by C. Greenwood
I tried to look back to the shore we had left behind, but it was already lost in the distance. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach, imagining us sliding farther and farther away from Skybreaker and any possibility of rescue.
“Come on. Hurry up.” One of my captors prodded me, keeping me moving toward the back of the ship. The crowd that had surrounded Basil and me when we had first boarded were gone from sight now. There were a few sailors here and there scrambling among the ratlines, and I saw the stark outline of a man on an upper deck, standing at the helm. But most of the crew must have gone below for the night.
I was escorted toward the back of the ship to where a flight of stairs leading to an upper deck twisted around on either side of a cabin. We didn’t go up those stairs but paused before the cabin, where one of my captors pounded on the door.
“Captain, we brought her up, like ye said,” announced the one-eyed man, pushing the door open.
The man with the braids shoved me forward until I entered the room, following the one-eyed pirate.
The interior was warm and almost stuffy after the coolness of the fresh breezes outside. There was a large bowed window in the back of the cabin, and it looked out on the moonlit waves and the white water churning in the wake of the ship.
Around the other walls there were shelves, trunks, and furnishings, including a table holding a flagon and silver goblets. There were rich tapestries decorating one wall, as fine as those from any palace. Looking strange beside them were stained and wrinkled charts hanging in frames on the walls. There were similar charts and papers spread out over the surface of a great desk that stood before the window. Flickering lanterns glowed at either end of the desk, illuminating the room with golden light.
My eyes were drawn away from the lanterns, toward a piece of furniture unlike any I had seen before. It was an ornate wooden frame so tall it almost touched the ceiling, heavily carved up the sides with the shapes of dragons chasing one another. At the top was a rippled pane of clear glass exposing a numbered face that reminded me of a sundial. Below this swung a great shiny pendulum. A soft tick-tock noise was made every time the pendulum swung from side to side. I was so fascinated by the unfamiliar sight that I briefly forgot everything else in the room.
“Time be a remarkable thing, be it not?”
I started at the voice intruding on my thoughts. Across the room, his back to us, a blue-coated figure stood before the bowed window, gazing out over the dark sea.
“Captain Ulysses,” I said, recognizing the pirate.
He didn’t acknowledge my greeting.
“The endless march of time makes slaves of us all,” he continued. “Days cannot be recaptured, hours can never be reclaimed. Even the greatest king in the world, for all his power and riches, cannot relive the past or leap into the future. Or such be the facts as mankind has always known them.”
His speech and accent were not as rough and uneducated as that of most sailors, but his words made little sense. Since I didn’t know what to make of his seemingly random statements, I made one of my own.
“My friend and I would like to be returned to shore,” I said to his back. “You have no right to keep us imprisoned aboard your ship.”
“Right? What has right to do with anything?” he asked. Turning around for the first time, he fixed his glittering gaze on me. He had bright cunning eyes as sharp as twin blades.
Back at the mapmaker’s house, I had been too distracted by my dismay at our capture to pay much attention to the leader of the party of pirates. But now I found that the face before me was unchanged since the last time we met.
Although he was probably no more than thirty or forty years of age, the captain’s leathery skin, battered by wind and sun, made him look older. A pale scar split his eyebrow and trailed down his stubbled cheek. He was little taller than me, but his stance projected the confidence of one used to being obeyed. His broad shoulders strained the blue coat he wore, a coat with long tails in the back that reminded me somehow of a peacock’s feathers.
Considering his unshaven chin and the grime ingrained in his hands, I found myself thinking that his coat was a strange bit of vanity, its front adorned with gold braid and shiny buttons. It must have been fine once but had clearly seen better days. The same could be said for the wide-brimmed hat he wore even while indoors. It had a decorative buckle above the brim, and drooping from it were the brightly colored plumes of exotic birds. Numerous weapons protruded from the wide leather baldric crossing his chest and from the equally thick belt around his waist. The handles of still more daggers peeked out from inside his coat and above the tops of his tall boots.
My eye was caught by a single ornament hooked through the lobe of the pirate’s right ear. The silver decoration dangled nearly to his shoulder and was worked into the shape of a hanging skeleton. Its tiny bones shivered slightly at every movement of the wearer.
I took in all these details with a quick glance, but my real attention was focused on what the captain had to say.
“You look unsurprised to see me again,” Captain Ulysses observed. “Maybe you have a guess why you be here, aboard my ship?”
“I have not,” I said. I didn’t admit that I had had a strange sense ever since our first meeting that I hadn’t seen the last of the pirate captain. Some premonition always warned me we would meet again. I just hadn’t imagined it would be under such circumstances.
“You don’t know?” he asked, his expression disbelieving.
“I realize you have a disagreement with my companion Basil,” I said. “But I don’t see what that has to do with me.”
“A quarrel with the boy?” He waved a hand dismissively. “I wouldn’t have come all this way to settle so small a score. It be you I set out to follow, after you left Port Unity so sudden like. You and me have unfinished business.”
“I can think of none,” I said, conscious of my glowing hand still trapped in the shackle behind my back.
