Kraken's Claw by Bruce Fergusson

Author:Bruce Fergusson [Fergusson, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Lucky Bat Books
Published: 2019-11-09T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22: The Sixers

THEY SAT ON the pile of thin hides next to the boat, and to keep warm they’d draped a few over their shoulders. Between them, at their feet, two dawnstone rods lay across the sack of food and water jugs and the four pages Vaience called an artifact.

The dawnstone rods had been leaning near the entrance to this sea-cave. Five more were scattered around the chamber that was scarcely more than a widening of the crevice that led down to this…tomb.

The rods were the same size, almost as long as Falca’s arm and perhaps half the thickness of his wrist. He’d held cold light in his hands before—chunks of dawnstone and lunelings—but he wondered why these rods of dawnstone seemed different. Was it because their polished, glistening smoothness was no more necessary to their purpose than the wave-like curls on the bridges?

Why not just bring a piece of dawnstone to where you needed light?—as Soso had done at the hut—for building the boat that would ensure your escape from your enemies, whoever they’d been. And not just one boat; Falca was certain there’d been another in here.

There was nothing more they could do now but wait for the night, take the boat and leave; leaving as well the unanswered question of why the man and woman here had stayed. A decision made hundreds of years ago—probably much more—now gave Falca and Vaience the chance to keep on. And hope they’d miss the rocks out there which could rip apart the boat before they got to the open sea.

~ * ~

Falca had approached the boat expecting another rotten hull—the Fates had their songs, too; surely after having had their laughs with the first boat, they’d want to enjoy more of the same despair of foundered hope from him and Vaience.

The boat lay slightly keel-canted, to Falca’s eye slightly wider and longer than the other one Vaience put his foot through, with a splayed double-prow like a strange sort of open fish-mouth, the top part of the jaw protruding over the lower. Looking for signs of rot or holes in the hull, he and Vaience ran their dawnstone rods along its length, both sides. The prow and keel seemed to be all of one piece. And it wasn’t wood—couldn’t be—or the boat would have been a pile of moist, clumpy dust. Nor was it metal. The keel, ribs and rails appeared to be made of bone, to which were stitched sections of some sort of skin or dressed hide, the seams sealed with Roak-knows-what. Three paddles—had to be bone, too—leaned against one of the two thwarts.

Stitching hide to bone? You’d think the builders of everything else on Angessa that wasn’t dry-stacked huts of stone, had used the customary iron tools; you don’t build a fortress, road and bridges and a temple and carve out steps, without metal tools.

But Falca and Vaience had found none—nor what might once have been iron tools—in what looked like a work area in the middle of the sea-cave chamber.

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