The basic concept of the “Ironclad” warship was hardly a novel one. In point of fact the idea of sheeting a ship entirely in munition-reflective metal had floated around for as many centuries as ships had carried armaments. Predating all modern navies and all but the most mott and baily iterations of piracy.
However, so few of them had ever been manufactured, and those that were in active service so rarely ventured more than a few leagues from the Iradyl mainland, that to see one up close was still a sight that inspired awe and fear.
Each ship spanned the length of two conjoined FPA buildings. From stem to stern they bristled with every caliber and weight of shipborne armament under the suns. From gargantuan rotary siege artillery, which sailors knew as shore cannons, to the standard midrange brawling variety.
The largest, which also included a pair of deep-set mortar wells known as Star Gazers at the bow and stern, were flanked by blocks of Sierra Flamel cluster rocket tubes. The rails, decks and crenellated terrace steps of their fortress flat pyramid bodies were lined with stacked phalanxes of octuple volley turrets and rotary cannons. With staggered wedges of pillbox tetrahedrons sporting the main spearpoint casts of capital armament planted along the main deck and up the shallow slopes of symmetric ramps up the foreward segments of the domineering central structure.
Every surface inch of their hulls and stocky pentagrammic upper bodies were formed from massive alchemically tempered armor panels. Even the four electromagnetic rail turrets were tubbed in glassy terra-steel.
As well as an expanded maintenance and engineering staff, even the simplest operations of the goliath machines required dedicated specialist teams to perpetually monitor and manage the ship’s energy allocation.
In addition to costing the Ironclads dramatically in the areas of speed, range and cargo capacity. Which was one of several reasons the three working service vessels found themselves relegated to domestic guard and patrol duty.
But for all they lacked in versatility and grace, the one thing that any intellectually honest Pyrate freely acknowledged, was the supreme and exacting, nigh mechanical precision, with which they filled out their intended role as projective instruments of prejudicial terror.
Indeed, so perfect was the design to the role of statutory deterrent that a theory had arisen amongst their Zen neighbors that the design hadn’t originated in the Imperial war cabinet at all, but rather within the political megasphere.
As Avlon had once intoned it, “the Imperial propogandists fashioned the Ironclads the way a master cobbler might warp and fit and bend a shoe around a genetically deformed foot.”
A single shot from the tertiary cannons could crack an enemy battleship in half from a standoff at more than twice a mainsail spotter’s horizon.
The morning after their departure, shortly after the Maiden had left the relative safety of the island chain known as the Great Border Wall, three of the floating fortresses blockaded their path and insisted they submit to “standard routine security checks”.
Luckily for the Iron Maiden, her hands and their mission, Drake had had the foresight to hide Steve amidst the depths of tidy clutter in the engine room.
Had he not, their stay in Iradyl might have been a considerable stretch longer than their present timetable would have allowed for.
But the Imperials’ search had turned up nothing of interest, of course, and they were let go within hours, rather than the usual days or weeks.
Despite this unforeseen run of good fortune, Drake remained on attentive alert until they were well out of sight of the Imperial home mass.
At which point he thanked every remote divine spirit he knew of that the Pyrates were presently on ostensibly cordial terms.
His antithetic feelings towards the regime and all it entailed notwithstanding, on a purely pragmatic level he didn’t much fancy the idea of having to face one of those behemoths with little more than his sword and some harsh language.
****
His waking call several mornings later was the familiar bone-shuddering booms of cannon fire and an unfamiliar pair of hands shaking him like a dusty rug.
His extensive verbal arsenal unloaded itself automatically upon this stranger until the remainder of his brain was at last salient enough for the Oreamnos’ words to take standing root.
“Wake up!” the beast snapped, literally slapping him out of sleep. “Get up Captain! We’re under attack!”
Drake heaved himself up and shoved the newcomer away with a blind arm swipe. A glance at his timepiece told him it was mid noon.
He bounded up on deck half-dressed, having wasted just enough time to snap on his utility belt and weapon harness.
The first thing to strike him upon entering the open verse was the sickly gray-green fog that swallowed all but the nearest seven steps of his visual radius.
‘The Miasma’ his secretarial sector told the rest of him.
The rippling war bellows of the cannons brought him back to the immediate. He didn’t need his eyes to tell him that the Blunder Twins were well at their work.
No sooner had he taken it into his mind to inquire after what they were shooting at than the answer came to him of its own accord in the form of a massive black shadow passing over the main mast’s flag summit.
“You missed one,” he snarled mostly to himself.
He rounded on the quarterdeck to see the stranger at the nav station and Tim at the helm.
This Drake had fully expected. “Status!” he shouted over the cannons’ racket.
The Blunder Twins were working the Maiden’s main belt teeth to the limits of their technology. Both boys were firing blindly into the mist, trying to hit the enigmatic shadows which, despite their massive size, continued to evade the guns’ arcing showers of plasma.
“Cease fire!”, Drake roared.
Their fruitless barrage came to an abrupt halt. At which Drake allowed himself a brief self-satisfied smirk. It wasn't just any beast who could simply order the Blunder Twins to stop blasting things and not get lit on fire themselves for the effort.
