The Red Sea (28 page)

"We're close now," Winden said. "Just past those peaks."

The ridge she gestured toward looked about as surmountable as a pane of glass. The next day, though, the trail led to a pass through the worst of it. Within two hours, they looked down on the north shore.

"The Joladi Coast." Winden pointed to a small green island a half mile offshore. "And Spearpoint Rock."

It looked close enough to swim to. But the Current was visibly enraged, white-capped swells rushing past the small island and destroying themselves against the disintegrating cliffs beneath them, the wild spray slicking the rocks. The cries of shorebirds lifted on the wind. Carefully, the three of them made their way down from the heights. They emerged onto a narrow beach stretched between the two surrounding ridges like a hammock of white sand.

Winden stepped out of her sandals. She smiled. "We're lucky. This beach isn't always here. In the winter, when the storms are worse, it washes away."

At the moment, the waves looked relatively gentle—a small reef or break was buffering the shoreline—but they hammered the cliffs to either side of the barrier. The tideline was littered with kelp, coral, shells, bones, and sticks, producing a thick smell of salty marine rot. Thousands of crabs scuttled among the debris, clawing up the shreds. Hundreds of birds were there, too, but the refuse of the sea was so plentiful they weren't even bothering to go after the crabs.

"Is this where Eleni led her people?" Dante said.

Winden walked closer to the waves, inhaling deeply through her nose. "That is what they say. But it's my people saying such things. So maybe we should be skeptical."

She said this lightly enough that Dante didn't feel bad about laughing. He could feel the waves slapping into the coarse, pebble-strewn sand at the water's edge. Not only was there the Current to contend with, but also a steady wind out of the north. He soon gave up any idea of attempting to sail or paddle out to Spearpoint.

He didn't have to, though. Not when he could build a bridge there.

He moved to the left side of the cliffs. There, he cut his arm and fed his blood to the nether. The shadows moved as swiftly as baitfish, as if enlivened by the fury of the ocean and its obvious wish for everything on land to die. He sent the shadows into the rock where the cliffs met the shallow ocean floor, softening it and lifting it, meaning to extend it foot by foot toward Spearpoint Rock.

As soon as he softened it, though, the waves and tides dashed the earth away, scattering it across thousands of gallons of moiling water. Leaving him with nothing.

"Something wrong?" Blays said. "You look like you just caught the wife you don't have in bed with the friend you don't have."

Without a word, Dante moved to shape the stone again. But again, the water churned it away, the particles as fine as dust.

"I was going to build a bridge," he said numbly. "A causeway to Spearpoint. But the tides are sweeping it away."

He'd never encountered anything like it. Then again, he'd never tried to work the stone underwater before, with the exception of the boiling channels at the Dreaming Peaks, where it had been his goal to remove the rock. He backed off and tried another route: softening the rock beneath the surface and lifting it up, leaving the top layers hardened.

At a certain point, though, the part of the rock doing the lifting—the fluid part he shaped with his mind—had to be exposed to the violence of the waves. As soon as the fluid rock emerged, water slashed in, rasping away every non-solid trace. The shaped block fell down, collapsing back into the bed of the ocean.

He tried as many variants of this process as he could imagine. After a while, he moved to the right side of the beach to see if the Current was any weaker there. This failed as well. So he couldn't go through the water—but what if he could go under it? He dropped his focus into the rock beneath him, beginning a tunnel outward. But the rock was porous, shot through with fissures, seams, and plugs of material that felt solid, yet turned out to be loose sand. Sea water gushed into his tunnel, rendering him unable to continue.

He tried again and met the same result. Conceivably, he could back up into the hills where the rock was solid, dig down as deep as he could, and make his way across the strait. To advance the tunnel, though, he'd have to be inside it. Any flaw in the stone could flood the passage, drowning him. And the closer he got to the surface of Spearpoint, the weaker he feared the rock would become.

As his command of the shadows grew fainter and fainter, he trudged up the beach and plopped in the shade.

"I can't do it," he said. "The water's too strong to go through. And the stone's too weak to go under it."

