The Farthest Shore (Eden Series Book 3) (32 page)

But they had reached Arrowhead by then, and Kovir’s shark caught a pair of large turtles to celebrate. He made her bring them one by one to the ship, Alyster gave Miri the last of his Admiral’s Blood, and she made a pot of rum-flavored turtle soup which they all shared on the deck that night, the chief engineer taking a rare moment away from his machinery to do so.

If Alyster had hoped to raise morale, it didn’t work too well, since the crew spoke so little that he began to seriously consider the possibility of mutiny. “Word is,” Vinsen said to him that night when the two of them were alone on the deck, him on watch and Alyster taking the wheel, “we’d be better off if you’d let us head for the coast.”

“And lose the race.”

“I hope they’re all of one mind with you in that regard. And that the money will be enough compensation for everything.”

Alyster felt more dispirited. Even if he and Miri had time to talk, he couldn’t unburden himself to her because she never complained, and he certainly couldn’t do the same with Vinsen because nothing he had experienced was as bad as what Vinsen had gone through. Being on watch was all Reveka would permit him to do until he had recovered completely.

Alyster couldn’t tell anyone what he hoped for the most from such a victory, either. He wanted to marry Miri once they returned home, not only because he cared about her but because it would make sure she was safe. The Admiralty would question her about whatever had transpired between her and the Tureans during their seizure of
Checkmate
. But there was only so far they could go with the wife of a captain in the navy—and even less far if he’d earned no small amount of prestige by winning the race.

In his cabin, he undressed before slipping into the bunk beside her sleeping form. The bunk was narrow enough that he had to press close against her or fall off, not that he minded the former option at all. Though even after he had wrapped an arm around her waist and rested his face in her hair, sleep was a long time coming. Just three days more. Surely nothing more could happen in three days.

They rounded the southernmost tip of Arrowhead the next day. On tall cliffs stood the blackened remains of a lighthouse, and according to the chief engineer, the engine was in just as much danger of burning out if they didn’t stop to descale it soon. Alyster spent most of that evening with the officers trying to come up with what Thomal called “alternative methods of propulsion”, because the race seemed all but won by then, but no one could think of how to move except by turning the paddlewheel. Vinsen pointed out gloomily that if the mast still stood, they might have tried running up sails somehow. Alyster thought of towing the ship, but they had no boats, and a shark one-third the length of the ship couldn’t pull them for any distance.

So he had a sleepless night as he considered the possibility of the engine giving out under the strain. Arrowhead was little more than a jut of rock over the sealine behind them by then, and it vanished before noon.

“We’ll be out of water by tonight,” Miri told him.

“By tomorrow afternoon we’ll be docked at Snakestone,” Alyster said. The wind was brisk and kept the nights cool enough that the crew could survive on half-rations until then. He was pushing them hard, but it wouldn’t be for much longer.

He was on the deck before dawn the next day, and Miri brought him a cup of coffee that tasted like something out of the sluices in the head. Choking it down, he envied Kaig for the first time. According to Reveka, Tureans had a lining in their stomachs which strained the water in but kept the salt out, and Alyster decided not to ask exactly how she had discovered that.

The sound of the engine seemed louder and grating, mechanical parts moving against each other with more friction than usual, and it unnerved him. Before midday, though, he saw a tiny dark point on the horizon to the west. He said nothing to anyone, but in two hours’ time Thomal had seen it too, and word soon spread through the ship. When he put the spyglass to his eye, Alyster saw the dark twisted shape of a dead tree atop a cliff.

“
The
Tree?” Miri said when he gave her the spyglass. For the first time in days she looked excited.

“One of them, anyway.” Alyster looked from the island to the funnels, silently asking the Unity to keep the engine working for just two hours more. Everyone who didn’t have duty below was on the deck by then, passing the spyglasses around, and a ragged but spontaneous cheer went up. He allowed himself to smile. They were close enough now that he could just make out the Tree with his eyes alone.

“What’s that?” Vinsen said.

Alone among them, he’d turned to the north and was looking at something on the horizon. Alyster could see only white sails, tiny as flecks of foam, but when he raised the spyglass again he counted how many of them there were—almost enough to hide the flags, which were the wreath-and-daggers of Dagre and the plain deep blue of a warship. He lowered the glass a fraction and saw the top of the ship’s figurehead.

