Chương 88: Drowned Lands Preparation

'What does tomorrow mean,' Kaito said.

'It means we stop walking away from Velhen and start walking toward a boat,' Sable said.

'The infrastructure whoever asked used doesn't cover water the way it covers land. The old registration didn't include the sea. The Precursors built the coast maps for the Thalassian Dominion to run and never took them back. If we're on a ship, whoever's asking can't find us the same way. If we're still on this continent tomorrow night, they might.'

'Which coast.'

'East. Two and a half days on foot if we don't stop for anything and don't touch a road. Three if we do it carefully.'

'Which port.'

'Cairnmouth,' Sable said.

'Small. River mouth. Half the trade there is legitimate. The other half won't ask questions if the money's clean.' Kaito stood up. He walked over and shook Domrek's shoulder once. Domrek was awake before Kaito's hand had come off him.

'Change of plan,' Kaito said.

'We're skipping Sarn Hollow. Straight east to the coast. Sable will guide us off-road.' Domrek didn't ask why. He looked at Kaito's face and said, 'How fast.'

'As fast as three men can walk without dying.'

'Fine.' Domrek was already rolling his blanket.

'Pell.' Pell was awake too, on one elbow, with his eyes already open.

'I heard,' he said.

'Coast is a better call than Sarn anyway. Fewer places to be trapped.'

'You knew this would come,' Kaito said.

'I hoped it wouldn't,' Pell said.

'That's not the same as being surprised.' They were on their feet in less than five minutes. The fire was cold in three.

They walked hard for two and a half days. Pell did most of the route-picking. He kept them low and quiet and off any track wider than a single deer trail. They ate on the move. They drank at streams. They slept twice, for four hours each time, in whatever cover the ground gave them. On the second afternoon they crossed a road at a bend where the sightlines were good in both directions.

There was a Compact patrol on it a mile north — six riders, moving fast, the kind of pace that meant they were looking for something specific and had a bad guess about where it was. Pell held them in the ditch until the horses were gone.

'They don't know we're this far east,' Pell said.

'Or they'd be moving slower and spread out.'

'How do you read that,' Domrek said.

'Same way you read a bad ring,' Pell said.

'They're hunting on a hunch, not a fix.' Domrek grunted, which was Domrek agreeing. The next morning they hit the coast road two miles north of Cairnmouth and walked the last stretch on it because they had to. Nobody looked at them. Cairnmouth was a working port and it was full of working people who didn't have time to look at three more men walking toward the docks.

'Sable,' Kaito said, quietly, as they came into the town.

'Any queries in the last day.'

'Two,' she said.

'Both from the same source. Both unanswered. The frequency is still doubling. Whoever they are, they are becoming less patient.'

'Great.'

'Cairnmouth harbor is not covered by land registration. Once we're on a ship past the breakwater, you drop off their map for at least a week.'

'That's the plan then.'

Cairnmouth was small. Two dozen buildings above the docks, all of them slate roofs and dark wood, and the docks themselves were an L-shape of black planking with maybe fifteen ships tied up. Fishing boats mostly. Two bigger vessels — a coaster hauling barrels, and something Kaito couldn't quite place at the end of the long side of the L.

'Contact,' Kaito said.

'Domrek. Yours.' Domrek nodded.

'Alehouse on the corner. Gray sign. Man in it named Corr who owes a favor. Ten minutes.' Domrek went in alone. Pell and Kaito sat on a bench on the harbor side of the street and watched the docks and looked, Kaito hoped, like two travelers waiting on a friend.

'You all right,' Pell said, after a few minutes.

'I'm tired.'

'That wasn't what I asked.' Kaito almost smiled.

'I know.' Pell didn't push. He watched the water. A boy about ten walked past with a crate of fish that was too heavy for him and set it down twice in the length of the block. Nobody helped him. Nobody bothered him either. That was Cairnmouth. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. Domrek came out of the alehouse in nine minutes. He walked over and sat down.

'End of the long dock,' he said.

'Ship called the Grey Line. Captain's aboard. Corr says she takes odd cargo and asks the price up front and doesn't want to know what's in the crates. He also says she is not to be argued with about the weather.'

'Name,' Kaito said.

'Oska.'

'Level.' Domrek looked at him.

'You'll see it when you see it. Corr wouldn't say. Said it's her business.'

The Grey Line was a two-masted coaster with a low profile and a clean line. Somebody had painted the hull dark gray, apparently on purpose, apparently to make the ship harder to describe from a distance. The rigging was tight. The deck was tidy. A woman was standing on it, near the aft rail, doing something to a coil of rope. She was maybe forty, maybe fifty — hard to say. Short, wiry, weathered. Her hair was cut close and gone half to grey. She wore a plain dark coat and boots that had walked a lot of decks.

