On the Isle of Sound and Wonder

by Alyson Grauer

  Karaburan put his hands down and tipped his head to one side, the rain sliding down his uneven face. “What is to be done?” he asked, his voice timid. “I will do it.”

  “My father’s book. The big, old book he carries when he’s . . . working.”

  Karaburan’s eyes widened as he nodded. “I know the one,” he murmured.

  “I have to get it. I have to take it away from him before he does something very bad. I need your help to get the book so I can destroy it.” Mira held his gaze. “If we destroy the book, no one else will get hurt, and we’ll all of us be free. You won’t be a slave, and neither will Aurael.”

  “Who?” Karaburan made a face of confusion.

  “He doesn’t even know you’re here?” demanded Mira loudly, her patience waning as she glared at the spirit.

  Aurael shrugged and became more opaque, his expression one of frustrated impatience. “So it’s my fault his mother never introduced us?” he muttered. “Dante told me I wasn’t to manifest before him, so I didn’t.”

  Mira turned back to Karaburan, who looked thunderstruck at the sudden appearance of the spirit. “Kabu,” she said, pulling his attention again. “My father has kept you and Aurael as slaves these last several years. He has kept me an unwitting prisoner, in ignorance of the past, and of the world beyond our island. He has done all of us a great injustice, and now he aims to murder several men. I need your help for this. Will you help me?”

  Karaburan looked frightened still, and ashamed, but he nodded after a moment. “I will try. If it means we all go free, I’ll try.”

  Aurael crossed his arms, his disgust written in his frown. “We could have done without him,” he muttered to Mira.

  She turned and met his gaze, watching him melt and cower a little before her. “No,” she said decidedly. “We couldn’t. We need him to enter unnoticed.”

  “Unnoticed?” Aurael’s dark eyes narrowed.

  “You will disguise yourself, take the shape of a mostly drowned sailor. Karaburan will bring you into the cave, telling my father that he has found one more body on the shore, while you remain unconscious. You will grant me your invisibility, and I will follow you both in. While Karaburan goes for the book, we will rescue the men, unseen. Then we destroy the book.”

  “What if he catches us?” shuddered Karaburan. “I’ll be beaten . . . we all will.”

  “He will destroy us if we fail,” agreed Aurael.

  “We have no choice! He has wronged us, and he’s going to kill Ferran and his family. Do you understand?” Mira drew a deep breath. “If we go, then we all go down together. If we do not try, we will never be free.”

  There was a silence, except for the gentle rain. Thunder rolled overhead. At last, Karaburan nodded slowly.

  “We go,” he agreed.

  Aurael sighed through his nose, and, with a shimmering like light through water, he vanished, re-appearing on the ground in a crumpled heap. His new shape wore torn trousers and a blood-stained shirt, his face obscured with long damp hair and wounds where perhaps sharks had nibbled away at his flesh. Karaburan recoiled at the sudden change, but Mira only raised her eyebrows.

  “How authentic,” she said dryly.

  Aurael made the castaway’s face contort in disdain, then relaxed again into neutrality, feigning death.

  Karaburan made a startled sound and stepped back, looking all about him in nervous disbelief. “Mira?” he cried, his eyes wide. He shifted his weight anxiously like a dog on a leash, turning his head this way and that.

  Aurael must have made me invisible already, she thought. “I’m right here,” she answered, putting out her hand to touch Karaburan’s shoulder. He stopped fidgeting and stared at the rain in front of him blankly. “Can you see me?”

  “No!” breathed Karaburan in amazement. “It’s good magic.”

  “Of course it is,” sneered Aurael from the castaway’s puffy mouth.

  “Quiet!” Mira patted Karaburan’s shoulder and then stepped back, out of his way. “All right. Drag him in, I’ll follow behind. But don’t let my father know our plan, Kabu. Just get us in there, and get me the book.”

  “I’ll try.” Karaburan wiped a scaly hand across his eyes to clear away some of the rain, and shook himself a little. Then he bent down and hefted the sailor’s body over his shoulder, cautiously making his way into the cave.

  Mira paused at the thin passage into the stone and shed her woven cloak onto the ground. She slipped into the cool, damp cave after Karaburan and Aurael, and squeezed the staff tightly in her free hand, willing it to give them the strength and speed they needed to do what must be done.

