Bone Jack

Itzal twitched into wakefulness. It always felt like twitching, that movement through the barrier between sleep and waking. His awareness flooded out from him, searching around, as it did whenever he woke up. At the Academy, there had never been anything to search for. But it had been an important discipline to cultivate for getting out. Not often. Sometimes during camping trips. In this moment—one of the first times he’d come to his senses in an unfamiliar place—he had no idea what to search for. It, in fact, startled him to realize he was someplace unfamiliar. He searched a second time.

The room was dark and quiet. The narrow window, lit with grime-thinned sunshine when he’d fallen to sleep, now looked gloomy as midnight in a city. That is to say, the flickers of torches and gas lamps cast an orange fug that hardly ought to be called light.

Someone pounded on the door. The thumps had a blunt sound. When Itzal opened the door, Ben grunted and nodded from the other side. He walked away.

Itzal followed. The common room was hardly quieter at this witchingly indistinct hour than it had been during dinner. Ben went out of the tavern and back into the dirt road that led to the docks. Itzal followed, pulling up a hood that came as part of the brown shirt he wore.

“Ben,” Itzal said.

“Do you need more food?” Ben asked, seeming to hope food would have a quieting effect on Itzal.

“I hope something hasn’t escaped your notice that seems a bit relevant about this moment.”

“Preserve us,” Ben said.

“I mean to say, it’s rather dark,” Itzal said. And it was. The stars smudged overhead, not as bright as they would have been somewhere that wasn’t an alley with torches every hundred yards and gas lights every five hundred or so. “It’s night time, I mean.”

“I see now why I keep hearing stories about your intelligence,” Ben said.

“Do you?”

“No,” Ben said.

“What about the whole…starting late in the morning,” Itzal said.

“What, never had a class in covert movements up on the mountaintop?” Ben said. “First rule they would have taught you is never say what you plan to do in public.”

“Oh,” Itzal said. “Right.”

“Never know who’s listening.”

“Don’t you?” Itzal said. He kept misstepping because he kept misjudging how fast Ben walked. It looked slower than it was. Itzal kept compensating. “I mean, of course you don’t.”

Ben grunted. He trudged on for a while. They passed a torch that thrushed in the wind and a drunk snoring in a doorway.

“Actually,” Ben said. “First rule is plan ahead.”

“Of what? Of covert operations?”

Ben grunted his yes.

“I see.”

“Wouldn’t want you running off with a wrong idea of the first step.”

“Sounds dangerous,” Itzal said.

“Might get you into trouble.”

“I see what you mean,” Itzal said.

Ben grunted again.

They got to the docks in the midst of quiet. Some things still moved about among the stacks of crates and barrels and the gantry cranes that creaked in the light breeze. Everything else that moved had its own business and wanted none of Ben’s and Itzal’s.

They got to the area near the gangplank that went into the Riot. The three-master scratched at the sky with empty jibs. What with the motionless spars and the ropes it looked every bit the skeleton of a few trees with dead vines hanging off them standing against the starry sky. They met no excitement, which put Itzal on edge. He’d been expecting some kind of unpleasantness ever since finding the reward poster with Ben’s face on it. He mentioned it to Ben. Ben grunted about it.

“There’s no bounty hunting in Garrison,” Ben said.

“Any reason for that?”

“There’s an office of the Confederation Constabulary here,” Ben said.

“The same constabulary that put a price on your head.”

“Yes,” Ben said.

“And they aren’t pursuing you because…fill in the blanks.”

Ben shrugged. “Sport of it? Hanged if I know.”

That didn’t content Itzal. He didn’t believe the honesty of it, and had no faith in the accuracy of it.

“I’ll get to the bottom of it, if you won’t explain it better,” Itzal said.

“Would you stop if I told you it wouldn’t be worth the work?”

“No,” Itzal said.

“Can’t say I didn’t try.”

Standing in the whooshing light of an oil lamp on top of a stick of bamboo, Tyro grinned and nodded to them. Unsurprising to Itzal he expressed not the smallest surprise at seeing them.

“Look alive, lads of lurking,” Tyro said. “Time’s arrived when you pass into the land of dead things where angels fly.”

With those words to muse on, Itzal walked up the gangplank. He kept his footsteps light. He always did when walking into a place where he wasn’t sure if he ought to feel comfy or not. Under his feet, the gangplank’s steadiness changed. Nearer the low end, where it rested on the dock, it felt as sturdy as the ground. Every step up toward the Riot got a lot more sway. It felt a bit like the perfectly solid boards under his boots were somehow also soft. The closest he’d felt to it was a rope bridge across a canyon, except that time he could make sense of feeling wobbly by looking around and realizing he stood on a board hung by ropes some thousand feet in the air. This feeling of the Riot confused his muscles and guts. Though he’d grow as familiar with it as breathing soon.

From the dock, the deck of the Riot had looked casually busy. From the dock, it had looked like a few people loitered on the ship’s deck without lights. It had been a deception.

As soon as he got past the railing, Itzal got shooed to a spot near the mainmast by someone carrying a coil of rope. He only stood near the mainmast for a breath before someone else told him to get out of the way of the crates. Itzal just managed to duck under one of a train of several crates being carried by two sailors each. From there he moved a direction that seemed clear. Before he’d gone three yards, a line of men all carrying the same enormous piece of canvas on their left shoulders padded in front of him, sounding in their bare feet like several large cats.

All of the commotion happened without a light or a word (barring a curse or two muttered at Itzal), and Itzal passed more activity than that. He made for the only place he could see that seemed free of movement: at the stern of the ship, a ladder of several steps led up to a platform. After a bit of a dance with the scurrying crew, Itzal got to the ladder. He climbed up onto the aft deck. From there he looked out at the bustle below, a mass of roiling shadows that all knew better in this small space what to do and where to be than most people knew on land.

