Extracts from the Journal of

Chapter I
Amber - Shadow Diega, 118 PPF

Qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum, illuc, unde negant redire quenquam (Now he goes along the shadowy path, there, from which they say no-one returns)

- Catullus

he Levantine gentleman's mouth hung open in a silent scream. A few gurgling noises may have issued forth from his contorted chest, but then crucifixion does tend to leave one short of breath. I finished hammering in the last of the nails, and then rejoined the Golgotha of gawkers at the foot of the ladder. "Anyone else fancy a martyr's death?" I asked cheerfully, wiping the blood from my hands. There was some shuffling and muttering, but no actual volunteers. "Good," I said, "Now I'll thank you to get back to work, and to refrain in future from performing emergency first aid on the exhibits when you're supposed to be putting them up." "It's not right," mumbled one of the workmen, "Groanin' and bleedin' like that." "It's what he does," I retorted, "And I'll have you know that he's a damn sight less vocal than the Incunabula Glossolalia in the Muniments Room, and he requires only a fraction of the mop-work of the R'lyeh Galleries. He is also, as I trust you will note, gentlemen, a large block of carved and painted wood. He does not need your assistance beyond being placed in the display area allocated. He is not going to arise on the third day, nor indeed at any stage in the foreseeable future." It was one of those days where you have to do everything yourself. I'd arrived in the Relics Room of the Medieval Art Gallery just in time to prevent one workman from blowing his nose on the Oviedo Cloth, only to discover his colleagues gathered round a life-size cruciform going "Hold on, mate" and "Give the poor sod some air" whilst hauling out the nails that held it together. Now that I had successfully arrested and put to rights this inadvertent vandalism, I was free to steel myself for the next emergency. After five years of rebuilding, restocking and recataloguing, the Amber Museum of Arts and Antiquities was finally due to reopen, and now that we actually had a deadline, everyone from the curatorial staff on down was eager to show me just how many of the museological niceties they'd managed to forget in the intervening period. With less than two weeks to go, I had to be everywhere at once. Right now I was due in the Ashlurien Annex, where the Assistant Keeper of Comparative Anthrophilology wanted my opinion on which of the Eltdown Shards we could safely put on display without giving our visitors too many bright ideas. First I lingered for a moment, but thankfully the workforce had resumed practice of their own specialty, that of Comparative Heavy Lifting. I nudged a bucket under the dripping statue, checked inside the Monstrance of Chorazin to make sure no-one had been using it to dispose of their dog-ends, and then left. The Relics Room, frankly, was a side-show, a collection of curios amounting to little more than a private joke. I didn't expect it to mean much even to the educated populace of Amber, but I just liked the idea of being the custodian of a reliquary where the small round item labeled "Skull of John the Baptist as a Child" was the genuine article. A junior store-room clerk bumped into me as I stepped outside. "Oh, sir," he said, "Where are these supposed to go?" I peered into what seemed to be a box of surgical torture implements. "Eating utensils for the Feast of Eihort," I said, "Main Building, Josephus Wing, second floor, hallway outside the Shaggai Room, case next to the Pentacle of Planes." "How do you remember all this stuff, my Lord?" he asked admiringly. "I don't," I said shortly, "It's written on the label here." He gulped, and then ran off, ghoulish cutlery jingling. I sighed. I wanted a holiday. Maybe it was time to go on another expedition for the Moon Lens. It was a sunny day in Amber City, the sky marbled by thin wisps of cloud as I strode out across the central plaza. In the shadow of the Pillar from Irem, conservators in Arctic clothing stood around debating how to stop ice forming on the Furnace of Yeb, while across the way a group of Professor Pitt-River's doctoral students hung about outside the Faculty of Historical Antiquity. From what I could overhear, they seemed to be reviewing the seminar schedule for the forthcoming term, but it was hard not to notice that they had carefully stationed themselves by the windows of the Excavations Office, temporary home of the newly appointed Lecturer in Field Archaeology. I hadn't yet met this Dr Croft, but already I'd had complaints from both Professors Pitt-Rivers and Petrie about her techniques, her attire, and the fact that she never seemed to go around a building when she could go over it. A rather less athletic figure was circumnavigating the standing stones ahead of me, causing me to