Bukel and Haxi and Sons and Daughters were an old shipwright’s firm, the oldest in the city. They had respect, and they had recognition, and they had historical weight.
They also had no money, so when a strange little wet bag made entirely (if crudely) of woven kelp was pushed onto their dock in the dead of night one moonless, starless eve, they were willing to listen.
And that was why Jenma Haxi (of the Daughters) was out at the witching hour sitting in a dinghy in the shallow waters off Deadreef’s Point, under the shadow of half a lighthouse and over the rubble of the other half of the lighthouse. The Point was a mite unstable, and it tended to shrug every so often. Because the shipwrights needed money, but they needed their reputation too, and there was no point making the head of the firm look like an idiot when you could foist it off on someone younger and suspiciously keen.
Jenma was less keen than usual, even under her best sou’wester and three blankets and the hardiest longjohns her brother Bucal could sew.
“Fuck,” she muttered, and not for the first time. Something unseen bumped the boat lightly in agreement, and not for the first time. “Fuck,” she repeated. “Aw fuckity fuck fuck.” Just what she needed: to be overturned and eaten by the first big shark to come in closer than the Deadreef in two generations. “Fuckleberries with fucked cream.” Typical, just typical.
“Fu-”
A highly technical and directed stream of water hit her directly in the face, turning the next thirty seconds of swears into sputters. Jenma spat and sneezed and coughed and hacked and heaved and by the time she knew which end was up she was headfirst over the gunwales and eye-to-eye with the least friendly-looking dolphin she’d ever met. Despite its (somewhat scarred) permanent smile, it seemed to be giving her the stinkeye.
“Hello,” she croaked. “Fuck. Ow.”
The dolphin spat in her face again. This time she wasn’t inhaling, but that was about as big an improvement as she got.
“Excuse me,” she managed.
The dolphin clicked at her and bumped the boat with a floating piece of wood. And not for the first time.
Oh. Not a shark after all.
“Got yourself a toy there? Nice. Please stop spitting at me.”
The dolphin bumped the boat. Then spat at her.
When Jenma’s vision cleared up again, the driftwood was in the boat with her and the dolphin was gone.
That suited her fine. It had left her a lot of reading to do.
***
One month later, Jenma rowed out past Deadreef’s Point again. That had covered three weeks of explaining, pleading, wheedling, threatening, blackmailing, stonewalling, extorting, and demanding; one week of making very discreet enquiries to very very well-paid experts about very very VERY complicated arrangements; and a few days of screaming nameless dread and horror and frustration into her pillow.
Her brother Bucal had sewn that pillow for her as a child. It was a tattered sack of sailcloth stuffed with rags that wasn’t fit to even be called an apprentice-piece, and she loved it more than gold.
Which was why it was buried underneath the multiple complicated chests, packs, and sealed print-cases. She needed a little bit of that love out here with her while she did this.
Bump bump bump on the hull. And this wasn’t the first time, so she peered over the side promptly. She’d had enough water squirted in her face.
“Hey.”
Two cold, icy little eyes glared back at her from above a big happy grin.
“I’ve got the plans. I can go over this step-by-step if you want.”
The sea moved, and underneath Jenma’s dinghy it was moved aside. A great grey barnacled back beached her high and dry; a valve twisted and huge lungs breathed deep and slow.
“Right then.”
So she went over it step by step. There would be three, and each would take a long time.
“Is this acceptable?”
Her client’s interpreter squeaked and clicked in the affirmative.
“Good. This is an off-the-books job, so there’ll be no master-marks on anything. If word gets out the other shipwrights’ll tear me apart in town square, and I can’t say the rest of my family wouldn’t join them.”
A raspberry, long and extra watery.
“Yes, yes, yes. Just explaining the circumstances.”
Click click clickclickCLICK.
“We can start soon. Meet up at Bluehollow Bay in three days, after nightfall. And be prepared to pay for each step in advance. And be prepared for it to hurt. A lot.”
Her client spoke aloud for the first time, but it was very, very, very loud. A dismissive snort is quite something when it’s forced through a blowhole.
Jenma spent an hour scrubbing herself down when she got home. The prospect of money helped keep her mind off what was coming out of her hair.
***
Bluehollow Bay was beautiful in the moonlight. Few waves, no wind, the perfect place to swim if you were from out of town and didn’t know about the massive drop that led into deep water, covering rip currents that could suck you out past the reach of everything but gulls.
This, said the interpreter of Jenma’s client, would not be a concern. She had arranged for protection. And so there was, in the water around the huge floating mass of flesh – a circling squadron of fins that she had to explain to the barber-surgeons were NOT sharks about one hundred times. Even then, some of them didn’t believe her until the interpreter poked his head up from the water to swear virulently at them. Some tones transcend languages and species.
