But the Typhon. The same sickness that affected Catch Hands assailed Lina and me. It seems dvergar have an aversion to the motion of sea vessels. Or possibly it simply runs in my family, for Lupina was not affected. Lina and myself spent the first seven days at sea vomiting up all food. It was a misery. And maybe a blessed misery. Because we missed the terror of the passage from Medieran-held water.
As we passed out of the Bay of Mageras through the southernmost isle of Occidentalia, I retched up bile, Lina at my side. As we sailed north, past the ruins of Fort Lucullus (which had endured the same firebombing as Novorum) we hung listless over the bulwarks, staring into the passing waters. When we ran from Medieran ships, and exchanged gunfire, Lina and I were useless. I remember great booming, and screaming, the ship keeling this way and that. The Typhon itself thrummed and juddered, and these developments made my retching worse – I dribbled bile and could take no crust, not bite of fish, nor dram of liquor. I was arrested in misery, caught in a half-state, still alive and half-dead.
Then it eased. I swallowed water and it did not come back up. I was able to think once more. I was able to walk, and string words together into coherent thought and speak these thoughts to the world. I felt like an infant, born into the world.
And when I came upon the deck after those dark days, the fresh air filling my lungs, I understood how some people felt called to the sea. On the grey-green waves, tossed under the wide vaulted sky, I was strongly reminded of the shoals, in the cradle of the Hardscrabble.
Life on a ship, one as small and cramped as the Typhon, is a godsdamned trial, that’s for sure. And sleeping in the engine room ate at me. At night, I would have bad dreams, images of being stalked by creatures in the dark. Each one thirsting for blood. Childish dreams of being chased. Horrific slumbers in which I would burn.
Waking in a sweaty nest of reeking blankets, I would turn to cast my gaze upon the glowing cage of Typhon. Its presence spilled out, even beyond the warded intaglio of the floor, to where Gynth and I made our berth. I spent what time I could awake, and would snatch naps where I could, on the deck, under the stars.
One day, we sighted a small village on the shore and risked port for provisions. I looked forward to disembarking.
‘No, Centurion Ilys,’ Tenebrae said, placing a hand on my chest. ‘You must stay on board as we source food and take on water.’
‘But— But—’ I spluttered. The solid earth was only a short distance away.
‘No,’ he said. ‘That is an order. You will lose your sea-legs and there is not a soul on this ship who wants to listen to you or your granddaughter vomit for days on end. Again.’
And so it was with great resignation that we remained on board as the rest of our crew disembarked. It seemed such a great cruelty to me, then. But it was mere hours until we were underway, steaming north again.
We bought food, and had gold and silver to spare, though the harbourmaster and merchants at the village asked a high price. They feared that Ruman coin would be useless now, or worth only the metal (and Ruman coins were notoriously debased) and so were exorbitant, but Tenebrae and Livia managed to strike a deal and we took on casks of home-made wine and pickled fish, garum and salt, bushels of maize and sacks of flour, crocks of butter, and two small amphorae of oil. This was all they could afford us, but most of it came in great quantities.
We fell into rhythms, we fell into trances. Maybe it was because I could hardly sleep and what I did manage was daemon-spiced and disjointed. Lupina, when she was not tending to the boy, got over her dislike of me enough to teach Lina and me to fish, and we spent our days letting out line, and our nights out under the stars in the shadows of shrouded guns. We had not seen any ships, Medieran or otherwise, for a long while. The days grew indistinct, shrouded and foggy. There were stretches of days where we saw no shore at all, and the waves grew high, high as a stretcher in the shoals. I worried my sickness would return but it did not.
The fish we snared were long, silver, and delicious – and vicious-looking, each mouth full of sharp teeth and their ridges with scales like daggers. Lupina, ever quick with a knife, would pluck them from the water, hauling them over the gunwale as they thrashed madly, and have them gutted in moments. So quick she was with the knife, she’d offer gobbets of meat, dipped in garum, fresh from the sea. And I could still taste the life in the flesh, as though I were one of those old Kithai vaettir, and the fish the snakes of the rice.
