by King, Dante
“Why the fuck didn’t you do that to begin with?” I panted as our schooner picked up speed once more, and we headed back into the fray.
“Not that simple, sir,” Barry told me. “My mind can only concentrate on a conjuration like that, and nothing else. I have to relinquish all my hold on our schooner to do something like that, momentarily let down every defense, lose touch with the sails, and give up controlling the rudder—not something I like to do in a battle. And, with a crew of landlubbers the likes of which most of these renegades are, sir—no offense meant, sir—it’s all the riskier.”
Out in the middle of the bay, The Hellbringer was being harried by three of the Arcane ships simultaneously. Our foe had obviously realized that Isobel and her huge galleon were the alpha threats here. It looked like the enemy was hoping to take her down before they lost any more of their ships.
It wasn’t as if things were going all our way, though. There was a column of greasy black smoke rising into the clear blue sky, a towering, reeking finger of black and gray shot with dancing purple sparks. It was coming from one of the ships that had been guarding The Hellbringer when it had sailed into the bay: one of ours. It was some distance away, but we could see all the hands on the deck running hither thither as they attempted to control the magical conflagration.
“That does not bode well,” Mallory said as she and I took a moment to catch our breath.
Her observation was accurate. A second or two later, the pirate vessel exploded. The cracking detonation rolled across the waters of the bay, and the ship burst apart in a swirling vortex of purple fire that spiraled into the air some hundred feet.
There was little time for being disheartened at the sight of one of our allies being obliterated, though.
“Brace!” I heard Barry cry.
“Brace!”
“Brace!”
The message was passed along the ship by any rebel who could still pack some punch into their voice.
“Brace for impact!”
One of the Arcane Council vessels had cruised within broadside range of us, and they had taken the opportunity to give their gunners a little target practice.
The shock of fifteen or so manaballs hitting us side-on sent groaning shivers through the hull of our schooner. The shield spell, which I had seen Barry cloak the ship in, ripple. In a sudden straining instance, the shield popped like a diamond soap bubble.
“Ah, shiver my fuckin’ ass!” Barry yelled in rage.
It was not the sort of exclamation that you want to hear from the guy steering your boat when you’re in the middle of a sea battle, especially when you’re still staring down the wrong end of about twenty mana-cannons.
“Barry, do something!” Cecilia yelled. She too had obviously perceived the slender thread that now held us above the mincing machine of fate.
“Hold onto your cutlasses!” the poltergeist screeched back. “Dropping port anchor!”
There was the clink-clink-clink-clink-clink-clink sound of rapidly unpooling chain, followed by a large splash, and then the whole schooner ducked hard right.
It was the equivalent of a handbrake turn in a car. Every hand standing on the deck of our ship was thrown from their feet as the schooner lurched violently around so that the bow was pointing at the enemy ship taking aim at us.
I rolled and tumbled into the foremast, the breath driven out of me, but I was able to grab Cecilia and Mallory as they rolled into me and stop them getting hurt.
“Holy shit!” Mallory gasped.
Hey, I guess if anyone knew when that curse was appropriate, it was her.
There was a roar as the mana-cannons of our adversary were fired in what would have been, had it not been for the evasive maneuver that Barry had just pulled, a sweeping broadside. With a drastically narrowed target, most of the manaballs now missed completely and splashed harmlessly into the ocean behind us, sending up geysers of white spray.
One shot, though, did find the target. It smashed into the bow of the schooner in a burst of dull blue fire. A severed rope scythed through the air, whipping across the deck like a released rubber band. Luckily, everyone was still flat on their asses, and no one was injured. Splinters of wood, some as big around as my wrist, were sent flying, a hail of organic shrapnel that put holes in the lower sails and stuck quivering into the bulwarks.
There was a scream then, an animal noise that stopped my heart because I recognized who the voice belonged to.
“Alura!” I said, jumping to my feet.
