Red Wishes Black Ink

Lymon Sulk was born an Orvesian.

Before the gods ended the siege of Infinzel, Sulk had been a constant at the front, the rhythm of his life assault and retreat. He threw himself against the walls with ferocity and dragged his wounded men to safety with grim determination. He was one of King Mudt's favorites. Thus, his contemporaries were surprised when he was marked not with the blackbird of his people, but with the shield that would come to be the symbol of his Ministry.

Only later would the hundreds who Sulk had helped flee the war reveal themselves. Men and women bound for the front, conscripted from villages by the Orvesian warbands, mercifully spirited away by Sulk or his agents. Soldiers from Sulk's own command whose minds had broken from the years of battle, or whose injuries left them unable to fight, all of whom would've been made into sport by King Mudt. Refugees from places razed by Mudt's armies who could find no other safe haven.

Sulk took them all. He operated a network unknown even to the assassin Bello, dead now, never to know how quiet, diligent Sulk had made a fool of him. Bello preyed on internecine weakness and deceit. Sulk relied upon devotion. His people loved him, and none betrayed him, until the gods made their loyalty clear to all.

Sulk hid his people in the northern countryside of Orvesis, in farmland turned fallow and allowed to rot under King Mudt's lax stewardship. They planted their fields of golden wheat and lived peacefully. These were the people who Sulk thought of when he wished for a bountiful harvest. It was their lands he wanted restored. Some had been given the shield, like their leader, but others yet kept the blackbird.

And so, it was Sulk and his first three knights who found Infinzel's champions on the island's southern grasslands. Two sets of champions stood opposite each other in a land untouched by war, the breeze gentle and sweet.

Cizco Firstson came to meet Sulk amidst the wildflowers.

"Your brother acted rashly," Sulk said.

"An understatement," Cizco replied.

"We cannot allow it to happen," Sulk said. "Hundreds of thousands, killed by the gods."

Cizco pointed at the shield on Sulk's neck. "You're not one of them anymore."

"That doesn't matter," Sulk said. "The gods test us and we fail. We have chosen to annihilate, to destroy, just as our peoples did in the last age. We have learned nothing."

Cizco ran his hand across the tops of the flowers. "You talk of bountiful harvests, Sulk. Let the Orvesians reap what they've sown."

"No."

Sulk drew his sword and Cizco gathered the power of the earth beneath them. The two sides fought. Cizco had prepared his champions well. He had a skilled healer, a master of sword and shield, and a slippery hunter at his side. They had spent a year honing their skills in the vaunted training pits of Infinzel, learning to fight as a unit. Compared to them, Sulk's knights were neophytes, and one by one they fell, until at last it was only Sulk, and then he, too, was gutted and crushed and killed.

All four of Infinzel's champions remained. Wounded, but standing.

"A fool's cause," Cizco declared. "The gods don't offer us peace. They offer us power."

The champions of Infinzel turned their backs on their butchery. None remained on the island who would challenge them. The first Granting ticked toward its conclusion. One last night on the island. One last night for all of Orvesis.

Yet, as he had done again and again, Sulk rose.

The gods had made him a survivor.

He shambled after the champions of Infinzel like a mad beast on the hunt. Here, bloody, frothing, dead, was the man who had terrified Infinzel, who had long sought to break himself against their walls.

Sulk found Infinzel's champions in their camp. Eating and laughing and planning. Cizco Firstson spoke of how he would finally take a wife.

Sulk killed the healer first.

He wounded the hunter.

He knocked aside the master of sword and shield.

And he plunged his sword deep into the belly of Cizco Firstson.

Overhead, the blue moon rose.

