Creation Mage 7

by King, Dante

  Mort looked a little aggrieved at this but said nothing. Igor, on the other hand, whispered to his bounty hunting cousin, “Rapscallion? Is that some kind of small onion, Mort?”

  I had the fraternity boys take command of the seventh schooner, although they had misgivings about breaking up the band.

  “I’ll feel better with you guys all together,” I told them, when Rick voiced an objection to my idea. “Only the gods know what crazy shit the Chaosbanes might get their ships caught up in. At least with you guys, I’ll know that there’s one boat apart from mine that will be staying on task.”

  Bradley clapped me on the arm. “I won’t lie to you, Justin, you’re going to be missing out. I’ve really raised my game when it comes to cooking after winning that contest. I bet I can put together something rather scrumptious in the galley.”

  “What can you do with fish, Bradley?” Rick asked. “I’m an island boy, and if there are fish to be caught in these waters, I’ll hook them.”

  Bradley’s eyes shone as he rifled through the recipe book of his mind.

  “Rick,” he said, “the more pertinent question would be: what can’t I do with fish?”

  Janet, Cecilia, Enwyn, and Alura the Gemstone Princess all came with me and Barry aboard the ship that he tried to tell me was called the Flying Dutch Rudder. I refused to call it by that moniker.

  “And why did you not trust us to command our own ship may I ask, darling?” Cecilia asked me as we watched our small fleet head off in their separate directions. “You do recall that I’m actually related to Captain Chillgrave here.”

  “And I’m a princess, Justin,” Alura said, giving me a pretty sparkling pout, the likes of which only someone who is basically a walking crystal can pull off. “I’m used to command, whether it be the carrot or the stick.”

  I grinned around at Janet, Cecilia, Alura, and Enwyn.

  “What can I say? I wanted you ladies with me for purely selfish reasons. I mean, what happens if we get becalmed for a week? How in the world will we amuse ourselves?”

  Janet laughed, bit her lip, and shook her brunette head.

  “Jeez, but you are a smart motherfucker, aren’t you?” she said.

  “I try,” I said, spreading my hands and winking.

  “Do you think everyone will be safe in these waters?” Enwyn asked Barry.

  Captain Chillgrave was leaning against the wheel and surveying the flapping sails. He shrugged and spat over the side. “Ain’t nowhere safe in this realm or the realms beyond. But there’s no going back now.”

  We set off across the sea, heading toward the smudge of blue land that became clearer and greener the closer we got to it.

  The thing about sea travel, on an old schooner like ours, is that it isn’t what you’d call fast. It’s like the dial-up internet of travel, but with less noise and more time for peaceful reflection.

  I sat at the prow, cushioned against a thick coil of rope, and watched the land come steadily closer. Around me sat Cecilia, Alura, and Enwyn, while Janet lay on the deck with her head in my lap and dozed.

  The sun was warm on our faces, making a nice change from the frigid cold that we had left behind at the Chaosbane ranch. The sound of the sea was a murmuring whisper in our ears, telling us secrets in a language that none of us understood.

  Barry occasionally stumped down to see how we were doing—he did not float, not in the Spectral Realm.

  “Did you miss it, Barry?” I asked him, when he had come down to peer over the side and make sure that all our rebel crew would be ready to man the mana cannons if required.

  “Miss what, sir?” he asked me.

  “All this,” I said, gesturing around. “The creak of the shrouds and the fucking… tangy smell of the brine, and all that other stuff?”

  Barry grinned at me and adjusted his eyepatch a fraction.

  “Aye, I missed it, sir, although I didn’t perceive just how much until now. The sea can be a bitter, cruel bitch, but she can teach ye a thing or three too. If you’re going through difficult times today, hear the ocean hiss against the hull, hold steady. It will change soon. The wind in the sails says: If you are experiencing smooth sailing and easy times now, brace yourself, matey. It will change soon. The only thing you can be certain of is change, Mr. Mauler, be it good or bad.”

  “That’s cute, Captain Chillgrave,” Alura said drowsily, from where she sat looking out at the gently undulating horizon.

