by Simon Archer
“Really?” Jenny turned and gave him a disbelieving look. “Ye’d question a musket as fine as that?”
“Enough,” Tabitha snapped. “We bring it all, aye, Cap’n?”
I nodded and grinned. It was interesting to see the little feline take charge and to see her cow Jimmy and Jenny both. Mary picked out the coffer and ran a hand over it.
“This is the real prize, my friends,” she said quietly.
“Is it now?” I asked with a tilt of my head.
“Aye.” The little changeling witch smiled and carefully drew the thing open. “This is what fuels the ironclad.”
Nestled neatly in individual compartments within the coffer sat a pair of softly glowing, perfect spheres, one blue and one red. Unlike the rough-worked stones that we had, these were perfect. They were elemental jewels worked by the hands of a master of the arts. Such things were legendary in both their rarity and their power.
“Are those what I think they are?” Tabitha breathed.
“Aye, lass,” I replied with no small bit of reverence in my voice. “So long as ye think they be elemental jewels, one water, one fire.” So saying, I reached out and gently plucked the fire stone from its home. At that moment, I held an inferno in the palm of my hand. This was the purest essence of elemental fire, distilled down and contained in a gemstone perhaps twice the size of a man’s eye. Opening my senses just a crack, I suddenly gained an insight into the interactions of the elements that I hadn’t realized had eluded me.
So long as I held a representation of each element, I could work with them all. I laughed suddenly, long and loud, as the epiphany hit. Then I replaced the stone in the coffer.
My friends and family all stared at me as if I was barmy, but I just shook my head as Mary shut the coffer.
“I realized somethin’ that I’ve been doin’ wrong,” I explained. “Ye shall see, soon enough.” Then I reached down and hefted the trunk up onto one of my broad shoulders. “Lead on an’ make sure I be havin’ clear footing, me hearties. I’ll wager Jimmy’d try to kill me if I dumped these on the ice an’ broke a few of ‘em.”
“After I got done cryin’, I would,” Mocker said. “Don’t even be jokin’ about that, Cap’n.”
23
“What’s this?” Bord asked when Mary handed him the silver coffer we’d taken from the iron box.
“Everything else ye need to get this tub steaming,” I told him.
The old dwarf’s eyes went wide when he opened it. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he breathed. “We found a place for mountin’ elemental stones in the boilers an’ in the furnace, but I hardly imagined ye’d find the perfect ones.”
“They were something of a gift,” Mary offered.
“We’ve more to show ye, too,” I said.
“Fine,” Bord grumbled, “but if ye keep showin’ me things, I’ll not get The Echo underway before summer.”
“This won’t take long,” I said and led him to where we’d dropped the iron chest.
“Weapons box?” Bord asked.
“Good guess,” Jimmy sat atop the thing, grinning ear to ear. He slid off and opened it with a flourish.
“Bloody hell!” the cannonmaster exclaimed the moment his eyes lit on the contents. “Heavy carbines with weighted stocks and axe blades for close work. Lemme guess.” His eyes narrowed as he looked up at me. “Another gift?”
“In a manner o’ speakin’,” I said with a shrug. “Don’t ye worry, though. We didn’t despoil the dead.”
“They told this green bastard where to find this shit,” Jimmy exclaimed. “Can ye believe it?”
“I can believe lots o’ things where Bardak be concerned, lad,” Bord said, “includin’ a few things ye might consider impossible.”
“Ain’t sure impossible’s a word where it comes to the captain,” Tabitha mused. “So, with regards to these weapons, there be anythin’ special we need to do with ‘em?”
“They use powder like anythin’ else,” Bord pulled one out of the box and went over it carefully. “Measure o’ powder, likely twice as much as ye’d put in a standard musket, then a heavier ball. There might be a few in the thing’s false bottom, but likely I’ll have to set one o’ my men to casting a few.”
“False bottom?” We all asked simultaneously.
“Did ye think we’d stash weapons without bullets?” the cannonmaster grumbled, offended. “Usually, crates like this be havin’ a false bottom where ye’d put bullets, tools, and most anythin’ else.”
