Guild Wars: Sea of Sorrows (6 page)

“Why do you like Orr so much?” Sethus asked him one night when they were lying in their hammocks. He bunked below Cobiah, occasionally reaching up to poke him with one foot when he couldn’t sleep . . . which was all the time. “Orr’s boring, Cobiah. It’s all sunk underwater now. There’s nothing to see! It’s not like you can ever go there, so what’s the point? I’d rather hear about the heroes of the Searing in Ascalon. Taking out the charr.” Sethus punched at the air as if fighting an enemy. “Winning the hand of the fair maiden Gwen! Those are good stories.”

“Charr are just mindless monsters, Sethus.” Cobiah yawned. “There’s nothing interesting about a mindless eating machine. You might as well be scared of the dolyak that pull carts in the city. Orr is where magic
comes from. The gods themselves lived there once. And now it’s vanished beneath the ocean, never to be seen again. Think of all the riches it must contain—the wealth and ancient secrets! I’d take that over monsters any day.”

“Orr sank because of the charr,” Sethus said smugly. “They marched across Ascalon and then went to Orr next. And the wizards of Orr—”

“Viziers,” Cobiah said, correcting him.

“Whatever. A vizier tried to use magic to stop the charr army but ended up sinking the whole peninsula. The gods themselves punished him; he got turned into a lich in penance for what he’d done. You know what a lich is? It’s an undead creature, risen from the grave!” Sethus grinned ghoulishly. “He got punished, Orr was destroyed, and the charr conquered Ascalon instead. That means the charr won. See? Charr beats Orr.” Sethus crossed his arms and swung back and forth in his hammock. Even though it was dark, Cobiah could
hear
the grin on his face.

Cobiah rolled his eyes and let the subject drop.

The next morning, Vost woke them up with his usual blustery yelling, rolling sailors out of their hammocks if they were slow to rouse. The ship’s bell rang loudly. “What’s going on?” Cobiah rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. “Corsairs on the horizon?”

“Captain’s inspection,” Vost grumbled as he stomped past. “Get on deck!”

Sethus punched Cobiah in the arm and raced toward the stairs. Not nearly as quick as the smaller boy, Cobiah called after him jovially as he trundled along with the press of sailors climbing up the ladders from the berth to the main deck.

The sailors arranged themselves in their rows. Some tugged their shirts down or straightened the bandannas
at their necks in case Captain Whiting took notice. Most of them didn’t bother, eyes wandering to ropes that needed to be coiled or sails that had mending to be done. An extra inspection was unusual, but it wasn’t enough to cause concern. Most likely, the captain just wanted to double-check the ship’s count before they reached port.

Heavy sighs and mutters escaped the bravest as the captain and his officers came out of the quarterdeck cabins. “Gah, get it over with,” Cobiah grumped under his breath. Daylight was wasting. He saw Vost standing on tiptoe at the banister, speaking in low tones to Damran, the pilot. The conversation seemed sober, their voices grim, and a tension spread through the crowd. This was unusual. Even the cold sea wind felt somehow wrong.

“Can you hear what they’re saying?” Cobiah whispered to Sethus, who was closer to the front ranks.

Sethus squinted and tried to put together the bits he could hear. “Sounds like a ship was sighted last night. The men on watch late said they saw something signaling. Flashing lights at us.”

“A message? What did it say?” He got no answer. One of the older sailors in the front row hushed them with a hiss and a glare.

As Vost stepped back, Captain Whiting moved gingerly toward the banister. His emerald baldric shifted about his tubby belly, the medals of honor twinkling and clanking with each uncertain step. The captain paused to exchange a few words with his first mate and the old navigator, then ran one lace-cuffed hand through the sparse hair atop his forehead with a gesture that spoke volumes. Cobiah watched him interestedly, wondering what had the officers in such a strange state. Usually they spent only a few minutes on the quarterdeck, the thick
brass banister separating the crew’s world from the high heaven of the pampered officers.

But today, instead of tossing a glance over the crew and heading back inside, Captain Whiting sidled to the railing with obvious discomfort. He gripped the brass rail with both hands, cleared his throat, and began—hesitantly—to speak.

