by Scott Jäeger
I looked to Ajer, whose eyes were keenest. He shook his head once.
“There is no one there, Isaac,” Erik said, brow furrowed.
I said no more about it, and collected my ration of hard tack and salt pork, and a water skin. With a hatchet I trimmed a stout stick for walking.
“If I have not returned by dusk tomorrow, send no party after,” I said to Erik. “Go back to known waters and leave this madness behind.”
My friends’ faces were grim, but no one gainsaid me.
I followed a well-worn game track, and at first the going was easy. I lost sight of the woman whilst scrambling through a shallow gorge, but I needn't have worried. Though invisible to my comrades, she stayed in plain view for me, and observing my approach was content to wait. An hour later, we were both on the same precipitous slope, and the woman was no less real. Though plump with middle-age, her face was youthful and untroubled. She wore a peasant frock and the wicker basket slung over her shoulder was full of wild mushrooms.
“Do you live on the mountain?” I asked, drinking from my flask. “Is there fresh water nearby?”
A minute or two passed and the great spreading oak at her back creaked in the breeze, a lonely sound on the open mountainside. She had parted her lips as if about to speak, but did not do so. I felt myself redden in irritation.
“My friends think you’re a hallucination,” I said.
“He is at the peak, yes,” she replied nonsensically.
“Is that so?” I said.
“No one lives on the mountain.”
“All right,” I said, moving past her. “Thank you for your help.”
She nodded, still smiling vacantly. I brushed shoulders with her as I went, but she did not vanish.
“Only death awaits you,” she said to my back. “That is not a metaphor, by-the-by.”
* * *
After the meadow, the ascent grew more arduous, and where no switchback was available I was forced to use rocky handholds and the thin, scrubby trees for purchase. I fancied myself in excellent physical condition, but climbing tired me quickly. I stopped often to catch my breath, and eventually realized I could hear no birds or other fauna. Not even the buzz of a fly disturbed the mountain’s perfect stillness.
The sun was well past its zenith when I sat for a longer rest. I had finished my rations hours before, and now my flask was empty as well. Groaning, I pulled myself up with the help of my stick, wondering if I had taken ill. It was while searching for one of the freshwater pools which dotted the mountainside that I came upon a goatherd, a young man accompanied by a single animal.
I opened my mouth to greet him, but only issued a wheeze, like a leather bladder fatally punctured. My body cried for me to sit again but, not wishing to show how weak I felt, I instead moved towards him, as if I wanted to see him more closely. I needed to go closer, for to my tired eyes his features were little more than a tan blur. I should have saved myself the trouble. He was gangly and ill-favoured, with a port-wine stain covering the left half of his face. Affecting to have just noticed my presence, he flashed a yellow-toothed leer in my direction.
“How do, Old Man,” he said in a flat, backcountry drawl.
“Old man, am I?” I said, in order to buy a few seconds to come up with something less foolish. “Not much of a goatherd I see. They only trust you with the one?”
“This wily beast got away from my flock,” he replied, stroking the animal with rather more vigour than I thought healthy. “But I'd never let him get far. Old Eamon is my favourite after all.”
“Eamon, is it?” I croaked. I felt I should be angry, but the reason escaped me.
He waited for me to say something more (even his waiting was insolent), but my thoughts rolled away whenever I tried to grasp them, like a handful of marbles dropped in the dark.
“Think you’ll make it?” he asked, nodding upslope. “I don’t.”
I worked to separate my tongue from my palate, thinking that instead of bantering with him I should take my stick to his marred face, but I was powerfully thirsty and I saw that both of us had stopped by water. I bent to drink, dipping my head as well. The water was exhilarating, cold and pure in a way only found in the wild, far from ship and city. After taking my fill, I remained on all fours to catch my breath, but when my reflection resolved from the ripples I jumped back, joints creaking painfully in protest. Dim, sorrowful eyes had looked up from the water, in a face as withered and grey as the hand I now held before me. It was the reflection of a terribly, unnaturally aged Isaac Sloan.
