‘Well the money we could make selling those back in Mandrabar or Castigon would certainly give us a nice little nest egg,’ Sinzar said, stroking his neatly-trimmed goatee, a roguish smile curling the corner of his mouth.
Sinzar approached the statue, boldly meeting the ape-god’s furious stare as he gazed up at the statue, hands on hips in a defiant stance.
‘So what are you waiting for? Those stones aren’t going to prise themselves loose!’
Without further hesitation, overcoming their sense of awe, Manu and Scrimshaw started to scale the statue, Haroun being relegated to watching from his seat on a fallen column, while Taboo gave Vasquez a helping hand up onto the idol, after the other two.
* * *
But as the others worked, under Sinzar’s direction and with the occasional unhelpful suggestion from Haroun, Kaseem’s attention lay elsewhere. While the others were fully focused on the task in hand, that of removing the jewelled eyes and blinding the god-statue, he was listening to the earth as it spoke to him. He could feel tremors rising up through the stones beneath his feet, like those created by heavy footfalls.
As he watched, broken fragments of marble skittering across the stone-flagged courtyard, his mind returned to something else that had been troubling him ever since they had entered the temple. Why was it that the ape-loving tribesmen had left them alone as soon as they breached the boundary marked by the line of skulls on stakes? Was it purely because the ruins were sacred to them and it was taboo for them to defile the place with their presence? Or was there another reason?
And thinking back to when they had first encountered the islanders, he recalled that it had been the treasure-hunters who had initiated combat. The tribesmen had only barred their way, up until the moment Sinzar’s party engaged them in battle. Kaseem couldn’t shake the feeling that perhaps the islanders had merely been trying to stop them from entering the temple. But why? Again, was it because the temple was a location they venerated, or was it more than that? Had they actually been trying to stop Captain Sinzar and his crew from doing something they might live to regret – if they lived at all?
And all the time Kaseem was wrestling with these thoughts, the vibrations caused by thudding footfalls increased in strength.
* * *
‘That’s one!’ Scrimshaw called from his perch on the idol’s left arm as he popped an emerald free, tossing it down to Sinzar.
The Captain caught the jewel deftly in both hands, feeling the satisfying weight of it in his grasp.
‘And one to go,’ he said. ‘Manu, how are you getting on?’
‘Almost there,’ the Shark grunted, as he struggled to get the tip of his dagger into the eye-socket behind the gemstone to prise it free.
‘Captain!’
Sinzar turned, hearing the edge of fear in the Earth Warden’s voice.
‘What is it?’
‘We’re not alone!’
‘What do you mean? Are the islanders here?’
But before Kaseem could answer, with a harsh, squawking cry, from across the courtyard there appeared a huge, flightless bird. It moved at a run, on huge scaly-skinned feet, darting between the pillars and leaping over the scattered branches with great lolloping strides.
Gasps and cries of alarm went up from the party, and the bird’s sudden appearance even caused Sinzar to take a few steps backwards in surprise.
The animal was huge, at least three times the height of a man. Its beak was so large it seemed as if its head consisted of little else, while its scaly skin and ill-proportioned body made it seem almost reptilian. The stubs of its wings and its tail stump were only patchily covered in feathers, while a black crest rose from the top of its head. The wings were certainly too small to allow the huge bird to fly, and were only any good for helping it gain some height when vaulting the tumbled columns and scattered tree limbs.
Sinzar took all this in in an instant.
The flightless bird was fast and before he could even draw his blade, it had plucked Manu, from where he clung to the statue, with its beak, one crunching bite severing the bloodthirsty pirate in two. Jerking its head back, the bird gulped down the Shark’s torso, leaving his twitching legs to fall to the ground, the dead man’s intestines spooling after them from his killer’s gory crop.
Bellowing in incomprehensible rage, his belly wobbling as he did so, Taboo charged at the predatory avian, even though the top of his bald head didn’t even reach up to its thigh.
The bird cocked its head on one side and fixed the dark-skinned sailor with a blinking, beady black eye. A sound like a curious chirrup escaped its flapping throat sac, and then, with a sharp kick from one of its over-sized feet, it floored the big man, trapping him in a crushing cage formed of its huge talons. In another swift strike, it took the man’s head from his shoulders with one sharp bite of its deadly beak.
