IGMS Issue 12

by IGMS

  I thought I heard a noise from downstairs -- had I even closed the door entirely in my hurry to answer my ringing cell? -- and decided it didn't matter. If a burglar wanted to steal our TV, let him. I would be gone in a moment anyway. I reached down into the tub, swirling my hand in the water, and the room filled with the scent of honeyed light. I picked up my plastic bag, sat on the edge of the tub, and took a deep breath.

  As I dove into the water, I heard Isobel call, "Harry? Are you okay?" and realized she'd come over anyway, and walked right into my house, as if she had every right in the world to be there. But by then I was under water, kicking as hard as I could for the greater light on the other side, the heavy bag trying to drag me down to the depths where the ghosts of drowned sailors lived in their shipwreck villages.

  Forget Isobel. Gwen needed me, even if she didn't realize it, even if I was the thing she was trying to run away from.

  I emerged gasping in a little lagoon full of sparkling lights, the sun -- redder and fatter than the sun of my world -- high in the sky. I waded toward the white shore of the nearest island, making my way to the shade and shelter of the familiar pale white trees with their wide fronds, dragging my pack behind me. The smell of the Lambent Sea was intoxicating. I got dressed.

  This was different from my first journey, when I'd pursued the nameless emperor and Gwen through a diminishing wormhole rift in reality, landing in the mountains leagues and leagues away from the evil sorcerer's destination, hopelessly far behind them. Now I was on the Lambent Sea already, the place I'd once fought and trekked and struggled to reach. I'd been frustrated by the long journey twenty years before, but my travails had hardened me, and the allies I made -- my trusted adviser Garduk the berserker-poet, the Whisper Sisters with their murmur-magic, the supernaturally lucky gambler Zanzo -- had taught me valuable lessons and helped me become the hero I had to be in order to breach the floating fortress and defeat the nameless emperor and win Gwen back. If I'd been dropped here, on this little island almost within view of the floating fortress, I would have been killed or captured by pirates as soon as I approached.

  Once hidden in the trees and protected by branches from the view of the nameless emperor's outfliers, I began looking for a stout branch I could cut into an axe handle. I didn't know what I was going to do, or how I was going to find Gwen, but over here, having a weapon close to hand is pretty much step one of any plan.

  Something splashed in the shallows, and a clear, familiar voice rang out. "Whoa. This is some Narnia-style shit. Hello? Harry?"

  I ran for the beach. Isobel. She must have jumped into the tub after me -- what a ridiculous, impetuous, Isobel thing to do. When I reached the edge of the trees she was walking out of the surf like a drenched goddess, wringing out her hair, her short sundress clinging skintight with wetness. She was a vision, and I noticed, gods damn me, even in the middle of my quest to find Gwen I couldn't help but notice Isobel's body. "Come here, quick," I stage-whispered, afraid she'd be seen, and to her credit she legged it over with good speed. She reached me, and embraced me, though it was less a clutch of passion and more a struggle to hold on to something solid.

  "Isobel," I whispered. "You shouldn't have followed me." I buried my nose in her wet hair, aware I was holding her almost as tightly as she was me.

  "So I think I have a head injury," she said, in a perfectly calm, normal speaking voice.

  "Shh." I began checking her head for injuries. "You shouldn't talk so loudly. Did you hit your head when you jumped into the bathtub?"

  "I don't know if I was in a car accident, or maybe your wife brained me with a pipe or something, who knows? But this totally has the ring of a coma fantasy." There wasn't a mark on her head. She wasn't hurt. She was just . . . coping. She stepped away from me and gestured. "I mean, come on . . . is that supposed to be the Lambent Sea?"

  I swallowed. "What? How do you know that name?" I wondered suddenly if Isobel was a spy sent by the nameless emperor to seduce me and destroy my marriage.

