“If it keeps on like this,” Clytus said, “we’re not going to get to die fighting sea wolves.”
“It’ll be boredom that takes us,” Kartholome quipped.
Geena drank from the flask, closed her eyes as she processed the taste and potency of it. Still doing so, she said, “I’ll not abide that. I made a pact a long time ago with the afterdeath. I’m not going to it quietly. A howling death I’ll have. None other.” She slapped a hand on the polished wood of the table.
Kartholome rose abruptly and went outside. They could hear him shouting out across the water, damning the calm and insulting the wind for cowardice, calling the waves craven. He returned and commenced to drink more.
Melio’s gaze drifted up from the ring of familiar faces and moved across the walls. Leagueman walls, decorated with their sparse sense of nautical gentility. He could not see it well from where he sat, but there was a mural at the far end of the room, painted right onto the smooth wood panels. He had studied it before. A league brig plied a sea filled with carnage, the bodies of leviathans thick in water stained crimson. Sea wolves, Kartholome had confirmed. The painting brimmed with details. Individual leaguemen and Ishtat on the deck of the brig. Harpoons caught in midair. A sea wolf pierced through a grasping tentacle, just one of many. Seabirds circling in the air above. Melio knew that detail to be true. The biggest brigs had their own contingents of birds that made the ocean crossing with them.
Despite the details, Melio could not quite believe the scene. The sea wolves themselves had no shape that he could credit. They looked like whales and squids and sharks all cut into pieces and floating in a wave-heavy stew together.
“What do they want anyway?” Melio asked. “The sea wolves, I mean. Why attack ships? Nothing else does that. Not even deep whales.”
“Nah, they just come and take a look, near to sinking in the process,” Clytus said. “You know how much we’d have made if we were whalers? If we’d taken that big bastard and dragged him back to Tivol?”
“The four of us? Not possible.”
Clytus guffawed. There was a comment to go with it, Melio could see, but Clytus kept it in. “So, do they have a taste for man flesh or what?” Melio asked.
Kartholome warmed to the question. “Leagueman flesh, I’d say. The league and they are enemies. Always have been. Just like in the painting you’ve been eyeing. Before they had the skin, the league lost a lot of ships to them. Even a brig went down once. Disappeared. None lived, but everyone believes it was sea wolves that took her. Long time ago, this is, but the leaguemen know how to hold a grudge. Once they came up with the skin they-”
“What is the skin? Do you know how it’s made?” Melio accepted the flask from Geena. He drank with the help of her finger, which tilted the flask up to lengthen his measure.
“If I knew, I’d not be here,” Kartholome said. “I’d be sipping lemon liqueur from a cliffside estate in Manil, with two redheaded whores named Benda and Fenda.”
“He’s partial to redheaded whores,” Geena explained. “An experience he had as a lad, see. Give him enough drink and you’ll hear more about it than you want to know.”
“Anyway,” Kartholome continued, “what I’m saying is that I’d be rich, is what. Nobody knows how they make it. Could be a process the Lothan Aklun clued them to. Wouldn’t surprise me. It’s the only thing that made the mist trade possible.”
The mist trade? Melio mused. He never calls it the quota trade.
“So,” Melio asked, “should we ever get moving again and come up against these sea wolves, will the skin protect us or won’t it?”
“That’s right,” Kartholome said.
“Which?”
“It will and won’t. You were there when we bought and loaded the harpoons. You didn’t think we were going whaling, did you?” He held up a hand to stop Melio’s response. “Let me finish. You asked a question. Let me answer it. Once the league had the skin, their big ships were safe. Little ones not so much, but the big ones could sail as they pleased. The sea wolves just can’t grasp the stuff. They slip off it. Tentacles and beak and teeth and everything. So the brigs just slid on by. That’s all right if you’re two hundred feet above the water. But when you’re down low like we are… that’s a different story. They’ll jump clear out of the water and smash down on the deck. They’ve got these tentacles with grippers all up and down them. They get one of those around your leg and you’re heading for their mouth. Beaklike, the mouth is. Ugly thing so sharp it serrates the flesh like two curved knives angled just so. You maybe should have asked more about them before you signed on for this trip.”
Melio, remembering that he did not always like this man, met his gaze without humor. “You knew all that and you still came.”
“There’s more,” he said, after a long draft of ale. “The league wasn’t satisfied with just being able to get across untroubled. Spiteful bunch, they are. They took to slaughtering the beasts whenever they could. Harpoons. Those big crossbow bolts of theirs. They even threw out barrels of pitch and set seas full of the wolves alight.”
“They still do that?”
“On occasion, I suppose. Did it for generations. Never did any good, though.”
Kartholome dabbed at the moisture at the edges of his lips. For some reason this prompted him to flash a sly smile at Geena. She responded with a finger gesture threatening his manhood with an unfortunate break. They did that every now and then. A game, Melio assumed.
“I haven’t made a scientific study of it,” the pilot continued, “but I don’t think so. What I heard is, it never changed things in the slightest. The league got tired of the effort. Now they just sail through them.”
“As we’ll do as well,” Clytus said. “Might have to tack a bit, but-”
“ ‘Tack a bit’?”
The brigand, thickly muscled, masculine-featured in a blocky, weathered way, tried to shape his large hands into a demonstration of the maneuvering he had planned. He looked like a bear trying to explain the use of a pottery wheel.
Kartholome chuckled. He started to say something but found it too amusing to put into words. Geena flicked a spoon at him. He found that hilarious as well. He got up, coughing out an overflow of humor as he headed back on deck.
Geena reached across the table and patted Clytus’s hand with a solemnity that-on her-could only be in jest. “I’m sure the wolves have never seen the likes of how an Outer Isle brigand tacks. They’ll wet themselves.”
This sat a moment in the room before the dubious humor of it got Melio wagging his head. Geena slid her chair toward his and leaned into his shoulder. Clytus began to explain that it was not just tacking he had in mind. There was… He stopped midsentence. Melio turned, ready to nudge him back into it and feeling it best he get Geena’s head off his shoulder. He caught sight of Kartholome.
The man stood framed in the door. The blood in his face had drained out of him right along with the good humor he had stepped out choking over. His eyes searched the room without actually focusing on anyone.
Geena started to say something. Stopped. It was Clytus who asked, “What?”
Kartholome said, very softly, “Come outside.”
Stepping from the dim passageway onto the deck, Melio thought a full moon must have risen, so bone-blue was the light. A pungent scent invaded his nose. It flared his nostrils as it pushed inside, a sea stink so heavy he could barely breathe it. As he stepped on the slick deck, he heard the sound. Not silence anymore but a hushed slithering, a moist friction of something all around the boat, a wet sound like an enormous tongue licking his ear: all of these at once. Then he saw what made the noise, and the light and the smell. The sea was in motion around them again. Only, it was not the water that was moving.