She Trawls for Drowned Souls

• Chapter 1 The Fog on the Narrows
• Chapter 2 Shillings and Seances
• Chapter 3 Bunk and Bilge
• Chapter 4 Salt-Stained Hands
• Chapter 5 Cast Out from St. John's
• Chapter 6 The First Trawl
• Chapter 7 Whispers in the Wake
• Chapter 8 Scales and Scapulars
• Chapter 9 The Ledger of the Lost
• Chapter 10 Deep-Sea Graveyard
• Chapter 11 A Hand on the Keel
• Chapter 12 What the Net Drags Up
• Chapter 13 The Voice of the Dory-Mate
• Chapter 14 Phosphor and Brimstone
• Chapter 15 The Caplin Run of the Dead
• Chapter 16 The Skipper’s Covenant
• Chapter 17 Leviathan’s Cradle
• Chapter 18 Blood upon the Cod-Block
• Chapter 19 The Virgin Rock Mirage
• Chapter 20 Hauling the Elder Thing
• Chapter 21 The Sinking Fleet
• Chapter 22 Below the Cold Meridian
• Chapter 23 The Song of the Abyss
• Chapter 24 A Brother's Salted Shroud
• Chapter 25 Breaking the Trawl Lines
• Chapter 26 Harbor Light and Hollow Dawn

The salt did not merely settle upon St. John’s; it consumed it. It ate the iron hinges off the saloon doors, turned the woolen shawls of the fishwives stiff as dried cod, and crusted the eyelashes of every man, woman, and child who walked the steep, muddy slopes of Water Street. For Maeve Sterling, the salt was also a conductor. It clung to her lips like a copper penny, carrying the faint, erratic hum of the dead who lingered just beyond the harbor’s mouth.

She stood at the edge of the wharf, her boots sinking slightly into the rotting timber and the slick, black grease of whale oil. Before her lay the Narrows, the treacherous, high-walled channel that squeezed the Atlantic Ocean down into a landlocked basin. Today, the passage was entirely gone, swallowed by a bank of Grand Banks fog so thick and pale it looked like grease poured into a pan. It did not drift; it crept, heavy and blind, smelling of kelp, sulfur, and the cold, flat rot of the deep sea.

Maeve pulled her threadbare wool collar tighter around her throat. In her pocket, her fingers traced the contours of a silver pocket watch—its glass cracked, its hands permanently rusted at twelve minutes past four. It had belonged to her brother, Thomas. Three months ago, the schooner William Dent had sailed past these very cliffs, bound for the fishing grounds of the southern Grand Banks. Three weeks later, a battered dory had drifted into the harbor at Trepassey with nothing inside but three dead cod, a shattered oar, and Thomas’s watch tucked into the bow-box.

The merchants said the William Dent had been run down by a steel-hulled French steamer in the dark. The priests said the crew’s souls were in purgatory, resting in the merciful hands of the Creator. Maeve knew better. She had spent her twenty-four years listening to the things that did not rest, and Thomas’s voice had not yet whispered through her parlor floorboards. He was not resting, and he was not dead in the way the Church understood it.

"He’s not out there, girl," a voice rumbled from the gloom behind her.

Maeve did not jump. She had heard the man’s heavy, uneven tread thirty yards back, the wet clunk of a wooden peg leg striking the spruce planks of the pier. She turned slowly, her face a mask of polite indifference.

"Mr. Clancey," she said.

The old harbor master looked like a creature carved out of driftwood and cured in brine. His beard was a tangled thicket of grey wool, stained yellow around the mouth by tobacco juice, and his single eye was watery and red-rimmed from decades of staring into the North Atlantic wind. He was leaning on a gnarled staff, looking out into the white wall of the Narrows.

"You’ve been standing here three hours," Clancey said, spitting a dark stream of juice into the harbor water. "The tide’s turned. If there was any luck coming through that gap today, it would’ve smelled better than this."

