Disclaimers in chapter 1.

Ch. 29

City of ships!
(O the black ships! O the fierce ships!
O the beautiful, sharp-bow'd steam-ships and sail-ships!)
City of the world!

-Walt Whitman

The first keel boat bobbed up to the dock, its bow suddenly grasped by several willing hands, who tied it off. The murky shapes loomed suddenly out of the fog, voices falling all around them as hands offered help.

Their rescuers clambered up first, speaking to the men standing around in dark gray tunics on the dock. Link grasped the first hand that reached into the boat, and jumped up on the dock, finding himself face to face with several caped men, as the sailor moved on to offer assistance to someone else. The caped men spoke quietly amongst themselves for another moment, before turning to move toward him.
These men wore the same tunics, but with metal-trimmed shoulder cuffs. There was a flash of dull gleam as the first bowed courteously, beginning to talk, that Link recognized as a golden brooch, shaped like an animal he didn't recognize.

Link bowed awkwardly back, the words rolling over him. He sensed Ichiro suddenly beside him, and cast a quick glance over to the general, who was fairly bristling. Ichiro ignored him, stepping forward and making a short bow as well.
"Greetings, from Hyrule," He said, his usually stern demeanor becoming even more severe.

"Quite the negotiator, wouldn't you concur?"

Link started, looking at the smiling scholar at his side. The Captain along with Ichiro had gone on ahead, speaking with the caped men. Link frowned.

"Where're they going?"

The boats were finally emptied, and the crew milled about, the soldiers watching their captain leave warily. The sailors, however, seemed to be already shaking of their surprise, somehow finding a way of communication with the more taciturn rescue crew that involved curses and hand gestures.

"To negotiate, I surmise," Tappor sniffed. "I do believe our services are presumed gratuitous."

Link grimaced. "I'm gonna assume that means unwanted." He sighed, rolling his shoulders to get the kinks out the long ride had caused. "I'm just happy to be on something firm," He confessed. The caped men, along with Ichiro, Deadleg, and part of the rescue crew had disappeared into a wide opening farther down one of the docks. From another door less tunnel, several more men appeared, these in softer blue tunics, heading their way.

"That is most astute of you, my friend!" Tappor said at last, having paused to wipe the fog from his glasses again before they followed the beckoning men. "The flooring here is very still!"

They followed the blue-clad men into the hallway, which was lined with carpeting and small wall-set candles that seemed to glow.

The crew fell silent in the hallway, and silence enveloped them, apart from the soft rattle of the Guards' chain mail and the soft lap of the water behind them. The tunnel was narrow, with several wooden doors corresponding on both sides, and soon even the sounds of water and the creaks of the ships disappeared, replaced by silence.

Link took a deep breath, his eyes flickering over their hosts, and to the close ceiling, and wondered what else they would find within a ship that also housed a docking bay.

"Tap?" He muttered softly.
The scholar looked up from his silent introspection. "Yes?"

"You think if they were going to try to kill us they'd have already done it?"

His companion chuckled softly, and several of the nearest sailors gave him nervous grins as well.

"I should imagine not," he muttered back, "at most we will be enslaved and required to toil until our dying days."

Link shot him a determined look. "They'd have to kill me first. I plan on finding out more about that pirate ship that has Saria." He looked up ahead, taking a deep breath and steeling his nerve. "If this place really is what you think it is, then somebody has to know something about it."
His companion nodded. "My beliefs exactly, my vigorous young friend. Now," He began, his large intelligent eyes following the silent figures of their hosts. "If we could only comprehend one another!"

Link nodded. "Maybe they'll have scholars here. Someone who speaks other languages…"
"A linguist," Tappor supplied, rubbing his hands together with interest. "Perhaps you are right! I am fluent in a quantity of dialects and idioms of old and surrounding the land of Hyrule. Perhaps we may find a medium!"

Unable to follow the scholar's enthusiasm, Link merely nodded. He hoped they'd get the chance to find out.

