Crown of Veils

Salt wind worried the tarps and banners along Gharum’s stone piers, turning the air brackish and cold. Nets hung like gray lace from mast to mast, dripping with scales that flashed like coins whenever a pale sun slipped free of the cloudbank. Neris pressed her palm to the slick mortar between breakwater stones and felt the harbor’s pulse in the vibrations of passing waves. Where the mortar had cracked, a tuft of faintly glowing hyphae crept out like a cautious hand.

She crouched, brought her copper blade to the glowing threads, and scraped them into a glass vial. The fungus gave a soft hiss when severed, a ghost of breath against the skin of the bottle. She corked it, labeled it with trembling script, then touched the edge of the crack and whispered thanks. Salt burned the small cuts on her knuckles; she’d forgotten her gloves at home.

“Girl! You’ll rot your lungs in this wind,” called Aunt Salai from the pier. Her shawl, woven from eelgrass, flapped around her elbows as if it might wriggle back into the sea. “They say the salt-cough’s come early. Marlo from the guild sent a boy, said keep the windows oiled shut at night.”

Neris rose and slid the vial into her pouch. “The vents kept the worst of it down last year. Once the lantern beds regrow, the coughing will pass.” She said it as if sure. She was not.

“All I know,” Aunt Salai said, stepping carefully among coils of rope, “is that I woke before dawn and could not pull a breath. The window rattled like a drum. And down in the alley, the vent sighed blue. That never happens in frost.” The woman’s fingers, scarred from net-mending, tightened on Neris’s sleeve. “Don’t go down there at dusk. Promise me.”

The promise snagged in Neris’s throat. “I’ll be careful.”

Bells gabbled from the harbor gate as a procession of salt wardens marched by, boots leaving chalky prints. At their head walked Guild Inspector Marlo in his indigo coat, his medals stamped with sea beasts. He glanced toward the two women with the absent interest of someone counting ledgers. “Apprentice Neris,” he called without slowing, “the Shrike House expects your samples before the next tide. And keep your nose out of the low tunnels. There’s been a breach somewhere under the old flensing hall.”

“I’m not in the habit of getting lost,” Neris said, but Marlo was already past, absorbed in his salt, his wardens, his sums.

They walked home along the quay where iron hoops thudded against posts. Gharum’s houses climbed the hill in a stacked confusion, roofs shingled with shell and slate, windows tight-lidded against spray. Here and there, metal grates in the street coughed pale vapor, the breath of the catacombs where the damp-lantern fungus smoldered in soft blue. Children hopped over the grates and dared each other to hold a hand above the breath until it stung. A black-and-white cat, thin as a ribbon, trailed Neris and stared up as if it had learned her name somewhere and was trying to decide if she deserved it.

“You feed that stray and it will move into your shoes,” Aunt Salai said, but her mouth softened. “You always were a magnet for orphans and oddities.”

“At least oddities don’t snore,” Neris said, though the last borderer she’d taken in had nearly chewed through her boot, desperate for leather.