“The water witch. She has a name, but I won’t be accused of calling her, not when there’s an excellent chance she might hear me. And if those fools back there think that she’ll grant any peace or prayer they offer, they have much to learn about the way the universe works.”
“Or the way you work?” Nia asked.
“Hush, now. I’m leaving.”
Sam heard that part and it frightened him. “What?”
“We’ve arrived, and I cannot risk a leap across the water. If even a speck of mildew should fall, then she will know I’ve passed this way. The less she knows of our escape, the better.”
“Someone knows we’re escaping?” Sam risked lifting the tarp, and seeing that Nia was clothed, he didn’t put it back down. “Someone other than those guys?” He jerked his head toward the distant shore.
The creature thought about it for a moment. “If she doesn’t know yet, she’ll learn soon enough. Those damn fools have accidentally called her correctly this time.”
“What?” Nia pushed the canvas up over her head, giving herself more room to breathe.
The creature made an impatient little sound and then reached for Sam’s shirt. It pulled Sam under the fabric and held the man’s face close to its own so it could speak quietly. “They’ve been trying to summon the water witch, because they are damnably stupid, and they do not know what she’ll do to them when she answers.”
“Trying?” Sam stammered.
“Trial and error, thus far entirely error—which is why they survive to chase us now. But they’ve done something right this time, and the call has sounded. It’s a pitiful squeak of a summons, barely more than a cough, but she is bound to answer it. She’ll go to them, and they know about us, so we need to be as far away from them as possible. Do I make myself understood?”
Sam nodded. “Understood,” he repeated.
It released him and tossed him backwards, out of the sheltering tent and into the open air.
The ferry bumped itself gently against the dock, and somewhere up above, Mel was slinging a rope to secure it.
The creature stood to its full height, and the tarp ballooned around it until the covering flew free and fell away.
Nia rose to her feet. She was not shaky anymore, and she could breathe without struggling. Her hair hung in heavy, brittle tentacles that swung down to her thighs. She was covered in dust, black flecks of earth, and peeling strips of the lingering stone shell. But she was standing.
She stretched and flexed, rocking on the balls of her feet to test her legs.
“Now,” the creature whispered fiercely. “Go.”
It crumpled to the deck, dissolving into a pile of mulch and broken twigs.
Nia grabbed Sam by the hand, and with a leap that surprised no one more than herself—she bounded off the ferry and crashed down onto the dock.
What You Pray For
And all the while, for all its stuttering incompleteness, the call was sounding.
And all the while, in the distance below the black waters, something was struggling against the summons. Something huge and angry was preparing to respond even as she was pulled up to the pier where the little ferry docked itself day in and day out.
She was coming because she was furious and possibly frightened, because she had been brought to the surface twice in as many nights. Prior to those events, no one had been ignorant enough or stupid enough to attempt a call in a thousand years, and now she was at the beck and call of the tiny and corrupt.
It did not matter that the success was all but accidental. It did not matter that the call was only partial and imperfect.
It mattered that there was a call. It mattered that someone or something believed it ought to have control over her. Arahab did not agree.
So despite the fragile and fractured nature of the song, the old thing with a thousand names gathered her strength—and there was much of it to gather—and she pulled herself into the Gulf of Mexico again, and across it. She followed the melody’s little lasso and let it lead her, for it was too feeble to force her.
Her fear was this: that someone was experimenting, and learning.
A fragment of a song that had first been sung when the sky was divided from the water was not enough to compel her. But the whole song, and assisted by a focusing object, and cast into the brine with intent . . . that was something else altogether.
If someone knew a part, then the whole could yet be gleaned. If someone knew even the basest germ of the facts, then the rest could be grown as if from a seed.
Unless she put a stop to it.
It was much better to cut it off now, while the will of the practitioners was weak and imprecise.
As she closed in upon them, she used the eyes she could gather—a snoozing pelican that awoke with a start, a jumping fish that slapped itself against the surface. She borrowed the sharp face of the nearest dolphin and bade it rise enough to spy.
Two people. No, three. One was a woman.
And the alpha of them, a man with a candle that burned a flame as short as a fingernail, knelt on the wooden slats in his semicircle of borrowed power and chanted wordlessly. He murmured the shape of the notes and they fluttered around him.
“Something’s happening,” Mrs. Engle said, more to herself than to either of her companions. “I don’t like this,” she added, even though there was something inside her that very much did like it—all of it, the uncertainty and the power both.
The water was shimmering, quicksilver on ink; and the warm air around them was buzzing with a sound more frightful than mosquitoes. Out in the Gulf, a big bird flapped itself skyward as if it had suddenly awakened, and a dolphin jerked its slick body nose-down into the surf.
“What’s that?” Roy asked, and he might have been referring to any of it.
“We’re being watched,” Mrs. Engle said.
Henry ignored her, concentrating hard on the small sliver of power he’d found. He handled the short stanzas with caution, with care, and with increasing confidence. All the power was congealing around him, ramping up a notch with every repetition of the odd, old tune.
