The day’s last dusty sweep of light painted the naked body of the harbormaster a sanguine red. High on a pole, where no shadow could obscure him, he’d been left, drained. It was only by conspicuous, brutal absence that any part of him remained invisible--though a cursory glance toward the base of the pole revealed his missing pieces.
Mierel kept his sinuous neck craned upward. He had the impression that this corpse was no redder for the evening light. Its ribcage, prised out like a clammonger’s wares, swung on stiff hinges. Shredded flesh lapped in the sea breeze. A dozen odd birds picked over this tattered meal, and a further horde of them squawked and screeched from all the rooftops. They hung on the wing, orbiting this perverse icon. The greediest of them danced about threateningly in the offal pile at the pole’s base.
Their haunting, scavenger harmonies set the mood low, punctuated as they were by a slow precipitation of morseled human--the last, half-coagulated clumps of the man’s living body.
Pedestrians gave the scavengers a wide berth, as if begging the sordid creatures to relieve them of this hideous distraction. They clung to the furthest edge of the dockside thoroughfare, muttering--more resentful than impotent. The lingering contingent of sailors reacted all according to their dozen, unknowable traditions. Most seemed to be enjoying the display. Some hopelessly prayed.
“By His Mane,” Mierel offered, with more disgust than sympathy. “That’s some interrogation. I didn’t want to sleep on another boat tonight, but it may be preferable to staying here.”
“Is that…” Ayricalt muttered, staring across the wide, empty road.
“Anyway, at least we won’t have to deal with that miserable landlady…”
“The Litherians,” Zigrel confirmed.
They shared some nominal relief at the sight of Kordos on his feet, and by his own power. Though his beard was no grayer, he appeared definitely aged--hunched so that his once powerful belly folded weekly under heavy shoulders. His formerly olivine skin, paled almost to a sage, still contrasted starkly with the smoky glass of his eyes, and the blue, baggy arcs which hung beneath them.
He exemplified mortal anticipation. It made Mierel’s hands itch. He struggled not to look away.
“Sprunishmen,” called Baramethi. He wore as arrogant a grin as ever, apparently unphased by the unpleasant ambiance.
“You’ve missed an exciting day at the docks,” he continued. “These Ellusenese sure know how to put on a show.”
“A simple beheading would have sufficed.” Mierel puckered as he looked once more to the harbormaster. “Humiliation breeds revenge more surely than plain justice.”
“Look who’s got thoughts about justice, now?” Zigrel scoffed. “Though I’m inclined to agree with you. Not that it should matter to us, either way,” she started, donning a wry smile, “it does make one think twice about failing.”
Mierel, betraying his sourness, snickered.
“You didn’t happen to see our comrades come through?” Ayricalt asked the Litherians.
“The Galites?” Baramethi, squinting confusedly, shot back. “No. Why? Should we have? Are they leaving Codisurn?”
“Not of their own volition. He saw to that.” Mierel pointed up at the expurgated man. What might have been a bitter laugh piqued back into an angry little frown.
“It occurs to me why I left Noria in the first place,” he muttered. “Too many Ellusenese.”
“We’re going to find them,” Ayricalt explained to the young Litherian. “And, I think, finish this business.”
While Zigrel sighed, and Mierel rolled his dark eyes, Baramethi cast the islander a plainly faithless glance.
“What makes you say that, Ayry?” Mierel prodded.
“I told you--I have a plan.” He displayed a grin as irritatingly self-satisfied as the worst which the Litherians had to offer.
Mierel groaned. “Right, well…if it gets us out of this pirate-ridden, insurrectionist gravesite, I’m all for it.”
Baramethi nodded. “We would be ashamed to leave our colleagues in the hands of these insubordinate villains.”
“If Arzado is…killed…” Zigrel started, falling to a whisper. But instead of finishing, she simply closed her eyes, exhaling a rush of breath through her nostrils.
“Well,” Mierel, hooking his thumbs nonchalantly in his sash, “let’s find a boat. I want to hear all about this plan, Ayry.”
Under a sky bruised and ringed black, they coursed over matte dark seas. The stars still glittered in their unfamiliar places, in the wide, clear band of night which stretched across behind them. Still, they were obscured at times by formless and inexplicable shadows. A pack of swimming stars crawled across that broad span of clear night, like diamonds falling through the deep.
They posed a mystery, one that not even the religious monks of Prighuyt Tuzhk had deciphered. A challenging, humbling mystery. Zigrel watched their ordered and unwavering motion incuriously. She did not think of home. She did not think of much at all.
She found herself, and her several companions, in far too small a sailing vessel--a fishing boat with a modest mast and a half-exposed shelter where a tired fisherman might rest. Ayricalt, the prodigal seaman, had insisted on it, and for some time, the weather had proved mild enough to keep the toyish boat relatively comfortable.
