If any beast had described to Drake what was unfolding around him he would have said they were bleeding mad.
Granted, all things considered, he supposed he couldn’t completely rule the reason worms out of his own cranial library either at this point. But still.
Also, granted, he’d known this wasn't going to be an easy or ordinary trip by any caste or level of analysis right from the offset. But this, what they were about to do, was its own special sphere of lunacy.
His suspension of disbelief up so high its dial was in serious danger of popping loose.
Far below on the obsidian silo’s opposite bank, a solar swell was gathering. An ephemeral shimmer like a foggy pillow left anointing a dark pit long after its parent mist had been banished by the suns clung to the adjacent cliff. Its writhing prenatal mass composed of spiteful legions. Blasphemous, traitorous, lecherous murderers, butchers, slayers and assassins. A squall of vile, incandescent hate plucked from the root balls of the Abyss to do their wicked master’s work.
So dense was the clot of unholy wrath that from here Drake could only barely, at moments, distinguish some of their peripheral number. Those glimpses revealed an array of living armaments. Swords, spears, hammers, spikes and even a few guns. Though he noted these were rare exception.
‘I guess if you haven’t got nexels on the other side you might be trying to mop with the stick end,’ he thought. And was pretty sure he’d kept it securely in his head vault.
He bared his teeth and muttered, “I suppose one card in our deck’s better than none.”
Be that tiny point of consolation though it may, even forgoing the necromantic element, to all conventional senses the enemy seemed as every bit as dangerous as any other mercenary legion.
Stunted range or no, any foe that couldn’t be resisted by steel or stone would make all but the most foolhardy pirates of his father’s age swear off drink and coin and convert to orthodox secularism.
He continued to watch in a stately trance which the Iralithian blade master Talhoffer once coined as “the soldier’s poise” as body upon body, rank upon rank, squadron upon infernal squadron of pondlike shades were shaped from the tapestral foam of the Abyss.
If Drake didn't know better, he'd swear the summoner’s head was on fire. Its eerie staff was floating by at motionless attention as its master made complex ritual gestures to summon even more spectral soldiers.
To face down this onslaught he and Schlagalmuck had at their command the three other Pyrates and a whole battalion’s worth each of spear, pike, javelin and sling wielding Skalgags.
Males and females took part in roughly equal proportion all round. With principally adults comprising the former, spindly juveniles and twiggy youths composing the latter.
Their ammo was the chamber’s own homegrown lamp crystals, couched in long black leather sling pouches or fastened at the butts of knives or knapped into spearheads.
Drake et all had watched at first with profound wonder, then slowly with professional appreciation the Skalgags ready their home ground for war.
Baskets of micro sunstar flakes and splinters had been produced from homes and methodically sewn around the lanes and main arterial road then dusted over like a strange alien crop.
The Pyrates had been casually informed that a similar process had been enacted while building their homes. Solid particulates of frozen light clandestinely populated every artificial edifice down and along the entire cliffside.
It might not be a perfect ward against the “siculfan”, or “dream masters”, as the Skalgags had named their void-shape oppressors. But it was better than what Drake had expected to have to work with.
If these crystals held anything even remotely comparable to a candle to their Nulls, Drake dared to harbor the suggestion that they might just have a stone’s, as opposed to a leaf’s, chance in a smelter of, if not winning, at least surviving this battle.
Or if not either, another voice of dubious origin told him, then at least hold back their expiator sands long enough for some beast to hopefully pull a miracle out of their back pockets.
Neither chief nor Captain was fool enough to think they had more stones than the underworld had souls to throw at this fight.
The idea to dispatch Crow to fetch the Maiden had flittered into Drake’s mental war room so many times he’d given it an honorary seat at the table.
His reasons for not enacting it were as numerous as they were individually flimsy. However, to his mind, muddied by stress and lack of sleep though it was, the risk incumbent on sending away their best fighter on the cusp of battle was marginally greater than the potentiality of them elapsing their rendezvous date and being left stranded.
He watched their rising adversary with blind eyes. His real gaze lost in the rational and ethical debates that consumed his heady council and heartful court.
‘Why are we really here?’ one faction posed.
‘We’re a rescue party, not a liberation front’ boomed another.
‘When your home is invaded, whose door do you guard?’ asked a third whose intoned cadence bore a distressing reminiscence of Nikodontus.
No beast had asked, if any had even bothered to wonder, what had been done with any too young or feeble to fight. Figuring they would either find out eventually or else it would be a moot issue.
With each moment Drake found it a harder stance to dispute.
A tap at his elbow brought his mind back to the anterior now.
The Skalgag Chief was there, bedecked in a cleverly layered suit of mossy bronze and scabby iron plates moored to each other with Gnarl vines atop a scarred river of maroon cloth, offering him a bowl of cobblestone sized crystals as though they were a new specimen of fruits.
The whole image had an almost whimsical, childish charm about it. Its true nature and context notwithstanding.
For half a stupid moment he contemplated trying one. But his sane reason was quick to assault and purge that blight spot of heretical nonsense.
Interpreting whatever part of this internal exchange showed on his face, Schlagalmuck said, “shadows … fear.”
Drake took them graciously and distributed them to his lot. Who, in their own turns, lashed them to their respective weapons. Painting the gray steel and blood thorns in the auras of a young dawn.
None could help being swayed by the effect. Including many of the Skalgags near enough to catch an eyeful.
“I have to ask,” Drake said as he finished lashing Lalitha to his cutlass guard. “Exactly how effective are these? That is, do they …”
Schlagalmuck shook his head. “No,” the tiny warrior admitted. “They … only … dispel. Chase. Dead … always … return.”
