Listen to the Water | FULL SERIES | Wattys 2022 Shortlist | ✔

(20) Taiki: Almost Friendly Faces

Reverence is harder to bear when I don't have any appropriate prayers to express it with. I could pray to Andalua, but that now feels wrong for several reasons. The demigods were once full deities, too. They were transformed into their current, diminished forms by the same song from Andalua that accidentally made the first Kels. If this writing predates that, it's not just from demigods. It's from their original forms, and I doubt those deities would be very pleased with Andalua. We don't have prayers for them anymore. I'm sure the eel Kels did, if they studied these pillars enough to read and recreate some of the gods' original language. But if that's the case, only scholars in Rapal can still read their recreations.

For a pulse of a moment, I want to be out in the open ocean with Ande, on our way to collect a Shalda scholar from Rapal. A scholar who knows more of the ancient eel-Kel dialects than Sar does. Who can point us in the right direction if taken to the writings in the depths of Roshaska. There were gods' symbols carved into the story Sar read, untold generations after the very oldest stories in those caves. We need to know what they mean.

Will that scholar, Xivay, even recognize them? Was that ancient language still known by the time Rapal was occupied? Is there enough context around the symbols for even the best scholars to deduce their meaning?

I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and let it out again. My heart aches to sign or sing something, but without adequate words, I settle for pouring all that feeling into the water around me and hoping it reaches whatever's left of whatever deity inscribed these words. If they come from a deity, maybe "words" isn't even the best way to describe them. I've got no way to know.

Predawn is lightening the waves that Chura never managed to reach when she died here. I wish we'd had a way to sleep before meeting Makeba, but my mind is moving so quickly now, I don't think I'll sleep for the next moon at least. I rejoin Luli.

"Is it safe to just swim up to meet them?" she asks, frowning up the gullet of Chura's Skull. "Or appropriate?"

"Makeba won't hurt us."

"I know that. Will her... group, I guess, recognize us, though?"

"They'll recognize me."

She eyes me. "You weren't kidding when you said you've been here a lot."

I have to smile. That was a dubious honor as little as a couple moons ago, but now I'm just glad. It gives me bargaining power that I wouldn't have had otherwise.

"Let's go," I sign, and swim straight up.

No Sandsingers leap from hiding to intercept us. When you live in a cursed formation in a cursed forest with red signal squid and sea-goddess tails in its depths, I guess there's not much point in guarding the water below your camp. We're maybe halfway up Chura's throat, though, when something else catches my eye. Luli pulls up as I veer sideways to a rock face I've seen before. Here, a whole stretch of stone wall is sanded smooth and carved with the map the Sandsingers use to plan their next raids. Me and Ande were taken here when we joined one three and a half moons ago. With what Sar's told us about the Sandsingers, it means much more to me now.

The bent line of the island chain stretches across the top of the wall. I wince. The number of rescued villages on it—crossed out—hasn't visibly changed. I count them and find only one more than last time. That's a normal three and a half moons for the Sandsingers, but still nowhere near enough to save the remaining seventeen in the ten moons we have left.

The rest of the map is filled with other annotations. Open-water currents in the Sami-sana, I know, but now that I'm looking, there's more. The Gods' Teeth aren't fully detailed, but someone's textured over the area they occupy to indicate the expanse of them. A slightly deeper poke would look accidental if I didn't happen to know it sits right where Underfarrow is. With Ruka involved in this map's creation, that can't be a coincidence.