Visir stared at the old man, his eyes clouded with a grey mist like smoke. Lifeless they seemed, striped of color and bleak as stone. Who is this man? Visir thought. What is he talking about? The eyes seemingly inflated, growing larger and larger until they glowed through the shadows like lamps. “What do you mean?” Visir asked. “I know not of your words.”
The man, who named himself Aandil answered, disregarding Visir’s puzzlement. He gripped the iron bars with an intense vigor. “You have come, at last, after all these years of searching, of hoping, of praying. The gods are good, whoever or wherever they are. The gods are good.”
Searching for me? This man is deranged; the sea has consumed him. He has let himself go. “You must be mistaken,” Visir said.
Aandil brushed the words aside like flies swarming over ones food. “The Son of Dhaeher is with whom I speak! He is here, before my very face.”
“Who is Dhaerer?” Visir asked. “Not in all my long years have I ever heard of such a name.”
“Then, my great lord has not lived long,” Aandil said. “The Lord, he is, the Lord of this Earth!” I’ve never heard of such man, Visir answered under his breathe. “His very son, you, yourself has been sent to men and I to find you. My spell, my curse will be released. Ah, yes, I will be free again, as I once was!”
“You’re cursed?” asked Visir.
“With the most terrible of curses,” Aandil said tragically. “Long ago, under a black starry sky I was cursed to forever live a life alone and to live it again and again, to never die, to never pass from this world. For ten thousand years I have walked this earth, bidding my time, watching the people and the wars around me fall into the Void and seen the world crumble and age, but I never have. I have been forced to endure. But you, you are here to save me, to cure me.”
“But I don’t know how,” said Visir. “I haven’t the faintest clue.”
“You’re the Son of Dhaeher,” Aandil said, convinced. “The son of my accursed, the one who did this to me for my sins, my actions, and my failures.” He took his hands off the bars and started to wave them in the air, as if drawling on a page of parchment, his canvas the dark, oppressive air. “It was said in lore, that the son of Dhaeher would come to me, or I to him, and he would be the only one who would be able to save me. He would be akin to the shadows, garbed in black and born from ice and snow. He would be my savior. Among the elder trees of the Forests of Ered I was cursed and there you must take me, Son of Dhaeher, to save me.”
“I can’t,” Visir said. “I don’t know how. I am no Son of Dhaeher, whoever he is. I cannot cure you.”
“You are blind to what you truly are,” the old man said raggedly. “What hidden truth lies deep within you is veiled. As with us all, there is a truth that stirs the moment we are born, and it is with that truth that we are made into who we are and our destinies determined. I cannot change fate, only follow it, and it has led me here, to meet you.”
“Even if I could, or even would take you, we are both in a cell and on a ship, sailing along the Endless Sea.” Visir hugged the stained iron bars with his bloodied and raw fingers, the jagged folds of skin spiking off his knuckles like spires.
Aandil fingered his long snowy beard. “We could escape.”
“Easier said than done,” answered Visir. “Each and every one of these prisoners wants to escape, yet none have. What makes you think we can?”
“I don’t,” the old man said. “But it is worth a try.”
“Worth a try to get out heads cleaved off?” Visir started. “I’m fine keeping my head on and attached to my body than having it roll down the planks of wood like a coconut.”
“You’ll get your head cleaved off if you stay anyway, at some point in time,” Aandil said. “Listen to me. You want to get out of here, I want to be free of this curse. Let us strike a deal then, shall we? I safely get you out of this cell and off this ship, and after, in return, you travel to the Forests of Ered with me.”
Once we escape I could just kill him… “Deal.” Visir didn’t even feel the words leave his mouth, but when they did, he knew he couldn’t take them back.
Eller watched the grey swirls of mist curl around the wooden belly of the galley like fingers of smoke. The water was dark with arcing bands of silky grey running like silver and fins of white hissing against the shadowy surface. The mists hung low, slithering along the water and faded to a clear grey sky, streaked with wisps of ashy clouds that made the sky look as if wrought of stone. Through the stony veil, the sun burned like a pale candle, feeble and weak as it struggled to shin through the bleakness.
They had been in Gallows End for a day, and the mists had only grown thicker. Shaalad sailed the ship himself, taking control over the great wooden wheel on the poop. The Grey Wind followed his commands like a wolf’s cub, wending through the broken fragments of tiny isles scattered through the seas, and avoiding the coast. The ship had just passed through the narrow gap of entry, barely missing the sight of Aegos, but they had made it.
The smoky grey sails of the Grey Wind writhed like the maroon cloaks draped over Eller’s back as he walked up to the quarter deck after standing up on the watch tower, high in the mangled maze of ropes on the main mast. He leaned hard on the ornate railing, moist like morning dew. Shaalad’s heavily accented voice ruled the decks, commanding his seamen to run below deck and take up the oars. Eller glanced back at the sails, rippling sickly, like a drunken man. Bloody wind, cursed Eller watching the heavy cloth fall off the masts solemnly and get folded and taken below.