--Record of the First Granting and Dawning of the Second Age

Lyus Crodd, Scribe of the Dead Kingdom of Orvesis

Red Tide, Enchantress of the 5th Renown, the Reef, hungry

Throne Gazer, Trident Master of the 5th Renown, the Reef, animal lover

Turtle Jaw, Quill of the Reef, getting sentimental

Salt Wall, Berserker of the 3rd Renown, the Reef, of the northern pods

Cuda Bite, Skulker of the 4th Renown, the Reef, gone scouting

8 Clocksend, 61 AW

A fishing village on the northeast coast

22 days until the next Granting

The gods damned dog wouldn't stop barking.

Strickland stumbled out of his hut an hour before sunrise, grumbling as he pulled a shirt over his head. In a normal summer, he would've been on the water already. The stripers liked to bite right when the sun came up, those first rays of light doing something to excite them, making them eager for the hook. But the catches had been sparse these last weeks, the waters choppy and ugly, so he'd fallen back on the lobster traps and taken to sleeping in. Strickland guessed that the dog might have gotten caught in the lines. Sometimes, desperate strays tried to gnaw their ways into the cages. The dog didn't drown quickly enough for Strickland to get back to sleep, so he went to investigate.

The fisherman threaded his way down to the rocky shore, knowing the path well enough that he avoided the cracks and clutches where a less experienced man would've turned an ankle. He followed the barking—rhythmic and sharp, like the metronome the pretentious harbor master kept in his office—until the dog came into view. The shaggy, grey-furred beast wasn't in any distress; it stood atop a flat rock, body pointed like an arrow ready to shoot, barking into the reddening sky like a mad bastard.

Before Strickland could scream at the animal, he spotted Mince down at the shore, prodding at something with an oar. Mince was half Strickland's age and possessed a quarter amount of his brains. He hadn't stopped fishing the ocean, stubbornly committed to his routine even as the catches came back light and Mince's ugly children went hungry. The younger man's boat was half in the water already, the early tide trying to push it back in. Whatever had distracted Mince, it made a squelching noise with every poke of his oar. Strickland's stomach turned, a rotten smell reaching him.

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Mince half-turned when he heard Strickland's crunching footsteps. He stopped poking with his oar, his shoulders curling upward like he was afraid Strickland might box his ears.

"His head was already like that," Mince said.

Washed up on the shore was the bluish-gray corpse of an oca'em warrior. These savage creatures were why the good fish had migrated elsewhere. The oca'em had dark wounds like leeches on his arms and legs, and his head was cleaved open, not much left except a grimacing mouth and half a row of teeth. No doubt Mince had been poking around in the remnants of the skull. The oca'em's clinging deep-silk clothing was shredded. Strickland knew a buyer for deep-silk, especially with intact wards, but stripping the fabric from this sloppy corpse didn't seem worth a few angles. A total waste of a morning.

"That's four this week," Strickland said.

"Five," Mince replied.

"What're you fucking with him for?" Strickland snapped. "This is our beach. You just making him harder to clean up."

"Gulls will get him," Mince said. "Be quicker if he's smaller."

Strickland dug the heel of his hand into his own ear. "No birds going to land if you don't get your fucking dog to shut up."

"He isn't mine," Mince replied.

"Finally, some good news," Strickland said, and picked up a stone.

Strickland turned toward the dog with his arm cocked back, then gasped. The animal wasn't alone on the rock. Next to him stood a tall oca'em, long hair decorated with beads and shells, a trident clutched in one hand. With his free hand, the oca'em stroked the top of the dog's head. Only then did it stop barking.

"Good morning," the oca'em said.

"Fish!" screamed Mince. "Get out–!"

A bubble of water enveloped the other fisherman's head. Some kind of ocean magic, Strickland figured. The gods would protect them from this trespasser, but that didn't stop Mince from waving his arms and clutching at his face, until he fell backward onto the rocks and the glob of water broke around him like an egg cracking, splashing down across his shoulders. Mince sat there coughing and crying.

Wild gods damned animals, these oca'em. Strickland knew better than to make any sudden moves.

"What do you want here?" he asked.