“Status!” Drake shouted again, sheathing the sword he hadn’t remembered drawing as he bounded up the quarterdeck steps.
“Can’t rightly say Captain!” Tim replied when he reached the top. “We met this fog screen about an hour or so ago and it’s throwing our sensors around like . Then that massive thing came out of nowhere … !”
He flashed a rude hand gesture towards the bow. “And then those two brainless saards started shooting at it and I think they’ve just made it angry!”
It was only after the last thirty seconds replayed themselves in Drake’s mind when a sudden lurching realization seized control over him and turned his heart to solid granite.
He threw a wild eye about. When what it sought failed to manifest he asked, “where's Ellie?” with a sharply pronounced urgency that naturally flew right between the Marsupial ensign’s prong ears.
Tim mimicked Drake’s movements before answering, genuinely, if clinically, puzzled, “I thought she was with you.”
The dense black chip in Drake’s chest exploded to a ball of churning materia, halfway between liquified mineral and charged gas.
“What?”
Tim aimed a finger at a looming black mass just off the bow. The scaley slope of its back gently nudged the tip of the bowsprit as the creature rode the Abyssal tide waves below them.
“Stow sails!” he ordered automatically. The herd complied with speedy intensity.
“When that thing …”
“Leviathan,” Drake corrected.
“Appeared,” Tim continued, tracing a rough shape in the air, “Ellie went down to fetch you. When neither of you came back I sent the new beast to check on your status.”
“Did you see any other beast below?” Drake asked the Oreamnos. A trace of unreal panic starting to creep into his voice.
Drake knew that to abandon one's senses when things were going horribly wrong was the quickest and surest way to get into even bigger trouble. But he had also spent enough time around Ellie to know that sense had exactly no sway over the heart.
“Nay Captain,” came the new mate’s stagnant reply.
Drake’s magnol chamber of a heart stood a hair’s breadth away from erupting.
Under most similar circumstances, he would have waved his feelings away as irrational and unproductive and then would have castigated himself for being too overbearing and overprotective.
But in the wise, and thus seldom heard or heeded, words of Professor Shanter, the heart and the mind are their own individual creatures. More akin to dominion deities than biological components. Each ran its own realm in accord with its separate needs and wants and in this accord generally operated on entirely distinctive wavelengths, indecipherable to all but the most pervasive and attentive minds. And even then only with the multiplicative powers of hindsight.
Drake wove an abominable mental curse string against himself. His many insubstantiations had already cost him the latest conscript note to his marque letter. The gods could damn him to the coldest sphere of oblivion if he was about to let Ellie slip into that same void.
He was about to head below to do something he hadn’t entirely sorted out yet when something monstrously huge and black lunged out of the port side Abyss and with barely a minor glance wrenched the fin’s hydraulic geartrain out of alignment.
As if to prove his neocortex right, at that very instant there came an impressively loud SNAP as the Leviathan made another impossibly nimble pass over them.
For a horrible instant Drake feared it had severed the main power cable. If that happened their chances of making a round trip would be pounding on Drachyn’s floorboards.
Then another black shape, considerably smaller and more canine, landed with a hard, crunching THUMP at the mast’s foot.
“Crow!” Drake and the Oreamnos yelled at once.
Both were at their mate’s side at the same instant. Both equally amazed to find the Wolf not only very much alive but already most of the way back to his feet.
It took Drake a moment to discern that the crunch had been the resulting failure of the deck planks to bear the force of the adolescent beast’s impressive impact.
Drake, now fully reverted into Captain-mode, asked curtly, “can you still climb?”
Crow nodded.
“Is there anything up there to mount yet?”
Crow nodded again.
Drake wagged an ear at the height of Crow’s fall.
“Off you go then.”
The Wolf nodded and flew right back to the top almost as fast as he had come down.
Even under such oppressive conditions, Drake couldn't help sparing a moment for appreciation. Then it was back to business.
First things first, if the Leviathan was awake that meant they couldn’t be more than a few leagues off their plotted point. It also meant that they, or at least somebody corporeal and unfriendly, were expected.
Drake turned on the Oreamnos. “What’s our bearing?”
“Unknown Captain. Our chart and compass are all over the map.”
“Well figure it out. And tell me as soon as you have something.”
The beast nodded and nimbly vaulted back over to the nav station.
Drake followed suit. Exercising a single tally margin’s more restraint in climbing back to claim the helm.
The brainy giant relinquished it readily but did not return to his usual post below boards. With Ellie gone and the Sailing Master occupied he was the next in rank order for the First Mate post.
He took Ellie’s spot tentatively, which gave Drake an idea.
“Hey Steve,” he called into the intercom. The floating head bobbed into stationary view above the nav station a few seconds later.
“You wrang mister big boss sir?”
“I need a favor. Float yourself below and see if you can see any signs of …”
What, exactly? Clearly he hadn’t thought this idea through entirely.
“Anything unusual.”
If Steve had had eyebrows one would have landed in Crow’s lap.
Lacking it he threw what was a quizzical look at Tim, whose profound ungift for normal facial decrypting left him with little choice but to shrug.
