Dark is the Moon

by Ian Irvine

  “I think there might be one flask left,” said Tallia.

  “Not enough to replace all the other cargo, much less our supplies and anchors.” He wrung his fat hands together.

  “Well, let’s sell it and take on some new cargoes before your debts fall due.”

  “No one will give me a cargo now. Bel Gorst has marked me—no one will dare! Ruined, ruined!” He staggered across the gangplank, a fat, sad, down-at-heel barrel of a man.

  “Pender, I’m sure we—”

  “Don’t talk to me—I can’t think! Leave me alone!” He wobbled up the street.

  Tallia watched him go, then turned back to Osseion and Rustible. “Well, what are we going to do about bel Gorst?”

  “Do?” said Rustible, licking his thick lips. “We’re not fighters. At least, I’m not. Take it to the constables.”

  “I’ll bet they’re already in his pocket!” snapped Tallia. “We humiliated him yesterday and he’ll want revenge. As soon as we leave port, he’ll be after us.”

  They talked for half the night but did not come up with any plan, and drifted back to the boat to take their turns at the watch and to sleep. However, when Tallia rose at dawn Pen-der had still not returned.

  “Probably got drunk and spent the night at the inn,” said Osseion, rolling out of his hammock.

  “Probably! He was well on the way when he left us.” Nonetheless, Tallia was worried, and after lunchtime came and went and still no Pender, she went out to look for him.

  She discovered what had happened at the first inn she came to. “Your friend was so drunk that he couldn’t stand up,” said the innkeeper, a bright little gnome of a man. He giggled. “Poor miserable sod, he’d just lost his whole life’s hope. Lucky his friends came for him.”

  “Friends?” said Tallia, fighting to keep the alarm out of her voice. “Who were they?”

  “The best friends anyone could have,” giggled the gnome. “Powerful friends—led by none other than Arinda bel Gorst himself!”

  “And Pender went with them?” she asked more calmly than she felt.

  “Last night he would have gone with the devil himself, if he’d offered a shoulder to lean on.”

  “Where can I find bel Gorst?” Tallia asked.

  “You’re from out of town, eh?” said the innkeeper with a knowing wink.

  “I was born in Roros, but I’ve not been here for many years.”

  “I thought so. No one from Roros would need to ask!”

  “I’m asking,” said Tallia, fighting her irritation.

  “He has his own island. Braggard’s Rock, it’s called, up the harbor across from the slaughterers.”

  Very appropriate, Tallia thought, turning away.

  Pender woke in a cramped cell that had a nauseating dead stench about it. Despite the wine he could remember the night clearly—the flask after flask of cheap wine, the agony of his loss, and at the end of the night the friendly sailors who had helped him outside. He could remember bel Gorst’s dark face smiling with menace, though the drunken haze had filtered that out at the time. Now it was all too real.

  Bel Gorst had said nothing to him, nor harmed him in any way, in the short march down to the wharves and the brief trip up the harbor. Pender was not fooled. The pirate would appear before too long, to torture and kill him in the most agonizing and drawn-out way possible. For revenge, or maybe for the sheer pleasure of it.

  After he had been awake for an hour or so the door bolts scraped and the door was opened a crack. A head peered in, then a slight figure slipped inside. A slave child, by the look of her, a dark-skinned girl clad in ragged shorts and tunic. Her black hair was plaited into a series of handles.

  “Garish ha! Ploggit!” she said in a voice not at all cowed by her surroundings, nor by him.

  “I don’t speak your language,” Pender said, sitting up carefully. His head ached abominably.

  The girl switched to the common tongue of the west. “Bright morning to you, I said.” She held out a wooden bowl, darkly crusted around the rim; within was a gray speckled mess like thrice-cooked gruel. It had the dense, cloying stench of fish preserved by rotting, and it smelled repulsive, even for a man as habitually hungry as Pender was.

  “What is it?”

  “Boiled slubber, of course!” she replied, amazed at his ignorance.

  “You can have it. I’m not hungry.”

  They regarded each other. “What are you doing here?” Pender wondered. “Are you a slave child?”