At night, I would cook – since of the crew I had the most experience – with Lupina overseeing my efforts. She was territorial when it came to fish.
The lascars found us strange, and while Sumner got along well with Tenebrae, some distance remained between the enlisted men and the former praetorian. On the whole, I quite liked Tenebrae, and there were moments he would speak or gesture and it seemed that Secundus was once more with us.
The sea, endless. The days, droning and empty, marked by fish and cups of poor home-made wine.
The days grew cold and we turned east, and north – though at this point those were just words to me, mentioned by Tenebrae and discussed at mess with the lascars and Sumner. It had no real weight, no veracity. The sun never rose or set. The white vapour that clung to us lightened and darkened and these intervals marked days. The sky was an endless expanse of white and the seas stilled. I had no sense of direction, or time. I was dispossessed, homeless. When I could sleep, I had dreams of hanging suspended in air over a circle of warding, and Fisk, Lina, and Gynth stood at the edges. Each had their claim upon me, but none more than another. It was an agony.
We no longer hugged the coast, and we would not have been able to see it if we had. Livia assured me the Typhon was rugged and had made the cross-sea journey from Rume. Much of the workings of the ship were a mystery to me – the navigation, the engineering maintenance that Sapientia had taken over, the way it was able to submerge and resurface (though this rarely happened since we had sailed so far north). So I focused on things I could understand, cleaning and cooking and fishing. I found some caustic in the mess and diluted it with salt water and spent many hours cleaning the interior walls and bulwarks of the Typhon, polishing anything that might be polished. I lunched with Fiscelion, and dandled the boy on my knee and sang him old dvergar songs in my rough voice. Sometimes Lupina or Lina might accompany me, on the ones they knew. He would still, and grasp my beard and listen to the old words. They might just be noise and melody, but it brought him some enjoyment.
The mist grows, tall as trees
Up from the seas
Up from the shoals
It grows, and laps at the feet of
Eldvatch stones, its bones
Dvergar made and dvergar home.
On those few days when the sun cut through the fog, we would take the lad Fiscelion on deck and Fisk would hold him on high and point out the gulls wheeling and diving in our wake, or watch Lupina and Lina taking fish from the sea. He made faces at the raw fish we placed on his perfect little lips, so full of rebuke. Livia looked on, pensive and wind-tossed, and I could sense a low tension building there between husband and wife. They’d never really had time to learn to walk together, learn to be two halves of the same coin, as mates are supposed to be. ‘Walk as geese,’ the dvergar called it. Fisk, now healed from his burns, was quiet and it did not take much imagination to puzzle out the whys and wherefores. We sailed for Terra Umbra, and at the end of this journey, there was some fate that was tied to the daemon hand, and our world, that none of us could foresee.
The seas grew higher, and I felt as though I rode the back of some great sea beast, dipping and diving into the waves. The air became bitter cold and some mornings there was snow on the deck. Fiscelion squealed with pleasure and slid about on his arse, and the adults did the same. There was less fog, now, on the slate-grey seas and occasionally we would see great white-blue sugarloafs of ice ramping out of the surface of the sea.
We slowed to a crawl at night. By day, the Typhon was trepidatious, moving sl
owly through the waters. The ocean was calmer now in these northern climes and that helped, though we inched our way through the seas like a fat baker threading his barefoot way through his household at night, slow and tentative. The days the fog was thick, everything was still and hushed. When the sun shone, the winds would rise and the seas grow high, but, Livia told us, never as high as on the Occidens.
On the fortieth day at sea, we saw the pillar of fire, rising from the waters.
The island grew from the sea, jutting up and spanning high, wreathed in thick forests and wracked by surf. It appeared in the same slow unveiling that occurs in dreams – the mists parting at the approach, shadows of cliff and land growing and swelling, eye-sweet to one long at sea; the spiky fringe of trees becoming evident, and beyond, the swirling maelstrom in the sky – the Emryal Rift, churning and casting off clouds and vapours, like some piece of riven invisible earth turned sideways in the sky. Smoke poured from the wound; arteries of air dragged away the rift’s effluvium downwind, making it seem if there was a titanic dark wall snaking away. It was massive and claustrophobic, all at once. Those two things warred within it and on it. It was conflict as landmass.
