Seawitch

reaching out into the Grey, gathering threads and pulling or shaking them, begging the Guardian to show its misty hide, but nothing seemed to have any effect. I couldn’t even hear it in the distance as I sometimes did, going about its business. In desperation, I tried appealing to Will or whatever might remain of him, but to that the silence was even colder.

“Come on, you slippery bastard!” I shouted. “Get over here and tell me what I’m supposed to do! I’ve got the lost you wanted, but I’ll lose ’em if you don’t give me some clue what you want me to do with them!”

I turned again to the bell. “It said ‘Find the lost’ and I’ve found you. I think. But now it wants to play coy. Obviously just finding you guys isn’t the end of this situation. It’s not as if the Guardian actually cares about suffering, because it’s never done a damned thing about it before, so what’s the problem?”

“Power,” the ghosts sighed. They stretched out from the mouth of the bell in wisps and eddies, curling around me, dizzying me with their ever-changing faces and forms.

“Yes, all right. Your souls represent a storage unit of power, but why does it care about that now?”

“Now the cycle renews itself. Now the floodgates open. We were not alone.”

“Oh no . . . He—it—the Guardian Beast wants me to free all of the souls the sea witch controls? How do I do that? Without becoming one of you, too.”

They made the incorporeal equivalent of a shrug, billowing around and moaning minor-key arpeggios that moved the mist of the Grey in swirls of smoke and blackness.

If she had other captive souls—and she certainly had at least four from Seawitch and possibly more—then she kept them where she’d kept the boat for so long. “Open floodgates . . .” So the door was open and where creatures like the merfolk who’d attacked us could get out, others, like us, could go in. But wherever it was, it would have to be a place with a twin in the Grey. It had swallowed up living things before, so . . . it was a sort of Grey Brigadoon—a magical place that appears for a while and then disappears again, going about its business, undisturbed in the ghost world, until the door is open again. The door had opened long enough for Gary Fielding to slip out with Seawitch and the ghosts of Valencia, but it was closing again.

“We have to find the cove. Where is it? Can’t you tell me?”

The spirits sang on in their dreary, coiling tune of hopelessness and told me nothing. I pulled back toward normal, seeking warmth as much as respite from the company of ghosts, and sat on the edge of the bunk, staring at the bell.

It was heavy and plainly wrought with the little loop and a bead around the top and the flattened edge at the mouth upon which the name had been engraved. Not cast, so the ship hadn’t been important enough to make a custom casting, but enough to cut the name into the bronze lip rather than let it go without; enough to tie it to one ship only. A ship so long lost that only a single lifeboat and a few pieces of timber had ever been recovered.

I flicked a fingernail against the bell’s lip. It made a dull chime that rippled across the Grey and washed through me with a sensation of pressure and cold that made me cough and catch my breath. The green coils around the bell sparked bright for a moment, sending a pulse out into the distance along the threadlike tendrils that reached to the east. The ghosts moaned and flared into a bright curtain of terrified faces, frozen as if by an actinic flash. Then they faded away to no more than a distant whisper and the feel of ice water trickling down my back. The green light around the bell faded more slowly, lingering like a disturbed phosphorescence on the surface of nighttime waters.

I yanked a heavier sweater on over my still-damp head and found some thicker, drier socks to pull on before I resumed wearing my wet shoes. Then I tucked the gun I’d left on the bed earlier into a zippered interior pocket of my jacket and put that on, too, before I picked up the bell and carried it to the main cabin.

Solis, coming up from the galley, gave me a curious look. “The Valencia’s bell?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve been wondering how we’re going to get into the place Seawitch was held, since it remained hidden for twenty-seven years. So it’s a place that exists more in the paranormal than the normal, though it has a normal twin. You don’t just walk into that sort of location—or motor, as the case may be.”

“Indeed?”

“Take my word for it. The easy way in is to die. I don’t think any of us want to do that just to take a look around the merfolk’s living room. We need a door opener. And after thinking about Fielding’s last words, I think this is—literally—it.”

“How?”

“Well . . . not only is it connected to two of the boats and crews who’ve been trapped in the mystery cove we’re looking for, but it’s a bell.”

Solis looked puzzled and Quinton glancing down from the bridge hatch asked, “Why is that important?”

“What?” Zantree asked, out of sight.

“The bell,” Quinton explained.

“What are bells for?” I asked.

“To ring signals,” Zantree shouted down.

“And to ring for assistance. Or entry,” I responded. “Magic is sometimes ridiculously literal. In this case, the bell is . . . also a doorbell. I think.”

“What makes you think so?” asked Solis.

“I felt it. I flicked the edge of the bell with my fingernail and the ringing sent out a wave that I could feel passing in the paranormal fringes. Like a ripple on water. This bell is tied to the location it was hidden in, so ringing it causes a reaction there—in the paranormal ‘there,’ that is.”

“Some kind of magical entanglement, like electrons?” Quinton asked.

“If you say so,” I replied, carrying the bell up to the bridge station. Solis followed me. “Also I noticed that the merfolk made a noise as they retreated that sounded like something clanging in the distance. Or they were responding to the clanging—I’m not sure which. Either way, ringing or clanging, a bell is a bell and this one rings in the cove where Seawitch was kept for the past twenty-seven years. I’d bet my life on it.”

“That doesn’t mean it’ll open the front door for us,” Quinton said.

“No,” I agreed, “but the sea witch will if she wants it back, which I’m quite sure she does. We just have to find the cove.”

“That’s not going to be easy.”

“It can’t be very far away, since the merfolk could hear the recall bell when they attacked us. And there is a practical limit to how far even the most powerful wizard can cast an illusion spell like the sea witch used on us.”

“Sound travels easier and farther underwater since both air and water are liquids. Water is denser so the rate of energy loss is lower,” Quinton offered.

“But even so, I’ll bet it doesn’t travel around corners,” I said.

Quinton shook his head. “Only insofar as the sound waves fan out when they exit a restriction. The direction of travel from the source will be straight until the sound waves reflect off something, and the more they bounce around, the faster they decay.”

I nodded. “Look at the chart and see where the sound waves could travel from to reach us without violating the laws of physics. The cove will be in that area.”

“There’re a dozen little coves and bays between us and anywhere that noise could have come from,” Zantree objected, clutching the wheel and making a correction against the current and wind to take us farther into the safe center of the channel and away from the rocks at the edges.

“It would have to be farther from here than Lonesome Cove,” I said, thinking aloud, “because Fielding said he missed that opportunity. Just where is Lonesome Cove, anyhow?”

“It’s on the north side of San Juan on Spieden Channel,” Zantree replied.

I set the bell down on the chart table beside the steering station. “Fielding said he had to pass up the northern entrance to Roche Harbor and was heading for Lonesome, but when I asked if that was where the Seawitch had ended up, he said no. He didn’t get to say where the boat did finally come to rest, but it definitely wasn’t Lonesome Cove. Unless there’s another cove between Lonesome and Pearl