02.10.08

13: Night Water

Posted in Pages at 11:54 pm by Alexandra Erin

Jace kept finding himself looking over his shoulder at Tarnach as he made his way past the end of the harbor master’s office, where he hoped to slip into the water out of sight of anybody on the ships. The strange man simply stood there, as still as a statue, until the final time Jace looked back and he was simply gone.

Startled by the abrupt disappearance of the mysterious figure, Jace continued walking while looking backwards and caught his foot on a length of discarded rope. He hit the planks with a rather loud oath that he’d never dared to ask anybody the meaning of.

Immediately, there were sounds from within the harbor master’s office. Jace froze, clapping a hand over his mouth, though of course it was far too late for that. The glow of a lantern appeared in the window. He scrambled backwards on his hands and feet, crab-like, feeling his way towards the edge of the dock, where he could lower himself down into the water.

Panicky and disoriented from the fall, he misjudged his position and put all his weight on his hand after he’d run out of wharf. He hit the water just as he heard a door being flung open and the beginning of a shout of “Who goes there?” or the like.

With no breath in his body, Jace had to kick for the surface… after a couple of attempts at finding which direction the surface was. His head broke the water to find a beam of light from a bullseye lantern hitting the water a mere arm’s length from his head.

He gulped in some air and went under, surfacing as quietly as he could beneath the wharf.

“Somebody down there?” the harbor master was calling, shining his beam around the water. “Hello?”

He stabbed around with the lantern for a bit longer, calling “Hello?” in ever quieter and more self-conscious tones, until finally he said, “Well, if somebody turns up drowned tomorrow, at least I’ll have a story to tell.”

Jace waited until he heard the door closing, then he took a deep breath and whipped his head down, propelling himself through the dark water towards the end of the pier.

He’d rarely had any reason to swim at night, and the inky blackness he found even a few feet down was disconcerting. The cold didn’t touch him, but the darkness was oppressive and he found it impossible to swim in a straight line when he couldn’t see the bottom of the harbor. In his first big push, he drifted way off course and surfaced to find himself facing away from the docked ships, to his momentary confusion.

He got back on course and approached the sleeping hulks anchored out in the deeper reaches by fits and starts, tacking like a sailboat against the wind. There was one that stood out to him from the beginning, though he couldn’t see why. Once he noticed it, it did seem to literally stand apart from the rest, and in some fashion that fit what he thought about Mondaldo, but that wasn’t what had caught his attention in the first place.

As he surfaced a bit closer, he realized what it was… though he hadn’t been able to make out the color, the deck rails had still caught more of the moonlight than those of any other ship had, giving the top of the ship a lustrous outline.

It was the gold paint which had drawn him in, just as the gold feathers in the princess’s plumage had caught his eye.

Buoyed by a returning sense of destiny’s hand on his shoulder, Jace kicked beneath the surface to make his final approach.

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