Chapter 6 #2
“What does your sister know?” he asks, tilting his head in Lydia’s direction.
Then the door to the tavern falls shut, leaving me in the dark with only Silas, his lantern, and my own quickening heart.
He doesn’t offer an explanation, just starts climbing down, and I have to stay close on his heels to remain in the sphere of the lamplight.
“She knows about my heartbreak.” I keep one hand on the wall for balance, and the stone is rough and damp through my glove. “She knows you’re proffering a cure. Not about August and … the shell.” I glare at the back of Silas’s head. “And she can’t find out.”
“That should be easy enough, since you don’t believe it anyway.” His voice is laced with scorn, inviting me to denounce August, but I won’t.
I feel certain that Silas is braiding lies and truth together, hoping I’ll buy it all. I’ll hear him out—maybe that will help me untangle what’s real. But I won’t—I can’t—believe that August wants to hurt me.
Cold air seeps up from below, and the lantern light extends only a few feet ahead, and I can see nothing but darkness beyond, but Silas’s tread is sure and steady as he goes down. Whatever this place is, he has come here many times before.
“You told me you want to end whaling—why?” Even to ask the question feels blasphemous. “You’re a whaler. This is your livelihood.”
“Have you ever actually seen a whale hunt, Lady Fairfax?” Silas asks.
His voice sounds distant somehow, swallowed up by the dark.
I grit my teeth. He must know full well that I haven’t, at least up close.
On the Volyar, Papa made me stay behind during hunts while the crew rowed after the whales, and everyone knows I haven’t been on a voyage since.
“It’s a bloody business,” Silas continues into the silence.
“Stick a Livyatan with harpoons until he rolls over and spouts blood. Tow him back to the ship and cut off his head and hack off the blubber with spades and strip his bones of flesh. By the end of it, the sea’s more sharks than water.
The smell of blood never leaves your clothes. ”
“I know how the hunt works,” I retort. Maybe I’ve never seen it close-up, but I’ve spent years studying the equipment, technique, weapons, every aspect of the hunt. “You don’t strike me as the squeamish type. Where are we going?”
“Have you ever visited the tunnels beneath the city?”
“I haven’t had the pleasure.” I’ve heard of the tunnels, but always thought them just a schoolyard story, or something out of Mama’s fae tales.
The legends say that the landmass of the north coast, or sometimes all of Abbonheim, is made up of the corpses of giant beasts.
Beasts as big as continents crawled out of the primordial sea and then died, and their eye sockets became lakes, and their vertebrae became mountains, and their calcified veins still make branching paths deep in the earth: underground passages where seawater flows far inland.
My thoughts are getting away from me. Just because one tale—of Drekja, of healed curses—might be true—might—doesn’t mean they all are. Maybe there are tunnels, but if so, they were dug by human hands, for human ends. Smuggling, maybe, or thievery.
“Some of us care for things beyond our own skins,” Silas says, picking up the conversation I tried to derail.
A ripple of anger runs beneath the placid surface of his voice.
The lantern bobs in his hand, casting strange shadows on the rough-hewn wall.
“You said it yourself last night. Livyati are disappearing. Your father knew that, you know that. But instead of doing anything to change it, you just send our crews farther and farther afield, push us harder to kill more and more.”
“People need whale magic,” I say. Silas Price knows this; everyone knows this.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says, implacable. “Like you said. Everything has a cost. We have to stop whaling, or the cost will be unimaginable.”
These last words have the feel of recitation, of words he heard long ago that have hung around his heart ever since. Memories of the night the Volyar sank intrude—teeth chattering, icy water lapping at my ankles, heart tearing in two—and I will them away with a shudder.
“So you’re just doing the finfolk’s bidding,” I hiss. “Were you doing the same on the Volyar? Are you on their side?”
He stiffens, almost stumbling in his climb down, my words landing. I don’t doubt Silas remembers just as well as I do what I said to him after the funeral, what I’m still ashamed of sometimes, in my nobler moments. You should have died with the rest of them.
“I’m not on anyone’s side,” he says coldly. “But I’m a sailor, Lady Fairfax; it’s not in my nature to ignore how the wind is blowing. You can try to sail through a storm or you can turn and run from it. But pretending you don’t see it, that’s a sure way to find yourself on the sea bottom.”