I sat on the mossy ground as if perched on a ledge over an abyss, while a hateful sound slowly overtook my panting. The goatherd was laughing as my palsied hands shook and, unrealizing, I whimpered.
Without the stick I could not have levered myself up from the ground, for mortality sat like a hundredweight on my shoulders. Though the next rise looked as high as the entire mountain had that morning, I hobbled towards it, leaving the chortling boy and his goat behind. I consoled myself that, like as not, the two of them were nothing but spectres.
* * *
Shaking free of a waking daze, I found myself stranded in a moment which knew no antecedent, nor expectation of the future. I lifted the skin to my lips and a little water trickled over tough and empty sockets where my teeth had been, the rest down my chest. The soft moss called me to lie down and rest, but to do so would not bring rejuvenation, but the final peace from which no one rises.
Fumbling about for a way upward, my mind and vision dim, I was several minutes in recognizing that the level space I had reached was in fact the top of the mountain. A stand of trees, half-consumed by the voracious undergrowth, was the sole landmark. Closer examination revealed not a copse, but a haphazard conglomeration of branches, driftwood, and lumber salvaged from wrecks. These propped up the round edge of a roof made of a pale, cream-coloured substance like bone. As if by design, a thick tangle of trailing plants held the whole mess together.
I could see no entrance, but when I moved close enough to touch a vine-choked spar, it was shifted aside to reveal a man’s face. He grinned ghoulishly out at me, or the scar did the grinning, whether he willed it or no. A deep white groove began at the left edge of his lips and extended in a crescent all the way to the hairline.
“Captain Bromm,” I said. Slowly I straightened from the crooked hunch to which my climb had reduced me. The mountain’s glamour had passed.
“My friends call me Smiley," he said in a gravelly voice.
I followed him inside the structure, where sun through the living walls made a cool green twilight. He manoeuvred himself slowly, with one hand grasping at the vinous walls and the other a broken decking plank, for his right leg was missing from the hip.
“Lost it to gangrene,” he said matter-of-factly. With a groan, the captain lowered himself onto a straw pallet in the center of the room. “Looks like we’re both of us accident prone.” He drew a finger across his throat where a lifetime ago I had caught the edge of a blade.
I had stopped to stare in astonishment at the ceiling. Shaped all of a piece, like an enormous shell, it was painted everywhere with stars, and illustrated with animals, men, and stranger things. The mural was marked in a fashion similar to a nautical chart, though for what purpose I could not guess, since the constellations were unlike any I had seen in the Dreamlands or New England. The crown of this illustration, immediately above Captain Smiley’s mattress, was the symbol long ago shown me by Bo’sun Longbottom, a pillar inside the letter Omega.
The few articles scattered about the room –two rugs, a battered brazier, a sailor's kit bag– reaffirmed what I already suspected, that this queer lodge wasn't Smiley's home, but a waystation.
"I have questions," I said at last.
“And I am the guru atop the mystical mountain,” he replied sardonically. He produced a small pipe from the breast of his robe and began to tamp it. Soon thick, sweet smoke billowed from his mouth in improbable volumes. It was the same variety as
that of the craggy old seaman I had met my first night in Kingsport, and as the incense I had discovered in my uncle’s hideaway on the cliff. Settling more comfortably into the straw he said, “Proceed.”
“I am in pursuit of a galley belonging to the turbaned traders from the north. They have taken a very dear friend captive.”
“Pirates, slavers, and all round dastards,” Smiley said, drawing on his pipe and exhaling after each designation, “with yellow eyes.”
“Yes, everything you said,” I replied, walking over to crouch down beside him, “and with yellow eyes.”
“You’ll have a piece of work catching them, for their craft are remarkable swift. It’s their oarsmen, you know, very motivated fellows.”
“Whether I will or not, I cannot pursue them any farther into the Fantastic Realms. My crew will do no more.”
