by King, Dante
“You tortured him?” Alura asked.
“Aye, I did,” Isobel said casually. “You can’t expect to lead a band of reprobates and not expect to get your hands bloody every once in a while, Your Majesty. It’s amazing what a chap will tell you when you strap a box of hungry panic crabs to his belly and they begin to dig around inside of him.”
Alura said nothing but pushed her plate of crab pointedly away from her.
The Pirate Queen grinned like one whose fun has gone well.
“These men, haven't they returned yet?” I asked.
A slight frown marred the Pirate Queen’s otherwise smooth complexion. She pushed some of her bright red, wavy hair back from her face.
“Not yet, no,” she said. “Though they sent a runner back, saying that they had successfully opened the rift and were heading on through. They reported that the rift had opened up onto some sort of—”
“Subterranean river,” Barry said.
The frown on the Pirate Queen’s face deepened. “Aye, that’s right,” she said slowly. “How the fuck did you know that, Chillgrave?”
Barry licked his lips and looked around the table. “Ye don’t mean… Your lads didn’t say that this was the underground river that runs under the Castle of Ascension, do ye?”
The Pirate Queen’s frown deepened even further. She wiped her greasy fingers on a white linen napkin and pointed one at Barry.
“They said nothing of the kind, Chillgrave,” she said, in a low, dangerous voice. “And if you know something, or think that you know something about that yonder cave,” and the finger she was pointing at Barry switched to point at the mammoth, yawning cave mouth, “then you had fucking well better tell me what it is.”
Barry sat back in his chair and regarded Isobel out of his one good eye. At that moment, I saw the experience shining through the ancient pirate poltergeist. It looked like an invisible, frosty calmness had descended over him. It was that level-headed demeanor, I figured, that had seen him through all the years and all the fights in his life and afterlife.
“It be that river,” he said, more to himself than anyone else at the table.
“What fucking river, Chillgrave?” Isobel said, her voice rising a touch. “I wasn’t sure where the rift came out exactly. I was only aware that it was bound to make smuggling in and out of the capital a breeze, according to the fucker I fed to the panic crabs. That’s why I sent the bloody scouts through first, to find out exactly where the rift opened into.”
Barry looked away from Isobel and addressed me.
“Mr. Mauler,” he said, “that there rift entrance was well known to me, many years ago now. It was a cheeky little hole that divided the Spectral Realm from Avalonia, and it brought in a shitload of doubloons.”
“But…?” Cecilia asked, taking the word straight out of my mouth.
“But I had to quit using it,” the poltergeist pirate said.
“Why?” Mallory asked.
“I doubt we’re going to like what comes next,” Enwyn muttered under her breath.
Barry scratched absently at the patch that covered his missing eye. “Well now, that’s an easy one. Me and my crews were forced to stop making use of it because the Arcane Council found out about it and seized it for themselves.”
That shut the mouths of everyone at the table. Janet’s hand stopped halfway to her mouth with her wine goblet. The match in Meng’s fingers, which had been an inch away from the thin cigar she had been on the verge of lighting, fizzled out. Even Caxton’s constant slavering devouring of those gross clamacondas was arrested by this revelation.
“You’re telling me,” said Isobel Galeflint quietly, still pointing at the impenetrable maw of the gaping cave mouth, “that the bloody Arcane Council could be on the other side of the rift I just sent my scouts through?”
Barry, cool as a cucumber that’s just taken an ice bath in Alaska, said, “Could? Nay, Admiral. I’d say that the chances are that they’re definitely on the other side of that rift you just sent your scouts through.”
“How can you be so certain, Barry?” Cecilia asked, feigning optimism. “Perhaps it’s an entirely different rift?”
“After they found out about the underground river and the rift,” Barry said, “which they probably wouldn’t ever have done if it weren't for a disgruntled drunk hand in my employ who tipped ‘em off, the bastards on the Arcane Council got busy.”
“Busy?” Isobel said woodenly. “Busy how?”