Likely having expected as much, Steve turned back to Drake and, having been suitably reminded that he had no face, chose to say rather than surreptitiously imply, “define ‘unusual’, Captain”.
Drake had only half of his answer configured when Tim plucked Steve out of the air with both hands like a sports ball and dunked him through the open hatch. At which the Goat yelled “score!”
Steve's belligerent curse was drowned out by the Twins unleashing a random volley at a looming shadow.
“I said hold your damned fire!” Drake shouted, more at the guns themselves than at the Twins as they were more likely to listen.
“Tim, go check on our reserve tanks. If we're going to drop out of the sky I'd like to have an idea when so I can plan my last words accordingly.”
Tim nodded silently and headed off after Steve. As his head was dipping a thought snagged on Drake’s brain. The young Captain looked down at himself then yelled after Tim, “and grab my cloak when you come back up will you?”
A hand and a raised thumb was Tim’s answer. He hadn’t made it five more steps when the entire ship lurched like a bodied sofa.
A quick glance over the side revealed a colossal black mass scraping along the ship’s underbelly. Drake leaned his head farther over the gunwale than most doctors or physicists would have advised, making sure that none of their essential components had come loose.
“Damage report!” he shouted.
“Nothing a little boot string and grog won’t fix Captain,” the Oreamnos replied dryly.
Drake let out a frustrated snort. He’d forgotten how much he loathed this saarding fog. It had nearly been the death of him the last time he’d traversed it alone, and unless his eyesight had taken a substantive cut in the interim or it had gotten several shades darker since then.
He had seen Leviathan before. knew that they possessed some magickal method of keeping themselves airborne. But this did nothing to absolve the fact that he couldn’t see the damn things until they were close enough to kiss.
Paradoxically, his feelings of helplessness and inadequacy in this instance only fueled his determination. Perhaps a bit beyond the reach of wisdom or even sanity.
If Ellie had been there she would have easily pegged him down with some snarky comment about overcompensation and mast length.
He thumbed the intercom switch and almost literally barked into the hand phone, “half speed.”
A heart’s swallow later a high, scratchy whine like a temperamental kettle came from abaft as Tim cranked open the reverse gates. Sleeves of carbide-coated metal parted along the rims of the vector engines. Catching and diverting portions of their hot ionized thrust forward, which dropped their already hobbled pace to a crawl nearly instantaneously.
For any beast wondering why everything aboard Pyrate ships is always fastened, strapped, nailed or bolted down at all times, or why there appear to be random wood or metal rods stuck on and into everything, this is the primary reason.
“Hold steady,” Drake ordered. He stared into the amorphous mire at approximately the spot where the lookout post should be.
“Crow! Anything I should know?!”
A rapid sentence composed of sharp, angular tweets came from the masthead. This was Crow's version of shouting “all clear!”
Thuswise informed, Drake pushed a small button on a panel in the wheel hub.
“Tim! How's it look?”
After a few moments a static brush came over the speaker, out of which a staticky voice shuddered through the harassed speakers.
It would take three attempts for these to crystalize into intelligible speech.
“The Twins' spurt of roughhousing didn't help any, but we should be fine. Provided we can get some power through the sails soon.”
“Define ‘soon’.”
“Two or three hours.”
“Understood,” Drake grumbled.
“If I may be so bold Captain, I'd recommend getting those little hooligans out of their chairs for the time being. You know … just so that they're not tempted.”
Drake could practically see the petulant grimace on his engineer’s face as he said that last word, and the expected concordant smile found itself on his face.
It wasn’t a real smile. Not in the conative way. For such a thing didn’t belong in this place or time and on the whole the universe was extremely proficient at weeding out that which had no place.
But from all angles it put on the act well enough to unleash the ballista coils winding his brain and let his thoughts fly free.
“Noted.”
Then, without warning, Steve shot out of the hold like a bolt-charged nexel. He soared over the quarter rail and came to a physics-defying halt an inch from Drake’s snout.
“Woah!” both yelled in mutual surprise. The forest weave of a cloak dropping from Steve’s teeth to drape over the wheel.
“Beggin’ yer pardon Captain,” Steve said with a untoward crackle of conscience about his tone that made the hairs around Drake’s nose bristle with static. “We’ve got a problem.”
Drake’s heart turned from rock to glass to plasma and then back again in the span of a few beats.
‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ his head said.
“Go ahead,” said his mouth as his hands put on the cloak.
Steve neither wasted time nor minced words. “I think Ellie’s been done away with.”
“What?!” Drake blared. His molten heart erupted in a geyser that spread through his veins, transmuting his bones and muscles into rods of solid steel.
This moment of adrenal shock a dormant power awoke. Only for an instant. A kind of strength, named the Regis Vitae by the alchemists, rarely called upon by mortals poured out from his very marrow, fractally scaling through his fibers, cells and tendons until he nearly crushed the pressure-treated wooden wheel spokes in his hands into pencil twigs.
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Steve paused. His mouth opened and shut in nearest imitation of a consternated blink as he could manage.
“Begging yer supreme pardon fer the poor turn of phrase Captain. I meant only to say that someone, or rather something’s gone and done a runner with yer mistress.”
