The Fire and the Fog (16 page)

‘I fear we must retire, before these harsh
winds and cold waters disturb your delicate frame.’ Dan’r replied
imperiously as he swung his arm wide, pointing at the calm, blue
sea and cloudless sky above, the air filled with nothing but
sunshine and the cries of gulls.

‘Your concern touches my heart.’ Maeglin said
sarcastically, and lovingly, as she wrapped her arms around
Dan’r’s, and the two retired, arm in arm, to their cabin below
decks, to resume where they had left off the night before. And the
cries of gulls were no longer the only cries to fill the calm sea
air.

The ship spent two weeks touring the Million
Islands, coming and going at the couple’s whim. Dan’r and Maeglin
made love, annoyed the sailors, visited secluded beaches, and
stayed in small coastal towns and villages. Everywhere they went,
Maeglin would tell people they were newlyweds. The women would gush
and gossip and whisper with Maeglin, the men would simply glare at
Dan’r, standing proud and love-struck behind her. In short, it was
the beginning of a perfect honeymoon.

At last, the ship left the Million Islands
and started the four day voyage to the secluded island of Kol,
commonly said to be the most beautiful locale in all of Alta. The
Char’Nathi Emperor himself was said to have at least two homes on
the island, possibly more. It was expensive to visit, and even more
so to stay, but for an Artist and the daughter of a Lord, that was
of no hindrance or concern.

Dan’r and Maeglin spent much of the voyage in
their cabin, recreating and sleeping. It was during one of these
periods of deep sleep that it happened. Dan’r and Maeglin lay naked
in bed, wrapped in each others arms after being rocked to sleep by
the waves of the ocean. So deep was their sleep that they didn’t
notice the ocean swells growing larger, the drops as the ship
crested the swells deepening.

Dan’r woke with a start as lightning crashed
just above the ship. His heart lurched in his chest and his stomach
heaved as the ship entered a brief moment of weightlessness as the
ship crested a large swell in the ocean. Then it fell.

Dan’r stood quickly, and shook Maeglin awake.
Moments after she woke, he could see the fear he felt reflected in
her eyes.

‘It will be alright’ he said as he embraced
her fiercely, and they clung to each other for several moments,
their hearts and minds pitching up and down with the movement of
the ocean. Dan’r eventually, reluctantly, pried Maeglin’s arms from
his own, and broke contact.

He quickly pulled on breeches and boots that
had lain in a pile, discarded there haphazardly much earlier in the
day, and was pulling on a wrinkled tunic when Maeglin spoke.

‘I’m scared’ was all she said as she wrapped
the bed sheets tightly around her, holding them up to her neck in
her trembling fists.

‘Me too’ Dan’r replied simply. ‘Get dressed,
but stay in the cabin’. Then he turned and sprinted up the stairs
to the door to the main deck.

As he opened the heavy wooden door, fierce
wind and heavy rain began to batter at him. He stumbled, and fell
to one knee, as the ship pitched and yawned in the storm.

He wondered where the storm had come from as
he stood in the doorway. As he blinked through the biting rain,
Dan’r could see sailors rushing about the ship, several working at
cutting away the madly thrashing mainmast.

‘How can they do this’ he thought as he
crossed the deck in a half-crawl, watching the sailors rushing
quickly about the ship as he slowly made his way to the rise at the
back of the ship, to the helm where the Captain stood. He reached
the stairs and climbed them slowly, his hands holding tightly to
the slick rails as he moved cautiously, step by careful step.

He had barely reached the top when the
Captain appeared out of the rain in front of him, and grabbed him
by the front of his shirt, the larger man’s hands knotting into
fists in the fabric of his shirt as he shook Dan’r.

‘What’re you doing up ‘ere, fool? He roared.
Had Dan’r not already been soaked through from the rain, he would
surely have been covered in angry flecks of spittle from the
furious Captain.

‘Will the ship be okay?’ Dan’r yelled back,
but the Captain seemed to ignore him.

‘Get back below decks, you fancy idiot’ the
Captain yelled back, and Dan’r grabbed the arms that still held his
tunic.

‘Will she be alright?’ he yelled, and he left
the Captain to decide whether he meant the ship or his wife. He
wasn’t totally sure himself.

‘Just get below’ the Captain yelled as he
dropped Dan’r’s shirt and turned. He started yelling for his bo’sun
to get the idiot noble off his deck, and Dan’r wondered how he made
himself heard over the roar of the storm as he started making his
own way back down the stairs.

He made it to the bottom of the stairs, and
halfway back across the deck, when he looked up and saw Maeglin
standing in the doorway to the cabin they shared. She was wearing a
thin white dress, now soaked from the rain, and water ran down her
hair in rivulets. The bedraggled look of her hair and dress, the
way the water ran down the dress and made it see through, at once
hiding and revealing everything, Dan’r had never seen her more
beautiful in his life. He barely noticed Om’bh standing beside
her.

And then he was hit high in the chest by a
huge wave that came crashing over the side of the ship. He saw her
standing there, perfection personified. His wife, his love, his
life, and he tried to raise his arm towards her as he was picked up
and carried off the deck by the powerful sea.

And then he was in the water, being carried
wildly, swiftly, away from the ship. He struggled against the
current, against the waves; struggled to keep his head above water,
but it was in vain. His clothes weighed on him, and he could feel
the undertow start to bear him down. Frantic, he cast out, eyes
blind, coughing as his lungs choked on the brine. And then his arm
hit something; wood. A barrel, washed overboard just like him. He
grabbed it, held tight, and it helped keep him above water.