He tapped his golden brass battle helm with the knuckle of a forefinger and armed himself with an embroidered stone pouch and a crude, but still doubtlessly effective, ax with crowning pale sapphire whose elder wood haft would have suited a regular beast for a hatchet but served its current master as a walking staff.
Drake processed a heavy breath. “I see,” he said in a mechanical tone. Which was true. Partly.
He spared a look back over the Skalgag village. Their strength and spirit of resistance under Naarfynder’s manufactured midnight bore a distinctively piratical scent.
Far from being weak and defenseless, the Skalgags had been biding their time. Planning and preparing for the day they might take justice by their own means.
He found Schlagalmuck and asked, “how long have these ghosts been a problem?”
The Skalgag chief replied, “long … past … they … drive... Skalgags … first … home.”
He pointed down to where the undead army was massing. “We … too … weak … fight.”
He sent an optical excursion into his weapon’s crowning icon. Whether probing for some lost clarity or banishing traitorous thoughts to its depths was unclear.
“Many … Skalgags … die. But … we … learn.”
He raised his battle scepter so that the edge was aimed directly over the cliff towards the prospective onslaught. “We … prepare. We … train. Now … we … ready. We … fight.”
Drake nodded and turned his back to prevent Schlagalmuck from seeing his wry grin. He studied the Lalitha Stone and mused, “and here I always thought these were just lights.”
A sliver of an instant too late Drake caught himself in the act of driving a pilon stake into the heart of the conversation.
Thankfully, from Schlagalmuck’s underworld perspective it appeared as a budding shoot to be consoled and nourished rather than an impertinent insult to be condemned.
The tiny chief cackled as only a beast who had lived his entire life in a cave could. “We … not … need … light” he said, lofting and waving his war stone like a courtly scepter. “Skalgags … need … weapons.”
Not ten heartbeats after saying this, one of the Skalgag servants jaunted up and knelt before her chief bearing what Drake’s mental catalogue pegged as a sling but which could have been a child’s hammock and a leather pouch teeming with smooth harvested opals.
Schlagalmuck waved the presents Drake’s way. Saying, “you … take … sling?”
Drake genuinely considered the items but ultimately shook his head. “Thank you. But it’s not really my style.”
With a courtly smile and a pat on his hip like a proud father congratulating a young son he added, “we came prepared too.”
Schlagalmuck shrugged and scuttled off, leaving the young Captain alone again with his warring thoughts. And also the sling and pouch. Which Drake wisely added to his arsenal.
When the time came a few minutes later for him to gather his crew and issue their standing orders, an imperative decision had at last been decisively staked and by force of tumultuous will claimed by a slim but sound majority of his mental factions.
For the first three turns it was routine. More ceremonial than informative.
In not so few words he told them to hunker down and hold fast in such locations as their particular skills and loadouts could be the most tactically viable. Blending their individual methods and strategies with the Skalgags if and wherever viable.
This they had all anticipated.
Still, like the well-oiled machine their group was, one by one they waited attentively to receive their instructions and nodded in respectful obedience to their officer before setting about their personalized missions.
This too was according to plan.
When Drake got down the line to Crow, however, his order was as simple as unexpected. Like a clean surgical sample of what was thought a deadly cancer bulb that turned out to be an alien fungal blot.
“Get the ship.”
This was unexpected. But not quite as shocking as Drake might have presumed.
Like his fellows, Crow answered his Captain’s command with a blunt nod before taking off like a trice of wind. In his own way this meant slipping back down the chasmic well as swiftly and easily as his own ghastly shadow.
It had once been speculated several years earlier by Professor Shanter that the universe’s appointed physical constants subcommittee had decided he just wasn’t worth the hassle of trying to regulate. And to this day many a hot debate was had over whether or not the old Tortoise had meant it as a joke.
Drake smiled. The look of an old friend accustomed but not fully acquainted with his companion’s strange ways. Then he turned back towards the cliff and was greeted halfway up the shallow march there by the dumbstruck forms of Hemlock and Bon Bon.
Though they were silent, he heard their words as though they were banged out on a morse trumpet.
He knew their question as well as he knew that there was no point in lying. A lesser beast might have tried regardless. But Drake hadn’t earned the title of “Black Rock” among his peers by taking after Prokvert’s slithery bureaucratic side of the Pyratic coin.
“I sent him for help,” he said as if he’d read it in a book.
The females passed a notated glance between them. The rarity of such an occasion alone spoke more profoundly and eloquently to its gravity than its actual subject.
Drake sighed and drew out his sword. The gently thrumming Preform stone at his wrist bathed both hand and blade in an electric golden aura that shown like the morning suns and glistened like their dew-refracted faces.
From afar he appeared as something out of a macabre art studio. A monster of dense black shadow wrapped in a sheet of pine flame lofting a dipolar rod of fulgur mercury and Magnolsis.
Vicarious flashes of what Ellie might be seeing crept into Drake’s subliminal arteries. Seeping dangerous poisons into his cardiac furnace which kicked his exponent fire up to a premature zenith.
‘So close. So saarding close.’
A part of him wished he knew the spell for summoning the storm hammer Mthraknir so that he might ascend with it to Eisvalyhm.
A part of him wished to sink to the lowest, most depredating depths of oblivion.
Another part of him sought vainly to bind a pact with Drachyn, the Abyssal Serpent, to trade the entire form and structure of the civilization around him, including the lives of his own dearest party, for that one life which he treasured ad maximum.
This moment came and went. And in its vile wake came one similar, though tortured with surgent shame and guilt that almost, but not quite, saw him fling his one and only defensive weapon over the adjacent edge as penitence.
But he stood strong. He took hold of that foul fiend who cursed his heart and made it bow to him.
