I mulled it over. “That could be. But if you were her, wouldn’t you want to get rid of us as early as possible? Unless there’s some reason she needs us in her lair before she tries to suck up our souls to power her spells, why let us get any closer than she has to? Consider that the Valencia was wrecked way out at the southwest point of Vancouver Island, west of here, but Fielding implied that her base is east of here, so her reach is—or can be—fairly wide. But the farther she wants to reach, the lower her power. So she has to play it close to her vest unless she’s willing to come out of her place of safety.”
“If, in fact, it has always been the same sea witch. But if Shelly usurped her mother and Jacque is doing the same now, each wreck would have a slightly different profile, since the perpetrators, though related, are not the same.”
I hmphed and gave it a few moments’ thought. “Possible. I guess we won’t know until we are face-to-face with her.”
“Is that wise?”
“I don’t see any other way to fix the problems we have. We both need an explanation for the disappearance of Seawitch. You can understand better than anyone that I need to set some things right with those ghosts and Gary Fielding.” I saw a question forming on his lips and cut it off. “I can’t go into the reasons but I also have a duty to the world I live in—I didn’t choose it but it’s still mine. And that includes, at the moment, doing something to free the ghosts of Valencia and Seawitch and get Gary Fielding straightened out in some way.”
Solis narrowed his eyes. “If he caused the deaths of the people on board Seawitch, it will require more than straightening out.”
“That’s another thing we’ll have to deal with when it comes. We may not have any way to bring him to human justice. If that’s even applicable. You may have to swallow dealing with this my way.”
His face settled back into his customary stillness and he didn’t say another word.
I wanted to tell him he couldn’t do anything to change it, but I just shook my head and got up from the galley table, wincing as new bruises expanded the zone of discomfort in my back, side, and chest. “I need to dry off and warm up before my muscles freeze up completely.”
“Your rib. My apologies; I’d forgotten.”
“I wish I could. This is slowing me down more than I’d hoped. And it hurts!” I added with an attempt at humor that fell a little flat on our ears. “I’ll tell you this, though: If we have any chance to catch one of those merfolk, we’d better take it. We could use some more leverage than just the bell.”
I left him to put on an extra layer of clothes. While I was in the cabin Quinton and I had been sharing, I took another look at the bell. Fielding had mentioned it as he disappeared. Examining it now, at my leisure and without someone looking over my shoulder, I let my vision shift as I sank closer to the Grey.
The bell was no longer bronze but black, wrapped in green tangles that sent out long, thin streamers that vanished into the eastern distance of the Grey. The boiling agitation of the ghosts within pushed outward into a thick smoke of faces and forms twisted into one another. I put out one hand, wondering if I could just pluck the mess apart and let the ghosts go their own way, but a warning roar came from the ghosts and they flared red as if their agonized faces were washed in the light of a conflagration. I guessed that was a pretty strong hint that if I did anything to the spell that held them in the bell now—or here—the situation would only get worse. Though worse for them or worse for me, I didn’t know.
I eased back a little, still immersed in the Grey, still concentrating on the bell. “Well,” I whispered. “You wanted them and I’ve got them, but damned if I know what I’m supposed to do with them now.”
I raised my voice a little and tried to call the Guardian Beast, concentrating on its form as if my thoughts could pull it to me. “I could use a little help here. . . .”
Nothing replied except the ghosts of Valencia, moaning like the wind. I tried reaching out into the Grey, gathering threads and pulling or shaking them, begging the Guardian to show its misty hide, but nothing seemed to have any effect. I couldn’t even hear it in the distance as I sometimes did, going about its business. In desperation, I tried appealing to Will or whatever might remain of him, but to that the silence was even colder.
“Come on, you slippery bastard!” I shouted. “Get over here and tell me what I’m supposed to do! I’ve got the lost you wanted, but I’ll lose ’em if you don’t give me some clue what you want me to do with them!”
I turned again to the bell. “It said ‘Find the lost’ and I’ve found you. I think. But now it wants to play coy. Obviously just finding you guys isn’t the end of this situation. It’s not as if the Guardian actually cares about suffering, because it’s never done a damned thing about it before, so what’s the problem?”
“Power,” the ghosts sighed. They stretched out from the mouth of the bell in wisps and eddies, curling around me, dizzying me with their ever-changing faces and forms.
“Yes, all right. Your souls represent a storage unit of power, but why does it care about that now?”
“Now the cycle renews itself. Now the floodgates open. We were not alone.”
“Oh no . . . He—it—the Guardian Beast wants me to free all of the souls the sea witch controls? How do I do that? Without becoming one of you, too.”
They made the incorporeal equivalent of a shrug, billowing around and moaning minor-key arpeggios that moved the mist of the Grey in swirls of smoke and blackness.
If she had other captive souls—and she certainly had at least four from Seawitch and possibly more—then she kept them where she’d kept the boat for so long. “Open floodgates . . .” So the door was open and where creatures like the merfolk who’d attacked us could get out, others, like us, could go in. But wherever it was, it would have to be a place with a twin in the Grey. It had swallowed up living things before, so . . . it was a sort of Grey Brigadoon—a magical place that appears for a while and then disappears again, going about its business, undisturbed in the ghost world, until the door is open again. The door had opened long enough for Gary Fielding to slip out with Seawitch and the ghosts of Valencia, but it was closing again.
“We have to find the cove. Where is it? Can’t you tell me?”
The spirits sang on in their dreary, coiling tune of hopelessness and told me nothing. I pulled back toward normal, seeking warmth as much as respite from the company of ghosts, and sat on the edge of the bunk, staring at the bell.
It was heavy and plainly wrought with the little loop and a bead around the top and the flattened edge at the mouth upon which the name had been engraved. Not cast, so the ship hadn’t been important enough to make a custom casting, but enough to cut the name into the bronze lip rather than let it go without; enough to tie it to one ship only. A ship so long lost that only a single lifeboat and a few pieces of timber had ever been recovered.
I flicked a fingernail against the bell’s lip. It made a dull chime that rippled across the Grey and washed through me with a sensation of pressure and cold that made me cough and catch my breath. The green coils around the bell sparked bright for a moment, sending a pulse out into the distance along the threadlike tendrils that reached to the east. The ghosts moaned and flared into a bright curtain of terrified faces, frozen as if by an actinic flash. Then they faded away to no more than a distant whisper and the feel of ice water trickling down my back. The green light around the bell faded more slowly, lingering like a disturbed phosphorescence on the surface of nighttime waters.