Blays sat beside him. "Then it's a real shame you're such a one-trick pony."

"If you have another idea, what will be faster? Telling it to me? Or making fun of me?"

"Sure, but which one will I enjoy more?" Blays plucked a piece of grass sprouting from the sand and held it at arm's length, eyeing its tip. "Think you could grow a living bridge across it?"

Dante rubbed his arm, which was crusty with salt from the mist tossed ashore by the surf. "I expect it'll be bashed to splinters. But it's worth a shot. I'm spent, but Winden should have some oil left in the lantern."

Winden was staring out to sea, shaking her foot whenever a small crab climbed across it. Dante moved beside her. "Blays has an idea."

"Grow a bridge across it?" she said.

Dante chuckled. "That would be it. Think you can do it?"

"Bridging something that far, it would take me multiple days. The water would destroy it in the meantime."

"I can help you after I've had some rest. And what if we used the shells?"

She nodded in thought. "I'll try. See how far I can get."

Winden walked away from the swarms of crabs and toward a twisted banyan growing at the base of the slopes. Dozens of roots were driven into the soil. She opened a small cut on her hand. Nether winged to her. She diverted it into the banyan. Rope-like branches slithered across the turf, then the sand. As they neared the surf, they elevated to climb over the waves, extending over the water.

With the branches drooping under their own weight, Winden sent roots questing down into the waves. Their tips had barely sunk below the surface when a sharp crack rang across the beach. One branch snapped in half. It was flushed ashore in moments. A second followed. So did all the rest.

Winden muttered a Taurish curse. "Did you see that?"

"You mean, was I paying attention to my only hope for salvation?" Dante said.

"This won't work. If I make the tree longer and thicker, that will only give more area for the water to press against."

"I don't suppose you know any friendly dolphins who'd carry us across."

She eyed him. "You're speaking to me like you speak to Blays. Does this mean we're friends?"

"I think you're about the only person on this island I could be friends with."

"That answer, it wasn't an answer."

He moved his gaze to the waters, which stubbornly refused to be agreeable and part down the middle. "I'm sorry. It's hard to think of any of you as friends when I'm fighting for my life to get out of here. But maybe I'll never be able to leave. If so, then I hope you would be my friend."

She was quiet for a moment. "Maybe we could try again. Or try to grow something beyond the breakers. The water there, it's less violent."

Blays crouched down to poke a stick at a white-shelled crab. It waved its claws back and forth like a pugilist. "What if we're taking the wrong side here?"

Dante looked up. "Wrong side of what? Surely you're not suggesting we try to make a treaty with the Tauren."

"The Current is basically a god. Not one of the happy ones, either. More like the kind who has just been awakened from an eternal slumber. Why try to fight a guy like that? We should be trying to buddy up with him."

"You're talking about extending a bridge from Spearpoint."

"I was thinking a vine-rope. Like we used to cross the Broken Valley." He stood and bent backwards, stretching his back until he could touch the sand behind him. "The more flexible you are, the less likely you are to break."

"And then what do we do?" Dante said. "Drag ourselves along it all the way to the island?"

"Sure. If we get tired along the way, we can tie ourselves to it and take a quick rest."

"That sounds beyond dangerous and firmly into suicidal."

"If we'd ruled out every suicidal idea we've ever had, we'd be dead a hundred times over by now. There are no bad ideas. There are only ideas you don't have the balls to attempt."

Dante snorted. "That sounds like famous last words. But there's no harm in seeing if we can extend a vine across."

He had all but exhausted himself, but they still hadn't tapped their supply of shells. He got one out of the black wooden box they were using to keep the snails alive and summoned the nether from one of the shaden. He gazed across the water, homing in on the trees along Spearpoint Rock's southern shores. They were close enough that he could separate each tree from the ones next to it, but even with the shaden's power, he couldn't reach into the nether inside the branches. He groped blindly, casting about for any feeling of the death that existed in all things. He felt nothing.

"It's no good," he said. "It's like when the loons broke. It's too far away to work."

