Ancients of Days

Chapter Twenty-Seven The Dredgers

Less than an hour after Phalerus had climbed into the crow’s nest Theias had so precipitately abandoned, the old sailor called in a high, hoarse voice, “Sail! Ten leagues to the first quarter!”

“It is the picketboat,” Captain Lorquital told Yama, after looking upriver through her spectacles.

So Prefect Corin had escaped the authorities at the floating harbor. Yama had been expecting it, and he felt a sense of relief rather than fear.

Captain Lorquital said, “I suppose we should be grateful it isn’t the warship, but she’s rowing steadily and hard and has crowded every yard with sail. I’d say she’s bearing on us at twice our speed or better. She won’t be able to keep up that pace, but we’re in the midway of the river and it will take us more than a day to run to shore and a hiding place. I fear that she will catch us before then.”

There was little that could be done, for the Weazel was already running briskly before a good wind, dipping and rising through long waves that marched across the Great River from far-side shore to near. Captain Lorquital and Aguilar discussed putting out the staysails, but decided that this would drive the Weazel’s bows down and make her more likely to plow.

“We should do it anyway,” Tamora grumbled to Yama.

“It would only delay the moment, and it would put the ship at risk,” Yama said.

They stood by the big square lantern at the stern rail. By naked eye, the picketboat was a black dot far off across the shimmering sun-struck plain of the river.

“It is Eliphas who leads them on to us,” Tamora said, “I swear he made a bargain with Prefect Corin while we were all prisoners.”

“Yet he urged me not to go into Mother Spitfire’s gambling palace. I wish I had taken his advice.”

“Grah. It is likely that Eliphas was to be the goat leading you to an ambush somewhere else, which is why he so earnestly wanted you to leave.”

Eliphas was talking with Ixchel Lorquital, hunched forward earnestly on the stool by her sling chair, his big hands moving eloquently. Yama said, “No, he is no more than an old man looking for one last adventure. Look at him—he talks too much to be a spy. Besides, I met him by accident.”

“Are you sure?”

“If not, anyone could be an agent of Prefect Corin’s, and how am I to live? Eliphas has given me a destination, Tamora. A place where my people might still live. If it is true, it is a most precious gift.”

“Grah. I’ll believe in this lost city when I see it, but let’s say he didn’t lie about it. Maybe he didn’t start out to betray you. But I still think he’s struck a bargain with Prefect Corin. Maybe he didn’t want to, maybe he was forced. Think carefully. You keep the spy machines away, but something has led Prefect Corin straight to us. In all the wide river, how would he find us so quickly unless led? It must be Eliphas. He’ll have been given a device of some sort. Let me search his kit. Let me search him, down to the bones.”

“I cannot know about every machine, Tamora. One could hang high above us, and I would not know. Besides, Prefect Corin knows that we are going downriver. The river is wide, but it is not infinite.”

Tamora stared hard at him. Sunlight dappled her skin, glittered in her green eyes. She said, “I will lay my life down for you, willingly and gladly. But I would hope it is not because some fool thinks to line his pockets.”

The cook prepared a sumptuous meal after sunset, roasting a side of ribs from the slaughtered shoat and serving it with a sauce of apricots and plums, riverweed fried with ginger, and side dishes of candied sweet potatoes and cassava porridge flavored with cumin. Most of the crew ate heartily, in a fine spirit of gallows humor, and all drank the ration of heart of wine Aguilar had broached.

“There’ll be another ration at the beginning of the first morning watch,” Aguilar announced. “All hands to deck then.”

She did not need to say that by then the picketboat would be in cannon shot of the Weazel. Before they bedded down for the night, Eliphas told Yama, “Our captain hopes to hail another ship tomorrow. She steers toward the nearside shore for that reason. Not because she hopes to reach it before being overtaken, but because that is where the shipping lanes are. If you are right about Prefect Corin’s motives, brother, if he has no official sanction but pursues you for his own ends, he will not attack us in plain sight of others.”

“I think that Captain Lorquital underestimates Prefect Corin.”

