The Gatherer by
Chris Howard is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at
http://saltwaterwitch.com/about.

       Time stopped him in the spring of 1822, and the life drifted from his ancient eyes at forty fathoms. The giant toothed whale, almost seventy feet from head to flukes, made a final breach, filled his lungs for the last time, and turned straight down into the dark Atlantic.
       He had soared through the oceans for many lifetimes of men, a king of the cold deeps and bright shallows. He had sired countless calves, eluded whalers in their sailing ships; harpoon scars notched and grooved his rippling flanks. His teeth had crushed monsters, giants of the abyss with cutting suction discs.
       A full day passed before his body reached the seafloor, and his massive corpse came to rest in a basin of sand at four-hundred fathoms. A day in life passed, and the whale was forgotten by all who knew him, but not by those who lived off the deaths of others.
       A sleeper shark and hagfish waited in the night, and then they moved in to gnaw and twist chunks of flesh off the whale's soft belly. Within a week, colonies of bacteria blossomed over the corpse's slick skin, eating into the softer pale flesh beneath, and the bone-eating worm, osedax, burrowed deep to feed on the whale's fat-rich marrow.






       A thousand of miles away from the whale's final resting place, on the same spring day of 1822, at nearly the same depth in the Atlantic Ocean, the king of the Seaborn spoke with his most trusted companion, Tyrtamon. They plotted the deaths of two rivals by setting one to assassinate the other.

       "I told the bone-gatherer, my lord, that the heir to Rexenor should become practical to the king."
       King Demetrios pulled himself closer to his old friend, Tyrtamon. "You said 'practical'?"
       Tyrtamon lifted his head, his braided hair fanning out in the water around his head. "I was also explicit. That Neokles should become one of the Olethren, his body dead, his soul bound in this world to your army."
       Demetrios was barefoot, and a fine web of skin stretched between each toe as he kicked higher in the water column. He felt the deep welling currents pushing at his back and through his hair as a surfacer might feel the wind.
       Lifting his head, he tasted a trace of squid's ink from the butcher's quarter of the Nine-cities, and turned toward it, his focus prodding through the blacker haze gathering near a visible section of battlement.
       "And House Rexenor will hunt Aleximor down," said the king, glancing up at the fiercely bright star of fire following a perfect arc over the city—the city rising off the seafloor in thickets of towers—some floating—around the central battlements of the royal city.
       Tyrtamon opened his hand, spreading a web of skin between each finger. "Can they kill him? I mean...permanently?"
       The king opened his mouth and then paused, kicking smoothly, drifting in a slow spiral that brought him upside down, the whole time playing with his short black beard. "We can play this out along many currents. We can reward Aleximor if he succeeds against House Rexenor. We can reward Rexenor if they succeed. We can join Rexenor to punish the traitorous murderer. We can condemn them both. We will just have to see how it flows."
       Thinking of his meeting with Aleximor, Tyrtamon sniffed, "The effrontery. He came with an escort."
       King Demetrios gave him a questioning glare. Why wouldn't one of the Seaborn of his position appear with trusted companions and guards?
       "Six of them. All dead."
       "Ah." The king nodded, continuing to turn until his feet brushed the stones.




       "I still have their taste in my mouth and in my memory. One wasn't much more than spelled and wired together bones. They are like the Olethren, but completely loyal, bound to his will, and they possess speed and intelligence I have not witnessed before."

