Hunter of Atlantis

PART I

1

It wasn’t the worst day of his life, but he’d had better.

Tar stood on the shore of the desert island and watched as the stolen ship Korgos sailed away. He and Krait, his partner-in-crime, had fought again—and this time, she’d marooned him. Pirates weren’t famous for their ability to reconcile differences. Marooning was a solution to the question of what to do with someone with whom they were friendly, but wanted to kill.

He knew the island’s approximate location. The mainland wasn’t more than a day’s sail away—yet without a sail, it was as far as the Moon Goddess’ pockmarked ass in the night sky.

The island’s only feature was a ragged hill. There was no water or food. A second, larger island stood nearby, a sharp crag sticking out of the sea. He might find water there, but saw no shore to swim to. It was all cliffs. If he wanted to survive more than a few days, he’d need to signal a passing vessel.

The trouble was that he had nothing to signal with, and there were no passing vessels.

His dilemma didn’t need to have happened. To remain aboard Korgos, all he had to do was agree with Krait that she was justified in shooting the Queen Empress of Atlantis dead in front of her entire family. He couldn’t say it. He didn’t mind the assassination—the Queen was an evil woman—but Tar had a strong personal interest in her daughter, the Princess Abeka. If Krait had shown any restraint, they might have been hailed as heroes instead of hunted like jackals. She didn’t.

Now Tar was alone with his pride. He preferred the company.

With nothing left but time to think, he watched the fine, swift Korgos scud away beneath her two big triangular sails. She passed the second island and began to pick up speed for the run to the mainland. With her bonny blue paint and fresh, white canvas, she looked like a fragment of sky that had chosen to ride the waves.

Tar was idly scratching his testicles, wondering how long he could survive on fish blood, when three enormous fireballs arched up into the sky from behind the other island. They were the molten glass type. Two exploded in the water, before and behind Korgos. The third struck her amidships. Gear and wreckage flew high into the air. The longship broke in half, burned, and sank in less than a minute.

It was too far away to see, but if anyone had survived the explosion, the imperial warship that emerged from behind the island intended to finish the job. It circled the site of the wreck by oar power. Tar saw no indication that anyone was hauled aboard, so the Korgos must have been lost with all hands.

That meant Krait was dead. He ought to have been overjoyed. But he felt only gloom. The two of them together had accomplished great things. Despite everything about her, she was as close to a friend as he’d ever had.

He considered trying to signal the warship’s crew, but that would be suicide. It was undoubtedly he and Krait they wanted to kill. Instead, he sat on the shore and watched the warship sail away until it was lost over the horizon.

Krait had tried to doom him, and saved his life instead. It was precisely the sort of ironic nonsense that amused Tar’s Nameless Gods.

The next dawn, Tar awoke to find some flotsam on the shore, brought in by the tide. Charred deck boards, sections of hull. He recognized them by their blue paint—pieces of Korgos. There was canvas that only yesterday he might have hauled up the mast. Crabs and gulls were dismantling the mangled corpses of three sailors he’d known. He also found a twelve-foot spar tangled in ropes, and realized he had the means to escape.

So it was that the least seaworthy raft in all of the Atlantean Empire was launched from a tiny island, then hauled up the mainland shore three days later by its lone, thirst-crazed occupant.

2

Tar’s difficulties weren’t over. He had nothing. No money, no tools but his knife, and no friends. The country in which he’d landed was unknown to him, far north of where he’d been born. He walked south for a day and found a fishing village. Everyone was afraid of him there—a fierce, scar-covered stranger with lion-yellow eyes was not the sort of person that inspired welcome. To get rid of him, a fisherman told him there was a port city another day’s march south.

He found that place as described, although barely a city. It was a small town with a fortification in the middle, and slips for a dozen vessels. However, there was a ship at the dock, Hillflower, and it was heading out that same afternoon, if the final member of the crew showed up. Tar prudently went into town, found the missing sailor, and knocked him unconscious. Then he returned to the dock and inquired if they’d take him for a sailor. Captain Brewkeh, whose ship it was, needed to beat the tide. So Tar became a working sea-hand once more.

