by Silas Post
“Those are lies,” I said.
“One man’s lies are another’s gospel truth,” she said. “The king himself declared the gods nothing but trickster sorcerers. They are enemies of the state by royal proclamation, their trinkets and baubles forbidden as contraband.
“Yours comes from the goddess of captured light,” she said. “I have heard tell of the peerless beauty that is her hallmark. May I?” She reached out, her wrist relaxed and her palm upward.
I hooked my thumbs into my pockets. “Does that mean you intend to buy it?”
“I could spare a sentimental coin for a piece of history,” she said. “An arcane curio to whisper about with thrill and scandal.” She arched an eyebrow awaiting my reply, as if her offer of a single coin could match the value of what my pocket concealed.
“Redelia’s gem is worth that price a hundred times over,” I said.
“Perhaps it was,” she replied, her hand still held out. “Its market has collapsed into criminality. One loud word to draw the guards and you’ll land in the stocks for its mere possession.”
“The king cannot forbid the world around,” I said. “This is a port city, with visitors that will pay a fair coin for a thing of holy workmanship to take home.”
“Foreign ships are turned away,” she said. “Ever since the Victor Coin attack.”
She spoke my name slowly, holding the vowels too long so that her mouth formed a ruby red “O” before concluding my surname is a half-smile. Her delivery of my name to my ears sent a shock up my spine that heightened my senses and started my feet to sweat inside their boots.
“The what?” I asked.
“The Victor Coin attack,” she repeated. “He decimated the pageant and killed the prince. Where are you from that you carry a jewel so impressive and knowledge so lacking?” She narrowed her eyes, catching me off guard by pairing her suspicion with a playful grin.
“Tremantle,” I lied. “But I have been on the road more nights than not and keep to myself among strangers.”
“Well,” she said, “if you can read you’ll want to check out the posting boards. The face of Victor Coin is the best known in the kingdom by now, just after the king, of course. Only a matter of time until he meets his rope, if you catch my meaning.”
“Crime is well punished in Greenloft,” I said.
“Come,” she said. “The precision is astounding compared to those dreadful pageant posters.” She moved her hand at last, forming a fist but curling her pointer finger, beckoning me to follow her across the plaza. She did not wait for my feet to move before turning her back toward me while she walked, swaying with confidence at each leisurely step.
Pinned to her back with a single strap was a musical instrument. It was much like a harp, shaped like a “U” with a single bar across its top and a series of strings pulled taut within its frame.
My feet begged for any direction but forward, yet I could not avoid following this woman. If a poster bore my face, I would gaze upon it and judge the threat it posed. I stepped on, a full pace behind her, careful to keep my hands near my pockets and the holy gem I guarded.
We stopped at a simple plywood board that stood at the intersection opposite Corrow’s statue. There were scraps of paper there offering odd jobs for low pay. One advertised the sale of a costermonger’s cart while another boasted home remedies for man’s most common ailments. And one, larger than all the rest, read as follows:
Wanted! Victor Coin. For the murder of Prince Taron among other crimes. Presumed armed and dangerous. Known bishop of at least one sorceress “god.” Travels with cyclopean war criminal and female goat-beast. Reward for live capture: 300 gold coins.
The illustration that followed was a detailed sketch and highly accurate.
“I wouldn’t stand too close if I were you, Lumbert,” this woman said.
“It’s Humbert,” I replied.
“I doubt that,” she said. “But the point stands. You and this Victor fellow bear a criminal resemblance, the new beard notwithstanding.”
There were too many people strolling idly through the plaza for me to tear the paper from its perch and remove my image from the public’s view. It would draw attention. Suspicion.
This woman, who spoke with such knowledge and confidence, had reached her contentment and turned to leave. Her hips swayed wide as she deserted me and my spitting image, slowly strutting out of my life as breezily as she entered it.
“What did you say your name was?” I asked before she could wander out of earshot entirely.
