by Rob May
‘Fancy one last meal before we leave the city?’ she asked. Kal nodded. She guessed now where they were headed: the Mooncusser Inn was a renowned smugglers’ haunt, and it was situated in a small hamlet that lay in the shadow of the ringwall. The hamlet was nestled in a deep hollow that was overflowing with fog, but yellow lights glowed from the windows of the Mooncusser to guide them safely to it. The inn was evidently open all night.
When they arrived, Lula flipped the stable boy a silver shilling. ‘Leave your chest with Ned here, Kal,’ Lula said, ‘and let’s go get loaded to the gunwalls!’
Inside, the public room was low-beamed and smoky. Men and women sat around in heavy coats and hats, despite the two hearths blazing away. Lula led Kal to a discreet booth at the back of the inn.
‘Moonheart at the Mooncusser,’ Lula joked. ‘Alright—last chance for a while to eat or drink something other than sea biscuits and rum. Although I advise against drinking the grog our boatswain serves up: it will tear a hole in your insides faster then a sabre through your stomach.’
Kal opted for ham, egg and chips, washed down with ale—an early breakfast of sorts. Lula ordered rump steak, but chose to drink rum.
‘Once you develop a taste for it, you never want to go a day without,’ she said.
‘I feel the same way about winning money at cards,’ Kal said.
As they chatted and ate, she cast her eyes around the inn and its patrons. Two men in the red uniform of the city watch were playing dominoes in one corner. Were they on duty or not?
‘The Mooncusser is a safe haven for smugglers,’ Lula assured her. ‘I can stow my unsold cloth here until I can find another buyer.’
‘Don’t the watch ever search this place?’ Kal asked, through a mouthful of food. The inn was festooned with nautical paraphernalia; rigging hung from the beams, and large oil paintings of ships at anchor off the coast of tropical islands hung from the walls. Behind her, on a shelf, was a miniature clipper in a bottle. The inn could hardly be more conspicuous if it tried.
‘They do,’ Lula said. ‘But they never seem to find anything. The sergeant of the watch in this sector is an agreeable man, and a friend. He has a lovely wife and some adorable children …’
Kal’s eyes widened. ‘You threaten his family?’
‘No!’ Lula laughed. ‘Or at least, only in the sense that they would be extremely hurt if word ever got out that the captain and I were lovers. Are you ready to go?’
Kal downed her drink and stood up. Lula motioned for her to sit back down, and made a subtle signal to the landlord. A minute later, the lad collecting empty glasses tossed something into the fire, making it flare up with green flames. As everyone’s head jerked around to look, Lula reached under the table and pulled a lever.
The table, chairs, and even a section of the room rotated one hundred and eighty degrees. Kal gasped in amazement as the inn slid out of sight. But the fun wasn’t over yet—with a quiet mechanical rumble, their table descended into the basement. They found themselves in a stone chamber, where a tunnel of natural rock led off into darkness.
Kal sat in awed silence for a moment, while Lula watched her expression, drinking in her reaction. Finally, Kal stood up. Her sea chest had been placed ready for her on the floor; she took hold of the handle on one end and Lula took the other. Lula took a lantern from an alcove, and together they plunged into the tunnel.
As they passed between large, white stone blocks—the foundations of the ringwall, Kal presumed—she idly wondered, as she always did at times like this, when she would return to the city.
She never ever wondered if she would return.
I.iv
Calico Cove
Kal and Lula struggled along the coastal path. In the Wild, outside the city walls, the paths were seldom-travelled, let alone maintained. The rugged coastline rose and fell, and Kal and Lula found themselves climbing rocky steps and sliding down muddy slopes, all while lugging Kal’s sea chest between them. A downpour of freezing rain upped the ante and made the journey twice as hazardous; Kal could barely see two feet in front of her. Lula finally called a halt under a rocky outcrop.
‘Almost there,’ she said, ‘but we’ll give the rain a chance to clear before we enter the cove. The way down is pretty dangerous.’
Kal looked out into the gloom. A miserable sea squall threw the raindrops around in a wild dance. Outside their shelter was a flat cliff-top of exposed rock, with a drop-off to the sea just yards away. What looked like a single tall tree had somehow managed to gain a footing in the cliff; the downpour obscured the top of it from view.
