At this hour the waterfront at Umma was free from drays, carts, load-poles and other freight transport. It was still crowded with sailors, sellers, buyers and onlookers. Led by Deyilan they shouldered their way along the broad esplanade and down a side-street to the recommended inn. Here they booked chambers for the next two nights, washed the salt from their bodies and changed clothes before sauntering out for platters of fresh seafood and crisp fried vegetables, served with an array of pungent sauces and tiny glasses of clear spirit.
The Shipwright’s Bank in Umma was an imposing block of white stone whose columned front and blocky outline combined to suggest both the welcome of a respectable hotel and the security of a small fortress. Within it was cool, well-lit and orderly. They visited in the morning to establish their credentials, then spent a pleasant few hours roaming Umma.
The contrast between Umma and Lagash could not be greater. One was dark, narrow, secretive, suspicious, swaggering. Umma was bright, open and cheerful. The few guards carried sticks, not swords and were most often found giving directions or finding stray children. Where Lagash cuisine tended to the more obscure denizens of reef and shore, Umma offered good plain cooking. It was comfortable to understand the conversations around them, although the local accent offered some challenges. Even the usual towering Saka long-houses were here replaced with more modest halls in yellow stone and soft red tile. Chrys realised that a tension she had not been fully aware of had leached away.
When they returned to the bank in the afternoon a sheaf of papers awaited them. Chrys looked at her account first and was gratified to see that she now had over eight hundred roses to her credit, even after her purchases. It was more than she expected. She leafed through the other messages – one from her aunt in Tsitiev, a brief note from Kosohona to say that her recovery was proceeding well, a reminder from the General Etheric Practice Association of the Haghakin League and Allied Nations that her membership was due for renewal. She looked around the table of the room the bank had allotted them.
Cardnial looked up. “There’s a message for us all from Ferrzhe Jiaghin. The families of the two dwarven shade-slaves in the tomb offered death-gild and weapon-gild, which he deposited in our accounts. He says he has made progress on finding buyers but not finalised any sales as yet.”
The others shared their news. Rakt’s family was doing well, but saw no need for him to return. Aitonala’s Guild sent a recommendation to their house here in Umma and to sister-orders elsewhere, and her father sent to tell her of a new nephew. Cardnial had no family and so no personal messages. Grymwer folded a message away, looking troubled. Chrys raised an eyebrow at him in sympathetic query and he shook his head slightly in reply.
Grymwer continued to be uncharacteristically quiet while they concluded their business with the bank and exited to find a drink and a snack. When they were sitting in a quiet arbour with a large jug on the table he leaned forward and unburdened himself.
“I had a message from my mother. The family has all moved to Zamo and settled in pretty well. It’s a town in the west of the archipelago. Anyway, my father’s not too well, and there’s a few issues a magician could help deal with.”
Chrys could see where this was leading. “So you want to leave us. Here?”
Grymwer was unhappy but plunged on. “It’s not just my family. We have made a fair amount of money – not a fortune, but enough to help with what I want to do. I’ve been killed once, and it wasn’t pleasant. Now you plan to go to some ominous ruin, one no-one has come back from. Well,” he hesitated, searching for the right words, “it does not feel like something I want to go on doing – just wandering from place to place, fighting, with no real goal. So after this last trip, and the fuss in Lagash, I think it’s time for me to quit and go help my family.”
Chrys could see his point. If they kept going long enough, they would die, one by one or perhaps all together. She had known grizzled nomad warriors, battered and scarred, who talked of the many and varied wars they had fought. Their living companions were few. If one had a goal, then the sensible thing to do was quit when one had reached it. Grymwer had reached his goal, and decided to quit. She would too, she said to herself, but not yet. Her goal was grander than Grymwer’s. A glance around told her that Cardnial probably felt much the same. Aitonala looked puzzled, Rakt thoughtful, Bajur accepting.
There was clearly no point in trying to persuade Grymwer out of his decision. Yet they were booked to leave Umma the next day, and Chrys was determined to make another try at fortune. A quick scan of the notes on the Castle of Unreturn suggested they would need both magic and steel; Grymwer and his grandmother’s halberd had provided both. Her own access to the ether had widened greatly, to the point where spells she would have blanched at trying two months ago were now well within her compass. If she and Cardnial could handle the magic, another fighter beside Rakt would be useful. Her gaze grew less distant and she focused on a figure entering the arbour.
