---Chapter 10
Jax and Leaflow were forced into a small space at the back of the lowest hold, where only a single purplish lantern hanging from the roof gave any light. There, they were put into a bare room and purple bars slid over the door so that they could not break through it. Outside the walls, the ocean could be heard lapping and swishing against the boards. The bands on their arms fell away and the young man let out a gasp, rubbing his wrists where red lines showed on the skin.
“Finally! I thought that old witch was going to keep us tied up forever. Why didn’t you stop her with your mental powers, Leafy? Like you did to Mendo Drann.”
“She is too strong.” Leaflow shook his head, moving over to feel the bars in his gloved hands. They did not corrode like a touch of the purple streaks, but they were cold and as hard as iron. “If I had tried to fight her in that way on her own, she would eventually have lost through inexperience and under-training. But with the help of EX-2? My mind might have gone Pufft.”
He made the last sound by slapping his hands together, producing a loud report.
“Oh, come on. You’re so strong you can create a whole world with your mind, but you can’t defeat a little 'ol pirate queen? Not cool.”
Leaflow gave him a level look. “I do what I can, when it is feasible. You do not know anything about what you speak of.”
“Then I wish you would teach me,” Jax muttered, moving restlessly around the room banging on the walls, in the vague hope of some secret exit. The planking was stout and floor solid, not one beam giving at his blows.
“So what are we going to do now?” he exclaimed eventually, full of frustration, “we can’t get out of this hole. You won’t use your skills to help us. Soleeryn is being forced to make some powerful concoction for this crazy witch, we might be discovered by EX-2 at any time and, worst of all, the rest of our friends are out drowning in the ocean! I would use something from my Telestorage to help us out, but I don’t think a hoverboard or electric razor is going to be much use. Unless you want me to burn down the walls, but I don’t--!”
“You do talk a lot, don’t you?” Leaflow observed with a dangerous calm, cutting into his explosion of words.
Jax looked at him with a touch of surprise, one hand upraised. “Don’t you want to think of a way to escape?”
“Yes,” the cloaked one returned pointedly.
“Oh.” Jax slumped to the floor, putting a hand to the bruise on his head from when he had struck the doorknob in the airship. After a moment, he added, “have you thought of anything yet? I haven’t.”
Crouching down beside him, Leaflow nodded slowly. “One thing.”
“Which is?”
“I think Soleeryn has a plan.”
Jax stared at him with an open mouth, blinked and repeated his earlier comment, “oh.”
It was some time later, as they sat on the floor each revolving their own plans, when they felt a sudden shift in the world.
There was a tearing sensation, everything spinning around them for a moment. When it settled, the dim lighting went from purple to the more familiar shades of pale yellow. The bars on the door faded away, as well as some of the details of filigree work that had been on it before. Jumping to their feet, the two travelers found that the door opened easily onto the gloomy hold.
“She did it!” Jax looked at his companion in surprise. “She’s defeated the Power Core!”
“Quick.” Leaflow brushed passed him, moving across the curved planking at a hasty pace. “Let’s find out how.”
Skipping over the great wooden ribs of the ship, Jax followed him. The ship was riding less easily now, swelling from side to side as they climbed up multiple ladders, through a hatch onto the deck.
There they found that the pirate ship lay in the center of a wide, open expanse of sweeping blue waves. The sky was cobalt, with big, puffy clouds hanging in it at various places like bobbing ornaments. The storm was gone, dissipated like the dream it was.
Giving a brief glance around the horizon, Jax could not see any sign of the rocky island that the airship had struck. But Leaflow was hurrying on to the cabin and the young man did not want to be left behind. Whatever had happened inside, between the two women, it must have been interesting. He wanted to be in on the discovery.
They went into the hall between the cabins, which looked much more worn and stained than when they had last been there. When the door on the right was opened, Jax peered over Leaflow’s shoulder and saw that it was faded and grimy in that room as well. The things on the table were gone, the drapes and silken cushions of the bed had disappeared. The couch was ripped, with puffs of cotton batting sticking out of it like rat’s nests.
Laying on it was a twisted, convulsed body dressed in tawdry finery. Hurrying forward he saw that it was the pirate queen, her hair thin and sun bleached, face contorted in a horrible last gasp of pain. Stopping beside her, he found that she was quite dead and had never been nearly as picture-perfect as she made herself appear.
