Rain lashed the desk of the ship and hammered into my face with a vengeance. Sails snapped in the squall and wood creaked and groaned as if put to the question by holy Cerevisian inquisitors.
My manacled hands clutched the rail with a strength earned through a lifetime of working the rigging and fighting to remain afloat amidst storm-wracked seas. This small gale was no stranger to me, and I felt my face stretch into a mad grin as I looked out over the dark ocean.
Men screamed in the background as they fought tooth and nail against the denizens of the deep on the rolling deck of our ship. The fish-thieves had taken offense at our trespass and had crawled from the ocean floor to swarm over the sides of the vessel and drag as many soldiers as they could back into the brine.
Pale, corpse-like creatures they were, naked and hairless. I’d heard many a whore insult a man with the comparison, and it still made me laugh to think about.
A webbed hand, tipped with barbed claws so very like the hooks used by fishermen themselves near the coast came flashing towards me in the unnatural gloom. I ducked aside easily, wrapping the chain binding my manacled hands together around the creature’s toad-like neck and squeezing with all the strength my waning physique could muster. I was in my twilight years now, but strength was the last to fade, and my gnarled arms bunched as I strangled the abomination to death.
Cerevisian blood stained the deck where the soldiers fought and died, but I heard a sharp cry and turned to see a few of the fish thieves descending upon a group of sailors huddled near the aftcastle. The creatures had broken through the ring of soldiers after one poor bastard had been eviscerated and another fled, and then leapt with glee towards the relatively defenceless sailors.
I growled in frustration and loped over, weaving between scenes of slaughter and violence as if I was born to it. In many ways, I had been. I watched a great oaf of a sailor club one of the ocean-dwellers to death with an oar in defence of his comrades and marked him for later investigation.
Pulling a discarded blade from a soldier’s corpse as I stomped over – he wouldn’t be needing it any long, after all – I set about killing the creatures that wished to feast upon my future crew. All was chaos for a few precious moments longer, and I felt the splash of salt water and blood across my face again. Gods, it had been so long.
Purple light split the sky, and the storm seemed to almost shrink back for a moment as the vampire hunter emerged onto the deck. His magical pistol discharged with beams of purple light, though the lack of a gunpowder stink and loud noise felt strange to my soul. Credit where it was due – the man was a terror on the battlefield. He surged across the deck, pistol leading the way and laying about with his blade – a fencing steel of the kind preferred by the high-born in the capital – as he did so.
It didn’t take long for order to be restored, and the soldiers remembered their training soon. Orderly ranks formed quickly, and the remaining abyssal creatures were pushed from the ship back into the ocean from whence they came in short order.
Still, a dozen or more bodies littered the deck, blood and brine forming a soup of suffering that would need scrubbing from the hardy wooden planks by some poor ship-hand before the day was through.
“Pirate,” I heard shouted over the howling wind, and turned to see the vampire hunter striding towards me, weapons raised. “Drop the blade. Now.”
I sighed, reluctantly releasing the thin sword and letting it clatter to the deck. It wasn’t my preferred type of weapon anyway, better for stabbing than cutting, but I still struggled to unwrap my fingers from its hilt. ‘A blade in the hand is a freedom of itself’ as my father had said, and freedom was something in short supply at the moment. Things were on the right trajectory though.
“Hunter,” I grunted, spitting to one side to clear the copper tang from my mouth. He held my gaze for a few seconds longer, before he nodded and turned away.
“Julius!” he called, and a fat toad of a man jostled over, his prodigious jowls wobbling with admirable vigour such that they almost covered the thin gold chain circling the noble’s neck. Not quite though, and I once again glimpsed the amethyst stone at its centre that locked my magic down so tightly.
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“The deck is clear – get the men back to their stations, and get us clear of this storm!” the hunter bellowed, and the noble hurried to obey, shouting orders to the scared sailors and generally doing his best to look important. I scoffed, but returned to my post at the railing, staring out at the roiling ocean beyond.
Soon, I promised myself.
----------------------------------------
We reached calmer waters soon enough, and with the lack of storm-clouds to obscure it, the wan light of the afternoon sun bathed my face, drying salt lines where they lay. I looked down at the little skiff that we had snared and frowned to myself.
