost smiled. “With a little black-and-white puppy.”

“Mine was brown.”

“You had to make it come to you—”

“—without calling to it or doing anything.” She frowned again. “I don’t remember how I did that.”

He sat back on his heels, thinking how he’d felt when he’d been told to call the puppy, which had seemed more interested in chewing on a length of sodden rope than paying any attention to him. The tattooed woman who’d brought the puppy to his father’s house had told him to imagine himself in the puppy’s head, to summon it silently and to give it a good reason to come when he called.

All of which had seemed bewilderingly complex to a seven-year-old who’d never tried anything like it before. The woman had told him he wouldn’t be punished if he failed, patting him awkwardly on the head as if to assure him of that—
like I was a puppy too
, he’d thought—but he hadn’t wanted to fail anyway.

“I imagined its mother,” he said. “That warm doggy smell, soft fur, and she’d be lying on her side so her…um, you know. Milk.”

“Yes, I know where milk comes from.” But the sarcastic edge left her voice and she spoke more quietly. “Then you had to make the puppy go away. You won that game.”

“You did too,” Kovir said, understanding. She’d won the game, and that had identified her as a potential operative to the Tureans, a useful pawn. “But that meant they got to you before Seawatch could.”

Muscles tensed in her jaw. “Kaig looked after me. He still does.”

“Then where is he?” Kovir shot back.

“He’ll be with
Checkmate
. I can go back there.”

She probably could, now that his shark had driven off the Dagran predators. He touched her mind, doing his best to urge her away from the kraken—the last thing he needed now was for her to attack it, making him and the girl fight each other involuntarily.

“Yerena. I mean, Nuemy. Please listen to me.” He knew he was playing for the highest stakes now. “Do you know what those ships were doing?
Mistral
and
Wrack
, those ships you sank? We were competing in a race, that’s all. Not fighting the pi—the islanders, not trying to take anything away from them. We just wanted to be left alone.”

Her face had all the blank composure any trainee in Whetstone learned quickly, so he couldn’t tell if that had reached her or not. How was he was supposed to appeal to her when she’d grown up among Tureans, when she didn’t know any of Seawatch’s customs or values?

Wrong
, he realized suddenly.
She knows one. Maybe the most important one
.

“We didn’t choose to fight you,” he said, “any more than the kraken chose to leave its home, be turned into…this, and to be a part of the war. The kraken probably just wants to be left alone to survive and heal. So do we. Please. Let’s call a truce and we can live through this, maybe even stand a chance of returning home. Otherwise, we’ll all go down for good together.”