The fog was dense but patchy. Toward the end of the morning watch the Weazel sailed out of a bank of white vapor into clear air. Everyone squinted in brilliant sunlight that burned off the rust-red sail and the white deck, and laid a net of dazzling diamonds across blue water all around. To starboard, long banks of fog hung just above the river like a range of low hills, their white peaks stirred and torn by the fresh cold wind; to port, the black anvils of thunderstorms towered along the margin of the nearside shore. Drifts of hail and rain swept across the sunlit water, falling from such a height that they seemed to come from cloudless sky. The Weazel passed through a brief hailstorm that had everyone running for cover. Small silver fish fell among the hail, jinking frantically as they sought escape through the scuppers. The storm ended as suddenly as it had begun, leaving a scattering of dead fish and shallow drifts of hailstones which quickly melted, leaving blood-red stains from the dust at their cores on the white deck.
Soon afterward, the picketboat breasted out of the fog bank behind the Weazel. Her light cannon flashed and flashed. Plumes of water driven by superheated steam shot up and collapsed half a league sternward.
“She’ll get the range soon enough,” Captain Lorquital told Yama. She stood at the stern rail, immense and foursquare, her day pipe jutting from a corner of her mouth.
She had put on a jacket stiff with braid, the better to make a target, she said. It had belonged to her dead husband, and its sleeves were pinned back from her wrists. “I sent a heliograph signal, telling her to lay back and cease firing, but she’s not responding. Of course, I suppose the cannon shots could be a kind of reply.”
“Let me speak plainly,” Yama said. The brief moment of hope had passed. He was convinced that the dredgers had failed him. That he had failed. “They do not want your ship or your cargo. They want only me. Lend me your dory. I will put out in it and wait for the picketboat to overtake me.”
Ixchel Lorquital drew on her pipe and looked at him calmly. “I will not let them take your ship,” Yama said.
“That’s a generous thought, but you’re only a passenger, and the ship is mine to dispose of as I will. My husband always told me that when passengers start giving advice, you should always agree, and then do nothing about it. But I’d rather not give you the false idea that you’ll be able to make such a silly sacrifice, so I will say now that I will not allow it.”
Yama stood his ground. “If you have any idea about what we should do, I would like to hear it. You have heard mine.”
Captain Lorquital turned her back on Yama and contemplated the picketboat. She said, “I am responsible for all my passengers, not just you. Besides, they’ll still sink us. They’ll want to leave no witnesses.”
“Then put yourself and your crew in the dory. I will stand here in plain sight. They will not chase you if they have me.”
Captain Lorquital said stubbornly, “I have sailed this ship for fifty years. I’ve been captain for ten. I won’t abandon her for anyone. Even you.”
Phalerus, who had the helm, said, “She’s right, dominie. If we get a bit of wind, we still might show those cullers a clean pair of heels.”
For the first time, Yama considered giving Captain Lorquital a direct order, but the thought that she might obey him with the same unquestioning alacrity as any machine was unnervingly horrible. Worse was the thought that if he tried to call upon machines to kill Perfect Corin he might be seized by his rage and kill everyone around him. No. He would avenge his father, but as an ordinary man.
Tamora came up onto the quarterdeck. She had put on her corset, and a fusil was slung over her shoulder. The bell of its muzzle flared above her shaven scalp. Captain Lorquital said mildly, “I do not remember ordering the crew to take up arms.”
“We can show our teeth at least,” Tamora said. “Why don’t you put back into the fog?”
“They followed us through the night and the fog,” Captain Lorquital said. “Why should day be different?”
At that moment, the man in the crow’s nest cried out. Patches of water around the Weazel began to churn, as if vast pumps were laboring to produce submerged fountains.
Glassy hummocks rose up, sputtering rafts of foam and slicks of fine silt. The crew crowded the rails, but Aguilar drove them back, shouting that they must see to the sail. Captain Lorquital told Phalerus to make hard to port, but even as the Weazel heeled about, more hummocks spurted around her.
A shoal of fish fled past the ship, swimming so frantically that they flung themselves high into the air. Some landed on the deck. They were as long as a man’s arm and their narrow heads and stiff dorsal fins were plated with dull red chitin; they banged and clattered against the deck as they thrashed toward the scuppers. Yama wondered if these were the sharers of the dredgers.
Caught between two rising currents, the Weazel began to turn in a slow circle. The sail flapped, filled, flapped.
Aguilar ordered it reefed, but before the sailors could obey a stay gave with a snap like a rifle shot. The broken end of the rope whiplashed against the sail and ripped a long tear in the canvas; the block which had anchored it tumbled end over end through the air and smashed into the deck a handsbreadth from Tamora’s feet.
The picketboat fired again. The cannon’s hot light flashed water into steam to the port side of the Weazel.
Water poured over the little ship’s waist; spray wet the torn sail from top to bottom. At the same moment, Yama saw something like a bush or tree rise a little way out of the water off the stern. It was white and pulpy, like something dead that had been floating in the water for a long time.
Captain Lorquital ordered that the sail be struck at once, and turned to Tamora and told her to take off her sword and return the fusil to the armory chest.
Yama laid a hand on Tamora’s arm. “They will take me in any case,” he said.
Tamora glowered. “I’ll throw away this blunderbuss, but I’ll keep the sword. It’s a poor thing, but it’s mine, and you’ll have to pry it from my cold dead hand.”
There was another flash of red light, but the picketboat was no longer aiming at the Weazel. Instead, she was firing into the water close to her, slowly obscuring herself in flashes of red light and billowing clouds of steam. The sailors aloft in the yards cried out and started to swing down to the deck, and the Weazel shuddered as if she had struck some underwater snag. Yama was thrown against the head of the companionway, and he clung there as the Weazel rolled to port and then righted herself violently. A forest of white branches was rising around the ship, as if the river was draining away from trees drowned an age past.
Tamora swore and unslung the fusil, but Yama, remembering his dream, told her to hold her fire.
All around the ship, creamy tentacles erupted from the water and rose into the air, questing this way and that.
Some ended in leaf-shaped paddles; some bore ranks of suckers; some were tapered and frayed in a multitude of feathery feelers. Huge, sleek arrow shapes moved beneath the churning surface of the river. Many were as long as the Weazel; a few were even larger. The sharers of the dredgers had come to the surface.
Captain Lorquital took Yama’s advice and ordered the crew to stand from the rails, and to put down the handling spikes and halberds with which they had armed themselves. Most of the sailors promptly climbed back up into the rigging, dodging tentacles which rose toward the mast and plucked at ratlines and stays as if at a harp. Aguilar stood at the bow, her cutlass resting on her shoulder, looking right and left at the questing tentacles as if daring them to get close enough.