VESKA SILMARA's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

Veska bound the spider silk to the deep-water rod and returned to the lake at dusk. The water lay flat and black. He had fished these channels by day for cycles, but never at night. In daylight he read the line by sight. He watched the thread for the twitch that meant a strike. Now the dark swallowed the line whole. He cast the blade-lure into the deep and lost sight of it at once. If the fis took the bait, he would never see it in time. He had one strike, and no way to know when it came. He waited. The line hung slack in the dark. Twice something brushed the lure, and both times he pulled too late. He felt the tug only after it was gone. His hands could not do the work his eyes once did. A net splashed further along the shore. Veska turned. Velar Tidemark stood in the shallows, casting for silkfin, his old fishing pole leaning against a Frost Bark Tree. Veska knew him from the shared waters. Velar spoke little and missed nothing. "You cast blind," Velar said. He did not look up from his net. "I can't see the line strike," Veska said. "By the time I feel it, the fish is gone." Velar drew his net in slow. "Watch your bait, not your line." He nodded at the water near Veska's hooks. A cluster of glowflies drifted low over the surface. Their blue light pulsed steady. "They gather where the fish rise. When they scatter, something moved under them." Veska studied the glowflies. They hovered in a loose ring above his sunken lure. He had ignored them all his life. Now he watched them the way he once watched his thread. He crushed a glowfly against the rod's blade-scales. Its light smeared bright along the lure's edge. He cast again. The glowing lure sank, and he tracked it down through the black water by its own faint blue. He fixed his eyes on the glow. The glowflies above it drifted, calm, then broke apart all at once. The light beneath the water jerked sideways. Veska struck. He hauled back on the deep-water rod with all his weight. The silk line went taut and held. Something huge fought below. It pulled him two steps into the shallows. The frostpine shaft bent but did not break. The spider silk cut his palm and did not give. He fought it to the shore. A massive fish broke the surface, its armored scales lit like scattered stars. It thrashed once on the mud, then lay still. Not the legendary fis. But large, and real, and landed. Velar looked at it. "That one's been feeding wrong," he said. He pointed at its belly, streaked gray, the same gray as the dead caps west of the water. "The sickness is in the fish now."