“Deyilan,” she called “How would you like to earn a lot of money?”
Grymwer found a ship bound for Mer Ammery leaving three days hence. Deyilan listened to their plans, considered briefly and then said that he had nothing better to do at the moment. That night they drank beer and ate fish steaks while looking out over the harbour. Grymwer tried to explain his feelings to Aitonala, then gave up and reminisced about their time together. The next afternoon, still slightly hungover, they boarded the Dicey Lady, bound for the Dravish port of Brafa. Grymwer lifted a hand in salute from the dock as they pulled away.
* * * *
“If we are heading for Dravishi,” Deyilan remarked, “then speaking Dravish will be useful. I can speak it quite well, but it would be better if I did not have to translate every time we need a bowl of rice. So,” he went on “it might be time to use those bottles you bought from Shiem.” They were leaning on the rail, watching the bow-wave curl past as the Dicey Lady headed out into the gulf. Calls of “All clear, no sightings” came from the mastheads at regular intervals as lookouts kept watch for sea-monsters, while crew clustered around dart-throwers mounted forward and in the waist. The atmosphere was one of caution but not alarm, as they were nearly clear of the creatures’ usual habitat. When no monsters had been sighted by sunset the crews stood down, dinner was served and the party returned to the language question.
Chrys opened the wooden box of small bottles. “We have three Dravish, one Pallo, one Merllan and one Saka, aside from the Higher Magic Theory. Who misses out?”
“I have a spell that will let me learn the language quickly,” Aitonala said.
Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.
“I know that God desires that I travel with you, but I also know that these Items were made by dark means and are unlawful to me. I will not partake,” said Bajur solemnly.
“It helps if you hear the language while absorbing it,” said Deyilan. “I can talk in Dravish, although I can’t read it.”
“Fine,” said Chrys. “We three will drink it down and you tell us stories.”
Bajur left for his own narrow bunk, Aitonala laced her hands in a spell and Deyilan began. “In a time before there was a powerful king...” as they drained the musty contents.
Chrys woke up next morning feeling distinctly uncertain. She was lying fully clothed on the lower bunk, staring at the underside of the berth above, a short arm-length away. She felt through her head, labelling things. The sound of the word for bed rolled through her mind, then that for itchy, then that for confused. They all sounded both familiar and strange. She tried a few words aloud, shaping them in her mouth before sounding them. Again, they sounded both familiar and strange, like a place well-known seen from a new angle.
Chrys was trained in careful observation of herself; now she let her mind wander through a chain of associations and then reviewed the results. Why did ‘water’ couple with ‘teeth’? What tied ‘ether’, ‘bones’ and ‘fire’ together? She puzzled for a bit, then rolled out of her berth, driven by the morning’s needs. The chamber-pot was in a box hinged to swing out from under the bed, a wash provided by a cloth that could be passed through a ring to clean and moisten it, and breakfast was presumably to be found on deck.
The morning was fine, if already heating up. The Dicey Lady heeled slightly as it reached across a steady wind. A hatch forward dispensed porridge sprinkled with chips of smoked meat, a crisp biscuit and a hot drink on request. Chrys carefully thanked the cook, getting first a querying look and then a smile. She found Deyilan at the forward rail, mug in hand.
“I think I’m speaking Dravish. Am I doing it right?”
Deyilan laughed. “You are doing very well, except that the vial must have come from a man. You are using the male personal pronouns, instead of the female ones. It’s as if I were to say ‘Is this woman doing well?’”
“I could be one of those people who are neither, or in-between.”
“Then you would use another set of pronouns: the neutral-personal.”
Chrys thought of gender words, then let the associated pronouns filter forwards. Deyilan was right. Her unthinking reference point was that she was male, a thought difficult to put together in Dravish. She wondered briefly what pronouns be appropriate for a half-female, half-male dwarf-human (or indeed vice versa), then went to find a female Dravish-speaker to practice on.