“They excavated a great space under the Castle of Ascension,” Barry told us. “They turned it into a subterranean port and shipbuilding yard. From what I was able to gather though my spies and blokes that I bribed, they hoped to run missions into the Spectral Realm.”
“But, no Arcane Council or Avalonian boat has ever run any sort of mission into the Spectral Realm,” growled Caxton, “and that’s a fuckin’ fact. Not while you were sailing the seas, and not since you vanished neither.”
Meng nodded in agreement, the burned-out match still clutched in her blistered fingertips.
“They were only waiting on mage engineers of their own to figure out how to build ships that could survive in the Spectral Realm,” Barry said. “Leastways, that’s what I heard. When that little nugget of gossip came to my ears, I decided to have the rift sealed from this side. It meant, obviously, that we wouldn’t be able to use the rift to smuggle goods anymore. Seeing as the Queen’s forces were as tight on that place as bark to a log, that didn’t seem to matter much. I had the place sealed, and we gave it up for lost.”
“And you didn’t recognize the big fuck off cave when you arrived here?” Isobel said, failing to keep the incredulity from her voice. “You didn’t think to bloody well bring this up before now?”
“Truth to tell, like so much in this afterlife of mine, the existence of the place had totally slipped from my memory,” Barry said simply. “If ye think a brush with the Arcane Council and the sealing up of some cave registered far up the list of my past history, Admiral Galeflint, then ye can’t have been listening to half the stories they tell of old Captain Chillgrave.”
Isobel Galeflint rose slowly to her feet. She was breathing like an asthmatic bull, her chest rising and falling in a way that reminded me sharply of the sex that she, Mallory, and I had just shared. She looked like she’d enjoy nothing more just then than shoving old Captain Chillgrave’s head up his old ass, but she refrained.
Instead, she pivoted and stared out at the huge cave opening. Everyone, in fact, looked toward the mammoth cave mouth that took up one whole side of the small island.
It was dead quiet. The scouts had already rowed in and disappeared about an hour before. There was nothing to be seen. No stirring of water.
Nothing.
“Sail ho!” a voice cried from up in the rigging.
Instinctively, I leaned forward and clutched at the rail, my eyes straining into the blackness off the cave. Still though, there was nothing that I could see.
Isobel, however, seemed to see something.
“Ship to stern!” she yelled.
All of us on the poop deck turned and stomped over to the most rearward rail of The Hellbringer.
Another ship was plowing its way around the headland that sheltered the bay. For a moment, I guessed that it must surely be some vessel sent by the Avalonian Kingdom. Then, my commonsense asserted its presence, and I realized that it was yet another pirate ship.
“Who the fuck is that, Meng?” Isobel shot at the selkie who stood beside her side with her hand resting on the butt of a mana pistol.
Meng shielded her eyes with a hand. “Looks to be… Chopsticks Nutlee, Admiral.”
“You’re sure?” Isobel asked.
“Aye, that’s the ruddy Tainted Waif,” Caxton said, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. “Ain’t no other ship so ill-kept as Chopstick’s vessel.”
It was true. I hadn’t really noticed it when Captain Nutlee had pulled up next to our schooner the day before, having not
hing to really compare it to, but her ship didn’t look like the cleanest vessel. More accurately, it looked like you’d be able to catch a venereal disease just by setting foot on the deck. The hull was covered in barnacles and other limpid growths, the sails were the off-white color of unwashed underpants after a four-day music festival, and there was a general air of dilapidated neglect about the ship.
“I wonder what that sack of wine wants?” Barry muttered in an aside to me.
“Trouble, you reckon?” I asked.
“Pirates like Nutlee always want trouble, sir,” Barry replied.
“I thought trouble was a pirate’s middle name?” I said. “Sort of goes with the territory, doesn’t it?”
Barry gave me a look and then squinted out at the approaching shape of the Tainted Waif. “Aye,” he admitted, “that it does, but more for them pirates as have dust and fluff betwixt the ears, if ye follow my drift, sir?”
“You mean, the best pirates are the ones who actually make an effort to engage their brains at some point?” I asked.
“Aye, that’s right, sir,” Barry agreed.
