Kest grimaced and shook his head. The space they shared in the stern would have been cramped even for the friendliest of companions, and it stank of sea creatures. “It’s hard enough to sleep in there – I don’t like to go in during the day.”
Gamarron nodded. “I don’t like it either, in truth, but it is the only location I have for my meditations.” The reflection routine of the koda was not something he wished anyone to see if it could be avoided, even the young hunter. Learning to focus and complete the proper movements in the small space had been a challenge even for one with his decades of training. Challenges were to be valued. “It was only this morning that I noticed a particular sound I had not perceived before. It sounded like a hundred pots of water boiling at once, but quiet, muted. And viscous somehow, too, like gas bubbles escaping a tar bog. I’ve never heard such a thing before.”
Fascinated, the lad ran to the stern railing and leaned far out over the water for several minutes. The resulting silence was quite pleasant. He soon returned with a scowl. “I don’t hear anything.”
“It can only be heard below.”
“Is it something they keep in the hold that’s making it, do you think?” the lad whispered. It was the most animated Gamarron had seen him since he presented his animals to his tribe. It was easy to see why they all loved him. He wore his enthusiasm openly.
“I don’t know,” the monk replied, smiling. “Whatever it is, I have full confidence that if we observed it for long enough, we would find it to be entirely non-magical.”
The young man’s blue eyes glinted as he spun scenarios in his mind. “Maybe it’s some beast they have chained down there that churns the water and makes the noise.”
Gamarron doubted it, but he did not say so. “You could always ask the boatswain. I’m sure she’d be glad to talk to you.” The young woman found as many opportunities as she could to be near the young Beast Rider, he had noticed.
Kest looked around for her, dismayed and alarmed. “N-no, I don’t… I’m sure she wouldn’t.” Gamarron hid a smile within himself. The naïve young Pacari lad was wary of all their Seafarer hosts, but he seemed very nearly frightened of the young boatswain, who had not been shy in showing her interest.
There was no denying that the Seafarer race were an intimidating lot at first sight. Of all the humans of Asunder the monk had seen since he fled from his home, they were the most varied and perhaps the most fearsome. The Mainlanders, for all their variety of skin tone, size, intelligence, and capability, were of a single type – two arms, two legs, ten fingers, and so forth. But the race of those who populated the inhospitable inner ring of islands that fenced the Mainland were far more flexible of form. Scholars said it was something in the poisonous gasses emitted from the many volcanoes and sink pits of the islands. No matter the reason, those who grew up on those islands – who invariably preferred the sea to their pitiful rocky homes, thus coming to be called Seafarers – continuously adapted in strange and unsightly ways to their harsh conditions. Their brawny captain, a man named Yafi, had three arms – two in the standard locations, tanned and scarred, and then a third sprouting from his ribs in the shadow of his left one, shorter and angling out behind him with only three fingers and a thumb. He was quite friendly despite his shaven head, tattooed face, and vine-attached battle axe, and he liked to joke that his extra arm was for scratching and wiping. It had grown in only a few years ago, apparently.
All the Seafarers had some kind of unusual growth or change in their appearance or function, and they were marvelously adaptive. If one of the crew were assigned to dive for fish to feed the others, for example, within months he or she was likely to show the first signs of webbing between the fingers, or perhaps sprout gills. If those gills went unused, they would most often close up or fall away before too many more months had passed, and their body would bring forth some new feature to aid them.
Thus came the source of Kest’s uneasiness. The boatswain Danica was fair of form by any measure, lithe and strong with a flowing mane of bright yellow hair and a pleasant amount of freckling. Her limpid hazelnut eyes gave a fair indication of what she thought of the pretty young Beast Rider who was now a passenger – but a jellyskin mask had become irreversibly attached to her face at some point in the near past, and the purple mass obscured everything from cheekbones to chin. The jellies were of great use to the Seafarers – they filtered the air and allowed their wearers to brave the poison gasses that shrouded many of the islands – but every now and then the parasitic creatures latched onto one of the great arteries of the neck and could not be removed without killing the unlucky Seafarer. Danica did not seem overly upset by the occurrence, but her speech was muffled and difficult to understand, and the writhing shroud over her face was unsightly. Even more disturbingly, she had developed a mouth on the cap of her right knee that allowed her to continue to eat. The toothy maw would occasionally squawk and mutter, and she would entertain herself and the other sailors by seeing what shipboard materials its sharp little teeth could sever. Kest never lingered long when she came near and sometimes even sought refuge in their cabin when no other bolt hole presented itself. For her part, boatswain Danica seemed mightily amused by it all.
The lad waved his hand as if he
