Crimson

by Warren Fahy

  As the men finished their breakfast, and Pickle confirmed from his stores that they had been delayed no more than a day, they convened before Nil on the main deck, the jumbled ice around them groaning against the Sea Mare’s hull.

  “All that’s left to us is this. We must carry boats over the island to our west. Once we have scaled it, we will see the Dimrok but a league distant. Most of the crew should stay aboard the Sea Mare under Karlok’s command in case the ice should clear. Thus we will have two chances to reach Trevin, one over land, and one over sea. Lince! Assign the landing party! Karlok! See to victualing the boats.”

  “My lord! One of the boats must carry the ship’s entire spare anchor line and anchor.”

  “Yes. And you shall be in charge of that boat! Let the watch leaders of each watch pick those that shall come with me in the landing party. I’ll need fourteen!”

  Nil lashed their attention to as many material details as possible as he looked down at their bruised and wandering faces.

  Two of the ship’s four longboats were hauled on deck, and Karlok oversaw the provisioning of each 15-foot vessel while half the crew went below to refresh themselves.

  Pickle quickly conjured a dinner of salt pork boiled in gravy with bacon and curry on brown rice with fried apples, which sent an intoxicating aroma wafting over the decks that finally convinced them they had passed from the Illusion Sea and safely back into the Hala World again.

  Chapter 27

  The Living Isle

  The Sea Mare was wedged between the unbroken sheet of ice to her port and the jagged slob ice grinding her starboard hull. Before her prow, the western isle’s slopes, jumbled with turned black soil and broken rock, were streaked with flowering coronas of red, yellow, and brown. Deep furrows split the hillside to the shore and red boulders rested precariously on its slopes. Though it had been dubbed the “Living Isle,” not a living thing was visible as far as the eye could see. Not even a gull rested on a rock.

  The driving sleet abated and Nil had the men set bonfires on the ice to the south. Rawley offered some of his spare lumber, and Lince allowed three precious casks of oil to be poured over the ice. The oil kept the meager fires burning, but a whipping wind from the north dampened the flames. The fires burned only light scars in the ten-foot-thick shelf blocking her.

  Hoarfrost crystallized on the Sea Mare’s spars and rigging as the relentless sleet, snow and rain pelted her. Nil ordered the decks mopped with boiling water to remove the ice building up. Seeing that it was fruitless, he ordered that no more wood or oil should be used to burn the ice to the north but should be reserved for maintaining the ship. They were all thankful, once again, for the iron ribs that lined the Sea Mare’s hull.

  Karlok and Lince met with Nil in his cabin. Bruthru Zee and Senthellzia Tunn joined them. “You should take the royal scepter with you over the island, Nilly,” said Karlok.

  Nil looked in Karlok’s eyes and shook his head. “The Sea Mare may yet reach him, Karlok.”

  Karlok looked fiercely at Nil for a moment. “Then why are you going? Let the others go.”

  “I can’t send them where I would not go.”

  “I knew it!” Karlok frowned. “You are a fool!”

  “I’ll go with you, Captain,” Lince said.

  “Yes, Lince.”

  “And I,” said Senthellzia.

  “No. You must stay and defend the ship, Lady Tunn,” Nil said.

  Karlok embraced him. “I know what you’re doing,” he whispered.

  “Mind the ship!” Nil said.

  With one breath Lince yelled out the roster: “Lanning, Bultin, Berrul, Overly, Sowernut, Rawley, Tunelle, Fedor, Bat, Karul, Parnel, Orvair, Wicket and Lonair, git yer sorry carcasses over here!”

  “Aye, men,” Nil nodded. “We’ll have a look over that hill and see if we can reach the Dimrok. The King has not much time, nor do we, if we stay here.”

  “You actually want me to come along?” Rawley asked Lince, incredulous.

  “We need a carpenter,” Lince said. “The boats are our survival. I thought you could jump about like a mountain goat, Mister Skarmillion, with that leg of yours. But maybe you’d like to stay aboard?”

  “No, sir! I wouldn’t miss it.” Rawley smiled at the first mate.

  “All right, then. Let’s get about it!” Nil said.

