As Ellie escorted Drake outside and down onto the student docks, she considered, not for the first time, where Amelia was at that very moment and what might be happening to her.
The image of little Amelia sitting scared and alone in the hold of some infernal ship swam around her head like a craven Locust horde. Devouring all that entered its flight path, leaving her mental fields utterly barren of all necessary thought.
She damn-near cracked her own teeth trying to restrain the mighty dragon threatening to unleash its swelling inferno on Drake. Which she knew would be actively counterproductive.
Having his uniquely qualifying skillset and experience at their helm was their best hope for finding Amelia before the worst should come. But in order for that to be realized he first needed to be relieved of his self-inflicted emotional constipation.
While Ellie would have been one of the first to espouse the utility of fighting fire with fire when it came to instilling discipline, she understood better than most that a hot prod was about as much good for solving matters of the heart as a wet blanket for stoking a hearth.
Pyrates’ Fourth Rule: beating a Mule with the carrot or feeding him the stick are the best means of motivating him to cave in your skull.
Drake didn’t make a sound the whole way down the long, vacant hall. He just stared and marched straight ahead like an ancient Lovatian Legionary on campaign.
She shadowed him until they’d reached the exterior Penir door. The instant the unshielded night wind met her nose the infernal dragon she’d been fighting down finally broke free of its fettering chains.
She caught Drake by the elbow and slung him around to the side as though he forcibly pinning him against the wall.
She pulled back his hood with one hand while taking and lowering his muzzle with the other.
Drake may have been her Captain, but that wasn’t because she was without her own strength. They both knew, even if not on the level that they could express it, they wouldn’t have lasted this long as a couple, nor indeed she come this far in her own right as a Pyrate, were she just another tame, decorative damsel.
She took him firmly but gently by the hands, mostly to stop her own from shaking. She would follow on that proverbial Sparrow’s wings along his fabricated trail. Snatching this problem in its errant flight and snapping it in one powerful blow.
At least that was her intention.
What actually happened when their eyes met, the treacherous Eagle she met there snagged her naivete in wicked talons and snuffed it out under a metal heel.
Where she knew ought to be a pair of portals into a wild but bountiful woodland stood instead indomitable shields of emerald glass gleaming with tint streaks of wicked steel in the pale night’s glow. Baring a raging furnace of immeasurable fury and power.
Ellie had witnessed this kind of internal firestorm only once before.
It had scared her beyond reason then.
Seeing it now in Drake, the one beast in all the world for whom she would have battled an entire necrotic armada, made her want to curl up under the nearest cot, shut her eyes and never emerge.
She forced several long doses of air through her lungs. Such thoughts weren’t getting any of them anywhere.
Meeting a wall with a shield was a stalemate. Meeting a spear with another spear is a slaughter.
What this scene needed was a compassionate score. Not the kind shared by bonded brothers over tavern ale, but the only music a truly world-damaged heart could hear. The complimentary beat of another.
This here was mother’s work.
Using her own inner fire to scour away her lingering doubts and with the impregnable honeyed calm that had bought her the moniker “Momma Bear” she asked, “Drake, what’s really eating you?”
For what felt like an interminable Era he said nothing. He just stared at his boots, half snarling, half looking like he was about to hack up a hair ball.
She swallowed the draconic urge to strike out at what she considered the universal male handicap of internalizing a problem rather than allowing another beast to help share the load.
Seeing the latter was a conclusion he was clearly unlikely to come to on his own, she decided to coax him into it by inching their bodies closer and closer.
Knowing that subtlety of the heart did not come naturally to most males, and knowing her chosen mate was no exception, she told him very slowly and bluntly, “we’re doing everything we can. We’ll get Amelia back.”
She cocked her head to one side and offered truthfully, “you know, we never would have even realized she was gone if you hadn’t spotted …”
Drake took a deep sigh. He knew there was no getting out of this intervention. Not with Ellie at its helm.
He also knew that there was no diverting her. She had a mother’s eyes, to which all his rivers were glass.
With her there could be no deceit, no evasion, no obfuscation. Her heart was the spiritual version of the nexel cartridge in that it rendered his mental armor and shield obsolete.
And this was why she was the only one to whom he could or would ever have entrusted his.
With her there was no anger, no fear, no regret, no resentment, no retribution, no intolerance. There was only the simple, brutally honest truth shared between equals. A transaction facilitated by the kind of clear and unambiguous known only to those who have experienced love like a key perfectly tuned to the tumbler metrics of a masterfully crafted lock.
“It's my fault,” he said. His hands trembled to compensate for his inability to shake his head.
Spitting the words out like mouthfuls of rancid vinegar. He hated the way they made him sound like a child. Like a coward.
‘You’re a Pyrate dammit!’
And what was more, he was a Captain.
He couldn’t afford to be weak or soft, especially not now. Not when the life of one of his herd depended on his capacity to lead.
But still, within every word, every breath, he felt his very soul being torn to shreds until all that was left in its place was a pile of worthless sand.
He choked against the leash of his shame and tried to turn away, but Ellie held him fast. Seeing the beast she had believed unbreakable being torn in half dug the searing dragon’s teeth into her heart.
There were not words to describe how desperately she wanted to just curl up in his arms by the fire and fall into a blissful sleep.
But Flint’s Fifth Rule for Pyrates was very clear on this point: “what we want and feel is of no consequence. Ten thousand dreams never amounted to a single honest deed.”
Like it or not this was their cross to bear. If for no other reason than the Sixth Pyrate axiom: to each his own hand, to each other hand the next.
She needed their help. In order to provide that they needed their Captain properly fit and capable. For that he needed his full untainted spirit back.
She pressed on as smoothly and evenly as an oiled rifle action, “what’s your fault?”
Drake almost smiled. He’d never understood how she did it, and had long ago resigned himself to the idea that he likely never would, but Ellie had a way of drudging secrets out into the light regardless of the willpower being posed against her.
Her seeing him as this pathetically vulnerable husk struck at the very core of his pride, both as a Pyrate and as a male.
“I let them take her. I let them get away.”
Hearing his own words as though through from the mouth of another beast he despised, he ground his teeth as if in attempt to destroy them on egress.
He clenched his fists so hard his knuckles cracked—completely forgetting that her fingers were still entwined with his. She gritted her teeth against the pain but otherwise did not falter.
“I should have stopped her,” he snarled, more to himself than to her. “I should’ve been faster. I should’ve …” He cut himself off.
He knew he was being foolish and irrational. He knew Ellie’s next words before she’d even opened her mouth.
“You are many great things,” she said in a firm but quiet voice. “But you’re not a god. You said it yourself, she was bewitched.”
“I know that,” he barked, suddenly windless. “I just ...”
Ellie’s dread serpent lashed at her throat so that she sounded like an old Lice addict when she said, “you did everything you could. More than anyone else could have. And you aren't giving up. You're fighting.”
She flicked her muzzle back in lieu of a thumb. “You saw them back there. How eager they all were … are … to follow you, even before they knew where or why. How many beasts this side of Flint could have pulled that off? How many would have the heart to even try? Especially for a beast they’d just met!”
Drake tried to shake his head. This time out of sheer stubborn habit than willful defiance. But that infernal will’s light had finally left him. His eyes were clear and clean like a summer glade again.
Ellie’s black dragon tormentor reared back and howled as blades of sunlit joy lanced through its Abyssal scales. But Drake’s own inner daemon had fangs and claws too. And it wasn’t about to give up its host without a bitter and brutal fight.
“What good will it be if I’m too late?” he asked. “If we don’t…!” He cut himself off. His nobility and strength were fast regrouping, but they were still on the back foot.
“Don't say that,” Ellie scolded, driving her proverbial cavalry to the front to reinforce the new effort.
She distantly thanked Iradyl that Drake’s head was still too foggy to hear the tremor in the back of her voice, and that it hadn’t broken entirely. “We will find her.”
She omitted saying ‘whatever her condition’.
Drake didn’t hear her. He was lost in his own mental forest. A long moment of silence settled between them as portions of Avlon’s intro speech ran through Drake’s mind, and Ellie stood by in silent recognition of his epiphany.
He pondered first the extraordinary power of circumstances to so vastly alter one’s perceptions and understandings.
