Shards

by James Duvall

  With a nod Timothy continued on, working his way north along the Idon River's east bank. Aebyn fell in quiet step behind him, his sharp eyes trained on the gloom ahead. Timothy held his lantern up to the darkness.

  “Christopher?” he called, but none would answer.

  “Do you think this is the night river?” Aebyn asked, stopping to look into the blue-tinged water. Now that the night had come the forest glowed with mist and the water too was tainted with its radiance. Timothy shrugged; he didn't know.

  “If we follow it we will find Christopher. I imagine he's halfway to the treasure by now, if he's not already found it. I hope this was worth it.”

  “If you ask me, “Aebyn said, “we should not even be here. We had to leave the entire crew behind for their safety. What if something happens to them and we are not there to protect them?”

  Caught off guard by the gryphon's unexpected concern for the welfare of the crew, Timothy fumbled for an answer. “Erhm, well, I am sure that Willoughby can handle the lot of them. They'll do as he says. In the morning, if we are not back, they will return to the ship. We will meet them there once we find Christopher.”

  “You're sure they'll do like Willoughby says?” Aebyn asked, doubtful. “He doesn't seem very smart.”

  “Willoughby's very smart in his own way,” Timothy assured him. “He may not know the ins and outs of magic or how to run a mercantile, but he knows airmen and he knows the ship. Besides that, the crew respects him.”

  “They don't respect Christopher,” Aebyn observed thoughtfully.

  “No,” Timothy admitted, “they don't. We'll have to do something about that.”

  “You should be captain!” Aebyn declared, brightening as though the idea had only just struck him.

  “The Stormbreaker is Christopher's ship.”

  “But you would make a great captain,” Aebyn admonished.

  Privately Timothy thought this might be true, but Christopher's vanity would never allow it. From the very first, Christopher had insisted that the captaincy be linked directly to the head of the company to provide an appearance of strength, control, and discipline over the crew for the sake of the confidence of his investors and clientele.

  “I very well might,” Timothy confided, “but it does you no favor in Christopher's eyes to mention it in front of the crew. The fact remains that the Stormbreaker is Christopher's ship and he has not appointed me as her captain. We must not undermine his authority by calling into question if he is the best leader for his own ship. Understand?”

  “Why not?” Aebyn asked. His wingtips flicked out a little, the feathers ruffled with disdain.

  “Because it is not proper,” Timothy answered, feeling a little exasperated with the gryphon's near constant indolence when it came to Christopher. He had begun to feel there would never be peace between the two. “Have you ever been part of a company, Aebyn?”

  “Master Raimes and I were paired with another bridger and lighthound for a time, but it did not last long. Raimes said the other bridger was a poor man's excuse for a bridger and felt it was a slight against him to be paired. I forget his name. The lighthound was nice though. Her name was Barina. She thought very highly over her master, even if he was common born.”

  “Common born?” Timothy asked with a raised eyebrow and disapproving tone.

  Aebyn's ears drooped, head lowering a little. “I did not mean offense. It is simply what Master Raimes would call him behind his back. I do not at all see the fuss about it. You do not have any titles and you are far greater a man than Samuel Raimes.”

  For a while the two continued in silence, following the winding path of the night river into the Mistwood's dark interior. Occasionally Timothy would see Aebyn's soft-glowing eyes peer up at him, looking for a sign of approbation in his demeanor, but the failing light and the starkness of their situation made it difficult to force optimism.

  “You are not angry with me, are you?” Aebyn asked with clear reluctance.

  “I am not,” Timothy answered. His tone was unconvincing but Aebyn was so ready to believe it that Timothy could see a marked change in the gryphon's gait and the white tips of his earthy-brown ears pricked forward again.

  “Why did you want to know if I had been part of a company before?” Aebyn asked. Timothy could see that he was eager to move past the awkward moment and was inclined to oblige him.