Vasquez couldn’t help crying out in shock and for a moment even Sinzar felt a chill shiver of fear. In the space of only a few moments, the monstrous bird had appeared as if from nowhere, and killed two of his crew with savage efficiency.
But Sinzar’s scimitar was in his hand now. The blood quickening in his veins, he charged at the bird, ready to separate its over-large head from its scrawny body with one swipe of his keen-edged blade.
It was only then that he became aware of the presence of another of the huge flightless birds.
Scrimshaw and Vasquez were sliding down the side of the huge statue, their precarious position atop the idol leaving them too exposed and vulnerable to attack, when the second monster appeared from behind it.
Haroun, sword in hand, struggled to his feet, the adrenalin-rush brought on by the avians’ attack helping him ignore his debilitating injury.
Scrimshaw darted out of the reach of the snapping beak of the new arrival, crying out, ‘We have to get out of here! Everyone, run!’
‘No!’ countered Sinzar. ‘Do that and you’re dead! You think you can outrun both of them?’
He dodged a stamping foot and walloped the second bird across the blunt end of its battering-ram beak with the flat of his blade. The overgrown fowl recoiled with a startled squawk.
‘A fighting retreat then?’ asked Kaseem hopefully.
‘Now how would that add to the legend of brave Captain Sinzar?’ Sinzar challenged the Earth Warden. ‘There’s still four of us—’
‘Five!’ Haroun blurted out indignantly.
‘—five of us, and two of them. And we have a Heritor of the Crystal Pool and an Earth Warden on our side.’
With that, Sinzar took off, bounding across the courtyard, approaching a looming stone column at an oblique angle.
As the first of the flightless birds dined upon the choice meal trapped between its talons, opening the carcass with incising pecks, and picking out the choicest morsels – the dead man’s rich liver, succulent intestines and meaty heart – its twin, not wanting to miss out, darted forward, head low, wings flapping uselessly, beak yawning in readiness to snap up anything that came within reach.
The sailors scattered, leaving Kaseem to face the avian’s charge alone.
With an almighty leap, Sinzar took off, his feet making contact with the pillar, his speed and momentum allowing him to take two more strides up the side of the column, carrying him even higher. Only then did he launch himself from the pillar, with a final, forceful kick, executing a perfect backward somersault – scimitar still in hand – and he sailed over the charging bird’s back, lashing out with his blade as he did so.
Kaseem’s hands were poised, a chunk of broken stone suspended between them – one above, one below – as the gigantic flightless bird took two more stumbling steps before its dragon-like legs gave way beneath it. It crashed to the ground, its head flopping at an unnatural angle beside its body, blood pooling on the ochre flagstones of the courtyard, Sinzar’s blade having cut almost clean through its neck.
The Heritor landed firmly on both booted feet beside the Earth Warden. ‘One down,’ he said, l
ooking pleased with himself, even though he was panting for breath and could feel the blood burn palsy taking hold of his limbs after his acrobatic feat.
‘One to go,’ finished Kaseem, letting the stone suspended between his hands drop to the ground even as he dropped to his knees.
* * *
Placing the palm of his right hand against an ancient paving slab, Kaseem closed his eyes and focused on what he could feel through the ground under him.
There was the cracked, cut stone beneath his hand, and compacted sand and earth beneath that. Deeper down he sensed the solidity of bedrock, the sandstone outcrop that formed the mountain peak of which the lost island was the only part visible above the sea. He felt the tectonically-folded strata beneath that, veins of quartz and feldspar hidden in the primordial rock, and then he found it – a fractured seam deep within the earth’s crust; a fissure. A fault line.
The tremors that rippled through the deeply dug foundations of the ruins were many times the magnitude of the tremors produced by the birds’ giveaway footsteps. As the waves of seismic force rose from deep within the heart of the island-mountain, the still-standing pillars and intricately carved friezes adorning the walls of the courtyard – that had survived who knew how many centuries, or perhaps even millennia – began to shudder and shake and, finally, to fall.
