Crimson

by Warren Fahy

  Nil then worked his way up through the ranks of mariners from the bottom rung, never betraying the great house from which he came by using only his given name, which earned him no favors. Poladoris was perplexed but never interfered on his behalf.

  Nil came to know many boats and ships during his toils on the sea, observing their weaknesses in storms or over reefs. And throughout his self-prescribed apprenticeship, he made extensive notes and sketches that baffled and intrigued his shipmates. Sometimes they had offered an idea or two of their own to his plans, and for each one he incorporated he wrote them a note of promise of a certain fee for each use of their idea, which they laughed at but accepted and tucked away—for they felt a certain faith in their mate’s ambitious dreams.

  So it was that Nil came to be on the White Shark when Trevin had been crowned. And when the King paid him a thousand gold gierons to draft maps of the Southern Reefs, Nil took that fortune to purchase his own shipyard and begin wrighting boats that employed his unorthodox ideas. For six years now he had nearly never left his shipyard in the city below. And each man he had issued a note of promise received their meager dues as many more deferred payment to join him as employees in his shipyard, believing in his dream.

  Lelinair closed her hand over her half of the lightstone pebble.

  Senjessi pointed. “What sort of sail is that? I’ve never seen such a sail!”

  “What are the millstones for?” Artimeer wondered.

  “The spikes on her keel—they’ll slow her down and make her heavy,” Poladoris noted, hiding his fatherly pride.

  “It’s too big!” Ninny cried.

  “It would be very expensive,” Bulgar reckoned.

  “It’s beautiful!” whispered Merania in Senjessi’s ear. Then she smiled at Nil, who blushed, unaccustomed to praise from such a lovely woman.

  Nil looked at Lelinair, who was now studying the model intently, ignoring him. But for the first time in memory, she was looking at him, he thought, simply by looking at the model.

  “It’s risky, Nil,” Artimeer said, with a gusto that approved.

  “She’s a beauty!” exclaimed Neuvia’s mother. Lady Fenstridol had resided in Castle Martharr since the King and Queen’s exile. She oversaw the kitchen there, unofficially, ever since. Though her cooking was bold, Nardleen was quite traditional. Yet Nil’s ship kindled a blaze of hope in her eyes that bent her iron lips into a half-smile.

  “She is something to behold, eh, milady?” Lince grinned, elbowing her and flashing his wolfish swag of teeth.

  Nardleen laughed at the rascal.

  “I’d be a carpenter for the rest of my days to feel her on the sea for an hour under my feet!” Lince said. “I’m with you, Nilly. Hundred-and-sixty feet from stem to stern? Now that’s a vessel, I reckon!”

  “Hundred-and-sixty-seven,” Nil corrected.

  Questions and remarks sprayed together in the air and Nil held up his hands to sort out their answers even as Lelinair studied the beautiful model.

  “I will explain her in more detail,” he said, “if everyone draws near. Stoke the fire, for the room is chilled by the hunting night. Don’t you agree, lord?”

  “Stoke the fire!” Poladoris agreed, rubbing his hands. “The hunting night approaches.” And it seemed his adopted son had stoked the tired embers in his eyes, as well, and lifted the shroud of defeat from his brow.

  Two servants threw logs of ashwood onto the fire and then all gathered close as Nil described the Sea Mare. “Two masts,” he noted, pointing.

  “I’ve heard that an aftward mast would turn a ship in circles,” Senjessi said.

  Ninny whispered in Bulgar’s broad ear.

  “Or push it backwards!” Bulgar said.

  “Not if the sail is of this design,” Nil said. “The aftward sail can be pulled completely around on a joint so that it billows forward no matter which tack is taken. And the flying jibs at the bow balance.”

  “How do you know?” Artimeer inquired.

  “From testing models on ponds on windy days.”

  “Models,” said Lelinair. “On ponds.” She looked at him in the eyes for the first time in years. “On windy days?”

  Nil nodded. “Yes. On windy days. I have not had the opportunity to build a full-sized version to demonstrate the principle.”

  Lelinair stared straight into his eyes.

  Nil almost averted his eyes to deflect the impact of hers after these years. “I have finally gotten your attention, then, my lady?”

  “For a moment.”