‘How many of your crew are bearing this … white spot?’ Kal asked her friend as they sat side by side, shivering together.
‘Quite a few,’ Lula admitted. ‘Less than half though!’ she added, seeing the expression on Kal’s face. ‘Don’t worry; no one is too far gone. You’re not going to get trapped on a ship full of zombies in the middle of the Silver Sea!’
‘I need to know what I’m getting myself into,’ Kal said. ‘Are all the victims Islanders?’
‘Yeah,’ Lula said. ‘Well, most of them. The captain’s got it too. He hasn’t told the rest of the crew yet. Didn’t want to worry any of them.’
Or inspire a mutiny, Kal thought. ‘I just want to know if I’m vulnerable too,’ she said.
‘Don’t you worry,’ Lula said, taking Kal’s hand. ‘Even if you caught it from me tonight, you’ve still got a couple of months until you turn. I have faith you’ll break the curse before then. We all have faith in you, Kal.’
Kal groaned inside. What had Lula told her smuggler friends? That she was some kind of superhero? There was a rumour going around the city that Kal had killed the ghost of Feron Firehand last summer; it wasn’t unreasonable, she guessed, that some superstitious people might think she had some power over the supernatural.
The rain shower passed over, and the bright white waning moon emerged from behind the dark clouds. Lula stood up and, taking a small brass telescope from an inside pocket of her long coat, walked to the cliff-edge and stood scanning the dark sea. From where Kal was sitting, the horizon looked empty; her eyes were instead drawn up the tree.
It wasn’t a tree.
A twenty-foot-high post had been erected atop the cliff, and swinging by a chain from the crossbeam was one of the most fearsome sights in the world: an occupied cage. The moonlight gleamed off white human bones that had been picked clean by gulls and crows, and washed down by the rain.
‘Friend of yours?’ Kal asked Lula.
‘That was Gaspar Azul,’ Lula said, collapsing her telescope and putting it away. ‘The second most feared pirate on the Silver Sea.’
‘The second most feared?’
‘Gaspar’s brother, Amaro, is still the number one scourge of the Republic’s trade routes. And now he’s out not only for loot, but also for revenge.’
Kal shivered. She had often seen pirates hanging in chains at low-water mark in the docks. Their bodies were left to be washed by the tide three times before they were taken down and buried. But by gibbeting Gaspar in such a high and prominent spot, the authorities were making it clear that he would be a permanent deterrent to other criminals.
‘And you make harbour right underneath this poor fellow,’ Kal said.
‘We’re smugglers, Kal, not pirates, remember,’ Lula said. ‘Big difference. We are not like him.’
She led Kal down a narrow crack in the cliff. Walls of stone rose on either side of them—alternating stripes of limestone and shale that looked as though they had been laid down by some divine mason. The rock was cleanly cut as if some other destructive god had taken an axe to the coast and gouged out the path in one clean strike.
‘Lightning hit here a few weeks ago,’ Lula explained as they descended. ‘Just ahead there was a massive rockfall that created a new cove that isn’t on any maps yet. The perfect place to haul up and hide.’
Kal slipped and almost fell. The smooth rocks were soaking wet.
‘Secret, but not very safe,’ she complained. ‘Did you carry all your calico up this way when you took it into the city?’
Lula laughed. ‘Of course not! We rowed as close to the walls as we could on a makeshift barge, but we sank it afterwards to cover our tracks.’
Once again, Kal was impressed with Lula’s operation. But to go to so much trouble for the sake of a shipment of cloth … well, something didn’t quite add up. Kal knew better than to press her slippery friend, though; she would have to find out for herself.
Something in the rockface caught Kal’s eye: a beautiful fossilised ammonite, its coiled shell perfectly preserved millions of years after its death. Kal looked around; now that she was looking, she could see hundreds of them.
‘Wait until you see what’s up ahead,’ Lula said. There was a glow coming from around the next corner of the gorge, and when they turned it Kal wasn’t disappointed. The passage widened, and a couple of ship’s storm lanterns had been left to illuminate an incredible natural wonder: looming above them was the fossilised skull, neck and upper body of what looked like an ancient dragon.
Kal stood admiring it for some time. ‘It’s not a dragon,’ she eventually decided. ‘Its jaw is too long. And are those flippers? What sort of creature was this?’
