Private Dreaming of an Absent Word

[Fray]

Fray watched Mak struggling to focus his eyes and thought to herself that they might well and truly be doomed. A drunk dreamer and murderer for hire trying to solve…a double murder. In the dark. On open seas. In under three hours. Was that the set up or the punchline of a terrible joke?

And now, as icing on the shit cake they had accidentally stumbled into, a scale of most unnatural origins was held up before them. It was leaf thin yet sturdy, slightly translucent and glowing under the moonlight, with edges rough enough to feel like rows of teeny tiny teeth. No harm to a casual touch, but if used to saw back and forth on a pliant surface…or, worse, to punch through a man’s chest…

Well, that would explain the bloody mess.

The mercenary noted how Mak refused to touch the thing. Must be hard, to be so delicate of constitution. Guess that’s why he hired her in the first place.

Fray sighed and felt around the scale. “Slippery from the blood, maybe,” she supplied once she had turned the thing in her hand a few times, rubbing calloused fingers against its alien surface. “But if you mean like fish guts, then…no. Not slimy enough.”

Hit with a sudden spurt of inspiration, she cleaned the scale off on the pant leg of one of the corpses. “Hmm. Feels kind of rough, actually, without all the blood. More like the outside of an oyster, just more flat.”

It was, in a strange, foreign way, kind of beautiful. There was an opalescence to it, like the inside of a shell, and paired with the way it glowed, gave the thing a rather ethereal look. But it also was likely responsible for skewering two able bodied men. Which made it infinitely more appealing as a keepsake.

Fray pocketed the scale, switching her attention to the floorboards beneath them. Water…that was a good suggestion. She scanned the room from one end to the other, spinning slowly from a squatted position. She could see splatters and puddles of blood, but no footprints from her or Mak, as they had been very careful not to leave any behind, and no dramatic signs of struggle. Whatever happened here had happened fast. Likely caught both men off guard. There was a slight arc of blood near the bodies. Perhaps when one man spun to watch the other die first.

She relayed all of this to Mak, her voice low and matter-of-fact. But then she paused abruptly. There was an odd shine to one of the floorboards, though it was near the middle of the room and not close to either the porthole or singular entrance.

“Over there,” Fray whispered, pointing at the spot. “Something’s off about that section. It looks wet, not blood, and water would have mostly dried by now.”

 

[Mako]

If he was asked, and by the eight's grace he was not, Mako would have babbled on about how surreal the situation felt. Sure, he could accept the captain's murder—man was a prick, hardly liked even by his own crew if the chatter from the mess was to be believed—and the circumstances surrounding it. The closed cabin, bloodstained rugs, untouched chest all of passing interest, believable. What he struggled to understand, not helped in the least by the drunken stupor that befell him, was how he managed to get caught up in it.

He shivered, rubbing absently at gooseflesh that puckered along his arms. Fortune rarely favored him. Omens, that shaman told him back on the shores of Aetochi, omens and prophecy. He was starting to believe her. Taken in that lens, each portent was a price. One paid in the present in search of future reward.

He wondered at that. What reward could the trickster moon bequeath him to make up for these trials? A kingdom sounded grand when it came from a woman's lips, a crown of swords stained red in the blood spilled in its forging. Not nearly so pleasant now, lamenting the knife of suspicion. His mind raced, painfully slow, and he struggled to condense thoughts past the thrum of his heartbeat.

Fray spirited him from his reverie. He could kiss her for that, if he fancied another broken jaw. Not likely tonight. Might make the whole thinking thing more difficult.

He moved at her direction, kneeling by the puddle of something. It pooled, silver in hue, glistering in the low light that filtered through the dark that occluded his eyes. Some of it hung in rivulets, caught in the seams of the cabin floorboards, viscous and thick. He scowled at it, leaning closer to sniff before making any judgment.

Nothing. It tickled the back of his nose but gave off no discernable scent.

"The fuck is this?" he asked. Dumbly, he dipped a finger in it, swirled the liquid around at the back of a nail. He staggered back, stifling a noise. The liquid climbed up his finger, clinging to skin in a refusal to shake off.

"Mercury? Silver? What the fuck?"

 

[Fray]

For one excruciatingly harrowing moment, Fray was convinced Mak was about to stick the weird slime in his mouth for a taste. Bad enough that he had even touched it. She was seconds away from wrestling his hand away, figuring she could break the finger before he ate mystery goo, when he suddenly flinched back.

“What? What is it?!” she whisper-shouted as he shook his hand frantically.

She felt sure that something vile would happen next. Like his skin melting away, or a mind controlling infection. But all that she could see was the liquid’s strange ability to cling to Mak’s finger.

Suspicion flooded her mind. Without a word, she grabbed Mak’s wrist and told him to hold still. In her free hand, she fished out a small knife from her belt, one she’d used many times to spear chunks of potatoes or whittle offensive images into the ship when no one was looking. She held her breath and brought the knife point right up to the silvery glob stuck to his finger.

Fray’s eyes widened in the semi dark when the glob shied away. She drove the blade tip closer, and in response the glob rolled like a bead of water around Mak’s finger, all while refusing to drop away. Absurd. This was absurd. How was this even happening?

“Wait,” she hissed, feeling panic through the spasming muscles of Mak’s arm. “I have an idea.”

Quickly, she reached behind and dipped the blade in some of the cooling blood. This time, when she held it near the glob, it had the opposite reaction. It actually reached toward the knife, going so far as to leave Mak’s finger and transfer to the blade. And then it…absorbed the blood somehow, until it was no longer silver, but a milky shade of salmon.

