Jala's Mask (25 page)

“Mountain's piss,” Natari swore softly under his breath.

Jala shuddered. “I think maybe we've been a little too free with that curse.”

Askel's breathing was shallow, and his eyes darted back and forth behind his eyelids as if he was having a nightmare. Jala wondered if Natari was picturing his sister practicing sorcery like this.

“Do you think the invaders have magic like this too?” Marjani asked after a while.

“No,” Askel rasped. His eyes flickered open. “Not like this.” He coughed. “I've seen them, my queen. Your ships. They have your ships.”

“Send a bird to Azi and let him know,” Jala said. Natari nodded grimly. Minutes later, the
Burst Hull
set sail for the mainland.

None of the men who returned from the raids ever spoke much of the journey there and back, and now Jala knew why. There was nothing to say. Less than nothing. Most of the time she couldn't tell one day from another. There was just the Great Ocean, stretching out in all directions, and the sky broken only by the ever-present storm clouds that gathered and flashed and broke apart.

When there was calm, Jala wished for a storm just so something would happen. When the storms hit, she prayed to gods she never bothered to name. She and Marjani curled up together, holding on to each other and to anything strapped down. The wind howled, water sloshed over the bulwark, and hail bruised their skin. Lightning flashed all around.

Only the prisoner seemed unmoved by the storms. He simply sat at the back of the ship, his hands tied to a hook on the bulwark. Jala could feel his eyes on her and on the chest of clothes where she'd stowed the book.

“Can't you do something about the storms?” she asked Askel once after hours of darkness and rain and thunder so loud that it still echoed in Jala's ears.

“If I had such power over the winds, do you think I would have let myself be hung over the fire mountain?” Askel said in reply.

At night, the stars filled the sky above them. But unlike the islands, where the stars moved slowly with the seasons, above the Great Ocean the stars seemed to change every night. There were old, old stories of sailors using the stars to reach one island from another. But the skies above the Great Ocean offered no such possibility.

The sailors sang and told stories to pass the time, but a few days in, it felt as though they'd sung every song and told every tale a hundred times over. Her back ached, and everything tasted of saltwater.
How can Azi like this?
Besides the boredom and the storms, the worst part was having to hang your ass over the side to piss. The sailors were used to it, but she and Marjani took turns holding a sheet for the other for some semblance of privacy.

Sometimes, high above, Jala caught sight of enormous birds soaring on great wings. Captain Natari told her how the birds would sometimes swoop down and try to grab a sailor from the ship. But from that, at least, they were safe. During the storm season the birds flew high above the clouds and rarely descended. Beneath them, too, were creatures Jala had never seen before, but these were hard to see in the dark waters. Sometimes a whale would surface, spraying water into the air. Once, a school of dolphins followed them, and the sailors struck the water with their oars to drive them away.

When she asked why, Natari explained. “Out here, they can't be trusted. They sometimes tip over ships. It's said there's a city under the water, built by those who fall in when they're near. They're as smart as we are, but they need hands to build with.” The stories didn't say how the people below the water survived. Captain Natari thought they might be drowned. Who knew what sorcery lay beneath the waves?

They saw none of the demons Lord Inas had hinted at so many weeks ago. But when she asked the captain about them, he shrugged. “Many things live above and below the Great Ocean, and no man has seen more than the smallest part of it. There are as many stories about strange things on the waves as there are sailors, but it's bad luck to tell them when on the water. The creatures of the depths are drawn to stories about themselves.”

Captain Natari's mood was odd. He was pleased with the speed they were making, but more than once Jala heard him whispering with their navigator about the strange undertows they kept encountering.

“It's almost like something wants us to reach the mainland ahead of the worst storms,” the navigator said at one point.

“If that's so, best to keep silent about it,” Captain Natari said. “Bad enough to be noticed by something that could bargain with the Great Ocean, but to let on that we've noticed it too? Can there be a more unlucky thing? I fear this trip will end badly, and by then we might wish for a death as right and natural as drowning.”

Jala wondered at his ominous words, but by now she knew better about Captain Natari's superstitions than to bring it up while they were still out on the Great Ocean.

Askel watched the water and the dolphins with an almost desperate intensity. He watched the sailors as they went about taking care of the ship. He listened to the stories and ate their food as if he'd never done any of those things before.

“Were you born on the Lone Isle?” Jala asked him once.

Askel shook his head. “Kade told me I was abandoned when I was just a baby, but I don't remember it. I've been there my whole life.” He looked at her and gave her a crooked smile. “How old do you think I am?”

Jala shrugged. “Old. Sixty years, maybe?”

Askel snorted. “Only twenty. Not much older than your king, I suspect.” He turned away from her. “At first, when Kade warned me about the cost of my sorcery, I didn't believe him. When I learned he was right, I looked for a way to have others pay the price instead. That was when he banished me.”

“That sounds horrible,” Jala said. “I'd have banished you, too.”

“Horrible to you, perhaps,” he said. “Not to the fire mountain. Not to the Great Ocean. All these things have power, all of them demand the same price, and none of them care about any of our quick, small, little lives. When you make deals with gods, you have to put such things behind you.”

Jala shivered at his words and let the subject die.

So the time passed until one day the sky ahead of them was clear of storms, and Jala realized the horizon was no longer flat.