  “It’s a gamble, all around,” Bulgar groused, his brow beetling.

  “What are those anchor stones behind the mainmast?” Sengi pointed.

  Lelinair held Trevin’s gaze.

  “Fishing nets may be used to entangle the guardians of the Dimrok. Anchor stones may be attached to the nets and rolled overboard, dragging whatever is caught in them under the sea.”

  “Why are there spikes on her keel?” Bulgar asked.

  “The Gyre will not be able to get a hold on the hull if it is too thorny.”

  “Perhaps,” said Poladoris. He rubbed his chin as fear chilled the pride in his breast. “Perhaps not, my son.” He looked hard at Nil with his violet eyes, his bushy eyebrows and beaky nose resembling a fierce owl.

  “I tested it, Father,” Nil said. “With models and a real gyre. The spiny nautilus was my clue. The spines on its shell will slow it down. It tends to chew all of them off before it crushes the nautilus.”

  “So how will you kill it after slowing it down, Nil Ramesis?” Lelinair asked.

  He looked at her. “The last spike is a harpoon much like that on a spiny nautilus. It will pierce the Gyre as we use nets, weights, catapults, fire, arrows, and harpoons to defeat it.”

  “And who is to captain this ship that sails straight into the jaws of death?” she threatened more than asked him.

  “I shall be the captain of the Sea Mare, Lady,” he said, locking eyes with her. “When the ship is completed. Do I finally have your interest then?”

  She saw now that he was splendid as he knelt beside his model, as time had chiseled him like a god hardened by the sea and bronzed by the sun.

  “Well,” Sengessi said. “It’s very ambitious.”

  “It’s too big!” Ninny warned.

  “It’s very large,” Bulgar agreed.

  “I’m with you, Nilly,” Lince growled.

  “I cannot finance the whole project,” Bulgar concluded, counting on his fingers as he kissed Ninny’s cheek. “But I can give you a trust of 400 gierons, and supplies from time to time. It’s nothing.” Bulgar shrugged as Ninny clutched his arm.

  Nil shook his hand. “It shall be your best investment, sir!”

  “I doubt that very much, Nil Ramesis,” Bulgar said. “But you are of this noble house, if not born of it. And I have learned to expect great things from it. To see little Nilly who always chased Lelinair across the fields when you were tiddlywinks now destined to be a sea warrior pitting his life against terrors bigger than mortal men—well, it’s not a thing I readily pay for. With luck, it will take too long to build your ship for you to captain her through the King’s horrors and fate will intervene to make her mission unnecessary and my investment squandered.”

  “Time will tell,” Nil said.

  “A little gold,” Senjessi muttered. Nil’s model moved his artist’s soul. “The Sea Mare!” The painter smiled, raising his brows and spreading his hands as he envisioned her setting sail on the sea. “A little gold should help.” He winked at Merania, who kissed him on his spiky cheek. “I shall donate 200 gierons.”

  “Thank you, Senji,” Nil said.

  Nardleen smiled as she removed her regal jewels and placed them in her hat, and handed them to Nil.

  “Thank you, milady!” Nil bowed low.

  “My heart is mixed,” Poladoris said. “I will not give you so much that you may complete this vessel quickly. For time may offer counsel, too."

  Nil squeezed
his hand in gratitude.

  “It is a bold plan, Brother,” said Teldon, gripping Nil’s shoulder. “Very little is known of the King’s Isles but you shall have the finest charts before trying that course. In every way, I am at your disposal.”

  There had never been any rivalry between them, and Teldon had never lorded his bloodline over Nil. They were brothers in every respect, Nil the older and more adventurous, Teldon the younger and more artistic. “Thanks, Telly!”

  Lelinair rose then. Her face was pale and her eyes were wells of horror as she looked at Nil for the first and last time in years. “So you will finally have your ship that will take you to hell, Nil Ramesis.”

  “Lelinair!” Poladoris scolded her.

  She ran out of the room through the jade arch.

  Nil rose and Poladoris tried to reassure him: “She must fear to see her brother set such a hell-bound sail, as do I, my son.”

  “She is not my sister, lord,” Nil said. “And you are not my father.”

  Nil’s words stabbed Poladoris.