       "The Olethren are a hundred thousand strong, and bound to my will." The king spoke quietly, but he might as well have roared the words.
       Tyrtamon flinched, felt the sting, and swallowed his elaboration of the differences he saw between Aleximor's six and the enormous army of the drowned dead the king commanded. The king's showed nothing like the cleverness and control he saw in the actions of Aleximor's guards. Finally, Tyrtamon said, "Aleximor has many more than six."
       "Which is why his power must be broken, his life taken from him," said the king shortly. "He's served the kings and queens of the Thalassogenêis well, but it is his time."
       Tyrtamon's eyes went unfocused for a few moments while he counted out Aleximor's age. "He's...more than a hundred and sixty years old."
       "Too long—too much accumulated power—for someone like him. I will find a replacement," said the king, and Tyrtamon knew him well enough to read the thoughts in his internal focus. A dozen abyss mages and other loyal sorcerers of rank and ability flipped through the king's mind like a handful of playing cards. But could any of them match Aleximor in power?
       Perhaps that was the point.
       Tyrtamon let his toes touch the flagstones. He kicked off without much will.
       The king allowed a few seconds pass, and then nodded. "My decision is made. Aleximor has grown too powerful. Before long he will be unassailable."
       Tyrtamon bowed his head. "Two fish. One hook."
       The king nodded. His fingers dropped away from his beard. "What did Aleximor say when he heard my command?"
       Tyrtamon held the king's eyes for a moment. "He said these exact words: if that is what the king wishes, then I will kill Neokles of House Rexenor and bind his psyche to the army of the dead."       

       Neokles, eldest son of Geryllos Lord Rexenor, woke with a shock. He snapped up his spear and kicked after the sixgill shark that shot through his hunting camp. He'd never seen one so bold. Not that sixgills were dangerous predators, but the shark's senses and instincts should have driven it to give the camp a wide berth.
       The rest of his party slept on, his brother Kassander and his tutor, the abyss mage Strates. Neokles didn't look back.
       His guards, always wary, kicked up with him, but he waved them off.
       He reached over his shoulder with his left hand, unfolded his fingers, and released a fist-sized glowing ball that hovered over his head, following him remora-like, lighting his way. It was an old trick Strates had taught him.
       Neokles' guard captain, Isander, grinned and pointed along the shark's heading, trailed behind, letting the young lord have full charge of the chase and quarry.
       Isander followed only to protect the heir to Rexenor. He commanded Neokles' personal guard. He was a giant among the Seaborn, utterly loyal to Lord Geryllos and House Rexenor, and by far the most experienced in battle. He'd fought in campaigns as far away as Rhodes, the Channel Islands and the North Sea. He'd fought at Geryllos' side against the Seaborn king, Demetrios himself.
       Seawater whistled through Isander's scaly armor, the song of war.
       He tucked his long spear under his arm, and drove his legs in smooth powerful kicks, slowing only when he felt the tail of Lord Neokles' kick-wash against his face.
       Neokles swam into the gloom, eyes locked on the swinging body of the sixgill. The shark was quick, remaining at the edge of the glow the prince had cast.
       On a far ridge, the bone-gatherer Aleximor made a weary attempt at a smile. Too easy. He watched the prince of House Rexenor swimming toward him, lured in by the urge to kill and the presence of prey. Aleximor had sent the shark, had guided it to his prey.
       Aleximor was in no danger of being spotted as he drifted in the open above the angled caps of stone and deep corals. The world had no light at this depth—but he'd done things to his eyes to make them work more efficiently. He couldn't go within ten fathoms of the sunlit surface without damaging his vision, but when he blinked, he cast out a fast moving cloud of reflective dust followed by a pulse of light. It allowed him to see great distances in complete darkness, even if it hit his senses in strobe-like frames of motion.
       His long hair, black as the sea around him, drifted in clumps around his shoulders, some loose, some in long braids. His skin was a mottled gray, his eyes cold blue. Otherwise he was like any other Seaborn. He felt little of the ocean's great weight on his body, he breathed in the fluid, slow and sure. A fine sheet of skin connected each finger and toe, although he'd torn the webbing between the third and fourth on his left hand during a recent disagreement over lodging in the Nine-Cities. It began as a disagreement, but he'd settled the matter.
       He curled one finger forward and his six dead slaves moved from a hollow in the cliff behind him, toward their master on legs of magically bound bone and shreds of tendon. All of them wore dull black armor, and two of the six carried spears. The others drew swords. They were slower than any well-trained soldier, but they followed Aleximor—and they would not die for him, for they were already dead.

