Chapter 4

I

The towering wave fell and destroyed my old prison with it.

But things didn’t make sense. Giant, city-crushing waves didn’t reach Karanas. Other islands, maybe. Coastal cities, it was heard of. But never Karanas. Because Karanas was protected by sorcery. By no less than three Guardians, sorcerers on whose power the Prince depended. More importantly, giant waves didn’t look like what I’d just observed. For one thing, they came towards the shore, they didn’t travel perpendicular to it. It just didn’t make sense.

Rather, I didn’t want to believe the one option which did make sense.

I turned to Cat. “Qoura is the one you’re so scared of, isn’t she? I was being held prisoner on her orders,” I shook my head, “The immortal sorceress of Karanas is – was – my jailer. Abyss take her and her ancestors.”

Her silence was more revealing than any answer.

And that terrifying display of pure might had been to destroy me, to make sure I would not survive my escape attempt.

Absolutely fucking fantastic.

Of course, things didn’t end after the water fell. Physics is funny like that. Even though its laws can be circumvented through magic, there is a limit. For example, when Qoura let go of her giant wave, it became a slave to reality again. In the real world, water acts according to rules. When you pour a gallon of it into into a large pot, the liquid settles down after a while. It creates for itself a smooth surface, with no section above any other. As if every single drop of water is equal to the rest, and none have a right to stand high. Water in the sea works along the same general principles. As the wave fall, the water under it had to move somewhere else, some of that water, about a quarter of it I’d say, decided to go northwards. More specifically, it moved towards where Cathy and I were standing, rooted in place. Cat horrified at the terrible display of primordial strength and me missing the relative safety of my prison all of a sudden.

This secondary wave was nowhere as high or as fast as the first one. But that didn’t make it less scary. Its speed was enough to preclude any attempt at escape. I counted seconds, listening to the furious sound and its accompanying mass of water come closer and closer. I was afraid. Any sane man would be afraid if a five-hundred-year-old sorceress was trying to kill him. But being afraid is not the same as having lost the battle, and after sleeping among insects, a few drops of water weren’t enough to cow me. Unless I died, of course, a distinct, if rather unlikely, possibility. The water could always smash me against something and break every bone in my body.

Finally it arrived, destroying the pier, the warehouses behind us, and two more blocks of wooden structures further inland in one fell sweep. Its force flung me backwards towards the land, quite violently. Blessed be the Jester’s mercy, my head did not connect with anything hard along the way and nothing pointy penetrated my skin during the journey either. I didn’t struggle, because supposedly humans would float in seawater as long as they didn’t flounder too much and I wasn’t too keen too drown. Instead, I suffered as the wave took me inland and then enjoyed the serene return trip when water retreated into the sea.

Both me and my kindhearted companion were left on the shore rather than taken into sea. My blanket and Cathy’s sack were not as lucky. In her unending and eternal mercy, and possibly as an apology for the horrible welcome she’d given my entrance into the real world, Sea-Mother decided to leave some seaweed in my hair as a gift. A few fish were scattered on the beach, flopping as they suffocated. Perhaps they were from Sea-Mother as well, lives sacrificed so that mine could be lengthened.

Live fish looked disgusting, far more disgusting than the cooked specimens I’d seen. I wondered how hideous their mother must be to have children such as this. A chilly breeze blew across the land, and its cool caress on the thin, wet cotton of my clothes was enough to send shivers through my body. I mourned the loss of the blanket, Cat had been right to insist on it.

We were left on a devastated shore, afraid of what Qoura was going to do next, soaked to the bone, shivering as the nightwinds blew past us and made our wet clothes cold as ice. Not a situation I was fond of. But still, freedom trumped all these minor inconveniences. Freedom to go where I wanted to go, see what I wanted to see, and most importantly, to do all my power allowed me to those who had held me prisoner. Although, to be perfectly honest, punishing an immortal sorceress who could bring down the sea on my head did not seem within my capabilities right now.

But those were all secondary issue. First, Cathy and I needed to find somewhere to get dry and some not-bloodsoaked clothing to wear. Although some part of my mind was in favour of remaining wet if it meant the same thing for Cat. Her blood-soaked dress highlighted her womanly charms very well. Charms I didn’t remember noticing before now.

