A hulking mass of empty space appeared in the clouded night like a shadow between shadows, transiently dancing behind lumbering crests of the dark and roiling ocean surface. Mierel, sleepless and nauseated, rubbed the salt mist tears from his bloodshot eyes, and circumspectly analyzed this nascent shade.. He’d half convinced himself it was just a mirage, something he hadn’t seen in many years. He greeted it like an old friend: warily.

Ayricalt, doubtless informed by those fuzzy sense fragments of an archipelagic childhood, identified it, crying out: “Ship! Ship off the larboard bow!”

His voice was an insect buzzing in the ear, still difficult to make out against the tempest; Mierel, rather haplessly awaiting orders, listened carefully.“We’ll have her!” Ayricalt cackled piratically, spouting off incredible nonsense about captives, slaves, and booty. He blessed the winds then condemned them in lockstep. He spoke to them with that insistent pleading which so dominated sailors’ speech, as if the weather itself was an eternally coy lover, tempted once, perhaps, and therefore prone to be tempted again. Within this tirade, he interspersed his orders, but Mierel and Zigrel had to wrap themselves around the railing to keep their beleaguered balance--Mierel’s bare skin splintered by the old wood, his robes folded up at his waist; his body, heaving and hot and sweating; and the wind was cold--their progress was slow.

Gut-wrenching forces rocked the boat in her course, careening and plummeting over unreflective waves like jagged obsidian. The winded spray obscured their vision for petulant intervals. Mierel could almost forget that it wasn’t raining, and he would have welcomed a thunder bolt or two to alleviate the claustrophobic darkness.

“We’ll bring them to the Cavern of Alidar!” Ayricalt boasted, “We’ll tie them to the stone posts!”

Now he sounds like a Sprunishman. Mierel gasped out a laugh, choking on missile splashes of sea, glad to be distracted from burning hands and so much wet rope. “Make them wish that goblins had got them!” he answered, turning his head and bellowing into his shoulder. “Skin ‘em,” he coughed out, “sell their hides in Gothesgal.” Nobody could have heard him.

Zigrel, posted at midship starboard, didn’t seem to say anything, but tugged her strained grimace into a queasy smile.

After another few exceedingly long minutes spent struggling over the tilting deck, carrying out the captain’s whispered orders, Mierel spied half a dozen flickering lights permeating through the darkness. At first, he struggled to catch them in the fully nauseating motions of the distraught fishing boat. He struggled enough to keep his eyes open, to stay propped up on shivering knees.

He struggled even longer to comprehend these lights (set like stars against the otherwise plain, gray overcast). Sure enough, they were torches. Beneath them, lined in their red, blearing edges, the ship: a slightly larger cousin of their Ellusenese charter.

The wind ceased with a long, dying breath. A suffocating silence swallowed up the crackling wash of crashing surf, which had not ababated. They carried on apparently by momentum alone.

Ayricalt, teeth clenched and drained of all his madness, clutched desperately at the still air, wrenching theatrically at nothing. A pantomime of some greater sailor. Alas, the wind would not be tempted.

He gave no orders. The crashing silence held anxiously suspended on the whitecaps.

Mierel spat.

He rubbed his raw and burning hands, watched the looming, torchlit vessel like a hunter tracks a hare’s dash--though through the waves it skittered up and down more like some gross lantern bug on fat and failing wings. He spat again. He clenched his battered red eyes into bleary slits, spying the space between the torchlight and the shadow--the thin, illuminated patch where the occupants cautiously materialized.

The ship was some hundred and fifty feet before them. They were still closing in, but not as fast as before (indeed, their momentum seemed ever less sufficient to clear each impending crest). Body-shapes shifted and faded in the obscuring, distant darkness.

It was still with a vertiginous backstep that Mierel observed a shadow, quite divorced from the ship, which seemed to levitate somewhere in the space between the vessels.

Mierel blinked, rubbed his eyes, sheafs of salt coagulating against his fingertips. The ship wasn’t more than a hundred feet before him. He tried to find that little patch of hanging darkness once again.

He did, and this time he beheld the gangplank, issuing out from the lighted ship, on which the suspended figure stood.

Mierel blinked again, and burned with focus to keep peeled his eyes, buffeted by a salvo of stinging seawater.

And through that dying darkness, backlit by blinking, wavering torches, he saw the broad, rounded, but imperfect curve of a bald head. He noted the peaking coils of whiskers sticking out the side of the silhouetted head. He prepared himself to see the glowing white lines of that ceaseless grin. Alas…

He watched with an as-yet dawning understanding as the gangplank dropped, merging with the shadowy hull of the Noriac ship. As his glance darted to the wild, watery surface, he could only anachronistically imagine that he had followed the plummeting shape of Kelcetrix the Sky Shepherd as it noiselessly crashed into the sea.

