Interlude 6

First clear night since we sailed, and the first time in a fortnight I've trusted my hand enough to write plainly. I keep this now less as a Chronicler's record than as my own — a habit older than the Academy ever gave me, of not trusting a thing to be true until I've seen it hold still on a page.

My working case came back into my hands only this past week — pulled, intact, from a locked chest in a dead man's cabin, three years of my own shorthand no worse for the crossing than I am myself. It should be a comfort, and in its way it is; but shorthand wants leisure to unpick properly, and leisure is the one thing this fortnight has not given me. The older folio, the one I kept at the Crow's Nest before I ever left the Capitol, is further out of reach still — I have had no word of it since, and no way to ask. What follows leans on neither: it is reconstructed from memory, and from a fortnight of unusually frank conversation aboard a ship I do not command, with a crew whose full particulars I am still assembling. I have made it a habit, these many years, never to consider a picture finished until it is complete. That habit does not serve me tonight. Better an incomplete page than none, and some of what I have learned will not keep quietly in my head until I can set it down whole.

--

Begin with the plainest matter, since it is the one I am most sure of. The war I grew up hearing about is not being fought. It has stalled, not ended — the Shatters threw up a barrier between the fleets that neither side has found a way around, and both nations have spent on their own recovery what they might once have spent on each other. I should not mistake that for peace, and I remind myself of it as I write: nothing has been negotiated, the two sides have simply been unable to reach one another, and the Kingdom has used the lull to look west rather than stand down, pouring what it can spare into a crossing meant to carry it around the Maelstrom entirely. I am told, though I have not verified it myself, that the Southern Houses read the New World the same way — the next arena for the old rivalry, now that the old one has gone quiet. What I can attest to more confidently is the shape of the gap itself: a ship carries news across the Maelstrom in weeks at best, and what survives the crossing is whatever a captain or a trading house has chosen to repeat. I spent three years assuming my own information was current and have spent this last fortnight discovering how much of it was not. Let that stand as a caution to myself, set down where I will have to see it again: whatever I believe I know of the other side of that water right now, I should treat as provisional.

There is a harder matter, and one that touches the young people I've fallen in with too closely for me to write about with any pretense of distance. They were declared heretics of the Church some years past, over a matter I have reason to believe I understand better than most — I will not detail it here, save to say it concerns an object, and a doctrine, and is not itself in question. What troubles me is the manner of the declaration: a public bounty, issued with a speed and a certainty that is not how the Church ordinarily moves against a handful of unproven youths. My own old notes, written before I understood any of this, already recorded alarm at the Church's sudden interest in them — I did not know, at the time, that I was watching the opening move of something already decided. I have a name in mind for the hand that decided it. I have turned it over enough now that I am no longer troubled by how well it fits, only by how much I would prefer to be wrong. I will not write it here, or anywhere. Not because I distrust this page particularly — I distrust any page, including the ones I mean only for myself, more than I trust my own memory to hold a thing until I can lay it across a table instead, in front of the people who need to hear it.

--

My old interest in the "Advance" and in Barrows, her captain, goes back further than anything else in this page — he belongs to a small and careful fellowship whose name I have never once committed to paper, and will not start now. I can confirm, from these young people's own report, what I had only suspected: the "Advance" was tracked two years past to an island the Islanders and the Elves both call Birdcrown, and has not been seen or heard from since. She has not been struck from any Navy list I am aware of, nor formally reported lost, which I find as strange as anything else in this account — a missing warship, on a mission that mattered to people who do not forget such things easily, going unremarked in the official record is either an oversight or a silence someone has chosen to keep. I do not know which. I will say plainly, because there is no one here to soften it for, that I am uneasy in a way I cannot yet justify with evidence, only with pattern: this is the second man of that fellowship to go quiet on that same stretch of water, on business the fellowship itself sanctioned, and I do not like patterns I cannot explain.

