by Warren Fahy
“Don’t trust him, Tobbs,” Lanning said.
“No!”
Lince came up from putting the weapons in order below and shot a look at Rawley as Bombo rang the mess bell, saving him.
The men consumed a breakfast of potato pancakes with shredded enrid and garlic, apple preserves and eggs scrambled with smoked pork and sweet cheese, along with strong coffee and orange juice. Nil rotated them off their watches to the galley and was glad to see them emerge with improved dispositions.
Sowernut took the crow’s nest, relieving Beenay of the third watch and the monkey-sailor.
Feferl held Jootle in his arms as he took the monkey to his bed after his long vigil aloft. “Jootle’s been sorely tasked, Mister Neery-Atten!” he frowned at the first mate.
“Aye. He should rest.”
“It’s not right he should have been out all night,” Feferl said, crossly. “He’s got the shakes from eating too many coffee beans.”
“Mister Feferl, all of us on this ship will do their part in our survival, is that perfectly clear?” The Creature growled as it came around Lince’s calf and glared contemptuously at the monkey.
“Aye, Mister Neery-Atten,” Feferl nodded curtly. “And your cat serves some crucial purpose, I’m sure.” Feferl turned and strode toward the aft passageway to go below.
Lince produced a stuffed rat from a pocket of his coat and threw it toward Feferl. The Creature snarled and leaped, catching it in its mouth and landing on the deck at Feferl’s heels. Feferl wheeled and beheld the cat attack the toy with bloodlust. “You wouldn’t want a rat gnawing on Jootle’s poor nose while he slept now, would ya?”
“Aye, the cat does its job, Mister Mate. No denying it!” Humbled, he hurried below to feed his charge a bottle of milk from the sweet-goat they had aboard and then he sat with Jootle until he fell asleep in his small hammock.
All took their stations: the second watch at the weather sheet, the first watch port, and the third at the lateen. A rotating contingent from each watch tended the jibs. Every inch of sail was now fixed to catch the southwesterly as Karlok conned her due east against the wind to keep her keeled while making straight for the island. To the south they might trespass the sea of madness recently reported there, and after seeing the Gyre trying to push them south, Nil was even more leery of crossing its invisible border.
Anxious to turn north as soon as he could, Nil watched the gray isle draw ominously near directly in their path. “Mister Carpenter!”
“Aye, Captain!” Rawley’s voice rose through the forward sea doors.
“How long do you need?”
“As long as we can possibly get, sir!” Rawley shouted. “The pitch must set, if you please, before we roll her back up. We’ve only three planks to go on the highest breach.”
“Very well! We’ll give you every last possible instant. But make haste, man!”
“Thank you, sir!” Rawley returned.
“Bloody ship’s carpenters,” Nil growled, and he gave the helm to Karlok as he climbed down the ladder to Lince’s cabin to consult Teldon’s chart.
Zee climbed in after him from below.
“Doctor, good to see you. Have some coffee with me.”
“Thank you, Captain. Of the five men in my infirmary, only two might be able seamen soon. Two suffered broken bones, which I set, and another has a head wound that is still grave. I am doing all I can for him.”
“Thank you, Doctor.” Nil glanced at the island ahead after pouring Zee a mug of coffee.
“We seem to be heading straight for that island,” Zee said.
“Yes.”
“A large beast roams that island, a prisoner of its northern beach, according to the dispatches.”
“So rumors have it, Zee.”
“And yet, we’re heading straight for it, I can’t help but notice.”
“You’re right, again.”
“Yes,” Zee said. “Why?”
“I am giving our carpenter time to complete his repairs so we can head north with the wind and pass its windward side. Then we’ll turn south on the far side with the wind and head straight for the Dimrok.” Nil moved a finger over Teldon’s chart as he spoke.
“Is that an atoll north of the isle?” Zee asked.
“A crescent of coral, aye, closes the island’s northern shore. I hope to avoid it altogether to the north, if repairs are done in time…”
“If not?”
