The first embarked into what was still mist. Only the muted sun had a hint of crispness. Of course. The ink was not dry. His eyes smarted wetly from the familiar cold. His sight trickled through stained glass spiderwebs. Then he saw the other one.

This one sat on the ground which was yet unresolved into sward or sand or rock or pave.

“Ah,” said the first. The other made no response.

“Crowsnest Hoim,” the first introduced himself, “of the ghost galleon Sorcerer.”

“Gohn,” begrudged the other.

“Of?” probed Hoim.

“The wraith ark Morrigan.” His mutter a bitter murmuration of sorrows.

“Ah,” repeated Hoim impishly. “Two crowsnests, two ships, encountering each other on an endless voyage over an infinite sea. Rare but not unique.”

“Both charting lands by the pens of their ship’s map-maker,” Gohn engaged, taking a sip from a flask at his hip.

“Mine charts fabulous cities as various as pearl and amethyst,” advanced Hoim.

“Mine tainted wastes,” parried Grim, “sometimes ravaged, sometimes haunted.” He reluctantly rose to his feet. Hoim thought he glimpsed a hermaphroditic quality to the act. The pair maintained some paces apart as befitted the conventions of such meetings.

“What were you,” he said, “before you signed on the Morrigan?

Gohn shook his head. “Though I think I remember dreaming of blood.”

Hoim gave a shallow mock of a bow. “Troubadour.” It was a feint, though he did sometimes fancy on the voyage that he heard distant snatches of madrigal. He envied Gohn’s voice, his brusque concoction of loss and anger and hopelessness. He secretly considered his own mouth a yawning solander containing nothing of truth or value. He stared at Gohn. Scar tells can be read, can betray a crowsnest’s vulnerabilities. Some used cosmetics, but these usually only made them more obvious. A tattoo is a better disguise.

Gohn returned the appraisal. “A peculiar jerkin.”

“Merrow scales woven into mail.”

“Invulnerable?”

“Perhaps.”

The mists still hung around the two of them. The ink still not dry.

“I wonder,” said Hoim, circling in the stalemate, squinting, “what will appear first. Perhaps a caravan, ingots of bronze, cakes of dates and sesame seed, bolts of cloth, bricks of salt ...”

“Ingots of curses, cakes of souls and witch’s gravewax, bolts of werewolf pelt,” retorted Gohn. But he offered his flask at Hoim.

Hoim shook his head, despite the chill.

“That’s a fine blade you wear,” ventured Hoim, toeing a luminal inflection between the conspiratorial and the meditative. “Is that handle kraken-skin?”

“Selkie,” reposted the other, stepping forward. “And yours is of a design I’ve not encountered before, though I’ve encountered many.”

And the duel began, or rather continued, by blade instead or rather as well as tongue.

*     *     *
In the eerie fullness of timelessness Hoim reembarked the Sorcerer. It was a tall craft, tiered with sail far into the sky, but those sails were now ragged and limp, its spars cracked, much of its rigging severed. Its bowsprit tuskspar was shattered. Hoim swayed unsteadily on the gnarled deck as if it rolled under him and watched the ship’s map-maker approach him. Her vestments billowed pneumatically as she shambled across the shipworm-crusted timbers, headscarf bowed as if into some pitiless gale rather than the becalmed stillness shrouding the ship.

Her eyes went to the wound below his chest, apparently deep and ancient, but still not dry.

Her eyes flickered up to Hoim’s. “Mortal?”

Hoim shrugged. “And now?”

“We repair,” she pronounced, with weary skeletal inevitably, “and sail on.”