They trapped the ghost together, stepfather and stepdaughter, in the corner of the warehouse. Prodding it along with puissant whisper-chants, they herded it into the ghostlamp trap they’d arrayed in advance. Powered on, the circled bulbs radiated a fence of thanoptic energies that a spirit could not easily pass. Orf raised his free hand in a wordless signal. The gesture meant that Delpny could begin.
Nodding, she flicked the three switches on the clockcraft box on her belt. The engine inside began to whirr at half-speed, intricate gears ticking away as they worked to send current shooting along the braided wires connected to the pole she held, illuminating the glass bulb on its tip with a thanoptic flame. Outgeister primed, she edged closer to the cringing spirit. Space throbbed around her, stimulated by submaterial energies.
Orf observed intently. His apprentice had done well this far, but ghosts were fickle things. He adjusted the lenses on his goggles, bringing this one into sharper focus. On the thanoptic plane, it manifested as a girl of sixteen, or rather the pellucid memory of one. She might have been an heiress fallen overboard while cruising the Roachwater Strait, whose spirit had clung remora-like to the ship back to port, or just as easily a quayjenny like so many of Sabot’s young women, whose last punter had paid in steel rather than gold. Who knew? Who cared? Ghosts washed up on the docks frequently enough to keep Orf employed exterminating them. Eventually, their stories overlapped into the same tragedy: people died for no reason, and the tide threw them back in your face.
On the material plane, the ghost had fashioned itself a prosthetic body. A mop and shovel hovered where her legs would go. A floating coil of rigging mimicked her intestines. Gull feathers and a terrified wharf-rat bobbled in the emptiness where her head wasn’t. Such entities craved life but, being mindless echoes, could only fumblingly approximate it. That hunger made them dangerous. This one was a thankfully mild challenge.
As Orf taught her, Delpny gave no warning before she lunged, stabbing her outgeister between flotsam and sundry to gouge the spirit. The ghost reacted unexpectedly fast; its matterless un-flesh flared on contact with the device and its phasmfire and began to burn away, but as it did, it lashed out with its rope-arm. Delpny reeled, blood bubbling from a fresh cut. Orf prepared to catch her, but instead she caught herself and, snarling vengefully, twisted the outgeister as the ghost disincorporated. Cinders of burning memory tumbled through Orf’s subconscious, charring into a faint, psychic stink, then nothing.
There was no passing-on for ghosts. They lingered until they were destroyed.
Orf watched this one burn, and imagined it was Effie.
“Giver Sea be good, did you see me do that?” Delpny crowed, hoisting her outgeister like the spear of a conquering queen. She kicked at the fallen rigging, now limp and lifeless. “One thrust, and there she goes. Hah!” Her laugh splayed her fresh wound, and she winced. “Got me, though, didn’t the bastard.”
“You were careless,” Orf noted. “Thought you’d had it when you didn’t.”
That ripped the wind from her sails. “Taker Sea drown you, Orf, I’m hurt!”
Orf shrugged. “That’s the job.”
Delpny’s shoulders slumped. “Really? I’m leaking like a bucket of chum and that’s all you’ve got to say?”
“It won’t be the last scar you’ll earn on this job. Best you learn to take them.”
She sliced him with a sullen look and then purposefully forgot him, making a show of shutting off the outgeister with her back turned. The meter between them yawned into a league. Orf chuffed. He’d hurt her again, and worse than a chop across her jaw. It was always something new with her, some random combination of words that struck like knuckles. Seeing her wincingly prod the cut, a part of him itched to hold her and sop the blood up on his shirt. And yet, another part recoiled from the lack of himself in her features. She wasn’t his child. His only daughter was buried in a dead womb years and leagues away. The love that leapt earnestly from him to Delpny found no blood to cling to. It could only retreat inside of him and shut itself guiltily away.
“Was fine work otherwise,” he muttered, for whatever it mattered to her now. “Come. We’ll get an ointment for that—”
“Mister Orf sir?”
The voice echoed down the evacuated warehouse, clattering between crates of eyefruit from jungled Bazempaa. Orf recognized the young hullpacker sprinting their way, a lad called Small Karl to distinguish him from veteran Karls Old and Too-Tall. Orf stopped the boy with a hand to the shoulder and let him refill his lungs. “What’s the dispatch, Mister Linnochson?”
Sweat darkened the boy’s denim coveralls. He’d run the whole way from hullpacker headquarters. “Guildmaster’s wanting you,” he gasped. “Says to come right away. Yesterday, if convenient, sir. It’s a matter concerning your profession.” He hesitated, then added, “probably.”
“Probably?”
“Well sir, nobody’s sure what exactly, but something’s come out of the sea.”
Worry was plain on the city’s face.
