“How did you injure your hand?” Shang-Li asked.
“A broken timber slipped,” she said as she watched him. “I tried to grab it.”
“Not a good idea.”
“I wasn’t thinking.”
Beneath the bandages, the palm of her hand was red and swollen with infection around a four-inch gash that ran crossways across her flesh. The tear wasn’t very deep, though the flesh was thin enough there that the muscles and tendons were revealed. Fresh blood rose from the wound and faded into the water.
A fish swam over to her and hovered over her palm. Shang-Li brushed the fish aside and it swam away.
“I don’t know how you did anything with this hand,” Shang-Li said.
“I tried not to.”
“You should have told someone.” “Everyone was busy trying to stay alive.” “Who cleaned the wound?” “I did.”
“You didn’t do a very good job of it.”
“Is criticism one of the services you throw in with your care?” she asked sharply.
“Yes,” Shang-Li said, “but thankfully it’s just as free as everything else I’m doing.”
Amree tried to withdraw her hand.
Shang-Li held onto her fingers. “There are splinters in there that have to come out. And I’m going to have to suture your palm back together.”
Involuntarily, Amree closed her hand and didn’t look happy.
“What’s wrong?” Shang-Li asked.
She grimaced and looked embarrassed. “I don’t much care for needles.”
Shang-Li retreated long enough to get a small knife and tweezers from a cleric kit. He added a curved needle and fine gut. Then he sat cross-legged in front of Amree once more.
“This is only going to make me dislike you more,” she threatened.
“That’s a risk I’ll have to take.” Shang-Li took her hand and held it gently but firmly. “This is going to hurt.”
She turned her head away and didn’t move while he removed eight good-sized splinter fragments. Once he was satisfied the wound was clean, he threaded the needle.
“You were lucky,” Shang-Li said in a soft voice. “None of the muscles, nerves, or tendons were damaged. Except for the tear in your flesh, your hand is fine. Once I close the flesh up, it will heal fine.”
“If it doesn’t it’s going to be expensive to have a cleric bless it back to normal.”
Shang-Li looked into her eyes. “If we leave it untended, you could lose your hand. Maybe sicken and die before we get out of this place. At the very least you’ll bleed and attract predators. And if you’re going to create enough air to raise this ship to the surface and keep us protected while you do that, you’re going to have to be healthy.”
“You don’t look the part of a seamstress.”
“Are you ready?”
She took a deep breath, held it a moment, then let it out. “I am.”
Shang-Li pushed the needle through her flesh, felt her tense, then slowly relax a little. He pushed the needle through the other side of the slash, then pulled the ravaged flesh together and tied the first stitch.
“I’m going to put a lot of small ones in,” he said. “Spacing them out might discourage scar growth. This should leave little in the way of damage.”
“All right.”
“Just keep breathing.” Shang-Li threaded the needle once more and began again.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Shang-Li swam with a heavy spear clutched in one hand. Given their present circumstances, the spear seemed a better choice than his fighting sticks. Thava and the sailors who followed him also kept their weapons out, ready for the Blue Lady’s creatures to attack.
Iados swam and scouted a head of them. The tiefling’s tail twitched like a cat’s as he surveyed the sea floor. They’d already learned many creatures liked to conceal themselves in the loose silt and the brush. And all of them appeared ravenous.
The forest continued on as far as Shang-Li could see. He’d never seen anything like the environment he watched around him. As a ranger, he’d been trained to feel at home in the forest. But though he’d tried to find some familiar bits of this one, there was no closeness, no safe harbor. The forest just felt wrong. It didn’t feel dead, but it felt something close to that.
Ahead, Iados waved and indicated that he’d found the first shipwreck of the day. Dodging through trees and brush, Shang-Li swam forward and Thava picked up her pace. The rest of the salvage crew trailed after them.
Holding the spear in both hands, Shang-Li dropped toward the sea floor near the ship wreckage. The vessel hadn’t fared as well as Swallow. She lay broken almost in half, her masts broken and splintered, and her deck largely gone. Cracked timbers and shattered planks lay beside the ship.
“She’s a cargo ship, isn’t she?” Iados asked. Like Shang-Li, he carried a heavy spear.
“I believe so.” Shang-Li used his spear to test the ground in front of him. He stabbed the long blade experimentally into the silt to see if anything lurked beneath the debris.
Curious fish swam nearby, and a few of them fell prey to the tentacled things that hid in the nearby brush. The hunters brought the writhing fish to their maws and ate greedily. Sharks had followed the scavenging crew from Swallow and now circled lazily overhead. The predators were patient hunters but every now and again one would drop down and hit the unseen barrier. Whatever force contained them discouraged them time after time. Shang-Li hoped that continued to be the case.
Thava stood at the keel and brushed away the algae that covered the bowed planks. “Her name was Bokhan’s Pearl. Does that mean anything to you?”
“No,” Shang-Li replied. “The ship we’re searching for is called Grayling.”
“Judging from the shape of most of the ships that the Blue Lady took under,” Iados said, “I wouldn’t hold out hope that you’ll find much of her.”
“I don’t need to find much of her,” Shang-Li replied. “I only need the captain’s cabin to be intact.” And somehow airtight, he thought, gods willing. “Let’s see what we can salvage.” He swam down toward the broken ship but remained vigilant.
He touched down on the ground a short distance from Bokhan’s Pearl. With Thava on one side of him and Iados on the other, Shang-Li boarded the ship.
The interior was dark. Cargo lay broken open and in disarray. Nothing looked as if it had been disturbed since the ship settled on the sea floor, but the damage from the storm that had taken the vessel down was apparent.
Skeletons, their bones picked clean and gleaming in the blue glow that permeated the area, lay scattered around the hold.
“What killed them?” Iados shifted one of the skeletons with a foot, making certain it didn’t rise up to grab hold of them.
Shang-Li knelt next to the nearest one and surveyed the remains carefully. The skeleton was intact and didn’t show any signs of combat damage or residual harm from the ship’s sinking. Tattered clothing clung to the skeletal legs and ribcage. An amulet hung around the dead man’s neck.
“I don’t see any signs of past wounds,” Shang-Li said.
“This one suffered combat injuries,” Thava said from a few feet away. “Axe blows. A sword thrust through the ribs. But all the bones show signs of healing. This person lived through those attacks. Whatever killed them wasn’t violent.”
“Storms are violent,” Iados observed. He remained on guard and watched the ocean around them.
“They didn’t die in combat,” Thava said.
“Then how?”