Saria… hold on.

If there was one thing he would always associate with his first memories of the N.A.C. ship, Link decided, it would be the people. They were everywhere. In just two days of his stay onboard the sea colony- for that was what it was- he had seen more people up and down his assigned corridors than he had seen in the town surrounding Hyrule Castle. Tappor had left him early on, with an enthusiasm to find like scholarly minds, and of the few glimpses he'd seen of Ichiro and the captain, hoarse and frustrated from the continued attempts at breaching the language barrier, he didn't have any desire to join them.

The Guard had been stationed in separate quarters with Ichiro, on another deck somewhere. The sailors, Tappor, and Link, had been assigned to crewmen's quarters, after having their weapons detained with much politeness and bowing. Link had been uneasy, along with the rest of the crew, at the acquisition, but had soothed his worries upon being shown the location of their weapons, as well as the supplies that had escaped the wreckage of the New Dawn. Only Ichiro and the Guard seemed to be allowed to keep their weapons with them, and only with great observance.

Having been left to his own devices early, Link had begun to wander the corridors, finding he was lost on many occasions, with helpful, if incomprehensible people helping him awkwardly back to his floor. And there were many of these people, who came and went, pushing creaky carts down the hardwood floors and coming and going about their daily duties. They hailed Link whenever they saw him, until he had learned the acceptable word for greeting, and responded back.

From what he was to understand from helpful maps posted at different intervals on the crew floors, he was farther up from the bottom of the ship, where the dock was located, and above that, a floor labeled Te'Gar. Above this mysterious floor were three entire levels dedicated to storage of supplies and stocks. The floors above these, the passenger, library, and other decks, seemed to be open to their exploration, however, Ichiro had forbid it on pain of death, until they could open up some sort of line of communication. After having learned that the only floors accessible were the cargo levels, and that Te'Gar was not, and realizing that he probably wouldn't see the larger part of his companions for quite some time, he decided to venture down and discover what they housed.

Tappor collapsed his short rotund form back onto his bunk, and sighed happily. Link followed him into his quarters, and leaned against the doorway. After a moment to gather himself, the scholar sat back up, and was once again seemed the calm wise scholarly type.

"Well," he said brightly. "There certainly is a great quantity of knowledge for one to imbibe here!"

Link blinked at him, standing up straight. "Any luck with the language?"

His companion sighed, his enthusiasm finally waning. "Aside from a number of scrolls in the Old Language, I fear not. Several of my colleagues led me to a mammoth library some flights exceeding ours! Believe me, my youthful friend, I have never perceived a compilation of knowledge come together quite so magnificently as this vessel holds!"

Link's sighed. "Ichiro doesn't seem to be having any luck either."

His companion chuckled, pulling out several scrolls he had brought in his long sleeves and unwinding one. "Considering our dear Chief of the Guard's temperament, it is no startling revelation." He flattened the scroll, pouring over it. "However," he said at last, "if one were to find the information one was seeking, which one unquestionably could here, it is within this congregation of many peoples' knowledge I have discovered!"

Link nodded wryly. "Deadleg said at least that they know of the pirate ship that attacked us. Apparently, it's also well known here, but it keeps distance from the ship." This knowledge hadn't helped any, after he had demanded for Ichiro to ask to the pirate ships' location. Ichiro had merely cast him an irritated look.

"As you can see, communication has proved out of our grasp," He had growled. "Perhaps we should have brought a different scholar or none at all." With another annoyed glance at the people busily passing them by, he had turned to return to the conference room he and the captain had been taken to.

Although secretly agreeing with Ichiro that having a…linguistic, was it? Would have smoothed things over, and cured his impatience to find out more about Saria's kidnappers, Link would never admit to it, or speak out against Tappor. The scholar had been a pleasant -if slightly erratic- companion to their crew, and Link now regarded him as a friend, as well as a veritable source of knowledge on the history of Hyrule and other interesting tidbits of information.

