by Scott Jäeger
The Black Galley
Dylath-Leen was the biggest port in the Dreamlands, and her walls, towers, and houses sprawled into the low foothills at her back. We had arrived at the basalt city without sighting the galley again, but Huspeth was not bothered. As she said, there was a chance we preceded them. Hoping to frustrate any who might be watching out for the Peregrine, we had berthed the ship in a natural harbour a few miles from town, a place popular with poorer traders who wished to avoid the exorbitant fees of the city harbour.
Dylath-Leen’s gate was unguarded and the people were as unwelcoming and dour as the streets and skies, which that day pushed down with a demotivating drizzle. In their sluggish perambulation, the native inhabitants brought to mind cogs in a massive, slow-moving machine.
Our small group included the soothsayer, Erik, Jome, Marthin and Gavrel, a middle-aged carpenter we had taken on during the voyage north. I had left Ajer Akiti to watch over the ship.
“The wall is thick enough,” Jome remarked, “but not so high. I could just about jump it if I got a running start.”
“It must be a dike,” said Erik. “I don’t see why they should need a wall. The best way to keep people out of this place would be to let them in to have a look around.”
“Are we going to search the harbour for the galley?” Marthin asked.
“Someone should look out for their ship, yes,” said Huspeth, “but do not suppose you can take Isobel by force. The Men of Leng have brought their trade to Dylath-Leen since time out of memory, and have many friends.” Shaking the palimpsest in her fist, she said, “This is the key. Once we have this treasure, they must come to us.”
Though I wished to see for myself if our enemies were near, I had to agree.
“The map shows the location of the Temple of the Toad in Dylath-Leen,” she said. This final detail she had kept from everyone but me. “Since theirs is an outlawed cult, its places of worship are a closely guarded secret.
“There is also another errand needs doing before checking the harbour.” Marthin stepped forward, and after Huspeth whispered to him whatever it was she needed, he set out on his own.
The houses of the city were high-walled, unnumbered and much alike, and the confined streets full of obtuse angles and dead ends. Even with the map it was the work of two hours to locate the temple. The entrance was a narrow, five-foot-high slot in a bare basalt wall. It was unmarked, except for a splash of paint on one side which may have been a secret sign, or just graffiti. I ducked down to peer within.
“If secrecy is their wish,” I said, “they’ve done a fine job.”
“Maybe they’re still doing it,” Jome said. “How do we know this is it?”
“This is the place referenced on the map,” Erik averred, shielding it from the rain.
“Are you sure this is necessary?” I asked Huspeth, holding out the jumble of rags that had been Marthin’s first errand, before he left for the wharf.
“You cannot go inside temple dressed as a sailor,” she said, “and secondhand garb will be less likely to arouse suspicion.”
“Stinks,” I said upon donning the beggar’s robes. Little better than sackcloth, the ill-fitting garment itched everywhere it touched my skin.
Erik stepped back as if pushed away by the smell.
“If at the end of today a new batch of lice is your biggest concern, you can count yourself lucky.” He pushed something cold into my hand, on a length of twine. It was an iron emblem of a toad, the same Gorice had picked up at the coal burners’ camp. I fastened it round my neck and pulled up the hood of my foul costume. It was like draping myself in a curse.
“Take it out,” Erik said. “Won’t do you any good if it can’t be seen.”
I drew the talisman out of the folds of the collar, the metal slick in my hand and unreasonably heavy round my neck. Saluting my companions as if fully confident I would see them again shortly, I slid through the opening.
A few smoky tapers bathed the corridor in an unsteady light. The passage broadened a little as I went, and after a long flight of downward steps I came to a picket of two men garbed in robes as rough and unappealing as my own. They also displayed the toad amulets. I passed between them, believing I would go unchallenged, but a hand reached out to halt me.
What I could see of the face in the cowl was fat but sickly, with fleshy, colourless lips. Wide cheeks merged into his chest without the interruption of a neck. He did not speak, but indicated a bin set aside for weapons. I dropped my cutlass into the box and the sentry bowed me on. Through a torn pocket, I reassured myself my pearl-handled knife was still close at hand.
