The first time had genuinely been due to dehydration, an excuse that held no water when he tried pawning it off on Kali, but it was tough to pin drinking a bottle of monster saliva on “being thirsty.”
He didn’t speak to Kali as they walked from her friend’s house toward the port. It was late, and the west side of town was home to the city’s most “respectable” of people, so they were all in bed, sleeping and dreaming in preparation for another day’s work. Silence buffeted the two as they walked, the only sounds being the padding of their footsteps and the faint hum of the lamps.
A part of his conscience ate away at him. Gnawing at the back of his mind. Gnashing it up like a dog with raw steak.
He could feel the vial, still bouncing around in his pants pocket. It was a heavy burden, one that threatened to drag him to the ground, scraping along the path to the docks.
Just get rid of, he ordered himself. When she’s not looking, throw it in the ocean. You don’t need it. It nearly killed you.
And yet he couldn’t. Because he wanted it.
The skinny bottle slapped against his leg with every beleaguered step, and with every reminder of its presence he chastised himself for lying to Kali about having some left. He tried valiantly to banish the foul jar of spit from his mind.
If he strained to listen, he could hear the rolling ocean in the distance, lapping against the shore of the beach not too far away. Near the arts district was a row of mansions with their own private beach, and close by was a public beach that ran up the coast to the docks. He imagined there were probably at least some men and women still toiling away into the night, unloading heavy crates from ships and carrying them off into the storage warehouses positioned on either end of the port.
The silence between the two of them started as they drank coffee in the kitchen while Eva put her boys to bed. It grew when Eva returned to the room, the two women engaging in friendly, nostalgic conversation while Puk stood idly by the counter, sipping from his steaming mug and waiting anxiously to leave.
All the while, he wracked his brain for something to say, some sort of rational explanation—words to smooth over everything between him and Kali. Beyond needing her help, he had grown to enjoy her company over the past few days, and he was angry with himself for jeopardizing everything.
But no words had come, and so they had said their farewells to Eva, each thanking her again for her hospitality (and she wishing Puk good health), then set off to meet Zenib.
He wanted to meet them at the “bone dock,” which was formally known as Seroo’s Tail, because that’s precisely what it was: the bones of Seroo’s tail. The ancient beast’s skull housed the city of Seroo’s Eye, which was connected to Restick by the Ribroad, and its body came to an end with the tail which extended out into the gulf, supported by posts. It was over a thousand feet long—Puk wasn’t sure how long exactly—and its tip dipped into the water, the only part not propped up. There was plenty of space for ships to dock and unload, as well as multiple smaller slipways for personal boats.
There were two impressive ships docked at Seroo’s Tail when they approached, but no sign of any workers or Zenib. They were alone.
Two additional docks were stationed a ways away on either side of Seroo’s Tail, farther down the coast, and some workers milled about on each of those, so Puk was surprised by the lack of activity on the bone dock.
Kali walked out onto the bone, gleaming white in the moonlight. She sat down on its edge and kicked her feet above the gentle water.
“Guess we’ll keep waiting,” she said, her first words to him since his much-deserved chastisement in the guest bedroom.
Puk took this as an invitation and sat down beside her, dangling his own feet. He imagined pushing himself off into the cold water, sucked down into the depths.
He felt the silence sprouting up again, and he wanted to nip it before it grew too large. He said, “I’m sorry. Again.”
For a second, he thought Kali wasn’t going to say anything, but then she muttered, “It’s fine.”
But he wouldn’t let himself off that easy. “Nah, it’s not, really. You’re right, I fucked up. I shouldn’t have put you in the position I did. I know Myrisih ain’t the most friendly of places, and I need to be aware of what’s goin’ on. Not babbling nonsense while I try to lick the floor.”
She chuckled at that image, then said, “I’m not trying to dictate your life. If that’s what you wanna do with it, then by all means, go for it. We can call this off and I can go home and figure something else out for myself.” She sounded almost hurt. Something in him suspected this whole scheme was a last-ditch gambit on her part.
Puk fervently shook his head. “I’m gonna see this through,” he said. “I’m done with spit.” He didn’t tack on for now to the end of the sentence; it would only elicit doubt. As he said it, though, it felt kind of true.
But it probably wasn’t.
He decided to be fully honest with her. He had to regain her trust. Lay everything on the table.
He said, “The reason I was singing in your parents’ inn is because I got kicked out of my troupe. I got kicked out for the same thing: I snorted some spit, and I genuinely was really dehydrated from traveling all day, and it fucked me up a lot more than it should’ve.” He went on to describe, in excessive and probably unnecessary detail, how he had vomited on stage during his performance and drew the ire of all his friends.
Kali busted out laughing at his ordeal. “That’s disgusting,” she choked through laughter. “Did any get on the audience?”
“Fuck, I hope not,” he sighed. “I hadn’t even thought about that.” He broke into a soft laugh too. He then said, “Anyway, my troupe was traveling across the country, performing shows, and then we were gonna go back to Atlua. Getting kicked out is why I needed to do this job. No shows, no money, no ticket back home.”