  Lanning was first to climb down the rope ladder to the ice. Fearing that it would fracture beneath his testing feet, it was even more distressing to discover that it held like granite as the rest of the landing party climbed down.

  Rawley had improvised sleds out of spars and rope, and these were set down on the ice to haul the two 15-foot landing boats. Rawley appointed Ed to the position of ship’s carpenter during his absence. For his part, Rawley did not flinch at the duty assigned him, for he knew that death was at least half of every option available now, and he preferred having as much impact on the outcome as possible.

  The men lowered the boats into the Rawley’s sleds and found that they slid easily over the smooth ice. The captain bade the crew of the Sea Mare farewell as the 16 men, dressed in their heaviest coats, set off across the ice sheet, leaving their 33 crewmates behind.

  Two men grabbed the lines of each sled and went ahead, pulling the boats over the ice. Two more men followed each of the sleds, giving them a push over bumps.

  Lanning walked ahead of them with Lince, Nil and Rawley, who bounced ahead of the party, testing the ice. On the shore, a little to the south, they noted an outcrop bulging from the ground that resembled an old man’s head with two blisters of rock like wrinkled eyelids. Further up the hillside they saw white steam hissing from random fissures.

  Lanning turned to Nil. “Just how living is this isle, Captain?”

  Nil surveyed the topsy-turvy landscape. “We’ll avoid that mountain, I think,” he said, pointing at the blackened cone that smoldered farther inland above all other peaks to the north. “We’ll cross straight west, as directly as we can, to the far coast.”

  Halfway to the shore, they saw the bulging eyes on the rocky outcrop swell and redden.

  “Nilly,” Lince warned.

  “Yes…”

  A piercing white light brightened the overcast sky. They turned to see Trevin’s statue blazing over the Sea Mare.

  An orange gout of fire spouted from one of the gnarled eyes on the outcrop, arching high like a red fountain that streaked over the crunching ice 50 yards to their left, curving in a wall of steam toward the ship. The men were not sure which way to turn then. Bat panicked and ran back toward the ship.

  “No, Bat!” Nil cried. “This way!”

  But the sailor would not turn back as Nil urged the others forward toward the shaking shore.

  They saw a red stream streak across the ice toward the ship as steam billowed from its banks and cracks exploded to either side. As Bat ran, the red river raced him to the Sea Mare. Seeming to sense his movement, it headed him off, and he ran harder on the slick ice, bearing down, but at the last moment, 50 feet from the ship, a bursting vein of lava spurted from the main artery and crossed his path. He backpedaled, and fell on his back, sliding through the red stripe only yards from the Sea Mare.

  He skidded a few feet more over the ice, screaming as the men on the ship called down to him. But his agony was short, at least, for the ice beneath him, and all around the Sea Mare, shattered then. Bat fell through the rubble into the sea as gouts of lava gushed over him. The river had not quite reached the Sea Mare before the ice gave way around her.

  Steam rose along glowing streams that bled over the channel as the ice cracked up to their south. The Living Isle quaked and fractured the ice packed along its shores. More bloody founts sprang along its coastline, raining spouts of fire onto the frozen channel.

  The men in the landing party hauled the boats across the last unbroken stretch of ice between them and the shore. Rawley, pogoing on his wooden leg, was far out ahead of the others and urged them on. He splashed through the slush
at the island’s shore and climbed onto its black gravel beach, turning to yell at the others as he saw the ice crumble in a rolling wave behind them. “Come on!”

  One team fell behind the other and slipped over the heaving ice as they hauled their landing boat. Lince ran behind the first boat, bulling it forward. When they finally made it to the shore, he jumped into the shallow water and grabbed the line himself, pulling the launch aground on its sled.

  “Bring it on, boys!” Nil yelled to the remaining team, who had stalled, losing their footing as the ice cracked into a puzzle around them. “Leave the boat!” Nil shouted, but his voice was outdone by a crackling roar as a lava spout to their right arched higher and shifted to rain down on the men, all five of them, who carried the boat with the anchor and line. A merciful cloud of steam rose over the hideous scene.

  The remaining landing party dragged their boat up the black shore in grief.

