Arn silently sat in the rowboat as the sailors got situated. As two others took the oars, Captain Emrez looked at Arn and ordered one of the crewmen to pass him an oar. Arn shrugged and grabbed it. He was still not as strong as he used to be, but Emrez was giving him the chance. Gamden held out a hand, but Arn shook his head and plunged the oar into the water. Emrez’ blank expression quirked with a smile, and then he looked back at his ship.
Yesterday, Emrez had not returned from his disembarking until midafternoon. He had come with patches for all of his men to sew into their clothes, but none for Arn or Gamden. Morlo had told Arn, “Soon.” The Captain had then gathered his men for a speech. From what Arn had comprehended, they were joining this fleet. There were to be training drills, both on land and in the ship. The Captain had boasted of their security here—the promise of good things to come. There had also been continued talk of Starath, whatever or wherever that was. Beyond this, Arn had missed the details.
Today, Arn and Gamden had been specifically requested to go ashore. As he ploughed his oar through the water, Arn caught Emrez’ second-in-command eyeing him. He scowled at the man, but at this, the cruel man patted one of the sailors on the shoulder and they both started chuckling.
“Ponark, stop,” Emrez said.
Between laughter, the second-in-command wheezed something Arn did not catch over the sloshing of water. They were halfway to the ground.
Emrez grabbed the second-in-command by part of his hair, pulled his head to the side and struck him with his knuckles. The laughter stopped at once and Ponark coughed and spit blood over the side of the small boat. “Soon alos,” the Captain told his man. “Lora, kokoram you must not. Irlin the man you are, Arn is.”
That turned Ponark’s submission to his Captain into a renewed glare at Arn. In response, Arn looked at the Captain and smiled. Emrez returned the expression, his eyes gleaming in the radiant sunlight.
Then, at last, they reached the shore. The sailor that Arn had relieved from oar-duty splashed through the water to pull their rowboat up onto the beach. There weren’t any docks in Tiyess, just rows of beached vessels. Emrez ordered one of his men to stay and then the rest of them—eight in total—walked up the beach into the town.
Arn looked around with wide eyes as they watched. There were women as dark as the members of the crew. Some wore the permanent war-paint like the men on the ship had. An old man sat at the corner of a clay building, unconcerned by the column of smoke that rose from the inside of his structure. He watched Arn pass, then went back to weaving leather around the handle of a large metal axe. As they wandered through a crowd of people, a loud metal clang echoed from the smoking building. Arn turned around, walking backward, to see the interior revealed by wooden support beams. A man stood there, muscles greased with what Arn could only assume was burned animal fat or mud, and slammed a hammer against an object on his work table. Bright red sparks showered into the air—like the ones that had been released when Arn’s evil sword split the Stone Spear in two.
“They make it,” Arn gasped. He looked at Gamden. “They have it everywhere because they can make it…”
Gamden nodded, wordlessly. He was frowning, putting into expression what Arn began to feel in his gut. Something was very, very wrong here, and it wasn’t just the prevalence of the uncanny weaponry. Emrez’ crew walked close around Arn and Gamden, and some of the passersby looked at them with pity in their eyes. Of course, Arn and Gamden were still malnourished, shaved of hair, and their skin burned into pock-marked reddish hides—not to mention Arn’s nose was just a pair of nostrils in the middle of a scar that spanned from his forehead to his cheekbone.
The sense of dread and the noisy chaos of the village drove Arn inward. He stopped looking around and stared forward, his face slackening into what once had been his painted face, ready for the hunt or the fight.
They entered a large clearing, an open square in the middle of the town. Men wearing bright colours bickered with one another in front of wooden building-frames. Not building-frames, Arn realized, but platforms for displaying their treasures. While dozens of men and women milled around these structures, a wide sandy stretch was left almost abandoned. A few rungs of wood were stuck into the ground, draped with rope, and accompanied by a metal ring with burning wooden logs held inside it. There were a dozen men standing behind these strange furnishings, watching Captain Emrez’s group approach.
At some unspoken cue, one of the men by the fire ring stepped forward. He clapped and a few of the men standing behind advanced toward Emrez’s group. Arn looked at Emrez and then at Ponark. Neither drew their weapons, though the advancing group were carrying spears. Emrez glanced at Arn; though his expression was blank, it forced Arn’s stomach to clench. Then the Captain bobbed his head toward the guards. “Go,” he said, quietly. He always spoke simply to Arn, uncertain if the survivor would understand his words.
Arn looked at Gamden. Gamden was looking around for a weapon. Then one of the sailors shoved Arn bodily—he stumbled forward, kicking sand up in a puff as he emerged from the protection of Emrez’s group. Gamden scrambled to grab a sword from one of the sailor’s sheaths. Arn watched him stumble out toward the spear-bearers a moment later, clutching his nose.
