The Edge
Sebastian emerged from his cabin and swore under his breath at the sight that greeted him. Water sloshed over the main deck and was slowly seeping out through scuppers cut in the bulwarks. He took in the snapped bowsprit and two missing sails, then upwards. The fore topsail yard was absent, now lying shattered at their feet, wearing its torn sail as a funereal shroud. The mainmast topsail was simply gone.
His crew stopped what they were doing. They watched him in silence, unmoving. Sebastian quickly glanced at the sky and saw the sun was dropping.
Hours. I’ve been in there with her for hours.
“What the bloody Deeps are you gaping at?” he bellowed. “Get back to work!”
He stomped over his deck, over the broken bits of the topsail yard that had stabbed him and went to Grunt who was resting on a crate, his leg pillowed on a pile of sodden burlap. Niven was sitting with him, looking pale and drawn.
I tended to Selena before my own crewman. Before Grunt.
“How are you, old man?”
Grunt grunted and patted the young adherent’s hand with his gnarled, sunburnt one. Sebastian inspected Grunt’s leg, remembering how misshapen it had been. Now it was puffed and bruised from ankle to knee, but straight.
“A few more prayers,” Niven said with a tired smile, “and he’ll be up and about in no time.”
Sebastian nodded. “Get him belowdecks.”
Grunt shook his head and held up a flask. He smiled a wobbly smile and then waved Sebastian away.
“Aye, then. Rest up.”
“Can I help Paladin Koren?” Niven asked.
“She’s fine.”
The adherent’s eyes dropped to Sebastian’s side where blood seeped through his shirt.
“Can I help you, Captain Tergus?”
“Later. How is Ilior?”
“Warming himself at the oven. I lit it, like you asked, but what if the merkind come back? Isn’t it very dangerous to leave the fire burning?”
“If the merkind come back, spilled tinder will be the least of our concerns.”
“Oh. All right then.” Niven gave a nervous glance to the seas around them. “Grunt is stable. I’ll check on Ilior again. Unless I can help you…?”
“Go.”
The adherent went.
Sebastian turned and Whistle was there with Cur, the young boy’s face a mask of worry. “She’s going to be fine,” Sebastian told him. Whistle’s bald-faced relief irritated him for no reason he could fathom. To Cur he said, “Let me see your hands.”
Cur held up his palms. They were scraped raw.
“Niven just went to the galley.”
Cur shook his head. He pointed at all the broken spars and dangling rigging, and made a questioning sign.
“She’s still seaworthy,” Sebastian said. “It’ll be tricky without the staysails, and slow. We’ll have to furl the spanker just to keep her straight.”
Cur signed again.
“The Isle of Lords,” Sebastian answered. “We can make it, slow and steady. If you won’t let Niven heal your hands, then get to cleaning up the deck. You too, Whistle. We lost some freshwater barrels. See what’s left and pull the extra from the hold to catch more.” His lips curled in a sneer. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and get hit by a squall next.”
Sebastian climbed up the ladder to the quarterdeck. Cat and Spit were at the helm. The Black Storm was slowing. The enormous wave Selena had called was subsiding behind them and the ship coasted slowly but the sea was no longer perfectly still and there was a slight breeze to propel them. Svoz lounged at the aft rail, smoking a stinking cigarillo. He followed Sebastian with his beetle-black eyes and a pleased smile on his snout.
“She’s safe,” Sebastian answered Cat’s scrutinizing stare. “She’s sleeping, she’s warm. Or as warm as she can ever get, I suppose.”
Cat narrowed her eyes.
“I fell asleep, godsdammit,” Sebastian snapped. “And if you hope to do the same tonight, you’ll finish your watch without questioning what I do on my own bloody ship.”
Svoz pushed his bulk off the rail. “Temper, temper, Master,” he said, emphasizing the word and adding a hiss to it. “Though if you prefer, I shall begin my indenture to you as I begin all associations with new masters by asking if there is anyone who requires disposal? The flame-haired flesh-tart, perhaps? She’s a mouthy one, isn’t she, Master?” He chuckled.
Sebastian glanced at his crew. Neither had a voice; speaking in front of them was as speaking to ghosts. Even so, he motioned for the sirrak to shut his mouth, and glanced at his wrist compass before surveying the horizon.
“The wheel is yours,” he told Cat. “Maintain this course, but do not drop anchor for the night. If those merkind come back…” He sighed. “Spit, keep an eye out.”
Spit spat. For once, Sebastian didn’t mind. The deck is wet enough.
He went down to the bow and inspected the splintered jut of wood that remained of his bowsprit with a dull ache. He fished around in the inner pocket of his long coat for a cigarillo but it was empty.