High above, the swirling, swooping shadows of crazed gulls kept an instinctive distance from this ritual.

Mierel did not see them--he did not look up at all--for his eye had caught on another defining stillness in the tempest, glinting maliciously through the black terrain…

“Rock!” he shouted. “Rock! By His sodden hooves, Ayry, a fucking rock!”

Ayricalt busied himself hopelessly at the rudder, his face a grim mix of fear and fearsome. He might have been wrestling a boar. He did not hear, or paid no heed. The boat carried on its unsteady way, rising and falling, apparently oblivious to Ayricalt’s supplicant urgings. If any doubt still remained about their velocity, it must now have been mollified, for each distasteful trip above the rolling crests revealed the errant rock closer and closer still.

Mierel stumbled down the deck, wrapped around the rails, to reach the captain. “Rock!” he kept screaming: “By Uxr’s wet tits, Ayry, you’ll fucking drown us!” But every time the boat crested, Mierel looked anxiously back at that obstacle--he made little progress this way, and it was just a few more oscillations before he knew he’d have to give it up.

He pressed himself off the railings, like mollusc peeled from its footing. Stumbling, he steadied himself on the narrow band of flat, larboard deck, falling heavily on one knee. He widened his stance, propped himself with one hand upon the salty planks. Rivulets of cold, tortured seawater trickled around his palm, then over the thin corners of his fingers, alternating with the ship’s exaggerated movements. He watched the rock approach, an invisible stillness, then charged…

and leapt…

Mierel closed his eyes, opened them. He saw nothing. A scatter of disoriented darkness. He screamed, perhaps, but could not hear himself above the cry of cracking timbers on hard earth. Even the impact came as only a distant sense, second to a scrabbling instinct against drowning. Mierel found his hands swimming bloody on sharp volcanic stone, a stinging edge of discarded salt. He fought to his feet, discombobulated and swinging on this unexpectedly steady ground.

He wiped his eyes again, pulling away the salt until it filmed over the edges of his fingers, painting his face with a smear of still warm blood. He saw the remains of their boat, a mangled mass which seemed somehow larger in its constituent pieces. It was with only the barest relief that he noticed two ghostly white hands, dully showing over the rock’s black surface.

He rushed to them, clog soles scraping hopelessly against fractal, virgin earth until he tripped into genuflection, then crawled, so the daggerpoints of black stone stabbed repeatedly at his knees and hands. But time’s advance, rapid with panic, saw him at his lover’s side in an unprocessable moment. He grabbed the white hands, warming them with spilled blood, wetted thin.

“Ayry!” he cried. “My fucking prince, Ayry, get up!” A wash of wordless oaths, ripe with more conviction than sense, drowned his hardly conscious mind.

But Ayricalt rose, displaying his own wan consciousness with a vapid frown. His lips quivered, a cold shiver mixed with something deliberate, but silent. He coughed.

“What?” Mierel shouted.

“My spear,” Ayricalt repeated. “Where’s my spear?”

Mierel turned his head to either side, taking in nothing, a hopeless search in the darkness. “Forget the fucking spear, Ayry.”

Ayricalt nodded mildly, then struggled to his feet with the patient effort of some contorted elder. When he had finally steadied himself, he glanced over the islet, beholding its rough diameter. It was fairly circular, a gradual but distinctly rising dome some sixty feet across. The tall waves reached only tacitly about the exterior, but the violence of its impact left a rain of spray which soaked the dome completely to its modest summit.

“Zigrel?” he dully shouted. All that wild, buccaneerish vigor had gone, sucked out like heat by the cold, solid ground. He shook his head gently, achingly, then repeated--in the Cricket’s Voice: “Where’s Zigrel?”

Mierel turned fully around, nearly tripped when he saw her standing just beside them, like a phantom built out of the shadowed mists. If the crash had left her shaken, as it had this hardened mercenary and this consummate seaman, then she did not show it. Besides the wet-streaked straightness of her dark hair clinging to her face and neck, she bore no less icy cool and lucidity than ever. She nodded impatiently over at the Noriac ship, which bounded in place just beyond the islet’s far shore. She curled one eyebrow curiously up.

Ayricalt frowned. “Let’s not worry about the ship--”

A ringing silence suddenly filled the ocean soundscape, and the invisible rain of spray ceased almost an instant. In the sudden stillness Mierel felt an irresistible press of nausea, and, just keeping his balance, evacuated his stomach with an understated wretch.