Sinzar braced himself, as did the surviving members of his crew, the ground at their feet behaving more like the rolling seas of the Southern Ocean.
The world darkened abruptly, a looming shadow falling across him. As the temple fell, so, at last, did its guardian deity, and when the stone colossus hit the ground it was with a colossal boom that sent shockwaves of its own rippling through the mountain. The survivors of Sinzar’s ill-fated treasure hunt tumbled to the ground – all apart from the Heritor himself and Kaseem of the Earth.
As the ape-god died, so did the remaining flightless bird, crushed beneath the toppled idol, every bone in its body crushed, the meat on those bones mashed, its internal organs pulped.
As the god’s head rolled clear of its broken body, the remaining stubborn emerald eye popped free of its stone socket and rolled to a stop next to Sinzar’s foot.
‘And now we run,’ he said, picking up the gem and pocketing it.
The adventurers didn’t need to be told twice; Captain Sinzar’s cavalier hubris had cost the lives of two of their party already, and none of them wanted to become the third – especially not the hobbling Haroun.
But as Sinzar ran towards the entrance to the tunnel mouth and freedom, feeling the reassuring weight of the eyes of the ape god in his pocket, a new shadow fell across the courtyard, plunging it into premature twilight. The Captain turned his gaze to the heavens as something vast and terrible eclipsed the very sun itself.
And Sinzar realised at last that what he had taken to be shattered marble bowls and crushed plaster littering the courtyard was something else entirely.
* * *
Lagan dozed in the soporific heat of the midday sun, lying in the shade of the loosened canvas sail. His feet up on the gunwale, his slow, heavy breathing occasionally birthed grunting snores, as the gentle breeze coming in off the sea tousled his bushy beard.
He was roused from a lovely dream – in which scantily-clad harem girls fed him grapes and danced for his pleasure, while another nubile maiden made sure that his wine goblet was never empty – by the desperate shouts of his companions, calling his name over and over again.
Blearily opening one eye, he saw five figures closing on his position as they crossed the beach, almost falling over themselves so desperate were they to reach the boat. Three of them were running pell-mell across the momentum-sapping white sand, while the Earth Warden and Haroun lagged behind, the former supporting the latter as he staggered and stumbled across the beach.
Lagan didn’t need to hear their urgent shouts to understand what was expected of him. Tumbling out of the boat, he put his shoulder against the keel and pushed, his feet sinking into the soft sand as he fought to get the Mermaid afloat once more.
And then the boat almost slipped out of his grasp, as Scrimshaw and the Captain joined him, helping to free the boat of the beach and push it out into the surging surf.
‘Denara, get aboard and get the sail up!’ he ordered his niece, the girl bounding up onto the gunwale and from there down onto the deck of the shallow-keeled boat.
As Denara did as her uncle commanded, the rest of the crew boarded the Mermaid. Kaseem was the last aboard, Sinzar having already helped haul the injured Haroun bodily into the boat.
With them all safely on board, Haroun huddled in a shaking ball beside the mast, the shipmaster took over, pulling on the tiller as Vasquez tied off a rope, the sailcloth snapping tight as it caught the wind at last.
He knew better than to ask what had become of Taboo and Manu.
* * *
As the Mermaid put out to sea, Sinzar cast an eye over the survivors of his little escapade, his narrowed gaze fixing at last on Scrimshaw, where the old sailor lay sprawled on the deck, his eyes closed and his chest heaving as he recovered his breath.
‘Show me that map of yours again,’ he said.
Scrimshaw didn’t even bother to open his eyes as he slipped a hand inside his sweat-soaked shirt and pulled out the greasy parchment, holding it out for the Captain.
Sinzar took it and unfolded it, even as he kept one eye on the retreating island. ‘You told us there were treasures to be had within the lost temple on that island.’
‘And we recovered them, didn’t we?’ Scrimshaw retorted.
‘I don’t dispute that, but death also awaited us there. Are you sure you read that inscription right?’
‘Well,’ Scrimshaw said, opening his eyes at last, ‘I’ve been thinking about that.’
