Ages of Wonder Read online

  “Now is the time to act,” Suria said. “You want to let them get away with this and use the cannons again?”

  “They can’t. It will take ages for them to find dry gunpowder and load the guns.” Aduka lifted his hands high above his head; let his gift loose, then used water from the deck to freeze four horrified sailors in place before they could get to their weapons.

  A clipped roar from the creature drew his gaze sideways. Aduka’s heart nearly stopped when he realized that the beast’s eyes were fixed upon him. It would be easy for the creature to tear the ship apart and claim vengeance for its lost kin. Regardless, as their gazes met, Aduka and the creature reached an unspoken agreement.

  The final stroke lay in the villager’s hands, for it was Aduka’s impetuous decisions that led the Varamithians out here. Only he could mend what he had inadvertently caused. Only then would he be able to redeem the ancestral trust he had violated.

  The waves beneath the ship rose to a giant swell, lifting it terrifyingly high. Wayfarer’s remaining crew clung to whatever they could until the ship plummeted back down. Men were thrown overboard like ragged dolls, never to be seen again. The bowsprit shattered along with the dragon figurehead. Whatever was left of the shrouds and rigging were reduced to flotsam on the sea’s surface, highlighted then by the first rays of the sun.

  Balanced on the drake’s spine, the villagers weaved the water and wind around them with the grace of dancers and the lethal precision of experienced warriors. Arms rising and falling in precise arches, they executed punches and strikes that turned the elements around them into deadly weapons. Aduka’s anger lent power to his assaults. He flung cannonballs made of frozen water towards the ship, watched in grim satisfaction to see the damage he produced. Soon, the natives’ paired efforts brought the mainmast down. The creature that bore them steered clear of danger, keeping them safe from the ocean’s wrath.

  Then, a wall of water, frozen to ice by Aduka’s expert, quick handling of the winds, blocked the ship’s path when it was thrust forward by the tide. Wayfarer slammed onto the thick block, smashed upon impact, and finally succumbed to the sea.

  Both men fell against the drake’s massive back, exhausted. Spent, no longer driven by adrenaline, they could do no more than cling to the guardian’s scales when it turned to leave.

  “What now?” Suria asked between fast breaths. “Where are we going?”

  For long moments Aduka could not speak. The feeling of remorse that welled up in him was so great, he could barely contain it. Tears of frustration and deep anger stung his eyes. He grieved for the dead guardian, yearned to turn back to that crucial juncture when he was first swayed by Captain Lopo’s lies.

  “We go back, get the colonists to leave. I don’t want them around anymore.” Aduka placed the palm of his hand on the drake’s scale. As it lifted its long neck from the sea to look at him, he sent a telepathic note of gratitude and gave an oath spurred by a new spark of determination. “No slinking outsider will ever soil our lands and sea again! I’ll make certain of that.”

  Here There Be Monsters

  Brad Carson

  We are Afhasi. The Waterwise. Humans call us the Fin, the Meara or simply, Mer. My father is a Mer Man. My mother Mea, before succumbing to the lure of the Forbidden, was a Mer Wife.

  I am Kya, a Mer Maid.

  We are Afhasi.

  Of the Sea.

  The watersky that shrouds our hidden refuge grows warm again; another ship burns above us. The sea writhes with lost souls seeking guidance to the calm. I feel their pain, their fear, and their sin.

  Our Eld Ones tell us air is comprised of two parts obsession and one part disorder, while water is magic and calm. They say a storm is born when water meets air. They warn against contamination and order isolation.

  But a heart has no ears.

  My mother stole a man from the embrace of the sea and left us to follow her heart’s command. Her rebellious spirit became a lesson of the Forbidden. My father retreated to the caves to overcome his anger and renew his calm. He abides there still.

  Wreck falls on our white coral towers like droppings from a hungry fish. We gather our school of children, not to take them away from the horror, but to instruct them in the folly. The drifting dead are lessons to be learned.

  Having no inner light of their own, Humans banish fear of the dark by burning the rendered flesh of the Wise Watchers. They think they own the sea. We left them the earth. Wasn’t that enough?