Drake’s head and heart were so shot that neither had the space to fully process that last, slightly less accidental, crude mannerism.
“You’re sure.” The words came out of him like water from a sun-drying sock.
Steve bobbled a nod. “Sure as I'm floatin' here. She’s nowhere to be found onboard.”
Thought patterns formed and melted in Drake’s head like nested snowflakes. Their common through line was a single question that glinted menacingly in the air between the conferring heads. Whether this was because one was afraid or the other too polite to voice it was unclear.
But either way, Steve’s maker was not a condolent, or indeed any kind of sensitive, sort. And any artist could tell a soul for a tool kit, and even the dimmest light among them would have known Tim’s for one wanting anything sharper than a screwdriver.
Steve took his blanched silence as permission to elaborate. Which he did in this wise: “I admit even I didn’t notice until I started lookin’ for it. But soon as I scanned fer anomalies there it was, plain as day. A trail bluer than the sky leadin’ straight into the bloody hull.”
Drake stroked his muzzle. A sure sign of the greatest trouble.
His rational sense tried to console him that this was a valuable piece of insight into their enemy’s capabilities. The pup inside that had grown up on this island yelped as though feeling the familiar sting of his father’s disciplinary hand.
He knew ghosts could parse solid objects as easily as glass, much like how everyone knew that forks were a poor utensil partner for soup. But had they always had the power of transposition? If so had Noah or his father or Nikodontus known? And if not then where had they gotten it?
Another resounding crash directly into their keel that bumped the ship a good six inches nearer to daylight sent shock tremors of every dire emotion known to science raking through his nervous system.
They had to get above this saarding Nihil field RIGHT NOW or they’d soon be joining their supernal guest in semper necrose fidelis.
He pressed the intercom button again. “Tim, you think she's got it in her to take us sky side?”
After a thoughtful pause Tim's honest, crackly response came back. “I can’t say definitively ‘no’. But I wouldn’t exactly stake my life on it either.”
Drake was in his element now. With nothing but a ship under his boots, a sword at his side and a clear objective in front of him, the whole rest of the universe just seemed to fall right into its place.
Here, in the Pyrate’s world, next words came easily.
“I’d just ease into it if I were you Captain. That last brush knocked something loose on the port side. I can’t tell exactly the extent of the bad news without physically going down there, but if my readings down here are anywhere near accurate, that whole fin might snap out on you if you’re not careful. Then we’re looking at a one way trip at the very, and I emphasize, very, best.”
‘Don’t I know it,’ Drake thought.
“Don't worry, I'll be gentle,” he said aloud. Then he closed the intercom channel and shouted over the whole ship, “every beast hold fast!”
‘And think lofty thoughts,’ his other voice added.
Keeping his left hand on the wheel he worked the pitch and yaw levers with the other. Adjusting all three of their rotational angles purely by his own sense of balance and working in close concert with Tim to keep their thrust,
Even without instruments, out in the open air he could have done this kind of basic maneuver in his sleep. Using the bodies of the planet below and cosmos above to keep them oriented.
But the uniform mass of vomit-gray forced him to fall back on experience and instinct to make sure he didn’t accidentally veer them dramatically off course. Or worse, dump them all into the Abyss.
This took what otherwise would have been an elementary exercise and dragged it out into ten painstaking minutes of constantly fidgeting with the controls, making many minute adjustments, coordinating all his efforts with the Sailing Master and masterfully tuning out Steve’s incessant narration of Leviathan’s every move.
What had become apparent to all of them during these past few days was that the techno-arcane breakthrough that answered mainly to Steve had as much the makings of a child as a piece of artwork or technological inventory. Meaning that he had inherited bits from his creator that were beyond any of his intentional design parameters. Including his propensity to let his mind run ahead of his mouth, and vice versa.
This was the crisp excellence of Pyrate training at work. Which wasn’t to downplay Drake’s particular skill by any means. But he was the Academy’s golden pupil for a reason.
Being a Pyrate, on top of being a Drake, he had learned early the sorts of hard lessons the average beast would sometimes go until middle age without so much as hearing of. Such as the inherent danger of letting eagerness get the better of him.
Even when he finally thought he could see a tantalizing slip of daylight his hands kept their pace steady and true, as if riding on a bomb’s taught trigger wire.
When they finally broke through the miasmic barrier, Drake waited for his eyes to adjust before taking professional stock of his surroundings. He saw nothing except the unbroken layer of murky cloud vapor in every direction.
Save one.
“By the gods,” the Sailing Master whispered.
Looming off their bow, only a few parayards away, was a baleful craggy mass of an island that Drake estimated to be roughly fifty parayards across. It was peaked by a megalithic black spire which stabbed into the pale mid-day sky like a cobbled, midnight spear.
The only open area of flat land that could be seen from this distance was totally surrounded by a tangled field of warped, viny simulacrums of trees. These were twisted and knotted together like a den of coiled snakes, creating what looked like the world’s largest malevolent tumble weed.
