Two: Parrots & Kings

Two weeks before Barkle began his hunt, the Blue Oriole had run into a bit of bad luck, which in sailor's parlance meant that her crew had barely escaped with skins intact.

First, they skimmed a compass point too close to the mad swirl of a Mother Storm.

Captain Marsh hoped to catch a spume current that would send his ship skipping across the Dream toward Melicont.

It was a risky maneuver, but the Captain had good reason for haste.

The Blue Oriole had been commissioned to deliver a cargo of caged parrots and the damnable birds were dying of some queer, molting disease.

Bright green and azure feathers littered the cargo hold. According to the contract, the ship lost a dozen gelders for every cursed macaw and conure that toppled stiff from its perch.

The Meliconts were distinctly unforgiving about such things. They cared nothing for the fact that the birds had arrived aboardship already itching and pecking irritably at their own plumage.

The Meliconts were a restless, farflung race. From their drab little home world, but had extended their disapora over the better part of the Known Dream.

They were mapmakers by trade. In any decent size port or crossroad harbor town one would likely find a blunt-nosed, watery-eyed Melicont hard at work on sheets of lizardskin velum.

(They used only velum stitched from the hides of a dog-sized variety of chameleon. Rather than using inks or dyes, they employes a secret technique to tease out the natural colors and hues buried within the lizardskin.)

The Meliconts created their maps as a collective, communicating with the Chartmeister Guild by way of these thrice-becursed talking parrots.

Each bird was made to memorize a certain amount of information, which had been gathered from explorers and spies, dreamsailors and military convoys.

(Meliconts had a distinctly unsavory reputation and were said to use any and every source for their maps, even consulting with the treacherous melphik and sending clandestine embassies to the Breathless.)

The cartographers used code for their communication, so that one could stand in the cargo hold of the Blue Oriole and listen to what sounded like a cacophany of madmen, when in fact one was hearing a secret account of the mysteries of Dream.

There was a saying among the Meliconts that parrots knew The Truth before kings.

And now, as Captain Marsh looked on, these tiny repositories of wisdom were clacking their beaks, shuddering, and falling into the sawdust at the bottom of their cages.

"We must make all haste," he concluded. "Set a course for the skirts of the typhoon..."

Next: The Mother Storm