A mile below the lowest cloud, rock breaches water and the sea begins.

It has been given many names. Each inlet and bay and stream has been classified as if it were discrete. But it is one thing, where borders are absurd. It fills the spaces between stones and sand, curling around coastlines and filling trenches between the continents.

At the edges of the world the salt water is cold enough to burn. Huge slabs of frozen sea mimic the land, and break and crash and reform, crisscrossed with tunnels, the homes of frost-crabs, philosophers with shells of living ice. In the southern shallows there are forests of pipe-worms and kelp and predatory corals. Sunfish move with idiot grace. Trilobites make nests in bones and dissolving iron.

The sea throngs.

There are free-floating top-dwellers that live and die in surf without ever seeing dirt beneath them. Complex ecosystems flourish in neritic pools and flatlands, sliding on organic scree to the edge of rock shelves and dropping into a zone below light.

There are ravines. Presences something between molluscs and deities squat patiently below eight miles of water. In the lightless cold a brutality of evolution obtains. Rude creatures emit slime and phosphorescence and move with flickerings of unclear limbs. The logic of their forms derives from nightmares.

There are bottomless shafts of water. There are places where the granite and muck base of the sea falls away in vertical tunnels that plumb miles, spilling into other planes, under pressure so great that the water flows sluggish and thick. It spurts through the pores of reality, seeping back in dangerous washes, leaving fissures through which displaced forces can emerge.

In the chill middle deeps, hydrothermic vents break through the rocks and spew clouds of superheated water. Intricate creatures bask in this ambient warmth their whole short lives, never straying beyond a few feet of warm, mineral-rich water into a cold which would kill them.

The landscape below the surface is one of mountains and canyons and forests, shifting dunes, ice caverns and graveyards. The water is dense with matter. Islands float impossibly in the deeps, caught on charmed tides. Some are the size of coffins, little slivers of flint and granite that refuse to sink. Others are gnarled rocks half a mile long, suspended thousands of feet down, moving on slow, arcane streams. There are communities on these unsinking lands: there are hidden kingdoms.

There is heroism and brute warfare on the ocean floor, unnoticed by land-dwellers. There are gods and catastrophes.

Intruding vessels pass between the sea and the air. Their shadows fleck the bottom where it is high enough for light to reach. The trading ships and cogs, the whaling boats pass over the rot of other craft. Sailors’ bodies fertilize the water. Scavenger fish feed on eyes and lips. There are jags in the coral architecture where masts and anchors have been reclaimed. Lost ships are mourned or forgotten, and the living floor of the sea takes them and hides them with barnacles, gives them as caves to morays and ratfish and cray outcastes; and other more savage things.

In the deepest places, where physical norms collapse under the crushing water, bodies still fall softly through the dark, days after their vessels have capsized.

They decay on their long journey down. Nothing will hit the black sand at the bottom of the world but algae-covered bones.

At the edges of the shelves of rock where cold, light water gives way to a creeping darkness, a he-cray scrambles. He sees prey, clicks and rattles deep in his throat while he slips the hood from his hunting squid and releases it.

It bolts from him, diving for the shoal of fat mackerel that boil and re-form like a cloud twenty feet above. Its foot-long tentacles open and whip closed again. The squid returns to its master, dragging a dying fish, and the school reknits behind it.

The cray slices the head and tail from the mackerel and slips the carcass into a net bag at his belt. The bloody head he gives his squid to gnaw.

The upper body of the cray, the soft, unarmored section, is sensitive to minute shifts of tide and temperature. He feels a prickling against his sallow skin as complex washes of water meet and interact. With an abrupt spasm the mackerel-cloud congeals and disappears over the crusted reef.

The cray raises his arm and calls his squid closer to him, soothes it gently. He fingers his harpoon.