“Svoz, to me,” he said in a low voice. The sirrak appeared immediately and Sebastian couldn’t help but feel a sort of twisted pleasure at the power he now wielded. “Do you have a smoke?”
Svoz gave him an arch look. “I do, but I sincerely doubt you will enjoy it.”
He produced a lit cigarillo seemingly out of nothing. Sebastian took a drag then convulsed, doubled over, and hacked smoke until his eyes streamed. He expected to see shreds of his own lung tissue mired in pools of muck on the deck, but there was neither.
Svoz chuckled. “Told you so.”
“What the bloody shit is in this?” Sebastian said when he could speak.
“Bloody shit.” Svoz laughed. “I tease!” He furrowed his brow ridges. “Although now that I think on it, you’re not too far off the mark. Not to your taste? They’re aged nicely.”
Sebastian tossed the cigarillo overboard but the stench lingered.
The sirrak lit another of the foul things for himself and took a deep, satisfying drag. “That was quite the excitement, wasn’t it, Master?” he said after a moment. “You were quite frantic when former master fell into the icy waters. Panicked, even.”
Sebastian spat into the water before replying. “You’d be panicked too, if eight hundred gold doubloons fell overboard.”
“Ah yes,” Svoz said. “You humans are quite fond of those little shiny trinkets, are you not?”
“We are,” Sebastian said, “and if something happens to Selena before we find Accora, I stand to lose a bloody fortune.”
Svoz tapped a black nail to his teeth as if he were biting back a smile. “Of course. That makes perfect sense.”
Sebastian ignored the sirrak’s knowing tone. “So. A blood oath, is it?”
“It is!” Svoz said. “A life for a life. I saved your precious Paladin and now you owe me the demise of one human flesh bucket in return.”
Sebastian kept his face carefully expressionless. “When will you name this person I’m supposed to kill? Have someone in mind already, do you?”
Svoz snorted. “Now where is the fun in that?”
“Bloody games,” Sebastian muttered. “And what happens if I refuse?”
Svoz seemed genuinely perplexed. “Refuse? You?”
“What happens?”
The sirrak became still. The heat radiating off his hulking red form seemed to become more intense.
“If you don’t do as required, I am free to do as I wish. Have you seen what I wish?” Svoz flicked his black gaze to the sea. “It’s quite entertaining although not, I imagine, from the other side. And when I’ve had my fun, I return to my home. With you.” He laughed coldly. “If you found my smoke not to your taste…” He flicked his gaze back to Sebastian and let a slow blink hood his eyes momentarily. “Your screams will resound in our halls of blood and bone long after you’re gone. One voice in a choir of poor souls who have failed to honor the oath that now binds us.”
The consequences for failing…
Sebastian rubbed his eyes. “Bloody mess.”
“I hope so!” Svoz elbowed Sebastian as if they were old chums. “I know you’re going to be ever so much more fun than my previous master, the godly little bitch you pine for.”
“Shut your mouth, sirrak,” Sebastian snarled. A dull thump began to beat at his brain. The cigarillo, likely. More likely it was these thoughts of Selena, of his last job, of his battered ship, all bashing around like blinded moths in a lamp glass.
“Why don’t you just call her by her name?” he asked Svoz. “Why don’t you call anyone by their names?”
“We are not permitted to use the true names of any human.”
“Why not?”
The sirrak peered at Sebastian. “I had taken you for intelligent, though it would not surprise me in the least to be mistaken. Are you not aware of the power of true names?”
“Enlighten me.”
“Sirrakind are powerful beyond any reckoning your puny brain could devise, but on this plane we are restricted. Not being permitted to utter the true names of the human scum that shuffle over this soggy orb is one way to curb our might. Being bound by blood is another.”
He licked his lips with a forked tongue. Sebastian wiped his slashed palm on his trousers, as if he could wipe the memory of that tongue lapping his blood.
“But come now,” the sirrak continued. “I find it preposterous that you do not understand the power of a name. You, who maintains a crew of mute and tongueless rogues. Surely you, Julian Tergus, must have some appreciation for the power of a true name.”
Sebastian gripped the rail. “You cannot speak true names, sirrak.”
“True enough,” Svoz returned, “and I did not, did I? Don’t fret, my dear Master. I am bound to secrecy. Our strange nature provides sirrak’ah with vast amounts of secretive knowledge and yet very little means to use it.”
“What does that mean?” Sebastian asked. “What do you know?”