He thought on what he knew of senior Pyrates and how they might handle this situation.
He knew Prokvert’s attitude would start and stop with, “the curfew is there for a reason. Amelia knowingly broke the rules and now she must face the consequences.”
Avlon, he thought, would counter by saying something like, “if the price for every mistake is death no beast would ever learn anything. Then there’d be no point putting them in school in the first place would there?”
He then supposed that if old Captain Flint was still around his advice might have been something to the effect of, “that Runt chose to become a Pyrate didn’t she? Nobody forced her hand? If her will wasn’t hard enough to stand against a little ghostly charm, what hope would she have of holding her own in a pitched battle with the likes of Black Sky or Conshorta?”
This hit Drake’s ignition switch. The shield line of his will hardened, their metaphorical boot heels dug in.
He was neither Captain Flint nor his protégé. One of Flint’s most abhorrent aspects, in Drake’s eyes, had always been his borderline sadistic sense of tough love.
Straightening, he finally looked at Ellie. He knew she was right, as she most often was about these things. All of them were doing their best and going as fast as any beast reasonably could.
Whether or not they were in time, whether or not all their plans and preparations held as much water as a broken sieve were irrelevant. This was their decision, to a beast. Their path was their own. That was the Pyrate’s way.
She didn’t care if he saw her tears. “You won’t let anything happen to her. I know it.”
Her dragon was dead. But it had left its sordid mark.
“Every road leads two ways.” The original source of that oft-cited and even more often paraphrased quote had been subject to fierce academic debate for centuries.
However, its meaning was well known and comparatively straightforward.
Every night has its dawn. Every coin has two faces. Every torch casts a shadow. Et cetera.
Drake had always, and would always continue to take the heaviest burdens upon himself. Whether he was asked to or not. Whether they were indeed his to carry or not.
It was his greatest virtue, or so Avlon had often said. It was what had first drawn her to him, oh so many seasons ago. Though, in retrospect, it really hadn’t been that many. Less than five months ago they had passed the world’s most stringent legal age barrier for matrimony on Aevon.
Even Ellie’s fearsome father, known to most beasts as the legendarily ruthless pirate Blackbeard, respected Drake enough to not impale him outright when the two had met briefly during their first semester hiatus.
Whether this actually owed to Drake’s perceived courtship worthiness or because Ellie was the only beast Blackbeard cared enough for to worry about what irreparable damage live-spit-roasting her swain would do to their relationship was known only to the “Scourge of the Nine” himself.
Regardless, his self-sacrificial nature would be the death of him one of these days if Prokvert’s many warnings were to be counted as credible.
If pressed hard enough on this front he would undoubtedly have prattled off some crap about it being “for the greater good”. What was worse was that, in his truest heart, she knew he would mean it.
More than anything, the thought of traveling that fateful road to its end terrified Ellie. Not just because her mother had died on a Raider’s blade when she was around her current age. Although that played more than a token role in the equation.
At that time Ellie had been too small to even comprehend where her mother had been taken off to, let alone feel sorrow at or avenge her untimely passing.
After her first combat exercise at the Academy, during which she had taken on and nearly beaten three senior students, each at least once again her size, the Headmaster had remarked that she’d had raw grit, spirit and will enough to weld the Continents back together.
To which Old Iron Hide had concurred in his way. Adding that all she wanted for was the reach.
Against her soothing embrace his heart’s crucible walls melted. “I’m not giving up. I just …”
“What?” Ellie pressed.
“Something Avlon said once,” Drake said, suddenly finding something on the floor extremely interesting. “About the burden of command. He said that when a beast under your command dies you’re haunted by their ghost forever.”
Ellie picked his chin up. She could see within him the remaining fire being held in check by a single thought, one unbendable thread of light.
“We haven’t ever lost anyone yet,” she blurted automatically. “And you won’t.”
She inclined her chin just far enough so that her next words were focused directly into his ear. “That's what we have these for,” she said with a light tap on her mace and an implied impish grin.
Implied, only because her lips were, at that very moment, otherwise occupied. Releasing her hold on restraint, she’d allowed a brief but intense taste of that cozy, familiar fire to seep through her skin and warm her blood.
She savored the intensity of his barely bottled fervor as it rushed through her, setting her nerves alight like a hot wind over dry reeds. She almost literally jumped when its current laced through her heart like a shot from a recoilless chase gun.
All too soon reality came crashing back down on them, as all paradoxes are wont to do. Past and future became disparate entities from the present only when she took an imperceptible step backward.
“I've always admired that in you,” she breathed. The words misting slightly as they hit the air. “Even before I really knew you.”
She drove the galvanized lances in her eyes through him. “Your willingness to throw yourself into fire for others.”
Lacing her fingers behind Drake's strong, muscular neck, she held his chin up with the backs of her thumbs. From Drake’s still hazy perspective, Ellie might have been speaking with the Mother Goddess’s voice when she said, “you would fight the world for your friends. And we all love you for it.”
She pulled his face in and rested her forehead gently against his and whispered, “me especially.”
He half-braced himself with the heels of his palms against her shoulders then he whispered, “I'm not my brother. If he were here, he would …”
“He's NOT,” Ellie snapped. She seized upon his scruff and pressed his forehead into hers as if trying to literally, physically force her point into his brain.
“You are. And you ... are ... not ... alone! You have me. You have us! You have your herd. And we are not going to let Amelia go without a fight!”
She loosened her grip. Drake didn't move. The hanging cloud of doubt over his mind broke apart. A ray of pure sunrise shone through the abyssal dark. In whose eye was pictured the truth of just how right he had been to choose Ellie as his Quartermaster.
“You don't have to prove anything to anyone Harold.”
This startled Drake out of his daze. It had been a long time since any beast had called him by his first name outside of a formal address. The last time he could recall hearing Ellie use it had been three summers ago when he’d nearly started a fight over the price of a mango. Through to this day she’d never believed it had been a simple linguistic twist up.
“You've met ghosts before. How many alive can say that?”
A thin smile slowly slithered onto his face like an old scar being unveiled. He came just short of voicing the fact that he’d never actually fought one of his father’s netherite brood before. Aborting course on the sole basis that she had a legitimate point, if a slightly underinformed one.
The number of beasts who had actually witnessed and lived to tell about the necro planal denizens were few and far between. Sir Francis and his favorite heir had seen personally to that.
But on the other hand he knew for as sure as he knew he had two hands that if Ellie knew the whole extent of his experience with the paranormal, or if anyone, including the Headmaster for that matter, had ever gleaned so much as the foggiest insight into what sorts of vile, despicable, wholly and utterly depraved evil he’d been a partner to in his youth they would have turned on him as quickly and as utterly as his onetime mentor had. And frankly he wouldn’t blame them. In fact he hoped they would have enough Pyrate character to cut him down on the spot.
Thoughts on this front quickly dragged him down to the lowest pits of Tartarian loathing. The frigid depths of that infernal valley’s shadow froze his nuclear Magnolsis chamber of a heart into glass. Which already threatened to crack open the fresh mold Ellie had just spent so much of her intractable magick to build for it.
‘Get a grip you saarding coward!’ his rallied inner general roared. ‘What was and could be are immaterial! What will be is up to you! Your father’s own words.’
That was true. His life was his to foretell now, thanks in no small measure to the Flint Pyrate Academy.
He shut his eyes. Sparks flew where should have been blackness.
He drew in air tinged with smoke through his nose and excised a long breath that tasted of sulfur and acid.
He owed it to the Headmaster to save his goddaughter. He owed it to Amelia to not let her pay for his family’s mistakes. And he owed it to himself to not let all the hard work and faith Ellie et all had invested in him go to waste.
He opened his eyes. Ellie blinked. A steady flame burned amidst pine and woodland prairie. Her Captain was back.
Her tears came freely. He brushed them off and took of her what only the gods themselves were thought to have to give.
After that brief but bright pulsar of a farewell they resumed their respective duties with a freshly kindled fire in their spirits and a corresponding spring in their steps.
Drake went out to inspect the ship which he somehow felt absolutely certain would already be signed out and getting prepped for launch. Though for the life of him he couldn’t think what made him think so.
