Across the Darkling Sea Read online

  A few days later, on a dim and watery morning, they neared Malach, the port city of Marique. Clouds hovered low in the sky, giving the air itself enough weight to leave her hair flat and her clothing damp. Fog hugged the ship and obscured Malach from sight as they approached. Ling clung to the rail, pacing from bow to stern and port to starboard, desperate for the murkiness to clear so she could catch her first glance of the mysterious place. What would a port city filled with magic look like?

  In the early afternoon, she heard the bells of the port and knew they were close. It was nerve-racking, sailing blind through unfamiliar waters, but the crew of the Courser knew their business well, and they slid into berth without incident.

  Ling watched as the crew ran a plank from ship to dock. She could hear the sounds of a port city all around her, but could see nothing through the shifting white fog. The dock itself was a vague, pale shape seeming possessed of just a bit more substance than the spinning whiteness around it.

  The passengers began disembarking as soon as the plank hit the dock, and Ling watched them as she wrestled with her own fear and anxiety. Dreskin had been right; she’d found safety on the Courser. Drake might have suspected her of hiding something, but she’d been nothing but kind. And Ling had not seen Alyssum once since that first night in Drake’s cabin. The Courser was the last shred of connection she had with home. When she stepped off this ship, that last bit would be severed. She would be more alone than she’d ever been.

  But she would never find Grag if she never left the ship. Her deep depression had largely left her, but her certainty that she needed to be unmade had not wavered. If anything, it had grown stronger through her journey across the Darkling Sea. She had to find Grag, and to find Grag, she needed to find the Registrary, and the sooner she did that the better. The constant tension, confusion, and fear were exhausting.

  She would step out of the familiar and into the strange. She would face the uncertainty squarely and find a way to end herself, one way or another. The idea of following Fariss off this ship and into the unknown of Malach was terrifying, but she would do it. Just like she’d fled Meuse. Just like she’d snuck aboard the Scarlet. Just like she’d boarded the Courser and made her way to the captain’s cabin to ask for passage.

  “Ling.”

  Ling turned to see Captain Drake approaching, a warm smile lighting up her face as it always did.

  “Captain. Thank you again for getting me here. I owe you a debt.”

  The captain of the Courser gave her a strange look. “We shall see who owes whom, Ling.”

  Ling didn’t understand what she meant, but said nothing.

  “We will be here for five days, Ling. If you’re back by then, we’ll see that you get back to Middelhaern safely.”

  Ling doubted Middelhaern would ever be safe for her again. She had no intention of returning to the ship. Coming back would mean she’d failed, and she had no intention of failing. One way or another, her journey ended here.

  She had no desire to worry Drake, however. “How often do ships sail back?”

  “Periodically. But not every ship is as...accommodating...as the Courser. And not all sail the route with an eye on safety. The sirené are not the only danger out there, Ling. Perhaps not even the greatest.”

  Ling felt her shoulders tense. Was that a specific warning or a more general observation? “I will be here in five days,” Ling said, reaching out a hand to clasp Captain Drake’s forearm tightly. She regretted the lie, but she didn’t want the woman worrying about her.

  “Do you know where you need to go?” the captain asked, returning the gesture.

  “Better than that. She’s got a guide.” Fariss walked up to them, customary tight smile on his face. Ling hadn’t shifted her eyes in his direction and, at the sound of his voice, saw an almost imperceptible darkening of Captain Drake’s own smile. Fine lines formed at the corners of her eyes as she narrowed them at the man.

  “She could find no better,” the captain said, though the words seemed forced and her teeth were somewhat clenched.

  “Are you ready, Ling?”

  “Yes,” she said, and she meant it. She desperately wanted this whole thing to be over and done with.

  Fariss tipped his hat to Captain Drake and made his way across the deck to the dock. Ling studied the captain for another breath. She had so many questions, but she didn’t know how to ask them. Finally, she smiled and nodded farewell before spinning on her heel and following after Fariss.