He stops walking. The staircase stretches away beneath him who knows how far, but the light from his lantern illuminates a small doorway set into the wall. It’s unremarkable, damp, questionable-looking wood, except for its placement.
And except for what I see when Silas opens it. The door is blocked by what I first think is a wall of dirty glass. But then I step closer to look, and I see the moisture beading on its surface, and feel the chill emanating from it.
It’s ice.
A shiver—not from the cold—runs over my skin. It’s cold down here, but not cold enough to allow for a wall of ice. Something is at work here, something unnatural.
Silas, a few steps below me on the stairs, has turned around and is watching me carefully. The lantern washes the color from him, painting him in black and white and silver, his eyes bright as coins. “Take off your gloves.”
I don’t know why, but I do as he asks, tucking the gloves into my pockets. It’s strange to feel the air on my bare skin. The oily light of the lantern catches on the scales, and I look away, hoping Silas didn’t notice.
“Do you want to be healed?” he asks, face unreadable in the dark.
I take care to keep my voice level and my posture casual, not to show any signs of the terrible fear suddenly pooling in me. “What kind of a question is that?”
“A genuine one.”
“Yes, of course I want to be healed.” My wrists and fingertips itch, a constant reminder of the ugliness there, of the curse infecting my blood, even if I don’t look.
“But the only good and true magic is the kind we get from the whales.” It’s a childish maxim, and my voice sounds childish to my own ears, high and uncertain.
“Other kinds might be real, but they lead into darkness…”
Silas waits for my words to trail off, then says, “And here I thought you were already in darkness.”
He reaches out with one hand and touches the ice wall.
A faint hissing noise starts up around us; there’s the strange note of petrichor in the air again.
And the ice—the ice is melting rapidly beneath his hand, his fingers sinking deeper, water trickling down his wrist. A concavity appears around his outstretched fingers, growing wider and wider.
Like his hand is radiating heat, or like he’s commanding the ice itself.
He drops his hand and it continues to spread, continues to melt, until a stream of water is running down the stairs around his feet and there’s a hole in the ice to the darkness beyond.
“You don’t have to believe me.” His voice is inflectionless, his gaze and his hand steady.
It feels as though we’ve stepped out of time, like the rest of the world has faded away and this is all there is, the staircase and the lantern and Silas.
“Not yet. But when August tells you he loves you, do you believe it? Put aside whether you want to believe it. Does it feel true?”
I swallow, a memory-ghost of August’s fingers brushing down the side of my neck, his intention clear—You’re mine.
Silas doesn’t wait for me to answer. He ducks inside, and even though every cell in my body is sounding the alarm—that I have gotten mixed up in something beyond my understanding, that I should run and not look back—I follow him, stepping over the dripping remnants of the ice wall.
Silas reaches back behind me and closes the wooden door, the one that was only concealing the ice, and turns a rusted latch.
We’re in a small oval room, maybe ten paces long and half as wide at its center.
Strangely, the air inside is warm. The walls and ceiling are the same rough stone as the staircase, though less grimy and soot-stained.
But the floor is flat and smooth, and something glitters in between the flagstones.
Silver etchings, symbols I don’t recognize as part of any human language.
And at the opposite end, something shines.
A pool is set into the floor, its edge perfectly straight, the water in it black and mirror-smooth, its surface slightly below the level of the stone. It takes up half the room, going right up to the walls. As Silas hangs the lamp on a hook on the wall, our eerie reflections mirror us below.
“What is this place?” I ask.
“Somewhere magic is close to the surface.” He leaves the lamp hanging and walks to the pool’s edge, kneels down. “This water is from the ocean. It comes in through a tunnel below us.”
Silas looks at me and then at the lantern—and it goes out. Darkness falls, so heavy and thick it almost feels material. My voice comes out choked, every sense instantly on high alert. “What—”
I sense Silas move in the small space and press myself back against the wall.
But there’s just the sound of disturbed water, and then an eerie green light illuminates him.
He’s on his knees by the pool, reaching in; the water glows where he’s touched it.
There’s the smell of petrichor again, and as I watch, fog begins to rise from the water’s surface and curl away from the damp walls.