“Right,” I grumbled. “Unload her, then, an’ we’ll see if there’s anything to this ‘false bottom’ story.”
Bord crossed his arms and stood offside to watch after giving a snort of derision. “Ye’ll see,” he muttered
And see we did. Once the guns were unloaded, Tabitha tapped around inside the chest and then opened it the rest of the way up. As the cannonmaster had said, there were about two-hundred oversized musket balls stashed underneath the false bottom, along with two boxes of extremely well-preserved paper cartridges and some metallic circles.
“What do these do?” I asked, holding one out to the smith.
Bord took it without answering, grinned, and then quickly primed one of the carbines. Instead of dropping powder in the striker pan, though, he tapped the metal circle in. Lifting the gun to his shoulder, he fired off a shot out over the water. The boom of it was louder and deeper than anything I’d heard short of a chasing cannon.
“Percussion cap,” the dwarf told me. “Replaces powder in the pan that could get wet or misfire when ye shoot. What’s more, these cartridges are treated to be resistant to water. They ain’t gonna survive a dunking, but ye’ll be able to shoot pretty reliably in the rain.”
“I like that,” Jimmy exclaimed with a low whistle.
“Alright, then,” I said after a moment. “Back to work. There look to be ten o’ these carbines. Give half of ‘em to Bord’s crew, and any o’ ye what wants one can have it. I ain’t about to change my loadout.”
“As for the jewels,” my gaze focused on Bord, “once The Echo be ready, call me an’ put those things in their places.
“Works for me.” Bord slapped his hands on his leather work-apron. “Call if ye need me.” Then with that, the dwarf stomped off and disappeared once more into the bowels of the ironclad.
“Ain’t much left to explore,” Tabitha complained.
“Aye, but like as not, we should take time to prepare an’ practice,” I observed, then stretched and rolled my neck. There was an odd feeling in the pit of my stomach, but I wasn’t afraid. Fear had been beaten out of me as a young orc during my training and throughout many raids and combats.
Now, though, we were building up to the big one. Whatever came next would be the culmination of everything that I’d done in the past months and the years before. Of course, I had good people to stand beside me and march ahead into the unknown once the fight with Layne was done.
I reached up and scratched my head with a vaguely sheepish look as I realized folks stood staring at me while my mind wandered. “Well,” I mock-growled, “off with ye, ye slackers.”
Jimmy and Jenny shared a look, saluted me in the orcish tradition, and headed off towards The Hullbreaker, where it rode at dock. Tabitha and Mary each took one of my arms and we walked down towards the end of the dock. As we passed the gangplank, Adra joined our little party, and we walked on.
Ligeia and the King Narwhal had been busy. Most of the expanse of water in the cavern had been broken into chunks, then broken even more so that there was little more than a slushy skin of ice over the dark water. They were out beyond the island somewhere, searching for food for the immense whale. He was an interesting addition to our party, though not quite so personable, I thought, as Tiny.
Perhaps I just hadn’t had the time to get to know him. The entrance he’d first made, impaling and destroying Lack’s little boat on his spiraling horn certainly had been memorable, though.
“Can you believe that we’re al
most done?” Mary asked as she perched on a stone piling. Fortunately for all of us, the cave held the wind at bay, which trapped a little bit of warmth in here and allowed us a bit more freedom of movement while the dwarves did their work.
“You may not wish to count the task so close to completed,” Adra warned. “There is still much ahead.”
I nodded agreement to the shamaness. There was a lot ahead of us, and there was, unfortunately, a great deal that could go wrong. “So long as Bloody Bill holds up his end o’ things, we should be okay, I think.”
“I ain’t so sure he’ll be there when ye return,” Tabitha said with a faint hiss to her voice, “or else he’ll be waitin’ to ambush us.”
“I don’t think so,” I mused. “I am of a mind to give him the benefit o’ the doubt.”
“So you say,” Adra murmured, then gazed off and upwards. “The dead are quiet now.”
“We settled them a bit, an’ we be doin’ what it takes to let them rest,” I explained. “They seem bound to yon ship, and yet they want to see it gone.”