They’d be sailing up and down the coast for a month or two. Tar was glad the itinerary didn’t include Atlantis. There was no way he’d set foot on that accursed floating island again. He hated it as much as it hated him.

Tar’s luck improved. He worked hard under Brewkeh’s command, won a little gold playing the dice game red and blue, and nobody asked him any questions. They shipped down the coast, ran errands, and ferried passengers. Although he enjoyed the lack of constant danger, Tar also found it incredibly tedious. For two months he lived this life. During this time he killed no-one, which was a personal record. He didn’t think about the past, and nobody reminded him of it.

Then the Hillflower was attacked by pirates.

We can easily take them, Tar complained to the captain.

Brewkeh had set the sails for the open ocean and did not have time to argue with an ordinary ship’s hand, but he sensed it was better to humor Tar than deal with his anger. A man with that many scars had plenty of fight in him.

She’s a pirate ship with twenty aboard, Sailor. We’re a dozen, and none of us pirates. Or very few, the captain added, eying Tar’s seamed flesh.

Why go off-course every time a pirate turns up? We’ll never get any work done, Tar said. I’ll do the killing.

How can you possibly kill that many pirates by yourself?

Mostly with an axe.

Absolutely not, Brewkeh said, and bent the sails for Atlantis.

Tar knew the plan wasn’t to sail all the way to the floating capitol of the empire—they only needed to find an Atlantean warship on the route. There were usually hundreds of them in the region. The trouble was that a warship’s officers would inspect the Hillflower’s crew and cargo. It was routine imperial policy. Now that Krait was dead, Tar was the empire’s most-wanted criminal. He couldn’t outfight fifty armored, professional soldiers with springbows.

But there were no warships, no matter how far the Hillflower sailed. Tar had never seen the sea so empty of Atlantean vessels. The pirates pursued them unopposed until the shining golden skyline of Atlantis itself broke the horizon. Only then did the enemy turn tail and streak back landward, a five-day sail.

We’re out of water, Brewkeh announced to the crew. So we’ll make port in Atlantis, spend a fortune filling our casks with the sour piss they drink, and go home after. I’ll give you a night’s leave in the capitol, but nobody get stabbed in a whorehouse. We’re short-handed as it is.

Tar had never seen Atlantis so quiet, even from the sea. There were no stevedores swarming the docks among the giant bronze pontoons that held the city up, no cranes lifting cargo to the warehouses above. What ships there were seemed to have been abandoned at their slips. Not one of the countless fishing boats that typically schooled at Atlantis’ waterline could be seen.

Nevertheless, he wasn’t taking any chances. As soon as the Hillflower was within hailing distance, Tar leaped overboard and swam for the city. Brewkeh wasn’t upset at this desertion—the tough young sailor made him nervous.

3

An hour later, a stranger strode the metallic underworld of Atlantis, wrapped in a damp cloak plucked from a smoldering pile of rags. The man wasn’t large, but marched through the ghetto so boldly that no thief would consider him prey—if there had been any thieves. The only people Tar saw out in the open were beggars too poor to live anywhere else, and they all shrank away when he came near.

The streets reeked of sewage and death. He’d never considered that the Atlantean underworld could get worse than it usually was. Somehow, it had.

He reached one of the broad ramps that led above to the first sunlit level of Atlantis. It was closed off with huge bronze grates. He tried another ramp. It was barricaded in the same manner. Nor were there any people trying to open the barriers. Ordinarily the city below the city was boiling with activity, like a carcass stuffed with maggots. Today the only movement came from the captive wisps of last night’s fog. He turned to the next beggar he passed.

Why is it so quiet? he asked.

Plague, the beggar responded.

When Tar offered her a copper crab in return, she recoiled and lurched off on rickety legs. He hadn’t seen a beggar refuse money before.

