by Unknown
As the ghosts consumed the ethereal liquid, a compensating quantity of water poured from their noses and ears.
I raised my goblet, but did not drink. “There are hundreds of you. How can you call yourselves alone?”
Geor’s ghost-form wavered. “Without the spark of life, it is not the same.”
“Again, I express my sorrow at your plight. It is not right that souls should be kept on Golarion, simply because they have the misfortune to drown. Now, if I might ask you about Twill Ninefingers…”
“He and I have much in common,” said Geor. “And much to settle, between us.”
“Why did he not join us at this feast?”
Geor edged toward me, his ghost-vapors fading through those of the table. “You did not drink.”
I adjusted my position, ensuring an unimpeded draw if I needed my sword. “As I said from the outset, we have come here neither thirsty nor hungry. Please do not consider it a slight against your hospitality.”
An angry groan hissed from the drowned host.
“You will drink, Challys Argent, and you will command your slaves to do the same.”
I wrapped my fingers around the goblet. “I am sorry to say it, Geor Whalespotter, but I suspect that this is a drowning potion, and that if we partake, we’ll be with you here forever.”
Geor swarmed at me through a suddenly dispersing table. Ghosts clawed my arms and back, the chill of their touch now multiplied tenfold. I swept my cutlass free. It slashed through them, its magic granting it at least some purchase against their soul-stuff.
My adjutants, like any pirate captains worthy of the title, also wielded weapons of some enchantment. These slashed through ephemeral bodies, which dispersed and then reformed, somewhat diminished.
Despite these swipes, the ghosts swarmed in. They struck back at us not with fist or blade, but with solitude. It weighed me down, buckling my knees, pushing me to the deck. The others folded, too. Aspodell dropped his rapier, hands clawed and teeth clenched. Rira went limp against a railing. Otondo gibbered, weaving on his feet like a drunken man who has forgotten how to fall. Seagrave I could not see at all.
With each gelid touch their bitterness invaded me. Dead and thwarted aspirations cracked through my certitude. My own thoughts turned traitor. Yes, they said, this island of ghosts is where you belong. You killed yourself the moment you enslaved the first of your adjutants. One day one of them will get you. But if you let yourself die here, on your own terms…. At least then it will not be one of them that slays you.
In a vision, I beheld myself as a ghost, among the legion here, dining at their table, forever drinking their wine of drowning. The four of them would sit at my side, prevented forever—more decisively than by the geases of Siren Call—from wreaking murder in the lands of the living. If I wished to sacrifice myself, I could do it now and here and permanently.
I fought these false thoughts. They were not my own, and only felt as the result of ghostly trickery. The enthrallment of the four captains, I reminded myself, was only a means toward the true goal, the quest for lost and stolen lore. In an eternity on Drowningtide, I’d recover not a scroll, not a scrap of a footnote…
The ghosts subsumed themselves into a single suffocating mass. The fortress of ships lost substance. The ghosts had fashioned it from their unslaked desires. Now they shifted its essence to their foremost wish: our demises.
I’d stopped breathing, I realized, and wondered if my last breath had already been taken in and exhaled.
My fingers spread out on the deck. I could see through them. They withered and f lickered.
I was becoming a ghost.
Chapter 4
Foes of Fin and Feather
As I died on the mossy deck of the Drowningtide ship-fortress, an utterance registered at the brink of awareness. With a last spark of curiosity I worked to perceive it. Words, guttural and outraged, cut through the mental assault of the ghosts ranged around me.
It was Seagrave, bellowing. “Curse the mewling lifeless cowardly lot of you!”
In my fading bones I felt the heat of his fury. The ghostly mass reared back from it. Its enveloping wall of soul-stuff broke up. It became a they, reverting to distinct, individualized spirits of the drowned.
Solidity returned to me. Seizing on glimmers of strength, I pushed myself up to my knees.
Seagrave swung on a translucent rope, landing on the feasting table. He kicked, punched, and slashed with his sword. The ghosts fell away from him, pushed not so much by the material force of his blows but by the steel of his will.