“Let me think on your problem,” he said, setting that topic aside. "A long time ago, your uncle and I were sworn to fight the servants of the Old Ones, among whom your moon worshipping galley masters certainly number."
"My uncle?"
“Of course your uncle. The way Eamon handled a cutlass, he could have been a surgeon.”
“Every time I speak with a friend of my uncle’s, my list of questions grows longer, but this is the one that vexes me most.” I rolled my sleeve up past the burn on my left forearm. “What is this?”
Smiley took a powerful draught of smoke and propped himself up on one elbow.
“It is a sign of your opposition to those who would enslave mankind. It offers protection as well.”
“What do you mean?”
“It is a ward against those who watch," he said ominously. "Do not ask me to explain further. If you never know more of what I speak, it will have done its job in full.”
Through an aperture formed by a pair of forked branches, the sun was setting over the endless wash of the sea. When the first star twinkled into view, Captain Smiley said, “My mountain aerie gets awful cold after dark. There is coal in my kit bag, son. Light the brazier for us.”
I did as he asked. In the fire’s unsteady light, the walls became a trackless forest, the ceiling a phantasmagorical night sky, and the captain’s scarred visage the face of a demon. With the scene thus set, he launched into his stories. The place names had changed, from Algeria and the Andalusian Coast to Ooth-Nargai, the jungles of Baharna, and the Cliffs of Glass, but they were the same tales of heroic deeds and desperate ends told by my uncle on his last night on earth. So we passed the hours until in a pause between adventures, Captain Smiley’s pipe died and he chose not to refill it.
"None of your tales explain what brought you to this mountain," I said.
"I have served the Elder Gods, in my own way. Now I wait here, if it please them, to rise into the Overworld."
He rested his pipe on the floor and we slept, he on his pallet, I on a rug with a dizzying pattern of sharp angles and contrasting colours. I dreamed that the shell roof shivered open like an enormous iris. The sky's light warped above us, a lens through which we became the focus of an unfathomable entity. I heard Captain Smiley's breath coming shorter and shorter, and turned to my friend.
“You’re dying,” I said.
“No,” he replied, painfully. “This earthly husk will expire, but my self rises into a more sublime state. The humanity I leave behind is but a chrysalis.” He shrank back from this small effort, and a lengthy and rattling hiss signaled that the following words would be his last: “But how I long to see New England again.”
I came slowly to consciousness as the sun’s glow consumed the chamber. Bromm’s cot was empty except for a scrap of onionskin, about two hands wide, covered in circles and slashes. I secured it in my belt and, taking up my walking stick, pushed my way out of the green house. The morning was eerily quiet without birdsong, but I met no phantoms on my descent, which was as quick and uneventful as the previous day’s climb had been torturous and bizarre. It was not yet noon when I reached the beach again, where the majority of my crew were taking their ease by the water. Their cheer at my return could be described as halfhearted at best.
For the first time in weeks there was purpose in my stride, and by the time I had returned to the Peregrine and assembled the pages of the palimpsest on top of a crate on the main deck, everyone had gathered close. The three leaves came together into a map, as I had expected, although its subject was not immediately clear.
“Where does it lead?” Marthin said, igniting a storm of wild speculation which, predictably, leaned towards treasure.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Jome said, shouldering his way to the fore. “These lines everywhere are too straight and the corners too crooked. They can’t be rivers or coastline.”
I myself was drinking it in with my eyes, knowing the riddle was on the cusp of being solved.
“It’s a street map,” I said.
“You're right,” Erik agreed. “These quadrangles and recursive lanes can only describe Dylath-Leen, the city of the yellow-eyed merchants.”
“That may be Dylath-Leen,” Huspeth said softly, “but the yellow-eyed merchants merely trade there. They are not her citizens. They are the Men of Leng.”
I had heard tales of that forbidden plateau, but never guessed anything human made its home there.
