As Pandaras and Eliphas clambered up the ladder to the quarterdeck, the ship shuddered and a cluster of palps dropped onto the starboard rail. Their ends thrashed in every direction like a nest of blind white snakes, stretching thinner and thinner as they walked on their tips across the deck. The rail splintered under the mass of flesh.
One of the crew darted forward and with a cry stuck a knife in a rubbery coil. It was Pandaras’s friend, the boy, Pantin. Tentacles weaved about him. One plucked his knife from his grasp; two more shot forward and struck him, one around the neck, the other around his feet. Pantin barely had time to scream before he was lifted up. The tentacles pulled in different directions. A rich red spray spattered the white deck and, still clutching the pieces of the boy’s body, the tentacles fell backward into the river.
More tentacles poured over the rail. The Weazel began to list to starboard. In the yards, the sailors scrambled for better foot- and hand-holds; skinny Anchiale clung to the top of the mast with his long legs tucked into his chest while a tentacle explored the crow’s nest.
Yama remembered the polyps which had swum in the flooded chamber deep in the Palace of the Memory of the People. Those had long ago lost whatever powers of reasoning they had once possessed, or so Magon had said, and returned to their cisterns only through habit; yet they had helped Yama by breaking the bridge before the hell-hound could cross it. Yama suspected that these giants were different not only in size, but in intelligence, too.
They did not serve blindly. They were looking for something. Clinging to the rail, looking down into a roiling mass of tentacles directly below, he glimpsed an eye as big as his head. Its round pupil was rimmed with gold. It stared at him for a long moment, and then it sank beneath a rush of white water.
Yama knew then what the polyps were searching for. He vaulted to the main deck, landing on hands and knees amidst a slowly writhing nest of white coils and cables.
Someone shouted and he looked up and saw Tamora falling toward him, her sword held above her head. She landed on the balls of her feet, bounced up, caught Yama’s shoulders and shouted into his face, “I won’t let them kill you.”
“They are looking for me! They cannot tell the ships apart so they are looking for me!”
Something coiled around Yama’s thigh. A wet palp slapped his chest and a hundred fine threads crawled over his tunic. Tamora was caught around the waist by a tentacle as thick through as her arm; three more, stretched thin, whipped around and around her corset. She held her arms high, the sword crooked above her head.
Yama was frightened that she would do something that would get them both killed. He reached for her hand, but tendrils as thin and as strong as metal wire coiled around his wrist and dragged it down. Something wet and rubbery slapped onto his face, covering his eyes and nostrils. It stank horribly of fish and rotten eggs. He could feel a hundred tiny suckers fasten and unfasten over his skin as the palp adjusted to the contours of his face. It flexed and spread so that it covered his mouth. Something pressed at his lips and he was frightened that he would be smothered.
The pressure was insistent. Although Yama clamped the muscles of his jaws as hard as he could, something the size of his little finger slipped between his lips and probed at the crevices between his gums and teeth before withdrawing.
The palp dropped away from his face. The tentacle around his legs uncoiled and dragged away across the deck. All the tentacles were retreating, thickening and pouring backward over the broken rail. The ship groaned as she righted. Tamora lowered her sword and rested its square point against the deck, so that the sailors would not see how her arm trembled.
Yama ran to the broken rail, but already the sleek shapes were sinking away through choppy water stained with abyssal silt. High above, Anchiale regained the crow’s nest and cried out. Yama remembered to look for the picketboat.
But it was gone.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Storm Damage
Captain Lorquital insisted on sailing the Weazel in slow circles around the place where the picketboat had last been seen, but except for a few splintered planks bobbing on the chop nothing was found. The wind was rising, and it drove the fog banks toward the far-side shore. Waves grew higher, breaking in white water at their crests, lifting and dropping the Weazel as they marched past in ceaseless succession. At last, as it was growing dark, fog engulfed the Weazel again.
Captain Lorquital turned her ship to head into the waves, but the waves grew higher still, breaking over the pitching bow and washing the main deck. Wind howled and plucked at the rigging. The crew, in yellow oilskins, with lines clipped to their belts, worked aloft to storm-rig the sail while the Weazel now plunged bow-first into the high waves, now was battered lengthwise, heeling hard with spray dashing like shot across her. The awning and bedding on the main deck were washed away; so were the chickens and guineafowl in their bamboo cages.
The four passengers retreated to Captain Lorquital’s cabin. Pandaras felt the pitching worst and was several times sick in a basin, groaning profuse apologies between spasms. Tamora sat cross-legged on the Captain’s wide bunk and glared at Eliphas, who was trying to interest Yama in his theories about the cause of the storm.
Yama hardly heard the old man. He could still sense the minds of the gigantic dredging machines, far below. It was as if the little cabin—the pitching floor covered with felt rugs, the swinging lanterns which cast wild shadows across the tapestries on the lapped plank walls—was slowly turning into smoke, or was a picture projected onto smoke that was slowly dissolving to reveal the real world.
The dredgers had returned to their immemorial routines, singing each to each as, followed by flocks of sharers, they plowed river-bottom silt in the cold black currents.
Yama was caught up in their communion. Join us, they urged. Watch over us. Affirm us. Their siren song wound seductive coils in his brain. They claimed to know all the wonders of the world, for everything came at last to the river. They claimed to remember his people. They would tell him all they knew, they said, if only he would join with them in the joy of forever renewing the world.
Someone shook Yama’s shoulder and whispered in his ear. Master, Master, are you asleep! Another said, He’s not sleeping. Either he is in shock, or calling up the monsters of the deep has exhausted him. And a third said sharply, I have seen men like this after battle. If he is not wakened now he may never wake. The first voice again: His coin is filled with light! See? You see? Master, I am taking it away. I think that it is doing something bad to you.
It was all very far away and insubstantial, like the harmless chittering of agitated ghosts. Yama was only dimly aware of someone slapping his face, of cold cloths laid on his forehead, of being walked around. The songs of the deeps were more immediate than the voices or the manipulation of his body; the channeled abyssal plain more vivid than the pitching cabin and its swinging lanterns.
One of the ghosts said, It may kill him.
Yama tried to tell them that that was what he wanted, to escape his body and fall into the depths where the dredgers sang songs in which every word was true, charged with the wise love of the Preservers.