Chapter 87: What Came Back

Elspeth Rowe had set two fish barrels across the quay’s narrow approach. A fisherman tried to slip between them as Severin arrived.

The messenger had taken them down the shortest path from the clinic. Leo was a few steps ahead, with Rafael beside him. Beyond Elspeth, a fishing boat rode against its mooring ropes, her wet deck littered with the day’s catch. Severin saw no damage to the hull.

"Behind the barrels," Elspeth told him.

The fisherman hesitated, then stepped back. Elspeth turned to Leo.

"One of the crew burned his hand hauling that net," she said. "I’ve told the others to leave it alone."

She led them toward a section of dock where a torn net lay over planks. A hook held one end of the mesh clear of the water. Two fishermen stood nearby, studying what remained of their gear.

Severin smelled wet rope and fish guts. Half the net had pulled loose from its weighted line, and several stretches were torn almost clean through. He crouched beside a blue-green stain caught where the mesh bunched around an iron fitting.

At first it looked like growth torn from the seabed, until a wet strand lifted in the wind and exposed a thicker deposit beneath. A faint light remained in it, easiest to see in the shade of the rope.

"Any idea what that is?" Severin asked.

"Haven’t a clue," the nearer fisherman said. "Lost half my net getting it aboard."

"Mind your boot," Rafael said. "There’s some on the boards."

The substance stretched between the net’s fibres, with a smear running across the planks near Severin’s boot. He remembered Miriam’s account of blue-green light beneath the water.

Leo inspected the iron fitting without touching it. "Which of you got burned?"

A younger man beside the boat raised his hand. The skin between his thumb and forefinger was raw, with a small blister forming at its edge.

"Started stinging while we hauled it," he said. "Thought the hook had nicked me."

"Did you wash it?" Elspeth asked.

"At the pump." He kept his hand away from his coat. "Still stings."

Elspeth beckoned one of the men behind the barrels. "Take him up to Carrick and make sure Ruth knows what burned him."

The young fisherman glanced at the torn gear. "What about the net?"

"I’ll see to it. Go on."

He followed the other man up the street.

Leo turned to the remaining crew. "Did anyone else touch it?"

"Can’t say before he called out," the older fisherman said. "We used the hooks after that."

"Keep doing that."

Rafael crouched beside the weighted line and held his pencil over the darkened iron fitting.

"Was it like this when you put the net out?"

"No. I checked it before we left," the older fisherman said.

Severin leaned closer. Small pits covered the metal where the blue-green substance had collected. He’d seen iron left in the rain for months look much the same.

"Any of the other fittings like that?" Leo asked.

"A few. Worse wherever that slime’s stuck."

A fish lay caught in the torn mesh, half-hidden beneath a fold. The older fisherman lifted the netting with his boat hook.

A broad patch along its flank had turned pale and soft. The scales were gone in places, exposing damaged flesh, while the rest of the fish looked much like the others spilled across the boat’s deck. Severin searched for a bite or a ragged tear and found neither.

"Could a rock have done that?" Severin asked.

"Scraped the scales off, maybe," the fisherman said. "But look at the flesh."

Leo leaned closer. "It’s got that blue stuff on it too. Leave it in the net."

The fisherman held his hook steady. "So what is it, then?"

"I don’t know yet," Leo said. "We’ll take a sample."

Elspeth sent a man to the harbor stores for a clean glass jar and tools. While he was gone, she kept the curious behind the barrels and told the crew to leave the rest of the catch aboard.

The man returned with a jar, a shallow dish, two clean iron nails and a narrow wooden scraper. Rafael steadied the jar while Leo lifted a smear from the net. The substance slid off the scraper reluctantly and settled in a thick streak along the glass.

"Don’t use that scraper again," Elspeth told the man who had brought it.

"I wasn’t planning to."

Leo put one iron nail in the dish of ordinary harbor water and touched the second with a fleck of residue on a separate piece of glass. He left both beside the corked jar.

