by John Ruch
Justina grew hardened by the constant beatings and violence. It was impossible now to think of her weakly hanging her head in her evil sister’s fake courtroom. Yet she found love again as well in this unlikely place. A fellow slave romanced her in the brief late-night stretches when they had a little bit of privacy.
But, in a horrific scene of pooled blood and snapping leather, he was caught stealing an extra ration to give to her, and was flogged to death on the deck by the crazy Captain Cruentus.
Mieux held her hands to her mouth as Justina sat at her oar, the place on the bench beside her empty, her upturned face lit by a spotlight shining through a hatch and wetted by artificial rain.
“From this stormy night, vengeance shall be me only love,” Justina swore into the rain. “I vow revenge in turn upon the captain, upon me sister, and then upon all slavers everywhere!”
If Justina was an equilibrique of the Sénche-do, endurer of the Thirty-Two Trials, that would not be much of a problem. “But sadly,” Mieux thought with a shake of her head that sent the prongs on her headpiece flopping, “she is just a soft princess trained only in hair-brushing, and it is super hard to think of a way she would ever get revenge.” Most likely, she would die lonely with the place beside her still empty, just as the seat beside Mieux often was in the Morpheum. Mieux pressed her lips together and fat, shining tears welled at the corners of her eyes.
To Mieux’s amazement, Justina had a bid for freedom the very next day. Captain Cruentus’s ship, the Monstrum, so often the predator, was now the prey. The Scarlet Flame, a larger vessel captained by the vile Saltpork Jack, attacked. The two ships’ huge prows ground together side-by-side. Justina was pressed into topless action once again, swinging her boarding cutlass, which seemed more flexible than it should have been, though Mieux chose not to focus on that. So fierce was the fighting that it distracted everyone from their course, and suddenly a cry went up from both crews: “Redwave Reef, ahoy!”
It was too late, and both ships struck the clump of rocks, lifting into the air in a dramatic piece of stagecraft. Most of the crew rolled and toppled down the tilted decks, leaving Cruentus and Saltpork Jack dueling on the prow of the Monstrum. Justina, her flopping cutlass held between her teeth, clambered up a rope to join them.
“Who might you be, lass?” challenged the wild-bearded pirate Saltpork Jack.
“The better of you both!” Justina cried. She drew a second cutlass from her rope belt and began dueling them both as they dueled each other. And she was indeed the better warrior, her skills honed by scores of combats and her foes too used to having their crews do the fighting. Captain Cruentus, however, had enough skill and balance to slash the brave Justina across the face.
“Aggh! Me eye!” she shouted in the pirate cant she had picked up, along with so many other uncouth manners, from being a slave of crazy Godsblood pirates.
Captain Cruentus laughed harshly, still fending off Saltpork Jack. “And now, the last thing ye shall see—if ye can see at all—is my face, just as your worthless slave-lover did when I whipped him to death!”
Fired by this final outrage, Justina leaped to her feet and skewered Cruentus through the belly. The audience roared as a huge quantity of bright-red blood dumped out of his shirt and wetted the deck so much that he slipped and fell.
Saltpork Jack met his end just as quickly, and Justina stood triumphant over their corpses as she took down the Imperial flag and tore a strip from it for a makeshift eyepatch. She raised her cutlasses high with a shout. The struggling crews paused to look up her and responded in kind. Mieux clutched her hands together and pressed them to her heaving chest.
“Hear me now and cease yer stabbing, mateys!” Justina bellowed. “We are all one and all the same, and I declare ye all free! The Scarlet Flame can yet be saved, and any who wish can join me crew and fight all flags! For we shall bend knee to no king or captain! We shall call no land home, save the rocks of Redwave Reef!”
“The rocks of Redwave Reef!” the crews shouted in chorus.
“Hail the Golden Queen of the Godsblood!” shouted a voice from the crew of the Scarlet Flame.
“Hail the She-Shark of Redwave Reef!” cried a former slave from the deck of the Monstrum.
