I.ii
It Came from the Sea
Kalina Moonheart lived alone on a lonely island on the other side of the world. Fifty miles from Port Black, as the gull flies, Kal’s home was one of the thousands of unmapped slivers of land that made up the Auspice Islands—a tropical maze of sand, jungle, reef and rock.
It may have been late summer in the northern hemisphere, but here in the equatorial seas the weather never changed. It was either hot and dry or cold and wet, depending on if it was raining or not, which was about half the time.
In either case, the best place to be was in the water, where the temperature was always at its most agreeable. Kal spent her happiest hours swimming the five-mile circumference of her island, an outing she made three times a day. At midday she would swim front crawl, as fast as she could, sometimes extending her exercise by ranging up to a mile out to sea. Pushing her limits every day for the past six months had honed her physique; she was tanned and hard-bodied, with powerful arms and shoulders. Her scars were now white against her brown skin, where once they had been red lines on pale flesh. She preferred them this way; the sun enhanced their beauty.
At dawn and dusk, she would swim close to shore and fish. It was dusk now, and she was drifting lazily through the shallows, towing a net teeming with mackerel. It was one of her biggest catches yet, and the bounty meant more to her than any of her old gambling scores or rewards for taking on dangerous assignments. Those days were behind her; she was no longer Kal Moonheart, Dragon Killer. When she made rare excursions into town, the fisherfolk and traders of Port Black just called her Kal, if they recognised her at all.
It had been six months since she last piloted her small coracle to port. She had lunched with the governor, an old friend, and traded her latest haul of dragon’s paw shells at the market, returning home laden with spices, tools and a new collection of paperback adventure novels. Since then, she hadn’t seen or talked to anybody.
But all that was about to change.
There was a ship in the bay: a small single-masted cog, so close to the beach that it must have been drawing only three fathoms. Kal trod water and squinted through the gloom to get a better look. It was hard to make out details, but she could see that the ship was flying no flags and displayed no name on the bow—a detail she had never seen on a ship that wasn’t up to no good.
On the long sandy beach in front of the jungle, torches were bobbing. Kal counted six. There were more lights on the beach than on the ship, which meant (perhaps) that the entire crew had disembarked. Kal still had a reputation in some ports: had someone forewarned them that they would need plenty of hands to take her on?
She ducked beneath the waves and tied her net to the reef. She kept hold of her fishing spear, though. There would be opportunities tonight to make catches of a different kind.
*
Kal rose from the waves and padded up the soft sand as if she had not a care in the world. She was aware of the torches at the edge of her vision, each of them dancing and flickering as they converged on her position. Before they could reach her, she made it to the tideline, where her smouldering fire pit was laid and her fish-smoker set up. She sat on her long driftwood bench and stirred the fire with her spear.
Six figures formed a ring around her. ‘Kalina Moonheart?’ one of them grunted.
Kal laughed to herself. Who else did they expect to find here? Maybe they had been told they would be faced with a great beauty. Or—more likely—it wasn’t actually a question. Either way, Kal hadn’t stayed alive this long by answering any old question the world threw at her.
She raised her head and looked her visitors in the eye. ‘I’d offer you dinner,’ she said, ‘but my nets were all empty. Did you scare off the fish?’
She was met with blank stares. Four men and two women. One of the men and one of the women were Nubaran sailors, a common sight in Port Black where they often dressed in vivid colours to make them look friendlier than they were. The two here were clad in purple pantaloons and wore plenty of gold (or more likely, polished brass) ornamentation.
The other four, though …
Kal shuddered. They had travelled a distance to get here—all the way from the other side of the world. Two young lads, one burly man and a scrawny woman, all dressed in loose ragged travelling clothes. It was their eyes that told Kal who they were, though—the glassy, distant eyes of those high on hallucinogenic drugs.
Acolytes of the Dragon. The cultists lived rough in the forests of the northern hemisphere, and often partook of a certain enchanted mushroom, before throwing themselves into battle on behalf of the winged god they worshipped.
