A Dying Land Read online

  He tossed back the last of his coffee. “When we move out into the river, keep low—well below the sides of the ship—or you’ll find yourself in the jaws of a river jackal.”

  “River jackal?”

  “They have teeth longer than any fish has a right to.”

  He yanked up the anchor. The chain was covered with thick brown sludge, slimy green bulbous gobs, and what seemed to be hundreds of some manner of scarlet eel that slithered through the chain, hissing loudly, until they splashed back into the river’s depths. He made his way to the wheel and, grasping a spoke in one hand, knelt down onto the deck.

  “You ready?” Mercer asked her.

  She nodded and then shook her head. “How will you navigate if your head’s low inside the boat?”

  He actually rolled his eyes at her, the whites of his eye stark against the dark brown of his skin. “You let me worry about that, girl. You just keep yourself out of trouble.”

  She nodded then, having no choice but to trust him. She braced herself, hands on the rail and legs wide. Mercer stared at her.

  “What’d I just say to you?” His impatience was clear, but she had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Get your body down low, unless you want to lose your head. Don’t forget again, or you’ll get us both killed.”

  “Oh!” she said, dropping to her knees in imitation of him.

  “And no dangling off like you did yesterday. Everything here eats everything else, and you are on every menu. Got it?”

  She nodded and tried to ignore the flutter of fear in her gut. He shoved a lever forward, and the ship jerked into motion with a metallic clang. The serpent rose out of the water to a height taller than the mast of the Mincon as they approached, and if Ling hadn’t already seen Mercer’s cool competence at the wheel, if he hadn’t already told her the glyphs would keep them safe, she would have sworn he was sailing them straight to their deaths.

  As the ship drew close, the serpent heaved itself toward them, mouth opened wide. Ling cowered, prostrating herself on the deck, but instead of the crack of breaking boards as that massive body hit the ship, she heard nothing more than an outraged hiss. She looked up to see the serpent immediately beside the ship, its body smoking. The scent of charred snake filled the air, and the creature vanished below the surface in a chaotic churning of white water that tossed the Mincon to and fro.

  Ling could hardly believe her eyes. Those barely-there remnants of paint had enough power to keep that thing away from them? She sat up, keeping her rear firmly planted to the deck to keep her head low. She gripped her empty coffee cup tightly, trying not to notice the shaking of her hand.

  They moved out to the center of the river where the water flowed slow and sluggish. Ling scooted her way toward the bow, still keeping her body well away from the edge, until she could gaze under the rail at the water in front of them. The gap between the deck and the bottom rail was low enough to see through. She gasped to see nothing but a solid, ever-shifting mass of serpentine bodies a few feet below the surface of the water.

  “We’re sailing on a mass of serpents!” she exclaimed, unable to keep her shock to herself. “That’s impossible.”

  “Nothing is impossible here,” Mercer replied. “You’re in the Colli Terra now. There is nothing the same here as anywhere else in the world. This is the land of magic, and the magic does as it pleases. Especially now.”

  “What are they?” Ling asked, staring at the shifting eyes glinting from the bodies below.

  “They’re the Sanguise, the water bringers,” Mercer said. “According to Mari legend, those serpents brought every drop of water to every place in the world.” His knowledge of Mari folklore surprised her. Most of the boatsmyn she knew dealt only in rumor and gossip. Not only did Mercer know the legend, his tone had a touch of reverence in it, as if he were a believer.

  “And yet we sail right over the top of them,” she said.

  “Of course. There is no other way to get there.”

  A pragmatist to the core. It made Ling smile. She sprawled onto her belly, grimoire open in front of her, but she didn’t write. Instead she watched Mercer. Grubby and rough he may be, but there was something underneath that gruff exterior. He had a story, and she wondered what it might be. He stared ahead, shifting his weight from one foot to the other as he scanned the water ahead of them.

  She turned her attention back to the grimoire. It had been quite a morning, and she didn’t want to forget the Sanguise, the flashing serpents that would feast on the flesh of humans if they could, but that brought with them the gift of water.

