Storm

Garrick Wynmore had never believed in omens, but he had learned, over twelve years at sea, to respect the barometer.

At four in the afternoon, a month out from Corvane, the mercury began to fall.

He stood on the quarterdeck with his gloved hand resting on the rail and watched the western sky go the color of a bruise. The swell had changed. The long, lazy rollers of the past week had shortened and steepened, and the Sable Albatross had begun to climb them with a small, sullen shudder at each crest. Gulls, which had followed the ship since the Canaries, had vanished an hour ago. Even the rats in the bilge, Brandt had reported without any visible irony, were moving aft.

"Pressure is down four-tenths since noon," Garrick said. "Wind backing. Reef the topsails and lash everything that moves. We will meet it with storm canvas and the head to the south-west."

"Aye, sir." The master's mate hesitated. "The men are uneasy."

"The men are always uneasy. Tell them a falling glass is a number, not a curse, and that the first man to say otherwise will be sent to the foretop to count the stars."

It was meant to steady them, and mostly it did. But as the mate hurried forward, Garrick caught the look on the faces below: the sidelong glances, the quick, furtive touches at collars and pockets where some sailors kept charms. A few of them were looking, not at the sky, but down. Toward the hatches.

The hold.

He turned his back on it.

Three weeks ago, on the first night out of the Straits, he had torn that hold apart. He had gone down himself with a lantern and a pistol and a half-dozen hands, and he had searched it from keel to deckhead: every cask, every crate, every sack of rice, every shadow behind every timber. He had found a haze of faint purple smoke hanging near the vents, sweet and metallic, a smell like burned plums. He had found two sleeping watchmen on the deck above, who awoke groggy and ashamed with no memory of dropping off. He had found rats. He had found nothing else.

He had written in the log: Search of Hold Three. Nothing found. Residual vapor of unknown origin, consistent with volcanic emissions from the island.

It was a perfectly reasonable entry. He had read it over several times since.

The first wave came over the bow at six.

It was not a large wave, as waves went, but it struck the ship like a fist, and the whole hull rang. Garrick felt the shock through his boot soles and up his spine. Green water poured aft along the deck, and men shouted and clung to the rigging, and then the wind arrived.

It came all at once, as if a door had been flung open at the edge of the world. The canvas screamed. The shrouds thrummed like harp strings. Rain hit the deck sideways, hard as shot, and the daylight went out as though a hand had closed over it.

"All hands!" Garrick bellowed. "Hands to the braces! Helm, put her head up! Hold her up, damn you, hold her up!"

For three hours the Sable Albatross fought.

He lost track of the time after the first one. There was no time; there was only the next wave, and the next, and the tilting black wall of water that rose on the starboard bow and hung there, higher than the foretop, with white fire running along its crest. There was the helmsman's face, gray with effort, and the quartermaster's voice roaring commands above the wind. There was the long bright crack of the main topgallant going, and the gun-crack of a splitting block, and a sailor swept off the foredeck in a rush of foam and hauled back by the lifeline with his mouth full of the sea.

There was his own voice, calm and level, issuing orders he did not remember giving.

That was the trick of it. Fear had no purchase on a man who was working a problem. The ship was a machine, and the storm was a force acting upon it, and a force could be countered with angle, with trim, with a hundred small calculations. He thought in vectors. He thought in fathoms. He thought of nothing else.

Until the foremast went.

He heard it before he saw it: a groan that ran down the length of the ship, a sound like a vast tree being slowly bent. He looked up. In the lightning, he saw the foremast leaning, impossibly, against the wind, the topmast already gone and the shrouds on the weather side parting one by one with the sharp, ringing snaps of cut wire.

"Axes!" he shouted. "Cut it away! Cut it away before it takes the bow!"

Brandt was first. The quartermaster went forward along the lifeline with an axe in his fist and the water to his knees, and three men followed him, and Garrick watched them chop in the wild flicker of the lightning, small and black and furious against the sky. The mast hung for a moment more. Then it fell, slow as a dream, over the side, and the sea took it, and the ship leaped like a freed animal and swung her bow back into the wind.

