by Brad C Baker
“Well, friend. It’s been a pleasure,” Vlados said.
“Shite of a dragon,” Crallick grinned. “It has not. I’ve been drunk more often than not and scared the shite out of your staff more often than not. Pleasure, my ass. But thank you for your friendship.”
Vlados laughed, “Ye got me there boyo. But you’re welcome.”
As the swells began to chuck the ship through steeper ramparts, Mr. Drake came up to them. “Excuse me, sers. Mr. Oakentree, would you be so kind as to lash Mr. Martine to the deck? Captain, please come below, there is no use for you up here.”
“Thank you, Mr. Drake. You make safe as well.” Vlados turned towards the hatch to go below. Foam plowed in massive geysers from the bow of the ship as the brigantine sliced down hard on a swell.
Crallick went over to the helm and waited for Jacob to wave him on. After Jacob leaned heartily into the lines holding the wheel in place, he called to Crallick, “I hope you lash me secure! This will be a ride of a lifetime to be sure! Good luck and gods bless you!”
Crallick grinned with assured grimness, “You’ll be fine. Just make sure I am. Make all the prayers you want, just hold on, and don’t drown!” the wind now was forcing the men to shout. The pitch and roll of the ship was making it hard to keep footing. The skies were so dark as to appear midnight, not five hours after noon.
After a brief concentration, Crallick invoked his channeling of life energy and caused vitally strong vines to erupt from the deck of the ship. Unlike his efforts against the Aquans, these held no thorns, only sure gripping bark. These tendrils bound Jacob securely to the deck and the wheel. Jacob was so secure, in fact, he could only nod his affirmation that he was all right. His words were breathed away by the gale as soon as they left his lips.
Crallick headed below.
***
By the end of the first watch of the storm, Jacob had done well, surviving the furious onslaught of wind and water, and pitching deck. He managed to get below, unscathed, when Crallick and Bargess the Komodoman helmsman got him down. Crallick was lost in thought when a swell rushed over the railing unexpectedly, taking him for a ride over the edge. It was only after Bargess had dug his massive clawed feet into the deck boards, that he grinned a toothy grin.
Through the pounding rain and the early morning gloom, Crallick clawed his way along the length of one of his vines with gritty determination. Hollered words being too much of a waste of effort, Crallick simply nodded. He recast his incantations of growth, entangling the Komodoman and the helm wheel further, then breathlessly made his way below.
“You alright?” asked a worried Vlados. “You took your sweet time.”
Noting the worried faces of the slavegirl, and helmsman behind Vlados, Crallick blew it off. “Just wanted a quick swim. The water is a lovely temperature.”
Vlados laughed dryly. “You are one crazy son of a…” he trailed off in a smile. “Be careful. Your daughter needs you,” he finished instead.
There was little water making it in through the hull, however, the torque of the ocean on the keel was taking its toll. There was a painful groaning, almost splintering sound from the bowels of the ship. The keel, the spine of the ship, was beginning to fail.
Kittalae rushed through the ship, reaching out with her mind to touch the spirit of the wood. Running her hands along the floor of the hold, she, guarded by Crallick, sensed out weak stresses in the ship and soothingly, lovingly cooed to them, persuading and seducing them to bend to her will.
***
The next change of helmsmen went off without a hitch.
Mid-afternoon found all of the glass shattered out of Crallick’s cabin. The shutters were reclosed, then lashed shut.
The two masts of the ship were creaking more than they used to but were hanging in. The deck seemed to be reinforced by all of the life energy that was being poured into it. The hull, likewise, under the careful ministrations of Kittalae, seemed to be holding strong. The greatest worry seemed to be the keel, which continued to groan and protest.
All of the sailors cowered in the hold, fearing for their very souls.
Wanda ensured Vlados she would unleash a divine miracle when she was called to it. This sent the dwarven Captain off grumbling in a fit of stress, not quite approaching rage. He muttered heretical and blasphemous slurs until his door slammed him out of sight from the others.
The second day’s tension was alleviated by the drinking of rum and playing at an island game called Slapping the Bones. Lanterns swung in the gloomy hull. Demoralized sailors prayed to any god they could think to invoke.
Those prayed to Aarison to calm the winds.
