Richard Byers - The Colors of Magic Anthology

"You don't have to drink it yet if it is too hot, " Crucias said, taking his own experimental taste. He grimaced.

"Or if it is too bitter." He set the teacup down on the tray.

Nunieve still held hers in dainty fingers. "No. This is the first time I've had a tea set, and the first time we've been on shore in a year, and I want to enjoy it all." She took another sip.

"You're a good, brave girl, Nunieve," Crucias said. "A good, brave girl."

Crucias awoke to a sea storm. The deck rolled in long, deep swells. Shudders ran through the planks. With each sway of the ship, shattered masts scraped along the gunwales. Metal shrieked. Wood moaned. Severed lines lashed the deck. Rain battered the captain's back.

"Blast."

Whether it was day or dark, he could not have told. The flash that had destroyed Argoth had destroyed his eyes, as well. He didn't need eyes, though, to know that most of his passengers and crew were dead. The cupric smell of blood filled the air, and a septic scent told of spilled guts and corpses. Aside from his own groans, Crucias heard no other human sound.

But he lived-if this could be called living. Blind, battered, sick aboard his own ship, Crucias lived. He could not man the pumps alone even if they remained intact, could not clear the deck, could not even see land or star to find safe harbor. Perhaps there was no land to see. Argoth was gone, its ravaged foundations somewhere in the sloshing depths below. The armies of Urza and Mishra were gone, too. Perhaps the blast had sunk Teresiare itself. Perhaps there was no safe harbor in the world anymore.

A wooden bucket bounded noisily across the deck toward Crucias. Blindly he lifted a hand over his head. He could only guess its course. There was a stunning sound, and the taste of blood, and he slumped again.

He had placed too much hope in the chirurgeon, the best on three continents. The man knew about the application of leeches, the uses of phrenology, the manipulation of pressure points on the foot and ear to relieve tensions in distal portions of the body, but the wasting illness that ravaged Nunieve was not localized anywhere, on ear or foot or body. It was the doom laid on beautiful things by whatever dark and jealous god equated mortality with misery. Her illness was not a thing of body but of soul, a curse laid on her because she would otherwise have been perfect.

The chirurgeon had had no answers for them beyond herbal balms and the insinuation of copper fibers under the skin. Crucias had followed his advice assiduously, and Nunieve had borne the painful brunt of these "treatments" with the same courage she had borne the scalding tea. She was a brave girl, not only by nature but by necessity. She saw acutely that her father needed her to be brave.

They lingered there, in that vine-strewn villa above the sea, so Nunieve could wear her tree dress and wander the bazaar. Her eyes gleamed with the bright flap of trader's tents, and her neck and fingers shimmered with the jewelry Crucias bought her. The money he spent was legitimate coin, and the adornments he bought reminded of the bounty of the sea-pearl and mother-of-pearl, nautilus shell and abalone, shark tooth and starfish. At first Nunieve gladly received these gifts and wore them everywhere. Slowly, though, she ceased to enjoy them. The shiny things only drew more notice to the taut lines of her throat and the thinness of her wrists.

One day, she refused his purchases. Instead, she turned about to find something of equal value in an adjacent stall-something for him. "Buy these, Daddy. You have been wanting a new set of knives for your carving projects," she said.

Shadowed by the slate roof of the smithy, Crucias smiled. "They are too expensive, Darling."

"No more expensive than the pearls you wanted to buy me," she replied. Nunieve laid hold of his hand and said gently. "You don't need to buy me all these things. I know that you love me."

"Good girl, Nunieve," he said through a choked throat. "Always know that I love you."

Crucias awakened, weeping into the teeth of the storm. The bucket lingered beside him and delivered a fresh blow with each roll of the ship. He flung it angrily away.

There never had been safe harbor for him, not when his daughter turned to a skeleton before him. Not when his nation ceased to exist. Not now. Had he been on land during that blast, he would surely have died, but this couldn't be called living.

The vessel heaved sluggishly beneath him as it lolled up one edge of a wave. Its bilge must have been filling. Between rain and sloshing waves, it could only be filling.

Then rain hardened into biting hail.

Growling, Crucias crawled across the battered planks. He groped for handholds. Ripped sailcloth… knotted lines… splintered spars… a cold, cold arm-

In the midst of pelting hail, he paused. His fingers held an arm in a sleeve of lace. He tried to speak but found his throat was fit only for screams and roars. Hoping against hope, he followed the lacy sleeve to a shoulder rill and past it to a collar. He pressed his fingers into the fallen woman's neck but felt only flesh as cold and still as meat in a cellar. There was no pulse.

The roaring hail grew voracious across his back.

He took a moment more to pass his hand over the woman's face. Madame Gheiri.

"Mayhem and death," he hissed. "Mayhem and death."

Miserable, Crucias crawled onward. Hail sliced into the back of his neck and the crown of his head. He clawed along the stumps of the shattered rail to 'midships and clambered over ironwork settees. There were three more bodies between him and the ruined hatch. He did not stop among them but only swung down into the hold, away from the lacerating skies.

Twilight had already surrendered to night before they returned from their last visit with the chirurgeon. Nunieve wanted more tea. Crucias was in a mood to refuse her nothing. Soon she sat in the same seat with the same Jamuraan tea set and the same tree dress as she had worn their first night on land. Once again Crucias stood, staring past grape vines and out to sea. Aside from the deep darkness nothing else had changed.

No, everything had changed.

"Daddy, don't be so sad," she said. "We'll be back at sea tomorrow."

"Yes, Darling," he said distantly. "We'll find another chirurgeon. A better one."

"We'll be back at sea tomorrow, so let's enjoy our tea tonight. This is my last night on land," she said gently, pouring herself some tea.

Crucias hurried to her. "Don't say that. We'll stay longer. We can stay here as long as you want."

"Oh, it's all right, Father." She was sipping the too-hot tea and struggling not to make a face. When she regained her composure she looked up at Crucias. "Don't be sad."

"But I am sad, Darling."

"Then don't be afraid."

"I am afraid. You are everything to me. My whole world."

"I'm not afraid, Daddy. Don't you be afraid."

He bent to embrace her. She melted into his arms and snuggled against his neck. There was a final, perfect moment as he held her. Then her last long breath left in a sweet susurration.

He breathed, too, a startled, trembling breath, as though he could draw her fleeing spirit into his body before it fled away forever.

Crucias stood. The Jamuraan tea set toppled and crashed to the ground.

She did not stir at the sound.

He lingered there, holding her, gazing out at the black, unseeable sea.

This ship had been his courage. He had not gone to sea again until he could take Nunieve with him. Now the ship was dead, and he nearly so. It was a ghost ship, ravaged first by economic necessities, then by jaded ill-use, and last of all by a blast that destroyed the very world. The same dark, inexplicable forces that had clawed from the blind earth to destroy his daughter had reached up from the black sea to destroy the ship that bore her name.