“He is only a man. Don’t make him more than he is, brother. You will find a way.”

Yama had surprised himself by eating his fill, and he found sleep surprisingly easy, too. Perhaps it was because he had come to a decision, a way of ending the uncertainty of the chase. It had crept into the base of his brain during the feast, as cruelly sharp as a knife. He would wake in a few hours, cut the dory free, and make off into the darkness. Once he was far enough from the ship, he would put out the dory’s drag anchor and wait for the picketboat to bear down on him. Attracting attention would be easy enough—he had only to call on Prefect Corin’s machines.

He would allow himself to be captured, and at the first opportunity he would kill the Prefect. He would gather all the machines within the range of his powers and kill everyone on the picketboat, and then continue downriver alone.

He had become a soldier after all, he thought, and realized that the war reached further upriver than the battlefields where armies clashed.

Yama slept and, freed by sleep, his mind ranged far down into the lightless depths of the river, where vast segmented monsters blindly humped through abyssal ooze.

Wholly aware that he was sleeping but that this was not a dream, Yama engaged with the minds of these ancient machines. He learned of the immemorial routes they followed among the slow, cold currents at the bottom of the river, of their endless work of pushing sediment into the subduction channels which transported it to the Rim Mountains for redistribution by glacial melt. Theirs was a world defined by the echoes of ultrasonic clicks and pulses, by touch and chemical cues. Neighbor constantly reassured neighbor with little bursts of data; they moved through a web of shared information that mapped the entire river bottom, its braided currents and thermal gradients, its deltas of mud and plains of chalky ooze.

As the machines plowed the river bottom, they were accompanied by their sharers. The sharers fed on the shell fish and blind crabs exposed by the machines, and in return scouted the layers of water above the trenches and channels of the river bottom, and cleaned away parasites which sought lodging on the overlapping plates of the machines’ armored hides.

We will help, the machines told Yama, although he had not asked them for help. He expected them to begin to rise toward the surface—any one of them could have sunk the picketboat by ramming it—but when he pictured this the machines told him that they could never leave the river bottom. They would help in their own way.

A league beneath the Weazel’s keel, the machines abandoned their routines for the first time in thousands of years.

They altered their buoyancy, lifting from the long trenches they had made in the ooze and drifting on cold currents until they reached the maws of nearby subduction channels. As the machines blocked the channels, the cold river bottom currents were deflected upward, where they spread out beneath warmer layers until they reached the steep drop-off at the coastal shelf. The machines saw, by an increase in the echo delay of their ultrasonic chirps, a huge unsteady lens of cold water growing beneath the warmer layers over the coastal shelf, pushing upward and sideways in unstable equilibrium…

He was woken by Pandaras. It was dawn, but the light had a diffuse cast. It was like waking inside a pearl. The mainmast stabbed upward, vanishing into streaming whiteness. Fog had settled damply over his blanket and drops of water hung everywhere from stays and ratlines.

“There’s something wrong with the weather,” Pandaras said. He had wrapped a blanket around his narrow shoulders like a cloak, but was shivering all the same.

“Where are the crew?” He would kill them all, if he had to, beginning with this silly little boy. Kill everyone who stood in his way when he took the dory. Or kill everyone now, and let the picketboat overtake the Weazel.

“Master, are you all right?”

Yama found that he was awake, standing beside Pandaras in the middle of a fog so dense he could not see the bow of the ship. Something had possessed him, horrible thoughts like ooze from the bottom of his brain. His power, he thought. It would survive any way it could, at any cost. He pressed the heels of his palms to his eyes.

Red and black jags of light. He suddenly had a terrible headache, He said, “I am going to steal the dory. You and Tamora will help me.”

“Tamora is with Aguilar. They are laying out the weapons, master, as sorry a collection of antiques that I’ve ever seen. As for the dory, you’ll have to explain your plan to the Captain. She came up on deck an hour ago, when the fog bank rolled across the river.”

“The machines of the river deeps,” Yama said, remembering the dream which had not been a dream after all. A small hope kindled in his breast.

“Machines, master? At the bottom of the river? What would machines be doing down there?”

