Crimson

by Warren Fahy

  “Woo-hoo!” yelled Overly, and the other men cheered.

  “Watch it, now!” Lince chided.

  Rawley and Nil looked back and saw the ledge crack and slide away under the men carrying the boat. They managed to catch hold of what remained of the ledge, but the boat fell over them into the bed of the canyon.

  Lince leaped down and to all the men’s amazement, the great sailor wedged himself under the boat and, sitting on his ankles with his arms wide and gripping the gunwales, the sailor gave a groaning lunge that lifted the boat and sent it into the air even as the red river swept around the sailor’s ribs.

  The men caught the boat as Lince’s face blanched and flushed in a ghastly instant, and he looked at Nil and Rawley as he succumbed, his topmost eye giving them one last look as the molten rock closed over it.

  “You bastard!” Nil wailed.

  Rawley stared with defiant eyes as the crimson river rolled and chuffed down the channel. As they stared in shock, an orange wave slurped over the ledge and reached three fingers of magma on the boat’s hull, passing right through its timbers as it burst into flames.

  “Leave it!” Nil said. “Get to the shore.”

  He and Rawley lead the way down the causeway to the water, followed by the others, and they stepped into the gentle waves there, leaping back—the water was boiling.

  They turned as the rising river of fire spilled toward them over the ledge. With the sheer wall to their side, the roasting river to the other, and the boiling sea at their backs, Nil’s mind scanned their rapidly shrinking trap. “So here it is, men!” he said.

  Their captain bowed his head, and then he looked at each of them in sorrow. “We did all we could, my brothers.”

  The molten mud oozed and slid over the ledge toward them now, and they felt the glare of its heat even 50 feet away.

  “We must choose how to die,” Nil said to them.

  “Which way will you choose, Captain?” asked Lanning.

  “I think I’ll face the sea and fall back when the fire reaches us.”

  “And I the same,” said Wicket.

  “And I,” Rawley said.

  “Let’s all do the same,” Overly said. “And join hands.”

  Sowernut gritted his teeth. “Aye, lets.”

  The eight men turned and faced the bay, shoulder to shoulder, as they felt the heat rise behind them and waited for the nudge of fire against their heels to fall back together.

  “Wait!” Sowernut said. “That’s the worst way! We should fall forward into the bay.”

  “How’s that better?” Bultin asked.

  “I’d rather be boiled than fried, that’s all!”

  “Goodbye, Rawley!” Bultin sobbed. “Bye, Lanning! And Wicket, and Lonair, and Overly, and Sowernut. Bye, Captain!”

  “All right, which way are we falling?” Lanning asked.

  They all felt the heat approaching a fatal temperature behind them.

  “It matters little,” Nil said. “Do as you wish!”

  They all looked back at their journey and prepared for the end.

  Nil consoled himself that in her heart she had forsaken him and had thought better of her brief madness of loving him. But insidiously he wondered if her absence before the end was meant to give him this very doubt in order to make his death easier. Here it ends, he thought, standing with his shipmates. Here, where fate so indifferent to justice will erase all accounts instead of settling them, and bury him on a nameless shore. Heat burned their backs. Nil and the others nodded farewell, gripping hands as they took their last breaths. And gazing into the fog ahead, where a moving point of light flickered and faded in the mist, they each paused though none of them remarked until the light appeared again.

  “Captain!” Rawley shouted.

  “I see it, lads.”

  Their heels smoldered as heat blistered their backs and they all bent forward, peering into the steam as the glowing point vanished and their toes were scalded by the water as they inched forward.

  Refusing to trust in hope anymore, Nil readied himself to fall backwards as the curtains of steam parted and a ghostly figure rushed over the water toward them holding a light that burned through the thick mist.

  The men gripped each other’s hands tightly to keep each other from falling forward or backwards just yet as the specter of a beautiful woman with chestnut hair flowing around her shoulders moved swiftly over the water toward them.

  Nil despaired to see the most dubious miracle of all, for it was Lelinair, standing on the prow of the mystical craft, peering through the fog as she held their shining love-star in her hand. Surely it was a cruel dream!