Chapter 20
After hearing Alura’s pained scream, I sprinted down the deck toward the nose of the vessel, hurdling over fallen renegades, leaping over dead bodies, and dodging those people trying to haul themselves to their feet.
The scream had died down to a dull moan. Somehow, I could hear it even over the excited, frantic chatter of the crew.
I skidded to a halt near the prow, where the damage caused by the manaball looked to be most severe.
Alura, the Gemstone Princess, was lying in a mess of shattered timbers, smoldering rope, and busted crates. Her face was drawn with pain, and she was clutching at her leg.
I blinked and tried to keep the worry out of my eyes and off my face.
There was a sliver of wood, roughly as thick as my thumb, sticking out of Alura’s crystalline right leg. There was about four inches of wood showing, but I had no idea how deeply it might be buried in her thigh. There was a pool of mercury colored liquid surrounding the injury, dripping from her thigh and over the deck.
Blood, or so I guessed.
“That looks like it stings,” I said, trying to use humor to keep Alura from freaking out. I knelt down to have a closer look. The piece of wood was not too jagged, but it looked more like a stake that you might try and kill a vampire with. I thought it might actually have been a peg or something, used for tying rope to.
Alura gave a little pain-racked snort. “That, I think, would be a bit of an understatement.”
There was only one thing I could do, one option available to me.
I looked up to see what was going on with the ship that had fired on us.
Our schooner was set on a head to side collision course with the vessel in question. I had no idea what Barry thought he was going to do. As far as I knew, we did not have a ram on the prow of this schooner, but maybe Barry’s schematics included a hidden one. In all honesty, even if that was the case, I wasn’t sure if we were going to get into ramming range in the time it took the mana-cannons on our adversary’s ship to recharge themselves.
It looked pretty fucking dire to me.
I concentrated on the one thing that I might be able to help with, which was alleviating Alura’s discomfort.
Gently, instinctively, I pressed my hand to the nasty wound.
“Justin,” the Gemstone Princess said through gritted teeth, “what are you—”
“Shh,” I said gently.
With my staff in one hand, I reached for my newest spell, Blessed Zephyr, and channeled the mana into Alura in a way that I could not describe, even to myself.
A wind that was not of the world around us gusted over the bow. Alura’s gossamer-like hair blew around her face, and she closed her eyes against the sudden breeze.
The wind was at once warm and cool, soothing, prickling with an energy and revitalization. It carried with it the smell and tang of tea tree oil. The Gemstone Elemental’s skin beneath my hand warmed. Looking down, I was astounded to see the sliver of wood beginning to work itself free, sliding smoothly out of the gaping hole in Alura’s thigh. Silvery blood welled out of the wound as the splinter was pushed out of Alura’s leg by my magic, but as soon as the stake fell clattering to the deck, the crystalline flesh of her leg knitted closed.
And she was whole once more.
I had been sitting on my heels, but suddenly experienced the sensation of having my head part company with my body—I was that light-headed. Fighting the urge to take a nap, I sat down heavily and leaned against a fa
llen barrel.
“Are you okay, Justin?” I heard Alura say.
Something about this struck me as funny. Hadn’t she been the one with the piece of wood skewered through her leg?
“I’m fine,” I said. “Just… just give me a sec. I think healing spells really take it out of you, you know.”
Alura had gotten to her feet and was flexing her leg, looking amazed.
“It feels good as new,” she said. “Better than it did before!”
“My spellbook did say that Blessed Zephyr was good for healing minor wounds and bolstering strength. Though I guess the energy and mana has to come from somewhere.”
I puffed out my cheeks, feeling a little nauseous. My head had stopped spinning, but the sooner we got this fucking battle done, the better.
“That ship that just shot at us hasn’t decided to flee by any chance, has it?” I asked.
Alura turned, and she swallowed. “No, it is still there.”
“That’s too bad.”
I got to my feet, helped by Mallory who had just arrived at the bow with Janet, Cecilia, and Enwyn.
