Sailing the Silver Void

The fog over the reef thinned by inches, not all at once. The bodies on the deck of the Pale Fang were where they had fallen. The Bone Devil stood at the rail of the skiff with its claws folded and looked back at the Watch like a guest who has stayed exactly long enough.

It distributed candles. One each. Black wax, marrow-white wicks, cool to the touch. “For when next we have business,” it said. “Light it. I will hear.” It bowed, a small, exact, courtly bow, the kind a creditor gives a client who has paid in full, and stepped to the wheel of the Raiding Skiff. “I look forward to our future negotiations.”

The skiff glided from the reef into the silver. The Watch were alone on a grounded warship, with four dwarves below decks and a small red wyrmling already, with Fizz’s help, working her quiet way through the pockets of the fallen.

Below Decks

There is a particular noise a party of five makes when they search a captured warship, and it is not a quiet noise.

Tink went for the engineering — Thessek’s berth, the psi-core conduits, muttering about the craftsmanship. Kaymos went for cabins and lockers and anything with a hinge. Lindon read. Pea found the crow’s nest and settled in for a long watch. Veyer moved through it all at half-speed, still ringing from the Commodore’s flurry — lifting a journal here, a letter there, putting a hand on each thing as if to ask it questions, and eventually settling against the foremast to read with the slow patience of someone who is hurting and not saying.

The pieces came together over an hour, not in any tidy order. The half-finished mandate. The patrol charts. The Pale Fang’s logbook. A field journal in Zar’rekh’s hand. A training journal in Thessek’s. A letter to Kelsh, Rider of Saerath. A signet ring marked with the Ascension Council. The carved fey acorn no one could yet make sense of.

A rider had been sent ahead of them. A young adult red dragon — Saerath — full brother to Embrath’s clutch, with a Githyanki named Kelsh on his back, carrying the Oakhaven survey to Tu’narath. Dragons, it transpired, do not fly through the open Void blind. They go waypoint to waypoint, and the next waypoint after this reef was Candlekeep.

Lindon set Candlekeep on the map.

The Watch sat with that.

Embrath — sitting where she preferred to sit, which was wherever was warmest — was asked, gently, about her brother. The asking required a suitable preamble: flattery first, and then the Commodore’s hat presented to her as a sign of respect. A head-tilt. A long thoughtful look at Tink. A little chuff. Yes, she remembered him. Yes, he was bigger now. Yes — and here she went still — much bigger.

The decision made itself in the silence after that. Saerath was a grown red dragon, or close to it. The Watch were five, plus a wyrmling, plus a Steel Defender currently in pieces in Tink’s lap. The chase was a race they could not be sure of finishing, against a foe they could not be sure of beating, away from a town that was waiting for them. Candlekeep would keep. Oakhaven, it turned out, would not.

“Candlekeep is on the map. The chase will keep. Home won’t.”

While the rest of the Watch had been sifting through Vael’s papers, Embrath had been working. The cargo hold of the Pale Fang was no longer just a cargo hold. The cargo hold of the Pale Fang was now, by quiet self-appointment, a hoard. Fallen Githyanki tend to wear coin and small bright things in inside pockets, and Embrath, with Fizz to fetch what she could not lift, had been making the rounds. By late afternoon there was a respectable little glitter in the hold’s far corner — gold, a few signet pieces, a half-dozen bone-and-silver fittings, a polished psi-shard the size of a thumbnail. It was not, on its own, a dragon’s hoard. It was the first sentence of one, and Embrath was very pleased to be writing it.

She also had, somehow, the Commodore’s hat.

Veyer and Lindon had paid her several careful compliments earlier in the afternoon, in concert and at length — yes, you fly very well; yes, you are very fierce; yes, you are clearly the most senior officer present — and at some point during all that flattery the hat had migrated from Vael’s cabin to Embrath’s small head, and there it had stayed. By the time the Watch reconvened on deck, Embrath was sitting on the foredeck rail in the Commodore’s hat, in front of her growing hoard, atop her recently acquired warship, and she had — somewhere along the line — concluded that she was now in command of the Pale Fang. Her father is a dragon. Her grandfather is a dragon. She had a hat, a hoard, and a flagship. She had, by her own assessment, arrived.

The crew of the Pale Fang were, naturally, a slightly different crew now. A more compliant one. A useful one. A kobold-shaped one.

Tink, when this dawned on him, did not argue.

The psi-core had hours yet to recharge. They had time to fill.