Wine, he thought, tastes no less better going up than down. Though it burned his sinuses unpleasantly. He snorted and spat.

The quiet moment stretched on, into the space of a thoughtful breath. Zigrel gasped--a sudden jolt of air to be suffocated in the clinging atmosphere. Mierel felt it just as surely as she had--and without the strangely sharpened intuition of a Tushikan monk.

After all, this wasn’t his first monster hunt.

A moment of reflection (though ultimately unafforded) might have revealed a faint, steadily growing rumble beneath their feet; or a perceptible sounding through the silence--a tone which shifted at once into melodies, into counterpoint, and on to wavering harmonies.

The adventures might have noticed a muted chanting, falling off the Noriac corbita like some miasmic fog. In fact they’d forgotten about the Noriacs, which was just as well. They might have noticed a shadow looming, circling the lonely islet…

Of course, they didn’t need to--for it arrived just as surely, either way.

A smaller sister mound appeared just beside the islet, only patiently disturbing the sea’s new smoothness. Mierel chewed his cheeks.

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Then the mound erupted, a heavy cascade rattling against stone, and pittering against the tiny cusped pools which pocked the little islet. A familiar refrain.

Mierel (whether by heroic intrepidity or some more instinctive sense of moment) swallowed any anticipation before it had the chance to germinate, and prepared himself to kill. Ayricalt, humming a disconsolate sigh, raised his elven blade, which seemed to sparkle even in the lightless dark. Mierel brought up the indecorous iron thorn which had recently been serving him. Zigrel, Mierel noticed, stamped her teeth till they might shatter, and her jaw trembled like it might snap.

A living model of Cad Aarvort’s statue appeared before them, parting the waterfall displacement with that unmistakable shape. Mierel only lamented that the sculpture had been of a diminutive scale.

The whaleherd’s torso stood in poise above the foam of its arrival, some eight, angular feet of rowed muscles topped by a generous, if indistinct, curve of skull. Its eye--for only one could be visible at a time--glimmered like a conspicuous gem set in dull stone. Mierel silently thanked his god for presenting him this creature in a thick and musty darkness. He would not have liked to see the shimmer of its squamous hide, the wrenching muscles of its long, marine arms, or its anguilliform tail slithering over the rocky shore. He would not have liked to see the strange and beastly face, whose intelligence had come through even on its underwhelming stone facsimile.

Perhaps he would not have liked to see what it cradled in the several articulations of its arthropodic arms--dark pendula of an all too familiar shape. He hadn’t noticed them, in fact, until Zigrel--with a hideous whisper--brought them to attention:

“Who are they?” she seethed. Generally, the answer was obvious enough. The real question might have been: “Which ones are those?” for this "crusis" carried only two limp humans at its side. Mierel offered no answer.

The creature slithered side to side, turning its broad-snouted face to observe them from one angle or the other.

Curious? Mierel wondered. Confused? Or… just amused?

Mierel, upholding a lifetime’s precedent, did not leave the creature much time for its mysterious considerations. His right hand, occupied by the old, nameless blade, dropped low. His left flew out from folds of robe left hanging at his waist. It held the rock salt dagger of Cad Aarvort, which swung in the air, a white glow, cutting arcs in the darkness. These slivered curves flew visibly, slashing talons of razor-thin salt. They impacted the whaleherd unnoticeably. Hitting and dissipating. The whaleherd barely shivered as they cut against its scaled hide. Then it twisted, writhed, and let out a roar like some enormous reed flute--a sung note more than a pitched scream.

“Tough bastard,” said Mierel. He did not want to lose the initiative, but throwing salt was tiresome work (and he’d scarcely had a chance to practice it). Furthermore, he had the sense that buying time would prove a poor bargain. This was not a creature which tactics would defeat. Not with such meager resources, anyway--nor on such unfriendly terrain. What they needed was a miracle, or some other intervention. A little luck would likely do the trick.

The crusis moved hypnotically, such that as it shifted its arms, releasing its cargo, it almost took its hunters by surprise.

Granted, these morbid projectiles appeared as dark lumps shifting against a dark and lumpy background, “Man-shaped” only by the imagination’s incapacity to recognize them otherwise. They flopped audibly through the space where the Sprunishmen had just dodged out of, limp hands waving in wide circles. They slapped, rather unwelcomingly, at Mierel’s legs, injuring his already crippled sense of decency more than anything else.

Mierel did not look toward where the bodies scraped and skidded to a stop, and so he didn’t see their faces. He felt no curiosity, no mournfulness or sense of tragedy. But he did see Zigrel--cocked to the side, facing down toward the ragdoll corpes. He had known she would look. She seemed rather mixed about her master, but there was, no doubt, affinity wrapped up between them.