Winden tried her hand at it, drawing from the same shell he'd used. Sweat popped up along her brow. Five minutes later, she stepped back, shaking her head.

Blays crossed his arms. "I hate to see a great idea ruled out by a little thing like the fact it's physically impossible. Well, maybe if we sit here long enough, the Current will shove the entire island over here."

Dante ground his teeth. "It was a good idea. But it failed. So what else do we have?"

"I don't know. Grow wings and fly there?"

"A
real
idea."

Blays glared at him. "I just gave you two. That's as many as you've come up with."

"And we're still not there. So what else do we have?"

"Increasingly strained patience?"

"I have one," Winden said. "Spearpoint Rock. We don't have to reach it to speak to the Dresh there. All we have to do is go to the Mists. And wait for one of the Dresh to die."

"Which could take years," Dante said. "Longer, if only a select few know about the history of the ronone."

Blays poked at another crab. "That's really not a bad thought, though. Maybe we're being too narrow-minded."

They discussed this and several other possibilities, but as the day wore on, Winden's idea remained the only one remotely plausible. In time, Dante's mind refused to process anything at all. The only thing he could do was stare dumbly at the distant island.

"There's no point staying here," he said. "We should go speak to the other people along the coasts. Some shred of lore may have survived with them."

Blays glanced at the sun. "It's the middle of the afternoon. We're not going to have more than two hours to travel."

"Then we'll be two hours closer to our answers."

"We just got here. I don't think we should give up this fast."

"Everything we've tried has failed. We could spend ten years here and still not come up with a plan. It's like you said: we need to stop being so narrow-minded. Come at this from another approach."

"We have failed," Blays said. "But that's nothing new. Sometimes, it feels like all we ever do is fail. But we've never given up. No matter how foolish we feel. And that's why we win—because long after everyone else has gone home, we're still here, pounding foolishly at the solution."

"There's a point at which bashing your brain against a wall results in nothing more than scrambled brains."

"Do you really think we've hit that point?"

Dante licked his lips. His skin was hot from too much sun, which was doing nothing to improve his mood. "We'll stay here overnight. I'll be able to work with the nether again come morning. I'll try again to build another bridge. Make another run at a tunnel. But if the sun goes down tomorrow and we're not any closer, I think we should move on."

In case the rains returned, they moved to higher ground and built a lean-to. Dante used the rest of the daylight to explore their surroundings, searching for inspiration, or any clue as to how the Dresh had crossed the channel all those years ago. With no fresh insight in hand, he returned at sunset to eat some of the mashed san they'd carried with them, then slept.

Hours later, the cry of a bird stirred him half awake. He couldn't bring himself to get up yet, but as he lay there, with the waves washing in and out below their camp, it sounded as though someone had set fire to the inside of the world and the entire sea was boiling itself away. A pleasant thought: if the water were gone, they could simply walk to Spearpoint Rock.

As intrusive as a stranger in a dark room, a thought appeared in his head. He couldn't boil away the sea any more than he could leap across it. Quite recently, however, he had boiled an entire river, flushing away the Tauren as the enemy had pursued them into the Dreaming Peaks. That had involved channeling water. Hot water. As he'd coaxed open the rock holding it back, he thought he'd felt the source of that heat: the rock itself.

And according to Winden's story, when the Dresh had walked into the ocean, the water
had
boiled.

He jumped up from his bedroll. It was dark out, the stars blazing like condensed drops of heaven. He got his torchstone from his pocket and blew on it, illuminating his way down the makeshift trail to the beach. There, the birds were gone. Thousands of crabs crawled over the detritus in a living blanket, shrinking away from the light.

He cut his arm. Brought forth the shadows. And plunged them down into the rock beneath the sand. The stone felt cool, immobile. He went deeper. Not far below the surface, what felt like a jumbled column of rock was embedded within the rock around it. He touched its edges, confirming its shape, and followed it downward.

After a long ways—impossible to judge the true distance—his touch weakened. But the stone was warming. He delved until his hold went feathery, prone to slip at any moment. There, he softened the rock and melded it into the walls of the tube it had plugged. Fluid rose to fill the gap.