Characters:RavenLogs/TTS WhatGoesDown
The Treacherous Sea: What Goes Down
Captain Raven has heard many times of the great waves spawned by undersea earthquakes, but in all her years on the sea, she's never seen one until now. The lookout in the crow's nest calls down to report the peculiar pattern that precedes a tsunami. They are far enough out to sea that it appears to be a swell, but closer to shore the water will suck out and then the wall will come crashing in.
The ship is beginning to rise on the water. If Raven is not careful, she will be drawn along to shore and her ship wrecked, her crew lost and scattered.
Raven swears under her breath; she wasn't fond of this place to begin with, and now this? She searches her memories for a moment. There had been an old sailor she'd shared drinks with back in Amber that had a few things to say about tsunamis. A lot of it, she suspects, was utter garbage - clothes sucked off corpses and fish in trees, for sure - but there's always a bit of truth to such things, and his comments on how his captain dealt with it seem sound enough.
"Turn us hard to port and put the bow to the waves," she orders, and by habit she scans the faces that turn towards her to see who disagrees. There should be an exit from this world somewhere two or three days up the coast, or so she's been told, and it's moments like this, when she has to order a change in course that takes them away from the next possible way home, that she clearly recalls how she became captain of this ship. The last world had been kind - or more properly, prosperous, and so her men are well-fed now and look better than they have in months. And richer as well, she notes with amusement as she spies touches of gold and embroidery on clothes and around necks. If - no, when - they make it back to Amber, there will be some very heavy trunks carried off this battered ship... her own included.
She paces restlessly as her orders are carried out, waiting to see if she's chosen correctly.
The Captain's men move to do as she says, not without grumbling. The officers quieten it; some of them have sailed long enough to see the swells that are coming and read their meaning. The ship slowly turns to port as the wave rises slowly.
Soon the ship faces out to sea, cutting through the rising water, running parallel to where Raven is sure the rift should lie, if the old rutters are true. Since the storm that sent them running and lost away from the double-dozen seas of Amber, the rutters have played Raven false more than once.
Something has happened to make this tsunami. Perhaps when she's ridden it out, its source will give her answers.
And maybe that source is something useful. Maybe it's even a way home; they have seen things as strange. Their passage to this land had been through the belly of a black fog, and some months back, there had been a ride on the edge of a whirlpool that still haunts Raven's dreams now and then.
She also considers that if they were to, say, continue the port turn once the swells had passed and make a loop of it, they will be unlikely to end up right back on top of it. And if they can stay behind the deadly wave, there might be a bit of salvage to be had - at least if the tales she's heard are true. Salvage, she knows, will go a good way towards making up the detour with her men. What she has been told about the exit down the coast sounds like she has a few more days than the days it will take to get there, so as long as they keep any other detours to a minimum, they shouldn't miss it if this tsunami turns out to have come from nothing they can see.
Raven nods to herself and continues to pace, keeping a sharp eye out for the end of the waves.
The waves continue to rise for hours, and it's close to nightfall before something changes. The lookout reports something in the water: first one, then another, then still more.
They are bodies, bodies that have come up from the depths of the ocean.
Raven stands at the rail, watching the corpses float. In normal waters, she would expect to be able to follow the corpses back to some great drowned wreck, probably a victim of whatever had caused the tsunami. Here? Well, who knows. There's nothing to do, she thinks, but to investigate with the hope that it's something to benefit her crew.
"Follow the bodies," she orders. "I want to see where they're coming from. Never know; it could be a way home."
The ship continues on its course, which seems to be heading toward the where the bodies are coming from.
The first mate turns to Raven and asks, "Shall we bring one up?"
Raven considers for a moment. The floating dead are macabre, but it might be useful to know what they're headed into. And - well, salvage is salvage. She smiles thinly at the first mate, an old drinking mate turned assistant with a face to match his namesake. "Do it, Mister Stone," she answers. "And make sure you give it a thorough search."
Stone nods and moves off to obey the order. A few minutes later, they retrieve one of the bodies. It's not, by consensus of the crew, costumed as a man of Amber or Rebma. The weapons, or rather, general lack of them, aren't right. The decedent could have lost his spear, though.
