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Rated T: The following chapter contains passages which may be disturbing to younger or sensitive readers. Reader discretion is advised.
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Thirteenth Waking.

I feel gross. My stomach hurts. Maybe writing will distract me.

Our water is gone. The sardis are gone too. Both long gone.

It's not so hard to find the ugly fish-things anymore. You just have to look carefully. They usually have their head-lures above the surface of the mud. And you walk up and keep your sleds on either side, and then skewer them. They're pretty big. We can go on maybe two of those a waking. For the meat, anyway. But we have to look further and further away each time we get them.

Something happier, something positive... Anything? I know. Shanda's voice came back to her. I've heard her humming and thrumming as she goes about.

When we would head for port after a long time out at sky, and the nights would get long, she would sing. She has such a pretty voice. I've written that before.

"I've written that before.""I've written that before!" Is that my favorite thing to say?

I am sorry.

And I think: Sorry to who? You? Who are you?

Who will read this? I think there has been an unspoken giving-up on fixing the engine. We just don't have the tools.

So will anyone...?

Are we going to get out of here? I want to. I want to get out and up and back into the sky. Out of the mud and above the clouds. I want to live, and have children and grandchildren who will read this book, and know that there is always hope, for I will have proved it by my having escaped the darkness.

I sound strange to myself.

I need to focus. Why am I writing? For distraction? What happened to the log-lust? Maybe this is the log-lust and I'm just pretending it's not. Maybe I'm just going crazy. I need something to write about. Something to tell. That's what journals are for, aren't they? To tell the journaler's story? Is that where history came from? Was it his-story? Whoever he was, that wrote it down?

I do not feel well. Not well at all. I can feel my heartbeat in my eyes.

A few wakings ago, Greys brought an ugly fish-thing into the galley. (Porter mostly stays out of the galley now, and just stays in his quarters.) Greys wiped a spot clean on the thing's underbelly, and then nicked into it with a knife. It started bleeding profusely. Greys held it up until it all bled out into a bowl. Fish-blood. No. Ugly fish-thing-blood.

Then he told us we might have to live on it. Because our water was as good as gone. "It's fluid," he said, "It's not as good as water, but it's fluid." And he went on about how it might sustain us.

Nobody liked the idea. I...protested quite openly about it. I wish I hadn't. And then Greys seemed on edge. And he picked up the bowl, right to his lips, closed his eyes and swilled it for about a third of its contents. That was disgusting. I don't know what he thought of it, I couldn't tell, but I don't care. It was just disgusting. Then he said, "If I die, you'll know it's bad." And he went away to his quarters. He seemed almost...angry.

What are we to him? Us three young fisher-sailors? Brats that need constant minding? He was right. I knew it, somewhere deep inside, in a horrible place where all the logic is cruel: we could survive by drinking blood. Greys is always looking out for us. Why can't I be more grateful to him? What, because the way he saves our lives tastes like something scraped off the keel? I was so ashamed of myself. I'm still so ashamed of myself. I need to apologize to him.

Because he was right. There was no more water. And no more water means death. But now we drink the blood of ugly fish-things. And it saves our lives. And it makes my stomach hurt.

It's one of those desperate measures that you are always aware of in the back of your mind, but then when it's upon you, you're surprised. Why is that? I don't know.

Well, it was upon us. And I knew we needed to show Greys a little faith. Dhalan took the liberty to acknowledge the fact out loud, and the way he said it annoyed me horribly. "He's right," he said, and started ladling everyone bowls of fish-blood. All perfect and knowing about it, as if nobody else besides him got the gist from Greys, the self-righteous... What am I saying? What's wrong with me? Moons, I hurt...

Did I sleep? No, I just laid here until it went away. And I heard Shanda singing.

And a wild thought: I'm dead. And it's the voice of my mother, coming to take me away. No. I pinch my arm, and it still hurts. I'm awake. I'm alive. The voice is from Shanda.

