by Scott Jäeger
“Witchcraft,” young Marthin whispered, breaking the hush.
As promised, there was a beach on the west side, and we had no trouble hauling our craft up on the soft sand. The fog stopped at the shoreline, leaving us at the bottom of a great grey bowl, open to the stars. Though I could hear the wind blowing offshore, the air of the island was inert and stifling.
Marthin lit three of the mirrored hand lanterns of Celephaïs while a few others muttered about cursed voyages. Crews had been lost forever in such places, they said, going cannibal before the end. As Orvuhlt gathered his breath to top these claims with something more outrageous, I interrupted.
“If this islet spawned all at once from the sea, where is the weed and kelp?” I rose from where I had been resting my palm on bare rock. “The ground isn’t even wet. We lost our heading and drifted, that’s all. If everyone’s done clucking like a bunch of hens, let’s get on with what we came for.”
I did not add that the rock was not just dry but warmer than the day’s sun, long since set, would account for. There was no vegetation either. I had never seen a place on the coast where thatch grass would not grow.
Taking up our kit, we followed a path of loose schist inland until we came to a cluster of roughhewn shacks. The men studied them charily until Marthin directed his lamp into one of the skewed openings.
“Do you see a bogeyman,” Erik growled, “sitting on a little pyramid of human heads?”
“No, just a few old bones, rotten rope, and the like.”
“Fascinating. Help me get a fire going, you layabouts.”
Since there was no deadwood to be had, the men began to dismantle the sheds, the regular thunk of Orvuhlt’s hatchet sounding to me like a bell calling for their occupants to return.
From the crest of the next hill I spied the cavern in a scene as still as a painting. I picked out four men, including Ajer, to accompany me and the boy. Erik followed us the short distance to the cave.
The tunnel was almost perfectly round, with shallow, regular ribbing about the circumference, reminiscent of a woodworm’s hole. A poorly made petroglyph beside the opening showed a giant lizard with ridiculous round eyes laying at the bottom of a chasm. Its blunt snout was raised towards a parapet, where a row of blindfolded people walked over the pit. Their genitals were exaggerated to show their nakedness, and the first of them was about to fall into the maw of the beast. I moved to block Lark’s view, but the boy showed no interest.
“Are we going to find this shrine or whatever it is,” Jome said, “or stand around looking at pretty pictures all night?”
“Well said,” I said to him, and to Erik, “Make sure that fire is hot and some kind of supper is waiting.”
He bit back what he had been about to tell me, and nodded.
The passage was comfortably wide, and straight and level as a mason’s rod. The air was cooler than outside, but sadly no sweeter.
“Are you going to work some magic when we find the pool?” I asked Lark.
“I know what to do,” he said, unconcerned.
I stopped when a side branch came into view on the right, but when I moved closer, I found the fissure was only about a hand's span wide. I ran my fingers along the edges, which were smooth and rippled, like blown glass.
We continued.
“If you ever tire of spells and herbs and whatnot,” I said, “there’s always demand for a smart boy to sign on as a hand.”
“Hell, he don’t even need to be smart,” Jome added helpfully.
Lark did not answer.
The passage opened into a much bigger space. Through a jagged hole in the ceiling the stars glittered like shattered glass.
“Cheerful, ain’t it?” Jome announced, loudly. Rather than return an echo, the cave swallowed the words.
“Just look out for the pool,” I said.
As we entered the chamber a trio of lights swam up through the blackness to meet us, the reflection of our lanterns in water. The pool was perfectly circular, about three meters in diameter but only knee deep. No seam separated it from the cavern floor.
Ajer and Jome milled about the perimeter of the chamber, flashing their lights and squinting into the nooks and corners.
“The way goes on here,” Jome said. The passage began to slope downward where he was standing. I was glad to leave it unexplored.
“Captain,” Lark said, “can everyone please cover their lanterns? When there is moonlight we may begin.”
