“Who’s next?” she growled.
“God wills it!” a man with more eagerness than sense rushed forward, bayonet glittering on the end of his crystal musket. He thrust. Kailey caught the bronze tip in her palm, bent it inwards and slammed him to the deck in the same motion. She kicked him in the side of the head, parried another bayonet with her other arm, drawing a knife from her belt. She plunged it into a man’s throat as she walked past, then slit another man from belly to chin with an upward sweep of her sword.
She had to hold back.
She didn’t want to break another set of blades.
The men around her were starting to back up, even as arrows thudded into the deck around her. Her crew had a few good archers, and they loosed every few moments as Hellenic soldiers fell and screamed and died. Then a knot of them wearing the thick cloth armor that Ares had settled on for his newly expanded armies stepped to the side.
Behind them was a Paladin.
Kailey’s razor sharp teeth glinted as her lips drew back in a steaming grin, starting to roil around her bared feet as she stood on the deck. “Good.”
The Paladin was a woman – human – but she was clad in a combination of flexible cloth, hardened crystal plates, and bronze that had been shaped to interlock and protect joints. The crystal itself was covered with a white cloth surcoat that had been decorated with the golden throne symbol that Ares had adopted. But what made Kailey pause was the sword the woman held.
It was made of metal.
A silvery, pale metal that glittered and glinted. It lacked the hues of bronze and copper, and yet it looked just as sturdy and just as sharp. She held it up in one gauntleted head and pointed it at Kailey as the two ships rocked against one another, pirates roaring as they started to leap over the railings. A few muskets cracked, swords clashed, bayonets thudded into wooden decks as their thrusts were deflected. But Kailey only had eyes for the Paladin.
She had heard stories.
They could take on ten men at once.
They could breathe fire.
They could fly.
They were blessed by the one true god of Purgatory. The one true god of the whole universe, the one who had made it all.
“Throw down your weapon,” the Paladin said, her voice muffled by her helmet. “And your death will be painless.”
Kailey rolled her shoulders. Then she flicked her wrist with the strength and speed of her riastrad. Her knife flew out, cutting a glittering line in the air, before the Paladin brought her sword up. The two blades met and Kailey’s shattered into a thousand fragments. Then the Paladin was moving – her body vanishing with a crack like a gunshot. She appeared five feet to her left and two feet forward, her feet skidding on the deck. But as she rushed forward, she vanished again, and again, appeared a short way off, her sword flashing as she rushed past Kailey.
Their blades met and Kailey was flung backwards. Even twice the size she normally was, she was overstepped by the other woman by a head. And more, the Paladin struck with the force of her war-god’s blessings. The impact sent Kailey tumbling and only her own enhanced reflexes got her back on her feet before the Paladin could casually impale her. Kailey ducked, then kicked out. Her leg caught the Paladin in a leg joint and bronze squealed as it was bent.
The Paladin slammed her helmeted head into Kailey’s. The impact set the pirate captain’s head ringing, riastrad or no riastrad. She staggered, then rolled away as the Paladin brought her sword down in a two handed stroke that split the railing and a good chunk of the deck. Wood splinters flew upwards, stinging across Kailey’s forearm. Then, moving with lightning speed, the Paladin swung her blade upwards and in a curving arc. Kailey’s sword met it and sheered in half with a spray of sparks. The impact sent her sprawling backwards. She skidded and came to a stop against the body of one of the Hellenes.
“God wills it,” the Paladin snarled, her voice coming in sharp pants as she advanced forward. Her boots thumped and clunked on the wooden deck, though her bent knee-plate meant that one leg had to drag rather than bend. She lifted her sword.
Kailey grabbed up the dropped musket of the Hellene and threw it like a spear. The bayonet hit the shoulder plate of the Paladin and the whole musket shattered, hard crystal going up against harder, thicker crystal. It still sent the Paladin staggering enough that Kailey could spring to her feet.
“Kay!”
