Tales of the Void

Trine

Three Short Stories

And

Three Addendums By

Black Waltz 0

†††

Addendum III

180◦

The island was small, warm and predominantly sunny, just about every bit a person’s perception of a tropical paradise. Those who travelled frequently delighted in calling it the jewel in the crown of the Void archipelago. It was a hub of barter and trade, of resource from both the sea and the sky, but it was the sea that connected the island like threads to every other place in the world.

Zagtakh had come from the sea. That had been some time ago now, though he wasn’t quite sure of the exact weeks and months as the procession of time had been blurry at the very beginning of his life. His life had become much better since he had met the land and figured out how to make it give him food and clean water, but the sea always reminded him of those great big wooden dragons out there on the waves, moving from world to distant world. He guessed in some way he wanted to be back out there in a ship on the ocean, where ropes needed to be pulled and sails filled and everybody worked as one. That had made him feel not so confused and lost.

He was not a human being, but that was okay because lots of other different creatures seemed to get along well with humans and there didn’t seem to be any major conflict. Somebody had even told him once that there was a village of mostly non-humans somewhere to the north, but he hadn’t visited there yet. He much preferred the coast for the time being.

A strange curiosity had eventually turned into a hobby, and from that into a means to live. On his many wanders down the coastline Zagtakh had begun to notice that things kept coming out of the sea; little bits and pieces just as he had out of that storm. It was mostly seaweed and basic to elaborate shells, driftwood both natural and worked by man and fragments of tiny, damaged metal. They were interesting, so he kept pulling wreckage out of the water until the constant surge of the waves were the only sound in his ears.

The best time to scrounge was at dawn, when the air was still lingering with chill and the sky was dark on its way to morning grey. It actually took him quite a while before he realised that some of the stuff he was taking out of the sea were the remains of sunken and destroyed ships. A bedraggled sail, still corded with a few trailing ropes ended up on the beach one rather unmemorable day. Stretched out on the sand it was entirely intact, so Zagtakh tried to wash it and sold it to some seafarer in the port for a surprising amount of money. Profit from the sea had been discovered.

Just about everything from the ocean held some kind of value, although small. Craftsmen wanted the dried-out driftwood, jewellers and alchemists wanted the occasional rare seashell for its pearly lustre or calcite (‘Kal… sight?’ Zagtakh had thought to himself oddly), even some cooks from the docks wanted dried and pressed seaweed for some strange recipe or another. On market days in the port Zagtakh carried and dragged all his best finds of the weeks into the plaza, and people actually came.

Money made things easier. He could buy better tools to help make life easier and buy food he didn’t have to chase down and kill by himself. One day he had been walking by the port’s smithy and noticed an axe hanging carefully on the wall near the anvil where tools and weapons were battered into usefulness. There was nothing special about it; it was merely a large axe, but all of a sudden he desperately wanted it and because of all the coin in his belt - he could. Breaking up the driftwood became much easier after that day and Zagtakh found himself much happier. Something strange deep inside really liked that axe.

One morning a huge chunk of a ship’s hull washed up on Zagtakh’s favourite beach, and when he broke it up into more manageable pieces using that same axe he paused, looking curiously at the insides. The inner hull, separated from the outer hull which kept the water out and the crewmen safe inside (though obviously not in this case, he thought grimly), was pocked with strange clumps of white stuff, hard yet moist to the touch, as if they had grown out of the broken hull itself. Zagtakh tried to scratch some of the stuff away and it gave easily when under a fingernail, but not if he poked it or tried to rub it away. They sort of looked like thick, heavy insect cocoons.

Even more curious than before, Zagtakh dragged the pieces further up the beach where the tide wouldn’t reach them towards his roll of tools, bound up in a sheet of woven palm fronds. A hammer and chisel worked a hundred times better than a fingernail and he had broken through the strange substance in only a handful of strikes, paring it away from the wood. It fell easily into his hand, and Zagtakh stared.

He now realised what it was. Somebody had melted white candle wax onto the floor of the hull, using it as a sealant to protect something from water and the sticky fingers of their crewmates. The glint of gold coin shone nestled in the little bed of wax. Zagtakh hurriedly freed the others in what seemed like record time.

There were two or three coins within each wax cocoon and by the time he was done Zagtakh wagered he had a small fortune on his hands. He waited until the morning grew warm and left the coins on a large flat rock to capture the heat of the tropical sun, softening and melting all the wax away. He then polished them with a bit of a rag until they nearly shone and for the first time since he had decided to search the seas for junk he wondered what he could do next with his life.