I whistled to the others and we squatted on our hams to wait. As the moon edged past the lip of the hole overhead, the water in the basin redoubled its light, revealing new details about our surroundings. A dozen of the vertical fissures were regularly spaced around the circumference of the cavern. Like the one in the passage, they presented a weird illusion, appearing to broaden into a passage when the viewer was more than a spear’s length away. A stone outcropping adjacent to the basin took on the aspect of a throne in the twilight, one that had grown up like a stalagmite, then eroded with time. Behind this projection was another, different sort of opening, an oval a meter high and the width of a man’s shoulders. I put a hand on Marthin's shoulder as he leaned forward to peer within. It arched straight down, the surface smooth and slick.
“It must go somewhere,” he said. “Feel the breeze.”
Wind sucked into the carrion-smelling hole, and I figured it for a garbage chute, or a pit to dump sacrifices.
The moon had come fully into view, and Lark directed me to kneel at the side of the pool, with my back to the weird throne. He withdrew a small pot of some gritty red stuff from his bag and loosened the ties of my shirt. With the tip of his boy’s finger he drew a circle on the left side of my breast, and inside it some kind of sigil. He followed this with a thumbprint of the same grit on my brow.
“Make yourself comfortable,” Lark said, though the dank floor made this impossible, “and think on the person you wish to find, all that you remember of her.”
I called to mind the first time I woke in the harbour, the snapping sails of dormant ships, the smell of salt and tar. It was surprisingly easy, and for the first time since the coal burners’ camp I recalled without pain Isobel dancing, carrying, walking with me along the pier.
“Place your palm on the surface of the pool,” the boy said.
The mirror-like surface remained undisturbed beneath my hand.
“Touch the water to your lips and say her name.”
“Isobel,” I said.
“Place her hair in the water.”
I did as he asked. The tie came loose and the hairs dispersed, filaments of pure negation floating atop the moon’s ghostly reflection.
“Say her name again,” he said softly.
“Isobel.” It sounded quiet and fuzzy, as if in a dream.
“Once more,” the voice sounded in my head like a father’s, wise and comforting.
“Isobel.” For one blissful moment, I heard her laughter as clearly as if she sat in my lap.
I opened my eyes and the restless and changeable patterns in the bottom of the pool had resolved into images. Ropes strained and a hull creaked as a wavering rectangle of light stilled and, as if through a window, I saw her face.
Isobel was huddled in a sort of cell in the hold of a ship, lit by a gap in the decking above. I heard the sound of a woman weeping and people speaking in an unfamiliar language. I tried to move, to call out to her, but was gently restrained, again as if in a dream. That scene darkened. Next, I witnessed a galley sliding through the seas, oars sweeping like the legs of a gigantic insect. The row of foreign characters on the hull burned like hot coals.
An inhuman shriek snapped my trance off as cleanly as a dry bone breaking and I sat down on the floor, thinking it the abrupt end of a nightmare. But there was another scream, rising to such a pitch that I covered my ears. When the screams ceased, I heard cutlasses being freed from belts and clubs taken in hand. It was dark now, the moon absent and the stars obscured, and dim lights, like paper lan
terns, hovered in pairs on all sides. I rubbed my eyes, figuring they were an aftereffect of the boy’s spell.
When Ajer uncovered his lantern, the ghost lights became a score of wild, white-skinned men circling us. Some were dressed in rags like marooned sailors, others were stark naked, and all stared from bulging, lamp-like eyes. Ajer’s light startled them, giving me time to draw my sword and dagger before they rushed at us.
They leapt with ululating cries to the attack, their splay feet gripping the stones and ripples in the floor like fingers. As disconcerting as their ambush had been however, they came at us with splintered timbers, sharp stones, and a few just with their fists. My allies and I drove back the first sally shoulder-to-shoulder, killing three while none of us was harmed beyond a few scratches.
