The Silent Isle
Nicholas Anderson
Text copyright © 2014 Nicholas J Anderson
All Rights Reserved
To Sarah, my wife and my muse,
without whom the battle for Haven would have never been waged, let alone won.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
- Hamlet (1.5.166-7)
Table of Contents
Prologue: The Watcher
I - The Gray Apostle
II - Marked to Die
III - Last Night on Earth
IV - Stowaway
V - The Raid
VI - Inside Information
VII - The Rangers
VIII - Dead Reckoning
IX - Valley of the Shadows
X - Of Monsters and Miracles
XI - Ugly Business
XII - Hollow Men
XIII - Eddie
XIV - The Hall of the Pale Princes
XV - Deathdreams
XVI - Fools’ Errand
XVII - Where Night Never Sleeps
XVIII - The Darkness at the End of the Tunnel
XIX - Drowning Man
XX - A Pyre for Hope
XXI - The Runaway
XXII - An Honest Day’s Work
XXIII - Ambush
XXIV - The Man Who Turned
XXV - Black Sails
XXVI - Pillars of Smoke, Pillars of Fire
XXVII - The Crooked Mile
XXVIII - Warren
XXIX - Sleeper Cell
Epilogue: The Sea of Possibility
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Prologue:
The Watcher
Silas Larder was a looker.
Or so he reminded his wife whenever there were younger women around. This always drew a laugh from Suze, and that's all he ever intended by it. “You may have the best set of eyes in the country, dear,” she’d say. “But they’d have to be blind for you to have a sporting chance.”
But, in all seriousness, Silas Larder was the greatest looker on the whole island of Haven – and perhaps of all the hundreds who lived within the holdings of House Hallander. He had a body like any other sixty-five-year-old who had served his time as a retainer in the hall of Lord Arvis's father, in a day when House Hallander was more synonymous with feasting than fighting. His hair was getting thinner and his waist wider but he still had the sharpest eyes in the mining colony. He credited the preservation of his vision to his 45 years of marriage to Suze; “On account of her being so easy on the eyes.”
Being such a looker came with its privileges. Silas had always said he’d seen Suze coming long before any of the other boys had. Almost, he’d add, before she’d noticed him. He had been the first to spot this island, previously unknown to his people, after their ship had been blown off course on a trip to the tributary island of Tira. Wrapped as it was in mist, the island seemed more like a cloud floating on the surface of the water; but Silas' eyes had not deceived him. Lord Arvis had let him choose his reward. He had chosen to be among the first settlers sent to Haven.
But being the looker he was also came with responsibilities. Thus he was standing on the rampart of the palisade that hemmed in his village in the predawn drizzle, looking out into the forest which engulfed this tamed little patch of the island. Behind and beneath him were the 124 souls, well, 122 now, of the Hallander mining colony; most of them still sleeping soundly.
Before him the trees climbed the steep slopes of the hills. When he stood still, Silas could just hear the babbling of the creek that slipped down the hill and past their village on its way to the harbor where their ships slept at anchor. But Silas was not looking at the hills or towards the creek. A spot beneath the darkened boughs of the pines about two hundred yards away held his attention. He had been watching this spot since he had first noticed the movement there a quarter of an hour ago.
Any other sentry would have written the movement off as just one of the myriad shadows that squatted and shifted beneath the branches with the breaking of day or a ragged bit of mist drifting between the trees.
But Silas was not any other sentry. And this did not feel like any other day. Something seemed missing from it. And Silas had noticed two things about the object of his focus. Unlike the shadows, he had watched it move from tree to tree. And once or twice, unlike the mist, he was sure he had seen it move against the breeze. At times, Silas even fancied the thing was stalking its way towards him, moving sometimes side to side and sometimes forward but never backward and always staying behind the trees.
He was not sure it was a man. It may only have been an animal. Most of the time, the sign was so faint Silas was sure he was only letting his imagination run away with him. Had circumstances been different, that is to say, normal, Silas likely would have taken no notice of it at all. But things had changed with the return of the boy.
Four days ago, two of the miners had set off with the goal of exploring more of the island, in particular, looking for more ore deposits. A boy had gone with them, the nephew of one of the men. A boy could crawl into holes in the hillsides the men could not and bring back word on whether there was ore within to warrant the men turning the crawlspace into a mine shaft. Thus it was not uncommon for the explorer parties to take youths with them. But nothing about that trip had been common.
Three days ago, the boy had returned, stumbling out of the forest at dusk like a sleepwalker. He was alone. He had not said a word since then; had not even nodded or shaken his head in response to the many questions the adults had brought down on him. Even when the other children tried talking to him he just stared right through them.
In the boy's silence, everyone else had begun to talk. There were three main theories, all of which were plausible, but all of which, in the three long nights he'd spent on the walls, Silas had begun to whittle down with the keen blade of reason. The first suggested the men had gone into a shaft, left the boy outside, and had been trapped by a cave-in. Men had instantly been dispatched to all the known mines and followed them to their roots, but they were all in good order.