He didn’t let any of his pain or weakness or shame show.
That was not the warrior’s way.
It wasn’t the Pyrate way.
It was not his way.
His way saw him wave his defiant battle instrument high above. Both as a hopeful banner for Ellie to rest her spirits upon and a promise of draconic oblivion to any who would not willingly submit and exile to Lalitha’s lingering shadow.
****
A part of him would have been surprised to learn this performative display had actually partially achieved results.
Although relief was perhaps as relevant to Ellie’s feelings on the matter as manure to an agricultural supply.
Helpful, yes. Certainly.
Vital? Not quite. Not when one considers the order of evolutionary development. Floral greens having evolved long before there were creatures alive to defecate on them.
Likewise in this way the emergence of her dashing hero posing resolutely beneath his epistemological war banner fed her soul a dose of valuable nutrients while still wearing the unmistakable mephitic perfume of its true birthplace.
That didn’t mean she didn’t appreciate it. And like any crop suffering under an oppressive plaque of ice
Being surrounded as she was by an unprecedented sea of undead, all armed and ready for battle. Their sole purpose in their new simulacrum of life being to kill those with whom she shared greater, more familial bonds than her actual blood relations.
On Saedel’s orders, Ellie had been relocated and lashed to the Giant’s mizen pole. Or what was left thereof.
From here her view of the cliff was almost completely obstructed by the ship’s dilapidated branches.
But her hopes had been kindled by that intense light and the faint cry that carried the softest traces of a name.
Her name.
Someone had called to her from within that stellar envelope. She had little doubt who that could be.
She knew of no other beast who could so easily get himself into this much trouble this quickly and still manage to come out on top ...
Well, except for maybe Avlon or Crow. But Crow was with Drake, so in her book it still counted.
She smiled. Turning thoughts of her beloved into fuel for her weary muscles, she swore she would stand by his side before the end came.
The problem was, she was too exhausted to realize it was not her own inner voice saying this. Nearly two full days of physical and psychological deprivation had her entire inner ecosystem under martial lockdown.
Any complex thoughts or reactions were met with a merciless neurochemical bombardment.
But it was of shallow consequence. Even a renegade spark of hope was worth a regiment of homebrew assurances.
Whatever came of this day, she had all the confirmation she needed that she would see her Harold again. Whether in this life or the next.
The single specter assigned to guard her seemed to sense the ineffable shift in her mood. He looked down on his helpless captive with what on a living face would have been disgust.
But, for their lack of an immune system, to a shade it registered as the ultimate evolutionary form of contempt.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” he growled. “We’re gonna turn everything up there into slivers.”
From the grave spot in her annals where she’d stored all the files pertaining to her pre Pyrate life, one of the few life lessons Ellie’s father ever taught her came crawling out of the fetid soil. “Some hearts are just born black, lass.”
Under normal circumstances, this would have been the last thing this rodent ever said before picking his teeth up off the floor.
As it was, she kept her expensive passion camouflaged and docile while continuing to fight against the binding cords ... an effort that coaxed a contentious chuckle from her captor.
He left her to her struggling and got on with sharpening his ethereal blade. An effort which proved to Ellie the second of the three cardinal lessons of her youth.
“Evil is like a fungus. It finds its most fertile root in the small and underlit mind.”
Ellie had to hand it to her father. Despicable though he was he was a metaphoric savant.
A voice like a rolling bombardment shuddered the silence of the chasm. She couldn’t make out its words, perhaps they weren’t even Adamic, but intuitions older than the concept of sailing found in its tones the maleficent peaks and valleys of primeval hate.
She trembled like a faun huddling under the deluge of its first thunderstorm. Only she had no warm maternal body to cling to for comfort. Just that celestial beacon that blazed overhead like a falling star.
Under its distant gaze she felt … numb. But not dead. Numb to pain, to agony, to dread. Numb in the way of a body flush with new life and vigor. And adrenaline. A way that erased all possibility of death and allowed her muscles freedom to move, to struggle, to fight.
But it made no difference. The ropes that bound her were perhaps the most solid parcels of matter on this blasted hulk of a ship. And they held before her onslaught like rings of iron.
She watched with impotent rage and horror as the cyclonal tower of wrathful spirits took off in an instant.
None of the spirits made so much as a whisper, but their hostility and restlessness at having been conjured from their eternity of slumber were palpable. Their sheer intensity made her nauseous, and though she let him think otherwise she had an even stronger stomach than Drake.
Ellie watched the specters rise like a bizzarro pillar of shimmering sky against a dark backdrop.
A flaming blister of pity welled on her heart for those who would be on the receiving end of their immortal wrath.
A second embryonic scar flared there not long after for herself. Being within striking distance of their problem’s crown and yet being utterly powerless to take it was her second worst nightmare.
****
A hundred yards up and about ten minutes into the future, Drake became conscious of a phenomenon that he could only think to describe as déjá vu.
Though he knew that wasn’t entirely accurate.
In truth it was more like he was having his own thoughts narrated back to him on a twenty second delay. Very peculiar. But of zero relevance in the face of what was occupying the greatest sum of his cognitive function just then.
Already he alone had forced more ghosts back through the eternal mantilla during the past minute than had been seen by living eyes during any one Era.
The problem was that for every vestigial spirit they banished, somewhere from ten to thirty more were hot off the summoning plate to replace it.
At first the Pyrates had fought exactly as they had been trained to do against heavily superior numbers. Cautiously and intelligently. Like feral nomadic predators stalking a stampeding herd.
Playing the role of hammer and nail to the Skalgag’s anvil and tongs. Using their allies’ tightly regimented lines as shields. Dashing and popping in and out of cover where applicable, taking shots and slashes at discorporate bodies where practical, then dodging back behind the walls of militarized sunstones to reload and regroup.