At first she kept walking. When she stopped, she held onto her cloak before she turned her head, ensuring that not a single strand of her hidden hair would escape her hood. She tilted her chin toward me with another half-smile and a gentle shrug of one shoulder. “I didn’t.”
5
I couldn’t stand beside my own wanted poster any longer and I knew better than to follow the one woman in the city who seemed to know my true name.
Instead, I headed west. This path would lead to the docks, where I could at least witness the ships anchored there and hope to find one that might accommodate a furtive journey to Okkor’s Isle.
Closer to the land’s edge, the sea air was cool and salty, a refreshing respite from the summer’s warmth and the city’s lingering scent of sun-ripened fish. The giant mast of an impressive cargo ship sat dead ahead, with a dark green flag flapping in the wind. It furled and unfurled, revealing the royal insignia with every other breath of wind.
I sped my gait, hastening past the clustered buildings of Telapa’s commercial avenues and into the open where wooden wharfs extended all in a row. Cargo boats, one after another, sat without crew or torchlight, quietly bobbing in the water. The dozen of them claimed half the port city’s piers — and each flew the king’s green flag.
This was an unwelcome sight. Not a single vessel flew a merchant’s ensign. These were not civilian flags for transporting goods port to port, and they surely weren’t commercial flags inviting passengers for travel.
The wharf itself was a challenge to navigate as I pressed on, eager to glean what new information I could about our chances of sailing off. I stalked through a maze of full cargo boxes, barrels, and wooden crates piled at twice my height in narrow columns and sprawling pyramids as if hastily unpacked and abandoned.
A single ship ahead bore a naked mast, its mooring hastily secured by a thick rope that tied its stern to a wooden post at a pier’s end. I crept closer to that boat and a pair of men that stood near it. Their voices carried across the otherwise lifeless wharf despite the sound of ocean waves lapping against the docks beyond.
“It is too late to unmoor,” the first man said. He was a royal guard, much younger than the swollen old men at the southern gate and fighting fit in ways the Telapan guard would never be. “All ships in Telapa’s harbor are subject to royal appropriation, and yours is no exception. You will empty your ship of its cargo or we will throw you in the city’s jail and empty it for you.”
“It’s not that simple,” the man said. “It’s alive. I can’t unload it without somewhere suitable for wet storage.”
If the king was claiming the commercial fleet’s cargo, I needed to know what that cargo was. I crept around the wharf’s edge and found a stack of shipping crates filled with fruits, paper-wrapped sacks of sugar, and sealed canisters of what might be cooking oil. Rations perhaps, to nourish an army on the move?
The wooden crates were sturdy enough to climb, so I mounted them carefully while the guard and boatman argued. His was the only vessel not flying the royal flag and its hull was barely half as deep as the cargo carriers that sat beside it. Ascending the mound of crates to a sufficient height, I saw the contents of this dwarfed boat’s deck: fishing nets, many of them full of fish that lay flat and dead at the boat’s far end, with more still that hung heavy from the ship’s perimeter, trapping entire schools of living food inside those rope-knit webs submerged just below the water line.
Then, at
the boat’s helm, my eyes darted to a net that moved. A long tendril of pink lifted the net it was trapped within. It had a tapered point at its end that led to a long and agile limb, lined with circular suckers on one side. A second tentacle curled slowly nearby.
I climbed another crate and leaned as far toward that boat as I could. Curiosity was too strong a motivator to deny. In the space between those tentacles, a pink shape shifted. It looked up at me.
I gasped at the sight of deep blue eyes half-open on a pale pink face. High cheekbones and a pointed chin framed an otherwise human, feminine appearance, though her midnight-blue lips and long tentacle arms left no question about her nature.
She wore no clothing at all, and when her tentacles tried briefly to support her, her soft pink body slipped and landed flat against the boat’s deck again. Those tentacles were her arms, and they were weak.