By the time the Dravish coast came in sight Chrys, Cardnial and Rakt were all comfortable with the language, and Aitonala had enough of a grasp to be confident she could ask for directions or a meal, or tell someone to get lost politely or rudely, as required. The Dicey Lady hove to off the Fa, one of the many mouths of a great swampy delta, and waited for a pilot. Chrys realised that she could put names to many of the scents that filled the air – the heavy smell of mangroves, the sharper tang of crab-limes, the rich mix of brine and weed from low banks exposed by the tide. There came with these a faint sense of nostalgia, as if she had been here before. It was, perhaps, an echo of the life behind the language.
The pilot swung aboard, a tall old man in a green kilt, his hair plaited into many small braids. Sailors braced the yards around and the ship’s motion changed from aimless bobbing to a smooth glide. The land grew closer on both sides as they wound their way up the main channel, then the pilot brought her around to run across to the north bank and the wharves of Brafa town. This sprawled along the low shore and some way out into the water as well, a medley of tall timber mansions, houses on stilts and low stone warehouses. A line was thrown to a boat, a hawser pulled after it and fastened to a bollard, the Dicey Lady was heaved in to lie alongside a tarred wooden platform and two officials in red kilts came aboard to collect customs papers. The passengers were free to leave after a cursory inspection of luggage.
* * * *
They found lodgings in an inn built out over the water. The river sent cool breezes through latticed windows and the suck and swish of waves against the pilings was a constant background. The group took a table on the deck, ordered cool fruit juice and talked about the Castle of Unreturn. Chrys looked through the brief Madame Zelenka had given them.
“The location seems straightforward. It’s about three or four days sail to our north. She warns that the inshore approaches are infested with scrags and clawfish, too shallow for large vessels, and the channels skirt banks of nasty oysters.”
“So no swimming,” Rakt commented.
“What are nasty oysters?” asked Bajur. “I mean, I’ve never eaten one, but I have seen oysters and they do not look vicious.”
“A bank of the nasty ones can put something in the water which makes fish go feral,” Cardnial explained. “They attack everything in sight, and the oysters feed on the debris. On one voyage I shipped with an old sailor who frightened me with stories of whales being torn to pieces by swarms of, well, everything with teeth that swims.”
“Then, when you land, elusive things come at night and attack out of the dark,” went on Chrys. “Some sort of large monkey, but very clever, survivors report.”
“Oysters, monkeys, what next?” asked Aitonala.
“Then there is some powerful protection on the castle walls, in that the mere sight of them has been known to induce madness, demon-creatures above ground within, and then nothing about the interior because no-one has come back. Also, there is a strong warning against flying anywhere near the island.”
“How do we know there is anything worth taking there?” was Aitonala’s next query.
Deyilan noted that Madame Zelenka had a good reputation. Chrys added that half the brief was devoted to old stories about a great treasure, although each version differed on the nature of it. She scanned the papers and informed them that another obstacle was that the Igwé Society – whoever they were - had proscribed travel to the island. Cardnial looked around and lowered his voice, even though the conversation had been in Saka.
“Then we need to avoid attention. They are powerful here in Brafa and indeed though much of the kingdom.”
“Is this a legal ban?” asked Bajur. “I do not wish to break the law.”
“Nor I to flee yet another town,” went on Rakt.
“The secret societies – the Igwé, the Imo Miri and others, they run a lot of things in Dravishi, but their word is not law. That belongs to the king or, more practically, the Skull-Moot.”
“Skulls again. There were two over the front desk, which is creepy,” grumbled Aitonala.
“Those were the owner’s parents or grandparents, keeping watch on the business,” Cardnial told her.
“We can keep a low profile, but we cannot blend in,” was Chrys’ contribution. “I stand out like a lemon in a basket of plums, and only Rakt comes close to looking like a local.”
They decided that Deyilan and Cardnial would try to sell the sierlak feathers and buy a boat, Bajur would look for devotees of God the Gracious and Chrys, Aitonala and Rakt would attend to rations, gear and any useful Items. That done, they settled back to enjoy the view, the food and the sweet-sour Dravish rice-beer.