The Dark Sea Beyond

by Rye Sobo

  “Drakkan maritime law is clear on matters of the chain of command,” the captain’s dry, graveled voice betrayed his smooth Laetian accent. “Every ship flying a Commonwealth flag must have a captain and first mate. And while we no longer have a mast, nor the flag atop, we are a Drakkan ship. Sergeant Reno Leon, would you do the Delilah Fritzbink the honor of being her first mate?”

  I turned to the master-at-arms, my face beamed with the first joy I’d felt in several spans.

  The massive man laughed as ran his tattooed hands over his blood red tunic to straighten it. He grumbled to the captain, “Not if it came with ten minutes alone with Erista and her sisters.”

  “Why in ten hells not?” The words escaped my mouth before I had even realized I was speaking.

  The brute lowered his head and sighed, “I swore I would never take a command again. It is on you.”

  The captain nodded and turned to face me, “Midshipman Ferrin Alsahar, do you accept command of the Delilah Fritzbink as her first mate?”

  This is the moment Zori had always wanted. The decades misspent on arcane studies, the moving from alehouse to seedy alehouse telling stolen tales of adventures. No manner of hiding at the bottom of a barrel can protect you from the life the Fates chose for you.

  Reno nodded his head from across the table, eyes fixed on me.

  I blew out the breath in my chest. “Yeah, I guess so,” my hands thrown up in resignation.

  The brute shot me a wide grin in approval.

  “Then I do hereby promote you to the rank of Lieutenant of the Southern Empire Trading Company and name you first mate of the Delilah Fritzbink.” The Captain extended his hand, and as I clasped it discovered he palmed an insignia, which he handed off in the handshake. “Congratulations, Lieutenant.”

  ***

  It was already dark when I stepped from the officers’ mess on to the main deck. The sun had grown as lethargic as the half-starved crew in the northern latitudes. The night was crisp, and I could see my breath in the red mage light.

  I climbed the ladder to the quarterdeck. “Go grab some food and rest, Jabnit.” I said motioning to the orc at the tiller.

  “Very well…” he paused and cocked an eyebrow, taking notice of the insignia change on my tunic. “Lieutenant? You rise quickly.”

  He nodded and maneuvered down the ladder and toward the hatch below deck with care. Gone was the nimble orc who danced with effortless ease in the rigging. A span and a half of cut rations led to aches and pains, frayed nerves, and short tempers. Jabnit, ever seeking efficiency and balance, hid the latter better than most.

  I took hold of the splintered spar and attempted to get my bearings.

  The warm light of the officers’ mess illuminated the main deck as Reno stepped out into the cold night air. The deck dimmed again, and he climbed up to the quarterdeck. He leaned against the aft rail beside the tiller and looked out over the dark sea.

  After a few marks of silence he asked, “Any idea where we are going?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “Even know which direction we are pointed?”

  “You know, it’s more of a formality,” I said with a laugh. “I have little say in the matter.”

  “I am glad we both understand that.”

  “You think that’s why Jabnit likes it up here?”

  “In times of extreme stress, the mind looks for anything normal to grasp hold of, a way to wrestle control back from the chaos,” he said. “After one bloody battle I once saw a man strip down and take a bath in the town fountain.”

  “What?”

  “He said he needed to get clean. To him, it was the only part of his world he could control at that moment. Trust me, the alternative is worse.”

  “Why did you turn down the first mate?”

  In place of an answer, Reno looked over the water. It was the same look I sometimes got from Dem when we would talk about his campaigns.

  “My mother always wanted me to join her in the family business,” I said, hoping the change of subject would bring Reno back from wherever my abrupt question had sent him. “She hoped, one day maybe a hundred years from now, I’d take over Southern Empire when she decided it was time to try something new. Father hoped I would become an Archmage at the University like him. He was so disappointed when the mages assigned me to Illusion.”

  “And what did you want to do?” the soldier asked, turning his attention from the dark horizon.

  “Drink and fuck,” I said with a chortle.

  Reno snorted at my honesty. “If I had the coin your family has, there would not be a dry keg or a straight-legged woman in the Commonwealth.”

