But this mind skips around. There’s something—
Tap. Orange. The smell of the sea and smoke and discharged powder, and he can sense the other men floating in the water, and below them, around them—Oh, by the hells. Sharks. Lots of sharks.
His finger is already descending. Tap. Red-and-sub-red-and-the-taste-of-blood-in-his-mouth-and-it’s-too—
The trick with sharks is the nose. Not so different from a man. You bloody a bully’s nose, and he goes looking elsewhere right quick. Easy, right? Easy.
Gunner ain’t no easy meat. The sea’s my mirror. Fickle as me. Crazy as me. Deep currents, and monsters rise from her depths, too. What others call sea spray, I call her spitting in my face, friendly like. Unlike most of this lot, I can swim. I just don’t like it. Ceres and me do our admiring best at a bit of a distance.
She must be ragging something fierce.
The shark she’s sent after me is a tiger shark. Good hunters. Fast. Curious as a crotch-sniffing hound. Mad as a starving lotus eater. Usually twice as long as a man is tall. But the sea’s shown me respect, as she ought. My shark’s bigger. Three times as long as I am tall, looks like. Hard to tell through the water, of course. Don’t want to exaggerate. Hate exaggerators. Fucking hate ’em.
I’m Gunner, and I give it straight.
The scraps and shrapnel lines and barrels of the shipwreck litter the sapphire waters everywhere, but that tiger’s coming back. Depending how tenacious she is, it’ll take me a few minutes to swim to an appropriately sized—
“Oy, Ceres!” I shout as a thought occurs to me. “I know why you’re mad!” Not many people know it, but the Cerulean Sea is named for Ceres. Not for the color. Those tits and twits at the Chromeria think everything revolves around them and their colors.
The tiger shark is circling me, dorsal fin cutting beautiful arcs on the open water. I’m on the edge of the wreckage. I got out first, saw that the fires were headed for the powder magazine. But being on the edge means that shark don’t have to go through the distraction of all the other meat to get to me.
“Ceres! Easy, Ceres. Come on now!”
I turn constantly, keeping my face to the beastie. Sharks are cowards—like to pull you down from behind. These big bastards float along with these tiny little moves, like soaring buzzards, making you think they’re ponderous, but when they strike, their speed is pants-drenching. The wedge-shaped head circles a bit closer, veers. And… now!
Gunner is the master of timing. None finer. Got to be when the seas are bucking under your feet and the linstock is in hand, slow match smoking, breathing burning saltpeter and lye in your face like a lover’s breath, and a corvette is pulling to broadside and if your chain shot doesn’t take her mast this time, she’s going to sink you and geld you and sell you as a galley slave after you’ve been made a bung boy for every man on deck with a grudge and a hunger.
I kick, stabbing one foot hardened to leather and bone by a life barefoot right at the tiger shark’s nose. I see a flash of the milky membrane over its eyes as I’m thrown, almost lifted out of the water by the force of its strike.
The shark shivers, stunned. Sensitive nose, my father told me. Looks like he told me right.
Gunner ain’t no easy meat.
“Ceres! You think I did this? I didn’t! It was the Prism! Gavin Guile! That damn boy blew up the ship, not me. Go get him, you dumb broad!” Ceres hates it when you dirty her face with exploded ship, and I’ve done that more than a time or three.
The shark recovers, darts away. For one second, I think I’m safe, that Ceres is going to be reasonable. There’s other meat out there. Then the shark turns, starts swimming back.
This is grudge. This is Ceres herself. And she’s used to crushing those who defy her by sheer brute force.
“Ceres! Don’t do this!”
I got a pistol still. Lost my musket when it blew up in my hands during the fight with the Prism and his Blackguards—which is infuriating, impossible, I’ve never double-charged a musket in my life. But that’s something to worry about later. The pistol might even still work, despite my plunge into the water. I’ve been trying to make a pistol that’s proof against Ceres’s spit for years. Nothing’s worked against a full plunge, though, and shooting into the water is a fool’s game anyway. Ceres’s sea skin shields her kin. So I pull my knife instead, its blade three hands long.
“Damn you, Ceres. I said I was sorry!” Sea demons are Ceres’s sons. I killed one, years back. She hain’t forgiven me yet. Won’t, until I sacrifice something surreptitiously special.
The tiger shark comes straight at me. No subtlety, and I got her timing now.
She strikes, and my heels collide with her soft nose one more time. This time, I absorb some of the blow in my knees, still giving the beast a good shock, but not letting myself be thrown so far. I stab for the eye, miss, and bury the knife in its gills. Pull it out with a crimson gush following the blade like fire from a cannon’s throat.
A mortal blow, but not a fast death. Damn. Meant it to be quick.
The wound stains the water in the high sun, and the tiger shark veers away. I swim like a furious goddess is on my heels. I get to the dinghy just as some younger tiger sharks arrive. They’re shorter than Ceres’s hellhound, their stripes more pronounced.
It’s a miracle the dinghy survived—a miracle only slightly tainted by the fact that there’s no goddam oars. I stand up, wide-legged, see that there are other men swimming for the dinghy. The first is a Parian with something shy of six teeth. His name is Conner, and for good reason.
That damned shovel head has got his grubby paws on two oars. He don’t look pleased to see that I’m in the dinghy already.
“You look wet,” I says. I got no oars, but I’m not swimming with sharks. And sharks don’t eat oars.
“First mate,” Conner says. “You’re captain. And we need us a crew. Take it or leave it. The winds and waves aren’t like to blow you to shore from here.”
He’s quick. Always hated that about Conner. Dangerous one, he is. Still, how good of a con man can he be? He let hisself get daubbed Conner.
“Hand me the oars then, First Mate, so I can help you up,” I says.
“Go to hell.”
“That was an order,” Gunner says.
“Go to hell,” Conner says, louder, heedless of the tigers.
I give in. I never give in.
Conner insists on holding the oars as I pull him in the dinghy—which is good. It keeps his hands busy while I stick my knife through his back, pinning him to the gunwale.
Even as the men watching from the water curse, surprised at the sudden betrayal, I pry the oars from Conner’s fingers. He’s dead already, hands convulsed, locked tight. I have to use the butt of my pistol to smash his grip open and drop the oars into the dinghy.
I stand easily despite the dinghy bobbing like a cork in the waves. I hold my pistol, waving it carelessly as I address the swimming, desperate men who’ve just seen me murder Conner.
“I am Gunner!” I shout, more to Ceres than to the men in the water. “I have done what satraps and Prisms only dream. I am cannoneer of the legendary Aved Barayah! I am sea demon slayer! Shark killer! Pirate! Rogue! And now, I am captain. Captain Gunner is on the look for a crew,” I say, finally turning to the men swimming, scared, surrounded by sharks. I rip my knife free of the gunwale and Conner’s body drops into the hungry sea. “Must be willing to take orders!”