Chapter 615: Something Going Somewhere

Kaito found them a boat nobody would miss: a broad-beamed eastern trader with a patched brown sail and a name painted over so many times nobody could read it. Brynn insisted on sailing it herself. Her arm was still strapped, but Isole had spent two nights coaxing the bone toward something like straight, and Brynn said that a fisherman with one good arm was worth more on open water than six fighters with four each.

Nobody could argue with that, so nobody did.

They left Korreth on the evening tide. Ryuken did not come down to the harbor. When Vane looked back from the mouth of the bay, the lamp was burning in the high sanctum window, a single yellow point above the cloud line, and he watched it until the headland took it.

The first two days were uneventful in the way Brynn said the Abyss always was, until it wasn’t.

The wind held from the east. Valerica learned the rigging and was competent at it by the second afternoon, which annoyed Ashe, who had grown up on a mountain and was competent at nothing on a boat except standing in the wrong place. Isole slept the way healers do after spending themselves on someone else. Mara sat in the bow with the ledger and a borrowed compass, writing down anything that stayed still long enough to be recorded.

Nyx did not sleep at all.

She spent the nights at the stern rail with the Dreamscape laid across the water like a net. From the cliff above Korreth she had found a slow, enormous movement in the deep to the south, and Brynn had plotted a course well wide of it. For two days the plan held.

On the third night, Nyx woke him.

Her hand closed on his shoulder in the dark, and he was on his feet before he understood why. Her fingers were shaking, and Nyx’s hands did not shake.

"It turned," she said, very quietly. "An hour ago. It’s under us."

He went to the rail.

The sea had gone flat.

Not calm. Flat, as if a hand had been pressed down on it from below, smoothing the swell out of the water for as far as he could see in the starlight. The sail hung slack. The boat sat on a surface like black glass, and beneath that glass, a long way down, there was light.

It was the same cold blue-black as the things that had crawled out of the breach in Korreth the night he came home. But those had been sparks, and this was a coastline. It began somewhere off the bow and ran beneath them and kept going past the stern, a band of dim, slow luminescence too long to be a shape, rising and falling very gently, the way a sleeper’s chest rises and falls.

The Usurper ran before he told it to.

It came back empty.

He had never seen that before. In all the years he had carried it, the Usurper had misread things, failed to complete things, returned question marks where it should have returned answers. It had never returned nothing. Rank, Authority, danger: every field sat blank, as though the taxonomy it was built on had looked down into the water and found no word for what it saw.

Behind him he felt Ashe come awake all at once. The Warlord rose in her the way it always did when something large was near, a pressure in the air like a held breath, the old territorial instinct pushing outward to claim the space and dare the thing below to contest it.

"Don’t," Brynn hissed from the tiller. "Nobody put anything out. Nothing. If it notices you, it’s because you told it you were here."

Ashe’s jaw locked. Vane watched her fight the instinct and win. It took her three full seconds, and he understood exactly what they cost. The pressure drained out of the air.

One by one, the rest of them went quiet. Valerica let her gravity settle until it was no heavier than anyone else’s. Isole folded both halves of Samsara down to nothing. Nyx pulled the Dreamscape in so tight she was barely there at all. Vane closed the wings, then closed the space under the wings, then made himself as small as he had been on the streets of Oakhaven when the gangs came through at night: no light, no sound, nothing worth turning toward.

Only Mara had nothing to put away. She sat in the bow with the ledger shut on her knees, looking down into the water with an expression Vane couldn’t read. The crossing ring at Verrin’s Landing had found nothing in her to measure. Whatever was beneath them seemed to find nothing either.

She began to count under her breath.

At first he thought she was counting to calm herself. Then he realized she was timing it. She was counting the seconds it took for the light to pass beneath the boat, one steady number at a time, the way she had counted guards at checkpoints and people out of burning villages.

"Ninety," she whispered.

The light kept moving.

"Two hundred."

Something vast turned over, very slowly, far below. The black glass of the surface trembled once, and the whole boat lifted half a hand’s width and settled again, as gently as a cup set down on a table.

Nobody breathed.

"Three hundred and forty."

He could feel it now, even with every sense pulled in. It had no aura. Nothing in it pressed or claimed or measured. That was what made it so terrible. It had nothing in common with the Emperor’s weight in the Grand Hall, which had at least been a kind of attention. This was an immense, indifferent presence that had no idea they existed, the way a mountain has no idea about the goat on its slope. It was going somewhere. They happened to be in the water it was going through.

"Four hundred and eleven," Mara said.

The light thinned. Faded. Was gone.

The swell came back first, a long low roll that rocked the boat on its keel. Then the wind found the sail, and the canvas filled with a crack like a door slamming, and the stars were only stars again on moving water.

Brynn let out a breath that sounded as though she had been holding it since Carrow.

Mara opened the ledger, found a fresh page, and wrote the number down.

"Four hundred and eleven seconds," she said, to no one in particular. "Nearly seven minutes." She paused. "I don’t know how fast it was going, so I don’t know how long it was." She looked at the number for a long time. "I don’t think I want to know."

Vane sat down on the deck beside her. After a moment Nyx sat down on his other side, and leaned against him, and did not say anything clever at all.

They raised the western coast two mornings later, a low grey line under a sky the color of old pewter.

Brynn stood at the tiller with her good hand shading her eyes, watching Carrow grow out of the haze. Vane saw her shoulders go tight before he saw why.

There was a ship in Carrow’s harbor. It was long and narrow and painted black from stem to stern, and it flew no colors at all.