A great cry went up from the crew.

Garrick wiped the water from his eyes and found he was gripping the rail so hard that the leather of his glove had split.

…

By midnight the worst of it had passed.

The wind dropped to a steady, exhausted gale. The ship wallowed in the heavy swell under a scrap of storm canvas, her foredeck a tangle of rope and splintered spars, and the crew moved over her like survivors on a wreck, silent and gray-faced and slow. Three men were hurt. Nobody was dead. Garrick had stood for nine hours without sitting, and when at last he handed the deck to the mate, he found that his knees did not want to bend.

He went below. In the sickbay, Dr. Pike was bent over a cot with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, and the lamp swung above him in long, slow arcs.

"Broken collarbone," Pike said, without looking up. "A cracked rib. And this one..."

He gestured with his chin at the second cot.

The sailor lying there was Thomas, a decent, stolid topman Garrick had known for six years. He lay with his eyes closed and his breath ragged. Across his forearms, from wrist to elbow, ran a pattern of pale blisters, in clusters, like the pox but not the pox, each one ringed with a thin line of violet.

"It's not a rope burn," Garrick said.

"No." Pike dipped a cloth in vinegar and began, very gently, to dab. "I've seen rope burn. I've seen powder burn and acid burn and a scald from a ship's copper. I have never seen this. He says it happened three nights ago, when he went down to the hold for water. He says he fell asleep on his feet, and woke with it."

"A reaction to the island's flora. The same vapor."

"Perhaps." Pike's voice was dry. "That's what I've written in my notes. Chemical irritation, source unknown. I haven't included the part where, in his fever, he said it was a witch's kiss."

Garrick said nothing.

"He also says she's kind," Pike added, softer. "That's what troubles me. A feverish man should be raving about demons. Thomas keeps saying, she told me my boy was well. And the boy was well, Garrick. I went through the letters from Bristol myself. The letter in his kit, dated three weeks before we sailed, says the boy had the marsh fever that spring. He recovered. He's well."

"Coincidence."

"You keep using that word."

Garrick turned away from the cot. There was a low, tight pressure behind his eyes that had nothing to do with exhaustion.

"The men are saying there is a woman in the hold," Pike said quietly. "A woman of smoke, who knows the names of the dead. They say the storm is hers. That she called it."

"The storm was a cyclonic depression of the normal Atlantic variety, and I can show you the pressure traces."

"I know you can." Pike straightened, rubbing the small of his back, and looked at his friend for a long, thoughtful moment. "I only wondered whether you would care to look in the hold once more. Not to prove anything to the men. To prove it to yourself."

"I have looked."

"You looked once, for a woman. You were not looking for a woman."

Garrick opened his mouth, and found he had no answer ready.

At that moment, footsteps came hard along the passage, and the door banged open on the wet, wild figure of Silas Brandt. He had lost his hat. His ragged beard dripped. In one hand he held a boy by the collar, and the boy hung there like a half-drowned kitten, white as paper, trembling in every limb.

"Captain," said Brandt. "I've found where the hardtack is going."

…

It took ten minutes. Jory Pell said nothing for the first five, and for the next three he said only please. The boy knelt on the cabin floor with his hands clenched, shaking, and Brandt stood over him with the dripping cutlass still in his belt, and Garrick sat behind the mahogany desk and said nothing at all, and let the silence do its work.

"Jory," he said at last. "I'm not going to flog you."

The boy's head jerked up.

"I am going to ask you one question, and I would like you to consider that I have been very patient, and that I have not had my coat off for fourteen hours. Who have you been feeding?"

"N-no one, sir."

"Jory."

"I swear, Captain. I swear on my mother's—" The boy choked. His face crumpled, and the tears came, helpless and shamed. "She's not bad, sir. She's not a witch. She just wanted to live. She's so thin. She's been sick for weeks and she hasn't eaten properly, and she told me my mother's name, sir, and the song, and I—"

"Where?"

Jory's mouth shook.

"Where, Jory?"

"Hold Three," the boy whispered. "Between the powder kegs and the bulkhead. Behind the rice."

