by Ivan Kal
She climbed the railing and jumped into the water. As soon as she hit its surface, she opened her eyes and saw the receding shape in front of her. It was the figure of a man, and she could’ve sworn that he was looking right at her and was smiling—but then his eyes closed. She swam toward him as fast as she could. She reached him and grabbed hold, pulling him up.
Ashara had always been an excellent swimmer and, quickly enough, she had breached the surface of the water with the man in her hands. She kept his head above the water and swam toward the ship. Two sailors watched from the railings and then threw down the net ladder toward her. She pushed one of the man’s arms through one of the holes, grabbing it on the other side, as the sailors pulled them up. They helped them up, but Ashara’s hold slipped, causing her to drop the man onto the deck. She dropped down on her knees with him and immediately checked his condition. As soon as she realized that he wasn’t breathing, she turned to the sailors that had gathered around them.
“Get the mage, quickly!” she yelled, and put her mouth over his, giving him breath. Then, after five breaths, she started pushing down on his chest, repeating. After her second time giving him breath, the man coughed and she turned him on his side as the water left him. Ashara’s attention was then drawn to the older woman quickly stepping in her direction. As soon as Ashara saw her, she moved back, getting out of her way. The old mage knelt and moved her hands above the man, drawing symbols in the air. As she finished the fourth symbol, she said a word, and the man started coughing more intensely as even more water left his lungs.
“Get him below deck to my cabin. I need to check him more closely,” the mage said grumpily. She cast another spell and the man’s clothes dried, the water flowing from him across the deck and back down into the sea.
The two nodded and carried him inside. The mage followed, and after a beat Ashara did too. Once they had reached her cabin and settled the man in the bed, the mage started casting spells above him. Ashara stood to the side watching as the captain and the first mate arrived.
“What happened? Who is that?” the captain asked her.
“I don’t know. I saw him falling in the water.”
“Where from?” Captain Corvo asked.
“There was… Well, there was a flash of light, and he just hit the water,” Ashara answered, as confused as the captain.
“He is not a part of the crew, Solun?” the captain asked the first mate.
“He is not,” Solun responded. “And there are no ships near us.”
“He couldn’t have just dropped out of the sky,” the captain said.
The first mate remained silent as he studied the unconscious man. Ashara studied him too. He was dressed in rags, and his wrists and neck were bruised. Ashara had spent enough time with her father when he had conducted business with slave-masters to recognize signs of someone that had been shackled recently. The selling of slaves was illegal in Amaranthine, but that didn’t mean that they couldn’t bring those they owned with them.
“He might’ve, Captain,” the mage said as she finished her spell-work and turned around.
“What do you mean?” the captain asked.
“He is drenched in anima, and he was clearly in the middle of some kind of anima explosion. The only thing I can think of that could cause that is if he was in the middle of a spell-construct.” The mage then turned to look at Ashara. “If what she says is true, he could’ve gotten here by an unanchored translocation spell.”
“He is a mage, then?” the captain asked suspiciously.
“Not as far as I can tell, Captain,” the mage answered. “There is something strange about him, there is no question about it. But judging by his clothes and the state of his body, I doubt it. My best guess is that he is a slave, perhaps owned by a mage from the slave cities. It is known to the Guild that the rogue mages there use slaves for research and tests. One of them could’ve been trying out a new spell that went wrong.”
Ashara looked at the mage and saw how she spoke—it was as if it didn’t bother her at all that a person had been used in such a manner, with no concern for their wellbeing. She knew, of course, the reputation that most mages had for being heartless, that they cared for nothing except their magic. The Council of Mages had laws that prevented such practices by those who were a part of their Guild, which was almost everywhere on Amiras—the northern continent of Enosia. But the mages of lands outside of their influence had different laws and different practices. The Council of Mages called all of the mages outside of their influence rogue mages—and some of them had practices that were both despicable and downright evil. The mage masters of the slave-cities would regularly use slaves as sacrifices and test subjects for their spells.
“I want to know for certain,” the captain said. “Watch him until he wakes up and find out.”
“He is very weak, Captain. It could be hours, or even days.”
“Can you wake him up?”
“I could, but I don’t recommend it, Captain.”
“I want to know how and where he came from, Ulyssa,” the Captain said resolutely. “Him falling from the sky just off our ship’s bow is no coincidence. Watch over him and find out who he is as soon as he wakes up,” the captain said. But Ashara could see that he wasn’t nearly as worried as his words would have him appear. The first mate seemed to pick up on that as well, which only made the Captain’s actions seem stranger.
“All right, Corvo.” The mage sighed and settled into the chair by the bed.
The captain turned around and left, quickly followed by his first mate. Ashara pulled out the chair by the table and sat in silence. She’d had very few interactions with the ship’s mage; only enough to learn that the older woman was grumpy and unsociable. The only thing that betrayed her age were the gray streaks in her hair. Other than that, the mage was a fit and attractive woman, her face possessing the same ageless quality that all mages’ faces had. She stayed mostly in her own cabin—the only time Ashara had seen her on the deck was when a large storm had threatened to overtake the ship. The mage had redirected the winds so that the Norvus would have enough speed to stay ahead of the storm. It had taken a lot out of the mage, and she had spent the next two days sleeping in her quarters.
