by Rob Scott
‘Great dry-humping lords, why?’ Garec asked.
‘Versen asked that same question,’ Brexan said. ‘He was convinced Prince Malagon had gone insane – he said there was no need in Eldarn for an army that size, and unless Malagon planned to march through Praga and the Eastlands to kill everyone they encountered, there would be no reason to amass such a huge fighting force. Versen said any army that size, encamped for so long, would be riddled with disease. Ailments, afflictions and infections would spread like wildfire, and they’d lose more soldiers to sickness than they ever would to an enemy.’
‘Two hundred thousand.’ Steven whistled low. ‘Why?’
‘Could they be slaves?’ Garec asked. ‘Once the Fold is open and that thing, that essence of all things evil is released into Eldarn, could they be slaves, or maybe a source of energy? Maybe it needs souls, warm bodies, blood, who knows?’
‘That may be,’ Gilmour said. ‘Apart from knowing it exists in there, we never knew anything about what it would do when it arrived.’
‘Blood, souls and warm flesh,’ Kellin repeated. ‘Rutting whores!’
‘But that still doesn’t answer the question of the shipments,’ Brexan reminded them. ‘Unless the trees do something to fortify the soldiers.’
‘Maybe they eat the trees,’ Garec said.
‘We won’t know until we get there,’ Gilmour said finally, definitively.
They spent a quiet moment looking at one another, wondering how many more of their own they would lose. Sallax and Versen had been brought back to life, if only for a moment, by a woman who refused to allow either of them to fade away entirely. Who would be the next to fall?
Garec said, ‘Well, the Twinmoon is upon us. If we can get to Pellia and stop Mark before he reaches Welstar Palace, we might be able to use the table to stop the shipments, neutralise the effects of whatever Malagon has already managed to transport and perhaps even to eradicate or disband that army.’
‘You think they’ll go home quietly?’ Brexan asked. ‘Malagon’s Home Guard are humourless individuals who take their role very seriously. It will take more than just us asking sweetly for them to pack up and head for home.’
Garec said, ‘True; we’ll probably have to fight them, and the Seron, but by that time we’ll have the table.’
They drank in silence. There was nothing left to discuss: they would find Mark Jenkins or they would die.
Eldarn’s twin moons, burnt-yellow and silvery-blue, drifted towards one another in the northern sky and as if in deference, the Ravenian Sea rushed through the Narrows to flood the archipelago that sprawled from Pellia to the wind-ravaged Gorskan coast. With the tide rising in Pellia, ships overladen with Malakasian lumber, textiles, quarried stone and sometimes even livestock set sails and tacked into a queue to pass through the naval blockade. Outbound ships were inspected at their mooring buoys, then given scarcely a passing glance as they made their way across the blockade and into deep waters. Prince Malagon’s naval officers saved their scrutiny for incoming vessels. Ships were expected to heave to and submit to agents of the Harbourmaster, the Malakasian Customs Admiral and the prince’s navy. Terrorists, while rare, were either transported to the wharf and hanged for a Twinmoon, or lashed to a quarry-stone and cast over the side to join the pile of decomposing freedom fighters on the muddy harbour bottom.
A gold-and-green-striped banner was run up when terrorists or Eastland partisans had been discovered hiding below decks, or stowed away inside a foreign merchant ship. The little flag was known informally as Stripes. At night, when it couldn’t be seen, a lilting melody, Stripes’ invocation, was piped across the water and a second watchlight was set – a lantern was hung from the bowsprit. Stripes was more than just military intelligence; it was also an invitation to an aven of distracting entertainment. Guilty merchant officers were arrested and shipped off to a Pellia prison, their vessels seized for bounty or, if old and battered and considered next to worthless, set alight, navy crews were allowed – if not encouraged – to watch the conflagration, and to provide a chorus of hoots and jeers as the guilty men and women, often beaten and bloody by now, were transferred to a Pellia-bound naval vessel. Malakasian navy officers, not normally a generous sort, would dole out beer or rum while their crew enjoyed the spectacle from afar.