The cavemen formed a group, capering and jumping madly, their shrieks rebounding in our ears. But when a light much brighter than a lantern flashed behind me, they jerked to a halt as if stung by whips. Dropping to all fours, they scurried back as if chased by our shadows, suddenly long and grotesque. Jome was about to press our advantage, but I stayed him. The wild men groped their way to the fissures in the wall and, with a sideways wriggle, vanished.
I turned to congratulate Lark on his magic, shielding my eyes against the terrific light. The boy was not the source of the unearthly glow, and I was slow to understand that he himself was silhouetted against two huge, unbearably bright eyes. What emerged would have been too large for the oval gap behind the chair, were it not soft and pliable. The head was like that of an enormous catfish, whiskers and all, covered with albino-white scales. Its blunt nose knocked Lark with a splash into the pool, and its dazzling gaze swept the room, freezing everyone in place. Quicker than a striking snake it twisted forward, took the boy headfirst in its jaws and began to slither backwards into its home.
I dropped my weapons and leapt towards the basin, catching Lark by the ankle at the far edge. In a single jerk, the monster’s weight pulled both of us all the way to the aperture. I held with both hands to the boy’s leg, bracing my right shoulder and knees against the edge. Eyes shut against the awful glow, I gagged at the creature's fetid breath, briny and unexpectedly cold. Before I had time to consider what waited should I follow Lark down that pit, darkness returned like an eclipse. I fell backwards with a shout, still holding the boy, and the creature was gone. Everyone else was yet rooted in place. I smiled weakly at Ajer, who looked down at me with eyes as round as saucers. My friend came to loosen my hands from Lark’s naked limb, and seizing me under the arms dragged me back from what I now saw: two small, bare legs, the bottom half of Lark trailing gore in a slick down the sacrificial altar.
I rolled over to vomit on the stone floor. Leaving the boy’s remains behind, Jome and Ajer hustled me back through the round, ribbed corridor, which looked to me now like a throat about to close. The cavemen reappeared and followed at a safe distance, stopping at the cavern entrance to pace back and forth like wolves behind invisible bars. As we hastened away, I looked back and saw their lambent eyes still swarming like fireflies in the darkness.
Returned to the sloop, I forced myself to stand upright at the mast as Erik piloted us away from that cursed rock, though it took every bit of my will not to lie shivering on the deck.
* * *
Our return to Zij was as easy as the outgoing voyage, affording me not even the distraction of hard work. In port our comrades scattered back to their lives, richer by a few coppers and an unbelievable tale, while Erik and I returned in a bleak bad temper to the Street of Candlemakers. The old augur sat stoically outside her hut, hands folded, as we approached.
“What did you not tell us about that island?” I asked without preamble. “We were attacked, ambushed by cavemen, and some monster–”
“With eyes like twin moons,” Erik interjected, still awed at its horror.
“Why didn’t you warn us?”
She looked from me to Erik, nonplussed, before saying in a quivering tone, “The shrine was abandoned decades ago. No one lives there, nothing can live there. I know of no monsters.”
“It is a place of sacrifice,” I said, trying not to remember the warmth of Lark’s thin ankle in my grip.
“Where is the boy?” she asked, the little colour in her face seeping away. She said it a second time, not as a question, but the beginning of a terrible realization. She had looked as sturdy and implacable as the stump of a twisted old tree, but in an instant grief reformed her into a pile of rags.
“I’m sorry about Lark,” I said, my anger fading to ashes as quickly as it had flared. I touched her arm as if to break a spell. “Was he your grandson?”
“No, he was an orphaned boy. But he was my only kin, and I his.”
“He was killed,” I said, “by a giant ghastly horror living in a tunnel beneath the pool. We were helpless against it.”
In the pause that followed, I tried to think of a way to offer her money without an accompanying insult, and also how dear such treasure would be in our pursuit of Isobel’s abductors.
“Did you bring his body?” she asked.
“Buried at sea,” Erik replied, a masterful bit of tact for a sailor.
“But you saw what you wished in the pool.”
“Yes,” I said. “I saw Isobel, kidnaped by the turbaned merchants, and the sign of their ship. I also saw her oars sweeping. The vessel isn’t in port any longer.”
