It shouldn’t have been possible, that we all agreed on. That it was happening, we also all agreed on.
Whale hunters, though I shall henceforth refer to them by their proper name, Boidae Aquatilis or the Giant Sea Boa, have a curious hunting pattern due to the difference in depths between where they prefer to live and where they hunt. They have gills like a fish, and it is speculated they have more incommon with sharks than they do with snakes. Their inhalation mechanism in fact is not particularly well suited for their size, working only due to the increased concentration of dissolved oxygen due to the colder temperatures of the bottom. Every moment they spend near the surface is akin to a human standing atop a snowy, treeless peak; but, that’s where they trap whales.
If the pod dives, the sea boa can immediately give chase and devour one of them. The whales have figured this out as well, and know to stay at the surface and flee. Thus, it becomes a chase where only the healthiest whale can survive, and then only if they don’t need to dive and eat soon. The Sea Bird’s Rest was only faster than an injured whale if the winds cooperated.
That night, the winds were in the right direction, but hardly enough to puff our sails. We could see the twin eyes, like glossy pearls, sway from side to side, slithering after us through the water.
Captain Bodin could see it clearest of us all, thanks to the blessing of his stigmata. His thoughts were hardly more poignant for it. “It was that pod earlier, the one that bumped us. They drew it to us. Sea’s blessing my ass, they’ve rubbed their trail off on us and escaped!”
“Mind you don’t blaspheme,” Honung said, peeling his forehead from the deck. He seemed to think prostrating to the open ocean would get his goddess’ attention, when it could scarcely be got in her high cathedrals.
Lucius asked, “If it’s following us, can’t we just pour the poison now? It will swim through and become ill, if nothing else.”
“I only made enough to pour once. We won’t be able to cross the sea lanes safely if we use it now,” I explained. We were on a ship, not in an alchemy lab. Procuring the proper materials was technically possible, since the active ingredients all came from fish beneath us, but the ship was not equipped with trawling nets, and it would take time beside.
“Then what do you propose we do?”
“Nothing. We aren’t certain it will bother to attack us before our departure from the sea lane. Best case scenario, when we do pour it, the beast becomes slowed and chooses easier prey,” I explained, gesturing beyond to the pirate ship. Their deck lights glimmered like orange stars.
“Two birds, one stone,” Lucius said with a nod.
Captain Bodin scoffed. “If we don’t lose speed before then and goad it into attack!”
It was Honung that saved us from the captain’s pragmatic fear. “We would have no control over that regardless. Captain Bodin, Sir, the best you can do is keep us in the western sea lane and hope the passage of previous ships keeps it disoriented.”
“Rest assured, I will stand here and watch that it doesn’t come up on us. Go, steer us well. It will certainly catch us if we hit a rock.”
Captain Bodin scowled, and stormed off to the wheel, taking it back from his first mate whom he sent to sleep. The moment his hands grasped the wheel, I noticed a change in his standing, in the magic about him. He had activated his stigmata. To my eyes, I saw a great many dancing motes of light leave his body, trailing out behind him and into the water. They flowed behind, reached a certain distance, and then leapt overhead to the front to flow past once more. In this way, he took in the nature of the water around us without much need of vision. It was even keener than daytime, by my reckoning.
“Well, for as long as the two of us are here,” I told the boy, “I should teach you the spell I used. It will prove useful in the future.”
“Spell? So it was magic?”
“Everything in this world is magic. That was lesson three I gave you. For all your recollecting you’ve been doing, did you forget that?”
“Lesson one,” my pupil said in a dry tone. “Trust only yourself, for you have no greater ally. Lesson two, learn from the world, for there is no other source of knowledge but experience. Lesson three, everything is magic.”
“Very good.”
He folded his arms. “You know, there was that scholar we met who believed the world was entirely useless to teach anything, that all it could do was provoke a memory already innate within us.”
“An idiot,” I pronounced. “He mistook a fleeting recollection from a life past as a universal truth. Remember lesson two.”
“So–” he nudged the cask. “Is it magic? Or alchemy?”
“Alchemy. Nothing the temples of Saphira couldn’t cook up if they had a mind to. I suspect they have in the past and simply don’t teach men like Honung how to do it because it might undermine the integrity of the sea lanes,” I said, and set about explaining to him the precise compounding and distillment I had used of standard reagents.
At the end, he said, “That sounds like you’re so carelessly working with it that you couldn’t possibly end up with anything helpful, but you’re making poison, so I guess that checks out.”
“Poisons are much easier to make than medicine.”
“Have you explained this to the doctor?”
“Not yet, I think I’ll tease him along a bit more before I do. He’s quite the thrilling study actually. I believe that were I to give him a fresh corpse, he’d waste no time in pulling it all apart to see for himself.”
“Depends on how you got the corpse.”
“That it would.”
Lucius rose and paced the deck, his gaze to the ladder down. “I should sleep. If it means to attack us, it will do so later rather than sooner. Better to be rested if I do have to jump in and stab it.”