Soleeryn was leaning against the wall nearby, staring down at a teacup hanging from one hand. Jax opened his mouth to congratulate her and ask how she had managed it, when he realized that not all was well with the healer. She staggered and almost fell to the floor, but Leaflow was quicker and caught her by one arm before she could. Jax jumped up beside them, noticing that her face had turned a terrible gray color.
“Are you still sure that healing and poisoning are so far apart?” Leaflow asked her gravely.
“Oh, Leaflow...just take me back to the airship, please.”
Jax looked between them, blinking as he understood. “You mean – you mean she’s been poisoned too?”
Leaflow nodded once. “Help me take her back to the ship. Her herbal cures are there.”
Without another word they began to carry the fainting healer out of the cabin, towards the landed air ship.
---
When he hit the water, Lenny thought that he had never felt anything colder, not even the air around a corrupted smear. At first the waves washed over him and he did not know what to do, but then the shock of the cold stirred him into action. He began to swim. His head broke the surface and he took in a great gulp of sea-spray filled air, looking around for the airship or his companions.
A head bobbed in the water nearby and it took him a moment to realize that it was Jackal, without his hat. Looking above it, he saw the airship being blown away through the storm. The air outside of the waves was hardly any dryer than what was underneath, what with rain coming down on them and spray flinging up. Lenny gasped for oxygen and floundered around, trying to figure out what to do next. Jackal’s hand raised from the water for a minute and he shouted over the sound of waves, “over there!”
Turning his head, Lenny saw a heap of rocks sticking out of the sea, still drenched with water but poking above the waves. Together they struck out for it, meeting on the way Dansei and Raggsy, both helping Amber towards the tiny island. She had never learned to swim well and the missing fingers on one hand made it even harder for her. Patch had been swirled to a further distance by the wind and waves, but was paddling strongly in the same direction.
They all scrambled up onto the slippery rocks, helping each other. Raggsy’s claws made this easier for him, so he got up on the stones first before offering the others a hand. There was nowhere nice to sit out of the rain on the barren boulders, not even a cave or crevice large enough to worm into. All they found was a place where a larger, flatter stone was surrounded by smaller, round ones and they huddled there, listening to the thunder and lightening crackle around them and the rain plunk off of the rocks.
Raggsy had shucked off his coat and helmet while he swam so that it would not drag him down. His fur was almost black with wetness and Lenny had to admit that he did simply look like a drowned rat of unusual proportions. Jackal’s boots and hat had gone the same way, but he had not given up his weapons. The pistol was belted to his side, while his rifle he had towed behind him as he swam. Patch was in the same condition, with no boots but his weapon intact.
Standing up, Lenny looked around the rocks and counted their numbers again. “Where is Jax? Or Leaflow and Soleeryn?”
“They were all in th’ cabin,” Raggsy chattered, hugging himself against the wind. “Maybe they didn’t fall overboard.”
“Then they might have a chance to get the airship back under control once the storm ends.” Amber was squeezing the water out of her hair in an oddly useless gesture, with the rain coming down on it, but she paused to look up at the sky in hope.
“If it ever does end.” Patch shook his head, black hair hanging in lank strings down the side of his head. The gold earring twinkled in one ear, still in place after all their adventures. “This storm is not canny, if’n ye ask me. I heard the laughter when we were swept overboard! This is the witch’s work.”
No one denied the statement. They just sat around on the barren rocks, trying to stay warm however they could. There was no talk of starting a fire, as there was no fuel and everything was sopping wet.
Slowly, bit by bit, the storm drew off in the same direction as it had come from. Eventually the rain stopped falling and an overcast sky presided above them. There was still a slow wind from the east, and no sun to warm them, but at least they were not getting continually wetter from above. Stiff from sitting in the cold and damp, Lenny stood slowly up to look all around. There was no sight of the airship in any direction. To the north, the wild clouds still hovered and stormed, flickering with magenta lightening.
“I’m afraid the others might still be in that mess,” Lenny said, crossing his arms on his chest. “Caught up in the whirlwind, or perhaps dragged down into the ocean in the airship.”
“It couldn’t sink. Not with the balloon.” Amber stood up to join him.
The young man shook his head in defeat. “It could if the balloon hit something and burst, or was struck by lightening.”
