by King, Dante
I had been refraining from bedding my companions, so it might just have been my overeager imagination that made me think that I could feel the press of a garter through the skirts that were squashed up against my own thigh.
“Still,” I said, attempting to keep my mind out of Aunt Ruth’s cleavage, “it sucks that they’re most likely going to tear the place apart.”
“Bah!” Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock said again, spraying spit out into the wind. “Why do you think that we built a log cabin in the middle of forested land, eh, Mauler? Those trees aren’t there just to look pretty and give us a bit of privacy! They’re building materials, lad! It’s because the Chaosbanes are always blowing up, setting fire, dissolving, or otherwise wrecking the ruddy place. Happens every couple of generations or so. Barry!”
The poltergeist was busy at the helm and appeared not to hear the oldest member of the Chaosbane clan. Buttuck, on the other hand, swept down from the rigging.
“Aye, small crusty one, sir?” he said.
Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock gave the spectral first mate a mean look.
“This damn ship have any guns on it?” he barked.
“Aye, sir,” Buttuck said.
“In that case, let’s roll them out and give those buffoons down there a damned good hammering!” Gorlbadock said.
Buttuck looked at Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock, then up at Barry at the helm, and then down at me. He appeared torn at having to make such a large call.
“Do as he says, Buttuck,” I said. “May as well give them hell before we go.”
Buttuck nodded his head and was just about to obey when Barry called out from where he was floating by the massive, ornate steering wheel.
“Pursuit off the port bow!” he cried in a thin, wailing voice that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on-end.
I looked to the left of the front of our ship where Barry was pointing with his skeletal thin arm in its voluminous seaman’s coat. At the same time, I heard Igor ask no one in particular, “There’s port in the bow? How marvelous!”
Off to our left, skimming low from out behind a headland that partly screened the taller buildings of the capital of Manafell, came half a dozen, low, single-masted ships.
“Is that the Arcane Council?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
Buttuck had procured a collapsible telescope from somewhere on his ghostly body and was peering through it.
“Aye,” he said, “that be the Arcane Council right enough, sir.”
I turned to the Headmaster, who was gazing out with some interest at the approaching ships.
“Sir, how do we get to this Spectral Realm?” I asked. “I mean. Exactly what do we have to do to reach it? I’m assuming that we don’t simply sail through the sky until we reach some floating sign that reads ‘Welcome to Fabulous Spectral Realm.’”
Reginald Chaosbane raised one eyebrow at me, and his cunning eyes twinkled.
“No,” he said, “but there’s a certain cheesy glamor to that, isn’t there?”
“So…?” I asked.
“So, we have to reach a certain number of knots—a certain speed. I am just a landlubber, mate, but I believe that at this appointed speed, the bow of Captain Chillgrave’s spectral ships are designed to cleave space-time in the same manner that a normal ship cuts through waves of a certain strength and resistance.”
Unbidden to my mind, a mental picture of the DeLorean reaching eighty-eight miles per hour and with 1.21 gigawatts of power flashed and faded in front of my eyes. I grinned.
“I think I follow you, sir,” I said. “So, it’s just a matter of reaching that speed before those Arcane Council vessels intercept us or bring us down? Just a matter of time, really?”
Reginald Chaosbane clapped me on the shoulder. For such a slender and roguish man, he had a lot of power behind him.
“This whole damned thing we call life is just a matter of time, my dear fellow!” he cried joyously, flashing me a madman’s smile.
Barry, who had been looking up at the masts and sails and touching a rope here and there, suddenly let out a screech of unadulterated rage.
“What’s got him by the short and curlies?” Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock grumbled, grabbing a hold of the rail as the ship gave a lurch.
“Ah,” Reginald Chaosbane said, “I was wondering how long it would take our dear captain to realize that the Arcane Council has infringed upon his copyright.”
Barry was hopping from foot to foot, managing to do so even while floating three feet above the deck, and shaking his bony fist at the oncoming ships.
