Whisper of Waves (18 page)

Tour name, though most pleasing to the ear,” he said, “confounds my sense of protocol.”

“I do not understand,” she said.

“How do I address you?” he asked. “To show the proper respect.”

“My name is Ran Ai Yu,” she said with a cheerful smile. “It would be customary to say ‘Miss Ran,’ if that pleases you, Master Rymiit.”

Calling him “Master” and not “Mister” told him she had done some investigating of her own. She looked like some kind of exotic courtesan, some kind of porcelain doll, but she was a merchant through and through.

“Well, then, Miss Ran,” Marek said, “please, sit.”

He motioned her to a chair and stayed on his feet until she lowered herself to the fine silk cushion. Afraid she would be reluctant to come to his home he’d asked her to meet him at a particularly exclusive tea house that specialized in teas from Kozakura and Shou Lung. He chose the place not sure if he wanted her to feel at home, if he wanted her to see that he knew something of her culture and customs, or if he simply liked the tea himself. In any case, the surroundings were quiet and cultured enough that they could speak without the venue overwhelming the conversation.

“Your message made me…” she said, hesitating, searching the air above her head for something. “Apologies for not knowing the word… hdo qui?”

Marek didn’t recognize the language but guessed, “Curious?”

“Not certain, but wanting to know more?” she said, floundering a bit.

“Curious, yes,” he said.

She nodded and said, “Your message made me curious.” “Well,” he said, “it’s actually quite simple. It’s come to my attention through various sources here in the city that

your ship met with some misfortune and you currently find yourself unable to return home by that means.”

“The rescue of myself and my crew from the waters of your Lake of Steam was no secret, I am sure,” said Ran Ai Yu.

“Oh, no,” said Marek, beginning to sense an impatience in the beautiful Shou merchant. “It was quite the sensation, actually.”

“And you have some service to offer,” she prodded.

A serving woman came and set a small porcelain tea pot and two dainty little cups and equally dainty little saucers on the table. She took the handle of the tea pot, but Marek waved her off. She scurried away and he poured the tea, first into Ran Ai Yu’s cup, then into his. She never took her eyes off his face and he wasn’t even sure she breathed while he poured.

“I can return you, your crew, and your cargo to Shou Lung,” he said, “without the necessity of a ship or the considerable time it would take to sail.”

“You would accomplish this by the use of magic,” she said.

He nodded and sipped the tea. He found it bitter but tried not to let his face pucker.

“That will not be necessary,” she said.

Marek hoped she would think it was the hot tea that made his face flush, not the sudden anger that welled up inside him.

“You have made other arrangements?” he asked, even though he knew in some detail the arrangements she’d made.

“A ship is being built,” she said. She made no move to drink the tea. “Ah,” Marek said. “Time.” She raised an eyebrow.

“Time to build a ship,” he said, “and time to sail the ship.”

Ran Ai Yu shrugged.

“I could have you home on the morrow.”

“I thank you for your offer, Master Rymiit,” she said, “but with respect, decline. I am not of a mind to travel in the Weave.”

“I can assure your safety,” Marek promised.

“On a ship,” Ran Ai Yu said, “I can assure my own safety.”

“On a ship built by whom, may I ask?” Marek said, baiting her.

“Ivar Devorast,” she answered.

“Ivar Devorast,” Marek repeated. “I’ve heard of him. Though it may well sound as if I’m trying to sway your opinion in favor of my own service, I feel I have a duty to inform you that this Devorast character has a rather less than admirable record when it comes to the seaworthiness of his vessels. The locals here won’t have anything to do with him. He and his former employer were, in fact, responsible for the deaths of dozens of sailors in a particularly disastrous catastrophe at sea.”

As he spoke he tried to interpret the subtle shifts in her expression: the narrowing of already narrow eyes, the twitch of a lip, the flush of a cheek. She didn’t seem to understand every word of what he said, but Marek felt reasonably sure she knew what he was trying to say. She either didn’t believe him or didn’t care.

“The people of Innarlith,” Marek went on, not giving her an opportunity to rebut or remark, “are quite enamored of all things Shou. I should think that you will do well here, regardless of what you trade.” He lifted the delicate cup to his lips and sipped the bitter Shou tea. “This, for instance, can make you rich alone. Like me, you are a visitor from a far-off land, and would do well to make friends here. You would do well to understand not only their customs but their perception of yours.”

