Never Grow Smaller #2
His counterpart glanced upward. Golden Sands blazed with light. Clerks worked inside despite the hour, none tired enough to make mistakes. Teamsters unloaded wine. Two sailors crouched beside a capstan with its housing open beneath a lantern.
Oliver slowed. One of them drove a retaining pin through the assembly. Backward.
He changed direction. "Stop."
The hammer fell.
Oliver moved closer. "Your pin."
Neither sailor looked up. The younger one struck it again. The other Oliver touched Oliver's sleeve, and a single impression accompanied the gesture.
Later.
Oliver looked at him and then back at the capstan.
"That housing will shear under load."
A faint shrug.
Oliver pulled his sleeve free. "When?"
Nothing answered. The sailors closed the housing and walked away. The capstan remained beneath the rain, apparently repaired. Oliver waited for the flaw to become consequence. It never did.
No future deckhand put weight on the line. No crate swung loose. No ship waited for a part that should have been maintained properly the first time. The faulty repair simply sat there, harmless because the world refused to reach the day when carelessness collected its debt.
The Kraken's lamps burned farther down the quay.
Oliver followed. He enjoyed the first hour obscenely.
Jasper took them through Needle Channel under enough sail to make the night interesting.
The coffee tasted like coffee rather than political punishment.
The black cylinder waited on the chart table, and nobody interrupted twice to ask for signatures.
The other Oliver worked across from him. Oliver found himself enjoying that almost immediately, which made the resemblance less amusing.
They reached for different reference texts at nearly the same moment.
Both rejected the most obvious translation of the lower symbol.
When one line could indicate opening or interruption depending on whether its secondary mark represented sequence or absence, Oliver spent several minutes arguing with his own face and disliked how much he wanted to continue.
"So this is narcissism."
Pleasure answered him without speech.
Oliver looked down at the page. "Disturbing."
They found the reef before dawn. The ship anchored beyond black rocks.
The voyage had delivered no storm, broken pump or fisherman requiring rescue.
No crew member had developed a fever at exactly the wrong hour.
The world had respected Oliver's pursuit with such perfect discipline that the courtesy itself had begun to feel suspicious.
His counterpart climbed the rail. Oliver looked toward the boat davits. The impression came again.
Slow.
The other man jumped.
Oliver laughed despite himself. "You make a convincing argument."
He followed. Cold water closed over him. His right hand cut cleanly through the sea. His ribs allowed a full stroke. Yesterday had left nothing behind inside his body. Oliver surfaced grinning.
The reef rose ahead. His counterpart was already climbing. Oliver followed him onto wet stone. They found the Serekh mark beneath the tide line. A broken circle. A vertical cut. Two symbols Oliver had never seen used together.
He crouched. The other Oliver offered him a knife.
Oliver took it. "Do we know what happens if I touch this?"
The mask watched him. Nothing. Oliver looked at the carved stone. Understanding waited behind it. His fingertips nearly reached the surface before he stopped.
"If this were real, Marin would ask what evidence says this is activation rather than notation."
The name altered the air by less than a breath. Then the thought returned in his own voice.
She isn't here.
Oliver's gaze sharpened. "I don't require her permission to be curious."
Silence. The implication remained.
Then touch it.
Oliver smiled without looking up. "Clever."
He touched the mark. For half a heartbeat, nothing happened. Disappointment flickered. The rock opened beneath his hand. A stair curved downward into darkness. Oliver's pulse accelerated. They descended. The place fed him beautifully.
Water climbed one wall against gravity. Three locked boxes occupied a stone shelf, each made centuries apart and each resisting a different mechanism.
An inscription used a Serekh verb Oliver had seen only once in Gideon's notes, but placed it where the grammar should have made the sentence impossible.
Beyond it, a black mirror showed a constellation no modern atlas contained.
Oliver moved from one problem to the next. The first lock yielded. The second required heat. The inscription began to make sense just as another doorway appeared beyond the mirror.
He followed. Several rooms later, the unfinished pieces began accumulating behind him.
The first box remained open with its contents barely examined.
He could still feel the shape of an unresolved clause in the inscription.
The mirror had given him an unfamiliar sky and he had never asked which season it represented.
