The unidentified ship passed the last row of rocks, while the deepest darkness swallowed the last vestiges of twilight. Leway sensed a change in the very nature of the sea, a change his cold, accountant-like mind couldn't reduce to a single number. The waves no longer moved with their familiar rhythm; instead, they seemed to breathe slowly, like the chest of a sleeping creature beneath the black water.
He stood at the bow of the ship, his hands clasped behind his back in his usual calm posture, watching the coastline shrink behind them until it was a thin strand of distant light, and then nothing at all.
"Don't look back any more than you should, my prince."
Doric's voice was hoarse, but it held a dignity that had been absent from their earlier conversation in the tavern. The old captain stood beside him, his wooden leg making a soft clatter on the damp planks with each step. "Once the fog swallows the shore, don't look back unless you absolutely must. This isn't some old sailor's fable, my boy, it's the first law we'll all need to learn before dawn."
Leway turned to him, raising an eyebrow slightly, with that cold look he reserved for anything immeasurable. "Laws? We're out at sea, Dorick, not in a temple. Waves don't care about human laws."
Dorik gave a short, dry laugh, but his one eye remained unmoved. "That's what every young captain says before he loses his ship, his crew, or his mind. You think the fog ahead is just thick, damp air obscuring visibility. But the fog we're approaching now isn't. It never has been. I'm not asking you to believe anything, my prince. All I'm asking is obedience—in the same way you demand obedience from your old staff without always fully understanding the implications of your calculations."
A brief silence ensued, broken by Gilbert, who was standing a few steps away, gripping the ship's rope more tightly than the situation required. "What... what are these rules, Captain?"
Doric turned to face the small crew gathered on the deck - three silent men whose faces were carved deep lines by the sea, the trembling Gilbert, and Leway, who maintained his apparent composure even as something inside him began to tremble in an unfamiliar way.
Dorik began speaking in a low voice, as if reciting a ritual that had been repeated a thousand times before him: "The first law, do not count loudly on this ship once the fog covers us. Do not say 'we are five' or 'we are six'. Counting attracts attention that we do not want."
"Interest from whom?" Leway asked calmly, trying to make the question sound purely academic rather than stemming from fear.
Doric completely ignored the question, as if it had never been asked. "The second law: Never extinguish a lantern, however unnecessary it may seem. Even if dawn breaks. Even if the sun is shining. The lantern shall remain lit from the moment the fog swallows us up until the moment it disappears from around us."
One of the three sailors—a bald man with a deep scar running from his forehead to his cheek—pointed towards a small lantern hanging from the mast, burning with a faint yellow flame even though night had not yet fallen.
Dorik continued in a lower voice: "The third law, if you hear something calling your name from outside the ship, do not answer unless it calls you three times in a row, with exactly the same voice. The first time may be just a hum of wind, the second just a coincidence. But if you hear your name called three times, with the same tone and rhythm, then only then may you answer - because that means that whoever is calling you really knows your name, and is not just guessing."
Gilbert felt a shiver run down his spine, and he tightened his grip on the rope even more. "And why would something in the fog know my name, Captain, if I didn't tell it?"
Dorik smiled a smile that offered no comfort whatsoever. "Good question, man. Keep it to yourself until you find an answer you can accept."
Dorik continued reciting the rules in his monotonous, heavy voice, as if reading from a book no one else could see: Never throw anything into the water, no matter how insignificant, for no one knows what something else might gather beneath the surface. Never point directly at thick fog; if you must, use your whole hand. Never ask which way the wind is blowing if it seems to be coming from two opposite directions at once; simply set your sail against the stronger current and ask no more. And last, perhaps most importantly: Never say the name of the archipelago aloud while within its boundaries. Say "over there" if you must refer to it, or never mention it at all.
When Dorick finished reciting his rules, a heavy silence fell over the ship, a silence not even broken by the familiar creaking of wood. Leway looked around—at the three sailors' impassive faces, at Gilbert's paleness, and then at the fog that was gradually thickening before them, like a living gray wall, breathing slowly.
"And what if we break one of these laws?" he asked finally, in a tone that carried a quiet, deliberate challenge. Part of him—that cold, calculating part that distrusts anything that cannot be proven by numbers—wanted to test the limits of this supposed myth, to understand where its truth ends and the imagination of the old sailors begins.
Dorik stared at him for a long moment with his one eye, as if scrutinizing his words before uttering them. "I don't know, my lord. In the twenty years I sailed these waters before I lost my leg and my license, I saw men break a minor law and return unharmed. And I saw others break the same law, almost on the same night, and never return. No one knows the true rule behind these laws. We simply obey them because those who came before us obeyed them, and those who came before them too, and this accumulated obedience is all we have to protect ourselves from something we don't fully understand."