  They live to own things. Surface dwellers have fought for hundreds of years for the right to own other surface dwellers. They call them slaves. Even when we were air breathers, the word sounded soiled to our ears; now we are battered by great waves of sorrow, torment, and torture of each passing ship crammed to the breaking with sickness and misery. Our sand pillars tremble and shift with the cries of the forsaken.

  We do not understand. How can you own another person’s soul, when you don’t even own your own?

  But a heart is different. A heart can be owned.

  It is Forbidden to seek the surface, Forbidden to know air breathers, Forbidden to interfere.

  Too much is Forbidden.

  I think the Eld Ones are wrong.

  I am my mother’s heir. The tide tugs at my heart from the watersky of our world as surely as it tugged at hers.

  Tonight, I will follow.

  Jonathon Diggs, bosun of the interceptor ship Fortitude, clung desperately to a narrow piece of powder-blasted deck. Blood still dripped from a gash in his forehead taken when a cannon shot had raked their barque from stem to stern, sending him and most of the forecastle into the water. His right leg throbbed but he didn’t think it was broken.

  He had watched impotently as the renegades boarded the Fortitude, the clash of swords washing over him like the cold waves that lapped at his spine. For a long time screams had sounded but as night descended and he had drifted farther from the sinking ship, the silence seemed eternal.

  They had been lying off the coast of Africa waiting to intercept the Blackbird on her return from the Americas laden with rum, firearms, and other trade goods preferred by the tribal leaders who provided the human cargo for work on sugar plantations. They were well hidden, yet somehow, Captain Edward Bane had slid out of a fogbank right across their bow in a classic maneuver called “Crossing the T.” The sudden appearance of the bare-breasted, blue-haired mermaid that served as figurehead for the infamous slaver had preceded a heavy broadside that toppled their main mast and left them crippled, like an old man waiting to die. The same volley had blasted Jonathon into the sea.

  He hated to see the end of the Fortitude, but even more, he hated to see the slaver win. Again. Maybe the scuttle that Bane had sold his soul was true after all.

  It wasn’t the first time the ’Bird had avoided them, almost as if Bane knew where the navy ships lay. Maybe, as some of the old salts swore, the notorious master’s good fortune was bound into the ship’s figurehead. Word was Bane used to be a simple merchant trader before adopting the mermaid icon.

  Jonathon well knew from his fifteen years before the mast that either tale could be true. The ocean was wide and full of mystery.

  The wet cold dug deep into his bones, numbing him, luring him. He had heard that drowning was like falling into a lover’s arms. Would that be so bad? The sea was his only love; it was only right she should claim him. Stars began to appear through gaps in the slowly spinning fog and he imagined a nice cup of hot grog in his warm hammock. He could almost hear the cabin boy’s hushed soprano, drifting on the steady rhythm of the waves, lulling him.

  His fingers slipped off the oakum-smeared planks. He spit salt and frantically kicked to regain purchase, but his leg screamed and he sank. He stroked upward with arms made powerful by years of hauling lines, but to little avail. The stars retreated. He dropped lower and lower.

  A large fish brushed by him and an underwater swell like an errant current bobbed him to the surface. His buoyed spirits fell when
he realized his planks had drifted away but to his surprise, they reversed direction and returned to his grasping hands as sure as if he’d hauled them in. Sputtering and gasping, he threw himself onto the decking as if he clutched a long-lost lover.

  He barely noticed that the sea around him had calmed.

  A burning ship as big as a Wise Watcher dangles halfway through our roof.

  Debris and charred, broken bodies block the sparkle of stars. Fire stings my nose and makes me gag as if air went down the wrong way. Sharks roam, tidying.

  Something snags me like the hooks that tear at my little brothers’ mouths whenever they get too curious.

  But this hook pulls at my heart.

  I follow it downwind in time to see a dark-haired man slip into the sea. The barbs of the hook dig deeper and, against all reason, I flick him to the surface and retrieve his floating refuge.

  Is this how my mother felt?

