The Crooked Key, Chapter 12: The Completely Forgotten Island
The Crooked Key by Kyle Marquis
Chapter 12: The Completely Forgotten Island
“So,” Eilo asked after they had both caught their breath, “how long do you think it will take them to climb down into the lighthouse and smash the lens?”
“Why do you always look for the worst thing that could happen?” Skaithness asked, lying spread-eagled on her back so she occupied almost the entire boat. Her head rested on Eilo’s lap, and he was too tired to move it.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said, looking over the side. “It looks like we’re going down a kind of ramp. In a few minutes we’ll be at water level, so if they turn off the lens, we won’t fall to our deaths. We’ll float around in the open ocean until we die of thirst.”
Skaithness’s mask popped open. She was smiling.
“Your face looks better,” the banisher said. The full moonlight was brighter than some dreary days in the past week. He glanced up at the moon and tried to imagine it green and thriving. It was beautiful, but dead.
“How is your ankle?” she asked.
“I can walk on it, so it’s not broken,” he said. “What about you?” He reached down and touched the blackened streak on Skaithness’s metal skirt, but it didn’t look like the acid had burned more than one layer.
“Excuse me,” Skaithness said. “Gentlemen don’t touch ladies there. Even I know that, and I was raised in an orb.”
“I thought you said it was a vault.”
“Well, it was mostly round,” Skaithness said. “Like an egg. Maybe it’s the Egg of Eime! Maybe I escaped from the Ovarch’s egg and that’s why everything is in such chaos! No, I suppose that’s not a very good explanation of anything.”
The boat skimmed a few feet above the water, moving so fast that Eilo was thankful for his winter clothes and long-suffering hat.
“Has anyone ever gone this fast before?” Skaithness wondered.
“Some of the people who tried to build flying machines,” the banisher said. “For a few seconds, at least.”
The banisher shifted to get out of the wind and found himself lying beside Skaithness in the bottom of the boat.
“I’ve never slept lying down before, I don’t think,” Skaithness said. Then she closed her eyes and slept.
Eilo awoke at dawn to the cry of gulls. He raised his hat and peered over the edge of the copper boat. They had reached an island: a colossal mountain of slag metal rising out of the sea, all gold and green and white like a very expensive cake. No grass grew anywhere, but Eilo saw seabirds overhead, a few crabs, and iguanas sunning themselves, apparently with some success, on the most burnished slabs of copper.
The sapphire light was gone. It had propelled them to a dock of gray-blue stone and wrought iron, similar in design to the lighthouse. Some unfamiliar property, like magnetism, held their boat against the stone dock. When Skaithness awoke, she spent a few minutes moving her gauntleted hand around the water, testing the properties of the dock.
Eilo hid on the far side of a coppery outcropping and attended to his bladder, then returned as Skaithness checked the boat.
“What happened to the bag with the food?” the armored woman asked.
“If this is your kingdom, tell your subjects to bring us something to eat,” Eilo said.
They didn’t even have water.
Skaithness sniffed the air, then said, “I’m not sure this is my kingdom yet. In fact, I think someone is already here.”
The banisher could smell it now too: charcoal smoke. A faint clang echoed across the metal beach. That might have been a natural property of the island, or it might have been a blacksmith. He retrieved his glaive, noting that it needed a good sharpening and oiling at the hands of an expert bladesmith, and followed the smell of smoke.
The island was bleak, but beautiful, shimmering in the light of the morning sun. The banisher did not think they had traveled far enough south to reach the warm Glyphic Islands, but heat radiated from the coppery rocks, warming his boots and banishing a chill that had clung to him since that last eastern outpost of the Emmer Duchies. But he still wanted breakfast, and his eyes kept going from the spring-loaded hook on his glaive to some of the fatter iguanas.