“An’ we passed their test, thanks to Bardak here,” Tabitha chortled. “He be the most honorable right pirate I’ve ever had the pleasure to know.”
“We all have known him, I believe,” Adra said with a faint smile.
“Are there complaints, then?” Mary asked teasingly.
A smile tugged lightly at my lips as the women bantered, and I couldn’t help but feel a degree of warm pride, along with no small amount of love for them. It was flattering that such amazing people such as they had thrown their lots in with mine and then gone a few steps further.
I let my mind wander over our first meetings. Mary had been in the dungeon in Insmere, witch-bound and awaiting a traitor’s death when I freed her. We’d lost ourselves in passion after a battle with Imperial marines outside of Jetsam, and that act drew Ligeia to us.
The siren had joined us initially to get revenge upon her once-lover, Bloody Bill Markland, though had reluctantly agreed to work with him when the need arose in our fight against Commodore Sebastian Arde, master of The Indomitable.
Adra had been a strange sort of gift from Markland, one that he’d intended as a spy, but his lack of understanding of spiritwalkers had provided us with a skilled and powerful ally. Eventually, she too joined my growing harem, but not before the Ailur pirate, Tabitha Binx.
Tabitha came to find me and saved my green ass from being shot in a bar brawl in a dive in the town of Caber. She’d wanted a piece of a treasure ship that had sunk during a storm a number of years back. In her possession were the keys to finding the thing, and we’d gone and proved successful against those odds, and against both the Admiralty and the resurrected Commodore Arde.
“Ye okay?” Tabitha asked, nudging me with a hip.
“What?” I blinked out of my reverie and found all three of the women looking at me with curious eyes and pensive expression.
“Copper for your thoughts,” Mary offered.
“I was just rememberin’ how we all met, one after the other after the other,” I explained. “‘Twas nice to just enjoy the memories.”
Adra laughed and poked me in the side with a fingertip. “Just be careful to leave the memories when you are done, Splitter of Skulls. You could become trapped in them, should you choose.”
“How can I choose t’be trapped in my own bloody memory?” I demanded. As much as I cared for the she-orc shaman, her strange ways often confused me, and the shaman training she’d given me didn’t always help to make her easier to understand.
“When the memory becomes all that there is,” Adra replied.
“I’d not worry about it,” Tabitha said with a laugh. “Ye sort of went all moonchild there for a bit, an’ we stopped talking to stare at ye.”
“How long did ye do that?” I grumbled.
“Not long before Adra decided to poke you in the ribs,” Mary answered, then grinned for a moment before looking out over the dark water. Already, the daylight was fading into the darkness of the short northern night. “Do you think Ligeia will be around this night?”
“I do not care to question her comings and goings,” I replied with my own cryptic answer. “She’s there when we need her or when she needs us, and I’d rather not be the one to try to tie her down. I suspect that is part of why there be bad blood ‘twixt her and Bill, aside from him leavin’ her.”
“Either of those would be enough to turn me against a man,” Mary said.
“And yet you are bound to this orc before us,” Adra mused. “Why is that, I wonder?”
“Because he’s bloody worth it,” my witch asserted. “Bardak, my Captain, is the best man I’ve ever met, and,” she smirked broadly, “the first to leave me begging for a rest.”
I sighed and reached up to rub the bridge of my nose. Here we go.
Tabitha laughed aloud and spun in place. “I’ll agree that he be the best man I’ve ever met, but atop that an’ the wonderful tumbles we’ve had, he simply makes me happy.”
“That is my position,” Adra added. “The Splitter of Skulls fulfills a need in me that I did not know that I had, and I celebrate him for that.”
This whole conversation had turned from flattering to flatteringly embarrassing. I really didn’t need to hear these things, though I couldn’t help but be pleased by them.
“For my part,” I said slowly, “I find that each o’ you fills a hole in me that I’d never before noticed. It be a strange thing, to me, but when all o’ ye, Ligeia too, are with me, I feel like I can do anything.”
I nodded. “That be why, when we go to war with the Admiral an’ face The Pale Horse, that I want all o’ ye at my side.”