  She crossed the plank, feeling the dock rock beneath her as she stepped onto it. She followed close behind Fariss, not wanting to lose him in the thick fog. They walked for several minutes, Ling listening to venders crying out their wares, to dock hands swearing, and to rope creaking as it transported heavy cargo from dock to ship or ship to dock. Magic this place may be, but docks were docks, it seemed.

  After several minutes of walking, she and Fariss piled into some sort of contraption with a handful of other people. She felt it swing lightly as she stepped onto it, and she wondered if it was floating. She cursed the thick fog again, straining to see around her. She wasn’t at all certain she could find her way back to the Courser even if she desired it.

  “Malach is well below the level of the sea,” Fariss said, as if he could read her discomfort. “It is surrounded by a vast wall, and we are up on what is called the Palm, a high platform with spurs stretching out into the sea where ships can dock. It’s quite a sight. It’s unfortunate the fog is so thick today.

  “To get into the city itself, we must descend quite far. We call this a lift—they have them in Meuse, as well, to get cargo from the ships to the warehouses in the dry season.”

  Ling had never considered that Fariss might have visited Meuse itself. The thought was deeply unsettling. She tried to remember if she had ever mentioned she was from there, but couldn’t recall.

  The last person to step onto the lift dropped a long pole across the entryway, closing them in. The lift jolted, and the box swung wildly as it began to fall.

  “In Meuse they are operated by oxen, but here, by magic. My discipline, to be precise, although I do not personally specialize in mechanics.”

  He spoke with more than a small amount of pride. She shifted her eyes from the blank whiteness around her and instead studied the faces of those on the lift. None of them had stained chins or stones embedded in their faces, but she didn’t know if that meant they were without magic like people in Brielle or simply not yet warlocks.

  The lift landed with another jolt. As Ling stepped out, she heard the familiar crunch of sand under her feet, though when she looked down, it was a startling shade of green.

  Her mother had a pendant her father had brought back as a gift from one of his trips upriver. It had been the same brilliant green as the sand at her feet, though it had a swirl of a lighter shade of green brightening the center of it. He’d called the stone malachite, and Ling wondered if it had been named after this place. The sand was beautiful, and she thought the effect of the green sand against the pink water would be dazzling once the haze cleared.

  From out of the mist drifted the sound of children laughing and singing as they played nearby. Fariss led her along the sand, and as she passed the children, she stopped to listen to their chanting.

  “Are you a warlock, or are you a Mari? Are you the wife of Porter Caree?”

  As she drew close, she could see their bodies as they danced about in a circle, a solitary girl huddled in their midst. The central figure knelt, head bowed, as the others danced around her. To Ling’s ear their tone was harsh, taunting, and their words sent a chill down her spine.

  As the song came to an end, the dancers spun inward and, as one, flung their hands outward toward the girl kneeling in front of them. Lightning flashed and the sand at their feet exploded out and up. The children screamed, and Ling stopped in shock.

  “Don’t worry yourself. It’s naught but a child’s song,” Fariss said, taking her elbow and turning her
to the left.

  “But the girl in the middle!”

  “Is fine. It’s harmless magic.”

  “But the screaming...”

  “It’s part of the story, Ling. All is well. Come on, the walkway is this way. Watch your step in this damnable fog.”

  “The children...they...they have magic?”

  Fariss chuckled out loud at the question. “You’ve clearly not spent any time outside of Brielle, Ling. Of course they do. All children do, you know. Outside of Brielle, anyway.”

  Ling was shaken, both from the kids’ game as well as from the careless way she revealed things about herself. Fariss was helping her, but he was not an ally. She had to be more careful.

  She pressed her lips together as she turned away and headed in the direction Fariss motioned. They’d “killed” the girl in the middle. Are you a warlock, are you a Mari...The kids played, but all such games came from some nugget of truth.

