The Plains - 18

"What?"

The span of Ashur's attention bottlenecked to only his eyes and ears and nose and taste and touch, leaving behind the the cloud of krill and feasting saildarters leagues distant.

Lips pursed into a smile, Egreall held the chunk of fish under his nose. Ashur accepted it automatically, blankly, found the skin sizzling hot. He popped a chunk into his mouth, his tongue better able to handle the heat than his fingers, salt and oily flesh. He picked the bones from his teeth, stretched his hand up to flick them over the railing.

"It about to go bad?" Ashur asked, sucking the bones out of another chunk.

"Mehth says he refuses to even try to dry it." Arrina was too oily. It was delicious.

"You been staring out half the morning," Egreall informed him. Ashur lifted a shoulder, let it drop.

"And you're in a freakishly good mood."

"I'm always like this after a good fuck," Egreall said lazily, leaning back on his hands. One baggy leg of his ragged pants rode up around his dark thigh, revealing the scar. The season was cooling, sporadic clouds blocking out patches of sun, but no one had brought out warmer clothes yet.

"Ah."

Ashur's back was whole, scarless thanks to Alan, except for one white line across the small of his back where he had scratched the scab and flaking skin off over and over. He drifted back out past the ship, carried by the dappled waves, the ship skimming over the larger pattern of the ocean, following the pattern of the winds, caught between two worlds. There were tiny lives floating across the crystal skin of the water, feeding on the light. Their lives were simple, complete, their conversations vastly complex. He didn't try to understand, just let himself be immersed in it.

Something moved across the far-flung edges of his perception, skating abruptly back out of range, then darting just within his boundaries.

Ashur frowned, losing focus on the ship and sails and men around him.

The presence was drawing nearer, not moving with the patterns of the currents and waves, but plowing through them. A noise filtered through his concentration, a voice.

"Hey, someone get Aramyys."

Instinct told him to call an alert, but he didn't know against what. He wanted to find out more, tried to reach and touch it, but it slipped away from him like a cunning fish from beneath his careful fingers. It was hard to find it again, distinguish it from the ocean. Words pulled him back again, the drone of conversation.

"What in eight storms..."

"You ever seen a bird like that?"

Tilting his head back to the cloud-dotted sky, Ashur followed the three or four gazes and saw a bird cut out of the blue, a long neck and blunt wings. Aramyys was staring up at it, eyes shaded by his hand. The shape was wrong, not an long-flier. Not a turn, or a shemeyye, or a broja. More like a hawk, but the proportions were off.

Ashur stood up, staring as the bird swung west, then north in a lazy spiral, brow creased.

The bird became a dark dash to his eyes, then disappeared. The presence encroached on his boundaries without him having to reach, coming from the west, and his eyes scanned the horizon, searching for some sign that his eyes could read. Ashur jumped to his feet, leaving Egreall behind, and ran up the stair to the sterndeck where Clisand stood at the wheel.

"Take us landward," he said. Eyeing him, Clisand gave the call, not questioning. As the rudder flexed and the ship wore around, the sails shifted around the masts, trimmed to maximize speed in their new direction. Ashur turned to keep facing the slippery otherness of it, until it faded, falling behind as they flew east.

Then it darted back in, seeming to swerve, pick up speed.

It was following them.

Shit.

Pattering down the stairs, he called across the deck, signing the commands above his head, "Wake everyone up! Tell them not to crowd skyside, but be ready. Things are about to go uncanny." There wasn't a sign for uncanny, so he used unknown. Solme darted down the hatch, and suddenly the slumbering lives beneath his feet started waking up, sparking momentum, energy. He watched the water, feeling the presence spread out like the fan of a flood, rushing toward them.

"'Uncanny?'" Ibleton called out to him, standing ready by the mainsail with Werser. "What does 'uncanny' mean?"

"We're about to find out."

The knot of Alan's power came up beside him, fresh from sleep, alert. There was a certain tension in the pattern of him, the lines and worls snarling tight.

"Did it wake you up?"

"You make my bones throb. This makes me feel like I have the ague."

Catching sight of a long shape held by his side, Ashur flicked his eyes down to Alan's lhir.

"That's not going to help you." Alan didn't respond to that.

"Do you know what it is?"

"It's big. It's, like kydele, like a hurricane, like the herd. That big."

"Look!" Aramyys called. "Dozen lengths out." Judging the distance, Ashur finally had an image to connect the sensation to, an unnaturally long span of rippling water contracting toward them in a great spiral.

His head jerked back as the clouds suddenly ripped back at spectacular speeds, the sun abruptly full and bright, the air warmer, faces staring upward in terrified awe.

Ashur had to restrain himself from backing up as the force of it surrounded them, coming from all sides, his mind knowing as his body did not that there was nowhere to run. The water changed colors, the deep green-blue replaced flooded with pale, crystaline blue. The hull groaned, the gut-wrenching sound of wood taxed to shattering. Then the ship rolled, tilting into a hard heel as the wind kept flowing into the sails.

"Drop the sails!" Ashur screamed, then the deck was more than half way to vertical. He dropped to the planks, fingers and toes latching onto the texture of the wood. He heard the shouts, a yell from inside the hold, saw Shenele disappear over the railing. Solme tumbled past him, slamming into the railing below. Ibleton dangled from a mast stay as Werser was wrestling with the halyard block, and he caught sight of Fis crouched on the radical angle of the mainmast, slashing at the rope suspending the yard.