“That's the Great Lighthouse of the Constant City,” Captain Natari said, pointing to an impossibly tall, thin stone tower. “Long ago one of their kings decided to build a lighthouse so great and tall that no matter where a man stood he would be able to see its light. He died, of course, and it wasn't finished. If such a thing could ever be finished.” Natari turned to her as they passed under the shadow of the lighthouse. “We have no friends here, my queen. Remember that. They'll tolerate us, but we're in danger as long as we're on the mainland.”

Jala and Marjani waited at the dock while Boka took a few sailors into the city to trade for transportation and a guide. From the water, the city looked like a piece of gaudy jewelry, with domed towers of bronze and gold, flags of all colors fluttering in the wind. Up close, standing on the dock, everything looked dirty and gray. The buildings pressed in so close in places the sun hardly touched the ground. And it smelled, of fish and rotting food and human waste.

When Boka returned, Jala and Marjani and all but six of the sailors prepared to leave. The sailors left behind would stay on the ship as long as they had food and drink. At least one of them would need to be awake day and night, ready to light the drum of oil and set the ship on fire if anyone tried to take it.

Surrounded by thirty sailors, Captain Natari, Boka, and Marjani, Jala watched the
Burst Hull
sail out into the water and wondered if any of them would see the ship again.

“Don't worry,” Captain Natari said. “We'll make it back. We both have husbands waiting for us back home, and I plan to make sure they aren't waiting longer than they have to.”

“I didn't know you were married,” Jala said. “I never asked you anything about your family, did I? I've been too wrapped up in my own problems.”

“And the fate of our people,” Natari said with a wink. “I'd say you're excused, my queen.”

It didn't make her feel much better. It would be all too easy to get caught up in the big picture and forget to see the people standing right in front of her. The people risking their lives for her mad plan.

“Well, come on,” Boka interrupted, waving them all forward.

“Tell me about your family now,” Jala said, falling into step beside Natari. “While we walk. What's your husband's name?”

“Onan,” he said, and then he told her about how they met and the life they'd made together.

The sounds of the city washed over Jala as they walked the streets. There were people everywhere, talking and arguing and laughing. Jala had expected them all to look like the Hashon, with light-brown skin and the straight hair Azi had described, but most of the people here had the same black skin that Jala did, and she kept seeing snatches of home as they walked past: a silk dress from the Bluesun Peninsula in a style her mother had liked, intricate bronze earrings from Shek or the silversmiths of Iz, a shirt dyed the same rich purple that had been a gift to Jala on her wedding.

She knew the clothes, but none of the people. They had bronze rings in their noses or eyebrows or tongues. Some of the men wore their hair long, in styles Jala had never seen, and some of the women had no hair at all. And it felt lonely to be surrounded by all these people and have no idea what they were saying.

Jala's group wore scratchy brown robes, the kind they'd normally only use for making sacks or pouches, but Boka had thought it best to go unnoticed as they traveled. The Queen's Earring still dangled from her ear, but it was a symbol only recognizable to the islanders.

“I never thought there could be so many people in one place,” Jala said, as much to hear a familiar sound as anything else. “And the smell's getting worse. I wish there was some wind at least, so I could breathe.”

“Maybe you should have brought more ships,” Marjani said. “It feels like we're being swallowed up. How long before we reach the other end?”

Boka laughed miserably. “If you brought the entire Kayet fleet the Constant City would still swallow it up. We won't see the end of the city until the sun has set, I think, but my queen won't have to walk the whole way. There are the horses now.”

He pointed at four huge creatures lashed to wooden carts. As Jala approached, the beasts stared at her with their large eyes and stamped their hoofed feet on the ground. One of them snapped at her with its yellowed teeth, and Jala jumped back with a cry. The man sitting atop the cart laughed at her and said something Jala couldn't understand.

“Are they safe?” Jala asked Boka quietly.

“Nothing here is safe,” Boka said. “Stay away from the horses, stay away from our guides, and don't ask me to translate what they say, because you won't like it. Unless you'd rather return to the ship and wait for my trade ships to arrive so they can take us home.”

“No. We're here now, so we go on,” Jala said. She waved at the drivers. “Will they take us to the Hashon?”

“Not all the way. They say that there's a river that runs to that land, though, so they'll take us that far.”

The sailors, too, gave the beasts a wide berth as they loaded one of the carts with chests and crates and barrels. The cart was soon piled high with food and wine for their journey, as well as two small chests of coins.

The cart bounced hard on the dirt and brick streets while Jala and Marjani watched the city slowly pass them by. They passed through a bazaar, and for a while the smells of the city were drowned out by the smell of cooking food. Jala almost told Boka to stop and buy her something. It felt like forever since she'd tasted food without salt. But they'd just eaten on the ship, and stopping now for food was probably too frivolous. Too soon, they left the bazaar behind them.

The carts turned down one street and then another, seemingly at random, and soon Jala had no idea which way would lead her back to the ship or even the ocean. She hadn't been able to hear the waves for hours. The only noise was the noise of the city.

“It doesn't seem like it'll ever end,” she said. “Like you could spend lifetimes here and never see it all.”

Marjani shuddered. “Why would you want to spend a lifetime here? This place is awful.”

They passed through an old, crumbling stone wall, and Jala thought they must have reached the city's end, but beyond the wall were more houses and more people. It wasn't until they passed through a second wall, taller but just as ruined, that the houses stopped. The plain outside the city was crowded with caravans and carts and pack animals of all different shapes. Even out here people bartered for goods while they waited to be let into the city itself.

“We'll travel at night for a while,” Boka said. “Try to put some distance between us and the city, and lose anyone who might try to follow us.”