  Later in the night, his strength fails again. I cannot let him die. I grasp his hands across the wooden boards and use my tail to support his body. I sing a Healing to close the cut in his forehead and mend the bone in his leg.

  His bleary eyes find me. “Who are you?” he mumbles.

  “I am Kya. I am Afhasi.”

  “Afa . . . Of the sea?” His head lolls, he drops further into the water, pulling me further out. “A vision,” he murmurs. “A dream. The ocean is wide and full of mystery.”

  He drifts. Words begin to seep from his mouth. He tells me of his home, of his childhood.

  I listen, I learn.

  He rails against slavery. Justice fires his soul; he speaks revenge and regret with the same breath. He expresses his love of the sea. He gives me his name.

  Jonathon.

  I hold him. He holds me.

  The night moves forward, the stars spin.

  Wellness ebbs. I am too far out of the water. My mind tells me to let the Human go. It is Forbidden.

  But a heart has no ears.

  Our faces are near enough that I can smell the salt on his cheeks. He leans in and touches lips to my hair. “You’re real,” he says in surprise. “A real mermaid.”

  I tickle him with my tail and say, “The ocean is wide and full of mystery.”

  He laughs and grasps my hands more firmly, but oh so gently. My heart thrums like a deep ocean current.

  “My leg? It’s better.”

  “I sang a Healing.”

  “A mermaid.” He speaks the term with grace. “I always hoped the stories were true. Tell me of your people.”

  “My ancestors long wandered the water, seeking a perfect harmonious home until they found Atland Dies. Shore of the Gods. Beautiful, bountiful, calm, our island nurtured us for hundreds of years. Then your race appeared.”

  “My race?”

  “Humans. I suppose you had been appearing for millennia, but we were so busy celebrating convergence that we missed the unquenchable curiosity that changed Apes into Humans. Lost in accord, we fell to discord. Your race grew hungrier and tried to learn the secret of peace through acts of war.”

  “Great cost for a greater good,” he says with disdain.

  “Our Eld Ones went into the deep caves seeking enlightenment and returned with the Sundering song. My own fore-family sang it. Atland Dies, our island paradise, sank. A great cost, for a greater good. We became of the sea. Afhasi.”

  “Sad,” he mumbles. “But beautiful. Like you.”

  He is what is missing from my ordered existence.

  “You saved my life,” he says.

  “You gave me mine,” I reply.

  We hold each other.

  The Eld Ones say the song of Sundering is still in our blood. So is the lure of the Forbidden. I sing him a Soothing.

  He sleeps, restfully, deeply. A tide of weakness and fatigue pull at me. I too must sleep.

  But I know I will never let go.

  Morning sun parches my skin through the thick fog. I am stretched out. My upper body, bathed by the madness of air, thirsts for the calm of water.

  Jonathon stares at me. “Kya. My mermaiden,” he whispers.

  My heart crests, but the waves lap warning.

  I hear the synchronized dip of oars before he does. A low shadow bears down on us unerringly through the haze. Jonathon tries to shake me loose. “Swim away,” he urges.

  I cannot.

  “Well, isn’t this a pretty sight.” A tall man wearing a long coat stands in the boat, aiming a weapon at me. “Avast, navy man,” he says, “or your little friend will suffer for it. And you bilge rats,” he turns on his oarsmen, “avert your eyes, or lose them.” He leans over, clothing in his hands. “If you would be so kind, my dear, to remove your lower body from the water, you will find that onboard, legs are more the fashion than fins.”

  “You want to go through there?” Jonathon asked, incredulously.

  He stood in Captain Bane’s well-appointed quarters in the stern of the slave ship. A large ornate bookcase was filled with books and charts. Odd but interesting seashells ornamented shelves and drawers. A chess set carved from coral was laid out below a wide window that ran the full beam of the ship, where Kya sat listening to dolphins chatter while rubbing at her legs.