“She is aboard one of the black galleys?” The seer shook her head slowly. “You have chosen a formidable enemy.”
“I won’t count the risk,” I said. “I will have her back, or have the head of the man who took her.”
“Bold words,” she replied, “but you will find them dangerous foes, as devious and resilient as any you have known, and as reluctant to part with their heads.”
I doubted none of what she said.
“I am coming with you,” she announced, drawing her shawl closer and lifting her chin.
Though he said nothing, Erik’s expression eloquently conveyed his opinion on the matter.
“I am not dead weight,” she protested. “A candle’s flame will not cut the darkness into which you sail. You will need an adept, and I can provide some coin as well for my keep.”
“I will not take your money,” I said. “I haven’t paid for what you’ve done already. But if you wish to assist us, you will be welcome, Grandmother.” It wasn’t pity that motivated me to take her on. If her apprentice could perform the wonder I had seen in the moonlit pool, she could be a formidable ally.
“Then call me Huspeth,” she said, a single tear creasing her face. “That name will suffice.”
The Peregrine
“Where’s Orvuhlt?” Erik was asking as I arrived at the Peregrine. Orvuhlt’s seamanship was rivaled only by his uncanny ability to avoid work.
“Spilling his seed in his hand, like as not,” Jome replied. He and another crewman were wrestling the water casks aboard, one of the final jobs before making sail.
While investigating Isobel’s disappearance I had been approached by a clerk from one of the ship’s chandlers in Zij. Solomon, possibly with some premonition of his end, had registered me as heir to his one valuable asset, a majority share of the trading cog Peregrine. With an oak keel fitted in Ooth-Nargai, she was painted workaday blue and outfitted for cargo. She was easy to maneuver, but not particularly fast, especially when loaded. The vessel was fortuitously in port and, as owner of the controlling share, I had acted on my privilege to appoint myself captain.
Ajer, who I had made quartermaster, had over the past several days secured our cargo and provisions. Erik would be my navigator and recruiter. He also had experience managing a crew. As captain I should have been overseeing them, but instead had been scouring the city from wall to harbour to gutter, questioning the locals about the yellow-eyed merchants.
“You look ill prepared for the work ahead,” said Jome.
“My mouth tastes of sick, and it won't wash away with water or rum.”
“Still thinking about that boy,” he grunted.
“Yes, that and other mistakes I've made. I fear he won’t be the last to die on this errand.”
“It’s a shame the boy got himself killed, but we are men. Men choose their own deaths.” Jome’s fatalism was typical of my adopted world, and of seafarers especially, but brought me no comfort.
Once Orvuhlt had been located and put to useful work, I conferred with my officers.
“We’re ready to sail,” I said to them, “but have no heading. Isobel’s abductors could be headed anywhere in the Southern Sea.”
“We’ll comb the docks for word,” Erik said.
“I’ve combed the entire town. No one knows a thing.” The biggest surprise had been the cheerless alehouses and their much reduced crowds. Men sat alone, grasping their mugs as if without that anchor they would founder. I could guess what had for many of them taken the place of beer and rum.
“You say you’re sure of the markings on the vessel that took her,” Erik said. “We’ll raise it with the harbourmaster.” Ajer agreed.
Harbourmaster Voxhaus knew the details of every ship coming and going from the harbour, which by some measures made him the most powerful man in Zij. I had little hope he would help us, but as a new captain I would in any case have to deal with him before our departure. I was glad to have my friends along. I sensed I would need their calm.
The first business with Voxhaus was the submission of the sheaf of documents which finalized my position as captain of the Peregrine. It was a laborious affair of stamping, signing, and witnessing. If he recalled my presence from the night of his quarrel with Solomon, his face did not show it.
“Thank you, Harbourmaster,” I said, counting out the coins of my fee. “There is one other matter. I would like to review the arrivals and departures of any ships hailing from Dylath-Leen.”