“It seems we’ll have an excellent view of the beast that lives there then,” said Nil. “If we can find a gap in the atoll. But if we have to luff around the island—”
“Eh?”
“If we take her further north against the wind she’ll yaw and breach the repairs, and we’ll soon be bailing water again.”
Zee frowned. “I hope Master Rawley finishes soon.”
“Yes. If you’ll excuse me, Doctor. You’re quite welcome to stay, but I think I’ll go up top.”
Zee swallowed his coffee. “I’m going below.”
All noticed that the Lady Tunn looked ten years younger now, a blushing heat in her cheek and the tiny wrinkles around her eyes smoothed away. Ever since she and the Norlanian prince’s secret rendezvous, she beamed at Rollum with poetry on her lips as he doted on her in return.
The mariners were pleased that one of Ameulis’s finest daughters, especially one descended from Gieron himself, had sparked passion in the heart of a Norlanian prince, and they took it as a blessing. Harm, for his part, sat disdainfully on the crow’s nest, preening his wings and glaring down at the foreign nobleman with green eyes.
The strange island loomed large on the waves, a reddish-gray slab so featureless and regular it was clearly no work of nature. The western end was 100 feet tall and 100 wide—a perfect square. The men saw the white spray of rollers crashing against its walls and now could make out what seemed to be a word carved into its face:
NO
The crew was little comforted to see how close the Captain was taking them to the forbidding cliff. It was clear that if they were going to pass north of this rock, they would not pass it by much.
“Shout if you see a gap in the reef! Hear me, Sowernut?” Nil yelled.
“Aye, sir! I see the ring-reef, broken just north of the island!”
“Just north, you say?”
“Yes, sir! A good passage.”
Nil calculated. “Mister Carpenter!” Nil bayed from the bridge. His voice rang down the forward sea doors into Rawley’s ear.
“Aye, Captain?” Rawley’s voice returned.
“When will you be satisfied, sir?”
“Half an hour, if you please, sir!”
“I’ll give you 20 minutes and not a second more!” Nil rapped on the overhead and took the helm from Karlok, spinning the wheel to conn her across the wind while luffing her north in the troughs.
The island grew, its gray cliff five times the height of their mast, as Rawley’s men continued to work below.
“Damn it, man, finish it!” Nil yelled and pulled them north in the last few troughs before the island.
“We need more time!” Rawley called. “We’re not gluing a vase back together!”
Still heeling the ship, Nil chose to head through the gap in the reef that Sowernut had spotted. They barely passed the isle’s sharp corner with ten ship-widths to spare. And the Sea Mare slipped through the gap in the reef into a turquoise lagoon.
The long, straight wall of the island stretched into the distance off their starboard bow.
The lagoon was clear, and from the crow’s nest Sowernut could not see any place where the reef was too shallow for them to cross, so they continued on.
A beach of pink coral sand lined the island’s long cliff beside them. A favorable wind swept over the island from the south and met them at a steady angle, allowing them to keep the Sea Mare heeled aport.
Those who climbed the slanting deck to look over the starboard rail saw the words stretching in giant carved letters along the length of the g
reat palisade:
NEVER JOURNEY HERE
Finally, the call came from below. “Finished, Captain!” Rawley cried.
Nil sighed. “Very well! Right her, Mister Mate. Half-sail!”
Lince ordered the mainyard hauled starboard and the sail halved as Nil pulled the helm a quarter north away from the shore.
The jibs were dropped and the men aloft clewed the great mainsail as the deck leveled. Now they could search for an exit from this lagoon at a slower clip.
Weary cheers below confirmed that the repairs were holding and the men began balancing her ballast as she streamed over aquamarine waters.
The heat of the noonday sun shimmered in the salt air as they cruised outside the mild breakwater. Between the words “NEVER” and “JOURNEY,” obscured by curling mists, a mass of rock suddenly moved.
“Ho!” Sowernut yelled, more in surprise than fear as he pointed, astonished. After a roar from the craggy mouth of a shambling monolith, the rest of the crew took notice, too.