So they stepped atop their patient, and they prepared their knives, and their saws, and their scoops, and their cauldrons and cauldrons of boiled antiseptics and soothing paste.
And they began to cut, and the bay ran red.
The client made no complaints. She held her breath as if she were on a deep dive, and every hour on the hour, as steady as a watch, she would exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, and hold again.
She did this ten times, and as the sun began to rise it was done.
“Don’t dive,” Jenma told the interpreter. “Not until the paste has dried away. It’ll start to itch then, and it should be fine. Give it a week and a day, and then we’ll bring in the smiths.
***
The smiths were less skittish than the doctors, although they were even more uncomfortable aboard a boat. They’d all shoed horses, and although this was very different in the details the shape and the mass and the form of the thing was graspable in a manner that felt familiar and proper and right.
So they stoked their little portable foundry on the shore, and they hammered and grunted and bent and poured and now and then explained to the interpreter what they were doing, because that sort of intense anger is something that demands answering for even if you aren’t sure how to do it.
When each piece was ready – still glow-hot – it was whisked, tongs and all, into Jenma’s dinghy, and from there to the client, and from there into the client, and from there it was bolted, and nailed, and hammered, and sealed into place against rib and joint and blubber and hide. The smell of cooked meat filled the air until it was enough to drive a lion to veganism, and everyone present took a small break for a vomit before lunch.
The installation took all night and a bit of the day besides, but it was done.
“Overtime pay,” Jenma said. “I can’t skimp on silence from these people.”
The interpreter spat in her face again, but he begrudgingly hauled up yet another (smaller) little kelp-string-bag to her hands, brimming with pearls.
“Wait a month for the weight to settle,” said Jenma. “And then we’ll do the tricky part.”
***
The tricky part wasn’t finding a power source – there was an infinite supply of seawater for boiling at hand, and a truly astonishingly potent heat-source – but tapping it without compromising the client.
This was done with cogs and rods and wheels and gears and teeth and boilers and plungers and piping and waterproofing and they even managed to find a way to repurpose the body’s own oils as oils, more’s the wonder.
Ammunition would be simple. Hell’s grapeshot, loaded with whatever could be crammed in. The expulsion method involved a lot of violence and steam, but well, again, water was easy.
Jenma wished the designer was at hand, but Grand High Artificer and Lord Engineer Lop Pon-Deapwit was an ill little thing and she refused to be moved from her bedside until she was finished dying. Ten months on and so far no luck, but one grew bored while dying and she’d been quite happy to distract herself with the worst technical problems she’d ever imagined. Hadn’t even demanded a fee for the work, let alone her silence.
The client settled low in the water when her project had been installed. Heavy with iron, and with lead, and with something hotter and more hateful.
“The job is done,” said Jenma, alone in her dinghy again as the last of the pale-faced clockmakers, cannoneers, and foundry-workers vanished over the road, over the horizon. “And it all should work. Do you want to field-test here, or-”
The client breathed out, then in, then dove. She left so fast the water in Bluehollow Bay nearly came with her.
Jenma sat back up and waited for the horizon to stop spinning. “I think,” she said to the interpreter, “I had which one of you was the angry one all wrong, didn’t I?”
He cackled at Jenma, then squirted her in the face.
***
“THAR SHE BLOWS!”
Ninety days out of port and not a sight but shattered jetsam, and at last the call, the blessed call to blood and sweat and money came down from the Brigmun’s mainmast. The lookout sang loud and strong, lungs as good as a trumpet, from the peak all the way into the hull.
“THAR SHE BLOWS!”
The men scrambled, the boats were hoisted, the harpoons were seized. Ahead it hove into sight, a lone cow, somnolent at the surface, heavy and low in the water with child (a bit wasteful, but best to take what you could get after this long a drought) and dreaming of happier things.
“THAR SHE BLOWS!”
Wait, what was that glint?
“THAR SHE BLOWS!”
It sparkled in the bright morning light, most unlike light on water.
“THAR SHE BLOWS!”
Wait, was that a CANNON?
“THAR SHE-”
…broadsides.
***
For some years thereafter, whaling took a sharp and inexplicably lethal downturn. At first the shipwrights did roaring trade replacing vessels, but only so much good money is willing to throw itself after bad, and soon the local harbours saw few vessels launched save for the little boats used by local fishermen. The shipyards closed, their wrights moved away or retired.
Except, that is, for Bukel and Haxi and Sons and Daughters. Inexplicably, they did quite well for themselves.