Being forest-born, and a sailor, Tar was skilled at climbing. He scaled the carved decorations on one of the pillars that supported the street above, then swung arm-over-arm along the trusses with his feet dangling until he reached a drainage hatch. He shoved the heavy copper lid aside, and pulled himself up into sunlit Atlantis, where light and air weren’t second-hand.

Even these typically bustling aboveground streets were deserted. The sailor’s taverns where he could find employment on a ship were shuttered and empty. The shipping offices were closed, warehouses bolted shut. The usual merchants, porters, and tradespeople were nowhere to be found, nor their customers. Tar felt increasingly unnerved. If asked to describe Atlantis in a single word that wasn’t ‘hell’, he would have said ‘crowded’. He had thought in the past that a deserted Atlantis would be far superior to its usual chaos.

It wasn’t.

Only after he’d roamed the empty city a while did he come to understand that people were still there, but hiding indoors. He’d see faces at portholes or peeking out of doorways, and heard voices behind the sheetmetal walls. There was a lot of wretched coughing. The streets above, like those below, were piled up with greasy filth tossed out of the dwellings. As the cleaning crews were also in hiding, the whole place stank of dung and urine—and something else. The gassy, clinging stench of decomposing flesh.

Eventually, he turned a corner and saw a very large man pushing a cart up the street ahead. Who dared these barren streets? Tar followed him. The man wore a tight-fitting leather mask with a long snout. He stopped his cart in front of a door marked with an X scratched into the metal. He pounded on the X. The door parted, and a limp bundle was pushed through the gap. It was a corpse.

The man scooped up the body with one hand and dumped it in the cart. Tar now saw another foot sticking out of the cart. The man was collecting the dead. He scratched a line horizontally through the X with a knife, then continued his journey. Three stops later, the cart heaped high, the man came to one of the open squares around which the street-level tenements of Atlantis were arranged.

The mystery was solved.

Alongside a statue of some God that Tar didn’t know, there was a mountain of burning corpses. Masked laborers like the man he’d followed slung fresh bodies into the flames from their own overloaded carts. What clothing the dead wore was stripped and flung into camel-drawn wagons standing nearby. Only one enemy could kill so many: Disease. Tar realized the cloak he wore must have been stripped from such remains. He had wrapped himself in the plague.

But he couldn’t take it off. There were soldiers overseeing the pyre. He must remain in the cloak and hope the disease didn’t succeed where so many fighters had failed. His luck had once again turned worse, which meant his Gods had not forgotten him. If they chose to kill him by sickness, it would be done.

When the sun went down, he was no closer to finding a way off Atlantis. In the morning he would have to steal a boat, and hope he could make it to the mainland single-handedly once again.

4

The day grew long. Tar hadn’t eaten since before he abandoned ship. He wondered how food was distributed in the locked-up precincts down below. Surely, so many people weren’t expected to starve? Then again, it being Atlantis, they probably were. Maybe they brought fish up with longlines from below. He would need to find something to eat on his own.

He reached one of the four great canals that quartered Atlantis. The water was higher in them than the sea, raised by a system of locks. He could hunt a fish or frog at the waterside, and eat it raw. He descended a stair that led down to the water, which was lined with narrow piers. He searched for something to use as a spear, as his sailor’s knife wouldn’t be of much use if he threw it, missed, and it sank into the canal.

Tar sensed eyes on him. Without changing his behavior, he began studying the shadows along the canal sides. He soon discovered a frog-catcher, one of Atlantis’ poverty-stricken orphans, was watching him from behind a barrel.

I’ve got gold if you know where to find food, Tar said.

The child scampered away. That was rare, too. They’d do anything for a copper crab.

It didn’t matter. Tar bent a boat hook into a decent spear, and after half an hour he was tearing strips from a bony canal fish with his teeth. He’d considered cooking it on the corpse-fire in the square, but such an unwholesome blaze would not make the flesh better than raw. His hunger slightly blunted,