“I designed those damned sloops,” he bellowed, “and now those scurvy dogs are using them against me? This will not stand, I tell ye! Buttuck, roll out the cannons!”
“No prey, no pay!” Buttuck howled into the falling night, sounding more like a ghoul than he had done up to that point. It struck me then that, as fat and sloppy and meek as he might first appear, the first mate must have been a real bloodthirsty son of a bitch back when he was a living, breathing sky-pirate.
Forming like a coalescing mist, rows of enormous magical cannons, shaped like basilisks with wide open jaws, manifested themselves on the decks of all eight sky-pirate ships. They were four feet in diameter and equipped with rudimentary sights, just a circle and cross of wire set near the rear, and a gunner’s seat.
“You there!” Barry said. “Mr. Mauler, sir! Man a cannon, if ye please! And you fellows!” and the poltergeist pointed his skeletal finger at Damien, Nigel, Bradley, and Rick. “You do the same!”
“The wenches can make themselves useful too, Captain Chillgrave!” I said cheekily, indicating Janet, Cecilia, Enwyn, and Alura, and flashing them a good-natured smile.
“Aye, that they can, that they can!” Barry crowed. “Tis a brave new world we are livin’ in after all!”
Janet fetched me a soft slap on the back of the head as she dashed past to take up a seat on the cannon to my right.
As Enwyn hurried past, she whispered in a sultry voice in my ear, “That bit of sass will cost you, Justin. A price must be paid.”
I smiled and sighted down my cannon. I loved those kinds of prices. I looked forward to paying it.
On all the other seven ships, renegades were settling into the gunner seats of the basilisk cannons.
“Mateys!” Barry cried then, and his voice was no longer the voice of the subservient poltergeist, but Captain Chillgrave, founder of the house of Chillgrave, famed and feared sky-pirate of the cirro, alto, and stratocummulus.
“Mateys!” he cried again, and his voice magically boomed over all eight ships, “This is your Captain speaking! Welcome aboard. We are presently sailing at a height of five-thousand feet on this impromptu voyage to hell and back! We are expecting a bumpy ride and anticipate a time-bending arrival into the Spectral Realm whenever those bastard gods of ours deem it prudent. Now, batten down the hatches, pucker your bungholes, and… FIRE!”
The cannons along the portside of our flying pirate ships roared—literally roared like lions, like dragons. Clouds of cloying blue mana-vapor bloomed in the air and lit the undersides of the few clouds that were unfortunate enough to be passing us by at that exact moment. The manaballs, if that’s what they were, sped out to meet the oncoming Arcane Council sloops.
As all the gunners hadn’t figured out how to aim their cannons just yet, many of the manaballs missed their targets, going low, or high, or wide.
Through the cloud of ethereal blue vapor, I saw my manaball heading toward the aft end of the ship I had been aiming for. The sloop managed to tweak away from the oncoming missile, and it only just grazed the back of the poop deck, shearing away some railings and rigging and knocking only a single Council seaman overboard.
“Man, those things can move for something so big!” I yelled. The basilisk cannon in front of me vibrated as a fresh manaball formed in the firing chamber.
“Aye, sir, they’ve a large bowsprit which means an increased canvas area which, in tur
n, adds better maneuverability,” Buttuck told me. “The great advantage of the sloops over our bigger schooners is that they’re a mite quicker and can attack swiftly and get away faster.”
“Not if we blow them out of the sky,” I said through gritted teeth and yanked the cord that fired the cannon. It bucked under me once more, like a mustang. This time, my manaball smacked squarely into the rudder of the closing ship.
“That’s the spirit, Mr. Mauler, sir!” Captain Chillgrave yelled. “That’s the spirit, sir! We don’t need to sink the heathen bastards, but only hold ‘em at bay for a few more seconds. We’re almost up to speed, sir!”
The sloop that I had clipped, now rudderless, veered to starboard and smashed into the ship traveling parallel to it. Even over the distance, I could hear the sound of screams as enemy mages plummeted from the rigging and fell through the sky. A few lucky Wind Mages bailed overboard and flew downward to try and catch their comrades before they were spread thinly over the snowy countryside below.
