The WorldMight

by Cyril L. C. Bussiere

  “Well, you should talk to Grimpwind,” the innkeeper said once he was done with his tale. “Ask for him around the shipyard, south o’ here. If it’s past noon though, don’t bother. He’ll be in one of the taverns down there. Your best bet’s Harly’s Sea Hole.”

  She turned around and called out loudly: “Got one breakfast waitin’ here!”

  “Name’s Drely,” she added once she turned back to him.

  “Nikos,” he replied.

  She led him upstairs to his room. It was nothing special, a small bed and a nightstand with a candle on it, but definitely better than what he had done with since leaving Syndjya. In the back, stairs led from the second floor to a water hole and a couple of shower stalls.

  Cassien wolfed down a breakfast of fried fish and vegetables and then took his first shower in weeks. Afterward, he sat on his bed, still half-wet and shivering, and counted his coins. Not all the travelers he met had been as generous as the Longrooves. After paying for breakfast and a night, he only had two silver and twelve bronze coins left. He doubted it would be enough to pay for his way across the Empty Sea.

  He found Grimpwind, Olast of his first name, by the docks near the shipyard. He was an old, sea-worn man with a mane of gray hair and a drunk’s stubble. He had a thick neck and graceless features: sagging gray cheeks, a large nose, broken at least twice, and eyes set far apart which seemed to look slightly beyond whomever he was talking to. He was somewhat short, shorter than Cassien anyway, and thick of legs and arms. He was the kind of man that was unsettling because he exuded both a fierce self-confidence and the fragility of someone who might unravel at any moment.

  Drely had not lied. Grimpwind had sailed the Empty Sea and would sail it again to a port in the land of Cahifu.

  “Cradled between cliffs so tall they steal your breath the first time you set sight on ’em,” the old sailor told him.

  But he would sail neither soon nor cheap.

  “Fifteen gold coins,” he announced to Cassien’s bewilderment. “It takes a crew like no other to sail such seas during wintertime, boy! And my Wavecarver, well, she needs some work done too.”

  His raspy voice was hard if slightly wavering and did not invite to bartering. Cassien, thinking that it was excessively expensive and that he could find a cheaper alternative somewhere else, told him that he’d think on it. But after spending most of the day asking around along the wharfs, it became clear that no one else would venture that far at sea during wintertime and that he had no other option.

  The Wavecarver was sailing out in forty five days’ time, after receiving the last of some cargo it was to transport to Cahifu. Grimpwind agreed to take Cassien on, provided that he paid the aforementioned fifteen gold coins and not a bronze less. It occurred to Cassien that he could try to sneak onboard before departure; but the voyage would be long and he would surely be found out and undoubtedly thrown overboard shortly thereafter. There was no way around it. He would have to pay his way across the Empty Sea.

  That evening, he returned, discouraged, to the Gray Maiden. The tables were full of fishermen, sailors, and city watchmen. Drely was tending the bar while her daughter, Hayrel, a tall and comfortably plump girl who looked nothing like her mother, worked the tables. At the counter was Captain Lenft, Drely’s husband. He was a taciturn but strangely warm man whose eyes were green like the open-sea under a stormy sky and seemed to drink in rather than simply look at what he set them on. He had a scar on the right side of his forehead which started at his gray hairline and buried itself into a thick eyebrow. Like everything and everyone else in Gray Arlung, he smelled of sea and fish.

  “’tis our new guest, Nikos,” Drely said nodding toward him to Lenft when he approached. Her voice was lighter, her demeanor less gruff somehow.

  “You found ol’ Grimpwind?” she went on.

  Before he could answer she turned to her husband, and, as she poured ale in a tankard from a large barrel set belly-first on the counter, she told him of their guest’s pilgrimage.

  “Across?” Lenft asked when she was finished, an expression on his face not dissimilar to the one his wife had exhibited earlier.

  “That’s quite an example of devotion,” he said, something akin to admiration in his voice.