Mrs. Engle watched as the Gulf began to swirl. “Henry? Henry, I think you should stop.”
Henry took a split second from his humming to blurt, “Shut up,” and then continued. With every note the vortex spun harder, bigger, and faster.
The pier’s pilings began to creak under the strain; the worst they usually faced was the steady pull of the daily tides and a very occasional storm, but the force of the sucking eddy made them bow and buck.
The candle fell over. Henry had already figured out that he didn’t need it, so he let it go over the side and didn’t even watch it fall. His voice was doing all the work by then. His pursed lips vibrated with the song that moved the waters and called up the old mistress.
He remembered the distorted trinket with a shape like a dancer. He held it aloft, and behind him he heard Mrs. Engle saying, “No, don’t. I don’t think—” But when the spiral had hit what felt like a peak, and the air had become so windy that he could scarcely keep his eyes open against it . . . he threw the warped lump of metal as hard as he could.
It hit the water with an inaudible plop, the sound of its sinking lost in the miniature maelstrom.
And as soon as it passed the surface, dipping beneath the water and dropping in a back-and-forth, leaflike fall, the hastily conjured storm stopped.
Altogether.
The sky went still, and the water was smoother than glass.
Nothing moved, and no one spoke. No fish slapped the water and no night birds called; no frogs croaked, and no sand-stranded crustaceans clicked themselves together.
Arahab rose up from the water with her hand held aloft and her fist clenched around the metal glob.
She did it so slowly and with such great control that the air didn’t stir, and not even the water from which she spawned herself rippled. Although she could have made herself huge, she chose not to; she made her body the siz
e of an ordinary woman’s—about the size of her young pet-daughter, Bernice.
Out in the water she lingered, close but not too close.
Henry’s mouth was moving manically, humming the song as though he were afraid to let the tune end, because then the woman in the water might leave.
“I am here,” she said. “I have answered your call, and if you like, you can speak.”
She said it soft and low, but Mrs. Engle heard power and tension flowing underneath the words. Henry and his assistant, Roy, stood transfixed. But Mrs. Engle shifted her feet nervously. She, too, was awed and amazed, but she was also more aware.
Maybe it was only that she stood farther away from the song and from the specter in the water, or maybe there was more to it—or less. But the water woman’s shape, with her seaweed hair and her blue-black skin shining under the stars . . . it unnerved her more completely than it overwhelmed her.
Mrs. Engle had seen things herself, before. In another place, and under different circumstances, with different spiritual leaders, she had been witness to ghosts and even a demon once.
But this was different. This was something at once purely alien and purely familiar. And, almost certainly, more purely dangerous.
Mrs. Engle raised one foot and moved it over half a step. When no one took notice of her, she took a whole step off to the side. Her shoulders clung to the tree and the shadows behind her because every primitive synapse in her body was telling her to hide.
If Henry and Roy had similar instincts, they did not act upon them.
“Children,” Arahab addressed the men. She did not look at Mrs. Engle, who was busily hoping that she had gone unnoticed.
“Mm-mistress,” Henry responded. He wasn’t sure what title she would prefer, and he didn’t want to say the wrong thing, but he couldn’t stop himself from speaking once the humming had ended and she’d commanded his mouth to engage.
“Mistress?” she tossed the word back to him with a question lifting the final consonants.
“Queen.” Henry grabbed Roy by the back of his knee and pulled the younger man down to a kneeling position. Roy toppled, but caught himself on his hands—a position that was prostrate enough to count as penitent, even if it had been coerced.
Henry bowed his head and tried to look at her, peering up through his hair and into the water. “What would you have us call you? We are your servants, and we wish only to worship and serve.”
“What would you call me?” The woman in the water blinked her pupil-less silver-green eyes and cocked her head in a thoughtful gesture as she considered which appellation she preferred.
“Anything,” Roy added. “Your Highness.”
Henry growled a hush. It rumbled out the side of his mouth and Roy heard it, and obeyed.
“My names are as numerous as the waves. From whence do you hail?”
Henry wasn’t sure what she meant, and he wanted to ask her to be more specific, but he could barely breathe, much less form an intelligent question. “From . . . from whence . . . ?”
“In colder seas I am called Merrow, or Manta, Ben-Varrey or Dinny-Mara, or Imap Umassoursa. In warmer places, and in the waters along the center of the world, I have other names. I am Ccoa, the cat spirit of the storms, Igpupiara, Yagim, and Huito—Mistress of All the Waters. Would you choose a name, or offer me one of your own?”
“Have you a preference?” Henry asked, tipping his eyes to meet her empty ones and shuddering, but holding the gaze.
“These years, I am sometimes called Mother.”
“Mother.” Roy nodded, as if it were perfect.
“Mother,” Henry agreed, because it was a fond word that easily moved the tongue.
“But I am not often called,” she said once their reverence was assured and confirmed.
Again Mrs. Engle felt that shock of panic zipping along her spine and up her neck. This was no phantom or farce. This was no impossible complaint from a vengeful demon. This was a goddess, and she wanted something very specific that she’d not yet revealed.