  The light of the stone did not erase his stubborn doubts until Stargazer ran aground before him and his men leaped aboard her, and dragged him after them.

  Chapter 28

  Drewgor

  Only three feet of air was left above Trevin in Elwyn’s tower. He still mused why bubbles did not escape into the sea…

  For better or worse, Trevin decided to “hang on,” as his father had done.

  “Are we dreaming?” Nil wondered as the boat slid away from the island and turned.

  Rawley laughed deliriously as Lelinair climbed over the men crammed into the narrow skiff to get to Nil at the stern, and the men stroked her with gratitude and she stroked their heads in return. “You are not dreaming!”

  As the claw-shaped sail pulled the skiff over the boiling waters Lanning turned to the pilot who sat alone at the tiller covered beneath a hood. “Who are you, good stranger?” he asked.

  The other men turned as the pilot pulled back the hood and revealed her face, serious and framed by long black hair flowing like midnight. A jewel that looked like a carved serpent was coiled around her throat. She smiled at Lanning. “I am Neuvia.”

  The men were awed.

  She appeared no more than 18 years old, yet there was a mist about her face and a melancholy that faded and sharpened her features.

  “Your Majesty!” Lanning exclaimed.

  “We’re honored,” said Bultin.

  “You honor me.” She stroked their heads as she walked through them to the prow, exchanging places with Lelinair.

  And her eyes touched every man now. “You must believe that everything Trevin made he made because he was trying to stop something much worse from happening.”

  “It’s an excuse, at least,” Rawley said.

  “I’ve heard dumber ones,” Overly admitted.

  “Am I in trouble now?” Rawley winked at her.

  “No! I should grant you a royal gift. I want to know.”

  “You can’t build the same thing to stop the thing you want to stop from being built,” Rawley said.

  She laughed at Rawley. “I hope you have something I can contribute some money to.”

  “Nothing but my mouth, Your Majesty,” he said.

  “300 gierons of gold to that mouth, to amplify it. But for now, we cannot spare a moment or the King is lost.”

  “How did you find us?” Nil asked.

  “We followed your love-stone,” Neuvia said.

  “We’re here to rescue him!” said Bultin.

  Neuvia stroked Bultin’s battered head and the big man blushed. “Yes,” she said, as tears rimmed her indigo eyes. “If we reach him in time.”

  Stargazer sliced out of the scalding bay and the men wondered if she were under some Wundry power other than her sail. The magical craft barely held them all and yet she rode so high in the water she barely left a wake.

  Lelinair faced the others from the stern. “Before I came aboard this enchanted skiff the Queen sailed through the Terrors all alone, invisible to all its demons. For this craft was made by the King’s own hands.”

  Stargazer flapped her sail crisply.

  “His Wizard’s Shoe,” Nil remembered.

  “Yes!” Neuvia nodded. “Stargazer found your Sea Mare.”

  “And the Queen’s pearl snake found our love-star, Nil,” said Lelinair.

&nb
sp; “We have followed it ever since,” said the Queen as the ivory serpent flicked its emerald tongue at her throat.

  The men looked at her with widening eyes.

  “Nil!” Lelinair kissed his hand. “When I tried to catch a boat to see you off before you left and bid you farewell if that was to be, the Queen appeared to me.”

  “I am sorry, Nil Ramesis,” Neuvia said as she sat at the prow. “But I persuaded her to keep a watchful eye on you, instead.”

  Nil’s heart healed as he squeezed her hand.

  “I told the Queen about the Sea Mare, Nil, and she—”

  Neuvia interrupted her gently. “If any should call me Neuvia, it is all of you. Please do so, forever and from now on. Take it as a Royal command!”

  “Yes, your Ladyship,” said Bultin, grinning bashfully.

  “You, too, Sir Bultin!” Neuvia laughed.

  “It’s hard to get used to,” Lelinair admitted. “We followed the Sea Mare as Stargazer’s sail hid us. And fortunately for us someone aboard your ship was quite reliably pessimistic.”

  “Eh?”

  “We found three of your buoys, Nil!” Neuvia explained. “And the journals inside kept us quite up to date on what was happening.”