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Since the only tool they knew could reliably touch, if not definitively kill as such, the anthro-pond shades were Tim’s Nulls, they initially tried to conserve their most valuable and finite assets by leaving the Lion’s share of the ranged work to the Skalgags.
But just as even the strongest arms cannot build an entire city, vis a vis the Pyrate Code’s Seventeenth article, their arsenal was slowly but surely shorn down to its marrow and then bled further into the realm of figment and memory. Forcing them to inevitably fall back on their atavistic war kit.
Which, to its deserved credit, performed well. At least as well as had been led to expect. Their admittedly clumsy slung shots causing as much panic and disarray within the necrotomic pact as actual destruction.
On contact the specters bled, as much as such entities can, in so far as an icy mountain peak leaked when exposed to the summer solar glare.
The complex, composite Logos field matrices which comported and animated them was disrupted. Or, if struck with sufficient force, collapsed altogether. Allowing their vital Pathos materia catalyst to leak back into the entropic wilds.
Drake noted how this ectoplasmic vapor retreated from the glowing missiles as though physically persuaded thereto by invisible plows.
This led him to conclude that their indirect volleys didn’t so much harry the tangential phantoms as literally, magnetically repulse them.
If what was true of the clock was true of the sundial, Tim may have just stumbled upon a secret older than the concept of record but which had only just now been bridled and hitched up to a chariot.
Although it should also be said that for as comprehensive as the Academy’s martial and weapon proficiency courses were, there were a few notable atlatl, scythe and jawbone shaped gaps in its coverage.
Fortunately, their frantic preparations were not just cosmetic. Drake still had his reservations on just how far he was willing to trust these crystals. After all, his father had made them.
However, he couldn’t dispute that whatever layer of psychic or mystic protection they laid had their enemy’s attack vectors limited to starboard, aka the right flank. Afore, or straight ahead. And overhead, or aetherd.
That said, crashing against the same faceless, nigh formless tides over and over again was no way to win a war. For all their efforts the most they’d managed to achieve was a grinding stalemate.
If for no other reason than because, as hearty as they were, they were still all subjects to mortal timers. If the enemy didn’t overtake them, hunger, thirst or exhaustion would. And no amount of chanting would be convincing their fallen to stand back up.
To make matters worse, through sudden chaotic means they learned that being untethered to flesh gave a beast unfettered access to the aurora’s aformal spectrum, nether to aether.
In the phantasmic plane thought did not simply become, it was. What was willed and what was true were one and the same.
Thankfully, with such powers, and indeed such beings themselves, being direct extrusions of the mind, and with the ensemble horde’s profoundest swathe being composed of dull, pre or semiconscious brutes the majority experienced only the most meager complementary buffs from their supernatural ordeal.
Although a few exceptional cases, the Pyrates each separately noted in their own time and way, must have been warlocks, druids or shamans in their original lives. This assumption being based not solely on their choice of dress and relative species.
Middling though it was, the arcane knowledge and talents of these pseudo-liches, not as much amplified as simply unshackled by their incorporeality, together with their multitudinous brethren lent them a considerable exponent of pressure to press on the allied defenders.
“One drop of water is invisible. Ten is a minor nuisance. A hundred is a refreshing drink. A thousand makes a puddle. A million makes a flood.” Pyrates’ Eighteenth scaffolding motto.
The numberless specters flew and crashed against their lines like fire over a furnace grate. Their iron will was power in itself. But it could not shield them from the sheer ungodly wrath being poured upon them.
In under the time it took the average gun crew to ready and train their weapons, the entire Skalgag village had been overrun by a scouring wash of ethereal beings.
Moving as a wholistic hive mass. Attacking with frightening speed, strength and coordination. Committed and commanded from afar by that unknowable entity the Skalgags had named “Schakzathulu”.
‘The unknowable dark of the depths’ in Adamic.
Every hand physically capable of grasping a weapon had been armed and was plying itself to the war effort in whatever ways best suited its strength and quality.
Those whose bodies had not yet grown cold but were too badly damaged to fight on up close were helped or dragged to the back, or whatever best resembled thus, handed slings or atlatls and set upon sending “express order deliverance” to any flanking foes.
At one time Drake and Hemlock stood back to back outside the chief’s capitol manner, fending off pervasive throngs from nearly every angle. The Lalitha Stone projecting a gentle but absolute warding bubble over the stalwart defenders which deflected the darkest of the preying magicks.
It was almost appropriately ironic that no beast was presently of a mind to suspect, much less know, this.
At that same moment, just out of sight beyond the curve of the center tunnel road, the other Pyrate pair formed the keystone diode of a battered and gradually dwindling semicircular phalanx in what might have loosely been considered the town center. Their charged objective being to hold back the perpetual rearward assailant tide.
But having not their Captain’s deus ex arx shield, they and theirs were suffering under the full weight of their foe’s forcibly prescribed pounding. The pitiless tax whittling their strength and fervor as eons of charged winds eroding an Abyssal shoal.
Bon Bon, meanwhile, seemed to be having the time of her life. Completely oblivious to the withering toil of battle and the grievousness of their cause she coursed a hypnotic frolic through the sundering chaos.
To the awing spectacle of all, including many of the undead, her epicyclic weapon thrashed and slashed and carried upon its flail chain winds of raw light that swept away all foes who met it like the rock and soil tithes paid to a mighty cyclone in its passing.
All the while intermittently humming, whistling and singing a distinctly tuneless hymn that went roughly this way:
“Gonna hip you, bop you, brain you, blop you! Hit and stomp! Bend and bomp! Spin them around and they all go whomp!”