  She looked at me, frowning. "Those fantasy novels you wrote under the fake name. You were embarrassed about them, and said they were out of print, and wouldn't let me borrow your copies. But come on, Harry, it's like you've never even heard of the internet. Hell, I got the last two books on Amazon.com for a penny apiece, plus shipping. The first one was the only one I had trouble tracking down." She gestured. "I remember how you described the Lambent Sea. A chain of tropical islands in an ocean that shimmers with witchlights, with cities of drowned sailors on the ocean floor, and a pirate armada on the surface." She walked to the edge of the trees, shaded her eyes, and looked out. "I don't see any pirate ships, though."

  "The main fleet should be visible from the other side of the island," I said. "Though sometimes scout ships ply the waters near these little islands, so we should be careful." I shook my head. "I can't believe you read those books."

  "I can't believe I remembered them well enough to construct a whole coma fantasy around them." Isobel sat down in the sand. "It smells good here. Weird, but good. Smelling weird stuff, isn't that a sign of a brain injury? I hope I'm in a hospital somewhere, and not dying in your living room. I knew I shouldn't have gone over there. I just wanted to help."

  I knelt beside her. "Isobel," I said, gently, gently. "This place is real. The novels I wrote . . . they described real experiences I had here, a long time ago. But I couldn't exactly publish them as non-fiction, so I published them as fantasy." I'd also made them into a better story, of course, less messy, with fewer stretches of boredom, fewer sandfleas, fewer pointless failures and dead-ends.

  "Yeah, that's plausible." Isobel rolled her eyes. She looked so young then. But she wasn't scared at all. I'd been terrified when I first came to this place, but then, I'd implicitly trusted my senses, and believed in the reality of this place in a way Isobel didn't. She was a doubter. There were fantasy novels with characters like that, too. "Well, since I'm in a wonderful vivid coma fantasy, and could die and cease to exist any time now, let's go kill some monsters and screw some wenches, huh?"

  I shook my head. "I don't know how I can convince you this is real, but . . . I'm here to save Gwen. She's been stolen away." Not exactly true, but explaining the reality of the situation would tax Isobel's imagination.

  "Like the chick in the novels, sure." Isobel sighed. "Stupid subconscious. I didn't think I felt guilty about screwing a married man, but I guess I've got some issues deep down. Okay. Let's storm the castle with our warrior buddies or whatever." She looked ready to climb rigging and kick pirates, but if she did that, she'd probably die.

  "Let's work out a plan first," I said. "First, I need to make a decent axe handle. Look, just have a seat, watch the waves, let me know if you see any ships approaching, all right?"

  "This isn't much of an adventure," she said, but sat down.

  I used the axe head to cut a branch of approximately the right length and thickness, trimmed it with my knife, and jammed the axe head onto the makeshift handle. I pulled up some tough grasses and tied the axe head on more firmly, and though the general effect was more makeshift caveman than noble warrior, it seemed steady, and I thwocked the axe into a tree a few times and wrenched it out again without tearing the head loose, so I figured it would suffice. I went through a slow kata, swinging the blade and trying to recall the mental state that allowed me access to true axecraft, the state where the weapon would become an extension of my body and will. Before long I was puffing and sweating, but the axe felt natural in my hands again, even if my body wasn't the well-honed weapon it had been before.

  "Harry, that's hot," Isobel said. "I've never seen you wield anything more dangerous than a letter opener." She stood and stripped her dress off over her head, tossing it to dangle over a branch. Her body, still damp and water-speckled, glistened. "Come here and wield me."

  I leaned the axe against a tree. "Isobel, this . . . I'm here to save Gwen, and . . ."

  She ran her hand down her chest, between her breasts, down
her belly, and lower still. "Join me or not, either way, I'm going to see if it's possible to get off in a coma. They say the brain is the most powerful sexual organ, after all."

  I steeled myself. I clenched my teeth and my fists in resolve. But when she lay down on the sand and began to moan, I joined her, of course. If ever there was an inauspicious beginning to a quest to rescue your one true love, this was it.