Justina the She-Shark’s first order was full-sail for the Tribunium estate. Her devoted crew rowed ashore with muffled oars under the ghostly bluish light that Atel’s Trail shed in the month of Galanos. They were just in time for a masquerade ball at the mansion and joined the line of people inside after wrapping their faces in handkerchiefs. Within, the vile Furta and Perfidium held court in the very same hall that had served as the fake courtroom where Justina had been sentenced to enslavement. The She-Shark stepped boldly forward.
“I was told that a fair Lady Justina ruled these lands. Where be she?” she proclaimed so loudly that all turned to hear.
Furta, now clad in rich furs and heavy jewels, smirked down. “Her name is never to be spoken here. She murdered her betrothed in favor of a swineherd and was justly sold to the privateer galleys.”
“A swineherd, eh? One that looked the spitting image of your cur of a bedmate?”
The partiers gasped and Furta leaped to her feet. “You have a problem with one of your eyes! Perhaps the wound afflicted your brain as well!”
“Arr, by me one good eye, I see the truth well enough!” the She-Shark cried, tearing off her kerchief to reveal her face.
Mieux carefully repeated to herself the useful phrase, “Arr, by me one good eye.”
“Justina!” the two evildoers said at once.
“Nay, the She-Shark of Redwave Reef!” Justina replied, jumping atop the low riser they were sitting on.
“But we framed you thoroughly and disposed of you with the slavers!” Furta confessed.
“It didn’t work!” Justina replied. She flourished her cutlass and then beheaded them both in a single swipe. Enormous gouts of blood and gore spewed from both bodies a good ten feet in the air, splattering down copiously onto the entire front row. The crowd roared once more, giving a standing ovation.
When the blood tanks ran low, the entire cast assembled in long rows across the stage, holding each other’s shoulders, and broke into song:
Ye can plot,
Ye can scheme,
But truth’ll kick in yer teeth.
Ye can’t run,
Ye can’t hide,
From the Queen of Redwave Reef!
The Pirate Queen of Redwave Reef!
The song dissolved into a messy chant of the title as the cast bowed and the audience began clearing out. Mieux pounded her tiny palms together in applause with such massive force that the boy in front of her held his ears and finally fled.
“That was totally great!” she cried, hoping the cast could hear her.
On the street outside, she pulled off her cowl and smiled to herself. She adjusted the loose bun that held up most of her glossy black hair and produced a little bone comb to brush her bangs and the two long tendrils of hair that framed her round face. She leaned down to pet a passing cat and ran her comb through its fur as it rubbed her leg. “Ha! Ha! Ha!” she laughed in a halting but merry staccato.
“The Pirate Queen had a poor husband in the form of vengeance,” Mieux reasoned, “but she also had many new friends among her crew and she would explore endless seas with them.” For the first time, she thought of Monsieur Ilmun and his other employees and patrons at the Blade & Ladle as a sort of crew, and Cor Cordum seemed a bit less lonely. She padded back toward home with a lightness in her slippered feet.
CHAPTER SIX
Ashton had seen three men die at the Blade & Ladle, and it had been downright unnatural every time. The first went by a broken bottle to the neck; the second had been clubbed with a burning log from the fire; the third drank himself to death in a rum-swilling contest with a guy half his size. At this place, a killing by blade would be comfortingly familiar and a killing by ladle would be no surprise.
Ashton had no intent
ion of dying by whatever means. As soon as he entered the bar and shook off the shock of its barnacles-and-pipesmoke stench, he made for a dark corner and clambered up a stack of crates to skulk in the shadows of the rafters. Safer to observe this sort of crowd from above, and easier to scan for the famous Shardaian girl. He wrapped himself in his new cloak that, in a concession to practicality, lacked any glittering silver studs and was dyed a deep crimson rather than black. He had learned from old smugglers that reds tricked the eye better than blacks in the night. More importantly, having some fabric wrapped around his face filtered the noxious air. The place was so smoky, he wondered if they forgot to open the flue.