Meanwhile Ellie went back to the supply quarter to collect Bon Bon. Having just recalled they’d left her there slaving over inventory sheets to keep her mind out of her personal drama tub. At least until they were away.
Perhaps the most oxymoronic aspect of Bon Bon’s entire character was that she had a head for abstracts and figures that was nearly on the level with Tim’s. Were it not for her pandemonious nature she may have had a promising career shot in one of the three cranial fields.
As it was, she would have been lucky to hold down a job as a stock clerk were she not a part in Flint’s foreign legion. And that would owe more to her sheer biological magnetism than any of her technical merits.
Ellie considered now how many ghosts she would be willing to fight bare-handed to not have to be the one to tell.
She consoled herself with the hope that Bon Bon, as per her usual M.O. when faced with tasks she didn’t want to do, had gotten bored and had just left to do some last-minute training exercises or simply gaze up at the stars.
One had to wonder what Bon Bon saw when she looked up at that infinite spread of microscopic pinholes of ancient light.
Drake was treated to a genuine shock when he arrived at the Zenward docks and found Headmaster Avlon standing outside on the narrow boardwalk.
He was decked in his full and proper station’s attire. Autumnal robes wafting in the early breeze conversing by a flickering lantern with a mountain-goat that Drake couldn't recall ever laying eyes upon.
‘Uh-oh’ was Drake's first and only thought as his feet brought him into hailing, then further into barking, and finally into talking range.
The Headmaster didn't come down to the student docks on a whim. Much less in the middle of the night.
It had, until that very moment, somehow flown over Drake’s head that he’d completely neglected to inform Avlon about why they were in so desperate a hurry to commandeer a ship or why he felt it so urgent to do so at such an unusual hour.
But it didn’t really surprise Drake that Avlon had discovered them. Avlon wasn’t the same dictatorial taskmaster that his brother was.
Contrary to what his general disposition suggested, he was as much a bleeding heart as a Magnolsis Godard Stone.
Unlike his brother and their mentor, Avlon’s perceptions often seemed to border on the supernatural. Trying to keep an operation like this from him, within his own domain, would have been like trying to keep the stars from fading at first sunrise.
Avlon had his back to Drake. He was speaking in a soft, hushed voice, barely above a whisper. Even Drake’s Canid ears had trouble picking out more than isolated syllables amidst the pervasive background clatter.
As he drew up on them, the old Pyrate turned and greeted him with a smile and a mechanically polite “good morning” then went on conversing with the Oreamnos as though the younger Captain were a mere construct of air.
Drake elected not to intrude. No sense inviting a wild wyntyrdyr into his house when it was perfectly content to romp in someone else’s.
As he made to walk past them, however, Avlon beckoned him over. The Headmaster pulled Drake in close, so they looked like two children huddled together trading secrets on the schoolyard.
“I know your mission, and believe me I've no intention to stop you,” the silver-maned Collie said. “But I would offer you a few words of caution.”
If Drake weren't already on high alert, he certainly was now! Avlon was not a beast given to bouts of fretful doting, at least not when it came to his students. Nor was he the type to offer pointless or hollow sendoffs like “be careful” or “keep your weapons handy”.
If Avlon had thought for a moment that any Pyrate needed to be told not to try fighting partial-residents of the eternal kingdom with only their bare teeth and fists he would have shuttered the whole Academy, written it off as a failure for the ages and retired to one of the several private islands he was rumored to possess decades ago.
Whatever was on Avlon’s mind warranted his personally coming down to the docks in the middle of the night, and it would be behoove them all greatly to take his words as though they were holy text.
“It has come to my attention that some of our local fence sitters have taken a curious interest in your quarry.”
Drake bit back a foul curse that would have made Blackbeard blush.
“Fence sitter” was Academy slang for a Conshorta freelancer. What with their constant habit of buzzing around the Great Border Wall like fleas orbiting a mangy street wiler.
Whenever they stuck their greedy punk noses into anything anywhere things tended to spiral off into a maelstrom of bad news in record order. If they’d somehow gotten wind of this their odds of catching the ‘Sleepless Giant’ would drop through the Harvest Lands.
And should the Armada get involved, as they were oft wont to on Conshorta’s behest, Amelia’s chances of rescue would soon be banging on Drachyn’s door.
With all but the most superficial trace of a militaristic clip scrubbed clean from his voice, Drake asked, “how do you want us to handle it?”
Outwardly, the Headmaster was implacable. He stroked at his long white beard and allowed his eyes to wander freely over the rows of tightly moored ships “acquired” over the years by students and then “donated” back to the Academy upon their graduation for training and grant mission purposes.
“Our sentinel garrisons can intercept and cordon anything that lot can send our way,” he said distantly. “And I’ll rally a flight squadron to see you safely to the Imperial border.”
Drake let out a relieved breath and almost had his mouth open to thank him before Avlon held him up with a finger.
“That said,” the old master continued very slowly in the manner of one indicating a conspicuous trail of breadcrumbs, “I expect you all to hold to our Academy’s standards for excellence. Whatever you find out there.”
A venomous film coated these final words. His sky blue eyes had turned abruptly sharp. The mind behind them as clear and precise as a glass blade.
Drake comprehended and assented with a mockingly exaggerated military salute. A deliberately crude imitation of the ludicrous heel-clicking, chest-pumping, arm-waving formalities cherished by the likes of Armada drones and Conshortan brats.
“Yes sir,” he said. His derisive intent betrayed only by the slight ruffling of an exaggerated accent flaring the arc of his r.
“Good,” Avlon said with matching underpinned mirth.
“Now I expect you still have much to do, so I’ll trouble you no further.”
The Headmaster turned to head back up inside but stopped at the edge of the first step as if snagged by an invisible hook.
For a few moments he stood motionless. Only a veteran fighter could have sensed the subtle articulations of muscle and tendon beneath the robes. The sign of either an indecisive traveler at an unfamiliar crossroads or a trained alpha predator steeling himself for combat.
Thankfully there was no violence to follow. But the hint plus the razor clip in his voice when he at last spoke set Drake’s well-tuned battle faculties on emergency standby.
“One last piece of advice son,” the Headmaster said over his shoulder. His use of the para familiar term ‘son’ further priming Drake’s captive anxiety. “Something Flint once said to me that I think you’ll find especially resonant in your journey; beware the False God.”
Drake was about to ask what in the name of some-rude-and-possibly-blasphemous-expletive that was supposed to mean, but Headmaster Avlon was already gone before Drake could even settle on the right expletive.
He shook it off, remembering his errand. They needed a ship. He was going to look and feel pretty stupid if the girls and Crow showed up with carts full of their supplies and he didn’t have a hold ready for them to stock yet.
He snatched the nearby lantern from its rest and fast-marched with it down the winding old wooden steps to the quay. Upon reaching the first corner he struck an immediate right toward the Shipmaster’s quarters.
Before he’d gotten halfway to the longhouse he stopped dead. His procured light glancing upon a glinting sliver of silver jutting from a mooring post which a closer look revealed to be one of the Headmaster’s Punch Marques.
At a glance it appeared like any ordinary carpentry nail. That is unless one paid it any amount of nearsighted attention, at which point would be revealed the cross peened block at its middle, the pinched neck space right below the head tied with black cord, and the abstract representation of a snarling wyntyrdyr skull etched into the rounded top.
Drake let loose a low whistle. The last time he knew of one of these being issued had been a few years before he’d enrolled. They were a privilege exclusive to the Headmaster. A stark symbol of his executive command authority. Typically only employed in the gravest of emergencies, their most general his personal commandment of a given vessel along with its crew, Captain, cargo and any other associated assets.
Drake took a step backward. Directing his lamp light up, he thought back on his and Avlon’s conversation. There could only be one explanation for the totem nail’s presence here. This was to be their charge craft.
And what a beautiful charger she was too.
A War Sloop, if Drake’s categorical memory served him well. A long, sleek razor crest of a craft with a silver and black painted hull. Designed purposely to be light on the draft, she had a limited cargo capacity and was therefore not suitable for long voyages.
But it was faster than a Praetor Raptor according to open sourced word of mouth. Which any savvy Captain knew better than to take as gospel.
