Desperately, Rogi grabbed at the wooden beam and managed to hang on, and then, as if climbing a tree, he shimmied his way up the curved member, his diaphragm pumping hard against his clenched-shut lips, seeking to draw anything into his lungs, whether it be air or not. And with black spots swirling before his eyes … all of a sudden was free of the seaward pull of the deep tow.
Now hastily scrambling upward, but still clinging to the sunken ship’s paling and with darkness sucking at his mind, at last his head broke free of the water, and—ghuu—uuh!—he sucked in sweet, sweet air, though with the offshore breeze blowing out from the swamp, others might not call it “sweet.” Yet to Rogi, nothing else in the troughs between combers had ever been so precious as the odiferous stench he sucked into his burning lungs.
With waves yet crashing over him, Rogi tried spotting the chest, the little hunchback scanning about in the surge. “Dogths ballths!” he shouted—glug!—as another billow washed by, “I’ve lotht it!” for he could see nought of the box tossing among the foaming crests.
Turning loose of the hulk’s rib, Rogi began awkwardly side-stroking in the direction of the tops of the waving reeds he could now and then see above the billowing whitecaps, and, struggling, at last he reached footing, muddy silt and sand though it was.
Waves knocked him down several times ere he gained the shore and, drenched, water runnelling from his completely hairless left side but sopping his extremely hirsute right, he made his way toward his clothing.
Rogi dressed quickly against the chill, for though the summer air was warm, the waters of both the ocean and the White Foal were startlingly cold. Even as he pulled on his breeks, he paused momentarily to mourn over his poor wrinkled dragon, but then hauled the pants up to his waist and cinched tight the rope he used for a belt. Throwing on his shirt with its too-long sleeves, he plopped down and slipped into his floppy-topped socks, one of his toes seeking freedom through a hole. At last he slipped into his shoes, with scrap leather stuffed inside to make him taller than his considerably short four foot six, though, hunched over as he was most of the time, he seemed more like three foot four. Finally, he flopped a great length of his long red hair from the right side of his head over the bald left side—the mother of all comb-overs, someone at the Vulgar Unicorn had called it—and jammed on his ear-flapped cap, tying the cord under his chin.
As he turned to take up his blowpipe and drugged darts, “Vathankath’th member!” he cried, for in the fading light and washed ashore not ten feet away lay the rune-marked chest.
Hâlott, looked up as the sound of a timid tap tapping came down the stairs from the weatherworn, heavy-planked, iron-bound door. “Rogi!” he hissed, his whispery voice sounding much like that of dead leaves stirring in a cold wind.
Moments passed and the familiar scuttle of Rogi’s waddle did not come.
“Rogi!” again Halott called out, if a hoarse rasping can be said to be a call.
Tap-tap came the soft knock.
Still Rogi did not respond.
“Pah.” Hâlott set aside the long, thin-bladed flaying knife and stepped away from the half-skinned corpse on the table and headed for the stairs leading up to the first floor.
Tap-tap.
With skeletal, black-nailed fingers, Hâlott lifted the latch and swung the door inward. Just beyond stood a woman in a dark brown, coarse-spun cloak held tightly ’round.
She cast back her hood. “My lord—” she began, and looked up into Hâlott’s face, and gasped and recoiled, half turning as if to flee. But then she mastered her panic, though not her rapidly beating heart and once more she faced this reputed necromancer. Before her she saw a tall, gaunt, cadaverous, dried-up, dark-robed being; perhaps he had once been a man, but no longer it seemed. He had parchmentlike yellowish brown skin stretched tightly over his completely bald skull, his face nought but sunken-in, hollow cheeks and a narrow, desiccated, hawklike nose, and his eye sockets covered with the skin of eyelids sewn shut. Even so, false eyes he had—painted in kohl—and the young woman flinched at the sight of them, for they reminded her of the markings on a death’s head moth. Long, bony, grasping fingers he had, and bony limbs from what she could see of his wrists and arms jutting out from partly rolled-up voluminous sleeves. And when his cadaverous whisper came—“Well?”—she was certain she was speaking to a corpse.
Hâlott on the other hand saw before him a young woman, and surely a lady, for beneath the coarse-spun cloak she wore the quality and cut of her garments told a tale. Too, her ginger hair was well coifed and in the latest style, and she was quite clean. Her nails were well manicured, and she wore a ruby ring on a finger of her right hand, a ring Halott recognized.
“What brings you here from the court, my lady?” Hâlott whispered.
She gasped. “How did you—?”
“I am Hâlott,” replied the necromancer, as if that explained all. “Won’t you step into my—”
“No, no,” she blurted, drawing back from this, this creature . And she twisted the ring from her finger. “Lady Na—um, my mistress commanded me to bring you this.” Her hand trembled as she gingerly held out the ring, the circlet tentatively grasped between thumb and finger, the maiden no doubt hoping against hope that she wouldn’t come into contact with Hâlott’s withered digits. “Though I can see nothing wrong with it, my mistress says it needs repair. Yet when I suggested Thibalt the Rankan—Thibalt the Jeweler—could mend any ring, she said it must come to you. And so …”
Hâlott’s blue-tattooed lips twitched in what was perhaps meant to be a grin, but appeared more like a grotesque facial tic instead. Again his hollow whisper sounded: “When?”
“My lady says she needs it two days hence, for she would wear it at the courtyard gathering three days from now.” In spite of the repellent being before her, the young woman’s face lit in anticipation. “We are celebrating the visit of per-Arizak—he usually stays up in the hills, you know—and just about everyone will be there, and my mistress would wear her bloodred stones.”
“Bloodred. How fitting,” said Hâlott, and again he smiled, this time more widely, his rictus exposing yellowed teeth.
The woman flinched back.
Hâlott held out his hand, palm up, and said, “Come back at this time two days hence. Tell—tell your mistress it will be ready by then.”
With relieved smile on her face, for she did not have to touch the yellowed and no doubt dead skin, the young woman dropped the ring into Hâlott’s hand and turned and fled.
At the palace, Nadalya, the golden-haired second wife of Arizak, stood in an alcove and whispered to fair-haired Andriko, and from the cast of his face and hair he, like Nadalya, was clearly of Rankan blood. The tongue they spoke was neither Rankene, Ilsigi, Irrune, nor even the bastardized Wrigglie. Instead in hushed tones they spoke Yenizedi, a language not likely to be understood by anyone else in this part of the palace.
“Driko, I would have you ride into the hills and find me a hornet’s nest, or that of wasps,” she murmured as the setting sun shone through a nearby casement and cast a ruddy light over all. “Make certain that it is plugged or contained in some manner so that they cannot escape, though I will need a means to set them free.”