The law had blocked traffic through to the southernmost curve of the port. Constables in black raincoats guarded wooden cordons, keeping the crowd at bay. One hundred docks fed Sabot, sifting the sea for sustenance like barnacle tongues, the linchpin of a globe-spanning intersection of trade. Even a day’s disturbance would quake the foundation of money upon which the city was built. Years ago, it had taken a civil war. Orf dreaded to know what it was this time.
He and Delpny instead cut diagonally through the narrow streets that carved apart the block of brick and concrete urbanity squeezed in behind the quayside warehouses. It was a liminal space between the greater metropolis and the lawless sea. A bank of sordid exchange. Costermongers jockeyed for space on the cobblestones, hawking fish from ice-carts, each bawling their own pitch-patter against their competitors. Overhead, painted quayjennys rested their bosoms on third-floor windowsills, sometimes to escape the heat, sometimes to beckon with smiles like old kjoli-boards, all yellow and black tiles offering even odds of delight or regret. Orf and Delpny slipped over rotting squid tripe and bodily jetsam as they hurried to their summons.
“What do you think it could be?” Delpny wondered. She trotted ahead of Orf, blonde braids bouncing. “Will we have to kill it, do you think?” The sudden change in fortunes had turned her mood like a weathervane. As her mother said, the girl had always struggled to keep her wits pinned to one task. She’d not yet learned her letters for that reason. Exterminating ghosts, Orf had found, was one of the few chores that could absorb her. Even then, her mind was always buzzing like a fly on a string.
“Hard to say,” Orf said. He, too, was distracted. Queer creatures dwelt beneath the Crawling Sea, and he was familiar with too many. The slugfolk of Grail Ishto were known to pillage ships in search of surface-world novelties. Drowned children might rise as brinebairns, pallid and otter-sleek, compelled to suckle on sun-warmed blood. But these were only vermin in the abyssal ecosystem. What could shut down the port? Orf feared to guess.
Delpny did not. “I reckon it’s a hailong,” she chirped. “Big as ten whales, teeth like crescent moons, washed up dead. I wonder what breakfast tomorrow will be.”
“Me, if we’re not brisk.”
The headquarters of the hullpackers guild rose on nine teetering stories to watch over the length of the port. The office at its peak was tiny, cluttered by library of reports and manifests outdated by years, and filled utterly by its occupant.
“There you finally are,” she exclaimed from her post by the big window. Guildmaster Thusia Hoarcry was a wall of a woman, built up by the years she’d spent packing hulls on the docks. A salt-blanched frockcoat trailed from her shoulders as she paced the room, and her jaw rolled constantly, kneading her stress into a cud of swoonleaf. “You catch a look at it already?”
Orf shook his head. “Came straight here.”
“There’s a shock. Drownéd thing’s bigger than the Quartermaster’s mansion.” Thusia took him by the shoulder and moved him to the window. Orf, no small man himself, went along like a kitten in her grip. “I’m at bloody loss,” she said. “Tell me, Orf, what do you make of that?”
An ancient scrap of Sabotine saltlore claimed that at the dawn of time, the Giver Sea had offered the first-made human a choice: to live below the waves or above them. But before they could decide, her rival the Taker Sea blessed them with her own gift: a vision of all that awaited them down where even whales feared to dive. Staring down at what had dragged itself from the sea, Orf understood why his fabled ancestor deferred to an air-breathing existence. The sun dispelled all confusion, while the depths crushed life into phantasmagoric shapes, cultivating things too strange to be real.
“Gulls,” Delpny swore, her eyes suckered to the glass. “Look at the size of it.”
It had surfaced between piers twenty-nine and thirty, splintering them with its passage, and beached itself upon what was now the rubble of warehouse thirty. Whatever it was now, the thing had begun life as a Sabotine zagermorder, the largest class of ironclad warship, yet it was as if it had contracted an infection of flesh. Here and there, smooth steel frayed into iridescent scale. Tears in its hull were filled by windows of wet membrane. One of the smokestacks upon its spine had been overgrown by spiraling brown-green nacre akin to the shell of a sea-snail, and the finned coils of an entire hailong threaded in and out of its framework, meat melding seamlessly with metal. While most of its immensity remained submerged, its bow jutted high over the nearest rooftops, drooling saltwater. The name painted along its portside was missing letters, but decipherable. Orf read it once, and then, his skin rucking, twice, to make sure it was not his mind haunting him with things that weren’t really there.
He shuttered the spyglass and set it aside.
“Are you all right, love?” Thusia Hoarcry’s callused hand folded around his shoulder, and Orf realized he’d begun to tremble.
“It’s The Auld Northern Way,” he said. Words he’d thought he’d never say again. They tasted decrepit on his tongue. He’d buried them alongside the first life he’d had. He’d thought he’d buried them deep. “It’s Effie’s ship.”
Delpny Hoarcry looked up, brow creased.
“The one that sank?”