After the sails were downed and the masts were bare of loose ropes, the seamen, garbed in haggard tunics of billowy blue and slate rushed down the doors in the wood to the lower holds, where the long oak oars rested like ribs in the heart of the ship. As Eller glared down into the murky waters, spitting against the ship, the first oar shot out like an arm, then another and another until bars of oak with great wide paddles sunk into the ocean. At the muffled words of the captain below, Eller could hear the oars stir to life in a rowing dance as they lifted and pushed through the water, leaving behind an untidy mass of grey swirls of silver and lead.
“Heave!” Eller heard the captain command below, and the oars pulled, tugging through the water as if it were a rope, propelling them forward. Soon, the seamen chanted, “Heave! Heave!” in a deep drum like a beat. The chants faded after a while, and the oars slowed, tugging through the grey waters arduously as if their shoulders had tensed and their strength had waned, for it had greatly.
The day trudged along much like the ship, and the hours seemed longer each time they passed. The wind was quiet and the ship was too, the heaves, all but forgotten. Eller had dipped below the deck to fetch a flagon of wine, searching specifically for the Vhirrani Shaalad had showed him, but finding only the Myrrn. Still, it was better than nothing. Below, he had scavenged in his wretched quarters for a map buried under his bed that he thought to bring. He found only dried vomit that compiled in the corner in a red-green solid like gel.
Returning above, he walked over to the rail again, growing fond of it, and took a draught of the wine, the sweet liquor running red down his throat. He glanced into the flagon, where the liquid was shaded and set it down with a thud and a splash as the wooden rail drank the summerwine eagerly. The dull silver strained to catch any glimmer or glister, and appeared rather dirty, with stains patched along the outer rim where he sipped. It’s still wine.
Draining the flagon esuriently, Eller let the last trickle roll down his lips and drip off his scruffy chin to smack against the wooden planks as he looked out at what he saw. Like the gloomy corpse of a ghost, the remains of a pirate galley spiked out of the murky grey waters jaggedly, with blades of fractured wood standing like broken bones and splintered trees. The black wood licked with violent leaps of flame, flickering crimson, yellow, and orange. Eller gaped silently as the Grey Wind whispered past, like a priest mourning the dead.
The splintered flotsam and jetsam drifted away through the swirls of silvery black water like ghosts, some wreathed in flame. Puffing into the air in a great plume of black smoke the dancing flames beneath roared and crackled like a funeral pyre, the embers glinting like stars soaked in blood. Eller’s pale eyes leaped with the brilliant red fire like torches as he sipped his Myrrn. Black as pitch, the heavy, mangled remains of a tattered flag floated like a dead body in the sea, licking with curling fingers of mist and thin bands of yellow flame.
A host of seamen rushed to the rail beside Eller, stopping as if speared with an iron spike, their eyes going white as bone. Like a wall, they watched the tendrils of cloth unravel across the water, its heart sinking into the grey, stony water, where a white skull with two cutlets stabbed into the eyes rippling in the corner and a large pearl, ripe with deep, wet blood pierced with a curving blade and asstraci trapped in the membranous red pearl emblazoned across the fabric.
Eller watched the ship, wreathed in a garb of writhing flame and a crown of puffing smoke fade away into the clutches of the great grey hands of mist and the last dismal wreckage slip away from view. He felt a hand rap against his cloaked back as he looked back down into the dull grey mirror of water churn with a steady roll and Shaalad said in his ear, “This won’t be the first sunken ship you’ll see before we’re out of the Gallows.”
Without a glance, Eller responded. “I care not of them for I can see a hundred of their galleys burned, just not this one go up in flames.”
“Aye, and it shan’t,” Shaalad said, taking the flagon of wine from Eller and draining it with a deep gulp. “Myrrn, aye, this galley was at once a Myrossi ship, docked in the coastal port of Myro, along the Long Sea. Stolen, I presume, carrying some sort of cargo in the likes of cloth, maybe carrying them to Aegos, maybe even O'aes.”
The smoke coiled into the air like great black snakes as Eller flashed back to O'eas. His past had all but been destroyed, and by his own hands, however clean they were, dirtied with red, the red of his kin. He wondered what they would say about him, about who he was in the history texts and how his legacy would live on. Legacy is for the weak, thought Eller. It’s for the ones who wait to die. Death will not wrap its hands around me so easily. I am not a legacy, yet.
“The pirates who attacked this ship will not be far away,” said the pirate. “That smoke is fresh, still burning from the newborn flames. We must stand guard, and keep a close eye out for them.”
“And if they do come?” asked Eller. “What then?”