‘A sea serpent,’ Lula said. ‘And they’re not all extinct, either. You don’t often see them, but there are dragons of the sea in the deepest parts of the world.’
‘We should get it out of the cliff!’ Kal said. ‘We could sell it!’
‘Oh no we shouldn’t,’ Lula said. ‘If we started digging that thing out, the whole cliff is likely to fall down on us. Leave it, Kal. Nature is no less dangerous dead than it is alive. Look but don’t touch! Come on, we’re almost at the ship.’
Around the next bend, the crevice opened up further into an enormous cavern. The southern side was open to the beach beyond, and half the roof was open to the moonlit sky above. The floor of the cavern was a carpet of smashed rock and fossils. And filling almost the entire two-hundred-foot headroom of the cavern was a sight that Kal found both familiar and novel at the same time.
‘Welcome to Calico Cove,’ Lula said.
A double-masted schooner was beached in the newly-minted cove. The ship was tipped over at an angle, and the exposed portside hull was busy with crew members working from a makeshift scaffold. On the starboard side, cables running between the masts and solid rocks on the cavern floor held the ship in position. The sails were all furled, but the flag on the mainmast was flapping in the wind that blew in from the sea. Kal recognised the design: a leaping fish above two crossed swords, white upon black.
She couldn’t quite make out what was going on in the moonlight. ‘Is the Swordfish getting a new paint job?’
‘She’s getting a clean hull,’ Lula said. ‘If you’re being chased by pirates or Republic warships, it can make all the difference between escaping and getting caught. Regular careening can give you three extra knots of speed and tighter turns.’
They clambered down the rocks to the cavern floor. Kal took a closer look at the Swordfish as they approached. She had travelled on it several times before. It was a fast ship, but not a fighting ship. There was no gun deck, and the crew carried pistols and cutlasses more for their personal protection in port, rather than for resisting boarders. She watched them now at work: men and women of all ages and nationalities, tarring and caulking the hull, fixing the rigging, and hauling casks of fresh water aboard on a winch. A group of sailors were ushering a herd of goats into cages ready to be put aboard. Many of the crew were Islanders or even darker Nubarans, but even the northerners among them had deep sun-bronzed skin. Kal would be the palest person on board.
The captain of the Swordfish was sitting at a desk that had been brought out onto the cave floor so that he could watch the goings-on. Lula joined a queue of other smugglers, and when she reached the front she handed over a bulging bag of money. ‘All deliveries successful,’ she told her captain. ‘All except one. Senator Nissa had a change of heart. He won’t be telling anyone, though. And I left the merchandise at the Mooncusser; they’ll find us another buyer.’
The captain, a heavy-set bald man with tattoos all up his arms, a patch over one eye and a monocle in the other, grunted in satisfaction as he weighed the gold on a set of merchant’s scales. He entered the figures in a ledger. Kal noticed that he kept his free hand tightly clenched as he wrote, no doubt to hide his affliction. ‘Nice work, Lula,’ the captain said. ‘And it’s good to have our quartermaster back, too; go and hurry up the crew. We need to be ready in an hour to slip out on the high tide.’
‘Aye aye, Captain,’ Lula said. ‘Oh, and I brought us Kal Moonheart, too.’
Kal stepped out from behind Lula and raised a hand in greeting. ‘Hello, Dead Leg,’ she said with a smile.
Dead Leg stood up and the monocle dropped out of his eye. ‘Well, I’m a son of a rum puncheon!’ he exclaimed. ‘I didn’t think that even the mighty Dragon Killer would be willing to challenge a god’s curse. Not even for a thousand doubloons!’
Kal’s smile froze on her face, and she slowly turned her head to look at Lula. The other girl looked uncomfortable under Kal’s gaze, and it took her a moment before she opened her mouth to speak. But Kal cut her off at the last moment: ‘I’d step in to help my friends for a lot less that that,’ she told Dead Leg.
‘I’ll show Kal to her berth,’ Lula said, dragging Kal away from the captain’s table.
‘A thousand doubloons?’ Kal said as they climbed a ladder to the tilted deck of the Swordfish. ‘When were you going to tell me about that, Lula?’
