“With respect, it does matter,” he said when the Cormorant was looking at him again. “After hundreds of years, every criminal who came on that ship is long dead.”
His words echoed in the Drowning Cave. Then the only sound was the noise of the airwheel and the thrum of the drift outside the cave entrance. The sea Lirin stared at him.
The Cormorant finally spoke.
“Why? What makes you think that?”
“They, er, well,” Ven stammered, “they, just are. It’s been hundreds of years.”
The merrow cleared her throat again and addressed the Cormorant.
“Even though they look like Lirin-mer, land-livers are more like, er, herring,” she said. “A few hundred storm, and they, well, wear out. They die of old age.”
“Old age? After a few hundred storm?”
The merrow shrugged. “They’re weak and without much value, I guess.”
“Thanks,” Char muttered.
The Cormorant looked as if he did not believe her. “How can a human—or any land-liver with a soul—only last a few hundred storm? Coreon—how many storm have you seen?”
The Lirin-mer boy thought. “Twenty-four hundred and seven.”
The Cormorant nodded. “As I thought. A man would not have even lost his air-voice after a few hundred storm.”
“When Lirin-mer are young, they can still speak and breathe easily in the air,” Amariel explained to Ven and Char, who were looking baffled. “As they age, it becomes harder for them to do either one, unless they are Lirin-mer of great power, like the Cormorant. Lirin-mer almost never go up to the surface.”
“Ah,” said Ven. He watched as several more soldiers caught rides to the surface on the airwheel. No wonder none of them speak, he thought. A little like kittens, who are born blind, or frogs that start life as tadpoles, with a tail and no legs, losing the one and gaining the others.
* * *
I don’t know why any of this surprised me.
Since Nain live about four times longer than humans, we tend to think of them as weak and fragile, too. A Nain boy usually starts growing his beard, his most prized feature, when he is about thirty in human years. By the time he is forty-five, his entire Bramble, the short growth that covers his entire chin, is almost always fully grown in. Only the very slow-to-grow, like me, are past fifty when their whiskers start appearing, and that is very embarrassing. And I still only have three of them, one for each adventure I’ve undertaken since my fiftieth birthday.
Now I understood why the Lirin-mer hated the occupants of the Gated City so much.
But they were hating people who had been dead for centuries.
* * *
“The original prisoners from that prison ship have been dead a very long time in human years,” he said again. “The people who live there now are their descendants, their great-great-great-great-grandchildren. Many of them are just as evil as the ones that came before them, but a lot of them aren’t. Many of them are just prisoners of circumstance, with the bad luck to have been born in the wrong place. There are quite a few children inside those walls. It’s not their fault they were born there. And while you probably see all land-livers as humans, not everyone in the Gated City is human, just as I am not human. There are many races in the Gated City—including Lirin. If you kill everyone, while you will be getting rid of some very bad people, it’s true, you will also be taking a lot of innocent lives. Isn’t that the same as what the humans in the Gated City are doing to the coral reef?”
The Cormorant stared at Ven in silence. His gills were flapping more quickly now. Finally he signaled to the Lirin-mer soldiers.
“All but Coreon, depart,” he said. The soldiers obeyed. He turned to the sea-Lirin boy. “You will stay and guard them. I will return shortly. If they give you any trouble, stop the airwheel and flood the Drowning Cave.”
Coreon nodded. He walked over to the airwheel and took up a guard position beside it. Then he raised his weapon and pointed it at Ven.
The Cormorant started for the airwheel. As he passed Amariel he paused and looked down at her on the coral cave floor.
“You may find, merrow, that when you try to live in two worlds you are at home in neither of them,” he said curtly. Then he strode to the airwheel and caught hold of a giant shell. He hung from it by one arm as it lifted him to the surface, then disappeared from sight.
“Well, this undersea adventure just keeps gettin’ better and better,” said Char, stretching out his arms.
Coreon sighted his crossbow. “Silence,” he ordered. His voice squeaked as he spoke.
“Oh, shut up,” said Amariel.
The sea-Lirin boy’s eyes opened wide in surprise.
“You’re not exactly in a position to disobey,” he said when he could speak again. “You’re out of the sea, merrow, in case you hadn’t noticed. I bet your tail is drying out about now.”
“Why don’t ya come over here and tell her that again, up close this time?” Char said. “There’s a sea lion with a broken nose on a skellig who thought the same way you do yesterday. He’s changed his mind.”
Amariel glared at Coreon. “Don’t you dare try to bully me,” she said. “You think you’re important because you have a barb, but your voice is changing. Pretty soon you’ll be just like the rest of them, and the Cormorant won’t have any use for you. Leave us alone.”
Ven sat down on the hard coral floor between his friends and the sea-Lirin boy. As he did, something in his pocket pressed up against his leg. He reached into the pocket of his trousers and pulled out the small green glass bottle. The cork was still in the opening, the wax seal unbroken. He held the bottle where Amariel could see it.
“Look what I found this morning in the surf on Skellig Elarose,” he said quietly.
Char’s expression brightened. “Oh, yeah! I’d forgotten about that,” he said. “I guess you can open it now, since we’re out of the sea for a moment.”
