Missing Piece Read online

  For Marsha Kirzner, Ananda Lebo, Eli and Daniel Kirzner-Priest, my parents, Betty and Ted Priest, William and Parker Broome, Pearl Priest, Eitan and Erez Lebo, Rikki, Aliza, Moshe, and Elisha Kirzner, and Michael Rand.

  Contents

  Map

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Lexicon

  Acknowledgements

  1

  Return to the Phaer Isle

  In the midst of a hurricane, the Dawnrider’s mizzen mast broke and was swept away. The vessel was driven many leagues off course and several crew members, including the ship’s surgeon, were lost to the fierce wind and waves. The ship itself was lifted so high several times it seemed about to be dashed to pieces. But somehow it survived and the storm finally abated.

  Not long after the last crosswind ended, Tharfen, standing atop the forecastle with her telescope, caught her first sight of the Phaer Isle in five years. Initially it was little more than a distant purple speck on the sea-green horizon, but as the galleon strove forward she could make out the fluttering pennants along the seawall atop the cliffs, and despite herself she felt a similar fluttering in her chest.

  Tharfen had been and done so much since she’d left this isle of her birth. She’d sailed all around the world with her father’s fleet. She’d studied navigation and military strategy in the finest academy of Udara. The greatest swordsman in the land had been her personal instructor and she his favourite student. At eighteen years of age, she was the youngest woman ever to captain a ship, and in two around-the-world voyages she had witnessed cultures and practices most people didn’t even know existed. During all her travels she had not missed the Phaer Isle at all. It was almost as though she’d been a different person then. If her mind ever did alight on one of its memories, it felt more like ten years ago than five.

  For a while she just stood there scanning back and forth with her telescope. Even when the galleon rocked in a cresting wave, her stance remained uncannily steady. She wore her second-best uniform — an embroidered blue coat unbuttoned to a white high-collared shirt, black breeches, and black stockings with buckled black shoes. Her rich red hair was captured in a tight bun at the nape of her neck, almost hidden in the shadow of her tri-cornered hat.

  Tharfen turned to look up into the billowing sails, and without any apparent extra effort, emitted in a loud, penetrating bellow “Trim the sails, Miss Yato!” Such was the authority and volume of this order that it not only caused the lookout to startle a little in the crow’s nest, but scared from the railings a long line of gulls waiting eagerly for galley scraps.

  The stopover would be brief. Once they had replaced the mizzen mast and provisioned the ship with water and victuals, they would catch the westerlies and rendezvous with the fleet to voyage for the first time into the underocean and back around. While Tharfen was on the isle she would take the opportunity to stock the ship with lots of pickled cabbage to fortify the crew against the loss of so much sunlight. And she already had onboard a large shipment of Pathan torches. She yelled again to the woman in the rigging. “Have an ear now, Miss Yato. Set a course due east.” The gulls that had only recently settled back upon their perches once again flocked off.

  Tharfen returned to her telescope and noticed for the first time the missing piece in the seawall atop the cliffs. Despite her detachment from this place, she felt surprisingly concerned. She made a note to herself to alert the authorities when she arrived — if indeed there were still authorities here at all; she had heard varying reports over the years. But she would nonetheless leave a strong message with someone at the port. It was the least she could do.

  The arrival of a galleon in the port of the city of Ulde was far from a unique event that day. Several other large vessels — a carrack, two schooners, and four cargo ships — were already lined up along the docks of the inner harbour known as the Lion’s Paws. Tharfen realized with some irritation as the Dawnrider sidled into eighth place that her stay here might not be as brief as she had hoped. A little of her annoyance at this crept into her voice as she barked orders at the crew. It was already late afternoon, and judging by how slowly the stevedore Thralls were transporting various cargo from the warehouses to the ship eight places ahead of them, she and her crew would be here overnight.

  Tharfen had work to do and maps to study, and she could easily have stayed on in her cabin, but she had a surprisingly strong desire to see the ancient city again. When she’d left five years earlier, mere days after the Second Battle of Phaer Bay, much of the city had still remained buried under the debris of spell-made things. What must it look like now? And what had become of her brother, Torgee? He had not been pleased when she’d told him she was leaving the Phaer Isle with her father. They’d had harsh words for each other, worse than any they’d had before — and they’d had many a bad word. But they’d always gotten over it. Not this time though. Not yet.

  There was something else that remained unresolved from those days, but Tharfen hardly even thought of it anymore. It had dispersed throughout her being so evenly that its effect on her was hard to detect. Ever since she had collided with her one-time friend Xemion of Ilde, in the frictionless city of Shissillil, it had inhabited her silently. But now, just under the rim of her consciousness, as she advanced toward the city on the heights, that thing, the piece — the piece of him — was struggling to make itself heard. She didn’t specifically think of it
now but Xemion himself came to mind.