Nor is it immediately obvious what the animal horn on a knotted leather string around his shoulder was for. It seems to have some sort of cap on one end, designed to seal it against water. He did die of injury and not from drowning or (solely from) crushing pressure.
The condition of the body is not great since it has been in the water for some time, but the crew has strong stomachs. They haven't had to handle it closely, though.
Raven walks over to the body and nudges it with her foot. If it doesn't immediately explode or do anything else untoward, she snorts. "Right. Somebody go pull Stern out of the mess." Stern has probably the strongest stomach of the crew; he'd told her once he had taken on a number of odd jobs before joining the Navy, including a brief stint working with the dead. And it's not the first time she's called on him for this kind of task, although she has to admit that the other times, the bodies had been a bit less soggy when they started. "Tell him there's a body to be dealt with again."
"Aye Cap'n." Someone runs off to do just that.
She works the horn free while she waits, turning it over in her hands for a moment before looking up again. "Miles." The owner of the name is terribly thin and always has been, and jumpy even when he doesn't need to be. "See if you can get this open," she tosses the horn to him, "without dumping it all over the deck or yourself. And stay in my sight this time, you hear me?"
Miles comes over to take the horn. "Aye, Cap'n."
Soon enough Stern comes up for instructions. Meanwhile, Miles has been working on the horn, which he's managed to open. He shows its contents to Raven: a strange powder with an odd smell that the horn has kept dry, perhaps magically.
Raven eyes the powder suspiciously. "Somebody pull up a bucket of sea water, and get me a spoon. Make sure it's dry."
She turns to Stern. "Strip him," she says bluntly, indicating the body. "And then chuck him over the side before he starts to stink worse than he already does. Let me know if you need a hand."
"Aye, Cap'n." Stern doesn't even wrinkle his nose, but begins work on the body. The rest of the crew finds excuses to be somewhere else as best they can.
Once she has both bucket and spoon, Raven wipes the latter on her shirt briefly - just to be sure. There are any number of reasons why this stuff was being kept dry, and she isn't eager to lose a hand if it reacts badly to water. Then she scoops out a tiny amount of the powder and drops it - and the spoon - into the bucket.
The spoon falls into the bucket and the powder gets wet. There's no chemical reaction that Raven can see: certainly nothing instantaneous.
Stern, meanwhile, finishes his gruesome task and there's a splash as the body goes overboard. He brings back a pile of goods. He hands what seems to be the coin purse to Raven without opening it separately from the rest of it, which he drops on the deck.
"He had a knife--" which Stern shows to Raven "--but that was his only weapon. And he had markings, tattoos, on the skin. No clue what they mean. Never seen anything like them."
Raven tucks the purse into her belt for the moment, still keeping a wary eye on the bucket. Just because it hasn't exploded doesn't mean it's safe - or, for that matter, that it won't explode soon. If the spoon dissolves or rusts or turns into a lump of unidentified goo, or for that matter if the bottom of the bucket dissolves, that will tell her something about the powder. And if none of those happen in the next few minutes, there's always the step of catching whatever was scuttling in the hold a few days ago and dropping that in the bucket to see what happens. Unidentified powders didn't make her happy; they never had.
"Think you'd know the marks if you saw them again?" she asks Stern as she examines the knife in his hand. "Seems a fair guess that there will be one or two more of those out there."
"Aye," Stern says, and makes shift to help hoist another body or two out of the water.
While Raven waits, the men haul up another body and Stern repeats his task. When he reports back, he has another horn of powder and another strange, fringed coin purse, which he gives to Raven. This man had tattoos of a similar design, but they weren't identical.
Meanwhile, the bucket has remained intact.
"See if you can find one without a horn to pull up," Raven tells him. "Let's see if those are any different."
She pulls the first pouch out of her belt and compares it with the new one. Fringed things always remind her of a rug her mother had insisted on hanging in her childhood bedroom, and she frowns at them. It's kind of... girly too, even if they'd both come off men.
At length, she opens the first one and shakes the contents out onto her palm.
It's not a money bag at all, as it turns out. There are objects in it: a couple stones of different kinds, one of which might sell for some money if it were polished up nicely, a feather that was probably very elegant before it was submerged in water, a small carving of an animal--maybe a bear?--that Raven can hardly guess what is, and some herbs, which, like the feather, are submerged in water.
