Doomed Archipelago: A Summons

I did not rise slowly. I did not ease into the waking world.

I jackknifed into consciousness, rolling out of bed and onto the cold stone floor as fists fell like hammers upon the door of my house. I tried to peer out the nearest window to determine if the sun had yet risen, if perhaps I had overslept, but something was blocking my vision. I lifted a hand to my face and felt a warm, rubbery film over my eyes. Skin, I realized. Eyelids. My own. I pried them open.

Beyond the window was blackest night, punctured here and there by a pinprick of starlight. It was very early. Or very late.

The pounding on my door resumed, and I stumbled toward it wearing only a thin sheet and an infuriated scowl.

I flung open the door and growled. “Knock one more time and I swear –”

My anger evaporated, however, when I saw the white-haired woman bent over my threshold. She was holding a lantern, and in its glow I recognized the wizened face of Madame Clara, the mistress of my guild. Beside her stood a man so tall and broad-shouldered that if he had chosen to enter my home, he would have been forced to duck his head and sidle in like a crab. He stood perfectly still, his hands folded neatly over his belt buckle, imitating the posture of a ramrod.

“Madame Clara,” I said, suddenly embarrassed to be standing half-naked in the dark. “What is it? Is something wrong?”

She smiled weakly and shook her head. “Nothing is wrong, Ember. But you must accompany us to the capitol at once. I will explain on the way. Get dressed, and quickly. This man has a carriage waiting for us.”

“Will he be pulling it himself?” I grinned impishly and looked up at the colossus, but his sepulchral face betrayed no amusement.

A few moments later we were careening down the road to the capitol, shouting at each other over the clatter of the carriage and the patter of hooves. I might have been worried that our madcap pace would stop Clara’s heart, if I hadn’t been so sure that her skeleton would be rattled to pieces first.

Several times I yelled at the driver to slow down, but he paid me no heed.

Clara put a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ve endured commutes far more arduous than this one — and will endure many more. Besides, our time together is brief, and I must explain why we roused you at so strange an hour.”

I was still enraged with our stony-faced driver for ignoring my commands, but I was also intensely curious about my presence in his coach to begin with. This latter sentiment proved the stronger of the two. “Please,” I said, “do tell.”

“Have you ever heard of Penitentia?”

She knew that I had. Everyone had.

Penitentia is the smallest and remotest of the islands in a chain we call the Shreds. It would be nothing more than a barren crag in the sea, an unmarked speck upon the floor of the Adytum, were it not for the abandoned prison on its southern shore.

Technically, the prison has no name. Practically, it is called Penitentia, after the island upon which it rests.

It was carved into the side of a cliff some two centuries ago by a special assembly from the Five Kingdoms, with each government committing equal funds and manpower to its construction. For years it was the severest of the world’s prisons, a repository of savages whose crimes had earned them a sentence worse than execution: a form of temporary damnation.

Because Penitentia possessed only a hundred cells, strict occupancy quotas were assigned to each of the Five Kingdoms, and only a handful of convicts were admitted each year. So rarefied were the ranks of Penitentia’s inhabitants that internment there became an aspirational goal among the members of our demimonde, the ultimate achievement in depravity. In seedy bars and dark alleys, thieves could be overheard venerating confederates who had “passed on” to that dreadful place, and every so often a murderer on the gallows would use his last words to confess a single regret: that he had not shed enough blood to earn him a trip to that rock at the edge of the world.

Twenty years ago Penitentia was abandoned. The cost of maintaining so extravagant a dungeon was astronomical, and the passage to the Shreds was so treacherous that two of every three ships sent there were lost to gales, or mutiny, or madness.

What prisoners remained in that place were left to starve, and now governments simply hang or behead their reprobates.

Penitentia was noteworthy for one other reason, too. It was — and is — the only square mile of earth to be peacefully occupied by citizens from all five of Atlantis’s factions. It helped, I suppose, that these citizens were separated by iron and stone.

“Yes,” I said. “I know of Penitentia. I know something of its history, and also of its location in the Shreds according to the Adytum.”

“That is good,” said Clara, nodding her head. “And of course the Adytum is accurate in placing it at the northwest extremity of the Shreds.”

“The Adytum is always accurate.”