"The fog has a voice today, Mr. Clancey," Maeve said softly. "It’s very loud."

Clancey grunted, a sound that came from somewhere deep in his leather-hard chest. "Aye, it’s loud enough to deafen a man. That’s the ice-blink talking, or the gulls. Don’t go mixing your head up with the old yarns, Maeve. Your father was a sensible cooper, and your mother knew how to salt a herring without praying over it. You should be back in the shop, not catching the lung-rot down here."

"The shop is closed," she said. "The landlords took the cooperage last Tuesday. There’s no wood left to bend, and no money to buy it."

"Then find a man with a house that doesn't leak."

"I don't want a man, Mr. Clancey. I want my brother."

Clancey’s expression softened, though on his weathered face, the transition looked more like a shifting of gravel. He sighed, the breath whistling through his broken teeth. "Thomas is gone to the bottom, maid. The Grand Banks don’t give back what they take. The ice gets them, or the dogfish, or the weight of the water. It’s three hundred fathoms of cold out there. Even if you could reach down that deep, there’s nothing left to pull up."

Maeve felt the silver watch in her pocket grow cold—colder than the harbor air, colder than the icebergs that drifted past the coastline in June. She knew what the old fishermen whispered in the taverns when they had three pints of black rum in them. They talked of the "Sinking Ground," the places on the edge of the shelf where the lead lines kept dropping, fathoms after fathoms, without ever striking sand. They talked of nets that came up from the dark filled with things that had no eyes but still watched the crew.

"The Edward Blake is signing on hands at the mercantile wharf," Maeve said, her voice steady.

Clancey turned his head so fast his neck joints popped. His watery eye narrowed into a sharp, suspicious slit. "The Blake? Skipper Jonas's boat? You’re mad, girl. That’s a salt-bulker. They’re going out for the late run, three months on the banks in the teeth of the autumn gales. It’s no place for a woman, let alone one who looks at the sea like she’s trying to read a letter written on the waves."

"They’re short three men," Maeve said. "The harbor talk says two of his crew walked off the vessel in the middle of the night, and the third was found drowned in three inches of water in a horse trough on Duckworth Street. They say the skipper is desperate enough to take anyone who can hold a gutting knife."

"Desperate doesn't mean soft," Clancey barked. "Jonas is a hard man. He’s of the old stock—the ones who believe a woman on board is a surer way to find the bottom than a hole in the garboard strake. He’ll throw you over the side before you clear Cape Spear."

"He won't," Maeve said. She reached into her wool coat and pulled out a small, oilskin-wrapped package. She unfolded the grease-stained paper to reveal a pair of heavy, iron-handled shears and a brass-bound compass whose needle did not point north, but spun in slow, erratic circles, always tracking the densest patch of fog. "I’m not joining as a dory-mate. I’m joining as the splitter. I can gut and salt eighty fish in an hour, and I don't get the sea-sickness."

"And the compass?" Clancey asked, his eyes dropping to the brass instrument.

"It find things," Maeve whispered. "My brother taught me how to read it before he left. It doesn't look for the pole. It looks for the iron."

"There’s no iron on the Banks but the anchors," the old man muttered, but his voice lacked conviction. He knew as well as anyone in St. John’s that there were ships lost in the fog that still rang their bells, and schooners that had vanished forty years ago that still drifted through the fleet on moonless nights, their decks white with frost and their sails rotten as lace.

"There’s the iron in the blood," Maeve said.

She turned away from him, her decision made, and began the long walk down the slippery timbers of the wharf toward the eastern slipways. The fog seemed to part for her, just an inch or two, before rolling back in to swallow her heels.

As she walked, the sounds of the harbor began to warp. The shrieks of the gulls overhead slowed, deepening into long, dry creaks like old leather being stretched on a rack. The sloshing of the tide against the green-slimed pilings took on a rhythmic, heavy thud—the slow, monumental pulse of a heart that beat only once every five minutes.