The necrophagic fog swirled around the island’s Stygian base like a kraken feeding frenzy. With the monsters’ innumerable seething tentacles winding and grabbing into every nook and cranny of the ebony shoreline. Bursting through and strangling the very stone where no natural purchase was on offer.
Drake whistled a long and slow drone through his fangs in the way his sire had inadvertently taught his sons to do.
He didn’t believe in fate. Or at least he didn’t like to stake much on it if and whenever he could help it. And since he’d inherited the popular understanding of fate and coincidence being two strings on the same puppet, he’d long ago rinsed that off in the bath too.
Still, he couldn’t deny that their timing was uncanny. If they had stayed submerged just a few minutes longer they would have become a small, and rather embarrassing, blemish on the island’s obsidian carapace.
“Thanks Nik,” he muttered. Feeling, despite every one of his better senses chiming like bells in a windstorm, like maybe just a bit of the old soothsayer had worn off on him.
Or maybe it was that the old Saint’s ghost was hanging around here somewhere.
Could he have been the one that … ?
Drake surveyed the mass of shadows and creeping flame-red tendrils before them. Proof for his expectations, but an added grain of slag to his ego, he didn’t recognize a square or cubic bit of the mangled mess.
He appealed to Crow’s higher eye. “Can you see a place to set down?!”
Crow responded with a fluid sentence of tweets which the Sailing Master interpreted as a set of broad coordinates which he entered into the table’s logarithmic charter. A triage of concentric crank-fed number wheels, the analog setup could calculate any trajectory in three dimensions with an accuracy hitherto only achievable by Sabathian snipers.
It would surprise nobody to learn that such an ingenious marvel was designed and patented by Nicolai Bombadash.
The selfsame, self-made technocrat who, by way of his unconventional technological and innovative genius, had made himself the single richest beast who had ever lived as well as the simultaneous personal hero of Tim, Hemlock and the Blunder Twins.
“As improbable a feat as the old gizzard’s tax receipts I’d wager,” Ellie had once remarked.
A few deft keystrokes later and the nav station’s cartography algorithms calculated the most efficient route to the landing area, and within seconds it flashed the all-clear green which he relayed to Drake by stabbing the air with his thumbs.
Drake then gave the order to “’lease full sails” and “press at full speed”. Risky though such a maneuver was at this range, they complied.
The second sun was starting to dip and Drake knew the Gnarled Wood was one of the last places they wanted to be caught alive or dead after dark.
Drake circled tight rings above the area Crow had designated. His decade’s harsh experience notwithstanding, the dark beauty of the evil jeweled stage below didn’t escape him. He was not, after all, soulless.
The rusty beaches perpetually slashed with refracted rods of twilight flame. The quiet grandeur of the dark mirror prism slabs of the midnight basin.
These were not actual minerals, Drake knew. Not the sand, not the soil, not the bedrock. None had an ounce of naturality about them in any respect or aspect or ration.
All were false. Mimicry. Sorcery by any other name. An upside down, backwards and crooked satire of a looking glass simulacrum.
Material coagulants of the sire Drake’s impregnable iron will. Crude, hard-edged imitations of the natural splendor he, and many dark wizards before him, by their nature had sought to cordon and control.
Most other beasts lacking his intimate familiarity would be easily snared in the mesmeric net cast by the lake of static fire. Even if they were trying to land a ship on it. Which was not a coincidence.
Crow directed Drake as best he was able, but even for the Wolf’s extraordinary eye and the ship’s seeing through the mangled mess of flora was like trying to read through a straining cloth.
Drake spun them over to the proposed landing site. It turned out to be a round flint axe-blade of a cliff overlooking a particularly dense halfmoon tentacular thicket.
Even as a pup Drake had sometimes wondered where the Gnarled Wood had come from.
Not the actual plants. He’d watched his father and Nikodontus conjure the first ones out of a dark materia cocktail of their own blood and sacrificial bone meal gotten from the gods knew where.
No. Where had the name, the ‘Gnarled Wood’, come from?
Not from any of his family, Drake was sure. And probably not anybody who’d actually seen it before, let alone set foot, hoof, wing or tail in it.
As someone who had been brought up in and under that wicked grove, it was the youngest Drake’s view, even if he would never think to word it so, that to call that tangled matte of biomass a forest was like calling a blunderbuss a pop gun.
It made sense in the same way it did to say that the suns and moons rose and set. But as any mathematician whose fortunes had them, whether by coincidence or errand, aligned with the sight markers of the fabled ‘pirate gun’ could tell, the only thing that generally went POP in the vicinity of a blunderbuss was its target’s head.
It was still well within sight of the coast. Hopefully outside the reach, or at least notice, of any Naarfynder who may be out searching for a late snack.
Had he been any other beast, one not armed with his extensive foreknowledge, Drake might not have believed the tales of wild, dark-magick monsters roaming the island’s gloomy tangles at night.
He might have relegated the idea of warped, demented abominations with the power to consume and digest life down to its most fundamental essence to the same empirical place most adult beasts stashed the knowledge of ghosts, fairies, hogfathers, nymphs, syrens and other such sideways wonder-mill fodder.
But, being as he was himself, and more a Pyrate, he understood that working on the faulty assumption that one knows everything was an error made by the terminally ignorant and the hopelessly deranged.