change direction abruptly before he saw me. Balder Norwulf was back. I couldn't very well throw him out, since his family had settled some very generous endowments on the new archaeological school, including the Norwulf Chair of Maritime Archaeology, and that despite the fact that the building itself stood on the site of their former townhouse, one of the subsidiary victims of the fire. Applied carefully, the nouveau riche constitute an invaluable addition to the tool box of practical museology, but the shareholder mentality can be hard to shake. And the last thing I wanted right now a demand to play tour guide from a man who thought that an antiquarian was a place where you kept fish. I adjusted my course to interpose the Hyperborean Gardens between us. In any case, I'd decided to stop giving preview tours after the incident with the Begman Cultural Attaché, the Tcho-Tcho prayer-wheel and the stuffed byakee. The only exception I was planning was an educational trip for Nurse Ratchett's charges, whom I trusted implicitly to leave toffee between the pages of Codex Chaosia, recite the formula "It wasn't me" over the pieces of the Eye of Light and Darkness, and be sick in the Ark of the Covenant. All of which I would welcome with open arms if it kept me from Balder's dreary clutches. Speaking of which … He had closed some of the distance between us, but still hadn't seen me. Another twenty yards and I would be under cover. Just as long as no-one else got in my way ... A worried-looking sub-Curator emerged from the wing housing the Iron Age Galleries, and cut off my retreat. I gritted my teeth. Balder ambled closer. "Well?" I demanded. "We've just finished re-assembling the Sutton Hoo longship," the young woman reported, "We followed the instructions and diagrams to the letter." "And?" I said. "There's a piece left over," she admitted. I glanced behind me. Too late. Balder had seen me and was starting to raise his hand in greeting. Thankfully, Altair chose that precise moment to Trump me. "My father's gone missing," she grumped, "He was out by Diega investigating these vanishing ships, and hasn't come back to port. We can't raise him by Trump, either." Hmm. The past few months had seen a marked increase in sightings of sea monsters throughout the Golden Circle, plus a slew of disappearing ships. Rebma had claimed a familiar mixture of ignorance and concern, but this time I was vaguely inclined to believe them, since three grueling years of treaty negotiations is generally enough to renew anyone's interest in the minutiae of kelp cultivation as a relaxing alternative to foreign entanglements. In any case, with Brand and Bleys back, if Llewella really wanted to try something stupid again, she'd have to take a number and wait to be called. However, since no-one had been trumpeting about lost cargoes within my hearing recently, I had rather assumed that Gerard had been on top of the problem. Now it sounded as if things might be the other way around. "Any discernible trail?" I asked, trying not to sound too desperately eager to come through. The sub-Curator was holding up a piece of dark, stained wood, which frankly could have been anything. There were footsteps on the path behind me. Altair shook her head. "I'm organising a search party," she said, "and I'd like some back-up." "Emergency," I informed the sub-Curator and the figure looming over my shoulder, "Got to go." I stepped through the Trump link to join Altair, congratulating myself on a narrow escape. We were in one of the gardens in the Castle. Ibrahim was there, dragging a concerned but also slightly peevish-looking Tristan through another Trump link. Presumably Brand had been abusing their tenancy agreement again. Also present were the children, clustered around Nurse Ratchett, who was doling out sweets to shouts of "Me! Me! Me!" and "I wanted stwawbewwy." Octavius glanced round and saw us. "It's Daddy Tristan and Daddy Damien!" he cried excitedly. We were immediately mobbed by sticky five year-olds. I swept up Carl and Beatrice while Luther stood on my foot and hugged my leg. "Have you been good?" I asked them. They assured me that they had. "We're always good," said Beatrice loftily, as Luther peered into my coat pocket to see if I'd brought presents. Angelique was showing Tristan her toy sword. She'd managed to break it, and wanted a new one. Tristan was humming and hawing in a "Well, we'll have to see about that" sort of fashion. "Tell you what," I said, "When you come to visit the Museum, why don't you choose a new sword from the Armoury, and then" - as I noticed Tristan's mouth drop open in horror - "Tristan can make you a safe version." Tristan's mouth closed again. Angelique jumped up and down. "Yes!" she said. Crisis averted, then. The years of trying to socialise an excitable and attention-hungry velociraptor were definitely paying off. Altair had now