“Good advice,” she said, though nothing in the look on her face made it seem she really thought so.

“If you make the wrong friends,” he said, leaning in just a little, “or if you let people think that you have a

strong preference against, say, alternative forms of travel, you could cause trouble for the good people of Innarlith and not just yourself.”

He knew that she recognized the threat for what it was.

Ran Ai Yu stood, tipped her head, then turned and walked out of the tea room without a word.

Marek made up his mind as he finished his tea that he would give her two days to change her mind, then he would make sure she didn’t change anyone else’s.

35__

20Flamerule, the Year of the Helm (1362 DR) First Quarter, Innarlith

Blue-white lightning sizzled the air, boiling the rain as it fell around them. Ran Ai Yu whirled her thin, straight, double-edged long sword over her head in an effort to draw the creature away from the defenseless shipwrights. The men scattered in a blind panic. The beautiful Shou merchant grimaced when one of the monster fish fell upon a particularly unlucky craftsman. With a mouth as big around as the man was tall, the demonic beast bit the man so cleanly in half that his legs continued to run for fully three steps before falling into a twitching-mess on the rain-and blood-soaked deck. Her new ship, still not yet completed, christened in innocent blood.

The monsters towered above her. In all her travels, from far Shou Lung to the great western oceans and back again, Ran Ai Yu had never seen something so big that was actually alive. There were two of them, one just a little smaller than the other, more blue than green, but they were obviously the same species.

She thought they looked a bit like eels, but they stood twenty feet above the deck, which was twelve feet above the keel, and there was another five or six feet of wood-beamed dry-dock to the water below. Ran Ai Yu knew enough about

what it took to float on water to guess that perhaps two thirds of the things’ bodies were still underwater.

She swiped at one of them with her sword and when the creature dodged back out of the way their eyes met. Ran Ai Yu detected a certain intelligence—not quite human, but far beyond the blank stare of a fish. That unsettled her more, and she shivered in her rain-wet robes.

One of Devorast’s crew, a stout dwarf she’d heard called Hrothgar, stood his ground nearer the rail. The smaller of the monster fish clacked its massive, fang-lined jaws at him, sending sparks showering down at them all. The dwarf steeled himself against the nettling burns of the thready lightning and drove at the thing with a heavy wooden mallet in front of him. It was a tool, not a weapon, but in the dwarfs hands Ran Ai Yu had some trouble seeing the difference, and by the way the giant fish eyed the hammerhead, it felt the same.

Ran Ai Yu saw Devorast’s face as he spun away from the larger of the two demon-fish. He was irritated, not scared, the look on his face as plain as the danger they were in. If she’d had any time at all to consider anything but her own survival, Ran Ai Yu might have thought him more foolish than brave.

The larger fish spat a bolt of lightning that momentarily blinded Ran Ai Yu. All she could see for precious moments was the purple, twisting arc of the great spark burned into her vision. She heard the dwarf curse loudly in his own coarse language, and at the same time the footsteps of the fleeing shipwrights echoed away into the distance.

There was a thud, and Ran Ai Yu stepped back quickly, squeezing her eyes shut to clear the lightning burn. It worked just enough to save her head—she dodged left just as the smaller fish’s massive fangs crashed closed an inch from her ear.

As she dropped away to the deck, she brought her sword up. The blade bit into the creature’s slimy, fine-scaled flesh and dragged a bloodless furrow half a yard long in

the thing’s neck. The creature didn’t flinch, and made no sound. Its eyes rolled to follow her, but she detected no reaction to pain. Pulling the sword out of the creature and rolling away she saw that the wound had already closed.

Though the sword was of fine craftsmanship and had been in her family for six generations, it was not enchanted. Ran Ai Yu had heard tell of creatures that could only be injured by a blade forged with the Weave, but she’d never found herself face to face with one, and the prospect scared her more than the fangs, the sheer size of the monsters, or the lightning.

Hrothgar slammed his mallet into the side of the smaller beast and Devorast grabbed up a machete from a scattered pile of shipwright’s tools that littered the deck. Armed thus, Ran Ai Yu knew it was but a matter of time before the giant eels had tenderized them with their lightning only to eat them in one or two gory bites.