After a few minutes, they reached a crude tower of worked stone, two stories tall and apparently empty, but showing signs of recent habitation. Skaithness noticed a stone with a crude design, more like graffiti than a boundary marker. It was the wilted flower of the Ergot Duke, whose war against the other dukes before Eilo’s birth had destroyed Castle Nysse—and killed tens of thousands. Above the stone flapped a little pennant with five crescents on a green field, the symbol of Lady Ryphonia.
The banisher stared for a long time, unsure what to say. Finally, he said. “Skaithness, this is the island where the Ergot Duke had a pirate base during the last war. And it’s where Lady Ryphonia fled after the fight in the capital.”
“How extraordinary!” the armored woman said.
“We just walked all the way to the far eastern edge of the world so you could take me to a place we could have reached by following Lady Ryphonia!”
“Halt! Declare yourselves.”
He’d let his guard down, and now someone had the drop on him. Squinting, he could make out two archers on a coppery protrusion about them, across from the disused tower.
Skaithness, stepped forward and said, “I’m Skaithness!”
That told the archers absolutely nothing, so the banisher said, “I am Eilo of Castle Nysse, licensed banisher.”
“A fucking hexguard,” one archer muttered. “Take him.”
“What? I’m not a hexguard, I’m a banisher!” So great was the outrage in his voice that the archers hesitated.
“What the hell is a banisher?” the other archer said. Eilo could see them more clearly now. They wore green tabards with five white crescents.
“Well, for one thing, Lady Ryphonia trained with us. With me and my mentor.”
“What was your mentor’s name?” the first archer asked. His tone implied that he was humoring Eilo.
“A rath-gorla took it. Look, take me to Lady Ryphonia and I can explain everything.”
“That’s not exactly protocol, young man,” the second archer said.
“Oh, you have a protocol for this?” the banisher said. “You have a protocol for when a man with a collapsible pole arm shows up on a copper boat with no oars and no sail, with a woman in armor made of the same metal as the island you’re on? What’s the protocol for that?”
“Gods to come, what a little shit,” the first archer muttered.
“He also tends to look on the negative side of things,” Skaithness offered. “But he’s nice once you get to know him.”
After a bit more negotiation, which eventually involved two lieutenants, a steward, and a self-declared “merchant king” who handled contractual matters on the island, it was agreed to take Eilo and Skaithness to the castle under guard. They took his glaive; he had no idea what had happened to his knife.
The castle rose from the island’s northern slope, a crude-looking thing like something ogres might have raised back in the most savage and godless ages of the world. It was made of huge copper slabs, pasted crudely together with cement, patched or reinforced here and there with imported stones. But its overall form was not as crude as its building blocks made it seem. As they approached, Eilo saw that the castle’s barbarous appearance belied a smart, modern design, with pointed, sloping walls to deflect bombardment, overlapping fields of fire in case anyone tried storming the beach, and multiple fallback positions. A triumph of some forgotten engineer loyal to the Ergot Duke, the castle was as cutting-edge as Old Rock had been primitive and badly formed.
Lady Ryphonia’s pennants fluttered on the walls. Three warships floated in the harbor. Two were galeasses of the tried-and-true style with rams painted green and gold, the colors of the island. (They were iron, of course—the island’s copper would flatten like pancake batter if it struck a hull.) Both also had bombards on the deck. The last was a carrack equipped with brass cannons.
From the raised vantage point halfway up to the castle, the banisher could see all around the island. From here, Eilo could see how small it was, and how irregular: the bay to the north provided some shelter for Ryphonia’s modest fleet, but a sheer wall of copper rose to the east, and though a jagged, rocky beach wrapped around the south and west, coppery rocks made any approach hazardous.
“Hexguards,” Skaithness said. She pointed to two tall metal hats moving on the nearest galeass.
“Useless assholes can’t figure out what’s wrong,” the merchant king said. Lord Halday was a big man with striped hose and a comically small hat to emphasize his girth. He shook his head as he regarded the hexguards, almost buffeting Eilo with his huge, waxed mustaches.
