“Am I your guest, then?” Madrenga spoke boldly. There was no point in begging or pleading, he knew. For one thing, he had no boat upon which to be set free. For another, there is no charity among the dead.

  His query stimulated some conversation among the shadows. Their words, like their discorporeal selves, were difficult to discern. From what he could make out, opinion seemed divided between enjoining him to stay for story-time, throwing him back overboard, or stretching his limbs between the masts until the sway and twist of the sea and sky tore him apart. All these words were whispered, the various vocalizations as faint as the throats from which they sprang.

  “It is the Mark of the Moon’s Month,” one shade said from deep within half-collapsed shadow armor. “For a day and a night, revelry reigns on the water. See first how he dances and sings, and then we will decide.”

  “Yes! … Truth! … Let it be so!” A chorus of ghostly attitude stirred the damp air on a deck of gray splinters held together by heartache.

  Madrenga swallowed. He had no reason to think that whatever enchantment had rendered him progressively bigger and stronger had done anything to improve his voice. As for dancing, he had seen more graceful puppets performing in a booth. But he would give it his all. He would have to.

  And then what? Become a passenger on this ship of post-death? Destined to sail to and fro across a great sea until he, too, perished from want of food, or water, or human companionship? Looking down at the worshipful Bit, he tried to view his peculiar circumstances through the eyes of a dog. One day at a time, Bit would tell him if he had the power of speech. Life is to be taken one day, one moment, one bone at a time. Could he, Madrenga wondered, do less?

  So he smiled at the circle of shadows that now surrounded him and lied most efficaciously. “I’m happy to participate in your celebration, though this is the first I have ever heard of the Mark of the Moon’s Month.”

  While no louder than the barking of frogs, the sounds that rose from the assembled shades were unmistakably expressions of delight. He was careful to conceal his own lack of enthusiasm. After the celebration, of which he truthfully knew nothing, then what?

  One bone at a time, he reminded himself. Surrounded as he was by a multitude of bones, or at the very least the specter of them, he could hardly forget.

  Where once had been day, now there was night. Madrenga knew this, not because the fog had lifted or the sun had shown through, but because it was told to him, and he had no reason to doubt it. Certainly it had grown darker on the deck of shadows. Just when he was concerned that vision was to be denied him for the duration of the celebration, the looming darkness was split by the lighting of first one, two, a dozen torches. They blazed high, the flames glittering off dew-laden masts and spars, deck and cabins. Fashioned no less of shadow-stuff than was the rest of his surroundings, he was left to wonder how fire could spurt from fog.

  He was still wondering when the Mark of the Moon’s Month celebration was to begin when he found himself in the midst of it.

  They came pouring out of shattered ports and rotting hatchways, fell like phantom flowers from the branches of yardarms, waltzed onto the main deck from the main stern cabin. Each was dressed in his or her finery, though given a steady degradation of spirit that sometimes stretched back for millennia it was sometimes difficult to tell male from female. More recent shadows were better intact. Some retained sufficient aspect of flesh to almost be appealing.

  He was grateful that the one who approached him first was definable of gender. Breasts that had not yet begun to degrade bulged from the lip of a low-cut gown the color of blood-infused sputum, and her black eyes were not so far sunk into her skull that he had to strain to see them. She paused before him; contemplating, assessing, deciding. Finally she extended both arms. Her fingers were long and so supple as to be almost cephalopodan.

  The music started. It arose not from a band or an orchestra but from the depths of the shadow ship itself. The entire hull expanded and contracted like a bellows, generating a sound akin to a full pipe organ. Echoes of ghostly woodwinds piped from groaning spars while the ragged rigging strummed and plucked. Last to make itself heard was the percussion caused by the slap of the sea against the hull itself. He was not listening to music, he realized as his deathly consort began to spin him around the deck: he was inside it.

  He could feel his own bones vibrating in time to the music and his organs pumping in identifying rhythm with the hull. Where there ought to be dread was joy. Faster and faster the ship played itself while everywhere on board the shadows of those stuck in a seaward limbo pirouetted and spun about one another.

