Frostgrave: Ghost Archipelago: Tales of the Lost Isles

by JOSEPH A. MCCULLOUGH

  Jondan just smiled at me.

  ‘Not all of nature is understood,’ he said, ‘but it is all wondrous.’

  I shrugged. He could have it his own way, but I wasn’t convinced. Magic worried me, and for a very good reason. Marta’s legacy had given me a healthy distrust of it since the very first time I had tried to use my inherited powers, and had ended up screaming on the floor for an hour afterwards.

  ‘Hallan, sound the depth,’ I heard Erik order.

  A moment later we had to move back to admit Hallan to the space at the prow of the ship, with her long-weighted rope in her hand. She was a big, burly woman, with more years at sea than I had been alive. She threw out the rope and hauled it back, and called out numbers to Erik that meant nothing to me. He nodded and barked orders, and in the rigging Headhunter and Francis pulled ropes and furled the sail.

  Dancing Girl slowed, and again Erik turned the wheel and called for the depth. This mysterious dance of ship husbandry continued for some time, until I was bored and the shoreline was less than a hundred yards from starboard.

  ‘Drop anchor,’ Erik said, and it was done.

  I leaned on the rail and looked at the beach. The sand was pale, almost white, and beyond it the jungle rose up in a wall of impenetrable vegetation of so dark a green it was close to black. Ropes creaked and boards flexed underfoot, and the breakers washed against the shore with a steady rhythm. It was hotter than ever now, the beating sun making sweat course down my face as I stared at the beach. One thing I couldn’t see was gold glinting on the sand.

  ‘Lower the boat,’ I ordered, and Francis and Hallan set to it while Headhunter stayed in the rigging, making things fast I could only assume. I know little of seamanship, as I said.

  Eventually he dropped down to the deck as the boat was settling into the swell beside Dancing Girl.

  ‘Done, boss,’ he said.

  I nodded as though I knew what had been done, and why. I would have hated to shatter anyone’s illusions of my competence, after all.

  ‘Where’s Iain?’ I asked.

  ‘Bilges,’ Erik said. ‘It’s calm enough here, but he’ll be on the pump for a while before we’re dry again.’

  ‘Aye,’ I said, pulling a face.

  If I came home with enough gold, I promised myself, the first thing I would do was buy a ship that didn’t leak. Well, perhaps the second thing.

  ‘He can hold the ship while we’re ashore,’ Erik suggested, and I nodded.

  He was a good man, was Erik, and a better first mate. He had the knack of telling me what needed to be done in a way that sounded like he was simply echoing thoughts I had already had.

  ‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘The rest of you in that boat, before anyone else turns up and beats us to it.’

  The men and women of my crew swarmed down the rope into the boat, and I followed with somewhat less skill but a great deal of enthusiasm. Gold, just lying on the sand!

  Francis and Headhunter put their backs to the oars and the boat pulled away from Dancing Girl, bouncing over the waves in a way that made me regret the salt fish I’d eaten for lunch that day. When the shallow keel scraped on sand at last we jumped out into the surf and hauled the boat up the beach, above the seaweed-marked line of the high tide.

  I stretched my back and looked around me, feeling fresh sweat break out on my face. The heat was suffocating even at the shore, seeming to roll down the beach from the dark line of jungle. I wiped my sweating hands on my britches and looked around me. My five companions looked similarly uncomfortable, all except Jondan, who was already digging enthusiastically in the sand with the trowel that was always at his belt.

  ‘Found any gold yet?’ Melissa asked him, her keen eyes bright with greed in her dark face.

  ‘The pattern of the mica is interesting,’ Jondan said, more to himself than her, and bent over his growing hole with obvious fascination.

  Melissa had already lost interest, and went to stand beside Erik on the shoreline.

  ‘Now what?’ Headhunter asked.

  He was a huge man, his arms rippling with muscle as he lifted them to shade his eyes with both hands.

  ‘Now we explore,’ I said.

  The beach itself was featureless and sadly devoid of nuggets of gold, but then rumours always exaggerate.