Most people in St. John’s heard only the wind when the autumn gales came up from the south. They heard the chimney pots rattling and the shingles lifting off the roofs. But Maeve had been born with the caul over her face—the membrane of birth that the old mid-wives said gave a child the "second sight." To Maeve, the wind was a crowd of voices, all of them wet, cold, and desperately hungry.

She reached the mercantile wharf, where the smell of dried cod and pine tar was thick enough to chew. The Edward Blake was moored there, her black hull looking like a sleeping whale in the dim light. She was an eighty-ton schooner, two-masted, her rigging white with salt crust and her deck cluttered with dories nested inside one another like wooden spoons.

A group of men stood near the gangplank, their faces shadowed by the brims of their sou'westers. They were silent, moving with the sluggish, heavy grace of men who spent more time on unstable decks than on solid earth. One of them, a massive man with shoulders like a draft horse and a beard that reached his collarbone, was checking the lashings on a stack of empty fish casks.

Maeve stopped at the foot of the gangplank. The wood was slick with cod-slime, and the air around the vessel felt heavy, as if the ship carried its own private draft of cold wind.

"I’m looking for Skipper Jonas," she said.

The large man did not look up from his knots. "The skipper’s not taking passengers, maid. Go on back to the shops. The wind’s rising, and we’ve no time for tourists."

"I’m not a passenger," Maeve said, stepping onto the first plank of the gangplank. The ship gave a low, uneasy groan beneath her weight, a vibration that ran through the soles of her boots and up into her teeth. It felt... awake. "I’m the new splitter."

The man stopped his work. He turned his head slowly, his grey eyes scanning her from her salt-stained boots to the wool cap pulling back her dark hair. A slow, humorless grin spread through his beard, revealing teeth that had been ground down by years of chewing hardtack.

"A splitter?" he said, his voice carrying across the quiet deck. "We’re going to the Grand Banks, girl, not a garden party in Georgetown. You’d lose your fingers before we cleared the Narrows."

"I’ve worked the premises at Tobins since I was twelve," Maeve said, her voice rising to meet his scoff. "I can skin, bone, and salt faster than any man you’ve got on this deck. And I don't drink my wages before the salt’s on the fish."

From the companionway of the aft cabin, a figure emerged. He was not as large as the mate, but he carried himself with an authority that made the other man instantly step back. He was thin, almost gaunt, his oilskins hanging off his frame like a shroud. His face was the color of lard, and his eyes were so dark they looked like two holes drilled into his skull.

"What’s this noise, Billy?" the man asked. His voice was low, but it had a strange, carrying quality, like water running over gravel in a deep well.

"A girl, Skipper," Billy said, jerking his chin toward Maeve. "Says she’s a splitter. Says she wants to sign on."

Skipper Jonas walked to the rail, his movements stiff and deliberate. He looked down at Maeve. For a moment, the fog seemed to thicken around them, isolating the two of them on the edge of the wharf. Maeve felt a cold prickle of sweat run down her spine. When she looked into Jonas’s eyes, she did not see the harbor or the ships. She saw a vast, grey emptiness—the flat, unchanging gray of the open sea under an overcast sky.

"What’s your name?" Jonas asked.

"Maeve Sterling."

"Sterling," the skipper repeated. He seemed to taste the name, his tongue moving over his dry lips. "Your brother was on the William Dent."

It was not a question. Maeve felt her heart skip a beat, the silver watch in her pocket suddenly feeling hot against her hip. "Yes."

"A good worker," Jonas said. "But he listened too much. He was always leaning over the rail, trying to hear what the lead-line was saying. The sea doesn't like a man who asks too many questions, Maeve Sterling."

"I don't ask questions," Maeve lied, keeping her eyes fixed on his cold stare. "I only do the work."