Each curiosity lasted only until another became available. His companion never asked him to finish.
Oliver's breathing quickened with exertion that carried no fatigue. "This is obscene."
Satisfaction touched him.
He laughed. "I didn't say stop."
The next door was wooden. Oliver's laughter died. Ancient Serekh stone surrounded a door from Golden Sands' private archive. Gideon's Binding marks remained near the frame. The other Oliver opened it.
No ward triggered. Someone laughed on the far side. Warm. Male. Exasperation overtaken by amusement before it could harden. The years between twelve and twenty-eight folded in half before Oliver could defend himself.
He stepped through. The Kraken's deck waited in daylight. Matthias Corren sat cross-legged beside the mainmast with a survey chart spread over his knees. Across the paper lay the shadow of a boy who was nowhere on the deck.
Corren swore at it. Gideon laughed nearby.
Oliver stopped breathing. He knew this afternoon.
He had remembered it in Caldris after Corren died, long before Second Frostglass, long before the darkness around him began slipping against the light.
Corren irritated because twelve-year-old Oliver could not keep his shadow off a survey map.
Gideon finding that irritation much funnier than Corren did.
Oliver had never told Marin. The man beside the wheel watched him. Oliver looked from his face to Corren, then toward the place where Gideon's laughter had come from. Empty deck.
Rigging. Sunlight. The explanation Oliver had offered Marin in Saint Orra no longer covered what stood in front of him.
The current shadow could not have watched that afternoon.
It could not have watched Oliver remember it in Caldris before its present behavior began.
Whatever route had brought the memory here, simple observation from the wall behind his bed was not enough.
Oliver stared at his counterpart.
"You weren't watching."
The mask remained still. He nearly asked how.
The question crowded his mouth with possibilities.
Memory. Preference. Some pressure through the same continuity Hollowfang had measured when he was a child.
A connection older than the manifestations.
A trick constructed from fragments he had forgotten supplying.
He let the possibilities remain possibilities. Oliver touched the edge of Corren's chart. The paper became a ledger beneath his fingers. Golden Sands. Payroll. The Kraken vanished. Morning filled the front office.
Maeve stood behind her desk with invoices stacked to one side and the payroll book open in front of her. She pushed it toward the other Oliver.
"Sign."
He closed it.
"Later."
Maeve frowned. "People need paying."
"They'll be paid."
"When?"
The man smiled. Maeve's irritation vanished without argument or persuasion. Her face simply relaxed, and she turned away. A clerk approached with a maintenance report.
"East pilings are taking water."
The other Oliver set the paper down. The clerk accepted that. A shipwright brought a cracked propeller invoice. An apprentice asked whether his contract would be renewed. A widow arrived with a benefit calculation that had shorted her three months of pay.
Every problem entered the room carrying a consequence and left without one. Oliver watched the widow fold an empty envelope and tuck it into her coat. She smiled at Maeve.
He wished she would become angry.
"How long has the east wall been taking water?"
No one answered. Oliver crossed to the maintenance report. The figures were incomplete.
"Maeve."
She looked at him pleasantly.
"When was the last inspection?"
"I don't know."
The real Maeve would rather have swallowed a nail than say those words without immediately finding the person who did.
Oliver turned toward his double. "You made them useless."
The mask regarded him. An answer reached him as content without sound.
Happy.
Oliver looked around the room. Everyone was smiling. No employee hid a mistake because mistakes never became expensive enough to frighten them. The widow required no justice because the missing money could not hurt her. Rotten pilings remained safely rotten forever.
Nothing needed Oliver after it stopped being interesting. The office felt peaceful. Oliver hated that he understood the appeal. His counterpart poured coffee. Oliver accepted the cup. It was excellent.
Naturally.
"Where's Marin?"
Attention shifted toward the stairs.
Upstairs.
Oliver studied him. "Actually upstairs?"
The mask smiled. Oliver climbed. The Riptide waited above Golden Sands.
Architecture had stopped pretending embarrassment.
Marin's coat hung outside the bedroom. He touched the repaired cuff.
Warm. Inside, the bed was unmade. Her knife rested on the bedside table.
A book lay open against one pillow, filled with her handwriting.