  ‘Do you hear something?’ Hallan asked suddenly. The big woman was staring intently at the dark line of the jungle, a frown on her sour face. ‘Sounds like drums.’

  ‘Drums?’ I asked her. ‘Why would there be…’

  The words died in my throat as I realised I could hear it too. It was definitely drums, and it was getting nearer and louder by the moment.

  Erik swore and unsheathed his shortsword, and a moment later the rest of my crew had their blades in their hands too. Except for Jondan, who was still busy digging, and me, who was almost paralysed with fear.

  Maybe they’re friendly, I told myself as they burst out of the green.

  They weren’t friendly.

  One look at them was enough to tell me that. A second look told me just how many of them there were.

  They were human, or thereabouts, but that’s where their similarity with us ended. They were almost naked, the lot of them, and brandishing a wide variety of sharp things. Their weapons ranged from what looked like wooden paddles edged with sharks’ teeth to wickedly cut flints lashed to branches. No match for our good steel swords, of course, but then there were only seven of us and that was if you counted Jondan. There were at least forty of them and they were coming on at a dead run, whooping and snarling like animals.

  Oh gods.

  ‘Brace for attack!’ Erik roared, lifting his sword high.

  All the hells let loose at once.

  The tribal warriors were on us in seconds, screaming for blood with their primitive weapons crashing against my crew’s blades. These were sailors not knights, more used to tavern brawls than facing a mass charge of armed men. Francis went down almost at once, his head split open by a crude flint axe.

  Jondan was on his feet now and hurling rocks out of the ground at the tribesmen, but it wasn’t enough. Headhunter roared and swung his blade, decapitating one tribesman and taking another’s arm off on the backswing, but it was no good. There were too many of them. Melissa was falling back already, blood streaming from a long cut on her arm, and Erik was trying to fight off three men at once while Hallan fought like a woman possessed and hopelessly outnumbered. Only a miracle could save us now.

  A miracle, or a superhuman.

  A Heritor.

  Oh gods, oh gods, oh gods…

  There was simply no other way, was there? I took a deep, deep breath, and called on my inheritance.

  Power roared through my body like a summer storm at sea.

  My muscles swelled, bursting the seams of my thin linen shirt. I felt my eyesight become keener, my senses come alive with an almost feral awareness. I could smell the salt tang of the sea, the stink of unwashed bodies and the steaming rot of the jungle. Time seemed to slow, the tribesmen now appearing to move as though wading through molasses. The power was like a drug, singing in my blood.

  With it came the pain, but that was nothing compared to the hatred that washed over me. The ferocity, the desire… no, the need to kill.

  The world washed red.

  I unsheathed my blade and severed a head in the same movement, ran one man through and kicked another hard enough to break his spine. I roared.

  This was Marta’s legacy.

  * * *

  I was lying on the shoreline, screaming.

  The pain!

  They call it blood burn, those who have never experienced it. Heritors have been studied by physicians, of course, those of us who carry the cursed blessing of our inheritance from the original few who drank from the Crystal Pool. I read once, in a medical text, a description of how the sensation is akin to one’s blood growing hot within the veins. If only that were all!

  My body was wracked with agony, every vein
bulging through my skin and feeling as though it were filled with liquid fire.

  ‘Shhhhh now, it’s done,’ Jondan said, and I felt him mop my fevered brow with a cloth that was wet with seawater.

  Whether his earth magic had some unknown healing powers or if the fit had simply burned itself out I didn’t know, but I felt myself beginning to recover. I looked up at the sky and saw that the sun was setting. Some three hours must have passed since we had landed on this island of the Ghost Archipelago.

  I forced myself up into a sitting position and stared at the carnage I had wrought. The white sand was black with blood and littered with corpses.

  ‘Twenty-two,’ Jondan said quietly, saving me the effort of counting. ‘Twenty-two tribesmen, dead at your hand. I got a couple with my rocks, and Erik and Hallan and Headhunter gave good account of themselves, but the butcher’s bill is yours to pay.’

  ‘What of Melissa?’ I asked. ‘Francis?’

  ‘Francis is dead,’ he said. ‘Melissa is wounded, but I’ve patched her up as best I can. She’ll live.’