“Everything.” Svoz regarded him from beneath hooded eyelids. “Your bloodied past is not something I may speak freely of to anyone but you. Another pity. Of all my masters thus far, you have the most promise and yet you conceal your glorious reputation—”
“Silence,” Sebastian hissed. “You will be silent, as silent as any other man in my crew, for that’s what you are now. Mine.”
Svoz smiled lazily. “A command uttered is as good as done. But may I be permitted a question?”
Sebastian held the sirrak’s gaze another moment. His head was beginning to pound in earnest. “Speak.”
“Why have you not carried out your task? Your…what do you call it? Your last job?”
Sebastian looked up sharply. His head thundered with his pulse. Visions of his atoll came to him awash in blood…
Svoz continued before he could speak.
“You could have let her drown, you know. Clean. Simple. Though not terribly fun, I agree.” The demon leaned close enough that Sebastian could feel the heat emanating from his skin. The sirrak’s eyes gleamed with longing, his voice thick with bloodlust. “Say the word, Master. Say it. If you find the job too odious or have not the heart for it…”
“No,” Sebastian said. His face was a mask, his voice stony. “I don’t go back on my word and I don’t pawn off my work to others.”
Svoz sighed. “I’m disappointed, of course, but I understand. If she were mine to kill, I wouldn’t let anyone else spill the golden-haired flesh-tart’s blood either. It tasted so sweet…”
Sebastian clung to the edge. He turned his gaze to the ocean. The sun was setting behind them, casting orange ribbons of light across the iron-colored water. The sky was not dark but would be soon. The moon was a silver crescent hanging in the sky, like a lopsided grin.
“She has a fucking hole in her chest and it keeps her perpetually cold,” Sebastian said after a moment. “Did you know that?”
“Of course,” Svoz said, “but…”
“But you can’t speak of it.” Sebastian looked up at the sky. “It’s a crescent moon, I know that. Black as pitch and it…emanates.”
“An ingenious conduit,” Svoz mused
Sebastian hardly heard him, his thoughts drifting back over the years.
“When I was a cabin boy on one of my first voyages, I fell asleep on deck. I curled up against the sideboards like a cat in a slant of sunlight. The bosun poured a bucket of cold sea water on me as punishment for over-sleeping my watch. I thought I’d die from that first shock and then shivered for hours in the damp after. And that’s how she feels every moment because of that damnable wound. How she isn’t mad or dead by now, I don’t know.”
“A mystery for the ages,” Svoz said airily.
Sebastian faced the sirrak. “You are not to tell Selena that you’re mine now. Not one word. You will act as if nothing has changed.”
Svoz pursed his lips. “I’m afraid that charade won’t work, Master. Any command from her will fall on very deaf ears.”
“I’ll take care of that. Just say nothing to her of our…arrangement.”
Svoz inclined his huge head. “As you say, Master.”
“Captain. You will call me ‘Captain’.” Sebastian peered up at the sirrak. “That is all that you will call me. My name is Julian Tergus but you are not permitted to speak it because it is my true name. Now go help the other clean up the mess.”
The sirrak inclined his head. “As you command. Captain.”
When Svoz had vanished in a puff of that same acrid smoke, Sebastian hung his head between his hands and suffered the headache, letting it pound the insides of his skull until he thought he might be sick. Exhaustion finally pulled him from the prow just as the sun sank completely.
He strode across the cluttered, sodden main deck, prepared to sleep until the dawn was old. He laid his hand on his cabin’s door handle and remembered with a jolt that his bed was currently occupied.
“Gods be damned…”
He leaned his aching head against the door until his face was composed. Stony. Expressionless.
When he opened it, he found Selena wrapped tightly in one of his blankets, standing over his desk. She had lit the lantern that hung from the deck head and it suffused the small cabin in warm yellow light. The falling night revealed in the gallery windows behind her frame her in deep blue. She smiled to see him come in.
“I was just looking at your sketches. They had spilled onto the floor during the maelstrom. I hope you don’t mind.” Her voice was raw and raspy, scratched by salt water.
A bedroom voice…
Sebastian strode to the desk. He hastily gathered the schematics and shoved them under a leather portfolio. “It’s nothing. Just something I do when I’m bored.”
Selena backed away from his desk and sat down on the edge of the bunk, clutching the blanket around her. Her hair was dry now and she had pulled it down her left side of her chest. The right side of her face was swollen and bruised where the boom had struck her and Sebastian’s blood still stained her chin. She looked like the refugee of a shipwreck, not the Summoner who made the seas do her bidding; not one who lifted his entire ship out of maelstrom…
“They’re hardly nothing,” Selena was saying. “You’re an extremely talented draftsman. Why don’t you work for the Guild?”
“If I did that, you’d have no one to take you to Saliz,” Sebastian snapped. He glanced at her again and then looked away. “Why aren’t you dressed? Why are you still here?”