As her friends knew, and their allies were quickly learning, to expect, her words carried in their wingbeats only slightly more rhythm than sanity.
But even so, Adrian had to admit her song had a strange sort of charm about it. A kind of sentimental resonance. The sort of fickle art that whispers of songs once sung, of things once seen, of deeds once done. Gently infiltrating the mind through the heart’s secret gate like a chill draft with this band of nostalgic usurpers and stealing the soul’s rightful throne. Seating in its stead an infinite dire hunger.
This was a kind of magick seldom seen outside of hospital death wards and nurseries. Its harmony naturally bracketed death and as such was anathema to it.
Which was perhaps the only reason any Pyrate lived long enough to think about toggling their strategy to phase four.
Drake sat on the verge of calculating what exactly that ought to mean when a jab from behind alerted him to another incoming crest of dire reinforcements surmounting the precipice.
Seeing that he and Hemlock were the only beasts in position to help, Drake rallied the nearby Skalgags with a scout’s whistle and, with the depleted lines aligned stoically behind them, the Pyrates braced for the worst.
Then a sound reminiscent of a diving raptor reflected off and through the star-studded silo, down the narrow street tunnel.
They turned just in time to see Schlagalmuck leading a forty strong contingent of spears and war clubs in an all-out blitzschlag charge against the undead battalion.
From beyond the village corona came a second call. More definitely sapient but not a bit less pure or strong.
From within the decrepit forest soared another force whose spear point was a golden nexel comet with a fanning orange and violet tail.
Drake gritted a smile. This was a warrior’s party.
Refreshed by their inflaming spirits, emboldened by their dire war cry, the Pyrates answered with the native roars and howls of their ancestral languages and lunged into the fray. The weary shadows of a proudly defiant race on their heels.
The battle was tremendous. The entire infernal cavern resounded with its crashing swells and rippling torrents. The living side dealt their oppressors pain on a dozen to one scale.
But for all their valiant efforts, still the entropic tide of war moved against them.
If Crow didn’t return with their miracle soon there wouldn’t be anything of their rescue party left to rescue.
****
From under the hood of the castle’s safer wall, Ellie’s fortunes were comparatively brighter. Although she would hardly describe them as such. Being forced to sit and wait while those she loved best fought to the death with a horde of unkillable monsters, all while the chief nightmare stood tauntingly within fang range and being able to do naught but watch and listen was driving her forbearing heart to an incepting level of madness. Just not quite so as to overcome the stocky bonds at her wrists, which only poured more fuel onto her intrinsic fire.
Frustrated with his army’s lack of progress, Saedel had cast the ship free from its roost and sentenced the harborless soul guarding her to the helm. Leaving her alone, by all methods of reason unsupervised, and therefore free to struggle against her restraints to her bitter heart’s and sore wrists’ content.
She did this with, it must be said, infinitely greater zeal than progress until a small voice from behind her took a reclaimant dagger to the throat of the wrathful daemon seated upon her mental throne.
But just as possession of a fancy hat and chair does not in itself equate to ownership of a kingdom, so too does the simple assassination of one inhospitable incubi alone not magickally right a listing spirit.
Only when the rescuing sound reached a critical level of volume and persistence did it at last break through to her war-torn rational bastion that an entity separate her own manic conceit was addressing her.
“Do you need a minute miss?” it said with barely restrained sarcasm. “We can come back later.”
Through a bit of creative contortion Ellie twisted around to search out the speaker.
It took her brain a few seconds and more than a few repeat assurances to come to terms with the reports her eyes were sending it.
The blackened image of a small Anuran female standing where should have, and indeed had been not a minute before, empty air. In whose hand was clutched an ivory wand bedecked in mechanical black and gold armor and crowned in a brass globe and black wire tulip cage.
To Ellie’s mind, this image proved beyond a shadow of a doubt her continued sanity and lucidity.
Not even in the most feverish depths of alcoholic stupors could she have imagined so bizarrely spectacular a device.
But then she noticed the second half of this picture. Or rather, he had allowed her to notice him per the blackened one’s muttered request.
The translucent beast shimmered into shape on top of the air an inch over the deck. His ethereal cutlass drawn and held at a lackadaisical angle by his side.
“Look out!” she cried on impulse. She tried leaping to her feet, only for her head to recall a tenth of a second after her body that her feet and hands were still moored to the mast by a caste of rope thick enough to render a ship three times the displacement of the Giant wholly inert.
She cursed her body and gravity and the unyielding composition of granite until, Amelia hunched down and closely placed her face in her Ellie’s line of vision.
She pressed a thin finger to her lips. “Shhh,” she whispered. “It's okay. He's a friend.”
Before Ellie could even start to digest these words, Silver’s blade flashed between the captive hound’s wrists and ankles. Slitting the ropes as though they were made of air and light.
Ellie wrapped Amelia tightly in her arms like she was her own lost child.
“Are you alright? What is this place? What’s this thing? Why is it following you? Did you charm it?”
Silver laughed. Amelia ignored him and shook her head.
“No time,” she said brusquely, causing Ellie to question her perception. Was this really the same timid little Runt from the Academy?
“We have a plan,” Amelia said, cutting her elder’s thought train off at the pass. “Or I should say,” she said with a glance over at her spectral companion, “we have an idea.”
Ellie looked from Amelia to Silver then back again. Guessing correctly the source of her elder’s confusion, Amelia flicked a thumb over towards the wheel.
“See that big guy up there with the horns?”
Ellie's jaw clenched, forbidding speech. So she nodded instead.
“He's the one who brought us here.” She ran a finger around an invisible wine glass rim, indicating their trifecta. “Iradyl called him a False God. I don’t know what that means.”