  The river was sluggish, the wind barely strong enough to ruffle the pages of the grimoire. It was hot, despite it being early morning, and the air was so still it tasted stale. She spun around onto her belly, and remained prone on the deck for hours, staring forward through the low gap to catch glimpses of the scintillating colors of the serpents below, and intermittently adding a word or two to the grimoire. The sun was at its highest point in the sky when she jumped to her feet and headed to the kitchen.

  “No!”

  Ling spun around to see what Mercer was shouting about and something cold and large slammed into her chest, knocking her several feet back. She landed hard on the deck, her breath exploding out of her chest. She could feel her lips moving, gaping like a fish out of water, as her body struggled to inhale. A distant part of her mind knew she had no lungs and didn’t need to breathe. But she had Evelyn’s memories. Her body still thought of itself as human.

  I am not human. I am not human. I am not human, she chanted, fighting against the fear, until she was finally able to fill her lungs.

  A fish flapped on the deck beside her, flesh smoking where it contacted the wood, its open mouth revealing teeth as long as her forearm. It’s gaping jaw and massive teeth gave it away, the river jackal’s bulging eyes were pinned on her, and its mad flopping was bringing it ever closer.

  She realized with a shock that the thing was struggling after her. She scrambled backwards in surprise, but Mercer was already moving. He scurried toward her, moving on all fours, and grasped the thing by its tail. He heaved it several feet closer to the edge of the boat. It thrashed wildly, but Mercer maintained his hold on the fish’s tail. Ling had no idea how. The thing was enormous, and every jerk of its muscular body shoved and pulled Mercer around the deck. Mercer stood and heaved, trying to throw the monstrous fish overboard before dropping once again to the deck. The fish thrashed in midair, smacking its powerful tail against the railing hard enough to keep it from going overboard.

  Ling saw a flash of white behind Mercer, and she realized another fish had made its leap. Mercer had moved fast, but not fast enough. She lunged to her feet, knocking the second fish off its path. She dropped back onto her backside, grasped the jackal around the middle and struggled to throw the thing over the rail. The fish was remarkably fast and managed twice to get its teeth into her leg before she finally heaved it over the side. She had distinctly felt its sharp teeth penetrate her flesh, but she didn’t bleed, and upon inspection she found no injury.

  Mercer was still struggling dangerously close to the edge of the ship. It looked as if the thing were herding him in the hopes of pushing him into the water. Ling crawled to him on all fours. She yanked Mercer backwards, away from the thrashing river jackal, while frantically shoving the fish toward the water.

  It changed tactics and shifted from trying to push Mercer into the water to trying to snatch a bite on its way off the boat. Somehow they both managed to avoid the smacking jaws and finally get the thing over the edge. They collapsed onto their backs on the deck, Mercer drenched in sweat, both of them panting.

  After only a few deep breaths, Mercer pulled himself onto his hands and knees and crawled back to the wheel without a word. Ling could feel his anger as clearly as if he’d screamed it. He’d told her to keep low. A simple instruction, and she’d failed. Her inattention could have cost him his life.

  She turned away
, cheeks burning in shame. She crawled back to her room, closed the door tightly behind her, and collapsed onto the bed. Her father, Evelyn’s father, had always reacted the same way when she’d made some terrible mistake back home. He would never say a word about it, his look enough to burn the lesson home. She wondered if Mercer had children of his own.

  Much later, she felt the boat pick up speed with a lurch. She swallowed her shame and made her way back to the deck—this time remembering to keep low. Water swirled all around the ship, and ahead the air was misted with a heavy fog from the frothing water. Boulders jutted from the river at every angle, and the beginnings of canyon walls stretched above her.

  It seemed they were plummeting downward—a confusing reality, considering the man at the Registrary had said the Colli Terra was in the mountainous center of the island. She crawled over to Mercer and wedged herself tightly in place, the rough current threatening to toss her overboard.

  “Isn’t the Colli Terra up in the mountains?” she asked.

