“You didn’t show any signs that you were being attacked. I could have...” Arayevo spread her fingers. She sounded truly distressed.
“Dak can rebuff some mage’s mental intrusions,” Yanko said.
This time, Lakeo was the one to ask, “Really?” She added, “I didn’t think Turgonians even acknowledged that magic exists. Wouldn’t take that special training?”
Dak appeared to be quite engrossed in navigating them past the last of the coral. He did not respond.
“Much like piloting an underwater boat, I imagine,” Yanko murmured.
Actually, he assumed that learning to repel mental attacks, as a mage hunter was trained to do, would take years. As complicated as the controls around Dak appeared, they probably wouldn’t take as long to master. Still, neither skill sounded like something a typical Turgonian soldier—even an officer—would be taught.
“I’m taking us close enough to the surface to have a look.” Dak glanced at Yanko, then nudged a lever a couple of inches.
Before, when they had descended, air had been let out. Now, Yanko had the sense of air being pushed into tanks built into the hull of the craft and of water draining out.
Dak left his seat, his head ducked and his knees bent so he would not hit the low ceiling. The underwater boats might have originally been designed by the Turgonians, but this one must have been built with the shorter Kyattese people in mind. Dak dropped to one knee when he activated the periscope, pulling down the viewing apparatus as a tube extended from the hull above them.
Now that they were close to the surface, the waves affected them more, and the craft bobbed about in the open sea. It was strange how quiet the water was deeper down. Yanko hadn’t expected that.
“See anything interesting, Dak?” Arayevo asked. “Such as an opportunity for us to sneak aboard Yanko’s mother’s ship?”
Yanko gawked at her. “Why would you want to go aboard her ship? She would be the one most likely to sense us. It sounds like she attacked Dak. Or at least probed him aggressively.” Based on what he had seen with the soul construct, Yanko thought she could have killed Dak if she had been trying to, mage-hunter training or not.
“Wouldn’t she be the one most likely to keep pirate treasure in her cabin?” Arayevo asked, that adventurous gleam in her eyes again.
Yanko frowned at her, remembering how she had once shown interest in meeting Pey Lu—and wanting to join her. Arayevo might be older than he was, but sometimes, she seemed like the naive one. Or maybe she wasn’t naive and just didn’t care how vile pirates were. That disturbed him even more than the idea of her sailing around with smugglers. He didn’t want to believe that someone with such a warm smile and a love for living could be indifferent to the pain—and deaths—of others.
“You don’t want to meet her,” Yanko said firmly, hoping reality would squash the romantic notion she’d always had of his mother. “She was the one responsible for killing all the people in that village. She ordered them interrogated, then hanged them when they didn’t give her the answers she wanted.”
The gleam in Arayevo’s eyes dulled, replaced by hesitation. Still, she looked like she wanted to protest. “How do you know she—”
“Maybe they did give her the answers she wanted,” Dak interrupted, his face pressed to the periscope viewer, his tone grim.
“What do you see?” Yanko asked.
“The rest of the rowboats are leaving the lagoon. She’s standing in one that’s piled high with loot. She has something small in her hands. It’s hard to tell without magnification, but it looks like a small chest.”
Yanko slumped in his chair. “A small chest such as might be used to hold a seven-hundred-year-old artifact?”
“Yes.”
“Does she have the chest of coins her grubby minions stole from me too?” Lakeo grumbled.
Normally, Yanko would have felt disgruntled that she was more worried about some coins than about an artifact which could save their people and usher in a new period of prosperity, but he felt too numb. The night had left him exhausted. He would have found the idea of sneaking about Sun Dragon’s ship less daunting than Arayevo’s suggestion of boarding Pey Lu’s craft. He would never forget the tortoise’s vision or the feeling of the raw