The late Mister Hoarcry had choked on an eelcake five years past, when Delpny was seven. His framed argentograph now sat on the crockery cupboard, overlooking the supper below.
Thusia would not allow them to discuss the ship or its portent around her daughter. Orf was more than happy to comply. Delpny eagerly filled the silence, recounting her earlier victory to her mother, who laughed heartily along despite the angst Orf knew was packed down underneath. Delpny’s eyes shone as she spoke, her hands pantomiming the writhing ghost, her killing thrust. She said nothing of how Orf had chided her, and Orf’s guts corkscrewed. She never balked at cleaning the equipment, or running through his drills until her calluses bled. She’d studied the outgeister enough to reassemble one with her eyes closed. This, and she couldn’t even read. The girl took such pride in being his apprentice; he didn’t know why he couldn’t have just let her have it.
Once the dishes were put away and Delpny sent to her chores, Orf and his wife met in their bedroom with windows latched and door locked.
In the previous hours, the constabulary had demanded jurisdiction over the ship. It represented an undetermined threat to the city, they claimed, potentially by foreign adversaries. Their advance had been rebuffed by a platoon of Thusia’s brawniest hullpackers— hard men and women beaten harder by the two fists of labor and time, unlike the constabulary, a pack of conscripted youths empowered only by their truncheons. “We won’t hold them off for long, though,” Thusia was saying. She paced the room like a zoo bear in too small a cage. Orf didn’t doubt she’d escape to her office as soon as his back was turned. “They’ve got the numbers, the guns, and worse, the bloody fucking politics.”
The hullpacker’s guild had held contractual dominion over Sabot’s quayside since the cosmopolitan city-state was just a squalid pirate’s haven, a fact that had sat better with some rulers than others. Orf kept his nose out of such matters, but it was a loud secret that the newest Quartermaster was eager for any excuse to retake the docks.
“Mark me, I’d love to let the Quartermaster take this bastard off our hands,” Thusia ruefully continued, “but if we can’t square this one away by our lonesome, the drownéd beetlecoats are going to muscle us out. And once we’re out, ain’t no hope we’re getting back in. Gulls, but this is a shambles, Orf.”
“I’ll have a closer look when the light is new,” Orf muttered, combing fingers through his thinning hair. “I can’t promise it’ll be in my purview, though. There are queerer things than ghosts adrift in the far out-there. It could be any drownéd thing, Thusia.”
From the most diaphanous shade to the most malevolent poltergeist, he’d never feared a ghost. At least, no more than any material hazard that could kill without precaution. And yet, he had no other word to describe the thing that had climbed ashore, and he’d realized that he was very afraid. His eyes tracked Thusia but inwardly he was watching fire burn on the ocean, while his lifeboat paddled further into the first sunrise of his afterlife. He’d saved nothing from the sinking ship but a guitar and a compass on a chain. He wondered now if something he’d left behind hadn’t missed him and come paddling upstream against the years in search of him.
Thusia noticed his thoughts were elsewhere. She came and sat beside him on the bed. Her authority seemed to boil off her, revealing an ordinary woman underneath, whose touch soothed like a lullaby. When they’d first met, Orf had been cowed by her bombast, the friction of her calluses. The first time her armor had opened and shown how much it could hold, however, he’d been sucked in and never once thought of escape. Some men hope for women who will go with them anywhere. Others, who have gone everywhere, fall for women who will let them rest by the warmth of their heart.
“I’m sorry, love,” Thusia said, kneading his palm with her thumb. “I know what this is to you, and I’ve been havering on like it’s a beached whale or some such. We’ll get it sorted, whatever it is. Why don’t you lie down, and I’ll lie with you as long as I can.”
Orf put her hand aside, gently, and stood. “You’ve got a war to win. Go see to your people. There’s no point in worrying about me.”
He swung the door open to find Delpny eavesdropping outside. She held a broom but no dustpan; Orf surmised it was an excuse in case she was caught. He wasn’t angry so much as startled. For the life of him, he never knew what to expect from the girl, what attitude she’d come brandishing, and preferred to be forewarned when she was coming.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her expression a mess of regret and worry. “Is everything going to be okay?”
It should have been so easy to just say yes, even if it weren’t wholly true. But she’d want more, the sort of guarantee backed by love that only fathers could give, and he’d be forced to give it. That part of him that hated to be touched recoiled at the thought. Orf felt himself calcify before her.
“It is what it is,” he said, and sidled past her.
At the end of the hall Orf turned and dragged his bones up the creaking stair towards the attic. He stored his equipment there, keeping his outgeisters well-oiled and off the floor on racks he’d whittled himself. A wide window overlooked the warehouses hooking towards the horizon like dirty teeth in a concrete smirk. High overhead, the two prominent moons of the month waltzed across the clouds, green Dinnaea and rosy Silhurta in gravitational embrace, while dour Holaxis observed jealously from outer night, waiting for his moment. Apart from his equipment, Orf kept a threadbare divan alongside a shelf of things that he preferred not to share. He stopped there now, hesitating, before sliding a certain drawer open.