  The girl scooped slubber out of the bowl with her fingers, eating it with, if not exactly relish, exceedingly good cheer. “Of course not!” she said with scorn. “My father and I are water carriers.”

  She said it with as much pride as if they had been master chroniclers, though it was a low, poorly paid job, in most places little better than slavery.

  “Aren’t you afraid, living on this island of wicked pirates?”

  “There is no one in the whole of Crandor would do harm to a child,” she said with utter confidence.

  “What about me?” Pender said fiercely. “I am not from Crandor but from evil Thurkad, on the other side of the world.” He stood up in a rush and a rattle of chains, trying to ignore the pain in his temples and the nausea in his belly.

  She placidly ate her slubber. The stench in the hot little room was overpowering. “I can tell that you are a kind man. Besides, there is a guard outside the door.”

  Pender slumped back down. “So what are you here for, child? What is your name?”

  “My name is Twillim and I am sent here to befriend you and find out who you are,” she said candidly, staring at him with wide brown eyes.

  “I make no secret of it,” he replied. “My name is Pender. I am a sea captain from Thurkad, trading where I can.”

  “Why were you asking questions at the Customs House?”

  “I am looking for a sailor called Jevander, who was lost from Thurkad about seven years ago.”

  “Why,” she asked, licking smears off her fingers.

  “Because his daughter, who would be about your age, Twillim, asked me to find him.”

  “Oh!” Twillim said, rocking back on her heels. “Well, I don’t know anyone with that name.”

  “It was a long time ago,” said Pender. “I promised to ask about him; I didn’t mean any harm by it.”

  “I’m not allowed to answer questions,” she said, standing up.

  “What’s going to happen to me now?” Pender asked, feeling the tables quite turned.

  “I’m afraid that you will be tortured when bel Gorst gets back,” she replied. “To make sure you are telling the truth. I’m sorry, I like you, Mister Pender.”

  She went out, taking the bowl with her, and the door was bolted again. Pender spent the next day in a paralysis of terror. He could not tolerate pain; in fact had always known himself to be a coward. He could imagine only too well the kind of tortures that bel Gorst would come up with, for sailing was a hard life and sailors’ tales were full of cruelty and torment.

  Late in the afternoon of the following day the door opened and Pender’s nemesis stood there, bel Gorst himself. Tall, lean, with dark-brown hair hanging in braids to his shoulders, a thin, bladed nose offset by rather full red lips, he had a poniard in one hand.

  “Come out, captain,” he said, unlocking the chains. “I want you to see the bonfire we’re making for you. Then you will join me for dinner—your last, as it happens.”

  Pender went, pricked every so often by the knife, his fat face a lather of perspiration. He was going to die a miserable, agonizing, coward’s death.

  Tallia had a busy afternoon, chasing up old contacts to find out all she could about bel Gorst, and why he seemed able to carry out his piratical endeavors unchecked. It was not until nearly midnight that she returned to The Waif to find Osseion and Rustible pacing the deck, anxious but not knowing what to do.

  “I was beginning to think that he’d got you too,” Osseion said, smiling his relief. />
  She smiled wearily back. “I’ve grown wary since the last time,” she said, referring to her capture back in Ganport last winter. “I wouldn’t mind some coffee if the stove is still burning.”

  Rustible went down to the tiny galley. Tallia sat in a canvas chair to take off her sandals. It was a drenchingly humid night and thunderheads were building up against the mountains behind the city.

  “I spoke to Aunt Dacia—the Deputy Governor,” she began. “Family are best where there is corruption involved. And the corruption here goes very high indeed. Perhaps all the way to the Governor.” Osseion was pacing up and down, hardly taking in what she was saying. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “When you’ve finished.”

  “Bel Gorst is wealthy and powerful, while customs is a sea of corruption and the constables not much better. If there is anything to be done about him, absolute proof will be required. Without it, my aunt cannot act.”

  “So we must do it ourselves. What have you learned about his island?”

  Rustible appeared with a pot of coffee and three mugs. Tallia unrolled a chart of Roros harbor.

