Up Into the Light Part 2

Dwellers of the Forbidden Isle — Session Three, Part Two

As recorded by the Lantern of the Thirteenth Word

I see many things. Some of them I have already told you.

When last I left them, the company had emptied a goblin-fouled tomb of something under five thousand in gold, paid a dragon his price of a single stamped bar, and camped the night beside the hill. In the morning they woke to a fog so thick a man could not see twenty feet, and they decided to wait it out.

"The jungle will take care of them," Xavravio had said the day before, of the fortune-hunters who would come after them.

The jungle was listening.

Two Feet

While they waited, Sigwulf did what knights of Hercules do in the quiet hours. He laid his hands on Azech, who was still carrying the goblins' spear wounds, and the god answered him as before, and the wounds closed.

Remember that, too.

The ghouls came out of the fog at two feet.

Not twenty. Two. That is how close they were when anyone saw them — close enough to smell, close enough to touch — and not one of them had made a sound coming in. Four of them, grey and hunched and wrong, with long hands and longer teeth. One for each of the company.

The company was not surprised. I want to give them that. They had been waiting in the fog with their weapons in their hands, and when the dead came out of it, they were ready.

Xavravio was quickest. He put his rapier into his ghoul before it had finished arriving. Then

the dead struck back.

A ghoul's touch does not merely wound. Its claws carry a cold that goes into the muscle and locks it, and a man so touched stays exactly as he is, unable even to blink, for a long and very terrible while.

Azech's ghoul missed him every way it had — claw, claw, teeth. Osbert's got a claw into him, and he felt the cold go in, and shook it off. Xavravio twisted away from every strike. Sigwulf took a claw across the arm, felt the cold, and threw it off. Azech brought his war hammer down hard. Osbert's sword went wide.

And Sigwulf raised his holy symbol against the dead and called on Hercules, as he had in the drowned forest, when he knelt among the bloodied and the god heard him.

This time, nothing answered.

The ghouls came on. Osbert struck his hard, took another claw, and shook off the cold again. Then a claw found Xavravio, and he did not shake it off. He went rigid where he stood and toppled. Another found Sigwulf, and he went down beside him.

Azech killed his ghoul. It died for the second time, which I think is the only correct way to put it.

And the two ghouls standing over Sigwulf and Xavravio stopped fighting.

Awake

I am going to tell you this part plainly, because there is no other way to tell it.

The dead did not finish them. The dead knelt down and began to eat them.

Sigwulf and Xavravio were not unconscious. That was the cruelty of it. The paralysis takes the body and leaves everything else. They could not move. They could not cry out. They could not close their eyes. They lay in the wet grass in a fog with no edges and felt every bite, and they could hear, somewhere close and impossibly far away, Azech and Osbert fighting to reach them.

And Azech and Osbert could not land a blow.

Osbert swung and missed. Azech swung and missed. Osbert again, and missed. The ghouls fed. Azech crossed to help Osbert with his, and missed. Every one of those misses was another bite.

Then Osbert's sword found his ghoul at last and put it down.

Two left, both of them feeding.

Xavravio went under first. I count it a mercy. One more bite took him past what a body can bear, and he dropped into the dark, where at least they could not follow him.

Azech struck the ghoul on Xavravio with the best blow he landed all season, and it came apart under the hammer.

That left one. And under it, still awake, was Sigwulf.

Osbert swung at it and missed. It fed. Azech hit it hard, and it did not fall. It fed. Osbert missed again. Azech missed. And Sigwulf, who had prayed and not been answered, lay under it in the fog and felt it, bite after bite, until at last he went under too, and lay past the edge of waking with his life running out of him into the mud.

Then the ghoul stood up from its meal to deal with Osbert, and came at him with claw and claw and teeth, and missed with all three.

Osbert killed it.

Rosemary

They poured healing into the two of them where they lay: red potions, bubbling, tasting of rosemary, worked between slack lips. Xavravio came back. Sigwulf came back.

I will not tell you what they said when they could speak again. Some things belong to the people they happened to.

The fog burned off at midday, as if it had only ever come for that.

They did not wait for anything else. They went down off that hill and back to the jungle road as fast as the wounded could walk, and nobody looked back at the door in the hill.

The Road Home

They camped that night by the road, and that night the jungle, which had done its best to kill them, changed its mind.

A small party of Tzanatlani hunters came out of the trees, led by one Etla, carrying a young deer they had taken that day. They looked at the company and at the state of them, and they gave them the deer. Then they went on their way.

That is twice on this journey that the people of that island have come out of the trees with food in their hands. I find I am glad of it.

The next day the company came back through the gate in the Wall.

From there it was three days on foot through the Tzanatlani towns to the harbor where the ships come in, ten silver apiece for passage, and three days at sea.

They were not the same men who had gone out. Azech least of all. Something had settled in him out there, in the torchlight and in the fog, and he stood at the rail like a man who knows precisely what he can do.

The Bone Charter

The Freeport of Santa Belaria comes up out of the sea slowly, and then all at once.

First La Loba: a rock at the harbor mouth with walls built onto it the same color as the stone, so that you cannot quite tell where the island stops and the fort begins. Guns sit low in those walls, looking at the water you are about to cross. A purple flag flies over it. The channel between the rock and the far point is narrow, and ships go through close enough to count the guns.

Then the mole, long and low on the right hand, and the buoys marking the channel, rocking in the wake one after another, leading you in.

And then, in the middle of the inner harbor, where every ship that enters must pass it, the

Reliquary.

The sailors call it the Bone Charter. Its proper name is El Relicario del Pacto, and it stands on a stone platform in the water: four terraces of bone, each narrower than the one beneath. The faces of the terraces are skulls, set in rows as close as cobbles. Between the rows, long bones are laid in chevrons and bound into arches. Along the second terrace a dozen wolves walk nose to tail, each built from forty or fifty pieces — shinbones for legs, ribs for backs, heads carried low and forward, the way a wolf carries its head. Fire burns at the top in iron baskets the size of a cart bed. In the hollows between the skulls, hundreds of candles burn in broad daylight. Purple and black banners hang between the fires, and on each one a crimson wolf is walking. Robed keepers move along the terraces with ladders and baskets, trimming the candles and tending the dead.

Set into the face of it, toward the harbor mouth, are tablets of dark stone taller than a ship's mast, cut with the same words four times in four tongues, deep enough to read from the deck:

You may arrive as anyone you please, own what you lawfully acquire, trade with anyone willing, worship or speak as you choose, and leave whenever you wish. You may not take another person's body, property, freedom or consent.

Every ship that comes into Santa Belaria reads the terms before it ties up. They say the oldest bones on the lowest terrace belonged to a fleet that once came to take the city.

Sigwulf stood at the rail and watched it go by.

Consider where he had been. A knight of the Order of Hercules, whose brothers in that city preach openly against its sovereign, a few days out from lying in the mud while the dead ate him, sailing past a monument built of the dead into a city ruled by a lady who has not been alive for a very long time.

I will not tell you what he thought. I will tell you he watched it the whole way in.

Ashore

Then the quays, and the noise.

The Santa Belaria waterfront is a hundred languages at once: fried fish and coffee and braziers, gulls and porters, and the Harbor Wolves in their file keeping all of it moving. The company came down the gangway into it with a horse, a dragon's thanks, and nearly five thousand in gold, which in that city is a fortune, and in that city is also a target.

In the month of Cerberus, Hercules went down into the dark and came back up into the light dragging its guardian on a chain.

These four went down into the dark and came back up dragging two thousand in gold on a horse.

Each to his labor.

I shall be watching.

— The Lantern of the Thirteenth Word