Kailey risked a glance. Quinn was staying on their ship – thank the gods! - but her hands were twisting as she worked her fingers, muttering the focus words. She had been thrown from the hermetic school because of her, ah, reasons unrelated to her education. The magic she called formed and crackled into the shape of a flaming sword. She tossed it to Kailey and it was borne on a curtain of rippling air.
If Kailey’s own blood hadn’t been boiling, if her body hadn’t been blazing hot, she was sure the flaming hilt would have scorched her. As it was the sword felt utterly at home, and she brought it around and locked hilts with the Paladin. The Paladin forced her backwards. The strength of Ares and the Morrigan warred through their respective representatives. But Kailey felt her arms burning, then buzzing... and then pushing forward. The Paladin gave step by step, her whole body trembling.
Then her sword gave.
The burning blade in Kailey’s hands sunk half into the strange metal of the Paladin’s weapon, then sheared through with a flurry of sparks before biting deep into the woman’s side.
The Paladin’s eyes widened under her helmet’s visor. She made a gurgling noise, wavered.
Fell.
And as she fell, the last Hellene was cut down by Thaddious. The pirates looked around themselves, shocked at the savage fury of not only the enemy’s resistance, but at the end result. Not a single Hellene had survived to be ransomed. Kailey drew her power back into herself. Her blood cooled. Steam stopped trickling from her pores. She shrank slowly from her enhanced height to her normal one – her skin feeling taut, her bones aching. The deck stopped smoldering underneath her feet. And the flaming sword she felt faded to nothingness as Quinn scrambled awkwardly over the pitching, rolling decks.
“Are you okay?” she asked, desperately.
“Not even a scratch!” Kailey said, ignoring the many tiny scratches and bruises. “See to the men.”
Quinn closed her eyes. Counted to three. Then nodded and turned. As she rushed off to begin healing, Kailey shook her head and brushed her palm along the arm that had been covered with splinters, knocking them out. A few had sunk in enough to require her to pick them out. She hissed each time as Thaddious walked over to her.
“We have the deck – lots of muskets, and their shot too.”
“It’s the hold I want to see.”
Thaddious nodded. The two of them walked towards the hatch that led to the hold – and then Kailey held up her hand. Her feet slipped slightly on the blood slicked wood of the deck, but she didn’t take one step closer to the hatch. Something about the lack of a lock caused her paranoia to scream to life. She looked back at the crew and the bodies. She smirked.
“Oh, I hate it when you do that,” Thaddious muttered – but it was too late.
Kailey had thought, earlier, that this power should be kept on the leash. And it was true. She’d go weeks - months, sometimes - without calling on it. But when she used it once, the second time was easier. And the third? Oh, the third came like she did when Quinn got her head between her legs. Her fingers crooked as the magic of her mother flared through her arm and one of the less badly dismembered corpses twitched, wriggled, then started to stand. Eldritch blue fire crackled from their sightless eyes as they shambled like a drunk towards the unlatched hatch. Their uniform had turned almost red from the blood pumping from their neck wound.
Thaddious glowered at the scene.
Kailey stepped behind him with a wicked grin.
The corpse flipped open the hatch.
The rain of blood, bone, body parts and organs splashed across the deck like a breaching wave. Thad
dious was soaked from his bald head to his bared toes. He spluttered, gagged, coughed, and an untouched Kailey stepped around him, skipped to the open hatch, then swung herself down into the hold with a cheerful whistle.
When her feet hit the hold’s deck, she almost balked her belly and breasts against something large and looming. A moment later, a still dripping Thaddious landed next to her, holding up a small stick with a glow-crystal attached to it. Pale blue light shone and Kailey breathed in a short, sharp gasp. The light glowed off long, thick tubes of pure crystal. Each one had a smooth hole bored in the front and a smaller one at the back, with firing pins made of bronze clockwork – finer than any work she had seen in her life. There were mountings shaped from wood and bronze along the edges, for wheels, though said wheels were stacked in the far back.
Kailey was almost afraid to count.
“Thirty six,” she breathed. “Thirty six cannons.”
