After a few seconds, the man spirit leaned forward and said, “Is that all?”
Pil nodded. Then she stumbled to the side and vomited over it again.
“Treachery!” the woman spirit shrieked, but she didn’t shift from where she stood on deck. “I’ll destroy this leaky box that you ride in!”
“We’ll die if you do that!” I said, edging over between her and my puking companions, a futile act if one ever existed. “You promised. We gave you the truth, and you said the truth can be disappointing. It disappoints us too.”
The man spirit surged up to the side of the ship and leaped aboard as light as a moth. He touched his wife’s shoulder. “We’ll find a way around this damn bargain. Come on.”
She closed her eyes.
Something hurled me to the deck and across it to slam into the side of the ship. I thought I was dying, but I after I took my next breath, I sat up.
The spirits had gone. None of us seemed to be dead, but we were definitely all naked. All the lines on the ship, from the shortest rope to the longest, were woven into a massive, tangled nest between the two masts, fifty feet above us. I assumed that the spirits had tossed in all the cloth on the ship too for the sake of thoroughness.
The experience shocked my companions out of their seasickness.
The water spirits hated Pil’s answer so much that they refused to let us sail on. The sailors sent men shinnying up the masts to begin untangling everything and gradually rerigging the ship. Meanwhile, the spirits swam the waters around the ship, sometimes surfacing to curse us and sing the disturbing songs of the undersea creatures they said would be devouring us soon.
The rope towing our boat had also been sucked into the spirits’ nightmare of hemp and cloth. However, we were becalmed, and the boat didn’t drift far. Without much delay, I swam to the boat, knife in my teeth, and I killed two of the prisoners with neat thrusts before rolling them over into the water. I had hoped to accomplish that unobserved, since the crew was consumed by this freakish disaster. That had been mere dribbling optimism. By the time I pulled my unclothed self back aboard, all the sailors knew what I had done. None of the crew spoke to me or even looked at me.
The next morning, the water-woses disappeared, but we spent another day becalmed, drifting on the current with the ship sluggishly spinning to all points of the compass. All the rubbish and filth we threw overboard floated beside us in the water. No pleas, compliments, or bribes convinced the spirits to offer a breeze.
I reattached the rope to the boat and took that opportunity to murder the remaining two prisoners, who would have murdered me with a cheery grin if they could. Afterward, the crew kept as far away from me as possible, which wasn’t far on a deck sixty feet by eighteen feet. By that evening, the ship was rerigged and everyone wore cloths. No garment had as much as a rip or a hole torn in it. That didn’t surprise me, since spirits are known for their refined touch.
The spirits allowed the wind to return. Before they departed, the woman told me, “Sorcerer, you cheated us.”
“I regret you feel that way. How did I cheat?”
She swam in an agitated circle. “I cannot say precisely. By some sorcerer trickery, without doubt.”
I smiled and tried not to seem nervous. “Good spirit, I can’t promise I will ever find out anything more about your question, but I will try.”
“Liar. I cannot understand why Krak chose a liar to be the Way-Opener.”
After a pause, I said, “This isn’t an answer, but I will tell you a real thing if you want to hear it.”
The woman spirit halted and glared at me. “Fine. Why not?”
“I can’t say where meaning comes from, whether it’s from you, or other people, or the gods, although I doubt the hell out of that last one. Meaning has nothing to do with time, though. Great things can happen in a month or a minute. They may be remembered for a thousand years or forgotten in a week. It’s all the same.”
The spirit opened her mouth, but I interrupted. “Just because you stop existing for a while, that doesn’t wipe out what you mean. That is, if you had meaning in the first place. I can’t speak to that.”
“That is a lie. Or a guess.”
“Nope.” I rapped on the gunwale three times. “It’s something my little girl taught me.”
The spirit didn’t look too impressed by that. “Sorcerer, you must know why Memweck wanted us to delay you.”
“Sure. He wanted to send his flunkies across the sea to be waiting for us when we dock in Paikett.”
“You will therefore sail elsewhere.”
I nodded. I had already agreed with Halla that we would sail for Sububb instead of Paikett.
“That is what Memweck wants. His . . . flunkies await you at Sububb.” The spirit examined my face.
“That sneaky son of a dickless dog!” Then I cocked my head and peered at the spirit. “How do I know that your intelligence on this is good?”
“How do I know that your philosophy on time and meaning is good?” She dropped beneath the swells and didn’t return.
TWENTY-FOUR
On any particular day, only so many parts of a ship need to be cleaned, mended, or polished. Sailors spend long periods of time doing not much on the same small deck with the same few fairly ripe people. Occasionally, a horrifying catastrophe will threaten to kill them all, and then they are given more boredom, which in truth is their greatest enemy.
The crew of Steffi’s Thumb did not thank us for making this passage so interesting. We had killed several of them, which of course put us in a bad light. I had murdered helpless men. They had also seen us talk to evil spirits that commanded the