“I found them and talked to them, and they said that they would help me.”

“They would be dredgers,” Eliphas said, looming out of the fog. Like Pandaras, he had wrapped a blanket around his shoulders. His eyes were dull pewter in the diffuse light; droplets of water beaded his smooth black skin and clung to the stiff curls of his white hair. “I once saw the carcass of a dredger that had been washed ashore. They are divided into segments like worms, and each segment bears a pair of paddles or other appendages. They clear mud and detritus that collects in the deeps; without them the river would soon silt up.”

Yama tried to think it through. The headache was like a spike driven through his forehead. He said slowly, “They changed the currents at the bottom of the river. The water is colder in the deeps, and perhaps it is now coming to the surface. Cold air is denser than warm air, so that as the air above the river is cooled, it draws down more. That is what drives the wind. The fog forms as the warm air cools, and can no longer carry as much moisture.” He felt a sudden surge of hope. “They are hiding us from Prefect Corin!”

Eliphas nodded, but Pandaras did not believe a word of it. He said scornfully, “Nothing can change the course of the river!”

“Not its course,” Eliphas said, “but its currents. The dredgers are very large. The one I saw was several hundred paces long, and each segment was as big as a house. Ah! There it is again!”

A flash of red light far beyond the Weazel’s stern, a dim flare that brightened and faded in the fog. Prefect Corin’s picketboat was still pursuing them.

“She’s trying the range,” Captain Lorquital told Yama, when he climbed up to the quarterdeck. “She is still too far off, but I think that she will catch up with us soon. The stronger the wind, the more advantage we have, because we’re the bigger ship. But the wind has almost died away since the fog rose. She’ll use her oars again, when her men are rested, and then she’ll catch us. There’s one hope, but it is a small one. If the fog was coming from the far-side shore I’d say we were heading into a storm, and a storm might save us if we were blown in one direction and the picketboat was blown in another. But this came up from the nearside, and I can’t tell if it means a storm or not.”

The fog was dense but patchy. Toward the end of the morning watch the Weazel sailed out of a bank of white vapor into clear air. Everyone squinted in brilliant sunlight that burned off the rust-red sail and the white deck, and laid a net of dazzling diamonds across blue water all around. To starboard, long banks of fog hung just above the river like a range of low hills, their white peaks stirred and torn by the fresh cold wind; to port, the black anvils of thunderstorms towered along the margin of the nearside shore. Drifts of hail and rain swept across the sunlit water, falling from such a height that they seemed to come from cloudless sky. The Weazel passed through a brief hailstorm that had everyone running for cover. Small silver fish fell among the hail, jinking frantically as they sought escape through the scuppers. The storm ended as suddenly as it had begun, leaving a scattering of dead fish and shallow drifts of hailstones which quickly melted, leaving blood-red stains from the dust at their cores on the white deck.

Soon afterward, the picketboat breasted out of the fog bank behind the Weazel. Her light cannon flashed and flashed. Plumes of water driven by superheated steam shot up and collapsed half a league sternward.

“She’ll get the range soon enough,” Captain Lorquital told Yama. She stood at the stern rail, immense and foursquare, her day pipe jutting from a corner of her mouth.

She had put on a jacket stiff with braid, the better to make a target, she said. It had belonged to her dead husband, and its sleeves were pinned back from her wrists. “I sent a heliograph signal, telling her to lay back and cease firing, but she’s not responding. Of course, I suppose the cannon shots could be a kind of reply.”

“Let me speak plainly,” Yama said. The brief moment of hope had passed. He was convinced that the dredgers had failed him. That he had failed. “They do not want your ship or your cargo. They want only me. Lend me your dory. I will put out in it and wait for the picketboat to overtake me.”

Ixchel Lorquital drew on her pipe and looked at him calmly. “I will not let them take your ship,” Yama said.

“That’s a generous thought, but you’re only a passenger, and the ship is mine to dispose of as I will. My husband always told me that when passengers start giving advice, you should always agree, and then do nothing about it. But I’d rather not give you the false idea that you’ll be able to make such a silly sacrifice, so I will say now that I will not allow it.”