The Battle of the Blood Groove had been famous for the twenty guns of the Cross Guard, whose cannonfire had rained down on the army of Brax the Golden. Each of those guns had been named in the ballads and the songs. No battle since, even in the grinding brutality of the civil war tearing the Dodekatheon apart, had matched it for the sheer amount of artillery. And here was almost twice that number.
“Dear gods,” Thaddious whispered.
Kailey walked past the guns, looking them over. She had never seen cannons up close, but she knew the basic idea. Jam gunpowder in the back, slip a ball down it – marble was popular, but stone could work too. Crystal was said to be the best, but the difficulty of chipping crystal into a sphere was well known. Lead was popular as well, but the alchemical process that created it was difficult and expensive…
“Quinn’s an alchemist,” she whispered. Then she saw that she had some time – the chests past the first of the cannons were filled with cannonballs. She brushed her finger along the metal, trying to feel what it was made of. But she wasn’t an artisan, she couldn’t tell.
“Captain!”
Thaddious had walked past her to another chest. His cry drew her attention and she rushed over.
“What are these?” he asked, holding up something strange.
“It’s an Ancient artifact!”
The pair turned to see Quinn coming down the hatch, her hair smeared with blood. “I didn’t manage to save any of the Hellenes, but Strap won’t be missing a foot,” she said, her voice distracted. “By Brigid’s titties, what is this?” She took the artifact from the Thaddious hands. Thaddious looked sulky, like a baby with its favorite new toy stolen. But before he could whine, Quinn started to eyeball the artifact.
To Kailey, it looked like a slave collar without a clasp and without any flexibility. A curved C shape made of solidified crystal and black metal, terminating in a pair of disks. Those disks would go over the temple on a human – though on a goblin, it would slide right off.
Quinn tested the give on the artifact, finding that it bent outwards, but not inwards. She whistled.
“Do you know what it is, Q?” Kailey asked, caressing her lover’s hair gingerly. She knew that Quinn would never wash her hair while something new – be it book or artifact – was waiting for her eyes. She’d have to crumble the blood out once it dried.
Quinn bit her lower lip. “I have no idea.”
“Well, put it on then,” Thaddious said, his voice gruff.
“Are you sure that’s wise?” Quinn asked.
“Of course!” Thaddious said. “These are weapons – these are cannons, cannonballs. Those casks contain gunpowder if I don’t miss my guess. This is a supply barge for the Hellenes. Not sure what they were doing so far off course, but there’s the breaks.” He shrugged. “Not sure why that idiot Ares didn’t just ship them overland.”
“Do you know how heavy a cannon is?” Quinn asked. She was normally a gentle soul, but even she could see through Thaddious’ irascibility. She started ticking off points. “They can weigh almost a hundred stone! And they’re not like the steel or iron cannons of Earth, these can shatter if they drop wrong!” She scoffed. “A ship can carry fifty cannons across Purgatory in a week, while an army might still be waiting for them after a month, and lost a quarter of them to accidents.”
“Better than losing all of them...” Thaddious muttered.
But then it clicked in Kailey’s brain. She had to check her thinking, though.
“What are the sides in the war again?” she asked. “It’s Ares and the gods he’s cowed into bending knee versus Zeus and his brothers, right?”
“Yeah. Zeus, Hades, and Pos-” Quinn’s eyes widened. “That storm last night wasn’t natural, I bet. It blew out of the Hellenic League hard enough to almost demast us. It did demast this ship. And Poseidon might have lost his sanctum and his home city, but he has worshipers enough. He could make the currents slip this ship even further than wind or wave could.”
“That’d buy them time. These are guns worthy of shattering a city’s walls...” Quinn rubbed her face. “By my count, Ares’ army had, eh, five, six cannons.”
“Your count,” Thaddious looked skeptical.
“The army’s visible on the horizon!” Quinn snapped. She looked at Kailey. “Ares will pay through the nose for this. Or Lord Vanderbilt! Or Thor! Or-”
She stopped when she heard Kailey’s giggle. The giggle became a laugh and the laugh became something close to utterly megalomanical. Kailey rolled her head back and leaned against her cannons as her shoulders shook and she wiped a tear of joy from her eye.