Zagtakh thought he knew money like copper and sometimes silver, but he was unsure of the value of those coins. He travelled back down to the port town of Calebas and stayed at an inn for the first time; the following night going to the tavern Molly’s Basket where sailors and other seafarers often frequented. Even amongst men of that stature he seemed tall, broad and scary. Men seemed to move out of his way when he got near them.

He was beginning to get a little discouraged when he heard, with a slightly drunken tint to the voice; “Ey you! Zagtakh you old sea monster, get on over ‘ere!”

It came from the back of the tavern, where it got dark and smoky. He headed in the direction of the familiar voice, the voice where, in the middle of the sometimes hard-to-understand words, he had heard his name. He looked down at the man with his feet on the table, a pipe between his teeth. “Hello Cassius.” Zagtakh said.

The sea captain moved his feet from the table as Zagtakh sat down on the other side. He smiled again, but this time without the pipe in his mouth. “So you remember me, mate. That’s good. How’s life on the land? I’ve been taking the Nostalgic route between the Cove and Patterson for six months now, it’s nice to be back in a clime that don’t freeze or rain in your tea.”

Six months. Zagtakh wasn’t sure how long that was. The captain made it sound long, though. He thought for several moments before he tried to construct an answer. “Is okay. Me work. Me… walk on beach. Find things.” He said at last, with some pauses as he tried to locate the correct term or noun.

“Trawling for tragedy, eh?” The captain asked in amusement, but also thoughtfully. He wouldn’t be the first to do that out of nothing else to do, and it kept the uninhabited beaches clean. “Find any long lost sisters of the Tesseract yet?” He inquired.

Zagtakh couldn’t properly answer him. “Don’t know. Can’t read.” He replied.

“Your common’s improving, though.”

“Yeah.” Zagtakh agreed, happy to answer this one. “Me talk lots of people. Get better… each day.” After the mention of the vessel which had saved his life he added; “How is… uh. Thing. Floats. Water.” He tried to imitate the motion of a boat on the water with his hand.

“My ship? The Tesseract?” Cassius guessed jovially before taking a mouthful of his beer.

“Yeah, Tesirackt.” Zagtakh agreed enthusiastically.

“Once we got past the storm belt she was glad to be back in warm waters again. Sea monsters like yourself yearn to bring her down into the depths of an eternal embrace.” He pointed his pipe at Zagtakh’s chest for emphasis.

Zagtakh didn’t understand that reference one bit. “Monster like… me?” He repeated, confused.

“Alastors,” the captain explained to his relatively simple friend, “don’t just menace the land. They also live in the sky and the sea. Your alastor won’t have the chance to smell the sea air for a long time yet, but its nautical colleagues have a fixation, a fetish for smashing our small ships into the sea.”

After trying to decipher the information for over a full minute Zagtakh finally gave up. “Me, uh, I not smash ships. I just pick up pieces.”

“The Menagerie sunk off the coast of this island a week ago. The entire crew drowned.” The captain said offhandedly, as if they were discussing it over tea and biscuits rather than at the back of Molly’s Basket. There was a chance that the wreckage Zagtakh had smashed up two days earlier had been that very same ship. If so, then what kind of monster in the deep could destroy a ship like that; into chunks no bigger than a tall work horse?

“That sad.” Zagtakh said after a while.

“What I don’t understand,” Cassius wondered out loud, skipping back towards an earlier topic, “is how shoddy your common is. Everybody speaks common; even discards are fluent most of the time. If we didn’t have that no discard would ever be able to understand anyone.”

“Hey, you just say before that me speak good!” Zagtakh argued a little louder than was normal, causing several people to move and look at them for a few seconds before turning away. Initially he had understood not a word, and after a few days on the island his strange, native language had faded like a dream. He was certain that, with time and practice, he’d be able to speak just as well as everybody else.

It wasn’t Cassius’ intention to ignore him, but with the alcohol greasing the lines he was trying hard to continue down his train of thought. “’Could be because you’re not human. Maybe your language was too strange for the gods to translate into common when they brought you here.” He guessed.

“That not seem… seem…”

“Fair?”

“Yeah, fair.”