  Hold on, she thought, picturing Ferran in her mind. Hold on, we’re coming.

  * * *

  Despite his every nerve and sinew begging to remain unconscious, Ferran drifted awake, the pounding in his head too steady and too loud to be natural. He forced his heavy eyelids open and saw, through a black fog, a massive clock face set into the rock across from him. The heavy tick and tock of the exposed, rusted gears was the source of the rhythmic pounding echoing in his skull.

  What happened to me? His palms stung and throbbed painfully. He vaguely remembered crawling and struggling down the narrow passageway of the cave in an escape attempt, scraping his hands and knees on the rocks. There was an echoing pain at the back of his head. An ambush, he remembered, and as he blinked, the black fog in his vision cleared a bit.

  Ferran was held upright with his arms and legs splayed, pinned by unseen chains to the rock wall behind him. His shirt was missing, and blood coursed weakly down his cheek, throat, and chest. A painful spot swelled on his head. The cavern he was in now was much larger than the previous one. This room was round and vast, and on the wall, evenly spaced along the points of a diagram which occupied nearly the entire vast floor space, were several other men, limbs splayed as Ferran’s were, heads bowed in unconsciousness. All bore recent injuries, bruises and drying blood painting their bare chests and arms as though they’d been through war. Between each man, a torch burned, illuminating the eerie scene and darkening the shadows in the room.

  The diagram was composed mostly of foreign shapes and letters. It had many points, and spiraled inward toward the center of the room, with strange runes drawn out around the perimeter. Directly adjacent to Ferran was a series of makeshift shelves and crates, some unusual-looking handcrafted tools, and various clay jars and bowls filled with powders, herbs and who knew what else.

  Several weather-worn books were stacked on the ground, the topmost of which lay open to a page showing the same diagram which was painted on the floor. At the center of the chamber was a faint patch of light from a hole in the ceiling that acted as a sort of skylight. The moon was not bright enough yet to show, but the dim gleam of night danced on the raindrops that fell down through the hole and pooled on the floor of the cave.

  This does not look good, thought Ferran weakly. Stories of human sacrifice and black magic rituals fluttered through his mind like nightmare moths, making his palms sweat and his stomach churn.

  Ferran suddenly recognized one of the men along the wall: Truffo. The prince inhaled sharply, causing hard pain to flare throughout his body. He winced hard, gasping for air, and, as the moment passed, he realized that he knew all of the prisoners: Truffo Arlecin, Stephen Montanto, Duke Torsione, Uncle Bastiano—and Ferran’s own father, King Alanno.

  Father! Ferran could not even cry out. His voice was as empty as a dying wind, gagged by his exhaustion. He tried to call again, but no sound accompanied his breath. He’s not dead yet; he can’t be! Oh, gods, Father! Please don’t die, don’t die yet, hang on . . . Please . . .

  A scraping sound echoed from the passageway, and Ferran let his head loll forward again, feigning unconsciousness. From under the cover of his hair, he watched with one eye open as Dante emerged from the dark, dragging a large, sharpened tool of some kind. It looked to be carved out of ivory, with a well at one end, almost like a soup ladle. Ferran had never seen a
bone that big before, and wondered nervously what kind of animal it had come from, and how Dante had come by it in the first place.

  Dante was muttering to himself, but did not seem agitated as he moved across the chamber to the set of small clay pots. He drew a pinch of some dark powder from one and sprinkled it lovingly over the instrument, then rubbed it in with his hands as gently as any healer performing rites for the wounded. This process he repeated several times with different powders, calm and methodical. Ferran studied the man, finally having a chance to really look at him.

  Ferran could not imagine this weathered, sun-soaked man as a decadent duke, but he must have looked very different, long ago. Dante’s hair was mostly dark gray, only partly tamed by what may have originally been a gentlemanly queue, but over time had tugged looser and looser by the wind, giving him a wild, unkempt look. The cloak he wore was salt-stained and ragged, composed of many different fabrics sewn and tied together. The colors ranged from black to blood red to midnight blue, with hints of what must have been gold and silver embroidery once upon a time. Dante’s hands shook visibly when he moved, and even more so when he stood still; Ferran hadn’t noticed it before, and wondered if those hands had shook when Dante first attacked him in the woods.