As if it had split from the face of the cliff, the colossus seemed to shrug and vast arms appeared at its sides.
Robed in seaweed and covered with barnacles, coral, and even a crown of cactus, the colossus shambled over the beach and into the surf. It pointed at Sowernut in the crow’s nest as they approached even as the pillars of its legs waded into the water.
Nil wheeled port to avoid the colossus, which was lumbering too slowly to be a threat, it seemed. The crew of the Sea Mare could see no reason to fear it since they would easily pass by before it reached them.
Lince ordered the crew to battle stations anyway. Senthellzia, standing beside Rollum on the forecastle, nocked a lead-cored arrow in her bow as she glared at the giant.
Encrusted with mussels, kelp and cactus, the stone giant looked like a patchwork monster from a child’s drawing, come to life. Cactus grew on its head and seaweed hung from its broad mouth in great lengths that draped down its body into the water.
The growl of the beast rumbled their bones as it stepped deeper into the breakers ahead of them and a high, desperate cry pierced the wind.
A group of men on the foredeck shouted and motioned toward a small figure thrashing in the sea.
“It’s a lady, Captain!” shouted Overly.
Lince scanned the sea as another scream guided his eyes, and he spied the woman struggling in the water before the oncoming giant: “Aye, Captain!” Lince called. “He’s right!”
Rollum noticed that the maid struggling in the water had long black hair that whipped around her head as she splashed wildly in a panic. She lunged out of the water and the men could see a flash of her bare breasts as she screamed, her arms raised high. They heard another shrill scream as she plunged into the water.
The coral beast lurched toward the woman as Rollum’s eyes lit with fury, and he turned to Senthellzia, kissing her brow. Then he ran like a hunting lion to his bunk below, retrieved his Norlanian sea-board and ran straight across the Green Deck to the aftercastle. She ran to the stop him as Rollum tied the sea-board to the taffrail and hurled it like a discus into the Sea Mare’s wake. Senthellzia was too late to stop him before he dove over the stern rail.
Rollum grabbed the line of the sea-board and slid down until he mounted it. Then he steered the polished wooden shield expertly across the Sea Mare’s wake.
Nil could see what he intended then, and he wheeled the Sea Mare starboard to bring them closer to the panicked woman without passing too close to the giant.
Clutching the edges of the sleek board the Norlanian bore down, steering over the rollers. As he glimpsed the woman splashing in the water, Rollum tightened his grip and swung wide of the Sea Mare’s wake, hanging onto the line with his left hand to catch her in his strong right arm as he passed. Thankfully, the Captain had steered the ship close enough to intercept her.
The beast sent another tremor through the sea as it planted a foot closer to its quarry, standing as tall as the crow’s nest.
Senthellzia stood on the aftercastle watching Rollum jet over the crystal water. Then she looked with mixed anguish at the woman who screamed on the swells ahead. She aimed at the beast but could not find a vulnerable target.
Rollum steeled his eyes, catching only brief glimpses of the woman’s midnight hair and her naked body as she frantically struggled to get away from the towering monster and came perfectly into his path.
As the men on the foredeck saw her, they screamed a warning behind them even as a great howling horn of sound drowned them out from the monster’s gaping mouth.
Rollum only heard her scream as he glided across the water and reached out to her. A moment before they met he noticed the woman’s coarse gray skin that was not human and he recoiled. For an instant out of time, he saw the spongy stump with long black fibers sprouting from the top of a rude plug of flesh with a pink hole through which a jet of air blasted another scream. What had seemed like breasts were no more than pink spots. “Her” arms were plugs of sticky flesh that wrapped around him.
Another shriek emitted from the quivering, spitting hole in the thing’s neck as Rollum gasped in horror. Struggling to look back at the Sea Mare, he couldn’t release the thing in his arms, which seemed covered in some kind of glue.
Sighting the head of the giant beast, Senthellzia’s eye did not flinch, though she blinked away a furious tear.