And this was what alarmed her. “Mother” was fishing for something, and she was doing it the way a wife does when she interrogates a husband, knowing that she’s going to learn something she doesn’t like. It was a startlingly human approach to interacting with humans.
“I want to ask you a question,” Mother said. She was being careful to enunciate every letter in every word, and even the spaces between them.
“Anything,” Henry assured her. “Anything at all. How can we be of service to you?”
She held out her hand, and held up the lump of misshapen metal. “This trinket you found—it is something I cast aside not so very long ago. Its usefulness has expired, though it retains the scent of power. Why would you cast it back again?”
“I—,” Roy began, but Henry kicked him.
“Shut up, you don’t even know what it is,” he mumbled. And then, to Arahab he said, “I used it, that is, I cast it only because I thought it might work. Together with the song.”
“There was a song?” she asked, with a tone that aimed for idle curiosity.
“Yes, yes. There was a song, just a little bit of one that I heard somewhere. I thought that it might please you. I thought that you might indulge us with an audience, if I were to sing it precisely right.”
“There are many old songs I know, but I heard nothing of yours,” she said.
“Oh,” Henry said. He believed her, because he wanted to.
“It’s this toy that interests me more,” she said. “Where did you get it? And why would you think it might work?”
“Well, why wouldn’t it?” He dodged the question. “I mean, it did work, didn’t it?”
“On the contrary.” Arahab swam without appearing to move a muscle. She glided and the water parted around her, and then she was mere feet in front of Henry and Roy. She stared up at them, not bothering to enlarge herself or intimidate them with her size.
“The . . . the contrary?”
“It did not work. I came not because I was compelled, but because it was my decision to investigate. I came because I wished to know what mortals believed that could wield such authority over me, to attempt a binding such as this.”
Henry sat up from his knees and leaned back until he was sitting, his legs in front of himself as if he were prepared to scurry backwards . . . though such a course would only have sent him back off the pier and into the water.
“A binding?” he squeaked. “No, no, Mother. We only meant a summons—or, that is, a request. A polite and most decidedly servile request, I swear to you on the lives of all I hold dear. Please, I would ask that you not misunderstand our intent. We only meant an invitation; we would never be so arrogant as to attempt to bring you here by force. Is that . . . is that what . . .” He pointed at her hand, which still held the lump.
She looked down at it and closed her fingers around it. “It once was, yes. It was fashioned by a man, across an ocean, and it signified nothing in his hands alone. But something somewhere infused it with more power than either of you have ever possessed. More power than either of you have ever even heard of—it would take much, much more to bring me here against my will. And once it’s spent—” She shrugged her arms in another peculiarly human gesture. “—it is spent. It is worthless.”
“But . . . you came,” Henry insisted. “You remembered us, as we prayed.”
“Yes, I came. And yes, I remembered you, as you prayed. But I do not want you, and now that I know you are here, I cannot stand it.”
“What?” Roy said it first.
“What?” Henry echoed, half a beat behind him.
Arahab let herself stretch, finally. She grew in size until she blocked out the moon and covered the pier with her terrible shadow, twice as dark as the night around them.
“Tell me how you came by the toy. I threw it down not a day ago, and now you throw it back at me again. Where did it come from, and why did you know what to do with it?”
“I found it
,” he said, but no one within hearing distance believed him.
“You found it, and you found the song, and you combined these things in a feeble attempt to bind me, and this came together by accident? By no design at all?”
“None, Mother. None.”
“You don’t even know how you did it, do you?”
“No,” Henry swore.
“No,” Roy added, even though it was clear that he was not being addressed.
“I just.” Henry shook his head, trying to clear it or reset something that had gone completely off course. “I don’t understand. We only wish to serve you.”
“That has never been the case,” she said, and by then she was looking down at the pier from a preposterous height. “No mortal has ever offered service without petitioning prayers and repeated requests. What would be the point, since you are all bound to die, regardless?”
“But—”
“I choose my disciples; they do not choose me. All this time and all these years you have prayed to be remembered—but if you’d had any wits about you, you’d have long ago hidden yourselves; and if you knew of me at all, you would pray that I never heard any cries of yours.”
When she spoke, the night shook and the water seized itself, clutching at her unseen bottom half. There was only darkness below her, for her body cast such a thick shadow that nothing escaped. Only her pale uniform eyes—unbroken by irises, un-tainted by any shade—glared down from the sky.
“All these years,” Henry said. He could barely utter the rest. “You knew . . . we were here?”
She leaned down low, until her face hovered hugely above and close to him.
“I knew, but I had forgotten. You are insignificant in the greater plan, and too powerless and proud to earn anything apart from my wrath.”
“But—”
Henry had never imagined that his last word would be a mere three letters long. Before he could utter anything further, Arahab raised a hand so fast that no one saw it, least of all Henry. The world was dark, anyway. The night had no stars and no moon, only two gleaming eyes set against the heavens.