Islands of the Inner Sea Read online

  Islands of the Inner Sea

  L J Chappell

  ISLANDS OF THE INNER SEA

  Kindle Edition

  Copyright 2018 L J Chappell

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Design by Diana Buidoso

  Published by Asquith Publishing

  Contents

  A Map of the Inner Sea

  Chapter One – Night Princess

  Chapter Two – The Geography of Mehan’Gir

  Chapter Three – Four Days in Sherron

  Chapter Four – Secondary Destinations

  Chapter Five – Fellow Travellers

  Chapter Six – Choices and Destinations

  Glossary of Names and Places

  A Map of the Inner Sea

  showing some places mentioned in the text

  Chapter One

  Night Princess

  1

  The Night Princess was a pirate ship: lean, fast and manoeuvrable. With full sails, the wind behind her and three crew shifts she was making over two hundred miles south each day, down the Western Reach from Stormhaven.

  It was winter – midwinter: there were only a few hours of daylight and night fell early.

  The man they called Lanvik stood on deck, gazing at the dark shore as it slipped silently past. From time to time he spotted an occasional light: the regular shape of a window, sketched out in bright yellow. He would watch as the ship gradually drew level with the light and then passed it, and it became smaller and smaller until he wasn’t sure that the speck he could still make out was real or only in his imagination.

  They sailed through the night without stopping so there were normally lamps around the ship, lamps that would have been visible from the shore. But not visible for long. He imagined people on the shore looking out to sea, looking back at him, and tracking their little cluster of lights from one side of the horizon to the other.

  His eyes were adjusted to the darkness, so even under the heavy clouds he could make out different shades and details on the shore – cliffs, mountains, fields, walls. On the other side of the ship, to the west, lay the Durrandir Spine: a hundred narrow, jagged islands that accompanied the coast for a thousand miles down to West Durrant. There were sometimes lights on the larger islands, but normally rock and snow was all that was visible.

  Apparently the prevailing wind was from the north, so they were making good time. Even so, it would take days to sail along the Western Reach, and that was only the first part of their journey to the Inner Sea.

  Lanvik rubbed his hands together, and then rammed them back into his pockets: although they were heading south, it was still cold. Everyone else, except the crew working the evening shift, was under cover – down below, or in one of the cabins of the quarterdeck. But despite the temperature, he enjoyed being in the open: simply standing, with no company but the stars above him.

  His earliest memories were of prison, a small stone cell that was far darker and far colder than where he stood now. Those earliest memories only stretched back ten days. Ten days ago he had been in prison for a murder that he didn’t even know if he’d committed, because he couldn’t remember.

  His rescuers, his new travelling companions, were a company of thieves and brigands and mercenaries. A Dark Elf called Kiergard Slorn was indisputably their leader: everyone had their own ideas and opinions, but he made all the decisions that mattered.

  Lanvik had no memories of his time before the prison, and no idea why those memories were missing. He had no memory of anyone except the people he had met over the last few days. In prison, they had called him “wizard”, but he had no memory of any magecraft. He couldn’t even remember his real name – “Lanvik” was what the Company called him: the name of the place they had rescued him from.

  Since being rescued, he had scaled the mountains they called the Black Dragon’s Teeth; he had seen the Festival of the Emerald Crown at Darkfall and there, he had assisted with the kidnap of one of the Empire’s sacrifices – Vander of Arrento. Kidnap, or rescue, depending how you looked at it – Lanvik was still unsure. Even Vander of Arrento seemed unsure for much of the time.

  His journey had been a frantic dash, filled with strange sights and smells and people, but now it had come to an abrupt halt as the realities of a long sea voyage manifested themselves onboard the Night Princess. This was their second day aboard.