He is standing on a granite ridge, where seaweed and ferns move against him, caressing his long underbelly. To his right, swells of porous stone rise above him. To the left the slope falls away fast into disphotic water. He can feel the chill emanating from below. He looks out into a steep gradation of blue. Way overhead, on the surface, there are ripples of light. Below him the rays peter swiftly out. He stands only a little way above the border of perpetual dark.

He treads carefully here, on the edge of the plateau. He often comes to hunt here, where prey are less careful, away from the lighter, warmer shallows. Sometimes big game rises curiously from the pitch, unused to his shrewd tactics and barbed spears. The cray shifts nervously in the current and stares out into the open sea. Sometimes it is not prey but predators that rise from the twilight zone.

Eddies of cold roll over him. Pebbles are dislodged around his feet and bounce slowly down the slope and out of sight. The cray braces himself on the slippery boulders.

Somewhere below him there is a soft percussion of rocks. A chill not carried by any current creeps across his skin. Stones are realigning, and a spill of thaumaturgic wash is spewing through new crevices.

Something baleful is emerging in the cold water, at the edge of the dark.

The cray hunter’s squid is beginning to panic, and when he releases it again, it jets instantly up the slope, toward the light. He peers back into the murk, looking for the source of the sound.

There is an ominous vibration. As he tries to see through water stained by dust and plankton, something moves. Way below, a plug of rock bigger than a man shudders. The cray bites his lip as the great irregular stone falls suddenly free and begins a grinding descent.

The thundering of its passage reverberates long after it has become invisible.

There is a pit in the slope now, that stains the sea with darkness. It is quiet and motionless for a time, and the cray fingers his spear with anxiety, clutching at it and hefting it and feeling himself tremble.

And then, softly, something colorless and cold slips from the hole.

It confuses the eye, flitting with a grotesque organic swiftness that seems to belie intention, like gore falling from a wound. The he-cray is quite still. His fear is intense.

Another shape emerges. Again he cannot make it out: it evades him; it is like a memory or an impression; it will not be specified. It is fast and corporeal and coldly terrifying.

There is another, and then more, until a constant quick stream dribbles from the darkness. The presences shift, not quite invisible, communing and dissipating, their movements opaque.

The he-cray is still. He can hear strange, whispering discourses on the tides.

His eyes widen as he glimpses massive backbent teeth, bodies pebbled with rucks. Sinuous muscled things fluttering in the freezing water.

The he-cray starts and steps backward, his feet skittering on sloping stone, trying to quiet himself but too slow-small shattered sounds emerging from him.

With a single motion, a lazy, predatory twitch, the dark things that huddle in council below him move. The he-cray sees the darks of a score of eyes, and he knows with a sick-making fear that they are watching.

And then with a monstrous grace, they rise, and are upon him.

Interlude II

Oh. Oh where are we going?

Locked in our cabins and questioned blank-faced, as if these murderous men these pirates were census takers or bureaucrats or… -Name? they ask, and-Occupation? Then they want to know my-Reason for heading to Nova Esperium? and I think I will laugh in their faces.

Where are we fucking going?

They take long notes, they itemize me on their printed forms, then turn to Sister Meriope and do the same for her. They respond the same way to the linguist and the nun, with little nods and points of clarification.

Why can we keep our things? Why do they not strip the jewelry from me rape me or run me through? No weapons, they tell us, and no money and no books, but our other belongings we can keep, and they rummage through our sea chests (a halfhearted search) and take out daggers and bills and monographs and dirty my clothes but leave what else they find. They leave letters, boots, pictures, and all accumulated tat.

I argue for my books. I can’t let you take them I say, let me keep them they’re mine, some I wrote, and they let me keep the blank-paged notebook but the printed ones, the stories the textbooks the long novel they take from me. Effortlessly. They don’t care when I show them that B. Coldwine is me. They take the Coldwines away.

And I don’t know why. I cannot make sense of what they are doing.

Sister Meriope sits and prays, muttering her sacred suras, and I am surprised and pleased that she is not weeping.

