“Well, maybe you just never bothered to talk to them,” September said, more snappishly than she would have liked. But she could hear Fizzwilliam! His voice sounded fresh and clean and warm, with a little saucy lilt to it, as though Fizzwilliam had seen many things in his life, and most of them shocking. She heard it as loudly as Saturday’s. She stared out the window at the lights of Ys, a shimmering web of street lamps like miniature castles, marquee lights in the theatre district advertising the opening night of A Midsummer Night’s Bream, and well-dressed lanternfish strolling to work with important papers tucked under their fins. Both of them brooded separately, until September decided to change the subject so that they could brood together.
“You talk about the Sea in such a familiar way. I can hear you put a capital letter on it!”
“Well, she is my grandmother. She’s all Marids’ grandmother. I suppose you know your grandmothers well?”
September picked at the hem of her emerald-colored smoking jacket. The jacket did not mind. “One of them. The other one died before I was born. It must be nice, to have a grandparent who can never die.”
“She’s not all warm currents and friendly whales. The Sea is very old and very set in her ways and very … particular about her housekeeping. She’s a terrible hoarder. She steals everything she can get her waves on and she won’t let go of even one doubloon, so it gets terribly cluttered. No one’s ever dared to try to take anything out of Mumkeep Reef.”
“The grandmother I know, that’s on my father’s side, she hates anyone touching her things. She doesn’t trust the banks anymore, so she keeps all her money and anything else valuable in a tin box under her bed and she says if anyone tries to swipe it she’ll tie a sheriff round their necks and throw them in the river. I do miss her awfully. And my father. And even the teacups in the sink.”
“That’s just how it is with mine,” said Saturday, all happiness again, eager to change the subject.
“Do we mean to take something, then?” September asked.
“If there’s something to take. I’ll apologize at Abyssmas dinner. We’ve always been her favorites, we Marids. She’ll forgive me. Probably. I should bring her a box of corsairs. They’re her favorite.”
“Will it be difficult?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never stolen anything before.” And Saturday gave her a circus-boy grin, a hey-watch-me-do-a-trick sidelong something that September loved best of all his hundreds of smiles.
September sat up very straight. “Fizzwilliam says he loves us and wants us to be safe and also he has sighted several unsavory creatures below us, port and starboard. He does not love them.”
Saturday sighed. “That will be the Pieces of Eight. I didn’t want to say. I thought they might have gotten lazy and would just let us steam past. I didn’t want you to worry. It’ll be all right! They’re only mostly furious.”
“What does any of that mean?”
“The Pieces of Eight guard Mumkeep Reef. The Octopus Assassins. A very ancient guild. Masters of the Octopunch and the Luminous Eight-Armed Thrill-Throttle. They’re actually nonapuses—nine arms. But when they pass their initiations, they always come out of the Grueling Grotto with eight. No one knows the fate of the ninth arm. It is one of their marauding mysteries.”
Saturday reached forward and pressed one of the bronze soap spigots on Fizzwilliam’s dash. It was all over before September could ask where Saturday was going: a hatch opened in the glass dome, Saturday snatched one of the pearl dishes, shot up out of the Bathysphere and into the open sea, and the hatch sealed up again, leaving September alone and only slightly drenched.
She pressed her nose to Fizzwilliam’s glass dome. All below her, spread out across the ocean floor, lay Mumkeep Reef. Coral branched and braided and knotted and sprawled, forming itself into a maze of staircases and grottos, spires and catacombs, peaked huts with the lights on inside, pits and vaults and great fields of waving anemones like a siren’s long hair. On every prong or shard of coral September saw a ship skewered, galleons and skiffs and dhows, even a few Bathyspheres like theirs. And everywhere else lay rusted boxes teeming with barnacles, bottles crammed full of unread messages, steamer trunks packed long ago with love and lost at sea, lockers and safes and cabinets and caskets. And treasure chests, the very kind every pirate draws in his notebook while his teacher tries to get him to agree that i comes before e except after c. Saturday darted and dove above the reef, swimming as easily as September could laugh.
But in and among all these locked-up, gnarled, crumbling wonders, she saw hundred of glass jars. Jar after jar after jar, every one open and every one aimed at them like an angry cannon.
And every one filled with a furious octopus.
CHAPTER XI
THE TATTOOED PENGUIN
In Which September and Saturday Tell a Lie to Avoid Death by Octopus, Meet an Out-of-Work Cuttlefish, Take in a Show, and Get Matching Tattoos
Four Pieces of Eight fired themselves at Saturday, exploding out of their jars, cannons of fiery-colored, tentacled hate.
“HALT!” trumpeted the lead octopus, a stream of bubbles punctuating her sentences.
Saturday came up short, floating in the deep blue sea, everything lit by the unearthly glow of Mumkeep Reef.
“Not you,” the Octopus Assassin sneered. “I have no quarrel with you, Marid. Enjoy your visit to Mumkeep, leave a donation in Anne Bonny’s skull—you’ll find it over by the wreck of the Revenge.” The octopi fell into formation around September’s Bathysphere, flaring their fiery limbs, ready to drag her down at one word from their captain. “Her. How dare you bring a dryhair here? I can smell the dirt on her from here. She does not belong! She’s already seen more than any dreary two-arm should!”
The others snapped their sharp cerulean beaks at her. They fanned out, whipping the water into white foam. The Bathysphere clanged and shuddered as an octopus lashed its tentacles around the glass dome. Another wrapped its arms around the bronze bottom of the tub. They began to drag Fizzwilliam down, down, down to the sharp crags of Mumkeep. September yelped, gripping the broom handles, trying valiantly to pull up. All she could hear was Fizzwilliam’s terrified, chattering cries as he tried to jerk free of the marauders.
“Drown her!” one hissed.
“Crack that tub like an abalone!” bayed another.
“If she can breathe water, she can stay. If not? Too bad!”