Some prayed to Flowwe to calm the ocean.
The desperate prayed to either of the Thetwin goddesses of light and dark. Jyslin to help them survive, and Chessintra to not take them too soon.
The dour mood of the trapped sailors did not go unheeded. The silent and stealthy aquan waited in the depths of the bilgewater, hiding in the subflooring of the hold. Fresh seawater flooded in regularly. The aquan began to plot to see how it could send these trespassing mammals to their doom.
The eye of the storm passed about an hour after midnight, on the third day. This held an uneasy truce for the sailors and their jailer storm. Wide-eyed, Vlados surveyed the devastation. The deck had been stripped of everything not nailed down. The aftcastle and helm were a veritable jungle of vines. The foremast had fared better than the mainmast, which had snapped halfway up. The tail end of the storm soon set upon them with renewed vigor and rage.
It was the fifth day that the waves seemed to be cresting the highest peaks. It was then, the aquan decided to act. Deftly and stealthily, he ascended the ladders, up to the main deck. He didn’t bother to close the hatch behind him. That wouldn’t matter. He decided to crawl along the deck to the wheel of the ship. The vines were alien to him as he tried to make his way to surprise the one sailor on watch. Using a coral knife, he shredded the rope. This caused the dark mammal to grunt with surprise, and his muscles to bulge.
Jacob was alarmed. There was no reason that rope should have given way. The strain on him, the wheel, and the rope had been all lessened by Crallick’s vines. He furtively glanced around him, all the while the renewed strain on his muscles kept dividing his attention. Too late, he saw the familiar fish-face of the aquan interloper. The saboteur drove a coral blade at his arm. Coral shredded its way through muscle and tendon, flaying his forearm to the bones. Jacob felt the strength leave his hand, as the muscle failed. By the god’s, if he lost the helm, all would be lost.
Below decks, Wanda began to pray fervently, inspired to calm the seas to the best of her ability.
Jacob let go of the wheel with his left hand, praying that the vines would hold for the moment he needed. He grabbed at the flailing aquan in his left hand. He felt the knife plunge into his shoulder. He drove the aquan’s head to the place where the handholds of the wheel disappeared into the brace for the helm. With a satisfying crunch, the wheel that he had spent so many hours guiding, did its part, crushing the aquan’s skull into a makeshift block to prevent the wheel from spinning out of control.
Jacob’s eyes began to swim as he desperately held on to the wheel. He would not fail his crewmates, was the last thought he would remember.
The pitch of the deck grew more rhythmic and less volatile. Some of this was attributed to Wanda’s furious chanting coming from the bow of the ship. She was crying tenants and adulations to Flowwe until she was hoarse. Sunlight began to stream in through the cracks of the shuttered portholes and aft windows.
Crallick and Vlados went above deck first, in order to lead the crew to assess the damage, and to relieve Jacob.
A grisly sight greeted the once cheerful and relieved survivors of the storm’s fury. In front of them lay the splintered carnage of shivered masts and yards, a deck swept clean of all traces of occupancy. And on the aftcastle, still clutching the helm wheel, was the rigor rigid Jacob, eyes staring a-bow, and foot brac
ed against the crushed skull of the aquan who helped keep the ship true to its course.
“Jyslin damn it,” Crallick said. Tears quietly welled up in his eyes as he gazed upon the sight of his former friend’s last heroic moments. Crallick solemnly bowed his head and turned from the scene. “I’ll be in my quarters. Figure out how off course we are. Get us back on track, Vlados. I want to quit this floating coffin and get back on dry land. I want to kill this Eli piece of shite.”
“Yeah sure,” Vlados quietly said to Crallick. “I’ll let ye know what is going on as soon as I have everything shored up. Send yer girl up if ye would. I need her feel for the wood.”
“Sure.” Crallick wanted to be alone anyway. He’d stop by the rum barrel first though.
Their foremast was now the tallest mast on the ship, so that is where they stationed the crew.
Mere hours later, Lawrence Marley was singing out, “Land ahead! Big coastline! I think there be sails anchored off it too!”
Mr. Drake had Jerrin run down to collect Crallick from his cabin. The lizardman and the Vitani-blooded warrior seemed to have a good bond.