We were still fifty yards from the other ship. I could see the Arcane Council’s soldiers swarming the deck as the gunners sighted their cannons.
“We’re screwed,” said Janet, who was always one to call it how she saw it.
“I’d have to agree, darling,” Cecilia added.
“It ain’t over till the fat lady sings,” I said lightly.
Chopsticks Nutlee’s ship crashed into the side of the enemy vessel from, seemingly, out of nowhere. The Tainted Waif’s prow, it appeared, was equipped with a ram, and Nutlee used it to smash into the stern of the enemy ship, throwing them into disarray. By the time the captain of the enemy ship had figured out what had happened, Nutlee was already sailing away.
And we were upon the foe.
Which was when Barry let loose with his hidden weapon: a fire cannon.
The blasting burst of flaming monochromatic magic fire issued from the front of our schooner. From some hidden place in the bow, it poured out and engulfed the main deck of the enemy ship. The twenty or so sailors caught in the roasting jet exploded into wisps of nothingness as they were swallowed up in the stream of magical fire. There was no time for them to even scream. Their bodies were simply reduced to something less substantial than dust and blown out to sea.
A cheering roar went up from our crew, but it was suddenly cut short when the purple tentacles of the kraken snaked up out of the depths and rose high above the burning ship.
“Oh, sure,” Janet said, her eyes glued on the monstrous and terrifying apparition, “come and steal our thunder why don’t you, you slimy bastard.”
“Hey,'” I said, “that pet of Galeflint’s can steal our thunder any time if it means it’s going to get a taste for the opposition. Personally, I was wondering when the hell it was going to start pulling its weight.”
The tentacles, instead of coming down with the force of a glacier on the burning vessel, this time descended and twined themselves around the ship in a careful embrace. I could see the shrouds and rigging collapsing and the huge suckers of the tentacles ripping up boards as they found purchase.
“What do you suppose that dude is up to?” Janet asked.
“The man with the torch?” Alura asked, squinting.
“That looks to me like he is the captain,” Mallory said.
Barry had turned us sharply so that we wouldn’t collide with the blazing enemy ship, but we were still close enough to it to feel the heat from the spreading phantasmic fires. Through the roiling smoke and falling ash, I could just make out a figure running along the deck, with a sputtering and flickering torch in his hand. It looked to be a sorcerous torch, for it was spitting green sparks.
“He’s got to be the captain,” I said. “Look at the size of the guy’s hat.”
The captain of the vessel flung open a hatch on the main deck just as the tentacles of the kraken squeezed downward. The mighty sea creature pulled the enormous vessel beneath the surface of the sea with the ease that I might have pulled down a rubber duck under the surface of my bath. The last I saw of the man in the big hat, he was throwing himself into the hold.
With an anticlimactic bubbling noise, the enemy ship was pulled below the surface to be consumed by the ravenous behemoth.
“Fuck me, I’m glad that thing is on our side,” I said.
“What do you think the captain was doing?” Mallory mused, her brow furrowed in contemplation.
“He looked like a man who was intent on going down with his ship,” I said. “Not that he had any choice in the matter once the kraken got hold of it.”
“Yes, but that torch…” Enwyn said as our schooner turned toward the cave mouth where the battle was still raging and mana-cannon mist lay heavy over the water. The other ship that had been guarding The Hellbringer was sailing across the patch of ocean under which the kraken had just pulled its prey. Evidently, the captain of the vessel had seen how close we had been to coming a cropper and had been sent by Isobel to ensure we didn’t require assistance.
“Yes, that torch did look like it had some sort of specific purpose, didn’t it?” Alura said thoughtfully. “Almost as if—”
The whole area where the kraken had drawn the enemy ship down, a good one-hundred feet by one-hundred feet of water, boiled on the surface for a fraction of a second, becoming a mass of fizzing and twinkling bright white bubbles. With a hissing roar that made Mallory involuntarily cling to me where we stood, the ocean erupted like a hundred-foot-wide geyser.