However, reputational exaggerations for the sake of market capital notwithstanding, what stood beyond dispute was its ample, if not overqualification, as a chase and capture vessel in every respect.
Which was only to be expected as the sloop line in general had been the favorite of classical pirates for at least five or six decades by the time the Academy’s first foundational blocks were being quarried. And the “War” variant had been Flint’s new Pyratical take on the design model.
Increasing the length from just fifteen meters to nearly fifty, when all other dimensions grew proportionately, allowed room for engineers to boost its lousy effective range, storage space and firepower. As well it offered leeway for further modification to weapons compliment, armor configuration and equipment loadout.
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In short, it was a light, nimble, versatile craft that perfectly encapsulated everything upheld as exceptional in the concept of Pyracy.
Its steeply angular prow tapered into the streamlined midsection, giving the ship a keen dagger-like appearance from this angle. Aloft it carried a pair of twin masts, each one sporting four glittering triangular sails.
Twin knife-shaped vector-net fins which functioned as vectoral controls as well as polarized the ionic discharges from off the Abyssal corona flanked the stern just ahead of the four main engines.
By drawing the otherwise corrosive particles away from the ship’s vulnerable underbelly and converting them into second stage charge they served as the backup generators for essential systems. Mainly the lofting field generators. Which, as the name somewhat alluded, kept the distinctly non-buoyant tubs of metal and wood from plummeting into infernal oblivion. As well as acting as electrodynamic wing foils generated via the ionic “wind’s” intercourse with their statically polarized surfaces.
Which had the additional benefit of letting them serve as rudders or emergency stabilizers in those particularly desperate circumstances where the main gyro-line jammed or was disabled by a cannon shot.
Like their lateral counterparts atop, these fins also served a dual role as high-electrical conduits. In more popular terms: lightning rods.
This being as much a boon as a necessary safety feature for countering the fierce lightning storms that raged over the open Abyss. This intrinsic multifunctionality being another sparkling gem in her polished Pyratical crown.
Poetic sects had called these the quintessential expression of both Pyracy and magick. Turning nature’s impersonal fury into a servile instrument of progress.
Normally these features would all be stowed away at the dock. The sails corded and stashed within the ships armored body. Their rods retracted by a series of gyros.
But this morning she stood proudly unfurled, her sails and engines already primed and ready to make windway. All she needed was a capable series of hands to guide and pilot her.
Despite its relatively light frame as far as warships went, being a Pyrate ship meant that, from bow to stern, her vantablack hull was rich with armor and bristling with weapons.
As per Pyratical standard, in so far as the liberal mass standardized anything, her primary armament consisted of eight 100mm “Medium” Bombadard carriage guns evenly distributed about her waist, four per side, and eight “Light” 50mm guns spaced out along the deck and hull.
All of which were installed in biaxal turret bays and pods which were remote controlled from a pair of nested nerve cells just aft of her sensory forecastle.
An array of quad-bore volley guns and hex-barreled rotary turrets accented her deadly physique. About a mixed dozen lined the gunwales and half again as many dotted the side planks. The latter sect being attached in remote hard points, though unlike the main guns these could be overridden if more direct fire control was deemed necessary.
In the bow and aft quarters a pair of 105mm and 50mm Chester8 chase guns bracketed the bowsprit and rudder jig respectively like the jutting horns and lethal tail spines of the mythical Prehistoric prey beasts.
Would any of these so much as bother a ship that shouldn’t even be their company in the sky to begin with? Doubtful. But then, supernatural hunters the original designers of these crafts and systems were not. Nor were the foes they had long cultivated their arsenals to combat nearly so foreign as this one’s destined prey.
Case in point: Conshorta. The single largest and most prodigious paramilitary force on the planet, both in terms of raw territorial scope and resources.
But as ruthless and chaotically lethal as their agents were, all were still as fully susceptible to death by Rapid Cranial Decompression as anyone else.
All that said, even the undead were a known quantity compared to this False God the Headmaster mentioned.
In all of Drake’s esoteric and exoteric education, and even throughout his limited personal study, he’d never come across such a reference.
But between this sturdy boat as their ferry, Tim’s Nulls as their sword and his inexpert expertise as their nav beacon, all sarcasm notwithstanding, Drake actually harbored a small kernel of optimism.
He reached to take the Punch Totem from its burrow and noticed that what should have also been there wasn’t. The ship’s certificate. It should have been tied in the Totem’s cord, but was missing.
Drake looked around. Nothing.
He scanned the ground with the lantern. Still nothing.
Had Avlon forgotten to leave the certificate? It didn’t seem the sort of mistake the Headmaster was liable to make.
But then, he was getting a bit long in the tooth …
A new voice trickled into his ear. Punching into his hallowed mental orchard like a felled star.
A short reem of words, one of whose meaning broke through as his own name, dutifully hacked its way through the abstract jungle of his tired brain to spin the motor receptor valve which brought his head, and by near extension his eyes, into track line with the upending vocals.
The strange Oreamnos to whom Avlon had been speaking standing, apparently waiting for him, at her helm. The trim-bearded Kid waved and held up a square slip of parchment with a dark splotch in its center.
Drake couldn’t make out much of his face in the clouded gloom, but his posture and tone suggested, not quite pleasure, but pleasant familiarity. Which was odd. For as far as Drake could recall he hadn’t seen this beast before five minutes ago.
Well … maybe he’d glimpsed him once around the Second Sun festival … And maybe they’d passed ways near Tim’s lab once … ? Maybe it was one of Tim’s friends? That would certainly make him a beast worth getting to know. As if his being onboard their ship wasn’t already reason enough …
Drake had just enough time to register the Goat’s next belted words, “at your back Captain!” before nearly being shoved off the way by what felt like a fleshy boulder.
He’d hardly had a chance to recapture his bearings when a familiar rude voice clapped right into his ear, “get outta the road ya blinkin’ idget!”
Drake absently stepped aside as Tim slipped past him with a heavy steel strong box under one arm and a faintly glowing satchel slung over the other with Steve the Skull floating along in front acting as a combination lighthouse and horn.
“Hey Steve!” Drake called. “Congrats on your new wings!”
Steve opened his mouth to answer but Tim beat him to the punch. “I was experimenting with a nexel when I discovered that they produce a kind of repulson field when compressed. Synching one with Steve’s core matrices and rigging it to a liaison pod was relatively trivial.”
Steve shuddered indignantly.
The irony of how such terms as or relating to ‘simple’ signified humility when applied to oneself but were considered passive aggressive when describing anyone else was, ironically, the only part of this whole exchange that wasn’t totally lost on Drake.
Likewise the irony of the Canid Captain’s confusion only not being lost on Steve was his alone to cherish. And it was only compounded by him trying to explain things in this wise, “you’ve heard of getting your sky legs Captain? Well, now I’ve got a ship’s legs … so to speak.”
Drake momentarily considered grappling with this further, but let it drop. The same way an Oreamnos chooses his mountain footholds with great diligence and care, so too a wise Captain knows where best to place his cognitive resources.
As far as Drake was concerned, that meant solving practical problems such as getting this ship loaded up and her crew seated ASAP. After all, bending his brain over arcane science problems was Tim’s specialty.
In any case Steve seemed happy. Ecstatic, in fact, was more accurate.
He did an oblong loop de loop and chirped, “how great is this?! I’m not stuck on some saarding shelf anymore! Ha Ha! Barking brilliant!”
Drake smiled blankly and gave them both the signal to head aboard.
He then aimed the lantern’s beam where the duo had come from and spied Adrian and Bon Bon coming down the steps hauling another large crate filled with several large sacks.
Behind them, not as much seen as inferred from the disorderly counterplay of their shadows, came Crow. He hefted a pair of line and wire spools the size of metric water barrels. Each of which, Drake noted absently, would have balanced a scale with an adolescent Bison.
The only thing that surprised the young Captain was that, when he checked the registration packet tacked to the mooring post, the ship had already been signed out to him.
No doubt Avlon had something to do with that. But who had co-signed the registration?
He’d have to remember to speak with the Headmaster or Yard Master about that if … when they got back, he remanded himself.