  Vander of Arrento seemed far happier aboard the ship than he had been on land, in Tremark, perhaps because he had no choice about what to do or where to go: struggling, resisting, or trying to get away would have been pointless. His relationship with Kiergard Slorn’s Company began to look more like a rescue than a kidnap, though Lanvik couldn’t forget that they’d had to drug Vander and tie him up in order to get him this far. This journey south, away from Darkfall, was not one that he had wanted to make.

  Not for the first time, Lanvik wondered about Kiergard Slorn’s motives for his own rescue.

  Had someone paid the Company to collect him, as they had with Vander? If he had his memories, would he be fighting and struggling against being taken south? Was he actually being kidnapped as well, but was going along with it because he couldn’t remember?

  If that was the case, then everyone in the Company knew and none of them wanted him to recover his memories at all. Perhaps they’d even induced his memory loss somehow: after all, the easiest way to kidnap someone, as with Vander, would be if they went along with it.

  It was an uncomfortable thought which had occurred to him before but there didn’t seem any way he could establish the truth, one way or the other. Without his memories, the best he could hope to do was judge events by what people told him, what they did and how much he felt he trusted them: his judgement of their character.

  The ship’s crew all seemed to be busy: when their duties were not occupying them, they had training routines. Kiergard Slorn’s Company had spent much of the first day on deck, but rapidly became bored with the monotonous repetition of the landscape. After that, they had joined the crew, exercising and training with weapons, or else stayed below decks, snoozing or reading or playing games of chance with cards or dice.

  Menska had advised Lanvik to learn to fight, to learn to play an instrument and to become stronger. Then he would be more useful to the Company even if his magecraft didn’t return, if it had ever existed. He had asked the others, and Thawn had offered to teach him basic swordcraft. It was instantly obvious that he had no fluency with the blade and little natural ability, so they concluded that he had likely never held one before. Nevertheless, he was determined to learn, at least to a level where he could defend himself.

  During the day, the crew flung open the shutters on the cargo deck to let in plenty of light and they exercised: they had bars, weights, ladders and ropes. They also organised bouts of physical combat, with or without weapons, and some of Slorn’s Company joined in, cheered on by their comrades. Bane was magnificent, defeated only through guile or accident. Thawn, Ubrik and his brother Garran, together with Kiergard Slorn himself were largely able to hold their own. The others were shown to be not nearly as skilled as the crew of the Night Princess.

  That was not the only way that Lanvik had been surprised by the crew: they were not at all what he had expected on a pirate vessel. Not only did they train rigorously, but they were well-drilled and disciplined: there were no fights, no sudden outbursts of anger or violence, barely any raised voices. And oddly, there were no young men – the crew were fit, strong and skilful with weapons but they were not young. He wasn’t completely confident, but he would have been surprised if any one of them was under thirty years old.

  There were a few Madarinn in their number, but they were almost all Light Elves – Tereva
rna. From their fighting prowess he guessed they were Dog clan rather than Black Rat, the traditional clan of sailors. Lanvik was the only Human aboard.

  There were well over a hundred crew, far more than had been obvious at Stormhaven. But then, a lot about the ship had not been obvious at Stormhaven. She had been docked under the name Morning Cloud, with a bill of loading, and under the charge of one “Captain Torbin”. And she had been a slow, wide cargo boat.

  Now, thanks to a shell of false wood and canvas, she was revealed to be a far leaner and faster vessel: clearly not a merchantman at all, but a light frigate. Accompanying the ship’s transformation, merry, red-faced “Torbin” had been replaced by Captain Redwolf – lean, sharp, older and not nearly so merry.

  Among the Company, Menska and Ethryk were visibly unhappy to be travelling by sea and spent most of the time down below. Despite Lanvik’s initial wariness and unsteadiness, the longer they were onboard, the steadier and more confident he became. He quickly mastered walking around the deck and navigating the ladders and stairs, even when the ship was rising and plunging through the waves.

  The upper deck boasted a raised quarterdeck and a small forecastle, and there were two crew and cargo decks below that, the lower of which must have been at least partly below the waterline. Below all of those was a hold, divided in three by bulkheads that stretched from one side of the ship to the other.

