Halciday, 24th of Frostember, 1788

  Isabella weighed nothing.

  Lambert carried her up through the hatch and down the corridor without adjusting his grip, and Laila, who had carried all four of her children at one time or another, knew what that meant. A sleeping body settles. It shifts, accommodates, finds a comfortable distribution of its own weight. Isabella did none of these things. She hung in Lambert’s arms the way a coat hangs on a hook: present, empty, waiting for someone to come back and fill it.

  The Nautilus received them without ceremony. The hatch sealed, the ocean resumed its patient pressure against the hull, and the processed air wrapped around them in its faintly apologetic way. Laila’s boots found the deck plates and she stood for a moment in the corridor lighting, letting the transition happen. Salt water to recycled air. Fathoms to metal walls. The unbearable openness of the deep ocean to the unbearable smallness of a submarine.

  Behind her, Wylan and Divina hauled Augustine’s unconscious weight through the hatch. The vampire was heavier than he looked. Most dangerous things are. Laila was already moving.

  “The bunk room,” she said. “My bunk.”

  Lambert carried Isabella without comment. He had to stoop through two bulkhead frames and struck his shoulder on the third, and the sound rang through the corridor, and he did not slow down. Laila led him through the hatch and pulled the blanket back from the lower bunk she had slept in the night before. Her pillow was still dented. She smoothed the sheet once, quickly, and stepped aside.

  He laid Isabella down. Gentle, precise, the way he handled sacramental objects. Her head settled against the pillow and her kelp-green hair spread across it in damp threads. Her eyes were closed. Her breathing was shallow and even, metronomic, each breath arriving at exactly the interval the last one had established.

  Lambert straightened. His hands were shaking. A fine tremor, barely visible, but Laila had watched those hands hold a prayer book steady through cathedral services and grip a chalice without trembling in rooms where trembling was the only reasonable response. The shake was new.

  “The healing,” she said. Not a question.

  “He answered.” Lambert looked at his palms. “Quieter than He should have. But He answered.”

  “Go and rest,” she said.

  “Madame—”

  “Rest, Lambert. I’ll sit with her.”

  He hesitated at the hatch. She saw him glance at Isabella, then at his own hands, then at nothing. He ducked through the frame without hitting it this time and his footsteps retreated down the corridor towards wherever solitude lived on a submarine.

  The bunk room was quiet. The engine hummed beneath the deck plates, steady and impersonal. Isabella breathed.

  Laila sat on the edge of the bunk and looked at her daughter.

  The jumpsuit was still damp. Orange cotton, creased and faded from washing, fitted for a body that had been wearing it long enough for the fabric to learn its shape. The delicate fins at Isabella’s ears lay pressed flat against her skull, the way they had since childhood, the habit Laila recognised because it mirrored her own. Ears flat. Guard up. Even unconscious, the body remembered.

  She touched Isabella’s forehead. The skin beneath was cool. Not cold. Cool, the temperature of someone who had been underwater for a long time and had not yet returned.

  I’m here, darling. We got you out.

  The breathing did not change.

  Laila opened the pouch at her belt and found the cerulean pigment by touch. She rubbed it between her fingertips, warming the powder until the colour bled into her skin. Blue as deep water, blue as the threads she had woven between minds for decades.

  She placed her hand on Isabella’s temple and closed her eyes.

  The cerulean found water. Dark, vast, and featureless. An ocean with no surface and no floor, pressing inward from every direction. Laila reached further and the water pressed back, patient, enormous, indifferent the way gravity is indifferent. This was not an emotion. It was a condition. Isabella’s entire inner landscape had been submerged beneath something that did not care whether anyone was looking for her.

  She pushed deeper. The water thickened. Sound arrived: a low, continuous roar, like holding a shell to one’s ear and discovering the shell goes all the way down. It was the sound she had caught through the dome, when she first reached for Isabella in the prison. The same conch-shell vastness, but closer now. Louder. The roar of something too large to perceive as sound, felt instead as pressure against the walls of her own mind.