Silas had doubted this theory even before the searchers had returned. The boy was dirty, but not in the way one gets dirty going down the shafts; he did not look like he'd been anywhere near a cave-in. Silas doubted the trio had ever made it to the mines.
The second theory alleged a hostile party, a group from one of the other houses, had landed on the island and encountered the trio and only the boy had escaped. Of all the explanations, this one caused the colony the most concern and was probably the main reason Silas was up on the wall. It was to escape the bloody house wars of the mainland that Silas and his fellow settlers had come to Haven.
Tal Harting, Captain Stearn's second-in-command, had assembled a crew and circled the island in the colony's swiftest ship, searching for signs of a landing. He'd returned at dusk last night. He had seen nothing to signal other human presence on the island.
But Silas had had his doubts about the invasion theory from the beginning. He doubted any of the other houses even knew of the island's existence. Its discovery by House Hallander had been an accident, after all. And now it was the House’s best kept secret. The ships that ferried the precious ore to the Hallander home port entered and left the port at night so as to hide their coming and going. The island, a recent addition to Hallander maps, was marked only by a breaching whale, a symbol which would seem only a decorative flourish should the map fall into unfriendly hands. Thus, Silas wasn't really worried about another house discovering the island and wresting it from the Hallanders any time soon. Haven’s safety lay in its secrecy.
It was the third theory, the
one which certain people talked the most about, but always in whispers and never in front of the boy, that really bothered Silas. It said the two men had done something shameful to the boy. Some people posited the men must have intended to kill the boy afterward and stage a cave-in to cover up the whole thing, but the boy had escaped them and they were now in hiding, fearing the consequences of his testimony.
Though he had no children of his own, the thought of men doing such a thing to any child brought Silas’s blood to a boil. He had personally volunteered to lead a search party, even though most of the men in the barracks were half his age. Wallace Stearn, the captain of the garrison and the highest authority on Haven, had refused. He didn't want his men scattered over the island with the chance there was a hostile presence onshore. He barred any further action until the boy said something.
So far, the boy had said nothing. He just sat in front of the hearth in the blanket Suze had wrapped around him and shivered like a wet dog.
But Wallace had had another job for Silas. And so, each night since then, when he should have been keeping Suze warm in bed, he’d mounted the wall to watch and to wait.
In his hours on the wall, Silas had begun to doubt even the final theory. A doubt that brought relief in one sense but brought also the nagging need for a new explanation.
The boy had come out of the forest like one in a trance, in no condition to have escaped from two grown men. And one of those men was the boy's uncle, for crying out loud.
And so Silas had taken the theories in hand and whittled them down until there was nothing left to hold onto. He had no answers, just a gnawing conviction they did not understand this island as well as they thought they did.
Silas stamped his feet and rolled his shoulders to shake off a sudden chill. He had lost sight of what he’d been trying to watch. He figured this might be a good time to get a second opinion.
He turned and glanced about the courtyard. A girl of five or six was pulling a smaller girl about the open area in a dogcart. He recognized them as Nat Aldine’s daughters, Nelly and Chloe if he remembered rightly. He smiled at their laughter. The only other person outside was Biggs Walker, the garrison’s cook, bending over his pot of porridge. Biggs may have had a fine nose but he also had about the worst eyes in the colony. Even Ben Cross, the colony's oldest member and revered storyteller, could see better than Biggs. Silas imagined Biggs on the wall beside him, squinting myopically into the fog, scrunching up his face as if he wanted to squeeze his eyeballs right out of it, while Silas tried to describe to him what he was supposed to be looking for. In the end Biggs would only shrug and shuffle off and Silas would have sounded like a fool, as though three sleepless nights had taken him to the edge of sanity. Better he leave poor Biggs alone. And Silas certainly didn’t mind being alone. He enjoyed the silence.
The silence.
In that instant Silas realized what made this morning different from the others he had stood watch and every other morning before them. The songbirds weren't singing. The forest surrounding the settlement was utterly silent.
He spun back towards the trees, and as he did there was a blur of black motion at the foot of the wall beneath him which seemed suddenly to fill his whole field of vision. Something struck him in the mouth with such force he was knocked to his back.
He tried to scream, but his mouth was full of something thick and warm with the taste of copper. But his eyes were open and he could see clearly the figure that towered over him, and he knew then, impossible though it was, his eyes had not deceived him. But he wished by Kran and Shammath and all the lesser deities of the pantheon that they had.
I
The Gray Apostle
Dane Hallander watched the mother duck shift her weight to better spread herself over her clutch of eggs. She quacked at him, as if annoyed by his intrusion on her privacy.
"How about that one?" Leech asked.
"No," Dane said, turning from the box. "Nothing here."
Leech glanced in the box as he continued down the trail. He turned a frown on Dane. "Nothing, huh?"
Dane shrugged.
"You think your father put these here so they'd have a nice place to live?"
"That would be a better reason than most."