  At first, it disconcerted him that the ship creaked as they moved.

  ‘You get used to the noise,’ Vander told him when he mentioned it. ‘The ship never really sleeps – she’s always moving in the water, even when she’s docked.’

  That phrase had sounded oddly familiar, like a half-forgotten memory – “The Ship Never Sleeps”. Was it a proverb? A song, perhaps? A nursery rhyme … a mage’s nursery rhyme? If it was, then he couldn’t remember any more of the words and none of the others were familiar with it, but it gave him some hope that, in time, his memories might come back after all and he could discover who he was.

  On the following evening out from Stormhaven, Lanvik found himself invited to the Captain’s table, together with Thawn, Vander, and the inseparable Tremano and Lisamel. Kiergard Slorn would be there as well.

  ‘Captain Redwolf is tricky,’ Vrosko Din warned Lanvik and Vander in advance. ‘He will want to find out whatever he can from you and about you, in case it is something he can use. He may believe that you are more likely to give something away than the rest of us. But remember, for all our good relations, we trust him about as much as he trusts us … which is very little.’

  ‘Thankfully, Vander knows nothing about us and Lanvik knows nothing about anything any more,’ Magda laughed. ‘But say nothing about how we met or where we are going or why,’ she cautioned. ‘That is our business.’

  Tremano, Lisamel and Kiergard Slorn seemed to have smarter dress clothes stowed in the trunks. Thawn declared that her existing leather jacket and skirt were perfectly adequate for the occasion, though she managed to find an undamaged pair of leggings. Vander had been borrowing clothes from the others, so nothing really fitted him very well.

  Lanvik switched back to the trousers and jacket that he’d been wearing in prison. They were clearly of high quality and they fitted him well, but unfortunately they had not been fashioned to withstand the rigours he had subjected them to and they were torn and damaged in dozens of small ways. The thick, basic garments that Kiergard Slorn had bought for him in Din’dorroden were in better condition but were dirty and didn’t fit him very well: he stowed them under his bunk and would wash them later. They were the only change of clothes that he possessed. He shaved, washed, and tried to appear as clean and presentable as possible.

  Surprisingly, he found himself slightly nervous about meeting Captain Redwolf face to face.

  In his mind, there would the six members of the Company at the meal, together with perhaps an equivalent number of Captain Redwolf’s crew, and they would eat at a grand dining table in an extravagantly decorated dining room, lined with trophies of the Captain’s adventures. In practice, of course, the ship was far too small for any such arrangement. Three smaller tables had been pulled together in the middle of the Captain’s cabin, and the seven of them squeezed in around it. Although the Captain’s regular furniture had mostly been removed for the duration of the meal, there was still so little space in the cabin that any of them could have reached backwards and touched the wall behind them. So their meal was surprisingly cramped and not particularly comfortable, but at least no-one had to shout to ensure that everyone else heard them.

  The Captain welcomed them aboard his ship, and explained that the meal would be an opportunity to get to know each other better. ‘Kiergard Slorn and I have been colleagues for some years now,’ he explained.

  ‘Perhaps “colleagues” is the wrong word,’ Slorn remarked, ‘but we have certainly worked together on numerous occasions.’

  ‘Reluctant to commit, as ever,’ the Captain laughed. He addressed Lanvik and Vander: ‘You are both new members of his Company. How do you find him?’

  ‘You mistake me, sir,’ Vander smiled. ‘I have not joined his Company. They are simply escorting me back home. It is a business arrangement.’

  ‘They are an expensive escort, surely?’

  ‘The answer to that would surely depend on the value I place on my own safety,’ Vander said.

  ‘That’s a fair point,’ the Captain agreed. ‘Well, then: how do you find Kiergard Slorn? As his employer?’