On this night, with the twin moons precariously close to one another in the heavens and the southern waters rushing north, three Falkan frigates were escorted towards the narrow mouth of the only deep-water passage through the Northern Archipelago. Somewhere in the midst of all the atolls, islands, spits and sandbars that made up the archipelago they would encounter the convoy of textile, lumber and livestock boats sailing from Pellia Harbour. Assuming the helmsman on each of the lead vessels knew the twisty route well enough, northbound and southbound ships would pass safely, though close enough to hail one another without shouting. Should one of the captains make a mistake, running inside a key marker or placing too far across the channel on a difficult tack, the entire group of ships would be in danger of running aground.
Redrick Shen, the raider-turned-merchant-seaman, had been through the Northeast Channel before, but like most first-timers, he had spent much of the journey watching from beside the rail as the lethal rocks and unexpected sandbars passed within a few paces of the ship’s hull. He might have glanced at a chart once, Twinmoons ago, but it had not been his responsibility to navigate the harrowing passage so he hadn’t committed the sequence of geographical signposts to memory.
Now he watched as the twin moons sought one another in the northern sky. They were an awesome sight, the massive glowing orbs sitting low on the horizon, one smoky-yellow and the other glinty-silver, destined to kiss before dawn.
Around him, the officers and crew, ignoring the Twinmoon, backed away. No one wanted to be in Redrick’s field of view when the demon sailor finally shifted his gaze from the heavens.
‘Captain Blackford,’ he said finally, ‘are you familiar enough with the charts to see us through this Northeast Channel?’
‘I’m sorry, sir, but I am not.’ The captain winced, looking as if he expected his insides to boil out of his orifices, or his flesh to ripen into pus-filled sores at any moment.
There was a thin covering of ice on the main deck and coating the lines. It would melt after sunrise, but right now the Bellan glowed moonlit-silver, the colour of cold. Redrick’s tunic was torn and his chest was bare, yet he wasn’t troubled by the icy temperature – indeed, he appeared to be positively enjoying it. He sniffed and caught the aroma of something dank – a swamp, or a stretch of water that has stood too long in the sun. It was certainly not the smell of anything common to winter on the Ravenian Sea.
Eventually the demon sailor blinked and asked, ‘What was I saying?’
‘Uh, you were asking about the passage, sir.’
‘Yes, very good,’ Redrick looked distracted again. ‘Check to see if any of these fellows knows how to see us through – and if they do claim to know the way, assure them that I will hold them personally accountable for every scrape and scratch we get while running north. If none of them feels up to that challenge, hail the Souzett and have their captain guide us through.’
‘Right away, sir,’ he said, trying not to let the pleasure of such a relatively simple assignment show in his voice.
Redrick stopped him again. ‘Did you feel anything odd today, Blackford?’
‘Odd? I’m sorry, sir, but I’m not sure what you mean by odd.’
‘Today, when I finally managed to kill Steven bloody Taylor and that band of milksops he hangs about with. Did you sense something curious about that?’
‘I don’t- I can’t-’
‘Never mind, Blackford, never mind,’ he broke in impatiently, staring north again. He pointed beyond the topsails. ‘Those moons up there are actually worlds and worlds apart.’
‘Yes, sir.’ The hairs on Captain Blackford’s forearms stood up; this sudden contemplative mood made him nervous.
<
br /> ‘But from this far away, they look like they’re about to butt heads. It’s funny what a little distance can do to one’s perspective, isn’t it?’
‘It is, sir.’ Blackford ventured a bit further. ‘Plenty of things appear different when examined from far away.’
Redrick’s more common look of vacuous disengagement returned as he whispered, ‘Yes, they do.’
‘I’ll make arrangements for the passage, sir,’ Blackford said, sweating inside his cloak.
Redrick snapped his attention back to the frigate. ‘Let me know when we enter the passage. I enjoyed that run last time.’
As Blackford backed away, he heard Redrick murmur, ‘There was something odd about those spells… almost as if…’ Redrick turned and strode into the aft companionway, leaving the moons to their rendezvous in private, still mumbling to himself, ‘-would look different up close-’
In the Viennese swamp, something large moved quickly past Mark. It didn’t stop to consider him, as foreign as he was to this environment, but sloshed briefly in the pool at the dark end of the Gloriette, scurried through the bushes on the opposite side of the bridge and then splashed again in the water off to Mark’s left. It was like spilled mercury, quick and insidious.
