Creation Mage 7
Page 17
“Bait?” Alura asked, her coffee cup paused halfway to her lips.
“That’s right, Princess,” said Isobel with a sardonic twist to her lips. “These raiders are not fools, unfortunately. They will flee and fight another day if they see a collection of my ships coming into view. They have some sort of magical weapon on board that has enabled them to escape and destroy the ships that I have sent to deal with them. All I want you to do is to draw these raiders out from whatever cove they are laid up in, engage with them, and then send up a signal flare. Then, you’re to keep them occupied until I have a chance to send in my kraken.”
“Kraken?” I asked.
“What, you’ve never seen a kraken?” Isobel shot at me.
“Uh, no,” I replied.
“Well, if you manage not to get yourself killed today, you might just be in for a real treat,” the Pirate Queen said.
“And if we do this,” I said, “you’ll promise to give some serious thought to our request, that you join us and show us the way to the Twin Spirit’s Stronghold?”
Isobel sighed deeply, but I could tell there was a smile lurking just below the surface of her badass pirate facade.
“Do this,” she replied, “and we’ll call it even. Do this and you have my oath, such as it is, that my pirates will fight against the Arcane Council. And I’ll even show you the location of the Stronghold.”
There didn’t seem to be anything more to discuss. Coming from a pirate, I figured that was about as good a promise as we were likely to get.
“All right,” I said, “you have a deal.”
Isobel clapped her hands. “Excellent. Now, have a good feed and build your strength up. If you’re going to meet your makers today, whoever they might be, then you don’t want to do it on an empty stomach, do you?”
“Dying hungry would be the fucking worst,” Janet said sarcastically.
“That’s right,” Isobel Galeflint said. “When you’re done, I’ll have Meng, Caxton, and a few of my other most trusted crew escort you back to your ship. We don’t want you getting knifed before you even set sail now, do we?”
We breakfasted in relative silence after that cheery comment, each of us occupied with our own thoughts and plans on how best to survive whatever was coming up next.
When we got up to leave and follow Meng and Caxton around the side of Castle Goldskull, Isobel reached out as I walked by her and held me with a strong hand.
“Survive this, Justin Mauler,” she said in a low voice that dripped with double meaning, “and there will be booty of another kind waiting for you.”
I caught Barry’s eye as I walked away, and the poltergeist gave me a knowing look. He leaned in close to me and said in my ear, “You know what, sir, I rather think that she was referring to you getting to strike her panties and drop your anchor in her lagoon!”
I put my hand on the sky-pirate captain’s newly strengthened shoulder. “Glad to see that you’re back and as sharp as ever, Barry.”
Chapter 15
It was surprisingly easy in the end, finding the pair of raiding ships that had been annoying Isobel Galeflint. I say it was easy, but I was sure that it took more than a little knowhow and sailing skills on the part of Barry to give our schooner the appearance of a ship that, had it been a living creature, was limping.
We sailed for a couple of hours in the area designated by the Pirate Queen’s sailors before Barry did a few nifty things with the sails so that it looked like our ship had barely survived a tempest.
We cruised sadly and slowly around the tall headland of an island that was little more than sheer gray cliffs topped with dark, waving forest. Then, we popped out into the calm, sheltered waters beyond it. It was a small and desolate little isle, and there didn’t look like there was any spirit of any kind inhabiting the place.
“You see any signs of fishermen or anything like that around here with that expert eye of yours, Barry?” I asked as we cruised around the blunt headland. Above us, birds that might have been a spectral form of gull called to each other in forlorn voices.
“Not that I can see, sir,” Barry replied, his one eye swiveling this way and that as he guided us around the promontory.
“That’s something I haven’t been able to get my head around, Barry,” Janet said, speaking over her shoulder from where she stood against the portside rail.
“What would that be, miss?” Barry asked.
“Just, like, do you guys need to eat here?” Janet asked. “We’re talking of fishermen, and we had breakfast this morning, but aren’t you, you know, technically dead?”
Barry gave her a thin smile. “Argh, we be dead all right, Miss Thunderstone. No doubt of that.”
“Then surely you don’t need to eat,” Janet said.
“Not in the mortal world we don’t, no,” Barry said as he gave the steering wheel a slight adjustment. “But here, in the Spectral Realm, those that be ghosts in the world of the living are made flesh and blood, ye see? Here, we are as real as we ever were in Avalonia, susceptible to pass on just like mortals are if we are killed or starved. Though it takes some potent magic to destroy a phantom or poltergeist in the mortal world, it is all too easy to kill us here and send us down the river to…”
“To where?” Alura asked, interest coloring her words.
Barry shrugged. “We be gettin’ into murky waters there, miss. That question is for the theologians, philosophers, and other hairy, unkempt folk who haven’t ever thought of getting real jobs. I am naught but a simple sailor, miss.”
We might have gone a little deeper into those murky waters, but we had rounded the cape and found ourselves at the edge of a huge, calm bay.
It was a great shallow wine glass shape this cove, the promontory we had just rounded on one side and a matching one a few miles distant on the other. A neat half-moon of white sandy beach lay off to our right, which was bisected by a river that issued out of an enormous cave in the cliff wall. The cave was easily big enough and wide enough for a full-blown galleon to sail in and out of, and my initial thought was that here was where the raiders had been hiding.