summoned forth Tamarind, who arrived in a rainbow glow bearing a large box. "Daddy Tamarind's brought us a present!" squealed Eleanor. I relinquished Octavius and Beatrice so that they could crowd the new arrival. There were sounds of disappointment as Tamarind declared that the box was not for them. "However ..." He produced a smaller package from beneath his cloak. Angelique grabbed it first. "You'll have to share," Tamarind warned them. The six of them quickly went into a huddle round the parcel, leaving the rest of us momentarily free. "It's a bit big for a Trump," said Altair, peering at the box. "It's the culmination of what I've been working on," said Tamarind, forgetting to add the obligatory maniacal laughter. I regarded it with renewed interest. So this was the Box of Summoning Beltaine, the Great Work that had been keeping him occupied while I had been rebuilding museums, hunting Great Old Ones and trying to turn Sebek into a responsible member of society. I hoped that he'd been meeting with rather more success than I had. However, Tamarind seemed disinclined to enlighten us any further, and Trumped Random to pass the device through to him for safe-keeping. We bade farewell to the children, who immediately looked crestfallen. I suppose it wasn't all that often that so many of us came to visit them together. "We've got to go away for a couple of days," Altair told them, "but when we get back we'll have a beach party. How about that?" "Beach party! Beach party!" Thus reassured, they turned their attention back to Tamarind's present: "Me! Me!" "I want the wapping paper!" "Look, it's a game!" "No, it's sweeties!" "You tore the paper. I said I wanted it." We left while we still could. "We should also contact Esmée, Margot and Caleb," opined Ibrahim. "And I need a sword," muttered Tristan, and hurried off to the armoury. Both seemed worthy preparations. I amended my outfit to something more suited to travel as I shuffled out Esmée's Trump. "That's a new thing," commented Altair at the sight of my coat changing colour and reabsorbing the lace. "My travelling wardrobe," I replied, and concentrated on Esmée. She was in a tapestry-lined chamber that I didn't recognise, wearing a long, medieval gown. "Gerard's missing," I told her, "We're going after him." Esmée digested the news. "In that case I suppose I should hold myself in readiness," she declared, "Unless of course you need me to come through now?" I allowed that this was probably unnecessary. "Then call me when you need me," she said, fluttering her fingers at me. I waved back and dropped the link. Altair meanwhile had added Caleb to our posse. He looked slightly bronzer than usual, and had come through clad only in a tattered pair of shorts. "Damien-man," he said in greeting. It looked as if the Navy's loss had been some tropical tourist board's gain. Certainly, Caleb seemed a lot more mellow these days than in the hard-drinking aftermath of Aximia's boot camp. Altair the Social Worker had evidently done him some good, although if he became any more relaxed he would probably end up deliquescing like Esmée and Tamarind. Meanwhile, his therapist was worrying out loud that the missing ships and her missing father might signal some resurgence of the Council for Victory. "I doubt it," I said, "It's not as if we left enough of them to resurge." "Well then," she said, "maybe there's a link between your Nyarlathotep business and the sea monster reports." That struck me as only slightly less implausible. The assorted manifestations of the Crawling Chaos tended to be terrestrial, aerial or space-going. I shook my head. "He's either dead, in hiding, or waiting for the stars to realign," I said, "and if it's number three then he'll have to wait a long time as far as Amber is concerned." On the other hand, it occurred to me, certain beings on his client list were indeed aquatic ... "If someone goes missing," Ibrahim was saying to Margot's Trump, "then perhaps people should all return to Amber rather than be spread about in Shadow." If this was meant to encourage her to come through to us, it didn't seem to work. Maybe she could see me over his shoulder. "She'll join us if we need her," Ibrahim announced as he put his Trumps away. "Is anyone else missing?" asked Tamarind. "Not that we know of," I told him, and waited to be informed otherwise. No-one made the attempt. "I was going to Trump Caine," said Altair, "He's been feeding me and Dad information from his informants, so he may have spoken to him recently." She quickly fed us a little more information of her own: The missing ships had to date been cargo vessels carrying expensive and luxury goods, but this seemed to the only discernible link between them. Their routes had been varied, likewise their Shadows of origin, destination and disappearance. And that, basically, was the sum of our knowledge. Tristan reappeared