Marks of the Deep Water

A diver's water-damaged field notebook on what lives below the Mirrenmere's waterline — brine-lurkers, tide-grippers, and the drowned that keep their shape and the drowned that don't.

This book went into the Mirrenmere with me on the Saltsung dive and came out wetter than I meant it to. Half of what I wrote that week is a smear now, and I have copied out what's left as faithfully as I can, gaps and all, because a half-legible warning is still a warning and I would rather you have it broken than not have it at all. [i]The eyeless one, first met at the Throat of the Pan, brine-pool bottom.[/i] Pale as a drowned bone, the whole length of it, and no eyes anywhere I could find, which I did not understand until a Hessk crewman told me it doesn't need them — it feels you coming through the water the way you'd feel a hand on your shoulder, pressure first, sight never. It does not surface. Whatever it was before the dark and the salt shaped it, it decided a long time ago that the top of the water was somebody else's country, and it has kept to the bargain since. Do not mistake its patience for slowness. It waits because waiting works. Rule: if you are diving brine-pool bottoms anywhere south, assume something like it is already aware of you before you are aware of it, and dive accordingly. [i]The many-legged thing at Tidewrack Cove, cargo-rack tide-line.[/i] Barnacled over so thick you'd take it for a rock outcrop until the rock starts moving, and it comes up the cove on the low tide on more legs than I ever got an accurate count of — I tried twice and got a different number both times, which either means I can't count under pressure or it doesn't hold still enough to be counted, and I am honestly not certain which. It goes back down with whatever it caught, cargo or crew, and the Hands have simply written off the lower racks rather than fight it season to season. The shell is worth real coin to the right buyer, which has gotten more than one greedy diver killed trying to collect it off the animal still wearing it. Rule: the lower racks are not abandoned because the Hands are careless. They are abandoned because somebody already worked the arithmetic and it didn't favor the racks. [i]The salt-kept dead of the Saltsung Barrow —[/i] [i]— four lines lost to water —[/i] and by the time the ink survives again I am already past the outer niches, so I will set down what I remember instead of what I wrote, which I trust less but is at least whole. The barrow keeps its dead standing, not lying, packed in salt above the old tide-mark by the drowned rite, and they are not drowned the way the shrine congregations are drowned — they are dried, cured hard as the rock they're cut into, and they do not fall to pieces the way I expected the old dead to. They reach. Not lunging — reaching the way you'd reach to stop a stranger opening a door in your own house, unhurried, certain of their right to do it. I want to be precise about this because it matters more than the shape of the thing: they do not chase. Cross back over the threshold you came in by and they let you go, every time, in my experience — but the threshold is exact, not approximate, and I have seen a diver misjudge it by less than his own body's length and pay for the mistake in full. My crewmates and I disagree on whether they know the difference between an intruder and a diver working with proper respect, or whether the threshold is simply the whole of what they are keeping and everything past it is trespass regardless of manners. I lean toward respect mattering. I would not stake a dive on my own opin— [i]— the entry ends there. The next page is fused shut and I have not been able to open it without losing what's underneath.[/i] What I can add, from the crew rather than the page: the Hessk speak of the saltkept with something closer to courtesy than fear, which took me longer to understand than it should have. They are not the enemy in this story. They are doing the job they swore to, the same as any garrison, and a garrison that never tires and never doubts its orders is not a monster — it is simply not a person you can reason with about letting you pass. The Hessk crew I dove with left salt at the outer marks going in, the way you'd leave a coin at a toll gate, and I have started doing the same, more from habit now than belief, though I could not tell you honestly which it started as. Last mark, briefer, because I have less to say about it and what I have is unpleasant: the drowned that go soft rather than hard. The shrine congregations below the tide-mark, taken by the water rather than the salt, kept no shape the rite would recognize, and they do not reach the way the Saltsung dead reach — they drift, loose-limbed, in whatever current is passing through, and the danger in them is not that they will come for you but that you will not notice one is close until you have already touched it, mistaking it for kelp or a trick of the murk. I do not like the soft ones. The salt-kept at least know what they are keeping and why. The soft ones don't seem to know anything at all, which I have decided, notebook damp and patience thinner than it used to be, is the worse of the two conditions to end up in.

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