Drake powered down the thrusters and ordered only a single anchor cable to be let loose.
He ordered Tim to keep the sails loose and the engines on standby, in case they needed to make a swift exit.
He told Adrian and Bon Bon to gear up and be ready to fight and ordered the Sailing Master, whose name he made another mental note to query at the first opportunity, to retrieve and distributed the Nulls equally among the chosen ground party.
“We should all go with you,” the Oreamnos said, indicating the rest of the herd, who were already kitting up. “You'll need all the support you can get down there.”
“No,” Drake stated in the stern, flat voice of command. “If anything happens to us, I want you and Tim to take the Maiden and get the saard away from this island. As fast as you can fly her. Am I clear?”
Without waiting for an answer he pointed back astern, against the trajectory of the suns.
“I know exactly what I’m asking. But if this goes belly up, we need at least one witness and it takes at least two to pilot a ship this size.”
He laid a hand on the Oreamnos’ shoulder, as he was the closer of the pair and because Tim’s would have been awkward to reach.
“Amelia’s the Headmaster’s goddaughter. Go back and …”
He stopped himself from saying “tell him not to send anyone after us” as it was a waste of words. Not simply because the Headmaster outranked him.
Which, if one took the official Pyrate credo on faith, he didn’t. On account of each individual being, first and foremost, his own actor.
Although any sensible Pyrate who’d made it more than five minutes into the game knew that figurative philosophy, however grand or eloquent, didn’t buy a single gram of food, an ounce of water or drop of fuel.
Few besides Avlon knew that Flint had once seriously considered hanging a sign above the front door reading ‘Abandon Yer Faith, or Be Ready to Put It to the Sword’.
Fact: Avlon was the Headmaster. Which meant he held supreme executive control over all the Academy’s assets. Including, but not at all limited to its militia defense flotilla, the armory and the “X Factor”, Goldfree. In short, he held most of the deck, ergo he was in charge.
But all this was so readily understood that it didn’t even count as a factor anymore. It was baked into the very format of the calculation.
No.
The cause of Drake’s consternate disentanglement of thought was because he knew they sounded heartless. Also he knew full well the folly of trying to give Avlon an order, even notwithstanding the power imbalance.
Thus it was he chose a more generic line that, because he knew Prokvert would appreciate it, drew the faintest lines of an animal snarl into his features. “Report our failure.”
Drake buckled himself into his full battle kit as he talked and threw over his “adventurer's cloak”, as Ellie sometimes referred to his favorite forest cloth.
He did this to distract himself from the very distinct possibility that Amelia and Ellie were already dead and possibly listless otherworld slaves by now. Or worse, they might have been sacrificed to the Naarfynders, as he knew the unkempt thralls often did to sate the ravenous hunters between culls.
He couldn't afford to burden himself with maybes or perhaps. As both Nikodontus and Professor Shanter were both so fond of saying, in near enough identical terms to beg the question whether it wasn’t some universal Tortoise saying, “until the possible becomes actual it’s irrelevant.”
As a consequence, his molten caldera of a heart froze into a plate of tarnished mirror obsidian.
Drake ran a routine equipment check with Adrian and Bon Bon. After determining they were ready, he started to hook himself into the rope sling and prepared to head over the side.
He was about to throttle them into approach when a hand the size of his head clad in thick brown leather waved to him from before the quarter rail. He looked over to see Tim, armed and in full battle harness, with Crow and Hemlock standing in full battle dress at his back.
“We're coming with you,” he stated.
“No,” Drake stabbed back against his own wishes. “It's too risky. Who knows what’s been festering down there these past six years.”
“All the more reason for us to all go,” Tim said. “Elementary algebraic symmetry. Greater uncertainty equals greater risk. More eyes plus more guns equals less chance for surprises. Ergo less risk. Thus the equation balances.”
This knocked Drake back a step. Of all the mouths he’d expect to hear this kind of sideways reasoning from, Tim’s ranked just one spot Zenward of Hemlock, who tied with the Blunder Twins.
“We’re all trained for battle,” the Marsupial said with a mild side helping of disgust. “We all know the risks. None of us is afraid of the dark.”
‘You’ve never really seen it,’ Drake’s internal dragon said. It’s fangs curling over each word like ivory cage bars.
The moment came and went. The thought sank into the abyss of the past. And in its place was a well of sympathy and regret.
He knew it was overly harsh. He knew it. Nearly every creature that found his or her way to the Academy did so through a gauntlet of one form or another.
But that only made them stronger. The brambles that had dug into their skin and bled them in their youth had become kindling for their hearts in age.
One by one he met their gaze. Challenging them. Studying them as the ancient Spartan elders examined each new cub that came into the world. Searching with predatory keenness for any signs of weakness or insincerity.
He found none. Not that he’d expected to.
Though it may have been logically sound to question the objectivity of his assessment given the circumstances, it ultimately didn’t matter. The decision was already made. All that was left was to settle with the consequences.
With an indifferent shrug and in a tone as used when ordering food at a restaurant Hemlock said, “personally, I'd take any excuse to get away from those two.”