  Ling thought of Alyssum—tall, vibrant, beautiful in an alien sort of way. What would those children do if it had been her in their midst instead?

  “Who is Porter Caree?”

  “It’s a bit of a dark story from a dark time, I’m afraid. He is only the most well remembered of many during that time who became convinced their partners, children, parents, or friends had been taken by the Mari and replaced with a changeling. Do you know this word, ‘changeling’?”

  Ling stopped breathing. She woodenly shook her head no, fear thrumming through her.

  “A changeling is a creature of magic. Most are made from stone or wood or earth. Anyway, the belief was the Mari took people and left changelings behind as part of an effort to build an army. Porter, like all the others, tried to banish the changeling, convinced if he could banish it, his real wife would return to him. He killed her, unfortunately. It was violent and gruesome, the poor girl. Like I said, it was a dark time. We’ve fought the Mari for many, many years.”

  Ling walked beside Fariss in silence as the crunch of the sand underfoot transitioned to the soft slap of shoes on stone. Perhaps this was the source of the stories she’d heard back home. Perhaps this, too, was what had prompted her mother’s actions. For the first time, she wondered if Grag had been a warlock at all.

  “Was it ever true? That the Mari took people and left...changelings?”

  “Took people, yes. Just as we have taken so many of theirs in turn.”

  Ling shivered at the grin that split his face at the statement.

  “But the part about the changelings I doubt very much. Such a thing requires a great deal of magic. Something that has been in quite short supply for as long as we’ve been fighting.”

  She’d never heard magic was in short supply. Regardless, someone had, in fact, had enough of it to create a changeling, and quite recently.

  “The Mari are vile and selfish creatures. Given their way, they would hoard every bit of magic left and leave all the rest of us to starve of it. Lucky for us, we’re winning this war, if a bit too slowly for my taste.

  “I was convinced for ages that they had some way of storing it. Much like our stones,” he continued, his fingers brushing against the amethyst in his chin, “but much, much greater. But there’s no way they have that sort of power. If they had, no doubt there would be many more of them and far fewer of us.”

  Ling gnawed at her lip hard enough for it to have drawn blood if she could bleed. She couldn’t reconcile his words with what she had seen between Captain Drake and Alyssum, or even between Alyssum and the crew of the ship. The crew, and clearly their captain, seemed fond of and friendly toward Alyssum. And, perhaps to an equal measure, afraid of Fariss.

  She looked down at her feet again. The thick fog swirling around outside matched the swirling confusion in her head, and the combination was too much for her to handle all at once.

  She focused in on the brilliant green stone of the walkway as it passed beneath her feet. It glimmered brightly in the thin, misting rain, the swirling patterns of lighter green and cream glistening. Things had been so much easier when she’d only ever seen those colors in her mother’s pendant.

  “I’d love to find one, though,” Fariss continued, lost in his own thoughts. “A changeling, I mean. Imagine capturing such a creature as that...Imagine all you could learn from studying it.”

  It. Ling kept her eyes on the ground in front of her as she and Fariss walked along, every hair on both her arms standing upright. It meant a thing, an object, not a person. Laera and Fariss had that much in common, it seemed. She desperately wanted to get as far away from Fariss as she’d managed to get from Laera.

  The roadway was crowded, but as they walked she noticed the others giving them a wide berth. Those wearing the colored robes of their disciplines nodded to Fariss as they moved aside. Acolytes shuffled to the edge of the path and whispered to one another, their hands covering their mouths, their eyes open wide. Who was Fariss, really?

  He continued to chat as they walked, but she could not follow his words. Her mind was a tangle of confused thoughts as she tried to tease out who was who and whom she could trust and whether any of that mattered at all.

  She’d known finding Grag would be hard, but she’d thought it would be the difficulty of finding a single person in a big wide world. She hadn’t expected wars, magical creatures, and politics to complicate things even further.