“And what’s wrong?” Skaithness asked. “I mean, in the general sense, not in the sense that, if you knew how to explain it specifically, you would be able to solve the problem yourself.”
Lord Halday laughed, clapped Skaithness on the back, then winced and said, “Carver-pigs.”
“Carver-pigs?” the armored woman asked.
“Nasty bald things, about the size of a man,” the banisher said. “They turn wood into useless pieces of art smeared with their , um, fluids. Brood magicians of the last age used them to create wooden weapons for use against spirits. They reproduce hermaphroditically now with no new injections of living material, so they’re inbred and the things they make don’t work.”
“And they breed like fucking Green Wolf raiders,” the merchant said.
Ignoring the man’s opinion on the Green Wolf Tribe, whom he liked, the banisher said, “I know how to get rid of them.”
The first archer cleared his throat.
“Um, we’re actually taking them to the dungeon, milord,” he said.
“Lord Halday, I am a banisher,” Eilo said. “Sometimes we get proud and say that we don’t like working as exterminators, but if you have carver-pigs, you need me to exterminate them before they get on the ships and turn them into decorative fruit bowls.”
The archers grumbled—they didn’t like any talk unless it involved Eilo and Skaithness in the dungeon and no longer their problem. The banisher almost understood. They were intruders on this island during a civil war. But he just needed to see Lady Ryphonia, even for a moment.
“A banisher?” Lord Halday turned to the archers. “Didn’t her ladyship say something about banishers?”
“She studied with us,” Eilo said, trying not to get frustrated. “But she didn’t get to the book in the main library about carver-pigs. To deal with them I need the services of an apothecary.”
“Why can’t you just tell us what to do about them?” the merchant asked, skeptical.
“Could you tell me how to buy and sell across the Outer Sea? Could you spend a few minutes explaining the basic principles and then send me out to make my fortune?”
Lord Halday nodded at that. But then, as they approached the main gate of the castle, two horsemen thundered to a halt. They wore scimitars and handgonnes at their belts, and regarded Lord Halday with cool dislike.
“Orders are to imprison the invaders,” he said. “They’ll await interrogation by Captain Aklurian.”
“Sorry lad,” the merchant said. “You heard the man.”
They were separated after that, and Eilo found himself flanked by the horsemen, who obviously wanted to ride someone down with their scimitars. He didn’t give them the privilege. Disappointed, they pushed him inside the gaol.
“It’s a very modern facility, as you can see,” the gaoler explained after recording Eilo’s name, profession, height, clan, and marital status. He led the way downstairs with a cut-glass lantern. An armed guard followed Eilo, banging his cudgel against the coppery walls. “We even have a separate lady’s wing, for the sake of modesty. She’s a lady under that armor, right?”
“Listen to me: I need to speak with Lady Ryphonia,” the banisher said.
“Everybody needs to speak to somebody,” the gaoler said. “I think that’s where true happiness lies, myself: speaking to the right person. The sort of person who understands you, like, soul to soul. But if you want to speak with Lady Ryphonia as some First Clan nobody, you gotta work your way up, lad. Honestly, I’d be honored to speak to Captain Aklurian. He’s a very important man, especially now that half the hexguards are working with the boy-duke. And he’s a very irritable man, on account of so many of his people now being heretics, so you should be polite. But I think he’ll like you.”
They put him in a jail cell, alone. The gate was wrought iron, the single window high overhead, and the straw, the gaoler explained, would be replaced twice a week.
“It’s all very clean and efficient here,” he said. “A new age is coming and we want to be ready for it, you know. It’s starting here, on this island!”