Orf visited the compass often enough that his little touches kept the dust off it. He took it to the divan, where there was light, and curled himself around it. A pocket-watch lid protected its needle. Inside, on a scrap of soft paper no wider than a matchbook, was a drawing of a man and a woman, the suggestion of waves behind them. Crude chevrons meant to be gulls. The man was Orf. The woman was Effie.
There had been no argentocameras aboard The Auld Northern Way, but a crewman friend had been an artist with charcoal. Orf and Effie had posed on the gun-deck, smiling through the cold. They’d met aboard the ship. He’d come from nothing to be there—a grubby bilge-thing scouring its underbelly of clinging ghosts. She’d been the ship’s navigator, sipping wine with the captain. Though only scant decks divided them, their worlds were impossibly far and below one another.
And yet. Somehow. Regardless.
Theirs was a bottled love, confined entirely between port and starboard, but one that roamed everywhere there were waves to carry it. From the Clockreef Archipelago to the polar seas of Thoreal, the world was their honeymoon. They’d witnessed hailong sunning themselves upon sandbars, clung to one another as living storms grappled for territory overhead. And yet, these phenomena paled beside the small moments their confines engendered. He’d shown her how to call the ghost of a rat with a whisper. She’d taught him the guitar, magicked music into his dirty fingers. The rest of the world was welcome, but surplus.
One cloudless night, when the wind was sweet, Orf had taken her to the gun-deck and played that old love shanty “Pocket Anchor” as best he could on his weathered guitar. When he’d finished, she’d told him she was pregnant. There was nothing to say to that but the truth afloat on his soul: I will be with you forever, on this side of the sea or the other.
And then, the wreck. Time had not spared those memories. It dulled them the way it did everything used too often. When they would not cut, Orf beat himself with them, bruising that night into his brain. The ship, aflame and listing. Effie heaving him and his broken leg into the life raft. Him begging her to come, to just let her crewmates go. She couldn’t save them all. I’ll be back, she’d promised, sealing it with a kiss. Then she’d disappeared back into the sinking ship, and Orf couldn’t stop the others in the raft from shoving off without her. Whether she’d kept her promise, he’d never know. Against that fire, all those screaming shadows looked the same.
Orf returned the compass to its drawer. He could only look at it for so long. The guitar resting against the cabinet caught his eye, its salt-silvered timber gleaming. An itch rolled from his spine to his fingertips. He took the guitar to the divan, facing that impossible, phantom ship. He coughed once and a song emerged, tripping over the uneven notes his rusty fingers plinked out.
This life been cut in twain
Ne’er will I stray too far from where
We said we’d meet again
I carry it with me, my pocket anchor
That place where I lost you
Waiting for the day I look to sea
And see one mast
Then two
All the friends I’ve ever had
Sleep beneath the driftwood tree
And all my children, could have been
Were never here, will never be
What thunder shouts and what wind shrieks
I stand and bear it true
Taker don’t drive me from my post
Still no mast
Not two
How many years have washed away
The sand beneath my feet
How the changing of the moons
Dulls my eyes, and lines my cheeks
I’m growing older, by and by
This year I may’nt see through
And still I wait through every night
To see one mast
Then two
“It’s about her, ain’t it.”
Orf choked on the last word and spun, heart drumming against his ribs. Delpny stood by the open door holding his compass, her thumb fitfully flipping its chain around and around. Her hair framed a curled lip, a brow crumpled together like a letter of bad news.
“Get out,” Orf growled. “I mean— put that down and get out. What are you even doing here?”
“It’s always about her,” Delpny spat, her cheeks smoldering, her knuckles turning white. “You’ll give some dead lady everything and mum and me nothing. She loves you even though you’re fat and old, and you act like you’re renting her.”
Orf’s feet took two steps towards her. The rest of him was shocked but did not resist. His eyes were locked on the compass, and the world was slowly turning red around it.
“Don’t talk about your mother that way.”
“You can’t tell me what to do,” Delpny retorted, clutching the compass to her chest. Orf doubted she knew its meaning, except that it was connected to his heart, and she could hurt him through it. “You ain’t got the right. You don’t love us. You’d prefer a drownéd corpse, wouldn’t you?”
Orf turned his memory out like a purse in search of something, anything he could say to coax the compass out of her hands, but all he could find was anger. “I said put that down, now.”
Delpny turned her nose up defiantly. “You’re only here because we were easier than scraping your dead wife’s bones off the seafloor.”
Orf lunged and Delpny screamed, high in fear, ragged in anger. She flung the compass blindly, and Orf watched it crack against the far wall, then clatter to the floorboards in two pieces. When he looked back at Delpny, she was gone, a door slam still echoing throughout the musty room.