It reminded me of the footage you see of depth charges going off, though on a far more violent and massive scale. The ocean fountained upward, a column of rushing sea water laced and impregnated with green fire and lightning.
The friendly pirate ship that had been traveling toward us over that stretch of doomed water was plucked into the air like a leaf in a tornado. It was lifted, well over one-thousand tons of ship, about fifty feet by the force of the explosion. It broke apart in the air as its great bulk twisted and groaned and shattered.
It was one of the most awesome and horrifying things I could remember seeing, and that was saying something.
The flailing, screaming bodies of sailors could be made out as they were flung through the mist-filled air and disappeared into the column of roaring spray.
The whole spectacle of an entire ship destroyed in an instant was bad enough, but then there came the gigantic, rancid, stinking chunks of extirpated kraken flying out and raining down like sushi from hell.
I could see what had happened, of course. It was all terribly obvious now. The captain of the doomed enemy ship had been a wily opponent, right up until the last.
In his final moments, the man had clearly taken that fizzing thaumaturgical torch and touched off some mana explosives or something within the ship’s hold.
As a final fuck you to Isobel Galeflint and her pirate scum, he had made the kraken’s last meal into a bomb. The kraken had swallowed what amounted to a block of C4 and had received the most spectacular case of indigestion in return.
“There goes our MVP,” I muttered as, with a rending boom, the remains of the obliterated pirate ship hit the surface of the sea and spread out across it like so many twigs and bits of torn cloth.
“There goes another one of our allies,” Mallory groaned softly.
We both made good points. In one fiery, scalding instant we had lost the creature that could have singlehandedly won us the battle, and lost a ship.
“I’m not entirely sure how things could be much shitter, right at this very moment,” Janet said.
The only sound was the occasional meaty splash as a chunk of kraken that had been blown a little higher than all the rest landed back in the sea.
“Janet, if you’ve learned nothing else over the past few months, you must have learned that there is always some way that things can go more pear-shaped than they already are,” I said.
“Sail ho!
” Barry yelled from the poop.
We turned and saw him pointing back toward the island, back toward the cave.
The blackness of the mouth of the cave turned to gray and then to white as yet another vast Arcane Council ship emerged from out of it.
“There you go,” I said resignedly, even as my spirit hardened into a thing of steel and adamant and diamond. “My point exactly. Just when you believe things can’t get worse, along comes the fucking Multiverse, right on cue.”
The Avalonian Kingdom vessel was followed by another and another, and three more.
“That leaves us at a…” Alura turned her head quickly and bit her lip. “A nine to three disadvantage.”
“Not great odds, really,” Cecilia said.
I clapped my hands and let out a sigh. For some reason, I felt quite cheerful. “Ah, you know what they say. Just when things are going most wrong, that’s when they start to go right.”
“That sounds like a load of bullshit to me,” said Janet mildly.
“Agreed,” Enwyn added.
I didn’t reply. They might have been right.
But I couldn’t be glum. This was what it was all about, this was why we had started our training at the Mazirian Academy.
We were War Mages.
I looked around at my five friends: Mallory, Alura, Janet, Cecilia, and Enwyn.
“We’re War Mages,” I said, speaking the words. “And this is a war.”
I wasn’t expecting a round of high-fives or a chorus of lame-ass cheering, and I was not disappointed. What I got were five extremely intense looks coupled with grim smiles.
“If we’re going to sell our lives,” Alura said proudly, “then let us be sure to sell them as dearly as possible.”
“Roger that,” I said, turning to face the oncoming armada.
The Hellbringer and The Tainted Waif had managed to get away from the three remaining ships that had first exited the cave mouth. The two vessels came to meet us now, where we had almost come to a halt on one side of the bay. They circled in close, close enough for Isobel to hail us from where she stood on the poop deck of The Hellbringer.