The tall oca'em didn't answer. Instead, Strickland heard the sweet tinkling of harp strings. A second fish—a slender woman, playing the instrument—slid into view from behind the first. In all his years, Strickland had never found a marriage that would stick, and he'd always told himself it was because he was a working man and couldn't waste his time with a woman's fickle pleasures. But gods, how he wanted to please this oca'em woman.

"What do we want?" she asked, her words a song that tugged at Strickland's guts. "Only everything you've got, land-walker."

Red Tide bit off a chunk of bread and chewed with her mouth open. The loaf had gone a bit stale, but the pickled salmon the fisherman had been jarring for sale was decent enough. After months living off the land, she had gotten used to making the best of whatever was at hand. In the far north, a place that now felt like a bad dream, she'd seen trolkin roasting their own people. After that, Red Tide had a new appreciation for scraps. Anyway, bread and jarred fish was a better meal than some of the malnourished wild game the dogs had caught on their way back south. Those were thin weeks, when the winds were too bitter to even get a fire going. Red Tide had learned the flavors of rabbit blood and dog spit.

The dogs. Only one of them left now. The biggest bitch of the bunch. As the weather warmed, the rest had broken off in ones or twos. Either Yodor Dominik's magic had worn off, or the songs of freedom Red Tide sang worked on their animal brains, or both. The Reef's champions had been on foot for weeks now, the sleds abandoned at the edge of the tundra.

Bored one night, Cuda Bite had made a naming song for the dog. It told of her strength and her loyalty and her grand adventure pulling oca'em to lands uncharted. In the common tongue, the dog was named Fish Dragger. Throne Gazer sat with her now, on a ledge of rocks beneath Red Tide's own, overlooking the beach. Soon, it would be time to say goodbye to Fish Dragger, too. Where they were going, the dog could not follow.

On the beach, Salt Wall had pulled four more bodies from the water. That made a total of six. For days, they had been following the trail of oca'em corpses south. They were still in the rocky, windy north, where even the summer had a bitter edge, but far from the desolate, icy lands controlled by the trolkin.

Salt Wall's pod was from this northern ocean. Red Tide had been grateful for the return to the water, though she didn't find the cold as invigorating as Salt Wall. As the berserker told it, her pod and the other northern ones migrated this way every year. The ice water oca'em were supposed to be hardy and stoic, like the berserker. They did not think much of the Queen of the Coralline Throne, though they had always been slow to rebel, detached as they were from the eel tangle of politics back at the Reef. Mostly, in Red Tide's lifetime, they had been left to their own devices.

Yet, they fought now, pods of northerners engaged in skirmishes with the queen's Coralline Elite loyalists. Bloody battles, up and down the coast. The champions chased the aftermath of the battles they'd caused.

On the beach, Salt Wall tied rocks to two of the dead and pushed them back into the ocean. Those would be her northerners. She returned them to the water so they could feed new life. The others—the queen's soldiers—could rot in the sand undignified and fill the bellies of birds or slithering sand creatures.

Red Tide took another bite. The smell of salt and death didn't bother her appetite.

"Anything good?" Turtle Jaw asked. He had been helping Salt Wall on the beach, but now he hiked up the rocks to join Red Tide.

She leaned forward to shove the backpack toward her Quill. She and Cuda Bite had accepted the gifts from the fishermen, keeping only what might be useful. Food, angles, fishing lines, bandages and medicines. Cuda Bite had taken an amulet that one of the charmed fools had claimed to be a priceless heirloom. The gold scraped off at the slightest pressure from Cuda Bite's dagger revealing plain steel beneath. Cuda Bite had chucked the thing into the ocean.

"Usual land-walker bits and bobs," Red Tide said. She looked up to find Turtle Jaw staring at her chest. "What?"

He shook his head, eyes watery. "I still can't believe it."

"My tits?"

"Your Ink," Turtle Jaw replied, sitting next to her. "First renown, maybe a second some years, if I was lucky. Never thought I'd see so much on one of ours."