The guitar was suddenly an anchor in his hand. He set it aside and knelt to collect the halves of his compass. The hinge was broken, but that, ultimately, was nothing he couldn’t mend. If only people were so easy to reassemble.
Delpny was gone by dawn.
She’d left all belongings save for her outgeister and a coil of ghostlamps. Between her empty room and the ongoing siege, Thusia would have been within rights to break down. Instead, her features hardened into an unreadable mask. Orf followed her to her office where she began to organize both the guild’s defense and the search for Delpny. Any spare hullpackers were needed to keep the constabulary at bay, but Thusia managed to put a few aside who could scour the docks for any trace of her daughter. A stranger might have called her heartless. Orf knew better. Tears would not oil the gears of her rescue operation. Elbow grease would.
She did not ask if he knew why she’d gone. No need— the walls of their house were not that thick. She did ask where Delpny’d gone, which Orf could not answer. The more he dug at that lack in him, the bigger it grew, until it pressed against his lungs and he could hardly breathe. He’d kept the girl at such length that, when she’d pulled away, he hadn’t felt it.
Finally, at a quarter to eight, Small Karl arrived with a lead. He dried his sweat on a newspaper and told them plainly. “The ship got her.”
A beggarwoman had seen it happen, the boy claimed. Last evening she’d snuck into the docks in search of choice pickings. There, she’d spotted a girl matching Delpny in every aspect approach the ship. She had some kind of stick, she’d recalled, like she was fixing to harpoon the thing. But as the woman attested, an invisible force had seemed to encircle the girl, lifting her kicking into the air, and dragging her through a rent in the ship’s hull. The beggarwoman had been so afeard that she’d fled, costing them hours spent in fruitless searching.
That was their only clue: gabbled hearsay from someone who’d say anything for a doubloon. Orf wanted to wring Small Karl’s neck in case it would squeeze a better answer out, but the fact remained: they’d had no other information to go on.
“You’ve got to get her back,” Thusia said. She sat by the window, her back to Orf, her tired eyes resting in a cradle of laced fingers. “If I could, I’d take me and all my boys in there and turn the drownéd thing inside out. But I’ve got duties, Orf. My people need me right now. It’s got to be you.”
What Thusia left unsaid was deafening. She was insulating a mother’s terror in business, making it safe to handle. Without that layer of abstraction, it would destroy her. Orf wasn’t good for much, but he could take it off her hands.
Minutes to noon, Orf was escorted into the ship’s shadow. The beggarwoman’s tale had made the rounds briskly, and being a superstitious lot, no hullpacker dared put a toe too close. Even Orf unconsciously prayed to the Giver Sea for safe passage as he clambered over the rubble surrounding the ship’s base. The great gouge through which Delpny had entered was the only opening not healed over by squamous membrane. Its edges were pimpled liberally with barnacles, giving it the appearance of a gnarled jaw. Adjusting his goggles from one end of the observable planar spectrum to the other, he detected no motion, spectral or otherwise. From his belt he unhooked his cnidolantern and shone it inside. Bottled jellyfish draped their bleaching luminescence across the burls of coral that contoured a corridor into the ship. Shadows fled into a pit with no bottom.
Orf balked at that threshold. He’d never feared a ghost. Some might take encouraging, but they were no more than memories, and by nature, memories went away. So what, then, did one call a memory that came back?
Alive.
Orf led with his outgeister and its pulsing phasmfire. With every step the atmosphere grew mealier, as though pressurized by depth like brine, almost too thick to breathe. Faint colors darted in his vision. Fishes, he imagined, that were only fractionally there, finned figments shoaling in a subnautical dream. Before long, Orf realized he was seeing by more than just his cnidolantern’s light. Bioluminescent corals lent pumicelike edges to the dark. Chromatophores winked like distant stars where slabs of squid-hide melded into riveted steel. He began to recognize his surroundings. Even overgrown by sea-life, all the gods knew his feet could navigate the bilge asleep. He and Effie had snuck away down here often, where the dark was as good as a curtain.
Orf’s spine chaffed beneath his skin. It really was The Auld Northern Way. Not that he could begin to imagine how. Perhaps this is punishment, a part of him wondered. He’d neglected the living for the dead, and no god looked favorably on that. If the Taker Sea had warped his dearest dream into a nightmare, it was a hell well-deserved.
The path led Orf up a stairwell where a skewering of huge, yellowed bones had transformed it into a whale’s ribcage. The door above was crusted open by a parliament of oysters, with just enough room to squeeze through. It was abyssal-black inside; crabs and other tidepool vermin danced away from his lantern-light. He only recognized it as the galley by the tables bolted to the floorboards, where heaps of starfish slithered in an orgiastic banquet. Even so, the air was humid with nostalgia. He and Effie had shared their first meal here. The first of what had not been enough. He clutched those memories like too few pearls on too long a string.
