Salt Storm: The Salted Series: Episodes #31-35

by Galvin, Aaron

  Brutus unsheathed his blade also. “Gave you my name already, you dumb git. You might’ve heard of me in a time long past too . . . as for your Warden Zane and what we’re doing here? Well, we put ends to your beastly friends in Røyrkval with these swords here, so we did. Aye, same as we mean to do for you today, sir.” He pointed the tip of his blade at Commander Pohl. “You and all the filth like you.”

  Commander Pohl smirked at that. “For Warden Zane, then . . .” He said, pointing his own weapon at Brutus. “And the torment I’ll give you and yours in his stead once this is over, Master Selkie.” Commander Pohl clapped his visor down with his free hand, shouting out orders. “Seawolves! Advance!”

  The Orc shield wall came on then, marching in practiced fashion as they approached the platform steps in unified step.

  With no point in pretending further, Lenny shirked off his handcuffs and drew his twin blades. Flanked by Vasili and Tom Weaver, Lenny held his ground and raised his daggers in a show of force.

  Brutus retreated to join the Selkie lines, even as he taunted the Orcs to join them on the platform. “Come on then, you bastards! Come on and give us a go!”

  Lenny grimaced when the Orcs marched up the steps and entered the Selkie lure he had helped to devise.

  With the Orcs’ united focus holding on Brutus and the prisoners braced for the charge, what the oncoming soldiers did not see was the other group of Selkies led by Jemmy T who revealed themselves atop the train cars. Each carried bolt-action crossbows, harpoons, and spears they had procured from the fallen Orcs in Røyrkval.

  “Fire!” Jemmy T bellowed to his crew, unleashing a flurried attack from above to rain down on the unwitting soldiers.

  Caught off guard by the sudden aerial wave, the shield wall broke when the first line of Orcs stumbled upon the steps, or else fell off the platform altogether. In moments, holes were formed in the front and secondary lines. And where Commander Pohl rightly believed himself protected from the Selkies upon the platform, the confidence of he and those with him collapsed when Henry Boucher and his group of Lepers slipped quietly up among the Orcish rear guard to flank them unawares.

  Caught in the design of the Selkie ambush, the Orc shield wall broke in full when Brutus led the charge for those upon the platform. Lenny followed him onward, running alongside Vasili, both little men hurtling themselves into the brink of battle. Both stuck close to their taller companions, working in tandem to bring down their enemies. While Brutus and Tom Weaver drew the Orcs’ focus at an eye-to-eye level, Lenny and Vasili swept in to swipe and stab at the larger foes’ legs and knees, each finding chinks in the Painted Guard armor to help wound and bring their enemies down for the taller folk to trample and finish.

  Lenny added his screams and war cry to all the others in the battle for Bouvetøya, then. With every swipe against the Orcs, Lenny Dolan remembered his father’s fall in Røyrkval and moved to the memory of his father’s teachings.

  Keep moving, Len . . . Hacking and clawing, Lenny Dolan never ceased to bob and weave as he advanced through the chaos. Move or die!

  Lenny obeyed, over and again, not stopping in his advance. Breaking through the shattered Orc lines, he wheeled to a stop when the last of the soldiers collapsed in front of him, stabbed in the back by Henry Boucher. His former crewmate’s face and suit were stained with the blood of others, but Henry Boucher looked none the worse for his battling of the Orcs. And though Henry took a moment to catch his breath, Lenny saw only stillness in the Frenchman’s eyes as the ragtag army of Selkies brought down the last of their foes.

  Near as suddenly as the onslaught began, Lenny Dolan saw no more Orc soldiers to stand against the Selkies. His heart thundering against his chest, his face covered in blood and sweat, Lenny relinquished his forward momentum. As Henry and Vasili moved on to stalk among the fallen victims and silence the Orcs who cried out for mercy, Lenny Dolan took a knee to catch his breath. His lips quivering, hands shaking, Lenny closed his eyes and imagined his father’s body lain upon the ice in the Lost City of Song. We did it, Pop. He thought to himself, strengthening his hold on the twin daggers he had used to avenge his father. We got them. These ones, at least.