Now, the seas were growing rough beneath the storm of the supposed whaleherd. Ayricalt was in the shelter with the convalescing Prince of Ithosphthoros, a conference which the former treated as a duty--one which his companion, frowning bitterly against the starboard rail, conspicuously avoided.
“You should know that we are heading to our deaths,” Mierel said to her, calling out against the turbulence so she could hear. Something in his tone--a complacent, conceding negativity--distinct from his usual cynicism.
She turned to him, away from the shrinking line of night sky. “Why do you say that, Sprunishman?”
Mierel hid a smile with a vicious furrowing of his brow. “Indulge me, witch? For a story?”
“Indulge me with my name?” she snapped back.
Mierel laughed again, then breathlessly began:
Here is the scene: The dawn light echoes over a ribbon of blackest cloud, paling the eastern skies. It is a fair enough light for the tasks at hand: loading, shoving off, and rowing-- though these sailors could perform no worse in a blind fugue. An augur meets them in the harbor, and strides along the longboat’s larboard side, testing buckets of freshly drawn seawater before the sailors dip their sweating, calloused hands and feet within. Then she smells it, stirring its silt and its fleeting specks of gold. She tastes it unflinchingly.
The augur’s mouth moves as if by accident, forming silent words. She speaks with the helmsman. They must be the words of a demon--no deity has blessed this crew’s departure.
Later, as the sail billows in the long winds of the open sea, and the longboat courses steadily along…
Now the sailors, fifteen other men besides the augur and the helmsman, sing and dance in the center of the deck. All except for one.
His name is Ayricalt, who is called the Transpontine, and he watches with unclever anxiety as the dancers outline every ineffable inch of their insular culture. These are the ancestral movements, and the poetry of the past. They move against the swaying motion of their vessel, their partner in these rituals. They call and they respond. Ayricalt does not know the responses. Places are named. Ayricalt does not know the place names. He sits near the stern, observing. Known words become mysterious cyphers. This is a story in a foreign mode.
The augur does not join. She is examining the waves now, leaning over the port rail, incessantly whispering her mysterious orders. And the helmsman hears, between his own directive chants, over the din of the fourteen carousing sailors, for the seamen of the Karafins speak with the tongues of crickets.
Ayricalt watches this second, inscrutable exchange. His timbers shiver with nerves. This is his first voyage, and this is the day he will become a man.
(Well… for the first time, anyway.)
Are these his people? These strangers with their strange songs? Ayricalt watches it all from his vantage, too occupied with his stirring fears to memorize the words and the movements.
Then, at once, the chanting stops. And Ayricalt has only dimly realized that a haggard voice, rough with salt and sand and time, is ringing in his ears. It is the voice of the augur.
“Whales off the larboard,” she says. The sailors’ faces hold a grim anticipation. How many lives have been lost to the leviathans? They pat each other’s shoulders, share brief embraces. They paint their faces with confidence, with conceited smirks and hard, shining eyes. They share a toast of boiled and burning sake, and each of them sneaks a few extra sips.
They pull long and wicked harpoons from the mounting beneath the rails, and mechanically distribute them.
Ayricalt the Transpontine watches with a stirring fervor. This is it. His head swims with silence and his stomach churns audibly. Choppy seas accentuate this violent anticipation. His eyes must be wide--stupidly so, and stinging with sea mist.
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One of the veteran fishermen approaches him, looking cautiously amused. Is this confidence? Or is it something hollow, filled with the hot fumes of alcohol?
“You’ll need the knife, lad,” he says, gesturing vaguely over his shoulder. Ayricalt nods, and staggers off to join the preparatory bustle.
“There’s our boy!” shouts one of the sailors. Their voices are indistinct, a wash of chatter. Mild cheering erupts between bouts of laughter. Ayricalt is myopic with pulsing fear.
“Shan’t be a boy for long, I wager.”
“Biggest lad left on the island.”
“Biggest lad in the whole of the Karafins.”
“Biggest damned lad in all of Sprune!”
“He’ll be the biggest damned man in Sprune, tonight!”
(So he is, as far as I’ve known. And I’ve been from Apple Orchard to the miasmic Fost.)
They shout and they cheer and they laugh a little more. They bear their vicious weapons with a deranged and inspiring comfort. But Ayricalt has only half-accepted their praise. Are these not the men who glance at him sideways, who spit pugnaciously as he walks by? How many of their children has he fought off? Two at a time; three at a time? What have these men told their black-eyed children, those many shamed and fitful nights, about young Ayricalt? What, besides venomous insults, have these sailors ever said on his account? His tears, hidden in the misty salt spray, are as much of betrayal as joy.