Only a small stretch of the room was dry. Water rose to the ceiling everywhere except within the few square fathoms in which he stood, as though some invisible dam kept it at bay. Orf touched a finger to the water, marveled as it passed through easily, then hastily retracted it as a great finned shadow knifed by. Turning in a slow circle, Orf’s light fell upon a giant clam anchored to the floor.
Inside, swaddled in supple mussel-meat, hands crossed on her breast as if in repose, was Delpny.
Swallowing a cry of relief, he ran to her, shaking her by the shoulder, but, though her chest rose and fell, her eyes would not open. Thinking fast, Orf wedged the butt of his outgeister into the clamshell and tried to leverage it apart, to no avail. Costly as an outgeister was, he’d have sacrificed its length in stacked doubloons if it would get Delpny free.
Leave her be.
It was less than a whisper—the memory of sound after it faded from the ear— yet it slid easily through Orf’s hide to tickle his scapulae. He spun on his heels, ready to fight, but there was no one. Suddenly, a light burst on, blue and cold as the moon through a porthole, scattering the many-legged things that teemed around him.
She’s only sleeping.
Orf looked up.
A strange appendage sprouted from high on the wall above— a bent stalk ending in an anglerfish’s fluorescent lure, if there were one big enough to bolt a man down whole. Pushing through the veil of seawater, it descended to bob between him and Delpny. The glow from within dimmed until Orf could discern the silhouette of something inside. Twin shadows flattened themselves against its glassy membrane, resolving into delicate hands.
Yes, that’s me. Hello again.
Orf was breathless. The voice speared him cleanly, pinning lung to heart to breast.
You were far away, but at last, I returned to you.
The light dimmed further, until Orf could see that its source was a woman suspended within the lure like a shark’s roe in a mermaid’s purse. Her eyes smiled. Her lips winked. Her hair wafted weightlessly, as if in the memory of Orf’s loving hands.
“Now pick your jaw up already,” Effie said, “before something crawls inside it.”
“I was dead,” she began. “And then, I sank.”
She spoke while treading liquid light, as though it were the natural step up from crawling. “I was almost nothing. It was like a dream. When you’re dead, nothing can touch you. The world goes through you like you aren’t even there. Without a skull to keep my thoughts in, I could barely think. I was inside the ship, but I couldn’t remember how to swim away. I only knew that I was falling.”
And as she fell, she could feel untold fathoms of saltwater passing through her, the herring shoals and jellyfish drifts, irrelevant to the material world. There would be no rest for her below, when the pressure could not crush her. Effie sank, doomed to haunt the dark at the bottom of the world, until there, where life was impossible, The Auld Northern Way encountered something living. Something that snagged Effie’s spirit like krill in a whale’s baleen.
“The entity took me. Swallowed me. But it did not destroy me. Digested, perhaps? I still don’t understand. All I know is I am part of it now, and it is part of the ship, and the ship is part of me. I am a ghost, but more than a ghost. I am a new kind of being, I think. I am sideways from death.”
All Orf could think to say was, “That’s not possible.”
At which Effie smirked exactly the way she had in life, her smile lopsided just so. “Everything’s impossible until it’s not,” she said, chidingly. “We’ve seen stranger, you and me.”
“Effie,” Orf breathed. Giver Sea be good— it was her in every way. But how could that be so? Not even the most wrathful spirits could do more than parrot their own life. They could not speak what they had not spoken. Feral memories, they could not think, could not choose, could not talk.
“Yes, it’s me,” Effie said, in defiance of all he knew.
The strength poured out of Orf’s legs, and he fell to his knees before her. “Taker Sea drown me. I’m sorry, Effie. I’m so sorry. I left you there, and I—”
“You did nothing.” Invisible hands cupped him under the arms and lifted Orf to his feet. “Don’t rewrite the past to make yourself nefarious. I was the one who left you, fool that I was. But I did promise I’d be back, and I’m sorry it took me longer than I thought.”
“Why did you come back?” Orf feared to ask in case it undid the knotted logic of this dream, but wonder pried it from him.
“You taught me that ghosts are nothing but a sum of memories. It’s truer than you know. When I look at myself, at the back of my hand, I see every motion it ever made preserved like a stack of argentographs. We were only together for, what, two years? Even so, you are in so much of me, Orf. You are a bullet hole through all my happiest moments. You are what made them happy, and I’m not satisfied with just that much. Is that greedy of me?”
The lure floated closer. Effie pressed against it, distending the membrane. Hesitating, Orf reached out and touched his hands to hers. If this truly had been only a dream, her touch made it real.
“Be with me in this new world I’ve found,” Effie urged. “You made a promise to me too, my love; don’t think I’ve forgotten.”
“On this side of the sea—” Orf murmured.
