Mav ate two plates of stew in the hall of Wildroot, standing up, and didn’t taste either of them. He didn’t have time.
He had told his Subjects that he would be back tonight. A month ago, he wouldn’t have cared about a promise made to seaweeds. But that was before a seaweed had stopped his body in open water to teach him what a promise was worth.
Ronald walked him back to the plaza. The arches around its edge were dark now, except when someone stepped through one. Mav chose the nearest, thought of a stone dome at the bottom of a sea, and the arch filled with pale light.
"Dawn," Ronald said. "Don’t drown."
"I’ll try."
The sea closed over him like a hand.
It was a bad moment. His lungs had spent a whole afternoon remembering what they were for, and now the water came back in and they fought it. He doubled over beside the dome with his chest on fire. Then One tightened at the back of his neck, the burning stopped, and the old coolness spread through him.
He straightened up slowly, and was surprised by how relieved he felt. This cold, black water had tried to kill him for a month. Even so, coming back to it was like taking off a pair of boots that pinched.
’Home. I didn’t expect to think that word down here.’
Something had happened to his main wall.
A stretch of it as long as three men had been taken apart and put back together. The boulders hadn’t moved, but the gaps between them were gone. Every space had been packed with smaller stones, each one turned and fitted so closely that he couldn’t have pushed a finger between them. It was better work than anything he had done in 30 days, and it had taken one afternoon.
Sela sat on top of it with her webbed feet hanging down, watching him look.
’All right. It’s way better. Thank you for your work, Sela.’
She looked extremely pleased with herself.
The rest was as he had left it. Six stood beside the new stretch of wall with a boulder in each claw. Two had his five young needlefish in a line and was driving them through the gate and back, again and again. Outside, Seven lay digesting something large.
Mav reached for the points in his head, the way he did every night. His good mood went out like a lamp.
There should have been 25.
He found his 15 seaweeds without trouble. He found Sela, and eight small, shy points gathered inside the wall behind her.
The tenth Reefkin wasn’t there.
-----
He found it at the very edge of his reach. It was a faint point, far away, and it was flickering.
Sela had stopped looking pleased. She slid down from the wall and stood in front of him, and for the second time that day, a picture came into his head that he had not put there.
He saw a forest.
It was made of plants, not trees. They rose from the seabed like green pillars, each one thicker than his body and taller than a foundry chimney, swaying in a slow current. Between them, the water was dim. In the picture, a small gray-blue figure was swimming toward them with a sharp stone in its hand.
A second picture followed the first. It showed a house cut into rock, with a bundle of long green stalks laid across the top for a roof.
’You sent him to cut roofing. In the new waters.’
Sela’s large dark eyes didn’t leave his face. Under the pictures, he could feel something else coming from her, small and miserable. She had taken charge of nine people that morning, and she had lost one of them before dark.
Mav knew that feeling. He had felt it for a whole night after the eel, with two holes in his head.
’It isn’t your fault. You didn’t know what’s out there. Neither do I.’
He was already picking up his harpoon.
The sensible choice was obvious. The Reefkin were rank F-. There were nine more of them, and they would breed. He had met this one a few hours ago. Everything in the new waters was stronger than anything he had fought, and it was the middle of the night.
But the point at the edge of his head was afraid, and it was his. That was the end of the discussion.
’Seven. Two. With me. Bring six others who can fight.’
They came at once.
-----
The forest began past the crab’s cliff, in a place where there had been nothing the day before.
Mav stopped at its edge and looked up. The stalks went on above him until the green light of his seaweeds couldn’t follow them. They didn’t glow, and they didn’t answer when he reached for them. These were wild plants, as mindless as grass. A soft sound came from between them, like cloth being dragged over cloth.
Seven’s unease ran through the cold river in his head. There were sparks in there, a great many of them, and most were as bright as she was.
’Everything in there is rank E.’
He went in without slowing down. He had killed the strongest beast in his old sea, and he wasn’t going to stop at the edge of a forest.
They found the Reefkin 200 meters inside. He was alive. He was lying on his back on the seabed, perfectly still, with his eyes wide open, and something was standing over him.