She nodded, her laughter dying down, then asked, “Did you always get high before shows?”
“Most of the time, yeah. If I had anything on me.”
“Why?”
He didn’t really understand the question. “Because it feels good?” he offered.
Kali shrugged, looking down at the water. His eyestalks stayed trained on her as she spoke.
“I would just think that…well, I guess not everyone cares about their job, but wasn’t singing something that you loved doing? Something fun and creative and fulfilling? Why would you want to dull that?”
It was a hard question to answer. But he tried.
“I don’t think I’ve really put any effort into music in a long time,” he said, the realization sending a pang through his chest. “We…the troupe was never particularly successful. We got by okay, I guess. People enjoyed our shows when they saw ’em, but there was never much of a turn-out. Not even here, where we thought a qarmish troupe would be a novelty that people would wanna check out. Seroo’s Eye was the only place we got a big crowd. I dunno. We just never made any damn money, and it’s hard staying motivated to do something when it’s just…constantly failing.” He curved his stalks down to look at the water as well. “No matter how ‘fun’ or ‘fulfilling’ it is, it’s kinda demoralizing after a while. I just got tired of the futility.”
He had put in the work. Had for years and years, with little to nothing to show for it.
So why work hard when he could have fun instead?
Silence. He turned one stalk to glance at Kali, and saw that she was still staring at the water.
“I get that,” she said. “I’ve been wondering a lot lately if any of the shit I’m doing is worthwhile too. It’s like you said: I enjoy doing it, but at a certain point, that’s not enough.” She turned to face him and said, “I haven’t given up, though. I’m trying to do everything I can to make it work. Clearly, since this crazy adventure is way out of my comfort zone. But I have moments of self-doubt too.”
Puk grinned. “Are you about to tell me not to give up on my dreams?”
“No,” she repli
ed. “I told you, I’m not trying to dictate your life. Do whatever you want. I’m just saying I know how you feel. I’m just also saying that I’m trying not to give in. But it is hard. No denying that.”
Puk leaned back, placing his hands on the dock. He tapped the length of his fingers on it, enjoying the split second of suction from his sticky skin adhering to the bone.
“So you’re tryin’ to tell me you enjoy selling shit to people?”
She laughed. “Yes.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “It’s kinda fun, honestly. Finding or making stuff to sell, striking bargains with other merchants, the thrill of a good haggle…plus, it’s great traveling all over, seeing different towns and cultures. That’s the part I like most.”
“That’s why you wanna go to Atlua?”
“Mhm. I think I could offer them a lot of stuff they maybe haven’t seen much of before, especially in the smaller towns. I hear there are a lot more small-town places over there than here. The desert makes for harsh living; most people congregate in the bigger cities.”
Puk nodded. He had visited several of those tiny towns across Atlua. Gesh, Balam, Leeros—hell, even his hometown of Trillowan was relatively small.
“I bet there’s a bunch of stuff over there that people here would love to get their hands on, too,” Kali went on. “It’s exciting thinking about all the different clothes and jewelry and medicines that I could bring over. What started this whole thing is that a white mage in Atlua invented a new potion for fighting off the mold.”
He remembered she had mentioned something about that in Zenib’s house. “Is that what noxspring is?” he asked, impressed with himself for not forgetting the name. She nodded. “Well, that’s a noble cause. Zenib sure could use it. Guy looks like shit.”
She chuckled, but whispered, “That’s mean.” Then she asked, “What got you into singing?”
That question was much easier to answer. There was nothing complex about his inspiration in that regard.
He told her about a traveling qarmish troupe that had visited Trillowan when he was still a child, only ten or eleven years old.
The group performed a play (a feat of organization and cooperation The Rusty Halberd never pulled off), complete with shifting sets on the small stage they brought with them. The production was set to music, played off-stage by two of the members who were performing double- and triple-duty with various instruments, and multiple songs were sprinkled throughout the story.
There was a duet sung near the start of the play that had enraptured a young Puk. Now, more than fifty years later, he’d be damned if he could remember the melody or lyrics, but back then it had captured his imagination.
Afterwards, he wanted to talk to the members of the troupe to find out the name of the song, but his father Brek insisted the entertainers were too busy to speak to a child.
So instead, Puk had gone home and started writing his own songs, emulating what he heard on that stage. As he grew older, he wrote less and less original music and instead learned pub songs, classical tales, and whatever else he thought might secure him a steady spot in a troupe.
It seemed like Kali was about to ask him something else when a shout came from the direction of Nyek Hollow.
“Sorry to keep y’all waitin’!” yelled Zenib, doing a terrible job of being discreet.
The two stood and approached the centript, who scuttled toward the dock on his countless clawed feet. An olive green cloak was draped over his back, covering up his missing carapace segments.