  “Believe me, I gave it my best go,” I said. “But I haven’t seen a stray pin from my family in years. I wanted to prove I could make it on my own, that I could do whatever I wanted, without the family wealth. I slept in a piss-soaked bed above the Rusted Sextant or the room of whichever woman or man I’d, uh, befriended the night before.”

  Reno cocked an eyebrow at me.

  “I wanted to be an adventurer,” I continued, “like the heroes of the Age of Legend I read about. Go to distance lands, fight great evils, rescue the damsel in the tower.”

  “In my experience, the damsel can rescue her own damn self,” Reno said.

  “I wanted to be a soldier, like my best friend, Dem,” I said. “Lead missions to bring food and supplies to starving farmers in the Outer Islands.”

  Reno bellowed a laugh, “Maropret? Is that what they told you back in Drakkas Port?”

  “Sure, Dem told me all about how the army brought food and medicine to Maropret to help the starving farmers,” I said.

  “Listen, I do not know about your friend Dem, but that’s not how I remember Maropret,” Reno said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The farmers on Maropret were starving. The island had been in a drought for two years before we ever arrived. Food and supplies were being shipped in by merchants, but the Vizier of Maropret decided to hoard the grain, meats, and medicines, dispersing them only to the noble families of the island. The month before we arrived, the riots began. Starving farmers, merchants, women, and children,” he said.

  “So you arrested the Vizier?” I asked.

  “You do not send ten ships filled with seasoned warriors and a battle-dressed dragon to smack a Vizier on the fingers and hand out bags of grain,” he said.

  “My column was the first on the beach when we arrived. The dragon had already begun passes over the island. It torched dozens of farms, homes, whatever it could find.

  “I remember there were no birds, no gulls around the port. No dogs barking as we marched inland. No cats around the warehouses hunting mice. They ordered us to march to the Vizier’s Palace, so that is what we did. Rioting is illegal in the Commonwealth, so is looting. We cut down bone-thin farmers like stalks of wheat in Panis. In one home…”

  Reno paused abruptly. I realized the brute was tearing up.

  “In one home we found the foot and lower leg of a child next to a hearth. A woman standing over a fire, turning a spit with a roast on it. Children, some as young as Cort, wore pots and pans as armor, wielding kitchen knives against trained soldiers. I had to give the order to my men. They never stood a chance.

  “The ruthless General Aurellis replaced the gluttonous Vizier. We executed men as young ten summers. The general handed women as young as eight summers over to the soldiers. ‘We must maintain the island’s population,’ they told us. We wintered in Maropret.

  “The new year saw rain for the first time in three years. My term was up by the time I returned to Drakkas Port. I resigned my post and drank my pay, hoping I could forget what I had seen, what I had done. But you cannot forget such things. By the time I sobered up, I was on an Empire ship in the middle of the Azurean.”

  The knot in my stomach tightened. I wanted to vomit, but my stomach wanted desperately to hold on to the few scraps of stale bread it had. “But all those stories from Dem,” my voi
ce shook as I spoke.

  “We tell our loved ones what they need to hear sometimes,” he said, “because we could never bear what they would think of us if they knew the truth.”

  Reno let out a breath that held the weight of years of unspoken truths. “I swore to myself I would never take a command again.”

  I stood in silence at what this truth could mean. Did that mean that Dem—

  “Mast off the larboard bow,” the cry ripped me from my thoughts.

  “I have a bad feeling about this, Ferrin,” Reno said. “Remember—yili, sebi, agoti.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “What do you mean you have a bad feeling?” I scanned the dark horizon looking for the masts.

  “Do you know many fishermen that head out after dark?” Reno said.

  “She’s a sloop,” Tredway shouted from the partial forecastle. “Fifty furlongs out and closing.”

  “This could be good. We’re saved,” I said.

  “This is not the Commonwealth. We have to assume they are pirates,” Reno said. “Tredway, do you see any flags?”

  “No sir,” the lookout shouted.

  “To arms!” Reno bellowed. “Get your asses topside and be ready to fight for your meager lives.”

  “They could be friendly,” I said.

