It’s fast travelling near the coast, East Tide tearing up, out and northwards. Its flanks buffeted by West Tide’s reverse push, inwards and downwards to the turbulent channels further south.
Shipwright had schooled him on it once, shown him the chartswith their deep, dark lines, the lanes where ships could switch between the two currents without being twisted in half like a hanging nail. She showed him the fish that thrived in the fast flow where the tides met, the backs of their silver heads threaded with purple ribbons. Delicate things which sifted nutrients from the warmer southern streams and from the bones of the shipwrecks that lay in the troughs between the tides.
The Yaw, the Hesper sailors called it – that sickening lurch that could sink a ship like a sucked thumb. It took a smart helmsman to steer this coast, in these seas. Someone like Shipwright.
Still, it was safer than tacking further out, or dragging a shipful of refugees overland.
Alone, they would have been fine. They’d roamed the miles between Hesper and the north often enough in the last few years, pulled this way and that by crisis after crisis. Chasing down rumours, whispers of anything that might give them a handle on what had happened in the south. They’d found too much. Hosts driven insane; short, brutal wars that had sprung up to fill the void; ruins guarded only by the skeletons of past mistakes; villages hollowed out by famine, by panic, by fire.
The Midlands had cooled as time rolled on. The world adjusted. The divisions ossified. Thell pulled even further back into itself. Hesper began its blockade of the sea routes. The south starved itself into fury as the Rim villages banded together, or were pulled into the shadow of Crowkisser’s new home in Astic.
Even so, stability was an illusion. There was no way a hundred-odd refugees were getting across the leagues between Hesper and the north without drawing some unfriendly eyes.
So, they’d taken the long way, as fast as they could, riding the lip of East Tide along the teeth of the coast. Less direct, but less deadly.
The refugees were chatty at first, grateful to be out of the city, their shoulders lifted at the thought of living a little further from the threat of war. They tried to make themselves useful, mending nets and rigging. The bloodworkers among them turned their oiled hands to aching muscles and twisted backs. A little hopecrept into their movements as time passed, and they drew further from the south. Their heads turned to Shipwright like flowers to the sun and even the lidded gazes they cast on Shroudweaver were leavened with a half-smile.
They had grown quieter as the ship pulled further north, as Hesper faded from the horizon, and they realised what they were leaving behind.
Eventually, they melted away as the ship stitched its way up the coast. A few got off at each village they stopped at, bundled down the gangplank, arms laden with blankets, supplies, pots and pans, whatever the ship could spare. That young man, Ropecharmer, fussing around them like a lean hen, settling them into rooms and garrets, tucking them in under the eaves of these small sea towns and crossing their hosts’ palms with silver or stern promises.
Most of the villages welcomed them, if quietly enough. There weren’t many up here that would turn away a bloodworker, or a strong pair of hands. There weren’t even many that would turn away the old, or children. The folk that clung to the coast were a practical lot, still able to see themselves in the faces of others.
Spaces opened around fires, at the ends of bars and in small, low byres huddled against the wind. It wasn’t much in the end, but Ropecharmer seemed to take comfort in it, Shipwright too. Shroudweaver, for his part, was just glad to see people moved a little further from death.
Once they were gone, he missed them. The remainder of the voyage had felt unusually still, marked by their absence. Quiet nights were spent under cooling skies as the north took them in, the coastline hardening with darker rock, like lips pressed too tight. The first glimpse of auroral fire in the distance, followed by the tang of glacier ice and the glow of stranger stars. The water, cool and clear in the day, refracted a white sun which made the boards stretch and creak, and left Shroudweaver drowsy, curled in rough nests of rope and canvas. His fingers moved fitfully in red-threaded patterns, his mind thinking about his daughter, about Thell, and about the dead, worries circling his skull like the rats in the hold.
At night the sea darkened and the depths fell away under the keel, black and endless, spotted with the phosphorescent lights of small jellyfish which rode the tide, ice crystals frosting on their backs.
To begin with, the crew had let down lines, snarling the tiny, glowing creatures, and pulling them up into buckets. Their blood did not freeze, and could be used to keep the spinners and rig charms moving.
They crunched when they died. Shroudweaver couldn’t stand it.
As the ship moved north, the lines grew thick with their pulsing bodies. Eventually, something larger surfaced to starboard, and ripped five lures away in a single moment, along with a section of the rail. Shroudweaver hadn’t seen it, but he’d heard stories of many eyes, and a great fin which ran slick with rainbow colours.
After a time, they had tacked eastwards, dodging the reefs, and docking at a fishing village where they were greeted with salted palms and cheeks rubbed raw by the wind. They traded iron and spice for news. Fishwives with chapped jaws took Shroudweaver aside, blew on cracked hands and knuckled their aching knees.
There was something on the air, they said. Their tellings wouldn’t work – long scrimshawed bones had snapped, twigs lay askant and useless. Their heads itched, their sons lied, and were shiftless about the nets. The shadow of war was on the wind.
The old bones felt restless underfoot. Mountain sons came to town with cartloads of blades and buckles, scavenged stoop-backed from fields which suddenly seemed to be made more of men than mud.
The hills refused their dead.
An old sailor sucked his loosening teeth. He’d brought the bones of his cat for a binding, said the damn thing was keeping him up at night, and he was perilous short of rum.
He’d said more than that, after the scapula were scorched and the reek of sulphur had burnt down to a small stench among the tavern’s broader smells. Putting an arm around Shroudweaverlike he was a child, he had pulled him close, pipe-smoked and worrying.
Some had seen fires, he said, low on the hills, in from the coast. In the high Midlands, still far from Thell, but near enough to remember the feet of the Emperor’s legions.
Later even, with the candles burnt down to stumps, he’d taken Shroudweaver’s fingers in his, and rubbed calluses like a warning. ‘Those hills only wake for blood,’ he’d said, rheum-eyed, as he’d tugged his beard and spat, thick and black into the sleeping fire.
Later than late, in the deep quiet of the night, Shroudweaver had heard a cat yowling at the door and the click of small claws.
There were more villages after the first, the ship pulling in at ports that were barely more than a sunken jetty. A lifted lock. A lamp on a pole. Towns riddled with streets that were explored by the light of tapers, by storm-lamps pulled tight against the wind from the sea. Shipwright had always taken the lead, her heavy boots striking flatly against wet cobbles, the broad sweep of her shoulders picked out in doorframes, against firelight, across suddenly hushed conversation. Forever the first over the threshold with questions, she fell back into the familiar rhythms of her old questing years. Hunting for answers. Always hunting, sifting tales from hands worn thin by the ceaseless pull of the sea, rope-scoured, pitted and pocked with the memory of storms. Filling palms with coin, twice-bit for trust. The questions always the same: what lay ahead? What stirred in the night? Had you, had youeverseen a crow?
The answers the same too, for the most part. The Midlands were restless. Rusted blades and emptied graves. Opportunistic men who liked flame and knew several useful knots.
A fear lingered on every hearth, muffled by normality, by the sharp and sour taste of fish stews, fingers crushing leaves into a roiling pot. Pipe smoke and a clear spirit which smelt of blueberries and fell on you like fire.