While they were talking, the Ninja had begun scrambling around among the heap of boulders, poking in crevices and looking over at the far side. He found untidy, broken bird’s nests and a few egg shells, but no living creatures or anything to help them get more comfortable. The island was only about sixty feet in diameter above the water, sticking up out of the waves into a pinnacle in the center. After searching around, Dansei perched on top, watching the horizon.
“We should do something,” Lenny sighed, looking around them, “but I don’t know what.”
Patch had taken off his shirt and was wringing it out, flapping the stained white cloth in the wind. On his chest, a silver cross dangled on a chain. “I’ll tell ye what, lads and lady,” he said after a moment, “I don’t know exactly where on this great ocean we be, but ships sail all over the world every day. Perhaps if we wait, one will come along and we can hail it.”
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“What about the other three, on the airship?” Jackal inquired, trying to find a dry patch of shirt to use on his firearms.
“They might also come to take us aboard, before then,” Patch acknowledged, “but if they don’t, I’m afraid they must be scuttled. If that’s the case than I am most sorry for them. They were good mateys and true. But as they say, these things happen at sea. We must press on.”
“Without the Di-jump? Without Jax?” Lenny rounded on him angrily. “What will be left to do, without those things? Leaflow has been good to us and Soleeryn is a gentle, kind person, so I would hate to lose them. But the mission could possibly continue with them gone. But Jax and the Di-jump? They are the very center of what we are doing! What can we do without them?”
Patch showed his teeth in a fierce grin, flapping his shirt onto his back like a cape. “There is only one thing to look forward to then, crewmate. Revenge!”
Lenny turned away, stomping off, flinging over his shoulder. “That’s all well and good for a time. But it gets us no nearer to EX-2!”
Raggsy had been chewing on a chipped claw, but now looked up with glinting, round eyes and said quietly to his nearer companions, “aw, poor Lenny. His mission is eating him up. But I don’t t’ink that we should give up hope on the others, yet. Jax is a smart kid: he’s been around the block. And the other two have some experi’ence on their shoulders.”
“I agree.” Amber nodded firmly. “If we have to wait for them, we will. I just wish it wasn’t so cold.”
“Heh, come sit up next to me. That will warm us both up a liddle. Though it would be nice to have my trenchcoat back, wet as it would be.”
Amber glanced around, pointing. “Look, what’s that floating on the waves against the shore? Is that it?”
“You’re right, it is!” Happily, the Ratperson scrambled down and fished the coat from the water. It was soaked through and the sling had somehow disappeared from the pocket, but he was glad to have it despite these problems. He wrung it out as best as he could, then he and Amber sat with it over their shoulders to keep the wind off.
Lenny was standing on a large boulder right up against the lapping waves, watching the storm in the distance. His arms were crossed and he felt chilled by more than the wind. If he could have cried, he would have, at the thought of the friends he might have lost and the mission that had come to an end. But he couldn’t weep, not anymore. His heart was too hard for tears.
He was still watching when the storm flickered strangely and began to fade. At the same time a wind whipped past for a moment, wailing in his ears. Something seemed one the brink of changing and...he felt the dimension rip apart. Everything shivered and blurred, the sky tore open into a cloud-speckled blue and the strange storm faded entirely away. Lenny almost lost his balance in surprise, straightening up and turning around to look in all directions. Everyone was scrambling to their feet, staring around with open mouths. Sunlight streamed down on them from the cleared sky, while the wind died away altogether.
“It’s gone!” Raggsy shouted, jumping to his feet and skipping around in a circle. “The Power Core has been defeated!”
“And look over there.” Jackal gestured towards the north with a flick of his rifle.
In the distance they could see the low shape of a large ship riding on the water. Floating up from it and drifting in their direction was a double form, the bottom shaped like a small ship and the top like a sausage. It was the airship.
Amber cheered, waving a hand in the air, while Dansei stood up on top of the pinnacle and watched it coming with a concentrating expression on his face. Lenny dropped his arms to his sides and watched in amazement, feeling a touch of hope come up into him. I was like a warm touch in a frozen room.
As they stood waiting the airship came towards them, zigzagging slightly as if searching the waves. As it neared, it straightened out and came right over them, floating down until it hovered over the shore just a few feet above the rocks.
Amber and Raggsy were still cheering loudly, while Patch waved his shirt around like a flag in his exuberance.
But then a dark shape stepped up to the rail and motioned them to silence with a gesture so final that they petered out quickly. Leaflow threw the ladder over the side, while everyone on the island exchanged doubtful expressions and fell silent.
