The limpet was a harbinger. In these low latitudes the Empty Sea appeared to be getting less empty.
A new kind of drakken appeared, a southern species. They were much like the ones of the north, but larger and more cunning-looking, with a cheerily calculating look about them. Instead of travelling in swarms of many hundreds these drakkens moved in a pack of only a few dozen, and when their long tubular heads came jutting up out of the water they were very widely spaced, as though each member of the pack demanded and received a generous territorial allotment from its companions. They accompanied the ship for hours, kicking along untiringly beside it with their noses up in the air. Their gleaming crimson eyes never closed. It was easy enough to believe that they were waiting for darkness and an opportunity to come scrambling up on board. Delagard ordered the watch below to go on duty early, patrolling the deck armed with gaffs.
At twilight the drakkens submerged, all of them vanishing in a single moment in that sudden simultaneous way of their kind, as if they had been sucked down in one gulp by some vastness below them. Delagard wasn’t convinced that they were gone and kept the patrols on deck all night. But there was no attack, and in the morning the drakkens were nowhere to be seen.
Then late that afternoon as darkness began to fall a great amorphous soft mass of some sallow viscous stuff came drifting by the ship on the windward side. It went on and on, stretching out over hundreds of metres, perhaps more. It might almost have been an island of some strange kind, it was so big: a colossal flabby island, an island made entirely of mucus, a gigantic agglomeration of snot. When they drew closer to it they realized that this huge puckered wrinkled thing was actually alive, or at least partly so. Its pale custardy surface was lightly quivering in fitful motion, pushing up little rounded projections which almost immediately sank back down into the central mass.
Dag Tharp struck a comic pose. “Here we are, ladies and gentlemen! The Face of the Waters at last!”
Kinverson laughed. “More like the other end, is the way it looks to me.”
“Look there,” Martello said. “Bits of light rising from it, fluttering around in the air. How beautiful they are!”
“Like fireflies,” said Quillan.
“Fireflies?” Lawler asked.
“They have them on Sunrise. Insects equipped with luminescent organs. You know what insects are? Land-dwelling six-legged arthropods, unbelievably common on most worlds. Fireflies are insects that come out at twilight and blink their little lights on and off. Very pretty, very romantic. The effect is much like this.”
Lawler watched. It was a beautiful sight, yes; tiny fragments of that enormous turgid drifting mass detaching themselves and rising, borne upward on the light breeze, glowing as they rose, quick flashes of yellow brilliance, little soaring sunlets. The air was full of them, dozens, hundreds. They coasted on the wind, rose, fell, climbed again. On, off, on, off: flashing, flashing, flashing.
On Hydros beauty was almost always cause for suspicion. Lawler felt a growing uneasiness as the fireflies danced.
Then Lis Niklaus yelled, “The sail’s on fire!”
Lawler glanced upward. Some of the fireflies had come drifting across the ship, and wherever they fetched up against one of the sails they clung and glowed steadily, igniting the close-woven sea-bamboo fabric. Little puffs of smoke were spiralling upward in a dozen places; little red gleams of burning threads could be seen. In fact the ship was under attack.
Delagard shouted orders for a change of course. The Queen pulled away as fast as it could from the bloated enemy on its flank. Anyone not needed to shift the sails was sent aloft to defend them. Lawler scrambled around in the rigging with the others, batting at the little sparklers as they came drifting into the sails, scraping away at the ones that were already affixed to them. The heat of them was insignificant but persistent: the constant warmth they emitted while stuck to the fabric was what achieved ignition. Lawler saw charred places where they had been pulled free in time, others where starlight glittered through small holes in the sails, and—high up on the foremast topsail—a scarlet tongue of flame, tipped with a black trail of smoke, where the material was ablaze.
Kinverson was climbing swiftly toward the burning place. He reached it and began to clamp his hands over the blaze to smother it. The bright flamelets disappeared one by one into his grasp as though by a conjuring trick. In moments nothing but glowing embers could be seen; and then those too were out. The firefly that had ignited the fire was already gone. It had fallen to the deck as the sail gave way around it, leaving behind a ragged, blackened hole the size of a man’s head.
The ship caught the wind and moved quickly off to the southwest. Their unlovely foe, unable to travel at the same pace, soon was out of sight behind them. But its pretty offshoots, its dainty fluttering fireflies, continued to ride the breeze for hours in lessening numbers, and it was dawn before Delagard felt it was safe for the defenders in the rigging to come down.
Sundira spent the next three days mending the sails, with help from Kinverson, Pilya and Neyana. The ship made no headway while the spars were bare. The air was still; the sun was disagreeably strong; the sea was quiet. Sometimes a fin flickered above the surface in the distance. Lawler had the feeling they were under constant surveillance now.
He calculated that he had a week’s supply of numbweed left, at best.
Another free-floating creature, neither as gigantic nor as repellent nor as hostile as the last, came by: a large featureless ovoidal thing, perfectly smooth, of a lovely emerald colour, aglow with radiant luminosity. It stood up out of the water to its midsection, but the sea was so clear here that its shining lower half was easily visible. The thing was perhaps twenty metres around at its waist, and ten or fifteen metres in length from its submerged bottom to its rounded summit.
Delagard, jumpy, ready for anything, lined everyone up along the side of the ship armed with gaffs. But the ovoid drifted on past, harmless as a piece of fruit. Perhaps that was all that it was. Two more wandered along later the same day. The third was more spherical than the first, the second more elongated, but they seemed otherwise to be of the same kind. They seemed to take no notice of the Queen. What these ovoids needed, Lawler decided, were huge glistening eyes, the better to stare at the ship as they floated past it. But their faces were blind, smooth, mysterious, maddeningly bland. There was a curious solemnity about them, a massive calm gravity. Father Quillan said they reminded him of a bishop he had once known; and then he had to explain to everyone what a bishop was.
After the ovoids came a species of flying fish, neither the elegant iridescent air-skimmers of Home Sea nor the hideous hagfish of the open ocean. These were delicate-looking glossy creatures about fifteen centimetres long with filmy graceful wings that lifted them to astonishing heights. They could be seen far off, bursting almost vertically from the water and travelling for extraordinary distances before swooping back down and re-entering the ocean virtually without a splash. Moments later they were aloft again, up and down, up and down, coming closer to the ship with each cycle of flight and descent, until finally they were just off the starboard bow.
These fliers didn’t seem any more dangerous than yesterday’s huge floating emerald ovoids. They flew so high that there was no risk of colliding with them on deck, and so there was no need to duck and hide as would have been necessary if an overflight of hagfish had come by. They were so beautiful, gleaming brilliantly against the bright hard dome of the sky, that nearly the entire ship’s complement turned out to watch their passage.