“There could be others out there. We haven’t done much more exploring other than to find new shipwrecks when we hear one come down. The sound carries down here far more than you might expect.”
“You’ve been here a month and you ain’t explored the place?”
“We are not…what did you call yourself? Dungeoneers? We are sailors from merchant ships. We don’t know what’s out there and we’re not in a hurry to find out. It could be we haven’t found anyone else because we haven’t explored or it could be because they’re all dead.”
“If you two are done,” Aldine said, “I see a lot of dwarves that look like they could use some rum and broth. In! In!” She flapped her arms at the tables and stools around the room. “Sit, make new friends. Kimber and I are going to do some catching up and you two can go discuss leader things where we don’t all have to wait on you.” She grabbed Ruby by the sleeve and led her away. The other dwarves began milling about, murmuring to each other as they split into pairs and trios and spread out into the ship. Catchpenny headed straight for a dice game.
“Leery,” Thud said. “Run back to camp and bring them in.” She nodded and jogged out the door. “Mungo?”
“The ship he mentioned? Already on it.”
Thud nodded, unsurprised that Mungo had made the same connection. The orc had mentioned a ship that had fallen a couple of weeks before. Right when the ship they were looking for had disappeared. Korak had said there were survivors. Mungo’s brain might have been cracked, but the pieces, in Thud’s experience, were razor sharp. The gnome was an enormous fan of anything that smacked of intrigue, to the point where he tended to invent elaborate conspiracies over the unlikeliest of things. When actual intrigue showed up? It was like unleashing a rock hound in a fresh strike. As an added benefit, when it came to questioning, most people were too distracted by the cat-hair beard to put up much resistance to Mungo’s dubious interrogation strategies.
Korak had relocated to a table along a sidewall, the stool across from him pointedly empty. Thud went to it and sat.
Chapter Fourteen
Agent Mungo moved through the room like a stalking predator.
No. Too plain. A little more poetry, a little more flair, a little more ambiance.
Agent Mungo glided through the dim and crowded room, a panther on the track of his prey.
A little better.
But ‘glided’, seriously? That was the past tense? Not, say, ‘glid’?
Take three.
Agent Mungo wove his way through the hazy room with the grace of a dancer, twisting and spinning to the steps that only he knew. A panther, stalking unseen through the herd, blood scent in the air. The ancient reel of predator and prey, the hunter and the hunted.
Mungo sighed. Reality could only be stretched so far. It was a group of drunken sailors ignoring him in favor of their rum and ale. From his height it was the usual room full of knees. His weaving like a predator was a thin mental euphemism for desperately dodging through a forest of legs that probably didn’t realize he was there. He’d had more than one operation foiled by a barmaid accidentally kicking him across the room like a pig-bladder.
There was an empty stool along the plank and barrels that were serving for a bar. The humans sitting on either side of it had both turned in order to watch the new arrivals. An older man on the right. Short hair, recently shorn and less than a week’s growth. An old scar on his cheek, ragged, likely broken glass. Bottle in a bar fight. Eye sockets slightly sunken–scurvy in the past. Weathered skin, heavily tanned and creased. Conclusion: Lifelong sailor. On the left a younger man, left arm in a sling. Hidden weapon? Maybe. Body language suggested arm legitimately injured. Wet spot on shirt indicates clumsiness in drinking beer. Left hand likely dominant.
Mungo fixed his face into a warm smile and waited for them to notice him. A gnomish smile is hard to miss, even from behind. Gnome’s mouths were wide enough to lick crumbs off their sideburns.
The old sailor noticed him first, his gaze drifting down and pausing thoughtfully. He reached out and thumped his companion on the arm to get his attention.
“Ow! That’s the broke one!” Sling-man’s glare turned to surprise as he caught sight of Mungo. “Oi, look! Who’re you, then?”
“Nice beard,” the older sailor said. He cleared his throat.
“Gratitudes!” Mungo said. “The name is Mungo. If you’ll permit me the stool between you, your next round is on me.”