“Chopsticks Nutlee didn’t strike me as one of the Multiverse’s great thinkers,” I said.
“Nay, sir,” Barry said. “There are them as think and them as do, and then there is them like Captain Nutlee.”
“One of those idiots who think that treading lightly is for the weak and the fearful?” I asked. “One of those who hasn’t figured out that a little fear and a little tact are actually a sign of common sense?”
Barry nodded and sighed. “Aye, that’d be it in a nutshell, sir. Which, ironically, is all that’d be needed to house dear Chopstick’s brain.”
As the Tainted Waif drew alongside, we could all see the big, sloppy shape of Captain Nutlee moving jerkily down the deck. The gnoll captain, despite having two peg legs, still managed to move at a fair clip, though I thought that she might have been powered by rage right now, more than anything else.
“She looks…” Enwyn began.
“She looks pissed,” said Janet.
The obese gnoll captain sure did. Even from where we stood, with the wind blowing from behind us so that sound struggled to reach us, I could tell that she was in the sort of irrational, arm-waving rage that could see even your most placid member of society do something as irrational as dick punch a baby.
And Chopsticks Nutlee, though our acquaintance had been blessedly short-lived, did not strike me as your average member of society.
“Ahoy there, Nutlee,” Barry called as the Tainted Waif cruised slowly past, only twenty or so feet away from us.
“Ahoy your fuckin’ self, Chillgrave, you loathsome worm!” came the spit-flecked reply from Nutlee.
“That’s not very nice,” Barry admonished.
“Nice? Nice? I’ll tell you what’s not nice, you cock-juggling squish mitten,” Captain Nutlee roared furiously, “it’s hearing from some shit-kicker in the port this morning that you and our great and gracious Admiral here have struck up a deal, a deal that pisses all over the agreement that you and I previously arranged!”
Isobel leaned over the rail casually. “I’m sorry that this news has come as a blow, Nutlee, but you must recall that we’re all bloody pirates here, and it wasn’t as if you hadn’t already tried to throw Captain Chillgrave to the sharks with me, was it?”
Chopsticks Nutlee was walking back along the deck as her ship moved past ours, so that she could remain talking to us.
“Ah, you’re full o’ shit, Admiral Galeflint!” she said.
“Careful, sailor,” Isobel said, in a voice dripping with menace. “I’ve just eaten a fair meal, which is why I'm in a relatively good mood, but if you push your luck…”
Nutlee’s ship passed by, and her string of curses were lost in the wind. As the Tainted Waif prepared to cruise past our other side, Isobel said to Meng and Caxton, “Make sure the mana-cannons are primed and ready. Nutlee is angry, and she’s stupid enough to miss the water if she threw herself overboard—a dangerous combination for one in charge of a pirate ship. If she should get any clever ideas and decide to open fire on us, I want you to hit her with a broadside that’ll knock her into the middle of next week, got it?”
Caxton and Meng saluted and hurried off.
Looking at the gnoll captain dancing in a rage around her deck, she was almost certainly on the verge of laying a hefty broadside on either Isobel’s or Barry’s ship. They do say, after all, that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and Nutlee looked like a woman who had been scorned like none other.
Her ship cruised menacingly past Barry’s schooner, which was just undergoing its final minor repairs. My palm itched with the need to summon my staff so that, should Chopsticks Nutlee crack and let loose with her mana-cannons, I might clip her with a well-placed Blazing Bolt.
The Tainted Waif was level with our schooner now. Barry’s ship, if it was attacked, was right in the way of the guns of The Hellbringer. If Nutlee was going to try and get her revenge on Captain Chillgrave, then now would be the time.
I saw the gnoll pause in her tirade and consider the vessel next to her. She was one of those people who can’t act and think at the same time, and I could practically hear the wheels turning in her head as she drew up a mental pros and cons list of shooting the vessel.
I saw her look sideways at a tall female figure that I assumed was her first mate.
The stupid ass potato is actually going to give the order, I thought dimly.
I conjured my staff to my hand. With the distance and the ropes, beams, sails, and people obstructing my shot, hitting Captain Nutlee was going to require nothing short of divine intervention.