He looked up. "I'm going down a couple of floors…see if I can find something out," he said.

Tappor chuckled, looking up. "If it is one solitary verity I consider I may rely on with warriors, it is their restlessness in all conditions."
Link opened his mouth to argue, and then closed it, to his companions' further amusement. He pulled his hood off, running a hand through his hair sheepishly. "I guess I just feel a little out of it." He put a hand against the doorsill. "This is the farthest I've ever been from home." He studied his braced hand, different than he last remembered it, gripping a horse's reins. Now it seemed paler, the skin cracked and dry from the salty air of the high seas. So much has changed… "I just figured I'd take a look around."

The Hylian scholar nodded, his eyes already drawn back to the tattered scroll he'd unwound. "Perchance some of the sailors would care to be an adjunct to you," he looked up with a blinking smile. "They seem to be anxious to unearth something to do with themselves as well."
Link finally smiled, turning to leave. The sailors could be found, most likely, holed away with the colonies' own boat crews, sharing strange "bilge water" kegs and incomprehensible yet bawdy stories that seemed native to all sailors wherever they were found.

Something that the exploration into the supply levels afforded him was time to be and alone and to think. It was something that had eluded him since the fast and perilous events that had followed their fight with the pirate ship and Saria's capture. He allowed himself a deep breath, pausing among the dark and dusty boxes that stacked up and created rows and walkways for him to wander. The stairs down had opened into a wide, dark corridor, lit sparsely with the soft magic lights that lined most places on the ship. Magic, it seemed, was an important part of this society's every day life. Different from Hyrule, where magic was contained to history, and the mysterious forces of the Lost Woods.

He brushed away a layer of dust from a crate nearby. The writing was entirely alien to him, even stranger than that on the maps and posters on the floors above. He peered at it, as the dust settled, feeling farther than home than he ever had before. He suddenly felt a wave of nostalgia for his cot in Talon's two-story, rickety house. Link swallowed the strange new feeling. Even when he had left the Kokiri, he had not felt any homesickness. There was nothing further than necessity that had attached him to the forest people.

But not to Saria… He moved on, exploring the different the nooks and crannies of the hold. Here, it creaked more, closer to the bottom of the ship. Would it have been different if he'd known her? It probably would have, he considered. A friend would have made a great difference in his lonely childhood. Someone to join him on his solitary walks into the wild, enchanted woods. I never fit in there… Link came to another doorway, leading on and to another wooden stairway that descended into further dark. He eyed it thoughtfully, maybe there was-

The dark, dusty crates around him suddenly seemed to be bending, stretching around him. He blinked, trying to rid himself of the vision, and began to feel his heart race. Not here… The creaking seemed to increase, until it was a groan from the thick wooden-platted walls around him. He squeezed his eyes shut, feeling a cold sweat break out.

Laughter, whispering shadows.

His eyes opened, widening, as the dim lights seemed to flicker, and shadows grew on the wall. Behind him, something shook, rattling like bones, and he whipped around, the hairs lifting on the back of his neck. "Who's there?"

Even as he said it, the room began to darken, the walls bending in around him. Damn it, get a hold of yourself! It isn't real! A shadow, darker than the rest of the interior of the cabin space, seemed to materialize and grow before him, its shape tapering off into a long neck.

"If this is another damn memory…" Link cursed, stumbling back, as it lurched towards him. "I don't think I want to know!"

It attacked suddenly, hisses and whispers and strange pipes playing crazily in his ears as he stumbled back, his foot suddenly encountering space. The dark shadow tipped crazily, along with the cart-filled room, as he plunged backwards, falling haphazardly down the stairs, and into the darkness below.

Just as he hit bottom, a door opened somewhere, and he crashed into whatever had come through. In the dark, he tried to pull himself up, tangled in warm limbs, the strange music replaced by curses and shuffles in the dark. At last, the magic lights seemed to flair back to life, and the form entangled with him suddenly rose up, fangs flashing below wild, gleaming eyes.