  Barry shrugged a crooked shrug and peered out toward the growing block of land that had defined itself into an island with more islands behind it.

  “We’ve all of us got salt in our veins, miss,” he said. “In our tears and sweat and spit. That’s why I reckon every man jack of us has an affinity with the ocean, no matter how small it is. When we look out on that briny deep, we can’t help but think that we’re looking out on the place that we came from, somehow.”

  “Being on the ocean is like being in a bar,” I mused.

  “How’s that?” asked Janet.

  “Turns everyone into a fucking philosopher,” I said.

  Barry barked a laugh, but the sound died into a gurgle in his scrawny throat.

  “What’s up, Barry?” I asked, catching the suddenly intense look on the pirate captain’s face.

  “A sail, skipper,” he said. “A sail is what’s up.”

  At that moment, the lookout on the ship’s top cried out, “Sail in front!”

  “That’s ‘sail ho’, ye jelly-boned, syphilitic streak of piss,” Barry grumbled. “Don’t nobody teach no one nothing no more?”

  It was still another hour before the speck of white solidified into a ship, and another half hour after that before Barry could make out that it was most definitely a pirate ship.

  “Nothing to worry about just yet, mateys,” he told the crew, when some of the other renegades started chattering a little nervously amongst themselves. “The Spectral Realm is the home of pirates, smugglers, and back-stabbing spit weasels from all the realms over. That being said, there is an understanding amongst those who seek the Pirate Queen. Let’s see what these scabby-assed merchants of the sea want with us, eh?”

  The crew settled down at this.

  “Might want to make sure you and the lasses here are manning some of the cannons,” Barry muttered to me as he stumped off toward the poop deck. “Just in case, sir.”

  “Just in case,” I said. I thought I knew what that meant.

  Barry did not try to run from the oncoming ship. I figured only a ship with a captain that was scared or carrying a cargo worth stealing would flee.

  Eventually, the pirate ship was within hailing distance. It passed slowly off our starboard side, and the girls and I were able to see the motley collection of vagabonds that populated its decks. They looked exactly as I had expected them to: swaggering men and women festooned with tattoos and gaudy jewelry that looked like it had been raided from a dress-up store.

  They whooped and hollered at us as they drew alongside and tossed grappling hooks over to our schooner so that the two ships could be hauled in close together. Looking around, I noted that the rebel mages who made up our crew looked unimpressed by the piratical theatrics we were being treated to. I reckoned that was what happened when you followed the lead of a man like Reginald Chaosbane. Everyone else looked normal and a little less colorful in comparison.

  Barry was standing proudly at the wheel, the ridiculously large feather plume on his hat blowing in the wind and the buttons on his faded red surcoat sparkling dully. When the ships came together and a couple of planks were extended over from the other ship to ours, he walked out to stand at the head of the staircase that ran down from the poop to the main deck.

  A big, ugly woman strode across one of the gangplanks first and deposited herself amidships. It might be more accurate to say that she tapped her way over really, because instead of booted feet, she walked on a couple of peglegs.

  I blinked a couple of times, trying to make sense of the woman’s p
roportions. It was kind of impressive, the way that such a beefy woman, with thighs almost as thick as Rick’s, could balance on such skinny peglegs. She was dressed in an assortment of ill-matched garments, superior in quality to those worn by her crew. A hat was perched on her head and on it was a feather of such enormity that it must surely have come from a roc or some other mythical avian beast. On closer inspection of her face, I noticed that parts of it bore a striking resemblance to the visage of a hyena. Was she a gnoll of some kind? I figured she might well have been at least two parts gnoll and four parts human.

  “A fuckin’ fine plan not trying to run from us,” she said, in an accent that was at once piratical and strangely reminiscent of Canada. “The last thing I felt like doing was firing a shot across your bow and then chasing! I’m not a one for chasing, me. I don’t have the physique for it!”

  She slapped her succulent guts with a hand, and the movement sent ripples into outlying areas of her body. She laughed at her own joke. Her crew, who had filtered across the gangplanks after her, laughed with her, like good little sycophants.

  “Or the legs,” someone from our crew said, and I realized that it had been me.