Jerrin returned to the deck, rubbing his jaw. “Crallick’s drunk, and not handling the loss of Jacob well, I fear.”
Vlados glanced over at Kittalae, who was working mystical energies over the mast. “Lass, sorry to put this on ye, but can ye…”
“Do not apologize,” Kittalae countered, interrupting the dwarf’s platitude. “He is my master, therefore, my responsibility.”
“When we get his daughter back, I’ll wonder what she’ll have to say about that,” Vlados mused dryly.
Kittalae found Crallick right where Jerrin had left him: in his cabin, with a decanter of rum in his hand, glass long forgotten, swilling the amber liquid in long draughts from the vessel. At her entrance, he glanced up. “What do you want?”
“To please you, and make sure you don’t make a fool of yourself,” Kittalae smiled soothingly.
“Fine then!” Crallick drunkenly growled, yanking at the draws of his breeches. “You’ve ogled me oft enough. Have at it then! Do whatever girl!” he fell back against the cot, slopping rum over himself in the process.
Smiling bemused care, Kittalae reached for his breeches and tugged them closed. “You’ve seen my appreciation for you. That is good, Crallick. You are drunk though, and our first tryst shall not come to pass with the aid of my demonic charms, nor your chemical fortitude.” Wrapping her arms around him, she dragged him upright into her embrace. “Forgive me master, but I shan’t grant that request just now. We can wait on that.”
Crallick mumbled something unintelligible against her breasts. She dragged him over to the chair and dumped him in it. “They’ve sighted land, Crallick. They want you topside. The villain’s ship is also in sight.”
This plea got through the rum-induced haze of the man. That couldn’t be? What were the odds? He managed to splutter out “Wanda,” before succumbing to the rum.
***
Crallick awoke, violently heaving his intoxicating gastric contents over the side of the rail. His head throbbed, his throat burned. His mind was clearing. He could hear Wanda telling Vlados, “He’ll be lucid soon. The toxins will be flushed soon enough.”
Whoosh; another gout of vomit projected out to the ocean in a greenish brown coloured broadside.
Wryly, Crallick straightened, collected himself, and turned to face the gathered onlookers. “All right, anyone fancy a kiss?” he puckered his lips for effect.
With somber satisfaction, several of the sailors ran off to puke at the notions put into their imaginations from his sinister play. To Crallick’s dismay though, Kittalae strode up to him and kissed him purposely on the lips, her tongue briefly sweeping the inside of his mouth. This caused several other sailors to join their shipmates in their gastric distress.
Then she stepped back and asked him directly, “There, now isn’t that better than rum?”
Gasping slightly, Crallick agreed, “Yeah, that was nice. But you’re too young…”
“I’m yours,” was all the argument she provided.
Shaking his head free of all the polluting thoughts, Crallick turned to Vlados. “Where is the damnable ship?”
“Just yonder,” Vlados pointed.
Crallick checked out the anchored vessel. It too, looked in rough shape. Then he took in the verdant jungle beyond it. White strips of sand created a border to the undergrowth, to separate the aqua sea from the shoreline. A dark green mountain range rose in the background. This gave Crallick pause. The extent of the mountains was such as to suggest more than a big island. He glanced at the veteran sailors.
“This isn’t an island, is it?” he asked.
Drake simply shook his head.
Pallan agreed. “Nope, ser. It doesn’t look like that at all.”
“Okay,” Crallick looked back to the panorama before him. “I figure we take their ship. Then when they have nowhere to retreat to, we go inland and take them. Thoughts?”
Vlados sighed heavily. “Well, I suppose it’s an inevitability. We’re going to have to take them on sooner or later. They’re bound to have a larger crew than us. It’ll be tough.”
“We can take all of the launch boats over to their galleon and board her from the anchor chains, nice and quiet. Kill a number before they can raise an alarm,” Mr. Drake commented.
“Good idea,” Crallick approved. “Even if they’ve landed some on the shore, we should be able to keep it quiet. I’ll be first aboard.”
It took only half an hour for the crew to be split up between four launches. There were five souls manning each boat. They left behind Mr. Wallace Pallan in charge of the Flamerunner until they would return. He was left with a skeleton crew of ten men. Among this number were counted the surgeon and the quartermaster.