Answering shots came from the closing enemy sky vessels, but Barry’s schematics were clearly more advanced than the smaller sloops that the Arcane Council had built using his stolen designs.
“Shiver me timbers and never mind the barnacle on my oar, ye’ll have to get up earlier than that to get the better of a Chillgrave!” Barry cackled. He danced a jig as an enemy manaball hit our schooner’s shrouds and rebounded back toward the ship that had fired it like a giant, smoking rubber ball.
Further along, near the foremast, I heard Cecilia give a shrill warrior’s cry at her great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather’s words.
Purple and green lightning crackled up the bowsprit, along the hull and across the rigging. It bounded across the deck and hopped from the end of one cannon to the next.
“Yar, just when this sky battle and the thought of a handful of booty had got me to full mast!” Barry cried joyously. “‘Tis time for us to cut into the realm beyond!”
“Brace yourselves!” Buttuck cried.
My ears went numb, the world went quiet. There was an instant of extreme pressure, as if the schooner was trying to pierce through the skin of some galaxy-sized bubble.
And then, we were through.
I jerked in my gunner’s seat, though I wasn’t sure that the ghostly schooner moved at all.
Without warning, we were in full daylight: hot sun and warm wind. Salt spray misted my face. In utter disbelief, I perceived that we were no longer flying, but sailing along, the bow of the schooner cutting through a deep blue sea.
“Okay, I’m lost,” I said aloud.
The ship itself had lost its eldritch glamor, had become more real. Hard, solid wooden planks underfoot, the color that weathered wood should be. I could smell tar.
“Cast your eyes to stern, mateys and see what happens to sky-pirates who come ill-equipped to the Spectral Realm!” Captain Chillgrave cried above the snap of ropes and thrum of the wind in the rigging. “Two of the enemy rode our coattails through the rift.”
He was right. Two of the Arcane Barges had arrived here with us. From what I could make out, the mages on board looked just as flummoxed as I felt at this sudden change of scene.
The two single-masted sloops and all their crew simply erupted into an expanding cloud of twisted metal, flailing ropes, splintered planks, shattered beams, and pulped flesh. It wasn’t an explosion as such – there was no flame or smoke or magical discharge. They simply fragmented apart in an almost slow-motion display of wonderful carnage. A couple of eye-watering seconds later, as if the visual-effects team had run out of budget, the expanding clouds of mutilated mages and wrecked ships sucked back in on themselves into a twisted ball of debris and mortal remains and plopped quietly into the rolling ocean.
“My goodness,” Bradley Flamewalker said into the silence, “what the bloody hell happened there?”
“That is what occurs when your vessel is not primed correctly to dance in and out of the Spectral Realm,” Captain Chillgrave said. “Regular vessels and anyone not contained within a spectral vessel cannot pass through the waters of the Spectral Realm.”
I looked up, and my jaw dropped.
Barry was no longer the skeletal poltergeist I had always known. Here, in the Spectral Realm, his bare bones had taken on flesh, his empty eye sockets filled—although one was covered with a patch. His clothes were no longer rags, but merely stained and frayed.
Buttuck looked more flesh than spirit too. He was fat and pasty, but most definitely more solid than he had been. His frizzy hair was salt-and-pepper colored and blew this way and that like an old dandelion in the wind.
They both looked alive here in the Spectral Realm.
But Captain Barry Chillgrave also looked weak, like the incredible vitality that powered him as a poltergeist back in Avalonia had been drained away.
Barry caught me looking at him and smiled wearily. I was so used to seeing him smiling all the time, that being the default facial expression for dudes who had more visible skull than face, that it was weird to see the guy with lips.
“Aye, Mr. Mauler,” he croaked in his piratical voice, “We have some work to do before old Barry is shipshape and we’re able to get all you fine folk to the Stronghold of the Twin Spirits.”
“You’re our guide here, Barry,” I reminded him. “Plus, I imagine we need you to get home again.”
