“Barry’s dead,” I pointed out. “You can stop doing his bidding now.”
“Oh, no, you misunderstand me, old boy. Arcanus. This is entirely for me. Inferus.” Bolts of fire magic crawled up and down his forearm. “Finishing another man’s spell, by god, the cheek of it. Maxima. Is that another thing they teach you in peasant school?”
He’d gotten his magic reserves back quicker than I thought; that little cudgel-induced nap had apparently been very restful. I wondered if there was anything I could say between now and the next magic word that would cause Benjamin and I to become firm friends.
“Tele . . .” he began, before something behind us caught his eye. “Is that a pirate shi—” He quickly left the scene, horizontally and on the business end of a cannonball.
The Black Pudding was doing a pretty good job of making the pathetic Yawnbore coastline seem epic as it creaked and “aharr”ed its way along, firing again and again at what remained of the town and Barry’s cowering army. Three rowboats on the near side of the ship were steadily filling up with cutlass-waving corsairs, looking forward to a good old pillage.
“Friends of yours?” asked Meryl.
“Oh, balls,” I said, quickly getting to my feet. I sprinted along the pier towards the ship, waving my hands for attention. “STOP LOWERING THE BOATS!” I yelled over the cannon fire. “WE HAVE TO GO NOW!”
The massive bulk of Captain Scar stepped up to the ship’s prow. She held her hands to her mouth and her equally massive voice boomed out across the water. “WHY DO YER ALWAYS HAVE TO BE SUCH A BUZZ KILLER?!”
“BARRY’S DEAD! BARRIER’S DOWN! WE HAVE TO GO NOW BEFORE HE GETS HIMSELF RESUR-RECTED!”
“WHAT ABOUT THE DRAGON MOSS?!”
I thought quickly. “TURNS OUT I HAD SOME IN MY POCKET THE WHOLE TIME! STOP LOWERING THE BOATS AND WE’LL COME OUT TO YOU!”
“ARE YE SURE BARRY’S DEAD, MATEY?!”
I paused on the verge of diving off the pier. “YES!” My throat was beginning to feel very rough.
“ONLY ’E’S LOOKING PRETTY FRISKY TO ME!!”
Somewhere behind me, I heard the angry lurch of a slightly damaged trebuchet, followed by the sound of a heavy payload whistling through the air. I glanced up just in time to see a loose collection of half-bricks batter the Black Pudding’s crow’s nest, whose occupant had the presence of mind to stop waving his cutlass around and dive into the sea.
Barry was alive again, his head none the worse for its ordeal. His anger had become a tangible force, crackling around him in a semitransparent white sphere.
“I,” he hissed, sparkling white energy bursting from his mouth and eyes, “have a SCHEDULE!”
A collection of heavy bricks rose unbidden from the ground and collected themselves in the trebuchet’s sling. Barry waved his arm, and the trebuchet flung another payload across the bay, this time leaving the top part of the Black Pudding’s middenmast hanging at an unhealthy angle.
There was a blast of cannons, and the Pudding returned fire. Two cannonballs were aimed at Barry and seemed to be dead on target until they reached Barry’s shield, whereupon they halted in mid-air and split into droplets of molten steel.
“You can’t stop me!!” he roared. “I have GOD on my side!”
I looked around for the priest, feeling certain he’d have something to say about that. He was still on the section of beach where he’d been knocked down, watching Meryl, who appeared to be desecrating Benjamin’s latest corpse. I watched, baffled, as she gathered his top half into her arms and waddled towards an oblivious Barry, holding out the dead mage’s still-sparkling hand like . . .
Like some kind of handheld cannon. I swore so loud that the spiders in my lungs had to cover their childrens’ ears, then started running back towards Meryl. I knew what she was planning and I knew what would happen if she tried it.
“No!” I cried, muted by another futile cannon blast at precisely the worst moment.
“Tel-ech-us,” I heard Meryl announce, pointing Benjamin roughly in Barry’s direction.
Several complicated things happened. Or rather, one very simple thing happened for several complicated reasons.
Magic can go wrong in so many fascinating ways you have to spend six months at mage school copying out the rule book before they’ll even teach you the wet dog spell. It’s certainly possible to cast a spell with the fresh corpse of a man who’s already said most of the words, because the magic stays stored up in his body; it’s just that doing so is really, really stupid. Magic is a living thing, inclined to all the same bloody-minded pettiness of other living things, and there are two things it really doesn’t like: being cast by a dead guy (properly dead, not the inferior Dreadgrave brand) and being cast by an amateur.