  Isabella. She shaped the name and sent it into the dark.

  Nothing answered. The water held.

  Isabella, it’s Maman. I’m here.

  The dark swallowed the words the way the ocean swallows stones. Laila felt the pull of it, the downward draw, the invitation to keep reaching, keep searching, follow the current deeper until she found the bottom or the bottom found her.

  She broke the connection.

  The bunk room reassembled around her, with its metal walls and processed air. Her hand was still on Isabella’s temple. The cerulean pigment had transferred, a faint blue smear across pale skin, and for a terrible moment it looked like a bruise.

  She wiped it away with her thumb. Isabella’s breathing had not changed. Mechanical, sustained, and empty.

  She’s alive. She’s stable. She’s breathing.

  She’s not here.

  Laila smoothed her skirts. She adjusted the blanket around Isabella’s shoulders, tucking it the way she had tucked blankets for eighteen years, and her hands did not shake because she would not allow them to.

  The submarine was small enough that four people could not avoid each other’s sounds. Lambert’s footsteps had settled somewhere aft. Divina’s voice carried faintly from the direction of the workshop, conferring with Vera about something mechanical. And beneath that, a second set of footsteps, lighter, moving forward. Past the bunk room. Past the mess. Towards the compartment where they were keeping Augustine.

  Her hand found Isabella’s. Cool, unresponsive. She held it anyway.

  The compartment Navarro had designated for Augustine was a stores locker with ambitions above its station. Shelving bolted to three walls. A narrow cot that folded down from the fourth. The phlogiston lamp in the ceiling had been turned to its lowest setting. It was a lantern running out of opinions.

  ? Naval tradition held that anything brought aboard without the captain’s explicit permission was cargo until proven otherwise. Augustine would normally have qualified on both counts, but expediency set this aside.

  Augustine was still unconscious. He’d been secured to the cot with heavy cord and whaler’s knots at each wrist and ankle, designed to hold something that thrashed. His coat had been removed. Underneath, a white shirt, damp from the transformation, pulled tight across his shoulders where the cord held him.

  Wylan checked the knots. Tugged each wrist once. Satisfied.

  The blond hair was darker wet. It fell across Augustine’s forehead in uncooperative strands, stripped of the arrangement the court candlelight usually gave it. Without the coat, without the composure, without the architecture of charm, he looked younger. He looked like someone who slept.

  Wylan opened his satchel and found the smelling salts by touch. He’d added three drops of his own blood to the compound before corking it. You’re not the only one who can command sleep, Mother.

  He uncorked the salts and held them beneath Augustine’s nose.

  The reaction was immediate. Augustine’s head snapped sideways, his breathing lurching from nothing into a ragged gasp. His nostrils flared. Something crossed his face that had nothing to do with the salts: raw, involuntary, hungry. It was gone before Wylan could catalogue it. His eyes opened.

  They found the ceiling. The shelving. The cord at his wrists. Then Wylan, standing over him.

  For a moment, nothing. The eyes were dark and unfocused. The performance Wylan had catalogued across three encounters in Seraphina’s court was absent. This was the face underneath.

  Then the face caught up with itself. The focus sharpened. His mouth closed. Augustine pulled once against the cord, tested it, and stopped. The composure that followed was built on top of something. Wylan could see the seams.

  “Wylan de Vaillant.” His voice was hoarse. It cleared itself and tried again. “This is not Pharelle.”

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “No,” Wylan said. “It’s a submarine. You’re aboard the Nautilus.”

  Augustine absorbed this. His eyes moved across the store’s locker. “And the restraints?”

  “Captain’s policy. Dangerous cargo.”

  “Flattering.” Augustine shifted on the cot. The charm was reassembling: the posture adjusting, the chin lifting, the voice finding its register. “How long?”