“You wish me to lie down and die with you? I will not!” His words struck them like a wall of surf. “I am Seagrave, and I will live!” Spittle flew from his mouth. “I will eat and drink and fight!”
I made it to my feet, Seagrave’s wildness filling me with exultation. My own reasons for living-the protection of others, the joy of discovery, and justice grimly dealt flooded my soul. The doubts instilled in me by ghostly assault-what the scholars would call a psychic attack visibly fled my body, manifesting as motes of sooty energy.
The ghosts groaned in chorus. Seagrave’s display gave heart to the others. Otondo’s scything cutlass dispersed a trio of incorporeal sailors. Rira drove ghosts before her with arcing bolts of arcane force. They quavered at the weaving point of Aspodell’s rapier.
As we rallied, a near-perceptible wave of enervation swept through our attackers. Their soul-forms dimmed and shrank. Their wailing dropped an octave, to congeal into pitiful sobbing. As a last few feinted ineffectually our way, their speaker, Geor Whalespotter, held out his arm in a gesture of truce.
“We meant only to embrace you,” Whale spotter said, his voice now reduced to a wheeze.
“Take your embrace and shove it in the bilge,” said Seagrave. He held his cutlass as if he wanted to use it some more.
“My adjutant speaks harshly, but overall I endorse the sentiment,” I said. “If you typically attempt to keep your guests forever, it is little wonder you get so few of them.”
The stump of Whalespotter’s missing arm twitched. “We are not the only jailors here,” he sulked.
“One day I’ll cast off her yoke, as today we cast off yours,” said Seagrave.
A change of subject seemed apt. “You promised to produce Twill Ninefingers,” I said. “Bring him forth.”
Geor’s features lost another degree of sharpness. “I did not promise that, exactly.”
“Where is he?”
“Not here.”
“You deny that you paid the cyclops Megeus to take him into your custody?”
“That I do not deny. But we were cheated before our ghost-boat reached these shores.”
“You tell your tale in dribs and drabs, drowned one.”
“Harpies f lew overhead, plucking him from our boat, when we were nearly home. They were gone before we could stop them. We were left with only this.” Twill’s kit of thieves’ tools f loated in the air before him. The leather case folded open, showing that one tool was missing-the one Rira had used to find our way here to Drowningtide.
“Your isle moves about,” said Seagrave, as if it were an accusation.
“Indeed,” answered Geor.
“You were here when the harpies got him?”
“No. Further south, near the Fever Sea.”
“When did they take him?”
“Just last night.”
Seagrave’s grudging murmur indicated that he had run out of questions.
I took the kit from Geor. “A mystery remains. This whole island and everything on it-it’s ghost stuff, just like you. As would be any locked door or chest. What need do you have of a lockbreaker?”
“I brought him here not for what he does, but for who he is.” A blue tinge bathed Geor’s ghost-form. “Twill Ninefingers is my brother.”
“And you planned to bring him here and kill him?”
“When you express it so, it sounds cruel. What good have the realms of the living done him?
At least then he would be here with me. I miss him.”
The ghosts let us go without further interference. We rowed back to the boat in the silence of our own thoughts. Of all that we had seen on Drowningtide, it struck me that the most chilling was not the weird town or its dead inhabitants, but Geor’s casual lack of concern for his brother’s life. Such was the logic of ghosts.
Once aboard the Aspidochelone, we made our way to a wine cask in wordless agreement. We’d dulled ourselves before going there, and now we did it again, to forget.
Only after several cups were drained did I stir myself to speak. “Our quarry, Kered Firsk, is not called the Monster Captain for merely figurative reasons. He may well command, or have allied himself with, a nest of harpies. We know he wants Twill. If we fail to find him before Firsk makes his rendezvous with the nest, we’ve lost both trails.”
“And with it, the Treasure of Far Thallai,” said Seagrave.
“So, where does one find a harpy?”