“Gentlemen and ladies,” he said to the crew, staring out over their heads in awkward formality. Cobiah blinked. The captain’s voice was thin, nasal, not at all what he’d have expected to come from the man’s barrel chest. He’d thought it would have more gravity. Instead, the master of the
Indomitable
sounded like a sheepish schoolboy addressing the class. “King Baede has given us new orders. A creature has been sighted in these waters. It’s wreaked havoc on two of his vessels, and now we’re tasked with tracking down the monster and destroying it. Therefore, our normal voyage has been postponed.

“We are the only ship of the line in the area.” Whiting shifted from foot to foot, gauging his words—or possibly, Cobiah guessed, trying to remember how he’d rehearsed them. “We’re well armed and well crewed. Nothing will deter us from the king’s duty.” Captain Whiting lifted his hat and ran a hand through his thinning shock of hair. “Once we have ascertained the issue, we will return to Lion’s Arch and bring word to the king at his palace. Only then will we resume our voyage to Cantha and deliver our cargo.” He coughed. Lowering his eyes to stare down at his polished boots, Whiting finished lamely, “That is all.”

Battle! Cobiah’s heart leapt in his chest. He’d never seen a ship-to-ship fight, but he’d often imagined the
Indomitable
’s cannons thundering over the waves as the galleon nimbly danced through currents. He dreamed of
sails stretched to their capacity, boards creaking with the force of a sudden turn. What an adventure!

Vost stepped in front of the ranks, shooting a concerned glance over his shoulder at the three officers on the quarterdeck. With a roar, he called out, “You louts heard the captain! Back to work, and twice as hard, or I’ll flog your hides myself! Tack her rudder north by northwest, back toward Kryta, and make it fast!”

The sailors scrambled to obey, running for the sail ropes and the ship’s rudder. Cobiah scrambled up the netting beside the galleon’s mainsail, Sethus racing him to the top. “Vost’s kidding, right?” Cobiah gasped, swinging aloft on a knotted rope. “We’re halfway to Cantha on the Sea of Sorrows. The only thing north of us is—”

“The wreckage of Orr.” Sethus looked
distinctly less pleased. He pulled himself up onto the high yard, the upper crossbar of the main topsail.

“Why us? Sethus, why are we headed to Orr?”

Sethus shrugged. “Everyone knows our captain’s a special favorite of King Baede; he’s dining at the palace most of the time we’re docked in Lion’s Arch. My guess is that Cap’n Whiting talked up the
Indomitable
, and now that there’s a problem, he’s going to have to live up to his bragging.”

“Well, we’re on a good ship. We’ve got a lot of firepower and a full load of munitions. This’ll be a breeze!” Cobiah swung out on the spar, tying a rope around his waist before he crawled out to cut free the sail. “The
Indomitable
can handle anything.”

“Cobiah, we’re talking about Orr. Those are dangerous waters. We’ll be sailing through sharp corals and rock pillars. There are broken stone ruins under the sea capable of tearing open our hull if the tide’s too shallow—and the tide there is completely unpredictable.” Sethus looked pale. “I don’t care what the tales say. No sane captain sails there. It’s like asking to have your keel ripped open and your belly eaten by krait.”

“Come on, Sethus. You’re just angry we aren’t sailing to Ascalon,” Cobiah teased, pulling up the free-hanging ropes as he sat balanced on the crossbar.

“Ascalon doesn’t have a coastline, you nitwit. It’s landlocked.” Sethus coiled the netting slowly in his hands. His dark hair fluffed out with the rippling breeze, brushing away from worried features. The ship was turning her bowsprit into the wind, and below them the ship rocked lightly to the side, altering her course with the movement of the rudder and recalibration of the galleon’s tremendous white sails. “Nobody goes to Orr, Cobiah. It’s a cursed land. A dead land. A drowned country that the gods themselves abandoned,” Sethus murmured over the rush of the wind. “I don’t care what the king thinks is important. We shouldn’t be going there. If we get too close, that land will curse our ship, too.”