She presented the White Wand for Ellie to see, but the Quartermaster’s thoughts were in another dimension entirely.
“Hold on,” she said when she had properly shaken herself back into lucidity. “Iradyl? You’ve … seen Iradyl? The Mother Goddess?”
She opened and closed her mouth repeatedly. Almost as if in an effort to prove she was actually saying the words she was hearing come out in her own voice.
“Iradyl … ? The … Mother Goddess?”
Reasoning correctly that simplicity was the better part of brevity, and that brevity, in this instance, was the better part of staying alive, Amelia hummed an affirmative.
Ellie shot up straight like a loosed catapult arm. Though she thankfully remained seated, she spun her head around wildly as though she’d just discovered there was an insect in her hair. “Where is she? What’s she like? Can she help us? Does she know where Drake and the others are?”
Now was Silver's turn to speak. “If you're referring to one Harold Drake,” he said, gesturing skyward. “I believe he's up there fighting half the population of the underworld.”
“What?!” Ellie screeched. She had thought so, but half of her had believed it to be a deluded fantasy of a girl slated to die a lonely Pyrate’s death. Now she knew. And that knowledge ripped what sanity was left from her, replacing it with the adamantine cremating fire native to the damned and the religious.
She whirled and launched herself for the helm. Only to be snatched midair and halted by Silver’s preternatural advantage of speed and strength.
“Get off me!” she cried. Straining and clawing at his fleshless appendages.
‘Wow. I’m glad I’ve never been in love,’ Amelia thought. ‘I probably wouldn’t live to warn people about it.’
It has been a solvent feature in the collective pot of common wisdom for as long as beasts have had the capacity to love that its two main side effects are a certain immunity to otherwise self-evident logic and the cramming of one’s mind and worldview into a singularly narrow tunnel.
The consequence of both being the most outlandishly stupid ideas suddenly seeming divinely inspired, and indeed often divinely mandated.
Such as the idea of charging bare-handed a being who commanded an army of reserve immortals and who one of the prime deities mentioned in tones befitting an eldritch fiend or primordial titan.
Granted, Ellie hadn’t heard Iradyl’s avatar say that. And in all honesty, given her depredated state at the time Amelia couldn’t rightly say she’d heard true either.
But that was beside the point.
While Ellie's logical sensibilities may have understood that what she was trying to do was the epitome of folly, that part of her mind apparently had an appointment on the other end of the universe.
She fought against Silver’s impervious hold with every ounce of fury the god slaying arrow afforded. But as in this place what was true of the mind was so of the soul, Silver’s strength was no longer in his arms.
Ellie wasn’t going anywhere. Not without his acquiescence, which he was of no mind to give for reasons that he would outline presently.
“If I let you do what you’re aiming to lass,” Silver advocated as though giving passing street directions, “you'll be waiting for your paramour in the Abyss.”
He paused to allow his words to sink in. Then he followed up his nailing blow with a raining hammer that struck her with the continental shearing force of a Divide.
“Assuming, of course, our mutual friend over there doesn’t pull you back to join his raiding party first.”
She would not be dissuaded. “I won’t let that happen!” she screamed. But there was a notable fault line running down the back of her tone.
“Yes,” Silver agreed. “And we will,” Amelia added. She didn’t need Silver’s powers to sense Ellie's defiant will ebbing.
Her resolve to fight and defend still raged within her like a locked boiler ready to burst. But that could very easily be put to use under prudently moderated ventilation.
For this problem Silver again had an answer. Which he provided in the form of a smoldering yellow crystal handed to Amelia.
“Where did you … ?”
“A gift.” He flicked a suspicious eye towards Ellie. “From your Captain.”
Sure enough, at the implicit mention of Drake, the golden dame’s eyes again shone with a deadly fire that rivaled the stone’s.
“Hitch it to the Wand.” He pointed to the thing’s black wire cage.
Amelia looked at the Wand, then at the stone. She allowed herself the briefest moment to bask in its radiant aura, then held it close to the delicately woven womb basket.
As though on the order of some unseen conductor, the elder mechanism parted before the stone’s touch. No sooner were her fingers clear the cage wound itself shut snuggly around the beaming egg.
Now the only hurdle left was the question of just what she was meant to do with the saarding thing.
That was as far down that trail as she got before a surge of pyromantic energy ripped open the air between them. Leaving in its place the full nightmarish frame of a daemonic demigod.
Faster than even an immortal ghost could react, a bolt of malign energy from the Necromancer’s staff crashed into Silver, throwing him from the ship on a comet surge of Erandic fire.
For the next half a second Ellie and Amelia wondered if they were hallucinating. But then a clawed, armored hand as hard and unmerciful as that of death itself snatched Amelia up by the arm, tearing the divine rod from her grasp and flinging her clean across to the bowsprit.
Uncertain as to whether the punctuating cracks were her own bones or the mast she hit, Amelia chose to lie there with her eyes shut and pretend, just for a moment, that she was anywhere else. Factional thoughts and aspirant feelings gasped for life before sputtering into maleic oblivion.
As though from a distant land the words “Don’t you dare touch her you saarding animal!” followed by a chorus of painfully familiar sounds floated across a minor desk in her neural administration.
‘So much for nap time,’ Amelia thought, still unable to muster enough will to force her aching body into motion. The Antimony field, also known as a ‘BION’, or a Believe It Or Not, field by those with less sorcerous proclivities, which had camouflaged their efforts from the False God’s fragmented attention had been momentarily overwritten by the Wand’s little sun-charge upgrade.
With his ultimate prize now in his hand, Saedel returned to the helm as though nothing whatsoever had happened.