Each man moved a nominal inch to the side. There was plenty of room already, Mungo being approximately the size of an overweight cocker spaniel. He deduced it was more of a symbolic gesture as a means of invitation and climbed onto the stool.
“Name’s Johnni,” sling-man said. “The beer here is free so you’re gonna have to owe me a round.” He whistled and the bartender arrived with a dented mug. He wiggled his bushy black eyebrows at Mungo, set the mug down, shrugged and went on his way without a word.
Mungo took a slurp. It tasted of wood, salt and skunks and had floating lumps of chewy grain.
“What was thy ship?” the old sailor asked.
“The Cackle Squiffy, sloop out of Stilton,” Mungo said in the casual voice of a weathered sea-hand. He hoped.
“I was on The Jolly Todger.”
“Katie’s Jigger,” Johnni said.
Well, that was easy, Mungo thought.
“How did you hurt your arm?” he asked. Obviously it had been in the shipwreck. Gnomish Intelligence Interrogation Tactic 32-F/2: “Ask a question with an obvious answer to get the subject to elaborate on that answer.”
“Tripped and fell when I was drunk night afore last.”
Ah, well. Not quite as easy. GIIT 12-A7: “Redirect.”
“Ha! I would have guessed the shipwreck.”
“Naw, got lucky there. Was in the rigging. Mast snapped when we landed but the end hit some other ship and left me hanging in the air.” He paused and his gaze darted around the room. He arched an eyebrow at the old sailor next to him. The old sailor shrugged and took a swallow from his mug. “Look, matey, there’s something you should know.”
Mungo liked where this was going. Someone was about to tell him a secret. This was almost unprecedented in his Intelligence experience.
Johnni went on, his voice now low, eyes still shifting, watching for eavesdroppers. “I can trust you lot because you’re from a different ship. This is something you need to pass along to your Captain, aye?”
Mungo nodded fervently. He was bouncing on his toes.
“There may be a traitor and murderer among us. One of the crew from my ship. Like I said, I was in the rigging. We was sailing at night and I was the lookout. We were on the run from pirates and the ship turned to port. Then I seen this big black shadow of something directly in front of us. ‘LAND FORE!’ I yells. Nothing. We’re still heading straight for it, pirates behind us. ‘LAND HO!’ I yells again. Again nothing and that wall of dark is getting closer by the second. I looked down to see if I could see anything happening on deck to account for it. Captain was at the wheel but also there was someone there nearby, moving ‘cross the deck, too dark for me to see who. They went through the hatch below deck. I start climbing down, yelling my fool head off but the ship keeps going and just when I think we’re going to run aground, well, into the shadow we go. We were falling seconds later.”
“The captain deliberately steered you into it?”
“No. We found Captain Marin after. He’d already been dead. Knifed and tied to the wheel. Someone else deliberately steered us into it. As to who done it? Don’t know. Don’t know if they survived the wreck. Don’t know if they’re in this room having a beer and a laugh. Don’t know why anyone would do such a thing neither.”
“Ten sailors here from the Jigger,” the old sailor said. “The kid here thinks some are above suspicion but I ain’t sharing his bias. You tell your captain and you tell him to keep this close to the vest.”
***
Ruby and Aldine were tucked
in at a tiny table beneath what had been a deep flight of stairs to the upper deck. The stairs were broken and splintered now and there was a length of jagged spar sticking through where the hatch had been. Aldine had a candle lantern hanging from a hook that cast a warm golden light across the wood. She almost seemed to bounce in her chair as they waited for Ruby’s teapot to heat.
“I’ve not had tea in months.”
“Never leave home without it,” Ruby said.
“How long has it been for you? Since you were home?”
“You mean the Athenaeum? A few years. We went past it not long ago but didn’t have time to stop. You?”
“Ah, decades, at the least. It’s strange for me to think that there’s still someone there, reading and filing my journals after all of the years.”
“I expect you have your own shelf by now. How did you come to be here?”
