The Spy in the Waves

Sera Whitlock had very good manners for a drowned girl.

She thanked everyone. She thanked Brannoc for the boathook, and Odile for the blanket, and Isolde for the tea, and then, after a small shy pause, she thanked the Overseer for not being quite as frightening as she had been told. She said it with a tremulous smile, wrapped in wool to the chin, sitting on the galley bench with her wet hair in rat's tails and her ringed hands cupped round a tin mug. She could not have been more than twenty. She had a round freckled face and large dark eyes, and the Lantern pin on her collar had been bent in the water so that it sat a little crooked.

"We came through Door Four with seventeen," she said. "Two days ago. I think. It's hard to tell. We were all together on the foredeck when the singing started, and the Captain— our Captain, I mean, Captain Orde, not Captain Fallowes— he tied himself to the mast. But the rope gave. And then they went. One by one." She wiped her eyes. "I held on to a spar. I don't know how long. I only know that I'm the one that's left, and I don't know why."

"I'm sorry," said Odile, taking her hand.

"You're all so kind."

"Don't mention it. Have another biscuit. I found them in the galley, they're very hard, but if you dip them—"

Isolde said nothing. She sat at the end of the table with her notebook open at her elbow and her chin on her fist, and watched Sera Whitlock drink her tea.

Something was wrong with the picture. She could not at first say what. It was a small thing, a nick in the grain of the wood, the sort of detail a scholar's eye slides over twenty times before it snags. The girl was frightened. She was grateful. Her hands shook just as hands should. Her story hung together. It was only that when she lifted her head to smile at Odile, the light from the swinging lantern fell on her hair, and the hair at her temples, under the dripping strands, was dry.

…

"She's lying," said Brannoc.

He said it very low, over the rim of his own cup, so that it sounded like a cough. It was the middle of the night, or what served for it, and the bell below had begun its slow tolling. Sera had been given the bunk in the first mate's cabin. Odile was asleep in the next. The old man sat with his back to the bulkhead and his boots on the table, and the single eye that was left to him was bright and wary as a bird's.

"I know," said Isolde.

"You do?"

"Her hair's dry at the roots. And she knows my name."

"Does she?"

"She called me Miss Isolde at supper. I never told her." She turned a page. "Odile did, in front of her, but not in that form. No one here has said 'Miss.' It's Gideon's word. It's what he calls me."

Brannoc grunted. He looked at her with grudging respect. "You notice things."

"It's the job."

"It'd be a mercy if it wasn't." He rubbed his scarred face. "I've seen this before. Three Cycles back. A Company puts a pretty girl in the water and fishes her out, and the next day somebody goes missing. They want something. They don't generally say what."

"The Lantern wants me."

"Or him." He tipped his head toward the stern. "Or both. Hard to say. They've never liked the Overseer, and they've liked him less since the cathedral."

"Why not?"

"Because he made a choice." Brannoc looked at her steadily. "You wouldn't know. You've not been here long. But in all my time in the Doors, in two years of looking, I never saw that man pick up so much as a spoon for a Stray. And now he's stepped in front of one. That sets things moving. The Companies keep a sort of balance down here. And you've dropped a stone in the pond."

She sat very still.

"I didn't know," she said.

"No one does, at first."

"Is that what the covenant is? A stone in the pond?"

"That's what it looks like to me." He drained the cup. "I'd not worry. It's done now. But I'd keep an eye on the girl."

…

She was waiting for it, so it came as no surprise.

Dawn on the drowned ship was a gray grudging thing, a seam of light between a black sea and a lowering sky. Isolde woke in the hammock with her heart quick and her mouth dry and her hand already closed round the charcoal pencil, and lay a moment listening to the groan of the timbers. Then she slid out of the hammock and padded barefoot across the cabin, and out into the passage, and up the companionway to the deck.

The deck was empty. A cold wind blew. The mast creaked. At the stern, against the gray, a small figure stood with its back to her and its face to the sea.

"Sera?"

The girl turned.

She had thrown off the blanket. Her face in the dawn light was bone white, and she was smiling, and it was a terribly sweet smile, the smile of a child who has been given something wonderful. In her left hand she held a flat leather case. In her right was a long thin knife.

"I'm so sorry, Miss Isolde," said Sera Whitlock. "I do hate to do this. You've been so kind."

Isolde stopped.