Out in the underground lagoon, an explosion of water heralded the arrival of the King Narwhal, and not long after, Ligeia slid up onto the dock and paused, looking around at the half-serious expressions on all our faces.
“Is there something wrong?” she asked.
I shook my head. “Nay, lass, only promise me something.”
The siren cocked her head to the side and looked up at me. She was the tallest of the women but still not quite as tall as I was. “Of course.”
“I need all of ye beside me when we go against Layne. Will ye be at our side?”
Ligeia gave me a toothy grin at that. “I would not miss it for anything, my Captain,” she told me, calling me that particular endearment much the same as Mary often did. The siren was a little bit of a mimic, especially when it was fun.
“Good,” I said and drew all of them into an embrace. There was no way I could lose, not with all of them at my side.
24
Almost exactly three days after they started refitting the ancient ironclad, Bord knocked on the door of my cabin, and when I yelled for him to enter, he stuck his bearded head in with a broad, toothy smile.
“I’ve somethin’ ye have to see, Cap’n,” the dwarf said.
All things considered, I had a pretty good guess as to what it might be, but I let him lead me out onto The Hullbreaker’s main deck. Adjacent to my ship at the pier sat the squat, blocky form of The Echo, and white smoke pulsed from her stacks in time with a low pulsing sound.
“So, she works, aye?” I mused. “Guess I don’t have to maroon ye, after all, dwarf.”
“Feh,” Bord spat. “I can take any five o’ ye greenskins, orc. Yer ship’d be mine afore ye could say Cap’n Bord.”
“Well, Cap’n Bord,” I addressed him, “show me how to pilot her?”
The old dwarf beamed happily and stomped off. I trailed after while the available crew of my ship watched in hope and amazement. We’d seen the cannonmaster work wonders but never anything quite like this. That ship was what could possibly win us this war, and it worked.
The shutters on the windows were open in the wheelhouse, but one thing I noticed was just how hot it was inside the ironclad. Some sort of hidden system circulated the air, but she still was a furnace.
“Ye know how to steer a ship,” Bord sai
d, “so I ain’t teachin’ ye how to suck eggs.” With that, he pointed to the lever beside the wheel. “Push it forward, ye head fore. Aft is aft. She’ll sail in reverse if ye need her to.”
I reached for the lever, but he stopped me with one gauntleted hand and pointed to a sort of empty bell that dangled at the end of a rope or cable or something. “Take that down an’ put it to yer mouth, then tell the crew to cast off.”
“Ye be a madman, Bord,” I complained, but I did what he told me, and was surprised to hear my voice carry across the ship. Heavy-booted dwarves hurried to do as they were told, and soon, The Echo drifted clear of the stone pier.
“What now?” I asked.
“Notch her up one mark,” Bord said, “an’ steer for the open sea.”
“We ain’t going to get caught in the ice?” I wanted to know.
“That’ll be less of a problem than I thought,” he replied. “Now go ahead. ‘Tis easier to show than to tell.”
I grunted and pushed the lever forward until I felt a click. The Echo began to make a louder, pulsing noise as it accelerated slowly. At just this first notch, as Bord called it, she pulled smoothly away from the pier as if under oar by a strong crew of hardy orcs.
“How many o’ these notches?” I asked as I set the ship’s nose towards the half-iced entrance of the cave.
“Seven,” he replied. “Five forward an’ two back.”
As we closed on the exit, Bord pulled down the speaking bell and said, “Set the ram, boys, an’ ready the vents!”
I gave him a curious look, and he grinned back. “Notch ‘er up.”
Bord hadn’t ever steered me wrong. Besides, if we wrecked, he and his boys would be on the bottom with me, and I could breathe underwater. I notched the throttle up, and the ironclad picked up speed. At the bow, a low grinding sound started up, and I gave the dwarf a startled look.
“Ye’ll see,” he said enigmatically.
I turned my gaze out to fore. I couldn’t see much because of the way the ship was armored, but I could tell we were heading to run aground on the building ice at the entry of the underground cove.