It was all well and good they had a ship that was suited to their task, but he couldn’t abide some beast strutting about impersonating him, even if it was on Headmaster Avlon’s authority.
Drake shrugged these thoughts off like a thick blanket on a hot summer night, when out of the corner of his eye, he spied Ellie cautiously feeling her way down the steps with Hemlock behind her doing the same. Both girls were struggling painfully with crates of green Nulls stacked precariously over their heads.
Without any precognition or intention of moving, Drake blinked and found himself at his paramour’s side, relieving her of part of her burden. In the flick of a mosquito’s tongue, he glanced over and saw Crow taking some of Hemlock’s load upon himself.
Like a paranormal clockwork organism they inhabited, possessed, loaded and readied their ship for cast off in the time it would have taken Drake to fill out the registration forms had Avlon not nullified that procedural step.
Drake almost felt bad for Avlon. Knowing as well as the Collie that his brother would never let such a flagrant abortion of covenantal bureaucracy go unchallenged. But as it stood, Drake would have been more inclined to pity Prokvert, were it not for how easily his sympathy for the statist mutt could have fit into a matchbox without even slightly displacing the full original garrison of matchsticks.
While the final systems checks were being completed, Drake and Ellie ducked into their seminal home’s hold to check off their inventory receipt for final deposit with the Yard Master. Which he would then copy in triplicate and further distribute to the Academy’s Quartermaster, Treasurer and Head Secretary.
All going well, this would happen several hours after they’d put a horizon between them and the island.
Drake read off the parchment, “rope?”
Ellie replied curtly, “check.”
“Sails?”
“Check.”
“Hooks?”
“Check.”
“Poles?”
“Check.”
“Arms?”
“Check.”
“Ammo?”
“Check.”
“Sundust?”
“Ch … Uhhh…”
Ellie swept a keen eye about the space. Packed with surgically neatness in a cultivated pattern into every cubic inch were food sacks, water kegs, bed rolls, spare cord, rope and wire spools, piles of spare sail cloth and patches, medicine and surgical supply satchels and neatly arranged tool pouches.
But nowhere did the cylindrical steel cages of the compact reactive fuel rods needed to drive the ship’s hungry reactors present themselves.
Drake rolled his eyes and was instantly glad for their being in the dark. Ellie put her hands on her hips. Her thoughts clearly going the same way as his.
Without fuel they might as well all just go straight back to bed.
Almost within the same heartbeat, both Canines realized that they couldn’t recall seeing the Blunder Twins since their herd’s initial gathering in the gatehouse.
To say they weren’t slightly tempted to shrug and say, “to the gods their play”, or to think that they wouldn’t rather be sawing the fins off a Leviathan than dealing with the L’Olonnais brothers’ antics would be in the same sphere as the belief that either of them seriously entertained the notion of flapping their arms to fly to Naarfynder and literally, physically beating the ghosts back into the underworld with wooden mallets.
But experience had taught them both that inaction was often as dangerous as thoughtless reaction where, when and however the Blunder Twins even might be remotely concerned.
With precious seconds ticking threateningly away, Drake took off in search of their walking destructive devices. Leaving Ellie informally in command as Standing Captain.
He moved room to room, systematically searching empty halls and dormant towers and even scouring the Walk from Apheler to Penir, Zenith to Nadir. All of which yielded naught but frustration.
He checked the dorms. Nothing.
He looked out on the range. Nada.
He even checked in Tim’s lab. He couldn’t have said what he’d have done if he’d actually found them skulking around in there. But thankfully for them the lab appeared entirely too quiet and peaceful to contain a single chaos singularity, let alone two.
This was a real problem.
Comfortably under the max bar of Amelia’s height and weight class they may have been, but stealthy they most certainly were not. Nor were they the disloyal type. Though they were notoriously prone to distraction.
Combined with the circumstances and their established propensity for collateral damage, their conspicuous absence worried him even more than that of the missing fuel rods.
His frustration exponentially mounted towards fear as his narrowing search continued to turn up nothing.
As he passed through the fuel storage silo, he discovered at least a dozen empty cannisters strewn about, as if a weather had passed through.
‘Two fronts’ Drake’s disgruntled sub-mind corrected. ‘A cyclone.’
Drake sighed. Righting the wreckage out of pure habit before leaving. stormfronts on legs with so little regard for protocol they would sooner cart the volatile fuel out to the ship by hand rather than having to return the storage containers to their proper places afterwards.
Hope now brimmed over the bleak curtain of dread that had previously fallen over his thoughts. His heart drummed hard in his ears like the report of an angry volley gun as he ran back to the quay to confirm his theory.
Upon reaching the top of the quay-ward steps he discovered, to his relief, that the ship was ready to cast off, and Ellie was waiting for him at the bottom of the stone flight.
Optimism blossomed into a squall of exuberant relief inside him. It showered the furnace of his anger, quelling its blistering rage down into a manageable simmer.
For the first time in what felt like years, but he knew couldn’t have been more than a few hours, he took a full and free breath. As though a window to his dark, self-made prison had been cracked open.
He allowed himself a moment to revel in this sweet respite. Suspecting his time to enjoy it would be severely limited. Euphoria had not completely robbed him of his sense.
He was right.
Having detected no trace of either the Twins or their Sundust regimen but being fresh out of places to look, he’d cobbled together a new stratagem on the way back to the shipyard.
Maybe if he got the rest of the herd in on the search one of them would see something in this mess he’d missed.
It was a slim hope, but it was better than wasting more time chasing his tail.
He’d just mounted the first steps down to the quay when, by the thin cracking light of dawn he caught the distinct glimmer of golden fur at the bottom step.
With admirable reserve he noted the haunted look on her face as he drew nearer. In the flickering yellow glow of her lantern Ellie appeared to have aged a decade in the span of a single hour.
The young Captain braced himself for the worst.
“What's wrong?” he asked autonomously when he’d closed to within earshot.
Bottoming out the stairs was when he finally saw the crumpled scrap of parchment she clutched as if it were the last remnant of a dear departed relative.
Silently, and from at what seemed an infinite distance of thought, Ellie handed over the sheet as though handing him his own signed death warrant.
Drake skimmed the single line of neatly handwritten script. Absently placing the formulaic penmanship as a product of Tim’s hand.
46.42º Nadir/ 86.57º Penir, Nadwest, 135.66º
His blank look was his question. Her answer was another slip of parchment produced from seemingly out of thin air held out for his inspection. He recognized it instantly as being the one he’d given her just two nights ago under the clock tower.
He passed an absent eye over the newly scrawled series of numbers then turned back to Ellie the same questioning eye. “I just got that from Tim,” she said dryly. “It’s The Giant’s projected sunrise heading.”
Without a moment’s hesitation Drake whirled and started towards the ship, but Ellie caught him with one arm.
He looked back to see her holding up the parchments as though they were his nearly forgotten wallet.
“Read both sets of numbers again,” she said with the repressed urgency of one trying to allude to a fatal disease.
He did. Afterward, he met her eyes with the same cold, unreadable countenance he had seen from her only moments ago.
The coordinates were an exact match.
“Where did …?” He stopped short when the words “projected sunrise heading” finally found and fell into its place in his mental puzzle. Rendering the question redundant and its attendant thought chain obsolete.
His eyes glassed over. From the outside it would appear that a dozen years had suddenly and mercilessly piled on him like he’d just issued a vulgar blaspheme.
“The Blunder Twins,” Ellie said, placing a habitual hand on her hip. The hollow dreg in her voice burned away before the heat of recalled irritation.
If there was one way to dredge Ellie out of a graveyard slump, it would seem, it was to bring the Blunder Twins back into her field of thought.
“They came back and gave it to me a few minutes after you’d left. Jerome said they'd stolen it from Bon Bon. Who, in turn, told me that she took it from Hemlock. Who claimed she got it from Steve to give to me. Who said Tim had forgotten about it but he thought it looked important.”
Drake and Ellie stared at each other for a while with perplexingly adorable expressions of befuddled bemusement. Under less urgent circumstances, they might have shared a laugh or Ellie would have wrapped him in her arms, cuddling him like a small child as she had taken to doing when they’d first started seeing each other seriously.