  “Yup,” he said, his eyes intent on the river in front of them. The boulders were growing ever more frequent, and they now sailed through impressive rapids. A wave of water crashed over the top of the boat, leaving her soaked through.

  “But we’re going down,” she said.

  “Sure ’bout that?”

  Ling looked around. The cliff walls to either side of them were growing ever taller. Water flowed downhill. They were definitely going down.

  “The water is flowing…”

  “I already told you: the rules don’t apply here,” Mercer said, eyeing her briefly. “Very few will sail to the Colli Terra, and this is why. It’s nonsense. Ain’t nothing here that works right. But the magic here allows warlocks to do stuff that couldn’t be done anywhere else. At least it used to. Now it’s just angry and violent. Like it knows it’s dying.”

  The boat plunged down a large rapid, and waves crashed over the top of the boat as they came up on the far side. The ship swirled madly as they were sucked into an eddy and then they were spit out into the suddenly lazy current in a pocket at the side of the river. Mercer pushed a lever, and a loud belch sounded from the right side of the boat. Black smoke billowed up from a pipe jutting out of the side of the hull, and the boat pushed firmly away from the wall and spun back into the rough current of the main river. The water grabbed hold of them and hurtled them upriver as if the boat were light as onion paper.

  Marique had a lot of violent water, it seemed. Ling wondered that Mercer wasn’t terrified. If she were human, she would be. Drowning seemed a high probability here.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Hold on!” Mercer shouted at her. She was right next to him, but could barely hear him over the relentless roar of the river.

  “I am!” she shouted back.

  “Hold on harder! We’re at the falls.”

  The falls? Ling stared ahead trying to see through the thick fog hanging above the violently surging water. It looked like they were in a broad pool, the center of which was a chaotic swirl of mist and water. The jagged shadows of enormous stones jutted out all around them. She could see no falls, no cliff. It looked more like they were at the bottom of a waterfall, only without the falling water.

  “Where?” she asked, confused.

  Mercer nodded toward the surging center of the pool as his lips thinned into a narrow line, his hands white on the wheel, legs braced. Were they going through the falls? Such a thing would pound a normal boat to bits. She wrapped herself around the base of the wheel and clung tight, eyes wide open, hoping the wards would protect them from the hammer force of falling water as well as it had from the Sanguise.

  The ship nose-dived over a small rapid, dropping about eight feet. Ling couldn’t see how this was possible, but before she could frame a coherent thought around it, the nose of the Mincon tipped forward again, sharply, as if they were falling over a ledge. Were they going under?

  And then they were in a swirling maelstrom, roaring water beating down on them mercilessly. She was convinced the pounding on her head would liquefy her brain if it lasted much longer. She held her breath, expecting the river to flood over the decks of the Mincon at any moment. But then she was weightless. For a moment it felt as if the ship had dropped out from underneath her, though she knew that wasn’t possible.

  They fell for the space of several breaths, and then she slammed downward into the deck, her breath knocked from her body for the second time that day. The boat leveled out and seemed to just hang there, floating as if it had no more substance than a cloud.

  “Are…” Ling panted, fear and excitement thrilling through her. “Are we flying?”

  “Floating,” Mercer shouted, and Ling was shocked to see a broad smile lighting his face. “I love this part.”

  “Can I look?”

  Mercer nodded, waving her to the edge. Ling climbed to her feet and leaned over the railing. Below her, she could just make out a broad pool, the center of which was a storm of swirling water and cloud. All around her water fell, but it traveled up instead of down, carrying her and the Mincon with it. The sound was deafening, just how she imagined it would be in the heart of a vast fall, but everything hurtled upward rather than down.

  For a moment, her head spun in confusion between what her eyes saw and her body felt. They drifted gently upward despite the violence around them. The air was softened by the heavy fog of water that surrounded them, as cool as a gentle rain on a summer day. She closed her eyes, breathing the cool air in deeply. She’d always wondered what it would feel like to fly.

  “I can see why this is your favorite part,” she said, opening her eyes and smiling at Mercer.