"It's only that I've been told it's for the best," said the girl, in a rush. "He said so. He said there's a better way. He said that if I could just get you away from— from him, for a while, you could be kept safe. Properly safe. He said you'd come to no harm. It's only that the Siren wants a singer, you see, and if there's one who goes willingly, she'll give us the key, and the other Doors will be easy, and the Captain says—" Her voice cracked. "I don't want to. I swear I don't. But I'm so tired."

"Put down the knife."

"I can't. They'll know."

"Who will?"

"The Captain. The Prioress. They'll—" She looked out over the water, and her whole face went slack with longing and dread. Far out, on the white road of the dawn, a pale head had risen from the sea. "Oh. Oh, she's so beautiful."

She's drugged, thought Isolde, with a swift cold shock. The case. It's a draught. The leather case in the girl's hand had come open, and inside it lay a row of small glass vials, each stoppered with red wax. One of them was missing. A bead of dark liquid shone on Sera's lip.

Singing willingly. She means to make me drink it.

She took a step backward. Her bare heel hit the rail.

"Please don't make it hard," whispered Sera Whitlock. She lunged.

…

He had been listening for an hour.

He did not sleep, as a rule, and the dream was in a merchant's pocket; he had no reason to lie in a bunk. He had sat in the dark of the forecastle with his back to the cold iron of the windlass and his hands on his knees, listening to the ship talk to itself. The girl's cabin was three doors down. He had heard her turn over. He had heard her stand. He had heard the stealthy, careful, bare-footed scrape of her going up the companionway, and the quicker, lighter, nearly noiseless steps of Isolde going up behind.

He had gone up after both, without hurrying, because he knew precisely how far he stood from the stern, and how many seconds it would take. He had run the figure over in his head, as a man tests a rope. It was eleven. It had always been eleven.

He reached the head of the stair and stopped.

Isolde had her back to the rail. She had gone as pale as paper, with her braid hanging down her shoulder, and she was not looking at the knife. She was looking, with an expression of intense, appalled attention, at the girl's face. It was the face of a scholar who has been shown a very bad piece of translation and is trying to understand what the scribe intended.

The girl lunged. And his shadows went out of him like arrows.

They did it on their own. He barely noticed. They flowed over the deck in a black current, took the knife-arm at the elbow, and the other at the wrist, and lifted the girl a foot into the air, quite gently, so that her bare toes dangled. The knife dropped. The leather case slid across the planks and burst.

The girl began to scream. It was a thin dreadful sound, with a lilt in it, as of a person who cannot decide whether she is terrified or enchanted. Her eyes were wide, and fixed on the sea.

He crossed the deck in four strides. He took her chin in his gloved hand.

She was so young.

It was an idiot thing to think. They were all young. He had killed a hundred children in his time, or so the count ran; he knew the number as he knew the number of stairs. But the soft round chin in his fingers was warm, and quivering, and the wet dark eyes were looking at him with a mixture of fright and wonder so entire that he felt the box in his chest creak and shift.

He stood there, with the dark hanging from his hand, and did not close it.

It would have been simple. The thing in him wanted it. It rose, cold and bright, as it always did, and said: There. There, do it, she meant to feed her to the sea. And he held it by the throat, in the dawn, on a rotting deck, and felt it fight him.

He looked at Isolde.

He did not know why. It was not a thing he had ever done. He was the Overseer. He took his orders from no one. But he turned his head and looked across the planks at a small white face with a dark braid, and the green-gray eyes in it were fixed on him, steady and level and wet.

She shook her head. Barely.

He opened his hand.

…

Sera dropped to the deck.

She lay in a heap, coughing, the shadows gone from her limbs. For a moment nobody moved. The dawn wind blew. The pale head in the sea had sunk down and out of sight, and the song had stopped, but a faint tingling hum lay over the water, like the air after a struck glass.

"Who sent you?" said Isolde. Her voice shook.

"Captain Fallowes." The girl was sobbing. "I swear. It was him. He said— he said the reader would be wanted, and she'd be wanted whole. He said the Overseer had no business— that it was bad for him. That it would make him worse. He said she'd be safe with us." She curled up, with her hands over her head. "I didn't want to do it. I only wanted to go home."

"Your Captain lied."

"I know."

"He sent a girl with a vial to feed me to a monster. He does not have my best interests at heart."

"I know." It was a wail. "Don't send me back. Please. I'll do anything. Please don't leave me here with him—"

"With whom?"