This belief was quickly backed up by the fact that two ships, of roughly equal if not slightly larger size than our own, were sailing out to meet us.
“They must have had lookouts up on the headland,” Barry muttered to us. “The raiders are already underway, as ye can see.”
“What do we do now?” Alura asked, watching the two ships heading toward us with the single-minded intent of a couple of wolves descending on a stricken sheep.
“Shoot the flare?” Cecilia suggested.
“That’d be good,” I said.
“Why don’t I do it?” Enwyn said with a grin that only a pyromaniac could muster. “I’ll add a little extra punch that’ll ensure the Pirate Queen’s fleet can’t miss it.”
Enwyn snatched the flare from Barry and then let loose. It shot into the air and expanded into a mushroom cloud of many colors.
“Nice,” Janet said as she clapped Enwyn on the back.
“What do we do in the meantime?” Cecilia asked. “Those two vessels aren’t simply going to wait while the Queen’s fleet comes to rescue us.”
“Now,” I said, looking at Barry, “we fight.”
I conjured the staff of the Twin Spirits to my hand. That went someway to settling any nerves that I might have had.
I watched as the two ships moved in closer and began pairing off so that they could come at us from different directions. The enemy crews scrambled over the rigging and up the shrouds. The glint of metal was much in evidence, and I spotted more than a few mana muskets in the hands of some of our foes.
Now that we had found our targets, Barry quickly righted whatever he had wronged on our ship so that the schooner regained the maneuverability that it had always had.
“All sailors away from the rails!” Barry roared in his commanding voice. “Shields are comin’ up!”
There was a flicker of greenish blue light, and a ripple
of magical energy swept up the mainsail and then popped over the schooner like a half-visible cloak. The layer of defensive magic dropped down almost flush with the railings and keel and disappeared into the water.
“Man the mana-cannons!” Captain Chillgrave bellowed. “Prepare to unleash a broadside!”
Our crew scrambled to obey, men and women of the resistance as getting into the gunner seats of the cannons.
For three boats that weren’t really moving all that fast, it only seemed like a few seconds before the enemy vessels were drawing alongside us.
“Hold… Hold… Hold…” I could hear Barry murmuring to himself. I was standing on the poop deck beside him, along with Alura, Janet, Cecilia, and Enwyn.
“Hold… Hold… FIRE!” the poltergeist shouted as the enemy ships drew abreast of us.
As one, the basilisk-shaped mana-cannons along our port side roared in unison. The magical equivalent of gunpowder smoke filled the air, great confusing, rolling clouds of light blue mist. Manaballs smashed into the flank of the attacking ship, sending up splinters of exploding wood in some places. In other places, I was amazed to see, there was hardly any damage at all. The manaballs hit the side of the ship and simply stopped dead, falling into the sea below with dull sizzling noises.
“What the hell?” I yelled, pointing at the useless balls of sorcery as they stopped like bullets thwarted by a sandbag and dropped into the ocean.
“Nothing to worry about, sir,” Barry said over the belching din of the mana-cannons. “Nothing to worry about! They’re simply the defenses at work. We’ll have to wear ‘em down if we want to cause them any damage.”
Our conversation was curtailed by the enemy ship firing its own cannons. The noise was astounding, even if we were sitting in the middle of a wide-open bay.
Manaballs of scintillating, fizzling pink light hit our schooner from point blank range. I found myself tensing up involuntarily, preparing to see absolute carnage on the deck below me.
However, I needn’t have feared. The raiding ship’s missiles punched into the invisible shield that coated our vessel with about as much effect as a custard pie thrown by a clown might have caused. The pink manaballs sent shudders through the hull, but not a single member of our crew was injured and not a single splinter of wood was dislodged from even one timber.
“Fire at will!” Barry crowed with delight.
The mouths of the basilisk mana-cannons sent forth their deadly barrage once more. Our adversary’s ship lurched a little in the water as our shots punched into it once more. There were a few screams this time, barely discernible through the noisy mist. I saw the flash of answering pink mana muskets from the deck and ducked as the stern lantern just behind me was blown to smithereens.
“How can the musket fire get through the shield wall?” I asked Barry.
“The defenses are only really effective against heavy magical artillery fire, sir,” Barry explained. “Any smaller spells or magic will slip through the hex-netting.”
I pointed my staff at where I thought the deck of the other ship might be through all the blue and pink mana-cannon mist and fired off a Storm Bolt. My spell flashed away into the murk, and there was a winking spark of a detonation as it hit.
Answering fire came from our starboard side. Then, there was an unexpected crashing crescendo of sound. The other ship had got around us and had let loose with a broadside of its own. Once more, the defenses held.
And then it was mayhem. There was noise—fucking lots of it. The whole world turned into a roaring mess of screaming and shouting and explosions. There was the dull thud of manaballs fruitlessly striking the sides of the ships, the whirr of flying splinters as occasionally one of our cannon shots got through a chink in the armor of our foes’ vessels, the rending tear of wood torn apart, the rib-jangling rhythm of the guns, and the whizzing hiss of mana rounds and spells whisking overhead and all around.