(He thought about those youngest men who, sniffing out meaning like marching ants, swarmed the sell-sword camps in late winter. Red faces, clothes still whole and smelling more like hot straw than the gorey muck which would soon encrust them. They spoke about their mothers and their fathers often, with swaggering chins and bluff remonstrations. If they died, they died with their mother’s name upon their lips, their father’s memory in their hearts. If they lived, they’d have something more interesting to talk about.)

Based on her unusual aloofness (Such a monster scares even a witch, right?), it seemed to Mierel that she must have found him. Blessedly, she did not wail. She did not move, either.

Ayricalt approached first, carrying his silvery blade slightly out from his side, like a sporting gentleman meeting a peer. His steps were careful, the broad ball of his clogs scratched to grip against the salt-caked surface, and shattering its crystalline rims.

Mierel watched with wide eyes. He was reminded of--and quite brought back to--a moment some years past when, coming upon a similarly monstrous quarry--the rock troll--Ayricalt had just as stupidly marched right up to it. Like a child seeking honey from a hornet’s nest.

What dash! Mierel thought, and what impudence! But what had Mierel thought, those many years before? Nothing so romantic, nothing quite like he now remembered it--tinted by the bold-stroked colors of all those years since.

Again, he watched a brave and foolish man approach something indelible, or close enough to it. The only difference now was that Mierel firmly loved that brave and foolish man.

Consequently, he watched with all his extremities numb and screaming--cold, stiff, and hot to the point of snapping! Tears caressed his cheeks as fate unfurled before him, and Mierel was impotent to it all. Perhaps he would have said: “My eyes do that, sometimes. To get rid of extra salt.” But it would have been difficult to hear over the choking sobs which swelled in his throat like a sprained erection, painful and inconsolable. He bit them down to silence, and watched petrified as the wet blur of Ayricalt dissolved into the darkness.

This proved an unfamiliar affliction, a much aggrandized version of the sense he knew as “fear.” Though it was mixed up with the warmth of love, he felt no comfort from it. He got over it (as for any other ill) with a spout of fury, drawn out from a well of abuse.

I hate fate, he thought; and if that was meaningless, he meant it anyway. He groaned and grunted, scraped his clog heel forcibly against the stone, to grind him to motion. He strained his neck to drain his red hot throat. What came out was a hissed grunt, an open cough.

“Stand back,” Mierel growled to the petrified witch, though she didn’t seem to listen. “We’ll bloody it with swords, not sorcery.”

And so he charged, never letting a moment for thought, away from his late comrades and their lone, mournful observer.

He caught up to Ayricalt just as the whaleherd acknowledged him. In a moment, the air between these men and their monster was a gust of swinging limbs, ten foot arms like fingered crab legs, chasing blurs like bats in the night. In fact, it wasn’t much of a chase. Ayricalt and Mierel parried as well as they could, the elven blade rending arcs through the chitin, and the latter’s dull, iron instrument beating resoundingly off the armored skin, but the weight of the whaleherd’s arms, hooking and hammering invisibly, took enough of a toll. They were battered against the fighting ring, more injured by the hostile ground than their quarry’s ceaseless blows.

Still, this monster was not accustomed to thin air--nor, it appeared, to such aggressive movements on the rough ground. Silver flakes of its variegated scales rolled cloudlike over the tiny pools, and clung like poplar cotton to their salty cusps. Though its blood was invisible, its left arm--much cut by Ayricalt’s blade--had slowed in its wide sweeps. Its hammering drops, drained of their weight.

Consequently, the beast increasingly lost interest in Mierel, who could tell, with each bash of chitinous flesh against his sword, that the weapon was dulling, becoming deadweight--just like himself. He cursed and spat, then dove for the monster’s convex belly. A well-placed stab--straight upon the muscular midline, nevertheless glanced off the slimy armor, drawing a sick but bloodless line against the monster’s long oblique.

It growled through its whole slithering body. Mierel felt it like his lover’s warmth, a sympathetic resonance convected between them. If he pissed himself then, or after the creature threw him up in the air--or after that, when he crashed unconsciously back onto the cold ground thither--he did not realize it. Alas, when he awoke, he was wet.

He had the sense of waking, too, which worried him. Actually, it more than worried him, but he shot up soon enough to see something sufficiently assuaging before he had the chance to process his despair.