He looked down at the tavern floor as if he were regarding a garbage pit full of broken glass from its dangerously eroded edge. It was the kind of place that used discarded ship-rope spools as furniture because they didn’t break if a man’s skull was smashed on them. It used candles for lighting instead of torches because it was harder to light a person on fire with a candle, and few of them because most of the clientele had already committed worse crimes than arson and liked a dark corner.
Ilmun, the owner, barkeep, and under-the-table dope-peddler, had a face deformed by nature or abuse, and either way had ended up a hostile son of a bitch. He kept a nasty black hatchet stuck in the wall behind the bar and was quick to end an argument with its edge. Jabbed in the wall alongside it were knives collected as cautionary trophies from would-be troublemakers. There usually were a half-dozen or so, but now, Ashton was surprised to see, the collection had grown prodigiously. There was even a short-sword hammered into the wood paneling. Somebody sure was cleaning house.
Not that it was that clean; the puking and swearing were the dive’s version of Violet’s harping at the Jury Lane, a discordant music all their own. But it was peaceful enough and had been for several minutes now, which had to be a kind of historic moment. Still, the boisterous noise reminded Ashton of something else—the tense ringing of a knife being sharpened just before carving time.
“Fuck you and your loaded dice!”
Ashton peered through the eye-stinging haze in the direction of the shout. “The veritable motto of the Blade & Ladle,” he thought.
A miniature figure darted from a back room, walking at a pace so fast it was almost comical. It was the little Shardaian bouncer, all right, and it was a good thing he’d taken to the rafters, because she was so tiny he never would have seen her otherwise. She stood no more than five feet tall, and at first he took her for a child until he saw her judgmental expression.
She was clad in a dark blue short jacket bearing curious knotted symbols and baggy purple pants with matching pull-on slippers. Her most notable feature was her gigantic doe eyes, wide open under glossy black bangs. As she trotted directly toward the newborn barfight, her eyes darted up a moment and seemingly, impossibly, locked right on him.
She stopped under the noses of the two beefy sailors, each of them easily double her weight, and interrupted their argument with a staccato barking voice so loud it made him jump and nearly lose his balance.
“You are being silly!” she harangued, holding her hands out pleadingly. “Look at this! It is much more interesting!”
She pulled some small objects out of her jacket pockets and solemnly laid them out on the table side-by-side. Ashton squinted and could make out a green wooden cube; two wooden balls, one red and one blue; and a pink scarf with a bit of sand or dirt tied into it as a weight. The two sailors, temporarily befuddled by the sheer novelty, looked on, one scratching his filthy beard and the other cocking his ratty cap back on his head.
The girl picked up the objects, two in each little paw, and began deftly juggling them. “Look at how amusing this is!” she commanded.
She was good. She momentarily flipped her hands behind her back without losing the rhythm of the juggling, then brought them forward again. Most of the bar stopped to cheer her on, several chanting, “Mi-eux! Mi-eux!”
As much as he appreciated the unexpected, Ashton had a queasy feeling this was not going to end in applause. Even worse, he had a horrible impulse toward doing something heroic, which probably would end up with him in an urn on Nalia’s mantle and a naughty killer’s knife added to Ilmun’s collection. He tensed and barely had a hand on his sword when it went sour.
“Fuck you, bitch!” the bearded one shouted, his animal curiosity burning out quickly. He took a swing with a fat right fist.
Mieux simply slapped it away with one hand, never losing her juggle.
Beardy tried again with the left fist, with the same result. He bellowed and stepped forward. She darted a little slippered foot out and hooked it behind his ankle. With a jerk of her leg, he fell hard on his ass and stayed there, already too booze-dazed to get up again.
Clever tricks, but she was distracted, and Ashton could predict what was coming next. Hat-Head whipped out a knife with the practiced speed required of any professional dice cheat and stabbed right for the girl’s neck.
A standard-issue bouncer would have been dead, but Mieux somehow felt it coming and simply stepped aside.
“Gonna cut you!” he threatened in frustration.
“Arr, by me one good eye!” Mieux cried weirdly, her little brow knotting above eyes that both appeared fully functional. “You put that down right now!”