“Just on the wrong ship, sailing from one place to another place.” She waved her hand. “The histories we write aren’t always the ones we set out to, eh?”
“Speaking of, tell me how you acquired the ‘Hag’ nickname.” Ruby upended her pouch over the tea pot, shaking out a practiced amount of scarlet leaves.
Aldine gave an embarrassed shrug. “I was always more prone to dabbling in magic than you were. I was secretary of the cantrip club. You’d be amazed how many of those you can find scattered amongst all of the histories.”
Ruby considered this as she poured hot water into the teapot. She wasn’t amazed in the slightest. Cantrips were little tiny spells, more tricks than anything. Some useful, some not so much. There were hundreds of them, if not thousands. Everything from making a cat meow to untying a knot to changing the color of someone’s mustaches. Many were trade secrets. Blacksmiths had cantrips that kept sparks from their beards or muffled the ring of the hammer. Tailors their own set, making the thread seek the needle’s eye, keeping the thread-ends from fraying. Tanners, bakers, fishmongers, all had their little aids. There were many more passed around among children. Cantrips that made a bug double in size, increased booger production or caused the milk to go blue.
“I was doing a culture survey of the Bechdel fisherfolk in lower Mygra,” Aldine said. “Stories, lore, remedies, that sort of thing. It’s poor country and thick with shamans and hedgewizards. I’d learned enough cantrips and remedies by then that the locals began coming to me for that sort of thing. I played the part–it let me collect more knowledge than just being a scribe. People actively sought me out.” She grinned a smile that resembled a garden fence, mossy and brown. “It just stuck with me, I suppose. Now your turn. You’re keeping different company these days, eh?”
“Yes, for similar reasons I suppose. They’re professional dungeoneers, specializing in relic recovery. They get me access to places and things I’d never experience otherwise. Puzzle pieces of history never before recorded.”
“What is a dungeoneering team doing in the middle of the ocean?”
“There’s an artifact on one of these shipwrecks down here. They were hired to find it and bring it back.” She lifted the lid on the teapot and removed the basket. Thanks to the teapot enchantment the tea was already done. Ruby began pouring. She loved her teapot. “It’s not all crypts and traps. Admittedly, this trip so far has hardly been the usual.”
“Two strange paths to reach the same strange place.”
“Indeed,” Ruby said. “But now we’re both sitting at the heart of a mystery, and what better place for two old fools like us?”
“Yes, and you’ll never believe what I found down here!” Aldine’s eyes went bright with excitement. “The very key to the mystery! Or so I think at least. I’m still sorting it out. I could use your help.”
“Oh? What sort of key?”
“A book,” Aldine said. “It was in the cargo of one of the ships that crashed a couple of weeks ago. Kimber, I think it’s a book about this very place!”
Ruby’s hand paused for only the slightest moment as she reached for her tea but she maintained her calm demeanor apart from that. Inside her heart was pounding against her ribs like an ogre in a drunk tank.
“What’s the name of this book?”
“I’m not sure.” She raised an oilcloth at the side of her chair to reveal a stack of books beneath it. “It’s written in Linear-Mer B. There’s what looks to be a title inside but my translating skills haven’t made much sense of it yet. I won’t keep you in suspense, though. Have a look.” She pulled the top book from the pile and lay it on the table.
The cover was a rippled gray shell, slick as if it had just come from the sea. It had an odd tinge of coral blue with runes carved into the surface and a sigil in the middle. It looked like a stylized eight pointed star with an eye at the center, the arms of the star curved making it look a bit like a top-down view of a cycloptopus.
Ruby rubbed her fingers against her suddenly damp palms. This had to be it. And if it was then there was a great deal of danger sitting on the table right in front of her.
Artifacts were power. Just how much power depended on the artifact but there was good reason that The Dungeoneer’s services were in demand. Sometimes because someone wanted that power. Sometimes because someone wanted to bury that power in the deepest hole they could find.
For example, in a shipwreck at the bottom of a trench beneath an island of shadow in the middle of an ocean.
