Brookins swore again, then tossed the weeds into the sea.
“A freak of nature, that’s what it is,” he said, having no idea how little nature had had to do with what he saw in the inlet before him. “Part jellyfish, part man, or somethin’ akin to it.”
“Perhaps part woman,” Quayle noted, pointing at the buds of what appeared to be breasts.
“Pour pitch on it and light it,” Brookins muttered. “I’ve got some in the boat.”
Quayle shook his head, thinking. “Naw,” he said after a moment, “we may be able to turn a crown or two on it. The catch was miserable today.”
“Turn a crown? Are you daft, man? Who would be willing to eat something so vile?”
“Not to eat, you fool,” said Quayle contemptuously. “We can sell it to a traveling carnival, a sideshow—that’s what buys freaks like that. There was one up the coast in Windswere just a sennight or so back.”
Brookins cast a glance up the coast, where smoke from the forest fires that had only recently been quenched still hung in the air. Until a few nights ago, the entire western seacoast had burned with rancid heat, acrid black flames that carried with them the unmistakable taint of evil. Now that the conflagration had been extinguished, a few of the evacuated villagers had begun to return, to pick through the rubble of the scorched homes on the water and in the charred forest. There was a stillness to the air that was unnerving, as if the coast was waiting for the next wave of destruction.
“If they was in Windswere, they probably fled east to Bethany with the other refugees,” he said, poking the creature gently with the oar. “This thing’d never make it that far.”
“Ayeh, looks to be a fish of some sort,” Quayle agreed. “The fish-boy.”
“Or girl.”
“Ugh. Well, the types that deal in curiosities and freaks and the like might have use for it, whatever it be, alive or dead. I’ll get the net; we can drag the thing out of the inlet and put it in the wagon. Might as well smoke the pitiful catch we have and cart it into Bethany. We’ll sell the wares and buy the ropestock and whatever provisions we were gonna get later in the month, and while we’re there we can look for that sideshow. The thing won’t take up much room in the cart.”
Brookins exhaled. “If you think so,” he said doubtfully. “But I’m thinking we’re going to need to keep it wet. After all, The Amazing Monstrous Fish-boy won’t survive out of water all the way to Bethany. Alive or dead, it will start to stink. Maybe will stink less if we can keep it alive.”
Quayle, already on his way to the boat, chuckled at the thought.
Faron was jarred to semiconsciousness by a violent jolt when the cartwheel made contact with a deep rut in the road. The creature opened one wide, fishlike eye, covered with a milky cataract, and winced, too weak to even recoil from the pain. The midday sun was baking its fragile skin with both light and heat, two elements that caused its body to blister. It closed its eye and wheezed with the exhalation of its breath. Faron was already so frail and ill from exposure that, in its foggy perception, death could not come quickly enough.
Despite being imprisoned all its life in a monstrous and malfunctioning body, Faron’s mind, while primitive, was keen, and even as close to death as the creature was, it was aware enough to recognize the vibrations that reverberated on its sensitive eardrums through the water in which it lay as voices, and unfamiliar ones. Involuntarily it shuddered, trying to piece together what had come to pass.
Having been kept from birth in darkness in a comfortable pool of gleaming green water, the creature had very little understanding of the outside world, although its father had told it tales during the evenings when he came to visit, bringing marinus eels for its supper. Faron’s father had been a tender caretaker, even if he had been given to sudden outbursts of rage and cruelty. Faron loved him, as much as an unevolved mind could love, and was bereft in his absence, so bereaved at his loss that death now was welcome.
Faron curled up a little more tightly, wishing it would come.
The sun beat down on the creature’s back.
And in the midst of its agony, it sensed another source of pain.
Hazily Faron tried to concentrate on the sharp edges that bit into the flesh between its arthritic fingers, in the sagging folds of its underbelly.
With the last ounce of available strength Faron unbent an elbow, bringing the soft bones that, formed normally, would have been a forearm up close to the fishlike eyes in its face.
And opened its eyes in tiny slits to spare them from the sunlight.
The creature’s hideously deformed mouth, with its lips fused in the center and gapping open over the sides, curled slightly at the corners in a shadow of a grimacing smile.
The scales were still there, one wedged into the flesh between its fingers, the others digging into the folds of its belly where they had been hidden.
Faron opened the first two fingers on the hand before its eyes, just slightly enough to see what they held.
The sun glimmered onto the irregular green oval, pooling there, making the center shine like the light in a glade, leaving the tattered edges of the scale cool and dark as the forest’s core.
The creature’s failing heart leapt. It peered into the scale, fighting off the assault of sunlight in its stinging eyes.
Faron twisted the scale slightly, allowing the light to run in shining ripples off the lightly scored surface; in the creature’s hand the scale took on an infinitesimal film, an iridescent surface, like a veil of mist, behind which a cool and verdant wood seemed to beckon. When it ascertained which card it held, its smile grew brighter.
It was the Death scale.
Since the creature had taught itself to read the scales, it only knew how to summon into its primitive mind the future they could foretell. Ofttimes in the past, when scrying with the scales for its father in the cool and delicious darkness of its safe haven, Faron would become confused, bewildered by the images that it saw reflected in them.
Thankfully, the Death scale was clearly interpretable.
Faron tilted the scale and peered into it.
All around the scale, the world melted away, replaced by darkness.
Life as Faron knew it was now depicted in, and limited to, the small oval surface defined by the tattered borders of the scale.
Against the frame of flat blackness, the scrying card hummed with power, like the deep green iris of an enormous eye.
Within its center Faron could make out a forest, the same sunless glade that was always visible in the Death scale. No birds sang in this place; stillness reigned unchallenged by even a breath of wind.
Faron waited, oblivious of the bumps in the road and the excoriating sun on its skin.
After a few moments a translucent figure formed in the glade, as if from the mist itself. It was the figure of a pale man, garbed in robes of green that blended seamlessly into the forest behind him. His eyes, black and devouring as the Void, were crowned by thick thundercloud brows, the only part of him that seemed solid, which gave way to snowy white hair. It was Yl Angaulor, the Lord Rowan, whom men called the Hand of Mortality.
The peaceful manifestation of Death.
Despite his stern appearance, Faron had never feared Yl Angaulor. The creature watched, entranced, as the Lord Rowan slowly shook his filmy head, then disappeared into the mist from whence he had come.
The Death scale went dark.
Faron’s eyes closed as the heat of the day returned.
Not for me, the creature thought in its semiconscious mind. I not die now.
A single caustic tear welled beneath a heavily veined eyelid and burned as it fell.