  Shaking herself mentally, she focused on trying to see through the fog to the city around her. The politics didn’t matter. She didn’t care what was going on between the warlocks and the Mari. It didn’t affect her. She didn’t need to trust anyone to do what she needed to do. She just needed to stay focused, and the rest would slip by her like background noise.

  She couldn’t see much through the haze, but she could see that the avenue itself was large, wide enough for fifteen oxen abreast, though they had no oxen here as far as she’d seen. It seemed Malach was much like Meuse—boats were the way to get around.

  Fariss pointed things out—or tried to—as they walked. “You can’t see it now, but every house sits atop a rock spire or is cradled in the branches of a cypress tree. There is also an inn just over there that is similarly located in the one of the trees, although we don’t get many tourists here.”

  She peered toward the inn, but with the fog preventing her from seeing anything around her, she wondered whether she’d be able to find it again.

  “And here we are. The Registrary.”

  Ling stopped and looked up at a massive doorway standing open in front of her, easily twenty feet tall. She could see the vague shape of massive statuary on either side of the door and hoped fervently that the fog would clear soon so she could get a glimpse of them before she left.

  “Thank you, Fariss. I appreciate you helping me get here.”

  “Not at all. It was my pleasure.” He reached out and took both her hands in his own. His hands were warm and dry, far from the clammy dampness she’d expected. “I’m well known here in Malach. If you run into trouble or find yourself in need of anything, ask for Fariss Arleé. They’ll know where to find me.” He bowed deeply before vanishing into the mist.

  Ling waited for several deep breaths, watching the place where he’d stood. When she was certain he’d gone, she rolled her shoulders and shook out her hands, pushing the tension out of her body.

  She’d been afraid he wouldn’t leave. That some sense of obligation would keep him at her side through the entirety of her search. Or worse, that he’d bring her somewhere she couldn’t escape from and put her under his knife just to see why Alyssum had shown an interest in her. If he did, he’d discover the truth of what she was soon enough.

  But he’d been good to his word. She was at the Registrary, and he was gone.

  She squared her shoulders and walked through the enormous doorway. The room was incredibly tall, but quite shallow once you entered. There were three desks spaced evenly across the length of the room. There was space for five, maybe six people to stand in front of each desk,
and only enough room behind each desk for the clerk sitting there. The entire room could only be fifteen feet deep. Quite odd given the size of the entryway.

  Behind each desk sat a woman or a man with a single book open in front of them. They looked surprisingly similar with their thin wire glasses perched on narrow noses and tightly clenched lips. Over each desk was a sign: Sign, Exit, and Search. The hall was otherwise empty of objects or people.

  Ling approached the Search desk and stood quietly. The man squinted up at her from behind his glasses. “Name.”

  Ling wasn’t sure if he was looking for her name or Grag’s.

  “Who are you looking for?” he demanded before she could formulate a question.

  “I’m...Warlock Grag,” she stumbled over the words. The man looked down at the book in front of him.

  “Surname?”

  “I don’t have his surname.”

  “No surname?” The man looked at her in clear distress. “Oh dear. This’ll take a bit. Wait here, dearie.” The man pushed back his chair, stood, and vanished into a door in the wall behind him. It was many hours before she saw him again.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Ling had no idea how long she stood before the Search desk, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. After what felt like hours, she began pacing the length of the room. Eventually she sat on the floor, leaning against the rough wall behind her. And some time after that, she laid flat on her back, staring at the ceiling above.

  The ceiling was spanned by what she’d originally taken for beams, but what she realized now were massive buttresses of wood. They looked like a ribcage stretching from one end of the room to the other, and they were so large that the spaces between them were buried in deep shadow. She let her eyes travel down along the wall. It was rough and reminded her of newly hewn wood from the mill back home. The floor was smooth beneath her, worn down by years of shuffling feet she supposed, and was a deep mahogany color. She realized with a start that she must be in an enormous tree. She itched to get outside and look at the building again from the outside.