“—or the other,” Effie finished, and then laughed, and it was so perfectly her laugh that Orf found himself laughing too.
They reminisced for a time, wading knee-deep through the past. There was no helping it. This was the font of all their memories together, and they pooled there still. The time they’d smuggled aboard a journeyfruit from the Isle of Kivkonye and gorged themselves into a psychedelic stupor. That night when the sun had stirred in its sleep, flexing its billion burning wings and turning night into day. All those moments that Orf had thought spoiled by tragedy became ripe in Effie’s presence. Within her, within the ship, within the miracle she and it were together, dead things lived again. And for all that she’d changed, Effie was still Effie. Her lips hid shark’s teeth, but they were still her lips.
It was the easiest thing to fall for her again. And, spotlit against his love, it was even easier to see where Effie ended and something else began.
“You can’t imagine what I’ve seen on my way to you,” Effie exclaimed, spinning in her brilliant solution, dancing on bubbles. “My keel has scraped the scummy steeples of Grïl Ishto. I’ve swam beside what hunts the greatest of sea-wyrms. I stared into the ocean’s deepest gulf and saw the Taker Sea herself stare back. Would you like to know the color of her eyes? Oh, I’m so eager to show you!”
On and on she went, peeling back bloodier layers of the ocean’s mystery. The longer she spoke, the more Orf felt a certainty tighten around his heart.
“Effie,” he said at last.
She swirled towards him. “Yes?”
“I love you.”
“Why, I believe I love you too.”
Orf felt a tear peel down his cheek, and tasted it a moment later.
“I think I have to let you go again.”
Her smile faltered. It held on by a dimple. “I don’t understand.”
Orf spread his hands, gesturing at once to her and to the resurrected ship. “These things you’ve seen, all these wonders of the undersea… they’re only beautiful to what you are now. Not to me. Not to what I am now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your world terrifies me. I don’t want to see any of those things. I can’t, I…” Orf swallowed, then dried his face on his palms. He had to stand strong like a seawall. Should that leak become a flood, he’d crumble, and everyone behind him would be lost. Giver Sea be good, it was so hard though. Once, he could have braved any horror if it were for her. It was an impossible, paradoxical burden to have to give up instead.
“We’ve grown apart, Effie. We can’t have new things. We have what we have already, but there won’t be any more. That’s what I’m trying to say.”
Effie took her fading smile and stretched it taut, staking it by force to her cheeks. “Well… that’s only natural, isn’t it? It’s all right, my love; I can make you like me.”
Orf shook his head. “I don’t want to be like you. I would have loved to drown with you. To be swept up as you were and change with you. I’d have gone with you into the dark, wherever it led. But that’s not how things shook out. I went another way. I found another family there.”
Effie shrank back from him. “You couldn’t.”
“Ten years, Effie. I spent ten years waiting on the beach for a mast that wasn’t coming.” Each word was a battle won against his weaker self, the Orf too eager to let fantasy fold over the truth. “I never moved on, but the tide brought them to me anyway. That’s my daughter you’ve got there. Please, give her back and let us go home.”
A thousand expressions cycled through Effie’s features. Anger. Sadness. Others he’d never seen a human make. Many that a human couldn’t. Finally, her face hardened into something inscrutable. “It’s not that simple. Let me show you something.”
Her lure pushed past him, its stalk extending on a limitless stockpile of flesh. The water curtained apart for her and revealed a sealed hatch. She made a terse gesture, and the lock undid itself. Orf followed dutifully. Only his tongue had agency in this place. All of it was Effie.
He crept inside, where it was very quiet. The furthest wall was a membrane looking out into the murky bay. It was full of water except for where he stood, and in that water was a scene like a nursery. A shelf of books saturated into bricks. A mobile of lobster tails and sea-glass. Below that, a crib babyproofed by plush algae.
Orf flinched as something sleek and pale darted past him. It doubled back, corkscrewing with an otterlike deftness to float before him, lightly paddling. She could have been no more than three, but the musculature beneath her baby fat was like a tuna’s, her toes and fingers webbed in-between. Her eyes had grown overlarge to see better underwater, but were the same color as his own.
Orf smiled at his daughter, and with sharpened teeth, his daughter smiled back.
“She’s a brinebairn,” he said.
“Yes,” Effie replied. They watched their child flit through the water, reveling in her powerful body. “Like me, she is perpendicular to dead. It may be slowly, but she is growing. She needs to eat.”
That last word summoned the image of Delpny displayed within that shell, her wan throat as soft as a nipple. With a shudder, he understood.
“Her name is Lalyae,” Effie said. “Like we wanted,” and like that, all of Orf’s convictions crumbled like a sandcastle beneath the tide.