  After we made love, as the sun began to set, Isobel and I sat leaning against tree trunks, smiling dopily at each other. The scent of the Lambent Sea was intoxicating, and the sparkles in the water were even brighter in the diminishing light. Strange birds called to one another, and the distant shanties of the dead sailors on the seafloor rumbled their subsonic way up through the water.

  "If I'm dying somewhere, this is a nice enough way to die," Isobel said. "It doesn't hurt at all."

  "You don't sound very upset about the prospect. I'm terrified of dying." I considered just living on the beach, eating fish and fruit and making love with Isobel. Sure, the pirates would find us eventually, but we could have a nice time until then.

  "It is a truth universally acknowledged that death is just a part of life."

  "I always thought you were pretty upbeat, for a student of Skaldic ballads."

  She shrugged. "Those ancient Norse guys were all about screwing and fighting and drinking and living life to the fullest while they had life to live. Sure, they had kind of a dark apocalyptic worldview, but they made the best of it. I'm just doing the same thing. Grab life while you can, because you could die tomorrow." She looked up at the sky, and I looked, too. Through the branches of the trees, there were a few peculiar stars appearing, and soon the broken moon would rise.

  I rigged a harness for the axe from the straps on my overnight bag, and slipped it over my shoulders so I could swim freely. "I have to go after Gwen now," I said. "It's dark, so I can risk making for the floating fortress. Assuming it hasn't changed since last time I was here, I should be able to find the rooms where they're keeping her, and get her out. And then . . ." Then we had to figure out a way to get back. The Whisper Sisters had helped last time, using one of the nameless emperor's glass eyes to trick a denizen of the spaces between worlds into opening the conduit again. That was after our mad race away from the collapsing floating fortress, pursued by the hordes of Delgeth and other imperial loyalists. Gwen had twisted her ankle, and I'd carried her the last league. But the Whisper Sisters were gone, and we'd have to find another way home this time. "I'll get Gwen, and I'll come back for you --"

  "No way." She picked up my knife. "Time for some warrior-woman action. I'm going too. Screwing and fighting. It's a hell of a coma fantasy."

  "This isn't a fantasy! You could get hurt!"

  She smiled. "Don't shout, Harry. The pirates might hear you. And don't argue with me. You never win. Let's go."

  I took deep breaths. There was no way I could make her stay, short of tying her up and leaving her here, and what would happen if pirates found her that way? "Fine. But be careful. If this goes right, we'll never even be seen. Are you a good swimmer?"

  "I was a lifeguard all through high school. I think I'll manage."

  "We might have to island-hop a bit. Most of the islands are fairly close together, they're really one big island with submerged sections. We'll make our way as close to the floating fortress as we can. We'll rest a bit on the last island, then we'll have to dive. Fortunately, with the lights in the water, it's not hard to see where you're going. There's an underwater entrance to the floating fortress. Can you do all that?"

  "Harry, I'm twenty years younger than you, and I work out all the time. If you can do it, I can do it."

  "Okay." I kissed her impulsively. "Let's go."

  The pirates captured us on the second island we reached, with the floating fortress still so far away that it looked like nothing more than a shadow on the water. They tore the axe right off my back and threw it into the sea, where it would make a good trophy for a dead sailor, I supposed. My heart sank with the blade.

  When they didn't kill us right away, I began to worry.

  Isobel and I were separated. As she was led away, she joked with her captors, a hodgepodge lot dressed in rags and straps and bits of armor, though they didn't speak English. It must be nice, to think this wasn't real. I was bundled into another rowboat, seated across from a grinning giant of a man with long, ragged, donkeylike ears. I'd never seen someone like him in my travels over here. I wondered if he was under a curse of some kind. I was hauled up onto the deck of the floating fortress, which reminded me a bit of the QE II -- a ship that's really a floating city, though this one was made of wood with brass fittings and flickering lights that burned oil and magic to keep things illuminated. The pirates hustled me down a succession of narrow staircases, and I considered twisting and fighting, trying to break some kneecaps. Twenty years ago, I would have tried it. I might even have succeeded. But the two short swims with the axe on my back had exhausted me, so I went where I was led. They put me in a stateroom, with a nice bed and a writing desk, and locked the door behind me. I checked the room, but the closest thing to weapons I found were candles. Not even a letter opener, and certainly no handy harpoons.

