The Scar

Interlude VI

The whales are dead. Without these vast, stupid guides, the going is harder.

Brother, have we lost the trail?

There are many possibilities.

Once again they are just a cabal of dark bodies above the base of the sea. They slide through blood-warm water.

Around them, the salinae are anxious. Miles off, thousands of feet below the waves, something is shaking the crust of the world.

Can you taste it?

Amid the millions of mineral particles that eddy in the sea are some in unusual strengths: splintered flint (shards and dust), little gobs of oil, and the intense, unearthly residue of rockmilk.

What are they doing?

What are they doing?

The taste of the sea here is reminiscent. This is drool that the hunters can taste; this is the world’s spittle. It dribbles (they remember) from ragged mouths cut by the platforms that suck up what they find, where beside concrete plinths men in inefficient swaddlings of leather and glass gaze wide, and are easily stolen and questioned and killed.

The floating city is drilling.

The currents here are labyrinthine, a morass of competing flows that dissipate the impurities in convoluted chains, taste-trails that make little sense, little pockets of different dirts.

They are hard to follow.

The whales are dead.

And what of others? Dolphins (willful) or manatee (slow and too stupid) or?

There are none suitable; we are alone.

There are others, of course, who might be called from the deep sea, but they are not trackers. Their work is very different.

Alone, but still the hunters can hunt. With a patience that is implacable (that does not sit well with this hot, quick place), they continue searching, teasing through the skeins of flavor and pollution and rumor, finding the path and taking it.

They are much closer to their quarry than they were before.

Even so, this warm water is hard, and sticky and prickling, and disorienting. The hunters circle, chasing ghost spoor and lies and illusions. They cannot quite, cannot quite find the trail.