Someone cuffed him on the head, leaving a slimy wetness, and Avery closed his mouth. “I’ve answered all the questions I’m gonna answer outta you,” came Segrul's voice. After a minute, he said, sounding somehow justified, “You chose the wrong course, didn’t you, Janx?” When the whaler didn’t reply, Segrul added, “I would’ve wished otherwise for you, old friend. I never resented your leavin’, you know.”
“No? I remember it different.”
“What, that bounty on your head? That was nothing. That was just for the sake of appearances, so’s not to encourage other captains to mutiny. If I’d really wanted you dead the bounty would’ve been much higher.”
“It kept me hoppin’ for years.”
Segrul laughed. “I hoped so! Many a night I raised a glass of stolen champagne and toasted the thought of you fleeing one step ahead of my knives. I imagined you always on the go, looking over your shoulder everywhere you went, never able to settle down, and I had many a good chuckle over it. I always said if my knives ever did bring your head back to me I’d have it alchemically preserved, then mount it in me bedroom.”
“That how you get your kicks now? Starin’ at people’s heads?”
“I didn’t tell you what I’d do to it there, did I? That nose hole of yours—”
Janx let out an inarticulate growling sound, and Segrul laughed. Avery was glad when the pirate ceased his chatter and they stepped off the docks and onto solid land. He tried to pause for a moment as his body adjusted, unused to the lack of rolling and pitching—the docks had only been a shaky prelude—but the pirates pushed him forward and he was obliged to keep moving. Sounds of activity surrounded him. He tried to open his eyes, then winced at the bright light and closed them again. Soon. In another few minutes he’d be able to see.
The pirates marched them down what seemed by the sounds to be a wide avenue. The smells of hundreds of people reached Avery, body odor from normal men and women, yes, but also the distinctive aroma of fish-men, the coppery smell of lobster-folk, the slightly painful sting in the nostrils from the waft of a jellyfish-person. Avery smelled the salty tang of the sea laced with ozone, fish frying somewhere, feces (likely from an open pit), refuse, and various spices from what might be a market.
He opened his eyes—experimentally, then, soon, continuously—and blinked at the strange landscape he walked through. The disorganized sprawl of Colu lay all around him, and sheltering the settlement on three sides were jagged, rocky mountains blocking out half the sky. One mountain behind the others smoked. The buildings of the town were composed of rock, mud, scrap lumber and sheets of metal—mostly things brought to the island by ship. It was easy to see why: the native Magons had almost completely denuded the island. Rocky pinnacles towered over a rocky beach framed by rolling mounds of rock and overhung by rocky shelves. No trees anywhere. Not even a shrub or patch of grass. Whatever the Magons had built with the wood they’d harvested years ago (assuming there ever had been wood) hadn’t lasted through the centuries they’d lived here, and when they had opened their arms to outsiders and allowed the pirates to establish a town where no navy or outside power would interfere with them, the outsiders had had to bring the town with them.
They had. Ramshackle bars and tattoo parlors and whorehouses, motels and trading posts and questionable eateries stretched in every direction, some even climbing the rocky foothills the town—city, Avery realized—butted up against. Smoke rose from countless chimneys and cook fires and the vents of drug labs. Avery was certain of this last, as several buildings he passed stank of universally illegal chemicals.
And everywhere there were mutants. Fish-women and seaslug-men, a fat man like a centipede shrimp, a posing prostitute lasciviously sticking out an anemone tongue. A strange creature passed before Segrul’s line of pirates, halting it briefly, and Avery realized the creature was a man who had mutated into something like a giant crab, complete with a shell as high as Avery’s waist, forced to propel himself along the ground in awkward stops and starts. Pirates, never one to waste an opportunity or fail to torment someone who couldn’t fight back, had scrawled lewd pictures and words into his shell, and one of his legs had been broken off. The crab-man finally hop-scuttled out of the way, and Segrul’s party moved forward, Segrul whacking the creature with his cane and cursing him as he went.
Not all the people in the town were infected. When Avery asked Janx about it, the big man said, “Pirates just capture the goods, Doc. They still need someone to sell ‘em to.” He nodded at a group of finely dressed men and women, and their bodyguards, as they picked their way down a narrow, twisting street. There were other buyers all over, some singly but most in groups, typically guarded. They were all too aware they would make good hostages, and their families could likely afford to pay the ransom. It was for these men—and women, too—that the air purifiers must have been installed around the city. And there must be some, as the visitors did not wear environment suits.
“Awfully risky just for the chance at some discount textiles,” Avery said.
“Oh, some merchants’ll do anything to get the leg up on the competition, Doc,” Janx said. “But that ain’t the only reason they come here.”