He appeared to guess the line of my thoughts. “Apologies for the nathamite bracelet,” he said, glancing toward it. “I would take it off, but if your powers be as great as I think, you could do no small bit of damage to my ship. You understand.”
“All I understand it that I’ve been taken against my will,” I said. “You have yet to explain what it is you want with me.”
Instead of answering, he slid his gaze past me, toward the tall piece of furniture with its ticking pendulum.
The tick-tock of the pendulum seemed loud in the stillness. What sort of mechanism kept it moving?
“Is it magic?” I asked aloud.
The captain seemed amused at my ignorance. “Aye, it be a kind of magic,” he agreed. “The flow of time be a powerful force, the one thing man can never conquer. Instead, it rules him.”
It wasn’t lost on me that everything seemed to lead Ulysses back to this same topic.
I became aware that we were alone now, the pirates who had escorted me here having backed out of the room at some signal from their master and closed the door behind them.
I didn’t get my hopes up that this might offer some chance of escape. My hands were still bound, the shackle on my wrist still walling me off from my magic. I was powerless to do anything but eye a sharp-looking letter opener, a silvery decorative thing on the edge of the desk across the room.
“Where are you taking us?” I asked, returning to the subject at hand. “I see we’ve raised anchor and left the shore behind.”
I walked toward the bowed window near the desk, as if to get a better view out over the dark waters.
The captain made no move to stop me.
“The question be not to where we will travel,” he answered, “but to when.”
“I don’t understand. What are you planning?” I asked
He came to stand beside me, so close that I backed up against the desk to put more space between us.
“My plan be to correct what should not have been,” he said. A crazed glint came into his eyes. “Wit
h the help of your wondrous powers, we shall reverse the years and return to a moment where the course of the future be undecided.”
It was the speech of a madman. “What you suggest is impossible,” I said flatly. “I may have absorbed a little magic into my hand, but I can’t turn back time. That’s not how my power works.”
I didn’t add that if I had such an ability, I would be using it on my own behalf, not aiding a wicked pirate on some mysterious quest. Whatever event he wished to change, I couldn’t imagine it would be to the good of anyone but himself.
At my answer, the wild light left his eyes and his expression grew strangely cool again. But it was a deceptive calm, the kind that came before a hurricane.
“I suspected you would be disinclined to cooperate with my little proposal,” he said smoothly, as if my protest was born of nothing but stubbornness. “Luckily, it be a long journey to the shores we have set sail for. Down in your cell, you will have plenty of time to think the matter over and arrive at a more obligin’ point of view.”
As if they had been listening outside, the pair of pirates who had accompanied me earlier suddenly swung the door open and appeared at the entrance.
My heart sank as I realized I was about to be returned to my cell. That was what spurred me to make my move. While the two pirates approached, my bound hands fumbled blindly along the edge of the desk behind me until my searching fingers found the letter opener I had noticed earlier. In a quick, secret motion, I grabbed the item and concealed it in my hands as best I could.
No one appeared to notice the move. The captain had already turned his attention away, as if I was no longer there. His two crewmen caught hold of me now and dragged me away.
As I left the warm light of the captain’s cabin behind, I tried not to despair at the thought of the dark cell awaiting me. Now at least, with the sharp weapon hidden in my hands, I had a fighting chance.
CHAPTER SEVEN
On the way back to my cell, I studied my surroundings, mentally measuring the distance Basil and I would have to travel across the moonlit deck if we ever managed to escape our prison. It would do us no good simply to get out. Our freedom would be short-lived without some means of leaving the ship itself. But we were surrounded by miles of ocean. The nearest shore was growing farther away all the time even if we knew in which direction to strike out. But there was the dinghy that had brought us here. If we could find out where that was stowed, maybe it could carry us back to land. I scanned the moonlit deck for signs of the boat, for bulky shapes hidden under canvas coverings.
Unfortunately, my eyes were unaccustomed to the darkness after the golden light of the captain’s cabin. And the pirates escorting me were in a hurry, rushing me belowdecks before I had time to see much. All I managed to do was to note the positions of the crew, memorizing the areas we would have to watch out for in order to creep past our enemies.
I didn’t resist as I was dragged down the same rickety steps as before. Mindful that it wouldn’t take much for my escorts to discover the sharp letter opener concealed in my hands, I didn’t give them any reason to look closely.
Basil scrambled to his feet at our approach. He needn’t have bothered. Our captors had no interest in him as they silently unlocked the cell door and pushed me inside. I watched the man with the dark braids lock the door again behind me, noting the many keys jangling on the large ring he carried on his belt. Was one of them the key to the metal bracelet on my wrist? Or did the captain himself keep that key? There was no way to know.
“What happened?” Basil whispered to me while the pirates walked away. “I didn’t expect to see you in one piece again.”
“It’s all right. I’m fine,” I assured him.
“I didn’t say I was worried,” he answered. “I just figure as long as you’re around to draw the pirate’s attention, they’re less likely to focus on taking their revenge on me.”