  “Move!” Nil shouted as the men cursed. “There’s nothing to be done now!” He looked at the Sea Mare as she raised her sail before the ice that now cracked and melted before her.

  “Look, Captain!” Lanning said, pointing above them.

  Nil looked up. “I see it, lad!”

  Vermilion rivers poured down the black slopes, branching in a fiery maze, which they must read quickly and correctly.

  “Let’s aim for that saddle!” Nil ordered. “Rawley, Lanning and Lince, come ahead with me.”

  Six men dragged the boat on its sled a few hundred feet up the barren slope to the saddle of an outcrop safe from the molten streams.

  The men gazed at the Sea Mare as she set sail in the channel below. Veins of red sank through the ice before her bows as the frozen barrier that blocked her shattered like a window pane. Karlok rigged her sails to take advantage of a fresh wind from the north. The men in the landing party watched with envy as the warship picked up speed, pushing south through the clearing channel.

  “Well then,” Nil said. This was all their expedition had to accomplish, but now they must save themselves. “It’s a race now. We must keep moving and keep this boat seaworthy, whatever we do. Let’s climb to that outcrop ahead and find the quickest route to the other shore!”

  “It’s too steep for the sled now men,” Lince said. “We’ll have to carry the boat from here forward.”

  The men hoisted the longboat onto their shoulders, Nil among them, as they dug in their heels to scale the forsaken slopes of the Island of Living Rock.

  Freezing water slowly swallowed his foot now as it rose. The painful sensation finally woke him on his tilted bed where he slept, and he saw himself reflected in the still sea rising infinitesimally in his chamber.

  The ocean had welled through the trapdoor and snuck up on him while he slept. His candle floated barely lit on the surface of the water.

  With the last fragment of the Cronus Star, Trevin shaved off a layer of the lightstone ceiling and he held the curled shaving as he closed his eyes. And the lightstone curlicue evaporated in white smoke that refreshed the chamber with new air released from its components.

  The piece of the Cronus Star in Trevin’s hand glowed brightly and he turned over on the bed and peered through his spyglass into a facet on the diamond’s bezel.

  And therein he saw the Sea Mare: trapped between ice and fire as she pushed through a frozen channel with all her sails. Trevin saw the island to one side, covered in ice and storm clouds. And the other, to the west, where he wept to see a party of men wandering over the scorched rock of that creation.

  The last piece of the Cronus Star dimmed as its power died, leaving him in near darkness.

  Nil and the others looked back at the Sea Mare a few more times before she was lost in the mists to the south of the channel, having broken free. The trembling jarred rocks loose above them. The men avoided the streams of lava and bouncing rocks as Rawley scanned for crossing points, zigzagging tirelessly up the hill on his spring-loaded leg to scout their route.

  The chill of the bay gave way to the inner heat of the island, which seemed to increase as they climbed higher. The men shed their coats before they reached the saddle of a ridge overlooking a charcoal valley bereft of any living shoot or insect. On the far side of the valley foothills scaled the base of a long ridge that stretched across their path and a peak rising to their left. Nil had them make for the ridge.

  They reached the bottom of the dark valley without incident as they moved fast. When they had progressed a few hundred paces over the tumbled floor of the valley, however, Rawley noticed a bulge rising in the earth a hundred paces ahead.

  “Captain,” Rawley said, looking back.

  Nil noticed the rising hill. “Give it a wide berth.”

  Rawley headed to the left to skirt the swollen hill, testing the jumbled earth under their boots more gingerly with his wooden foot before shifting forward with his full weight, which slowed them down.

  A bubble of dirt swelled to their left suddenly and belched gas, but they managed to keep hold of the boat as they dodged flying rock and coughed the acrid fumes, moving forward.

  Rawley surveyed the valley floor ahead as it bubbled before them and shook his head. “I don’t like it!”

  A hill behind them exploded gas through a fissure in its side and collapsed like a pie crust.

  “Hurry it up, Mister Skarmillion,” Lince growled, coughing.

  “Aye.” Rawley pushed forward.

  The going was painfully slow, though. Bubbles swelled the earth all around them as though ready to vent their poison, subsiding only when the men paused. The steady rumble under their feet deepened as Rawley wound their way between the rising crusts.