“What is it?” Amber looked up anxiously. “What’s wrong, Mr. Leaflow?”
Leaflow beckoned for them to come up, and when they were all on deck he explained, “Soleeryn is gravely ill. She is the one who destroyed the Power Core, but I’m afraid she paid a heavy price for it.”
The crew understood now why they had been enjoined to silence. Looking over, Lenny saw Jax at the steering wheel, expression more serious than it was apt to be. Joining him in a few strides, he exclaimed quietly, “Jax! I’m glad to see you whole. What happened? Was the Power Core aboard that sailing ship?”
“Yes, and Soleeryn poisoned her with the Triple Grag!” Jax hissed, “but listen to Leaflow: he’s telling the story now.”
The cloaked one explained as best as he could what had happened, though Soleeryn had been unconscious since her last words on the pirate ship, making much of the story conjecture. They had seen the crimson liquid in the cup Soleeryn had been holding, even while they brought her aboard the airship, and knew what it was. But why she had drank some of her own poison was uncertain. Leaflow guessed that it had been an act of self-sacrifice on Soleeryn’s part, drinking it to prove that it was a magical 'elixir’ in hopes of being able to cure herself before it took effect.
“Can’t you help her?” Amber asked hopefully, “you know about poisons.”
“But not always their antidotes,” Leaflow admitted, “as I have said before, I am not a healer by choice. As far as I know, Triple Grag has no antidote. That is what makes it so useful in my profession. There are a few things from her sack I have tried at random. They seem to have prolonged her life...Soleeryn herself may be able to make a cure, as she knows much about remedies. But while she sleeps she can not make anything.”
“Prolonged her life? At random? Oh.” Sadly, the girl turned towards the cabin and disappeared within.
“It’s better than killed her at random,” Leaflow muttered, also moving away. The rest of the travelers gathered around Jax to find out more details about the stay on the pirate queen’s ship and what had happened subsequently.
“Talk about an evil witch!” Jax exclaimed, becoming agitated, “she was glad that you were drowning in the ocean or slowly perishing on this stone heap! Golly, I wanted to run her over with a hoverbus right there. But her purple mist made us march away and when we escaped Soleeryn was already poisoned. Do you think she’ll live?”
This was asked particularly of Lenny, who shook his head in uncertainty more than denial. “I haven’t even seen her.”
Jax tapped a finger on the tip of his nose as he thought aloud, “she saved me from the corruption’s poison. I wish I could save her.”
“The druids in this world might be able to if we got there in time,” Patch put in, “but I would have to figure out where we are now, first. My guess by the color of the sea and direction of the waves would be somewhere off the coast of Bramzelle, perhaps between it and the peninsula of Despair...but that makes the druid’s wood hundreds of miles away.”
They all stood in deep thought with their heads bowed for a few minutes, before Dansei suggested, “if she learned knowledge of healing strange poisons in her dimension, perhaps that is where we should go. There must be others there who know as much. If the Di-jump is still in action?”
“I haven’t checked on it, except to make sure it was still here.” Jax made a face. “It will have got a soaking. We should have put it inside the cabin.”
He left the wheel in Patch’s care and hurried over to the Di-jump. Turning it on, he watched the needle flicker before nodding slowly. “It looks like it’s still working! Good ol’ Grummage. Now we can jump through dimensions until we find one that has a healer for Soleeryn--”
“It’s too late.” Amber climbed up onto the deck from the cabin, wiping a tear from her eyes. “She’s gone.”
A bleak quiet fell over the airship. Except for the first Leaflow, who was a true person, they had not lost a member of their companions yet. Now that they had, it seemed entirely unexpected, despite the many perils they had passed through before and the times they had seen death only a step away.
“Are you sure?” Jax asked finally, incredulous.
Amber nodded, unable to speak. Though they had not known much about Soleeryn’s past or her life before, she had become an integral part of their fellowship and had been traveling with them for some time. That she would be taken away from them so suddenly was a shock to them all. Even Jackal, who had buried part of a village of people he knew personally, looked like he would have taken off his hat if he still had it.
---
They all agreed that Soleeryn’s world should still be their next stopping place. It was fitting that she be taken back to her home to rest, even though she had almost been an exile when leaving it.
And no matter how grieved the dimension travelers were to lose one of their numbers, their mission had to continue. The Power Cores had to be defeated in every one of the original nine worlds, before EX-2 could be destroyed.
