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Eighteen

Embar Dea, released from the prison of sluices and cities, swam through warm seas and cold seas, scenting ice and occasionally, when a dark bloom fell across the surface of the water, rising to see the chilly secret of the North Star, which is sacred to some dragons and is said, on certain days, to speak. It is said, too, that it was from the stars that the dragons had come, making their way to the sanctuary of Cloud Kingdom, but Embar Dea did not know whether this was true or not. Whatever the case, the North Star did not speak to her, but remained in glittering silence at the height of the sky. Embar Dea saw it as a friend, nonetheless, and took inspiration from it before she once more dived, and sang.

There were other voices, but they were very faint and far away. Sometimes she could not be sure whether she was hearing them at all, or whether what she was hearing was the past, swimming back through her ancient memory, just as she herself swam through the waters of Earth, when the seas were alive with whales and dragons, singing to one another. She heard whalesong now, but much less than before, and it saddened her. But some of the voices—if they existed at all—were not whales, and Embar Dea headed toward them, hardly daring to hope. She swam up straits, aware of the bulk of land on either side, once quiet and harmonious earth but now humming with technology and a sour and bitter magic. The world had changed too much, while Embar Dea dreamed in Sulai-Ba. It was better when she swam into the Sea of Japan, veering away from the land and curving past Hokkaido and then out into the open ocean. She called on her own, half-forgotten, magic as she swam, willing invisibility and causing it to wrap itself around her, keeping her warm just as it kept her unseen. Shoals of fish accompanied her, bream and mackerel, the group minds of the shoals engaging her in slow and careful conversation about currents and tides. Embar Dea drew on knowledge that might no longer be applicable and shared what she could.

It was the fish that told her about the wreck.

They did not know where it had come from, but Embar Dea knew what it was as soon as it was mentioned. The ship had glided over the sea for a great distance before it had struck something—not an iceberg itself, but the ghost of one, lingering in the northern ocean since the end of the Great Ice—and the damage it had sustained had caused it to sink.

The ship was called the Veil of Day, and it had set sail from Heaven many years before, but had never reached its destination—which had been Hell—and Embar Dea did not know why. It carried a treasure which had never been found and Embar Dea was amazed that this was still the case, for surely someone must have searched for it. But then she reasoned that few things could come this far and this deep: not even Hellkind.

But water dragons can dive to the bottom of the deepest trench in the ocean without injury, for water dragons are the sea itself, made of sea-stuff, and cannot be harmed by it.

So Embar Dea thanked the fish, and let them lead her to where the wreck had last been seen. She was aware of urgency, of those distant voices calling, but the thought of the wreck, if it was indeed the Veil of Day, nagged and twitched at her and she was too old to ignore the promptings of instinct. North and north again, she followed the fish until they reached the limits of their territory and she watched them as they shot away, falling silver down the stairways of the sea, until she was once again alone in the middle of the ocean. She rose to the surface, waited till the sea lay on that time between night and day, and then just as the moon was rising and the tides of magic were at their height, she dived, arrowing down until the faint illumination from the dying day was gone and there was only the dark.

Embar Dea's lamplight eyes shone beams ahead of her. She saw nothing for a long time, only a few strange fish, but then a moonscape land rose up to greet her and she knew that she was close to the seabed. At this depth, it was empty, no weeds or shellfish. Nor was there any sign of a ship.

The dragon swam along the seabed, seeing only a glimpse of her own writhing shadow in the light cast by her eyes. She swam for a mile or more, becoming increasingly sure that the shoal had been wrong, that there was nothing here, only acres of rumpled sand—but then she saw a glint of white in the seabed, something very small. She angled down to rest and plucked it free with one clawed toe. She found herself holding a skull. It was not human, although the configurations were a little similar. But the eye sockets were too large, the skull longer. She knew what it had belonged to: a Celestial being, one of the creatures from deep inside Heaven, who had never been born into the world.

Creatures like this had crewed the Veil of Day. She wondered what had happened to the skull's spirit, whether it had returned to Heaven to take on a new form, or whether it had become trapped in this lattice of water and dark. She was not skilled enough to say, versed in magic though she was. She laid the skull gently back on the seabed and swam on with renewed hope. After no more than a few minutes, the hull rose up in front of her.

She had not realized that the Veil of Day had been so big. The wreck was massive, a galleon, with a great curving arch of hull encrusted in turn with ghosts: little ones of barnacles and shells, of things with teeth. When she reached out a claw, it went straight through them to touch the glimmering surface of the wood. The ship was surprisingly intact, but then, the wood of Heaven took a long time to rot.

Embar Dea gathered water around her, calling on ice and tide and flow, forming a shell of protection about her body. There were still things that sought to trap dragons and she did not want to take the risk. Then she swam up, following the arch of the hull, and came to a porthole. She looked through, into a cabin gleaming with phosphorescence. One of the crew still sat at a table, a skeleton holding a pen. There was no flesh left on it at all, it glowed white, and as Embar Dea stared, its head rolled as though a sudden current had eddied through the wreck, and it said, "You are a dragon, are you not?"

"I am a lung of the sea. My name is Embar Dea." She spoke unhesitatingly, though it was well known that it was not wise to tell one's name indiscriminately to anyone. But this had been a Celestial.

"I would give you my name," the skeleton said, "but I cannot remember it."

"I understand," Embar Dea said. "You have been dead for a very long time. Yet you are still here, are you not? You haven't been reborn?"

"We cannot. We are enspelled around this wreck. We could not leave the ship in life, you see, not until it reached its destination and we had discharged our duty, but we did not get so far."

"And so you cannot leave at all," Embar Dea said. A great surge of pity rose in her; even she, a sea dragon, was not entirely happy so far down and in such darkness: How then must these Celestial spirits, used to light and air, feel? "I would like to help."

"You can help," the skeleton said. It leaned forward, its narrow jaws creaking. "You can take our cargo. If you promise me that you can deliver it—"

"Where is it supposed to go? To Hell?"

"To the Savior of the World," the skeleton said. "Once, that person was in Hell, but now it is likely that matters are different."

"I don't know who that might be," Embar Dea said, taken aback. "I don't even know if there is such a person these days."

"If there was not," the skeleton said, with a logic that caused that twinge of instinct once again, "I don't think you would be here."

Embar Dea had lived long enough to know when circumstances were pushing her in a certain direction. "Very well," she said. "I accept."

Something flowed outward from the being, a pale, watery mist that took on sketchy features of the creature that the Celestial had once been. "Do you swear to me?"

"I swear," Embar Dea said, after only a brief pause. And the wreck of the Veil of Day flew apart.

Embar Dea, still wrapped in her magical protection, was safe from the shards and splinters of wood as they foamed through the water, but she could see little through the boiling roar of sea. Then, through the bubbles and froth, she saw a skein of brightness, a web of light that spiraled up into a twist of gold and rose and azure, and she knew it for the spirits of the crew, returning to Heaven at last. She felt them pick her up and carry her with them, as lightly as if she had been a small and empty shell, but the speed with which they rose sucked her remaining breath out of her. She lay gasping, floating on the surface of the sea, with a calm crescent moon above her. The spirits of the crew flashed upward and were gone. In one clawed fist, she found that she was holding an object both round and smooth. When she looked, she saw that it was a pearl.

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Framed