“Very well,” I said, concealing the chill I felt, “assuming the map represents Dylath-Leen, what does it lead to?”
My question hung unanswered in the air as I studied the document for further clues.
“What is this text here?” I pointed to a section where the layers of the palimpsest had resolved into cryptic symbols rather than streets. “It doesn’t appear to be a legend.”
Huspeth traced the characters slowly with her finger.
“It describes the original source of the map, a certain arcane tome now thankfully lost. The map itself points to a component of a dark ritual, the summoning of–” Here she struggled with the script.
While waiting on her, I became keenly aware of the press of sailors around us, scanning the secret map with hungry eyes. I considered the problem of the black galley, how it lingered always just out of reach, leading us to these forsaken shores and now to the resolution of this puzzle. For the first time, I suspected that Isobel’s abduction had been a deliberate strategy, that she was part of a script which I had followed to the letter for an unseen master.
The old woman had read something that bled her face white.
“The annotation follows the patterns of a swamp people dialect,” she said, also realizing how many eyes were watching, "but with runic characters. I cannot translate more whilst standing on deck, crushed by sailors. It will take time.”
I declared an extra ration for the men, and invited them to make whatever merriment they could until nightfall. The promise of another day of rest was met with a more enthusiastic cheer than my reappearance, and soon Jome was sharing out his last remaining stash of tobacco.
While the crew resumed their leisure, my exultation at completing the map waned to a bone-deep exhaustion. As my mystic advisor worked on the translation, I slept below until Ajer woke me near dusk with as stony an expression as I’d ever seen. With one hand, he signaled two things: the swimming motion of a fish, which he had adopted to describe Trout, followed by a dismissive gesture, meaning gone.
Ajer’s news abruptly cast Trout’s inexplicable behaviour during our voyage into a very different light. I headed to the captain’s cabin, wringing my hands like a supplicant.
“I did not wish to say more with so many looking on,” Huspeth said without raising her head, “but I am close to finishing. The remainder of the text was in the form of a cipher, which I have now solved.”
When I explained that after viewing the map our youngest deckhand had vanished, Huspeth did look up, with a stare as flat and dead as a snake’s.
“Our swab, the master spy,” she said, spitting on the floor in disgust. “The Men of Leng led us to the place where the riddle would be
solved, but they could never have climbed the summit. The map was what they wanted all along and you delivered it into their hands.”
“You are quick to place blame,” I retorted, “but when did you advise me this entire time? I’d have been better served to bring a marble statue for counsel.”
“I wanted my revenge,” she said, shaking her head at her own foolishness. “If they hadn’t kidnaped your Isobel, Lark never would have died. I did not understand what was at stake.”
“What is at stake is Isobel’s life and freedom,” I replied, my voice steadily rising. “Whatever else you're on about doesn't concern me.”
“But maybe it will.” She squared the vellum sheet on which she had been scratching her notes. “I have deciphered enough of the text to guess the rest. This cipher is the work of the Toad cult, and the map shows the location of their secret temple in Dylath-Leen. Every such temple houses a sacred relic at its exact center. That must be what the yellow-eyed ones are after.”
“What will they do with this relic?”
“They seek to enact an unspeakable ritual,” she replied calmly.
“And Isobel?”
“She will yet be on the black galley, if she is to be had at all.”
“If we can run them down before their ritual, I will have Isobel and you will have your revenge, I promise it. Do you know how to find them?”
“Simple. Now that they’ve acquired their prize, they surely make for Dylath-Leen, as the crow flies this time.”
“If they are able to plot a proper course while we must follow the coast again–”
“Not at all. Your navigator may take the most direct course.” To my nonplussed expression, she said, “The stars are auspicious.”
I climbed to the deck where Erik was already staring upward, sextant dangling from one hand. I looked up. For the first time since we had entered uncharted waters, each star was in its proper place and every constellation in order.
“Unless I misread the stars,” Erik said, “we are not far from Jundara.”