Two Pieces of Tarnished Silver (2 page)

Instead, a red-fletched bolt pierced Delmios’s eyepatch, and the boy collapsed upon him. With all of his effort, Korm shoved the lifeless form aside and sat up, casting a wary glance at the stairs.

There, arrayed in long coats of ringed mail and wielding powerful crossbows loaded with red-fletched bolts, stood a half-dozen helmed warriors clad in the red-and-yellow livery of the wizard kingdom of Nex. They stood in taut formation, unharmed, their weapons pointed at his heart. Korm looked behind him to see Aebos standing dumbfounded in the doorway, surrounded by the bolt-pierced forms of the crew. The cyclops shrugged, offering a feeble smile that revealed blood-crusted teeth. Aside from the soft moans of the dying crew, all was silent.

At once, the crossbowmen relaxed their weapons and parted with a fluid motion, snapping to attention with their backs against the stairway walls. Soft footfalls descended the steps, and a feminine figure emerged from the sunlight and into the darkened, body-choked hall. The woman’s jeweled slippers came first, followed by legs cloaked in a filmy red silken dress gathered around a circlet of filigreed bone that ringed her navel. The garment pulled tight against her smooth hips and generous breasts, and while the complete effect suggested seduction and a woman well acquainted with her physical charms, the precision of the cut and the elaborate decoration upon the cloth suggested wealth and influence. She carried a stout black wooden staff carved with runic symbols in one hand, and a small glowing crystal sphere in the other. As the woman reached the final stair, the crystal’s brilliance flared, revealing a cold, beautiful face framed by an elaborate headdress of beaded glass and tropical feathers.

The orb’s coruscations played upon the glass beads and the woman’s dark eyes as she surveyed the scene. She regarded the slain crewmen without an ounce of sympathy, pausing only a moment to gaze at Korm as he slowly stood. With a flash she turned her attention directly to the cyclops. Her red lips curled into a wide smile.

“Korm and Aebos,” she said with satisfaction. “I’ve been looking for you.”

Korm and Aebos emerged into the morning sun to find the bodies of their crewmates hacked apart and bleeding upon the midship deck. Red-fletched crossbow bolts stuck out from the corpses at odd angles. Korm’s empty stomach lurched, and with a grimace the slender swordsman realized that the carnage had caused his mouth to water with anticipation. An hour ago, here on the windless barrens of a stillswept sea, the ship’s gory deck would have been the platter for a life-saving feast. As he warily eyed the dozen armored men who circled them and held loaded heavy crossbows at the ready, Korm wondered how long that life would last.

At the head of the armed brigade stood the dark-hued woman whose arrival had saved them from the knives of the cannibal crew. Despite the readied weapons of her warriors, despite the bodies and severed limbs littering the deck at her feet, the woman’s posture betrayed no hint of alarm or worry. Even the most hardened warriors often lost some of their composure in the presence of Aebos, for the day of the cyclopes had passed millennia ago, and the race stood on the precipice of legend. But the woman and her troops all came from the wizard kingdom of Nex, where swordsmen were little cause for concern, and strange, inhuman creatures walked the city streets as a matter of course.

“I’m glad we were able to find you when we did,” the woman said with a thin smile. “My alchemist has been toiling away at breakfast for hours now, and it would be a shame not to honor the sole survivors of the Queen’s Lament. So sad that the ship sank with nearly all hands aboard, but these are difficult times for pirates.”

“I’m not hungry,” Korm said, almost too quickly.

“The ribs showing beneath your shirt suggest otherwise, Mister Calladan,” she replied. “Of course you are free to deny the invitation, but in that case I suggest you start looking for the choicest cuts of meat here on the deck, before the ship sinks and you have to wrestle them out of the mouths of sharks.”

“You seem to know a lot about us,” Aebos said warily, rubbing his meaty hands clean on a bit of shirt stolen from one of the dead crewmen at the top of the stairs. “But we don’t know anything about you.”

“On the contrary,” the woman said. “You know that we are friends. My men do not want for ammunition, and two more shots would have made very little difference. But we spared you. It should be obvious that we mean you no harm.”

Korm and Aebos shared a stern glance.

“I am Iranez,” she said. “Of the Orb. Chiefmost among the Council of Three and Nine that rules in the name of the Archwizard Nex from the port of Quantium, three days to the west. I’ve got a ship that can sail without wind, a table topped with food prepared by the most talented chef in all of Garund, and chairs for two at the head of it. And I grow weary of waiting. Won’t you please be my guests?”