One line cut, two, and the yard plummeted, hitting the slant of the deck and dragging sail and tangled lines behind it as it made a deadly slide straight for Rher, clutching the low side of the railing. Ashur's hand shot out, made a grabbing motion in the air even as he began to slip, and his eyes shot wide as the yard stopped, a physical weight in his empty hand.

In the space of that heartbeat the mizzenmast snapped, and the ship lurched upright again, sending Fis crashing to the deck. The point of the naked mainmast traced dizzying shapes in the sky as the ship rocked back and forth, nothing but a child's coracle in a stream.

The world suddenly righted, Ashur looked around wildly, found Dhomlar clutching the hilt of his knife sunk into one of the seams in the deck, Alan pushing himself up onto all fours, lhir gone.

"Shenele!" Naal shouted overboard. Ashur couldn't hear an answer. Solme wasn't moving, a tangled ball of limbs, Rher crawling over to him.

Someone else was shouting, "Clisand!"

"Tsunami are—" Ibleton spat, staring over the edge. Ashur scrambled to the railing and looked, and found the hull disappearing into the water.

"We're sinking!" Eana shouted, the edge of panic in his voice. They weren't sinking, and as Ashur stared, he couldn't fault Eana for his panic.

"We're not sinking," Rher called, voice sharp. "Th'water's rising."

"What?" Egreall demanded.

Ashur couldn't pay attention to them, had to stop it before the ship was crushed. With will and self he pressed down, like palms against the steady resistance of flesh, pressure sizzling along his skin. The water slowed for a few long breaths, until he saw wetness seeping toward them, fingers and ripples of it, like a skin of water flowing down a wall, but up.

Heart thundering he tried to sink into it, become a part of its pattern, and found himself peremptorily rebuffed by its own sense of self.

Tell me what you want. He threw the thought into the world in desperation, to land wherever it might. Tell me what you want and I'll find another way to give it to you.

You have what I've been looking for.

His eyes widened as he watched the clarity of the water continue to rise up the hull. He had never been answered that way before, never been answered by anything that perceived itself as a singular entity.

The water reached the railing, spilled over in a slim torrent, men lurching back, watching it flow across the deck, leaked down the crevices toward the bilge. It was like the ship was a depression in the ocean, impossibly still whole, glassy blue impossibly touchable, reaching away from them.

Someone was whimpering, "Mina ormiet, mina ormiet, mina ormiet..."

"Mama auntie mama auntie—" Ibleton was chanting under his breath.

Ashur backed rapidly away, bumping into Ibleton, feeling the warmth of the water seep between his toes, the dry space on the deck rapidly disappearing, nowhere to run.

You're going to destroy us-drown us-kill us-snuff us out. You can't—

Behind him, someone started screaming.

Ashur whirled to the bewildering image of Alan falling to his knees and slapping the wet deck with all his might, over and over, screaming with every breath he possessed.

Werser was backing away from the frenzy, into the veil of water darkening the boards. Instinct took him, snatched his concentration away from the rising water, and Ashur dashed over, scraping his knees as he dropped beside him.

"Alan—"

Alan's face lifted, framed by a veil of unkempt yellow hair, and the rings of his eyes flickered and shifted like a breeze over coals. One last tendril of water slithered across his face to curl inside his ear, disappearing, leaving his skin dry.

Ashur felt himself freeze for an instant, before he grabbed Alan's face, reaching beyond the boundaries of his skin. There was no time to think of a path, only be guided by sensation. He plunged his bodiless self into Alan, gathering himself around the water's living essence to wrench it from his flesh.

Alan's mouth moved, a flash of blood-stained teeth.

"No."

The air crystalized around them to hot, iridescent shards. A tone sounded, like an immense horn beneath the weight of the water. The sound was almost too low for his ears to hear, but he could hear it in his organs, in the tissue connecting his muscles and bones as the air began to split. The burning eyes were locked into his, pain shuddering behind the rigid muscles of his face, and then Alan grabbed the back of his head and slammed it into the deck.






The world snapped back into place like it had never left. He had been the one to leave.

The air stopped dying. The iridescence faded, and all the shards of air began melding back together. It could only have been a few breaths. Alan was still on all fours beside him, staring through the deck.

He heard dimly, "You deal with him."

A man's voice, soft, "Juele?"

Hands on him, steadying him as he struggled upright. The deck was dry. He recognized Litin's touch before he saw his face.

"I'm fine," he said, irritated, trying to focus his eyes. "Get off. I need to." He couldn't remember what he needed.

"Get me the bag." Black hair brown skin deft fingers in the corner of his eye as he stared through the orderly rows of planks. Litin's fingers probed around his skull, a finger slipping into his ear. He pulled his hand back, stared at something Ashur couldn't see. "Mina ormiet."

Ashur tried to push himself up, slapping at Werser's huge, fat hands.

"Get me to Alan," he said, trying to make his legs work, and Litin said something behind him. Then a hand wrapped around his mouth from behind, pressing a damp cloth over his face. He sucked in something sickly sweet, and left the world again.