Leaflow stood watch over the body in brooding silence, while everyone else prepared for the jump.
“I didn’t think he liked Soleeryn much,” Lenny confided to Amber.
The girl shook her head, “I don’t think he disliked Soleeryn. He just does not like doctors, for some reason. But I think he feels partially responsible for her death.”
“Do you think his ‘random cures’ harmed her instead of doing good?”
“No, it’s not that. I asked him more about that and it wasn’t actually as random as he made out. That’s the thing with talking to Leaflow. He’s not a liar, but not everything he says can be taken how you think he means it.” Amber shrugged, fiddling with a length of her hair uncomfortably.
“So why--?”
“He showed her the Triple Grag originally, and was not able to use his mental abilities to stop the Power Core from making Soleeryn take her own poison, I guess. Ask him yourself if you dare.”
Lenny gave a pale grin. “No thanks.”
“I’ve got the world dialed in now!” Jax called out from his post at the Di-jump, urging them to get into their places. Once they were ready, he pushed the button.
A tingling sensation ran across everyone on the airship, something happened to the world and they were blinking their eyes open in a new place. This place was cool and moist, with the smell of green grass and dead leaves hanging in the air. Gazing around, Lenny saw that they were hovering just off the ground on the slope of a mountain. Behind them it rose up to a jagged line in the sky, topped with white snow. Cliffs, open, grassy slopes and clusters of deciduous trees spotted its sides, one group of trees nearby creating the dusky, moist-leaf scent in the air. In front of the travelers the landscape was split into two parts. On the right stretched open moorlands, varied only with gentle hills or clumps of scraggly brush and trees. To the left the earth sloped away into a valley, which seemed to be full of a thick, gray mist.
Everyone on deck stood looking over the moorlands and valley for a time, having moved up into the bows after tying off the wheel. The mist appeared untouched by purple corruption, though the grass of the moor was turning lavender at the roots as it did on taken worlds. The sky was an indigo more purple than it should have been. And floating in the air on the slope of the mountain behind them was another of the fissures in the sky, which pulsed and glowed so oddly. This one was bigger than the one they had seen over the ocean, though Lenny could not tell if it had a palace in its center as well, at such a distance.
“We must be on the far side of the Outland mountains she told us about,” Amber pointed out, sweeping a hand across the moorland. “Those must be the Outlands.”
“Yeah, so that’s the mist she came walkin’ out of when she was little, in her story,” Raggsy agreed, pointing towards the valley with one claw. “What a weird place to have been born. I wonder if her Mummy and Pa still live in there?”
“Probably not, if they never came looking for her,” Jax said wryly, “either that, or they weren’t worth staying with.”
“But maybe between the mist and grass is where she would want to be laid down for good.” Jackal stared out at the scene, eyes dark in their deep sockets.
The airship was gently piloted down to a flatter space of land where the grass just started to tip off towards the mists. Almost brushing the top of the long, soft blades, the ship was made to hover in space. There was no shovel or other digging tools aboard their craft. They let down the ladder and stepped onto the moorland, legs swishing through its purple-green cover. The earth underneath was soft, so they used sticks and knives and a large spoon from the kitchen to dig the grave hole, working in shifts so that they would not become too tired.
Soleeryn was lowered from the ship in a sling, wrapped in a spare blanket as a shroud. They carried her to the hole and lowered her gently into it, just a long, thin bundle covered in gray. The dirt was put back into the hole on top and no one knew what to say, at first.
Then Jax looked up and his eyes got wide. “The mist has come around us!”
Lenny followed his gaze and realized that, while they had been paying attention to the hole, the mist from the valley had indeed crept all around them. Now instead of standing under an open sky on the moorland, they were encased in a moist, gray fog. He could hardly see the members of the crew who stood at the head of the grave, the mist swirled between them so thickly.
“Does it always move this way in the evening, I wonder?” he muttered, because the sun had been near setting last time he had looked at it. But something told him that it did not. There was an uncanny feeling in the fog, as if something alive were pressing around them.
A sound came through the grayness, faint and drifting at first, and then growing more powerful. It was like music, but a wild, tuneless music which sounded almost like the wind in pine trees during a storm. High, then low, wailing and then sighing. It grew around them to an almost intolerable pitch, before abruptly falling into silence. At that moment they all became aware that someone else was there.