Nobody aboard the Aglarbalak dared to approach Captain Tarîkmagân’s cabin. The first mate had told everyone that the Captain was sick and needed his rest. Everyone knew that in truth Tarîkmagân was blind drunk.
They would reach the Mouths of Anduin within two days.
The Aglarbalak cut a jagged silhouette against the coast of Harondor, its black sails hanging like torn wings over a hull scarred by years of raiding. The ship moved with predatory purpose, a slow, deliberate glide that betrayed the weight of the chained lives hidden in its hold.
The Corsairs had expected easy, profitable plunder from the Harad villages along the River Harnen, but the reality proved a heavy disappointment. Most of the villagers had fled inland before the Aglarbalak reached their homes, taking everything of value with them and leaving behind only empty clay huts. From the few they managed to seize, many were too old or too weak for slavery, and the number of captives chained in the hold remained pitifully low. Instead of gold and jewelry, they found only a few sacks of coarse grain, worn‑out tools and a dozen skinny goats – hardly enough to cover the provisions for the journey.
Meagre profits had left the crew hungry and mad, and they had vented their frustration on the few unfortunate prisoners they had managed to drag into the darkness of the ship’s hold.
Captain Tarîkmagân had been the most disappointed of all – the self‑proclaimed sovereign of the coasts and riverlands from Haradwaith to the Anduin, a brilliant strategist whose very name was said to strike fear from Umbar to Pelargir. Or so his first mate kept telling him, feeding the captain’s pride to keep him in good humor. Tarîkmagân had been drunk for most of the voyage, raids included.
The reason was simple. Tarîkmagân had been seething since the beginning of the voyage: his mistress, a beautiful slave from Harad whom he had bought had killed herself in Umbar Baharbêl to escape him.
Now Tarîkmagân’s fury had found a new target in Si’nol, the Harad boy from Umbar Baharbêl they had dumped on him without a word of explanation.
Tarîkmagân meant to punish Si’nol for his mistress’ final defiance. He intended to crush the boy’s mind until nothing remained but a hollow creature responding to his slightest movement in instinctive dread. He wanted to drown him in fear and shape him into something that belonged only to Tarîkmagân.
Gâzmor, a Citadel Guardsman, had already judged Tarîkmagân a madman. He prided himself on being a reasonable man, yet the ship’s stifling, violent atmosphere gnawed at him from the moment they left Umbar. His duty was to keep the boy alive and deliver him safely to Fangnir, a Gondorian sea-captain. This voyage was unlike the others: there was supposed to be no raids, no slaves, no expendable Corsairs – only a quiet passage to the Mouths of Anduin, where the Aeartur and the Aglarbalak would meet in peace. There, Gâzmor would hand the boy over to Fangnir, who would carry him to Pelargir in secret.
Except that on board the Aglarbalak, Tarîkmagân’s word was the only law, and he showed no concern for Gâzmor’s orders, Umbar’s interests, the boy’s safety or even his own future.
”Protect him well”, Captain Azgarôn had said, without knowing Tarîkmagân or understanding anything about the mad sea-captain and his hunger for wanton cruelty.
”My masters in Umbar Baharbêl demand that not a single hair from the boy’s head is lost, or we will both lose our own heads”, Gâzmor had tried to explain Tarîkmagân one night, when the sea-captain had been blind drunk.
”I have no masters!” Tarîkmagân’s voice was raspy and low, rising from somewhere deep in his chest. Gâzmor found it hard to fathom how so much hatred and contempt could come from such a small man. ”I am more of a man than you could ever be, you Citadel errand‑rat. I fear neither you nor your masters. I have skinned little Harad boys like that alive before – have you? Once I made a coin‑purse from the skin of one. Do you want to see it?”
Gâzmor endured all this without a word. It was his duty. In another time, in another place, he would have gladly killed this ogre.
”The child must be returned to his mother”, Gâzmor said patiently.
”I don’t need to touch his hair to break his mind.”
Captain Tarîkmagân was drunk. The whole cabin reeked of wine.
Tarîkmagân was a small man, barely five foot tall. His body was well-proportioned, his eyes small and brown like raisins, his hair dark brown and his face sharp. His beard was long and unkempt.
Tarîkmagân felt sorry for himself. He had felt sorry for himself for his whole life. Early in his life on the docks of Umbar Tarîkmagân had been constantly overlooked, mocked and pushed aside by larger men. He had quickly learned that brute force made men angry, but unpredictable cruelty made them freeze. He had gained a reputation as a man who would smile warmly while sliding a dagger into a crewmate’s ribs over a minor insult.