  ‘So far I find him to be extremely competent, if a little direct at times. And a little over-enthusiastic at times.’

  From there, the conversation moved to gentle parrying between Slorn and Redwolf, and then gradually around various topics, chiefly concerning Tremark and how certain things were done differently in the far north.

  Lanvik had avoided answering the Captain’s first question and, although he was part of the ongoing conversation it was at least half an hour before the Captain addressed him directly again. ‘You were wearing a wig when you came aboard,’ he remarked. ‘Even if your hair is long enough that it would raise few suspicions, you must have felt that you needed to disguise it in Stormhaven. So are you a mage, or are you not?’

  Thawn had found a wig for Lanvik to hide his shaved head, the single most obvious characteristic that marked him out as a mage. Most of the others still thought that his hair was far too short, but he had decided to stop wearing the wig soon after they were out of sight of Stormhaven. He was fed up with the damned thing itching all the time; and he felt it looked stupid; and he felt that wearing it all the time was probably stopping his real hair from growing as quickly as it should. Finally, it was beginning to smell and he was afraid it might fall apart if he washed it.

  ‘Master Lanvik here has been ill,’ Kiergard Slorn answered for him. ‘His hair fell out.’

  ‘I couldn’t go anywhere,’ Lanvik elaborated. ‘People kept thinking I was a wizard, pointing, even stopping me in the street; even though I don’t have any kind of staff. So it was easier to wear a wig until my hair started growing back.’

  ‘How did you find that? Being mistaken for a wizard?’

  ‘Some people became angry when they discovered that I was not who they thought I was, and others were disappointed. So I started wearing the wig. It wasn’t as dramatic a change as becoming “Captain Torbin”, but it stopped the questions.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Captain Redwolf smiled. ‘I find that my likeness has been circulated among several provinces and ports in the Empire. It seems that they have decided I am some threat to the state, and are offering a reward for my head: enough of a reward that some people might try to claim it. So even though it is not a good likeness, it is still prudent to take precautions. It stops me from having to kill people unnecessarily.’ He turned to Vander: ‘And what about you, Mister Vander? Do you have a secret identity as well?’

  ‘I have no need to disguise myself,’ Vander replied. ‘Not so far, at least.’

/>   ‘Your accent places you far from Tremark and Stormhaven. How do you come to be so far from home?’

  ‘I had business in Darkfall,’ Vander told him. ‘Business of a religious nature,’ he added. Then he said: ‘I’m curious about your ship. You mentioned your own disguise, but does she always become Morning Cloud in port?’

  ‘She only wears that mask in Imperial ports. Recently the Empire has taken to appointing anti-piracy officers – they have even created a dedicated squadron to that effect – and unfortunately they have branded me a pirate and the Night Princess a pirate vessel. In contrast, I find the authorities in other ports across the Three Lands are far less concerned, and to most people even the word “pirate” feels like a subjective, political label.’

  ‘But you couldn’t sail as Morning Cloud, even in Imperial waters? I assume your disguise wouldn’t survive?’

  ‘Oh no, you’re right. It’s a simple frame, so it couldn’t take any strain or weight. If we stayed at sea or sailed in rough weather, the whole assembly would fall apart.’

  Arrento was one of the islands of the Inner Sea, and in those parts their whole existence seemed largely defined by sailing, fishing and trading: Vander’s interest in the Night Princess extended to a large number of questions regarding its operations. That soon compensated for his own and Lanvik’s reticence to answer questions about themselves.

  He quizzed Captain Redwolf on the way the ship was set up, how she was rigged, how she was maintained and so on. The captain found himself deep in conversation regarding problems of sailing in the open ocean, navigation away from land, managing the surging gales that sometimes plagued the west coast during winter; even the intricacies of importing, exporting, loading and unloading various cargoes in foreign ports. He explained the documents that were required for the harbourmasters, and the bills of carriage and bills of sale that were required for the calculation of duties and tariffs.