I'm okay, it's not so bad. I can handle this, I can handle this. It's just fish-blood. I can drink fish-blood. It tastes like creeping evil, and swallowing it makes me feel like my eyes are going to pop out of my head, but it's good for me, it's good for me, it will keep me alive. I've been consuming it for days--for wakings. Why can't my body just take it? Why doesn't it seem to bother Dhalan and Shanda as much? Cursed Nasreans! What intolerable foods can they have possibly been subjected to in that sand-blasted country, that they may easily subsist on the lifeblood of dirty, plague-ridden mud-worms, and yet remain in good health! I am envious. In some twisted way, I am envious something terrible.

Ah, and I hear the middle-part of that song, that is the most beautiful. And everything vanishes. Shanda does that. I've written this before: She says she does it to while away the time, or just absentmindedly. But it is still so lovely. She should be performing for emperors and kings, not fishing for sardis. Then she would not have ended up here.

And she would never have met Derek Haley. She wouldn't want that.

This song... I have not heard her sing this tune in a long, long time. It makes me feel...peaceful. Like everything's going to be all right.

Thunder?

Did I really think it was thunder? That must have been hours ago. I was so hoping for rain. But there is none.

The ugly fish-things that we've been eating, and drinking blood from...are babies. And we have seen the unholy creature that gave birth to them. Holy Moons above, it was a monster, a demon, something evil, and it almost ate Dhalan, and I hope never to see it again.

But Dhalan's okay. Just a little muddy. Well, very muddy. He's outside, half-naked, scraping the mud off his clothes. We can't wash them, so Dhalan figures to just hang them to dry, and then beat them out once the mud hardens. I don't know how fast that will happen though. It's so muggy here.

Now I'm going to try to put together everything Dhalan told us with everything I saw for myself, chronologically.

Dhalan was looking for ugly fish-things far downslope of the ship. What he said happened was that he thought he found one, and that he could get it, real easy, just like that. But when he thrust in his skewer, a bigger part of the ground seemed to lurch in protest, bigger than usual.

So he took his cutlass--if my other journal hadn't burned, you'd know from what I've written before that Dhalan always carries a cutlass--Dhalan took his cutlass and stabbed it down along with the skewer, thinking it was just a bigger-than-normal ugly fish-thing. And then he realized he was on the back of something very big, some animal that was coming up out of the mud. So he pulled out the skewer and cutlass and jumped off and landed in the mud.

Then he told us what the thing looked like. He said it looked almost exactly like the ugly fish-things, but bigger, much bigger--the size of an arcwhale, he said. And the two front lures on its head were bigger too, and they glowed in the dark. And the sideways jaws were proportionally bigger, and so were the teeth on the inward ends.

So Dhalan was stuck in the mud, and there was a monster ugly fish-thing above him. He said it stooped down to eat him, but he jabbed his skewer and cutlass toward it. From what I understand, when the skewer connected, the monster sort of veered upward and a little sideways in its dive, so when it plunged into the mud, it barely missed Dhalan. But the impact of the monster onto his skewer drove Dhalan deeper into the mud too, and he said he barely remembered to let go before he was pulled down completely.

So the skewer was gone, but he still had his cutlass, and he slashed at the monster's underbelly as it slid past him into the mud. And then he said the ground started to move again. I didn't quite understand this part. He said it felt as if he were being sucked downward, and then moving sideways, or something, and then the ground fell, and an even bigger monster ugly fish-thing came out of the mud. It was a giant ugly fish-thing.

My hand is getting tired. I'm going to call them the monster and the giant.

So the monster pulled up out of the mud, and the giant came out of the ground and saw the monster. Dhalan decided to lie still and wait, thinking his muddied clothes would hide him. This turned out to be a wise decision. Then Dhalan said the giant did something...strange. He said it looked like magic. I don't know what magic looks like. Well actually I did see Captain Peralta make a healing spell once, and that made a green glow. But Dhalan said the giant seemed to...shoot lightning from...its head or somewhere. And it shot it at the monster. I don't know what magic spell there is that looks like that. But Dhalan's been more places than I have, and he's seen more things. I'll ask him about it later.