The Petrified Reef

The reef was a strange place to walk in.

Coral that had once been alive had been turned by the slow attention of the Void into something between stone and bone — white and porous and warm in patches where the light caught it. There were pillars taller than Veyer. There were flats smooth as ballroom floors, where dragons could land. There were eyes — small, slow-blinking, set into the older formations, watching without comment.

They found the perch. Scorched stone, fresh red scales, a glove with someone’s blood on it, ash on the brazier-marks. A clear bearing burned along the petrified flat: south-and-east. Candlekeep.

And, scattered through the reef like things the tide had been keeping for them, the Watch found gifts.

Tink found a Modron plate — a small brass disc, geometrically perfect, alloy he did not recognise. He put it in an inside pocket and did not say anything about it for some time.

Lindon found a silver chain with a small disc on it — a wheel, six-spoked, the spokes carved roughly. It was not the kind of thing that washes up in a Githyanki reef by accident. He put it around his neck and felt nothing in particular, which is sometimes the loudest thing a token can do.

Lindon’s seedling, all afternoon, had been leaning. Not toward the perch. Not toward the script. Southward. Past the storm-fringe, toward the dark heart of the Tempest’s Maw, with the slow deliberate patience of a plant that has decided where it wants to go.

He did not say anything about that either.

Embrath, Suited

The glow at the centre of the reef was the kind of light you walk toward without deciding to.

Slow. Blue. Deeper than the surrounding coral. The Watch went to it, because the Watch always go to it. Two coral pillars on the path turned out not to be pillars.

The anemones unfolded. Tendrils — twenty-five feet of them, ringed with stinging cells — uncoiled in long slow whips, and the air went briefly full of moving rope. Veyer, who was nearest, was caught around the waist before she had finished drawing. The tendril reeled — fishing-line fast — and the second anemone’s Crushing Maw opened wide for her, and that should very likely have been the end of Veyer.

Tink had been keeping something in his pack since morning.

He had spent the recharge hours kneeling beside what was left of Princess. He had laid the parts out in the order he had built them in, and he had taken the chassis apart, and he had built it again — smaller, lighter, hinged to fold along its own axes, sized for a body that was not a brass dog but a small red wyrmling. Princess as a suit. Princess as Embrath’s coat.

He pulled the case from the pack and threw it underhand, two-handed, the way you throw a sleeping cat into a bath.

The case unpacked in mid-air.

It came apart along its hinges as it flew — segment, segment, segment — and each segment found Embrath where Embrath was, and each segment closed where it should close, and by the time the last plate snapped home around her tail Embrath was wearing Princess from snout to tail-tip and she was, suddenly and visibly, cross. Tink ran three strides, planted a foot on a coral knuckle, and vaulted onto her back as she stooped. The anemone’s tendril was still reeling Veyer in. Embrath hit it like a small armoured comet.

The tendril broke. Veyer dropped to the coral, gasping, alive. Lindon’s Healing Word found her on the way down. The first anemone exploded from within a a searing beam of moonlight hit it causing the coral to melt, bubble and shatter. The fight ended.

Embrath, when it was over, sat down on a coral flat and washed one armoured paw with the other, and then washed her face with that paw, exactly as a cat will do, only louder. The plates clicked. She did not appear to mind them. She did not appear, particularly, to have noticed them.

Kaymos looked at Tink for a long moment and did not say anything. Tink looked at Embrath. Embrath looked at the sun.

Princess, in her way, was still here.

The Lagoon

They pushed deeper after that, slower now, and the reef opened.

It opened the way a hand opens. The petrified coral fell back from a basin of still, dark water, perfectly round, dark as glass, and the bleached coral around it was shaped like an amphitheatre, and the air over the basin held a song that was almost a song — high, mournful, just on the wrong side of audible.

At the centre of the lagoon, rising from the water as if it had grown there, was a salt crystal as tall as a person and as bright as a held breath. It was cracked along one face — already cracked, before they had arrived. Inside it, suspended in its core like something held in amber, was a slow blue pulse the size of a fist.

Lindon’s seedling pulled in his hand. It did not pull toward the splinter. It pulled past it — south, again, toward the storm-fringe beyond the lagoon, with the same slow strain it had shown all day, only stronger, as if whatever was calling it was nearer here than elsewhere.

The Watch stood at the rim and did not, for a moment, say anything. The light was beautiful. The water was very still. The siren song settled over them like a hand on the shoulder of a person who has come a long way.