  If I did not know better now, Ferran thought, I would think him a gentle and kind-faced old man. Perhaps he was even handsome once, like his brother. But there was something about Dante’s calm that terrified him.

  “Your thoughts are as loud as your breathing, Prince,” said Dante quietly, turning to look at him. “There is no need for panic, yet.”

  Ferran’s blood ran cold. He swallowed, his mouth kept firmly shut, but he lifted his head to meet Dante’s eyes.

  “You have grown much since last we met,” Dante observed, turning back to continue his business with the bone. “In height, in weight, in mind . . . And yet, not grown enough in spirit to please your father, I understand. At least, that’s what I hear from your father’s dying dreams.” He nodded toward the king’s limp body. “His impressions of loss and disappointment are powerful. It must be difficult for you to shoulder your father’s dismay as you do.”

  The sting of the remark prickled Ferran’s skin like hedgehog spines, but it was nothing compared to the pain he still felt pounding through his head and pulling at his wrists and ankles. He said nothing.

  “So. A prudent prisoner.” Dante smiled. “That’s fine with me.” He went back to the clay pots.

  After a time, Dante moved across the room, dragging the ivory instrument with him, and approached the unconscious Torsione where he was slumped upon the wall. Ferran strained to see what he was doing, and Dante gave him a tired, wry look.

  “Curious, too? Even in the face of death? I need a little more blood from each of you. All part of the recipe, you understand,” the old man explained calmly, pressing one end of the bone instrument to Torsione’s chest. The sharp end of the instrument sliced delicately into the skin. Torsione did not stir or wake, but his blood slid brightly down the grooves in the pale bone. “From my brother, for his treacherous ambition.” He repeated the process with Bastiano. “From the king’s brother, to balance my own brother.”

  Ferran strained against his invisible bonds as Dante turned toward him next, still carefully tilting the bone so that the samples of blood remained in the well at the bottom of the shaft. The old man’s gray eyes were bemused and strangely glossy as he peered into Ferran’s face.

  “And some from you, too, boy,” Dante murmured. “Son of a king, to balance the sons I never had. My wife died, you know. You were too small to remember it. That was the start of it all.”

  Ferran felt a tickle in the back of his throat. He swallowed several times as Dante studied his face.

  “There’s no way you wouldn’t have been brought into this,” Dante was saying. “It was your destiny, so there’s really no use in thinking on alternate situations now, worrying about how things could have been. Your fate always would have brought you here. It couldn’t have been your sister; it had to be the son.”

  Ferran furrowed his brow, still surreptitiously twisting at his restraints. What is he talking about? What is it all for?

  “You’re confused, and rightly so.” Dante tipped his head to one side thoughtfully. “You’ll forgive me if I spare you the unfortunate, lengthy details, Prince Ferran. You would not understand them. I have been hard at my studies for such a long time to keep them all in order.” He tapped his temple and chuckled airily. “So to be brief: I will conquer death itself, so that never again can it take from me anything that is precious.”

  Ferran felt the tickle rise in his throat again and he made a soft sound, much to his own surprise. Dante raised one brow.

  “What’s that? Finding your voice, are you? I have a moment to spare for your words, if you make them brief.” He beckoned with a trembling finger, and Ferran’s throat cleared of the tickle so suddenly as to make him cough.

  “What . . . what’s left that is precious to you?” he croaked at last, his voice unsteady. “You have destroyed yourself, ruined Mira’s life, broken all bonds. Now you will kill your remaining family and once friends? You cannot hope for your wife to return, sir,” Ferran coughed. “She is gone, and you remain. Mira remains.”

  “You do not know what I am capable of.” Dante’s sneer was abrupt. “You are just a boy.”

  “And you are an old man. If you kill us, you’ll have nothing left.” Ferran saw Dante’s eyes narrow a fraction in uncertainty.

  There was a fretful sound, like a groan, from somewhere further down the corridor, and Dante flinched slightly. He turned away from Ferran without completing the task, clutching the bone in his shaking hands. Ferran exhaled softly in relief.