Past the guards, the torchlight was replaced by a greenish luminescence from the floor where a low recess ran along the walls on both sides. Small, hidden lamps emitted just enough light to keep me from braining myself on the regularly spaced overhead beams. When I heard soft footfalls ahead of me, moving in the same direction, I slowed my gait until they faded. I did not know if the disciples were silent by vow or by nature, but I had no wish to engage with any more of them.
The way continued without intersections or doors, and I walked on for several more minutes before arriving at a pentagonal room approximately three meters to a side. An idol in green marble squatted in the middle, a bulbous monstrosity the height of a man and in the shape of a toad. Its ugliness combined with the low ceiling and too small space to disturbing effect. Shrugging off my distaste I approached the altar in front of the idol, where a low mound of cut gemstones glittered in the faint light.
Huspeth had indicated the artefact would sit immediately before the statue. I knelt to look more closely at the gems and they wavered before my eyes as if shimmering with heat. I gave my head a shake at this dizzying effect and found myself looking not at precious stones but a shallow pile of river rocks, upon which two snakes slept, twined together.
I stepped back from this unsettling illusion to think on my options. The statue told me nothing. I inferred that the disciples may have hidden their artefact, knowing it was threatened. But if that were so, they should have stopped me earlier, or attacked me now that I was cornered in their sanctum.
I heard a rattling sound from behind the idol, like something knocked off a shelf, and moved around to the far wall. A wooden hatch near the floor had recently been kicked in, and I crouched down to look into a fetid smelling compartment. It was a garbage room, heaped with refuse in all stages of decay. The source of the trash was an upwardly sloping shaft in the far wall at about shoulder height. Perhaps the chute was part of a clandestine system for drop-offs, or perhaps it was an architectural holdover. Whichever it was, the citizens of Dylath-Leen used it as a trash bin.
A slight man stood with his back to me in the dingy rectangle of light from the opening. He had shifted a pile of debris beneath the chute and was trying to lift himself up into it. His leather satchel bulged with an object the size of a watermelon.
Trout turned as I crawled, knife drawn, into the room, his eyes like holes gouged in plaster. He looked as if fifteen hard years had passed since I’d last seen him. He had already found his purchase however, and wasting no time sprang into the tunnel and began pulling himself upwards.
I had no difficulty accessing the shaft, but my weight and wider shoulders slowed me down. Where Trout climbed its entire length in a few minutes, I took ten, and emerged aboveground filthy and sore, nowhere near the place I had left my colleagues. The rain had let up, at least, and despite the byzantine windings of the city’s streets I was able to locate my friends quickly.
“I’ve seen Trout,” I gasped while sloughing the soiled disguise for my seaman’s togs. “He has the relic. Gavrel, Huspeth, go to the Peregrine and tell them make ready to sail. The rest of us will head him off at the wharf.”
We raced for the docks, dodging around the disapproving city folk, for whom haste seemed to be a kind of sacrilege. Marthin waved us down, and we followed his pointing finger. Having just cleared the harbour, the galley was turning her pr
ow north, silhouetted against the horizon as if to deliberately mock us.
“I saw them cast off, Captain,” Marthin said despondently. “That’s the ship, but there was no way to stop them.”
“This is no time to stand around moping,” Erik said, already turning back the way we had come. “Step lively.”
By the time we reached the Peregrine, the clouds had parted on blue sky and she was prepared for departure. We sailed on a fierce following wind and within an hour caught our prey heading north-northeast.
Once she was in our sights I was ready to declare our luck changed, but the galley’s oars moved with metronomic constancy. Two hours later, both my head and arms ached from holding the spyglass up to watch the hateful vessel. Though the wind was in our favour, the gap between us had grown no smaller.
“Always they race ahead of us,” I said, looking up into the rigging as if I could will us faster. “We are undermanned again.”
“While we were wandering the alleys of Dylath-Leen,” Erik said, “some of the men jumped ship.”
“Are we such hard masters as that?” I asked, dismayed.