“I’ve oft found them in my bed in the morning,” said Aspodell, “mysteriously transformed from the lovely creatures they were the night before.”
I had long ago learned that the best way to combat his woman-hating jests was to ignore them. “Seagrave?”
“I’ve seen harpies on Poison Coin and heard of’em on Footless Isle and Clubber’s Point. But I’m thinking it has to be Sarenvent. They’ve nested there for generations.”
“And it’s within f lying distance of Drowningtide’s likely location.”
“That’s my guess.”
With dawn light on our sails we laid course for Sarenvent. I plotted two routes: a longer path that would circumnavigate many of the Shackle’s more dangerous isles, and a more direct approach that held greater threat of unrelated trouble. On another day, caution might have won. But now we raced Kered Firsk and the Slicer, and could afford no tarrying. Assuming no interference from the fearsome residents of islands various, it would take eight hours to get there. From a small cloth bag that hung on my belt I took my weather predictor, a miniature ship of wood and cloth fashioned by a Sargavan artificer. Its sails shook, predicting strong winds ahead.
They came an hour later, pushing the ship through glassy water. The sun chased early clouds from the sky, turning the sea a brilliant cerulean. In the depths we saw disporting dolphins, fast-moving rays, and a great silvery mass of wahoos. The ship glided over the notorious wreck of the Dusk Poacher, whose crew still guarded its shattered hulls as barnacle-encrusted skeletons. A few hours into the journey, Seagrave shouted from the craw’s nest: He’d spotted something huge with tentacles-perhaps a giant squid or devilfish, maybe even a kraken-waiting in a narrow channel. We altered course to avoid it. The correction would cost us over an hour, a loss preferable to a confrontation with a monstrosity large enough to sink us.
Not long after, Seagrave, climbing down the rigging, spotted another obstacle ahead. He jumped down to the aft deck to pass me his spyglass. I scanned the horizon and saw nothing. He pushed the end of the glass down.
Below the surface surged an armada of the fish-people known colloquially as sea devils. I spied several variants among the fast-swimming horde. Most numerous were the common sort, boasting fishy, toothed jaws and bloodred fins that fanned from heads and limbs. Reptilian tails, also lavishly finned, jutted out from their hips. While swimming, they kept their legs tucked in tight, using the tails for propulsion and balance. Across their backs they had slung tridents and crossbows lashed together from lengths of bone. Among them swam dozens of sharks: I spotted makos, hammerheads, allmouths, and a quartet of great whites, easily twenty feet long. A specimen of a type I have never seen before dwarfed them all. Black as the ocean depths and fifty feet long, it opened jaws large enough to bite off the prow of a galleon.
Bizarrely, this massive shark, which I mentally dubbed the bigtooth, was caparisoned with an assortment of belts and harnesses. These accoutrements appeared from a distance to be made from seaweed and polished coral. They held in place a sort of carriage or howdah, in which sat a splendid party of exotically colored sea devil grandees. Their scales flared with the bright blues, golds, reds, and oranges of tropic fish. These alternated in variegated patterns that dazzled and confused the eye. The leaders’ fins jutted out in an assortment of spines and projections. Concentrated around the head, they resembled the crowns and ruffs of peacocking kings. The creature occupying the howdah’s highest, central seat-who for no good reason I took to be a female-had a face reminiscent of a scorpion fish. Others in her retinue glowered through visages like those of sharks or morays. I could also swear that I fleetingly glimpsed one that looked more elf than fish.
The sea devils swam roughly parallel to us, on the port side, heading south as we did.
Rira stood alert on the rail, trembling strangely, a long knife in each hand. In this reaction I sensed a story-which I would have no hope of drawing from her, now or later.
I called the crew to battle stations. Every sailor learns to fear sea devils, because they come at you with no ship to sink. A battery of fire-spitters does nothing against an underwater force. When the fish-people attack, they can simply proceed to board, climbing up your hull and over your rails. To hurl them overboard is simply to return them to their natal waters, allowing them to refresh themselves and then surge at you again.
