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SOCIETY FOR THE PROTECTION OF NATURAL MAGIC

Office of the Director

This reply has been generated automatically by a standing correspondence charm. Director Berman is currently away from her office and has not read your correspondence. She will respond personally upon her return.

Amrita Berman Director, Society for the Protection of Natural Magic

FOURTEEN

RAYA TUFAN AND THE SKELETON CREW

When Amrita came to, she was sitting on the deck of a ship that could only be The Tufan. Her hands were tied behind her back and her feet were bound. Her teeth chattered from the cold. The last thing she recalled was being taken from the library by the pirate Raya Tufan. He’d worked a charm to subdue her, apparently, because she had no memory of boarding the ship or of being bound. How long had she been out? It could not have been long. The sun wasn’t up yet. Dawn was approaching. A crack of light was gathering at the edge of the horizon and creeping up towards the sky.

They weren’t far from Alexandria. She could still make out the shadowy suggestion of the coastline through the fog to the southeast. Another boat, barely a speck on the horizon, trailed behind. The soft, dry breeze coming from the east carried a hint of the desert from whence she’d come. But this was of little comfort to her. She was still uncomfortable, not to mention cold, and she could not reach her wand.

She would not panic. She was the Director of the Society for the Protection of Natural Magic, and she had been in countless difficult situations before. She was going to assess the situation methodically and respond accordingly. She was going to⁠—

The storm that surrounded their ship seemed to rise directly from the sea beneath them. Was the ship trying to outrun the storm or stirring it up in its wake? It was impossible to assess which came first. It had not been there a moment ago. The water had been calm. But now a wall of weather surrounded them. Dark clouds shrouded the horizon, erasing the gentle rays of dawn. Metallic barbs of lightning split the sky. The wind swirled in circles, creating waterspouts and crashing waves. It didn’t seem to touch the ship, however. The ship sat at the dead center of the storm. Not bobbing and pitching, nor swaying to and fro as one would expect any ship to do in the midst of such a maelstrom. It remained steady, floating above the surface, protected within a shining bubble. The deck and the mast glowed with an eerie reflective incandescence. She imagined the effects of this would be multiplied many times over, were one outside the bubble looking in. Another piece of the puzzle clicked into place.

This, Amrita thought, must be how the pirate worked the glass illusion. As long as the ship was inside this bubble, not only was it impervious to storms, it also appeared to be made of glass should anyone get close enough to catch a glimpse.

She was impressed. Raya was no fool, and, apparently, not an Ordinary either. The pirate knew how to spin up a storm just as well as a story.

She only had a few seconds to make these observations before something clawed at her from behind and grabbed her by the back of her collar. It hauled her upward with a preternaturally strong and frigid grip. And, she was certain, undead.

It heaved her to a standing position and spun her around. She counted three bony figures standing in front of her. Skeletons, but not in the ground as they ought to be. So the legends about The Tufan being sailed by a crew of corpses, were true?

Amrita took a mental snapshot, quickly cataloguing the trio. The one nearest to her held out a sword and looked quite prepared to use it on her. It was only inches from her throat. The second one was hanging back a bit, observing. She—somehow Amrita felt quite sure it was a female—had decorated her collarbones with fluted seashells. She wore carved coral bangles stacked on her arms and had collected an assortment of sand dollars and dried starfish in the basket of her ribs. Her head tipped back as she studied Amrita through the empty glowing orbs of her skull. The third one stood at the back, hand on the great oar, steering the ship. Also seemingly female, she was wearing a spoon-shaped pendant on a cord around her throat. There was something strikingly familiar about the trio, she felt she knew them from somewhere. There was an ancient resonance about them. The Morai, perhaps?

Amrita also noticed a large gray owl perched in the ship’s rigging. It gazed down at her with round, all-knowing amber eyes. She had the inexplicable sense that the owl had been expecting her.

As suddenly as the storm had risen around them, it fell back. She could still see the squalls that surrounded them, but they were far enough away that they no longer posed a threat. The sky above cleared and the sun broke through.

Amrita was blinded by the sudden burst of light, feeling its warmth. Dawn was putting on a spectacular show. The oranges and pinks were in sharp contrast to the blue all around her. The skeletons stood still, watching her watch the sky. The ship sailed upon calm waters with a gentle splash.

The skeleton with the sword advanced. It used the tip of the blade to lift the hem of Amrita’s skirt and shake out the contents of her pockets. It discovered her flight of poison darts and tried to pocket them. They fell through the skeleton’s hipbone and onto the deck. This seemed to irritate the skeleton, who then used its sword to lift and launch the darts into the sea. Next it slashed a slit in the pocket where she had her protein bar. The bar tumbled out and the skeleton speared it, held it to its nose to sniff, and put it to the side to save for later. Finally, the skeleton found her wand. It plucked it from her pockets and held it between two bony fingers.

The skeleton with the pendant had not moved. Both hands still on the ship’s rudder, its gaze remained steady on the horizon. It seemed disinterested in Amrita. This one, Amrita thought, was probably the most dangerous of the three.

The one that was decorated with all the shells and coral began to pick over her personage. It found Amrita’s NIP clip and removed it from her hair.

She was standing very close, examining the clip with the focused delight of someone encountering a novel object whose function was both mysterious and fascinating. She turned it over in her finger bones, squeezing it to open and close the jaws of the clip. She moved her own jaw in time. She then attempted, with great care, to attach it to her own skull.

This did not work, of course, as there was no hair for the clip to grab onto. She tried a rib next. Also unsuccessful. The clip clattered to the deck. The skeleton held it up to the light. She appeared to reach a conclusion. The clip went over the railing.

Amrita could feel that she was being watched, and not just by the three undead crew members.

She craned her head to the side and got her first proper glimpse of the great pirate, Raya Tufan.

After finding her own note in the exhibit she had read everything the Society held on the elusive pirate, which as it turned out wasn’t much. None of it had prepared her for his intense, judgmental gaze.

He was also taller than she’d expected.

The pirate wore loose dark robes in deeply saturated shades of blue, and purple—a color that Amrita recalled was produced from snails. It was a costly process usually reserved for royalty during this era. His hair was long, wild and wavy, a glossy midnight black. Half of the locks were formed into dreadlocks, decorated with bits of shell and bone. As for his face, she could only see his thickly lashed eyes properly. He wore a mask across the lower half of his face.

She heard a sharp screech from the owl that she’d noticed earlier. It swooped down from the rigging and landed on Captain Raya Tufan’s shoulder, its orange eyes trained on Amrita. Not threatening but paying close attention. Its feathers ruffled in the breeze.

Raya Tufan continued to study her as well. His hazel eyes quickly assessed her, sweeping over her like an X-ray, taking her apart, examining the pieces, then putting them back together again. When he crossed the deck, Amrita couldn’t help but notice how agile, graceful and precise his movements were.