The entire swamp seemed to gasp when the shadow passed through. There had been evil in here before – the coral snake with its ruined head, the poisonous serpents, the tadpoles moving in that ungainly crawl to feed on Redrick Shen – but those things were the kind of evil one expected from a haunted swamp. This newcomer, already gone, was worse, for this would have been evil anywhere; there was no force of goodness strong enough to mitigate it. And Mark suddenly understood from where Nerak had summoned his almor hunters and his acid clouds.
‘What was that?’ he said, confident whatever it had been was gone already, the chill in its wake weakening.
That? Just a bit of insurance for me.
‘Planning to take up bungee jumping?’ Mark wanted the lights on; he needed to move between two more of the columns to reach the little bridge. It wasn’t far and wouldn’t be long, but he didn’t want to risk the slippery coping in the dark; if he stepped in the water, the swamp’s retaliation would be swift and terrifying.
Some things just look different from far away. Moons, mountains, and magic spells, especially.
‘Where are you sending… whatever that was?’
I’m not sure, Mark, that’s why I’m sending her. Perhaps she’ll rid me of your irritating roommate, or maybe she’ll just eat a crew of my own navy. Wouldn’t that be ironic? Ah, well, you can’t make an omelette without killing a few sailors, can you?
Mark didn’t answer. Hugging the column, the same one Jody Calloway had pushed him up against when she grabbed his crotch on Herr Peterson’s class trip, Mark closed his eyes and waited.
THE TAN-BAK
The tan-bak gripped the brig-sloop’s hull with webbed fingers. The journey had been brief but exhausting. She had paused along the bottom to feed on soft-shelled booacore scuttling beneath rocks and clumps of seaweed. The miniature crustaceans had been tasty, but the tan-bak would need more sustenance to remain on the light side of the Fold. On a previous trip outside her obsidian prison she had fought with abandon, although she hadn’t fed for days. Now, thousands of Twinmoons later, she was getting older and feeding was the only thing she intended to do this time.
Her webbing slipped on the slimy, barnacled planks of the old ship’s belly so she abandoned the webs, sprouted a fistful of talons and dug in, heaving herself nimbly up the side. She glanced at the Twinmoon and her flesh dripped dry as she considered this curious place: wet below but dry and windy above. The tan-bak had come across images inside the Fold – mostly lost thoughts and drifting memories – but had never imagined how it would feel to swim in seawater.
Gills closed as puckered lungs opened. Pupils shrank and toes split into claws. As she clung to the starboard bulkhead, her smooth leathery skin reflected the moonlight. The tan-bak looked like the twisted offspring of a spider, a black-haired monkey and a lithe, sinewy woman. The appendages she had used to locate and reach the ship, now useless, had been reabsorbed into her malleable flesh, vanished like forgotten vestigial organs and replaced by fingers and toes, resilient bones and opposable thumbs.
Almost as an afterthought, the circular tympana she had used to hear the booacore fleeing across the sand ruptured and caved into the side of her head, forming primitive ears. That was better; there was less background noise. Now she heard them: breathing, snoring, rolling over in their blankets. One farted, another coughed. They were nestled together inside a cabin, somewhere below the forward mast, but there were others, just a few, above decks. One stood in the bow, the tendons in his joints creaking with the rolling swells. Another, a woman, waited at the helm; the tan-bak could smell her musty aroma.
She listened. There was another back there, a man, breathing in slow, barely audible sniffs through his nose.
Him she would take last.
The rest would be easy.
She would deploy a team of scouts below to locate hidden defences, weapons or magic she hadn’t sensed while she dispatched the woman at the helm and the rickety sentry in the bow. She pinched one of her fingernails, a barbed talon, and wrenched it off. The pain was immediate and excruciating, and the tan-bak whined, biting back a scream. She had been too loud. She froze in place, listening for the woman or the forward watch.