  Rising from the deep, a brace of whales joined in, their sonorous singing causing the last unaffected bits of the spectral vessel to quiver with delight. Squid of monstrous size and bejeweled flesh rose to flank the vessel to starboard and port, refulgent patterns of colored light racing in perfect tandem along their cylindrical flanks while eyes the size of dinner plates glowed like irised suns. Sonophores sparkled everywhere and comb jellies paraded rainbows within the mist. From the deep dark depths rose all manner of bioluminescent monstrosities and serpents to bathe the ship and its celebrants in an explosion of heatless, heartless light.

  As the dancing grew wilder and more uncontrolled, Madrenga’s mistress for the evening began to sing. Despite recognizing neither melody nor language he did his best to emulate her words. He could be accused, tried, and convicted of tunelessness, but not a lack of enthusiasm.

  Dizziness assailed him. The enveloping fog had become a voluptuous cape, wrapping him in an embrace that was at once damp and comforting. No one and nothing within reach of the music was immune to its rhythmic blandishments. Out of the corner of an eye he saw Bit dancing with half a child. While she hopped grotesquely on one foot in perfect time to the music, the dog bounced and spun on his hind legs. Madrenga had seen him stand thus before, but only for a minute or two before being compelled to drop again down onto all fours. As it was with his master, the evening was summoning forth unexpected talents.

  From Orania, too. She did not rear up on her hind legs and presume to waltz. On all fours she pranced partnerless in the center of the deck and dashed around the fore and main masts, teased by giggling sights and tempted by promises of the sharing of shadow food. In truth, Madrenga thought she looked a little drunk. As he no doubt did, letting himself be spun about by a feminine apparition formed of fog and mystic miasma.

  Then a most wondrous thing happened.

  The fog broke. For an instant, or maybe two. A full moon shown unimpeded down on the deck. The music and dancing stopped as all aboard halted whatever they were doing and tilted back their heads to look upward. Conversation ceased abruptly, as did all singing.

  For that brief, argent interlude the ship of shadows was whole again. Sturdy and gleaming with fresh paint, she slipped over the swells as cleanly as any fast cutter. It was no less with her passengers and crew. Men and women, Harund and even one or two Selndar, stood on her deck dressed in the finery of many lands. Gilt armor gleamed on stalwart soldiers while jewels of every cut and description adorned the flesh of women whose skin shaded from pure white to obsidian black. None of the men were less than handsome, none of the women wanting in beauty. The revealed moon having drawn his gaze as powerfully as the others, Madrenga now lowered it. Had he found the wind, he would have gasped.

  The woman standing opposite looked but a few years older than himself. Such beauty he had never before beheld: not in paintings idealized, not in sculpture venerated, and most certainly not in the flesh. Her eyes were jewels of the night, her body a mathematician’s wet dream, her lips formed from the juice of the ripest pomegranates.

  “Only at this time,” she told him in a voice of vanilla and honey, “do we become briefly again what we once were.” She gestured skyward with fingers that unfolded like the petals of an orchid. “At the Mark of the Moon’s Month.” Her sadness was epic. “We who loved the light now have none.”

  It was not within him to ask by what curse she and her companions had been condemned to the shadows. He had neither the experience nor the knowledge to understand anyway. He could only be sad with her, could only draw her close and feel the delicious curves of a body that was momentarily once again radiant with life.

  Then the fog closed back in. The moon disappeared, banished somewhere above, and once more all was mist and gloom. The dancing slowed, the music went away like a scream in the night, and he found himself again surrounded by the decaying shades of the dead. With the light and the moment of the moon went all joy, all pleasure, all compassion.

  “He cannot sing,” a raggedness of a sailor croaked, “and he dances only when a woman leads. Kill him.”

  “And his animals, too,” hissed a shape who a moment earlier had been an image of beauty and font of desire. “Feed them to the fishes and the water serpents.”