In Crallick’s launch, he had Kittalae, a rather diminutive tree froggle by the name of Glip-Glip, Jettin the monitorman who had watched his back in Jamtown, and the Amarallan Brom Corr, who he had first met in Marahaven.
Vlados’s launch followed close behind Crallick’s. In it, he had chosen the eagle-eyed Carib native Lawrence Marley, the two brothers Fransisco and Izzy Nunez, and the Monitor lizardman, Menshirre.
The first mate’s launch contained Hullaboo, who was so happy to be smelling fresh water in the air, as well as three human deckhands: Gregor, Jarod, and Jaroll Hawthorne from Bannathyr.
The last launch was commanded by the massive Komodoman Bargress, who carried Wanda with him, as well as Mahar from Jherrim, Lavarth from Amral, and Ronald Noble.
Crallick took a stiff pull on a flask of rum he had stowed in his jerkin. He felt the warmth and burning comfort fill his mouth with cane sugar and spices, then the burn ran down the length of his esophagus as he swallowed. The comforting crutch radiated out through his limbs. When the boat nudged the side of the massive ship, Crallick leapt over to the hanging anchor chain and drew himself up the length of the Chess’s Blight’s hull. The black lacquered wood was rather difficult to scale, but still, he beat all but the tree froggle to the top. Glip-Glip called out “Kree kree” a few times at the empty deck. There was no answer of any sort. By the time the other three launches had tied off and disgorged their crews aboard, an ashen Crallick was coming back up to the main deck.
“Well, how ‘bout it lad? Save any for us?” Vlados joked, hefting his hammer jauntily. “Did you see the girls?”
When Crallick was slow with an answer, Vlados began to move forward, “What is it, what’s the matter?” Panic was welling up in the dwarf’s anxious face.
What wasn’t slow was Crallick’s hand snapping out to snare the dwarf roughly on the arm. “No!”
“Bugger that,” growled Vlados, trying in vain to pull free of Crallick’s iron grasp. “Where are they?”
“Not there,” growled Crallick back, matching the dwarf’s vehemence. “They’re gone. The whole crew is ashore. They surely don’t care what happens to their ship but I’m telling you, there is
not a living soul aboard, other than us. Let’s get to shore, now. Have the Flamerunner send over the crew, this ship is in much better shape than the Flamerunner.”
“You’re right,” Vlados began. He half-turned to Mr. Drake, “Signal Mr. Pallan with those instructions.” As he felt Crallick’s arm lighten its tension, Vlados reversed his momentum and dropped his weight down and away from Crallick, whom he actually caught flatfooted. Tearing free of Crallick’s grasp, he bolted down into the hold of the ship. There was a chorus of “No!”s and “Stop!”s that followed his departure.
The first thing that assailed the dwarf’s senses was the bouquet. There was an acrid stench of stale, long-standing urine. The acid wrenching putrescence of half congealed vomit followed the initial wave. All the while was the pungent, heady odour of feces, some stale, some fresh. Mildewed and mouldy hay covered twelve iron-barred cages, six aside. Vlados sank to his knees, the pluck and vigor leeched away from him through his nose alone. A sob wracked his core, as he thought of his daughter in these squalid conditions. An urge to wretch began to consume him, fueled in part from the stench of vomit; his shoulders began to shudder. Vlados wept openly.
“I told you not to come down here,” came the quiet admonishment from behind him.
“Bugger you,” Vlados choked out. “How can you even imagine your daughter in this shite?”
“I don’t need to,” Crallick said. “She etched her and Bekka’s names on the hull.”
Vlados choked and puked.
As his breakfast joined the slurry of effluvia on the hold deck, Erik came down the companionway ladder, holding his nose. “Don’t worry, they’ll have this clean before we get back, sir,” he said in a vain attempt to dignify his captain’s distress. Then to Crallick, who motioned him to leave, he said, “They’re on their way with the Flamerunner. They’ll tie her off, and begin transferring cargo over.”
After Vlados could hear Erik’s footfalls no longer, he sobbed out, “They’ll pay for this Crallick. By all the gods, they’ll pay. They’ll pay for what they’ve done to our daughters.”