Shortly after meeting Dusk, one of the kratts came to get her. It was Floppy this time. She saw her pouch of spell components dangling over its shoulder. As it led her up the stairs, she reached up and opened the flap, then slipped her hand inside, offering a half-hearted prayer to Lelantos that her touch would go unnoticed. She quickly guessed at the contents of the vials, choosing one based on touch alone. The vial snagged for a moment, just enough to tug the bag. Floppy looked back over its shoulder, and she hid the vial behind her back, trying to look innocent, even though her blood had frozen in her veins from fear.
It seemed to work, as it said nothing. Ruby slid the vial into the hood of her drysuit. They passed by Callisto without Floppy giving her away.
“Oi!” she shouted, and Ruby yelped.
Callisto snickered. “Why so jumpy?”
“I’m naturally nervous,” said Ruby, pressing her empty hand over her chest.
“Well stop it!” Callisto scoffed, waving her over for her morning dosage. Ruby felt feverish, and it wasn’t just hunger or nerves; it had been growing the entire time she’d been on the boat, because she wasn’t getting enough medicine…
She gulped it down, and then Callisto gave her an MRE packet. While Ruby struggled to get it open, Callisto looked out at sea, not toward their destination, but back the way they came. Her brow was creased with worry, and Ruby remembered the black-sailed boat from the other day. Was it still there? Was it giving chase?
Callisto turned her attention back to her and any trepidation on her face was replaced with a smug smirk. “I’ve got good news for you,” she sang. “I’ll be letting you go today.”
“Oh, today?” Ruby asked, trying to feign a cautious excitement. Then some smidge of bravery possessed her to ask, “will you be giving me to that black boat…?”
“Never you mind that boat,” Callisto snapped. Then she crossed her eyes and regained her composure with evident effort. “We’ll be letting you off at an island in the afternoon,” she crossed her arms. “So lighten up! Drink in your last few hours on a real pirate ship.”
“I will,” said Ruby.
“But get to work!” Callisto clicked her heel against the deck.
“Oh!” Ruby scurried off to find a bucket, slipping the MRE into her pocket.
She scrubbed the floor for the next two hours, pacing herself better than yesterday, partly because her back was stiff and painful from yesterday’s efforts.
It turned out that Callisto had slept in, which is why Ruby had been allowed to do the same; she’d been sent for at ten, and around noon Callisto announced that she was going to lunch.
Free from her watchful eye, Ruby enacted her plan. She went up to the poop deck, scrubbing it slowly and carefully, waiting for her chance. She’d decided her victim would be Bob. Bob was nice to her, and while that might have been a manipulation tactic, it didn’t matter. She would manipulate it back. Her only compunction about it was that she wasn’t sure what kind of things were living under its sweater and she was afraid to find out.
When it passed below her she tipped over her bucket, dousing it with dirty water from the waist down. It let out a mechanical groan that managed to sound annoyed, and Ruby let out a sad whine. “I’m sorry, Bob!” she cried. She leapt to her feet and fell against the railing, before scurrying down the stairs and tugging at its dripping hem. “Let me clean you up!”
Bob made an inquisitive set of clicks and clacks. Something slithered under its mask, right between its eyes. Ruby gulped, but just looked up at it with her best puppydog eyes.
Bob let out a clack and nodded, allowing Ruby to pull him aside. She removed its mask and sweater, revealing its skeletal face and chunky body. Ruby tried not to look at the nest of eels wriggling between its mechanical organs. She wrung out Bob’s clothes and draped them over the ship’s railing, shooting glances back at Bob’s horrible body, until she found its binding sigil.
Ruby sighed in relief that it was exposed to the air. “Let me take care of this too…” Ruby grabbed a dry rag, and a rag that was wet with seawater, and started to pat Bob down, working her way around to its back. She figured that Callisto had bound the kratts herself, as they were rather weak spirits, much less powerful than the creatures running the paddlewheels. Perhaps someone had built their frames for her, but Ruby was certain that Callisto had done the summoning. Ruby knew enough about magic to change the binding, it just wouldn’t work because of her condition. But she could, hypothetically, command a demon imp or something of that level, if the binding was degraded from days of salt air, and if she provided it with a powerful practitioner’s blood.
The ritual of return also required a powerful practitioner’s blood. And her mother had been kind enough to include a vial of hers among Ruby’s supplies.
With a quick swipe of her saltwater rag, Ruby wiped out some of Bob’s binding sigils, and it let out a stifled groan. It was stuck inside the metal body, unable to move. Ruby dabbed her finger with the blood vial and drew out new sigils as best as she could, then went around to the front, tipping the rest of the vial into its mouth. Bob had no throat, but the blood disappeared anyway. She considered giving it one of the familiar bracelets, but Bob was too weak. Any attempt to equalize their power would destroy it instantly.