Sera lifted her face. It was swollen and wet and smeared with sea-salt. She looked past Isolde, over her shoulder, with an expression of pure terror, and said in a very small voice: "With the Overseer. He's looking at me. Oh God. He's looking."

Isolde turned.

He stood at the head of the stair, perfectly still. The dark had drawn back into the folds of his coat. His face was gray. It was the face of a man who has done a thing against his nature and cannot yet tell what it will cost. He did not speak. He only met her eyes, and she saw something there that she had not seen before. It was not defiance, and it was not apology. It was a question, a wordless anxious one, as of a child who has made a gift and does not know if it is wanted.

Was that right?

She gave him a small, shaky nod.

Something in his shoulders loosened.

And behind them, across the water, a high clear sweet voice began to sing a very familiar song.

…

It was not the Siren.

That was the horror of it. It was Sera. She was sitting up on the deck with her wet hair in her eyes and her arms around her knees, and she was singing. She had not meant to. Isolde saw that at once: saw the glazed look in her eyes, the rapt, vacant tilt of the head, the way the notes poured out of her like water from a cup. It was the draught. It was whatever she'd swallowed. It had been in her blood for an hour, and it had waited for the ordinary little shock of safety to loosen her.

Ah-ah-aaaah. Ah-ah-aaaah.

"Stop," said Isolde. She threw herself across the deck. "Sera, stop, stop it, close your mouth—"

The girl smiled up at her. It was lovely. It was the smile of a woman waking to her mother's voice.

The water rose.

It came up over the rail without a splash, in a single smooth gray swell, as if a hand had lifted it. It lapped the planks. It flowed round the girl's knees, her waist, her shoulders, and she sat in it, singing, without fear, and the song went up and up, and the waves closed. There was a long, silvery, drowsy sound, like a sigh. There was nothing on the deck but a damp patch and a bent Lantern pin.

Isolde knelt with her hands over her mouth.

She did not weep. She had no tears. She knelt there in the pale light until she felt a hand on her shoulder, large and cold, and heard a voice she knew say, very quietly, "I did not—"

"I know."

"I would have— I wished to—"

"I know." She reached up. She put her own hand over the glove on her shoulder, and held it. "It wasn't you. You stopped. I saw you stop."

Silence.

"It is the first time," said Valerian, slowly, "that I have done so."

She looked up at him.

"I do not know why," he said. "It was not a decision. There was a moment, and you looked, and my hand did not close." He seemed to be examining the words as one examines a strange coin. "I thought that I should be sorry. I find that I am not. I find that I am something very like—"

He did not finish. The ship shifted under them. In the hold, the old bell rang once, and rang again, and Isolde remembered, with a start, what Brannoc had said about the key.

The captain's cabin, he had told her. The sea chest. An iron tongue.

"Come on," she said unsteadily. "We have to find the clapper. It's nearly morning."

…

They found it under a pile of rotted charts, wrapped in oilcloth, black and cold and shaped like a long thin tongue. It fit the bell in the hold as a hand fits a glove. Brannoc rang it. The sound rolled out of the ship in a great round bronze wave, and where it struck the water the gray sea lay down flat and went to glass, and in the glass, far down, a door opened.

They stood on the deck in the thin new light, the four of them, with the sea going quiet at their feet. Odile held Isolde's arm. Valerian stood a pace apart, his hands in his coat, saying nothing.

"I'll tell you what," said Brannoc, hoarse and abrupt, at her elbow. "I'll come with you."

"You don't have to."

"I know I don't. I've been in the Doors two years, and I've never once had a reason to want to. But I've a notion that something's changing, and I'd like to see it." He spat over the rail. "And I've a feeling that you're going to need an old man who knows the Companies."

"Why?"

"Because of what Fallowes did." He turned his one blue eye on her, and it was grim. "You've heard it. You've had it from the girl. They sent her to take you from him. And they'll send others. Every Company in the Hollow will know by nightfall that the Overseer's picked a side, and half of 'em will want to use you to get at him, and the other half will want to be you."

"I didn't ask for that."

"No." The old man's mouth twisted. "But you did it all the same."

The door in the sea waited, wide and bright. A cold clean wind came up out of it, smelling of pine and cut stone, and the pleasant voice said, from every direction at once, "Door Five is passed. Seven remain."

And under it, so softly she nearly missed it, in a hollow, tired, familiar voice:

"Eight."