The bustle of the tavern around them was the only sounds for some time after that. They were the sounds of men talking and women laughing and the frequent clink of glasses as people drank. The captain was finishing off his beer. After thinking about it for a while Zagtakh guessed that Cassius was just about the only person he could trust at length, so he took a gold coin from the bag on his belt and laid it down on the table in front of the other man. In the dimness of the tavern the gold seemed duller, but its worth could clearly be seen.

The captain was holding the beer glass to his lips when Zagtakh did that, but he noticed something placed on the table from the midst of the foamy dregs. He put his glass down and stared, then after a few moments he slapped his hand down onto the coin, more of a mean to conceal it rather than to steal. Without thinking Zagtakh’s mind jumped to the conclusion of the latter so he slammed his hand down on top of Cassius’, like they were playing one of the basest versions of cards.

“What you doing?” He growled, unwilling to give up his precious find.

“Idiot! Don’t flash coins like that openly in a place like this! You’ll certainly be buying yourself a truncheon to the head and a night in the ditch if you try!” Cassius growled back at him, leaning over the table as he spoke. His hand covering the coin trembled slightly after being slammed by Zagtakh’s, for even casually he was ridiculously strong.

Zagtakh relaxed his grip and the captain pulled his hand away as if it had been caught in a mousetrap. He brought the gold coin to his palm and inspected it as Zagtakh spoke. “Found the other day. More like it. Me not know how…” After carrying the sentence for so long he finally fumbled and struggled to find the right word. “How big money is. You know?” He asked.

“You want to know the value of this coin?” Cassius questioned, to which he received an eager nod. He looked at it thoughtfully, but he was already well versed in the currencies of the archipelago. “Well, looking at the seal here this is definitely from Echuca, or possibly even Endia. Do you know those places, Zagtakh?”

He shook his head.

“They’re on the mainland, but somewhat removed from the midland and the south.” He brought the coin up and bit into the edge, leaving marks behind. “It’s not fake either. How the hells did you get this, and how many are there?” He demanded.

Zagtakh held up ten fingers, then, remembering how he had practiced memorizing the number before he had come here, held up six more. “Found them on beach.” He explained.

Such luck bestowed on somebody so oblivious to it! The captain had to smile. “You don’t have any idea how lucky you are, do ya?” He grinned, folding his arms on the table. “You know how much it costs for a home-cooked meal from Molly Mallory, right in this tavern?”

“Yeah. Why you ask?” Replied Zagtakh, a little confused by the sudden veer in the conversation.

“One of these coins would buy you a hundred meals here, or maybe twenty if you wanted a piece of sweet Molly herself. Molly and her little basket.” The captain announced with a snicker, having a private laugh like so many other young sailors did over the double entendre of the title.

“So I… rich?” Zagtakh ventured, not yet understanding the scope of his luck but well on the way.

“Verging on it, I suppose. Only seafarers and foreign traders would take your coin though; that’s not a currency they use on this island.”

“Me could buy place live?”

“If you build it yourself I should say so.”

“Someone show me speak good?”

“’Don’t see why not.”

Zagtakh was beginning to remember words at a more rapid pace the more excited he became. At last he stood up from his seat and thumped both hands on the table. “I could buy you take me to India-”

“Endia, mate. No such place as India.”

“-Endia, and me change to coin they take?” He looked expectantly at his friend.

Captain Cassius considered it. After the cold seas of Port Patterson and Crescent Cove the trade route to Endia seemed mighty tempting indeed. He began to re-pack his pipe from his tobacco pouch. “For two of those coins you could privately charter the Tesseract to the mainland and back, yes indeed.” He conceded.

“But,” He interrupted right when Zagtakh was about to agree with him, grinning in a mischievous manner, “you keep your money. Don’t waste it on something snooty like that. It just so happens I’m going to be working that trade route these next few months; right now I’m busy looking for a crew. Of course, they travel for free. The Tesseract could use your behemoth’s strength again Zagtakh, what do you say?”

He was rewarded with a focussed stare. Zagtakh appeared to be thinking very hard. “Me on ship again? Like in storm? To Endia?”

“Aye, just like the night the gods sent you here. Hopefully not as many monsters, though.”

It was easy for him to make up his mind once he understood the question. Zagtakh beamed. “Okay. I go with you to change money and make house, learn speak good. But first,” he reached over and snatched the coin back from the captain’s reluctant fingers, “you think Molly would take coin?

And Cassius laughed with him.

-fin-