Oh, he saw her trap clearly. Yet still he took the bait. He knew that he should flee and take Delpny with him by force, but he could not help gazing at the daughter that a part of him insisted he should have had, and what he saw spellbound him. She was beautiful. Truly. A parent’s only real need was to see their child healthy, and there was no limit to that hunger. It didn’t matter what she’d become— for a moment, Orf was incandescent with pride. Nothing else mattered.
“She’s ours,” Effie whispered. “She looks like both of us. My ears. Your eyes.” Each word was a sharpened hook tying him tighter to the ship, to her, to this miraculous bubble of what could have been.
As he drank his daughter in, though, finding more of himself in her features—his high cheeks, his dimples—he realized there was nothing but him to find. No good memories sprang from that recognition. She might have been his kin, but she was ten years removed him from. Too vast a distance for blood to call to blood, with no happy moments to bridge the gap. He’d never held her, never known her at all, except as a possibility.
Instead, Orf’s thoughts gravitated towards Delpny. Delpny with her unbridled energy, her drive to do good. Delpny, who worked for his approval no matter how little he gave her in exchange, who wasn’t his, but wished to be. Lalyae looked so much like him. It should have been so easy to trade his world for her. But all the love he threw at her found nothing to grab hold of, and retracted back into him to coil around his stepdaughter’s smile.
Orf place his hand against the sheer wall of water, sending a ripple in all directions. “Lalyae. I’m your papa.”
Lalyae paused, treading water, and smiled again, but there was no recognition in her eyes, nothing to suggest she understood or wanted what he offered. Not like Delpny. Then she was off again, exuberant in the strange and only life she knew.
Orf turned to Effie. “She’s beautiful,” he said. “But she belongs to you and the sea. Not to me.”
Effie regarded with the stillness that precedes a storm. The outgeister was still with Delpny. Orf had nothing to defend himself with but trust.
“I suppose we have grown apart,” Effie murmured. “Haven’t we?”
Orf nodded. “You’ve got your life now. I have mine. Maybe they aren’t what we wanted, but they’re real.”
“And we’re not?” Effie asked, even then begging reality not to be as it was.
“Not to each other,” he replied. “You are all my best memories, and I am yours. That will have to be enough. Can you let it be, Effie?”
She thought on that, and when at last she gave her answer it brought Orf fully to tears, because to the end, she’d only ever given him reasons to love her.
Hoisting a torpid Delpny on his back, Orf lingered at a safe distance to watch The Auld Northern Way shove off. It took all its organic components heaving in tandem to lift off its bed of rubble. In motion, it gathered momentum like an avalanche and crashed into the bay. One smokestack and then two dipped beneath the surface, lacey waves folding neatly over their peaks. Only a ripple marked the ship’s course towards the sun. Wherever Effie was bound, Orf hoped the Giver Sea would send strong winds. Perhaps there was a kind of passing-on for ghosts, an alternative to obliteration. Being memories, maybe one simply had to let them go.
Halfway home, Delpny stirred. Her breath came in phlegmy coughs, then steadied. Her clammy hands wrung warmth from Orf’s shirt.
“You’re safe,” he said. “Go back to sleep.”
“I was awake the whole time,” she rasped. “I heard it all.”
“Oh, did you now.”
She was silent for long enough that Orf feared she’d drifted off again. Finally, she said, “I think about my papa every day.” It was only her voice in pitch. Where it normally skipped along ahead of her brain, it now peered guiltily out from cover. “In every moment I’m awake, I’m wondering how better it would be if he was in it with me. If I hadn’t lost the life I should have had. When you came around, I got to thinking you could be him instead of him. I wanted you to be more than you wanted to be. I’m sorry. Please don’t hate me.”
Hate her? Orf never could. They were the same kind of creature, the haunted and unwhole. Perhaps their ghosts weren’t so much echoes as absences, gouges in the soul contoured to what they’d lost, aching in phantom pain. Maybe if their ragged edges matched— not perfectly, but well enough— they could try and fit together. He reached back to smear her tears off the nape of his neck. “Tide brings what the tide brings. Not always what we’re hoping for. All we can do is make the most of what we get.”
“You didn’t want me?”
“No,” Orf replied truthfully. “Did you want me?”
“No,” Delpny admitted, hiding her face in his shoulder.
Orf shrugged higher onto his back. She was getting big, and he was getting old, but he’d carry her for as long as he was able. “No,” he said. “But you got me anyway, and I’ll never let you go.”
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Evan Marcroft is a speculative fiction writer from Sacramento California, currently surviving the windy streets of Chicago with his wife. Evan uses his expensive degree in literary criticism to do menial data entry, and dreams of writing for video games, though he’ll settle for literature instead. His works of science fiction, fantasy, and spine-curdling horror can be found in a variety of venues, such as Strange Horizons, Asimov’s SF, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Find a complete list of his published works at evan-marcroft.squarespace.com, or follow him on twitter at @Evan_Marcroft. |