Two, three, four seconds later, they hit the water.
It wasn’t cold. At least not icy. Their speed carried them deep, however, and the impact separated them. For Candy there was a panicky moment when she thought she’d used up all her breath. Then—God bless him!—Malingo had hold of her hand again, and gasping for air, they broke surface together.
“No bones broken?” Candy gasped.
“No. I’m fine. You?”
“No,” she said, scarcely believing it. “I thought he had us.”
“So did I. So did he.”
Candy laughed.
They looked up, and for a moment she thought she glimpsed the dark ragged line of the bridge high above. Then the river’s current carried them away, and whatever she’d seen was eclipsed by the roof of the cavern through which these waters ran. They had no choice but to go wherever it was going. Darkness was all around them, so the only clues they had to the size of caverns through which the river traveled was the way the water grew more tempestuous when the channel narrowed, and how its rushing din mellowed when the way widened again.
Once, for just a few tantalizing seconds, they caught a glimpse of what looked like a bright thread—like the Skein of Lydia Hap’s account—running through the air or the rock above them.
“Did you see that?” Malingo said.
“Yes,” said Candy, smiling in the darkness. “I saw it.”
“Well, at least we saw what we came to see.”
It was impossible to judge the passage of time in such a formless place, but some while after their glimpsing of the Skein they caught sight of another light, a long way ahead: a luminescence which steadily grew brighter as the river carried them toward it.
“That’s starlight,” Candy said.
“You think so?”
She was right; it was. After a few more minutes, the river finally brought them out of Huffaker’s caverns and into that quiet time just after nightfall. A fine net of cloud had been cast over the sky, and the stars caught in it were turning the Izabella silver.
Their journey by water wasn’t over, however. The river current quickly carried them too far from the dark cliffs of Huffaker to attempt to swim back to it and bore them out into the straits between Nine and Ten O’clock. Now the Izabella took charge, her waters holding them up without their needing to exert themselves with swimming. They were carried effortlessly out past Ninnyhammer (where the lights burned bright in the cracked dome of Kaspar Wolfswinkel’s house) and south, into the light, to the bright, tropical waters that surrounded the island of the Nonce. The sleepy smell of an endless afternoon came off the island, which stood at Three O’clock, and the breeze carried dancing seeds from the lush slopes of that Hour. But the Nonce was not to be their destination. The Izabella’s currents carried them on past the Afternoon to the vicinity of the island of Gnomon.
Before they could be delivered to the shores of that island, however, Malingo caught sight of their salvation.
“I see a sail!” he said, and started yelling to whoever might be up on deck. “Over here! Here!”
“They see us!” Candy said. “They see us!”
THE LITTLE VESSEL MALINGO’S sharp eyes had spotted wasn’t moving, so they were able to let the gentle current carry them toward it. It was a humble fishing boat no more than fifteen feet in length and in a very dilapidated condition. Its crew members were hard at work hauling up onto the deck a net full to bursting with tens of thousands of small mottled turquoise-and-orange fish, called smatterlings. Hungry seabirds, raucous and aggressive, wheeled around the boat or bobbed on the water close by, waiting to snatch up those smatterlings that the fishermen failed to get out of the net, onto the deck and into the hold of their boat quickly enough.
By the time Candy and Malingo were within hailing distance of the little vessel, most of the hard labor was over, and the happy crew members (there were only four on the boat) were singing a song of the sea as they folded the nets.
“Fishes, feed me! Fishes fine! Swim in the nets And catch the line! Feed my children! Fill my dishes! That’s why I love you, Little fishes!”
When they were done with the song, Malingo called to them from out of the water.
“Excuse me!” he yelled. “There are still two more fishes down here!”
“I see you!” said a young man among the crew.
“Throw them a line,” said the wiry bearded man in the wheelhouse, who was apparently the Captain.
It didn’t take very long for Candy and Malingo to be brought up over the side of the boat and onto the stinking deck.
“Welcome aboard the Parroto Parroto,” said the Captain. “Somebody get ’em some blankets, will you?”
Though the sun was still reasonably warm in this region between Four O’clock in the Afternoon and Five, their time in the water had chilled both Candy and Malingo to the bone, and they were glad of the blankets and the deep bowls of spicy fish soup that they were given a few minutes later.
“I’m Perbo Skebble,” said the Captain. “The old man is Mizzel, the cabin girl is Galatea, and the young fellow there is my son Charry. We’re from Efreet, and we’re heading back there with our hold full.”
“Good fishin’,” Charry said. He had a broad, happy face, which fell naturally into an expression of easy contentment.
“There’ll be consequences,” Mizzel said, his own features as naturally joyless as Charry’s were naturally happy.
“Why do you always have to be so grim?” Galatea said, staring contemptuously at Mizzel. Her hair was shaved so close to her scalp, it was little more than a shadow. Her muscular arms were decorated with elaborate tattoos. “Didn’t we just save two souls from drowning? We’re all on the Creatrix’ side on this boat. Nothing bad’s going to happen to us.”
Mizzel just sneered at her, rudely snatching the empty soup bowls from Candy and Malingo. “We’ve still got to get past Gorgossium,” he said as he headed down into the galley with the bowls. He cast a sly, faintly threatening glance back at Candy as he departed, as though to see whether he’d succeeded in sowing the seeds of fear in her.
“What did he mean by that?” Malingo said.
“Nothing,” said Skebble.
“Oh, let’s tell the truth here,” said Galatea. “We’re not going to lie to these people. That would be shameful.”
“Then you tell ’em,” Skebble said. “Charry, come, lad. I want to be sure the catch is properly stowed.”
“What’s the problem?” Candy said to Galatea, when the father and son had gone about their work.
“You have to understand that there’s no ice on this boat, so we’ve got to get the catch back to Efreet before the fish go rotten on us. Which means…let me show you.”
She led them to the wheelhouse, where there was an old and much-weathered map pinned up on the wall. She pointed a well-bitten fingernail at a place between the islands of Soma Plume and Gnomon.
“We’re about here,” she said. “And we’ve got to get…up to here.” Their destination lay past the Twenty-Fifth