“Why else?”
Janx hiked his chin at something, and Avery turned to see a crowd gathered before a stage in a wide plaza. On the stage, a leering pirate showcased an obviously captive young woman. A leash trailed from a collar around her neck, and the pirate clenched it in one iridescent-scaled fist. He had already removed most of her clothing, and vivid bruises showed on her breasts and torso. Her expression was faraway.
“Slaves,” Avery realized dully. “They sell slaves.”
“Aye, and not just for sex, either.”
Janx indicated something to Avery’s right, and the doctor turned to see a pit carved out of the rock. A ring of shouting pirates had gathered around it, and down below two frantic-looking men, one armed with a hammer, another with a knife, swung and stabbed at each other, sweat flying from their filthy hair. Two corpses littered the pit already, flies buzzing about them. A swell of revulsion rose in Avery.
“Gladiators,” he said.
“Yep. And they’ll be others, too. Slaves for labor, slaves for sums. What else do you do with a captured clerk? Slavery ain’t illegal everywhere, an’ it can be hidden other places. I’ve seen places like this before, or near enough, many a time. They spring up like mushrooms on desert islands, ‘least till some navy or other gets wind of ‘em. Then anther springs up somewhere else. This looks a bit more settled than most. Guess the Magons really are shelterin’ Segrul’s lot.”
“The different branches of the R’loth faith uniting,” Avery said. “Charming.”
He glanced back to the pit. The man with the hammer swung a devastating blow, shattering the skull of the knife-man and spraying blood over them both. The knife-man flailed for a moment, scoring some minor wounds on his opponent, but these were just reflex gestures, and after a moment he sagged to the ground, the man with the hammer descending with him. Tears glistened in the victor’s eyes. He bent over and retched, right next to the dead man, as the crowd above cheered or booed depending on who had won or lost money.
On the auction block, the leering pirate was leading the young woman down, jerking her leash as he descended the rickety stairs. A man from the crowd, well-dressed and important-looking, stepped out and accepted the chain.
“It’s awful,” Avery said.
“Aye.”
Avery started to ask Janx a question, then thought better of it. There were some things he didn’t want to know.
Janx seemed to sense it. He sighed. “Ya wanna know if I did any o’ this, back in my piratin’ days."
Avery hesitated, then nodded. I hope I don’t regret this.
Janx cast a look at Hildra’s and Layanna’s backs—the women had been led ahead of them, toward the head of the line of pirates from Segrul’s party, Layanna assuming a place of perverted honor among the group—as if to make sure they couldn’t overhear.
“I never raped a woman, Doc, and that’s the truth,” Janx said. “An’ I never bought or sold one, either.”
Avery could hear the but. “But your men … you were a captain …”
Janx’s large head nodded slowly. “Aye. I couldn’t stop ‘em. If I’d tried, I would’ve had me belly slit open, live eels stuffed inside and sewn back up. I’ve seen it happen. No, I knew better than to fight it. Not all pirates are rapers. Some’re just outcasts with nowhere else to go, usually with some law or other gunnin’ for ‘em, like I was. But most are. The ones that manage to keep their honor’ve got to stay outta the way of the ones that don’t, and that’s just the way it is. Even if you wind up captain.”
Avery absorbed that. “It’s still terrible.”
“So’s the plague. Nothin’ you can do about it.”
They fell into silence as Segrul led the way through the town, and Avery wondered what had been here before. He assumed the Magons must have had a fishing village or the like on this spot before giving it over to the reavers, but there was no sign of it now, nor was there indication at all of the natives. They must stay well clear of this place for some reason. Religious, possibly. Or perhaps it was the R’loth keeping the right hand and left hand separated.
Segrul stopped at the edge of town, where a narrow path wound up a stone hill that flowed into a mountain. And above, more mountains.
A party of natives waited for them. They were not what Avery expected.
“Turtle-men,” Janx grunted. “I always wondered the Magons looked like.” Avery was forced to agree with the description, at least in part. Dark, ridged tortoise-like carapaces arched from the natives’ backs, and their chests, arms and legs were also encased in tortoise-like armor, though the joints were sheathed in fleshy greenish tissue. For heads they boasted a dark green mound bristling with a profusion of stalks and mandibles, not turtle-like at all, and instead of hands they had long, tapering dark-green pincers. From the last joint of armor at the end of their forearms, purplish tendrils writhed, very narrow, perhaps half an inch in diameter, mottled with black. Just a few inches of the tendrils' lengths were visible, but Avery sensed they could shoot out when needed and perform any actions that pincers could not accomplish. They were organically armed and armored creatures, and all of them seemingly alike, of which there were about half a dozen.