Kaito opened his Sight before he called out. The class notation on her was strange. He'd got used to reading levels off a person at a glance. Domrek's read as a wide dense band that hummed. Nara's had been a tall spare column of numbers that stacked cleanly. Most people were narrow ribbons that thickened as they leveled. Oska's read like a wall. Not thick. Solid. A flat sheet of nine-nine that didn't move, didn't hum, didn't have the shimmer around it that a live class notation usually had.

Underneath the wall there was — something. Kaito couldn't get a read on it. The wall was in the way on purpose.

'Sable,' he said, under his breath.

'What is that.'

'A voluntary seal,' Sable said.

'A very good one. She was offered a class evolution and refused it. Twice. Maybe more. The System accepted the refusal and put a hard cap on her progression at ninety-nine. Which is one below the Heroic threshold.'

'Which means she never leveled up past mortal on purpose.'

'Yes.'

'Why.'

'She has her reasons,' Sable said.

'The seal is doing something specific under the surface. It is protecting something. I cannot tell you what. She would not have built it if she wanted anyone to be able to tell.'

'Understood.'

'Kaito — one more thing. She almost certainly has some form of Sight herself. Or something like it. Cassian could read you at a glance. This one will read you the same way. Assume she already knows you are strange.'

'Great,' Kaito said.

'That'll save time.' He walked to the edge of the dock.

'Captain,' he said. Oska looked up from the rope. She didn't smile. She didn't frown. She looked at Kaito for maybe two seconds, at Domrek for one, at Pell for one, and then back at Kaito.

'Corr sent you,' she said. Her voice was low and even. She sounded like a woman who'd said everything she was going to say in a life and was down to only the necessary parts.

'He did.'

'You're going where.'

'Noxara.' She kept looking at him. She still hadn't moved.

'What part of Noxara.'

'The part where a scholar named Tessara Moonveil was last seen four hundred years ago.' Something moved in Oska's face. Not much. A small tightening at one corner of her mouth. Then it was gone.

'That's a long dock,' she said.

'You picked a strange first stop.'

'I know.'

'Three passengers. One dwarf. One man who does not know boats. One man who is quiet and reads the crew before he reads the captain.' She glanced at Pell.

'Where'd you get him.'

'Velhen,' Pell said, before anyone else could answer.

'Owed a debt. He paid it. I'm here for the work.' Oska looked at Pell one more second and made a small nod that Kaito took as her having filed him under acceptable. She named a price. It was steep. Kaito paid half up front in the coin Cassian had provided and offered the rest on arrival. Oska took the up-front without counting it.

'One rule,' Oska said.

'On my ship, my word is the whole law. You don't argue with me about wind or water. If I tell you to go below, you go below. If I tell you to be quiet, you're quiet. If you can't do that, get off my dock now.'

'Done,' Kaito said. Domrek nodded. Pell said, 'Yes, captain,' the specific way a man said it who'd worked ships before.

'You've sailed,' Oska said to Pell.

'A little. A long time ago.'

'Good enough. You'll pull rope. The other two will stay out of the way.'

'When do we leave,' Kaito said.

'The tide turns in three hours. We leave then.'

'Route.'

'My route,' Oska said.

'I don't discuss the route with the cargo.' She turned back to the rope. That was the end of the conversation.

They went below and stowed their packs in the small cabin Oska waved them toward. Two narrow bunks and a hammock, which meant one of them was going to be uncomfortable for however long the crossing was. Pell called the hammock without being asked, because he knew ships and he knew that the bunks against the hull were worse in weather. Kaito sat on the edge of a bunk and let out a breath he had been holding for something like three days.

'Sable.'

'Yes.'

'When we're past the breakwater. If the query comes again. What does it look like.'

'It comes to AXIOM the same way,' she said.

'AXIOM answers with a null result. The asset who sent it can either accept that or move to a different infrastructure to ask again. If they escalate, we'll see the shape of it.'

'And if they don't.'

'Then we get a week of open sea and you get to sleep more than four hours at a stretch.'

'I'll take that trade.' He lay back on the bunk. The ship moved under him, small and steady, in the way water made things move even when they were tied to a dock. At some point during those three hours, before the tide turned, one more notification came. He read it once. [Architect. External asset registration query: paused. Cause of pause: subject location has exited land-based registration coverage. Note: asset has filed a redirection request to alternate infrastructure. Route: unknown. Expected time to first alternate query: not yet determinable. Additional note: the entity you know as Erebus filed no queries today. It is watching without asking.] He read it a second time.

'Sable,' he said, quietly.

'Erebus is not asking questions and someone else is asking a lot. And now the someone else is switching to a different system to ask the same questions again.'

'Yes,' Sable said.

'Whoever they are, they very much want to know where you are.'

'And now they're finding out how to.'

'Yes.' He closed his eyes. Above him the deck creaked. Somewhere on it Oska was walking. He listened to her boots move fore, then aft, then stop. He thought, 'Three hours. Then a week of open water. Then Noxara. Then whatever a four-hundred-year-old elf has been waiting to say.' He didn't say any of that out loud. He just breathed, and waited for the tide.