“Thanks. I’m glad I could help,” I said sarcastically. “Anyway, all that happened was that I was taken into Captain Ulysses’s cabin. He talked a great deal about strange things and made senseless statements. I’d like to believe he’s a madman, but he has an unnerving way of swinging back and forth between wildness and logic. He wants to use my magic somehow to turn back time. It’s a subject he seems obsessed with.”
Basil was as confused as I was about the captain’s intentions. But at least his gloomy mood lifted a little when I showed him what I’d managed to snatch from the captain’s cabin. The letter opener couldn’t remove the metal bracelet still clamped around the wrist of my magic hand. But at least it could cut the ropes binding my hands to one another. It could also free Basil’s hands. That was better than nothing.
But even unbound, we were helpless to escape the cell itself. We pulled at the bars and fiddled with the lock, but it was no use. Finally we gave up. It had been a long night, filled with exhausting events. Dawn was probably not far off, and we had no way of knowing what the next day would have in store for us.
We lay down on the dirty straw-scattered floor to rest.
I shouldn’t have been able to sleep in such dangerous circumstances. But both mind and body must have been more tired than I realized, because I soon found myself falling asleep. I didn’t fight the dreamy mist rising up to claim me.
* * *
I wasn’t surprised to look around and find myself surrounded by ancient columns, marble pillars that were part of a crumbling structure that had been damaged by the passage of time. I had been to this place before. Ever since absorbing the power of the Sheltering Stone on that awful day when the Ninth Isle had sunk, I had been haunted by dreams of this spot.
I stood in the center of a lonely, open chamber with a tiled floor and no roof or walls. Tall weeds grew up between the floor tiles. Beyond the chipped marble pillars, green hills rolled on as far as the eye could see in any direction. It always seemed to be nighttime in this place, the star-studded sky and crescent moon as constant as the distant chirping of crickets.
The floor felt solid beneath my feet, even though I knew it wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. Not when my body was far away, lying in a cell in the belly of a pirate ship. A cool nighttime breeze ruffled my hair and carried the scent of flowers to my nostrils. Not the sweet-smelling blossoms from the jungles of the Ninth Isle but a subtler scent.
Just like last time, I was alone and yet the chamber wasn’t empty. Strung all around me, filling the hollow space while seemingly connected to nothing, was the now-familiar web made up of hundreds or thousands of gossamer threads that glowed and shimmered in the dimness. I held my breath and listened to the soft thrumming sound emitted by the threads as they vibrated, seeming to pulse with the energy of the lives they were connected to.
Past experience told me if I touched one of those threads I would be drawn into the consciousness of a stranger. Sometimes it would be people with whom I had some tenuous connection, folk I had met, such as the Gold Ship Voyager with the intense eyes that I had briefly encountered back in the Blue Mermaid tavern at Port Unity. Other times it would be some random person living far away, going about their daily business. They had no connection to my life and no awareness that I was riding along with them, a secret bundle of consciousness in the back of their heads. I saw through their eyes and felt through their senses. It was the ultimate form of intrusion upon the unwitting hosts, an experience more unpleasant for me than for them.
Most of the times I had touched the threads had been accidents. I hadn’t meant to leap out of this place and into someone else’s body and awareness. It had just happened.
But now I felt as if the threads were calling to me, each emitting a soft, wordless whisper that invited me to approach. For the first time, I noticed that one tangle of threads nearby had lost their glow. A few still flickered and throbbed weakly with life. But most had gone dark. What did that mean? Did those threads belong to people who had died?
Almost without realizing it, I drew closer to the tangle. I didn’t know what
it was, but those few flickering threads called to me strongest of all, pulling at me as if they had some right to claim my attention. What were they to me? What was so special about those weak threads?
Then somehow I understood what it was. The answer came to me in a sudden instant of inexplicable knowing. These darkening threads were the life threads of the people of the dragon, the inhabitants of the Ninth Isle. I had thought myself the last surviving dragonkind. But here was proof that a few of my people had, against all odds, survived the sinking of Corthium. I didn’t know how I knew it. But I was certain.
And if these threads could connect me to other dragonkind, I had a responsibility to reach across that distance. Even knowing that in the past these glimpses had forced me to witness things I didn’t want to see, I had to make use of my ability now. For the first time, I saw the power bestowed on me by the Sheltering Stone, not as a curse but a gift. I must make use of it.
I reached out to one of the flickering threads and touched it. Instantly I was transported.
* * *
The driving rain lashed my face, and the wind ripped at me, as if trying to tug me off the raft and hurl me into the dark waters all around. Great waves washed over the flimsy structure that held us afloat, the force of the angry sea shaking the raft from side to side. I squinted through the soggy green veil that was my hair, watching my husband’s back as he wrestled with the pieces of scrap timber and canvas we had fashioned into a sail many days ago. The crudely thrown-together craft had held through all the days and nights since the sinking of the Ninth Isle. But tonight it looked as if this storm might be our undoing.
Despair engulfed me as I thought of the food and water that had finally run out the day before. Even if we were able to survive the wild wind and the pitching seas to make it until dawn, our case was hopeless. We were lost in the great ocean with no land in sight. If the storm didn’t take us, hunger and thirst would soon bring a slower death.