Ashara knew that having a ship’s mage out of commission was dangerous: there were threats on the open seas that only a mage could avert. From leviathans to pirates and storms, it was the mage’s job to protect the ship. It was why most ships in her father’s fleet had had at least two mages serving on them, but as she had learned, not everyone had the coin to pay for their services. The Guild mages were competent, but that meant that they weren’t cheep.
Ashara suddenly felt the mage’s gaze on her, and she turned and looked at the older woman.
“You plan on sitting here until he wakes up?” the mage asked.
“I saved his life,” Ashara answered simply. She did feel a tad bit responsible for the man.
The old mage grunted, and turned to look at the man.
Ashara sighed. Yes, this will be fun, she thought.
* * *
It was maybe an hour later when the man started showing signs of waking up. Ashara stood and walked over to the bed. “Is he coming around?” she asked.
The mage ignored her and studied the man, and so Ashara did the same. He winced—his eyes opened slowly, then began blinking rapidly. He stared at the planks above him for a moment or two, and then his eyes traced downward slowly. He looked at the bed and then studied his hands for a moment. The mage coughed pointedly and the man turned, startled. Once he saw Ashara and the mage, his eyes widened and his mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out.
“Now, do you want to tell us who you are and how you got here?” the mage asked, speaking the tongue of the Free Cities.
The man looked at her blankly, and then he spoke a few words in a tongue that Ashara had never heard before.
The mage frowned and turned to look at Ashara. “That sounded like nonsense to me. Perha
ps his mind is addled.”
Ashara shook her head; she had heard many different languages from when she had worked with her father, enough that she could tell nonsense from an actual language. She smiled at the man. “Do you understand me?” she asked in Kahaldian.
The man again looked at her once more without understanding.
“You speak Kahaldian?” the mage asked with surprise in her voice.
“Yes,” Ashara told her simply. Then she turned back to the man and repeated the question in both Amaranthine and Lashian, and then in Narssi—the tongue of the Shattered Isles. The man didn’t recognize any of them. That surprised her, as those were the most widespread spoken languages in the world, and the rest of the languages spoken on Enosia were derived from them. He might not have been able to understand every word, but he should’ve recognized at least one of them enough to respond. Ashara turned to look at the mage, who was studying her intently.
“I don’t think that we are going to get anything out of him like this.”
The mage nodded, glancing back at the man, who somehow looked remarkably calm for someone in his position. “No, we won’t…”
“I doubt that the captain will be happy about that,” Ashara added.
“No.” She sighed, and then for a moment she seemed to be debating something before she stood up suddenly. She walked over to a large chest, opened it, and started looking through its contents.
Ashara turned back to study the man, who in turn studied her. He looked her over his eyes, which were lingering on her face and hair, before sliding over the rest of her. She realized then how she must’ve looked; the mage had been kind enough to dry her clothes, but she likely still looked disheveled. Only, he did not look at her as most men did; instead he seemed more interested in her clothes, other than what was beneath them. His eyes moved away from her and he began looking around the cabin. There was not much around for him to see—there was only a table, a small cabinet, and a chest on the other side of the cabin. Yet his eyes took everything in, reminding her a bit of the men her father had hired to serve as guards, particularly the older ones who had been mercenaries for years.
His studying of the cabin was interrupted when the old mage walked back to them, holding a small, pebble-sized gem set into a silver base with glyphs inscribed on it in her palm. Ashara raised her eyebrows at the mage. “You have a tongue-gem?” she asked, surprised.
The old mage grumbled, “This is a merchant vessel! Of course I have a tongue-gem. We might not encounter ships from the other side of the world very often, but one needs to be prepared. And now I am about to waste a small fortune on a slave.”
“I’m sure that the captain will pay you back for it,” Ashara said. “What language does it hold?”
“Amaranthine. Now, let’s see…” She started to place the gem against the man’s temple, but he moved back. His eyes looked dangerous and alert as he looked at them with suspicion.
“It’s all right, this won’t hurt you,” Ashara said as she tried to make placating gestures. Then she gestured to the stone and then to her mouth, hoping to convey the meaning. She saw that it had little effect, so she took the gem from the mage, and then placed it against her head. “See? Nothing to be afraid of.”
She pointed at him and slowly moved closer, and he allowed her to place it against his temple. As soon as she did, the mage said a short word of power, and the spell in the gem activated. The man’s eyes widened, but it was too late for him to do anything. The spell had worked its magic, and once it was finished, the man jerked back.
“What you done to me?” he yelled out in a thickly accented Amaranthine.
“It’s all right. It will take a few moments for your mind to make sense of all the new information you now have,” Ashara told him gently.
The man looked at her in surprise. “I understand? How is this—” he started, but the rest of his sentence came out in his native tongue, which only baffled him further.
“That was a tongue-gem. It gave you the knowledge of our language. It is of course not perfect, and you will not speak as well as a native speaker, but it will allow us to communicate. And with time, with practice, you will learn to speak as well as we do,” Ashara said.