Dhalan said the lightning-bolt was so loud he had to cover his ears. My guess is that this is what I thought was thunder, earlier. And he said it felt strange, in the air. He said he couldn't describe it any other way than by saying it made the air crack, and it made the hairs on the back of his neck prickle all over. After the first blast, the monster fled--Dhalan didn't know where--and the giant followed and blasted again--the second roll of thunder I heard.

Porter told me once about some kinds of water-dwelling fish that can hunt by creating jolts of electricity from their own bodies. He said it stuns any other nearby water-fish, and that that's how they catch their prey. Could this have been one of those fish? Mud-dwelling instead of water-dwelling? But water-fish are so small.

But I'm below the clouds. Why should I expect anything to be as it ought to be? Does it matter? I'm in Deep Sky. I'm in Deep Sky. Moons, are we going to get out of here? I shall not dwell on it.

When I heard the thunder, I raced to get outside. My stomach is feeling better, Shanda is singing, and now rain! I thought. But when I got to the hatch, all I saw was a series of odd happenings. First, I saw Shanda accidentally do a back-flip from off her usual place on the prow-ward part of the hull. Greys was already out on the platform, and Shanda landed on her hands and feet near him, I think. I'm not sure. I was distracted by the big shadow that was the monster, soaring over our ship and up the slope. Did it knock her off? And then Porter bustled up behind me with two huge pots, saying "We've got to collect it, we've got to collect it!" I guess he thought it was rain, too. I feel bad for Porter. He's lost it completely, I think.

And then everybody just stopped, and stared, as the giant flew overhead. It was enormous. It loomed like an island in the darkness. I couldn't believe how big it was. I'm sure one swiping fly-by with its body would be enough to crush our ship all to splinters. The giant chased the monster up the slope, way up the slope, so far I could barely see them through the dark haze, and then the pursuit wheeled around to the left, and went back downward, until they both disappeared into the blackness.

And then we remembered Dhalan.

But Porter had disappeared into his quarters again.

Shanda went into immediate hysterics, lashed on a pair of sleds, and ran down the slope. I remember thinking it was funny: I didn't know that somebody could sled over the mud that fast--and then being ashamed for thinking something like that, when I should have been worried about Dhalan. So Greys and I lashed on our own sleds and followed as fast as we could.

It was a little difficult finding Dhalan's sled-tracks. There were a lot of tracks down the slope; we just tried to find the freshest ones. I don't know if Shanda thought about this. She just ran on ahead, shrieking "Dhalan! Dhalan!" And pretty soon she was so far ahead of us that we had trouble seeing her.

And I griped, "Great, we're going to lose her!"

And Greys quipped back, "Only a deaf man could lose her."

And we laughed and continued on. But it was a shallow laughter--we didn't know if we were going to find Dhalan.

But we did find him. Shanda found him. We heard them calling to each other, and then Shanda yelling for us to come. When we got to where they were, Shanda was wiping Dhalan's cutlass clean of the mud. Dhalan was sunk, at an odd angle, up to his armpits.

It took us almost an hour to get him out. The mud made him weigh about three times as much as he should have, and the suction beneath him was horrible. One of his sleds had snapped, and we never found the skewer.

It was hard going for him on only one-and-a-half sleds, but we managed to get him back to the platform. When we got back we heard Porter weeping inside the ship. Greys got mad and went inside, to smack some sense into Mr. Porter, I hoped. That's bad of me; I shouldn't think that.

Meanwhile, Dhalan asked Shanda to find him some dry clothes. And then he asked me to help him peel off his vest, shirt and trousers. It was cold and wet and grainy and awful. Once that was done, I came in here with a mad log-lust about it, and was surprised to remember that I had thought it was thunder. I don't know why. But that was a long time ago, and Dhalan has long since come inside and gone to bed and stayed there.

Ah, and it strikes me. I said before that I envied him. I do not envy him now. That's...funny.

I shouldn't think like that. What's wrong with me?

We've decided not to fish downslope anymore.