The banisher lost three days waiting in that cell. He was fed twice per day, usually lentil stew, and let out once per day to get the “sea cure,” where he stood on a cliff and smelled hot metal for twenty minutes. It wasn’t bad up there, standing next to a spike of rusted iron and looking out at the clouds. And he was able to listen in on his gaolers when the wind carried their words: apparently the Trusted Seven were amassing a fleet to crush Lady Ryphonia before the Ovarch made a decision either way as to who should rule Baristoc. The Massacre of the Alewives (which, remembered, the banisher still knew nothing about) had turned many in the Church against those of the Seven who had been involved, and those at risk of judgment pushed to “clarify” the line of succession before the Church of Eime looked too closely at their activities in Bant.
On the second day, a common soldier who had mouthed off to his commanding officer joined the banisher. The soldier provided him with entertaining company but advanced his position not at all. And though he was forced to compare the conditions favorably to Fylent Maer’s own imprisonment in the dungeon of the Ergot Duke—where his clanmate had lost a leg to infection and his teeth to the most savage torture—all the light and the regular inspections and the clear lines of sight meant that Eilo could formulate no plan of escape.
Captain Aklurian visited him on the third evening, flanked by four gaolers Eilo didn’t recognize.
“Where is Skaithness?” the banisher said.
“Worry about yourself,” the hexguard said. “You keep asking for her ladyship and insisting that she studied with the banishers. Did it ever occur to you that she left of her own accord, and with reason?”
“I never saw one of those hats up close,” the imprisoned soldier beside Eilo said. “You look like a fucking idiot in that thing. Can I flip you over and pour wine from your ass into bottles?”
“Excuse me?” Aklurian said.
“I bet they stack ‘em up that way for transport, one on top of the other across the sea. Hey, this guy says you’ve got a carver-pig infestation that you’re not smart enough to solve. Lose any more ships this week?”
Ignoring the man, Aklurian turned his attention back to the banisher.
“Lady Ryphonia was sent to the banishers to get help,” the hexguard said. “Did you think Nowan de Valc was the first gentleman who turned to the dark arts? Her family was rotten, and she wanted your help. But you and your nameless master couldn’t help her. That’s why she left.”
The imprisoned soldier turned to Eilo. “Did you and her ladyship used to, you know—?” He made an overly complicated gesture.
“Do you really think she’s going to listen to you?” Aklurian asked the banisher.
“I did save her from Nowan de Valc,” Eilo observed.
“And I set her on the path to becoming a duchess!” Aklurian said.
Eilo worked it through for a moment, then said, “I suppose your incompetence in Upper Bant accidentally moved the duke into a compromising position, that’s true. How do you explain it to her without making her ask about your blunders?”
“I tell her that sacrifices had to be made,” Aklurian said. “Lady Ryphonia understands sacrifice.” He almost laughed, his beard quivering. “After all,” the hexguard said, “when I learned that her father was consorting with dark spirits, I was the one who ordered him killed. I kept the reason quiet so she would not fall into disgrace...as long as she dealt with her mother as well.”
“Her parents weren’t consorting with anything!” Eilo snapped. “Their castle was haunted by a rath-gorla. Could happen to anyone. In fact it’s still happening—that castle was abandoned years ago. The hexguards spent years trying to fix it, without success.”
“But for a while,” Aklurian said, “people believed that we had fixed the problem by getting rid of the old man. Even though there was no legal record for why Ryphonia’s father died, the people knew. The people knew we had protect him.” He chuckled without humor. “A hard sacrifice, and a politically complicated one—do you know how hard it is to arrange for the death of duke’s nephew? But it was a necessary sacrifice, to protect the reputation of the Church and of our order.”
“I understand now,” Eilo growled. “Rynne’s mother knew you would come for all of them because you couldn’t stop the rath-gorla, and she sent her daughter to us. She wanted us to teach her how to stop the rath-gorla that haunted her castle.”
Aklurian laughed. “And you didn’t,” he said.
“I know how you work, hexguard!” Eilo said. “When you can’t solve a problem, you find some mad woman or simpleminded boy, call him a witch, and string him up. It deflects the blame from your own failure. That’s what you did to Rynne’s father, and then to her mother.”