Some cheered as the gallant Rollum appeared to have caught the maiden but they cried out as he was jerked high out of the water, letting go of the sea-board. He flew through the air before their horrified eyes, reeled in by what looked like a cable of twisted seaweed sucked into the yawning mouth of the giant.
Senthellzia fired her lead-cored arrow as Rollum tumbled upward through the air and finally he saw her on the deck below just as her arrow pierced his heart, passing through him and disappearing down the monster’s open mouth.
The colossus crushed Rollum in the next instant in its jaws—but Senthellzia’s deadly aim had done its work.
The titan fell to its knees even as Senthellzia did as she stared through the rail at the sea-board, skipping on the Sea Mare’s wake.
Drewgor smiled.
The men on the aftercastle tried to comfort her, glaring at the statue of Trevin above, which had not warned them of this wickedness.
They noticed the giant crumble behind them in the surf: the Lady Senthellzia’s heavy arrow had struck something deep, and rivulets of black blood ran from its rocky jowls, staining the foam.
NEVER JOURNEY HERE. The letters carved into the island’s wall mocked them as they passed the long cliff. Nil’s heart was gored by the senseless death of the gallant prince, and he held the helm steady though a good part of his will was shattered then. Sowernut spotted a deep-water gap out of the atoll to the east, and he conned the Sea Mare toward the opening.
Zee went to Senthellzia as she knelt on the aftercastle. She turned and hugged him fiercely, burying her head in his scented orange robes, too proud to show her sobbing to the sailors, who hung their heads now in grief and looked away, not wishing to see.
Nil looked wrathfully at the ugly isle and now he wondered, his hope failing in the aftermath of this cruelty. Why had Trevin’s statue had not warned them of this evil?
“It’s a mean thing, Nilly!” Karlok said. “I don’t see what else to make of it.”
“Perhaps he is dead,” Nil said. “I see no good in a heart that could make this thing, nor in one that would not warn us. Why save such a king?”
“’Twas only the second guardian he made,” Karlok offered, with a pretense of hope. “The Gyre was the first. They seem to be the most reckless of his terrors.”
“How can I lead us to save the soul that made this?” Nil asked.
Karlok put his hand on Nil’s shoulder and squeezed it grimly. “Rescuing the King is Ameulis’s only chance, Nil,” he reminded him. “However thin that chance may be, what waits for Ameulis instead is worse, though it has the courtesy to warn us.” Karlok raised
a hand at the message carved into the cliff beside them. “As do these cliffs, Captain.”
Nil looked at Karlok’s steady eye. “Aye! Alas. He did warn us plain as day, Karlok. This is my fault.”
“We had to heel the ship,” Karlok said.
“Call the crew!” Nil said.
Karlok rang the bell and Nil addressed them from the bridge.
“’Tis an evil thing, Captain!” shouted Lanning.
“Aye, Mister, you’re right!” Nil said. “The same that traps our King!”
“His statue didn’t warn us,” Bultin yelled.
“He warned us.” Nil waved at the cliff.
“Maybe the King is dead,” yelled Sowernut from aloft.
“This is the time we are tested,” Nil said. “The ugliness of this beast was not meant to destroy us but to break our hearts and turn us away. There is mercy in that, though hard to find, for this beast was not meant to sink ships but to sink hearts, instead, and kill all will to rescue those who seem to be in peril. I believe the King is still alive, though without long to live. And if he dies, so do our hopes of stopping the evil that awaits Ameulis. As long as we can save him, we must try!”
“You heard the Captain!” boomed Lince, only half-convinced himself.
There was no ready cheer this time.
The Sea Mare glided out of the lagoon through a gap in the far side of the atoll, and as they pulled south they saw the single word carved onto the island’s eastern end:
GO!
After they passed its corner, they yawed southwest, heading directly for the Dimrok.
At four o’clock a strong headwind challenged Nil’s drive southwest, and they began arduously tacking across the current that was pulled them southeast.
The lateen aided them greatly in this effort, but the current pulled them nearer the channel of ice and fire between the islands that flanked the Dimrok’s eastern shore as they zigzagged across the treacherous passage.