After a moment, Bob’s eyes fizzled and went black. Ruby felt the tiniest thread of connection between their spirits. “It worked,” she breathed. “Is that my color?—go back to red before someone sees!”
Bob obeyed and she helped it get dressed once more. She tried to see if the eels’ eye color had changed too but they were wriggling too much for her to tell. Once Bob was back under wraps, she bade it to lean in close, and whispered her plan in its ear.
Ruby had no choice but to trust the work to Bob after that. She knew that a real practitioner could see through their bound demon’s eyes, or control their actions directly, or channel its power through their own bodies, but the connection between her and Bob was so thin that it would break immediately if she tried any of that. She was vaguely aware of him moving about the ship.
Its first mission was to gather up Ruby’s stuff. The rods probably couldn’t be wrested from Callisto’s grasp, so she gave up on those. She’d asked it to find some replacement weapon in their stead, and to put everything in her backpack and have it ready for her when the time came.
This mostly went smoothly; kratts were particularly skilled at stealing and hiding things, to the point that Ruby wondered why anyone would trust them to do work at all. At one point she watched it get into an altercation with Floppy over her pouch, but fortunately they were able to come to a trade; Bob gave it one of its eels, and Floppy happily chomped on its head and slurped the body like a wretched noodle before handing the pouch over. Ruby didn’t watch that part.
“Land ho!” shouted Callisto from the crow’s nest, and Ruby yelped, because she hadn’t noticed the girl coming back out. She berated herself for only paying attention to Bob even as she rushed to the railing to look for land.
Off in the distance was a small island. It looked almost like a regular island, rising like a low hill, with palms growing on the shoreline and seagulls swarming overhead. But its off-white gleam, the way it bobbed in the water, and its sinister shape, all gave away the island’s true nature; the skull of some monstrous serpent, adrift on the water.
Callisto swung down from the mast on a line and landed with a loud thump next to Ruby. “Take a good look, Achlydes,” she said. “That’s where I’m gonna leave you.”
“It looks scary,” said Ruby.
“Don’t let it fool you,” said Callisto, clapping her on the shoulder. “Tis a sweet little land, full of puppies and coconuts. The skull thing is just a common trait of the land in Undaina.” Ruby knew that last part to be true, but she also knew that Callisto was trying to catch her off her guard. She played along; it was the only thing she could do.
It was a few hours til landfall from there. Ruby ate another MRE and this time Callisto watched her and loudly spoke about how her lunch of monster sushi was so delicious. After that she kept cleaning, again trying to conserve her strength for any running she might have to do. She kept her water rod pencil-sized and tucked away, in case Callisto decided to complete Ruby’s set as a final farewell.
About half an hour from land, Bob neutralized Choppy. Ruby had figured he was the most dangerous of the kratts, and needed to make things as difficult for Callisto as possible at the last moment. He made it look like an accident, pulling the wrong rope and sending a boom hook swinging into Choppy’s back. The kratt whined as its shoulder blade was torn off with a squeal of metal, then slumped, its command sigils destroyed. The swinging hook flung the ruined metal into the sea, just in time for Callisto to notice. She let out a frustrated scream. Ruby had hoped the attack would launch Choppy overboard completely, but she was content enough. That damage wasn’t something that could be fixed in half an hour.
Fifteen minutes before landfall, Callisto was still busy trying to fix Choppy, and Bob passed Ruby her backpack. She checked it quickly, spying most of her stuff in there, as well as some bladefish meat wrapped in butcher paper and a wooden handle of some kind. Ruby put on the backpack and altered her outfit, changing her drysuit for a baggy cable knit sweater, sweatpants and running shoes. Then she made her way down into the hold.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.
One minute later, she stood face to face with Dusk. “Hello again,” she said.
“Good afternoon,” said Dusk, glowing the colors of fire.
Ruby held up Bob’s keyring. “I’m going to give you these keys,” she said.
“Wonderful,” it said, reaching a hand the color of molten steel through the bars.
Ruby pulled back, just slightly. “You have to promise not to hurt me. You know the deal.”
“My dear, I’ve already agreed,” said Dusk. “But you only have me at my word, and we are strangers. Perhaps you would like to seal it with magic? A drop of your blood is all it would take.”
Ruby pulled a vial of blood from her pack. It was the one she’d fed Bob, refilled with a bit of her own blood. By now it had probably finished devouring Morgause’s magic. She wondered what would happen if a creature made up mostly of magic ate it. “You can have some of my blood,” she said. “But you have to promise not to drink it until after.”