“You almost understand,” Aklurian said. He glanced at the two gaolers Eilo didn’t know. “Take him.”
One threw the door open and two grabbed the imprisoned soldier, who screamed in terror and confusion, while the last kept a sword pointed at Eilo.
“What are you doing? What did I do?” the soldier howled as they wrenched him out of the cell and manacled his hands.
“This banisher just told us what you did,” Aklurian said with a cold laugh. “You’re responsible for the carver-pig infestation.”
“You...you can’t do that!” Eilo shouted. He jumped to his feet, but the gaoler still had a sword drawn on him, and he was unarmed. The swordsman backed away until another man was able to lock the door, and there was nothing the banisher could do.
“Of course I can do it,” Aklurian said. “It will buy me more time to solve the actual problem, and let’s be honest: no one needs a disobedient soldier.”
“Let him go!” the banisher shouted, uselessly, as the struggling man was dragged away.
“But his execution as a witch only buys me time,” Aklurian said. “Carver-pigs are a tricky problem. So eventually suspicion will fall on the witch-girl, and then on you. I just have to convince Her Ladyship to see the truth. But with Nowan de Valc’s fleet bearing down on us and spies everywhere, I don’t think it will take long. She’ll try to solve the problem any way she can, even if it means getting rid of both of you. When you see me again, banisher, it will be because the witch-armor girl is already dead, and you’re going to join her!”
They dragged the screaming soldier away and the sounds died down. Eilo tested every inch of the cell, looking for a way out, without success. His only satisfaction came from understanding certain events in his early life whose motives he had never fully grasped. Why had Rynne appeared at Castle Nysse one day, and then vanished a year later? Hexguards had killed her father and threatened her mother. Her mother had sent Rynne to the banishers so she could learn how to end a rath-gorla haunting. His mentor had, presumably, tried, had not worked fast enough, had been fatally wounded by the rath-gorla. The great lady had taken her daughter back, disappointed—had died shortly thereafter at the hands of Aklurian. The hexguard had concealed the true cause of the Yanegasts’ deaths, because that gave him leverage over the young Lady Ryphonia.
Understandably consumed with despair, Eilo kept turning over in his mind the failure of his mentor. At the time, of course, he did not know how skillfully the hexguards had thwarted the master of Castle Nysse, nor how cleverly they had transferred most of the vast wealth of Lady Ryphonia’s mother (who came from a wealthy merchant family, not the nobility) to their own coffers. The entire theft—for it was a theft—was a plan twenty years in the making. In our time, the events have been both described and dramatized so many times that I will not bore you with another recitation of all the clever details, all the twists and betrayals, and Nowan de Valc’s secretive involvement in the affair. Suffice it to say that at the time, trapped in that dungeon room, Eilo considered the banishers a failure because they had not saved Castle Yanegast from the rath-gorla, and considered abandoning his career, if he even survived his imprisonment.
Dinner came late that night. The gaoler who brought it was a familiar face to Eilo, and the man looked haunted. He set the lentils down and when Eilo asked him about his former cellmate, the gaoler just shook his head sadly. He didn’t come back to collect the plate.
The banisher awoke in pitch blackness around midnight, but without his cellmate, he had no one to talk to. Unable to drop back to sleep, he retrieved the neglected plate and made plans to escape. An hour before dawn, he heard movement in the hall outside. Eilo hurried back to the bed and gripped his shard of the broken clay plate, which he had wrapped in a scrap of bedding.
A lantern bobbed into the room. Eilo heard whispered voices, then saw Lord Halday’s big red face with its wide mustaches. The two cavalry officers who had taken him here followed the lantern bearer into the room.
“Banisher, you alive still?” Lord Halday asked.
Eilo rose, hiding his improvised weapon.
“What is it?”
Lord Halday reached into his wide sleeve and pulled out an intricately carved wooden gravy boat, decorated with little ornamental holes that rendered it useless.