She bobbed her chin over to where the Blunder Twins were merely tussling and chasing on another about the deck.
The thought then sprinted across Drake’s mind, waving to him in passing as it went, that the Twins were only fourteen years old.
He cast one last consolatory look over all of them before letting out a defeated, but grateful, huff.
“Very well.”
Thus relieved of their mutinous duties the herd almost literally lined up before their Captain to receive orders.
Tim was first on Drake’s priority list, him being the Acting First Officer. “If we're not back by this time tomorrow, you, Adrian and …”
He paused. What was the Goat’s name again? He scribbled another note for the mental discard pile.
“Sailing Master whatsisname take the Maiden and get the saard out of here.”
Tim straightened indignantly. Hadn’t they just had this conversation? “Hold on!” he bleated.
And as if pulled by an invisible string, Steve the Skull joined in the scolding. “Are your brains leakin’ there beast?”
Adrian took this as a chance to throw in his two fennings. “Yeah. What’s the deal? You just said …”
Drake trained his sternest Captain’s eye on all of them. Choking out their rising discord with a clenched eldritch fist.
Evidently his father’s assessment of him being the magickal equivalent of the number zero wasn’t entirely accurate.
“We can’t leave the Maiden empty handed,” he said slowly, deliberately, as though explaining complex algebra to an invalid. Delicately but resolutely committing to each syllable like a needle driving a stitch.
“She’s our only way out of here. And if this thing goes the way I fear it might we’re going to say our goodbyes with extreme prejudice. You get me?”
They did. And they nodded accordingly.
“When that time comes, I’d like to know I have some competent beasts,” he opened a gestural palm afore, “up here who won’t ‘accidentally’ blow up the ship,” the quotation marks were so bold in his tone that they hung themselves on the air without any extra help from his hands, “or sink the bloody island until we’re ready. Clear?”
Again, nods all round.
Drake looked from face to somber face. He could see they understood rationally. But still, some part of them remained unfulfilled.
It was the Pyrate spirit he knew. The lust for action, the compulsive need to preserve honor not easily denied and almost never fully quenched.
A light sparked on in Drake’s head. Some fraction of which must have shown through his eyes as even before the first word left his mouth he could already feel all of their counterpoints peeking out of the trenches, ready to charge at the first quiet moment.
“Besides, Tim, you're our only other trained pilot.”
Adrian’s mouth clamped shut.
Steve’s jaw hung partially ajar. His teeth ground the air as though punishing an invisible nut.
Tim’s face went blank as mirror copper while his brain grappled with the how and why of the moment. To wit, how and why such an obvious point could have not occurred to him first. Or at least long before now.
“Oh yeah. Right. You’re right. I am. That’s right.”
Steve bounced playfully once between Tim’s tall ears and remarked, “If yer thinker's getting a bit worn I'd be happy to take over for a while.”
This got a bout of genuine humor from everyone, including Drake. His dry slab of a heart melted just slightly along the rim as the image of Ellie’s smile wedged itself between his mental lenses, only to harden into a black razor again when the fictitious reality of the event came crashing back into focus.
“Alright,” he said finally, turning and addressing Tim as reluctant Acting Captain.
“Keep a body in the crow's nest at all times. We'll signal you with flares if we run into serious trouble. Whatever you do, and I'm sure I don't need to tell you this, but I'm going to anyway, DON’T let the Twins out of your sight for an instant. Copy?”
“Aye Captain,” all three answered with the utmost seriousness.
“Good,” Drake said, firmly back in Captain mode. “Now that’s settled, every beast, let's get a move on! I’d rather not give the Necrophages a nicer dinner platter than we already have.”
Drake knew that no one outside of his father’s inner sphere could know what a Necrophage was. Indeed, he himself had only ever heard the term in distant passing and was pretty sure his father had made it up.
But thanks to Nikodontus he knew what was meant, mostly by the old sage beast, when he mentioned Spill Thoughts.
What the term Necrophage was to the grand sum of unnatural nightmare spawn, Spill Thoughts were to all the most vital ideas that were not spoken and yet were clearly understood.
The “Dark Matter of conversation” as The Alchemist had put it.
Thanks to this invaluable army of quantized information bits, his meaning couldn’t have been clearer if he’d made it out of window glass.
On his order a quartet of woven steel braids headed by electromagnetic plumbata were driven by seismic spring coils into the cliff’s alien soil.
Sailing 101: Some Finer Points on Attunement. Any excursion on or over land carries an inextricable cost. Namely the fractional power consumption, owing to the dearth of ventral particle flow. Thus limiting a ship’s power return to her sails. Strictly limiting their offensive, defensive and aerobatic options to those achievable on internal energy alone.
Therefore, it is generally advisable that a Pyrate Captain refrain from conducting operations over land to those wherein the substantial risk of becoming grounded are calculatedly minimal, preferable or unavoidable.
Misloff’s Unmoderated Guide to Wayfaring
Like the rest of his herd, Drake had studied Misloff’s alleged works. Like they he knew also to measure the worth of printed words in how much rice they bought him.