He doesn’t have long to ponder this, which is well enough--all the pondering in the world never seems to be enough for Ayricalt. One of the sailors is coming forward with a gargantuan sword.
“Here’s the knife, Ayricalt,” says he, offering it in open palms. It is more than three feet long, and single-edged, with a half-spear tip. A sodden, reedy circle forms the crossguard. It is a steel as fine as the elves can fashion.
“You know what to do with it?” he asks, but not really asking. “Press it in, far as it’ll go, then cut.” (Here, Mierel made a hard, chopping gesture.)“It was forged on Karaf’s Dome,” he explains. “It’ll do the job--if it’s properly guided.” He speaks with rote sympathy, a practiced wartime mentor.
“Now don’t you worry about us, boy. We’ll hold her steady for you. But be quick about it. There are creatures which would like to eat a whale--fierce ones--and the smell of blood travels fast in these rough waters.
“And not to mention the whaleherds.” He laughs, and slaps Ayricalt’s back with manly affection.
Ayricalt nods, holding the heavy sword in his own open palms. He almost drops it as the ship turns violently to starboard.
“Close, now. They’re brushing the hull.” It is the voice of the helmsman. Ayricalt looks toward him. He is standing attentively, his right hand grips white on the rudder handle, his left describes arcs in the air around him, catching and throwing the cold, morning breeze. He spies around with frenetic deliberation, starboard to larboard, fore and cranes his neck to glance back behind him. His lips never stop moving. He is addressing the crew one at a time.
“Wet your hands, boy,” he commands, now facing a different direction, and then another. Aryicalt staggers over to the nearest bucket, numb and shivering. His leg bones have gone soft. He presses his hands in first, allowing the soothing cool of the brine to coat his skin. It gives him feeling. He is surer as he stands on one leg to wet the other. Now his feet are shimmering like all the other sailors’, and he feels a bit more at ease. He brings the whale knife into a comfortable grip. It occurs to him, with a hot breath of pride, that no prior seaman can have wielded it as adeptly as he. It is no longer than one of his arms.
It is the last good feeling he will have this day.
“On the line!” yells one of the sailors, slurred slightly and panicked. The message is relayed silently across the deck, the fluttering of Karafin lips.
And the time is suddenly near, though it has come in slow, fitful moments. The whale breeches, and the force of its displacement sets the vessel tilting. When it rocks back, it is a violent reciprocation. Before the leviathan, this boat is a toy made of green reeds.
The wooden decks crack loudly as the whale dives back into the silver foam, and the echo of its horrible song reverberates in the sailors’ water-logged feet.
“Bring it to heel!” they yell, and “Get the big bastard!” The ship heaves, sailors stuck by their enchantments perpendicular to the deck. Their long, tied hair hangs down before their wide eyes. Yet they hold resolutely, like the steel of the whale knife.
Inch by frightful inch they reel in the lines. Ayricalt’s sense of time is corrupted. He has not yet realized that the harpoons have been cast. He is unprepared.
“We’ve got him bloody up!” The Voice of the Cricket screams through all the ears of the crew. Half of the harpooners drop off, sliding swiftly into place on their benches, and work their oars into the tumultuous starboard waters.
Nearly at once the rocking ceases. Ayricalt’s guts lurch. The helmsman has let go of the rudder, he now waves both his hands mysteriously through the air. He is calling the wind.
The wind does not answer.
“Get the big, bleeding bastard!” shouts one of the oarsmen.
Is it the cricket’s voice? The world has gone silent. But they have not noticed. They cannot see the helmsman failing at the rudder. They are all glancing sidelong toward Ayricalt, wearing the same look of stern impatience.
They know better than this lad what the stakes are. Cold feet will not be tolerated.
Ayricalt steps. One step into the next. He is running soon, closing the distance to the larboard rail quite rapidly. The whale knife is heavy in his hands. His ears are too full of blood to register the silence. He puts one foot upon the rail, unthinking, and he vaults. The leviathan’s gray back occupies his narrow vision, though it is a wide enough canvas. All is coarse gray, and silver foam, interrupted only by the cavernous black spouting nostril in its center.
He sticks to its wet surface like hot tar. He feels its living vibration echoing through the static grasp of his bare feet. He can feel its fear, and he shares its remorse.
“Fell it!” A chorus of voices rings in his ears. “Kill it.”
“Bisect the big fucking fish.”
“Before its master comes…”
And he plunges the knife down, just ahead of the cranial spout. It pierces quite as easily as though through firm fruit. Then Ayricalt moves his feet, dragging the knife up the whale’s long skull, feeling the wet bone split and the gouting blood bathe his toes with warmth. He is shocked by sensation.
The men on board cheer. Perhaps they have now comprehended the silence. But the silence is quickly dying. Soon Ayricalt cannot hear their cheering. Soon they cannot hear themselves.