"Tell me what happened from the moment the line caught," Leo said.

They moved to the boat, where the remaining crew could show them the line without going near the contaminated net. The older fisherman took one end of a clean rope and passed it over a hauling point at the gunwale.

"We were fishing our usual ground when the net went tight," the older fisherman said. "Thought we’d snagged a rock."

"And then?"

"We eased it a little. Then the line yanked sideways."

He pulled the clean rope sideways across the gunwale to show them.

"Against the current?" Rafael asked.

"Aye. Nearly had my mate overboard. Swung the boat round before we could give it any slack."

Severin examined the hauling point. A fresh scrape cut through the old paint where the rope had dragged.

"Could a full net pull that hard?" Severin asked.

"Maybe. But you’d feel the weight build. This hit all at once, then went slack."

A sailor beside the tiller shook his head. "Thought we’d lost the net."

"How long?" Leo asked.

"Five seconds, maybe," the older fisherman said.

"Felt longer," the sailor by the tiller said. "I was about to cut the line."

Leo asked how deep the water was there and whether the current had changed while they worked.

Severin studied the hauling point. A fixed snag might have turned the boat if the current shifted, but the fishermen said the line jerked sideways before the boat swung.

"See anything down there?" Severin asked.

"Just the net," the man by the tiller said. "Couldn’t see much past it."

"I thought I saw a light under the line," the older fisherman said.

"What color?" Leo asked.

"Greenish. Could’ve been sunlight on the net. I only saw it for a second."

"See where it came from?"

"No. I had both hands on the line."

Back at the fouled net, Severin checked the two nails. The one touched by the substance carried a dull streak; the nail sitting in harbor water looked unchanged. Neither showed the shallow pits already visible in the old fitting.

Elspeth brought a chart from the harbor office, weighted it on a crate and called the fishermen over. The older man found the ground where they had set their line, then traced the rough route the boat had drifted while they worked.

Rafael recorded the position in his notebook. Leo checked the mark against the refuge entrance and the part of the coastline the team had mapped over the previous days.

Severin followed the coast with his finger. The fishermen’s mark lay well beyond the refuge entrance and the severed conduits. Nobody from the Order had tested the open water there.

"That’s well past the refuge," Elspeth said.

"Quite a way," Leo said.

"So the cut’s failed?"

"Every check says the cuts are holding. I can’t tell you where this came from."

Leo slid his finger from one mark to the other. Severin could imagine the current carrying residue across that distance, but not the sudden sideways pull on the net.

"Miriam had an old account of blue-green light under the water," Severin said.

"The Drifter story?" Rafael asked.

"That’s the one. Doesn’t mean that’s what this is."

"Make a note of it," Leo told Rafael. "Don’t put a name to it yet."

Elspeth tapped the fishermen’s mark on the chart. "Our boats fish there every day."

"Can you warn the crews off that stretch for now?" Leo asked.

"Today, yes. Tomorrow they’ll want to know when they can go back."

"We need to see the ground first."

"All right. For today."

She went to the waiting crew and gave them instructions to keep the contaminated gear apart from their ordinary tackle. One man asked whether the whole net had to be thrown away.

Elspeth told him nothing was being cut loose until the investigators finished with it, but nobody would be handling it for salvage today.

The fisherman swore under his breath, eyeing the torn mesh. Severin doubted the man had spare coin for another net.

Rafael called Severin back to the chart. A low line of offshore rock lay close to the marked fishing ground, barely visible at high water. It would have been an ordinary place for a net to snag.

"Can we land there?" Leo asked when Elspeth returned.

"With a skiff, once the water drops. One of my men knows the approach."

She checked the tide figures at the edge of the chart. "It’s already going out. You’ll have a little while on the rocks before it turns, if you leave now."

"Your man stays aboard," Leo said.

"He will. Someone has to keep the skiff off those rocks."

Leo rested his hand beside the position Rafael had marked.

"Get us a boat."