Much of what the over-acclaimed, self-revered, obsessively philanthropic playwright, poet and author extraordinaire wrote was practically soluble. This much was common knowledge among experienced wayfarers also.
But Misloff hadn’t become a global literary tycoon by playing his cards evenly straight. Even the half of his corpus that was allegorical, misleading or outright fictitious was generally engaging enough to make the lonely watch hours pass less noticeably. Thus were his ideas generally, if not accepted, at least begrudgingly tolerated by aureole officers and continental command corps.
Under ordinary conditions Misloff would have been correct in his assessment about the unwisdom of hanging a ship over a bank of inert rock for an unspecified number of hours.
However, Naarfynder was no normal island. And these were no ordinary stones.
Power aboded here. A primeval sort. A chaotic sort. The signet seal of a twisted personality’s excrement domain was stamped upon every atomic structure and quantum matrix of this infernal abstract playground.
Sorcery 101, Elemental Basics: Animancy, as it is commonly understood, is the art of ‘life magick’. It deals with the acts of willful reimbuing, reimbibing, rebinding or redistributing the natural life giving properties, or ‘essence’, of a living being.
By diffuse contrast, Necromancy is the art of mimicking, replicating, manipulating or outright manufacturing those same processes in an ordinarily inorganic, or nonliving, body.
Misloff’s Moderated Spell Guide, Chapter 2, ‘Atlas of the Occult’
As any halfwit arcane acolyte could and would freely acknowledge, the physical properties of the so-called “life force”, whether going by chi, prana, brahmin, ashlar, aura or aether this century, were functionally indistinguishable from the more profane forces like electromagnetism or gravity.
Consequently, the Iron Maiden’s ordinary harbor cables’ conventional power conduit channels were perfectly adequate for syphoning energy directly from the bones of this island-shaped necromantic magickal construct.
Drake knew this.
As did he know that ghosts and their Necrophagic predators no more needed ropes or gantries to scale such a paltry distance than Avians needed ladders in order to fly.
But, staying in line with his earlier coincidently objectively rational premise of their flying within narrowing margins for escape velocity and vectors on this mission, by his order there was to be no other direct contact with the land until or unless he specifically, that is in the flesh, gave the command to do otherwise.
Until such time they were to stow the fins, lock and brace the guns and hunker down until nightfall.
“And if we’re not back by dark,” Drake had told Tim privately, “take her offshore and do a perimeter sweep until crest noon. And under NO, and I mean NO, circumstances are you to come onshore and look for us. Either we come back to you or you will leave without us. Is that understood?”
Only once Tim had answered with an unambiguous “aye Captain” did Drake and Crow slide down the aft anchor cord together as vanguard set. With the rest of the waiting party acting as first line backup and aerial fire support.
The Sailing Master took to Crow’s usual post with such speed and cunning deftness as to firmly seat himself on the midway rung between the elite Oreamnic Sturmjägers and Crow himself. It was only a shame that no beast other than himself had been keeping score.
Tim, by contrast, was working on the most unsolvable problem of his life. Trying to chase, herd, corral and finally coerce, in that order, the Blunder Twins below boards and failing miserably in that same order.
Eventually he resorted to waving Steve’s magickal headlights in front of them as a shiny, and helpfully rather noisy, lure. This worked only because Steve had the brilliant idea of convincing the pair that if they could catch him there might be a reward made of sugary dough in it for them.
There was not, of course. And no doubt there would be endless whining about it to bear through once they inevitably were forced to unlock the hatch.
But that was for then. For now they could be sure there would be no distractions or wayward fireworks. At least not from their end.
Crow first touched down like a wraith on the sable plane which, when viewed from only head height away, peered back sightlessly through a field of sunken maroon eyes.
Drake almost literally followed in the Shinobi Wolf’s shadow.
Together they combed the nearby tree line for threats, and when they found none he signaled for the next pair to join them.
The female set navigated the cable flight as though they were abnormally narrow stairs.
With the efficient grace of a dance team, the instant their hoof and paw met terra incognita they set forth, drew their weapons and formed the counter angle of the males’ open shield diamond.
As he waited for his companions, Drake stalked cautiously over to the nearby cliff edge and took a long, hard look at the path that lay ahead of him.
Impartially scanning and absorbing every detail of every rock, every glob of fleshy maroon and slash of wicked crimson amidst the swamp of ebony shadows. Categorically analyzing each and every knot and crescent dagger for any wandering parts. Namely those of a lunging out of the shadows persuasion.
Falling back to his approach and seeing the rest of the ground party assembled and standing guard with expectant looks, Drake felt an irresistible compulsion to kindle another light of humor.
In honor of Ellie? No! No. She wasn’t dead yet. Not until he saw her body and checked her pulse …
At the risk of achieving the opposite result, in a move that stunned the whole herd into silence, Drake spun on a heel and spread his arms wide in the universal posture symbolizing ‘universe’ or ‘look at me’ or ‘I’m the center’. Or, most often, all in one.
Putting on his most convincing ringmaster hat he announced with theatrical comedy, “ladies and gentle beasts of all ages! Boys and girls of all stripes, angles and scales! Welcome, one and all, to the Island of the Damned!”