It was one of the most intense battles that I had ever been in. Mostly because our schooner was the meat in a cannon sandwich. We were being pounded from both sides by the enemy ships, occasionally getting a breather as we passed by one before circling around again.
The sea battle itself was taking place in the bay, in a very localized area of water. Barry was adhering to the instructions that Isobel Galeflint had given us and making sure that we kept our enemies in as single a spot as we could.
Barry had a mana pistol in each hand and looked to be having the time of his life. He fired off a series of shots that ripped along one of the yardarms of the ship on our starboard side, causing an enemy sailor to sprint along the beam. Barry’s final shot caught the unfortunate elvish woman in the leg and sent her screaming to the deck below where she splattered against the wood.
The raider that I had been watching tried to swing across from his ship to ours on a boarding rope. He emerged out of the swirling mist, his cutlass clenched in his teeth. I reached down, picked up a broken piece of wood, and smacked the handle of the cutlass as hard as I could just as the man’s feet touched down on our deck. The blade swiveled around and cut the top of the sailor’s head clean off.
Another raider swung across on another rope, screaming a battle cry. As he swung over the poop deck, his eyes fixed on Enwyn, I reached out, touched him with my staff, and used my Crystallize spell to turn him into a glistening block of crystal. Frozen solid, he swung back out into space, and Enwyn used a fire spell to sever the rope. The sailor dropped into the sea and sank without trace.
“Time for a little bit of improvisation,” I said.
I ran down the stairs that separated the poop deck from the main deck. I vaulted a basilisk mana-cannon as it was blown off its mount by an enemy shot that appeared to have penetrated Barry’s defenses, dashed past a dwarf who was bleeding from the head, and then started to climb up the rigging.
I needed a better view of the unfolding battle, which meant getting up into the crow’s nest. Barry, while we had been sailing toward this bay, had given me a brief rundown on the history of the crow’s nest. It had been one that the girls had found boring to the point of tears, but I had found strangely illuminating.
Apparently, the crow had been an essential part of the early Avalonian sailors’ navigation equipment. They were, according to Barry, land-lubbing fowl that were carried on board to help the navigator determine where the closest land lay when the weather was so bad that it prevented sighting the shore visually. In cases of shitty visibility, a crow was released and the dude steering the boat plotted a course that corresponded with the bird's because it invariably headed straight toward land, which is where the expression ‘as the crow flies’ had come from.
I reached the small, enclosed platform in which the sentry should have been standing, only to find the bloody lower legs of whatever poor bastard had been stationed up there.
“Not confidence inspiring,” I muttered. I pushed the image from my mind and the sentry’s legs over the edge of the crow’s nest, and then held up my staff. What I was about to do was something that I couldn’t recall having tried before.
I was going to attempt to infuse one of my spells with another.
I had a brief look at the mass destruction taking place below me, across the decks of the three ships engaged in the bloody battle.
There might have been two of the enemy ships, but Barry’s schematics were clearly superior to whatever it was that the other captains were packing. What was more, now that Barry was all juiced up, he was a force to be reckoned with in himself. I could see the little bastard zipping around the deck, fending off raiders as they tried to board our ship from both sides, firing off spells, strengthening defenses, and cutting spectral sailors down with whatever edged weapon happened to be at hand.
Tearing my eyes away from a withering hail of mana musket fire that had just ripped out from the center of our deck and scythed down a few of the enemy, I turned my attention to the boat on our port side.
I raised my staff and conjured Rain of Toads.
The falling toads took on a gruesome, sickly green light. As they fell on the opposition crew, the little toads sapped the energy from the sailors they came in contact with and gave it to me.
This was precisely what I needed; extra mana power with which I could help fight off our enemies. I wasn’t sure how long it was going to take Isobel to arrive with her kraken, but I knew that every enemy raider that I could take down or immobilize would be one less that might end up hurting Janet, Alura, Cecilia, Enwyn, or one of our crew.
As bewildered havoc began to spread across the decks of the port side ship, I turned my attention to the vessel that had just hove up alongside the starboard side. Even as I watched, they loosed a broadside at our schooner and, this time, more than one of the pink manaballs penetrated.
Solid planks of inch-thick timber were ripped up from the decking near the bow and sent spinning up into the air. One of my fellow rebels shrieked horribly and went up in a blaze of sticky fuchsia-colored fire. They attempted to throw themselves overboard and douse the fire in the sea, but whatever magic powered the enemy manaballs it wouldn’t let sea water quench the supernatural fire. The rebel squirmed and thrashed in the water for a few seconds before she was completely consumed by the cotton candy-colored flames.
The sight of that pissed me off no end.
With the image of the burning rebel still seared into my mind’s eye, I unleashed the Amber Dragon that I had captured during the subterranean War Mage Exhibition match.
The mana drain was great, not just on me but on the dragon itself. I would only have the massive mythical creature on my side for a limited time, and I would need to use the dragon to its full potential before recalling it back to the orb. Luckily, the mana drain on myself was offset by the extra mana that I had taken on through my Leech spell-imbued toads.