  “I am sorry, my lord!” Nil said. “But I must know her heart!”

  And he ran after her.

  Nil pursued her up the winding stair of the jade Even Tower that they had climbed so many times as children when everyone was fast asleep.

  The last time they had met here, Nil was 17 and Lelinair was 16, they kissed long beneath a crescent moon for the first time. That morning they had found a lightstone pebble on the beach, and now cracked that pebble on the crenellation of the Even Tower. Each took half, and Lelinair surprised Trevin with a challenge: “Everything you are, Nil Ramesis, you owe to my father,” she said. “I cannot think of you as other than a brother, and never as a man, until you make a name for your own house and ask me into it.”

  Those words became the blood that coursed through his veins. It was a mighty challenge to an orphan, and one from which he did not shrink in the ten years since. And in all that time Lelinair had not married, giving him a constant hope.

  Yet now as he climbed the last few steps, he saw her standing atop the jade tower wrapped in a dark blue cape under the pale clouds and looking at him with a burning wrath.

  He went to her, taking her with his strong arms and kissing her. After a moment, after a decade, she yielded to his lips. After another, her lips turned hard, and she pushed him away. “Captain!” she cursed. “How much must you prove, Lord Ramesis?”

  He was dumbstruck.

  “How wrong must I be?” she cried.

  “How right must I be?”

  “I waited! Wasn’t that enough?”

  “You would throw yourself away?” Her fragment of the lightstone gouged her palm as she clenched her fist and struck the jade wall.

  Nil seized her wrist. “The Sea Mare might be our only hope, and only I can captain her. But it will take two years to build her, and I do not intend to die.” He knelt on one knee. “Lelinair, you are everything to me.”

  She looked down at him. “When did you think you would have time for me, Nil Ramesis? After which wave? The next one, or the one after that?”

  “Now. I ask you now. Marry me, Lelinair.”

  “Marry you? So I can be a widow two years hence? I will never marry you or forgive any part of your plans. I will curse them! You have tortured me long enough by proving too much to a young girl’s vanity and never forgiving or forgetting a cut made hastily and not meant to cut a decade deep! I am mortal, sir, and you have spent my youth unwisely, needing to prove all in advance! Yes, you have faced the hard world every day, but when did you think of taking your reward. If I was your strength, your goal, your salvation, when did you plan to have courage to include me in your life? You were too devoted to proving yourself and forgot the reason why, and the reason I was waiting. So now an enemy as great as love you have inherited for all your trials, and a punishment greater than any reward you might have imagined for these cruel years.” Lelinair laughed at him, then, and it was like a knife attack. “Irony on top of irony, Captain Ramesis!” Lelinair opened her hand so Nil could see her jagged piece of the lightstone pebble.

  Nil opened his hand and showed her his glittering half.

  “Let us see if they still join,” he demanded. “Our pride will make an irony of everything if we let it!”

  Nil reached for the stone on her palm, but Lelinair pulled her hand away, closing her fingers. “I will not know the answer now that you plan this voyage of death.”

  “It may be our only hope.”

  “It’s absurd! Ridiculous! Insane!”

  He had never seen her cry. But Lelinair’s face seemed gashed by a ruinous blow of grief now, one he had himself delivered. “I hate you!”

  “I demand we test that stone!” he said. He held his other hand out for Lelinair’s half. “Show me that our love is not whole. And I will leave you forever. Show me the pieces will not fit and I will kill myself, as you wish!”

  She threw the stone from the tower.

  “No!” he cried.

  The glinting stone sank between the courtyard walls, and Lelinair turned away as Nil wept bitterly on her bloody palm.

  “When I look at the sea, I will remember you,” she said. She scowled at him on his knees before her. “You are the tragedy of my life, as unforgiving as the sea that brought you to me and took you away.” She took her hand away. “Go now from me forever!”

  Blox nestled in the high-backed chair of the Mayor of Gwylor as he picked a scab on his nose with sarcastic curiosity. Alone for a moment in the dark Congress Hall of Ameulis, the new mayor rubbed the point of the great wedge that was the mahogany table cut from a single 3,000-year-old tree to form the ancient pyramid spread symbolically in the hall before him.