  Cassien pulled a long face and told them of his predicament.

  After a moment of looking pensive, Lenft asked him what his trade was. Cassien hesitated. He did not want to tell them too much for fear that someone might connect him to the apprentice that was wanted throughout Alymphia. After all, that was all the travelers he had met on his way from Syndjya had been talking about and he did not doubt for one second that Lenft and Drely had heard of it as well. But then, what else could he do? If Lenft could in any way help him, he was in no place to refuse.

  “I work metal pretty well,” he said.

  Lenft peered at him thoughtfully, and Cassien felt awfully naked.

  “I’ll talk to Parblo at the shipyard,” he eventually said. “He might have some use for you. If you work hard and spend as little as possible you might make enough coin in time.”

  The next day Cassien earned his first silver at the shipyard’s forge. Parblo Orldenst, the master forger, assigned him to a small coal forge in the back of a building at the western end of the shipyard. There, for the next thirty nine days, Cassien was to cast drifts, keel bolts, fastenings, and mast fittings. Each piece to be replicated to set specifications and each that departed from said specifications was not bet tallied toward the day’s output. Parblo had warned him in a dry voice that if the day’s output was less than what he set, it would be deducted out of his pay.

  The hours were long and the work tedious. The forge was poorly ventilated despite the almost omnipresent wind that blew fresh from the open-sea, and the large vats of molten metal made the air dry and coarse in Cassien’s throat. He soon realized that his fellow workers were taciturn men unlikely to waste a word.

  Every day, Cassien left the Gray Maiden in the darkest hour of dawn, before even the fishing boats had returned to the docks from their night at sea. And by the time he came back, the inn was packed with a loud crowd of drunken patrons. He would sit by himself at the counter where Drely served him a hot soup or the stew-of-the-day. They exchanged a few words while he ate and sometimes he even listened to the ramblings of a fisherman or another. Then he would make his way to his room where, despite the ruckus coming from below, he would fall asleep within minutes.

  Every night he dreamt of Aria. She came to him in various forms. Some dreams were bright, almost happy ones while some left him twisted and anxious. Others yet were mundane and bland. But she always called for him from a mountain top.

  Every morning, as he headed to the forge, he looked longingly at the sea beyond which he knew her to be. He would close his eyes and in the salty rush of the wind he could almost hear her calling for him.

  Soon the days started blending together in a swirl of monotonous repetition, effort, and exhaustion. Only the steadily increasing weight of his coin satchel remained as an indication of the flow of time. At some point, Drely and Hayrel started expressing their concerns about his working too much.

  “You sleep half as much as I do and work twice as hard, and Hethens knows I work hard myself!” Drely told him one day as he dragged himself to her counter after another eighteen-hour workday.

  “You don’t even eat much!” the soft spoken Hayrel added, dropping a plate of salt-fish and fresh clams in front of him.

  Cassien talked their worries down and kept at his work. Even the master forger eventually said something, although he was mostly worried about an exhausted Cassien messing up and the potential for an accident. Cassien reassured him as well and kept working.

  He had done the calculations; the draconian schedule he kept was the only way for him to earn enough money to pay for a place on the Wavecarver. So, ever more mindlessly, he sweated over his forge, hammering away the hours, folding and shaping soft metal into items of pre-determined dimens
ions. The whole time, his mind stubbornly focused onto thoughts of Aria.

  Eventually, upon waking in the mornings his blurry vision started tinging with green accents that a good rub would rid him of. He put it on account of his being tired. But as the days went by the green tint became more persistent, more pronounced too. Until one day he realized that it had started lasting longer than the morning blurriness itself.

  A few days after that, nausea began permeating his waking hours. It was not much at first, a tug in his stomach he barely noticed. But increasingly it made its presence felt to the point that every so foten he had to stop what he was doing for a few seconds to steady himself.