  “A few hours. You were in shark form when we caught you. Lambert prayed and you went to sleep.”

  “Ah.” A pause. “Your brother’s god is persuasive.”

  “Stepbrother. And yes.”

  Augustine’s gaze found Wylan and held, properly, for the first time. “You came alone.”

  “I didn’t need company.”

  “And yet here you are. Not on the bridge with the captain, not debriefing with your family. Standing in a store’s locker with a restrained vampire.” The corners of his mouth moved. The smile was finding its way back, but it hadn’t fully arrived. “Should I be concerned or flattered?”

  “You can be both. Most people manage it.”

  Augustine’s pupils were wide. Too wide. In this light, a human’s would have contracted. His had gone the other direction, blown dark and hungry, the irises reduced to pale rings. Wylan catalogued it the way he catalogued any reaction: pupil dilation, elevated pulse visible in the throat, perspiration at the temple despite the stores locker’s chill.

  “When did you last feed?” Wylan said.

  Augustine’s composure flickered. “That’s a personal question.”

  “It’s a medical one. You were in shark form. I doubt you were feeding on anything useful to a vampire. How long?”

  Augustine smiled. It was not the smile that had been rebuilding itself since he woke. It was slower, and it showed his teeth, and his teeth had changed. The canines had lengthened, sliding into place. A mechanism designed for one purpose. He held the smile long enough for Wylan to observe the full extension.

  “Long enough,” he said.

  Wylan opened his satchel. The vials were arranged by shape. He could identify each by touch, and did, his fingers passing over the iron tonic, the lead draught, the tin infusion, until they found the one that was warm. It was always warm.

  He drew the vial out and held it between his fingers.

  Augustine did not react. That was how Wylan knew he’d been waiting for it. The pupils, the sweat, the fangs, the composure rebuilt against something that had been pulling at him since he opened his eyes. The golden blood had been in the satchel the entire time. Augustine had known.

  “You brought that,” Augustine said. His voice had lost its music.

  “I packed it before we left Pharelle.”

  “For me.”

  Wylan turned the vial in his fingers. The golden liquid caught the phlogiston light and threw it back richer. “I’m an Alchemist. I pack for contingencies.”

  “I am not a contingency.” Augustine’s eyes had not left the vial. “And that is an invitation. Or a provocation. I’ll let you pick.”

  The engine hummed beneath the deck plates. Wylan said nothing.

  “I need to understand something first,” he said. “You appeared right outside Undertow Keep, after we managed to escape on a highly secretive operation. You clearly weren’t part of the garrison. So that leaves me with the question:” He held the vial still. “Where did you come from?”

  Augustine bit his lip. Just enough that a welt of blood rose on the curve of it. Even in the dim light Wylan could make out the intensity of scarlet colouring his mouth.

  “I couldn’t say.”

  Wylan reached behind him. The stores locker’s shelving ran on a rail system, and the rail system connected to a pulley, and the pulley connected to the cord securing Augustine’s ankles to the cot frame. He had checked the knots when he came in. He had also checked the rigging.

  ? There exists no formal protocol for the interrogation of vampires. Unfortunately, most experiments on the matter ultimately defaulted to who drew blood first.

  He pulled the rope.

  Through simple mechanical leverage, Augustine was summarily hoisted from the cot and inverted. He hung from the ankle cord, swinging slightly, his shirt falling towards his chin and his blond hair pointing at the deck plates. His face began to darken.

  “Interesting,” Wylan said. “Blood can rush to your head.”

  “It’s not the only place it’s rushing to.”

  Wylan felt his face suddenly match Augustine’s. He shook his head and steeled himself. This isn’t getting me anywhere.

  He popped the cork on the vial.

  The pretence vanished from Augustine’s face. What replaced it was hunger, plain and unconcealed.

  “If you answer me, I’ll give you a taste. Where did you come from?”

  “The Black Trench,” Augustine said immediately. Dignity abandoned. “Or rather, heading towards it.”