At forty, Tarîkmagân had been a Corsair for most of his life. He earned his first command ten years earlier, a brilliant sailor able to guide a ship through treacherous, reef‑choked waters where others would wreck and to plan raids with surgical precision. He maintained discipline aboard the Aglarbalak through punishments that shattered his victims, body and mind alike. When it came to captives and slaves, no cruelty was too extreme for him. Everyone on the ship feared him to death and whispered that Tarîkmagân was a fell spirit wearing mortal flesh.
Gâzmor tried not to let the boy out of his sight. It was all he could do to protect him. But even Gâzmor could not guard the boy all the time. A week and a half ago, when the boy had boarded the Aglarbalak, reluctantly and confused, Gâzmor had left him alone on the deck in the middle of the afternoon. When he had returned, he had found Tarîkmagân holding a massive, half-starved, vicious mastiff on a leash with both hands, its snapping, drooling jaws mere inches from Si’nol’s face. Tarîkmagân was laughing, the boy screaming hysterically.
Gâzmor had drawn his scimitar and struck the flat of the blade against the massive hound’s snout with enough force to send the beast yelping back to the mast. After that the crew had started to treat Gâzmor like an unwelcome guest, not a Citadel Guardsman. Gâzmor’s food was served stale or contaminated with bilge water; his quarters were deliberately fouled or left freezing. Whenever Gâzmor walked the deck, the crew fell silent and glared at him and the boy.
Gâzmor had quickly understood that his mission to protect the boy was hopeless. Misery clung to him, and he felt painfully out of place aboard the ship. For the first time in his life, fear took hold of him; he had begun to believe that Tarîkmagân was not merely cruel, but the vessel of some evil spirit.
During the raids Gâzmor had been in his quarters with the boy to spare him from seeing the brutality of the Corsairs against his fellow Haradrim, but it had been of no use. Tarîkmagân had dragged one of captives in their quarters and slit the prisoner’s throat without breaking eye contact with Si’nol. As the blood sprayed across the floor, Tarîkmagân had wiped a smear of warm blood onto the boy’s cheek and grinned.
”Cry, and your mother drinks this”, he had rasped.
”Where is my mother?” Si’nol had asked Gâzmor afterward, when they were alone.
”Soon, little one”, Gâzmor had said.
It was all Si’nol had asked of him. Si’nol never talked to him again.
After that Si’nol would sit long stretches on the deck of the Aglarbalak, his gentle brown eyes staring vacantly onto the horizon. He was a child, accustomed to the madness of the adults who ruled the world. Like his mother, who had allowed bad men like the Corsairs to take him from her. Like the hideous Captain. Like Gâzmor, who promised only lies.
Si’nol would not talk of the Captain. He would not tell Gâzmor how Tarîkmagân had once grabbed Si’nol by the hair when Gâzmor was sleeping and forced his head down onto a wooden crate. He would not tell Gâzmor how the Captain had then pulled a red-hot iron coal from the ship’s galley brazier using iron tongs and held it an inch away from Si’nol’s wide, terrified eyes. He would not tell Gâzmor how the Captain had whispered into his ear how easy it would be to make him blind so he could never see his mother again.
There was a rumor aboard the ship that Târikmagân had once killed a pair of treacherous veteran Corsairs by feeding them to the crew. According to the rumor, the Captain had first poisoned them with a paralyzing poison from the jungles of Harad. Then he had called the entire crew to the deck and forced them to build a fire, announcing a ’grand feast’. Tarîkmagân had begun to slice thin pieces of meat away from the thighs and arms of the still-living, paralyzed traitors, throwing the meat onto the fire to cook. He had then forced the crew members, at sword-point, to eat the cooked flesh of their own mutinous comrades.
To this day, whenever a sailor complained about the ship’s rations or stale biscuits, Tarîkmagân would slowly look up, smile, and say:
”Would you prefer the captain’s special cut instead?”
Gâzmor thought he understood Tarîkmagân perfectly well. The Captain did not want to kill the boy. He merely wanted to break and defile him.
”You fear the Captain”, the first mate had once told him quietly. ”Don’t deny it. Even a Citadel man feels it – the child feels it, I feel it. That wickedness pours off him like heat. You’re right to be afraid. He’s a fell spirit.”
”A very small one.”
”You mock him. But quietly. I’m telling you, there is no soul behind those raisin eyes. There is only a fell spirit, a shadow that crawled out of the Ephel Dúath or the dead wastes of the South, looking for a skin to wear. A spirit like that does not feel fear. It feels only hunger. It is playing with you, just like it plays with the boy. If you keep standing between that thing and its meat, it will drop the mask, and you will find out what really commands the Aglarbalak.”
Through those nightmarish days and nightmarish nights, the child called Si’nol – a hostage aboard a Corsair ship creeping north along the coast of Harondor – slept beside the Citadel Guard Gâzmor, as if the proximity alone might keep the fell spirit from devouring him.