“Get the fucking oars!” The cricket’s voice splits into Aryicalt’s skull like a clap of water, and still he can scarcely hear it. A song is echoing in his feet. Ayricalt glances back, and sees the old helmsman waving his arms in desperation--grasping hopelessly at the air, as if it was a dying lover. The other men are white with shock. Ayricalt looks for the augur--she has pressed herself up against the prow. She is stricken, a calcite figurehead.
The song is bubbling through pink foam, reverberating in Ayricalt’s knees so that he must grip the knife’s long hilt to stay standing. The song grows louder, reaching a feverish amplitude.
It is getting closer.
When it breaks the surface, everything collapses.
Ayricalt only sees it from the corner of his vision. He is grounded by a now silent pain in his ears, a tremorous disturbance in his gut, which leaves him convulsing. He is collapsing, but before his feet relieve their wet grip on the whale’s leather back, he hears it.
It is the coordinated assault of a dozen horns, played as distant as the heavens, and as loud as creation. It hangs like a ceaseless thunder in the air, a melody shifting endlessly into itself. An unfathomable harmony. It sends a ripple on the surface, and ripples rise and the whale’s body bobs in the water like a dry stick. And the ripples become waves and waves become surf, and they crash over Ayricalt. And through the song, does he hear the snapping of tethers? The harpoons’ wooden shafts cracking against a tremendous mass of water?
The sea falls on him like flagstones, like some demon jealously squeezing the air from his lungs. The whale’s body is spinning. Ayricalt is fortunate he doesn’t think much: his hand is at its task without question--it is still gripped around the knife’s hilt, and the knife is still wedged tightly into the leviathan’s skull.
When the corpse raft has steadied, he looks back toward the ship. He needs instruction (and yes--he has not yet let go of the knife). He needs at least some reassurance.
The ship is no longer in reach. It never will be again. Ayricalt watches, in perfect horror, as the ship is suddenly thrown into the air--ten feet, twenty feet. A cascading, shimmering tower of mist comes up and grasps the airborne vessel like Uxr’s own hand. It moves through the wood like wood moves through water. The prow tilts, and the stern falls in the opposite direction. The tower falls back to the sea, carrying with it the many pieces of the longboat, and all of its crew. The corpse raft shifts with the ensuing tide.
Ayricalt watches the water--squinting with desperate eyes. He looks for flailing arms, for bodies grasping to an errant shard of floating plank, or chunk of mast, cresting over water. But there is nothing but the gray horizon, and the gray sea, and the invisible place where they meet. Once more the water is still.
Ayricalt notices, after a moment, that the only sound on this desert patch of ocean is his own confused wailing.
They both started when they noticed Ayricalt looking gloomily over their backs, propped up on his long and strange, bronze polesword.
“That’s…not really how it happened, Mierel,” he said. He sounded almost apologetic.
“Well, I’ve only heard you tell it once,” Mierel replied, rather sheepishly. His embarrassment looked not too dissimilar from his fury: the clay tan of his face flushed shining, and his green eyes split wide.
“The augur wasn’t speaking to demons,” Ayricalt explained to Zigrel. “And I wasn’t afraid.”
Mierel hummed. “Ah. So you were skulking there the whole time…”
An awkward period of silence punctuated the exchange.
“What about the monster?” Both Sprunishmen turned to face Zigrel with curious expressions. “You said ‘that’s not how it happened.’” She grimaced impatiently. “Well, what about the monster?”
Ayricalt frowned; his gaze wandered off into the darkness. “No, he wasn’t exaggerating about that.”
“Then what in a demon god’s hallucination is your plan?” she seethed. She could not shake the vision, borne of no prognostication, of the fishing boat erupting from the water, pulled back to the sea in a tatter of splinters and expatriate corpses.
Mierel sighed, a limp sympathy, while Ayricalt of the Isles blossomed in the darkness with an arrogant smirk.
“Cad Aarvort had a statue of the whaleherd,” he whispered giddily, barely audible over the ever-rising weather. “Whoever made that statue, then, has seen a whaleherd. If someone has seen a whaleherd, that means the whaleherd cannot always remain in the water.”
“Seems unlikely that it posed for a sculptor,” Mierel shrugged. “It’s mad, but it’s the most convincing bit of reasoning I’ve ever heard from him.” Not that it was any consolation.
Prince Ayricalt of the Karafins, unphased by this slight, grinned into the distance. The fishing boat carried on its sinusoidal way. Zigrel, now oblivious to the discomforts of this voyage, felt a layer of sweat seeping cold into her body. She shivered.
“A secular monk is never in mortal danger,” Arzado had told her, “with three exceptions:
“On the battlefield, on open seas, and before only the most vicious monsters.”
She could only try to convince herself that she hadn’t chanced into all three at once.