  At some point the nausea turned into something different, a destabilizing hollowness that would drag his thoughts away from Aria to its unwelcomed presence. But still he kept at his work, and still his coin satchel grew larger and heavier.

  One evening, while he was eating his dinner at the inn, he overheard Drely chatting at the other end of the counter with a couple of animated city watchmen. The guards wore the blue and silver uniforms of Gray Arlung. Both of them had long faces with brown, messy hair and a couple days’ worth of stubble. They could have been mistaken for brothers except for the fact that one had a thin long nose that gave him an inquisitive look while the other’s nose was flat and thick like a small shield and gave his face a defensive appearance. Both were sipping on tankards of ale and slurred their words.

  There was news from Syndjya, bad news. Queen Silifia who had been grief stricken since the disappearance of her children had fallen sick.

  “It’s losing the prince and princess that did it, I’m sure,” one of the guards was saying to Drely. “They say that all the kingdom’s doctors’ve seen her, one after the other. But none of ’em can figure out what’s wrong with her!”

  “Hethens’s Breath on her,” Drely said, sounding sincerely sorry.

  She glanced at Hayrel who was wiping down tables at the other end of the room.

  “I can’t imagine how it feels to lose your children,” she said, “both of them at the same time. And to Hethens knows what. Not knowing’s got to be the worst.”

  “Well, they still say that apprentice who’s done the temple runner in is responsible,” the second guard, the one with the fat nose, said.

  “So it’s a fact now,” Cassien thought as he kept his eyes to himself and, more alert than usual by that time of the day, he quietly slurped his soup down.

  “But they’ll find him now,” declared the thin-nosed guard.

  He looked around and meant to drop his voice but when he went on he was still loud enough for anyone within twenty feet to hear what he was saying.

  “The king’s consulted with members of the Faith and it’s been found that the apprentice is an Undoer!”

  “No!” Drely said in a gasp.

  “Yes,” the guard said, something malicious and fearful in his voice. “There are witnesses. Some say an elite saw it happen, saw him take Princess Aria. ’t was the work of Cythra herself!”

  “Not possible,” Drely said. “If an elite had been there he would’ve stopped him for sure!”

  The guard looked thoughtful for a second, took another mouthful of ale and burped loudly.

  “Well… that might be true, you see, if the apprentice been normal, but if he’s an Undoer…”

  A shiver coursed over Drely’s face.

  “Then there wouldn’t be much he could do, now, could he?” the other guard added.

  Drely did not reply but she looked somber now.

  “That’s why the king’s created the Order of GrandJoy,” the thin-nosed guard continued.

  “And what’d that be?” Drely asked, an eyebrow arched up.

  “Elites, trained in some special art of the Doing,” the guard started explaining.

  “Something to do with Hethens’s Breath,” his comrade interjected.

  “Yes, to fight off the Undoer,” the thin-nosed guard went on unabated.

  “Their only purpose’s to find the Undoer and destroy him.”

  “Or her, ’cause there might be more than one, you know…”

  “Right, or her, I guess... but that’d be them then.”

  “Right, or them but-”

  From there the exchange devolved into drunken quarreling.

  Cassien finished his soup and left. He had heard enough. Elites were after him and that was bad. On his way up to his room he calculated that he only had five more days in Gray Arlung. After that he would be unreachable. He dropped on his bed wondering if elites were already in Gray Arlung, looking for him. He felt he should have been more worried about it than he was. Maybe he was just too tired to be worried.

  The thought made him think about the repetitive and boring work he had been doing. He realized that, given the schedule he kept, few people knew that he was in town. He was never out during the day and only moved around during the darkest hours of night. The thought gave him a small degree of comfort as he drifted into sleep.

  “Soon,” he thought, as another dream of Aria -or was it of the WorldMight? - was already forming behind his eyelids.

  “Soon…”

  Chapter Thirty

  The Wavecarver, Empty Sea.

  Year Hundred and Fifty of the New Age.