She smiled. Then, after studying my face for a moment, she said: “I will tell you something that the Adytum cannot. When the Five Kingdoms built Penitentia, they each stationed a bastion of five guards there. Once a year the chief guard from each bastion was dispatched to his respective kingdom’s capitol to report the number of vacancies in Penitentia’s cells for his government to fill. Most years the number was one or two. But every decade or so, when an especially powerful tempest passed over the Shreds, the bottommost floor of the prison would flood, drowning all the convicts confined there, and the number of vacancies assigned to each kingdom would approach double digits. These were known as ‘purge years,’ and they were always cause for celebration in Penitentia, where so many longed to die.”

I shook my head. “Why are you telling me this, Clara?”

“Because this year is a purge year.”

The shift from past to present jarred me. She is an old woman, I reminded myself. Surely her tongue has slipped, or her mind has slid into memory.

But when she continued, she did so in the present tense. “In addition to the twenty guards,” she said, “there are some twenty sailors who live in Penitentia. They are among the world’s foremost experts — perhaps its only experts — in the violent currents that assault the shores of the Shreds. For most of the year they are paid outrageous sums of gold to simply mill about the island. Drinking, I suppose. Gambling, perhaps. Only the gods know what else. But every so often a chief guard must return home to fetch new prisoners, and a crew of seamen is sobered up and put to sail with him.”

Here I should explain that the Shreds are so named because the torrents and eddies that whip and lash among them have, over the eons, eroded those islands to mere tendrils, to wisps of swamp and rock. Since my childhood I had heard tales of spontaneous whirlpools, of currents that reversed their course without warning, of tides that dropped so swiftly that ships crashed and broke upon the reefs beneath them. Such tales were invariably secondhand, always told under influence of drink, and almost certainly embellished. For no captain of sound mind charted a course to The Shreds. What few had gone there had done so by accident, having lost their way at sea.

Or so I had always assumed.

“Clara,” I said, now certain that the old woman really believed what she was saying. “We both know that the prison at Penitentia has been empty for twenty years. What are you saying?”

But she carried on as though I had said nothing. “Between the twenty sailors and the twenty guards — and a few others of whom we know much less — there are more than forty free men on Penitentia, and these men have built for themselves a small village outside the walls of the prison. It is a primitive village, I am sure, with only a few hovels and shacks, but it is a village nonetheless. And I am told it even has a road, which begins at the pier, runs up through the village, and terminates at the prison. And as you know, Ember, where there is a road…”

“…there must be a map,” I finished. It was one of the mantras of our guild, branded so indelibly upon my psyche that I could no more have prevented my lips from completing Clara’s sentence than I could have prevented my eyes from dilating in the dark.

“Just as you say,” agreed Clara. “And so one of our guild members must go and make a map of this village. And there is only one ship that sails from our kingdom to that village, and it does so only once a year. And because its purpose — indeed, its very existence — has been a secret these twenty years past, it anchors for only a few hours before casting off again, in the blackest hour of moonless night. Tonight, Ember.”

The implications of Clara’s words seeped in gradually, and as they did, a terrible new feeling welled up inside me. It was something more insidious than fear, more final than panic. It was how a monarch must feel after unmasking an assassin at his banquet table — just after swilling the dregs of his poisoned wine.

“Why?” I asked. “Why me?”

Clara smiled. “You’re looking at this the wrong way, my dear. Aren’t you always criticizing our guild for its lack of ambition? For what we’ve become? Only a handful of people in this kingdom even know that Penintentia still operates, and now you may count yourself among them. You alone will map an island more remote than any place your peers could ever hope to explore. It is the opportunity of a lifetime, every cartographer’s dream.”

“Even so,” I said, stilling the tremor in my voice. “I should like to know why I, of all the mapmakers in Trita, have been selected for so dangerous an assignment.”

She frowned. “I will tell you the truth, if you must have it. But we have known each other a long time, Ember, and I am sure you would prefer not to know the answer. Or if you must have an answer, let me tell you a lie, something  to –”

“The truth, Clara. The truth, and tell it straight. Why me?”

“Because,” she said, locking her tired eyes to mine, “you were the first to answer his door.”

***

On a moonless night, all shadows are false.

The ship was an impatient wraith, pacing along the edge of the bay, discomfited by its proximity to so much immovable earth. Its black sails were visible only by deduction; where they moved, no stars shone.