  These here didn’t know me, son . . . he imagined Declan Dolan might say in such a moment as Lenny found himself in now. And there will be more to come hunting you all after what happened here today.

  Trembling, Lenny used the sleeve of his Selkie suit to wipe away the blood upon his face and out of the corner of his eyes. Blinking back the glazing in his eyes at the constant thought of his father gone, Lenny knew the Selkie victory for another hollow loss the moment he opened his eyes to the cold reality of Bouvetøya once more.

  So many . . .

  He blinked at the prisoner masses huddled some one hundred yards further into the cavern. Trapped inside the frost-covered cages, some of the Selkies prisoners were calling out for help from those who had claimed victory upon the train platform. In most of the Bouvetøya prisoners though, even from afar, Lenny recognized acceptance of defeat and hopelessness. A few yet held to spirit and life. His eyes stung at one in particular; a caged boy, perched atop his father’s shoulders – the only place for the son to sit and wave his arms for someone to notice and hopefully come to free them.

  Lenny was off and running then, sprinting toward the boy’s cage without the thought there might be still more Orcs awaiting further into the cavern. Fortune favored him, for the moment, and Lenny Dolan found no sign of more soldiers before he reached the prisoner cages. Once there, he threw himself at the lock, driving the tip of his dagger into the key-hold, working it back and forth to free the pin inside. He scarcely heard the prisoners inside calling out to him in foreign languages, their voices a collective cry of tears and thanks. The ones nearest to him reached through the bars, clutching at his shoulders and hair, anything they could grab ahold of as Lenny continued prying at the lock. He ripped it off the moment the pin burst free, then flung open the door and waved them out.

  “C’mon,” he cried, his voice hoarse and catching in his throat, his father’s continued mantra a constant in his mind. “C’mon. Hurry. You’re free.”

  We’re Dolans . . . he thought when the first among them began to spill outside. We don’t leave others behind.

  And I won’t, Pop. Lenny spied the Selkie boy still perched atop his father’s shoulders. I’m not leaving none of these here.

  “C’mon!” Lenny cried louder, waving on all those hesitant to step out, almost as if they feared more Orc soldiers and retribution to come. For a moment, their fear struck the same in him also, the idea he had abandoned safety among his fellows for the sake of saving a single boy. Still, he would not turn from it. “C’mon! Get out!”

  As the cage began to empty, Lenny glanced over his shoulder in search of another wave of Orcs.

  What he saw was worse.

  Further off, near two hundred yards away from the other prisoner cages, tucked away in a stony alcove, there were uncountable stacks made from bundles of varying colors, shades, and designs. Each bundle had been tied together by crisscrossed ropes, packing the contents together and maintaining the cube-like shape created. The bundles too had been grouped and stacked upon each other along a series of wooden, pallet-like sleds, all packed and placed along an icy field. Behind the stacks loomed an exterior wall of a frost-covered, brick building, three stories high and as long as a football field.

  Despite the other caged prisoners clamoring for help and release, Lenny’s focus held not only upon the building and the bundles outside it, but that which emerged from inside the building. Lenny took a step toward the bundles and the building when he sighted a constant stream of pure-white smoke and seeming snow belching forth from the brick chimneystacks, its sides devoid of any tracing of ice that covered the lower tiered walls.

  Careful . . . Lenny thought, even as morbid curiosity drew him toward the building and its bundles. Turn back. Now, before it’s too late.

  Lenny Dolan could no
t. Not a hundred yards out, when the seeming snow landed against his cheeks and did not melt. Not fifty yards away, when he recognized and understood what the bundled tens of thousands stacked and strapped upon the pallets truly were. Despite all that his conscience warned to turn away, Lenny Dolan did not stop in his search for the dark truth of Bouvetøya and its prisoners. Not until he rounded the corner of the frozen building in search of its entry, finding a different answer altogether.

  Lenny stopped in his tracks, no longer caring what lay beyond the ice-covered threshold of the brick doorway, his gaze fixated on that which seemed to stretch endlessly on to the furthest reach of the cavern. Buckets of blood . . . Lenny gasped, his mind having no answers for what he witnessed there. Tears brimming in his eyes, the cavern’s natural cold threatened to freeze and fuse them with his eyelashes by the time two of his Selkie companions found him.