“Unity,” he heard himself say, as if from a short distance away. “It’s
Enlightenment
.”

Chapter Twelve

Deeper Than All Oceans

If not for everyone else seeing
Enlightenment
too, Alyster would have thought it was a hallucination spawned by mostly waking nights. He watched the ship, trying to gauge her speed and estimate which of them could reach the island first.

No one spoke, and he knew the same thought had crossed their minds. Lowering the spyglass, he turned to Vinsen.

“What exactly are they doing there?” he said.

The question came out as more of an accusation than he had intended, and Vinsen glared back. “Trying to win the race, I presume.”

“I thought you said the crew was poisoned.”

“I didn’t say fatally.”

Reveka cleared her throat, and any sounds out of her were novel enough that everyone looked at her rather than staring in fascination at the brewing argument. “I suppose they broke out of the hold and then took the quicker way around Arrowhead?”

Vinsen seemed to calm down. “Probably. But we can still reach Snakestone first.”

Alyster thought it might be a close-run finish, because that glance through the spyglass had shown every stitch of canvas flying. From spritsail to moonrakers,
Enlightenment
was taking full advantage of the wind, running before it. Not that that was safe, but the Dagran captain seemed prepared to take as many risks as he was doing to win.

“Weren’t the captain and first officer both killed?” he said.

“Yes,” Vinsen said without looking away from the ship. He’d taken a spyglass and was frowning as he stared through it. “It’s odd… There’s a full complement of crew.”

They must have stopped at the Embrace and taken more hands on, Alyster thought. Not to mention supplies of fresh water. A Dagran sailing master would have been able to navigate the maze of shoals and sandbars that could be a maritime graveyard, come out with an intact ship and then follow trade winds and ocean currents to cut
Checkmate
’s advantage in half.

“Thom,” he said, “pass the word to the engine room. An hour at full steam should see us there.”

Thomal went below.
Checkmate
continued onward, the shark no longer swimming parallel to her but in her wake, where it took advantage of her slipstream to save its strength—that, as much as the spray flung into the air and the tortured sound of the engine, told Alyster how fast they were going. No one spoke, only watched tensely as the island grew slowly larger. Two ships waited at anchor, a line of tiny red flags stretching from one prow to another. That marked the mouth of the lagoon which was the finishing point of the race.

Checkmate
was so close now he saw all that without the spyglass, and he gripped the rail as if he could infuse his strength into the ship. The smooth brass vibrated beneath his palms and abruptly the ship’s whistle shrieked.

He spun around. There was no reason to sound the whistle except that it bled off a little excess steam, and if the engineer needed to resort to that—

A roar of thunder shook the ship. Alyster pulled Miri down and everyone else dropped as well.
Checkmate
lurched, wood splintering far beneath them and shattered metal clanging wildly, but the hiss of escaping steam was louder. The boards of the deck were already turning warm.

He scrambled up and bolted to the hatch. Smoke thickened with steam drifted up from below, but a figure struggled through it, and he caught Thomal before he could collapse. “What happened?” he said as he dragged his first officer away from the hatch, but he knew the answer.

“Boiler…overpressurized.” Thomal gasped for breath.

“The engineer?” Alyster said. The rest of the crew hurried to pull up buckets of water.

“I think he got clear. Sir.”

Alyster hoped to the Unity he had. When a boiler blew open under the pressure of too much steam, shards of red-hot brass and fragments of pipe flew in all directions, slashing into bulkheads and bodies and anything else in their way.
With our luck, that ruined the other boiler as well
. The engine was already shutting down as the steam escaped.

Leaking superheated vapor in a dozen places,
Checkmate
floated forward a few more yards on sheer inertia and came to a halt. Alyster sagged against the gunwale, then forced himself to his feet again.

“Do you want us to go in?” Vinsen said. He had a pail of water and a deeply reluctant expression as he looked at the open hatch and the pall of smoke drifting up.