  “Braggard’s Rock? It’s surrounded by a wide belt of mangroves riddled with snakes and chacalots. Bel Gorst has a great country house there, as well as barracks, slave quarters, storehouses and a watch-tower.”

  The moon came out between the thunderheads. A breeze sprang up.

  “I’ve learned something too,” said Osseion. “There was a ship called Stiletto registered here, but it hasn’t been seen for years. My informant thinks it’s been sold somewhere down the coast. It had a bad reputation.”

  Tallia stared at him. “How bad?”

  Osseion could not contain himself any longer. “As bad as Poniard!” he exclaimed. “It had the same owner!”

  “Oh!” cried Tallia. “Then we know who to ask about Lilis’s father, though I suspect the news will be bad. Bel Gorst is a monster. Poor Lilis! Enough talking! Let’s take a look at Braggard’s Rock.”

  They sailed up the harbor for an hour or two, drifting along the channel markers in the gentle breeze. A cluster of large buildings appeared to their left, lit by bright lanterns. The wind carried the vilest of stenches—decaying blood and offal.

  “What’s that place?” Rustible asked, covering his nose.

  There was a single boom of thunder then rain began to pour down.

  “The slaughter works,” Tallia replied, “and the boiling-down vats beside it. What’s left over, they throw into the harbor, so I suggest that you don’t even put a finger into the water.”

  They sailed around the island, well offshore, though in the dark and the rain there was no chance of their being recognized. Poniard was tied up on one side of the island, at the end of a long jetty which ran onto a boardwalk through the mangroves. There was a smaller jetty on the other side, reached the same way.

  “There’s no other way through the mangroves,” said Tallia, “on account of the chacalots.”

  Out of sight of the island they put down their remaining anchor and tried to work out a plan. “Well,” said Tallia, “we either do it with an army, or just one. And since we don’t have an army—”

  “I don’t like it,” said Osseion. “If someone has to go, better that I do.”

  “But this calls for cunning, for sneaking and deception, and perhaps for my Art too, if they’re expecting us. You’re too big and obvious, Osseion, and you don’t have what it takes to be a spy. Here’s the plan! Dressed in sailor’s blues, I’ll land on the small jetty before dawn and climb up into the mangrove trees, from there to spy out the lay of the island.”

  “Pretty dangerous plan if you ask me,” said Rustible.

  “I can’t think of anything better. Can you?”

  They agreed on time, place and signals, then Osseion rowed Tallia to the end of the jetty. It was empty. She waved and disappeared into the fog. Osseion rowed back.

  The day passed slowly. The time to pick Tallia up came and went, but she did not appear at the rendezvous.

  “Tallia must have been taken,” Rustible said that night, when it became clear that she was not coming.

  “I’ll go looking for her,” said Osseion. “But we need some kind of diversion. Pity we couldn’t get a few of these chacalots to march up into Gorst’s bedroom.”

  “That’d make him hop,” Rustible laughed. “There’s a thousand of them across the bay at the slaughter works. Don’t need to guard that place.”

  “Let me think,” said Osseion. “Is there any chance of sinking Poniard at the wharf?”

  Rustible shook his head. “Too well guarded. There’s two or three on board all the time, and she’s always ready to sail.”

  “Perhaps we’re taking on too much.”

  “We are,” said Rustible mournfully.

  “I’ve got an idea,” said Osseion a few minutes later.

  “Whatever it is, it won’t work,” Rustible replied morosely. He leaned on the rail, staring at the dark shape of the island. “There’s nothing we can do for them.”

  “I’d hate to explain that to Mendark,” said Osseion. “Stay here; keep watch. I’m going for a row in the dinghy. Argis, come and give me a hand.”

  “Where are you going?” asked Rustible.

  “I’ll tell you if it works!”

  They pulled away to the other side of the bay. “Rustible’s a worrier all right!” said Osseion.

  “Ain’t he though,” said Argis. A taciturn man, he asked no questions.

