Chapter 133: A Diver’s Handshake
The shark came on in no hurry at all, gliding through drowned iron and drowned bone as though the wreck had belonged to her since the sea first claimed it.
James had heard fishermen talk about creatures like her. Gray-backed, sharp-nosed, fast enough to scare the courage out of a man, though harmless enough if nobody did anything foolish. A reef shark, near as long as James was tall.
She crossed the last stretch of open water and kept her attention squarely on him, drifting close enough that he could feel the water rolling off her body against his bare chest. The shark went around him once without haste, the way a dog checks a stranger before deciding whether he’s worth trusting.
James found the whole business more curious than frightening. Her little black eye passed over him each time without ever seeming to linger.
Then her back bent.
Her pectoral fins lowered stiff against her sides and the lazy sweep of her tail sharpened into quick, tight strokes.
She wasn’t curious anymore.
Her jaws parted open, rows of pale teeth showing through the dim water, and this time she came at him for real.
There wasn’t any use thinking about it.
James reached out and caught her by the snout just before she could bite. Then, with no better plan than the one his instincts had apparently invented for him, he pushed downward and rotated the shark over onto her back.
The shark stiffened all at once.
Then every bit of her went limp, as though somebody had reached inside and turned a hidden latch.
He let go.
She floated upside down for another moment, looking as puzzled as a shark had any right to look, before she finally kicked herself away. She wandered off with her nose dipping and her tail flicking every which way, looking for the right direction much like a fellow leaving some tavern after four cups too many of rum.
James watched her disappear.
Anne and Mary floated a little way off, both of them frozen the instant the shark had turned. Neither moved until the water calmed behind her again.
By then all three of them were short on borrowed air, and there wasn’t anything left below worth more than another breath. They swam back to the bell, slipped beneath its rim into the trapped pocket of air, and words became possible again the moment James’s head broke the surface.
"Christ, Calloway."
Anne wiped the water from her face and stared at him as though she couldn’t decide whether to laugh or box his ears.
"Did ye just flip a shark over like she owed ye coin?"
"Well, she looked at me funny."
"Fuckin’, holy."
Mary leaned against the curved iron, her expression caught somewhere between disbelief and pure delight. "I’ve seen grown men lose their wits over a rat in a chamber pot, and here ye are handlin’ apex predators like a skittish mare at market."
"There’s a name for what I did."
"There is? What’s that?"
James considered the matter with all the seriousness it deserved.
"Get rotated, idiot."
Mary snorted so hard she nearly laughed away the little air she’d managed to borrow.
Anne shook her head slowly, the grin she was trying to hide gave away the truth well enough. She wasn’t nearly as cross as she wanted him to believe.
The rest of the day found its own steady rhythm after that.
The shark never came back, whether from wounded pride or plain good sense James couldn’t rightly say. Trip after trip had them between the bell and the wreck, and gun after gun was checked sound or ruined, hauled away or left where the sea had decided it belonged.
Coombes swore the ninth gun along the starboard row had a mean streak of her own because she’d nearly taken his hand off in the sling. He refused to touch her again without crossing himself first, and the two sailors never grew tired of copying the gesture behind his back.
Bucket cursed the capstan from above every time another load came aboard, just as faithfully as he had when they’d first hauled up the diving bell.
Grey kept complaining with his chart whenever a fresh sounding disagreed with the last one, carrying on as though the sea had shifted the bottom out of nothing but spite.
By the time the light overhead began to fade, more because the day above was running out than for any reason below, a respectable pile of iron already stood lashed across the Gilded Herring’s deck. More waited in the sand and more still lay hidden somewhere in the wreck, keeping its own counsel until somebody came looking.
Anne and Mary had turned to secure what had already been raised.
James found himself with nothing much to occupy his hands, and that had never suited him. He tapped Anne on the shoulder, pointed toward the stern, and got a wave that plainly told him she’d do just fine without him for a while.
He swam aft alone, passing the last exposed guns and the black scars where fire had eaten deep into old timber, until the wreck narrowed toward the stern.
Whatever had ripped her open amidships and brought down her foremast had done its cruelest work farther forward. The stern had escaped with bruises instead of ruin.
Its walls still stood around a chart table leaning hard to one side and a brass lantern gone green with age, swaying gently whenever the current found another crack to creep through.
The captain’s belongings lay scattered across the silt.
A sea chest stood open, emptied long ago by the current. Floating nearby, clothes had rotted into nothing and a razor case had rusted itself shut.
Beneath the overturned chart table, half buried where a man could easily swim past without seeing it, lay something smaller and much finer than the rest.
A chest no bigger than a loaf of bread, made from dark wood with brass fittings too carefully worked to belong to any ordinary officer’s keepsakes.
James slipped the edge of his knife beneath the lid and pried it open.
Inside, wrapped in what had once been oilcloth, lay a letter, or what little the sea had spared.
The paper had turned soft and brown and it came apart at the gentlest touch, every trace of ink bled away long ago. Whatever words had once been written there belonged to the ocean now, and she wasn’t in the habit of giving things back.
The wax seal had weathered the time far better.
It remained whole and sharp, bearing the mark of a Crown official’s office, the kind of seal that did not find its way onto the private effects of ordinary men. James did not recognize the hand that had pressed it there, but he knew enough to understand that whoever had owned this letter had not been a man of little importance.
Beside the ruined letter there was another bundle, wrapped separately and protected much better because of it.
Inside lay a length of stone black as pitch, carved into a serpent curling around its own body. It was no bigger than James’s palm and one end narrowed into a toothed point, shaped plainly enough for work instead of ornament.
A key.
And not one any honest Christian ought to have much use for.
James turned it over once in his hand.
The serpent caught the faint light, and the meaning came rushing back.
He knew that design.
He had seen it carved across the ruins on Andros.
The familiar shimmer appeared before him with the thought.
⚔ [QUEST ISSUED]
Coils Within Coils
Beneath a swamp on an island you were assured no living soul had cause to care about, a serpent was carved into a door centuries before anyone alive now drew their first breath.
Aboard a British man o’ war, tucked among a dead commodore’s private belongings, that very serpent appears again, carved in stone, considerably better preserved.
Discover who else has taken an interest in your forgotten temple, and why a Crown already drowning in wars and debts has apparently found room in its interests for one more.
Reward : 50 Fate
Reward : ???
It appears you were not, in fact, the only nosy bastard involved.