My father had often said that dead men tell the best tales, but I’d never agreed, at least as a child. Dead men tell no tales, after all, as every good pirate knows. I'd seen him interrogate men, and the ones who lived would spin some pretty yarns for sure. It was almost ironic; the more grisly the work he put into them, the prettier the tales they would tell.
But as I looked down at the bloodless body of the boy in that skiff, I wondered if he might have been on to something. The corpse below me was a ballad, words written across the pale flesh in the form of tiny puncture wounds, its desiccated nature adding context and complexity, as does music to a tavern tale.
It was a familiar tale, in a way, though strange to see out at here. 15 generations had passed since the God-Plague, and this was the first to go by without endless war against the vampires that had resulted. The gods-forsaken country seemed to have a handle on the bloodsuckers now, much to my chagrin, as they’d finally turned their sights on the rampant piracy surrounding the island nation a few years back. Or as I had once called it; stable employment for me and the lads.
“What do you think then, Ragadan? You've never seen anything quite like that, I’d say!”
I saw the noxious form of Julius Noxel, appropriately named in my opinion, and I couldn’t help my lip from turning up in derision at his shrill voice in my ear once again.
“No,” I ground out in as level a voice as I could manage, “can't say I have seen anything exactly like that in my days.”
The little toad of a man seemed to swell with pride. “Well, that's why you weren't the only person we brought along on this little expedition here, Ragadan,” he replied smugly, seeming to take great delight in using my name, bastard that he was. “Have you been introduced to Lucien Lucksworth yet?” He asked.
With such admirable timing that I suspected it might have been planned, the vampire hunter emerged from the aftcastle and swanned over to where we stood at the railing amidship. He was tall, strutting with all the confidence of youth but none of the innocence. His smirk was nearly as oily as his hair.
I felt my grimace widen a touch. I hated vampire hunters. Pampered noble brats, as far as I was concerned - spent more time in taverns than out hunting the cursed blood-suckers they crafted a name off. The way this man was dressed, in a long, oiled coat, his house insignia on one breast and a fancy tricorn hat worn at a jaunty angle, seemed to only confirm that opinion.
Although it wouldn't do to underestimate the man. He had a good frame on him, and I knew from first-hand experience how potent the magic that the wytch-hunters of Cerevis could bring to bear truly was. I’d also seen him earlier reaping a lone harvest through the fish thieves while his soldiers struggled to even survive.
“I'm not surprised you've never seen anything like it, Radagan,” he said. “What would a pirate know of the dark ones, after all?”
The fat noble holding my life in his hands laughed, high and shrill.
“Are you sure it was a vampire?” I asked cautiously. “Looks to me like deep-crawlers left those marks.”
“Pah,” Julius laughed. “Nonsense man, the boy is clearly drained. Dry as a nun!” he said, chuckling with forced joviality.
“I agree, Julius,” Lucien said, drawing his pistol and putting a new hole through the torso of the corpse below us. The wound leaked no blood, just a thin hole drilled through the boy’s chest, and Lucien holstered his pistol with a satisfied smirk. “Anything to add, Radagan?” he asked casually.
I grunted. “Say what you like, but I recognise the bite pattern – deep-crawlers for sure. It’s not unheard of for men to exsanguinate in the ocean after being nibbled for a time. The salt draws out the blood, ya see?”
I sighed then. “Only thing I can’t work out is how he got into the boat afterwards…”
“An interesting theory, but as you say, one more full of holes than the boy down there,” Lucien said, and Julieus nearly howled with laughter, evidently trying to ingratiate himself with the high-born lad. “Besides, I have found that people tend to see only what they know. It’s no surprise that a pirate lord sees the perils of the sea in all things.”
I scowled, wondering if the man saw the irony in what he said.
“Oh, don’t look so glum, Radagan.” Lucien drawled. “We’ll find this vampire quick-smart and get you back to your comfortable cell in the capital in no time!” he gave a patronising little tap to my manacles that set the chain chattering before turning on his feet to look over the crew of sailors ringing the deck.
“No more dawdling boys! We’re following the trail of that skiff. Get to it!” he shouted, before turning back to me. “You steer us through this fog, pirate, and I promise you some final comforts before your execution.”