“Since leaving the Fantastic Realms, we’ve only stopped to replenish supplies. Weeks spent sailing but not trading is time unpaid. If so many of them weren’t our friends, they’d probably cut our throats and take the ship for themselves.”
I vented every curse I could call to mind, though more at myself than the crew, and went below to corner Huspeth in my cabin.
“The foe is in our sights,” I said to her, “but they are too swift. You were a help to us deciphering the map and finding the temple, but now I need sorcery. Can you stop them?”
“There are forces I can call on, perhaps.” I disregarded the tremor in her voice, usually as steady as an oak beam.
“Then call them,” I said frantically. “Get me close to that ship and I will smash them.”
“These forces I speak of,” she said hesitantly, “there is a cost.”
“Damn the cost! The crew is on the edge of mutiny. Help me make an end of this or I will lose Isobel for good.”
Huspeth lowered her chin in resignation.
“The men will not understand what must be done,” she said, gathering chalk, a tiny bone figurine, and several other small items from a traveling case. “Get everyone below, and yourself as well.”
“Everyone?” I asked. “We’ll drift with no one at the helm.”
She answered simply, “I must do this alone.”
“What are you doing?” Erik said, aghast, as I hurried everyone off deck. Despite the good weather and fat sails, the men were content to drop their labour and asked no questions. “With the wind on our side, we need only wait them out. Their oars must slacken eventually.”
“I don’t believe they will,” I said, testing the weight of the new cutlass I had salvaged from our stores. “The Men of Leng have commanded this game since the day it began. It's time to change the rules.”
“Speak sense,” he retorted.
“The soothsayer has a plan, but the men must not see her working magic.”
Erik had no confidence in the old mystic, but he marched unhappily below with the rest.
I took the wheel myself in defiance of Huspeth’s directions, intending to keep the galley in sight as long as I could. Ignoring me, she hunkered down on all fours. She began to draw on the deck with her chalk, and fastidiously set out her selection of objects in a grotesque parody of a children's game.
Nothing transpired while Huspeth carried on her with preparations, except that with no one trimming the sails we began to lose ground on our target. When she was satisfied with her drawings, she rose up and spread her arms wide to perform a series of gestures in the air. If she spoke at all I could not hear it from the helm. Though I had seen no rainclouds approaching, we sailed suddenly in a grey pall, our visibility cut almost to the gunwales. Huspeth had stopped in place, arms and face upraised in supplication, and the air grew charged. The tension broke with a bump from below, as if a whale had brushed against the keel. With a cacophony of groans, the Peregrine lifted clear of the waves and the deck fell as motionless as a ballroom floor. The dense fog had opened like a corridor ahead of us, and we were racing towards the black galley.
Breathless and terrified, I clung to the wheel, slack now that the rudder was free of the water. Through the chaos of fog and spray I saw, far off the port side, a surface like a high cliff, carved with a giant, flat-featured face. I waited, hypnotized, for the illusion to vanish in the furiously eddying mists, but our velocity increased again and the sound of shouts and confusion rising from below deck forced me to gather my wits.
The enemy loomed dead in our sights; we would fall upon her in a matter of moments. I bounded past Huspeth, who clung to the mast as if weathering a storm, for the hatch. In the next instant Erik and I were bellowing all hands on deck. There was no time for the crew to question the supernatural swell that drove us, for the Peregrine was already easing directly alongside our quarry. The black galley’s oars stopped their methodical sweeping and were smoothly shipped. Their deck was empty. No man was posted, not even a lookout.
As the hulls knocked together, I called the order to board. Our grapples and ladders came down like a row of falling axes and as the Peregrine's men leapt to the enemy's deck, theirs began to boil up from the black square of the main hatch like angry hornets from a smashed hive. Here was the galley's tireless, wilted crew, muscles in stark relief on gaunt frames, eyes rolling in the gouged out hollows of their sockets like marbles in a dish.
I recognized the first of them, wielding a hammer and stripped to the waist to better display his hulking frame. Marthin recognized Gorice as well and instead of shooting his ridiculous crossbow hesitated, to his ruin. In that instant, the blacksmith leapt forward and caved in Marthin’s ribcage with his first blow.