       Aleximor hunched down a little behind the ridge of rock, and motioned his slaves to their positions. He counted ten more beats, listening for Neokles’ kicks churning the water.
       The bone-gatherer threw his hands toward the approaching shark, drawing it in line with his position, and the young lord followed.
       Aleximor saw Neokles clearly in pulses of color and light. The prince had come alone, without his armor or helmet, and he carried only a hunting spear. Neokles had pulled his hair into one thick tail that swung side to side as he kicked, matching the shark's caudal fin motion.
       "What fortune," whispered Aleximor, his fingers trembling, curling into tense hooks as the sixgill neared.
       The shark bucked and twitched, its instincts reacting to Aleximor's control, but it remained on a path that took it right over the bone-gatherer, its soft pale belly passing within reach of his fingers. He followed it a moment more, and let it go into the blackness beyond the cliffs.
       Aleximor's hand shot up, signaled. His soldiers sprang off the stone ledge, into open water, the two with spears going wide, circling to drive the prince into the trap.
       The four with swords kicked into the clear, bones clicking and popping, armor creaking. They made no other sounds.
       Neokles' focus dropped from the shark's tail to Aleximor's gaunt face, went wide for an instant.
       The Rexenor lord didn't slow down. He took in the ambush, swung his spear across his body, and with a side-to-side motion, shoved one of the dead out of his way, on his left, stabbed into the rotting knobs of bone supporting the second's skull.
       Neokles knew this game. Kill the master and the slaves will follow. He twirled out of reach of a sword stroke and kicked past two more sweeping blades, toward Aleximor.
       Kill the master. He cried a long wailing note.
       A blade caught Neokles across the back of the right calf muscle, cutting to the bone. The dead closed around him, stabbing and twisting, and stabbing again.
       The prince of Rexenor pulled his spear back for a thrust.
       One of the dead's swords pierced Neokles' side, drove through the space between two ribs, carving up a lung and connective tissue. The tip ground to a halt in the gap between vertebrae and pried them apart.

       Neokles' back arched. His jaw sagged open and his body went numb. He'd been driving his spear's point at Aleximor's throat. It went wide, turned up by the bone-gatherer's rising forearm.
       The sea went silent. Neokles drifted in a cloud of bright red oxygen-rich blood, his face paling, his fingers loose. The spear slid from them into the gloom over Aleximor's shoulder.
       The bone-gatherer stared into the horror in Neokles' eyes, and sang softly.
       The words rippled through the water, gathering form, a soft glistening gel that thinned into sheets spreading over the Rexenor prince. The gel slid down Neokles' back, enclosing his arms, sealing his body in a thick shimmering bag.
       Neokles stared out through the film, alive but helpless. Aleximor closed his lips. His song ended.
       A bulge of gel sagged from the back of Neokles' head, oozing into a point with an open hole the thickness of a man's thumb.
       The casing congealed around Neokles' body and the funnel shape curved down into a narrowing tube, like the spout of a teapot.
       Aleximor edged closer and dug something white out of his cloak. He lifted a cylindrical vessel of bone against the spout, and siphoned off the psyche of Neokles son of Geryllos, heir to the lordship of House Rexenor.
       A hot yellow glow like molten metal followed Neokles' soul into the container. The light faded and Aleximor, with a smooth motion he'd performed thousands of times, sealed off the cylinder's open end and pulled it away from the spout.
       The gel casing softened, split into sheets, and peeled away from Neokles' body. They folded into a blurry nodule that Aleximor plucked out of the water and pushed into one of the pockets in his cloak.
       The prince's body sagged into a limp pile on the rocks, his face turned up, no horror in his eyes, emptiness in them.
       Aleximor stared down at the eldest of Geryllos' sons. He felt something odd. Not sympathy, but there was a sour edge to this, the sense—the knowledge—that King Demetrios had used him, sent someone as valuable as his ostologos along on this undertaking like some errand boy. Kill the Rexenor prince. The king wishes Neokles to become one of his dead army.

       Neokles was the heir to one of the powerful great houses. They would not look on this as anything but an act of war. Demetrios was foolish to think that Rexenor would not—
       A skull from one of his dead slaves tore from its bony mount and hit Aleximor in the shoulder, jolting him from his private thoughts.
       Isander was among them, sword hacking through bone and armor in great arcing sweeps of sharpened metal. He'd charged first with his spear, and left it wedged between one of the dead's armor plates. He cut down another of Aleximor's slaves by chopping it into enough pieces that each by itself could do no harm.
       Aleximor gave his remaining guards a motion of command, and fled over the cliff wall behind him, kicking with all his strength.
       Isander blew a horn, eerily loud and sharp-pitched, calling the Rexenor guards.

