She called for Roinar immediately. This was something that only a witch could figure out.
"It's two more of them."
He just circled around the table in the cabin, like a wolf trying to decide whether its prey was still too alive to have the cubs come over. He looked so dangerous and the dice looked so harmless. Mariana knew that it was the other way around.
"I know," she said. "I just want to know if these things know where their friends are. What are we? Keepers of dice?"
"Seems like that fate has befallen us, yes, Captain Adams."
Mariana groaned and sank into a chair that had been made for someone at least a foot and a half taller than her.
"It is way too much responsibility," she said. "I don't want to be the one to blame if the eleventh abomination gets out and the world ends."
"The fates do seem to think that you are a viable candidate for the guardian, though."
Mariana licked her lips. Now, she had changed her mind about never telling anyone about the entity with glowing eyes. It seemed like she was fated to be in Roinar's guidance, might as well talk about this thing, too, right?
She explained the situation with as many details as she could remember. Roinar listened, occasionally checking that the door was still locked.
"And then I woke up," she finished her story. "What do you think it was?"
"And you said it did not smell like anything? You know that subdogormic demons smell and superdogormic don't, right?"
"Super…excuse me, what is that?"
She didn't want to hear the long explanation.
The gist of the problem was that demons over Dogormo in terms of power lacked a distinct energy footprint and therefore had no special scent associated with them and only them. If they took the forms of people or animals, they could pick and choose their own perfume, but that was only because they were so wretchedly powerful.
"So, my former boyfriend might be…not only a demon, but a great demon, that is splendid. Great." Mariana shook her head. "How can I tell?"
"You could try to summon him?" Roinar shrugged.
"But you have told me that the beasts will kill everything."
"I know a man in Neul who knows a few tricks. He is a stage magician. He can roll the dice so that we get the desired result."
Mariana bit her lower lip. "I will be in deep trouble if I ever return to Neul at all."
"With a competent pirate crew and a decent witch with you? I doubt they will say anything at all."
"Well, I guess you are right, Roinar. We must sail back south and make sure that we are accepted by the Neulian underworld. Privateers who have turned to piracy will be something that is quite hard to wrap one's head around…"
After selling the cargo, they turned back towards Neul, not intending to stop in any port before reaching their destination.
Mariana kept an eye on all of the dice. It was not easy, and she stayed awake for long periods of time, but she did not trust many people with this task. Madeliene had abused the box once. She would do it again.
The rainy season seemed to be taking a few days off. The weather was unnaturally sunny and clear, and while the pirates welcomed this change, there was something about it that really made Captain Mariana feel queasy. Perhaps the sun, too, was made out of something divinely hostile, and it sought to end the race of men by drying all their crops until they could not grow anything.
The Good Wife bobbed along their intended route. Nothing much happened during the voyage, except for Wolfe recovering. He said that he did not remember anything at all about falling, or anything before climbing up into the rigging for that matter. Mariana didn't know whether he was telling the truth or covering some memories that would have been too horrible and too much related to the pirate king for her to hear them.
Still, it was great to have him back in action. He had some neck problems. That did not matter to his captain. All he had to do was to learn how to properly teach and then delegate things so that the only sane man aboard the Good Wife would be safe from harm.
Neul was such an ugly place when one had just come from the beautiful tropics.
Its dull, muted colors tried so hard to look bright and happy, but when Mariana took a close look at the surfaces of the merchant stalls and the houses, it soon became obvious to her that the city used bad paint and did not repaint anything too often. The lack of vivid pigments was so pervasive that it felt like walking in a ghost town, and still, there were happy and fat little women selling the best fish pies in existence, there were funny-looking salesmen selling some of the most obscure books known to man, and then there was the most Neulian feature of all.
In this city, obstructive power structures and a vibrant criminal underworld of thieves and addicts lived side by side, feeding each other, and Mariana kind of loved it. The three-dimensionality was not something that could be found everywhere, heavens, no, some cities were actually functional, unlike Neul. It was the best place to go if one needed a stage magician who could summon a demonic pirate without also summoning a world-ending monster.
Mariana had to get used to her sea legs on dry land again. She could do shorter periods of time, but a long stay meant that she had to pay special attention to avoid becoming one of those drunkards who didn't know what left or right were.
She swayed her swagger into the White Horse, and that was where all hell broke loose almost immediately after she closed the sticky front door and stepped into the smell of stale beer.