  Tom Weaver’s shadow enveloped Lenny as he came around the factory corner. “My God . . .” was all the elder Weaver could manage at the sight of the frost-covered fields of stone and their trenches filled with naked, frozen corpses.

  More than a handful of Selkie prisoners had been left to manage the barrows, casting more corpses into the mass graves that showed no concern of body size or shape, age, gender or race. All were lined in rows and placed atop one another like stacked logs in preparation for a deep winter to come.

  Another fleck landed upon Lenny’s cheek, the whispered touch tickling him as he attempted to brush it away, his fingers staining whitish-gray as he did. Much as Lenny attempted to convince himself that he knew what the inch of similar dusting that covered the trench bodies was, his mind warned that no true snow could fall and linger within a cavern, not even in the Antarctic cold.

  What is this place, Pop? He wished that Declan Dolan was there to ask, or else to look too for some modicum of understanding for the hellish landscape before him.

  Whether the stacked bundles of Selkie skins outside the factory, the constant churn of seeming snow pouring forth from its chimney, or the emaciated Selkie prisoners driving their wheelbarrows in endless rotation to collect and deliver more corpses to burn, Lenny Dolan recognized the answers to his question lay plainly in multiple forms right in front of him for all to see and know.

  It’s a death camp. Lenny fell to his knees, gagging and vomiting until he had nothing left to spare. Bouvetøya is a Selkie death camp . . .

  12

  CHIDI

  It’s almost done, Chidi thought, taking a deep breath, looking again on the nearly finished puzzle of translations before her. She had read several of the translated verses already, each as confusing as the next to her mind. Riddles upon riddles.

  For all of Chidi’s confusion over their words, Marisa Bourgeois seemed to share none of it as her hands worked to maneuver the various pieces into a final alignment. All were neatly aligned next to individuals letters that Chidi had assigned them, each based on the portrait etchings Marisa had drawn. “What do they all mean though?” she asked. “What’s the point of them?”

  “Does a compass not act as a guide, Chidi?”

  “A compass needle shows the direction you’re going,” she replied. “That doesn’t mean it’s the right way to go.”

  “As these words may prove for us also,” said Marisa, transcribing the alignments of symbolic cut-outs to match with the Common language letterings she and Chidi had worked out during their sea journey over the previous several days. “Still, the needle guides . . .” said Marisa, finishing the last of her writing and placing her pencil upon the table. Then, she offered Chidi the notebook she wrote upon. “And the choice of direction is left to us.”

  Chidi trembled as she again looked upon the completed work. “It’s finished, then? You’ve worked it out?”

  Marisa shrugged. “Who can say for certain? But, if our work together in translation is true . . . if these lyrics are to be believed . . . then, aye.” Her eyes shone in the pale light as she again offered Chidi the notebook to read. “I believe this puzzle of words will act as our map, at least . . . again, assuming we’ve placed them in the right order.”

  A big if, Chidi took Marisa’s tone to mean. “But to where?” she asked. “Where do these pieces lead?”

  “To the end, Chidi,” said Marisa. “To the truly completed work.”

  Chidi’s throat ran dry at the ominous words. She glanced at the piece of paper once more, not daring to read the newest alignment Marisa had made. “What do they say?”

  “You tell me.” Marisa gave over the notebook. “Read the message aloud, Chidi. Aye, that we might both hear the Ancients words as they were once given and intended.”

  Chidi’s fingers shook, even as she accepted the notebook from Marisa. “Why me?” she asked. “Why can’t you read them?”

  “Because my voice is not the one that I hear in the dreams given to me,” said Marisa, retreating back into her seat.

  Chidi glanced upon the scrawlings Marisa had made. She shook her head. “I don’t know that I want to.”

  “Why not?” Marisa asked with a sly grin. “You fear the power of words, Chidi?”

  If they come from you, I do, Chidi thought but did not say. She only nodded in answer to Marisa’s question.