“Will that be a habit of yours?” someone asked. Itzal looked at them. They were a tall man with a thin waist and shoulders that either were broad or looked broad in the long coat of black leather around him. The coat dominated Itzal’s impression of the person. The coat had large cuffs and a collar that rose around the man’s pale cheeks, and it hung down to the man’s ankles. It emphasized the straight-edged, finely tailored shape of the person. It was, in every way, an excessive garment.

He moved like a falcon who’d learned mime, or a mime out to kill you who, though standing in your full view, has evaded your notice even though he had his knife to your throat at the moment when he delivered his most recent witty jibe.

“I, um,” Itzal said, checking to see whether he’d missed something the person had said while he mused. He didn’t have anything in his subconscious about it. “I try not to develop habits of any sort.”

Raising a black eyebrow, the person turned away. His attitude was less as if he liked the answer and more as if he’d made note of it so that he might deal with it at a time when he had more leisure. As it was, and though he never spoke another word, he seemed invested in the doings on the deck of the Riot.

Itzal decided this must be the ship’s skipper. Every so often, a few other men darted near him to share a few whispered words. He’d reply something even briefer, and the person would hurry back to the deck. After these little talks, the goings-on below would shift and morph like a large living thing made of small living things.

After not long at all, another of the men came toward the skipper. Before he could say anything, the skipper said, “We’re ready.”

“Aye, sir,” the other said.

“Cast off moorings, Mr. Teknik. Raise chocks,” the skipper said. His voice rising to a conversational tone. A hushed boomed over the already no-louder-than-skittering deck.

The night took a breath.

“Make sail,” the skipper said.

“Aye, sir,” said Mr. Teknik. He went to convey the redundant command to the sailors on the deck below. Sails already started unfurled from the masts at the skipper’s spoken command, as if the living animal that was the ship knew the skipper’s mind. Waves of canvas lowered like clouds glowering over the stars.

“Make for open prairie. Mr. Tyro, attend me here, if you please,” the skipper said. The lavender oil smell of Tyro seeped nearer followed not long after by Tyro himself. Itzal hadn’t realized that smell was familiar to Tyro, but he noticed it now. Giving Itzal a smile that nearly glowed in the dark from how the moonlight shone off his teeth, Tyro stood near the captain.

Then a most peculiar sensation shook Itzal back to his earliest memories. His body relearned the uncertainty of learning to walk, even if he couldn’t conjure the images.

The earth moved under him. He had a feeling of forward motion that had nothing to do with him. It started with the physical equivalent of a clunk—slightly less than a lurch, but much more than a wobble. Then, for a few seconds, it seemed like nothing more changed.

The movement as subtle as falling to sleep in a silent, dark room grew to a creaking like an ache and swallowed groan. The ground seemed loathe to let the ship go. In the fight that followed, the ground lost. What felt at first like a doubted bur, easily dismissed, creaked on to a feeling of leaning. The docks moved backwards, inching past the railings of the ship. Still eerie, but no longer illusory.

The Riot moved. It moved at a walking pace, but it moved.

“Not that fast,” Itzal said. He didn’t mean to. Somewhere in him he felt a need to say something. There’d been too much quiet for the last few moments. Those words came first to his tongue. He wished he’d managed to think a moment longer.

“Oh, gods of old, are you still here?” the skipper said.

“She don’t run fast in the forest, no. And here’s the forest, as you can well see,” Tyro gave a wide gesture to the well-described forest of masts in the Garrison docks. “Just you wait till we’ve got past the Razorbacks. She’ll run then, till we get out of the foothills.

“What’ll she do when we get out of the foothills?” Itzal asked.

“Then, sir, she will fly,” the skipper said. He turned and looked Itzal full in the face now. Itzal felt himself being investigated. He wasn’t sure what all he was giving up in that investigation.

“You are cargo belonging to Ben Mouse,” the skipper stated. The words had an implicit invitation of response in them, so Itzal made a response.

Then stopped before he spoke. He wondered if the whole conversation about cargo that Ben had with Tyro had been code from start to finish. Felt probable.

And entirely off topic. It just dredged up from his depths at that moment. It distracted, however, from the subject at hand: that of being called Ben’s cargo.

“I see what you did there. Tried to associate me with the point of begrudgingly delivering on an old promise thereby creating an association between me and your annoyance,” Itzal said. “Well, I’ll have you know there, mate—”

“Captain,” corrected the skipper.

“That I’m onto you.”

The skipper stared at Itzal before responding.

“And do you aim to do anything with that…colorful analysis?” the skipper asked.

“I don’t think so,” Itzal said. “Just so long as you know that I’m onto you.”

Without responding to Itzal, but still looking at him with expressing anything, the skipper spoke to Tyro.

“Did you hear word around Garrison of the conditions on the run to Kuraai Daalain?” the skipper asked Tyro.

“Aye, skipper,” Tyro said. “Fair wind and clear skies.”

“I am glad to hear it. I shall prefer a swift finish to this…importunate errand.”

With that, the skipper turned away from Itzal. He watched the doings of his crew and the approach of the starry breach between the Hogbacks. That gap let traffic out to the foothills, and eventually to the Razorgrass Sea.

“I’m called Itzal Dantzari,” Itzal said to the skipper.

“I am called Captain,” said the skipper. “My name is Iskander Younes.” He looked again at Itzal. The stars glinted in his eyes. “Welcome to the Riot.”