The pupils of Dusk’s eyes bent upward in a way that Ruby thought might indicate a smile. His skin glowed a healthy pink. “You have my word. I know the plan, now just give me the items and head back to the deck before you’re missed.”
Ruby carefully lowered the keyring and the vial into his hand without touching his skin. He closed his fingers over the items with deliberate care.
“Goodbye,” she said. “And good luck.”
“I wish you the same.”
She scurried back up the stairs.
Ruby stood nervously by the gangplank as the ship turned, angling to drop its gangplank on the jawbone of the island. The water directly around the island was green from the forest of kelp growing from its underside. She wondered if that’s what helped the dense bone stay afloat. It had to be something like that; the skull was massive. One of its fangs was laid across the mouth like the trunk of a fallen sequoia. The highest point of the island, the arch of an eye socket, looked higher than some of the hills back home. The socket had partly filled in with dirt, and a grove of trees sprouted from it. Laughing gulls nested among the crags and cracks in the bone as easily as any seacliff.
The jawbone was misaligned from the skull. The seaward edge was bare bone, but the interior had filled partly in with detritus and sand, creating a boggy lagoon. She could see things moving in the center of it. Fins?
A hand pulled on Ruby’s backpack and spun her around. Callisto. “Well well, you look like you’re ready for your first day of school. I don’t remember allowing you to have this back,” she yanked at the strap of her backpack, but Ruby held tight.
“You’re already gonna leave me here,” said Ruby. “May as well let me have all my stuff.”
“You’re not gonna need it much longer,” said Callisto, smirking at her. “I may as well let you know now. You’re just supposed to be bait for the beast.”
“Oh, right,” said Ruby, taking a step back. “I uhh, knew that.”
Callisto took a step closer. “What, you think you’re gonna make a run for it? Maybe you’re slippery enough to get away now, but you won’t be when I manacle your legs together.”
Before Ruby could reply, one of the kratts blasted the ship’s horn. Another horn answered, and another. Callisto looked over her shoulder and saw a line of ships approaching the island. There were galleons, junks, steamships, and stranger things as well: a ship shaped like a gilded pyramid, pulled by a mighty sea monster with a serpentine neck; a giant nautilus with structures built into its shell; a schooner made of glass or crystal. But the black-sailed boat was there too, and closest of all. “Bollocks,” Callisto muttered.
Ruby didn’t say anything to that. She just snatched the canteen off Callisto’s belt and hurled herself over the edge.
It was only about a ten foot drop, and snakes didn’t have teeth. She flopped onto the bone and held back a hiss of pain, then limped to her feet and started running. The closest part of the skull was maybe a city block away, and she’d have to hug the rim to avoid the bog. There were coconut palms along the boundary of the water and the land, where there was just enough soil for them to grow. If she could make it to cover…
She made it ten paces before she heard Callisto shout. Ruby looked over her shoulder; Callisto had leapt after her, and the kratts were about to follow. “Bob!” Ruby shouted. “Stop them!”
It immediately grabbed Floppy and hurled it against Poppy, whose much-abused body immediately bent out of shape. The three of them started brawling.
“How’d you do that?!” Callisto demanded, and she pulled the red rod from her sleeve.
Ruby yelped as she tripped on a piece of wood, falling to the marshy ground just as a blast of red light exploded overhead. Ruby pushed herself to her hands and knees and started crawling. The water was up to her wrist. Another blast exploded against a palm to her left. She leaped forward as the long trunk slammed down behind her. Breathing hard, Ruby called out, “Don’t you need me as bait?!”
Callisto snorted. “That’s right. Stand up right now, hands in the air, and I won’t shoot you.”
Ruby took a deep breath and stood up, hands in the air, and turned slowly.
A blast of light hit her in the chest and knocked her to the floor. Green; the disruptor. She’d forgotten Callisto had that.
She knew from her reading that disruptors made practitioners feel weak, sluggish, half-dead until they regained some measure of magical energy. But Ruby always felt like that. It made no difference to her at all.
She feigned helplessness as Callisto approached, climbing over the fallen log, one rod in each hand. Her heeled boots weren’t suited for the terrain here and both her hands were full, so she was having trouble. Ruby took advantage and reached into the bag, grabbing for the wooden handle of whatever weapon Bob had given her.
A second later, Callisto was looming over her. “Well—”
Ruby swung as hard as she could, knocking the red rod out of Callisto’s hand with her bag as the weapon swung loose.
It was a gun. A huge gun. Some kind of rifle even. Ruby shouldered it as best as she could while sitting down. “You go away!” she shouted. “Turn back right now!”