Jonas looked at her hands, which were bare and scarred from years of handling rough hemp and cold iron. "The William Dent didn't sink because of a French steamer," he said softly, so low that Billy could not hear him over the creak of the rigging. "The water just got too heavy for her. The same will happen to us if we don't bring back what we’re sent for."

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, black ledger. He opened it, the pages damp and curling in the fog, and held out a pencil.

"Sign your name," Jonas said. "The shares are one-eightieth of the catch after the salt and provisions are paid. If you die, your share goes to the ship."

"And if we find what we’re looking for?" Maeve asked, stepping onto the deck.

Jonas didn't answer. He only looked out toward the Narrows, where the fog was beginning to churn, rolling inward like a great, white hand reaching to drag the town into the sea.

The ink on Skipper Jonas’s ledger was of a peculiar, oily consistency that did not dry so much as it soaked into the porous paper, turning the letters of Maeve’s name a bruised, waterlogged purple. When she handed the pencil back, her fingers were stained with the grease of it. It smelled of old tallow and something sharper, like the copper tang of a battery.

"Get your kit," Jonas said, his eyes already drifting past her toward the grey cliffs of South Side Hill. "We cast off at the turn of the glass. If you’re not on the timbers when the lines are cast, your name stays in the book, but your share goes to the bilge."

Maeve did not argue. She slipped the grease-wrapped shears back into her apron pocket and turned down the gangplank, her boots squelching in the black mud of the slipway. She had two hours before the tide peaked, and only five shillings left to her name—hardly enough to buy a loaf of hardtack and a bottle of kerosene, let alone the oilskins and woolens required to survive three months on the Grand Banks.

The wind was veering south-southwest as she climbed the steep, cobbled incline of Prescott Street. The scent of the harbor followed her, but here, higher up the ridge, it mingled with the domestic reek of coal smoke, boiling cabbage, and the damp wool of laundry hung out to dry in a fog that would only make it wetter. St. John’s was a city built on wood and grease, perched precariously on the edge of a continent that did not want it there. Every house seemed to lean against its neighbor for support, their clapboards painted in dull ochre, iron oxide red, and the occasional, startling blue of a leftover copper-paint barrel.

She turned onto Duckworth Street, where the shops were smaller and the signs more weathered. Above a narrow, sagging doorway hung a shingle painted with a crude white hand, its palm facing outward, a single eye staring from the center. Mrs. Sterling—Consolations and Inquiries.

The bell above the door gave a dry, rusty tinkle as she entered. The parlor inside was small, dark, and smelled intensely of dried lavender, wet dog, and the bitter, oily smoke of a cheap paraffin lamp. Heavy velvet curtains of an indeterminate green hue were nailed over the windows to block the gray light of the Narrows, casting the room into a perpetual, artificial twilight.

A woman sat in the wicker armchair by the cold grate, wrapped in a collection of grey shawls that made her look like an accumulation of dust. This was Maeve’s aunt, Clara, though everyone in the neighborhood called her the Widow Sterling. Her eyes, clouded with cataracts that turned her pupils the color of skimmed milk, snapped toward the door at the sound of the bell.

"You’ve got the salt on you, Maeve," Clara said, her voice like two dry shingles rubbing together. "You’ve been down by the water again. I told you, there’s nothing to be found there but cold feet and wet skirts."

"I’ve signed on, Aunt Clara," Maeve said, hanging her damp wool coat on the peg behind the door. "With the Edward Blake. We sail on the afternoon tide."

The wicker chair creaked violently as Clara sat forward, her claw-like hands gripping the armrests. "The Blake? Jonas’s vessel? You’re a fool, girl. That man’s got more than fish in his hold. The whole town knows he doesn't sell his cod to the merchants at Bowring’s. He unloads in the dead of night at the private coves down the southern shore. They say his money doesn't ring like British silver."

"It’s eighteen shillings a month and a splitter’s share," Maeve said, kneeling by the hearth to stir the dying embers of the peat fire. "The landlords took the cooperage. The shop is gone. If I don't go, we’ll be sleeping in the scrub behind the poorhouse before the first snow flies."