I preferred to peer out across the bay at this strange vessel than to look in the other direction, where six bruised, blindfolded prisoners stood shackled together in a circle. Their backs were turned to the inside of the circle, presumably to prevent their nodding or smiling or muttering conspiracies to each other. Three men stood around them, leaning against spears, bags under their eyes, stubble on their cheeks.

If these three men were guards, they were unlike any I’d encountered in Trita’s capitol. The imperial guards I knew were fixtures of the cityscape, like street lamps or signs, posted not so much to prevent crime as to impress visitors. They were invariably tall and impeccably groomed; they held their overpolished shields so still that nobles would stop in front of them to primp themselves. But the three men here looked more like ruffians or mercenaries than anything produced by our government. They wore loose-fitting shirts, open at the chest. They yawned. They shifted. They itched themselves, unabashed.

Then there were the prisoners.

Of the six, four were old men disappearing beneath the long, tousled beards and the gaunt, slack-jawed expressions of those who had been starved or sleep-deprived. They were hunched over, swaying dizzily in the breeze as though the simple act of standing were some forgotten skill.

The fifth prisoner was neither younger than the first four nor in better health, but nevertheless she was as different from them as they were similar to each other. There was her gender, for one, which was enough by itself to jar any casual onlooker. But there was something curious about her mouth, also; it seemed to be locked into an involuntary smile despite its desiccated lips and rotting teeth. I imagined a woman who had enjoyed a life so full of happiness that to do anything but smile required a conscious effort, a force of will, and I nearly shed a tear at the thought of such a woman fettered to a rock in Penitentia, learning to frown.

At first glance, the sixth prisoner seemed neither man nor woman, but some golem of ivory. It stood motionless and erect, its eyes unblinking, drawing breaths so shallow that they were nearly imperceptible. It was shirtless and bald, too, and its skin was bone-white save for scattered patches of yellow and purple. Though it was slim and short of stature, there were whipcord muscles running under its colorless skin, such as you might find on a swimmer, or a hound.

I had heard tell of such creatures in storybooks and seaside taverns: men who were not quite men, who were born of something older than men, something closer to gods.

But I’d paid little heed to such tales then, and I afford them even less attention now. The man I beheld was neither god nor golem but albino, and the swatches of color that decorated his skin were bruises, endowed to him not by some divine sponsor, but by the blunt end of a spear.

Though his guards were brutes, they were not fools. They had noticed the confidence in the albino’s posture, the sinew in his arms, the violent potential in his stillness, and they feared him. They shifted when he did; their eyes followed his.

We were somewhere far south of the capitol, standing at the foot of a narrow jetty that thrust out into a small, nameless bay. Madame Clara and her colossus had deposited me here not an hour earlier, explaining that the captain of Whisper would be along shortly.

Which begged the question: What was he waiting for? His prisoners were here. Their guards were half-asleep on their spears. His ship was stalling on the horizon. Dawn approached. It seemed to me that if the captain wanted to slip out to sea unnoticed, he was running out of time.

“Where is she?” grumbled one of the guards, reading my mind — almost. He was the largest of the three, nearly a foot taller then the albino and twice as thick, with curly black hair and a beard to match.

Another guard coughed, then spit on the floor. Here, I thought to myself, was a study in contrast, for this second man was pale and blonde, with straight hair and a narrow frame. An elf beside an ogre. “Something isn’t right, this time,” he said. “Something is different.”

“Aye,” agreed the third. He was the most human of the guards, the basest prototype from which the gods had worked. Medium height, moderate build, brown hair, brown eyes. Remarkable only as a foil to his peers. “Why don’t you ask the mapmaker? We’ve been doing this every year for the last five, ain’t we? Never had a mapmaker aboard before. He knows what’s afoot, I’d wager.”

“How about it then, mapmaker?” said the ogre. “What are you planning to map, anyway? Nothing worth your time in Penitentia, surely.”

I smiled faintly enough to seem mildly amused. “I’ve got no business in Penitentia. I’m on holiday.”

One of the old prisoners choked off a laugh, but he was too late. The blonde guard slammed the heel of his boot into the man’s ribs, and a sound like a twig snapping echoed through the night. The prisoner would surely have collapsed then, but the chains fastened to his hands were so taut that they held him upright. He coughed instead, and blood sputtered from his lips.

“Does anyone else find the mapmaker humorous?” asked the guard, glancing about. When no one spoke he turned to me and said: “You see, mapmaker? Nobody appreciates your japes.”