That was when the rest of the silver puddle started undulating, moving as if it were alive. Faster than Fray could react, it lurched up, suctioned the salmon colored droplet, and then shimmied itself through the planks until there was nothing left.

Without hesitance, she stuck the knife in one of the planks, which turned out to be quite loose, and pried it open to reveal a gaping hole leading to absolutely nowhere good. She made quick work of two more planks, as they had clearly been removed often, no doubt by the captain himself. Beneath them lay a man sized hole, large enough for even the burly captain to fit through, and a very questionable looking flight of stairs.

Fray stared at the hole in silence before muttering, “Mak, have I ever told you that you somehow always find the worst fucking jobs?”

 

[Mako]

He thought on that for a moment. Shrugged.

"At least we were paid in advance," he said, thumbing at the pouch of coins looted from the captain's chest. By weight, he held enough to ensure their escape from a fate of sleeping under hedges for a comfortable few months. That was worth some measure of danger by his reckoning.

His heart began to settle to a reasonable beat, absent the fluttering that assailed it moments prior when the viscous, silver substance leapt from flesh to knife and slipped between cracks in the planks. He let out a breath and watched Fray set to work with eyes maladjusted to the dark. He heard more than saw her open up the planks, curiosity crooking his gaze as he peered into the abyssal flight of stairs.

Gingerly, he set a foot to the first. It made no more than a peep beneath his weight, felt altogether solid in opposition to the otherwise shoddy construction of the ship's façade. A wave of vertigo washed over him.

"Ladies first," he said.

As if in answer, a slushing growl echoed below.

 

[Fray]

She conceded that he had a point. But only in her head, and very reluctantly.

Coin made the world go ‘round. Every so often, Fray worked up enough charm to earn the charity of some lonely, wealthy widow. Those were easy days, filled with pampering of unparalleled luxury. Sometimes, she wondered if Mak had done the same, in times of great need—or fortune. She would not have been surprised in the least if he did. One did what one had to in this cold and hungry world of theirs.

It was coin that had lead her here, after all. And coin that had convinced her to stay. Though, Fray was finding it harder with each passing day to insist that it was coin alone that bound her. There was also some irritating, undeniable chord that Mak’s plight struck within her. She knew what it was like to be orphaned. To lose the very roots of who you were. While she would never have gone to such lengths for a family member who, by all appearances, had chosen of their own free will to disappear, oh what she would have given, killed even, to have just one of the dead come back to life.

But thinking of Fen made her sad, and sadness always festered into anger in that warped, little husk where Fray’s heart used to be.

The Deva scoffed, masking old hurt with ill humor. “You don’t pay me nearly enough to go down there blind, Macky.”

Of course, she was very rarely actually blind. But she just didn’t like the odds of her Devahni eyes versus one, supernatural blob of quicksilver in the dark.

It had taken many hard lessons to form the habit, but these days Fray went nowhere without flint and steel hanging from her belt. She stood up to retrieve some of the snuffed candles, as well as an oil lantern she’d killed earlier at Mak’s behest. Upon returning to the opened floorboards, she set down her spoils and placed a single, stubby candle upright. Then she removed her tools from one of several pouches and set to lighting the candle with quick, practiced motions.

It came to life slowly but surely, the wick barely exposed enough for a flame to form. But it was enough, and once it grew strong enough, she lit the rest of the candles, lining them up like waxy soldiers around the opening. Four in total. The lantern she saved for last, careful to keep it as dim as possible.

“Alright,” she whispered, picking up one of her sacrificial soldiers. “Time to see what we’re up against.”

And then she dropped the first candle down into the hole.

Surprisingly, it bounced off some stairs before landing on solid and decidedly dry looking wood. The flame did not sputter out in a pool of slime like she had anticipated. Or water. Instead, the sad lump of candle lay forlornly on its side, tiny flame alive and flickering in spite of everything.

Fray sighed deeply. “Well, shit. Guess it’s safe enough to take a look.”

She handed Mak the lantern. He needed it more than her, and the last thing she wanted was for him to take a fall and crack his skull open. Then she’d have three murders pinned to her already murky name. The other three candles she scooped up, holding them out in her dominant hand as she gingerly stepped down. Fortunately, the boards she had pried up formed a wide enough hole for each of them to pass through. It was a tight fit, both her and Mak being taller and broader than most, but if they descended single file with their shoulders at a slight angle, they’d make it down without too much trouble.

Fray’s horns barely cleared one of the edges as she continued walking down, one rickety step at a time. The hole was surprisingly deep and oddly dry. She expected at least a trace amount of bilge water at these depths, but there was none, only a faint stench of brine.

Once she reached the bottom, she set one of the candles down to the side. It wouldn’t burn for very long. An hour tops, judging from its height. But she felt better knowing it was there, in case she had to buy Mak time to come stumbling back up in the dark. Their odds were better with him resurfacing first; he was the stronger candidate to explain this wretched mess, should the mystery remain unsolved by sunrise.

Fray waited for him to clear the last step as well before speaking into the darkness. Her voice was muffled here, the space dampened and eerily quiet. No sign of the strange growling from before. “Better watch our backs,” she warned, no longer whispering. “No telling where that thing went or how many—er, much—more there are.”

Then she stepped forward, candle in one hand and Fang in the other, wishing for all the world that some other unlucky fool could solve this disaster for them.