I.iv

Creature Comforts

Kal and Sorin stepped out into the dirty street and turned to face each other.

‘Where are you staying?’ Sorin asked her.

Kal had to think for a moment. ‘I’ll probably curl up in a coil of rope down by the wharf. I’ve done it before. I’ll try not to get press-ganged this time!’

Sorin laughed. ‘Don’t do that,’ he said seriously. ‘I’ve a mansion up on the hill. You can stay tonight.’

Again, Kal had to take pause. It was a chill night - the chilliest she had ever experienced in Port Black. The fog was piling up at both ends of the street. Sleeping outdoors didn’t hold its usual appeal.

‘You have a spare room, right?’

Sorin’s grin split his face like a red wound. ‘Kal, I’m not trying to seduce you. I need you. Tonight, but for the turn of a single card, I was struck with a fate that has ended the lives of all that have come before me.’ He casually rolled the cursed coin between his fingers - from thumb to little finger and back again with a practiced, nonchalant ease. ‘I need you, Kal … to protect me from whatever comes for me.’

Kal shivered. ‘Toss it away,’ she said. ‘Whoever picks it up off the street can deal with whatever awful death that comes sniffing around.’

Sorin shook his head. ‘Holding it for a mere second is enough to damn you. I may as well keep it now and see if I can at least buy something nice with it in the morning … if I see the dawn.’

Now the chill settled on Kal’s shoulders, and her whole body shivered. She recalled studying the coin while at sea in her coracle … staring at it, tracing the bat with her fingers … biting into the gold …

And Sorin knew it too, but she had little choice.

‘Show me the way to go home,’ she sighed.

*

All roads in Port Black flowed like a river from the jungle gate at the top of town, to splitting like a delta down to the harbour. The cobblestones and walls were slick and shiny with water, and the fog smothered the  roofs of the buildings. Climbing Main Street was like ascending through a tunnel. 

Sorin walked slowly but confidently up the camber in the dead center of the street, while Kal wandered left and right, checking shadowy sidestreet porches and awnings. Shops were boarded up extremely securely, and some shutters were conspicuously new. But one thing that the foul weather  or strange dread could never overcome was the colourful murals that decorated every available brick and stucco wall. Kal stopped in front of a twenty-foot-high grinning pirate complete with eye patch and gold tooth. He was holding up a gold coin as if for inspection.

‘Carlos Barracuda,’ Sorin said. ‘He owned a chandlery on Wharf Lane. Popular fellow. Not a real pirate. He was killed last week.’

Kal looked again at Carlos’ cheerful face. ‘How?’

Sorin stopped in the middle of the street and looked up at Carlos almost wistfully. ‘He sold a boat.’

Kal wasn’t slow. ‘Let me guess. Someone paid for it with a certain unlucky coin.’

Sorin nodded. ‘The boat was found adrift  a few days later, full of bodies. Carlos was working late one night doing ... I don’t know, whatever store owners do. Stock taking? They say the creature got him. The store was looted pretty soon after and the coin moved on …’

Kal had only one question.

‘The creature?’

Sorin continued his stately walk uptown, and Kal fell in line. Every alleyway and street corner now breathed extra menace.

‘A big dog.’ Sorin said. ‘Nobody knows where it lives - some cellar or warehouse in town perhaps, or the ruined abbey - nobody generally dares follow it. It tends to go about its business after midnight.

‘We should have stayed at the bar,’ Kal said.

Sorin shrugged. ‘What difference would it make? It’s going to find me wherever I am, and my house is more secure. Besides, I have you to protect me now.’

‘Lucky you,’ Kal said. ‘Just how far is your house?’

‘I rent a mansion at the top of town, on the cliff overlooking the harbour.’

Great, Kal thought. Just about as far as it’s possible to be, and as close to the creepy ruin as it’s possible to be too.

As the land rose higher, the streets got wider and the buildings lower and more spaced out. Screens of eucalyptus failed to keep the wind out of Kal’s face - it seemed to switch and snake every which way to get to her. It was cold, too, and Kal had on only one layer: a loose linen shirt and pants that kept out the sun, but not the more forceful attack of the wind.

Sorin’s black shirt was open almost down to his navel, but he didn’t appear bothered at all.

‘Well, you seem at home here,’ Kal said. ‘What is it that you, er … do?’

‘My home—my home home—is a little backcountry east of the Silent Forest,’ Sorin said. ‘A bit of a dump, to be honest with you, but I’m here to make some trade deals that will put us back on the map again.’

Kal stopped in her tracks. ‘A bit of a dump! Sorin, the land between the forest and Vorpalore was wiped off the map centuries ago. There’s nothing there!’

Sorin stopped too and turned to face her. ‘Ah, so you’re familiar with the place. Have you been?’

‘No!’ Kal said. ‘It’s a place full of ghosts and monsters, but hey—I admire your optimism in trying to make something of it. Now how optimistic are you of getting back to your fancy mansion tonight?’

The wind screamed around them, and mixed in was howling of another sort: bestial, wild, feral and hungry.

‘Top of those steps, left onto the Esplanade, then it’s the house with the back door.’

The final steps were broad and wide - wide enough to fit a town house on either side of each step. Merchants, retired officers and retired pirates owned most of them - quiet displays of modest wealth, accumulated by exploitation and violence.

Two steps from the top, Kal froze, and Sorin almost walked into her.

A low rumbling growl like thunder rolled from around the corner of the last tall townhouse on the left. The sickly glow of the gas lamps threw a shadow onto the facade of the temple to Whalo  at the top of the steps. Murals that were colourful in the sun were bleached white by the lamps, and starkly blocked out by the enormous shadow, a dozen feet high, of …

… a hound.

Going by the shape of the shadow, its muzzle was long and dripped slathering drool. Its ears were sharp and pointed, and its back shaggy and muscular. Kal could now hear its claws scraping the cobbles.

But how big was it really? She had to know.

Sorin put a firm hand on her shoulder. His touch sent a paralysing chill down Kal’s back. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘It can sense you, but it can’t see you. If you look, it will be the last thing you look at.’

‘It will track us anyway,’ Kal said. She had some experience with dealing with wild animals. ‘We can’t run. We have to kill it.’

‘You can’t,’ Sorin said. ‘It’s not of this world. I have a plan. Wait here. When you hear it move, run to my house. The door will be open.’

Kal looked around. She had questions. But Sorin had vanished. She was alone, crouched down against the wall of a wide empty stair. There was no cover, and all the townhouse windows were barred or shuttered. The lamps that were installed to make the streets safe now made it seem like an arena where you had no choice but to stand and fight.

Kal drew her sword.

Then there was a sudden thunk and a scrabble of claws. The hound was moving away. Kal didn’t waste time checking—she launched herself up the final steps and out onto the Esplanade, belting hell for leather for the mansion. She clocked the black door first before glancing down the street. The hound wasn’t as big as its shadow, but it was bigger than a bear. It was loping to where a human body had been cut down from a gibbet at the look-out point at the end of the street.

A diversion!

Kal grinned as she ran. Sorin had proved his worth. She hurtled to his door and her body slammed up against it. She rattled the knob: it was locked.

For fuck’s sake!

She heard the sound of claws behind her. She knew a predator would instantly abandon dead prey for live. A sense of overwhelming panic overtook her, and she lost all self-control.

‘Sorin!’

The door opened and she tumbled inside.