On the Shatters themselves, and what caused them, I know rather more now than I did when I left the Capitol. The light said to rise from a Totem in the instant of its destruction is not, I am now confident, a detail specific to what happened at Spider Island — it matches, closely enough that I no longer credit it to coincidence, an account already forty years old and independently recorded. My own circle's working belief is that a Totem's power does not simply vanish when the pillar breaks; it is loosed all at once, ungoverned, which is why the aftermath scales with whatever the Totem itself was worth destroying. One thing more, and I mean to treat it as carefully in my own thinking as I do on this page: there are more such sites, known to people I trust, than the two the world already has cause to mourn. I do not know how many. I do not know where. I set it down only so that I do not, myself, mistake two incidents for the whole of a pattern.

--

A smaller, tidier matter, if only because questions of Church structure are the one part of this page I can answer without hedging. I had cause recently to confirm, from a captured vessel's own crew, the fates of two priests aboard her — a senior woman, Margot, trusted with a relic and formidable in her own right, and a junior man, Arnim, neither talented nor especially unlucky, simply posted where the Church needed a warm body willing to go. Both are missing, presumed drowned, and I do not expect that to change. Worth recording for my own reference is the question that was put to me afterward: whether either of them held some rank above the ordinary — a "summoner," in the word used to me, as though the Church kept some office for commanding power beyond a cleric's reach. It does not. I can say this with the flat certainty of a man who has spent a decade cataloguing that hierarchy: Twin Eminences, Archons, High Clerics and Canons, Vicars, Clerics, Curates, Prelates, Deacons, Acolytes, and one office outside that ladder entirely, the Censure — sent when the Church expects to find and destroy something it has already judged heretical, and equipped accordingly. Neither Margot nor Arnim was a Censure. I write the distinction here as plainly as I can, if only so I remember it myself the next time I am tempted to treat a difficult priest and a genuine one as the same order of danger.

I owe myself, if no one else, an honest accounting of my own conduct here, if only to understand why I am this late getting anywhere at all. I went looking for a ship called the Fortnum in person rather than by correspondence, once I learned she had been reassigned from ordinary convoy work to something closer to hunting — the particulars of what, I will not set down here, save that it touches the same doctrine as the matter above. That was my own choice, not an assignment, and I do not regret making it. I learned, aboard her, rather more than a Chronicler's ordinary remit allows, and rather less discreetly than I intended — enough that her captain, a man named Mason, had every reasonable cause to treat me as something closer to a spy than a guest. I will not pretend otherwise, least of all to myself. He did not treat it as a hanging matter. He confined me, took my writings into his own keeping for safety rather than destroying them, and asked only my word that I would not attempt escape while he held them — a bargain he kept in full, and one I broke only once the writings themselves were no longer his to hold, at which point I told him so to his face and considered the matter closed between us. He accepted that without argument, which I have not stopped turning over since. He was, by every measure I could take of him in the time I had, an honourable man doing an ugly job competently, and I do not enjoy that his death sits at the end of my own rescue.

--

The last matter I set down here I still do not entirely understand, and I will let this account end in a shrug rather than a conclusion, because that is the honest shape of it. Chroniclers are taught to call and steady message birds over long distances; a very few of us are taught that the same faculty, cautiously and rarely used, extends further, toward creatures larger and less biddable than any bird — not command, properly understood, so much as an urgent suggestion laid across an animal's own instincts, which it is free to answer or ignore as it chooses. I had used this, in small and careful measure, more than once during my confinement aboard the Fortnum, to harry her with lesser creatures and buy myself what openings I could. In the last extremity of my escape from her, with the outcome very much in doubt, I called again, with rather more need behind it than I had ever risked before, and something answered that was larger than anything I had thought myself capable of reaching — large enough to break the ship in two. I do not know why that attempt succeeded where my earlier, smaller ones only startled a watch. My best guess, and it is no more than that, is that the size of the need shapes the size of the answer, but I have no way to test it, and no wish to test it again if I can help it. Nor can I explain a stranger detail from earlier in that same voyage: on one occasion, a lesser summoning of mine was answered not only by a serpent but by a burst of mortar fire from a source no one aboard, on either side of the fighting, ever claimed. I have turned over every ordinary explanation I can think of and settled on none of them. I set it down here only because a loose thread left unrecorded is one I will not be able to pull on later, should I ever need to.