       Aleximor's fear faded with the distance, as he dropped vertically along the face of the mountain's far side where the Atlantic's floor became a shallow slope of sand.
       He threw a glance over his shoulder. His eyes picked up no pursuing shapes.
       "The king wishes it," he said bitterly into open water. He grinned at the container of bone that held the psyche of the Rexenor prince. "Do you hear that, Lord Neokles?"
       He clutched the cylinder with both hands, shaking it, laughing now, nearly all his confidence restored. He slid his gaze right, toward the south and west where the king and most of the Seaborn dwelled.
       "Hades fuck you, king. A hundred years and more I've served the throne, Demetrios. I have served one king and two queens of the Seaborn. For a hundred years I've built up the Olethren, the drowned dead, gathered them off the seafloor, dragged them from wrecks, unburied them from a century's drift of sand. I have pulled them halfway to life, and set them in line to wait. Rank upon rank of them, waiting for the king's command to destroy his enemies. One of the kings of the past—even I know not which—built the stone fortress to contain the Olethren and their stench. The Wreath-wearer may know, and the keepers of history, but for me, the fortress is beyond memory."
       Aleximor was about to go on, but lifted his open mouth, pulling his lips back, tasting the currents. He kicked harder, leaning a little to his left. He breathed in the water rushing past his face.

       "Death," he whispered. He smiled at the container in his hand. "Smell it, Lord Neokles?"
       He kept his new heading, toward the taste of decay. He found it farther away than he would have guessed, along the flats. He couldn't help finding it. The thing was a mountain of rotting flesh.
       It had once been a whale of some kind. He had never been good with animal identification, but he'd seen this kind before, sleek deep divers, a single row of enormous teeth on a long slender jaw bone. Its head alone was six or seven times Aleximor's length, with a massive squarish nose, now flattened against the dark sand.
       Aleximor guessed it to be no more than twelve to fourteen days dead. Bacteria had eaten into its skin, leaving the pale under-flesh exposed in mottled patches.
       He put his fingers to his chin, scratching it in thought. His hair rippled around his shoulders. The current was coming at him, picking up the dead whale's rot, which was why he'd sensed it so far off.
       The current before him also prevented him from hearing—until it was too late—the rush and accompanying high whistle of a bolt aimed and fired at him from behind.
       A thumb's length barb hammered into his back on the upper right side, at a steep downward angle. The bolt punched through his shoulder blade, shattered more bones, and ripped through one lung.
       The force of the bolt shoved Aleximor forward, tossed him off the seafloor, and spun him halfway around. His jaw worked, gaping and closing like a landed fish.
       Upside down in the water, he saw them, soldiers from Rexenor, Neokles' guard, at least twelve of them led by Neokles' brother, Kassander, all flying over the sand.
       It astounded him that one of them could get off a bolt from that distance, not only with accuracy, but with enough force to come close to running him through. But then Rexenor always was disreputable, half a foot in the old Telkhines magic. They welcomed unorthodox weapons and ancient tricks. It was why King Demetrios envied and feared House Rexenor.
       Confidence in splinters, like half the bones of his right shoulder and upper chest, Aleximor, tugged his body around to face the dead whale. The sealed cylinder with the psyche of Neokles lay on the dark sand, thrown from Aleximor's fist with the bolt's impact.
       He blinked, his mind going foggy with pain. Another bolt hit the sand between his legs with a bloom of gray silt. He reached for the cylinder, his eyes nearly closing. Blood surged in a thick haze around him, mingling with his hair and clothes, twisting in ribbons and feeding the currents.
       He gasped, sucked in a ragged draw of the sea, and threw one hand out to the whale. His fingers clawed the soft rotting flesh, and he used it as an anchor to draw him closer. He tucked the prince in the sand, wedged between his knees and the whale. His right arm hung limp, useless. He pulled his cloak around with his left, and tugged out the near transparent ball of gel he had used to extract Neokles' soul.
       He lunged forward and planted the ball on the side of the whale's carcass. The gel flattened, sensed the flesh and bone beneath its touch, and slithered through the sand under the carcass, oozing into a thin case around the entire whale.
       With shaking fingers, Aleximor pried open the bone cylinder and jabbed it over the spout that formed near the joint of the whale's jawbone.