just in time to miss the entire briefing, and once it had been repeated again for his benefit, we retired to a nearby sitting room to attempt a collective Trump contact of Gerard. It would be embarrassing if we dashed off to scour the Seven Seas, only to find that he had in fact been perfectly Trumpable with just a little extra effort. "Caine's, Brand's and Julian's Trumps are active at the moment," said Tamarind, performing his customary pre-contact survey. This intelligence provided us with no particular reason to alter our plans, so out came Gerard's Trump, and we all concentrated on it. "This isn't working," I said after a few minutes of fruitless endeavour. Tamarind had already dropped out of the link, and Tristan and I followed suit. Ibrahim and Caleb just waited politely for Altair to face facts and give it up too. Bowing at last to the inevitable, Altair calmly shuffled her Trumps away, got up, and walked out of the room, closing the door behind her. We heard a muffled "FUCK!!!" from the corridor, and then she came back in again. "Maybe we should go to Diega," said Tristan. "I could shift Shadow there and then Trump the rest of you," he offered. "Erm ..." said Altair. She looked as if there was something she'd really prefer not to have to tell us, but under the circumstances ... "We could Trump to the Morningstar," she said, "It's a ship I have which doesn't really exist." I assumed without further explanation that by this she meant something unofficial, covert and therefore deniable, since I couldn't see us getting very far in a purely imaginary vessel. "Tristan can then shift us to Diega from there," she added. This plan met with universal approval, and a minute later we stepped through one of Altair's Trumps into a large, well-appointed and gratifyingly solid stateroom. "Neat," said Caleb, and indeed it was. The room spanned the entire width of the stern, with windows across the entirety of the rear wall and halfway down the sides, giving it a light and airy atmosphere. Books and charts stood to attention on shelves and racks, apart from those lurking on the chart table, including one fairly fresh-looking outline of Amber's recently circumnavigated continent. We wandered up on deck to see just how non-existent the rest of the ship was. It was a smallish clipper, not particularly heavily armed, but with more sail on it than I had ever seen on a ship of that size. I had a vague suspicion that it had probably been banned from every Tall Ships race in Shadow on the grounds of unfair advantage. I was soon proved right. Altair issued orders to her First Mate, a lean-looking woman whose name I gathered was Natasha, and then accepted Tristan's offer to give her wind. So to speak. Even more sails were hoisted, Tristan summoned a quickening breeze, and off we went. Within minutes, we were barrelling along at the better part of sixty knots, and yet we still seemed to be the right way up and structurally intact. I peered over the side. We should have been airborne, but we weren't even hydroplaning. And overhead there was space for more sail still. Impressive. Quite the ideal vessel for hunting pirates or smugglers, or, hmm, for beating them at their own game. Either way, Morningstar would be a remarkable little hunter-killer of a ship, the velociraptor of the high seas. Which reminded me, I hadn't got round to visiting Sebek this week. Maybe I should have brought him along for the ride. I glanced around the deck, where Tamarind was tugging his armour forth from behind a coil of rope, and Caleb was berating Tristan for trying to shift him into some proper clothes. Then again, maybe not. Sebek didn't care for ships very much. Other than on the largest of vessels, he tended to feel cramped and restricted with nowhere to run about in. And I knew from experience that a velociraptor in the rigging is rarely conducive to shipboard order, especially when he finds he can't climb down again, or even worse, decides that it might be fun to slide down an unfurled sail, braking himself with his claws. I looked up into the vast expanse of canvas billowing overhead. No. Not on this trip. Our velocity through Shadow was of much the same order as that relative to the ocean surface, which is usually the case when Tristan drives. Sea, sky and magickal ambiance flickered and changed, and I could sense my spells starting to fizzle in protest. I hurriedly started to concentrate on maintaining them, and when I looked up again, satisfied that I had them under control, we had arrived in Shadow Diega. Ahead of us lay the capital city, tier upon tier of lime-washed villas climbing the hillsides above a large and bustling harbour. And atop the highest hill, the creamy-white edifice of the Royal Castle looked down across the sprawling metropolis, the Delphinus et Gladii of Diega fluttering from its flagstaffs. The harbour was growing larger