--

There is one more thread from these weeks, and I have it only at second hand, since I was not there to see any of it myself — kept below decks the whole while we lay at anchor, by the party's own vote, so that nothing of where we'd called would find its way into these pages even by accident. What follows is reconstructed from what a fortnight of conversation since has let slip, not from anything I witnessed, and I set it down with that caveat attached and no other. Among the old company of the "Advance" was a junior priest, Nicolas, whom I gather has gone thoroughly to seed in the years since — preaching, by all report, a private gospel of his own devising to a "Brother (Handsome) Gulliver Gold" he holds to be some manner of divine kin to the god he was ordained under. He has made real converts of it, a modest handful of local sailors taken hard enough by his preaching that he would not leave without two of the most fervent among them, nor at all without the freedom to preach daily from the forecastle to whoever cared to listen, and his carved statue of Brother Gold carried along with him. He is, I am told, unchanged in every other particular — touched, possibly deranged, in a way none of them could quite agree was worsening or simply constant. What moved him in the end, more than anything else tried, was the promise that the voyage itself might turn up some trace of a "Sister Silver" he believes must exist somewhere to match his Brother. He has already asked to see the object I am not to name even here; he was told, truthfully as far as I can judge, that he will, once we are properly underway. I record the promise only because I mean to hold the ones who made it to it.

--

Once we were properly underway and Nicolas had settled into the ship's routine, I made a point of sitting with him myself, rather than leaving the whole of him to what others had gathered secondhand. My own old interest in Barrows and the "Advance" is a thing I have already set down here, and it seemed a poor use of the opportunity to let it pass unquestioned. He was willing enough to talk, more so, I think, once he understood I asked as a man who keeps a page rather than as anyone likely to repeat him to a superior.

He served on the second voyage of the "Advance," this time under the command of the newly captained Barrows, the senior priest, Jacque, set over him. He described a captain much changed from the one I gather the party knew — quieter, more deliberate, a man who had been given his ship back once and did not mean to lose it a second time to a mistake of temperament. Of the ship's heading he could tell me only what a junior priest is ever told: west, and further west, into the same waters where Maynard had gone missing, with no port of call he could name between the mainland and Port Sardina, where he himself came off her partway through the crossing. He does not know, and was careful to say he does not know, what waited for her past that point — only that Barrows meant to sail on, and did. Of the "Advance"'s first, ill-fated voyage under Maynard he was no part, nor was Jacque; of it he knew only a single name, the one junior priest who came home again — Philip. Why Philip did not sail a second time under Barrows, Nicolas could not tell me, only that the name went unspoken aboard ship, and that he had learned early not to ask why.

Of Jacque himself he would say little, and what he did say came slowly, and touched only the end of it: that whatever finally split him from the ship in Port Sardina was as much a falling-out with the priest who had ordained him as it was anything else pressing on him by then, and that the fault, such as it was, sat more with him than with Jacque. He did not want to say more of that, and I did not press him — a man does not owe a stranger the whole of a falling-out with the priest who ordained him, and I have my own reasons for knowing better than to demand it. Of what came after Port Sardina, though, he was almost eager to talk, as though the telling cost him less than the parts that came before it. He does not remember those weeks kindly — a passage south worked rather than paid for, aboard a hold whose name he never learned, captained by men content to leave a defrocked priest's questions unasked so long as he pulled his share, and more of the crossing lost to drink than he cared to number. He fetched up in Drowned Man's Port for no better reason than that it was as far as that ship went and no ship going further would have him, and he has stayed ever since less from any decision than from never finding cause to leave. What carried him the distance, he said, was that Gulliver Gold had followed him aboard every hull since the "Advance," and that a carver in the port's shipwright's yard, once shown what Nicolas meant by the name, proved willing to give it a face. He did not call that meeting a beginning. He called it, if I understood him rightly, the first time since the "Advance" that anyone had taken him seriously enough to argue with.

--

I began this page meaning only to steady my own hand, and I find, having written it, that I am less troubled by the gaps in it than I expected to be. The old folio I kept at the Crow's Nest, before ever I left the Capitol, was the most densely annotated document I had ever kept on these young people, and still the least finished — wherever it sits now, I doubt that has changed. The case I carry in its place, three years' worth and still growing, will have to do the same work from here; I have watched them long enough now to trust that it, too, will stay unfinished for some time yet. I mark this page in the corner as I always do, for reasons that are mine alone to know.