       Aleximor's eyes slammed shut against the flash of fire light. Another bolt hit him. Vertebrae splintered and cut through his chest and abdomen.
       The Rexenor soldiers were on him, beating him to the sand, tearing his cloak, pinning him to floor with sword points.
       Aleximor blinked slowly, black dust billowing like a cloud of ink. He showed his teeth in a smile as they back-kicked from him, a rush of fear.
       The seventy-foot dead whale shook itself off the seafloor with a thundering kick of muscle animated by the psyche of Neokles. It tore through Aleximor's enclosing gel and shot into the black, dripping rotting tissue. One fluke caught Aleximor in its sweep and broke more bones, sending him higher into the water.
       The Rexenor soldiers swung from below and grabbed the ostologos, two on his legs, one on either side of him. A fourth took a hunk of his long hair in one fist and snapped his neck back.
       Aleximor felt no pain. His body had stopped breathing the ocean. His eyes stared out stupidly, but he was still behind them.
       "What's to be done, Strates?" A young man spoke. Aleximor recognized the voice of Kassander, the brother of Neokles.
       "He is not dead," said a slow voice, smooth and careful like an easy current crossing loose sand without stirring it up. Aleximor recognized its owner as well. Strates Unwinder was Rexenor's senior abyss mage, an ancient man. "We cannot kill him."
       "With blade and bolt?"
       "By any means that I know." Strates shook Aleximor by the grip of his fingers on his hair. "Take care what you say. He can hear us even now."
       Aleximor drifted in and out of his half-dead state, gathering his strength in minuscule amounts, and listening to their plans for him. In time, he'd regenerate every broken bone, every torn muscle and organ.
       His soul clutched at the flesh of his body, its grip strong but not strong enough to hold open the channel to his senses. His sight dulled. His hearing rolled in and out like the surge on a shoreline. He heard enough.
       "...his permanent death may be beyond our power but we may be able to imprison him, seal him behind a lock of sufficient intricacy."

       "Kill me, my lord. I have failed Rexenor," said Isander, skidding to his knees and letting his sword fall. He'd been battling a wound fever for a month, but as soon as he had strength, he kicked from his bed and sought Neokles' brother.
       Kassander, the younger brother of Neokles, the new heir to the House, let his weight carry him to the floor of the assembly hall, joining his battle teacher there. He picked up Isander's sword with his right, placing his left on the old soldier's shoulder.
       "Rise, my friend."
       Isander lifted his eyes to his lord's. His teeth were tight against the pain in his body. He showed little of it in his wrinkled face. He'd nearly lost his head to one of Aleximor's dead, the sword chewing through shoulder muscle to the spine.
       Kassander bowed his head. "You will accompany me to the far side of the world. Aleximor has recovered his senses and most of the control over his body. We won't be able to hold him much longer."
       "Our prison?"
       "Will not keep him."
       Isander winced as he formed a confused glare. "Why not simply cut off—"
       "He cannot be killed...permanently. But Strates has devised a way to lock him inside the body of the earth."
       Isander started to nod but the stab of fire up his spine told him he'd not yet recovered enough to make complicated head movements.
       "I need you," said Kassander. "King Demetrios had a hand in this, we're certain. Our spies have told us that the ostologos did not act on his own direction." Without appearing to change the subject, he managed to chart a completely different conversational course. "Neokles was always more of your student."
       "And Strates Unwinder, always more your teacher," said Isander, always good with directions.       