Red Tide finished the bread and brushed off her hands. "Throne Gazer's got the same as me. Go stare at him if you're going to get all emotional."

Turtle Jaw knuckled the corner of his eye. "No tits on him, though."

Red Tide snorted. "You ask Salt Wall where her people might be heading next?"

"She thinks they may have gone to a place called the Ledges. Not far off now. Easy place to defend, if they want to drag things out."

"Soon, then," Red Tide said. Her throat felt suddenly scratchy, so she coughed into her shoulder and pretended it was the dry bread that bothered her.

They had been up and down this continent in pursuit of Ink and allies. First Besaden and its aloof beastlords, then the overzealous trolkin of the north. Along the way, they'd found common ground with some Penchennese and played bluffing games with an enemy from Merchant's Bay. To Red Tide, these complexities felt much simpler than dealing with her own people.

It had been many years since Red Tide had been part of a pod. She had learned to tolerate Turtle Jaw and her fellow champions. Maybe she even liked them. But, once they caught up with Salt Wall's people and Deep Dweller's remaining rebels, there would be oca'em politics to deal with. Speeches and songs. Fighting, probably. They were meant to form a coalition capable of overthrowing the Queen of the Coralline Throne. A lofty goal for a group who'd be dead in a month.

She glanced toward Throne Gazer. He'd been groomed to lead by his mother, but had all the charm of a crab's asshole, and already one failed coup that made his song a dirge. He'd never been talkative, yet he'd somehow grown even quieter these last few days. Red Tide had caught him once, late at night, practicing a speech on his dog. He knew what was coming, too, and didn't relish it any more than Red Tide.

"Hey, this isn't bad," Turtle Jaw said.

Glad for the distraction, Red Tide turned back to Turtle Jaw. He'd found himself a spyglass while rummaging through the fisherman's spoils and already had it up to his eye.

"That's a sailor's toy," Red Tide said.

"Doesn't mean it's useless," he replied. "I think… huh…"

Something out on the ocean had caught his attention. Red Tide squinted, but saw nothing except choppy, white-capped waves. After a moment, Turtle Jaw passed the spyglass over to her.

"What do you make of that?"

Frowning, Red Tide peered into the tube. The world magnified. She scanned the horizon until she found what had bothered Turtle Jaw.

Sails. Brightly colored and draped from towering masts, at an angle to let the great boat drift. Red Tide recognized the four-tiered deck. The last time she'd seen a merchant gellezza, it had been on fire. The memory made her smile.

"Far north for merchant business, isn't it?" Red Tide asked. She nudged the pack of stolen items with her toes. "If the people around here had trade with the Bay, they wouldn't be so shabby."

"Maybe that's Gucco's boat," Turtle Jaw said. "Could be he's hanging around to keep a line on us."

"Maybe," Red Tide replied. "Maybe they just came up here to see us kill each other. Can't say I wouldn't do the same if it was the families bleeding each other in the middle of the Bay."

Before either could say more, a high-pitched whistle pulled Red Tide's attention to the shore. Cuda Bite came bounding out of the water, the slender-boned skulker moving with the loose-limbed gait Red Tide knew meant something was chasing him. He'd been gone to scout the waters ahead, to see if he could track down who had made all these dead bodies.

"I found them!" Cuda Bite shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth. "They're coming!"

Down below, Throne Gazer stood up. "Which side?" he asked.

"Your auntie's," Cuda Bite yelled back. He danced around a body that Salt Wall was preparing, then leaned against the berserker's shoulder. "Two pods of Coralline Elite. Right on my ass."

Two pods. That meant about twenty warriors.

Red Tide exchanged a look with Turtle Jaw, then turned to find Throne Gazer staring up at her. He spun his trident around his back, his eyes shining.

"At last, we have found the war," Throne Gazer called up to her.

Red Tide rolled her eyes and picked up her harp. "But first, music," she replied.