The cove announced itself by absence. The coastline, which had been a continuous argument between rock and water, suddenly gave way to a wide, sheltered inlet. The kind of place where ships should be safe. The kind of place, in fact, that existed for the specific purpose of keeping ships safe, and which some force had repurposed as a place where ships came to die.
Wylan counted the hulls from the rail. Seven that he could see, in various stages of surrender. Broken masts jutted from the shallows at angles that suggested violence rather than weather. Splintered timbers lay across the rocks like bones after a meal. The oldest wrecks had been there long enough to grow things; the newest still had paint.
? Seven is the number at which a collection of wrecks stops being a coincidence and starts being a landmark.
“Any of them twitching?” he said.
Lambert turned from the rail. His expression was distant, but the question reached him. “What would a twitching ship look like?”
“Less safe, probably.”
They anchored in the shallows and took the longboat in. The water was clear enough to see the bottom, which Wylan wished it hadn’t been. The shapes down there were just rocks and timber and kelp. He was almost certain they were just rocks and timber and kelp.
The shingle shifted and crunched beneath his boots, and the air in the cove was different from the open coast: still, sheltered, heavy with brine and the sweet rot of waterlogged wood. Wrecks that had looked dramatic from the rail were merely sad up close. Broken ships with nothing left to break.
“Split up,” Laila said. “We’re looking for the Salvation’s Promise, but anything unusual is worth noting.” She looked at each of them in turn. “Stay within shouting distance.”
They spread across the cove. Wylan took the nearest wreck. He crouched beside the hull and ran his fingers along the damage. The wood was torn, not cracked. Splintered outward in places, inward in others, as though something had gripped the hull and pulled. He looked at the next wreck, twenty metres along the shore, and the same pattern repeated in the next.
“This isn’t rocks,” he called to Lambert.
Lambert was further along the shore. He knelt beside a gouged section of planking, examining the marks. “Something tore through them.”
“Something large.” Wylan stood and looked across the graveyard. All the wrecks torn by something other than weather or reefs, and possibly more beneath the waterline. The Malothar chapel and its keeper were fresh in his mind. The kraken as instrument, as manifestation, as the physical weight of what lived beneath the surface. Not a myth, then. A navigational hazard.
Laila found the Salvation’s Promise at the far end of the cove, sitting lower in the water than the others, half-buried in silt. She waved them over. The nameplate was salt-scoured but legible, which was more than could be said for the ship.
“So much for Braesyl,” she said.
Wylan pulled the logbook from his coat. He’d been carrying it since the lighthouse, waiting for somewhere still to read it properly. He sat on a flat rock beside the hull and opened it, and the others gathered.
Navarro’s handwriting was cramped and precise, shaped by small spaces. Anatomical sketches filled the margins: something with too many limbs, rendered with the clinical attention of a man who had seen it and needed to record what he’d seen. Symbols Wylan did not recognise, in no system he had been taught.
The log ran for several dozen pages. The final entries were routine. Weather. Heading. Provisions. And then, in Navarro’s careful hand: Departed Fairhaven for Braesyl. Fair winds. All preparations made.
“It matches the manifest,” Lambert said.
“Of course it does.” Laila’s voice was flat. “The manifest says Braesyl. The logbook says Braesyl. And the ship is here.”
Wylan looked at the hull, half-sunk in silt ten metres from where he sat. The log described a departure. The ship described something else entirely.
“They tried to leave.” Lambert was watching the other wrecks. “Whatever did that to the others caught them before they cleared the cove.”
“That’s the obvious reading,” Laila said. She did not sound convinced.
Wylan wasn’t either. The Salvation’s Promise was damaged, yes. But looking at it now, alongside the other wrecks, the damage was wrong. The others had been torn apart. This one was just... sitting here. He closed the logbook and was about to walk the length of the hull when Divina’s voice rang across the cove.
“Darlings. Come and look at this.”
She was standing on the deck of the Salvation’s Promise, beside the mainmast, which lay across the planking, broken roughly two-thirds up. Her sequins caught the flat grey light. She was not smiling.
Wylan climbed up. Ten years of rot and salt had softened the edges of everything, turned hard detail into suggestion. But wood that broke under stress did not look like this.
“A storm break splinters along the grain,” he said. “Follows the weakness in the wood. This is too clean.”
“Someone took a saw to this mast,” Divina said. She ran her thumb along what remained of the edge, held it up, grey with powdered wood. She looked at Laila. “You don’t saw through your own mast unless you want your ship to stay where it is.”
Wylan looked at the mast. Then at the hull, settled deep in the silt. Then at the logbook in his hand, open to Navarro’s neat, careful handwriting. Departed Fairhaven for Braesyl. Fair winds.
“The hull isn’t torn,” he said, slowly. “Not like the others. No predator damage. She’s sitting in the silt because she was put there.”
“The mast was cut,” Divina said. “Deliberately.”
“And the logbook says they sailed.” Wylan closed it. “You don’t cut your own mast and then write a departure entry. Not unless the entry is the point.” He looked at Laila. “The log’s as false as the manifest. They never left this cove.”
