Winter ended and the waters ran warm. And where went the warm, there went the wizards in their great study-ships: fat-bellied and top-heavy; high in back and front and overstuffed with mobile studies and bilge laboratories and secret water-and-air-tight compartments and crewed by a few shaken souls or no one at all.
And where wizards went, other wizards typically did not. Because of things like this.
***
“This,” said Hope, waving her hand up and down at the breadth of this, which had been smelly even before its preservation in brine, “is my finest discovery yet.”
“Doubtless.”
Hope had a habit when lecturing of tapping her fingers on any nearby surface in a way that wasn’t quite a rhythm. She did this now. “Radical bauplan inversion; in full defiance of gravity – the torso reversed; the tail turned on its head; each limb completely acting in antitorsion. An incredible and incredibly demanding feat to sustain in violation of natural and physical laws, powered by an internal metaphorical stomach capable of turning any concept that can fit down the gullet into fuel.”
“Impressive.”
“It took a two-day chase to bring down this specimen. It was only foiled when it tried to swallow my anchor and got stuck on it. Forged and worked metals were a complete novelty that it had no idea how to cope with; although I hypothesize it would’ve managed with sufficient exposure.”
“Very likely. But there is one small problem.”
“What?”
Mercy sucked down the last mouthful of tea for just a little longer than necessary. “You have interpreted the organism upside-down and backwards.”
***
And so came the third thing that turned with the seasons: with time came the warmth, and with the warmth came the wizards, and with the wizards came the perniciousness.
Perniciousness was Hope naming a newly-described and interestingly-shaped coral Gluteus mercy.
Perniciousness was Mercy sending one messenger-gull an hour to Hope’s vessel for six nights running, each with only a useless fragment of a request or a slight spelling correction on a previous message.
Perniciousness was Hope intercepting the monthly merchant resupply whale-pod and bartering for all of their squid, tunny, and marlin – far in excess of what any one researcher would need for even the most extravagant birthday feast – on Mercy’s birthday.
Perniciousness was Mercy’s spynacles letting her know the precise day on which to announce her weeks-old description of a new species of ectoplasm-consuming nothosaur, which was the exact day before Hope finished inscribing her final analysis of her own specimen of it.
And true perniciousness was that the first question that appeared in each of their heads each time after each insult without fail or hesitation was ‘how can I beat this?’
***
It was never a difficult question to answer.
This time, the answer was a small clockwork fish filled with a particular enzyme extracted from a pernicious species of cave-dwelling trilobite, which would result in whatever ate the fish metamorphosing into something spined and horned and aggressive and very rapidly cancerous, which would then do likewise to whatever ate IT, and so on and so forth. Hope’s theory was that if she flung it into the sea in Mercy’s general direction the odds were better than not that she’d end up with an angry armoured fish devouring part of Mercy’s rudder before the week was out.
“Good luck,” she told the little brass-and-coral nightmare, and with a gingerly-applied pat to the backside, she flung it into the sea.
***
Simultaneously, Mercy stood from her desk with a sore back in the palm of one hand and a devious little mixture in the other. It was made of ground ultraviolet glass and bottled sunshine and just a hint of malefic vitriol extracted from black walnut heartwood. It wanted out, and wanted to be consumed, and whatever consumed it would, should, could become a wrathful and desiccated husk of its own self devoted only to mindless thrashing spite against every piece of the world to make contact with its own rotting frame.
The currents were augured to be favourably Hope-borne for the next few days, so she dumped the lot overboard with a very lazy flick of her wrist and didn’t bother to look twice.
“Have fun finding specimens with THAT,” she muttered to herself three minutes later, when the words occurred to her. She was alone on her vessel and felt no shame in doing this.
***
Three days later the surface of the sea ran black-and-electric with a host of screaming, thrashing, nightmare-ridden, armour-plated, invincible, immortal, agonized beasts of various sizes and shapes, all lethal and unhappy about it and all of them skeletons filled with tumorous spike-and-tooth growths.
Hope tried fire, the standby of every wizard. It made them smell like glue and the shoreline, but did not make them flinch.
Mercy, the elder and the more experienced mariner, tried lightning. It made them shake and shudder and move twice as quickly for approximately an hour. The waves ran thicker and thicker with enemies and the hulls of each ship – reinforced with word and wand though they were – began to groan and creak under the many, many, many teeth and jaws being applied ever more pressingly.
“Perhaps this will work,” said Hope as quietly and carefully as she could, measuring out a dram of powdered brontofish grain-by-grain into a triple-sealed lead-glazed flask, hands made clumsy and fingers barely able to move in safety gloves fashioned of inch-thick walrus leather. “As long as I’m careful,” she amended.
“Needs must,” said Mercy, who had brought up the hidden vault attached to her ship’s anchor and was – behind a cold iron safety sheet –opening a triple-combination-locked door entirely by feel. It cracked open, revealing a single megaloplesiosaur tooth, vibrating under the pressure of the atmosphere and its own charge. She plucked it up and began to wrap it in the thickest possible blankets, as carefully as if it were her own newborn child. “If done properly.”
It was at precisely that moment that the two ships – driven by the push and pull and prying of the deranged hosts of enraged sea creatures, and otherwise left undirected and unobserved – bonked into one another at full force.
***
When the explosions were over and the clouds had begun to creep back over the horizon and the sea had recovered enough to let ripples disturb its surface again, it dawned on a very new sort of argument.
“I have the space; you make the offer,” said Mercy.
“I have the provisions; YOU make the offer,” said Hope.
“A barrel of hardtack isn’t worth much if a passing scavenger takes your legs before you’ve even had a chance to get hungry.”
“And a nice safe chunk of driftwood isn’t much use if you wither up and die on it weeks before it starts to sink. Give me something I want.”
“I think I see sharks coming back,” said Mercy.
“I think they’ll damage this barrel if they eat me,” said Hope.
They waited there for the second-longest ten seconds of either of their lives, avoiding eye contact. Then Hope clambered aboard the chunk of what had been part of Mercy’s fo’c’sle while Mercy fished out the (still dry) barrel.
“I think perhaps,” she said as she began to pry at the edge of the lid with the charred stump of what had once been her emergency stylus, “we may have gotten a little over-invested in ourselves.”
“As opposed to our research.”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps.”
“After all, it is the knowledge we produce that will truly matter in the long run.”
“Indeed,” said Hope. “Our egos are only truly grown through genuine accomplishment, and accomplishment cannot be made by hounding at the work of another. When one of us spends their time on rivalry over scholarship, we all lose, history included.”
“Truth,” said Mercy, putting her weight on the stylus, which snapped.
The lid of the barrel came off with a pop.
They looked inside for the longest ten seconds of either of their lives.
“You know,” said Hope, “I spent ages looking at this specimen after you left. It wasn’t upside-down and backwards at all.”
“Oh?”
“No. It was just upside-down.”
Mercy tilted her head and squinted. “You know,” she said. “I think you’re right.”
“I don’t think it’s edible.”
“I think you’re wrong.”
There was no way to record who pushed who overboard first. It was simply too close to tell.