  Stunned, Madrenga turned to the enthralling vision who had been his companion for the celebration. But she was gone. Standing in her place was a hellspawn harridan with barnacles where her ears should have been and hollow eye sockets crawling with eels. The cackle that came from where lips had once promised chilled his blood.

  “Save me the finest piece, for I would try to taste what I cannot kiss.”

  Orania held her ground as the crowd closed in. Drawing his sword, Madrenga backed up against her. He was under no illusion concerning his weapon’s effectiveness against the spectral horde, but he felt bound to try and defend himself. Standing at his feet, Bit charged forward and snapped powerful jaws. They came away with a leg, whose owner simply laughed at the osteal excision. A moment later the dog was spitting out water.

  A thunderous bellow halted the advance of the whispery circle.

  “What’s all this? Why was I not awakened for the celebration? By Balatho’s lightning, I’ll wrap the lot of you around the mainmast and knot you there for eternity! I, Admiral Baros Soen Dailanceon, swear this!”

  Shadows parted to make way for a shade twice the height of any other present. It was the echo of a Golgox giant, clad in the tattered uniform of a senior naval officer. Torn epaulettes hung from shoulders better suited to the body of a bear. Earlobes that had once been stretched by weights hung low while eyes were shaded by a shelf of solid bone from which thick hairs thrust and curled.

  A nervous tittering arose from the assembled. One shade, serving as supplicant on behalf of his fellows, took a daring step forward and pointed at the grim-faced Madrenga. Beside him, Bit whimpered and Orania whinnied nervously.

  The figure continued to advance until it was looming over the castaway. It would have blocked out the moon, had the moon stayed to observe. Huge glowing eyes glared down at the youth as a hand big enough to fit completely around Madrenga’s waist reached for him. He started to raise his sword. Young man and primeval shade locked eyes. The ancient admiral snarled like a mad thing.

  Then his glowing eyes blinked. He halted, drew back his reaching hand, and fell backward, throwing up his arms to shield his face.

  “Fools of the dead! Can none of you see what you so blindly have brought aboard? Are you as devoid of perception as you are of life? Unclean, unclean! Tainted even to the deceased!” By now he was back on his massive feet and scrambling in the direction of the stern cabin from whence he had emerged.

  “Cast it off! Give it and its creatures a boat lest by trying to drown it you only make it enraged. Even a shadow may feel pain from something capable of inflicting it. Send it away before it thinks through all things and realizes itself!”

  Bewildered by the reaction of their fearsome commander, the shadows of the ship hastened to comply. A small boat was lowered into the water. Though itself composed of nothing but fog, it floated as buoyantly on the swells as did the larger vessel. Full of questions but not daring to say anything that might delay or inhibit his departure, Madrenga allowed himself and his companions to be placed in the small boat by the same means that had brought them aboard. His possessions were thrown over the side and he had to strain to catch them before they landed in the water. Standing in the front of the boat, his feet poised on the bow, Bit was barking furiously as the shadows on board.

  “Make haste, make sail!” Even in his confusion Madrenga recognized the deep voice of the Admiral. “Away from this contamination and out to the safety of the middlemass!”

  No less confused by the unexpected turn of events than the shadow ship’s compliment, Madrenga sat on the hard watery bench at the center of the boat and watched until the ship faded from view. Or faded into it—he could not be certain if it had sailed away or simply become one with the mist that surrounded it. Something had frightened the Admiral. Something menacing enough to scare even the dead. Him. The Admiral of ancient specters had been frightened of him. Madrenga brooded on this. But not for long.

  Because the more he pondered what had just happened, the more he began to frighten himself.

  Chapter Twelve

  Though the ship of shadows vanished into the same mist that had given it birth, the fog itself hung around like an old acquaintance with a big smile and an empty purse. Composed of scarcely sterner stuff, the small gray boat that was all that lay between Madrenga, his companions, and the ocean beneath somehow held its shape.