The merrow’s brows drew together as Ven pulled his jack-rule from his vest pocket.
“What are you doing?”
“The cork is sealed with wax,” Ven explained as he extended the knife from the odd folding tool. “It looks like it has a message written on paper inside it, wrapped around something hard that clinks.” He shook the bottle gently to demonstrate.
“What are you doing over there?” Coreon asked suspiciously.
“In case you’re interested, you are about to hear the sound of a human, a Nain, and a merrow ignoring you,” said Amariel. “Be careful with that knife, Ven.”
“I will,” Ven said. He slid the knife carefully around the cork seal. The wax seemed old, or at least hardened by the sea, so it took a good deal of prying before he could reach the cork. The wooden plug cracked and dissolved into pieces as he tried to pry it loose, so he shook it out onto the floor of the Drowning Cave, then gently pulled the little scroll of paper out of the bottle.
Before he could unroll it, something dropped into his lap from inside it.
Ven held it up in the shadowy light of the lantern.
It was a thin piece of metal, straight like a sewing needle but with a curve near the end with what looked like a tiny tooth at the very bottom.
At the top of it was a small carved metal skull, its hollow eyes blank and its toothless mouth grinning blackly.
“By the Blowhole,” Amariel whispered.
“What the heck is that?” Char asked.
“I don’t know,” said Ven. “It looks a little bit like the lock picks in the weapons store in the Gated City, the Arms of Coates, remember, Char?”
“You mean those tools that thieves use to open locks without keys?”
“Yes. Or maybe it’s a key itself.” Ven held the tiny tool up closer to get a better look.
“A skeleton key?” Char shrank away.
“What’s a skeleton key?” Amariel asked.
Char wrapped his arms tighter around his knees.
“I’ve never seen one, but the sailors tell st
ories about them sometimes. Pirates are said to have ’em. I think it’s supposed to be able to open any lock, even a really complicated one.”
“Hmm,” said Ven. He handed the key to Amariel, who took it gingerly, then carefully unrolled the small scroll of paper.
It was an old piece of oilcloth, scratched and dulled with time, that smelled of salt and leather. On it one word was printed in ink that had smeared slightly.
Athenry, it said.
15
An Uneasy Truce
While the boys were examining the scrap of oilcloth, the merrow was examining the key.
“There’s some writing on this, too,” she said. “Very small.”
“What does it say?” Char asked.
The merrow glared at him.
“Let me have a quick look,” Ven said. He knew that Amariel could not read human script.
The merrow passed him the key. He held it up in the lanternlight. The letters were tiny, but he could read most of them if he turned it slowly.
“‘Free the only innocent prisoners she ever held,’” he read.
“It says all that?” The merrow let out a low whistle.
“Criminey, whatdaya s’pose that means?” Char wondered aloud.
Suddenly, a loud thud echoed through the Drowning Cave.
Something large and heavy had fallen from the same hole in the coral ceiling through which they had entered. A few seconds later, the Cormorant entered as well, followed by sea-Lirin soldiers, their gills flapping more shallowly now.
Ven and Char scrambled to their feet. Ven tucked the key and the tiny oilcloth scrap back into the bottle, and the bottle back into his pocket. Char stepped forward and stood in front of Amariel, trying to keep her hidden from the entering Lirin-mer, but the merrow gave him a shove.
“Get out of the way, Chum,” she said impatiently. “I want to see.”
“I was trying to protect you,” Char protested, but the Cormorant was now standing in front of him.
The Cormorant stared at each of them for a moment, the greens of his eyes glistening in the fading light of the lantern. Finally he took in a breath, then exhaled through his gills.
“You wish to go to the Summer Festival?”
The children looked at each other.
“Yes, sir,” Ven said.
“Then you will tell me, as you agreed to, everything that I need to know about the Gated City. It will be easiest if we return to the drift to do this, so that you can picture the streets in a sunshadow so that we may all have an accurate view of the inner workings of the city.”
Ven’s stomach turned over. His head felt numb, but he managed to nod.
The Cormorant looked at him sharply.
“But before we return to the drift, I want you to tell me the names of all the good people in the Gated City,” he said. “I need to know where they live, so that we can spare them if possible when the battle begins.”
Ven swallowed hard.
“I—I don’t know how to do that,” he said. “I know the names of a few of them, but there are so many—”
“Tell your tale, Ven,” the Cormorant said darkly. “My patience is thin and wanes with the sun—which is beginning to set, in case you are interested.”
* * *
So I started talking. I told the Cormorant all the things I could remember about the Gated City.
First I told him about the Outer Market, about the street vendors who roasted meat over open fires and cooked squash soup inside a pumpkin shell the size of a wagon. I told them about the clowns, and the storytellers and jugglers, and all the people selling magical and wondrous wares. I told him about the puppet shows in the streets and the people who had been kind to me there when our friend Saeli was missing.
Next, I told him of the Inner Market, a darker, more evil place, where Felonia, the Queen of Thieves, had held us captive in the labyrinth of the Raven’s Guild hall. While I imagine the people of the Outer Market are the descendants of the cutpurses and con artists who first came on the Athenry, I suspect the members of the Raven’s Guild are probably the great-great-grandchildren of a worse sort of criminal.