"And what of the work here?" Clara gestured vaguely toward the small round table in the center of the room, which was covered in a green baize cloth and set with a small, cracked porcelain saucer. "The women from the battery are coming at three. Mrs. Morrissey’s boy was lost on the Flora last month, and she wants to know if he’s in the gravel or if he’s still swimming. That’s two shillings in the hand, Maeve. Real money, not paper shares from a skipper who looks like he was buried last year."

"The dead don't pay enough to buy flour, Auntie," Maeve said softly. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the brass-bound compass. The needle was still twitching, pointing not toward the north but downward, toward the cellar floor, where the old well-head sat beneath the pine boards. "And they’re getting louder. I can’t hear myself think in this room anymore. Every draft in the chimney is someone’s uncle telling me where he dropped his pipe."

Clara sighed, her small, dry body sinking back into the shawls. "You have your mother’s ears, Maeve. It’s a curse. A cooper’s daughter shouldn't have to listen to the sea. It’s too big, and it’s got too many mouths."

"I’m not listening to the sea," Maeve said, though they both knew it was a lie. "I’m looking for Thomas."

"Thomas is in the deep water," the old woman whispered. "And the deep water doesn't have ears. It only has teeth."

Maeve went to the small dresser in the corner and began gathering her things. She packed her spare woolen stockings, two heavy flannel shirts that had belonged to her father, a tin of lard for her hands, and a small, bone-handled gutting knife with a curved blade that had been ground down so many times it looked like a crescent moon.

As she worked, the bell above the door rang again. Two women slipped into the parlor, their faces pale and pinched against the autumn draft. They were dressed in the heavy, black-dyed wool of mourning, their fingers raw and red from the salt-cod washing stations on the wharves. One of them, Mrs. Morrissey, was a small, round woman whose eyes were so swollen from crying they looked like two raw plums.

"Maeve, darlin’," Mrs. Morrissey whispered, her hands shaking as she pulled a greasy woolen purse from her sleeve. "The harbor master said you were down by the slips. You didn't see him, did you? My Jimmy? He was the header on the Flora. He had a blue anchor tattooed on his wrist, just by the bone."

Maeve looked at the two shillings the woman laid on the green baize table. They were worn thin, the likeness of Queen Victoria almost rubbed smooth by the thumbs of desperate people.

"Sit down, Mrs. Morrissey," Maeve said, her voice dropping into the quiet, professional rhythm she had learned from her mother. She took her place opposite the grieving woman, leaving the other visitor to stand in the shadows by the door.

She did not use cards or a crystal glass. Such things were for the tourists who came off the Halifax steamers, looking for a thrill between dinners. For the people of St. John’s, the dead were too close for such theatricals. They lived in the walls, in the salt-crusted floorboards, and in the very water that came out of the backyard pumps.

Maeve took Mrs. Morrissey’s red, calloused hand in her own. She did not close her eyes; instead, she looked down at the brass compass she had placed in the center of the table.

Almost immediately, the room grew cold. The paraffin lamp flickered, its yellow flame shrinking to a tiny, blue bead of light. The smell of lavender vanished, replaced instantly by the overwhelming, freezing stench of rotting kelp and the greasy, yellow fat of a dead harbor seal.

Maeve felt the salt in her skin begin to prickle, a hundred tiny needles of cold heat ice-walking up her forearms. In her ears, the low, steady rumble of the Duckworth Street carriages faded, replaced by the dry, rhythmic screech of iron blocks and the heavy, wet slosh of water moving through a vessel's hold.

"He’s cold," Maeve whispered. Her voice sounded thin, as if she were speaking through a long iron pipe. "He’s very cold, Mrs. Morrissey. But he’s not in the gravel."

"Where is he?" the mother sobbed, leaning forward, her breath smelling of tea and salt fish. "Is he in the churchyard? Did they find him?"