  In the bottom of the craft he found a mast made of mist and a silvery sail so feathery light it seemed that the mere act of raising it would cause it to be torn to bits by the slightest of breezes. With low expectations but determined to strike back against inertia, he raised the mast and set the sail. To his surprise it filled with the same east-blowing wind that had propelled the Thranskirr. Scudding along more swiftly than he had any right to expect, he was soon dashing forward in the wake of the ship that had deserted him. He had no illusions about overtaking the much larger and more substantial vessel. Staying afloat would be satisfaction enough.

  How long he sailed thus he did not know. Lost within the persistent fog and in the absence of clearly defined day or night he could judge neither time nor speed. Though his muscles and joints grew stiff from inactivity, no such hardship afflicted his companions. Threatening many times to upset the little boat, Orania would scramble over the side and into the sea whenever Madrenga deemed it calm enough to be safe to do so. As he watched her swim lazy circles around their insubstantial refuge, he found himself envying her the opportunity to exercise. He dared not join her lest the untended boat, even with its sail furled, drift out of reach. As she swam, she munched on drifting seaweed and other aquatic plant life. Whether it was to her taste or not he could not tell, but the dark green water plants sustained her.

  Fishing gear would have been welcomed. In its absence he had to rely on Bit, whose proficiency at snatching passing fish proved something of a revelation. With no fire to cook with and no means of starting one, he joined his dog in eating the canine’s catch raw. When he is grown sufficiently hungry, a man will do away with fire, condiments, even salt, and revert to consumption of the most basal nature.

  Cold and damp, he ought to have welcomed the sun on the morning when it finally began to burn through the seemingly never-ending fog. He did not because in addition to dissolving the mist that had surrounded him for an unknown number of days, it also commenced the slow but steady evaporation of his boat. Frantically he prepared for the moment when it should give way completely beneath him; stowing smaller bits of gear as tightly as he could within his clothing, securing the double pack across Orania’s lower back, then strapping on her saddle and the rest of her tack.

  He was preparing to bring down the mast and sail in the hope they would lend another few moments of stability to his improbable craft when a silhouette appeared out of the mist and directly ahead. At first he thought it must surely be a mirage. He had heard of such things but never seen one. The more the mist around him lifted, the more substantial seemed the vision forward. From what he could remember, mirages tended to ripple and flow from the heat that produced them. This one did not. He hardly dared believe.

  It was an island.

  Settling himself at the increasingly soggy tiller, he steered straight for the apparition. Even if it turned out to be a mirage it was the only destination in sight. Soon he was near enough to see trees: coconut and morefruit, screwbark and laplate. The composition of the dense green and lavender understory was less familiar to him, but an equally welcome sight.

  As it started to come apart beneath him the boat began to ripple like a fading dream. Straining to see as far ahead as possible he detected no hint of breaking waves. According to one more piece of knowledge he had picked up by listening to sailors’ conversations while on the Thranskirr, that suggested the absence of a murderous reef, or at least one that was situated too deep to present a threat to a struggling small boat. Rising rapidly in the sky now, the sun blazed down on him and his barely intact craft. Though he had not seen the sun in many days he did not welcome it now.

  Orania’s greater weight sent her plunging through the disintegrating bottom of the boat first. She sank swiftly—and stopped. Lowering her head and neighing excitedly at the prospect of something green yet dry to eat, she trotted right through the dissolving bow and onto the shore. A moment later the boat, now a shadow of a shade, ran the rest of the way up onto the beach. There it collapsed, leaving Madrenga sitting on the sand and a barking Bit running off to join the mare in exploring the fringing jungle. Too relieved at having made it safely ashore to let out even the mildest of triumphal shouts, Madrenga clasped his arms around his knees and watched his companions. Orania was already nibbling at something like purple spice cane while Bit ran back and forth along the line of vegetation barking at everything in sight.

  When finally he rose and brushed the grit off his backside, a downward glance showed a damp but fading outline in the sand where the boat had landed. It was the final indication that there had ever been a boat, much less one formed from fog. The last remnant evaporated even as he stared at it. Then he was pushing his aching leg muscles to carry him up the beach and toward the line of vegetation, calling to his companions as he went.