She seized the tumbling green cube in midair and slammed one of its points into the sailor’s wrist. He screamed and dropped the knife as she returned the cube to the juggling flow and, almost casually, twirled herself into the air to land on his shoulders. Still juggling, she crossed her legs around his neck. His hat popped off as he fell to the ground. Mieux jumped to her feet just before impact and caught all of the objects in her left hand, dropping them back into a pocket. The crowd erupted in cheers and applause.
Stunts and violence were a combo sure to charm a bar crowd, and this Mieux was an instant hero. Various sleazeballs even tossed the drunks into the street for her, still more tossed coins her way, and one of them picked up the knife and handed it over to Ilmun, who gave her a nod and a grotesque smile.
Mieux suddenly looked a child again, her round face a picture of innocence, as she scooped coins into her pocket while politely saying “thank you” over and over. But then her gaze snapped up into the ceiling again. Her eyes narrowed as she wagged a finger.
“Get down from there right away! Unless you are a bird wearing human pants! Ha! Ha! Ha!” Her laughter was like a hammer breaking on an anvil.
“She can’t possibly be talking to me,” Ashton thought. “I snuck into a Mix-Fiend den this way.”
She put her little fists on her narrow hips, glaring right at him through the darkness and smoke. Sheepishly, Ashton crept off the beam and dropped to the floor.
“That is better! It is totally crazy to climb on the ceiling!”
Ashton shook his head. The crowd was laughing and starting to get into this latest act of tonight’s show. Best to play along.
“Seemed to me like the crazy people were all down here.”
Mieux’s frown disappeared instantly. “That’s true!” she allowed. “But still it is super dangerous to climb up there!”
“Yeah, well, look, my name’s Ashton.”
“I am Mieux Vigouroux of the Sénche-do!” she cried, and made a weird flourish with her left hand.
Ashton recalled from the Imperial documents that the Sénche-do was the circus-cult that produced this odd breed of bouncer. Her accent and mannerisms suggested she might really be from Shardai originally, though how she got through the mystery storms was among the many topics that were inappropriate to chat about at the moment.
“Mieux, can we talk somewhere more private? I’ve got a proposition for you.”
“What is a proposition!” she demanded.
The crowd roared anew, sailors snorting as they repeated the word “proposition” to each other. Ashton put a hand to his face and pinched the bridge of his nose. Then he glanced around with more caution than embarr
assment. Good humor could turn bad real fast.
“It’s a business deal,” he continued. Then, with a con-man’s instinct, he leaned in and added quietly, “Bankrolled by the Tetragate.”
Mieux’s eyes swelled like a cat’s. “The four kings of the Empire!” she said in a quieter voice. “Very well! Of course I will obey their decree! Should I put on a hat!”
After his confused assurance that he had no intention of taking her outside at the moment, and her confused response that she didn’t see what that had to do with Tetragate hat decrees, they agreed to meet in her room behind the bar.
She was living similarly to Ashton, only worse, truth be told. The windowless room smelled of soured ale and was crowded with boxes of broken bottles, cordwood stacked against one wall, and other sundry tavern debris. Her only possessions seemed to be a cot, a canvas satchel, and a rack holding a few dresses and covered with what must have been the only tablecloth in the building. As he was looking around for a place to sit, Mieux suddenly wheeled on him, tilting her head back to glare up at his face, fists on her hips.
“Who are you anyway!” she cried. “For real!”
He jumped slightly. Her questions sounded like statements, and all of them were shouts.
“Like I said, my name’s Ashton. Ashton Arrowmask.” He felt vaguely ridiculous explaining himself to a girl who barely came up to his chest. “I do some work for the Tetragate—acquisition of rare materials…”
“You are a mercenary!” she cried.
“Well, yes, you could put it that way.” How could she fluster him so easily? “But it’s not my main trade. I’m a sailor, not a soldier. Also trading in rare goods…”
“You are a smuggler!”
There was no point in continuing his verbal wriggling. She was plainly no idiot, and he had a low pulpit indeed from which to preach his respectability after being caught climbing the rafters in thief’s dress in one of the city’s worst murder-holes. Perhaps a judiciously edited confession was the way to go.