“You didn’t have to do that,” I said. “If he’s bleeding inside, he’ll die at sea.”

“I should say he’s the lucky one, then,” he replied, smiling cruelly. “A few days suffering is a merciful death by Penitentia’s standards.”

“Let’s try this again,” said the human guard, nodding at me. “You must know something. They couldn’t have dropped you off here without telling you why. Remember, friend: the quarters we’ll share on that boat will be cramped enough, and secrets have a way of making spaces smaller.”

“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” I began. “But if you’d met me last night I’d have told you that Penitentia was a moldering ruin, the relic of a bygone era. I didn’t know that it was still in use — or even that it truly existed — until a couple of hours ago. All I was told is that there is a settlement emerging there, established by retired guards and reclusive sailors. It is the policy of our guild that where any such civilization exists, a chart must be made.”

“But why the middle of the night?” asked the ogre. “Why so sudden? They could have given you notice, surely. Time to prepare for the voyage.”

I shook my head. “I’d not have gone,” I answered. “I’d have refused. And anyway, I’m not sure that the mistress of my guild knew of your ship’s schedule before last night. It seems that very few people know when you sail, and to where.”

All three of them nodded thoughtfully, as though my explanation had passed some unspoken test.

“It’s true,” said the human, “that there’s a village rising on the shore of Penitentia. Not much more than a few wooden huts and a gravel road, but I suppose it qualifies. Still, I’d risk banishment from my guild before I’d spend a night in that place.”

I shrugged. “I’ll take my chances.”

But the guard shook his head. “That island is a whisker of limestone caught in a permanent maelstrom. The squalls last for weeks at a time, and between the rain and the sea there’s no escaping the wet. Spend a few nights in that village and you won’t feel dry for the rest of your life, no matter how far inland you retire afterward. And it’s not just the damp that’ll stick to you. It’s the howl of the wind, too. It crawls into your ear and burrows there, soughing and squealing until the day you die. No more quiet, after that. Not for you.”

“Come now,” I said. “It can’t be as bad as all that if there are people living there.”

“Tell him about the livestock, Ian,” said the ogre.

“Massive, spiny things,” said Ian. “As though our Lord of the Trench fused the legs of a spider to one of his deep-sea lobsters. Dire crabs, they call them. They’re the only thing that can survive in that place, and even they don’t dare surface from their sandpits more than once every month, and only then to feed.”

I smiled. “If they’re the only creatures that can survive in Penitentia, what do they eat?”

But there was nothing in Ian’s dour expression to suggest that I’d called his bluff. He let my question linger not because he had no answer, but because the answer was so obvious and unsettling that it was better left unsaid.

“Anyway,” I pressed on, motioning toward the prisoners, “there must be sufficient supplies on the island to keep these lot alive.”

The elf snorted. “For them, yes. The hold of that ship” — he motioned to the pacing shadow — “is filled with meals and sundries that we’ll deliver to the guards in Penitentia’s prison. But you’ll not be allowed in the prison itself. No one is. Makes for a cruel irony, doesn’t it? That by the end of your first week on that island, you’ll be begging the guards to put you in a cell and ladle you gruel.”

“Enough,” I said, stepping forward. “You’ve been clear. It’s a nightmarish place we’re going, and I’ll die or go mad before I leave it. Be that as it may I am going, so you can save your bluster for the taverns or the wharves or wherever else there are drunks and fools gullible enough to believe you.”

The elf stepped toward me and began to whisper something through a cruel grin, but he was interrupted by the rattle of wheels and hooves on the path behind him. A small coach appeared, not unlike the one in which I’d arrived, and from it emerged three passengers: a small, sunburnt woman whose hair was twenty years too white, clutching a bundle of scrolls and a slim folio beneath her free arm, and two similarly complexioned, bearded young men with legs that wobbled when they hit the ground.

“What are you waiting for?” asked the woman, fixing an impatient gaze upon the guards. “Get this lot on the tender. No time to waste, now.”

The guards corrected their postures just enough to demonstrate deference without suggesting obedience, and led their prisoners toward a skiff bobbing at the end of the jetty.

Only when prisoners and guards alike were aboard did the woman turn her attention to me. “You’re the mapmaker, then?”

I nodded. “And you, I presume, are our captain?”

“Aye,” she said. “You best board as well, mapmaker. The ship I sail doesn’t exist, you know, and the night is scarce.”