  Wylan was hoping he was composing his features, because that was not the answer he’d expected.

  “With whom?”

  “Callion. And Lampetia.”

  Wylan kept his hands steady. “And what are you doing down here with Lampetia?”

  “Callion and I are the only ones who can navigate deepwater.” Augustine’s hands closed and opened against the cord at his wrists. “Lampetia required both of us.”

  “Required you for what?”

  “To reach the Trench. I was not invited to understand the specifics.”

  “So what, the Undertow Keep was a delightful stop along the way? Some sightseeing on the bottom of the ocean floor?”

  Augustine stopped swinging and gave Wylan a pointed look.

  “Maybe I’ll tell you a secret,” Augustine said, “if you give me a kiss.”

  The stores locker was very quiet.

  Wylan did not have a response. He could feel his pulse beating hard in the silence, and he knew that Augustine was aware of it. There in the low light.

  “I’ll settle for a dash of that blood,” Augustine said.

  “I’ll give you both for a really good one.”

  Wylan looked at the vial in his hand. He’d forgotten he was holding it for a moment.

  Wylan tipped the vial to Augustine’s mouth, carefully. He swallowed once, twice, and thrice with his eyes half-closed. The hunger left his face in stages. Augustine’s eyes opened and found Wylan’s from above. Sated. But another hunger remained.

  The vial was empty. Nothing between Augustine’s lips and his own. Wylan leaned forward.

  He had intended for the kiss to be brief. He had intended for the kiss to be gentle. In a moment he found himself deeply entangled, reckoning with a kind of chemistry he was not prepared for. Some part of him was trying to catalogue the phenomena at a distance, but for once he dismissed it. There was him, there was Augustine, and a metallic taste.

  Augustine pulled back, because Wylan didn’t know when that should be.

  The stores locker was the same size it had been thirty seconds ago. It did not feel like it.

  Wylan wiped the moisture from his lips and looked down at the red stain on his cuff.

  Augustine’s composure hadn’t changed. Some part of Wylan was fuming at that.

  He found his voice. It took longer than it should have. “You still haven’t told me what Lampetia wants down here,” he said.

  Augustine swung gently.

  Wylan pushed him. He swung harder.

  “That’s not answering my question. And you promised.”

  Augustine sighed, which was an interesting thing to watch upside down. “Honestly, I don’t truly know. All I know is that we’re here about some kind of egg, though don’t ask me why. Seems stupid if you asked me.”

  They know about the egg.

  Wylan calibrated to his surroundings. He corked the vial. He returned it to the satchel. He had just barely enough self-control to close the hatch calmly, despite his racing heartbeat, holding a choice curse word from escaping.

  The hatch opened hard enough to ring against the bulkhead. Wylan stood in the frame, breathing fast. His face was flushed and his satchel was clutched against his chest, and his eyes were not on Isabella.

  “We need to get to the bridge,” he said.

  “What happened?”

  “Augustine told me something. I need to talk to Navarro.”

  Laila looked at her son. The flush. The breathing. The satchel held too tight.

  She turned back to the bunk. Isabella’s hand was where she had left it, open on the blanket. Laila folded her daughter’s fingers closed, kissed her forehead, and stood.

  Wylan was already moving. Laila caught his arm in the corridor.

  “What did he tell you?”

  “Lampetia knows about the egg. She’s heading for it.”

  She let go of his arm. They walked.

  The projection dome wrapped the bridge in deep water. It gave the impression of standing at the bottom of the sea with nothing between them and it.

  Navarro stood at the helm console. Lambert was already there; hands folded behind his back. Both looked up when Wylan came through the hatch.

  “Captain, I’ve spoken to Augustine,” Wylan said. “He was part of a two-person escort detail accompanying a vampire called Lampetia towards the Black Trench. The other escort is a turned siren named Callion. Augustine says they’re down here for the egg.”

  The bridge went very still. Navarro’s hands flattened on the console.

