Pulling on his oar, he glanced down at the aisle dividing the rows of slaves. Latticed gates lay flush in the floor, held fast with huge iron padlocks. They led to the lower decks, where still more slaves-men as well as women-were held.
At the docks, the women and the men had been herded together. Twenty-Nine had been puzzled to see that they were all about the same age: somewhere between thirty and thirty-five Seasons of New Life. Then, after a small quantity of their blood had been taken, they had been branded. Those given the designation R'talis had been carefully boarded first and were treated marginally better. For example, he had never seen an R'talis forced to toil at the oars.
Lost in thought, he let his mind drift just a bit too long. Before he realized that his pull on the oar had slackened slightly, the knotted nine-tails came whistling out of nowhere.
Snapping loudly, its leather straps seared their way into the naked skin of Twenty-Nine's back, making him scream. Trying to regain his focus, he screamed again, perhaps more loudly than was truly warranted.
It was good enough for the bleeder with the whip. Apparently satisfied, the creature turned his white, opaque eyes to someone else, weapon arm raised.
Suddenly a latticed doorway in the deck above opened and a stairway descended with a crash. Sunlight and sea air streamed in as a figure slowly climbed down. Twenty-Nine narrowed his eyes. He had seen this being only one other time since boarding the slave ship, and knew him only by the private name he had silently bestowed on him: the Harlequin.
Even though the slaves continued rowing to the mind-numbing beat, every pair of eyes was now focused squarely on the Harlequin.
As had been the case the other time Twenty-Nine had seen him, he was absurdly dressed. His long-sleeved, black-and-white-checked doublet was fastened down the center with shining gold buttons. Highly padded epaulets broadened the shoulders, and short, white ruffles on the raised, circular collar and cuffs of the doublet lengthened neck and arms. The almost obscenely tight, bright red breeches ended in black, square-toed shoes with raised heels and highly polished silver buckles. Rings adorned almost every finger, and a matching gold necklace hung to his breastbone. The long fingernails were also red.
Strangest of all, his face was painted.
The effect was chilling. His face was stark white; his lips were deep scarlet. A bright red painted mask surrounded dark, piercing eyes. Angular and foreboding, its edges swept back sharply from the eyebrows and lower lids into the stark white field surrounding it. The haughty, prominent nose was severely aquiline, the jaw surprisingly strong. An inverted red triangle was painted beneath the lower lip.
His hair was dyed a bright red, and was pulled back tightly from the widow-peaked hairline to the rear of his skull.
Fastened to his belt was a device that looked like two small iron spheres, one black and the other white, attached to either end of an alternating black-and-white knotted line. The line was coiled up and hung neatly from a hook on his belt at the right hip. Sometimes, usually when he was deep in thought or watching something he found to be particularly stimulating, the Harlequin would reach down and grasp the twin spheres, then gently rub them together, producing a soft clinking sound. There was something unnerving and perverse about the action, and Twenty-Nine cringed whenever he saw it.
Taken as a whole, the Harlequin looked like a freak on view at a province fair rather than the leader of the fearsome taskmasters controlling the oarsmen. But whomever he turned his eyes on quickly learned the truth. This was no fair, and his intentions were sincerely deadly.
The Harlequin whispered something to the bleeder keeping time, and the monster stopped pounding on the block of wood. As they had been trained, the oarsmen immediately ceased their labors. The silence was deafening.
"Raise oars!" the bleeder shouted. Immediately all of the slaves pushed down on the handles of their oars, raising them up out of the restless Sea of Whispers.
"Ship oars!"
The slaves dutifully began to pull their oars into the ship and lay them down in the aisle separating the rows. Gasping, exhausted, they tried their best to remain quiet.
"We have arrived at the first of our destinations," Harlequin said to the bleeder. "I shall need forty of them." He placed his hands upon his hips. "You may have the honor of selecting them for me." His eyes hardened. "Make sure you take Talis only," he added.
"As you wish," the master bleeder answered. Rising from his seat, he began walking down the length of the bloody aisle, pointing to slaves seemingly at random.
A cold sense of dread shot through Twenty-Nine as the blanched creature stopped directly before his row. His broken, bloody hands were trembling. He held his breath and kept his head down and eyes lowered.
"You," came the simple command.
Twenty-Nine looked up. The bleeder was pointing to Twenty-Eight. Feeling guilty, Twenty-Nine let out a long breath.
Other bleeders began unchaining the chosen forty. They were forced to stand; many at first went crashing back down to the bloody deck, their legs too weak and cramped to hold their weight. Eventually all of them, including number Twenty-Eight, began shuffling stiffly toward the stairway where the bizarre Harlequin stood waiting. Twenty-Nine tried to give his seatmate a look of encouragement as he walked away, but Twenty-Eight wasn't looking at him. As the slaves began climbing the stairs, the Harlequin examined each of them closely.
Another of the chosen men was weeping openly. He was pulled out of the line. The Harlequin drew him closer.
"Do not fear," he said, almost compassionately. "You go to a far better place." With that he released the man to the bleeders, and they forced him up the stairway. "Choose two more." The bleeder did so, and the Harlequin followed the last of them up the stairs.
It was at that moment Twenty-Nine realized things had changed.
He could sense no movement: The ship was no longer rocking back and forth in the sea, as one would normally expect. There was no creaking of the ship's sides. There was, in fact, no sound whatsoever.
And then the temperature began to change.
It started to become cold-impossibly so. The slaves in their meager loincloths began to shiver; their breath turned to clouds of vapor.
Twenty-Nine bent over, trying to conserve body heat. Then he had an idea. Sliding as far into Twenty-Eight's vacant seat as his chains would allow, he peered across the shivering bodies of the other four slaves in his row, trying to get a better look out the small oar slit.
What he saw did not encourage him. The ship seemed to be in the grip of an impenetrable gray fog, the likes of which he had never seen. Growing up in the coastal city of Farpoint, he had seen fog banks roll in, to be sure. But this was decidedly different. As if it had a life of its own, the fog began to slither into the boat, tendrils reaching in through the oar slits and falling down the stairway from which the Harlequin had descended. It quickly filled the deck. As it increased in density the fog replaced the smell of the salt sea with a cleaner odor, such as one might inhale on land after a brisk, cold rain.
Then came the voices: many voices whispering as one.
"Pay us our bounty or we shall first take your ships, and then your bodies."
Almost immediately Twenty-Nine could hear desperate, tormented cries from above. Then everything became eerily silent again. The ship continued to sit motionless, but at last the fog still surrounding them began to thin, and he could see the terrified faces of his fellow oarsmen.
Craning his neck, Twenty-Nine saw that the sun shone brightly once more. Then the splashing noises began.
Instinctively, he started counting them. As he watched through the narrow slit, he could see the occasional bloodied body plunging into the sea. There were forty splashes in all.
Then he heard snuffling, snarling, grunting sounds. They reminded him of one time he and his father had been ocean fishing. Twenty-Nine had been young, and had made the mistake of accidentally tipping an entire bucket of bloody fish offal overboard. Sharks had swarmed.