Amelia looked to her right. A casual swipe of Saedel’s gauntleted arm had sent Ellie careening into the foremast like an ungifted skater.
She lay on the deck unmoving. Amelia heard the telltale ragged snores that usually signaled a few broken ribs.
If this was a false god he put on a very convincing act.
She looked to the helm and contemplated what an eternity of abject servitude would be like.
She dropped the thought like a hot forging billet.
Now that he had his prize what did he plan to do with it? Considering the abyssal depths of cruelty and malice he’d demonstrated during her brief stint as part of his unwilling cohort, Amelia didn’t dare let her imagination anywhere near this particular bone.
Both girls were semiconscious when the False God apparated back to the helm. The ship continued its ominous ascent towards the swirling tropical storm of battle.
All ears caught on the harrowing winds. Ellie looked up with a contorting mixture of dread and dismay that made Amelia’s heart flinch.
“Drake,” she whimpered.
Amelia looked from her to the ledge then up to the ecliptic event horizon far beyond.
The sleeping giant had been awakened and was coming out to play. And without Silver or the White Wand she was powerless to fight back against the advancing scourge.
A garden of hate grew inside her breast. Its many thorned tendril weeds choked the light from her heart’s fire, and in its now umbral wrath her will languished and was hardened.
“First rule of war: if you meet your enemy’s strength with strength you’ll both lose.”
‘Thanks dad,’ Amelia thought in the way of a cultish disciple capping a prayer.
If all she could do was watch and wait, then she would do precisely that. With a predatory scalpel she scanned the Giant’s castlelike section.
To overcome the might of the herd the lone Lion needed an equal and opposite proportion of patience and cunning.
To dissect a mountain one must become the scarring river.
To be impervious to fire one must become like the dead ash.
Likewise, to step to a nascent god one would need equivalent powers of a sort the infernal foil lacked. And so she would wait. She would become the hunter.
The dark shade of dawn. The lingering shadow at twilight.
She would watch. She would wait. She would learn. And when her moment came she would seize it without fear, hesitation or mercy. Such was the way of the jungle.
****
There were many prefixes in the Adamic lexicon that, when affixed to the word storm, would have adequately described the chaos unfolding in the Skalgag village. Most of them had crossed Drake's mind at one point or another.
Many of the Skalgags were either dead, dying or closely contending. They had almost no crystals left for their slings, and the ghostly hordes still poured over the rise like endless rolls of Abyssal fog.
The Pyrates were holding out in the plaza outside the wreckage of Schlagalmuck's ancestral home. Taking refuge inside were Schlagalmuck, his family including most of the servants and bodyguards, and what oeuvre who had managed to escape the carnage in the village proper.
Those who still had ammunition as well as arms to use them were offering whatever assistance they could from what remained of the building’s upper level.
Theirs was not a hopeful zeitgeist. Their enemies’ numbers seemed limitless. And perhaps they were. Their crystal and Null supplies had all been spent, and all were starting to feel the thorny, groping fingers of fatigue.
Without the Lalitha Stone they had only their blades and their wits to keep them from getting shredded like so many pounds of fresh roast.
Drake's last words to Hemlock had been, “if we die, we die on our feet.”
To which Hemlock would have responded, “I'd rather it be them if it’s all the same to you,” but her better judgement and her stoic pride united in a successful blitzangriff to corral and decapitate her compulsive wit.
They each cut through another half-dozen spirits before Hemlock voiced the question that Drake had been consciously suppressing since nearly the start of the battle.
“Where the saard is Crow?”
Drake would have shrugged had his arms not been more desperately needed elsewhere.
“Your guess is as good as mine!”
Then their ears pricked at the same time, but as Drake’s attention was busy at the front, Hemlock sent her lieutenant gaze upwards instead. And in that moment, for the span of time that it took the thought to come and cede obeisantly to her ignominious throne seat, she smiled.
“Guess again.”
Drake did. At first, all he saw was a tiny spot of black, riding another spot of black dropping towards them out of the blackness beyond the shrinking dome of battle. As the specks came closer, it became clear that the larger speck had multiple glowing curtains of orange plasma splayed out from its top side.
As if further confirmation were needed as to the nature and origin of the new arrivals, the large speck grew into a massive deltoid blot, as it parked itself about a hundred feet directly above them. Then the smaller beige speck leaned out over the gunwale and started shouting.
“Ahoy Captain!” it called. “We were just flying by and heard y’all could use a hand!”
“I could use a drink!” Drake shouted back. He was too tired and relieved to come up with anything more original. “Now less talk and more shooting if you please!”
The Goat flashed twin thumbs up and gave a stout “aye Captain!”
He then rounded on the Twins who sat ready at their gunnery stations. With both thumbs aimed skyward, he shouted, “let er rip lads!”
The Blunder Twins reply was an expertly planted hail of incendiary plasma that scattered the undead mass before punching a surgical hole through the thick ebony walls. Exposing the tower material’s inborn blood taint and bathing the battle plane in the opulent fire hues of the cleansing morn. Causing the remaining undead legion to scatter and flee into the sanctuary depths before the fell blaze.
“Yeah!” cheered the ground troops.
“Nice shooting mates!” Steve cheered.
“Stay sharp,” Tim ordered from his place at the wheel. “And hand over those life lines.”
Crow hauled the hefty spools over to the Maiden’s gunwale while the Sailing Master hitched the carabine ends to the capstan. Then together they heaved the weighted armor-silk over the rail.
On Drake’s command Hemlock, Bon Bon and Adrian took hold of the ropes.
But for reasons not readily apparent to any beast but himself Drake himself hesitated.