"He’s on the southern edge," Maeve said, her hand tightening on the woman’s fingers. The brass needle on the table began to spin, its motion so fast it became a blur. "He’s... he’s with the others. There are so many of them there. They’re standing in a line, Mrs. Morrissey. They’re holding the long-line. They’re pulling."

"Pulling what?" the other woman by the door whispered, her face white.

Maeve’s eyes widened. The room around her seemed to dissolve, the green velvet curtains turning into great, vertical walls of grey water that rose up to meet a sky the color of lead. She was no longer in the parlor; she was standing on a deck that pitched and rolled with a sickening, heavy grease-like motion. The water was thick with fish, but they were not cod. They were strange, flat-headed things with pale, milky eyes and skin that shimmered with a green, phosphorescent rot.

And there, standing at the rail of a vessel she did not recognize, was a young man. His hair was gone, his skin the color of lard, his lips eaten away by the sea-lice to reveal a white, grinning set of teeth. On his wrist, the blue anchor tattoo was swollen and black, the ink spreading through his rotten flesh like grease on paper. He was not looking at the water; he was looking directly at Maeve, his hollow sockets dark and bottomless.

He was holding a line that went down, down into the black water, fathoms beyond the reach of any lead. And as he pulled, his mouth opened, and a sound came out—not a voice, but the deep, resonant chime of a great brass bell, muffled by miles of cold water.

Clang.

The sound rattled the teacups on the dresser. Maeve gasped, her hand snapping away from Mrs. Morrissey’s as if she had touched a hot stove. The parlor rushed back into view, the paraffin lamp flaring up with a greasy black soot that settled over the table.

Mrs. Morrissey was weeping aloud now, her face buried in her apron. "He’s gone," she wailed. "He’s gone to the Sinking Ground. I knew it. The priest said he was in heaven, but I knew he was in the cold."

Maeve sat back in her chair, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. Her forehead was wet with a cold, greasy sweat that tasted of salt. She looked down at the two shillings on the table. They looked very small, and very useless.

"Take your money, Mrs. Morrissey," Maeve said, her voice shaking. "I can’t... I can’t tell you any more."

"No, keep it, darlin’," the woman sobbed, rising from the table and pulling her shawl over her head. "You’ve given me more than the priest did. At least I know he’s with his mates."

The two women hurried out of the shop, leaving the door swinging in the wind. The cold air of the street rushed in, clearing the smell of the sea, but the chill in Maeve’s bones remained.

Aunt Clara looked up from her wicker chair, her blind eyes fixed on the spot where Maeve sat. "You saw him," she said.

"Yes."

"He was pulling the line?"

"They were all pulling," Maeve said, her fingers tracing the edge of her brother’s silver watch. "Like they were trying to haul something up from the bottom. Something very heavy."

"That’s the old work," Clara whispered, her voice dropping to a frightened hiss. "The work they did before the French came, before the English, before there was ever a church on the hill. My grandmother told me about it. The sea has its own church, Maeve, and its own priests. They don't pray for souls. They pray for the weight."

"I have to go," Maeve said, standing up and reaching for her oilskins. "If I stay here, I’ll end up like Mrs. Morrissey, sitting by a cold grate, waiting for a bell that’s sixty fathoms down."

She packed her kit bag—a canvas sack stiff with old herring grease—and threw it over her shoulder. She did not kiss her aunt goodbye; they were not a family for kissing. Instead, she laid one of Mrs. Morrissey’s shillings on the table by the old woman’s hand.

"Keep the fire going," Maeve said. "I’ll be back before the ice comes into the bay."

"Don't look down the hole, Maeve," the old woman called after her as she reached the door. "When you’re on the water, keep your eyes on the sails. If you look down into the net, you’ll never look up again."

Maeve did not answer. She stepped out into the damp, cold air of Duckworth Street and pulled her woolen cap down over her ears.