The fishing boat’s cargo was a woman, and not just any woman. She was an ocean jewel, a breathtaking creature with delicate features and a dwindling strength, reeled in with a net as though she were a simple mackerel.
“It’s not one of those gods-forsaken forest animals,” the fisherman said, his voice continuing to rise in volume and in pitch as his effort to resist the guard’s instruction met enduring resistance. “It’s a delicacy I can sell by the pound, but it has to be fresh. I can’t cut into the flesh until morning or the meat will rot before it hits the market stalls.”
Meat. I imagined the cruel knife that would sever the tentacled arms of that withering woman. I pictured the people of Telapa chewing fried pieces of her, never knowing the beautiful face that begged for salvation from the fisher’s wicked net.
“Your lost profits,” the guard said, “are not of royal concern. You have your orders.”
He turned and marched off, ending their conversation unilaterally. The boat’s owner stormed away, but my eyes did not follow his trail. I was focused too intently on the aquatic beauty awaiting a livestock’s demise.
With all human attention but mine draining from the boat, I climbed down from the stack of shipping crates and crept toward it. Twenty feet of slack rope kept the vessel from drifting too far out from the pier’s edge. With enough effort, I could reel it toward me, climb aboard, and save her.
At least, so had been my hope.
“Aho!” the guard yelled, now jogging toward me in his green tunic and chainmail.
“Aho,” I replied.
“The port is off-limits by order of Prince Wick,” he said.
“I mean no trouble,” I said. “I seek only to contract a sailor to explore the sea beyond. Surely someone offers passage for hire?”
“All travel from Greenloft’s realm is prohibited on account of war,” the guard said. “Clear the wharf.”
“What does Prince Wick want from merchant ships?” I asked.
“Clear the wharf,” the guard repeated. His hand drifted toward the scabbard that held a sword by his hip.
“Of course.” I tightened my grip on my staff and raised my free hand in a display of contrition. “Pleasant evening.”
I walked slowly from the wharf under the guard’s watchful eye, glancing back only once to steal a glimpse of that fishing boat. The woman inside had lifted her head again, her mouth opening and closing in small movements I assumed were faintly voiced words. Help me. Save me.
“Hold on, my maritime marvel,” I said. “Hold on.”
6
I had not forgotten my lovers outside the city wall, nor my sacred duty to sell Redelia’s gem and purchase safe passage across the blue waters that separated us from Okkor’s Isle.
If there was a way to do right by every woman counting on my valor, I had not yet discerned it. I was alone inside a foreign city, and my isolation only improved my danger. I was a wanted man with his face on full display wherever handbills were posted, with no ally by my side to call out danger’s approach.
Long I paced, allowing my mental millstone to churn and grind despite the lack of ideas it produced. Stalking the streets under mounting duress would not force my imagination to formulate a grand plan. I needed to stop moving and start thinking in earnest. I needed refuge.
One place in every city offers respite from my kind of solitude, a likeminded mob of men and women tossing their lots in with one another and calling their shared seclusion companionship. I headed there now, guided by the warm lights glowing through the open windows of a nearby waterside tavern.
The night was still young, and the tavern only half full. To one side a few women sat together, each painted with more makeup than the most maudlin puppets in my old toy shop.
To the other side, a few men sat with flagons full of frothing ale and plates piled high with rice and herring. They wore the same orange uniforms as the Telapan guards at the front gate, and they boasted the same rolling gut after a work life poor in physical demand and a diet rich in fatty fishes.
A table against the rear wall held a lone man. His head swiveled as he spouted angry words, holding a court of no one at all and gesticulating wildly. When his face turned I recognized him as the man from the docks, the one whose irate protestations could not persuade the city guard to let him sail into the night’s open waters with a woman whose elegant body was a culinary delicacy in his barbaric mind.
And now, my ideas could flow.
I stepped toward the bar counter and caught the attention of a short man with a bald head polishing a large empty glass.