But I don’t know that for sure.
Finally, I told him about the Downworlders, a ragtag group of outcasts who lived in a vast maze of tunnels beneath the streets of the Gated City, hidden away from the sight of the world. I told them of Macedon, the Rat King, who was their ruler, and how they had helped us when we were lost in the Inner Market, running for our lives from Felonia’s goons.
* * *
“So you see,” he finished, “there are so many people who are good, or could be good, in the Gated City that it would be impossible to name them all.”
The Cormorant watched him a moment longer, then turned and started for the airwheel.
“That’s a pity,” he said. “Oh well. I’m sure you tried your best.”
“Wait!” shouted Char. His voice came out louder than he expected, and it echoed through the Drowning Cave. The gills of the merfolk fluttered at the sound. “Madame Sharra—there’s a fortune teller, tall and thin and she has golden skin and eyes. She’s a good person. She should be saved.”
“And Mr. Coates,” Ven added. “Mynah Coates, I think was his full name. He’s a weapons maker, and he has two dogs, Finlay and Munx. He was very kind to us as well.” His voice got quieter as he thought about the last time he had seen the Arms of Coates, the weapons shop, empty, its door ajar, all of the security traps sprung, thin streaks of blood everywhere. “Actually, I’m not sure he’s even still alive. He may have paid for helping us with his life.”
In the back of his mind, something Mr. Coates had said to him early in his visit to the Gated City came back to him.
There are many layers within any prison; remember that. It all depends on who’s guarding what. Not just anyone can go at will out of the harbor tunnels, believe me. If they could, I—
The weapons maker had never finished his thought.
“Mr. Coates told me that even though everyone in the Gated City knows about the harbor tunnels, not everyone can use them. So some of the people who live there are also prisoners of their fellow prisoners.”
The Cormorant stopped. The children watched as he stood in thought for a long time. Then he returned to where Ven was standing.
“I have never seen a Nain,” he said. “But if you are, in fact, Nain, then you are a son of the Earth. You are out of place in the sea, Ven.”
Ven sighed. “So I have been told.”
“Perhaps your connection to the land will help us make sense of the problem with the Gated City,” the Cormorant continued. “I have no desire to slaughter the innocent. But it is my responsibility—my first responsibility—to prevent the destruction of the reef and its inhabitants. This riddle is beyond my ability to solve.”
He signaled to the sea-Lirin soldiers. They picked up the heavy object that had fallen before they entered and carried it over to him, depositing it at his feet.
It was what looked like a canvas bag like sailors used to carry their gear in, clearly made at one time by humans, with a series of cords tying it closed.
The Cormorant opened the bag and pulled out three knapsacks, which he placed on the coral cave floor in front of them. Then he drew forth two barbed weapons like the one Coreon was holding, and two short spears.
“I suggest if you meet the Sea King at the Festival, you stay out of any sunshadows near him, especially on Threshold, the last day of summer,” he said. “His power is at its highest on that day, the last day of his reign, and he makes great use of sunshadow then. You would be well advised to stay clear, or you might find yourself transported to another part of the sea on the other side of the world.”
“I don’t understand,” Char said.
“I need to send a message to the Sea King,” said the Cormorant. “I need his guidance about who to kill and who to let live within the Gated City. I do not have the ability to send such messages through sunshadow, but he will be able
to send one in return to me that way.”
“And you want us to deliver your message to the Sea King?” Ven asked excitedly.
An expression of disbelief crossed the Cormorant’s face.
“Hardly,” he said. “I want you to accompany Coreon while he does it.”
16
Back to the Drift
Coreon’s green-tinged eyes opened in surprise. “Me, sir?”
“You may as well go with them,” said the Cormorant. “They already have your name.” He sounded annoyed. “You will take them past the kelp beds to the Underwater Forest, then through the Sea Desert and beyond to the Festival. Deliver this message to whoever has been crowned king of the sea this storm.” He put his webbed-fingered hand on Coreon’s forehead. The sea-Lirin boy closed his eyes, as if listening, then nodded. The Cormorant picked up one of the knapsacks and handed it to him, then tossed the other two at Char and Ven.
“You will find dried kelp and the un-salt water humans drink in there,” he said. “There should be enough to get you safely to the Festival. After that, you will have to provide for yourselves.”
“What about Amariel?” Char asked.
“A merrow is more than able to find food and drink in the sea. To laden her with provisions would make her clumsy, endanger her. You may take the weapons—she does not need one of those, either. Her weapons are part of her.”
“Yep—ask any sea lion ya happen to come across,” Char murmured.
The merrow smiled smugly.
The Cormorant signaled to the soldiers again. Different ones stepped forward this time and handed Ven and Char what looked like a piece of cloth from an old sail wrapped around something soft. Ven opened it to find a piece of cooked fish.
“Thank you,” he said.
The Cormorant nodded. “We remember the stories from the Before-Time, when Lirin-mer still lived on the land, about drying fish in fire before eating them,” he said. “It has never made any sense to me, but if it is your tradition, well, then, it is.”