“It will not kill them!” she shouted even as Devorast’s machete sank deeply into the larger fish, producing no blood and not even a quiver of the eel’s skin to mark its presence.

She could see by the twitch in Devorast’s eyes and forehead that he was drawing the same conclusions as she.

“Well then what in the name of Clangeddin’s steaming bile do we use on the damned things?” the dwarf bellowed.

Ran Ai Yu had no answer, and she looked to Devorast.

The red-haired man banged his machete against the blazing white fangs of the larger fish, sending sparks of lightning scattering all around them. His arm jerked and he grimaced in pain. The huge creature snapped its head back and Ran Ai Yu thought it looked the same as the way Devorast’s arm had jerked,

“The mouth!” she said to the dwarf, but the weapon he was using was made of wood.

Still, Hrothgar struck at the smaller monster so hard he lost his footing on the rain-slick deck. The demon-fish took no notice of the hammer blow to its fangs and quickly

bent to take the dwarf in its powerful jaws. Hrothgar looked up into the face of his certain death and opened his mouth to scream.

Ran Ai Yu dived head first at the dwarf, barrel-rolling in midair with her sword held straight out in front of her. The monster fish opened wide its jaws to eat the dwarf and instead got the Shou blade lodged between two teeth.

Lightning discharged from the crease at the edge of the monster’s mouth and smashed into Ran Ai Yu. Pain flared through her body. Her jaw clenched, her chest tightened, her back arched, and her hands wrapped around her sword pommel so tightly she feared her arms would break, then they tightened some more.

Her left forearm snapped like a dried twig, sending another spasm of pain through her still-seizing body. Her vision dimmed and blurred and she was certain she was dying—passing out at least, and that would surely mean a hideous death.

She opened her eyes as wide as she could and only with the greatest effort of will she’d ever managed did she draw in a deep breath. It was enough to keep her awake, but her twisted, broken arm couldn’t hope to hold onto her sword and it stayed lodged in the monster fish’s gums.

The thing drew its head up, which revealed Devorast facing down its larger cousin.

Devorast glanced back at her and they made eye contact long enough for Ran Ai Yu to see the concern in his eyes. She knew it wasn’t a feeling he was entirely familiar with.

A shadow fell across her face and she looked up to see the smaller fish, her family’s blade still protruding from its mouth, falling toward her.

It means to smash me, she thought.

Ran Ai Yu couldn’t move at first, and when she finally put out her arm—the arm that bent at an agonizingly unnatural angle—to push herself into a roll, she screamed in pain.

It was Hrothgar’s turn to save her, and he did so by jamming his mallet to the deck head first, with the handle sticking straight up. The massive fish came down on the edge of the handle, which was too blunt to pierce its skin, so it succeeded in stopping the enormous bulk with barely a handspan to spare. Ran Ai Yu was not crushed.

Hrothgar grabbed her uninjured arm and pulled when the smaller fish reared up again, its too-intelligent eye lolling down to find its target once more below it. Lightning flickered around the sword in its teeth. The obscene blue-green folds of skin that sufficed the demon for lips twitched and quivered in time with the arc of blinding light.

Rather than try again to smash Ran Ai Yu or Hrothgar, the smaller fish shook its massive head. Fins like prayer fans fluttering at the sides of its neck. The sword bobbed and shook, and longer, brighter arcs of electricity played around it, but it appeared to be firmly embedded.

A strange noise like the tinkling of bells demanded Ran Ai Yu’s attention and she reluctantly tore her eyes from the thrashing giant.

Devorast whirled a length of chain over his head as the huge fish tried once, then one more time to bite it out of the air.

He looked at the Shou and bellowed, “If I miss, catch it!”

His eyes flickered to Hrothgar, who nodded. The bigger fish, having grown weary at last of toying with its prey, came in fast with its huge jaws agape.

Devorast let fly the chain but had to jump away at the same time to narrowly avoid being bitten in half. The chain flew toward the Shou long sword that the smaller demon-fish still hadn’t managed to tear from its gums. Had he not had to jump away, it might have hit its target, but instead it fell to the deck.