"You know how fond he is of duck eggs."
"Yeah, well she probably has him beat there all the same."
"It's amazing we bring back anything at all from these trips."
"What are you upset about? He eats just fine as it is; and besides, you've made a new friend." Dane jabbed a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the occupied box.
Leech sighed and stepped from the nest back to the trail. "Let's get back. If we're gone any longer he'll be mad we didn't bring more back."
"Enough with the eggs. Don't you feel the least bit bad we built those boxes to trick them into thinking they're a safe place to nest so we can steal their eggs?”
“To that I’ll answer, as would any loyal subject, it’s not about my feelings, it’s about your father’s appetites.”
“Loyal subject? I always hoped you were more interesting than that.”
“Well, not publicly, at least.” Leech stopped in his tracks. “Oh, why do I even bother?” He trotted back to the box and slipped the single egg from his basket under the duck. She jabbed his hand as he withdrew it. “Some friend.” He turned to Dane and shrugged. “You can tell your dad we made an investment in the future of his duck egg enterprise.”
As the two men came out of the marsh and onto the beach, they saw a lone ship with a black and white striped sail approaching the harbor. “You heard what they’re saying about Bax’s slave girl?” Leech asked.
“Yeah,” Dane said, feeling glummer than ever, “I’ve heard.”
“You two used to terrorize me,” Leech said. “Do you remember how you would fly straight at me, yelling, ‘Duck, sucker,’ and if I didn’t hit the dirt you’d knock me down? Only, half the time I ducked you ended up kicking me in the head as you jumped over me anyway.”
“Sorry about that,” Dane said.
“You always say that.”
“Well, you keep bringing it up.”
“I only mentioned it because you and Bax used to be inseparable. Now you won’t even speak to each other.”
“Things change.”
“You’ve changed. I’m not sure if anything else has.”
“Did I change?” Dane said. “Or did I just die and forget to tell my legs to stop moving?”
“I could diagnose that for you.”
“No thanks. I’d rather not know. Just be glad I’m not still kicking you in the head, sucker.”
“That was mostly Bax. He never had your vertical.”
Dane halted to watch the ship. "That's one of the Haven ships."
"It can't be; what would it be doing here?"
"It is. Just look at it."
“What's that on the sail?"
Dane had noticed it, too. Across the thick black and white vertical stripes of canvas, a large mark had been painted in red. The mark looked like a plus sign, but at this distance and with the sail slack and the black and white bars it was hard to be sure.
“What are they doing here?” Leech said. “They know they're only supposed to come at night."
"Something's wrong," Dane said.
“I know something's wrong. Your father gave express orders the Haven ships should only enter under cover of darkness."
"No, I mean, where is everybody?"
"What?"
"Where's the crew?”
For the first time, Leech really looked at the ship, not just its mast and outline. No oars protruded from the gunwale. Yet the ship was moving against the wind. He did not see anyone on the deck or the lookout platform atop the yard. "A ghost ship," he said under his breath.
"Come on," Dane said. He dropped his basket and ran towards the water.
Several people had gathered on the beach and a handful more were watching from the docks. No one other than D
ane and Leech moved to approach the ship. The ship had entered the harbor and was heading for the south side of the beach, to the left of the main three docks as one looked out at it from the beach. Leech halted at the waterline as Dane waded in. "Don't get any closer," he called to Dane, "It may be cursed."
Dane splashed forward through the surf, the waves slapping against his thighs. He called back over his shoulder, "Cursed? Where’s the fearless man of science, now? Come on. The crew may be sick or hurt. They could need your help."
Leech shook his head and then waded in after his friend. A mooring rope dangled into the surf near the prow of the ship. Dane grabbed hold of it and pulled himself aboard. At first he did not see anyone, not even any bodies. The deck was a jumble of barrels and nets and rope. "Hello," he called.
Grunting, Leech pulled himself over the gunwale behind Dane.
"Hello," Dane called again, glancing up and down the length of the deck once more. From in front of him, beyond a pile of nets and tarps, there came a hoarse, raspy sound, like a cry but hardly louder than a whisper, and then the sound of something scraping across the deck. The scraping stopped and was replaced by a series of short, rattling respirations, almost like panting. Dane wondered if it had been a mistake to leave his knife with his basket on the hill. Nodding to Leech to follow him, he crept around the pile of rope and cloth. A sudden jolt shook them as the boat struck the beach. Dane crouched down and clutched at the netting to keep from being thrown backwards. Then he continued aft. He made it to the rear of the ship.
A single body lay on its back near the stern. At first Dane thought it a corpse and his eyes darted around in search of what else could have made the sounds. Suddenly, the figure raised its head. It was an old man. The hair was mostly gone from on top of his head and his beard was scraggly and gray. Dane’s stomach constricted and a chill washed over him when he saw the face. He glanced back at the sail and found that, whatever the mark had been made with, it had bled through the canvas so its reverse image showed on this side. He turned back to the man. The same mark had been branded in his forehead.
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