  They found the slaughter works to be lit up, the gruesome business going night and day because of the festival. Osseion went into a huddle with the night manager and for a handsome bribe rented the offal scow, which was almost full, for the night.

  They towed it back to Braggard’s Rock with the dinghy, running out a trail of blood, guts and offal all the way across. Unseen creatures thrashed in the wake, tearing at each other in a frenzy and churning the water to foam.

  “What time is it?” Argis whispered.

  “A couple hours short of dawn.”

  At the small jetty Osseion crept down the boardwalk to the guard post and struck down the solitary guard. He searched along the edge of the mangroves in the dark, even calling Tallia’s name softly, but there was no sign of her. Argis and he shouldered a barrel of offal each and staggered up to the veranda of the big house. The door was open, for it was a hot night. There was no guard here.

  Osseion swilled his offal in through the doorway. The stench was overpowering in the humid night. They ran a trail back to the boardwalk, and emptied the second barrel onto the mudflat, completing the trail back to where the water foamed and the reptilian eyes shone in the starlight, where the vast serrated tails thrashed and the huge jaws tore playfully at each other.

  One chacalot broke away from the others, swimming swiftly through the shallow water, then moving with a sinuous waddle across the mudflats and mangroves to the shore, following the trail. Within a minute a vast pack of chacalots flowed like a river up the bank, snapping up titbits in the grass as they came. They pushed through the open door, finding just enough offal to fight over and to whet their appetites. The house was full of prey—they could smell it.

  Osseion and Argis rowed back to The Waif, where Osseion explained what they had done. A scream rent the night, swiftly truncated. Osseion chuckled. “Right,” he said, climbing into the dinghy. “I’m going after Tallia.”

  “Better make it quick,” said Rustible, who was at the helm. “That lot’ll be right across the island in a few minutes. Wait! How are you going to get back up the jetty?”

  There was a long pause. “We’ll have to use the other one,” Osseion said in a rather subdued voice.

  “You’ll never get past Poniard and those guards,” cried Rustible, tearing at his yellow hair. “Why didn’t you tell me what you were doing?”

  Osseion swore. “This captaining lark is a bit harder than I thought. We’ll have to take Poniard first.”

  “We?”
said Rustible. “I’ve never used a weapon in my life.’

  30

  * * *

  THE CHACALOT

  FEAST

  Tallia landed on the small jetty and crept down to the boardwalk, sweating as an occasional board creaked under her weight. The intermittent moon revealed chacalots dozing on the mudbanks, each four or five spans long with a mouth that could swallow a child whole. The largest eyed her as she went past, waving an enormous scaly tail.

  From the boardwalk Tallia swung up into the branches of an overhanging mangrove tree, the only safe way to get to land, for there was at least one guard at the other end of the boardwalk. She slapped away a swarm of midges, then clambered from branch to branch right up into the canopy, so that she was hidden from below. Beneath her the chacalots were still, but after the sun rose she saw more than one eye on her hiding place. There would be good eating tonight.

  When it was light enough to see, Tallia moved closer to shore, to a perch high enough that she could see a good part of the island. It was mostly open land, with storehouses and barracks scattered along one side next to the wall of the mangroves, a gently sloping grassy hill and at its top a vast house set among trees. She sweated and swatted on her branch. The day passed with no indication where Pender could be. Tallia took out her lunch, settled herself on a branch and promptly dropped both bread and cheese into the mud. Before she could scramble down to recover it a dozen crabs had torn the bread apart and were scuttling off in all directions.

  Evidently there was little work to do today, for a bunch of sailors could be seen kicking a ball back and forth across an open space. People went by occasionally—sailors, officers, guards—but they all looked comfortable with their place on Braggard’s Rock. She was looking for someone who wasn’t—a slave or a drudge who might tell her willingly where Pender was.

  Later a ragged group of slaves began stacking a bonfire in the middle of the lawn. An overseer roared at them periodically, though with two guards standing by there was no chance for Tallia to speak to them. Other slaves hauled burdens between storehouses, barracks and the house, occasionally going past her hiding place, but each time Tallia thought to accost one of them, a guard appeared.