Laila was very still.
“False manifest,” she said. “False memory in the lighthouse keeper. False logbook. Three lies, all telling the same story, all pointing away from this cove.” She looked at Lambert. “Navarro was meant to disappear. And whoever arranged it was thorough enough to build the disappearance in layers.”
“Meant to disappear,” Lambert said. “Or meant to stay.”
Nobody had an answer for that.
The cove offered nothing further. The wrecks sat in their silt. The tide came in and went out and did not care about their questions.
Divina had gone back to the wreckage. She moved through the debris with a compact device held out before her, sweeping it across the timber and sand in slow arcs. Resonance detection, scanning for active or dormant artificer signatures. She’d been doing it since they came ashore, he realised, methodical and thorough.
He was sitting with the logbook again, turning pages, looking at Navarro’s anatomical sketches of the many-limbed thing, when her voice reached him from across the cove for the second time.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
“I’ve got a signal.”
She was past the Salvation’s Promise, kneeling where the waterline met the shingle. The device in her hand was humming steadily, pointed at a spot beneath the shingle. She was already digging, sequined sleeves pushed back to the elbow.
Wylan crouched beside her. She cleared sand and salt-crusted timber until her fingers found a small, weathered case, green with age, half-buried.
She worked the catch and opened it.
Inside, a cylindrical device. An artificer’s beacon. Dormant, intact, the coils still wrapped tight and the resonance chamber sealed against the damp. It had been buried for years. It was still holding a charge. Good artificer work outlasted the people who buried it.
Divina turned it over in her hands, held it up to the fading light. Her fingers found the resonance chamber by touch.
“Misaligned,” she said. “The oscillator’s off-centre. Whoever buried this either did it in a hurry or didn’t know what they had.” She produced a tool from her belt and made two adjustments, deft and certain. The hum steadied. “There. Should give you a clean signal now.”
The beacon was already humming. A low, steady pulse, rhythmic and clear, reaching out across the water toward something they could not see.
“Divina,” Laila said. “Did you just activate that?”
Divina looked up. “Was I not meant to?”
“We might have discussed it first.”
“In her defence,” Wylan said, “it was a big red button. Telling her not to press it would only have made things worse.”
? Divina’s relationship with unidentified devices was the same as a cat’s relationship with closed doors. The outcome was inevitable; the only variable was how long it took. Artificers see a dormant device and take it personally.
Nothing happened.
They waited and the pulse continued. Minutes became an hour. An hour became two. The Pendulum swung westward and the light began to fail, the grey afternoon dimming toward a darker grey that would soon be evening.
Lambert leaned against the hull of the Salvation’s Promise and folded his arms. “Let’s hope it doesn’t summon anything worse than what we’ve already seen.”
Wylan looked at him. “You know that’s exactly the kind of thing people say before something worse arrives.”
“I’m aware.”
The beacon pulsed. The sea kept its counsel.
Wylan was reaching for the beacon, ready to shut it down and call the experiment a failure, when the alarm reached them.
Distant and sharp: the Black Corsair’s bell, carrying across the water in a rapid, unbroken chain. A warning.
Lambert straightened from the hull. “That’s ours.”
The bell rang on, each strike overlapping the last, and the sound bounced off the cove walls until the direction was everywhere and nowhere. Then Laila said, “Move,” in the voice that did not invite discussion, and they moved.
The longboat was a hundred metres up the shore. The shingle shifted and grabbed at their boots with every step, punishing urgency. Wylan ran with the beacon still in his hand because stopping to put it down would have cost seconds he was not sure they had. Lambert reached the longboat first, hauled the bow off the shingle, and held it while Wylan and Divina threw themselves in.
Laila was further back. The shingle that had merely inconvenienced the others chose this moment to demonstrate its full potential. Her boot caught a ridge of rock beneath the loose stone and she went down hard, one knee hitting the ground, hands bracing against the wet shingle.
“Laila!” Lambert was already out of the longboat, reaching back.
She got up. She did not need help getting up and her expression said so.
They rowed. Lambert pulled the oars hard and said nothing. The Black Corsair grew from a silhouette to a shape to a ship, and Nikolaos was at the rail, waving them in with both arms.
“Something in the water!” His voice carried flat and hard across the gap. “Something big. Under the hull.”
They climbed aboard. Wylan’s experience of ships was minimal, but he knew enough to know they had moods. And hers had soured.
He felt it through his boots before his eyes caught up: a faint vibration, deep and rhythmic, coming from somewhere beneath the waterline. The crew were at their stations, very good at their jobs and very much wishing their jobs did not include this.
The sea moved.
The surface of the cove bulged, as a vast displacement of water that had no weather to explain it. The Black Corsair tilted, gently at first, like a cup on an unsteady table, and then less gently.
The first tentacle broke the surface thirty metres off the port bow.
It rose slowly, water streaming from its surface, and kept rising. The scale of it was the first thing that registered: thick as the mainmast, longer than the ship, moving with the confidence of something that had never been challenged. It hung in the air for a moment, a vast curve of dark flesh against the grey sky and then fell.
