The featureless eye above watched the critters below. Sartore thought he was getting special attention. He and Maisero shoved and doged between the other legs moving in the street. He could feel the skin on the back of his neck tanning into a strip of leather. A few steps ahead, he saw Maisero hunkered down with a hand kept above his brow as they went.

Maisero’s heart was ringing in his head. Every glance from the other street-dwellers caused him to hunch forward a little further. The children running between his feet and bumping into him didn’t help things. He couldn’t stand their laughter, and especially not their unearned tears. Maisero turned for a moment, saw Sartore disappear in a stream of equally-sized hooligans, then reappear when they had left. Maisero beckoned him to move faster, and they did.

As Maisero shoved past a few more people, freeing himself from the crowd behind him, the docks appeared suddenly at his feet. He stood at the tail end of the wooden ramp that turned and bent to the waters. The ocean seemed to have no end, neither past the horizon nor in the deep below its surface.

The water will devour you if you near it.

Maisero recoiled from a tug at his sleeve. Sartore stood beside him, watching him. Now it was Sartore’s turn to beckon forth; but Maisero did nothing. Sartore went on ahead, running down the ramp and heading downwards. Maisero caught the child scanning the bottom of the docks, as though searching for something.

Maisero had never learned to swim. His last real contact with the ocean had been as a child, dipping his toes into the waves at the shore. Swimmers and sailors were blind, Maisero thought, to the fiends that dwelled below them, waiting for the end of a man’s breath or the listing of a ship in the wind to bring the trespasser into the darkest shade below.

As Sartore rounded the corner of the ramp and fell out of sight, Maisero followed.

When he rounded it himself, Maisero saw Sartore standing at the ramp’s conclusion, a flat wooden platform a few inches above water, admiring the massive sails that had landed here. Again, Maisero hesitated; he imagined approaching the child, only for a liquid tentacle to wrap around his ankle and drag him down.

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“Move it or I’ll throw you in,” a voice growled from behind him. Maisero didn’t waste a second in sprinting down the docks. His vision had gone gray and red, and he could see his heartbeat, especially as he looked down at his feet to see the shifting image of his reflection over the diluted blue. But his eyes returned to the ramp, where a short handful of loud knocks against the wood ended a few more feet from him.

“And what’re you doing here, Misery?”

Faori had a pipe gripped firmly in his scowl.

“Faori, hello,” Maisero said, offering his hand. When Faori pulled out his own, caked with wet soil and discolored nails, Maisero his his hand in his shadow. Faori grunted.

“Well?”

“Well, Faori, I was wondering if I could provide—this child beside me would like to sail down to Pallasi, and I would like to provide it.”

“The rat?”

Maisero raised an eyebrow and turned back. Sartore’s eyes had grown wide with recognition, and had slowly shuffled to Maisero’s back.

“What rat?” Maisero asked.

Faori laughed. “The kid was running around the docks yesterday morning, making a lot of noise. Right, kid?”

Sartore was completely obscured behind Maisero now.

“Sure, I can give him a ticket. You want to go to, Maisero? Go for your first sail?” Faori couldn’t finish the sentence with laughing, a sound like the wrinkling of a sheet of paper.

No.

“Yes.”

Faori stopped. He examined Maisero closely, stepping closer to than Maisero would’ve preferred, but found the answer truthful.

“You sure about that? Mind my words, but you were never much for sailing.”

“I think I’ll take this journey. Just the one.”

Faori raised his hands and dropped them back to his sides. “Whatever you say. Follow me. Head up kid, stop running around like a rat.”