The walk back to the mercantile wharf was a blur of gray stone and wet timber. The wind had risen, hauling round to the east, bringing with it the first heavy drops of a cold, stinging rain. By the time she reached the Edward Blake, the deck was a scene of wet, slippery confusion.

The crew was busy securing the last of the salt casks. Massive white pine barrels, each containing five hundred pounds of coarse Portuguese salt, were being lowered into the main hatch by a squeaking derrick. The air was thick with the scent of pine tar, damp hemp, and the sharp, alkaline smell of the salt itself, which drifted across the deck like dry snow.

Billy, the massive mate, was standing by the mainmast, his red beard glistening with rain. He watched Maeve climb the gangplank with her canvas sack, his expression one of grim amusement.

"Back so soon, sister?" he shouted over the rattle of the blocks. "I thought you’d have changed your mind once you smelled the bilge. We’ve no room for dry-land fancies here."

"I’ve got my kit," Maeve said, throwing her bag onto the hatch cover. "Where do I stash it?"

"Aft companionway, down the ladder," Billy grunted, pointing with a thick, grease-stained thumb toward the small cabin behind the mainmast. "You’re in the cabin with the skipper and me. The dory-mates are forward in the forecastle, and they don't want a woman smelling up their grease-pots. But don't go thinking you’re a lady of leisure. The cabin’s three feet high, and the bilge-pump leaks through the floorboards."

Maeve took her bag and headed for the narrow, dark opening of the companionway. As she descended the steep wooden steps, the light of the harbor vanished, replaced by the yellow, smoky glow of a single slush-lamp—a tin cup filled with cod oil and a floating rag wick that gave off a thick, fishy soot.

The cabin was tiny, smelling of damp wool, old boots, and the sour, pickled cabbage the skipper kept in a small keg under his bunk. There were three berths, each nothing more than a wooden shelf with a straw mattress and a single grey blanket. On the small table in the center, held down by a wooden rim to keep it from sliding in a sea, was Skipper Jonas’s black ledger.

Beside it lay an object that made Maeve freeze.

It was a piece of stone, about the size of a man’s hand, grey-green and greasy to the touch. It had been carved with strange, geometric patterns that did not look like the work of any Christian tool. They were too sharp, too precise, looking more like the natural crystals of a basalt column, yet they formed a shape that suggested a mouth—a wide, lipless maw lined with dozens of tiny, vertical ridges.

Maeve reached out, her hand trembling slightly, and touched the stone.

A shock of cold ran up her arm, so intense that her breath caught in her throat. For a fraction of a second, she did not see the dark cabin or the smoking slush-lamp. She saw a vast, subterranean hall of black stone, submerged under miles of silent, motionless water. In the center of the hall, something huge and white was moving, its slow, monumental coils shifting with the weight of an ocean.

"Don't touch that," a voice said from the shadow of the ladder.

Maeve jumped, her hand flying back to her side. Skipper Jonas was standing on the steps, his oilskins dripping black water onto the floorboards. His pale, lard-colored face was illuminated from below by the yellow glare of the lamp, his dark eyes fixed on her with a cold, unblinking intensity.

"That’s the ballast," Jonas said, his voice low and dry. "Every vessel needs its weight, Maeve Sterling. Some use stone from the hills, some use scrap iron. We use what we find."

"It’s... it’s very cold," Maeve said, her heart pounding.

"The bottom of the sea is cold," Jonas replied, stepping into the cabin and picking up the green stone. He did not seem to feel the chill; his fingers wrapped around the carved basalt with a familiarity that made Maeve’s skin crawl. "It’s where the light doesn't go. But there’s things down there that have been waiting since before the first tree grew on Newfoundland. They’re hungry, Maeve. And they like the salt."

He placed the stone in a small, iron-bound chest beneath his berth and turned the key.

"Go on deck," he said, not looking at her again. "The tide’s turned. It’s time to see if you can split."