“If Kered Firsk is the Monster Captain,” asked Seagrave, “does that mean he commands sea devils, too?”
“I hope not.” Every treatise on this fierce underwater people begins with their overweening hatred of all other beings. But if any human could convince the shark-riders he was their peer, it would be Firsk. Commanding would not be the right word, but I would not put an alliance past him.
When the riggers were in place, I ordered them to tack. Otondo relieved the helmsman. He responded to my signal to veer with a ferocious pull of the wheel. Groaning, the Aspidochelone obeyed, angling away from the shark flotilla. The winds favored us; within moments we were outpacing the sea devils by a speed of three to four knots. With Seagrave I dashed to the aft deck. Through the spyglass, they appeared as a dwindling collection of black dots beneath the surface. Then they seemed to speed up.
They were indeed giving chase. This did not prove they served Firsk; their intentions could easily be opportunistic. If they caught us, the question would be largely academic.
Then a frothing arose behind them, sending the tight swimming formation into disarray. Black tentacles lashed up into the air. They rose and fell, coming up each time curled around a squirming sea devil, who was then hurled into the far distance. It was a great squid-surely the one we’d adjusted our route to avoid. As I lost sight of them, the tentacled beast had wrapped itself around the bigtooth shark, hauling a third of its bulk above the waterline.
For hours afterwards we remained on uneasy watch for a return of the sea devil legion. Later, we had to duck down below the rails to avoid the spearing noses of a school of flying fish. This thankfully proved our sole remarkable incident as we closed the rest of the distance to our destination.
The isle of Sarenvent rose abruptly from the sea. Steep slopes covered with lush green vegetation converged on a central, bowl-shaped depression. Identifying it as a geographical anomaly, I called for Young Hallegg, the ship’s artist, to sketch it. Where I knew the Shackles in general as the remnants of a sunken landmass, Sarenvent, on their periphery, showed all the traits of a volcanic island. Its central depression could be nothing other than the crater of an extinct volcano.
I spied a swift shape swoop down from the sky and past the crater’s lip. It could only be a harpy, headed to its nest.
After gathering the four for a conference, I braced Seagrave on his knowledge of harpies. This would not be my first time encountering the beasts; during my days of early wandering, after the destruction of my cloister but before I came to the Shackles and adopted the pirate f lag, I’d blundered into a nest of them. However, the prepared Pathfinder readies herself for local variati
on. “The harpies I recall captivated their prey with a song that pierces the soul. Should we expect the same from these?”
“Aye, ma’am. Or so go the tales.”
“Can we hope to negotiate with them?”
“They like pretty baubles,” he said.
“And thus will have plunder,” said Rira.
“Given the chance, you’ll get your loot,” I said, “but it’s Twill we’re here for.”
“If they don’t serve Kered Firsk, as you guess they might, Ninefingers is already a jumble of stripped bones,” said Seagrave. “What they covet more than wealth is the flesh of humans and their kin.”
Otondo licked his lips.
Seagrave paid him no heed. “Harpies favor meat that’s had a soul in it. They say they can taste the lingering tang of thoughts and dreams.”
“What rot!” spat Otondo. “It’s not the mind that makes the meal. Whether man or pig, the flavor’s in the roasting.”
The ogre saw my grimace and responded with a wink.
Ignoring the provocation, I continued. “I acknowledge that they may have taken Twill for the simple reasons you state. Still, we must chance it.”
“Their gold is reason enough to fight them,” said Rira.
“But if they’re holding him for Firsk, he’s paying them in the jewels and rich adornments they covet. Perhaps we can outbid him.”
“Why start with talking?” Otondo grumped. “If there’s to be stupid palavering, do it after we’ve crushed them, and they’re weak and begging.”
“The big one has a point,” said Aspodell. “Rudely stated, but salient.”
“You’ll be glad to hear that I agree. If we take the nest by stealth, we may be able to snatch Twill away without a fight.”
“That’s not what I meant,” said Otondo.