Philip Athans - Whisper of Waves

“Your message made me …” she said, hesitating, searching the air above her head for something. “Apologies for not knowing the word … hao qui?”

Marek didn’t recognize the language but guessed, “Curious?”

“Not certain, but wanting to know more?” she said, floundering a bit.

“Curious, yes,” he said.

She nodded and said, “Your message made me curious.”

“Well,” he said, “it’s actually quite simple. It’s come to my attention through various sources here in the city that your ship met with some misfortune and you currently find yourself unable to return home by that means.”

“The rescue of myself and my crew from the waters of your Lake of Steam was no secret, I am sure,” said Ran Ai Yu.

“Oh, no,” said Marek, beginning to sense an impatience in the beautiful Shou merchant. “It was quite the sensation, actually.”

“And you have some service to offer,” she prodded.

A serving woman came and set a small porcelain tea pot and two dainty little cups and equally dainty little saucers on the table. She took the handle of the tea pot, but Marek waved her off. She scurried away and he poured the tea, first into Ran Ai Yu’s cup, then into his. She never took her eyes off his face and he wasn’t even sure she breathed while he poured.

“I can return you, your crew, and your cargo to Shou Lung,” he said, “without the necessity of a ship or the considerable time it would take to sail.”

“You would accomplish this by the use of magic,” she said.

He nodded and sipped the tea. He found it bitter but tried not to let his face pucker.

“That will not be necessary,” she said.

Marek hoped she would think it was the hot tea that made his face flush, not the sudden anger that welled up inside him.

“You have made other arrangements?” he asked, even though he knew in some detail the arrangements she’d made.

“A ship is being built,” she said.

She made no move to drink the tea.

“Ah,” Marek said. “Time.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Time to build a ship,” he said, “and time to sail the ship.”

Ran Ai Yu shrugged.

“I could have you home on the morrow.”

“I thank you for your offer, Master Rymut,” she said, “but with respect, decline. I am not of a mind to travel in the Weave.”

“I can assure your safety,” Marek promised.

“On a ship,” Ran Ai Yu said, “I can assure my own safety.”

“On a ship built by whom, may I ask?” Marek said, baiting her.

“Ivar Devorast,” she answered.

“Ivar Devorast,” Marek repeated. “I’ve heard of him. Though it may well sound as if I’m trying to sway your opinion in favor of my own service, I feel I have a duty to inform you that this Devorast character has a rather less than admirable record when it comes to the seaworthiness of his vessels. The locals here won’t have anything to do with him. He and his former employer were, in fact, responsible for the deaths of dozens of sailors in a particularly disastrous catastrophe at sea.”

As he spoke he tried to interpret the subtle shifts in her expression: the narrowing of already narrow eyes, the twitch of a lip, the flush of a cheek. She didn’t seem to understand every word of what he said, but Marek felt reasonably sure she knew what he was trying to say. She either didn’t believe him or didn’t care.

“The people of Innarlith,” Marek went on, not giving her an opportunity to rebut or remark, “are quite enamored of all things Shou. I should think that you will do well here, regardless of what you trade.” He lifted the delicate cup to his lips and sipped the bitter Shou tea. “This, for instance, can make you rich alone. Like me, you are a visitor from a far-off land, and would do well to make friends here. You would do well to understand not only their customs but their perception of yours.”

“Good advice,” she said, though nothing in the look on her face made it seem she really thought so.

“If you make the wrong friends,” he said, leaning in just a little, “or if you let people think that you have a strong preference against, say, alternative forms of travel, you could cause trouble for the good people of Innarlith and not just yourself.”

He knew that she recognized the threat for what it was.

Ran Ai Yu stood, tipped her head, then turned and walked out of the tea room without a word.

Marek made up his mind as he finished his tea that he would give her two days to change her mind, then he would make sure she didn’t change anyone else’s.

20 Flamerule, the Year of the Helm (1362 DR)

FIRST QUARTER, INNARLITH

Blue-white lightning sizzled the air, boiling the rain as it fell around them. Ran Ai Yu whirled her thin, straight, double-edged long sword over her head in an effort to draw the creature away from the defenseless shipwrights. The men scattered in a blind panic. The beautiful Shou merchant grimaced when one of the monster fish fell upon a particularly unlucky craftsman. With a mouth as big around as the man was tall, the demonic beast bit the man so cleanly in half that his legs continued to run for fully three steps before falling into a twitching mess on the rain- and blood-soaked deck. Her new ship, still not yet completed, christened in innocent blood.

The monsters towered above her. In all her travels, from far Shou Lung to the great western oceans and back again, Ran Ai Yu had never seen something so big that was actually alive. There were two of them, one just a little smaller than the other, more blue than green, but they were obviously the same species.

She thought they looked a bit like eels, but they stood twenty feet above the deck, which was twelve feet above the keel, and there was another five or six feet of wood-beamed dry-dock to the water below. Ran Ai Yu knew enough about what it took to float on water to guess that perhaps two thirds of the things’ bodies were still underwater.

She swiped at one of them with her sword and when the creature dodged back out of the way their eyes met. Ran Ai Yu detected a certain intelligence-not quite human, but far beyond the blank stare of a fish. That unsettled her more, and she shivered in her rain-wet robes.

One of Devorast’s crew, a stout dwarf she’d heard called Hrothgar, stood his ground nearer the rail. The smaller of the monster fish clacked its massive, fang-lined jaws at him, sending sparks showering down at them all. The dwarf steeled himself against the nettling burns of the thready lightning and drove at the thing with a heavy wooden mallet in front of him. It was a tool, not a weapon, but in the dwarf’s hands Ran Ai Yu had some trouble seeing the difference, and by the way the giant fish eyed the hammerhead, it felt the same.

Ran Ai Yu saw Devorast’s face as he spun away from the larger of the two demon-fish. He was irritated, not scared, the look on his face as plain as the danger they were in. If she’d had any time at all to consider anything but her own survival, Ran Ai Yu might have thought him more foolish than brave.

The larger fish spat a bolt of lightning that momentarily blinded Ran Ai Yu. All she could see for precious moments was the purple, twisting arc of the great spark burned into her vision. She heard the dwarf curse loudly in his own coarse language, and at the same time the footsteps of the fleeing shipwrights echoed away into the distance.

There was a thud, and Ran Ai Yu stepped back quickly, squeezing her eyes shut to clear the lightning burn. It worked just enough to save her head-she dodged left just as the smaller fish’s massive fangs crashed closed an inch from her ear.

As she dropped away to the deck, she brought her sword up. The blade bit into the creature’s slimy, fine-scaled flesh and dragged a bloodless furrow half a yard long in the thing’s neck. The creature didn’t flinch, and made no sound. Its eyes rolled to follow her, but she detected no reaction to pain. Pulling the sword out of the creature and rolling away she saw that the wound had already closed.