“We seem to have little choice,” Korm scowled.

“Oh, lighten up, Mister Calladan!” She pivoted on a slippered foot and laughed over her shoulder. “I’m fairly certain my men and I just saved your lives.”

The soldiers shifted starboard, urging Korm and Aebos along in their wake. The cyclops bent down to whisper in his partner’s ear.

“She’s probably right, you know,” he said. “Besides, what harm can come of it?”

Korm frowned. “Ask me again after I’ve had a bit of her alchemist’s breakfast.”

As the group approached the starboard rails, Iranez’s ship came into view, and Korm’s breath caught in his throat. Thin cords, gangplanks, and rope bridges connected the Queen’s Lament to the attacking vessel, but the two boats could hardly have been more different. Iranez’s ship stood tall in the water on two sleek hulls, like a catamaran, and came to a sharp point at the front, as if designed to slip through waves like a knife slides through a ribcage. Its smooth surface looked as if it had been shaped from ceramic or carved from lightweight stone. Two tall, impossibly thin masts rose from the slender deck, but neither had been rigged with a sail. However the Nexian ship had made it alongside the Queen’s Lament, it had arrived under its own power.

“Gentlemen,” said Iranez, “I present the Relentless, very nearly the last of its kind. Shaped by the otherworldly shipwrights of the archmage Nex himself, she once stood at the vanguard of our nation’s armada. I rescued her from a sargasso on the edge of the Eye of Abendego a century ago, and she’s been my personal vessel ever since.”

As Iranez turned to admire the ship, she gently placed her left hand upon the top of the orb at her side, which seemed to hover of its own accord. The crystalline sphere pulsed with a soft green illumination, and the woman’s slippered feet lifted off the deck. Without any hint of effort, the Nexian rose over the siderail and glided across a dozen feet of open ocean toward her vessel. The armored guards sheathed their weapons and scampered across the ropes and planks connecting the ships. Aebos looked to his companion, shrugged, and scrambled after them.

“Just because Iranez saves your life doesn’t mean she can be trusted.”

Korm stepped forward and looked over the deckrail to the glistening azure waters between both ships. The high morning sun shone brightly upon the placid surface, giving the water a radiant, almost mystical quality. In the last weeks he had come to think of the sea as a prison, and very likely a tomb. Now he saw the brilliant blue as a crystal portal between two dimensions, a wizard’s membrane separating the world of the living from the world of the dead. Without so much as a glance behind him, Korm hauled himself up onto the rail near a thin gangplank and took a decisive step toward life.

∗ ∗ ∗

The alchemist’s lips quivered in self-satisfaction as the translucent slug pulled a trail of brilliant amber across the serving tray. “We begin with a delicacy unique to the untamed jungles west of our homeland, brought to the table of Lady Iranez by the reach of almighty Nex’s unparalleled merchant network and prepared by yours truly, Epostian Creeg.”

From his vantage at the head of the table, the well-manicured dandy raised an eyebrow and surveyed his audience for reaction to his name. Iranez offered a thin smile while Korm and Aebos looked on without expression. He continued.

“The creature’s slime deadens the tongue’s acidity, triggering a mild euphoria in the taster. When combined with the ink of the Blanchess urchin smuggled from the depths of Lake Ocota, this effect unlocks what the Mwangi mystics call the ‘seventh flavor,’ a sensation ordinarily reserved for their haughty, ancient spirit-gods.”

He surveyed the panoply of dining implements before him—mirrored at each place setting—and gingerly selected a long length of polished whale bone stained with dark purple resin. The three diners followed suit. Iranez drew her bone across the viscid trail, gathering a dollop of slime no larger than a silver coin upon the flattened end. Epostian Creeg returned a smile and nod, and the woman brought the slime to her tongue with a steady, practiced hand. She carefully placed the implement back on the table, closed her eyes, and focused on the sensation. Her nostrils flared and her head fell back slightly, betraying just a hint of ecstasy. Korm looked awkwardly toward his companion across the table, unsure of his next move. For his part, the cyclops eagerly dipped his stick into the slime and brought it to his wide mouth. His huge eye shut almost immediately, and Korm noticed swift movements behind the lid, as if his friend were dreaming. Korm felt Creeg’s eyes upon him. Expectant.