He saw Ayricalt standing over his enemy--standing on his enemy. The whaleherd lying armless against the ground, its belly cut, filling the salt-rimmed pools with more dark lumps. Ayricalt stomped over the creature’s broad side, it eyed him and snarled, and bit. Ayricalt swung a clog heel into its formless chin. The head reeled back. Than Ayricalt fell with the blade, onto his knees, till it rung dully on the stone below. Then he dropped his shoulder, and pulled out the whaleherd’s throat.

It was a special fortune which had, on more than one occasion, afforded Mierel the chance to witness true heroism. Once, it had been a person whom he’d killed. All the rest had been from Ayricalt, and they had the peculiar quality of always seeming greater than the last. Mierel knew that this pattern could not repeat forever--but his cynicism lay muted by sheer wonder. He limped forward, leg scraped numb by salty teeth. He did not look for the witch.

“How the hell did you do that?” he asked, voice hoarse, and discovered he was crying.

Ayricalt panted and shook his head. Mierel fell on him, an ill-informed tackle which saw them fall back, heads against the stone. They groaned, and laughed, and struggled for breath. Mierel held Ayricalt’s beardless, boney cheek in his palm.

“How in Ans’ holy red cock did you do it?”

“Easy,” Ayricalt wheezed. “Big dumb bastard. Just kept swinging.”

“Are you talking about the whaleherd,” Mierel snorted, “or yourself.” and they laughed some more. “You’ve got a master’s patience, if you can wait out a monster like this.”

“Please,” Ayricalt snickered. “I hang around with you.”

Zigrel knew she’d have to get up eventually. The ground was biting into her seat--she’d have rather been sitting on the whaleherd’s carcass. She’d been a bit hypnotized by the receding shadow of the Noriac ship, wondering how in the world they were going to get off this rock. The monster was sure to start smelling, and she didn’t know how much longer she could take the hostility of the terrain.

Mostly, though, she was thinking about her departed master. These were unproductive, half-formed thoughts--but thoroughly absorbing. Assailing, even.

She did not look at his body. While she knew that he was dead, she refused to realize his passing.

And she knew she should rise. A walk would clear her mind, set her into motion--perhaps bring her feet back to the Glass Path. But she felt a great inertia, besides a niggling sense that clarity might provoke the realization which she paradoxically avoided.

Nevertheless, she stood, and all she really felt was an empty soreness in her legs. And guilt. She tried to distract herself, wondering about the Sprunishmen, and what they were getting up to. But it had been some time since she’d engaged in the sexual rumor-mills of the novices, and she didn’t properly have the imagination to fathom it.

“Sprunishmen,” she demanded. They both peeked up from behind the monster. Unfortunately, she hadn’t thought of anything to follow that severe introduction. Silence hung awkwardly.

Mierel grinned. He pressed himself painfully off the ground, grunting and cursing, then leaned his hip against the monster’s spilling cadaver. Ayricalt, propping his hands on his knees, stood and shivered. His naked torso glistened with a cloying sweat. He looked feverish.

“Well,” said Mierel, “how do you suppose we get off this rock?”

The Sprunishmen’s heads darted comically from side to side, scanning the dark, plain surface of the islet as if some unseen solution beckoned them. And what would they see? A big, slain monster and a broken boat; one fallen vassal of the Mighty Shu, and one deceased master of Prighuyt Tuzhk. They would think nothing of it.

The sea lapped gently at the coast, and the wind pulsed calmly back to life. High above them, the clouds shifted and thinned, and a lunar brightness burned coldly through.

“Same way we got here, I suppose,” said Ayricalt, nodding over at the wreck. Mierel and Zigrel found each other’s eyes through the darkness. Mierel shrugged, a dashing, wild grin split his hairy face.

Zigrel shook her head and sighed.

So much for a rescue, she thought.

The guilt was simple, the grief, topical. Zigrel sensed the Glass beneath her feet, but she couldn’t feel traction. She didn’t look into the future, but she knew:

They’d start a fire, and then they’d sleep. That was a start. “You must take each moment as it comes…”

And, perhaps, tomorrow she would feel better. More likely, she’d feel worse.

“Move like the water around a stone. Hold like the stone when water strikes it.

“Be the stillness and be the storm. See the invisible, and see through the real.”

Somewhere in her steady, practiced breath, she sighed again.

It’s all the same, she thought (and it was little consolation).

You’ll just be doing it…

Alone.

Whales breached mournfully off the islet shore, spraying their misty tears into the gentle breeze.

Zigrel envied their conviction. She ran through the wailing chants in her head, but dared not utter them. Meanwhile, Mierel started a fire.

Then, heads rested on the whaleherd’s stiffening body, they fulfilled that untold prophecy, and slept.