He could hear shouts from the ship somehow,
even as the waves and the thunder roared, and the ocean’s swells
carried him further from safety. He saw Om’bh, his watcher, jump
over the railing, falling in a smooth dive and splitting the ocean
cleanly. He caught glimpses of Om’bh as he crested each ocean
swell, glimpses of the dark man’s powerful strokes as his watcher
tried to reach him, and then Om’bh was gone, pulled under by the
same current that had nearly taken Dan’r.

The last thing he saw before the ship was
carried out of sight by the raging sea was a figure clad all in
white, reaching over the rail towards him, only held back from the
turbulent, dark blue waters by the hands of two sailors at her
side.

And then the water was between them, and all
Dan’r saw, felt, or heard, was the raging of the storm.

I

‘The same dream. Always the same dream.’
Dan’r thought to himself as he woke slowly, groggily in the
alleyway. ‘Why won’t it stop? When will it end?’ He lay there for a
while, in the dark, cold alleyway, its walls made from bricks with
peeling paint and garbage, its sky filled with the slate rooftops
of buildings, its smells the smells of rot and discarded
refuse.

Out loud, he simply cursed and groaned.

Every night he returned to the past in his
sleep, and every morning he woke, trembling and sweating, and he
remembered how he was washed ashore all those twenty odd years ago.
And this morning was no different, although with no sun visible
past the rooftops, it could have been anytime during the day.
Despite all his attempts to forget, to escape the dreams, despite
the alcohol and the fighting, he woke once again, shaking and
sweating.

As if the dream alone weren’t vivid enough,
with the dream gone came the memories. Dan’r remembered waking on a
new shoreline, alone and half dead, in a strange, foreign land,
stranded and separated from everything he knew, everything he
loved. It had taken him years, but Dan’r had slowly learned about
the land he was now stuck in; learned their language, learned of
their technologies, of their one god.

It was a strange land he had found himself
in. They had guns and cannons, engines and factories. They had
trains, which he still failed to understand, and they could
construct marvelous feats of engineering, bridges that spanned
great distances. But they had no art, no magic.

Not to say it was the same everywhere. Some
of the outlying lands reminded him of home. The tree-choked Heyle
reminded him of Wessen, both countries completely overwhelmed by
forest. But the South, Rognia, the largest of the countries in this
strange land, they were moving away from anything he found
recognizable from his old home. They fought like one of the Hundred
Kingdoms, bickering and warring with everyone around them, but they
were as organized as the Char’Nath Empire, only much more
hostile.

But what scared him most, more than all the
guns and trains and technologies, what still kept him drinking,
night and day, for the past twenty years, was that there was no way
back. There were constant storms just off the coast of Dohm, and
they made it impossible to sail home. Even the fishermen of Dohm
rarely sailed outside of the sight of land. No-one from Alta had
ever been to Dohm, and no-one from Dohm had ever seen Alta. Dan’r
was the first, the only. The last.

Alta was home, but a home he would never see
again. He would never escape from this prison called Dohm, never
see Maeglin again. Never again would he visit the towered cities
and tended forests of Sheith, he would never again stand in the
Cities of Char’Nath.

All this ran through his head as he tried to
stand, as it did every morning. One hand planted on the wall behind
him, its thin coat of paint flaking as he touched the worn,
decaying bricks, he slowly pulled himself to a stand, his free hand
grasping once more through his cloak, ruffling through the pockets
sewn inside for the paper he knew was there.

Pulling out a new, full wineskin, Dan’r
unstoppered the skein and drank deeply of a nice, refreshing rosé.
He was always partial to a rosé in the morning, he found it settled
his head and stomach best, and tended to lend towards a better day
as a whole. He started down the alleyway while he thought and
drank, wondering where he should end up that afternoon.

A city like Wraegn, a hub of commerce and
industry, had many inns and taverns, but Dan’r had started becoming
known, and unwelcome, at too many of them. After the fight the
previous night,, he likely would not be allowed into the Rusty Nail
again, and he would not again try the wrath of the Rivet’s owner.
Her head was as red as her temper, and she could not take a
joke.

Not counting the nicer taverns of the city,
the ones normally frequented by merchants and nobles, that left
Dan’r with two main choices. The broken rudder was a nice, rowdy
tavern, much like the Rusty Nail, although it had much more the air
of a Sailors tavern, and kept trying to serve fish. At three days
hard ride from the nearest sizeable source of water, fish were not
a commodity that could be served well cheaply.

On the other hand, the Hopper’s Grain was
less rowdy, much nicer a place for a meal, and it had one serving
girl that never seemed to complain when he groped her, and always
let him hang on for longer than she should.

His decision made, Dan’r stumbled slowly
towards the Hoppers Grain. After his bad luck in the brawl the
night before, a night spent with nice ale and some nice company was
much more appetizing than another night in an alley.

The alley Dan’r had spent the night in was a
part of a large warren of connecting passages, created by a swiftly
industrializing city. Rats, refuse, and other drunks littered the
alleyways of Wraegn, or they littered the eastern edge of the city
at least. There were thieves, beggars, cutpurses, men and women of
the night; they all found their way to the eastern side of the
town, where the factories were. The alleys were closer together,
and the church patrols much less frequent.

That was not to say that the church had no
presence in the eastern edge of the city, or that it was inhabited
only by criminals. There were taverns, legitimate businesses, and
church patrols daily. Many regular people made their homes by the
factories, forced there by rising rents on inner city houses, paid
to the Church to support the wars against Riin and Heyle.

But the alleyways, the alleyways were
essentially off limits for regular people. Go into the alleys, and
you got mugged, knifed, or worse.

He didn’t like it. Dan’r never did. These
smokestacks and tight alleyways, the guns and engines and
mass-produced clothing and food; the colour was being bled out of
the entire rotten continent of Dohm, and he was stuck here.