       "We will need both against the king."
       Isander looked into Kassander's bright greenish-blue eyes, the color of tropical shallows. He noticed for the first time the lord wore battle gear, full armor, his helmet with Gyrellos' seabird—something the surfacers called a Cormorant—fixed above the brow. Kassander's dark braided hair stuck out under the rim and played along his shoulders.
       He looked so much like his brother, Neokles. But there was something of the abyss in Kassander as well, completely absent from his brother, a deeper layer of armor that held in a secret power like the rocky shell of the earth contained a molten core. Kassander had the bleed in the family.
       Isander bent his whole body forward rather than move his head. "Command me, my lord. Anything. Find a prison that will hold the bone-gatherer and I will guard it to my death if that is what you wish of me."
       Kassander appeared to be thinking that over. "We leave soon. Dress for a long journey."

       Strates cast a binding on Aleximor before they departed the Rexenor fortress in the Atlantic deeps, but it wore off halfway across the Pacific, and the Rexenor guards had to fire two bolts into the bone gatherer to get him under control. By the time they reached the canyon on the far side of the world, Aleximor had recovered enough strength and wits to attempt his escape.
       The party rested against a canyon wall, weapons bared, half-circling the bone-gatherer, ready for an attack.
       Kassander and Strates kicked along the stone face to a cave not far from the surface. Strates, always the teacher, repeated his instructions for the use of the special key he had created, along with commentary on the names of passing fish and an occasional foray into surface history.
       "A cave is necessary, and the lock must be placed inside, hidden but accessible."
       Kassander nodded, tucking a thick fold of brown papery material into his belt. He kicked into open water ahead of his teacher, anxious to return to the floor where Isander and the others guarded Aleximor.
       Strates paused at the cave's entrance and lifted his face to the bright ceiling of the ocean, his eyes following an odd-looking lump of gray with stubby tailfins.
       "Look. A sunfish." He smiled, turned in the water. He pointed along the serrated silhouette of the canyon wall against the pale ripples of the surface. "The Spanish call this Monterey."
       Kassander followed his teacher's arm. He had spent time among the surfacers in their city of Boston, and he often dreamed of sailing across oceans to other surfacer nations.
       His reverie broke when Strates frowned, and then stared down into the blackness where the Rexenor guard held the bone-gatherer.






       "Death," breathed Aleximor. He tasted it in the water.
       The Rexenors didn't appear to hear him—or ignored him. The bone-gatherer talked to himself constantly.
       Aleximor twitched and shook and carried on heated conversations with himself all the time, so they paid him no greater heed when he raised his left hand, palm up, and spread his fingers until the webbing went tight between them. He dug into one hand with the sharp nail of the finger on his other, carving into the meaty bulge below his thumb, cutting diagonally across his palm to the first knuckle of the little finger.
       Blood gushed in the wake of the nail, a dark syrupy red. It rippled away from his hand like strips of ribbon in the water.
       "I call to you," he said in a clear commanding voice.
       He curled into something close to a sitting position and floated a few feet off the floor.
       He calmed himself with slow pulls of the ocean into his lungs, and closed his eyes, chanting something about a door into the pit of Erebos where darkness fears the monsters that dwell there, and how he possessed the secret that keeps defiled Persephone under the world. He sang of the Erratic One, Akastê.
       A bright light flared in front of him, orange and red like roaring flames. It radiated through his eyelids, and then died to an ember-like glow. He opened his eyes.
       A rippling line of fire burned in the dark water, running from high above Aleximor, long thin line from this world into another, one that opened into a volcano's heart.
       A voice as cold as the sea's depth rumbled through the opening, a woman's low voice. "What do you call yourself?"
       Aleximor released a breath, drew another deep pull of the sea, and answered in a commanding tone, "Give me the names of the dead in—"

