Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 549 of 619

Two days later, Ajax rowed out from the falls in the coastal boat. Rowan sat in the bow reading the shore. Chalam knelt amidships with his bone staff. Aldric hunched over a wet sheet, charting each rock they passed. The bay fell behind them. Ahead lay water no one had walked. By midday the sea turned wrong. The swells stopped moving with the wind. Rowan raised a hand. "Water's shallow here. It shouldn't be. Not this far out." Chalam lowered the staff toward the surface. He said nothing for a long moment. Then he sat back, and his face was flat. "There's stone under us. A reef. Wide as the harbor. It runs from that cliff line into open water." He looked at Ajax. "I can feel it. I can't read the gaps. Where a boat passes and where it breaks, that's the same to me. I have no gift for water." Ajax gripped the rail. The scout had answered its first question. The island was real. Its cliffs stood pale on the horizon, close enough now to count. But the reef sat between them and the shore like a wall no eye could see. One hidden tooth of rock would open the hull. Four men would drown in water no ring could reach. "Then we don't guess," Ajax said. "We turn back before the swell gets worse. A drowned scout tells us nothing." Aldric set down his pen. "We turn back with what we have. The route to the reef is charted. That's real ground gained." He tapped the sheet. "But the Seraphine can't cross what I can't draw. And I can't draw a gap I never found. We need a man who reads shoal water. We have none." Rowan pulled the mast down and worked the oars. The boat came about. The cliffs shrank behind them. By dusk they touched the falls again, dry and whole, and Ajax knew the scout had ended in a hard fact. Back at the harbor hall, he laid it out for the council. Tucker leaned on the bar, a chain catching the lamplight. He listened until Ajax finished, then set down his cup. "So the island's there and you can't reach it," Tucker said. "You don't need a wizard for that water. You need a shoalman. Someone who's spent his whole life reading reef by the color of the sea." He shrugged. "Harbors up north are full of them. Pilots. They hire out to guide hulls through bad channels. Costs coin. Costs an oath." Chalam nodded once. "He's right. My staff finds stone. It doesn't find the way through. A pilot does that with his eyes." Ajax weighed it. The reef had beaten the scout, but it had named the fix. He would not sail the Seraphine into that water blind. He needed a man who could. "Then we hire a pilot," Ajax said. "Marcus knows the northern harbors. He finds one, we bind him, and we cross that reef with sight, not luck." The scout had failed at the water. But it had turned that failure into the next road. The island still waited, and now Ajax knew the shape of the door.