“Or what, you’ll shoot me?” Callisto stood warily, disruptor up but not aimed. “Do you even know what that is? The Avtomat Kalashnikova,” she put on a cartoonish Russian accent, “model of 1947. The AK-47. It’s the world’s most popular assault rifle. Nine pounds of steel and plywood. It’ll shoot whether it’s covered in mud or filled with sand. It’s so easy, even a child can use it, so go ahead lass, pull the trigger—”
Ruby screamed, closed her eyes, and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
Callisto lunged for the red rod, picking it up from the marsh, and aimed it at Ruby’s head. “Didn’t your elders teach you, Achlydes? Fires won’t start in Undaina. That means gunpowder won’t light!”
Then the beast lunged up out of the water and clamped its jaws around her midsection. Callisto let out a loud shriek and started blasting the creature with both rods, still clenched tight in her hands. Ruby turned and ran, and kept running.
As she went, she unstoppered the canteen and started chugging down its contents, making up for missing doses. This was terribly unsafe, and she quickly felt like her veins were going to explode. She took a moment to risk a use of magical energy to send her awareness back to Bob. She couldn’t see through its eyes or anything without destroying it, but she had a sensation of cold and wet. The ship was sinking.
All according to plan. She’d hoped Callisto would still be aboard by the time Dusk made his move, but she was out of the picture now, and so was the beast. Hope fluttered in Ruby’s chest. Was she really going to make it? Was she going to succeed, all on her own, without anything more than some borrowed magic and a lot of overthinking?
A boulder stirred in the shadow of the palms ahead, and she realized it wasn’t a boulder. There was another beast.
Callisto had mentioned sharkhounds; Ruby had a vague idea that they were some kind of land dwelling sharks. But this creature had a body more like a bear; long limbs and blubber, paws like dinner plates and claws like knives.1 Its black doll eyes zeroed in on her as it stamped the ground like a bull, ready to charge. It chuffed through its gills, twin puffs of air bending back the grass on either side of it.
Ruby had dropped the gun a while back—it was useless after all—and reached for the blue rod, tucked into her waistband. The sharkhound took it as a threat and charged, mouth agape. Ruby held the rod out in front of her with both hands and shouted the command spell. A jet of boiling water shot into its open mouth. The sharkhound let out a pained gurgle and red tinged water shot out of its gills. It turned on a dime, huge paws throwing up clods of muck as it sprinted for the lagoon.
But the commotion just drew the attention of the pack. A dozen sharkhounds rose up from the lagoon, nosing about for the intruder. Ruby took off running once more. A loud chuff and the sound of dozens of paws splashing through the murk let her know she’d been spotted.
She didn’t have the illusion of making it to safety this time. Her leg still hurt and she’d always been slow. And clumsy. She’d trip any minute, and then it would be over—
Ruby tripped. She tripped and fell face first in the mud. She was always tripping, she thought, always needing someone to come and pick her up, but nobody was here. Her nose hurt and it was full of mud and she could feel the sharkhounds’ breath on the back of her neck—
Wet, hot liquid splashed onto Ruby’s back. She peeked up from the murk over her shoulder, and saw the biggest sharkhound spasming on the ground, its throat shorn open. A man in black stood between it and her. For a moment her heart soared, as her panicked brain thought, Henry.
But it wasn’t him, she saw that right away. They had the same height and build, but the similarities ended there. Henry was only a year-and-change her senior, but this was clearly a grown man. He was handsome, square jawed, and his hair was strawberry blonde, with a matching mustache. He looked just like a pirate in a casual way that Callisto failed to achieve, and he swung a cavalry saber through the neck of the next sharkhound with a contemptuous grace to match his swagger. A third sharkhound lost a paw and fell to the side, whimpering, and a fourth was spared the blade and received a pommel to the nose, so hard that it fell insensate to the ground.
The stranger gestured, and in that movement forged eight tentacles of mixed blood and water in a circle around them, lashing the sharkhounds as if they were bullwhips. Any beast that dared get closer was punished with the saber, and soon there were three more dead on the pile. The rest figured that this pair of humans weren’t worth all the blood. In less than a minute, the sharkhounds were gone, set to route by a single man.
He looked down at Ruby with blue-green eyes, not unkindly, and offered his hand. “My name is Eric Aonbharr, chevalier of Ys. And you are?”
“Ruby Reveur,” said Ruby, taking his hand. He pulled her up.
“Enchanted to meet you,” he replied, then he leaned down and kissed her hand.
----------------------------------------
1. Sharkhounds are not natural creatures of course, even in Undaina. They were created by wizards from shark stock, as well as canids and even bears and crocodilians for flavor and bulk. Despite the multiple species at play, they can all breed with each other, though typically the offspring will favor one parent or the other. This particular sharkhound resembled a tiger shark.