as we approached, and seemed to be bustling all the more as people took note of our current speed and bearing. "Can we possibly slow down prior to landfall?" asked Tamarind politely. "Oh," said Altair, "yes." Orders were shouted, sails were lowered, and our speed dropped to something vaguely sensible, not to mention far less likely to dent someone's pier. People on the harbour walls pointed and marvelled as we glided into port and into an unoccupied berth. So much for the Morningstar's non-existence. Altair quickly buried herself in a Trump call before anyone could pass comment. The harbour was moderately crowded, but there was no sign of Gerard's flagship, the HMS Unicorn's Flight. However, there were a couple of smaller vessels flying the royal ensign of Amber just across the way, the HMS Spear and the HMS Indefatigable. I could make out the faint glint of reflected sunlight from their poop-decks. People with spy-glasses were taking an interest in us. "Well," said Tristan, "I can't sense any signs of recent Pattern use here. Apart from my own," he added quickly, lest our confidence in him suffer due to misunderstanding. "Caine says he hasn't spoken to Dad in two days," said Altair, putting her Trumps away. So, now we were here, how were we going to go about finding him? Tamarind wondered if there might not be some point to walking the Pattern and teleporting to Gerard's ship, but Tristan nixed the idea. "I think it's a bit like teleporting to people," he said, "You'd really have to know where the ship was." Well, if we'd come all the way out to Diega just to ponder shorter and quicker routes to our missing admiral, there was always the obvious solution. "If you know it well enough," I said to Altair, "why not just do a Trump of Gerard's ship?" Altair allowed that she could do a sketch of her father's cabin. First, however, she sent a message to the other two Amberite vessels, just to let them know that contrary to appearances we were neither smugglers nor pirates, that we were kind of official, and that she wanted their captains to come pay us a visit. Caleb decided to remain on board with a sketching Altair while the rest of us headed up to the castle to see if the Diegans knew anything of Gerard's recent movements. Altair lent Tamarind her Trump of the Morningstar, just in case, with the proviso that he be very careful with it, not so much because it led directly into her private quarters on a ship nobody was supposed to know about, as because it had been her first ever permanent Trump. Tamarind solemnly took note of this. He'd once been there too. We attracted a number of curious glances as we disembarked and set out through the warehouse district and up into the city. Tristan, although paler than the olive-skinned locals, didn't particularly stand out, but English gentlemen and Bedouin cavalry officers were obviously an unusual sight. The strangest looks were reserved for Tamarind in his purple crystalline carapace. Unsurprisingly. I recalled a shopping expedition for children's toys a year or so ago, where I had ventured into an emporium in Shadow to be confronted with a bizarre-looking plastic doll with a hide almost identical to Tamarind's armour in colour, translucency and texture. It had been called Mongor the Mutant, or something like that, and according to the blurb on the box, its arms came off too. The children would have loved it. I'd refrained from buying it. As it was, we weren't the only mutants around here. Diega is situated at the point where the Shadow paths from Amber branch out towards the more distant realms of the Golden Circle, and is hence a major centre of trade in its own right. Consequently, the streets were thronging in cosmopolitan fashion with merchants and sailors and travellers from a dozen different worlds. Some of them were giving Tamarind funny looks as well. Ibrahim sent Tora aloft to keep watch, but although the view through her eyes must have been quite spectacular, there appeared to be no-one waiting to jump out at us. We wandered up the main boulevard, the streets lined with shops and orange trees, and then the commercial quarter gave way to more residential areas, the houses growing larger and more imposing as we ascended the central hill. A wide, dry moat and a kill-zone disguised as a ceremonial plaza separated the Castle from the surrounding mansions of the nobility. The drawbridge was down, as it usually was, and four guards in the royal colours of white and silver on blue were standing to attention outside. On learning who we were, they sent for the Captain of the Guard, one Captain de Montoyez, who hurried out to greet us after a brief pause to polish his spurs, comb his epaulettes and wax his moustache. "This is partly a courtesy call," explained Tristan, just in case the good Captain entertained any suspicions that we'd come to kick over the flower-beds, "but