At first, Mav took it for a fallen stalk. It was as long as a rowing boat and as flat as a plank, and its skin had the same spotted green and brown as the plants around it. Then it shifted its weight, and he saw the legs. It had six of them, jointed like a crab’s, and it stood on them the way a table stands. One leg was planted on the Reefkin’s chest. A flat, pointed head was lowering, slowly, toward the small body.
It didn’t swim. That was what struck him. Everything else in his sea swam, or crawled on its belly. This thing walked.
His Status told him nothing about it. It never named a wild beast, and it never gave a rank. But Seven was rank E, and her cold river shrank back from that spark.
’Rank E+, then. A stalker. I’ll call it that until I learn its real name.’
’Seven, don’t flash. He’s too close to it. You’d stop his heart.’
That left only one way to do it, and it was his kind of way.
He took a firm grip on his harpoon, reached for Six with one part of his mind and for Two with another, and pushed both at once.
His skin turned to stone.
Then the forest blurred.
Dart threw him forward 10 meters in the time it took to blink, and he hit the creature in the ribs like a boulder dropped from a cliff. Something cracked under his shoulder, and it wasn’t him. The beast went over sideways with its legs thrashing, and its foot came off the Reefkin’s chest.
’Two! Take him!’
Two was already there. He shot under the flailing legs, closed his long jaws around the Reefkin’s arm as gently as he had once pushed Five, and pulled him away into the stalks. The six others closed around them like a fist.
The beast rolled back onto its feet. It was fast, far faster than it had any right to be. Its flat head split open sideways, and Mav saw rows of hooked teeth.
Stone Shell ran out.
His skin turned soft again, and in the same heartbeat, one of the front legs came down on him like a pick. It went through the meat of his left shoulder and pinned him to the seabed. The pain was white and enormous, and Mav screamed into the water.
But the leg was touching him, and the Reefkin was 30 meters away.
He reached for the cold river.
[You have borrowed a skill: Discharge.]
He was rank E now. Blue light burst out of him in every direction, and the beast’s whole body locked. For two long seconds, it stood over him like a statue.
Mav tore himself off the leg, drove his harpoon into the joint where it met the body, and twisted. The leg came half away, and thick dark blood clouded the water.
The beast staggered back on five legs. Behind it, Seven rose like a pale wall, with her power gathering.
Mav had a choice to make, and half a second to make it in.
She could kill it now. It was wounded and slow, and a beast like this was worth at least 100 points.
Or he could think like the boy who had taken a crab and an eel.
’No. Let it go.’
He felt Seven’s surprise.
’It walks, Seven. Nothing I own walks, except Six. I want that one alive, and tonight I have no seaweed to put on it.’
The beast didn’t wait to learn why it had been spared. It backed between two stalks, and then a strange thing happened. Its skin shivered and changed. The green and brown ran together until they matched the plants behind it exactly, and where a monster had stood, there was only forest.
Seven could still feel its spark, limping away into the dark. Mav let her follow it with her senses until he was sure of the direction.
Then he sat down on the seabed, rather suddenly, and looked at the hole in his shoulder. The green thread was already creeping across it.
-----
They carried the Reefkin home between them.
He had three cracked ribs, and he was shaking so hard that his teeth clicked, but he would live. He was a young male, smaller than most of the others, and he didn’t let go of Mav’s sleeve once during the whole swim.
The other nine were waiting at the gate. When they saw what Two was pushing in front of him, a sound went up from them that Mav had never heard, high and trembling. Sela reached the small one first. She ran her hands over his ribs, then pressed her forehead against his.
After a while, she turned around and looked at Mav.
He had bled through what was left of his shirt, and he was so tired that the wall kept sliding sideways. He lowered himself onto a flat stone and let his head hang.
Letters appeared.
[The affinity of the Reefkin has risen to Good.]
A feeling came with them, warm and a little unsteady, from 10 places at once.
Something touched his knee. Sela was standing in front of him, holding out a fish. It was a good one, and she had cleaned it, which nobody had ever done for him in this World.
’Thank you.’
While he ate, his eyes went to the cracks in the rock around the dome. Five of them held a root that hadn’t sprouted yet. He needed one seaweed without a host. Just one, and the second thing in his sea that could walk would be his.
Mav looked at the five roots.
’Grow fast, please.’