She noticed the ways I was looking at her. Her questioning expression prompted me to speak. “Do you know where to go?”

She nodded and started walking, far slower than she’d walked in the library just a few hours ago. “We’ll go to Braka. The Prince’s Guard can’t go there easily, and if they come they won’t find us.”

I knew about Braka. Cat had talked about being born there and the few years of life she’d had as a fisherman’s daughter. The place was a dump, supposedly the worst part of Karanas. It was a floating city made of old boats and anything else that could possibly stay above water and hold ... stuff, filled with people who didn’t have enough money to rent rooms on land. A quarter of Karanas’s population lived there, and most of them were convicts, fishermen, and escaped slaves. They were most unfortunate, for not only were their homes wet, half-sunk ships, they didn’t even enjoy the protections of the Guardians. The floating city was battered yearly with storms that didn’t touch Karanas itself, fires could burn half the craft and leave the people even poorer than they’d been, and the stone outcrops to the west were poor protections against the rare but deadly tsunami.

In turn, Brakans abhorred the Prince and his Guards, and they hated the merchant families only slightly less. Any law which the Prince had set you could break without consequences in Braka; any criminal the Prince wanted could live in safety in the floating city. In theory, it was large enough to hide both of us from my jailer.

In theory.

Of course, I hadn’t known my jailer was Qoura before fleeing my prison. If there was one person in Karanas stronger than its ruler, it was Qoura. The Sorceress of Water, the North Star, the First Guardian of Karanas, she who had sunk the Ask Imperial Fleet and broken the Ashkan emperor’s hold over the high seas five centuries ago. The only reason the woman didn’t rule Karanas outright were the other two Guardians, whose services were as necessary as hers and who wouldn’t stand for her ascension.

“Cat, tell me where we are.”

She looked around and shrugged. “I don’t know. Somewhere around Sack’s Way.”

Expecting anything more accurate would’ve been too much. She’d never lived in the city, spending the first few years of her life in Braka and the years after being sold in the Prince’s palace. Knowing our exact location wasn’t a requirement for getting us to Braka from anywhere on or near Sack’s Way. It was just a matter of walking west until you arrived at the shore.

The street was wide, straight, and long. It was paved with sett; here and there, there were big piles of shit that couldn’t possibly have been human. Possibly horseshit. On both sides there were drainage canals for rainwater, and sewage from the stink. The neighbourhood’s buildings were large, squat structures, most wooden, but a few made of brick. There were dirty people in rags on every corner, in shadows and side-alleys and in the drainage canals. Looking dangerously thin, sleeping on bare stone without a care for the world. The few who were awake watched us pass with hungry eyes that made me uncomfortable, because I thought they knew who I was and what I’d done. But it was not me they were looking at, the subject of their attention was my redheaded companion in the clinging white dress with her hand around my shoulder. She ignored them, but the tenseness in her arm conveyed her fear loud and clear. These men had hard lives, and they didn’t look afraid of taking whatever they wanted, as long as they could.

A shudder ran through me. I wished the steel knife was in my hand again. Sometime between leaving the library and arriving in the street it’d been lost. Its absence left me naked to the world in all the ways that mattered. The longer they stayed on me, the more scared I became of those starving eyes. I walked faster despite my burning calves. Cat didn’t protest. She increased her pace to match mine without a word or a single glance towards the shadows around us. I could almost hear someone walking behind me. Stealing a glance backwards revealed nothing. But it didn’t mean no one was there, our stalker could’ve been hiding in one of the shadows. Yet Cathy wasn’t showing any more fear than a single tensed muscle. I could just be imagining everything; from the eyes to the footsteps to the feeling of cold fingers touching my neck for fleeting moments. Yes, it could be all in my head.

But as we walked further west, the feelings grew stronger with every step. They mixed together, the sense of being watched and the steps and the fingers, until it turned into a single urge harrying me towards an unknown target. I felt like prey, as if I was the boar in a Domainee king’s hunt. With drums and trumpets and footmen guiding me towards arrows and pikes. Strangely, even as my breathing quickened and my heart tried to burst out of my chest with every beat, Cathy showed no more signs of fear. She matched my pace, and she looked at me with worried eyes, but she didn’t seem to feel the urging.