“One cup of water,” I said, “and one with four farthings of your strongest spirit.” I slid a silver shilling across the counter, making clear that the copper farthing of change would be his gratuity.
“That would fill a stein to its brim,” the barman said. “What’s her name?”
“I don’t follow,” I said.
“The woman you’re trying to forget.” He laughed while he filled the cups, then set them down with handles facing my way. “Nasty stuff, rotka, but it gets the job done.”
I sniffed at the flagon of clear liquid and nearly gagged from its aroma. It was briny and scummy with an odor that latched onto the back of the throat and clung there like a foul parasite. “What is rotka?” I asked.
“Fermented cod guts,” the barman replied. “A Telapan original. Fish guts have little use otherwise, so we ferment and bottle the stuff to stop it piling up and throwing the town into a pungent stench. Well, any more than it already is.
“Plentiful, cheap, and strong though,” he concluded.
“Every vice has its virtue,” I said. I nodded my thanks and made to turn when the barman slid my copper coin across the counter.
“Keep it,” he said with a wink. “Never know when you’ll need an extra farthing.”
I pocketed my coin, took both drink handles in one hand, and turned toward my target. He faced the wall with his back toward the tavern’s front door, a clear sign that he wanted to be left alone. It was a sign I would ignore.
“Aho, my friend,” I said, taking one of several open seats across from the fishing trawler’s owner.
“I have no friend here,” he replied, waving me off with one hand. A white bandage wrapped one of his fingers tight, stained with red.
“If you count your chickens before they roost, you’ll always count short,” I said. “Here, a gesture of hospitality from one stranger to another.” I pushed the flagon of rotka toward the man and sipped at my water.
He eyed the drink cautiously.
“The roads here were a ceaseless monotony,” I said. “Your legs must ache from the walk, but this local brew will spark new life in your nerves. I know it has in mine. They call me Humbert.”
The man across the table took a moment’s pause, then smiled. “Dineel.” After downing the rest of his own drink, he turned toward the stein full of malodorous liquor.
“No weary legs for me,” he said. “I am a man of the sea. Or, rather, I was.”
“Retired so young?” I asked. “Your business must have thrived.”
“It w
ould have,” he said. “If the prince and his goons hadn’t stolen my life from under me. They appropriated my boat!” He slammed a fist on the table, rippling the contents of my stein and drawing unwanted attention from other patrons nearby.
“Ah, to fill with soldiers,” I said. “He could lead half the men of Greenloft to his war on Okkor’s Isle with the vessels parked in Telapa’s harbor.”
“No,” he said, slurping down another gulp of tepid liquid. “King Corrow has ample warships at the capital. This is something else.”
“Supplies then,” I said, slurping from my own cup. The water was smooth and chill, but the scent of fermented fish hung heavy between us, exacerbated by Dineel’s every breath in my direction. “You must have important cargo.”
“Squiddy looking thing,” he said. “Real squid is rare in these parts, but I can pass off the tentacles well enough. They’re the right color, and by the time the taste is discovered I’d have been long gone. There would’ve been a fine farthing in it for me if Greenloft didn’t steal it!”
“Your high volume speaks the depth of your emotion, friend, but perhaps the whole tavern needn’t hear it.”
He rubbed his forehead and took a deep breath. “Hoo-boy this stuff is strong.”
“So you came to Telapa for money,” I said, returning to a topic I could work with.
“Rough waters and vicious luck drew me here,” he replied. “I’m not supposed to be in tiny Telapa, I was destined for greater shores! Cosmopolitan cities whose merchant class carries weight with the crown. Where good men with good ships are left to their proper business.”
“Places where they might appreciate an artifact such as this,” I said, placing the pendant on the table. The soft light from Redelia’s jewel was a gentle prism that illuminated our darkened corner of the tavern, but Dineel’s body would shield its view from the others here.
“I have seen nothing like it before,” he said, gazing in wonder.