Leway had no suitable answer. For the first time in many years, he was deeply troubled by something that defied the logic of numbers and probabilities. He had built his entire life on the idea that any system, no matter how complex, could be understood if its parts were analyzed patiently enough. But Doric was telling him something entirely different: that some systems are not understood, but only obeyed, and that the gap between understanding and obeying can sometimes be a matter of life and death.
The ship advanced cautiously and slowly toward the wall of thickening fog, and it seemed to the Wai that even the sound itself had changed the moment they crossed its outer edge: the familiar roar of the waves faded into a distant whisper, replaced by a thick silence broken only by the creaking of the ship's wood, the men's nervous breathing, and the light tapping of Doric's wooden leg as he moved across the deck with the confidence of one who knew every inch of his ship despite the increasing darkness.
Gilbert sat beside Leway on an old wooden box, hugging his knees with his arms like a frightened child, in a manner unbecoming of a man his age. Finally, he whispered in a voice barely audible amidst the oppressive silence: "Sir, do you think he's telling the truth? I mean, as far as the laws are concerned."
Leway thought for a moment before answering, his eyes fixed on the fog that surrounded them on all sides, like the walls of an endless room. "I don't know, Gilbert. But I do know one thing: an old man who lost his leg and his license to sail these waters, and yet he is still alive after twenty years, having sailed them cautiously, while men younger and physically stronger than him have vanished completely. Whether his laws are true or just superstitions accumulated over time, the result is the same: he is alive, and they are not. And in the world of accounting, Gilbert, it is the result that matters, not always the cause."
This reasoning offered Gilbert little real comfort, but he nodded silently and wrapped his arms tightly around his knees.
An hour passed, then another, and the ship crawled slowly through a fog that seemed to grow thicker the further they went. There were no stars to see, no moon, only that thick gray that swallowed up all light except for the faint yellow glow of the lantern hanging from the mast.
Leway began to succumb to a monotonous rhythm of silence and waiting when he first heard it: a distant, very faint sound, like a wordless song, echoing through the fog from an indeterminate direction. He stopped breathing for a moment and suddenly turned his head toward the sound, but there was nothing but endless gray.
Dorik noticed his nervousness immediately. "You heard that too, didn't you?"
Leway nodded slowly, trying to keep his voice steady. "Singing. Or something like singing. Where does it come from?"
"Don't ask where it's coming from, my prince. Just ask: Is it coming closer or moving away?" Dorik pressed down on his staff and tilted his head slightly, as if listening intently. "If it's moving away, there's nothing to worry about. But if it's coming closer..." He didn't finish his sentence, but gestured with his whole hand, without moving a single finger, in the direction from which the sound seemed to be coming, just as he had warned before.
Everyone listened in complete silence for long minutes, while the distant song oscillated between clarity and disappearance, until finally it seemed, slowly and reassuringly, to gradually fade away, as if its source was drifting away from them into another part of the vast fog.
The bald, scarred sailor breathed a sigh of obvious relief and whispered a word Leway didn't understand, in an old seaman's tongue—it sounded like a prayer, or a plea for protection. Dorick didn't comment, but silently nodded in agreement.
At some point during that long, seemingly endless night, Leway felt a strong pull to learn more - the same thirst for understanding that had always outweighed his natural fear, the same thirst that had led him, since childhood, to old tax records in search of patterns that no one else could see.
He approached Dorik, who was standing behind the wheel, his eyes fixed on the fog ahead with the concentration of a man reading a map that no one else could see. "Dorik, tell me honestly: have you ever sailed these waters yourself? Or are you just repeating what you've heard from others?"
The old captain took his time to answer, and when he did, his voice was quieter than it had been all night, as if the question had opened a door to a memory he hadn't touched for years. "I sailed it, Your Highness. Once, across it completely, exactly twenty years ago. I was young then, bolder than I should have been, and far less wise than I am now. I was carrying cargo I shouldn't have been carrying, to a destination I shouldn't have known about, and on the way back, I lost my leg under circumstances I won't discuss with anyone, not even if the Emperor himself were to ask me."
"And the rest? Have you actually arrived? Have you seen what's there?"
Doric looked at him finally, and in his single eye was a strange gleam—a mixture of pride, awe, and something akin to regret. "I have arrived, my prince. And I have seen enough to know that all I heard in the tales before that voyage was a great understatement, and that all I will tell you now will also be a great understatement, however I try to describe it. Some things cannot be described in words, my prince. They can only be seen, or never seen, and sometimes it is better to remain unseen."