At the helm, Sera cocked an ear towards the starboard rail and peered into the half-light. She waited, but heard nothing more. She made a mental note to warn Captain Ford that something might be coming loose somewhere below the scuppers.
Oily black blood from the torn finger dripped into the water and a moment later, the first of her assistants pushed through the meaty flesh, and crawled, trailing a length of sticky afterbirth, onto the brig-sloop’s hull. Two more followed, then the tan-bak replaced her talon. The soft sucking sound as it reattached was lost in the wash of wind and water. The huntress gestured to her scouts and watched as three tiny spider-beetles, their exoskeletons black with demon blood, scuttled over the rail and crept across the main deck, searching for the cracks Captain Ford had meant to fill with tar just as soon as he and the Morning Star’s crew returned to Southport.
Before the evening’s attack had ended, one of the tan-bak’s scouts was dead, crushed underfoot. Another found a berth and a folded blanket, where it waited. The third, the most fortunate, had dropped through a hatch onto someone’s shoulder, crawled under a forest of flaxen hair and, undetected, inserted itself into the twisting canal of a sleeping partisan’s ear. An irritated scratch and a shift of the pillows was all the resistance the creature encountered.
Now the tan-bak, matching the ship’s colour and texture perfectly, rubbed a healthy talon over the grainy wood. She straddled the gunwale and leaped into the rigging like a fugitive shadow, looked around and chose her target, then sprouted a mouthful of fangs and dived into the night.
Sera struggled to stay awake. Run downwind had been Captain Ford’s final order an aven earlier; that had been his only order for days now: push north for the archipelago. Tubbs was in the bow, also standing the middle watch. The fire in the watch brazier winked periodically; so she knew he was still moving about, still awake. When the old sailor caught a whiff of her Pragan tobacco – she had no use for fancy Falkan leaves – he would wander back, purloin a pinch and then retake his position between the catheads. The two had stood the middle watch together for more Twinmoons than Sera could recall.
She was waiting for him to join her for a smoke when the tan-bak struck. The creature plunged a clawed fist wrist-deep into her chest and Sera, neither shouting nor releasing the wheel, looked down in amazement, as if witnessing a marvel of ancient magic. Her eyes, half-closed against the cold and wind, flew open as her jaw clamped shut, biting straight through the hand-carved pipe.
A yellowed tooth distracted the tan-bak, who tapped at it with a claw, thinking it migh
t be a piece of something Sera had been chewing, or perhaps even one of the insect scouts, far out of position. With her hand still buried inside the woman’s chest, the tan-bak plucked Sera’s fingers from the Morning Star’s wheel, leaped back to the starboard rail and dumped the yellow-toothed woman over the side.
She heard the man approach before she saw him; his knees and ankles were so noisy, it was a wonder the old man could still get himself around the deck.
When Tubbs reached the quarterdeck, he found the wheel abandoned and the little ship beginning to spin with the wind and the current. He turned a quick circle. He couldn’t call for Sera – Captain Ford had a special connection with the brig-sloop; like many captains, his sense of the Morning Star went beyond the merely tactile and he could sense the tug in a line, the draw on a sheet, the pressure against a plank in the hull, as if the ship was a living, breathing thing. If he called out, Tubbs knew Captain Ford would be dressed and on deck in two breaths. Instead, the old mariner took the helm, steadied it – changes in course were enough to keep Ford awake for a Moon – and continued his silent search for the ship’s navigator.
*
The tan-bak was thrilled with the acrobatics she was able to perform on the shifting vessel. She dived from the shrouds, touched down on the rail, leaped for the main spar and tumbled out of the darkness to tear Tubbs’s throat out with one vicious swipe. Before his body struck the deck she was on him, feeding. The blood was warm and salty, delicious, but the meat – ah, that was something inhabitants of the Fold dreamed about. And inside the Fold, there was ample time for dreaming.
The captain stirred. It didn’t take much to wake him. He sat up and strained to hear anything out of the ordinary. A wave lifted the Morning Star… it wasn’t right. He had left orders for Sera to keep the old ship running before the wind and from the way his cabin rolled over that last swell, he could feel that they were at least a few points off their tailwind.