  Under a hard expanse of low, luminous, gray clouds the Wavecarver sped away from the shore. Around it, the Empty Sea was a somber rolling spread which bore behind a thinly veiled tension the threat of imminent turmoil.

  Cassien stood by the stern of the vessel, his face already wet from the cold sleet rising from the ship’s roughly-carved path. The open-sea wind, sharp and wet, whooshed around him before jumping off the stern and trailing swirls of foam in its wake. Cassien peered at Gray Arlung.

  In the distance the city-port was quickly shrinking out of view behind a low fog that wrestled with the waves around the spread of docks. To the south he could see large volutes of white smoke ascending from the shipyard in the cold morning air; the shipyard where he exhausted himself beyond what he ever thought possible.

  Through a fog of his own, he was distantly aware of the relief he felt at finally leaving Alymphia. He had amassed the coins he needed for his place on the Wavecarver on time, and had enough left to last a good while. No elite had sprung for him from a dark alley during one of his going to or coming from the Gray Maiden. All in all, despite his tiredness, he should have been exuberant. But the nausea, the hollowness he had at first mistaken for a crystallization of his longing for Aria, had become increasingly bothersome; so much so that in the last few days it had become disruptive to his sleep, waking him multiple times a night.

  He was rocking slightly on his feet, almost in rhythm with the movements of the deck underneath him. He closed his eyes and slowly breathed in the biting air. He felt sick of something alien. Something that he sensed was not really a physical illness. He clasped his hands over the railings. The wood was covered with a thin layer of ice and the coldness spilled into his hands. Behind him he heard Grimpwind shout orders. The crew was twenty or so strong, men of the sea, hard and sharp, with wind-cut features and eyes that told of their love for the rush of the elements. The ship itself was double-masted and had a barrel of a hull that made it look like a pregnant beast. There were another handful of passengers besides the crew, merchants going back home to Cahifu or bringing goods for trade on the other side of the vast sea.

  Cassien had been shown to his cabin before departure. It was a small room on the second deck, smaller than the one he had inhabited at the Gray Maiden, barely more than a deep closet. It was close to the kitchens and above the ship’s entrails where the sailors slept and the cargo was stored.

  The sails were rounded with wind and tight against their sheets. On the deck, crewmen were busy greasing parts of the bridge while others attended to the many lines. Cassien turned away from the shore and absentmindedly shook his hands. They were pale and callused with scabs and fresh scars, red lines and spots which stood out amon
gst older, whiter-than-skin ones.

  “They are not pretty hands,” he thought, “and they hurt.”

  The cold had seeped deep into them and his fingers burnt slightly. The sensation was present but vague, as if it did not really belong to him, though it had a particular physicality to it that he recognized; one that was absent from the hollowness that clawed at him.

  That night he could not sleep. He would have put it on account of the rolling of the boat or the chilly dampness of his cabin, but he knew better. By early morning he had given up on sleeping altogether and had decided that now that he had time to attend to it, he would find the root of the void growing in him and rid himself of it.

  As the first sunrays graced the sea with their gentle warmth, he sat on his bed as he had done in the past with Master Baccus and struggled to still himself. The rugged swells of the sea swayed the ship unpredictably and his mind was in turmoil, Aria and the void fightingt restlessly for his attention. She, flashes of memories drenched in longing , desire, regret and guilt. It, a harrowing emptiness that surged from the inscrutable depths of his being.

  That day he did not come out of his cabin. He sat on his thin mattress, cross-legged amongst the creaks and cracks of the ship contracting and expanding like a living thing under the rough touch of the sea. He forced himself to focus past his sensations and thoughts and let the subtle contractions at his core reveal themselves. The small candle on the wall by his bed died out quickly. He heard it fizzle out and the smell of the burnt wick mixed with the ambient salty humidity. The day went by and turned into a muddled collection of fruitless effort that did not bring him any closer to grasping what went on in the fathomless reaches of his being.