  “Forty furlongs.”

  “If they are friendly,” Reno said, “then they will understand our caution.”

  The crew clambered up the ladder onto the main deck, each with a blade or two in hand; seven in all—all save Tomas Flores. He stayed below deck in his cabin.

  Each of the crew was sinewy. There wasn’t a man among us who hadn’t lost a stone or two since the storm. After eleven days of half rations, even I could count my ribs.

  Captain Azpa burst through the hatch from his quarters and seemed to climb to the quarterdeck in a single bound.

  “Reno to the forecastle,” the Captain shouted. The massive former soldier leaped from the quarterdeck and cleared the main deck in the blink of an eye. With the eyepatch over his eye, two spans of beard growth, and the pair of sabers in his belt, the captain cut a fearsome image, like the sailors of legend. “Ferrin, you stay here with me. If they so much as scratch their nose and you did not expect it, you are to burn that ship to the waterline. Understood?”

  “Yes sir,” I said. My hands shook as I tightened my grip on the splintered tiller.

  “Thirty furlongs.”

  “Breathe deep,” Captain Azpa said. “Clear your mind. Focus.”

  “Ten furlongs.”

  I took a deep breath of salty air and felt the rocking of the waves. For the first time in what seemed like a span, my mind was clear of everything except the sea and the waves.

  “Ho there!” a voice shouted from the other ship as it drew close. An older man stood on the bowsprit of the sloop holding the rigging with the left hand and waving with the right. His skin was as pale. Even after the darkening from the sun, he was paler than anyone I had ever met. The waving man wore a dark woolen shirt and tufts of gray hair poked from under a dark, wide-brimmed hat.

  Three other ghost pale men stood on the deck of the small ship amid nets, barrels, and trappings of a fishing vessel.

  What a waste of a good, fast ship.

  “We saw your ship just before the sun went down,” the pale man spoke an older, broken dialect of Imperial through a thick accent.

  I’ve heard that accent before.

  “Took you for derelict until we saw lamps after dark. I am Tolek. This is the sloop Pomsta. That is Stas, Nik, Ger, and Ewa on stern,” Tolek pointed to each of the crew. The last, the navigator, was a slender woman with dark, stringy hair down to her waist.

  “We are the merchant cog Delilah Fritzbink,” Claudio bellowed out in his now raspy Laetian accent. “I am Captain Claudio Azpa. What are your intentions, Pomsta?”

  The sloop floated a dozen fathoms from the rail of the Fritzbink. My eyes darted from one man to the next, looking for any sign of hostility. Each of the pale men stood empty handed though two had knives tucked into their belts. The woman at the helm moved frantically to keep the two vessels close without a collision.

  “Food and aid,” Tolek said. “Our island is close. Ledeni has a safe harbor for repairs.”

  Several of the crew looked to the Captain and waited for his response. Claudio exhaled and nodded.

  “Well met, Pomsta. We could use the help,” Claudio shouted. The men let up a cheer and tucked their blades into sashes and scabbards.

  “The current is not so strong beyond those rocks,” Tolek shouted. “Is your rudder damaged?”

  The rocks he pointed to were only quarter furlong off the larboard bow. I pushed the tiller, and the ship glided larboard toward the rocks.

  The Pomsta moved behind and circled around to our starboard side. As soon as the Fritzbink passed out of the current, she slowed and drifted in the dark water. At the captain’s order Fawz and Elazaro dropped mooring lines to the smaller ship.

  While two of the pale men tied down lines, Kane Cloud, the large Aeromonian sailmaker slid a plank out to the sloop. Tolek climbed the plank, followed by Stas, who carried a bag.

  “Permission to come aboard,” Tolek said at the top of the plank. The fisherman stood a head taller than the Aeromonian, perhaps eye-level with Reno.

  “Granted,” Claudio said, hand outstretched to greet the fisherman. “Welcome aboard the Delilah Fritzbink, or what is left of her. This is my first mate, Gustavo Blanco, and my master-at-arms, Reno Leon.”

  Reno and I nodded.