As it was, this coincidence of fate signified a larger game at play than any of them initially suspected.
“How did …?” Drake started again.
This time Ellie cut him off. “I tried for hours to make headway on that bloody Codex thing you gave me,” she lamented. “But I couldn't. So I took it to Tim and made him swear to come straight back to me with any progress. Obviously I didn’t enunciate that part clearly enough.”
This was too convenient. A pair of roads leading to the same eventual endpoint, Drake knew from years of study under a prolific seer who had trained him to spot the difference between real coincidence and a pattern.
Though his master had made clear the point that the simple existence of patterns in the universe did not in itself signify intelligence, he knew also that the vast majority didn’t arise by pure random chance.
Something about this whole ordeal stank like a rotten corpse. The problem was he couldn’t figure out just how or where the pieces were misaligned.
All he knew for sure was that an instinct that had yet to steer him wrong had spectrum-shifted this whole mess into the infrared and it was glaring with the thermal intensity of a thousand suns.
“Too hot for its mass,” to quote Nikodontus verbatim. “It’s an uncommon saying, even among the alchemists whose bygone members coined it. But it means that there are fractal spheres of the universe that we are unaware of. Dangers a thousand fold what your mind can encompass lurk in those depths, young one. Do you understand?”
At the time, being a naïve pup, Drake had answered with a definitive, “yes master.” But now he wasn’t so sure. About anything.
‘You know where your feet are’ his inner monologue interceded, ‘and your hand and your sword.’
He thought of Tim, so entangled in his labyrinthine mental palace that he’d have long ago misplaced his thumbs if he hadn’t crafted a literal second head to remind him to check in front of his wrists.
He looked down at the coordinates again. Two keys to the same lock. What were the chances?
The words “I should have thought of that” and “it probably took Tim all of ten seconds to crack” held fast on the back of Drake’s tongue. Awaiting his conscious signal to go ahead. But he wasn’t that tired of living just yet.
Realizing Ellie was waiting on him for a reaction, he instead plied her with the first whole question of the morning. “And the Sundust?”
Ellie answered with a curt nod.
Drake breathed. At last a spot of good news. Excellent.
“Then let’s go,” he said, shoving the parchments into his pocket and leading them back to the ship at a dead run.
Rushing up and over the gangplank at a blitz pace, Drake nearly toppled over Adrian as he bolted up the steps to the quarterdeck. Once he was secure at the helm station and Hemlock gave him the signal from the fo’c’sle, Drake bellowed, “all hands to stations! Make us ready!”
This was met with a resounding reverberance of “aye Captain”s. Even from the animus skull.
Within seconds, the ship became a hive-swarm of activity. Beasts were scurrying hither and to, moving with the kind of fluid precision and intensity that would have impressed even the strictest Imperial Admiral.
Tim slid nimbly down to the engine room. An impressive feat for one of his height and bulk, considering that the hold of a Sloop, even a War Sloop, was only six feet at the highest point. Making it a claustrophobic nightmare for beasts much larger than globally standard. Not to mention a strain on the thighs.
But Tim could be appreciably agile when the situation demanded it, and he made the contortionist maneuver with seemingly little effort. Also, as all beasts who knew him could readily attest to, he was by no measure claustrophobic.
If anything, he reveled in the relative solitude provided by the dark environment. It gave him plenty of time and a quiet place to indulge in his life’s two greatest passions: tinkering, and inventing. After all, it wouldn’t do for the herd’s blacksmith and chief engineer to let his skills at metalworking get rusty now, would it?
His was not always a perfect isolation, however. With Bon Bon serving as their cook and deputy ensign her duties often brought her into Tim’s tiny black box of a world. Or so her story typically went.
Though her windblown, impulsive nature might have made her an odd choice for the latter, her keen head for complex tables and figures more than made up for it in a pinch.
But her skills in the former were unparalleled at the Academy. Her ability to conjure up exotic, intoxicating and exotically intoxicating delicacies seemingly out of imagination space with only their utilitarian shipboard ration stocks to work with made her a favorite among crews and kitchen staff alike.
This creative genius on top of her beauty had led to her being lovingly christened “the Gourmet Witch” by the FPA’s Chief of Staff, one Miss Alexandria Ambrosia Hopkins. Miss AAH for short.
And though no amount of torture would have induced Tim to say so to any beast, he did, at times, actually sort of like Bon Bon’s spontaneously erratic company.
She may have had the attention span of a suns-struck moth, but her mind, and memory, were sometimes sharper than an obsidian razor.
This made her a superb lab assistant, when she wasn’t getting hopelessly distracted or “accidentally” mixing a beaker of carbonic acid with a flask of ammonia sulfate.
Tim and Adrian vividly remembered the last time one of her improperly calculated misadventures had frothed out of its beaker and had nearly eaten a washtub-sized hole in the floor before Tim had managed to neutralize it with a potion made out of, in his own words, “common bar soap, a dash of saltpeter and a pinch of sodium nitrate”.
Hemlock, by contrast, had earned her moniker solely for her meticulousness and patience. Traits found in every successful hunter since time immemorial. Traits that also readily lent themselves to her preferred stations as carpenter, cooper, seamstress and relief spotter.
Hemlock was also known for often sitting alone for hours in a meditative trance. Her focus was so finely tuned, it was said that she could split a candle wick with her throwing knife from twenty feet away. An impressive feat if true. One matched only by her chief comparison, the “One-Eyed Bandit”, Crow.
The Wolf was, at that very moment, nimbly scaling the mainmast with his bare hands. Where, at the very top, his unnaturally keen senses and impeccable aim would serve as their ship’s outermost fortress line.
A common misconception was that his feature position, the crow’s nest, was the source of his monosyllabic title. The actual truth was that no beast alive knew what Crow’s full or real name was, or if he even had one.
For most who knew him, a number countable by most species on their hand digits, they never asked and he never told. They had a means to address him and that was enough for all.
Adrian stood ready by the main mast terminal in his Rigger position. His responsibility mainly revolved around keeping and maintaining all the ropes, wires, circuits, gyros, and generally everything within the hard-to-reach nooks and crannies.
It hardly needs to be said that the Blunder Twins were the herd’s gunners and weapons specialists. They took their places at the fire control station while Drake took his at the helm with his Second in Flag position at the port gunwale.
The only station yet to be filled was that of Sailing Master. Whose standing station lay at the base of the quarterdeck just ahead of the helm.
Like most things of supreme interest and import, it looked crude and uninspiring at a glance. A circular brass table with glass top measuring around three feet at the center, it was anchored to the deck by a single titanium leg and four tungsten bolts.
The quarter section facing the foreward bore a thirty degree slope, which was impregnated with a dizzying array of buttons, knobs, keys and switches.
But all that was tertiary window dressing compared to its primary feature. Its artificial turquois sapphire top protected a complex topographical array of laser and plasma projectors.
When calibrated by the Chief Ensign, or the “Sailing Master”, depending on how much of his ancestry the Captain owed his station to, these would render a tri-dimensional scale model of the environment. The stream of data for which was collected and updated twice per second by an array of alchemical sensory nodules dispersed along the ship’s bowsprit, masts, sail yards, fin trusses, and raft beam.
Drake looked down at the nav station and saw an ambiguously familiar form hunched over it. The Oreamnos must have sensed the presence of suspicious eyes on his back, since he turned around in short order and gave Drake a melancholic salute and smile. Then he went back to his work.
Drake blinked and shook his head as if to throw off a persistent insect trying to roost in his ear.
That instinct warning about unrealistic correlation was back in force. Drake felt in his marrow that he knew this beast, or at least knew his face, from somewhere. But for some reason he could not nail down any specific details to attach it to.
It was like trying to catch smoke bare handed. Only not exactly. As regular smoke didn’t swim through purposeful hoops to evade capture. This mystery was more like a swarm of butterflies, only some were hallucinations and others weren’t.
And he didn’t like it.
Indeed, he couldn’t decide what part angered him more: the imprudence of the universe to just go and drop an invisible wall straight into his path, or his utter impotence to do anything about it.
‘Well, as Noah always said, when a razor won’t cut it, use an axe.’
He whistled and the Goat turned to silently regard him again. Drake then offered the beast a salute in the customary manner of all Pyrates.