Yama stood his ground. “If you have any idea about what we should do, I would like to hear it. You have heard mine.”

Captain Lorquital turned her back on Yama and contemplated the picketboat. She said, “I am responsible for all my passengers, not just you. Besides, they’ll still sink us. They’ll want to leave no witnesses.”

“Then put yourself and your crew in the dory. I will stand here in plain sight. They will not chase you if they have me.”

Captain Lorquital said stubbornly, “I have sailed this ship for fifty years. I’ve been captain for ten. I won’t abandon her for anyone. Even you.”

Phalerus, who had the helm, said, “She’s right, dominie. If we get a bit of wind, we still might show those cullers a clean pair of heels.”

For the first time, Yama considered giving Captain Lorquital a direct order, but the thought that she might obey him with the same unquestioning alacrity as any machine was unnervingly horrible. Worse was the thought that if he tried to call upon machines to kill Perfect Corin he might be seized by his rage and kill everyone around him. No. He would avenge his father, but as an ordinary man.

Tamora came up onto the quarterdeck. She had put on her corset, and a fusil was slung over her shoulder. The bell of its muzzle flared above her shaven scalp. Captain Lorquital said mildly, “I do not remember ordering the crew to take up arms.”

“We can show our teeth at least,” Tamora said. “Why don’t you put back into the fog?”

“They followed us through the night and the fog,” Captain Lorquital said. “Why should day be different?”

At that moment, the man in the crow’s nest cried out. Patches of water around the Weazel began to churn, as if vast pumps were laboring to produce submerged fountains.

Glassy hummocks rose up, sputtering rafts of foam and slicks of fine silt. The crew crowded the rails, but Aguilar drove them back, shouting that they must see to the sail. Captain Lorquital told Phalerus to make hard to port, but even as the Weazel heeled about, more hummocks spurted around her.

A shoal of fish fled past the ship, swimming so frantically that they flung themselves high into the air. Some landed on the deck. They were as long as a man’s arm and their narrow heads and stiff dorsal fins were plated with dull red chitin; they banged and clattered against the deck as they thrashed toward the scuppers. Yama wondered if these were the sharers of the dredgers.

Caught between two rising currents, the Weazel began to turn in a slow circle. The sail flapped, filled, flapped.

Aguilar ordered it reefed, but before the sailors could obey a stay gave with a snap like a rifle shot. The broken end of the rope whiplashed against the sail and ripped a long tear in the canvas; the block which had anchored it tumbled end over end through the air and smashed into the deck a handsbreadth from Tamora’s feet.

The picketboat fired again. The cannon’s hot light flashed water into steam to the port side of the Weazel.

Water poured over the little ship’s waist; spray wet the torn sail from top to bottom. At the same moment, Yama saw something like a bush or tree rise a little way out of the water off the stern. It was white and pulpy, like something dead that had been floating in the water for a long time.

Captain Lorquital ordered that the sail be struck at once, and turned to Tamora and told her to take off her sword and return the fusil to the armory chest.

Yama laid a hand on Tamora’s arm. “They will take me in any case,” he said.

Tamora glowered. “I’ll throw away this blunderbuss, but I’ll keep the sword. It’s a poor thing, but it’s mine, and you’ll have to pry it from my cold dead hand.”

There was another flash of red light, but the picketboat was no longer aiming at the Weazel. Instead, she was firing into the water close to her, slowly obscuring herself in flashes of red light and billowing clouds of steam. The sailors aloft in the yards cried out and started to swing down to the deck, and the Weazel shuddered as if she had struck some underwater snag. Yama was thrown against the head of the companionway, and he clung there as the Weazel rolled to port and then righted herself violently. A forest of white branches was rising around the ship, as if the river was draining away from trees drowned an age past.

Tamora swore and unslung the fusil, but Yama, remembering his dream, told her to hold her fire.

All around the ship, creamy tentacles erupted from the water and rose into the air, questing this way and that.