One of the armed guards reached for Arn with a leather-clad hand. Arn ducked to one side, springing between the warriors to get away. The man’s comrade sprang back a step, waving his spear towards Arn. Reconsidering his instinct to sprint for it, Arn kicked his feet through the dirt and wrapped himself around the surprised first guard—the one who had tried to grab him. The knife on the man’s belt slid free. Arn pulled himself back from the set of four spearmen, holding the point of the knife over the stunned guard’s heart.
While all this had happened, Gamden had managed to get behind Arn, while the other three warriors had leveled their spears at their compromised comrade and his captor.
Emrez guffawed loudly. He clapped his hands against his thighs loudly. A number of the men and women from the colourful stands across the town square had turned to watch. Ponark had drawn his sword.
“No,” Arn said in their language. He could kill this shirtless spearman easily. “Arn is… wind—drifting—man.” He didn’t know their word for freedom. “I go. I go!”
His cries were only met by Emrez’s chuckling. The stranger who had ordered the spearmen forward had crossed his arm with a scowl on his face. The Captain stepped forward, holding out his empty hands. “No,” Emrez said. “Arn is quiva—pirriva. Coins.” He rubbed his fingers together. Morlo had taught him that word when he showed Arn the metal pieces he kept against his hip at all times. They had value to these men… value like a shirt or a meal.
“I kill him!” Arn threatened. He turned his head to look back at Gamden for just an instant, then looked back at the others. In their language, he told Gamden, “Get out of here. Run while you can!”
The guard Arn held whimpered, but Arn twisted his bodily strength to the side, holding his prisoner tight.
“I’m staying,” Gamden said. “We survived the island together. We survive this together.”
“Kill him?” Emrez asked, laughing. He waved his hand around the sandy square, where onlookers continued to gather. “And mars then? Mars next?”
What next? Arn recognized. He looked around—at the murderous hate in the eyes of the spearmen, the bored look of the robed man that commanded them, the simmering air over the fiery pit, and the ominous wooden frames near it. He had nowhere to go. If they had not killed him already, they had something worse planned. So, Arn made his choice. He would force them to kill him. “Sorry Gamden,” he said, quietly.
Then Arn drove the knife in as deep as it would go. He pulled it out and jabbed it again. Incoherently, he roared his hate at this world as he drove the knife in a third time. One of the spearmen came at him with a thrust, but Arn threw down the corpse he had just made to absorb the point. He scrambled up the length of the wooden spear shaft, driving his bloody little knife into the man’s shoulder. They floundered toward the ground as Gamden charged at another of the guards with his bare hands. Emrez shouted instructions to the guards, but Arn couldn’t understand them. Instead, he screeched from his gut as he snatched up the dropped spear.
Then, as Arn tried to stand up, a wooden pole struck him in the forehead. He smashed into the sand, hard, and gasped as his sight flashed between night and day. He had managed to hold on to the spear, and flailed it around as he tried to stand up. Gamden speared one of the other men, before someone struck him in the arm with a wooden spear-butt. He lost grip of his weapon.
Arn found his own spear yanked from him, wooden slivers digging up under his fingernails as he desperately tried to hold onto it. Another guard whipped him across the back with a weapon shaft—Arn grunted and fell onto his palms. The hot sand seared them.
Then a heavy weight drove down onto his back. The ground, stained with blood, burned against Arn’s craned neck. He peered up at Emrez, waiting for his death to come, and then realized that the Captain was whooping with mirth. He leaned close to Arn’s cheek and sneered, “Many, many coins.”
Arn found himself dragged across the sand bodily. He was flung down between two wooden bars. Gruff, painted men tied his hands in place, though his knees hung toward the ground and his feet flailed loosely. His arms were stretched wide enough apart he could not move. He peered over his shoulder, gasping and coughing as his body fought against the dozen bruises he had acquired.
The overseer of the spearmen calmly removed a rod from the circle of flame. On its end was a bright orange circle. The air shimmered and danced around the wretched object, as though the world itself tried to reject it. The man approached behind the prisoner. Arn heaved for breath, but the terror choked it out of him. He heard Gamden cursing and struggling in one of the other binding frames nearby. There were more empty ones ahead of Arn, and more fire pits.
“No, no, no!” Arn cried, in both languages. They shoved a wooden bar into Arn’s mouth, but he spat it out. The man who had put it there shrugged and left it discarded in the sand. Whimpered pleas continued to flow from Arn’s chapped lips.
Arn had not entered the dreamworld in weeks—not since his rescue from that sun-blasted beach. When he heard Gamden start screaming, the first tendril of that other world clutched at him—Little Rat’s blissful, innocent laughter echoed through the town square, ringing in Arn’s bleeding ears.
Then they put the red-hot circle in between Arn’s bruised shoulder blades and the dreamworld exploded around him—salty waves splashing through the blood of the dead guards, a chorus of water-scale reptiles dancing around the daytime moon, and the likeness of Stone Spear himself, rising out of the sand beneath Arn, reaching with half-rotted fingers down Arn’s hoarse throat to grab hold of an agonized scream and rip it out of him.
Arn dove into the dreamworld and everything faded to black and tranquil warmth.