“They will share the fate of those at the floor of the sea,” Shaalad said, his brown eyes stiff like stone. “The Grey Wind has never bee sunken, in all its long years on the water. It shall stay like that forever, and it shall go down in history for songs to be sung of it: the ship that never sank.”
Never is a longer time than you think. “And I shall sing with you when we reach Lieth,” said Eller, walking away to the forecastle, the oars thrumming like a bowstring in his head.
Illyr stood like a shadow in the coiling mists, watching the seamen tie the ropes on the rails. He looked somber, like a great weight heaved on his shoulders. The Lietheen was conflicted, his fingers told Eller that much, for he knew, since they were children, that he twirled his thumbs when he was troubled. He was doing it again.
“Troubles are often brought upon by the troubled,” Eller said as the ship moaned forward.
“And the troubled are often troubles themselves,” Illyr said as his voice hissed with the mist.
“You weave webs of words like the spiders do under the Seastone Keep,” Eller praised, ushering him to the rail of the ship.
“I pride myself upon it,” Illyr said. “It has become rather my pleasure, to spin riddles like gold. For then gold is soon to follow.”
“Your tongue is legendary,” Eller complimented. “As legendary as the great sphinx of Qur that sits upon the fabled Black Pyramid in the sea.”
Illyr’s face darkened as the mist curled around him like tendrils of grey flame. Eller pressed on, “Some say too that you have a hundred ears, placed all across the South, and even the north realms of Runir and Vorae, some say. I will not burden your weary ears any more so than they are now and I shall ask it straight and plain: are the two Qurossi dead?”
“It pains me to say that such people you speak of—“
“Say it plain,” Eller beckoned. “Words will only prolong the pain, you know.”
“No, Eller, they still live.” Illyr avoided eye contact like a dog when it’s been beaten, cowering in fear.
“You were supposed to have them killed,” Eller said calmly. “They were supposed to be dead. But now you say they roam freely, breathing the air, smelling the flowers, seeing the world. Does not sense reach that brain of yours, or is it imprisoned behind the wires and bars of your words, your lies, you betrayals.”
“I never wanted, no never,” Illyr fumbled with his words as if he was juggling with them. The thing that had made him so infamous was now becoming his downfall. Words are just wind.
“You were given a simple task, Illyr,” said Eller, heated. “Kill the two Qurossi. And yet, given your boundless supply of men, contacts, assassins, and spies they still walk this earth. And with their life, so too do I live on in the thoughts of those who meant to know of my death. The plan has failed, Illyr, I am a wanted man!”
“There is still time to fix this,” murmured Illyr. “I can fix this. They will die, yes, they will pay for their knowledge.”
“That is what you said to me before, a week ago,” Eller continued. “Trust is no more a word to me, and words are just wind, Illyr. You are just wind, blowing how it chooses.”
Eller turned to face the misty sea, pale as slate and dark as night. He stared out, where above the blanket of wispy grey there was an island that sprouted from the sea like a shrub across a plain. Illyr rambled behind him, his words dissolving as they entered his ears. Instead, watched the isle march by, a dark ghostly blur on the horizon that rose like a tooth, meeting at a dulled peak, where from great folds of rock, clad in green arced down the face of the single mountain, dropping off to a grey sand beach, veiled with mist.
Turning back on Illyr, he heard him say, “I am your cousin, please Eller, trust me as you once did.”
“A cousin you are, Illyr, and I remember so when we grew up together. I remember when we played on the rocky beaches of O'eas, and atop the great Serpent Tower high in the stony shelves of the Mountains of Saahei, where we used to look out at the trees and think they were walking and make stories about them. I remember it all, Illyr. I remember the cousin I had, but he is all but gone now.”
Eller drew his old dirk forged of seastone that Illyr had made him when they were young and stuck it into his cousin’s stomach. The crude blade slid under his ribs cleanly like a shard of ice and when he wretched it out, the grey-blue blade drenched in red, and a splatter of blood pouring from the wound, he looked into his eyes. “Do you remember the blade, cousin? Do you remember what we called it?”
Choking on blood, Illyr growled, “Betrayer.” Eller grinned and sheathed the dagger under his cloaks silently and threw Illyr over the rail, his limp body ripe with blood. Flailing like a flag, he hit the water with a splash, the grey turning a dark and grim red. Eller looked down at his hands, dark with the blood of his kin. How many more must I murder? The answer came fast. Just one.
Looking down at his hands, he felt a sudden splash of warmth dance across his face and vanish as soon as it had come. Quivering next to his eyes was the fletching of an arrow, wreathed in wild flame, stuck in the thick wood of the foremast. Another arrow hissed past his face, the flame licking his flesh like cool silk, driving into the opposite rail with a hallow thud and a quaver.
“We’re being attacked!” Eller heard Shaalad shout, and the ship roared with chaos.