  “When you are part of a company it is important to consider the welfare of everyone involved in your undertaking, regardless of their station. A good company is like a good airship. Some parts might be more valuable, like the glidestone engine, but all of the parts are vital. So it does no man any service to speak ill of his captain before any other man because to defame one part of your vessel is still to defame your vessel. Is that clear?”

  Aebyn did not answer right away, only half paying attention to where he was going while he mulled over this new piece of intelligence. Despite his near certainty that the lighthound was doing nothing more than trying to poke holes in the theory, he left the young creature to his thoughts.

  “Would it not be better to simply have a better captain from the start, so that no one has anything bad to say about him?” Aebyn asked eventually, provoking a sigh of exasperation from his beleaguered companion.

  “It would, but things are seldom as we might wish them to be.”

  “Torvald does not like Christopher much at all, and he seems sensible. I've heard him speaking with others in his quarters and he thinks you would make a better captain also.”

  “You've heard him in his quarters?” Timothy asked, red-faced. Such an intrusion on the second mate's privacy was unwarranted, despite what intelligence Aebyn might have gained. While smugglers were not the sort of people to often stand on ceremony or the usual niceties of the social contract, there was no quicker manner to sow the seeds of distrust and scorn than to be caught eavesdropping.

  “It is not at all appropriate to sit outside someone's door and listen to his private communications. I must insist that you do not do that again or we will both be just as bad off as Christopher in the eyes of the crew.”

  “But I wasn't outside his door!” Aebyn protested, wide-eyed and pleading. “I swear it!”

  “Then where were you?”

  “In our quarters. The walls are not so thick. I can hear all the way to the galley when Willoughby isn't asleep in his quarters. He's always snoring...” the gryphon complained.

  Aebyn grumbled unhappily at the last, as though the man snoring two rooms and two walls away was somehow depriving him of his sleep but Timothy knew that couldn't be true; the lighthound had taken to sleeping on the deck in the middle of the afternoon and would be fully assailed by the noise of the crew hard at work beneath the boson's boisterous command. Surely the warm sun was not an adequate balm against the tumult of a busy deck crew.

  “Of course you can,” Timothy remarked dryly. He had reasoned out that the many arguments with Christopher over Aebyn's status in the crew and his risk to an already uncertain enterprise had no doubt carried to the lighthound's sensitive ears. It did much to explain Aebyn's distrust of his business partner. Such proceedings being conducted beneath the shroud of Willoughby's snoring had earned the first mate Aebyn's disdain.

  It was behaviors like these that made Timothy question the nature of his new companion. It was easy enough to forget that he was not a normal creature when conversing with him. To his mind's eye the gryphon resolved somewhere in that region of human but not human, set apart from the beasts of the field like the birdlike Tintori or the Magashan centaurs, but there was not a kingdom of gryphons outside of the imaginative stories his mother had told to him and his sisters when they were very young. Everything about him seemed normal until matters of Timothy's welfare, at which point he became as protective and on edge as a mother bear.

  It reminded Timothy of the old mongrel of a dog that used to sleep in the crook of the stairs leading up to the butcher's shop. He'd taken a job there one summer del
ivering orders with Christopher as a way to establish capitol to start a business of their own. They had been only eleven years of age at the time and much of the proceeds were lost to treats from the confectioner's shop or went directly into the family's weekly food budget and the planned bookseller's store never materialized. The dog had been a constant since the earliest years Timothy could remember. Always it would just sleep, perhaps lifting an ear when a new pair of boots trudged up the creaking wooden steps, its nostrils flaring a little when the door would swing open and usher the thick scent of raw meats out onto the cobblestone way. Then one day a knifeman had come and tried to rob the place. Timothy had never managed to come to terms with whether the plan had simply been ill-conceived or had been a bonafide death wish, as the butcher chased the man into the street wielding a much larger meat cleaver. It was the only time Timothy could remember the old dog doing anything other than drowsing. It sprang up like a creature of many fewer years, barking ferociously as it went after the knifeman, mauling his ankle and shin before being called back to his sentry post by the butcher's whistle.

  “Do you see that?” Aebyn asked, drawing Timothy out of his thoughts.