  The large, scaly-skinned man appeared once again, slumping out of the passageway with an anxious expression on his face. He carried another body on his shoulders, and he gave another little groan again as he met his master’s eyes.

  “Karaburan,” Dante said through gritted teeth as the castaway was delivered carefully onto the floor. “Did I not ask that you leave me to my work in peace? Without interruptions?”

  “Yes, Master,” mumbled the creature, his pale blue eyes watery and worried. “I did think you might be unhappy that I returned, but you told me to bring all of the bodies to you, and I obey in all things! I found one more,” he explained, gesturing to the sailor’s body.

  “He’s no one,” Dante frowned, stalking over to the corpse and eyeing the dingy clothing. “It’s just a sailor, you mongrel; I don’t need him.”

  “But I obeyed!” protested Karaburan, worriedly. “I did not want you to think I disobeyed solely for the fact that you already had what you needed!”

  Dante sighed through his nose. “Very well. Turn him over,” he commanded. “But I am sure I do not need him. Everyone is accounted for.”

  Karaburan knelt and turned the body over, the unkempt wheat-gold hair tangled with seaweeds. He reached up and pulled the weeds away from the sailor’s face and made a strangled noise of terror. Across the room, Ferran craned his neck, trying to see the face. Dante gasped and almost dropped the bone instrument, and, as he fell to his knees, Ferran finally saw the sailor’s face.

  Mira!

  Well, thought Mira, that was rather dramatic. She stood near Ferran, holding the staff in one hand, watching Karaburan fall to the floor in tears upon recognizing the body.

  It was an unusual sensation, looking at her own dead body. Mira felt oddly amused at the sight and paused a moment, despite her urgent purpose to free the men and stop the ritual. There was a great swath of rope and seaweed tangled about the corpse’s throat and torso, and her eyes stared blankly at the ceiling, a dull cold green. Her face still shone purple in the dim light; it appeared very much that she had strangled and drowned.

  Beside her, Ferran made a soft, choked noise. Mira looked at him and saw tears begin to pour down his cheeks. Karaburan was sob-hiccupping in terror, his large, six-fingered hands
patting uselessly at the body. Dante set down the ivory instrument with one hand, trembling as he reached out to close the corpse’s eyes. He looked as pale as the bone beside him.

  “How could you,” whispered Dante, rocking a little over the body. “My daughter, my only child.” He looked at Karaburan. “How could you?”

  “Me?” sobbed the creature, “I didn’t do this! I could never have killed her!” His fat tears pooled and slid over rough cheeks. “I did not even know it was her,” he squealed in agony.

  Ah, poor thing, she thought. He didn’t know that bit was coming, either. Quite the performance, though. And my father! She couldn’t help but be intrigued by his emotional outburst. It was more real feeling than she’d seen from him in years.

  Dante cursed loudly, pressing his hands to his eyes in pain. Karaburan lowered his head to kiss the corpse’s lifeless hand, but Dante looked up again sharply and swiped at him.

  “Get away, beast!” The force of his gesture flung Karaburan across the room, toppling the shelves and crates, dumping books and pages and artifacts onto the weeping creature. Dante bent forward over his daughter’s corpse, mumbling something insistent and forceful, but whatever incantation it was, there was no flicker of life in the body.

  Mira focused her mind on Karaburan in the pile of books and crates, reaching out with the power of the staff. Kabu, she called with her mind, and heard his sob turn to a yelp as he struggled to get out of the debris. It’s Aurael’s trick. I’m still here. Bring me the book!

  Beside her, Ferran shut his eyes, seeming unable to keep his head up any longer. He had stopped straining against his invisible bonds.

  Right, thought Mira. Ferran.

  She covered his mouth with her hand, and Ferran’s eyes snapped open in panic, shifting from side to side frantically, but did not see her.

  “Shh,” she breathed in his ear. “Don’t speak. I’m not dead. Just follow my lead, and stay quiet.”

  Ferran gave a tiny nod and looked straight ahead, watching Dante attempt to revive the corpse. Mira reached for his wrist, feeling the binding spell and attempting to unravel it with her mind. It took several moments for her to figure out how to unlock it, but once she did, the bindings at his other wrist and his ankles were easy to remove. The others won’t take long, now.