She takes some time to examine these things while the men pull up another one. Once they get it on deck, Stern calls over, "Cap'n, you'll want to take a look at this one."
When Raven does, she can see that his gear is easy to recognize, at least for an Amber sailor. He's Rebman.
Raven pockets everything but the feather and the herbs, which she decides aren't worth saving. She tosses them over the side to join the rest of the waterlogged dead before heading over to the latest corpse.
"I'll be damned," she says. "Looks like we're closer to home than we thought, lads." She turns on her heel, locating her first mate, and calls across to him, "Make sure we're keeping an eye below the water as well as above, Mister Stone. And if anyone spots a landmark they know, don't be shy about calling it out."
"You lot," she adds, turning again to the body and the crew that had pulled it up, "back to work. Stern and I have it for now." She kneels next to the Rebman, indicating Stern should start on the other side with a gesture, and looks him over.
The crew disperses and heads back to work, or back to stations where they can look for the signs of Rebma. There's a palpable excitement among the crew now: hope that they'll make their way back to Amber soon.
Stern and Raven look over the the Rebman's body. He doesn't appear to have been killed by weapons. It's more like he died of falling rocks or some other crushing damage.
Raven frowns at the body in puzzlement. One killed by weapons, one killed by crushing... and presumably all three had come from the same place. And it could be that they all came from the source of the tidal wave. It's interesting, she admits to herself, and not a little baffling. "Well, he doesn't look like an officer," she says quietly. "Let's strip him and chuck him, same as the rest. How did the other one you pulled up die? Anybody that looks like an officer out there?"
Stern says, succinctly, "Battle. But I've been looking over the edge, and some are dying of both. I saw one bloke, one of the others--" by which he means _not a Rebman_ "--who looks like he got crushed and squoze." Stern makes a wringing kind of a motion with his hands. "You know what that means?"
"A messy death," Raven answers drily. "I've a thought on the matter, but I wouldn't mind hearing yours first, seeing as how you're the expert on dead bodies around here. And if you've got another on why we're seeing the crushed and the battle-marked all floating on the same sea, I'll hear that as well, because I don't much like mine."
"Why the one that looked like something fell on him was like that, I don't know. But all squoze up like that means Tritons, Cap'n. The Rebmans brought the Tritons to war."
Legend has it that nobody has done such a thing since before Moire was Queen, perhaps not since the Tritons were bound to serve Rebma. Only in direst need would the Rebmans do such a thing. It speaks of disaster of an epic level.
Raven whistles lowly. "That's worse than what I'd come up with. Guess it was too much to hope we'd come home to what we'd left." She settles back on her heels, frowning at the corpse. Doom and war come to Rebma - but was it just Rebma, or would it be in Amber, too? Better keep a sharp eye out. Not - and her frown twists towards a smirk - that she was going to have to tell a ship full of homesick sailors looking for landmarks of home to keep a sharp eye out. If more than bodies get by, she'll be surprised.
And then, of course, there's what she has to assume is the other side of whatever's going on. She fishes out the two purses and the contents of the first and drops the handful on the dead body - since it's between them, it can serve as a table as well as it can rot. "Interesting coin purse you found. Stones and this thing," she pokes the carving, "and some bits of plant. I bet the other's the same. The closest I've seen to anything like this is that port months back where they were handing us shells instead of proper money." She regards Stern with her best prompting stare, although she's not hopeful; he probably would have mentioned recognising the other corpses by now.
Stern shakes his head. "If this is money, the hinterlands they came from were more broke than most of the stale backwaters Amber can't be arsed with." And it's true, no two things are alike. And it's not like they're carrying gems of quality that they could use as money in different Shadows.
It's reminiscent of the troubles in Amber after Oberon left, when Eric took the Regency and then the throne. When strange things came out of Shadow, and the rumor was that one of the Princes had sent them against his brother, or worse, when there were armies led by Bleys and Corwin that the navy had had to defend against. At least this lot seems to have been human.
"That we're seeing folks with clothes we don't know at all means the Royals were involved," Raven counters. "Just because Amber wouldn't give a rat's arse for it don't mean someone couldn't have got an army of them anyway. They brought in those ships full of whatsits, right? Don't suppose those things used proper money either."