“Thaddious,” she said, her teeth glinting in the pale light of the glow-crystal. “Get the crew ready. We’re looting this ship. And get the charts for Melos and start plotting a course.”
“But-” Thaddious started. Then he stopped, then bowed low. “Yes, Captain.”
He hurried off.
Quinn looked confused. “Kay, we can’t use these. And we can’t sell them to Pleon. He doesn’t have the coin to buy cannons. Our ship-”
“Our ship is our ship,” Kailey murmured. “And we just took the oar positions out. If we went into Melos for some time, we could refashion those into something befitting this new age. We have enough gunpowder. And you? You’re an alchemist.”
“I am...” Quinn blinked. “I never made gunpowder before.”
Kailey grinned. She grabbed her lover’s hair, not caring if blood smeared her fingers. She dragged her close and the two goblins met in the darkness and closeness of the hold. The smell of battle overhead was washed away by the smell of the salt sea and the tang of gunpowder in the air. It smelled like victory. Quinn never took the lead while kissing, which suited Kailey just fine. Her tongue probed the other woman’s mouth like a man’s might have.
But Kailey remained softer and more knowing than a man would have been. Her breasts pressed to Quinn’s smaller ones, her hands cupped and squeezed Quinn’s rump. Quinn whimpered into the kiss, her eyes closing tight as she lost herself in the excitement of the moment. The stereotype was that librarians and mages were detached from physicality.
The truth, at least when it came to Quinn, was that she was quite a sensual being.
She just needed to be smacked in the forehead with her body’s needs to go: Oh. Right! I need this.
When Kailey drew her mouth back, she could see the eager glint in Quinn’s eyes that said that smack had been delivered.
“To the cabin?” Kailey whispered.
“Uhhh...” Quinn looked at the hatch to the deck. Then, with her hands grabbing her shift, she whispered. “Nah.”
The slight lift and then jiggle of her breasts as they were freed never ceased to drive Kailey wild. There was a delight in being the smaller partner, when it came to making love with other people of other races. But this moment, shared between her and Quinn, was unique. Not only were they the same build and the same height, but they often felt like they shared two halves of the same soul.
Quinn proved it by looking down at her own breasts, cupping and squeezing the fi
rm, green orbs. “Yes. I have really nice breasts, now that I think about it.”
Kailey snorted, then grabbed her lover and dragged her close. She leaned forward and teased Quinn by kissing the flat expanse of her chest, then darting up to nuzzle and lick at her chin. She kissed her lower lip, sucking on it gently as Quinn began to pant and whimper. The faint rocking of the boat faded. The dimness of the hold faded. Everything faded as Kailey dragged her teeth along Quinn’s lower lip, freeing her mouth to fasten around Quinn’s neck. She bit and sucked at the same time, and through her hold on Quinn’s hips, she could feel the other woman’s knees quivering.
Well.
Kailey knew how to fix that. She took Quinn to the floor of the hold with a simple twist and roll, ending up on her back with Quinn straddling her. Kailey’s back was tough enough to absorb the impact and ignore the splinters, which freed her up to cup Quinn’s shoulders and draw the other gobliness over her. Quinn’s breasts swayed with the motion of the ship and the movement of her back, and her moans joined the song of the sea as Kailey fastened her mouth around one dark green nipple and sucked. Her hands slipped along Quinn’s back, taking her time to feel every inch of her alchemist.
She didn’t know exactly what Quinn did to keep coarse sea salt from leaving her back and exposed skin as weathered as old leather. But the result spoke – or at least slithered – against Kailey’s rough, battle scarred palms. Quinn gasped and moaned and rolled her head backwards, her pale white hair cascading along her shoulders. “Kailey...”
“I’m not hurting you, am I?” Kailey’s voice was as soft as the slick noise that Quinn’s sex was making against her belly. The heat of her. The wetness. Kailey couldn’t help herself, she started to push and lift Quinn up and over the mounds of her own breasts. Quinn let herself be moved. But her voice was shy.
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