  “Right up to the terrible fate that ended it all, which by then we already knew wasn’t true.”

  They laughed. “Tobbs,” Nil nodded.

  “When we hauled in his last testaments we could not wait to read the last sentence at the end,” Neuvia said.

  “We were wondering, however, how the logs were copied so precisely,” said Lelinair.

  “Yes,” Neuvia said. “It’s not important. But even the ink-spots were perfectly duplicated!”

  “You’ll have to thank Tobbs for that, milady,” Nil said.

  “Our young naturalist,” said Rawley.

  “We shall!” Neuvia said. “Most richly.”

  “His pessimism was our hope,” said Lelinair.

  “What is Trevin’s condition, my lady?” asked Lanning. “Do you know?”

  “He does not have long,” she said. “Hours or even minutes now.”

  “So he is still alive?” Nil asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what has become of the Sea Mare?”

  Neuvia closed her eyes as Toy whispered in her ear. Then, looking up at them, she said, “She approaches the Lightstone Tower, right now!”

  Stargazer sped over the sea toward the Dimrok’s northern shore.

  “I see the King’s Tower down below!” yelled Ed as he peered with sharp eyes over the prow rail.

  “Avast, half sail!” Karlok called from the bridge. “Stand by to heave to!” He was still flushed from their successful navigation of the southern reefs. More than once a fatal reefing had been fended off by the few copper spikes the Gyre had failed to gnaw off the Sea Mare’s keel. Against all odds they had found a course through the treacherous maze that no heavy ship had ever passed.

  They made a slow approach with half their canvas, and when they were over the Lightstone Tower they countered the sails to stay hove to over the Lightstone Tower.

  Senthellzia and Harm now joined Karlok on the bridge. The Creature, who would not have tolerated Harm in its presence, especially on the bridge, had died but an hour ago, whimpering and freezing on the deck. The proud cat had closed its eyes and seemed to fall asleep. All had taken it as a dark omen for the landing party, and Zee had given the cat a proper funeral.

  Karlok called out a sharp series of orders: “Toss Captain Ramesis’s floats over the starboard bow. Let two men man each and report what they see!”

  Three teams of two jumped overboard on the gentle waves, kicking out on the floats Nil had designed, which were fixed with lines to the ship’s starboard rail. In the center of each float was a glass circle covered by a black umbrella so the men could look down into the sea through a window.

  “It’s a wonder,” cried young Skillah, peering through the round portal on a heaving wave. “The Lord’s Tower is lit up like a candle! Ain’t it, lads?”

  The others nodded as they looked through the other floats.

  “Tie the royal scepter to the starboard anchor’s fluke, Ed,” Karlok ordered quietly.

  Ed took the royal scepter young Kandrus Flint now handed to him with trembling hands. He secured the crown jewel to the iron anchor with a thick leather cord, which he knotted expertly. “Ready, Captain,” he called, jumping back from the cathead, and the others let the starboard anchor go.

  The windlass spun paying out the hawser as baited hook dropped down into the depths.

  “We’re kingfishers now.” Karlok winked at Senthellzia, who stood grimly beside him.

  The iron hook of the Sea Mare’s anchor, baited with the royal jewel, plummeted on the great line into the depths.

  As they came around the shattered cliff of the Dimrok in Stargazer they all saw a sea dragon much like Knot, only bigger and even more ferocious—embedded in the island’s broken cliff face. The ancient red impression of the long dead monster buried in a grave of green shale was only recently exposed.

  Then they saw beside the cliff the Sea Mare rocking on the waves and they sent up a cheer, hailing her with waving arms. The ship’s sails were half-clewed, and she looked scarred and patched from her trials as her anchor unwound over her bow.

  Ed noticed them first. Then they heard the ship’s bell ringing and all waved as they approached her.

  Where is the air going? Trevin wondered as no bubbles rose above the tower even as the water still rose to fill the last inches above him.