The unlikelihood of a book about the island happening to be on a shipwreck in the very place it was about did not escape her. Their information had indicated that the Katie’s Jigger had been passing by on its way to Stilton. And the one ship with the book had been plucked out. There was intent behind that. But whose? The sender wouldn’t have bothered with the ruse of sending it to Stilton if their intent all along had been for it to end here. The receiver would have an easier time delivering it themselves rather than arrange somehow for the ship to be caught mid-route by something out of a sailor’s ghost story.
And it was almost certain that whatever or whomever was behind the book coming to the island hadn’t intended for it to end up here, on a table between the only two people within hundreds of miles that might have a chance of making sense of it. The fact that it was written in Linear-Mer B was suggestive. One of the proto-merfolk alphabets. Linear-Mer C was not an uncommon subject of study at the Athenaeum as it was the dominant script on tablets recovered from pre-glacial era merfolk sites. It was similar enough to Mer B to allow one to puzzle things out, given time.
Artifacts were not to be trifled with. But Aldine had already trifled with this one, not knowing what it was, and seemed no worse for wear assuming that the sea-hag look wasn’t an extremely recent development. Ruby’s fingers trembled slightly as she tugged at the shell at the top and bottom. It seemed to resist for a moment, as if the shell was still alive. The smell within of ancient…not vellum…were the pages some kind of fish skin? They were gray and felt oily to the touch.
She saw the frontispiece and her breath caught in her throat. Although it was already caught, causing her to hiccup instead. Aldine took that as the cue to pour more tea. The frontispiece was a woodcut of the ocean, an island of black shadow on the horizon. It felt slimy beneath her fingers as she turned the page.
Four lines. She sounded out the symbols in her head, guessing at the ones she didn’t recognize, trying to associate them with their more familiar descendants. Their individual sounds became fragments of words that could be fit together like jigsaw puzzles with missing pieces.
Beyond light, darkness
Beyond day, dream
Beyond life, void
Beyond the sea, Gr'bl-Neb'gthrb
She frowned over the last word. It wasn’t one that she was able to piece together into anything that made sense, even out of the context of the line. A name for the island, perhaps? She turned to the next page.
That word again, centered. A title.
Gr'bl-Neb'gthrb
“See what I mean about the title?” Aldine asked. “It’s l
ike they just started gargling through their pen.”
“That’s an apt description of Mer. You should try a merfolk poetry recital sometime. I don’t think that this is a matter of the symbols being unfamiliar. The word itself just isn’t put together in a way that I’m familiar with. It’s like a word from another language, transcribed in Linear-Mer B.”
“Gods that’s a dull name for a language,” Aldine said. “Just hearing it makes me want to start doodling in my journal.”
“Aldine, I think this may be the relic we came here looking for.” Ruby turned the page again. Apart from some drawings of humanoid frogs blowing trumpets and what looked like a line of dancing clams the page was a squiggle of mer symbols. It looked like tiny worms had run amok through an ink-spill.
She rubbed her temples. “What are the chances they put in an index?”
***
“Lot of survivors from your ship,” Korak said.
“All of us,” Thud said. “Some broken bits here and there but no losses.” Up close the orc smelled like talc and an onion gone bad.
“How’d you swing that?”
“We had advance warning. Used the hammocks,” Thud said, not wanting to take the time to try and explain the parachute sail. “They were enough to take the fall.”
Korak sighed. “We had heavy losses.” He gestured at the other people in the room. “All of us here? You’re looking at all that’s left of the crews of four different ships.”
Thud was silent, figuring anything he said might be taken as disrespectful.
“Your group gives us a personnel issue,” Korak said. “You see that, I assume?”
“Us showin' up out of nowhere and doublin' yer numbers? Yeah, I’m cognizant of that. Don’t worry, we’ve got our own gear and supplies. We’ll set up our own camp nearby and be out of the way but still around and handy.”
Korak nodded. “Good, nice to have that settled so easily.”
“All of you being here tells me you’ve not found a way out.”
The Dungeoneers: Blackfog Island Page 17