Without a word he turned and disappeared into the house. Finding Schlagalmuck lying amidst the strew of mangled bodies on the floor in the main foyer, cradled in the arms of what Drake assumed was his mate and surrounded by what that same instinct identified as immediate family and a cadre of silently weeping bodyguards.
The young Captain rushed to their side only to watch helplessly as life slowly faded from Schlagalmuck’s ghostly features.
“No … worry,” the old Skalgag wheezed. “I … rest … now.”
“What'll happen to your village? Your people? Your family?” Drake asked. Though his effort was mostly academic. In truth it was the desperate effort of the drowning looking for a raft he knew wasn’t there to find.
Through some shear in the fabric of mundane logic he’d heard Schlagalmuck’s words before they’d been physically spoken.
The old war chief spat out a thick wad of magenta. He had no open wounds but the lower left quadrant of his chest had been caved in and the overlapping flesh was stained a distressing shade of purple.
“Nothing …” he managed to choke. “Our … purpose … spent.”
He silenced the young Captain’s rebuke and protest with a harsh, rattling breath. The sound of a suspect coin scratching a touchstone. “We … go … proud. Happy.”
Drake looked from one steadfast face to the other. While their leader seemed to be the only member of the village who spoke Adamic, more was said by their one shared moment than could have been captured in a thousand years’ worth of writing.
With that, the wise Skalgag closed his eyes for the final time, breathed a last gurgling farewell, and slipped away into the blissful felicity of the underworld.
Drake lingered just long enough to offer a respectful salute before turning to leave. He didn’t waste precious moments trying to convince the them to leave. Their fates were locked in and sealed by their own hands. Few could want for an end any greater.
But the Skalgag population outside was another matter. Could the sparing of their lives cleanse his father’s sins? Not even close. But as was frequently touted as the penultimate Pyrate Codex amendment, “a war over power and honor is called a conquest. A war over pride and faith is called a crusade. A war over honor and principle is called life.”
When Drake hauled himself aboard the Maiden, in a moment that came as a shock to every beast, Bon Bon laid a steady hand on his arm. “I’m … we’re proud of you. And Ellie is too.”
The words wherever she is caught and hung in the silent air for a few moments like an Odinfer eclipse.
Drake didn’t miss a beat. “We’re not done yet” he said, looking back across the village.
“Don’t touch that line!” he barked at the Sailing Master, who was just about to haul in the last of the cables.
Drake wasted but enough time for a glance over the rail. The ghost army had rallied from their cannon barrage and were rapidly reforming their clenching noose.
Only a minute remained before they would be on the Skalgag homestead and razing it to the ground. Then from there the village and all its residents would surely fall.
‘Not if I have anything to say about it’ Drake’s heart told the rest of him. A new fire
He raced to the helm and took up the intercom.
“Put me on full blast,” he barked down at Tim, who saluted and ducked below. A few thuds and clicks later a bar of lights on the instrument panel turned yellow in rapid sequence, then a final one burned green.
“All yours Captain,” Tim’s voice crackled through the brass palm grate.
Drake cleared his throat once, twice, inhaled deep into himself the Castle’s foul air, then spoke into the device calmly and plainly.
“Warriors,” he said. His voice resounding throughout the chasm, magnified through the Maiden’s hailing tubes, further exalted by its own cavernous reflections. It was as though the tower itself spoke.
“If you can understand me, I offer you safe passage and refuge. We have a home far from here where all are welcome. I cannot take back the evils done to you. Nor can I regift your old lives or lost loved ones. But if you wish to start anew, if you wish to carry on, to spite our enemies by living to fight another day, you need only follow my voice.”
An insurgent bolt of inspiration took mastery of him as he replaced the speaker. As though a banished spirit other than his own possessed his body.
He raised a sword-clenching fist high over his head and shouted at his crew, “for life! For love! Death to the Necromancer! Death to the False God!”
The consolidate round of whoops and hearty cheers that followed was quickly overtaken by a rattling buzz from below like that of a stirring Apian hive.
The Pyrates stood agape as from over the gunwales the Skalgags came swarmed up to land upon the Maiden’s armored deck. Their ears gently pulsing a fluorescent saffron like lamian moth wings.
The Pyrates traded looks that all said minor deviations on the following: “did you know they could do that? No. Did you? No.”
It was then that a section from a book he’d read as a pup, possibly one of his father’s many journals, flittered over his mind’s coronal lens.
Pirates are called criminals by The Powers That Be because they are free to choose life over duty, to pursue good or evil as they see fit and to engage in whatever calling suits them best. Their rejection, and individual usurpation, of centralized social direction makes them naturally anathema to any imposer of order. That any beast may do as they alone see fit is beyond the scope of acceptance for any tyrant. And indeed beyond the scope of calculation for many a mindless servitor.
Perhaps it was just all the thrill of the moment. Or maybe it was his brain shifting to a lower gear to conserve power. But whatever the reason for his quarter turn of view, in that instant Drake decided to be the son his father had always envisioned.
For this one hour of this one day, he would become a pirate in the truest sense.
He flicked on the intercom setting and set both hands upon the wheel. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing Silver’ he thought.
Then he shouted, “alright mates, all hands to your stations! We've got a day that still needs a bit of saving!”
He watched with ensnaring pride and vigor as Bon Bon skittered below to her post, the Sailing Master took to the nav table, Crow and Hemlock flew to their respective roosts, and Adrian spun open the heart valves of the Maiden’s amber sails.
As sure as rain poured from a troubled sky the ship crackled and pulsed to life in a brewing storm of technological wizardry. It’s honeyed veins beaming captured the day’s lifeforce. Its main armaments thrumming like a plucked bass. Its guts purring like a satisfied Feline.
They were ready for round two.