  With a squeak, the door at the other end of the dusky room opened.

  One of Blox’s chief administrators, Rishen, slipped in.

  Blox watched the aristocratic Ameulintian strut proudly past the empty chairs that lined the triangular table as he approached. “May I sit with you, Lord Mayor, for a moment?” Rishen said, smiling triumphantly as he raised his arms, jubilantly.

  “No,” Blox said, arbitrarily. “Stand.”

  Rishen frowned and remained standing.

  “You are late, by the way, Rishen.” Blox scraped the gray bump of his nose pleasurably with the nail of his left index finger. “New laws shall be manifest. Take notes!”

  Blox glanced through the Long Window of the Hall at the Gulf of Gwylor below. To his amusement, Rishen immediately fumbled for the quill on the table to write notes on the spool of vellum that he carried on his arm to keep track of Blox’s many dictates.

  Blox glanced around the great hall, and noted the aging things that were preserved and hung on the walls of this building Ameulentians revered so terribly much, and it irritated him. There was something he liked to do to relieve himself from the fixed rigidity and specificity of the Hala World, especially in places like this. He liked to blur his eyes, just a little, to see it all melt at the edges. “There are more necessities to attend to,” he said, smacking his lips in disgust as his eyes came back into focus. “We need food, again, Rishen. And medicine and gold for our hungry, sick, and impoverished followers. I believe it is now time to conscript fishers, farmers, doctors, and especially the wealthy of Gwylor, Rishen.”

  “Why not just take food, medicine, and gold, my Mayor?” said Rishen.

  Blox shook his head at the dullness of his supposedly sophisticated servant. “You still don’t understand it completely, Rishen. Neither the power of this office nor the power of pure will rules nature in this crude and stubborn world. One cannot wish or will it to give us bread by getting angry at it or passing edicts. Here, men must decipher Hala’s stubborn laws and pay its many fees of body and mind to bring forth its tiny measure of reward. And yet, for those who are privileged to rule men, the harvest is rich. You see? To own men is the key to power in this sad world.” Blox was irritated as he watched Rishen furiously write notes on the spool of paper
on his arm. “You don’t have to write that down.” Blox looked out the window. “You don’t even need to remember it. It’s not your concern. Loyalty is all I require of you. Ameulis is the key to Hala. And Gwylor is the key to Ameulis.” Blox grinned, staring at the city of Gwylor that was faceted in the glittering window.

  “I see, my Mayor!” Rishen said, his gray eyes wide with admiration.

  “Gwylor shall be made an example for the realm, preparing the way for Nekkros,” said Blox.

  “Yes!”

  “We have done well, so far. Go, Rishen, and tell all the Nekkrosites to post my decrees. By the time the Congress of Ameulis convenes next year, we shall outnumber our surviving opponents as more followers of Nekkros arrive from the countryside and the other cities to swell the vote. This game of democracy is so easily won!” Blox slapped the table with his real hand.

  Rishen bowed before the Mayor and left him.

  All alone at last, Blox laughed obscenely in the dark hall, for there was no one he had more contempt for than his own followers and no one he took more personal joy in bedeviling.

  Leaning back in his chair, he curled his gray lips in a satisfied sneer. “O Ameulis,” he promised. “Soon, everything your weakling king feared to touch lest he do it harm shall be shredded into ribbons of sorrow and ash!”

  Chapter 14

  Here and There

  For seven years Neuvia and Trevin traded loneliness in Hala for their reunions in Wynder.

  They seldom thought of their forsaken kingdom. But when they did it was with misgivings, even though the Ameulintians had, for the most part, left them alone.

  Trevin had raised a new defense, nevertheless, six times on the seas around his island, and six times they met in Windyrnia. And after each incantation the time that they Wyndered together grew longer.

  Yet even if they spent two or three months there, only two or three days seemed to passed here in Hala during that time.

  The last five times, Neuvia had gone to sea in Stargazer and had slept peacefully in the Grotto of Blue Candles, as she called it, guarded by Toy, Stargazer and Gieron’s scepter. As soon as she woke, even as Stargazer took her back to the Dimrok’s bay, Neuvia made a practice of writing down all she could remember on the blank pages at the end of Selwyn’s General Observations.