       Kassander released a roiling ball of steel gray light. Aleximor narrowly dodged it, but couldn't get his arm pulled away in time, and lost most of his left hand.
       "Take him," Isander shouted, and two crossbow bolts hit the bone-gatherer, one through the left arm, another just above the groin.
       Strates dove past Kassander, grabbed Aleximor from above, driving him into the sand, but Aleximor anticipated the move and kicked off the stone wall with Strates on his shoulders, pushing the old Rexenor mage into the line of yellow light.
       Strates' eyes shot wide. His legs swung over his head into the burning light, and something on the other side grabbed him and sucked him in.
       "Kassander!" Strates shrieked, fingers clutching at the fire's edge. He used the last of his strength to surge forward, pushing his shoulders and head into the ocean. "Use the key. Before he esc—"
       Strates vanished. The line sealed behind him, and the fire burned in the back of Kassander's eyes. Blind from the struggle, he held Aleximor fixed to the canyon wall by driving his sword through his chest, pinning him to the rock.
       Isander braced himself on Aleximor's other side, holding a thick clump of black hair in one fist to keep the bone-gatherer's snapping teeth away.
       Kassander elbowed him. "Hold my sword."
       Isander dug one foot deeper in the sand. He let one of the other guards take Aleximor's hair, while he drove all his weight against Kassander's pinning sword.
       The prince of House Rexenor pulled out a short black knife. His eyes, cold and pitiless rings of bright blue-green, stared into Aleximor.
       He drifted forward about a foot off the ground, knife held low. His voice exploded with hatred.
       "Aleximor! Dead raiser. I cannot take your life. I can prevent you from taking another's."
       Knife in one hand, he unfolded a crinkling square of paper with the other. The paper contained a man's bloody handprint. Both sides did, left to right, facing each other, a matching set.
       Aleximor's eyes went wide. All the life in his newly formed lungs shot from his mouth. "Kassander."
       The prince of House Rexenor pulled the knife across the bone-gatherer's throat and pasted the paper over the gush from the wound, his hand curling firmly over the bloodprint.
       Aleximor's body went limp, his face softening, hair loose in the current. His eyes were empty.

       Kassander nodded to his guards, gasped, "Release him," and peeled away the paper. "He's no longer in there, but in here." He pushed his chin out at the brown square sheet. "Come with me," he said to Isander.
       Holding the corners delicately as if a wrong move could release the bone-gatherer, he kicked to the cave high in the canyon wall. He selected a space of clean rock and, pressing the paper against it, pushed his right hand into the matching bloodprint.
       Without a sound or protest, the psyche of Aleximor the bone-gatherer entered the prison of stone. Kassander lifted the paper away, carefully, both sides blank, and the bloodprint stood out clearly on the cave's wall.
       He studied it for a moment, and then turned to Isander. "You will guard him. Take two you trust most. Do not touch it, ever. Kill anyone who attempts to place his hand against the key."
       Isander bowed. "Yes, my lord."

       King Demetrios, ruler of all the Seaborn, was celebrating the new bone-gatherer with a little party. He slipped the ribbons off the bright orange box and flattened down the four sides to reveal Telanthes' masterpiece, an orange and pink cake of gelated algae, and some kind of sweet paste. Telanthes was the greatest confectioner in the City. He didn't hand out recipes—even to kings.
       The four ladies in the king's party nodded appreciatively. The king, Tyrtamon, Sinauros—Demetrios' replacement for Aleximor—and the captain of the king's Eight completed the small gathering.
       The king served the dishes, and, stabbing the knife into the remaining half of the cake, bidding his captain take it to the seven guardsmen waiting at the foot of the slope.
       Demetrios kicked into open water, high above his guests, raised his plate of cake and said, "To Sinauros, the new ostologos. May you serve me and the Seaborn as faithfully as your predecessor."

       There were several shouts of "Sinauros." from the guards and Tyrtamon.
       "Come. Sinauros, give us a song or a bit of—"
       King Demetrios twisted around, his brows knuckling up and his eyes going to crisp blue squints. A low rumbling sound hit his ears. He saw something in the dark, a rolling pale squarish shape.
       Before the king's guard mounted a defense, the white whale, reeking of death, thundered out of the gloom, dropped its long tooth-lined jaw, and snapped up the king.
       Demetrios was gone. Two heartbeats later, the whale was a distant smear of pale kicking flukes, and then it vanished.
       The king's wedge of cake spun a few times end over end and drifted to the seafloor. Then the screaming and panic started.

       The white whale went on to plague shipping in every ocean, but some ingrained pattern in its rotting brain drove it to derive special pleasure in taunting the whaling fleets of New England.