  He looked ahead, but could not see anything but the shroud of cobalt mist rising up in the darkened wood. The night river carved through the darkness like molten copper poured into a casting die. Timothy raised a hand to his eyes to shield them from the brightness even as his other instinctively dipped into his jacket and came up with a pistol. Aebyn darted forward and came up with something silver wrapped around his talons. A topaz the size of a grape dangled from the chain. It began to glow as though a firefly had been captured inside the glassy surface.

  A ghastly figure appeared on the grassy bank, shimmering faintly with otherworldly light. He was thin to the bone, so weary and wan that Timothy did not immediately recognize it as a luminarian. It stood utterly silent, transfixed in horror upon the distant blackness with the stillness of death. A mechanical contraption of gears was fixed to one of the creature's legs.

  “Who is that...?” Aebyn asked, his voice a bare whisper.

  Already Timothy was edging away, fully prepared to flee into the darkness rather than remain in the grim specter's presence. All at once it began to move, as though waking, eyes blinking as it looked around and realized where it was.

  “Sapphire?!” the specter cried out to the void. No one answered. He shouted her name again to no avail, then trembled as his pallid eyes fell upon Aebyn's talons and the topaz amulet's silver chain looped around them.

  Finding himself the unhappy recipient of the apparition's undivided attention, Aebyn squeaked in fright and took to violently shaking the delicate chain from his claw as though it had suddenly turned into an occupied spider's web.

  “Wait!” the apparition shouted. “Wait don't, I nee– ”

  The chain finally shook free and tumbled to the ground. The apparition vanished like a blown out candle. The topaz orb glowed like a castoff ember, quickly fading until Timothy could barely pick out the amulet's shape among the dark shadows cast by the reeds and tall grasses all along the bank.

  “That was scary!” Aebyn declared, at last finding his voice. The gryphon's eyes were as wide as Timothy had ever seen them. He shied away from the dropped amulet as though he thought it might at any moment spring to life and bite him. He circled it at a distance while Timothy threaded it through with a tree branch and held it up to get a better look at it.

  “It looks ordinary enough,” Timothy observed, though he shared in Aebyn's anxieties. He did not believe in ghosts, or so he told himself. He repeated the thought to himself several times...

  At last Aebyn voiced the question they were both wondering. “What do you think it needed?”

  “I'm not sure but I can think of a saying or two about curious cats right about now,” Timothy muttered. “I'm sure Willoughby could think of quite a few more...”

  Still, Aebyn seemed unharmed, so...

  Timothy reached out with a trembling hand and grabbed the cold metal chain. The gem gave off its faint light again and the ill-favored luminarian materialized between them, his eyes frantic and ears tilted back.

  “Please! The amulet! I need you t-” the luminarian shouted frantically, reaching toward it with a gaunt claw. Immediately Timothy let go of the chain and the luminarian dissolved into a teardrop of white flame that quickly burnt itself out.

  Aebyn looked from the place where the fire had gone and back to Timothy. “You have to hold onto it,” he supplied helpfully.

  “I gathered,” Timothy said flatly. He summoned the apparition again.

  “Thank you,” the white and orange luminarian said. “I... I'm looking for my mate. She was here. She wore that amulet... I... have... have you seen her...” he swallowed hard, his words choked off. “Her body...? They attacked her... I... I need to... find her...”

  Without further explanation the shimmering form started into the tall grass, his gait slow and tremulous, as though he were marching to his death. He had a contraption attached to the hind leg on the right side, with gears and a winding spring. The sound of clockwork ticked off the seconds, cogs ratcheting with every ungainly stride. Aebyn fell in step alongside him, peering with childlike wonder into the creature's swimming yellow eyes.

  “We haven't seen anyone,” Aebyn assured him. “She must have escaped.”

  “You're.. sure...?” the apparition asked, sounding eager to believe but afraid to trust his hope.