  “I heard there were small people in the Dragon Lands,” Tolek said. “I never thought I would meet one.” He bent low to inspect me closer. At arms distance I could see his hair was not white, but a golden color. His eyes were the same color as the sky, and though wrinkled by the sun, he was much younger than he appeared.

  “Gnome. We’re called gnomes,” I said and shook his massive hand.

  “Good to meet you, Lieutenant Blanco,” he said before he stood back to his full height. “We have fish, bread, and wine. You all looked half-starved. In morning, we navigate rocks to Ledeni. Tonight, we feast, yes?”

  Stas set the sack down. Kane and Tredway took a step back and reached for their blades. Stas held out a hand to ease the sailors, then opened the sack to reveal fresh bread and bottles of wine.

  The men of the Fritzbink clapped each other on the backs and cheered. It would be the first full meal of fresh food in two spans, perhaps closer to a month.

  Two more men soon climbed the plank, each with crates of fresh fish. One had an oud-like instrument strapped to his back. Both pale men wore large smiles as they set the food on our deck.

  “Niva demands we care for strangers,” the youngest fisherman said. He produced a stack of wooden platters and served a fish with the bread.

  “Niva? Goddess of winter,” I asked as the men huddled around fishermen.

  “THE goddess,” said the man with the oud. His long, dark beard swayed as spoke. “There is only one goddess and we know her as Niva. She is light. She is good.”

  The fishermen passed out wooden cups to each of the crew and filled each with wine to overflowing.

  I motioned to the man with the oud and after a moment of hesitation he handed the instrument to me.

  It was well-crafted, an instrument too nice for an average fisherman.

  I played the first chord of Drakkan Ladies, considered our hosts, and changed to the more celebratory Off Laetian Shores.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The sun beat down on my face as I awoke. My head throbbed with pain and shoulders ached. I opened my eyes to find I was face down on the deck, my hands and feet bound behind my back. Those fuckers.

  The sun was high overhead, and I could hear water lapping the side of the ship. We are moving. The cry of a gull cut through the silence. We’re close to land.

  I looked around and could see other members of our crew bound and gagged on the deck near me. Most looke
d bound with hempen line, though Reno wore iron manacles around his wrists.

  “The small one stirs,” the graveled voice of the bearded pirate said somewhere behind my back.

  “Pick him up,” Tolek said.

  I felt a pair of hands grab me, lift me off the deck, and place me down on my knees. Claudio was bound beside me, a dark bruise formed on his face, and dried blood ran down from his mouth and stained the deck.

  Tredway lay in a heap at the base of the ladder near the forecastle. He was on watch last night and had forgone the wine. His throat was slit, and the crimson pooled around his body.

  “Lieutenant Blanco,” Tolek said. “Tell me, what treasures are the Drakkans transporting this far north?”

  “Fuck you.”

  A hand gripped my hair. The bearded pirate stepped around from behind and drove a punch into my stomach. Doubled over with the pain, I concentrated on the waves. I would need to heal myself.

  “Forgive me,” Tolek said, his demeanor calm, cold even. “My Imperial is out of practice. What cargo do you carry on your ship?”

  “Chisels so we can break off the ice to get at your mother’s frozen cunny,” I said. I waited for the hand to grab my hair again, but it never came. Instead a massive boot connected with my jaw, and my vision went black.

  ***

  I came to again as my body was thrown against something hard and metallic. My jaw hurt and my left eye was swollen shut. I tried to concentrate on the sea, a desperate attempt to build my yili. Nothing. I couldn’t hear the waves or feel the rocking of the ship. It was dark. I was in a cage. Somewhere.

  I sat motionless, my body rocked as though it missed the sea. I set my sebi inward, took my own yili and focused it on my wounds. With a word, the swelling subsided, and I could see. Another and my jaw set with a flash of excruciating pain. My hands still tied behind my back.

  The cage was a tight cube, my height in any direction. It was inside a cramped wooden structure, a shed or a shanty. The tight space filled with a foul stench. Nothing moved—the walls, the floor—it was an odd sensation. I must be on land, their island perhaps? It was strange how uncomfortable I felt on land after a little more than a month at sea.