Going near the engine room might mean being roasted or steamed alive, and Alyster couldn’t risk losing what remained of the crew. He tipped a bucket over himself instead and ventured below, only to find a crumpled body halfway down the passageway. It was the chief engineer, bleeding where broken metal had struck him. Half-crouched to avoid breathing the worst of the fumes, Alyster pulled him to the hatchway. Every inch of the man’s exposed skin was red where it had been scalded, but at least he was alive.

“What now?” Vinsen said when the rest of them had carried the chief engineer up. Kovir was on the deck as well by then, and Alyster supposed he could take news of the disaster to the waiting ships. The race was lost, of course.
Enlightenment
, approaching from the north, was only half a mile or so from Snakestone, and
Checkmate
was dead in the water.

The wind was cool against his sweat-dampened skin, and
Enlightenment
’s flags streamed out, but she had stopped moving. Men furled her sails and lowered a boat instead.

“What are they doing?” Miri asked.

“Shallower water,” Alyster said flatly. “They’ll row the rest of the distance.”

“Wait.” She spoke fast and intently. “Alyster, if the rules of the race didn’t specify your ship had to reach Snakestone, would it be enough just for you to do it?”

Alyster turned to Kovir at once. “Your shark. Will she carry me?”

He had never thought a Seawatch operative could look so dumbfounded. “Captain,” Kovir said, managing to work his mouth again, “are you sure you want to get on a tiger shark’s back?”

“Can you make her not kill me until we get there?” Alyster climbed over the gunwale without waiting for the answer. “Then move!”

He let go and the water swallowed him up. An echoing splash as he surfaced told him Kovir had done the same thing, and he blinked his vision clear to see the boy swing himself easily on to the shark’s back as she swam past them both. She turned in a tight circle and swam back. One gloved hand on her dorsal fin, Kovir tore off his other glove with his teeth and stretched his arm out.

Alyster caught it and used the leverage to hook a leg over the shark’s spine and pull himself astride her. He wasn’t sure what to do with his hands after that, but Kovir settled it by yanking both wrists around his waist and Alyster locked his fingers together, relieved that he hadn’t had to touch either living or dead sharkhide with his bare skin. The impulsiveness that, for him, occurred perhaps once a decade had passed, leaving him wondering what the hell he had done. He was only too aware that between his splayed legs was well over a ton of brute strength and serrated teeth, kept from killing him only by an intangible link to Kovir’s mind.

The shark’s tail scythed. Her fin just broke the surface, water splattering on either side of it, and she arrowed through the waves. Muscles tightened beneath Alyster’s legs in long powerful ridges as her entire body worked, each flex culminating in a hard sweep of the tail, but he didn’t think she was moving at her top speed. Perhaps she was tired too, from trying to keep up with
Checkmate
’s breakneck pace during the past few days, or she wasn’t used to twice as much weight on her back.

“Can’t she go any faster?” he said.

He knew that had been a gaffe even before Kovir’s back went rigid. “Feel free to jump off and start swimming, Captain,” he said. “She can follow you and bite your feet to make
you
go faster.”

Alyster said nothing more. In any event, they were only three hundred yards away now. The oarsmen on
Enlightenment
’s boat pulled hard, but they couldn’t match the shark’s swiftness. Two hundred yards. He saw Dagrans crowding on the decks of the waiting ships, sunlight glinting off brass and spyglasses. More people watched from the cliffs of Snakestone Isle on either side of the lagoon, shouting and cheering.

The shark put on a final burst of speed, froth spattering him and Kovir. One hundred yards.

Enlightenment
’s cannons blasted. Ahead of the shark, water fountained upward in a boiling spray. The shark jerked as if she had been harpooned—and plunged deep. Water splashed into Alyster’s eyes and filled his mouth as he fought his way back to the surface; his clothes had given him no purchase at all on the shark’s skin, and he’d let go of Kovir as well as he swam up. He wasn’t even sure either of them was alive.

His head broke the surface, and the air had never felt so good. Coughing, he shook his head and opened his eyes, ignoring the sting of salt. Kovir was near him and the shark swam an erratic circle around them, fin appearing and disappearing.

“What the hell…” No, he knew what had happened. “Is she hurt?”