A shiver ran down Cobiah’s spine, but he laughed it off. He’d heard such rumors before. Sailors were notoriously superstitious and had an irrational trust in everything from the number of knots used on the sail ropes to coins thrown into stormy seas to appease the god of death before a voyage. A mere whisper of bad luck could make the swabs turn white and start muttering about curses and evil eyes. Nothing more than sailors’ talk.

“Look there.” One hand clutching the crossbar between his legs, Sethus raised his other to point toward the ship’s bow. From their vantage at the top of the
Indomitable
’s mast, Cobiah could see a darkness on the horizon, a place where the waters turned into moving shadows beneath the storm. The sky there was green with sickly storms and black with clouds, and lightning flashed in the depths
like twisting eels fighting in clouded waters. Where they reached down to touch the water, Cobiah could see shapes illuminated beneath the waves. At first he thought these were merely rocks, bits of island, or coral formations just below the white-foamed surface. As he peered longer, he began to pick out regular and oddly distinct edges, the features taking strangely familiar form.

Spires. Pointed stone rooftops, like the high pointed tops of churches and meeting halls in Lion’s Arch, but standing beneath the surface of the sea. Startled, Cobiah narrowed his eyes and tried to see more. “What are those?”

“Those are the ruins of one of the great cathedrals of Orr. Legend doesn’t say which one. Sailors call them Malchor’s Fingertips.” Sethus shivered, pulling himself back up onto the spar to stare out over the sea. “Ships don’t cross that threshold. When the pilot sees those black spires, you turn back.”

“Malchor?”

“An old legend,” Sethus said. “Malchor was a great artist who carved statues of the gods. After he was done carving their statues, the gods shut themselves away from mankind. But Malchor had fallen in love with Dwayna. He couldn’t stand thinking that he’d never see her again, so he threw himself into the ocean and drowned. Sailors say those steeples are Malchor’s hands reaching out of the sea toward the heavens, trying to touch the gods that left him behind so long ago.”

Cobiah looked at the faint pillars of stone at the edge of the horizon’s curve. They did look a little like fingers. “That’s where the seas of Orr begin?”

“Yeah. Right at that line of stones.”

“What’s beyond?”

“Orr itself. They say the water there is as black as night, like ink’s been poured into the waves. It never
gets lighter, and the sun never warms it. Sailors have used Orrian water to freeze things even in the Maguuma Jungle’s heat. Just one drop turns meat into jerky. A canteen could ice over even the fires of Sorrow’s Furnace!”

“Superstition,” Cobiah snorted, but he didn’t take his eyes off the sea. In his time as a sailor, Cobiah’s stomach had never given him an inch of trouble. Come smooth seas or rolling winds, he’d never been seasick and he’d never offered a “sailor’s prayer” over the side of the deck. Suddenly, thinking about sailing over the depths of a land abandoned by the gods and cursed by haunts, Cobiah felt his belly roll over. He’d been excited before, when Orr was a figment of his imagination. Now that he could see black stone fingers reaching up out of the ocean’s murky depths, he suddenly felt the tang of fear.

“Do you think we’ll find the monster that the king is looking for?” Cobiah whispered, coiling salt-roughed rope around his elbow and wrist. “Does it live in Orr?”

“I don’t know,” Sethus answered in a somber tone. “But I do know that no ship that sails beyond Malchor’s Fingers”—Sethus gulped, suddenly looking down at his net—“ever comes back.”

T
he next morning dawned crisp and cold, wintry enough to drive away the warmth of early autumn they’d known only the day before. Last night at sunset, the slender spines of Malchor’s Fingers had been barely a jagged line against the horizon. In the soft gleam of morning, the spines were much closer, clawing their way up from the depths through rings of thick sea-foam.

“Eyes on the rocks, lads!” Vost shouted from the bow. The ship’s bosun seemed ill at ease, one foot planted atop the bulwark near the
Indomitable
’s six-armed figurehead. He kept his bosun’s whistle clenched in one hand, the other holding fast to a mainstay rope as wind buffeted his crisp white shirt. Captain Whiting and his first mate stood on the forecastle with him, staring past the cutting waves at the front of the ship toward the sea ahead where rocky stanchions loomed. The captain fidgeted with his sleeve cuffs as he stared into the wind, but the bosun and the first mate were as still as statues.