  I nodded, and blew a sigh out through my cheeks.

  ‘And who are they?’

  ‘Ah,’ Jondan said. ‘Yes.’

  ‘What in the hells does “yes” mean?’

  There was a group of figures standing in the shadow of the jungle, watching us. They were men, dark-skinned and dressed in leather. Each had a bronze-headed axe at his hip, but none were drawn against us. Yet.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jondan admitted. ‘They came while you were… were in your other aspect. Seven hells Marek, three years I’ve known you and you didn’t tell me you were a Heritor?’

  ‘It’s not something I’m proud of,’ I muttered. ‘What do they want?’

  ‘Erik spoke with them,’ he said. ‘Apparently they saw you fight, and now they want to show us the way to their city of gold.’

  ‘Gold?’ I sat up sharply, and instantly regretted it as a fresh wave of pain battered my head. ‘A city of gold?’

  ‘Hmmm,’ Jondan said. ‘So they say. Do they look trustworthy, to you?’

  I shrugged. This was a strange land, one that vanished for centuries at a time and returned on a whim, a land made of islands that didn’t even stay in the same place from one day to the next. Who was to say what an honest face looked like, in a place like this?

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘Help me up.’

  Jondan put an arm under my shoulders and heaved me to my feet, and I retrieved my fallen sword and sheathed it at my hip. I spared a look for Francis’ body, but there was little enough to be done for him now.

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Come on then.’

  The dark men led us into the jungle while dusk gathered around us. The heat was so oppressive that my entire body felt slick with sweat, a thick liquid coating on my skin that made my clothes stick to my back and chafe under my arms. I could hear monkeys chattering somewhere in the canopy above.

  I was aware of my crew hanging back from me, of the nervous glances they passed between them. None of them had known, of course. None of them had known what I was, what I could do. I sensed a new-found respect for me amongst them, and something else too.

  A fear.

  Everyone knows that Heritors exist, of course, but no one expected to ever meet one. Much less be led by one, on an adventure such as this.

  Only one of the natives appeared to be able to speak the trade tongue, albeit haltingly, but he seemed happy to talk with me while we waded through the steaming, swampy terrain. Great ropes of plant life hung from the twisted boughs of the trees, alive with huge, pale spiders. In the thick, greenish waters around our ankles worse things moved, always just out of sight.

  ‘We are Dricheans,’ he told me, and his dark eyes looked at me as though that word should mean something to me. ‘Javan will welcome you, man from ship.’

  ‘What are Dricheans?’ I was forced to ask.

  He made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a snarl. I swiped at a dragonfly as big as my palm, sending it coruscating into the steaming undergrowth.

  ‘Warriors,’ he said. ‘Overlords. Stone city men. We are their rangers.’

  ‘And you’re… friendly?’

  ‘Warriors,’ he said again, and nodded. ‘You great warrior, we see. We watch. You kill many Tribals. We respect that.’

  ‘There is a city of gold, you told my man?’

  ‘We have great gold,’ he said proudly, nodding his head as he spoke. ‘Much gold. Much weapons. Great warriors.’

  ‘And you don’t like the tribesmen?’

  ‘No one likes them,’ the man said. ‘They are savages. Cannibals. No one like. Drichean make war, but Tribals are many, and hidden. You kill many Tribals. Dricheans respect you.’

  There was that, I supposed. I’d rather have their gold than their respect, but it was a good start. This talk of a stone city resonated with family legend. Marta Price had found the Crystal Pool in a lost city of stone, I remembered. Uninhabited then, to be sure, but a lot could change in two hundred years.

  ‘Where is this stone city?’ I asked him.

  ‘Not far, not far,’ he said. ‘Close now. We scout, we show the way.’

  Scouts…

  ‘Say,’ I said, as though it was an afterthought, ‘you rangers must have been all over these islands. Have you ever heard of a Crystal Pool?’

  The Drichean stopped in his tracks. The look he turned on me was like razors.

  ‘No.’

  I swallowed. My question had angered him, that much was plain, and I didn’t want to make an enemy of these men. Not now they had led us deep into their own country.