She eyes the objects for a moment longer and then scoops them back into her pocket. "I bet you're right that it's not money, but why are they carrying pouches of trash and horns full of powder that don't seem to do anything?" She shakes her head, thoroughly puzzled by this. "Strip this one and throw him back, Stern. And see if you can spot me an officer or two; seems like we're sailing into a nasty bit of business, and it'd be nice to know what it is."
"Aye, Cap'n." He lets Raven retreat before he starts the business of stripping and dumping the body.
It takes about a half-glass for them to find a Rebman officer, or one with enough of him left to be worth saving. Miles appears at one point to report they think they have one, but he turns out to have been a meal for a shark, so there's not enough of him to be worth bringing up.
The officer's corpse doesn't seem to reveal much other than that he had a nasty encounter with a spear that ended his life. He's not carrying dispatches or any such.
One of the sailors, Vado, whose mother was a Rebman, approaches Raven to speak. When she permits, he says, "Captain, I've been watching the bodies. Not all those Rebmans are army. Either they summoned reserves or there were Rebmans on both sides."
Raven frowns at the information. Tritons plus non-army Rebmans and foreigners adds up to two very different pictures in her mind, and one of them is likely to be more hospitable than the other. How all this might be affecting Amber is another question, and one she has even less of an answer to so far. "You probably know more about Rebma than I do," she tells Vado. "Anything from before we left that might point to whether we're eyeballing the remains of an invasion or a civil war?"
Vado shakes his head in the negative. "There's been no civil strife in Rebma since before Prince Martin quit Rebma, and that's been more than a century. But if it's true what they say about Rebma and Amber, that the undersea city follows the landward?" He shrugs. "It's above my head, Captain."
"So, it's likely invasion." Raven nods. She understands the feeling, but she's not going to admit it quite yet. "Keep an eye out for anything else that strikes you as odd and let me know." She doesn't bother with a formal dismissal, but a dismissal it is, as she moves back to the group pulling up bodies. "Keep fishing until you find me a useful officer," she orders. And then she snorts in amusement; dead men weren't exactly useful, unless you were desperate or starving. "Or at least someone with papers. A courier'll do."
Papers are less likely in the undersea, but they might happen. Unfortunately, in Rebma, the information couriers had is likely to have died with them. They might get lucky and find a written message with the surfacers, though. The men redouble their efforts.
Assuming they have nothing to add, she turns on her heel, surveying the deck, and locates Stone. "How ready are we," she asks as she reaches him, "if trouble should come looking?"
"Close quarters combat, we're good for. Better than we were, if we take any decent weapons from the Rebmans and their foes." Stone flashes a smile at the idea of spare weapons he might leave in his enemies. "Ship to ship, depends on their weaponry. Thraxian fire might be a problem, but not so many carry that."
Raven nods. "Good enough. I'm not sure of what we're sailing into still, but it's as like as not an invasion into Rebma and who knows what into Amber beyond. It'd be best if we're keeping a sharp eye on the water as well as below." She smiles thinly in answer to his, not at all disagreeing with the sentiment. "We've got a few weapons so far, and some clothes for those that want it. Holler if I'm needed; I'm going to help fish 'em up."
"Aye, Captain."
From above a voice cries out. "Sails Ho!, Land Ho!" The man on the top of the mainsail is pointing in the direction of both the stream of corpses and the prow of the ship.
"What flags?" Raven calls back up.
Then, to Stone as she heads back down to Stern and the others, "Have someone run up the Amber flag, or what's left of it, anyway."
"Aye, Captain!"
As soon as she reaches the group, she directs briskly, "Strip 'im and ditch 'im, boys, and no more for now. Any of you need clothes or weapons, take from what we've pulled so far and then pass the rest out to those that need it. Miles, take the horns and stick them with the rest of the crap we've not made heads or tails of." As she speaks, she picks up the bucket she's left sitting all this time, fishes out the spoon, and dumps the rest of the contents overboard.
There is no effect from dumping the pail overboard.
Raven's men scramble to obey her orders as the news filters down from the crow's nest.
"There's a gate, Captain. And on the other side, they fly the flag of Gateway!"