  “If there were a luminarian here, I would be able to smell her,” Aebyn explained. “You are not here, so I cannot smell any luminarian at all. She must have left quite some time ago. I think I recognize the amulet. Does she have white fur and a blue mane? With blue on the tips of her flight feathers?”

  “She does!” the lumarian answered, tears running down his face. He took a ragged breath and turned his eyes skyward.

  “Almighty above us, she's alive...” he said in a faint voice.

  Timothy was unsure what blessings could be said for this piteous creature's life. He looked one cold night from his grave.

  “We'll carry your amulet with us, so that you might look for her,” Aebyn promised.

  “What?” Timothy heard himself saying. He was still missing a business partner and running off to look for a distressed luminarian girl would not be conducive to securing Christopher's welfare and making a quick withdrawal from the bleak of the Mistwood. There was also the matter of whether or not the creature was even real. Who could know the madness that might lurk in the addled mind of a luminarian touched by magic? Certainly not Timothy Binks. For all he could discern, the image was some solace to the lonely creature but in reality could serve as only the echo of a life lived and lost. Nothing good could come of it. Nothing good ever came from Merindi.

  “Of course!” Aebyn said to him. “I would want him to carry me about if I were made of light and needed to find you. The amulet is not heavy. Give it to me, I will carry it around my neck and you shall not have to worry about it at all. Then Christopher will see I can attend to my own affairs and am not a 'risk to the enterprise.'” he said, the last part in his best approximation of Christopher's haute manner.

  Timothy was not at all sure how bringing the departed shade of a feathered dragon onto the ship could do anything by way of ingratiating Aebyn to Christopher. Nevertheless it was the first time Aebyn had ever shown interest in doing so and Timothy was not about to do anything that might discourage the behavior in the future. So it was done, the amulet was placed around Aebyn's neck, the glowing topaz resting against the white splash of his chest like a fireball resting over his heart. The luminarian's form wavered like heat in the desert sun as the bauble was transferred. He breathed a small sigh of relief when it was over.

  “I am Dawn,” he announced wearily. His head bobbed a little, muzzle pointed toward the ground as though weighted down.

  “I am Aebyn the Lighthound, and my companion is the highly esteemed Timothy Binks,” Aebyn said.
He spread his wings in a flourish as he performed the introductions less like a gentleman and more like a magician on stage. The titles and praise seemed all but lost on the dreary luminarian.

  “Need to sleep,” he confessed not long after. He laid down, a pair of books suddenly appearing beneath his chin to support his head as he slumped to the ground. Then he was gone, leaving Timothy to wonder whether he might ever wake again.

  On return from his first scouting flight of the morning, Aebyn brought word of Christopher's whereabouts.

  “I found him about an hour's walk up the river,” Aebyn said, his speech interrupted every few words by the imperative to take a heavy gulp of air. By his heaving chest and froth-darkened feathers it was evident that he had made every effort to return with all due haste.

  “Good heavens,” Timothy balked. “Is he alright?”

  “Yes,” Aebyn answered. He began to fan himself with his wings, lurking in their shadow to keep the sun off the darker fur of his mane and chest. “He's fine. No worse for wear than we.”

  With a sigh Timothy found a seat on a fallen tree, softened by the years and frequent rains. Christopher was alright. That was good. It meant he didn't have to feel bad about socking him in the face when they were reunited.

  “Catch your breath,” he said, “and then we'll go.”

  “He said he would wait for us,” Aebyn said miserably. Timothy gave him a nod of approbation and stroked the near wing while the gryphon recuperated. He waited a full five minutes after Aebyn's panting had stopped before he rose and ushered him to follow.

  Christopher was prodding at his breakfast fire when they reached him. An egg sizzled pleasantly in the frying pan. Looking up from it for only a moment Christopher waved amiably and then added a dash of pepper. If he perceived what was about to happen it did not show in his face or perhaps he thought he might stem the tide by playing ignorant.

  Like a storm that started with a single rising gale, Timothy marched briskly into Christopher's camp and kicked over the cooking rig, sending the nearly-finished omelet into a dirty ashen heap. Christopher rose quickly to his feet.