also to find out anything you can tell us about Prince Gerard's recent movements. Who he was liaising with, that sort of thing." De Montoyez had heard that Gerard hadn't come back, but was not personally acquainted with the details of his comings and goings. "Their Majesties are currently in Audience," he told us, "I will take you to see them." We followed him through the Castle, through successive ring-walls and guardhouses. The place had been built primarily as a fortress that could withstand almost any conventional assault, although the successors to its somewhat single-minded builders had made some effort to soften its overbearing outlines with decorative carvings and cornices, and small gardens had been planted in the less strategic courtyards. Architecturally, it represented the high point of the utilitarian medievalism of Diega's last Silver Age, although the material of choice, the cream-coloured stone quarried just along the coast, was more typical of the subsequent quasi-Moorish style, with its many-sided courtyards and cloisters. One thing I hadn't noticed before, though, was that the central keep had been erected on the foundations of an older fortification of a slightly darker stone, the angular blocks of which must have given the original walls an oddly scalloped appearance ... I looked up to find that the others were now some distance ahead of me. I quickened my pace. De Montoyez led us through the main doors of the keep and into the Royal Council Chamber. King Phillipe and Queen Maria of Diega were currently on public display on a dais at the far end of the room, the Delphinus et Gladii emblazoned above them on a large, rippling banner. Various nobles were milling about trying to get themselves noticed. However, they couldn't really compete with us, especially with Mongor the Mutant in tow, and so we were ushered up to the front ahead of the queue. Phillipe and Maria, an imposing-looking couple in early middle age, inclined their heads to us as we bowed. They knew Ibrahim from assorted military liaisons, in particular the regular joint training sessions with Amber's cavalry. Me they remembered from my collecting expeditions, not to mention my non-military liaisons at Court. I glanced around. Miranda de Cazadores el Grande y Maridio Qaraba was not currently in attendance. I wasn't sure if their Majesties had met Tamarind before, but their battlements must have given them a fine view of Tristan dropping rocks on the Council for Victory's blockade. "What brings you here?" enquired the King, "Is it to do with Prince Gerard?" Tristan affirmed that this was indeed so. "Can you shed any light on the matter?" he asked hopefully. "We had been co-operating with Prince Gerard in the matter of the missing shipping," said Phillipe, "and we were saddened to learn of his disappearance. We shall of course provide you with whatever information we can. Captain de Montoyez will assist you while you are here." The courtesy bit of our visit concluded, we thanked their Majesties for their time, bowed, and withdrew. De Montoyez scratched his head thoughtfully as we exited the Chamber. "The best sources of information," he said, "would be the Harbourmaster's Office down in the port, or the Office of the Navy." The latter was more conveniently situated here in the Castle, and in addition would contain intelligence of military import unavailable from the civil authorities, so the Office of the Navy it was then. De Montoyez showed us the way, and on arrival we quickly ensconced ourselves in a ledger-lined room and bombarded the clerks with questions. When had Gerard last sailed from Diega? Where had he been going, and why? Had he made any requests of the Diegan Navy? What information had he passed on to them and they to him? Who was the liaison officer detailed to work with him? A picture slowly began to emerge, although it was a picture more akin to one of Eleanor's mystifying stick-figure compositions ("It's not a tree, it's Mummy Altair in her sailor's hat.") than to one of Tamarind's intricate canvases. Gerard and his flagship had last been seen vacating the harbour about a week ago. He had taken no other ships with him, and from what we could tell, he had weighed anchor in response to a spate of ship disappearances in the vicinity of the Golden Circle Shadow of Derima, further out along the Shadow paths. The last report filed by his Diegan liaison, a Captain de Rodriguez, concerned the disappearance of the Colob, a merchantman from Shadow Fendir that had gone missing somewhere en route to Derima. Other than a specific place to look, this didn't tell us very much. The reports themselves seemed to be perfectly in order, with no noticeable inconsistencies or suppressions to liven up their dry officialese. Not that I entertained any real suspicion of the Diegans being somehow involved, although a mole or two in the local