Like all real codes and signals, its meaning was cryptic but straightforward. An offhand index finger aimed at his jugular meaning simply ‘be ye friend?’
The Goat’s reciprocating affirmative, the same hand’s thumb and forefinger pinching his own throat, was all Drake needed.
If Avlon trusted this beast enough to let him sign out a ship, then at least for the moment he could feel alright letting it stand.
There would be plenty of time for pleasantries once they were away and well on course.
Drake engaged the wheel hub’s drive circuits with a few neat strokes of the lever. Then he barked, “loosen sails and trim the prime valves!”
As Ellie watched him, shouting orders and just generally being their Captain, she was reminded sharply of just how short on years Drake really was. They all were.
A few seconds later, the ship’s powerful Magnolsis engines roared to life, shattering Ellie's daydream. She watched with pragmatic appraisal as Tim expertly dialed in the Sundust reactors, and Adrian skillfully guided the golden triangular sails into alignment. The whole affair, a seamless concert of technology and teamwork, played out in under a minute.
Through the near perfect blackness of the still overcast night, their sails glowed heavenly like a legion of distant flickering torch lights, as the high-yield Adamantium Corp fuel rig below drew power from their cosmic and solar absorption cells as well as the ionic field exciters in her fins.
The rest of the power it garnered from burning their reserve Sundust to power the ship’s two Sterlent generators.
This created enough power to excite the now super-heated Magnolsis core and focus the resulting explosive flare into a coherent surge, which blasted out of their aft burners with such tremendous force that the entire reinforced docking platform which they were foolishly still anchored to started to shudder and buckle under the strain.
“Someone cut those lines!” Drake shouted, managing to restrain a venomous curse at his own expense.
He’d been so focused on the broader mission that he’d forgotten Pyracy’s most understated rule: never touch anything you don’t know how to use or aren’t prepared to pay for.
There came three distinct loud POPs as the electromagnetic mooring clamps which anchored the vessel to the dock were sequentially deactivated. This was followed by a long, whining HISS as the ship’s internal hydraulic winches effortlessly retracted the cables into her belly.
At last, clear of any hinderances, the ship gracefully rose twenty feet as Drake expertly maneuvered them up and over the chaotic tangled mess that was the FPA's student shipyard. Drake had seen enough commercial and military shipyards to know that parts of each ship should not be overlapping.
Undoubtedly the result of letting unpracticed novices behind the wheel. Novices who, if their parking skills were any indication, would be better suited to the lifestyle of wild wyntyrdyr tamers than that of professional Abyss farers.
Once free from the litany of crowded hulls and lattice of sprits and fins, Drake sent down the command for Tim to “open throttle”. Then he shouted for the rest of his herd to “brace for speed!”
This proved to be an unnecessary order. Without having to be told, every hand onboard except for the Blunder Twins and Steve was inexorably drawn to a mast stave, a gunwale, or the nav table ... Basically, anything that was bolted down and could feasibly withstand the force of a full-grown beast's mass accelerated at three times the gravitational norm.
None of them needed to be reminded of the consequences of remaining unsecured.
Tim did as his Captain ordered. By the set tune of his talented fingers, the engines’ initial dull humming slowly opened into a seismic rumble then crescendoed to a mighty roar like a giant awaking from a slumber.
The whole ship trembled as, with magnetic shield and quantum pulsar spear, her tempered steel and alchemically braced tungsten heart fought to contain and direct the crystal star fuel’s unbound fury.
The horizontal tail silos ruptured the quiet night behind them, magnetizing the air and vectoring it into Galvan spurts of pale white plasma. On whose eerily billowing masses were cast both ship and crew into the enveloping dawn.
Meanwhile, from his sanctum vantage on his office balcony, intentionally obscured from outside via a sophisticated encephalographic field beneath the clock, the Headmaster watched them go with a familiar potion of pride, fear and shame framing his thoughts.
Once they had hit the first league marker, Drake personally cut the throttle to the minimum necessary to maintain headway. Leaving the ship to coast mainly on its own momentum, with only the most minute vectoring and trim controls allocated to the automated way marker.
The Oreamnos gave him the nominal thumbs up. He then relayed the okay to Tim to engage the Abraxas cycle.
A network of tubes, turbines and wires engaged at Tim’s command. Until the suns rose, they would channel the excess heat generated during the explosive takeoff to spin the six gyroscopic Sterlin wheels that ran the length of her keel. These were to top off her reserves until dawn broke and they could open sails and open throttle again.
All but the most critical systems, those being the lofting fields, secondary engines, and nav sensors, would be offline while the power systems recycled. That meant that, until the suns came up they were essentially adrift and defenseless.
But Drake could already see the pale streams of his escort squadron coming up from behind port and starboard. So long as there were that many guns and a Great Border Wall between them and the great unknown, Drake knew that he and his own were safe as houses.
That being the case he stepped away from the wheel and took few great heaves of breath to compose himself. Then he stepped up to the rail and looked out at the sleek black dagger of a craft he was commanding.
“If we pull this off it’ll be one for the histories” he thought. Then he scoffed at how he sounded like an addled pup who’d never so much as seen a ship up close before.
While he wouldn't become a legally recognized Pyrate Captain until he turned eighteen, he had headed enough missions already to know a good solid vessel when one was under his feet.
Her sails exuded a faint candle-orange pulse as their semi-organic composites worked to extract all the ambient energy they could from the environment, to recoup their massive recent expenditure.
They would have a much easier time of it in a few hours. The first sun’s coronal rays had already turned the cloud-strewn horizon into a bubbling scarlet blade.
Drake looked out over the calm vestiges of night and said out in his strongest Captain's voice, “nice job, all!” Which led to a dim round of whoops, mainly from afore.
A few minutes later he called in a less formal tone, “first watch! Any takers?!”
In what some more experienced officers might have interpreted as a textbook gesture of token solidarity to promote morale, Drake raised his own hand first. Just as the textbook predicted, a few others shot up shortly thereafter.
He knew his taking first watch wasn’t the wisest choice. If any beast was going to need their full rested wits at daybreak, he would be the chief candidate.
But he enjoyed these respotic moments being alone on a deck floating over the empty Abyss.
This, right here, was the Pyrate life’s premium face. The feeling of total, unabated freedom. That sublime sense, however illusional, of being able to go anywhere he wished. It reminded him of a much simpler, better time. A time when his imagination could and did take him either high above the stars or below the most infernal depths of the Abyssal miasma.
When he was a pup Drake had made many voyages across the endless expanse with his father and older brother.
The few, very few, good memories he had of his youth were the times when he’d felt truly at peace. Like he had finally come home.
But that was before his father had gone off on his ill-fated escapade into chaos. And also before Prokvert had come upon Drake alone, stranded and working for his keep in a dissolute tavern on one of the Tail Islands.
None but the Head Secretary himself could say what had compelled him to offer the scroungy pup a place at the FPA. But so far as the nascent Captain could see that life now seemed like it wasn’t even really his life anymore. It belonged to some other poor, lowly beast whose only joy was watching the suns set because it meant the escape of sleep.
Drake returned from his reverie as the herd dispersed. Some took their posts. Others retired to their beds for a few precious hours of shuteye. Drake turned his attention at last to Ellie, who had come to stand by his side at the helm.
“You should get some sleep,” he said as she took his hand in hers. “I’m gonna need you come the morrow.”
He was awake enough to be conscious of how deliberately she stroked his wedding finger.
He acknowledged this in his way. With a cocky half-smile and what he’d meant to be a hearty addendum, “it’s gonna be one saard of an adventure.”
She opened her mouth to protest that it was her Quartermaster duty to be on watch with her Captain. What came out instead was a long, drawn out yawn, after which she found herself devoid of strength enough to even argue. His smile broadened, and he nuzzled her cheek with his snout, as if he were a new father and she his little puppy.
She swooned theatrically, then kissed the end of his muzzle before trotting off below to her own welcoming bedroll.
Once she was gone, a loud thump from below jerked Drake out of his thoughts. He peered over the rail to see the Oreamnos Sailing Master lighting up his station’s holo-screen and carefully setting the needle on its peripheral compass.
