Eleven Harmony and Harbingers

ELEVEN

Harmony and Harbingers

MARY

W e parted from The Red Tempest without incident and continued our course, following the Free Channels close to Mereish waters until darkness fell, then veering across the line. We sounded no bells and we lit no lanterns, though we spied others on the horizon.

Either Olsa or Sam attended every watch, lending their Sooth's foresight to the task of keeping us away from prying eyes. Spring on the Winter Sea, they said, was a fortuitous time—a time of great luck or greater ill fortune. The former, thankfully, seemed to grace us.

During one of Samuel's watches, I joined Olsa in the main cabin. She sat at the central table with a lantern swinging overhead and an array of papers spread around her—the documents Faucher had given to Samuel, along with the cipher that was intended to decode them.

"How goes it?" I asked the Usti, sinking down across from her with a mug of hot tea.

The older woman frowned and picked up a page covered with indecipherable Mereish. "I am beginning to wonder if this Faucher is Yissik Ocho himself. These are encoded, and not lightly, either. I believed this here to be a key to the cipher, but I cannot unravel it. Ris cannot. Why did he think Samuel could?"

Ris was Olsa's ghisting. I saw the being's spectral flesh flutter across Olsa's hands at the sound of her name.

"Who, ah, is Yissik Ocho?" I asked.

"An old Usti god. The trickster who led St. Helga to her death in a snowstorm," the other woman clarified. "The Mereish call him Saint Yalen, Saint of Fortune."

I picked up one of the letters and tilted it towards the light. Tane, too, turned her attention to the paper, but the beautiful, sweeping letters remained as obscure as ever.

"All I have learned today—or that I have guessed—is that all of these are copied from originals," Olsa said. "Their dates, which Samuel deciphered last night, are years apart, but this paper is all new, and the writing matches Faucher's supposed key."

"So Faucher kept the originals." I laid the paper back down. "That seems natural."

The older woman let out a long breath and sat back, lacing her fingers over her breasts. "Tane, will you try?"

"She doesn't recognize the writing."

"Try, please?"

Tane slipped from my skin with my next breath and considered the papers, rounding the table in a slow, steady gait. She could not pick the pages up, linen as they were. But she stopped in front of the key, clearly displayed, and stared down. I felt her thoughts as distant whispers, a quiet wind through a forest canopy.

She lifted her sea-glass eyes to Olsa. Did you try to read it in the Dark Water?

Why would I do that? Her response was inaudible, channeled through Ris, but came to my mind all the same.

Tane gestured to the table. Faucher gave them to Samuel, a Sooth. They are indecipherable, yet clearly intended to have meaning. Why not try everything?

Faucher is no Sooth, though , I interjected. How would he make something like that? Is it even possible to tie paper to the Dark Water? It's not wood or flesh or bone.

Tane glanced between us, disapproving. Both your powers come from the Other, and yet somehow you forget it pervades everything.

Olsa stood. "Fine, we will try. Mary, join me?"

I hesitated. Tane slipped back through the wood of the table and into my bones.

"I'll only have four breaths," I reminded her. Even being ghiseau and bonded to a Mother Ghisting, my body was still human, and taking in too much of the Other's foreign air would begin to change me. Unlike Sam, whose physical body remained in the mortal world when he looked into the Other, mine came with me. I truly walked into that other place, and so we had begun to call it Otherwalking.

"And?" Olsa countered, unbothered. "You should practice."

"But it's dangerous. And uncomfortable," I mewed, heard how pathetic I sounded, and caught myself. "Fine, I'll come."

Olsa's smile was smug as she reached out her hand. I rarely missed my mother—I'd spent most of my life without her—but the look in Olsa's eyes and the feel of her fingers in mine reminded me painfully of her absence.

Olsa's eyes took on a distant quality. I inhaled, deep and only a little shaky, and let Tane tug me out of the human world.

The ship faded to transparency, bulkheads growing thinner and thinner until I could see an endless expanse of black waves. A chorus of lights awoke, glinting like stars at dusk.

I caught my breath. My first breath. Olsa was a specter here, clothed in forest-green light edged with grey, but I was here in my entirety, my human skin—flesh and blood—glowing a soft teal, brushed with grey.

We looked down at the table, which was transparent save for the faint remnants of ghisting influence. The papers, as I expected, were invisible.

But the ink was not. Lined with the barest light, the text remained, transposed onto the spectral wood of the tabletop.

Another breath.

"See?" Tane inquired. Her voice was sonorous here in the Dark Water, audible in a way that she never was in the human world, unless she used my mouth.

Olsa tilted her head and paced, surveying the letters with furrowed brows. Then she grinned. In the human world, her physical body must have picked up Faucher's cipher, because the lines of text rose into the air before us. The hands of her spectral body remained unmoving—one on the tabletop, one in mine.

The bizarreness of it all made my head spin. No wonder Samuel was terrified of losing his mind here.

"Look," Olsa urged.

My third breath. I looked at the floating words, Usti and Mereish in scattered rows. Then I blinked. There were more words on the page now, hidden letters that transformed the key from illegible to… something Tane comprehended, but I did not.

Movement snatched my attention up just as a malevolent orange light plunged through the deck towards us. I had just enough time to glimpse wings and a beak—a huge, thick, clattering beak—before I let out my fourth breath in a shriek and toppled back into the human world.

I landed hard on my ass, tearing my fingers from Olsa's. The older woman came back to herself half a heartbeat later, braced and calm. She cast me a high-browed look as the orange light extinguished, the Dark Water faded, the papers returned to their previous, inscrutable state on the table.

"It can't follow us back," I panted, needing her to confirm it. "Whatever that was, it can't pass through."

"No. But now we are aware that there is a dittama watching us in the Other," she observed dryly. "Nothing should have found us so quickly, and my Knowing affirms it. I think you should not Otherwalk until it moves on, at least aboard ship."

"Happily." I eased to my feet, aching and rubbing my back. "Why is it following us? I know the stories about ill omens and such, but… there must be a proper reason."

"It is hunting."

I cringed. "Hunting us?"

Olsa nodded and shuffled the papers. "So, I can read the key, though if that creature is fixated on us, this will take time. I will not be able to move in the Dark Water for long. The dittama cannot eat my spirit there, but it can harm Ris."

I dusted off my hands, forcing my lingering anxiety aside and, all too happily, shedding any responsibility for the papers and their deciphering. Whatever they said, whatever secrets they held, I did not want them on my shoulders, anyways.

"Well, then," I said, making for the door. "I'm going to bed."