hierarchy would certainly have been a boon to the true malefactors. My actual thinking was along less sinister lines, to the effect that the military mind is sometimes disinclined to commit to paper mere impressions and hunches, but this de Rodriguez fellow seemed thorough enough, and his prose, if dull, showed none of the hesitation of a man holding back for fear of being thought overly imaginative. I asked if we could meet him in person anyway, just in case he had kept any insights to himself, intentionally or otherwise. Tristan meanwhile had noted a potential peculiarity in the sequence of disappearances. "Look at these ones," he said, "One ship goes missing here, and then four days later another goes missing over here. If we're looking for a single culprit, then they must be able to move through Shadow themselves. I can't see them moving about that fast if they're restricted to the Shadow Paths." So, our presumed privateers had access to what? The Pattern? Something akin to the random-faceted gem of Chaos? Nyarlathotep's Gate Magick? Or were we just dealing with a well co-ordinated pirate fleet? "Of course," chipped in Ibrahim, "a Trump Artist could sketch a ship while it was still in port, and then Trump a boarding party onto it after it had put to sea." A Family involvement seemed to be rearing its ugly head. Hopefully not, though. The days when we made our own entertainment were supposed to be over. We decided that we had exhausted the possibilities of the naval archives, and so we bade farewell to Captain de Montoyez and set off back down to the harbour. Captain de Rodriguez, we were promised, would be asked to attend us at the Morningstar. We met Altair coming out of the Harbourmaster's Office. She hadn't uncovered any more than we had, other than that the Spear and the Indefatigable were courier ships that had turned up after Gerard had left, nor had she reached any further conclusions based on what little evidence we had. "Maybe we should speak to the Ship Captains' Guild," said Ibrahim. "Try their pub," snorted Altair. She may not have meant it that way, but the conjured image of grizzled old sea dogs mumbling into their cups did not inspire confidence. Ibrahim did not bring the subject up again. We returned to the Morningstar, where the ever-vigilant Caleb was on watch from the depths of a hammock. A trio of naval officers, two Amberite and one Diegan, had formed an orderly queue for interrogation - Captains Blevins and Roberts of the Spear and Indefatigable respectively, and Captain de Rodriguez, of filing-in-triplicate fame. We trooped down to Altair's stateroom to see what they could tell us. Blevins and Roberts reported that they had been dispatched to Diega with messages for Gerard, which Altair promptly demanded, and got. One concerned the apparent re-emergence of certain items of cargo from one of the missing merchantmen, the Gurmu, that had vanished between Shadows Jalona and Aksim. A number of brandy barrels bearing the appropriate markings had turned up in a warehouse in Shadow Trocil, a freeport at the far end of one of the local Shadow paths, just outside the Golden Circle. Well, that helped, if we didn't managed to get through to the Unicorn's Flight. The other message she just sat on, since it later transpired to hold secrets of a naval variety. Blevins and Roberts were thanked and told to carry on. I turned to de Rodriguez. "Did Prince Gerard say anything when you last met?" I asked him, "Anything that didn't go in the reports?" Gerard had been hoping "to pick up a trail" in Shadow Derima, came the reply. "I got the impression," admitted de Rodriguez, "that he'd worked something out about the disappearances. But he didn't say what." The rest of us exchanged significant looks. Gerard would also have noticed the seeming Shadow-mobility of whatever agency was at work here. He had been using Diega as a base of operations on and off for about a fortnight prior to this, the good Captain informed us, but this had been the only time he had alluded to a possible lead. We thanked de Rodriguez for his assistance, Altair adding a further request that he co-operate with Caine if and when the latter should turn up. De Rodriguez did not giggle hysterically, nor did he mutter "Like I have any choice?" under his breath, but solemnly assured her that it would be done. The rest of us turned to Altair once he had taken his leave of us. Where we ready? She produced a Trump sketch of a cabin not unlike the one in which we were currently sitting, only a tad higher in the ceiling and slightly more cluttered. "Let's get on with it," she said. We called Caleb down to keep a hold of the Trump should the rest of us need to pile through at short notice, and then we crowded around to seek permission to come aboard the HMS Unicorn's Flight.

Index   Chapter II

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