Both the man and the woman drew rusty daggers from their belts. The two younger disciples moved around to cut Kal off, should she try to run. The Nubaran sailors—mercenaries most likely hired in some northern port to ferry the cultists here—just grinned and settled back to watch. Kal noticed both of them were packing pistols, but they were the least of her worries—firearms were notoriously slow, and in the time between an enemy aiming and working their way through the firing mechanism, Kal would almost have time to walk up behind them and knock them on the back of the head.
No, her biggest concern was how was she going to take on all six of them at the same time.
‘Jaliz is dead,’ she stated as the acolytes closed in.
The man and woman in front of her paused, looking confused. But the pirates’ reaction was more telling: the smiles were wiped off their faces. Their hands lingered on their gun barrels.
‘Jaliz?’ the woman said, as if trying to work out if that was important or not.
‘The other member of your crew,’ Kal reminded her. ‘The one you left on the boat. I checked that over first before I came ashore. It would have been rude not to. I say he’s dead—well, badly wounded would be more accurate. I left him tied up in your hold … but with a candle to see by, so he might have gotten free by now. I left the candle on top of a barrel of gunpowder I found in the aft store.’
‘Fucking hell,’ one of the sailors breathed. He exchanged glances with his fellow Nubaran, seemingly unable to decide what to do: risk going back to save their ship, or write it off.
‘It wasn’t a very big candle,’ Kal said, spinning out the time as best she could. ‘Just a stump really … well, not even a stump. More like a small blob of wax that—’
The dark island was suddenly lit up like a carnival. A fraction of a second later there was a sound like several simultaneous thunderclaps, and fragments of timber began to rain down on the beach. Before the debris hit the ground, Kal had already thrown her fishing spear and taken one of the pirates in the belly. As the burly cultist closed in, she ducked under his clumsy dagger strike, tripped him up and pushed him face-down into the fire pit.
The woman charged in next. Kal grabbed her by the wrists and spun her in a half-circle just as the surviving pirate discharged her pistol. The lead ball entered the woman’s spine between her shoulder blades, and she collapsed to the sand like a hanging victim whose noose had been cut.
Kal looked around. One of the younger cultists was already down, a shard of the cog’s mast poking out of his ribcage—lucky for Kal; not so much for him. The other lad was running away down the beach. The pirate was fumbling with his shot bag.
Kal calmly stepped over to her fish-smoker: a large tee-pee constructed of four poles covered with large palm fronds. She kicked away the palms and took a pole in each hand. They had been hardened by the heat, and Kal had sharpened both ends because, well, you never knew when you would need a hidden weapon or two. She hurled one like a javelin at the fleeing cultist and brought him down before he reached the safety of the jungle, then she dropped and rolled in the sand to spoil the pirate’s aim.
A loud report told her that he had wasted his one small chance to kill her, and she sprang to her feet right in front of him, putting the point of her fish scaler into his brain via the underside of his jaw.
Then she stepped back and looked around. The fiery glow in the bay was dissipating as the small cog burned itself out. The man lying in the firepit was still twitching and groaning. Kal rolled him onto his back with her foot.
‘Why did you come after me?’
The man’s face was a welter of burns and scars. He didn’t seem to feel the pain through his delirium, and started babbling incoherently in a strange tongue. It was supposedly the language of dragons, but Kal had yet to be convinced it wasn’t just made-up gibberish.
She knelt down next to him and put the man’s own blade to his throat. ‘Tell me why you’re here and I’ll kill you quick. Otherwise you’ve got days of pain and suffering to look forward to.’
The cultist seemed unmoved, however, and continued his tirade. Kal’s spirits left her and her energy drained out. Despite her threats, she had no wish to extend the man’s suffering. She prepared to make a clean cut.
Then she noticed a flash of gold on the man’s clenched fist. She stamped on his hand and pulled a heavy gold signet ring off his finger. There was a dragon on the flat top surface.
‘Nice,’ Kal said. She held it up to see it better, while stabbing the man in the throat with her other hand.
The dragon’s wings were spread, its ears long and flared, but its snout was short and upturned.
Not a dragon, Kal realised …
A bat!