The Trials of Trass Kathra (19 page)

It was two days, during which the Black Ship passed through the crackling maelstrom that was the Stormwall and she was forced to insulate herself from the electricity that danced through the ballast bulkheads, before she ventured on decks. There, she had two destinations. As it was likely that the ship’s crew knew little – if anything – of Redigor’s plans, one of these destinations was the elf’s cabin, which she had located towards the stern of the ship. Before that, however, she had a higher priority. This involved her travelling the length of the ship to where she had previously located a set of steps leading down to the cargo hold, where she suspected the prisoners were being held.

Having donned her Faith robe once more, she made her way as far as she could along the open decks, swapping from starboard to port to avoid patrols, and then ducked through a hatch back inside. Here she stowed the robe, the heavy cloth counterproductive to stealth and because it would do little to conceal her identity in the close confines of the interior anyway, and began to negotiate the corridors.

It was like beating a maze where no other wanderers were allowed to see you, but thankfully Kali had always liked mazes. She dodged left and right, right and left, pausing at corners and then moving on, sometimes only a second behind crewmembers in whose steps she silently walked. It took half an hour during which time she hardly dared breathe, but at last she came to the steps she wanted.

She headed down into the hold, three decks below, gratified to find that her suspicions had been proven right. The entire area below decks had been converted into a makeshift prison for the many brought forcefully aboard, kept in groups in cages laid out in a chequerboard style. Guards wandered the shadowy criss-cross of spaces among them and Kali was once again forced to ‘dodge the Filth’ as she worked her way towards the people she wanted to see. Others – people she didn’t know, just innocents who had spoken out against the Faith – rose hopefully as she slipped passed their cages, but for now there was nothing she could do to help or comfort them. Kali continued to move between the cages, inspecting their occupants, and coming at last to two adjacent cages which held her friends from the
Flagons
and Jengo Pim and his men. The fact that these were positioned the farthest back and together suggested that Redigor wanted those closest to her well incarcerated, but it also worked to Kali’s advantage as it was an area the guards only glanced towards occasionally.

Inside the first cage, Red Deadnettle caught a glimpse of her face and was about to holler out when Kali put her finger to her lips, silencing him. The huge poacher nevertheless moved eagerly to the bars, Hetty Scrubb and Pete Two-Ties squeezing in beside him. At their rear, Kali could just make out Martha DeZantez tending to the stretchered Dolorosa.

“How are you?” Kali whispered, glancing sideways to keep an eye on the guards.

“Could do with a drink,” Red shrugged.

“Me, too,” Kali agreed.

“They could have given me a cryptosquare, to pass the time,” Pete Two-Ties moaned.

Kali smiled; the man lived to complete his cryptosquares.

“Nihc,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“Chin up.”

“Oh, ha,” Pete responded, dryly.

“Personally, I would like to rip off their balls,” Hetty Scrubb hissed. The tiny herbalist was never at her best when unable to sample what she sold, and every sinew and tendon thrust prominently through her parchment skin. “Rip off their balls and ram them in their eyes.”

“You’ll both have what you need soon,” Kali said. “I promise.”

Red stared at her. Giant that he was, it was amazing how much like a child he looked. “Then you are not here to get us out?”

“Soon.”

Swallowing, she checked the positions of the guards once more, ducked momentarily into shadow, and then moved across the aisle to the opposite cage.

“About time you showed up,” Jengo Pim said. “We need out.”

“There are what?” Kali said. “Twelve of you? Twelve thieves locked in a cage and you can’t
escape
?”

“You can see that this is a rune-inscribed lock,” Pim hissed.

“Even so. I really should report you to your union.”

“Funny. Now are you going to find a way to get us out of here or not?”

It was only at that moment that Kali realised the reality that she had so far been denying to herself. Had denied to all of them. It was a reality she didn’t particularly like.

“I... I can’t.”

“Can’t?” Pim repeated.

“Think about it, Jengo. We’re outnumbered two, maybe three, to one on a ship we don’t know how to control, heading for a destination only Redigor knows the location of.”

“We can handle odds like that. And unless I’m mistaken, didn’t you and your people once take control of a spaceship? How hard can the Black Ship be?”

“If we take them out, we might not have enough people to run the ship.”

“Then we
force
some of them to run it for us. And Redigor must have charts.”

“We can’t take that risk.”

Pim thumped the bars, then eyed Kali carefully. “Just between you and me, these are just excuses, aren’t they?” he said quietly. “You
want
Redigor to get where he’s going.”

Kali swallowed. She should have known it wouldn’t take someone as astute as Pim long to work out the truth. “I didn’t know you were all going to be here, okay? I honestly didn’t. But I have to reach Trass Kathra.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Pits of Kerberos.”

“Trust me, Pim. I think this ship needs to get where it’s going, for all of our sakes.”

“Even the old lady? What’s her name? Dolorosa?”

Kali took in a sharp breath. “Even Dolorosa.”

Pim took a second and then nodded reluctantly. “Promise me one thing. That you get us out of here before the shit hits whatever fan it’s going to hit.”

“Nothing’s going to happen until this ship reaches Trass Kathra, I’m sure of it. And when it does, I’ll have you out of there, okay?”

“Okay.”

Kali hesitated, bit her lip. “See you later, Pim.”

“I hope so.”

Reluctantly, Kali left the prison deck and made her way back the way she had come, all the way to the stern. Her second destination, Bastian Redigor’s cabin, awaited. The only problem was that Redigor didn’t leave his cabin. Not then and, when Kali returned, not for the whole of that day. Nor the next. Nor the one after that. Eventually Kali concluded that, for whatever reason, the elf was going to spend the entire voyage in isolation, and resigned herself to the fact that the information she wanted would have to be sought later.