  Striding along the wharf toward the tunnel, Tharfen couldn’t help but remember the last time she’d seen Xemion, blood-spattered, here in the low-tide sands of this same bay. And she recalled his terrible accusation, something she hadn’t thought of in quite some time. She rejected it now as she had rejected it then.

  Spotting a long-limbed, long-haired Thrall she vaguely recognized, she called out, “You! Where is your governor?” Her elocution, shaped by two years of speech training, was almost too precise.

  The fellow looked up, offended by her tone, but he soon surrendered under the greater force of her gaze. “Lirodello? He’s upstairs,” he responded in a surly drawl, taking a big haul on his pipe and blowing the smoke as near her face as he dared.

  Glaring at him, Tharfen removed her tri-cornered hat to wave away the tendrils of smoke that had drifted too close. As she did this, a long lock of red hair escaped from the bun at the back of her neck and dangled elegantly down her right shoulder.

  The Thrall cocked his head to one side and said “Tharfen?”

  “Captain Tharfen,” she responded.

  “Tharfen the Cyclopes-slayer?” the man asked excitedly.

  Tharfen rolled her eyes.

  “Fellows!” the Thrall shouted. “Lookee here! I’ve got Tharfen the Cyclopes-slayer here.”

  “Be quiet, you fool!” Tharfen barked at him. “I didn’t ask to be announced.” As she set off through the mouth of the tunnel and up the pathway beside the rail line that transported the shuttles of foreign goods up to the city, she had a momentary feeling that it was something much more powerful than her curiosity that was tugging her forward.

  2

  Something from the Bog

  Just outside the west wall of Ulde a crimson-feathered bird descended and lightly skimmed the brown layer of scum that covered the swampy edge of the peat bog there. Its foot touched down only briefly but there the scum parted, leaving an opening through which the shallow waters shone. At first the opening was almost perfectly round like a crown, but then as the shape shifted and the sky darkened it began to suggest something more ominous — an oval absence, dark, half-rotten, and gasping. Perhaps it was a mouth cut away from its animal — the last remaining part of an eel. Perhaps it was some newly shed spore-child of the bog itself. For if you looked down from the portal suspended high in the air above you saw that the whole bog was shaped like a gaping mouth sucking at the cold salt of the northern ocean.

  In long gone years, believing the bog to be the mouth of some dark underearth lord, there had been people who brought sacrifices to it. Bodies of murderers with ropes about their necks; bodies with parts missing; hands and arms cut away from criminals. For a thousand years the bog had been fed in this way and somewhere preserved in its utmost depths, it was said, the bodies and the pieces of bodies remained exactly the same as they had been on the day they died, but polished dark like black leather. In recent times, though, the practice of feeding the bog had all but ceased. For fifty years the bog mouth had sucked at the globe of the sky like a famished infant at its own fist, drawing on the sun with panic energy, swallowing and swallowing, sustaining itself on flies and rain where once it devoured multitudes.

  The little mouth shape at the edge of the water was in that state right now. It was detectably pulsing open and shut. Craving. It wanted something it couldn’t quite envisage. Something red. A fly drew too close and the mouth quickly sucked it in and it was gone. The fly was now part of the mouth. But the mouth still wanted something red and there was nothing red to be had. A tiny white-spotted frog approached and quicker than a fly disappearing down a frog’s throat, the frog disappeared down the throat of the little mouth and the mouth grew. And even as the mouth devoured, the bog was regurgitating, wrenching matter out of its deepest innards, retching it forward so that slowly an aura of substance began to materialize around the mouth. Gradually the scum parted wider and wider, branching out until it formed a sky-reflecting body shape. It was still more of an absence than a presence, but soon — was it wings or shoulders that arched up off the surface of the water? Yes, they were shoulders, but more a suggestion of shoulders than real, material shoulders. Soon hands and arms of the same kind pushed the fog-like thing up from the shallow bottom and halfway onto the shore. It could almost have been a buzzing of blood flies about some ghostly cadaver but it quickly thickened and became more and more substantial. The mouth part of it was desperately gnawing now, drawing in the dark peat-riddled loam like milk from a mother’s breast. Eventually it had enough substance to rise to its knees. A lost sparrow flew by. It was sucked into the mouth and became part of it. Another. Another. And now the mouth knew that the thing it wanted — the red thing also had wings. As it strained to rise to its feet, words took shape in its mind — finch, tanager, cardinal.

  When it finally stood up the figure was clearly human. The details of a face took form and were visible just long enough to reveal feminine features. Then the weeds and green slime of the bog fashioned a cloak about her. And within the hood of that cloak the dark oval of the head had another unseen sideways oval that even now still wanted a red bird. A tern? A swallow? Suddenly as the descending sun touched the far horizon a birdsong arose from a birch grove at the edge of the bog and the name came to her — nightingale. She wanted a nightingale.