  “Your wisdom is matched by your beauty then,” said Marisa. “But we need not fear these Ancient words, my friend. We ought to celebrate them for showing us the way and all that will be required of us. Now, please . . . read them.”

  Chidi reached for the glass of water that Allambee had left for her before he had fallen asleep again. The remainder had less than a swallow inside. Chidi took it down all the same, her throat raw and aching, desperate for more. She glanced to the counter, searching for both the source of the drinking water and a reprieve from what Marisa asked of her. To reach the sink would mean waking Allambee, and Chidi held no desire for that.

  Marisa leaned forward upon the table. “Read them, Chidi . . . read the words.”

  Chidi looked upon the paper, then quietly obliged the mystic Silkie.

  “Our doom draws nigh upon us, Children, and this our final song. Still, we would have thee sing it, and pray thee to be strong.” Chidi’s voice trembled as she moved onto the second verse. “We leave this world a harsh one, Children, a challenge not easily bested. And yet the Salt shall change for no one, for how else should thou be tested?”

  Chidi set the first piece of paper down, her brow furrowing further at the words in the second piece as well. “Receive these mystic gifts, Children, and believe all these words we leave. For the shadows shall rise always, and the dark arts they will weave.”

  “The Other . . .” Marisa interrupted, her voice quieter even than Chidi’s had been as she pointed to the Ancient word for shadows. “They speak of he and his kind there, I think. Aye, Chidi, all that we have seen thus far, no?” She glanced to the ladder leading up to the boat deck above. “Or perhaps the greater storm still to come . . .”

  Chidi nodded, then looked back to read the second piece when she could no longer continue to meet the certainty in Marisa’s eyes. “But when all else grow to fear them, Children, and all the woe they bring, let you heed our song then, Children, and remember these words we sing.”

  Despite the cabin cold, warmth spread through Chidi as she finished the words of the second puzzle piece.

  “The open,” Marisa said of the piece as Chidi lightly placed the paper scrap back into its former place amidst the formation of others. She nodded toward the next scraps of symbols and their adjoining letter twins. “And now their challenge to us.”

  Breathless, Chidi continued on with the third piece. “One for times rich, one for times poor. This gift to all sworn evermore. This blessing we leave to both above and below. This one for all who join and know.”

  Chidi caught Marisa watching her, the elusive runner’s gaze drifting from the parchment and to look on Chidi’s fingers instead.

  The ring . . . Chidi thought, looking upon the seemingly unremarkable gif
t that the old Merrow, Wilda, had given her back at the Indianapolis Zoo. “It’s a wedding ring . . .” she said to Marisa after reading the Ancient riddle again. “Wilda’s.”

  “The Merrow gift, aye,” said Marisa. “Or so I believe.”

  Chidi look down upon the pebbled stone that served as the ring’s lone adornment. But could it be the same ring this riddle is talking about? She wondered, doubting the momentary idea. She changed her mind once more when she again caught Marisa’s knowing eyes still watching her as she plucked up the fourth bit of paper to read.

  “This one for those dealt in blood and death,” Chidi shivered at the words before forcing herself to read onward. “This one for warriors of Salted breath. We gift you this dagger, that it may add to your life, and when the time comes, to remove sibling strife.

  Chidi looked to Marisa as she placed the piece of paper down with the others. “We have to find a dagger?”

  “If the riddle proves true, perhaps,” Marisa replied. “And if you believe the weapon mentioned is truly a dagger.”

  “You don’t?” Chidi asked.

  Marisa chuckled. “It is a riddle, Chidi. And an Ancient one at that. Simple as the words may sound, who can say for certain what deeper meaning they may carry. Likely, we are not meant to know, lest it would be solved already and all the five pieces of two gathered.”

  “But you’ve seen things . . .” said Chidi. “You have to know.”

  The confidence in Marisa’s gaze darkened. “If only what you say were true,” she said quietly. “Again, for all you may think of me, Chidi, I am not all-knowing or seeing. I witness only so far as whoever gives me such dreams allows. The same as can be said for all who receive such visions.”

  “Who is giving you these dreams, then?” Chidi asked. “How are they even doing it?”