  The hardened boatsmyn that looked as if he’d steal the clothes right off your back and the girl who wasn’t a girl shared a smile, delighting in the simple joy of a wondrous experience. An unlikely pairing as ever there had been. Falling up a waterfall, it seemed, was the ultimate equalizer.

  They drifted this way for what seemed like ages. Once she’d gotten used to the confusing sensory experience, Ling became so enraptured by it that she completely lost track of time. They floated so serenely through the mist that it didn’t feel like they were moving at all. Only the regular yawns from Mercer as he sought to pop his ears suggested otherwise.

  “Look,” Mercer said.

  Ling looked up expectantly. She breathed lightly, watching the rising water.

  “Not there,” Mercer said. “There. Below you.”

  She leaned over the side and watched as the boat drifted slowly down as if it were a feather dropped from a high tree branch. They had been floating upward before. Somewhere in the raging mist of the falls, they’d begun descending, coming out somewhere far different than where they had begun. A moment later, the clouds ended with an abruptness that was almost rude. Below them stretched an expansive view of the Colli Terra. As the land drew nearer, the violence of its creation became increasingly apparent, as did the brilliant hues of its deeply saturated color. She didn’t know whether to love it or loathe it.

  A wide expanse of flat earth stretched away from what appeared to be a massive river basin, or at least what had been a river basin at some point in the past. It was wide and flat, but instead of lush green stretching out from blue water, she saw land twisted into sharp knives of rock. They jutted up from earth split by a winding expanse that might have been a river at some point, but was now crusty, mineral-laden stone.

  The stone was colored in deep oranges, yellows, and reds so dark it looked as if some giant had collapsed there and bled out, its blood seeping miles across the twisted landscape. Perhaps those knives of rock were all that remained of the ribs and spine of some long-dead monster.

  Random pools of muck, ranging from emerald to moss to sickly green, steamed and sputtered, sending plumes of grey smoke rising into the sky. The colors took her breath away, but the twisted landscape sent a shiver up her spine. She’d never seen anything so barren of life and of water. She had spent her en
tire existence in a place that never fully dried out. She was headed into a place where it seemed to never rain. Far in the distance, barely visible through the haze, rose the interior mountains of the Colli Terra.

  The smell hit when they were still a good distance above the land. It was the stench of rotting flesh, rotting eggs, as if the corpse of whatever creature had bled out here was still decomposing somewhere below. She gagged, leaned over the side of the boat and retched, watching her vomit fall before splashing against the rocks below. The Mincon stopped its descent and hovered about five feet off the ground, just above her splatter of vomit.

  “Will the smell go away?” she asked.

  “You’ll be smelling that for a while, I’m afraid,” Mercer answered. He grasped a couple levers to the right side of the wheel and gave a heavy yank. The two levers came together, meeting in the center, and Ling felt the entire boat shake violently as another metallic sound split the air. She spread her legs, bracing herself against the force of the vibration. The boat gave a final shudder, and the shaking and clanging went quiet.

  Ling looked at Mercer, wondering what was next. They were in a boat, but there was no water to sail on here. Only a bone-dry, twisted landscape.

  “This might feel a bit odd,” Mercer said, and he hit a blue button beside the two levers he had just yanked together. The boat gave another lurch before moving forward a bit and then lurched again. They moved across the landscape in this manner: lurch, move, lurch, move.

  “Is it…walking?” Ling asked, incredulous. Mercer didn’t speak, but his smug smile was all the answer she needed. “Is this magic, too?”

  “Tovenveran. When they’re not busy destroying worlds, they can create some spectacular things,” Mercer said.

  She leaned far over the edge of the boat, trying to see what mechanism was moving them forward. She could just make out a small bit of the legs—giant, shiny things that bent like they had knees—and the pads on the bottom that acted as feet. They stomped across the tortured land, squelching through shallow green pools and crushing small spires of stone with callous disregard. Ling thought about the Courser and the paddles that had pushed them through the windless Mare Tenebrarum.