He hadn’t eaten proper food in weeks, he thought, musing on the change in perspective that had classified euphoric slug slime as “proper food.” It beat human, anyway. With a resigned sigh and an eye on some of the more appetizing provender crowding the table, Korm dipped his utensil into the trail and reluctantly raised the amber slime to his tongue.

It had an earthy, sharp taste Korm usually associated with poison, but just as soon as it registered the sensation faded into a dull, comfortable stupefaction that began at the tip of his tongue and ran slowly down his throat and into his chest. Almost against his will, Korm’s heavy head tilted back against the padded chair and his shoulders began to sink into a pleasant lethargy. For the first time in weeks, Korm Calladan allowed himself to relax.

“A fitting start for what it to come,” the alchemist said, eyes flashing, “for the slime is but the first of eleven courses we will enjoy this morning.” Creeg motioned to a long porcelain tray to his left, drawing his slender fingers across a meticulous display of dozens of small gray hard-boiled eggs shot through with flaky gold spices that sparkled in the nimbus of Iranez’s orb.

“In the wilds of Nex’s southern plains, too near the treacherous, blasted landscape of the Mana Wastes for human settlement, dwells a peculiar avian known to the roving tribes as the aubekan. Aubekans mate for life, and a pair of these rare birds produces a single offspring only once every six years. These creatures never survive in captivity, but their eggs convey a rich flavor unlike that of any other creature on Golarion. When seasoned with a special spice of my own creation, these eggs serve as the perfect opening to our feast.”

Without need for further explanation, Aebos reached across the table and grasped a half-dozen eggs in his powerful hand. Smiling at Korm under a heavy-lidded eye, the giant threw the whole handful into his mouth, smacking his lips with all the decorum of a Queen’s Lament crewman feasting on his fellow sailor. Iranez selected a single egg, spearing it on a long-tined fork and cutting it into several pieces on her fine porcelain plate before taking tiny, delicate bites. Korm followed suit, bringing a small portion of aubekan egg to his mouth.

It didn’t taste anything like he expected. Creeg’s golden spice gave the egg a powdery consistency that didn’t match its succulent appearance. At first he detected a hint of sourness redolent of a ripe apple, but the sensation soon slipped to sharpness suggestive of aged cheese. Korm wondered if the shifting tastes were inherent to the aubekan egg, to the euphoric slime, or simply to his weariness and recent unfamiliarity with decent food. Before he could decide, the flavor changed again, and the swordsman almost spit out the egg into his embroidered napkin. It tasted just like every meal he had eaten in the last month. Like human.

Aebos didn’t seem to notice, and kept shoveling the gray-and-gold delicacies into his huge mouth. Iranez and Epostian Creeg both marveled at the cyclops’s appetite, completely ignoring Korm, oblivious to his growing disgust. As Aebos neared the end of the tray, Creeg turned to a wide plate to his right, cleared his throat quietly, and continued.

“Next we have a rare delicacy claimed from the deep waters east of Katapesh: the finest ocean caviar wrapped in the dried skin of a giant river gar, pierced by mussel skewers flavored with a variety of spices imported from distant Tian Xia and supplemented with a unique herbal blend of my own design.”

Each portion of the extravagant dish measured no wider than the palm of Korm’s hand, so it was a good thing that Creeg had prepared far more than a single serving for each diner. Again, Aebos devoured the stuff moments after its introduction, tossing the packets of fish eggs into his maw three at a time. One was enough for Korm. Again, the dish produced a profusion of flavors ending in the familiar tang of long pig.

Each course that followed was the same. Meticulously prepared and delicately spiced with Creeg’s golden flakes, the plates looked more like fine art than food, yet despite his hunger, Korm had to force himself to continue. After the caviar, everything started to run together in his mind, and they all led to the same revolting conclusion. To Korm, everything tasted like human.

Boletus and dungeness crab handkerchiefs. Human. Aurochs tongue on a bed of pesh flowers. Human. Truffled mammoth curd. Human. His fellow diners didn’t seem to notice, treating each new course as a wonderful delicacy to be savored and enjoyed. After a while Korm decided his affliction was psychological, and once he had swallowed enough of Creeg’s food to stave off starvation, he took only the smallest of bites, tuned out the alchemist’s pretentious presentation, and allowed his mind to wander.