“Just startled.” Kovir looked startled as well and was watching
Enlightenment
, but Alyster only had eyes for the rowboat. It had drawn ahead, so by the time Kovir calmed the shark and they both climbed back on her, the boat was less than a dozen yards from the row of red flags. The shark took off with an angry flick of her tail, but Kovir didn’t bother coaxing more speed from her, and all Alyster could do was watch as
Enlightenment
’s boat crossed the finish line.

The roar from the watching people was almost as loud as the cannons had been. A soft white rain descended from the cliffs to either side, a cascade of petals settling on the water and the Dagrans as they waved. Someone who must have been their commanding officer stood up at the bow of the boat, doffed a cap and bowed. A long braid fell forward as she did so, gleaming red in the sun.

Alyster had felt blank and empty with the knowledge he had lost, but at the sight of Lera Vanze, his vision went redder than her hair. He was so furious, it was only surprising the seawater soaking his clothes didn’t boil away at once. Where in hell had she come from, and how dare they fire on him?

The shark swam into the mouth of the lagoon, by which time the cheers were quieting as people stared at them, some crowding so close to the edges of the cliffs that Alyster hoped they would fall off. Slipping down from the shark’s back, he reached the boat in a few quick strokes and caught the gunwale. Someone extended a hand to him but he ignored it.

“What are
you
doing with them?” he said to Lera.

“We got off
Wrack
before she sank and were heading for the coast when we saw
Enlightenment
drifting.”

So that was why the ship had a full complement. Alyster knew too that it was the only pairing which could have beaten
Checkmate
—the Dagrans’ knowledge of their home waters and their unique weaponry, coupled with a Denalait’s seamanship and willingness to take any risk in the ocean—but that didn’t make him feel any better.

“You fired on us!” he said, wondering if that might mean disqualification.

Lera folded her arms. “The rules prohibited damaging or attempting to damage a competitor’s ship. We didn’t fire at
Checkmate
—we fired at a shark. And aimed to miss, because those gunners could have made fishbait out of it.”

That was for the benefit of the listening Dagrans, Alyster knew, but before he could say anything else, Lera turned to face the nearest of the ships. The officers in their blue and gold were gathered at the gunwale, deckhands seated on the yardarms and bowsprit for a better look. She raised her voice.

“The first to the finish line,” she called out. “Captain Vanze,
Enlightenment
.”

The captain nodded, touching the brim of his own cap. “Congratulations.”

The silence on
Checkmate
’s deck was made of spun glass, solid but so infinitely delicate that the least movement would shatter it. No one spoke as Kovir regained the shark and they swam ahead in what Miri thought was more of a symbolic gesture than anything else, though when she saw heated words being exchanged, she soon guessed what had happened. Vinsen looked through the spyglass and confirmed it. Alyster and Lera were too far away for anyone to hear what was being said, but no one needed to.

“Better get back to work,” Thomal said finally. “If the captain comes back to find us all standing here gaping, he’ll be in an even better mood.”

The gathering dispersed immediately. Miri helped Reveka carry the chief engineer down to the surgery, because although she longed to know what would happen next, she knew how humiliating it would be for Alyster to make a defeated return to his ship. She did what she could in the surgery while the rest of the crew saw to what was left of the engine room, and then she went to Alyster’s cabin to put clean dry clothes out for him.

He still hadn’t returned. Her stomach rumbled, and she tried to think what she could prepare that didn’t require either fresh water or fuel, but when she crept up to the deck, she saw the shark heading towards
Checkmate
. She was back in her cabin within moments, listening until she heard Alyster go into his own quarters.

This is ridiculous
, she thought. Someone had to talk to him eventually.

As if she were walking across a sheet of ice, she made her way to his cabin. The outer door was open—not a good sign, she thought, since Alyster was such a private person he always had it closed. She pushed it open a few inches and tilted her head to look in.

Opposite her, the bedroom door was open too. He had taken off his coat and shirt and boots, but they were tossed in a heap on the floor and he sat on the bunk, for once doing nothing other than looking straight ahead at the washstand. She wanted to tell him it didn’t matter, to put her arms around him or help him undress, to comfort him, most of all, but he was so proud he would hate any hint of sympathy. And yet there was nothing on Eden that could have made her leave.