‘Go on,’ growled Sinzar.
The sailor sat up and, even though he was now looking at the map upside down, he pointed with a smoking leaf-stained fingernail at the line of angular marks inscribed beneath the crude drawing of the topography of the island. He stopped at the second symbol from the left.
‘This symbol means “lies” or “buried”, but by extension I believe it can also mean “hidden” or “possess” – as in, something you want to keep a safe hold of you hide – and therefore it can also mean “keep”.’
Sinzar pointed at the marks that came after it on the parchment. ‘And these? You said they meant “this place” or “here”, didn’t you?’
‘Alright, I’ll admit I misread that one.’ Scrimshaw pointed at one of the angular markings. ‘It means “that place”, not “this place”, but it can also mean “from here” or “away”.’
‘So “Keep Away”.’
‘Hmm,’ Scrimshaw mumbled in a non-committal fashion.
‘Let me guess’ – Sinzar pointed at the first symbol – ‘this mark here doesn’t mean “fortune”, it actually means the opposite, “misfortune”.’
‘Or “danger”,’ Scrimshaw added, ‘but in my defence the written form of Drichean is very hard to decode. There are all manner of subtle nuances. The meaning of a symbol can change with a simple extension of a line here or there.’
Haroun gave a harsh bark of laughter from where he lay half curled around the mast. The makeshift bandage wrapped around his leg was stained red with blood. ‘Danger, keep away!’
‘I found us a nice little nest egg though, didn’t I?’
‘True,’ admitted Sinzar, ‘but at what cost?’
‘I think we’re about to find out,’ Haroun said, pointing skyward, the smile gone from his face. ‘She’s not giving up.’
Sinzar looked up as a great shadow fell across the boat.
If a raven could be considered a bird of ill-omen, then the thing bearing down on them now must surely have been considered a portent of certain death. Its vast black wings blotting out the sun, its wingspan was as far-reaching as a Castigon galleon was long.
‘By Mermydia!’ Lagan gasped, hastily making the sign of
the sea goddess. ‘What did you do?’
‘We killed its young,’ whimpered Kaseem, looking queasy.
‘And mother’s none too pleased about it,’ said Haroun, unable to tear his eyes from the black-winged titan. He fixed Sinzar with an accusing glare. ‘A nice little nest egg, you said.’
Opening its vast beak, the roc gave voice to a primordial screech and, angling its wings, swooped out of the sky towards the boat.
‘Snap out of it!’ Sinzar shouted, seeing the trance-like expressions on his companions’ faces. ‘Arm yourselves! We’re under attack!’
Suddenly the deck of the Mermaid was a flurry of activity as the crew armed themselves as best they could, considering the size and nature of their foe.
‘What are you waiting for?’ bellowed Captain Sinzar, leaping onto the gunwale of the boat, scimitar on one hand and gripping the rigging with the other. ‘Do you want to live forever?’
As the monstrous bird swept down out of the azure fastness of the sky, Sinzar wondered what price feathers the size of trees would fetch back in the bazaars of Mandrabar.
Now that would make a very nice little nest egg indeed.
BLACK JACQUES’ LEGACY
BY
MARK A. LATHAM
‘We’ve found it, lads, and that’s worth drinking to!’
Kassandra Dupont raised her tankard to the cheers of the crew, and drank deep of success. The atmosphere in the tavern was raucous, and Kassandra’s men led the revelry. In the Hanged Head tavern, on the fringe of an island group that men called the Serpent’s Teeth, sailors of all stripes set aside their rivalries for scant hours of amusement. This was neutral ground, although the unwary might still wake up dead, their pockets empty and their ribs stuck with sharpened steel. Now, drunkards and brigands craned their necks to see what all the fuss was about, but they’d not muscle in on this celebration. This night belonged to her, to the woman known as ‘the Owl’.
‘Another round, courtesy of the Captain!’ The cheers were led by Kassandra’s first mate, the hulking Zhembian, Kymba. He stood to his full height, beaming smile and booming voice, tossing a purse of coins to the nearest serving wench.
Frostgrave: Ghost Archipelago: Tales of the Lost Isles Page 10