  “He used that word?”

  “He didn’t seem to understand the significance. But I bet Lampetia does, and she and Callion are still out there.” Wylan looked at the dome. “Can we find them?”

  “Two vampires in the deep ocean,” Navarro said. “The dome shows what’s outside the hull. It doesn’t search.”

  “Allow me.” Laila stepped forward. She took Wylan’s wrist and turned it. The red stain on his cuff was still damp. Wylan went rigid. Laila did not look at his face. She pressed her handkerchief to the stain, lifted it away, and opened her pouch.

  Viridian. She rubbed the powder into the handkerchief where the blood had transferred. However that got there. She pressed the stained cloth to the dome’s surface and reached.

  The dome responded. Its panorama narrowed, pulled, hunted through dark water. Viridian was good at finding things. Blood was better. And vampiric blood called to its own.

  Two figures.

  The first swam like he belonged. Webbed hands trailing, body rolling with the current, utterly at ease. A siren, even turned, never lost the water.

  The second was not swimming. Lampetia drove herself forward and the ocean got out of her way. White hair streaming, limbs churning, the mechanical fury of something that did not breathe, did not tire, and did not intend to stop. She moves like she owns this. Laila watched her barrel through the deep and understood, with professional clarity, that they had been living in this woman’s territory the entire time.

  “Lampetia,” Lambert said. His voice had gone flat.

  Navarro looked at him, then at Laila. “How much do you know about this vampire?”

  Laila met his eyes. “More than we’d like.”

  “That is not an answer, Madame la Duchesse.”

  “It’s what I have, Captain.”

  “Madame la Duchesse.” Navarro’s voice changed register. The politeness burned off like morning frost. “You might be the second most important person in Pharelle, but you are standing on my ship. I currently outrank you. You will explain to me what I need to know. Now.”

  Nobody spoke. Lambert glanced at Laila. She gave a fractional nod.

  “Lampetia is connected to R?zvan,” Lambert said.

  Navarro went still. “R?zvan ?epe?. Valère’s opponent.”

  “Yes Captain, he’s alive, or at least undead: he’s a vampire. And Lampetia appears to be working towards elevating him to something beyond what he already is.”

  “Divine,” Navarro said. “You’re telling me a vampire wants to become a god.”

  “The egg is part of it,” Wylan said. He’d been watching the dome, but he turned now. “I found references in a scroll in Pharelle. Draconic essence as a ritual catalyst. The specifics are complicated, but the short version is: they need something with that kind of residual power, and a dragon egg is exactly that.”

  Navarro’s jaw worked. “How long have you known this?”

  “Pieces of it. For weeks.” Lambert stepped forward. “Captain, these waters are familiar to Lampetia. We found a temple dedicated to her in Fairhaven. She has an affinity with the deep ocean that we didn’t—”

  “A temple,” Navarro said. “In Fairhaven.”

  “We didn’t know,” Lambert said. “None of this was clear until we arrived.”

  Navarro closed his eyes. When he opened them, the expression was bleak. “Of all the places in an unlimited ocean. We stationed ourselves in the one place she considers home.”

  “We also didn’t know she was your mother until recently either,” Wylan said. “She’s full of surprises.”

  Navarro’s head turned. “Your mother?”

  Lambert’s hand found his prayer beads. “Only by blood.”

  Navarro looked between them, then visibly chose not to pursue it. “How did they find out about the egg?”

  “I’m sorry,” Wylan said. “I didn’t think to ask our...” He paused. “Our prisoner. I came with the most immediate information.”

  Navarro placed both hands flat on the helm console. He looked at the dome, where Lampetia’s white figure tore through the water and Callion glided in her wake.

  “Madame la Duchesse,” he said. “I’m sad to say you’re about to get your wish. We are heading to the Black Trench to extract the egg.”

  Somewhere behind them, the engine’s pitch changed. The Nautilus turned.