Not sure where I was going with this but it suggests a prologue to me. An odd piece

Inheritance

And so we made it.

Talk jostled with earnest faced tinkering and shouts of triumph, followed quickly with bitter curses. The jars, unguents and powders; the half known science and badly translated grimoirs littered a study of shipwood polished by a hundred greasy palms. A laboratory of forgotten instruments and dead end tools, crafted from the rubbish gleaned from every passing ship in the chaotic spice and fishing port Degorat.

Saren was overjoyed when the dockside book-miners presented him his own magnum opus, a tale in 16 volumes, each detailing the sciences and magics of a forgotten age. Beautiful, they were, each volume newly inlaid with whalebone and scrimshawed to relief scenes of baroque beauty. One in every five pages was missing, torn out for tinder, by accident or simply for eating. Sailors are no respecters of a book. Of the remaining pages most were salt stained and ink run. He whispered to me like a man in a fever, gripping my wrist with his webbed hands and murmuring about this being two halves of different runs of print.

I only admired the scrimshaw bone covers. Saren was at a dead end in our venture, tattooed hands shaking as he packed herbs into a clay pipe and pretended his demonology had some sort of relevance. The marsh man had spent himself to far in those fumes and lost more than his precious writings.

Degorat is a miserable rock, fully 300 miles from anything approaching civilisation. The populace tolerated us as the inheritors of the driftwood palace. The coin and trade helped the tolerance to stay fresh. A close people, dark haired in the main, squat speakers of the guttural steppes tongue-albeit with a heavy dialectic variation.

I stepped out of the ‘palace’ that was a paupers tavern to anywhere worth calling itself prosperous, and wound my way down to the dockside, watching each tread on slimed rock cut steps. The Ranking Desire was back, after a two-season absence.

I waited for Jonsz to emerge sporting his flamboyant coat and battered skullcap, gazing up at the driftwood palace perched above the small dock-town like an elephant graveyard. The ribs stuck outwards in a grasping gesture, each fashioned from the accretion of centuries patch-jobs and make do’s. In the centre was the low building we called Lab, almost obscured by mist. Whatever vaulting ambition put a building atop a small island mountain months travel away from trade routes was either suffering hubris or in the flush of Empire.

We know about hubris, we inheritors.

My guidesman was totally uneeded, I knew the island like my own reflection but guidesman is an inherited position. So I paid him his coin as he bobbed an oilskinned head and muttered a benediction in the garbled steppe-doggrel they speak here.

He left me and made his way towards the valley town where the fishermen and sometime-wreckers keep alive epics in taverns with sung verse and then murder each other for a length of rope, or a perceived slight. A sluice opened and swamped the edge of my brown rough spun robe in shit and greywater.

Jonsz was not who met me. Instead I am faced with his first mate, a gap-toothed slight figure in oiled leather sporting a tulwar on his hip. Jonsz never came to me armed.

‘Garet!’

‘Lord Inheritor. We have been from you too long’

I clasped his hand in mine

‘Where is our Jonsz today? Half drunk and balls deep eh?’ I grinned.

Garet looked down

‘Storm outside of the Farseen Straits. He went over, no man reached him quick enough. Your scholars were right though, we found the deposit.’

Jonsz was the most able sailor I have ever met. A man no more likely to be washed over than I was to drink poison.

‘Drowned?’

Garet refused to meet my eye

‘Nothing could be done Lord, y’see’

I saw. Maritime powerplays and skulduggery at sea are not my concern. I had liked the man. A glass in his honour tonight.

‘A sad end. He shall be missed Garet. You have taken command? Then let us speak of coin and haulage’

And haulage it was. Past the fading luminescent fungus that coated the skirts of the driftwood palace and into the courtyard took half the ships crew. Most bargained away fees for a stay in a rib-room surrounded by hot food and warm beds. The rest snatched coin and made their way to the dock town for whores and gambling. Idly, I wondered which of those would not return.

The twins oversaw securing, fussing and muttering as they directed complaining scholars pinning down oiled sealskin over the chests of books and curios. Filed teeth, tattooed faces and a rumoured incestuous relationship. We tolerated each other. Lord Inheritor, inherits what he does. These hedge-witch strangelings were part of the framework when I arrived a lifetime, five years ago. A year on Degorat stretches. Sometimes I dream of the light sunny walks of Tzur city, the heady flower laden air of a morning in Start quarter when the summer is young. My waking hours are in Degorat, shrouded in mist and mistrust and the stink of burnt offerings from the Pentii .

We made it though.

The dream to touch the green orb that showed nightly. The oldest records show it as white, claim with such pride that it was made green and left for us to inherit. And here on Degorat the ancient office of Lord Inheritor waited. An appointment that meant nothing more than watching over half crazed scholars and mendicant preists and sybils of religions I couldn’t care to name all engaged in a fools dream.

This place drew the spicers for the fungal harvest, the trash peddlers and book miners, and the dreamers of a dozen cultures. The latter sought something I had long considered nothing more than hopeless myth.

But we made it.

It was Carris month, on the fifth day, which broke bright, that we really began to unlock the finds of Ranking Desire.