  Two hours had passed since Trevin had stopped breathing. The shrinking pocket of air above him was almost gone. He floated in his room, his hands touching the vaulted ceiling as he peered upward with steadily dimming sight. He saw his own turgid fingers through his milky eyes, knowing that his body was giving way to destruction by degrees. With each passing second his flesh became more useless to his nemesis, and for this he held on.

  He felt Drewgor waiting impatiently for him to surrender and could see him above now as though in a tunnel ready to descend like a spider on a thread.

  The last bubble of air was swallowed above him and only then did the answer occur to him.

  Like a giant diamond, his grandfather’s tower must be a lens between the worlds. Indeed, that must be why he had built it. That is what Drewgor had meant.

  Trevin saw him preparing to pounce through the tower’s portal into his own decaying body, and Trevin decided to use his grandfather’s gateway for one last purpose then.

  While he still had the strength, if only to steal one last moment to say farewell…

  He reached out a bloated hand and touched the lightstone wall, and he closed his eyes then for the very last time.

  Stargazer approached the Sea Mare, and Toy started raveling his braid around her throat. The slender serpent reached up and flickered his tongue on her earlobe. “Yes?” Neuvia whispered.

  Nil called from the boat to the men floating on the waves, “Can you see the tower down below?”

  “Aye, Captain! Captain! You’re alive!”

  “Yes, damn it, can you see it?”

  “Yes, it’s a wonderful sight!” yelled one of the men peering through the nearest buoy.

  The men on the decks cheered to see the landing party, dismayed by its diminished numbers and bewildered by the craft that bore them.

  “The King has gone to Wynder!” whispered Toy in Neuvia’s ear.

  “What? Why!” Neuvia said.

  “We’ve got a bite, Captain!” cried one man, who peered through one of the floats on the sea, and the men at the other floats confirmed it.

  “We hooked the King’s Tower!”

  “One of the top windows, Captain,” Tobbs shouted.

  “It’s coming up!” cried the man across from Tobbs floating on the waves.

  “What is?” Nil shouted as Stargazer paused before the Sea Mare. “What’s coming up?”

  “The top,” sa
id one.

  “The tip of the tower,” said another.

  “It’s coming up fast!”

  Toy hissed in Neuvia’s ear: “It isn’t Trevin!” The serpent turned bitter cold around her neck.

  “Ameulintians! Get away!” Neuvia shouted, rising at the prow of Stargazer.

  The crew of both vessels and the men around the floats heard her voice pierce the air and somehow they knew who she was immediately, and they were afraid.

  “This is not the King! This is not the Lord Trevin my husband who rises!” she cried. “This is the enemy who has been stalking him and us!”

  “We gave him the scepter,” Karlok shouted from the bridge of the Sea Mare.

  “Yes, that was our plan,” Nil told her.

  “Get away from here then as fast as you can,” Neuvia cried. “Dear mariners, you must believe me. Get away!”

  Lelinair squeezed his arm. Nil glanced at her and filled his lungs as they both dove into the ocean and swim for the Sea Mare.

  “You men, get back to the ship,” yelled Karlok.

  The men abandoned the buoys and pulled themselves back along their lines as the sea welled at their backs and bubbles filled with colored light burst on the churning water.

  The cone of the Lightstone Tower, with its tattered flag of the Cirilen, pierced the surface of the sea in the boiling foam.

  The men on the decks watched the windows of Trevin’s room for any sign when one of the windows of the bobbing pinnacle opened and a figure climbed out onto the roof to hang from its flagstaff.

  Many cheered to see him, for he looked like Trevin, whose image everyone knew from coins. But others were chilled by his strange pallor even at a distance. Trevin’s black hair was twisted round his neck and his eyes seemed to flicker crimson. In one hand he held up the royal scepter they had given him, and its star suddenly showered a thousand colors around him. He dove into the water as the tip of the tower rolled and sank behind him under the waves. He swam straight through the dark water toward Stargazer.

  Neuvia ordered the rest of the men to jump out of the boat and swim for the Sea Mare. Bultin pulled Rawley along through the water. Neuvia then shed her cloak and drew Gieron’s scepter from her boot. She hesitated as she stared at the face of Trevin nearing her in the water, and it proved more gruesome than all her fears as his red robe streamed behind him.