Before I could so much as exclaim at Marthin’s death, Erik and I were pushed aside as Jome rushed to meet the galley’s crew. He had always been one of the best fighters in Zij, but in that battle became a man possessed. Gorice blocked twice, but his counter-swing may as well have been sent parcel post. Jome opened his throat to the spine and the blacksmith’s hammer flew over the rail.
In the ensuing pandemonium, I forgot Jome and Marthin and my world was reduced to the reach of my dagger and sword. Erik, Ajer and I fought close together, I stabbing with the pearl-handled knife when I hadn’t room to swing a sword in the press of straining fighters and clashing weapons.
The galley slaves fought as if driven by the Devil himself, but bled as readily as any man, and though we began evenly matched, our side had the advantage. The Wilted fought without discipline or cooperation, as if they were strangers meeting for the first time on the field. As their numbers thinned and we pushed forward from midships, I saw their masters in a group at the prow. There were four of the yellow-eyed ones in their bumpy turbans alongside a bloated grey humanoid, a brother to the worm-faced thing I had shot down in St. Mary’s Hospital. This creature stood intimately near to the last of them, Trout, who still held his satchel. For some reason, the boy was looking beseechingly in my direction.
With the fight all but decided in our favour, our remaining opponents began to break, falling to the deck and begging our quarter. They were ignored or kicked aside as we advanced on the officers and their monster, but three of the Men of Leng chose not to fight us. These ones stepped gracefully up onto the rail, and with a single pirouette dropped feet first into the sea, sinking with barely a splash into the green depths.
Seeing his masters go over the side, our treacherous swab tried to break towards us, but was seized about the chest by the abomination. The never resting nodules that served it for a face grazed upon the boy’s hair as it clutched him close, until with a powerful spring it carried them both likewise into the sea. From Trout’s expression as he disappeared over the rail I gleaned he’d sooner have run full upon my sword.
The final galley master remained standing at t
he prow, unarmed and at ease, as if he had come on deck to enjoy the sun and intended to do so until more pressing matters arose. He made no move to defend himself as Ajer swept his feet out from under him.
The surviving Wilted cowered against the gunwales, and though they had surrendered, no man of the Peregrine had lowered his weapon. Ajer had interposed himself between our other prisoner and the crew.
“Orders, Captain?” Erik shouted, knowing as I did that we must move quickly before our victory turned into a slaughter.
“Right," I coughed at the reek of spilled blood. "Gavrel, get our wounded back to the Peregrine. Erik, sit the prisoners in a row starboard and get a couple of fellows to watch them. The rest of you, put the dead slaves over the side.” I would for many nights wish I hadn’t seen the bodies of the Wilted drifting in the waves, nor their twisted faces, which showed no peace even in death. The remaining captives we would later put ashore to survive or not as chance willed.
When minor wounds had been tended and our own dead set aside to be burned, everyone began to drift back to the galley foredeck, but not too close to Ajer, who would gently reproach nosey colleagues with his staff. I took note of Jome for the first time since he had felled Gorice. He cradled Marthin’s crossbow in his right arm; the other hung useless and running with blood.
“Where have the blackguards got to then?” someone asked, peering over the side.
“To drown,” Erik said gruffly, “where else.” But I did not believe this.
“Where have your comrades gone?” I said to their captain. He did not shift where he sat at Ajer’s feet, cross-legged and again at ease, nor indicate he had heard. “Share your plans with us, and if I’m satisfied I will put you ashore with the others. If not–”
“Put him to the question, Captain,” Jome cried. For all his talk of Fate, tears coursed down his cheeks. “Let me do it. I’ll get to the root of their mischief.”
This suggestion met with approval on all sides. Though my first thought was naturally to search for Isobel, part of me feared what the search would reveal, and I would not leave the prisoner to the mercy of bloodthirsty sailors. I looked to Huspeth, who at some point had recovered enough of her strength to join us. A spray of brown weals had ruined one side of her face, part of the price she had paid for the conjuring.