Elsewhere and otherwhiles…

Pyna and Umin were led with an uneasy wariness down the onyx-dark dune-face, and into the heart of the nascent corsair’s encampment.

Which had bloomed in a short while like a collection of canvas-woven mushrooms. Between the scalloped, somnolent shoreline, and the abutting skirts of the silty, black dunescape.

The air was piquant with the scent of tar, and the ever pervasive perfume of salt and burnt-stone.

Other corsairs had paused in their busy employ, in order to peer curiously at the unlikely pair, and their guarded escort. 

Umin was spent. 

His feet had begun to drag, puffing plumes of inky dust.

He desired nothing more at this juncture, than to pour something cold down his throat, and stretch out senselessly upon the nighted silt to sleep for a long, long while.

While Pyna, spectrally graceful, and mockingly blithesome as always, rhymed and sang softly to herself, as the corsairs firmly nudged them past the amber spill of shrouded copper lantern-fires, curious eyes, and cold frost-lights.

Near the core of the spreading canvas piles there bloomed, like a woven anemone. A markedly broad grey-gold striped pavilion of fine adumbral spider silk, and muted, knotty ribbons.

Here the party paused as Red-beard flung aside an unmoored flap of undulant cloth, and ducked into the candle-bright lacuna of its diaphanous heart.

Umin watched as his imposing figure bent to quietly address another seated personage, their slimmer and smaller aspect obscured by the flowing enclosure.

“Send them, Irik!” Red-beard’s muted voice soon directed from beyond the veil of silk.

The odd pair, alone, were subsequently ushered into the pavilion’s pellucid cocoon.

The interior of the pavilion was of a broad circumference, peppered with richly patterned copper-threaded pillows.

Abreast the center pole rested a number of sea-chests of incongruous shape and size, and in various states of disgorgement. Their contents strewn and stacked and disheveled.

Here upon a nested heap of pillows, sat a middle-aged man with a short, salt-hued beard in a modest sea-robe of the same grey-gold pattern as that of the silken, surrounding canopy. 

His eyes were colorless and watery. Which seemed to be a common idiosyncrasy shared amongst many of the sailors upon the Great Lower Sea.

Red-beard stood straight, and leaned with deceptive grace, and a sense of readiness against the center pole. His face, a mask of carefully composed disinterest. 

“Well…” Remarked the seated, short-bearded fellow. His mien, flat with a twist of the brow.

“Unexpected, is the expression I suppose.”

“Falwyrm, fetch some refreshment, if you would. 

The Guildsman looks near to crumpling.” 

At the wave of his languid hand, another figure, previously obscured by the hanging knots and pleats, to the rear of the pavilion. Made his easy way across the pillowscape and to another set of ill-comported sea-chests nearby.

From here he withdrew a carafe and a silver-plated service.

Which he then moved to place reverently, upon a board near the seated figure.

This wiry fellow also wore a sea-robe of a similarly grey-gold composition. 

His eyes though, were bright with the unmistakable smouldering inner-hunger of a Weaver. 

Which fell upon Pyna with a voraciousness that Umin found to be obscene.

“A Child of the Paper God…

How rare, and perilous…” His voice, like fingers drawn through sand.

“Her name is Pyna, Falwyrm.” 

Yes

Sendrin

Oh

Sweet

How

You

Remember

Me

“You and your, Father. Are not a pair easily forgotten…

Given the nature of our…”

An expository twist of the wrist, as Sendrin leaned back upon a luxurious cushion and pursed his lips.

“Please, sit. Eat, Drink, Guildsman. Ere you die upon my doorstep.”

Umin gratefully collapsed upon the stiff carpeting, his posture like that of a wet sack. 

He was offered by Falwyrm, a divinely fragrant and cool elixir from the carafe, a loaf of salty and pale bread, and a bowl of scalloped, dull mauve-grainy mushrooms.

Umin set into the meal with as much propriety as he could muster, as Pyna sat herself down closely abreast, quiet as a phantom.

Sendrin watched him eat for a moment, mildly bemused.

“Understanding your peculiar appetites, Lady Pyna. I’m aggrieved I’ve little to offer by way of board.

I hope your thirst is not so great…”

Pyna blinked very slowly, her expression affable.

I am

Well 

Yet for

A measure of

Bells

“Hm!”

Sendrin studied the pair with a soporific squint. 

Their bearing, and apparently intimate proximity one to the other.

“What a truly perplexing pair you are…

Fendin told me you have a tale to tell. 

And a bargain you would make.” 

He indicated the looming Red-beard with a crook of a leathery finger.

“I think, we’ll leave the telling thereof to the Guildsman.

Lest we be here a ten-night...” 

Sendrin’s lips curled into the space between a grimace and a grin.

Umin, his mouth brim-full of mushroom, peered sharply at Pyna, who simply smiled, her little doll’s inscrutable smile. 

She appeared to be as ever, proof against insult or irony of any manner.

Umin swallowed his mouthful and cleared his throat.

“Thank you my Lord-”

An abbreviated flutter of Sendrin’s fingers.

“Captain, or simply Sendrin will do. 

I am lord of nothing…”

“Now, eat. And tell me how you came to be pacing idly across the Siffaq…”

Umin proceeded, between sips and mouthfuls, to relate a carefully measured portion of their hunt for his fellow, the fugitive Guildsman, Ure.

As Pyna sat closely abreast of him, in her ever discomposingly rag-doll manner. 

From time to time, she would blink very slowly, but was otherwise unmoving. Peering into some middle-distance which made it seem as though she slumbered, with eyes wide.

From Lord Meshmin’s decree, their subsequent departure from out the Gate of Candles, and the intervening voyage before being waylaid by the pontificating, and copper-masked Red Weaver.

