The sea behind Sark and Jaunty Blue was full of floating bodies, most with horribly anguished expressions on their faces. Sark and Jaunty Blue had been rowing for a long time to reach the shallow seabed just offshore, beneath a sky so bright and blue that had they not been long transformed from mere mortal beings they would have had to squint against its brilliance. The bracing smell of brine permeated the cold air, and it was in all ways a splendid day for both of them.
Sark and Jaunty Blue were full of arrows. Studded with arrows. Pincushions before man and god. But neither of them seemed to mind. As servants of the Builders, or at least some of them, nothing much fazed the two anymore.
Behind them on the open sea lay a sinking galley ship. Its sails lay in tatters, one mast broken in half, the rowing stations empty, smoldering in flames. The clatter of oars foundering one against the other became more and more muffled by the salt water as the ship drowned inch by creaking inch.
“Oh dear oh dear,” Sark said, while Jaunty Blue pantomimed gurgling distress. “We’re full of arrows.”
Jaunty Blue fell over in the boat, dead, then straightened up again.
“The tailor’s bill … now, that will be astronomical,” Sark said, smiling at his longtime accomplice.
Jaunty Blue wore what to the unsophisticated might appear to be a sheet, but it was in fact a Fresian water robe. Jaunty could be quiet, but he could also be fast. And mean. Both qualities Sark admired in a compatriot.
Right now, his “sheet” was torn through with arrow piercings, though. It was only a sarky rumor that Jaunty Blue wore a sheet to disguise the bloody mess underneath, the result of a close encounter with a blunderbuss. Who could tell? Not Sark.
“Quite a dramatic, stirring sight, Jaunty—like a war-torn flag still standing on a hill after battle. Yes, that’s right, Jaunty—I compared you to a flag. You should be proud.”
Jaunty folded his arms and assumed a defiant position, down on one knee at the prow of the boat, causing considerable rocking and shaking.
But Sark was, as always, unflappable. There simply seemed no part of him that might ever flap. Rage, perhaps. But not flap. For he always looked rather like he ought to have an h added to his name just after the S—a sharp face anchored by a narrow brow from beneath which remarkable green eyes shone with peculiar force. As if should his gaze ever widen, the world might be in for a bit more trouble than the usual.
Jaunty Blue, as ever, dark eyes shining from pale water robe, appeared to be a little lost ghost, the kind who smelled of baby powder, so you’d invite it into your house out of pity, only to be left headless, you and your whole family, sometime around the serving of bread pudding for dessert.
Bread pudding was always a hit, Sark found, and worth delaying a massacre for, even mediocre bread pudding. Which could be freshened up with syrup. Sark loved syrup. Like some type of pollinating insect or a vicious, bloodthirsty hummingbird, Sark existed almost solely on the stuff.
Jaunty Blue preferred bone marrow, and always ate daintily under his sheet. Although at times it might blossom from the inside out with blood circles and the rich, rich smell of offal.
In truth, there was nothing much left of the original bandit duo of Sark and Jaunty Blue except some affectations and mannerisms of speech … but the two who peered out from their eyes had been very fond of the originals. Jaunty had been a handyman become a highwayman, with a chip on his shoulder and an ax to grind that also was something he used to carry around with him. Of Sark’s origins, the less discovered or repeated, the better.
Their heists in this glorious place had been stealthy and their means not those of ordinary highwaymen. For the estuaries had been their life’s blood back when they’d been ordinary. They’d silently glided over old, ripple-less water and made landfall with the slightest bump of prow against pier and then docking before proceeding on foot for the next victims, only to sneak away by water unseen after.
Did Sark animate Jaunty Blue, or did Jaunty Blue animate Sark? Who could tell? Certainly not Sark and Jaunty Blue. But it is true they were never seen apart, rarely had a dissimilar thought these days. When they did, it was a matter of grave concern.
It seemed to Sark and Jaunty Blue that their glorious reign of terror had been without end, although they could each remember before, when—
Came then a searing rip and obliteration of the peacefulness of the floating bodies. Came the sonorous fleck-flicker of a tear in the sky before them and a hole forming in a deeper blue. The wind stopped. The stabbing smell of something ancient and stale and dead and yet terribly fragrant and electric. As if the sea had become made, for a moment, of human sweat and tears.
The galley ship behind them crushed to kindling, and the wind rose again across the shallow seabed, likely to smash their boat onto land while they held on for dear un-life and in the subsiding felt both relief and dread.
For still the chaos in the sky ahead lowered and began to conform to a type of shape with which they were most familiar from past summonings.
“We could ignore it, Jaunty Blue,” Sark said. “We could go on with our glorious lives in this wonderful place. Raid more ships. Live the good life. With syrup and marrow forever.”
But, onward rowing, Sark and Jaunty did go, for there had been a calling and a sending that could not be ignored, even on such a beautiful spring day full of corpses. Across the seabed they had loved so much before they’d been changed.
Ever peaceful they did glide and stride, glide and stroke until finally they reached the door now hovering above the water and prepared to climb through it.
Sark and Jaunty Blue gazed one more time around them.
“Our vacation is over, Jaunty Blue. Our days of simple robbery and slaughter over. Our service begins once more. Alas.”
Yet there was a secret satisfaction in his tone. Even a beautiful morning by the seaside could become boring, without the infusion of diabolical plotting, or machinations involving entire worlds.
Jaunty Blue clapped his blood-encrusted hands together like an excited child. For Jaunty Blue would never be able to disguise his delight in returning to the Château Peppermint Blonkers.
“I wonder where we’ll set up shop this time?” Sark pondered, for both of them. “And what do you think of the invoker? I’m getting an inkling. Trying to save its own skin. Yes, I think that’s it. A worthy cause—none worthier. As for what we can get out of it, I suppose it’s hide-and-seek, wait-and-see.”
Jaunty gave him a look.
“Oh, Jaunty, you’re such a romantic. No one ever escapes from the Château Peppermint Blonkers. The Builders made sure of that.”
Together they made passage through the door in the sky, which closed behind them.
There came the terror of nothingness, and the ecstatic glee of nothingness, a cackle of knowledge that nothing ever really ended but was always beginning. Shoals of stabbing light enveloped them, faded into darkness, left needles in their minds from the journey.
Finally they both could see or at least glimpse hints of their destination.
“Oh dear, I remember this backwater. Prague, isn’t it? And not even the good part—more the touristy part.” Clucking his tongue. “Why not somewhere in Mali or Zimbabwe or the United Iroquois Nations? Well … let the games begin, I guess, Jaunty Blue.”
Jaunty Blue was still too stuffed with arrows to give a reply.