Hunted On Black Tides

Kellan glanced over his shoulder. Sella stood beneath the dripping awning, one hand gripping the chart board. The map was spread across it, its inked lines trembling with the ship’s movement.

“Then steer west,” he said.

“I am steering west.”

The channel ahead bent east.

Kellan stared through the rain. The cliffs leaned inward there, their black faces slick and shining. A broken mast jutted from the water at the bend, though no wreck had marked that place on any chart he had ever seen.

“Give me the board.”

Sella crossed the deck and shoved the chart into his hands. The parchment was old, patched at the corners, and marked with the coast’s known hazards: shoals, reefs, reefs beneath shoals, and the dead waters where ships vanished without leaving splinters.

The line for the channel ran cleanly west.

Kellan looked at the sea. The current pulled east.

“Who drew this?” he asked.

“Master Venn copied it from the harbor chart at Blackwake.”

“Venn’s been dead three years.”

Sella’s mouth tightened. “The chart hasn’t.”

A wave struck the hull. The ship lurched. Somewhere below, a barrel broke loose and slammed from side to side.

Kellan pressed a finger to the parchment. The ink along the channel’s edge looked blurred, as if rain had touched it. But the rain had not reached beneath the awning. He rubbed the mark with his thumb.

The line moved.

Not smeared. Moved.

A thin black thread crawled across the parchment, sliding against the grain of the paper. It left a wet trail behind it. The channel bent beneath Kellan’s hand, its new course curling east toward the black water.

Sella saw it too.

“Captain,” she whispered.

“Keep the crew at their stations.”

“What is that?”

“Something that wants us looking overboard.”

The ship groaned. From below came a deep knock, not wood against rock, but something heavy striking the keel.

Once.

Twice.

On the third blow, the lanterns in the rigging went out.

A murmur passed through the crew. Men crossed themselves. Someone began praying to a saint Kellan had never heard of.

“Silence!” he shouted. “Hands to the lines!”

The wind answered with a shriek. Rain swept across the deck in hard silver cords. Kellan could barely see the bow, but he heard Jory yelling from forward.

“Reef ahead!”

“Hard to port!” Kellan ordered.

The helmsman hauled the wheel. The Sea Wraith answered sluggishly. Water surged around the hull, lifting the ship and setting it down sideways. A jagged tooth of stone ripped through the surface to starboard. The Wraith scraped past it with a scream of timber.

A rope snapped above them.

The loose end whipped across the deck and struck a sailor in the shoulder, knocking him flat. Sella ran toward him, but Kellan caught her arm.

“Leave him. We lose steerage, we lose everyone.”

“He’s trapped!”

Another wave broke over the rail. The sailor vanished beneath it. When the water drained away, only one hand remained hooked around a cleat.

Sella tore free and dragged him clear.

Kellan forced his eyes back to the channel. The black water was closer now, spreading across the passage in slow folds. It did not move with the storm. The rain struck it and disappeared without a splash.

“Captain,” Jory shouted. “There’s no channel!”

Kellan saw what he meant. The western passage had narrowed to a slit between the cliffs, packed with white water and broken stone. The eastern bend opened wider, though it led toward the black tide.

The chart in his hands shivered.

A new mark appeared.

Three short strokes, shaped like a hooked claw, formed beside the eastern route.

Sella came to his side, blood running from her brow. “We can’t take the west passage.”

“We can’t take the east.”

“Then choose which way kills us.”

Kellan looked at the men on deck. Their faces were pale beneath the storm. They had followed him through cannon fire and fever ports because he had always known where to put the ship. A captain who lied about the sea did not keep a crew for long.

The chart was changing under his hands.

If he told them, fear would do what the storm had not. It would break the deck into factions. Some would demand the west passage. Others would put him ashore at the first rock and call it mercy.

He folded the chart.

“East,” he said.

Sella stared at him. “Captain - ”

“East!”

The order cracked across the deck.

Men moved. The surviving lanterns were relit. Sailors hauled on the braces, and the Sea Wraith swung toward the black water.

Kellan kept one hand on the wheel and the other on the folded chart. Beneath his palm, something tapped from inside the parchment.