  If hunger was everything she would have gone into the grove and hunted for that nightingale. But in the part of her that was not yet a heart there was something even more powerful than hunger that wouldn’t let her stay and hunt; that drew her on toward the city of Ulde.

  3

  Tharfen Remembers

  In the dimly lit tunnel, memories that Tharfen had pushed out of her mind quite successfully during the past few years came flooding back in. She tried to resist them, but seeing the cliffs and the bay again had refreshed them too strongly. She saw Saheli again, on the night of the battle, lying dead in the sand, and Xemion leaning over her, desperately trying to revive her. She felt the same piercing ache in her chest that she had felt as she watched him bend down and kiss her. She had been moved by the tenderness in it, but frightened and embarrassed, and … Then he had lifted his face up to the stars and cried out in a voice full of rage, “Poltorir!”

  She saw herself as though from far away, back in that darkness, the flames and cries and carnage of the battle all around her. She watched him clenching his fists and panting. Again he bellowed to the sky, his voice so ragged it seemed as though it should have ripped his throat open with its force. “Poltorir!”

  She’d stepped toward him and whispered his name. She saw the crisscross wound in the middle of Saheli’s chest. Xemion closed Saheli’s eyelids before looking up at Tharfen. She felt a deep and terrible sorrow that stripped away whatever hostility there was between them. They had both loved Saheli in their way. She took another step toward him.

  “Stay away!” Xemion shouted, holding his hand up, illuminated by a distant bonfire on the beach.

  She stopped and saw that he was covered in blood. When her voice came out, it sounded like the voice of a little girl. “Is she going to be all right?”

  He waited a long time before answering, while she just stood there frozen in her tracks. The night grew darker and there was a sudden shift as the sea winds reversed. A shout came in from far out at sea, where the lucky among the enemy had escaped back to their galleys and galleons.

  Finally Xemion shook his head, averting his eyes from her. Her chest was wracked with a sob so big she couldn’t get it out of her. She took one more step closer to him, but suddenly a black wind seemed to come straight down out of the sky, bringing with it a downdraft of horrible, pungent electricity. When Tharfen looked up and saw dark wings descending, she screamed and ran.

  Tharfen’s memories were not as precise about what happened immediately after that. Somewhere she had stopped and turned to look back. By then the whole bay w
as full of an acrid stench, and she saw the same dragon that had attacked the enemy army in the battle crouching on the beach beside Xemion, its webbed wings tucked in at its sides.

  Xemion was clearly not afraid of the creature. He signalled with his hand and the dragon brought her long green gullet down onto the sand. Tharfen, trembling with fear, watched Xemion take the chain that was still around the dragon’s front leg and loop it back over its shoulders, where he tied it to the other leg like a harness. She crept silently closer over the sand. Xemion gently lifted Saheli in his arms and slowly walked toward the spiked tail.

  “Where are you taking her?” Tharfen yelled.

  Xemion hadn’t even turned to look toward her. “She said she wanted to be buried at sea!” he yelled back angrily.

  “She was our friend, too,” Tharfen said, the tears finally cracking open in her throat. “She’s not just yours.”

  She would never forget the sound of his voice then as he hissed back at her. “If it wasn’t for your friendship, she would still be alive!” That was when he turned to look at her, his face so fierce he seemed like someone else entirely. He was no longer that annoying lad who had once enthralled her with his recitation of the Phaer Tales, but some kind of dread and powerful warrior or mage. Then, with unerring balance, he walked up the dragon’s thick spine carrying Saheli in his arms. His accusation had an almost physical tearing effect in Tharfen’s chest, both then and now. Cradling Saheli, not looking at Tharfen, he straddled the dragon’s neck, held on to the chain, and gripped tightly with his knees as the dragon leapt across the bloodied tidal flats of Phaer Bay and took to the sky.

  Tharfen had only stayed in Ulde for a few days after that. Those who survived the battle had cheered her and celebrated her amazing feat of slaying five Cyclopes with her sling, but Xemion’s words had cut very deeply. It seemed almost a miracle when her father’s ship had sailed into the bay and taken her off on her first voyage so soon after. Despite what had happened with Torgee, she still had no regrets about leaving. But the pain of losing Saheli was another thing. She was amazed at how strongly she still felt the ache of it now that she let it move again. Wherever Xemion had taken Saheli, he certainly hadn’t returned to the city before Tharfen left. Not that she would have wanted to see him after his vile accusation, but Saheli … She would have loved to have seen Saheli in all her goodness and grace once again.