‘The ten men and women who suffer the curse each gave me a hundred doubloons to go get you, Kal,’ Lula explained. ‘They didn’t specifically say that the money was for you. I was going to tell you later, so we could discuss how best to split it.’
‘You could have told me sooner,’ Kal said. ‘I agreed to come and help you, Lula, because I thought you were my friend!’
Lula stopped at the door that led below the quarter deck at the aft of the ship. ‘No, Kal, you came because you wanted to get out of that stinking city. Because you crave freedom and adventure. I gave you that chance; gold or friendship has nothing to do with it!’
Well that told her. Lula was nothing if not challenging. ‘Don’t worry about it, Kal,’ she said in a more soothing tone. ‘There will be plenty of chances to make money in the weeks ahead. A thousand doubloons will seem like a drop in the ocean!’
The living quarters for those crew members who qualified for a berth of their own were behind the galley, and as Kal and Lula passed along a passage that ran along the port side of the ship, they caught whiff of a strong spicy aroma.
‘What is that smell?’ Kal said. Food was one of the few things that had the power to take her mind off money.
‘Don’t ask me,’ Lula said. ‘Usually the sweetest-smelling thing on board this ship is your own armpit.’
The galley door swung open, and the man who stepped out defied Kal’s previous assumption that she would be the palest person aboard. He was tall and skinny, and his skin was the colour of chalk. White dreadlocks were tied back in a tail behind his neck, and the only colour about his person were the food stains on his white apron, and the pink in his eyes. He was holding half a coconut in each hand.
‘Greetings, friends!’ he said. ‘I hope you both like Island curry.’
‘I love it,’ Kal drooled.
‘Great!’ the albino said. ‘Because you eatin’ it every day for the next month. My name is Che, by the way. I’m the new cook!’
I.v
Mort Royal
The Swordfish made an impressive getaway from Calico Cove. The scaffolding and anchoring ropes had been removed, and the schooner—its clean hull free of barnacles and seaweed—now sat upright on the sand, waiting on the high tide. Only one line remained in play: a thick hawser that stretched out to sea, looped around a large smooth rock that broke the waves
a hundred yards out, and returned to the ship where it was wrapped around the capstan—the barrel-shaped winch in the middle of the deck. At the turn of the tide, four of the strongest deck hands stepped up to the bars of the capstan and pushed in a clockwise direction, pulling the hawser taut. The Swordfish was fifty yards long, and weighed a hundred tonnes, but it popped out of Calico Cove like a cork from a bottle, slipping off the floor of the cave, sliding off a sandy shelf, and plunging into the cold grey sea.
While most of the crew wrestled with the canvas on the wind-and-rain-lashed deck, Kal decided to try and find something to do down in the dry hold. With a bowl of curry in one hand, she went around making a show of checking and adjusting the ropes securing the water casks in their racks. A great deal of food and water was required to nourish a crew of twenty for a month at sea.
Kal spooned the hot, coconut-flavoured curry into her mouth under the baleful gaze of a goat that had stuck its neck out of a nearby cage.
‘Don’t worry,’ Kal said. ‘I’ll make sure you’re last in line for the pot.’
The goat bleated at her.
‘What’s that? You’d rather go first and get it over and done with?’
‘Sun over the yardarm!’ a voice squawked from right behind Kal. She almost dropped her bowl, and spun around to find a bamboo cage full of around thirty wildly-coloured parrots and parakeets. One of them beat its wings furiously in front of Kal’s face. She stepped back and almost tripped over something else.
She looked down. A dog! A small brown dachshund was yapping at the birds. All the goats were braying now, and Kal felt a mild rush of panic as she tried to stand clear. She hadn’t expected to find such a menagerie on board. Then she turned and came face-to-face with another frightening sight: a white, skeletal face that grew out of the shadows.
She just about managed to avoid making her shock obvious. ‘Che,’ she said.
‘Hello, man,’ he said, ignoring the obvious fact that Kal was a woman. ‘Makin’ friends? Hey, Sea Dog! Go ’way!’ The small dog ran off and bounded up the aft companionway. ‘Sea Dog is the captain’s pet,’ Che said. ‘Should’ve got a cat, if you ask me, on account of all the dirty rats down here. Now that is one animal you can’t make a sweet-tastin’ curry from.’