We are kept inside and time to time they come to us with tea and food, not rude nor pleasant, disinterested as zookeepers. I want to get out I tell them. I rap sharp on my door and I must visit the privy I say, and peer around the door frame and the guard in my corridor bellows at me to get inside, and brings me a bucket which Sister Meriope stares at in mortification. I don’t care, I was lying, I wanted to find Johannes or Fennec, I want to see what is happening elsewhere.

All over, sounds of feet and half-heard discussion in a language I almost understand.-North-north-east I hear and other side of the deck and-Ever? I couldn’t tell and-where’s His Guardship gone? and then I hear more that is opaque.

Through the porthole by my head I see nothing but squalls above water, darkness above and below. I smoke and smoke.

And when my cigarillos are finished I lie back and realize I’m not waiting to die, I don’t believe I’ll die, I am waiting for something else.

To arrive. To understand. To be at my destination.

I realize with some surprise as I watch sundown’s greasepaint that I am closing my eyes and I am bone tired and godspit really? really will I? I will, I will sleep I

sleep

unquiet but long, sleeping eyes flickering with Meriope’s religious whimpers, opening sometimes but still

asleep

till with a rush of panic I sit up and look out at a brightening sea.

Morning is coming. I have missed the night, hiding away in my dreaming head.

I dress carefully. I rub my long boots clean. I paint my face as always and tie back my hair.

It is half past six when a cactus man knocks at our door and brings us gruel. As we sip he tells us what will happen.-We are nearly arrived he says.-When we have tied up follow the other passengers, listen for your names and go where you are told, and you’ll…” but I lose track, I lose track, we will what? Will we understand then? Will we know then what is happening?

Where are we going?

I pack my belongings away and prepare to disembark somewhere, somewhere. I am thinking of Fennec. What is he doing and where is he, so quiet when the captain was killed (blood bursting)? He would not want it known that he has a commission, that he can command ships, reschedule ocean crossings.

(I hold him in my hands.)

Out. Into a quick bright wind. It worries at me insistently.

My eyes are like a cave-thing’s. I have learnt to see in the drab brown light of my cabin and this morning startles me. My eyes are teary and I blink and blink and the sea clouds run from me above. Everywhere I can hear the soft applause of waves. I can taste salt in my air.

Around me are the others, Mollificatt and Cardomiums one and two. Murrigan and Ettenry and Cohl Gimgewry Yoreling Tearfly my Johannes glimpsing at me swiftly and with a sudden smile before swept away in a crowd, and Fennec somewhere his head down still, and all of us look made of roughcut paper in this light. We are made of baser stuff than the rest of the day. It ignores us with the arrogance of a fucking child.

I want to shout to Johannes but he’s been taken away by the current of us and with my newly clear eyes I look and look.

I struggle with my sea chest, stumbling, hobbling the deck’s length. I feel battered by the light and air and I look up again and see birds arcing. I struggle forward and keep them in my sights and they wheel over us, passing to starboard, and they head erratically for the horizon and I see masts in their flight path. I have been avoiding this. I have not yet looked to the side of the ship, I have not seen where we are. My destination has been skulking beyond the corner of my eye but now as I watch the gulls it leaps into view.

It is everywhere. How could I not see?

Someone is shouting names as we shuffle past, splitting us into groups and handing out instructions, complex orders but I am not listening because I am looking out over

Dear Jabber

My name is called and I am here next to Johannes again but I am not looking at him because

I am watching

mast upon mast and sail and tower and

on and more

We are here

beside this forest

Godspit Jabber and fuck

a trick a trick of perspective

a city that moves and ripples and slops endlessly side to side

– Miss Coldwine someone says coldly but I cannot, not now I am looking, and I have put down my chest and I am looking

and someone is shaking Johannes’ hand and he stares at them bemused as they speak to him.-Dr. Tearfly, you are most welcome this is indeed an honor, but I am not listening because we are here we have arrived and look at it all look at it

Oh I’ll I’ll I could laugh or spew as my stomach yaws look we are here we are here

We are here.