Kali didn’t go back above decks for the remainder of the voyage, returning to her nest in the ballast bulkheads and spending her time foraging for discarded food, sleeping – as best she could on the violent seas – and befriending and feeding two sodden and sorry looking floprats she named Makennon and Munch. She also read through the journal Merrit Moon had given her in the World’s Ridge Mountains. Kali flipping the pages eagerly, as intrigued as much by the old man’s journey of discovery as the one she herself was on. The chamber from which she had rescued Moon was, according to his notes, the first of three which together formed the passage through the World’s Ridge Mountains he had speculated existed. The Hall of Tales was the first, the Hall of Howling Faces the second, and the third the Hall of the Mountain... thing.

Obviously he hadn’t managed to translate that last bit.

A few events distracted her during this time. The first was the ramming of an untershrak herd against the hull, sometimes so powerful she expected their triple-jawed snouts to punch through the watertight plating beside her head. The second an attack by the Great Blob itself. No one knew the exact nature or intent of this much feared aquatic denizen, though it struck Kali as being fundamentally benign – an observation based on its plaintive and almost befriending cries as it circled the Black Ship, occasionally rubbing itself up against it. Kali didn’t interfere as the Faith fought the creature off – how could she? – and felt monumentally saddened when the blob’s cries turned pained and then faded away into the distance.

One night – on what she calculated was the twelfth night of the voyage and in relatively calm seas – music drifted down from somewhere above, a familiar melody that reminded her of Slowhand, and for the few hours until daylight came again she felt agonisingly homesick.

At last, a burst of activity on the upper decks signalled what had to be the end of the voyage. Kali stole from her hiding place, figuring that if it was all hands on deck she should be able to go unnoticed in the crowd. Sure enough, as she emerged into natural, albeit a stormy grey, light for the first time in two weeks, the decks were awash with so much activity that no one had time to give her a second glance.

Kali made her way to the prow, and immediately saw why. Couldn’t miss why, in fact.

The Black Ship was heading towards a stretch of ocean that could only be the swirlpools that Brundle had described, and while the dwarf had intimated these obstacles were dangerous, the word dangerous hardly seemed to do them justice.

Kali gasped. For what seemed like leagues ahead of them, and leagues to port and starboard, sweeping away in a broad band, the ocean was in upheaval. Great, circular eddies, hundreds of them whirling away, crammed together and crashing together, forming other, new manifestations of themselves, making the waters they were about to sail into seethe and boil and explode upward into the sky. Far higher than the Black Ship itself, these violent eruptions of ocean seemed almost alive, made of stuff more viscous than the seas that birthed them, somehow almost sentient in the way they hung there before plummeting whence they came, worsening the chaos beneath. It was like the ocean was at war with itself, and Kali knew instantly that to enter this battlefield would be deadly.

A shadow darkened her view. Redigor stood calmly by her side, hands holding the rails, as if they were two friends on holiday, enjoying the view.

“Spectacular, are they not?” the elf said.

“Personally, I prefer the banks of the Rainbow River, or the Shifting Sands of Oweilau.”

“Both beautiful, especially seen as I have seen them, awash with the blood of battle.”

“Thanks for reminding me what a fruitcake you are, Baz. You don’t seem surprised to find me alive.”

“Not surprised at all. I could
feel
you infesting the bulkheads like a filthy floprat. What is it you call such vermin these days? Pests?”

“Then why didn’t you subject me to pest control?”

“I had... other concerns.”

“I can tell.”

Kali studied the elf’s profile as he stared impassively beyond the prow of the Black Ship. His – that was Freel’s – condition had deteriorated dramatically even since they had met on the ship’s gangplank, and was presumably the reason he had locked himself away inside his quarters. His long black hair was thinning and billowing about his body like a shroud, his skin flaking away, peeled from him by the sea wind and trailing behind him to be slowly scattered amidst the grey, cloudy skies like ashes from a burnt-out fire.

The man was a ghost even though he wasn’t dead yet.

Not yet.

“It’s over, Redigor. Give this up.”

“I am touched by your concern for my health.”

“I don’t give a flying fark about your health, elf. It’s Freel’s health I’m concerned about.”

Redigor’s jaw tensed. “Forget your friend. He’s gone.”

“Not while I’m drawing breath, Mister.”

“Then I shall once more have to address myself to making sure that you don’t.”

Kali glanced casually down over the edge of the deck, saw the white of the angry ocean rushing by the plimsoll line. There was no way she’d survive that. And even if she did, where would she go, in the middle of nowhere, here, on the other side of the world?

“Shouldn’t you be ordering a full stop?”

“On the contrary. The island is my destination. I intend to reach it.”

“But the ship will be torn apart.”

“Yes.”

Kali gasped as a particularly violent surge caused her to lose her grip and she was slammed around, her back impacting painfully with the prow. It was in that moment that she realised something that she – and Brundle, wherever the dwarf was – had missed. The only thing that mattered to Redigor was that he made landfall, and to that extent the ship was nothing more than a means to an end. It had been built the way it had to be used as an ocean-going battering ram, to get them as close to the island as it could, and if it was wrecked in the process, he didn’t care.

He wasn’t going home. No one on the ship was going home.

This was a voyage of the damned.

“My god, Redigor, what have you got planned?”

“Salvation,” the elf said.

And with that he raised his hand, signalling those on the bridge behind him not to slow but to speed their knottage. The Black Ship ploughed ahead.

Heading straight for the swirlpools at ramming speed.

CHAPTER NINE