I followed her to the end of the jetty and stepped carefully into the boat while she unfastened the single line securing me to the country I’d called home for some forty years. Then she and her men leapt aboard and pushed us off into a new world full of mast-bending gales and hull-breaching shoals and mind-numbing doldrums.

The two sailors immediately made their way to the fore of the vessel and took up two long, heavy oars, which left two more unmanned at midship.

“Right,” she said, looking over the guards. “Would you gentlemen mind rowing? Only fair, what with you representing as much ballast as you do.”

The three of them exchanged frustrated expressions, and after a moment Ian and the ogre set down their spears and splashed the remaining oars into the water.

The captain leaned over and whispered into my ear: “The name’s Lenore, by the way. Len, if you please. But never ‘captain.'” She pointed at her sailors. “Those two men are Cyrus and Sherwin. They’re brothers, in case you couldn’t tell.” Then she motioned to the guards. “You’ve met those cretins already, I suspect. The big one is called Otis, and the thin one Emmet. The ordinary-looking fellow is Ian, I gather. Hard to remember, that one. They don’t work for me, mind you. They’re agents of the crown, if you can believe it, though the crown would just as soon disavow any connection with them. They’re as dangerous a lot as the prisoners they guard, truth be told.”

“My name is Ember,” I replied. “And I must apologize now for the many questions I’m likely to ask you in the coming days, for I just learned a few hours ago that I’d be sailing to Penitentia. I know little of the island, and less of the route.”

Lenore waved her hand dismissively. “Questions about the Outer Isles are incompatible with apology. A month from now you’ll know more about the Shreds than any mapmaker in the world, so far as I know, and the sum total of your knowledge will be less than one iota.”

“Is that how long the voyage is, then? A month?”

“Two weeks from here to Sentinel Island. Do you know it? Of course you do — but only on maps, I’d wager. A strange place, but safe enough. From there to the Shreds, it’s a different story. Pick the wrong day to set sail in those straits and you’ll wake to the sound of a storm prying nails from the deck. Or else you’ll hear nothing at all, and we’ll drift off into the Endless Calm, where we’ll all starve or go mad. So it’s best to wait at Sentinelport for just the right weather, and that can take anywhere from one week to three. Add it all up and aye, it’s a month, give or take, if we value our lives.”

Nodding slowly, I searched my memory for records of Sentinel Island. I recalled that it was dominated by fetid swamp, with barely enough inhabitable land to contain its port and lighthouse, and that it was situated at the northern limit of the five kingdoms’ influence, a far-flung sanctuary braced against the Vast. I could not remember to which of the five kingdoms it belonged, though I was sure that it was not my own.

“Have you paper and ink aboard your ship? I left my home this morning without so much as a change of clothes, I’m afraid, and I’ll need at least those things to complete my assignment in Penitentia.”

Lenore’s smile dispelled the curse of her years, so that for a half-second she appeared as she had a decade ago: an unwrinkled adventuress with mischief glimmering in her eyes and tugging at her lips. “I was told to give you this,” she said, offering me the folio that I’d noticed earlier. “Keep it protected for now, though. I wouldn’t want it destroyed by the splash of some rogue wave.”

I nodded, stealing a glance at it before folding it away under a flap of my cloak. I recognized it immediately for one of the oversized notebooks our guild used to make rough sketches. It would contain exactly four quires of parchment, and concealed within its spine I would find a small vial of ink and a quill. Standard issue, except that I had felt loose leaves shift within this one. Notes from Clara, I guessed — or some other benefactor.

“Listen,” said Lenore. “I don’t want to frighten you. But for our first few days at sea, I’d stay in my cabin at night, were I you. Until the crew knows you.”

“The guards,” I guessed.

She nodded. “There have been one or two… incidents, over the years. With prisoners, mostly. Best not take any chances.”

And then the great, creaking hull of Whisper loomed over us, filling our nostrils with cedar and tar, and Lenore was standing and shouting orders to unseen sailors above, and ropes and ladders were falling from the sky. I’ve no idea how the guards managed it, but in an instant the prisoners were up and over the gunwales, then I, and finally the captain, and then the yawl on which we’d arrived was being hoisted up on davits and Whisper was racing into the black, reducing Trita’s illimitable lanterns to a slippery impression of their pattern, and finally to merest memory.

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