This particular juncture in their journey appeared to be the most salient to Sendrin.

He had Umin describe the bloody encounter thrice, each time acutely interrogating him concerning the masked creature’s comportment, idiosyncratic sea-craft, and nightmare retinue. 

And onwards. Ultimately to how he and Pyna had come to be lost at sea, then their unlikely sojourn ashore. And at last their wanderings across the thirsty onyx-sandscape of the Siffaq.  

Umin was cunning in his telling of a few falsehoods by omission, singularly concerning the nature of their destination…

Of which, he admitted to himself, he still understood little.

Sendrin paused thoughtfully, peering up into the silken folds of his pavilion.

“Think you then, that Lord Emberbole. And all hands have been lost…”

“I think it to be likely, Captain.” Umin frowned.

“A great tragedy.

Often foe, and rarely friend. 

Still, he was well admired across the breadth of the Great Lower Sea.

May Otombalm of the Black Egg speed them on.”

Sendrin bent his fingers in a florid gesture. 

Whether of piety or protection, Umin couldn’t tell.  

“Fendin, take them out and let them rest. While we think on this.”

Red-beard, aloof, led them out and a ways through the encampment, to an eminently smaller and more modest canvas construction. Here he left them.

Umin crawled under a thin coverlet and set his head upon a mealy sack that might have been a pillow. Everything reeked of black-salt and burnt dust.

“Well, why do I feel as though that was fruitless…”

Pyna cocked her head, eyes of glistering broken blue oddness, reflecting his frost-light. 

We will

See

Sleep

Sweet I

Will watch

The shore

A while

Umin offered no objection, but drifted soon into a blessed, and downy darkness.

Umin dreamt once more, of being suspended between achromatic seas, above and below. 

Of a world where angles were an odious obscenity.

A rolling, molten landscape of sensuous, unceasing curvature. 

Until Ure’s plum-fruit rotten skull came again to whisper to him. Unknowable words in a voice too vast and magnificently profane for his gossamer vessel to contain.

He awoke with a startled huff of breath, as the dream dissolved beyond all grasping.

His frost-light lay where he had set it, filling the small canvas pavilion with a sharply cold, shadowless refulgence. 

Pyna was absent.

The unceasing saline-sluggish wash of the Great Lower Sea against the scalloped shoreline, could be heard distantly beckoning from the eternal darkness beyond. 

He couldn’t say for how long he had slept.

Still, he felt curiously refreshed.

Umin gathered up his frost-light, checked his short-blade, and pushed out of the concealing canvas and into the sprawling blackness without.

Casting about, he soon spotted four cowled figures fussing against the not too distant atrous-sandy shoreline.

The smallest figure amongst them cocked its head and turned immediately.

Raising its little hand to wave at Umin as though he were an old companion long absent, at last come home. 

Its marble-wan mien at any distance, unmistakable.

Pyna…

Umin made his way swiftly across the sands towards her, and the toiling trio.

How did

You sleep

Sweet

She reached out to brush his arm, slowly with her cold fingers.

“How long?”

A bell or

Two

“I-” 

Umin paused in mid-pronouncement, as the three corsairs dropped their sodden burden wetly upon the strand.

The reek of putrescence alone was unspeakable. 

A corpse, tangled in the remains of what seemed to be a slimy sea-robe. 

Its torso agape, soft tissues hollowed out. 

Eyes, pitchy, addled hollows. And Lower jaw, lost.  

The corsairs argued amongst themselves for a moment, before swiftly resolving to inform Red-beard.

Wait

I know

A

Song 

Proper

For

This

Pyna withdrew her Innulian blade from its concealing fold, and proceeded to prick her finger upon its rapacious point. 

The minikin haemal bead which there like a rubious flower bloomed, was syrupy and nearly night-black against her smooth, porcellanous skin. This she then painted with. Undulant shapes across her wan, little palm.

A dread scratched at Umin as he watched her labor. 

As the boundless and engirding gloom appeared to thereupon curdle, and fold inwards with a purposeful density.

Pyna moved towards the salty husk like a hungry apparition.

She then thrust her bloody fingers without preamble, into the jawless maw of the resting cadaver. 

Into the mandibular space from whence a tongue had once protruded.

Pushing and pulling. Down deep into its overripe gullet. 

She whispered and sang, along with the hideous skull’s foul squelching, a ghastly Cant that bent the very air.

Umin felt a sourness rise into his throat. 

The stink had grown to be insufferable.

“Blasphemy...” Muttered one of the corsairs, unnerved. 

The others drew away.

Oh, no

You

See?

Simple

Puppetry

These

Are

Only whisps

Of

Memory

She withdrew her befouled fingers, as its empty eye-sockets wrinkled, and the obscenity sat up. 

A tangle of wet rags. 

Coughing and retching like a drowned man…

Speak to

Me

Man of

The

Sea

The nightmare gurgled and sloshed.

Pyna placed her ear close to its jawless orifice as it hissed out a salty string of sibilant, stinking spittle.

Umin remained rooted to where he stood, his mouth a pale, thin line. 

A familiarity had begun to surface. Something in a dream…

The company of corsairs retreated farther up the shoreline. 

One fled, off towards the pavilions. 

The drowned, ruined thing’s aqueous babbling continued this way for some time, before it suddenly paused and began to quake.

To laugh.

Umin could make no sense of most of its watery, slippery speech until he heard it quietly sough:

Blood…

Worm…

Pyna’s eyes widened.

She drew back with inhuman haste, as if something had burned her. 

Then she tore the rotten skull from its stringy, putrid neck and hurled it far, far out into the brinish darkness.