“Yes—and now you need to answer a few questions,” the mage interjected sharply.
“Tell me how you gave me this knowledge first,” the man demanded, his words already sounding a bit better.
“It was a very complicated spell that had been put into this gem.” Ashara showed him the now-empty gem.
“Spell?” he asked, his tone strange.
“Yes, a spell,” the mage said impatiently. “Magic.”
“Magic…” he said as he leaned back. He looked at Ashara. “You are mages?” he asked with wide eyes.
Ashara immediately put her arms up. “I’m not a mage—she is. And I promise you that we wish you no harm. We just want to know how you came to be here. Do you remember how you arrived?”
“I… I… Where am I?” the man eventually asked.
“You are on a ship in the middle of the ocean,” the mage said. “Which begs the question of how exactly you managed to arrive here, in the middle of nowhere, just at the same moment that we were here.”
Ashara gave the mage a scolding look, which she ignored.
“An ocean?”
“Tell us what you remember. What happened before you arrived here?” Ashara asked him gently.
The man looked at them both, studying them for a time before answering. She could see him weighing something, and then he answered. “I was imprisoned. I don’t know for how long, but then I was taken out of my cell and then… I can’t recall clearly. There was a flash of light, and…I was falling, and then there was water.”
“I saw your fall. I was the one who jumped into the water after you,” Ashara said.
The mage broke in impatiently. “Where did you come from? What is the name of your homeland?”
The man turned to look at her and answered with a word, one unfamiliar to Ashara. The mage turned to look at her. “Do you know where that is?”
Ashara shook her head. She looked back at the man. “Is your homeland on Amiras, or on Emaros?”
The man looked at her in confusion.
“Are you from Shattered Isles, perhaps?” Ashara asked. She knew that there were some tribes that lived in isolation and ignorance of the rest of the world in the more remote islands of the Shattered Kingdom, and that the slave-hunting ships often visited them to capture new slaves. And the man did look kind of like an Islander…except that their skin was generally darker. She looked more closely at him. She couldn’t really place his features. But then again the world was a vast place, and he could be from the other side of the world, from a place she had never even heard of, for all she knew.
“Apologies, honored sisters. I don’t know anything about the places you speak of,” the man answered respectfully.
Ashara narrowed her eyes at him. His demeanor seemed to have changed, but it could have just been that he had finally calmed down. Reason aside, though, she still couldn’t escape the feeling that he was holding something back—but the spell had not yet completed its work, she knew, and aside from his accent being thick, he didn’t yet have complete understanding of the language. Even after the spell’s work was done, he would need to be taught the rest of the Amaranthine tongue by mundane means.
“What is your name?” she asked at last.
The man straightened and put his fists together, half bowing over them before answering. “The name I am known by is Kai Zhao Vin.”
CHAPTER FIVE
VIN
Vin looked over the railing at the endless sea. The ocean—that is what it was called, he reminded himself. His people hadn’t had a word for it. Why would they when there was no such body of water on their world? The largest body of water they’d had to sail through only took a couple of days to traverse. The seas of Orb were nothing compared to this “ocean.” And it wasn’t eve
n the only one… He shook his head. To travel on a boat—if one could call the vessel much larger than what he considered a sailing boat to be that—for months at a time was something that Vin had never thought possible.
But then again, there had been a time when he had believed his home was all that there was. And then the Arashan had arrived and changed everything. Now Vin was on a strange new world he knew nothing about. He did not know its rules—already he had managed to insult a sailor by commenting on the development of his body, which was ludicrous, as any spirit artist should welcome criticism and advice for improvement. And yet the man had thought him an ulqan, a man that attracted to other men, and the man had acted as if that was the most disgusting thing in the world.
Everything about this world was strange and foreign to him.
It had been two days since he had passed through the archway, and many of the crew were nervous around him. They didn’t know him, of course, and he couldn’t explain how he had gotten here. Narzarah had said that there were people on this world working with the Arashan to build the World Gate, and Vin could not risk early detection if he was to stop them. His world might have fallen, but Vin would not allow another to follow suit. He needed to find the Arashan that had crossed over from his world and stop them before the new World Gate could be built. But already, from the conversations with the crew of the ship, he had started to believe that the chances of anyone on it working with the Arashan were slim. This world seemed far larger than his own; so large, in fact, that he wasn’t sure how he was supposed to find the Arashan agents. He didn’t even know if he was on the same world as them. He needed to learn about this world and then seek them out. Yet he knew deep down that even if he somehow found them tomorrow, he would be nothing compared to them. First, he needed to become stronger.
Asking questions of the crew had already proven unsuccessful. The mage and the woman—Ashara—had been suspicious of his answers to their own questions. He had tried to tell as much of the truth as he could, telling them that he had lived in a small village before they were attacked and he was imprisoned. The two had tried to pinpoint the location of his home, but of course there was nothing on Orb that would match what they were describing. Vin’s answers had led them to believe that he had been captured as a slave and then used for magical experiments, a belief that Vin had tried to subtly reinforce. Thankfully the spell they used to give him the knowledge of their language was not perfect, which allowed him to act more ignorant than he was.