The ship entered the dark tide.

Cold burst through the hull.

Not seawater’s cold. This was deeper, a dead pressure that seemed to pass through the planks and settle in Kellan’s bones. The storm noise dulled. Wind still tore at the sails, but beyond the rails the sea had gone strangely quiet.

No waves broke there.

The Wraith slid forward as if pulled.

“Drop the anchor!” Kellan shouted.

The anchor crew stared at him.

“Now!”

The iron hook plunged overboard. Chain roared through the hawsehole, then stopped with a jolt that threw two men against the rail.

For one breath, the ship held.

Then the chain began to rise.

Not drag. Rise.

Link by link, the anchor came back out of the water, dripping black threads that writhed across the deck. The iron hook swung free, clean of mud and stone.

Around the ship, the surface lifted.

A broad swell formed beneath the keel, though no wind touched it. The water rose in a slow circle, climbing the hull until the Sea Wraith seemed to sit inside the hollow of a vast eye.

Kellan heard a sound beneath the ship.

A call.

It was low and distant, like a horn blown through a flooded cave. The note traveled through the deckboards into his feet.

Several sailors froze.

“Did you hear that?” Jory asked.

“Keep working,” Kellan said.

“What was it?”

“Keep working!”

The sound came again, closer this time.

The black water bulged beside the port rail. Something moved below it, long enough to pass beneath the ship from bow to stern. The hull lifted over its back.

A row of pale marks showed beneath the surface.

Not scales.

Letters.

Kellan gripped the wheel as the Sea Wraith rolled. The marks vanished, but the water remained raised behind them, following the ship’s wake against the current.

Sella came beside him. “It’s following us.”

Kellan unfolded the chart.

The ink had spread across the parchment. The old channel lines were gone. In their place lay a rough drawing of a wreck, half-submerged beneath a hooked cliff. A black line ran from the wreck to the mark at the channel’s edge.

At the bottom, where the map had once named Widow’s Hook, new words appeared in wet, slanting strokes.

COME BELOW.

Sella read them over his shoulder.

“Turn us around,” she said.

Kellan looked back at the channel. The western passage had vanished behind curtains of rain. The eastern water stretched ahead toward the hooked cliff, where something pale protruded from the waves.

A mast.

The wreck sat just beyond the black tide, half buried in the channel. Its hull had split open, but its stern lantern still burned beneath the water, a dim yellow pulse that appeared and disappeared with the swell.

“Is that the wreck from the chart?” Sella asked.

“It wasn’t on the chart.”

“Nothing is on the chart now.”

The mark beside the wreck darkened.

Three hooked strokes.

The same shape Kellan had seen carved into the iron anchor of the Sea Wraith the morning they left Blackwake. He had thought it was a maker’s sign. A sailor’s superstition. Something left by a bored hand.

Now the mark crawled across the parchment like a living thing.

The water beside the wreck sank.

Then it rose.

Slowly.

Deliberately.

The entire black tide began to breathe. It drew inward around the half-submerged hull, pulling rain, foam, and floating splinters toward the wreck. The Sea Wraith’s bow dipped as the current caught it.

“Cut the sails!” Kellan ordered.

Sella seized his sleeve. “If we lose the wind, it will take us straight in.”

“If we keep the sails, it will take us faster.”

Jory appeared at the wheel’s edge, soaked to the skin. “Captain, the crew wants to know what’s beneath us.”

Kellan looked down.

Through the dark water, something vast turned beneath the ship. A pale ridge passed under the keel, followed by a single lidless eye opening in the depths.

It looked up at him.

Kellan’s mouth went dry.

“Tell them the truth,” he said.

Jory waited.

“We’re being hunted.”

The next breath of the sea pulled the Sea Wraith toward the wreck. The ship’s timbers creaked as if they knew the way. Kellan shoved the chart into Sella’s hands and reached for the boarding hook.

Behind them, the black water closed over the channel.

Ahead, the wreck’s drowned lantern blinked once.

Something inside the wreck blinked back.

End of chapter one. 7 more chapters and about 16,286 words in the full book.