“You look in high spirits,” Zenib observed, and when Puk looked to Kali, he was surprised that there was indeed a smile on her face. “That excited for the floating city, eh?”
“Floating city?”
“That’s just what some people call it,” Puk explained. “It don’t really make sense, the city’s not floating, but it takes up an entire small island on its own, so…” It was a name he personally found to be stupid and not entirely accurate, but many of the city’s frequent visitors used the moniker.
Zenib clapped some of his hands together and said, “Shall we head to my boat?”
They nodded and followed the centript, who turned around and plodded off in the direction from which he had come. The group passed a warehouse on their left that Zenib surely frequented, then further on past another dock on their left and the Hollow on their right.
At the edge of the Hollow was a length of white bone wall, demarcating the city limits. The fence was obscured in shadows cast by clay buildings of the centript’s neighbors. A knot tied itself in Puk’s stomach as he gaped at Zenib climbing up the wall with ease then jumping down, no longer visible on the other side of the opaque wall.
“I can’t do that,” said Puk. It had nothing to do with believing in himself; his tiny body could not physically do it.
Kali hoisted herself up, her boots scraping noisily against the bone as she scrambled upward. Resting on top of the wall, she leaned over as far as she could and held out her hand.
Puk grabbed it and tried to assist with his ascent as much as possible, kicking his feet up the side of the wall like she had done to propel himself upward, and after a few strained moments he sat atop the bone wall with her. He offered his thanks, then they both hopped down into the sand where Zenib patiently waited.
They continued following the man for almost ten minutes, until the sand gave way to rock at the coastline, and soon they came upon a diminutive boat nestled away between two large, red rocks, only visible from the sea or if you came at it from a certain angle.
“Here she is,” said Zenib with misplaced pride.
The boat could not fit more than four people, and Puk had his doubts that even just the three of them could squeeze in with their luggage in tow. It was painted a boring gray, likely to remain unseen in the night, but some of the paint was chipping away to reveal the brown wood underneath. Oars were propped up in the center of the vessel, though the paddle of one had a chunk bitten off.
But still, it was a boat, and they needed a boat.
“Does she have a name?” Puk asked sarcastically.
“Yep: the Fiery Lass.”
“Incredibly bad name for a boat,” said Puk. Kali giggled but nudged him to quieten.
“Watch your tongue, or you might find the Lass sending you overboard,” Zenib growled. Puk apologized, eliciting more hushed laughter from Kali.
Zenib pushed the boat out from between the rocks and into the lapping waves. He held it in place while Puk and Kali piled in, pressing toward the front, then he slithered aboard himself. The centript’s long, shelled body took up half the boat on its own.
He gripped the two oars and pushed off, sending them out into the sea.
Finally, they were off.
- -
The Fiery Lass did not handle waves well, so it was lucky for them that the Loranos Gulf was mostly calm that night.
Kali was sandwiched between the two men, with Zenib at the rear and Puk at the prow. The sound of wood scraping wood as Zenib oared made her skin crawl.
For a while, she couldn’t even make out the horizon. The black of the sky and the dark of the water blended together, stars reflected on the surface, creating a massive dotted canvas that they sailed toward without any sense of progress or reality.
She decided to make small talk in an effort to dull the boredom. “So you said that Myrisih’s port is only open every few days?” she asked Zenib. She craned her neck to look at the centript behind her.
He nodded and said, “On the third, fifth, and seventh days of the week. So strictly speaking it was yesterday they were open, but they won’t close down for another couple hours. I don’t think, anyway.”
The uncertainty in his voice did not inspire confidence.
But she plodded on. “That’s strange.”
“Whole place is strange,” said Zenib. “The entrance is smothered with an enchantment, too. The ujaths who first lived there struck some sort of deal with the jeorni
sh that migrated to the desert from the north.”
“What kind of enchantment?” she asked. She had never heard this aspect of the city’s mythos.
Zenib said, after grunting with exhaustion from rowing, “I don’t know how the spell works—that sorta thing is beyond me—but there’s some spell within the entryway that makes the people who leave forget how they reached it in the first place. Just fades from their memory. The only way to find the city is to learn of an individual who’s been trusted with its location and obtain a passbook from them, which informs you how to navigate there and is proof to the guards you can be trusted too.”
It sounded ridiculously convoluted to Kali. “So that’s what you were doing after we left your place? You had to go meet your contact in Restick who distributes passbooks?”
The centript nodded. At the front of the boat, Puk remained silent, watching the water lap up against their vessel. Kali couldn’t tell whether he was uninterested in the topic or simply couldn’t hear them.
She asked, “How many people actually know where to find Myrisih?”
“That info ain’t for us to know,” he said over the rolling waves. “The people in charge take security very seriously. That’s how come it’s stayed a secret for so long, and why no authorities anywhere have cracked down on it. It’s in the middle of the gulf, too, so it ain’t anyone in particular’s problem, and the ones that somehow find it and try to get in don’t make it too far.”
Spit and Song (Ustlian Tales Book 2) Page 23