“We just lost one of the galeasses,” he said. “These are floating around in the bay by the thousands. Can you stop the infestation?”
“If you’re willing to meet my conditions,” the banisher said.
Lord Halday glanced at the officers, then nodded.
They led him through the neatest, most smartly laid out infirmary Eilo had ever seen—the walls seemed almost to shiver with anticipation—to an apothecary’s shop that faced the castle’s only public plaza. Eilo looked through faceted glass windows at the castle’s tavern and barber shop, still closed, as it was not yet dawn. Then he ordered tapers lit and examined his equipment and supplies. They had laid out everything he thought he needed—and his coat, hat, and boots. No glaive, though, but he didn’t need it.
“Carver-pigs are hermaphroditic now,” the banisher said as he decocted a slimy pink potion that smelled like honey and vomit. “But they need a brood pig to keep their young at the right temperature to develop.” He poured the potion into twenty thimble-sized wooden bowls. “Leave these bowls all over the island. The pigs will snuffle at them and get this stuff on their face whiskers. Whenever they communicate with each other with those whiskers, the stuff will spread. It will react with wood the next time they get any, and poison them. But now we need to deal with the brood pig.”
The cavalry officers headed out, each with a tray of the little jars like busboys at an elegant cafe, while Lord Halday remained behind.
“What of my final condition?” the banisher asked.
“The armored girl?” the merchant king said. “We’re working on it.”
The banisher ground his teeth, then said, “Come with me, then. We’re dealing with the brood pig.” Eilo headed outside onto the slowly awakening street and looked around for carver marks.
“But my soldiers are better qualified to handle—”
“You have a sword, don’t you, Lord Halday?” the banisher said. It took him only a moment to find the first mark. Like following plookins on their rooftop excursions—in fact, like following many spirits or strange creatures—it was best done around dawn or dusk, and best done in a relaxed and intuitive state of mind, with eyes and ears wandering a little to catch cues that a focused mind might ignore. So the banisher ignored Lord Halday’s prattle, except to say, “You have a sword, and you’ve refused to give me back my glaive. So I need you. Don’t worry: steel works fine here. They’re basically just animals.”
He led Lord Halday into the barber shop and out the back, to a narrow alley abutting one of the castle’s many sharply angled defensive walls. Here in the shadows, the metallic ground and pre-dawn air were both icy cold. Steam rose from a pile of vegetable scraps and carted-away filth in the deepest, darkest corner.
“Your sword, Lord Halday,” the banisher said. “Or your courage, if you’d like to do the work yourself.”
The merchant king handed over his jewel-studded, basket-hilted saber. It was a big, heavy weapon, ideal for butcher’s work. When the banisher approached, the vegetable scraps shifted, and a thing stood up that resembled an obese naked woman. She had many breasts, and little wrinkled things hung from most of them, clinging with many tentacles. In the darkness, the brood pig’s face looked like a tangle of hair that covered a woman’s face down to the tops of her uppermost breasts. Then the tentacles started to writhe. The brood pig sprang, tentacles streaming out behind her, poisoned dewclaws gleaming in the dim light.
Eilo sidestepped and brought the saber down in a whistling arc, severing one forepaw just as the brood pig landed. It squealed and rolled sideways, and he gave ground so it wouldn’t roll over him. More saber cuts tore open the pig’s legs and stomach, stunning it with pain. It righted itself on three feet and one bloody stump, now looking nothing like a woman. The banisher stepped around to its front and lunged, driving the tip of the saber straight into the mass of tentacles, into its brain. He twisted the blade as he pulled it free, then flicked blood from the edge. The banisher handed the saber back to Lord Halday as the brood pig writhed and spasmed in its death agonies.
“My recommendation,” Eilo said, “would be to import some actual pigs, and feed them the sort of scraps that brood pigs like to hide in. This is a good sword, by the way.”
*