  The lardy woman’s eyes snapped across to me. They narrowed, making her look less like the female gnoll addicted to pie that I thought she was and more like a pig in a wig that’s just been asked to calculate the square root of pi.

  “What the fuck was that, you dung munching crab bucket?” she asked me in a low, dangerous voice.

  I raised my own voice a little, so that my words carried over the assembled crews.

  “I said, you don’t have the legs for a chase either,” I reiterated, pointing at the twin pegs.

  The pirate captain’s five chins quivered with indignation. She drew in a couple of labored breaths, spit spraying down the front of her already filthy coat. Her eyes narrowed to slits so that she now looked like a pig in a wig that had been asked to calculate the square root of pi and was now having a severe allergic reaction to something.

  “And who,” she sneered, “the fuck are you?”

  I waved cheerfully at her and said, “Justin Mauler. And you are?” My hand ached with the need to summon my staff and cast this slug of a woman into the sea in pieces.

  “Captain Nutlee,” the gnoll sailor replied. “Captain Dora ‘Chopsticks’ Nutlee. You may have heard of me.”

  “Nope,” I said.

  Captain Nutlee’s nostrils flared.

  “Tell me, Justin Mauler, are you the captain of this ‘ere vessel?” she asked. “For I’ve a mind to mount your head on the wall of my captain’s cabin once I’ve hexed it from your shoulders, but only if you’re the leader of this rabble.”

  There was the unmistakable rustling of mages on both sides shuffling into fighting positions at these words—the ever so subtle sound of vectors being removed from pockets and belts, of cuffs being pushed up and knives slipped from sheaths.

  “I’m not the captain,” I said. “I don’t have a big enough hat to play that role.”

  “Then who does?” Chopsticks Nutlee growled.

  “That’d be me.”

  Captain Barry Chillgrave stepped off the top step of the poop deck and out into thin air. He walked out into space, over the heads of his crew, and then descended regally. He came to stand next to me, both of us were facing the hideous excrescence that was Captain Nutlee.

  If I had thought that I had seen a commanding look in his one visible eye before, then I had been sorely mistaken. He was giving the other captain the kind of stone-cold killer look that would have turned a diamond back into coal.

  There were a couple of little tapping noises, like someone thumping a pool cue twice on the deck, as Nutlee took a couple of involuntary steps backward.

  “I’m the captain of this here schooner,” Barry said. He pointed upward, not taking his one smoldering eye off the gnoll in front of him. “Note the hat.”

  Captain Nutlee’s hateful little eyes rolled upward, as did the rest of her crew. Then they slid down again.

  “Aye, I’m the captain of this here tub,” Barry said, running his gaze across the other crew, “and I’ve done you the courtesy of offering our hospitality to you because I have always thought that there was an unspoken pact that there’d be no scrapping for those seeking the Pirate Queen.”

  Captain Nutlee ran a pale tongue over her slightly green lips.

  “Your name?” she croaked.

  “The name’s Captain Barry Chillgrave,” Barry said. “You may have heard of me, Chopsticks Nutlee, though you might not recognize me. It strikes me that you might be a bit green to have sailed these waters whilst I was still plying the piratical trade.”

  There was a chorus of ‘shiver me timbers!’ and ‘blow me down!’ from the crew that had boarded our ship.

  “You… you can’t be Capt’n Barry Chillgrave,” Captain Nutlee said in a disbelieving voice. “Not the Capt’n Barry Chillgrave.”

  “I can,” Barry replied, “and I am.”

  “They said you was dead,” Nutlee said.

  “I am fucking dead,” Barry replied. “We’re all fucking dead, ain’t we?”

  Chopsticks Nutlee shook her flabby head and looked around at the rebel crew. She looked visibly shaken, like she had seen a ghost—which for a specter probably compounded the shock somewhat.

  “This lot ain’t dead,” she said in a weak voice, gesturing at the mages among Barry’s crew.

  “Ye be on the money with that observation, Nutlee,” Barry said. “Might be more than just shit inside your skull after all, eh?”