  The carpenter quickened his pace as he found a path between two swells, then he stopped to mark their next path forward. Rawley’s guesses had been shrewd so far and had gotten them more than halfway across the bubbling valley. Only a hundred yards remained between them and the far ridge. They passed no bulges at all for a short distance when the carpenter suddenly stopped for no apparent reason and a long minute passed, causing Bultin and some of the others to grumble under the boat.

  “Rawley, get on with it,” Lince said.

  “What is it, man?” Nil said.

  Rawley frowned. “I don’t know.”

  “Let’s go!” said Lanning.

  Rawley took a reluctant step forward, and his wooden foot plunged through.

  He vanished, his shout echoing in a black mouth that had opened in the ground.

  Nil let the boat slide from his shoulder as he ran forward to look down the hole. “Back away!” he told the others.

  “Rawley!” Lanning shouted, running perilously close to the hole beside Nil.

  A draft of heat rushed upward at the edge, blowing wider, and they backed away. Bultin bellowed and bolted from under the longboat, prompting the others to lower it completely as the big man ran to the hole. “Rawley!” he bellowed, pounded the ground in grief as slivers of earth fell from the edge.

  “Get back or get a grip, Bultin!” Nil commanded.

  A hoarse gasp rose from the infernal darkness below.

  “Rawley?” Bultin peered into the dark, wiping tears from his eyes.

  They saw the carpenter lying on top of an improbable black tower of rock lit by a patch of sunlight from the hole above. Around the pinnacle on which Rawley lie a black lake simmered hundreds of feet below, crackled with pulsing veins of light. Bultin grabbed the edge of the hole, which crumbled in his hands as wind sucked down into the cavern, turning the red lines on the lake yellow around the pinnacle on which Rawley fell.

  Rawley rolled onto his knees. He had fallen about 30 feet on his back into soft ash and pumice that cushioned his fall. He choked on the heat and smoke as a life-saving column of cool air sucking down from the hole washed over him.

  Sowernut threw a coil of rope from the boat to Nil. Nil took hold of one end and let the coil fall down to Rawley. Lanning and Bultin took hold of the line beside Nil.

  Rawley could see
Bultin, Nil, and Lanning around the hole over him, and then the dancing rope uncoiling above. “Get away!” he coughed as a wave of heat singed him. “You want the roof to come down?”

  “You shut up, Rawley,” Bultin yelled. “Grab the rope!”

  Rawley saw the rope whip above him out of reach in the swirling winds coming through the hole. Nil tried to swing the rope over Rawley but the gusts of air coming through the hole pushed it wildly over the lake where it caught fire. Nil reeled it in quickly and stamped out the burning end. He found a stone and tied it to the end as the ground lurched. They jumped back from the hole as a few feet crumbled from around the edge. Nil cast the stone down from the edge of the widened hole and shouted, “Take the boat, men, and get off this plain.”

  “Wait on yonder ridge!” Lince said, crouching a few yards behind Nil.

  Nil guided the rope toward Rawley. But even with the weight of the stone, the line was buffeted by the swirling air. Moreover, since the edge had crumbled they weren’t directly over Rawley anymore.

  Rawley shouted, “Go, Captain! I won’t make it!”

  Nil hauled up the rope to lessen its swing and lowered it again, and Rawley reached, barely catching himself from falling off the precarious outcrop as he missed the already flaming end of the rope and the stone fell off into the fiery lake, which spouted a yellow jet of below.

  Rawley noticed his beard catching fire and he howled, “Get away! I’m done for!”

  As Bultin crouched on his knees at the edge of the hole the shelf gave way beneath him. His firm grip on the rope ripped it out of Nil and Lanning’s hands.

  The rest of the coil danced on the ground behind the men and Lince grabbed its tail end in one iron hand. As the rest paid out Lince ran from the hole and hauled the line over his shoulder hand over hand, as he raced Bultin’s fall. The sailor absorbed the weight of Bultin as he reached the end of his rope, digging in his feet.

  Lanning and Nil grabbed the line behind Lince and together they hauled Bultin up as high as they could. Inching back along the rope, they looked down through the hole.