  ‘It’s nothing, really, I’m sure,’ I said. ‘Just something I heard about back home, that’s all.’

  ‘Forget about that,’ he said. ‘You forget all about that, man from ship. That knowledge is not for you.’

  I frowned, but had little choice other than to accept his words.

  ‘So, where’s this city then?’

  ‘Too late, too late now,’ he said. ‘Camp for night. Find dry ground. Light fire, sentries find us.’

  * * *

  They came at dawn.

  I woke to see twenty warriors arrayed at the perimeter of the rangers’ primitive camp. They were tall and dark-skinned like the rangers, but these were dressed in leather armour studded with bronze, with bronze-tipped spears in their hands. Each carried a great shield of beaten bronze, embossed with a seahorse motif, and wore a short-hafted bronze axe at his belt.

  ‘Warriors,’ the ranger told me, but by then I had worked that out for myself.

  I got to my feet and brushed the worst of the spiders off my clothes and out of my hair, and raised my hand in greeting to the one I took to be in charge. He was the only one wearing a helmet anyway, a great bronze helm topped with the figure of a leaping fish.

  ‘My name is Marek Price,’ I said, slowly and clearly.

  ‘We know,’ the man said.

  His dark face was impassive in the open front of his helmet, giving nothing away. I was at a loss for anything else to say, so I resorted to the sort of rubbish one says to foreigners.

  ‘I come in peace.’

  The man threw back his head and laughed.

  ‘You jest well, Marek Price,’ he said. At least this one spoke the trade tongue properly. ‘The rangers have told us of the bloody slaughter you wrought upon the beaches. You are a warrior born, and you came in blood.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ I said, feeling somehow slightly embarrassed.

  I was aware of Jondan and the four surviving members of my crew standing behind me, watching me face down this bronze-clad avatar of war. Truth be told I was feeling rather like I was swimming out of my depth, and it’s widely known that most sailors don’t swim well.

  ‘My name is Javan. You will come with us, to the city,’ he said. ‘We will show you true Drichean hospitality.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, although I had a feeling that his words had been more of a statement than an inv
itation.

  We left the rangers there in the jungle, their work done, and followed the Dricheans through the suffocating weight of the green. I could feel my boots starting to rot around my feet as I waded through the stinking mire, the sweat rolling down my face in the oppressive heat. The Drichean warriors showed no sign of discomfort though, and set a punishing pace.

  At last we came out from under the darkness of the canopy into a shaft of searing bright sunlight, and there before us was the Drichean city. Long ages had passed since it had been built, I could see that much. The city was made of great blocks of grey stone piled one upon another, moss-covered and heavy with the weight of thick creepers. Above it all towered a great stepped pyramid, topped with a huge sun of beaten gold. The light of the true sun blazed off it in reflection, all but blinding me.

  I gaped. Factoring the height of the pyramid, I worked out that the golden sun must have been almost half the size of Dancing Girl. That much gold could found a dynasty, or rescue one.

  Javan paused, obviously taking in my reaction.

  ‘This is our home,’ he said proudly. ‘This is Jav-va-chocqunel, the city of the golden sun.’

  I could only nod in agreement.

  ‘Magnificent,’ Jondan said at my side, making me jump. ‘The age of this stone… quite remarkable.’

  I spared him a glance and shook my head as he traced his fingers lovingly along the nearest block of hewn stone, sparing not a glance for the king’s ransom that loomed above us.

  ‘Gold is plentiful, here?’ I asked Javan, struggling to keep my tone light.

  ‘Gold? It is shiny, but no use for making weapons,’ he said. ‘Too soft. We use it to make mirrors and decorations, but bronze is more valuable.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said hurriedly, thinking fast. ‘Yes, bronze is better than gold. Steel is better still.’

  Javan frowned at me. ‘Steel?’

  I eased my sword slowly from its scabbard, not wanting to give any threat, and showed it to him.

  ‘Steel,’ I said.

  He took the weapon from my hand and examined it, a deep frown creasing his dark features.

  ‘How is this made?’