Leway didn't press for more, even though every fiber of his being yearned for more specific answers. His innate political sense allowed him to know when to push too hard and when to leave the door slightly ajar for information that might later emerge on its own.
As midnight approached, and as fatigue began to weigh down even the most vigilant eyes, something happened that Leway would remember for the rest of his life with a clarity that surpassed any number he ever recorded in his ledgers.
They heard a voice, clear this time, not a distant song but a direct call, a voice like a woman's, coming from a place very close - perhaps only a few feet from the visible edge of the ship, lost in the thick fog.
"Gilbert..."
The old writer froze instantly, his eyes wide with terror. His name had been pronounced perfectly, without any ambiguity, in the same tone used in the palace corridors, and with the same rhythm his youngest daughter used when calling him to dinner in their distant northern village.
He looked at Leway with pleading eyes, as if asking for permission, or perhaps reassurance, or perhaps just another person to witness that he was not imagining what he had just heard.
"Don't move," Dorik whispered sharply, his hands trembling slightly around the steering wheel for the first time since the journey began. "Just once. Remember the law. Once means nothing."
Long, heavy seconds passed, during which only the muffled breaths of everyone and the faint creaking of the wood could be heard. Then the call came again, the exact same voice, the exact same tone.
"Gilbert..."
The old clerk's face grew paler, and his lips began to tremble, as if his whole body were fighting an overwhelming urge to answer. Leway gripped his shoulder tightly, pressing with his fingers as a silent reminder to him not to move, not to utter a single word.
Then came the third call, slower this time, warmer, and more convincing, as if the speaker knew exactly how to penetrate the defenses of an old man longing for his distant family.
"Gilbert... go home."
Gilbert squeezed his eyes shut, and silent tears began to trickle down his wrinkled cheeks, but with all the willpower he had left, he didn't say a word. Leway felt the old man's shoulder tremble violently beneath his hand, but he didn't back down, didn't answer, and didn't break the law.
A full minute of complete silence passed after the third call—a minute that felt like an hour—before Leway noticed that the voice hadn't been repeated a fourth time. Slowly, everyone began to breathe again, as if the air itself had been trapped in their chests all those moments.
"Was... was that real?" Gilbert asked, his voice trembling, wiping his tears with his wet sleeve. "Was... was that my daughter?"
Dorik did not respond immediately, and continued to steer the ship in silence for several long minutes, his eyes fixed on the fog, which, for some reason, seemed slightly less dense than it had been before the call.
"I don't know," he said finally, in a voice more tired than ever. "But I do know that you haven't answered, old man. And that's the only reason we're all still breathing now."
Leway looked at Gilbert—at the man who had served him faithfully for many years, and from whom he had never asked anything beyond the safety of his family—and for the first time since the beginning of this whole journey, he felt the true weight of what he was asking of this old man: not only his political loyalty, but his personal courage in the face of something neither of them could fully understand or explain.
"Thank you, Gilbert," Leway said quietly, placing his hand on the old man's shoulder again, this time gently rather than firmly. "I will never forget this."
Gilbert did not answer, but gave a small nod, and returned to his trembling silence, staring into the fog as if he were afraid to hear that voice again at any moment.
As dawn approached—although Leway wasn't entirely sure how such thick fog would allow any clear sunlight to pass through—the grayness around them gradually began to shift to a slightly lighter shade, a lesser shade of true light than a lesser intensity of darkness.
Dorick stood at the bow of the ship once more, his staff embedded in the wooden planks, his single eye staring straight ahead with a new focus that Leway had not seen him in all the previous night.
"What do you see?" Leway asked, cautiously approaching him.
"Nothing yet," Doric replied in a low voice. "But I can feel it. A new current is pulling the ship, a current that was not there an hour ago. This means one thing, my prince: we are approaching the inner edge of the fog. In a few hours, we will either see the first real sign of life in these waters, or discover that we have taken the wrong path entirely, and we must start the journey all over again, if we have enough time to do so."
Leway felt the weight of the remaining day of the four-day deadline pressing down on his chest once more, that countdown he had almost forgotten amidst the dread of the long night. Only two and a half days, perhaps less, remained, not only to find the archipelago's true intermediaries, but to negotiate with them, finalize the deal, and return to Oswald before the deadline expired forever.
He looked at the fog that was beginning to sway slowly before them, like a huge stage curtain about to rise over a scene that no living human being had seen for a long time, and whispered to himself in a barely audible voice: "Then let's see what this gray curtain hides, before it hides me in turn."
He did not know, as he stood there between the gradually fading fog and the uncertain dawn, that the hardest laws he would learn in this archipelago would not be those taught to him by Dorik in his rough and cautious voice, but those he would discover for himself, at a high price, in the next few hours.