  I sat on the edge of the bed and waited, wondering what would happen. Maybe Gwen knew I'd followed her, and had asked the pirates to spare my life. They hadn't treated her badly when she was a prisoner before, and we were never entirely sure why they'd wanted her in the first place -- to be the nameless emperor's bride, I'd assumed. Why else would he steal her away, try to teach her their language, dress her in beautiful garments? The nameless emperor was a hated tyrant -- I'd had no trouble finding allies in my war against him -- so her kidnapping couldn't have been for any good purpose.

  Eventually, the door opened, and the nameless emperor himself stepped inside.

  He looked much the same as he had when I'd fought him last time. His black hair and beard were streaked with gray now, though, and he'd replaced his glass eyes with pearls from the giant clams that abounded in the shipwreck villages, one pearl opalescent white, one shiny black. I was sure he could see me fine with his magical eyes, and could probably see all sorts of other thing, too. He bared his teeth, and they were still tiny ivory carvings, little dragons and tigers and wyverns and naga and dire wolves. Each tooth gave him a power from one of the animals they represented. He wore a suit of leather and sailcloth with wooden and brass buttons, clothes fashioned from elements of his ships, giving him a magical link to all the vessels in his fleet. His boots were made of the skin of selkies, and he could walk on water. The clothes were the same. But when he spoke, I knew the man wearing them had changed.

  "Hello, Harry. Welcome back."

  I tried not to gape. His English was heavily accented, but I'd had more trouble understanding foreign students in my survey courses. Last time we talked -- last time we parlayed, when I was a general leading a revolutionary army against him -- we'd needed a chain of translators, from English to Thalassian (Garduk the barbarian-poet spoke both, and was my translator for most of my journey, until I learned enough Thalassian to inspire the troops), and from that to the Koronos that one of the pirates spoke, and from there into the selkie tongue that the nameless emperor understood. His words, relayed through all those languages back to me, had been mostly incomprehensible mishmash, a game of telephone gone horribly wrong, and it hadn't been a successful negotiation.

  "How did you learn English?" I asked, trying to lounge casually, propped on one elbow on the edge of the bed. I'd led an army against him, once, after all. No need to show fear or surprise now.

  "Garduk wrote a primer, though it was very basic. I expanded my vocabulary with that rhyming dictionary you left behind." He kicked the door shut behind him and leaned against it, watching me with pearly eyes. He chuckled. "You got away with a lot using that dictionary."

  I nodded. One of the most feared deities over here was the God Under the Rock, and he was known to give his follow
ers sacred texts in alien languages that only they could read. I'd used the rhyming dictionary as a shield many times, claiming to be one of the untouchable acolytes of that god. Of course, the one time I met a real priest of the God Under the Rock, I almost got killed. "So. What happens now?"

  He raised an eyebrow. "Oh, no bluster? No threats? Not so tough without an army of revolutionary malcontents at your back?"

  "Would you be so tough without your floating fortress and a horde of pirates backing you up?"

  "Actually, I would." He chuckled. "But we're not pirates. You think because we live on ships and dress a bit oddly we're pirates, but we don't pillage anybody. In fact, we protect the shipping lanes for the whole empire."

  I snorted. "Sure, but you pillage your citizenry, with taxes, executions, unjust wars -- Garduk told me all about it."

  "You're an idiot, Harry. All your information about my empire came from exactly one source. Garduk, the first son of a bitch you even met over here. He's the one who shaped your whole perspective. You never lived here, you certainly never met any of the common people, you have no idea what their lives are like. Now, I'll admit Garduk is a gifted man -- his facility with languages is nothing short of miraculous -- but he has some . . . decidedly odd political ideas."