The sound of mana-cannons booming rolled across the waters of the bay.
But they hadn’t come from the Tainted Waif. They hadn't even come from one of our ships.
The Tainted Waif rocked as it was hit squarely by a fusillade of glowing orange manaballs. Tangerine fire blossomed like a series of giant, bright roses along the spell-protected side of the vessel, as most of the crew were thrown off their feet by the unexpected assault. A taut rope attached to one of the sails was severed, and it whipped across the deck with such speed and pent up energy that it went through a seawoman like a hot wire through a wheel of brie and left her in two gory pieces on the deck.
The panic and the shock and the surprise was tangible even from where we stood on the deck of The Hellbringer.
“What the fucking fuck?” Janet said succinctly.
A galleon, crisp white sails fluttering and dark wood gleaming, was moving out of the cave mouth like a bear that’s just been awakened from slumber. Even as we watched, the cannons mounted to its bow spat misty orange vapor. A second later, we heard the sound of the shot. More manaballs smashed into Chopstick Nutlee’s reeling ship, rocking it once more.
“To arms, to arms, you dogs!” Barry roared in a voice like guns and drums. “It’s the damned Arcane Council! Here they bloody come! Man the cannons, charge the muskets! Take no prisoners and show no mercy, for you shall receive naught from these bureaucratic buccaneers!”
Chapter 19
Everyone around us scrambled to carry out Barry’s orders as the newly arrived vessel pounded Nutlee’s ship with manaballs.
“Mr. Mauler!” Barry called to me. “Grab the ladies and get aboard our tub. I’ll meet ye there!”
I nodded, not bothering to voice my agreement. Barry had already stepped off the rail of the poop deck and was running through thin air toward his schooner as easily as if he had been descending a set of stairs that only he could see.
“Come on!” I grabbed Alura and Janet by the elbows and urged Enwyn and Cecilia to follow me. We marched across the deck toward the rope ladders that hung down from the side of The Hellbringer.
Are you a mage or not? my brain shot at me as we waited for a break in the crush of rebel sailors that had been feasting with the pirates from The Hellbringer. There were so many rebels trying to get down the rope la
dders and back to our ship that it was taking what felt like an age.
“You take Cecilia,” I said to Enwyn. “Flame Flight.”
I held onto Alura and Janet as tightly as I could and, taxing my limits a little, I used my Greater Flame Flight spell to boost us up and over the scrum of people and onto the deck of our ship. Enwyn, with Cecilia holding onto her back, did the same with her own spell.
We landed a little heavily, and I staggered, but I was quickly back on my feet thanks to Alura holding on to me. My head felt light, and I guessed that my spell was only meant to lift myself and one other person.
“Are you okay?” Janet asked.
I waved her concern away and pointed to the basilisk shaped mana-canons down the port side of the schooner.
“Get into the gunner’s seat,” I ordered the women, “let’s light that motherfucker up!”
“Those motherfuckers,” Janet said.
“What?” I asked.
“Those motherfuckers,” Janet repeated, pointing past my shoulder.
I spun around.
More ships were appearing from out of the enormous cave mouth. Two more, three more, four.
“Uh oh,” I said.
“Uh oh is right,” Enwyn said.
It looked like the Arcane Council had been standing ready for such a chance as this. No doubt, as soon as they had heard that we had traveled via rift to the Spectral Realm, they had started putting this little armada together. I imagined that they had probably had teams of mages working on opening the rift when Isobel’s scouts had unexpectedly done the job for them from the closed side.
They would have thought that Yuletide had come early, that the gods were smiling on them.
Clearly, they had perfected the art of building war vessels capable of making the transition between the Spectral Realm and Avalonia, because the galleons sailing into view unfortunately did not show any signs of imploding into compressed balls of fractured wood and pulped flesh.
“The only thing that we have going for us right now,” I said to the four women as we watched a sixth ship sail out of the cave, “is that they probably weren’t expecting to find five ships waiting out here for them. Now, man those damned canons and let’s light these guys up!”