Brandt made a short, hard sound in his throat.

"I took twelve men through that space three weeks ago," said Garrick, very quietly.

"She hides well, sir." The boy was crying openly now. "She says she can make people not look. If she wants. She—Captain, please don't kill her."

Garrick rose.

He did it slowly. He took his coat from the hook, shrugged it on, and buttoned it with the careful precision of a man preparing for an inspection. He tucked a pistol into his belt, and then, after a second, took it out again and laid it on the desk.

"Silas."

"Captain?"

"You will stay here with the boy. You will tell no one. If I am not back in half an hour, you may send the marines down, and you may do as you please."

"Sir. Let me come."

"No."

"She's a witch, sir." Brandt's voice was low and hard. "I've seen what her kind does. My grandmother had a name for it. She'll get into your head. She'll—"

"Silas." Garrick's tone did not change, but something in it made the quartermaster stop. "I am not afraid of a woman who hides behind rice sacks."

He took a lantern from its hook, and went out.

…

The hold was dark and breathing.

He descended the ladder one rung at a time, with the lantern held high, and the air rose to meet him, thick, damp, and warm, laced with gunpowder and tar and wet oak. The ship's movement was gentler down here. The barrels creaked in their lashings. Somewhere in the dark a rat scurried, and was still.

And over it all, faint but unmistakable, that other smell.

Burned plums. Warm iron. Sweet, and strange, and faintly like something his mind recognized and could not name, a smell from the very edge of memory, something half-seen on the blood-red edge of a night he did not allow himself to think about.

He stopped at the bottom of the ladder.

Rational. He took a slow breath. There is a stowaway. There is a girl who has been hiding in the hold, and who has been fed by a lonely child, and who has made herself a reputation among superstitious men with some common tricks and a bag of herbs. There is nothing here that cannot be explained.

He walked forward.

Past the first row of powder kegs. Past the stacked crates stenciled with the Admiralty crown. Past the sacks of rice, gray-white in the lantern light, heaped like a wall. He heard his own boots on the planks, and the creak of his coat, and his own heart, which was beating a little faster than he liked.

At the end of the aisle, where the bulkhead met the kegs, there was a gap.

It was no wider than a man's shoulders. Behind it, in a space the size of a coffin, a light was burning.

Not his lantern. Another, softer, wavering and faint: the glow of a small, red ember in a clay dish, and rising from it, in a slow, perfect spiral, a thread of violet smoke that did not drift with the draft but stood straight up, like a prayer.

And in the middle of the smoke sat a woman.

She was sitting cross-legged on the bare planks, with her back against the powder kegs and her hands resting open on her knees. She was thin, painfully so, with hollows beneath her cheekbones and her collarbones sharp under a torn linen shift. Her skin was a deep, burnished brown, dulled by weeks without light. Her hair was a mass of fine dark braids, gone wild, hung with salt. She looked like something that had been washed up on a beach. She looked like a drowned queen.

Her eyes were closed.

He stood very still. He did not know why. A cold, clear part of his mind noted that this was an unarmed, starving woman and that he could cross the distance in two strides and seize her; and another part, deeper and older and entirely uncontrollable, noted that his body had simply stopped working.

Do not look at the smoke, said the rational voice. Do not breathe.

He breathed.

Nothing happened. There was no dizziness, no hallucination, no unnatural lethargy. Only the sweetness of the air, and the faint rise and fall of the woman's chest, and a feeling that he could not describe, like the hush of an empty church.

Her eyelids lifted.

They were black. Not the black of a dark brown, but a true black, depthless as the sea at night, and when they settled on his face, he felt the weight of them as a physical thing, a hand pressed flat against his breastbone. She did not startle. She did not gasp, or shrink, or reach for a weapon. She looked at him as a traveler looks at a landmark long awaited.

And then she smiled.

It was a small smile, and it was weary, and it was entirely without fear. It cracked her dry lips, and she touched them with the tip of her tongue and did not seem to notice.

"Finally," said Ixara, in slow, careful, accented English. "You came."