Some ended in leaf-shaped paddles; some bore ranks of suckers; some were tapered and frayed in a multitude of feathery feelers. Huge, sleek arrow shapes moved beneath the churning surface of the river. Many were as long as the Weazel; a few were even larger. The sharers of the dredgers had come to the surface.

Captain Lorquital took Yama’s advice and ordered the crew to stand from the rails, and to put down the handling spikes and halberds with which they had armed themselves. Most of the sailors promptly climbed back up into the rigging, dodging tentacles which rose toward the mast and plucked at ratlines and stays as if at a harp. Aguilar stood at the bow, her cutlass resting on her shoulder, looking right and left at the questing tentacles as if daring them to get close enough.

As Pandaras and Eliphas clambered up the ladder to the quarterdeck, the ship shuddered and a cluster of palps dropped onto the starboard rail. Their ends thrashed in every direction like a nest of blind white snakes, stretching thinner and thinner as they walked on their tips across the deck. The rail splintered under the mass of flesh.

One of the crew darted forward and with a cry stuck a knife in a rubbery coil. It was Pandaras’s friend, the boy, Pantin. Tentacles weaved about him. One plucked his knife from his grasp; two more shot forward and struck him, one around the neck, the other around his feet. Pantin barely had time to scream before he was lifted up. The tentacles pulled in different directions. A rich red spray spattered the white deck and, still clutching the pieces of the boy’s body, the tentacles fell backward into the river.

More tentacles poured over the rail. The Weazel began to list to starboard. In the yards, the sailors scrambled for better foot- and hand-holds; skinny Anchiale clung to the top of the mast with his long legs tucked into his chest while a tentacle explored the crow’s nest.

Yama remembered the polyps which had swum in the flooded chamber deep in the Palace of the Memory of the People. Those had long ago lost whatever powers of reasoning they had once possessed, or so Magon had said, and returned to their cisterns only through habit; yet they had helped Yama by breaking the bridge before the hell-hound could cross it. Yama suspected that these giants were different not only in size, but in intelligence, too.

They did not serve blindly. They were looking for something. Clinging to the rail, looking down into a roiling mass of tentacles directly below, he glimpsed an eye as big as his head. Its round pupil was rimmed with gold. It stared at him for a long moment, and then it sank beneath a rush of white water.

Yama knew then what the polyps were searching for. He vaulted to the main deck, landing on hands and knees amidst a slowly writhing nest of white coils and cables.

Someone shouted and he looked up and saw Tamora falling toward him, her sword held above her head. She landed on the balls of her feet, bounced up, caught Yama’s shoulders and shouted into his face, “I won’t let them kill you.”

“They are looking for me! They cannot tell the ships apart so they are looking for me!”

Something coiled around Yama’s thigh. A wet palp slapped his chest and a hundred fine threads crawled over his tunic. Tamora was caught around the waist by a tentacle as thick through as her arm; three more, stretched thin, whipped around and around her corset. She held her arms high, the sword crooked above her head.

Yama was frightened that she would do something that would get them both killed. He reached for her hand, but tendrils as thin and as strong as metal wire coiled around his wrist and dragged it down. Something wet and rubbery slapped onto his face, covering his eyes and nostrils. It stank horribly of fish and rotten eggs. He could feel a hundred tiny suckers fasten and unfasten over his skin as the palp adjusted to the contours of his face. It flexed and spread so that it covered his mouth. Something pressed at his lips and he was frightened that he would be smothered.

The pressure was insistent. Although Yama clamped the muscles of his jaws as hard as he could, something the size of his little finger slipped between his lips and probed at the crevices between his gums and teeth before withdrawing.

The palp dropped away from his face. The tentacle around his legs uncoiled and dragged away across the deck. All the tentacles were retreating, thickening and pouring backward over the broken rail. The ship groaned as she righted. Tamora lowered her sword and rested its square point against the deck, so that the sailors would not see how her arm trembled.

Yama ran to the broken rail, but already the sleek shapes were sinking away through choppy water stained with abyssal silt. High above, Anchiale regained the crow’s nest and cried out. Yama remembered to look for the picketboat.

But it was gone.