“What's our course?” Drake asked. To which the new guy replied in a clipped, mechanical monotone, “fifty-three degrees nadirwest till we hit the Great Border wall …”
The Oreamnos checked a flashing readout on his table screen. “then a leeward drift to account for turbulence ... then straight through the Burgaal Depth until we reach Iradyl.”
Drake inhaled to inquire about their ETA, but the Oreamnos seemed to read his mind and answered before he had even finished formulating the question.
“Provided we have no border hang ups, and assuming fair weather conditions, I’d say we should peek over your dead island’s horizon by the third sunrise.”
Drake exhaled. That had been mostly what he’d expected to hear.
And, of course, by “border hang ups” was understood by both beast as, ‘if the Empire doesn’t invent a new cargo tax when they see our colors.’
These irregular searches were sometimes known to keep non-Conshorta or Imperial ships tied up for weeks or sometimes months. Drake briefly entertained the notion of blasting any Imperial ship that tried to board them. But then his higher faculties started working again.
“After that we have to skirt around the High Continent to Siril where we’ll resupply. Then it’s roughly another two-day journey at forty-five degrees Nadward past Phakathi …”
He paused and twerked his mouth into a mangled half-frown. “If your coordinates are right, that’s where we’ll hit Naarfynder.”
Drake squinted at him through the dim light. A whisper of recognition hung round the edges of his mind. It was like the fading memory of a dream.
But just like a dream, the harder he tried to bring the fuzzy images into focus, the looser his hold on them became.
This beast somehow knew Drake’s every word before he spoke it. He seemed to be allowing Drake to finish his sentences only as an act of professional courtesy.
“Do I know you?” Drake asked suspiciously.
Two words later his mind exploded as though the fluids in his brain had been flash boiled by a Harbinger sniper’s plasma beam.
“Name’s Jacob.”
For what was, yet unbeknownst to him, the second time that day, images like flurries of icy hail peppered his mind and turned his very bones into icicles. These images burned and twisted in his brain like a forge-hot nail under a blacksmith’s hammer.
“Jake!” he blurted.
His shock and shame and fury over forgetting his best mate burned hotter than the Magnolsis reactor core. It also conveniently blinded him to the fact that his outburst had caused his voice to crack.
Was this periodic memory loss new? It wasn’t unique to his mind, Drake had seen that. And why was it only centered around this one beast?
It had to be magick. That was the only explanation that made any sort of rational sense.
But what sort of magick could wipe all memory of a beast only to return it at the mention of a name?
He’d heard of family curses before, but none like this. And that still did nothing to address the larger questions of why the Hornigolds and why had it only just started happening?
A satisfied snort from Jacob snapped Drake back to reality. He saw in his old mate's face that their thought trains hadn’t so much converged as collided.
The sardonic quirk in the corners of the Sailing Master’s mouth indicated that he knew something Drake didn’t. Which, in fact, he did. He knew without a shadow of a doubt that his friend would forget all about him again before the last vestiges of night had given way to silver-screened day.
But one question did come to mind, whose answer he would not soon forget. He felt incredibly stupid that it had not occurred to him earlier.
He folded his arms over the wheel and asked as casually as he could, “what did you say was the name of this ship?”
An impish grin tugged at the corner of Jacob’s mouth. “I didn't,” he said as if answering a private riddle between he and himself.
Drake relaxed. This was the sort of quiet, easy banter one didn’t often get to partake in as a Captain. What with everyone always expecting you to be the stoic, upright beacon of certainty.
He rested his chin on his knuckles in imitation of an odd museum statue he’d once seen. “Would you care to enlighten me?”
Jacob’s grin settled into an earnest smile as something vaguely reminiscent of joy started fluttering around in his chest.
They were both deliberately dragging out this interaction for their own reasons and both knew, or at least heavily suspected, as much.
Jacob couldn’t remember the last non-transient conversation he’d had that hadn’t mainly concerned his identity or lack thereof and he wasn't about to let this one pass him in a hurry.
“She’s called the Iron Maiden,” he said at last.
Drake glanced musingly up at the graying mass of the early sky. He liked that name. “I like it,” he said distantly, and Jacob nodded in preoccupied accord.
Both stood silently for a long while. Neither beast was willing to walk away from the other. But neither had anything else to offer to fill the conspicuous void. Finally, reluctantly, Drake broke the stalemate. “The first sun will be up soon.”
Jacob nodded, not trusting himself to speak, while knowing Drake couldn't see him, as the young Captain had suddenly become keenly interested in the state of his fingernails.
The elder Pyrate-in-training seemed to be having similar trouble. When he said, “you should go get some shuteye,” it came out as though from the mouth of one who had never heard his own voice before. “Something tells me we’re in for a really interesting trip.”
The words fell like a black storm front over Jacob's budding heart. Drake’s speech was only impaired when something deeply troubled him, or when he was in a hot rage. Jacob decided it fair to assume the former.
Again, Drake sensed his friend’s thoughts and offered what he’d meant to be a reassuring smile. “Go on, get yourself below before the good spots are taken.” He waited a moment, and when the Sailing Master still did not move, he added what he had meant to be a light-hearted jest. “That's an order.”
There exist no words to describe how badly Drake wished he could recant those two decisions.
Jacob’s face fell. It was like watching lead sink to the bottom of a crystal pool. He sighed dejectedly and gave a half-hearted salute. Drake’s mouth opened, but then he shut it again. He had already done more damage than could be repaired by any amendment to their current schedule would allow time for. As Jacob opened the access panel to go below, he cast a weary eye up at Drake and said, “Aye, Captain,” with perhaps a bit more resentment in his voice than he had intended, but much less than what he felt.
Had a situation arisen then that required their Captain’s immediate attention, Adrian or Crow would have had to locate the nearest bucket of cold water or else find themselves as Acting Captain. Their ghost ship quarry could have appeared at the tip of Drake’s nose right then, and he would have seen straight through it.
He was beyond time and space ... staring off to the horizon as though trying to will it closer.
In another instant, all recollection of Jacob having ever existed was gone from his mind. Drake reset the altitude vector and paced lazily up to the bow. He nearly stumbled over himself as the ship reared up at a nearly twenty-five-degrees slope designed to hoist them into the Zenith corridor. One of the ninety six charted pan global “Oscillating Magnetic Vortex” tunnels used to expedite sailing for centuries. One of the nineteen they would need to charter between here and their destination, and one of the three they and their escorts would plot before reaching the Imperial boundary.
Drake stared drearily out at the open Abyss. How beautiful and primal it seemed. Terrifying and boundless. How ancient and yet new. All the lands of the world were slung easily upon its back and yet the lightest graze of a breeze could toss it, tear it open and sow its ectoplasmic guts across hundreds of leagues.
Drake jarred himself back to reality, slapping himself awake. He dragged his uncooperative legs onward and forced himself to go about the first watch as if they weren't sailing right into enemy Depths.
He and Adrian wiled away the hours, as if they weren’t going to fight an enemy that any beast with any amount of sense would turn tail and run from.
“What the saard are we doing?” he asked himself for the umpteenth time.
He didn’t say a word to anyone when Hemlock emerged to take Adrian’s place an hour past first sunup or when the Blunder Twins next took to their preferred roost an hour after second sun.
It was only when Ellie came up an hour after that to take over the command watch that anyone realized that the Captain was in fact fast asleep with his eyes wide open.
Being of the most practical, if not the most socially studious, mind, it was Hemlock who shook him awake, to her instant regret.
Drake awoke with a start, and his hand flew to his sword. Only Crow’s phenomenal reflexes stopped Drake from doing something he would have always regretted.
Ellie escorted him below, ignoring his many protests. It took a dose of Trevemil Root greater than most doctors recommend, a powerful sleeping agent, mixed with some of Bon Bon's Thorn Beef and Raptle Leg soup, to get him properly to sleep and stay that way.
When he awoke at half past cardinal noon, he lay there in a state of tranquil summer bliss. His muscles were spry and healthy again. His mind and heart were as clear as a mountain spring tap.
But the certainty that he should have stayed in bed fell on him when he saw the look on Ellie’s face when she shook him awake again an hour later, a few minutes after crest noon.