She clutched the blanket more tightly. In one hand was her linen undershirt. “But for this, my clothes are gone. I didn’t want to traipse around the ship wearing only your blanket.”
“Cat set them to dry. I’ll go get them.”
“First tell me the crew and the Storm are all right.”
“Crew is fine. The ship’s taken damage. We’ll need repairs at the Isle of Lords. But it could have been worse.” He mustered a grim smile. “To say the least.”
She released a breath and touched her fingertips to her bruised cheek. “I’m so glad. I was so scared. I thought it was going to be worse. For me, I mean. Like last time.” She glanced up at him. “What of the merkind?”
“After what you did, I doubt they’re very eager to try to enforce their justice on us again.”
“And if they tried, we would die. I can’t Summon again. I can’t. I can feel the god watching me, waiting to see how much more I’ll take. And it warned me. I fell overboard…” She met his eyes with her sky blue gaze. “Did you pull me from the water?”
“No,” Sebastian said. “Svoz.”
“But it was you who helped me to breathe again. Wasn’t it?”
“I suppose.”
“Thank you for saving my life.”
“You would have done the same.”
“And you warmed me,” she said. “You didn’t have to but—”
“I had to get you dry. It was the only way,” he said quickly.
“Thank you.”
She smiled at him, softly, warmly. She was sitting on his bunk wearing only a scrap of cloth…
Sebastian retreated behind his desk. “Stop saying that,” he snapped. He jammed his sketches into the portfolio and shoved it into the desk drawer.
“Saying what?” Selena asked, taken aback by his sudden anger.
“Thank you.” He slammed the drawer shut. “Stop thanking me all the bloody time. You saved my ship. I blew some air into your lungs. We’re bloody even.”
“Are we?” she said hoarsely, rising. The ship swayed beneath her but she found her balance quickly. “Are we even?”
No, now I owe Svoz a life too, Sebastian thought. “Aren’t we?”
She shook her head, flustered. “No, I mean…is that all there is? As though we… as if there were nothing but debts to be paid or repaid?”
“That’s all there is. That’s all life is.” He counted off on his fingers: “Take what you can get, always watch your back, and repay what’s owed so you don’t fear the knife in the night.” He made a cutting motion with his hand. “That’s it.”
“Very well. If that’s how you look at things. I’m surprised you had the presence of mind to help me at all today, given the way you sometimes look at me.”
Sebastian stared at her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Sometimes I feel like you don’t care should I live or die, and other times I feel as though you hate me,” she said, meeting his gaze unwaveringly. “And sometimes, you are very kind. As on Nanokar…” She shook her head, looking away.
The silence that hung between them was thick and heavy. It seemed to Sebastian, the only sound was the thundering of his pulse in his head.
She could relieve that pain, he thought and the image of her standing close, close enough that he could smell the salt of her skin, feel the soft of her hands touching him, the warm sunrise glow of her healing engulfing him until there was no pain…
No pain.
There was always pain. The expression on Mina’s face—the last she would ever wear—was one of agony, emblazoned on his soul forever. The screams of his own victims echoed in the endless cavern of his memory.
I don’t deserve her healing.
He fought for the edge again, and watched Selena as if from a great distance.
“You hired me to sail you to Isle Saliz,” he said in a dead voice. “That is the only matter of concern between us. There is nothing else.”
Her face paled slightly and then she drew herself up and the small woman was gone. She was imperious and the immense power she wielded suddenly seemed very close to the surface. The warmth in her eyes when she looked at him vanished and her voice was as cold as the northern seas.
“Of course. You are correct. My clothes are in the galley?”
“Should be.”
“I’ll return your blanket after I’ve changed.”
“If you please.”
She went to the door. There she paused, and for a moment he thought she would speak, but then she was gone, closing the door—not gently—behind her.
Sebastian slumped in his chair, drained. The lantern above his desk swayed with the gentle rocking of his ship. He remained on the edge, not trusting himself otherwise, but his stomach interrupted his nothingness with a growl. The ship was quiet with exhausted crew. He thought it safe to find something to eat in the galley. He threw open the door and nearly tripped on his blanket, folded neatly outside. He retrieved it and retreated back into his cabin, thoughts of food forgotten.
Before he could stop himself, he pressed the linen to his nose. It smelled of seawater, faintly, and beneath that, Selena’s scent, warm and clean, and just as strong as when he’d been pressed to her, warming her with his own body.
Sebastian hurled the blanket onto the floor and returned to his desk, to the lantern. He watched its back and forth—light and shadow, light and shadow—until he stood up and blew it out.