I produced my pipe from my robe and set about lighting it. Sleep wasn’t nearly so necessary for me, but I advised him, “Had you intended to sleep, you should have pressed it and joined the girl in her cabin.”
Even in the moonlight, I could see his cheeks color. “She would have rebuked me and you know that!”
“She would have, but that doesn't mean she wouldn’t have accepted. Think about it from her perspective.”
“What? That she owes her life to me?”
“That she doesn’t want to be seen as a floozy! You must know she’s conscious of that, given her profession. The stereotypes.”
“Oh, what would you know of young people?”
I huffed and sucked on my tobacco. “I was young once too.”
“Oh yeah? How long ago?”
“Impudent brat,” I growled at him, and he escaped, down to the crew hold where a hammock had been assigned for him. The rumor of the snake preceded him, bringing with it ill rest and whispering. He never made it to his bed that night, something far more demanding of him presented itself.
Aisha made eye contact with him from the door of her cabin and held it a moment. Without a word, she stepped back into her cabin, and left the door open. Lucius was but a boy. His impulses may as well have had an iron chain around his throat and dragged him over, to find her sitting, knees to her chest, on the straw mattress provided her. The silver moonlight left half of her in shadow, only revealing a glimmer of the liquor bottle as she looked over at him.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“You people just can’t let me have a good night’s rest, can you?”
“You heard?” Her cabin was small, a shallow thing squeezed against the hull, with a tiny plug of glass overhead to let the light in. The bed itself was little more than a box to contain straw and a smell hinting of mold. The closest thing to a seat for Lucius was to plant his rear upon a ledge meant for candles. It gave him just enough space to face her.
She pointed at the window. “You’re practically over my head, and the captain wasn’t keeping his voice down.”
“We’ll be fine.”
“Oh, I’m sure I’ll be fine. You’ll jump in to save me, won’t you?” The moon nearly hid her sly smile.
“Preemptively this time.”
“Would this be your first time fighting a sea monster? Or have you faced one before?”
“First time for everything. I’m more experienced with dragons and humans.”
“Not even trolls?”
“I’ve never been that far north, though I once met a trollkin, a halfbreed.”
That gave her pause, and she delicately asked, “Which parent was the troll?”
“Neither, both were trollkin themselves.”
She leaned closer. “And their parents?”
“Didn’t ask, don’t really want to know. Master says it’s a persistent gene, gets passed down for generations.”
After another pause, she asked, “So a bunch of generations ago–”
“Quite curious about that, aren’t you? Not exactly a field of study I ever pursued.”
“Trolls are like ten feet tall though, at the shortest! That would be like a dog and a hare!”
“Stranger things have happened.”
“Oh yeah? Like what?”
“Bear-spiders.”
“Bear-spiders?”
“Doesn’t look like you’re going to be falling asleep soon…”
“Not with a sea snake hunting me, no. Tell me a bedtime story, why don’t you?”
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The best material with which to make a binding circle is the creature you intend to bind. This is somewhat arcane knowledge, because generally speaking, I’m the only one who has a use for it. The rest of my kind being deceased, humanity relies on cruder methods of steel and fire. They plead with the gods for intervention should all else fail, and in the case of godlings are generally successful.
With no humans west of the mountains, the issue had never been brought to the attention of the Divine Beasts, much less the gods. In such shadows of perception, the godling had grown. It had suckled out vestiges of life and woven them into itself again and again, until it dared to venture out to eat. Then it did more than eat, it made new life.
One such monstrosity was still in the proximity of the village, and I tasked Ezra with felling it. Not that I am some monster who would send an eleven year old girl to fight a bear, I gave her a proper weapon.
“What is that?” Lucius asked.
“Shut up, it’ll hear us.”
“You’re louder than I am.”
“To make sure it gets through your thick skull, now shut up.”
What she had looked quite like a shaft of wood with a hole drilled through it. It seemed blackened within, as though scorched by fire, but that was nothing more than graphite lubricant. The magic of the device was in the stock, the contraption beside her cheek that could compound the spring loaded flick of a mallet through successive ley rods into a lead slug, multiplying the force several orders of magnitude. She had a hand cannon.
“Okay, but what is that,” Lucius asked, pointing at the misshapen creature. It staggered as it tried to move, smudging wads of silken webbing between a pine and a fallen birch. Some threads went across elegantly, others broke and tore beneath a clumsy paw. Only half of its body had the waxen hair and chiten to manipulate the threads, and it lacked the intelligence to know which half.
“Prey,” Ezra said. She stuck her tongue out one side of her mouth, adjusted the way she was hunched around the hand cannon, and tried to steady her breathing.
“You’re not going to eat that, are you?” Lucius asked, breaking her concentration.
“Would you please shut up?”
“Can’t you just tell me what it is?”