  A slight flush crept up the fat wodge of Captain Nutlee’s neck. “If you were any other gobshite, I’d have your guts for garters,” she growled, in an obvious attempt to recapture the momentum in the conversation.

  “Aye, matey, but I ain’t just anyone else, am I?” Barry said in a loud voice, addressing not just Captain Nutlee, but her crew too. “I’m fucking Capt’n Barry fuckin’ Chillgrave, the maddest, smartest, most dangerous ne’er-do-well to ever sail the Spectral Seas. The canniest inter-realm smuggler there ever was or probably ever will be. The man and poltergeist that built a house o’ gold on a mountain o’ bones and who, in my younger days, was the sort of cracked bastard who’d throw rocks at the stars even at the risk of bringing down the bloody sky!”

  I wouldn’t have ever guessed that the cackling, sexual innuendo-loving poltergeist from whom I had purchased my first vector could be capable of pouring out such rugged eloquence, but Barry was doing it. In a single breath, he had effectively diffused the tension that Captain Nutlee had so effortlessly conjured between the two crews.

  Even if he hadn’t calmed things down, he had definitely sowed the seed of doubt in many of the minds of Captain Chopsticks Nutlee’s crew. I could see now that most of them would have been only too glad to hop on over to us and sail under the famed Captain Chillgrave.

  “Well, Capt’n Chillgrave,” Nutlee said, in a tone dripping in oil, “now that we’ve established that our two ships are on cordial terms, you were saying that you were in search of the Pirate Queen or some such…?”

  Barry looked around at the rebels still gathered around us.

  “All right boys and girls,” he said, “I think it’s safe to say that there’ll be no exchange of manaballs just yet. Why don’t you all piss off and play dominoes and have a tot or tow of rum or something while I swap the news with my fellow captain here, eh?”

  Our renegade crew didn’t need telling twice. They might have been staunch fighters when the situation called for it, but they weren’t about to get into a sea battle for no reason.

  Especially when the alternative was booze and boardgames.

  The girls and I hung around Barry, while everyone else, from both crews, wandered off to take up various positions of relaxation, although I noticed that hands did not stray too far from vectors.

  Just in case.

  “Who is this Mauler and these four buxom wenches, Chillgrave?” Nutle
e asked, looking down the squashed deformity that she probably called a nose at me, Alura, Enwyn, Janet, and Cecilia.

  “Never ye mind who they are, Chopsticks Nutlee,” Barry said. “Suffice to say they’ve more brains apiece than you and all your hands combined.”

  Nutlee ground her teeth but said nothing.

  Under the veneer of piratical disgruntlement and injured pride, I saw the light of fan worship shining in the eyes of Captain Nutlee. I abruptly realized that Barry was acting in exactly the cocksure, arrogant, swaggering way that the captain of the other ship expected him to act. If I hadn’t known any better, I would have thought that Nutlee had a crush on Barry.

  The thought made me cringe.

  “Now, ‘scuse me for saying so, Captain Chillgrave,” Nutlee said, “but you look like a spirit in need of some rejuvenation.”

  Barry smiled. “Aye, rejuvenation,” he said, “and plunder is what I seek.”

  “Plunder?” Captain Nutlee asked, her slightly pointed and droopy ears pricking up at the word.

  “Aye, o’ course plunder, what else is it that we pirates live for, do you think?” Barry said. “I want to plunder and to replenish my powers so that I can get my crew back on task and regain my full might.”

  “Well, if you need me to point you in the right direction, I’d me more than willing to help out such an esteemed individual as yourself, Captain Chillgrave,” said Chopsticks Nutlee graciously.

  “Would ye just?” Barry said with a mocking simper. “How positively upstanding and righteous of ye.” He snorted. “I’ll tell ye what I want from you, Nutlee. Rather than a finger in the right direction, I’ll be having you lead us to where I can get my hands on gold and a source of revitalization.”

  The peg-legged captain slumped against the railing and regarded Barry through her watery red eyes. I could tell that she wanted to bite back against the way that Barry was trying to order her around, but she also obviously did not want to pass up the chance to render a service for so distinguished a figure as Captain Barry Chillgrave.