  The spacious quarters far outmatched the utilitarian cabins of a navy ship and contrasted even more fiercely with the pens in the tweendecks of the Blackbird where slaves were usually wedged together in low cells only three feet high, shut out from light or air. Those desolate spaces were barely big enough for twenty to sit with heads bowed to their knees, but Jonathon knew they could hold as many as two hundred pressed shoulder to shoulder, giving each an average of twenty inches, breathing in each other’s stink and vomit for months on end.

  Captain Bane pointed at a chart lying on a polished rosewood table, touching a section to the southeast of their current position. “Your navy gives me little choice. They nip at my heels like hounds at a stag.”

  “A stag is a noble beast,” Jonathon said. “You are not.”

  Bane grunted, “Ah, bosun, a man of high morals. I once spoke as you do, but found that words did not fill my stomach.”

  “True, but they do not turn it, either.”

  Bane tapped the map. “My navigator says we can make it through.”

  “Then he is a fool.”

  The captain’s light mood vanished like a squall rising on a calm sea. “Be careful what you call my navigator.”

  “To go where you propose is death for all. Here,” Jonathon recited words on the map, “there be Monsters. No one goes there. The Kraken makes sure of that.”

  “Kraa’kken?” Kya asked, abandoning her view of the sea. Jonathon nodded and she shook her head slowly. “You must not disturb Kraa’kken.”

  A smug smile formed on his lips. “There. You see. Who would know more about the Kraken than Kya?”

  “Indeed.” Bane’s own grin widened to show his teeth. “Kya is the reason I am going to succeed. She will calm the monster. After all, who would know more?”

  Kya stumbled to an open porthole and put her face to the spray of the sea, breathing deeply. “Do you even know what you contain with the word ‘monster’?”

  “It’s some kind of giant octopus or squid,” Jonathon explained, watching her carefully.

  “No, she said. “Kraa’kken is the last dragon. He fell into the sea and his wrath tore the ocean floor and shifted continents until—until he finally fell asleep.”

  Bane moved to her, wagging a headmaster’s finger. “But you omitted something, my dear. He didn’t just fall asleep, did he? The Afhasi calmed him, just like you will again, so we may pass in safety.” He offered a slight bob of his head to Jonathon. “But, sadly, not your navy ships.”

  “You would wake this pitiful creature to use as a weapon?” Kya tottered away and almost fell, until Jonathon steadied her elbow. Her skin was cold and clammy. “You are disordered,” she said to Bane. “I will not help you.”

  Bane drew his sword. “I think you will.”
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  Jonathon charged, but the point of the sword forced him to stop.

  Kya shivered, but replied. “Death is calm.”

  “Dear girl,” Bane said, “You mistake my intent. I know Afhasi do not fear death. But I will kill the holder of your heart, carving him slowly like a fat whale, slice by slice, until he is barely alive. And if he manages to heal,” Bane shrugged and smiled, “then I will begin anew.”

  Kya began to tremble, her mouth opened and closed, repeatedly.

  Jonathon tried to ease her anxiety; he reached out overtop the sword. “He’s bluffing,” he said. The blade flicked a hot sting below his arm.

  “There’s the first one,” Bain said as a sliver of flesh fell to the floor.

  Jonathon reeled in shock and pain; Kya placed her hand on the bloody wound and began to sing.

  “Ah, a Healing.” Bane moved in close as if basking in the sound.

  Jonathon’s arm felt washed in cold water, the wound began to close, but then the song stopped abruptly.

  “You didn’t finish,” Bane said regretfully.

  Pain distorted Kya’s face, her pale skin turned translucent and she fell.

  Bane caught her, but after a glance, dropped her to the carpet.

  Jonathon scooped her in his arms where she gasped like a fish out of water, her legs jerking and fluttering. “Kya! Kya!” His heart pounded in fear.

  “Jonathon.” Her hand trailed across his brow, then dropped and she lay still.

  “No!” He pressed his face against hers, trying to warm her flesh with his breath. “Don’t leave me!”

  “How touching,” Bane said.

  “You bastard!” Jonathon shouted, then sputtered and spit as a jug of water splashed down on them.

  Kya gasped, breathing again, but shallow.