“I don’t know! Master does, but he didn’t tell me. Now shut up so I can kill it,” she snapped back at him, and her voice carried too far, too well. The creature looked over at them with five bloodshot eyes, the fur molting from its face and its teeth longer and sharper than ever. “Crap!” Ezra shouted, and stuffed her cheek back to the stock. She pulled the hammer and blasted off a round. The lead flew true, but at the time, I had not implemented rifling to the bore, so the lead ball deformed on impact and came tumbling from the barrel. It flew at great speed, but veered from the true line.
The slub punched through the abomination’s shoulder, bursting muscle and chitin. It howled as thick blood gurgled from the wound, but did not fall. It came charging at them instead, barely limping.
“Reload! Help me reload!” Ezra shouted as she tore out the pouch of slugs. The ramrod went flying. “Get that!”
Lucius leapt for it, grabbing it up as she fitted the shot cloth to the round and stuffed it into the mouth of the hand cannon. Without knowing the operation of the thing, all he could do was hand it over as she fumbled. The act of reloading was opaque to Lucius, who had no familiarity with it in the least. He had not even heard of the material ley in his life. What he understood was that Ezra had done something to injure the beast at a distance, like an arrow without a bow, and she hadn’t abandoned it. Resolved that she needed time, for he had seen arrows slay a bear once, he did not flee from the monster.
He stepped out before her, lifting up a stick between he and it.
The abomination swatted him aside like a person might flick an insect from their dining table. Even the greatest knights in the land would have struggled with but a stick against such a monster, so his pain could only be expected. That burst of agony, of being smashed through the branches of the pine tree, bought Ezra the time she needed.
She screamed as she fell backwards, hefting the hand cannon up like a spear as the monster fell upon her, and she blasted. The second roundstruck the monster in the face, ripping between the rotten flesh between bone and chitin and driving through the mush that constituted its brain. Gore exploded out the back. The creature smashed into the ground at her feet and gagged, the convulsion squirting more blood from the wounds before it laid still.
Ashen faced and unable to breathe, much less cream for help, she had to force herself back to her feet and choose between reloading a third time, and finding Lucius. His croak of pain washed the choice from her mind, and she ran to him. The needles and cracked wood had ripped his shirt and skin. The blood dripping from his body ran like sweat as he worked one joint after the next and found them still in working order.
“You idiot, what did you think you’d accomplish like that?” Ezra demanded as she pulled him from the mess.
“Thought I would buy–” He grunted in pain, the exertion making his entire body shake and tense as he hissed.
Ezra abandoned the abomination’s corpse and made Lucius drape himself over her back, much to his manly chagrin. She was older than him, and a fair bit larger. Running him back to our camp was well within her powers, and so she did.
“Dislocated ribs,” I pronounced after prodding him a few times. “Lay him down and let him rest. Get a clean rag to wipe the blood away before it festers. It won’t kill him.”
And so I left the two of them by the fire, so that I could go to the abomination’s corpse and perform my grisly alchemy. Ezra fetched water from the town well and did a crude cleaning first as she boiled more water to clean afterwards with. She tried to be somber and delicate, and still drew out whimpers of pain at first. When she switched over to the boiled water, the noises stopped.
So did the bleeding.
Every scratch and cut across his back had sealed shut and his breathing had returned to normal. The only price seemed to be a deep sleep thrust upon him before night began. She tried afterwards to stay up and berate him for the scare, but sleep shut her eyes long before he rose.
I was still awake, the runes I had to carve to create the logic circuits(1) were quite tedious. “Better already?”
“I’m hungry.”
I gestured to the pot, which had rather cool stew available, this time without the spice. “That was very clever of you,” I said as he spooned himself out a bowl.
“Nearly dying?”
“Changing Ezra’s impression of you.”
“Did I?” he asked, keeping his eyes on his food.
I grinned. “You heard of that in a story, didn’t you? And recreated it.”
“So what if I heard a story? Lots of people have heard stories.”
“Because it got you another meal, and something more valuable than money, good will… what’s your name, boy?”
“Lucius.”(2)
“Would you like to study under me as an apprentice, Lucius?”
“I don’t want to work for anyone.”
I set my carving aside and folded my hands together. “You’re quite a bit too young to be on your own. You lack the knowledge and the strength. I won’t force you, but you have a good deal of talent that I would like to foster.”
“Why should I care what you would like?”
“Because, I can offer you things you would like.”
“Like money? Is that what you’re going to suggest?”
“I’d start with your missing arm,” I said, pointing a finger at his exposed stump. It had a fresh inch of raw flesh more than the morning. It nearly reached to his elbow, well beyond where it had been hacked off so long ago. As the adage goes, every man has a price.
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1. By the time of your reading this, you may have heard of such a thing as logic circuits in regards to digitized computation. I assure you this was more rudimentary than can even be called analog. I was working in the language of logic and meaning, for there is little other way to craft magic.
2. As noted previously, he had another name which I have omitted for clarity of the narrative.