Barry nodded. “I’ll be all right, sir, I’ll be all right. Being a poltergeist in the living world of Avalonia gives a piratical scamp like me some half-decent powers, but taking leave of the Spectral Realm, as a spirit, for as long as I have… That plays havoc with a shade’s ectoplasmic composition.”
I didn’t really have a clue what Barry Chillgrave was talking about, but there was no denying that he looked like a hatful of assholes that had been run over.
“Are you alright, Barry?” I asked, stepping up close to the more solid version of the most feared captain ever to sail the skies of Avalonia and smuggle magical contraband from one realm to the next and back again.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” he replied. I’d have to take his word for it—he looked anything but fine.
I pursed my lips and looked out at the tolling expanse of blue that surrounded us: blue sky, blue sea and, in the blue distance, a dark blue smudge that spoke to me of land. “How do we find the Stronghold?” I asked.
Barry removed his tricorn hat with its enormous feather and ran a hand through his greasy hair. It had always looked green to me on Avalonia, as had the rest of him, but I saw now that it was jet black. “I need power, skipper, power,” he said. The pirate captain thought for a moment, looking around at all my gathered friends standing on the main deck of the sky-schooner, which had now become, well, just a schooner.
“We divide our most trusted crew amongst the ships,” the pirate captain said to me. “Makin’ sure that there is at least one able-bodied seadog aboard each who knows how to conjure a homing phoenix so that we can communicate with one another. Once we’ve a few solid men and women of conviction on each vessel, we set off on different courses. We’ll cover more ground that way, and the Pirate Isles are rife with coves, inlets, and waterways that will take us a long time to cover.”
“And in the meantime,” I said pointedly, “where will the crew of your ship be heading? I can tell that there is somewhere specific that you have in mind to restore your vitality.”
Barry grinned. For a moment, I could see the ghoulish skeletal smile of his shining through the wrinkled flesh of his face.
“Aye, skipper, that there be, that there be,” he said. He replaced his hat and fluffed the feather. “You, me, and whoever you choose to come with us, will set sail for the Pirate Queen.”
Chapter 7
As Barry suggested, the core group of trusted rebels on his ship were divided up amongst the other seven vessels, for peace of mind.
To his great delight and chest-swelling pride, Buttuck was given command of his very own schooner by Captain C
hillgrave. The fat first mate, now with a complete head, swept his bandana off and bowed as low as his expansive gut and tight coat would allow.
“Ye’ll not regret this, Cap’n,” he said after Barry had delivered this order to him. “Have no fear, sir, I’ll make sure that we weather any storms the Spectral Realm should think to throw at us. I’ll make ye right proud, Cap’n, you don’t worry yourself on that score, sir!”
“Ah, get your tongue out o’ my sphincter, will ye, Buttuck, and man your wheel,” Barry snapped, but he looked pleased at the fawning nonetheless.
Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock and Aunt Ruth took command of a ship each. Neither wanted to share the command with the other, and I knew for a fact that either of them could handle a whole crew of renegades quite easily on their own. They had doubtless had more trouble with an entire houseful of Chaosbanes.
Mort and Igor shared command of another.
“Why do Reginald and Leah get to have a ship each all to themselves, Chillgrave?” Igor demanded. “Yes, some might argue that Reginald is overqualified for piratical command, what with being a genius, a professional wastrel, and serial fornicator, but you realize Leah’s a woman!”
Leah Chaosbane, sitting with legs akimbo across one of the cannons, stuck out her long pink tongue and twirled her long pink hair with a finger. She had found a pair of pirate’s boots from somewhere that reached up to mid-thigh, and she had unraveled her holey baby blue knitted sweater because of the Carribean warmth of the Spectral Realm. It now showed off an expanse of pale stomach that caught the eye and held it, while simultaneously kicking the imagination into overdrive.
“Aye, I see she’s a woman, ye damned rapscallion!” Barry retorted. “That’s precisely why she gets her own ship. Being a Chaosbane woman, I bet she’s got double the brains, cunning, guile than you and Mort have combined.”