The Typhon drew closer, Tenebrae steering, with some help from the lascars who spoke into voice funnels, informing him of whatever dangers lay hidden beneath the foam. We found a sheltered bay and brought the Typhon as close as possible, but as there were no away boats, it became obvious we would need to either swim or wake Gynth and plead for portage.
‘Get your boy,’ Fisk said to me, looking at the shore. ‘Make a raft.’
‘All right, pard,’ I said. ‘You’re gonna hang back?’
Fisk looked at me. We’d not spent much time together on the journey. But there was no distance.
‘Hang back?’ he said, looking at me thoughtfully. ‘I wish it was my decision, Shoe.’ He shrugged. ‘Livia is firm on some things and I’m not to be in the away party.’
‘That’s well and good, pard,’ I said. ‘We’re able to fill in the gaps.’
‘The gaps,’ he said. He looked down, to the deck. ‘There’s likely to be some gaps.’
I went to Typhon’s Bower. Gynth remained exactly as he’d been early in our journey, more than two score days before. There was mould I hadn’t noticed before growing upon the hem of his trousers and his shirt. He’d been damp, I guess, when he entered this implacable slumber, and the rot took hold.
‘Gynth,’ I said, quietly. ‘We need you, pard. Again.’
He remained still. I reached a hand toward him and he said, ‘Yes.’ He raised his leonine head. His eyes were unfocused for a moment, like a man coming from a dark room into brilliant light. ‘Where are we?’
‘Where it all begins, hoss,’ I said. ‘The hole all those daemons come from.’
He stretched out his legs, lowered his arms. Each movement, deliberate. Measured.
‘Hole?’
‘I think the idea is we’re gonna plug it, and—’ I made my hand into a fist and showed him what the Brawley folk like to call a puckered bunghole – a great insult, if made in anger; a great joke, if made in mirth. ‘Stop the daemons from coming through.’
‘As long as it is under the sky. Let us go.’ He crawled toward the door and into the command chamber. It was easier than being hunched half-over.
One of the lascars presented me with an axe and hemp, and Gynth ported me over to shore. It was a rocky expanse, the countless stones worn to smoothness but piled in jumbled heaps on the shores of a large stream rushing into the sea. It rained, lightly, and our breath came in plumes, a soft rain, surely, but one that seemed it could turn to snow or ice at any moment. Beyond where we stood, looking at Terra Umbra, moss and lichen covered the larger, more removed mist-worn boulders, painting the craggy shore in yellows and ochres. Some hundred paces from the surf a forest grew, with great narrow trees like sentinels’ spears piercing the air. In the distance, vaporous mountains quickly rose, blanketed in green up to snow-rimed peaks, half-occluded by clouds. And framed between mountains, up the sundered valley, the rift, churning.
The atmosphere here was charged – pregnant with possibility. And much of that possibility was frightening.
‘It is sharp here, is it not?’ Gynth raised his head and seemingly sniffed the air.
‘Don’t know about sharp, but that thing makes me nervous,’ I said, gesturing toward the churning mass. ‘Let’s go cut some trees.’
From the great scrawls of deadfall, we took logs, those that seemed fresh enough to not be rotten, and weathered and dry enough to float. There was no lack of the stuff. I knocked off all the remaining branches and lashed a makeshift raft together within hours and began ferrying back and forth between the Typhon and land. The lascars remained on board, along with Lupina and Fiscelion (at least until our task at hand was complete), and Tenebrae, who for all purposes was the captain now, and the rest of us found ourselves on the shore. I know not what goodbyes were given to Fiscelion. Tearful? Earnest? Fisk’s expression looked helpless and desolate after he disembarked the raft on the Terra Umbran shore. He carried the box holding the daemon hand.
‘So,’ Carnelia said. ‘What next? Do we just go up to the—’ she waved her hand, vaguely ‘—thing and toss the daemon hand in?’