The impact shuddered through the deck. Wylan grabbed the rail and held on.
A second tentacle surfaced to starboard, and a third behind it. They moved in sequence, rising and curling, each one gripping the Black Corsair’s hull with admirable precision, given the circumstances. Wood groaned. The rail beside Wylan’s hand cracked, and a splinter the length of his forearm spun across the deck.
“It’s pulling us!” Elara shouted from the helm. The wheel was turning against her, the rudder answering to something stronger. “Toward open water!”
The tentacles tightened. The Corsair lurched sideways, dragging through the water at an angle that ships were not designed to sustain. Rigging snapped overhead with sounds like whip cracks. A barrel broke loose and rolled across the deck, collecting a coil of rope and a crewman’s boot on the way.
? The crewman got the boot back eventually. The rope was less cooperative.
Lambert had drawn his blade, which was brave and entirely useless. Laila was gripping the mast, directing the crew with a voice that carried over the groaning timber. Divina had braced herself against the capstan, tools still at her belt, watching the tentacles.
Wylan watched the nearest tentacle. It was near enough to touch, near enough to see the surface in detail: dark, wet, glistening, the colour of deep water given form. It moved with a muscularity that was entirely convincing, each contraction rippling through its length like a wave through cable.
This is what lives in her waters. This is what the keeper prays against.
The ship was being dragged sideways through the cove. Water surged over the port rail, cold and black. A tentacle tightened across the bow and the wood screamed. The Corsair had been silent until now. She was making up for lost time with a rumbling timbre.
And somewhere in the back of Wylan’s mind, beneath the fear, beneath the adrenaline, beneath the very reasonable desire to not be crushed to death by a sea creature, a thought snagged.
Why would an artificer’s beacon summon a living creature?
The beacon was still in his hand, still pulsing. He looked at it, then at the tentacle.
An artificer’s beacon operated on resonant frequencies. It sent a signal. A signal required a receiver. A receiver required engineering. A receiver required someone to have built it.
Krakens don’t have receivers.
“Wylan!” Divina’s voice, cutting through the chaos. She was staring at the nearest tentacle with professional fascination. “Stop panicking and look at it properly! Not like an adventurer. Like a scientist!”
He looked.
The tentacle was three metres from his face. Close enough to see the surface, and to see that the surface was wrong. Flesh rippled, yes, but the ripple was too even, too rhythmic. The contractions came at precise intervals, mechanical intervals, too regular for muscle. And there, where the tentacle curved around the hull, where the stress was greatest, he could see a seam.
A seam where two plates met. The plates were etched with fine patterns, hairline grooves that could have been mistaken for skin at a distance but up close were clearly machined. That’s not flesh! It was metal.
“Those aren’t organic,” Wylan said, quietly. “They’re mechanical.”
“What?” Lambert, blade still drawn, looked at him as though he had lost his mind.
“The tentacles. They’re artificial. Look at the seams. Look at the movement pattern.” Wylan pointed at the nearest joint. “That’s not a muscle contraction. That’s a piston cycle.”
The tentacles stopped.
All of them, simultaneously. The grip held but the pulling ceased, and the Black Corsair settled in the water, her dignity offended by the rough handling. The vibration beneath the deck changed pitch, deepened, and the sea began to move in a new way.
The water between the tentacles churned white. Something was rising. Something vast, displacing the sea in a great upwelling that lifted the Corsair on a swell and dropped it again. The tentacles peeled back from the hull, repositioning, opening like fingers uncurling from a fist.
And from beneath the surface, in a cascade of black water and streaming foam, the body of the thing emerged.
It was shaped like a kraken. The dome of it, the mantle, broke the surface first, shedding seawater in sheets. Immolator lamps blazed along its hull, burning bright and steady beneath the waterline, and for one terrible moment it looked alive, looked like the great ones the keeper had described, the vast bulk of what the sea had been hiding.
Then the water cleared and Wylan saw the rivets, the plates, the porthole set into the forward curve of the mantle, dark glass ringed with brass, and behind it, faintly, the steady amber glow of an artificer’s workshop.
In the next moment they were all struck by a brilliant light, blinding them alarmingly. A hatch opened on the upper surface of the mantle. Something climbed out of it, difficult to make out against the lights.
As Wylan’s vision adjusted painfully, he began to make out a figure: at first a silhouette, then a uniform, and finally a person.
He was old. Weathered with markers of a time well spent at sea, his face carved by salt and wind into stern determination. He stood on the hull of his machine and looked down at the Black Corsair like a man who had been waiting a very long time for someone to press the right button.
“Hold!” The voice carried across the water, deep and steady, accented with the rolling vowels of the Iberian coast. “Well, if I live and breathe. If it isn’t Madame Laila de Vaillant.”
Wylan looked at Laila. “You’re kidding.”
There was a pause. Laila’s grip on the mast held fast, as she looked decidedly ill. Her expression suggested she was going to need a moment with the fact that six years of searching had just resolved into an old man standing on a mechanical kraken.
“Well met, Captain Navarro,” she said.