POV: tress
Summary
The line of rainfall on the horizon turns and comes for the Crow's Song in a way that, to Tress up on deck, looks deliberate. The narrator pauses to remark on how universal that perception is — sailors across his travels invariably ascribe volition to weather, and the rain on Tress's world is not Invested and not self-aware, but you would not have known that from how it is behaving today. The joy of her Sorceress map discovery curdles in her mouth. It could end right here, she thinks numbly, all the planning and preparation simply pulped on a hundred different spikes and pulled under, and she would be unable to do anything about it. She wants the rain to be deliberate, the narrator adds, because she does not want to die at random.
Salay does not particularly care, the narrator says drily, whether her death is deliberate or random — only that it be a long time coming. Up on the quarterdeck she snaps orders, and the Dougs obey. Three of them rush the wheel and heave alongside her, bending the ship's mass to her will. Even Captain Crow, the narrator notes, ends up hauling on a dropped rope and doing what Salay tells her — a sailing ship is not a vehicle that turns just because you want it to, and on the spore seas the helm is not the secondary post it is on his world. She cuts the Song sharply right, skirting the wall of falling crimson aether so close a few of its spears scrape the hull.
Then she calls for the sailors to steady and slow, for a reason Tress does not at first understand — until she sees the great snarls of red spikes beginning to sink, the aethers devoured back down into the spores. The eruption-and-retreat sets the sea quaking. Spore seas do not normally carry waves, the narrator tells the reader; when they do, the waves are extremely dangerous. The Song shakes hard enough to make Tress sick to her stomach. Panicking at the thought of what vomiting onto a spore-strewn deck would do, she finds a bucket — her first job on the ship turning out, to her credit, to be of unexpected use.
Through all of it Salay keeps shouting orders. She moves the Song against the waves where she has to, and rides with them where she can. In those moments, the narrator says, she is playing the ship like a musical instrument and steering them all to safety. But on the last beat, a final swell breaks over the side and slops spores across the deck. The silver in the wood is overwhelmed for a few seconds. There is a burst of red spikes near the foot of the steps to the quarterdeck. In a blink one of the Dougs — Pakson — is nailed to the wood, dying as fast as anyone the narrator has ever seen die. The other Dougs remember their training and scramble for emergency towels to sop up his blood before any of it can run off the side: blood in the Verdant would immobilise the ship; on the Crimson it would shred them. The hulls of spore-sea ships are pitched and sealed against exactly this kind of leak. The silver catches up, the live spores go grey under foot, and the survivors grind them into the deck as they work.
Then the ship grinds to a halt. The stilling has arrived.
The narrator admits, with some discomfort, that even knowing the rain is not Invested he was not certain in the moment — knowing, he says, is not the same as believing. The two dozen people on deck turn as one to watch the rainline swing back and bear down on the becalmed ship again, a wall of water leading a wall of red aethers three ships wide. Salay cannot help them now; nothing moves during the stilling. They wait. The line of water misses by a few hundred yards. What had looked, in their horrified eyes, like a deliberate attempt to kill them turns out to have been chance. The rainline dances away into the distance and vanishes, leaving behind a tall persistent wall of red thorns that will only sink when the seethe returns.
Capricious god? Random chance? The narrator declines to choose for the reader, then declines on his own behalf in the other direction, and closes the chapter by saying he knows perfectly well what he himself believed that day.