“Mother taught me how to read sign in the wild. She taught me to notice variances in everything I looked at. Especially things I thought I already knew. If anything, I’ve neglected what she taught me this time.”
Kwan Yung pursed his lips and shook his head slightly, but he didn’t argue the point. “Did the sailor know this paper was here?”
“There’s no indication of the binding having been disturbed before I lifted it. If I hadn’t felt the discrepancy beneath my fingertips, I wouldn’t have noticed it either. The paper was very well hidden.”
“You’ve looked at it?”
“I have. And it only offers yet another conundrum.” Shang-Li fished out the paper, unfolded it, and left it there for his father to peruse.
After a brief inspection, his father leaned more closely to the paper and gave it a more thorough examination. He traced the lines with his forefinger, then quickly drew back in surprise.
“Did you feel that?” his father asked.
“The shock?” Shang-Li inquired.
His father nodded and rubbed his forefinger against the ball of his thumb.
“When I touched paper, there was a spark. It bit into my hand.” Shang-Li showed his father the indigo spot that had been left on his palm.
Concern darkened his father’s eyes. “Are you sure you are well? Books have sometimes been treated with all manner of traps.”
“I know. I had the ship’s mage examine my hand.” Shang-Li made a fist and still felt some of the dull tingling he’d experienced since touching the paper. “He said magic had lingered within the paper, but it was nothing that would harm me.”
“We’re going to put into port soon. Perhaps we should have someone check your hand there.”
“If there are any problems, we can do that, but I don’t think that’s going to be necessary.”
“I’ve touched the paper several times since the first shock,” Shang-Li said. “It didn’t affect me again. I think whatever residual force remained within the paper has been expended. I think it was just the remnants of a defensive spell, nothing more. I was surprised it affected you.”
“Not in the same manner that it has affected you.” His father offered his hand for inspection. His forefinger was unblemished.
An uneasy feeling twisted through Shang-Li’s stomach as he cast a surreptitious glance at his marked palm. It’s nothing, he told himself again. Still, he made a fist and tried to will the faint numbness away.
“I can’t read this page.” His father frowned in displeasure. Kwan Yung ran his fingers through his wispy beard. “This looks more like a code than a language.”
That was the consensus Shang-Li had reached. “Which leads us to a bigger problem: Droust knew many languages.”
“Deciding whether he chose to construct a code in his native tongue or in some other… Have you matched this handwriting against a sample of Droust’s handwriting?”
“You’re better at confirming that than I am.”
His father nodded. “I’m also better acquainted with Droust’s works.” He sighed. “Let me work on knowing Droust better while you remain focused on transcribing the journal. Maybe I can find something that will help us with this code.”
Shang-Li tried not to let his disappointment show. He knew his father would divide the labor as he had, but he wished he could pursue the mystery of the note.
“Ship’s hit a reef! We’re going down! Man the lifeboats!”
In the dream, Shang-Li woke in the hold, where he’d retreated after a storm the night before had liberally drenched Jakkar’s Fox, soaking her decks. He grabbed his bag and slung it over his shoulder, and grabbed the sword he’d carried then.
Although he knew he was asleep and dreaming, the old fear of sinking returned to him. He felt the cold mist and the light breath of the fog as it surrounded him when he reached the deck. Jakkar’s Fox was quickly sinking. The merchant ship took on water in her busted prow like a sieve. She waddled and rolled like an ungainly duck.
All around Shang-Li, merchants and their wives screamed in fear. The pleasant trip they’d expected had ended suddenly. A few of them had died that day, and Shang-Li was surprised at how well he remembered their faces in the dream. There had been the silk merchant from Chessenta, a guildsman from Impiltur who was relocating to Westgate in hopes of better business, the twin sons of an investor in the Dragon’s Reach that had fancied themselves as ladies’ men.
As he had done on that deadly day, Shang-Li helped the passengers into the lifeboats.
Only this time, every person Shang-Li tried to help turned to a corpse as soon as he touched them. They turned to him, hollow-eyed, and breathed their last rancid breath on him, then crumbled into butcher’s slops at his feet.
Blessed Mielikki, what was happening? Shang-Li froze as a young girl watched him drop her dead mother to the deck. The little girl ran screaming through the panicked crew and passengers already swamping through water that rushed across the floundering ship’s deck. The captain and his crew drew their weapons.
“What are ye a doing there?” Blikaga, the ship’s first mate, drew his sword and strode toward Shang-Li.
Shang-Li tried to protest and tell all them that it wasn’t his fault, he was only trying to help. But his voice wouldn’t work. No matter how hard he tried, no sound would emerge. He backed away, unwilling to fight the men he’d accepted as casual friends. Only a few days before they’d risked their lives together to repel a pirate attack.
“Stop!” The woman’s imperious voice rang out.
Everyone aboard Jakkar’s Fox froze in place.
A moment later, she strode through the billowing fog. Her blue skin marked her immediately, Her beauty was breath-taking and she knew it. Despite the fact that the ship was sinking fast, every person aboard Jakkar’s Fox watched her, spellbound.
Then she faded from view and a row of monstrous tentacles at least forty feet long burst from the fogbank. Some flailed into men and knocked them overboard while others grabbed men and crushed them to death.
Shang-Li tried to run but there was nowhere to go. With the tentacled monster weighing the ship down, it sank even more quickly. Before he knew it, Shang-Li was in the water. Something grabbed his foot and dragged him down. He fought but couldn’t escape.
The Blue Lady’s face somehow formed in the water. It wasn’t flesh. It looked more like the gelatinous, translucent mass of a jellyfish.
“Come to me, manling. If you’re brave enough.” She mocked him with her laughter.
Shang-Li woke in a cold sweat and stared around the cabin he shared with his father. He had escaped Jakkar Fox’s sinking, but it had been a near thing. He’d been tangled in the rigging when he’d gone down. But there had been no tentacled monster, and no Blue Lady.
He brought his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around his legs. He knew it had been a dream, but he couldn’t help feeling it had been more than that as well. He worked on his breathing, leveling off all the anxiety and panic the dream had brought with it.
Knowing he wasn’t going to be able to sleep belowdecks, he grabbed his gear and went out onto the deck. It was the darkest hours before the dawn, the time when the world seemed its quietest. After hanging a hammock, Shang-Li sat there for a long time, then the familiar rocking of a ship under sail finally lulled him back to sleep.
CHAPTER SIX
Vibrations in the wooden floor of the crow’s-nest drew Shang-Li from the sketch he was working on. He’d summoned images from the dream and brought them to life on the paper, surprised at how much that effort had given new birth to the fear he’d felt the previous night. Even before he saw who climbed into the crow’s nest, his fighting sticks were in his hands.
Yugi, the young sailor that often occupied Swallow’s crow’s nest as lookout, hesitated as he hung onto the ratlines that ran to the top of the ship’s mainmast. Constant exposure to sun and salt air had given his black hair an orange sheen and his buttery skin baked pink every day until it looked like coals burned within his flesh. He held up one hand and grinned at Shang-Li.