Fisk frowned. ‘I do not think that will be the way,’ he said.
‘No,’ Sapientia said. ‘I think not.’
‘Whatever the case,’ Livia said, placing her hands on her hips, ‘we’ll need to make camp. The hour grows late and no journey will be made in the dark.’
We had no tents and no kit, but we took one of the Typhon’s old gun-shrouds and with much hemp and Sapientia’s instructions, strung up between trees a rather grease-stained pavilion with no walls and built a fire in the centre of it.
‘This will work, I think,’ Sapientia said, happily, hands on her hips. Here stood a woman who enjoyed problems, conquerable problems, problems she could master with her hands and her considerable wits.
‘And tomorrow?’ Carnelia said. She wore a sword at her hip, now, and a pistol.
‘We see what we can see,’ Fisk said. He placed his blankets down and sat the box containing the daemon hand upon them. It would be a damp night, once sun set, and I was prepared for an uncomfortable rest, but anything was better than staring into the Typhon’s daemonic nether eye all night in my dreams.
‘I think I will take a gander around,’ I said. ‘Maybe scout a bit up trail.’
‘Might be wise,’ Fisk said. ‘Maybe I’ll come along. I could use a stretch of the legs.’
‘Gynth?’ I said, looking to the big vaettir. ‘How ’bout you, hoss?’
Gynth stood still, his back to the fire, sensing the air.
‘That would be a bad idea,’ he said. In his voice there was something I had never heard before.
‘Why is that, pard?’ I asked.
‘Dragons,’ he said. ‘Many dragons.’
TWENTY-NINE
Holy Hell. I Have Never Seen The Like.
‘IS THAT THE correct word?’ Gynth asked.
‘Dragons?’ I said. ‘What are we talking about here, pard?’
Fisk, Livia, and Carnelia perked up. They moved away from the fire and approached Gynth. In most things, the Rumans either ignored Gynth, or addressed him with extreme politeness. Some flaw in their character – or possibly the inability of Ruman pride to recognise something or someone so vastly and obviously superior to them, by dint of nature, if not birth – made them hesitant and tentative around the stretcher.
‘Like the kinthi,’ he said, using the dvergar word for mountain lion. ‘But bundles and bundles larger and covered in armour.’
‘The great wyrms,’ Carnelia said. ‘Ah, Tata would have pissed himself in joy.’
‘I might’ve pissed myself for other reasons,’ I said. ‘Gynth, how do you know this?’
‘I can sense them,’ Gynth said. ‘They have energy that is … very big. Very large.’
Livia said, ‘Qi.’ I
remembered the curious word from her Quotidian letters to Fisk.
‘There’s more,’ Gynth said.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Look,’ he responded.
It was growing late in the afternoon, and over the whole island of Terra Umbra a gloom hung, half from clouds and sea-mist, half from the Emryal Rift and its effluvium. I began to understand why those old engineers called it the shadowland. Our fire seemed very small and the island very large.
A group of figures emerged from the gloom. Fisk drew his sidearm, Sumner raised a carbine and worked the action. I was a bit surprised when Carnelia drew the long, elegant sword she had hung at her side. It was the sound of Carnelia’s steel blade that stopped the forward motion of the shadowy figures.
‘Devils seated in the flesh,’ Sapientia muttered.
‘No,’ Lina said. ‘My eyes see better than yours. Those are vaettir.’
They were old, and clad in armour made from what appeared to be scales of tremendous fish, viridescent and gold, but I realised in a moment they must be scales from the dragons Gynth had sensed. They wore fine cloaks of some fabric that appeared to be leather but was hard to determine, and it too shimmered like the scales. If Illva and Ellva were alabaster, these vaettir were the absence of all colour – or maybe the presence of all light – and seemed luminous even in the gloom and fog of Terra Umbra. Impossibly tall, they moved with a stately grace. Each wore tremendous, oversized steel blades, some curved, some straight. Two of the vaettir held half-spear, half-sword weapons similar to the one Ellva had wielded on the killing fields of the Grenthvar. Others held bows that no living man could draw.
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