The result of either was generally what we in the trade call “a voyage to the cock-up peninsula.” Meryl was attempting both. By the time she finished saying the word I had almost reached her, so I was around just in time to take a full-scale magical blowback right in the mush.
After my eyes started working again and my ears stopped ringing, I discovered that I was in the air and the entire town was traveling away from me at great speed. I made the mistake of wondering how I’d gotten through that intact, at which point I made intimate contact with the Black Pudding’s figurehead spine-first. I heard a sound like a wooden ruler breaking over someone’s knee, then felt my limp carcass flop down into the water.
I tried to start swimming, but my limbs were obstinately refusing to respond. I floated on my back for a while, staring up at the night sky and slightly misaligned figurehead, listening to the distant sounds of Yawnbore: the crackling of massive fires and a succession of little follow-up explosions trying to leech off the success of the first.
Then I heard the splashing of an inept swimmer coming up to my side, and Meryl’s face moved into view. “Jim! Are you all right?”
“My spine’s broken and I can’t move. You?”
“One or two liquefied internal organs. Nothing I was really using.”
“I, too, am once again spared, that I would complete my God-given destiny,” added the priest, like anyone cared.
The pirates let a rope down, so Meryl tied it around my legs and I was hauled upside-down to the deck. On the way up, I had a chance to get an inverted look at what remained of Yawnbore after the disastrous magical hissy-fit. Most of the seafront buildings were burning merrily, and I hazarded a guess that the thin layer of ash and blackened body parts around the splintered remains of a trebuchet were all that remained of Barry and his crew. Perhaps he would appreciate Meryl’s blunder keeping the demolition on schedule.
“So things’re getting a wee bit confused,” said Captain Scar after her men had laid me out on the deck. “‘Ave yer what yer needed fer the undeadifyin’? Are we killin’ the vicar or what?”
“No, no, he’s dead. We can get past the barrier now.”
“Well, all right then.” She made a complex hand signal, and a couple of her men rushed off to haul up the anchor. “We’ll skirt by the cliffs to pick up Slippery John and be on our way. Is there a reason why ye’re lyin’ down like that?”
Meryl appeared over the side. “Hiya,” she said, flapping her hand madly in what was probably supposed to be a greeting.
Captain Scar looked at her, then back to me. “’Oo’s she?”
“An associate,” seemed like the most honest answer.
The priest arrived next, taking a good long look down his nose at the company he was now keeping. Captain Scar sighed and folded her arms. “Ye only ever seem to raise more and more questions, don’t yer, laddie?” said Captain Scar, rubbing her chin again. “We’re pleased as punch to be gettin’ away from that shithole town, though, so I won’t make too much of an issue of it if yer ’and over all yer valuables and promise to look like ’ostages.”
“Deal,” said Meryl, rolling me onto my front and messing with my tormented robe. “Shall we have a look at this spine, then?”
With my face f
lat against the splintery wooden floor, I was given chance to reflect. “Barry,” I said. “He was killed when that bit of rubble fell on his head, right?”
“Probably. A bit of his brain hit me in the eye.”
“But he came right back, is my point.” I gestured upwards with my eyebrows. “Pull me up. I need to check something.”
Obediently, she hauled me up by my shoulders and propped me up on the side. The site of Barry’s most recent death was getting further and further away, so I focused my magic undead vision as hard as I could.
There was movement around the trebuchet’s ruins. A little dust eddy was swirling, moving the ashes around. A tiny little whirlwind with an artistic leaning seemed to be engaged in creating a little ash sculpture of a man.
“Shit,” I exclaimed, disturbing my lung spiders a second time. “I knew it’d be something like this. He regenerates! We have to go faster!”
“Not ’til we pick up Slippery John,” went Captain Scar from the main deck. “Not much prevailin’ wind, anyway.”
“But the barrier could come back up any sec—”
“Tally ho!” came a voice from above us. We were passing by the cliffs now, and Slippery John took the opportunity to leap heroically onto the deck, Drylda, wheelbarrow and all. The cast-iron wheelbarrow landed squarely on me, pinning me to the floor. “Oh, sorry, monstrous cadaver. Slippery John got a bit caught up in the moment, there.”
“Go faster!” I yelled, as loudly as I could manage with a mouthful of deck varnish. “The barrier . . .”
“Yeh’ve got this nasty ’abit of thinkin’ yeh can order us around,” said Captain Scar irritably.
Then the barrier returned, at precisely the moment when the Black Pudding was part-way over it. And everyone who hadn’t listened to me had only themselves to blame for what happened next.
When I’d foretold that the barrier wouldn’t let the Pudding through, I’d been pulling things out of my arse. The fact that I had apparently been horribly, inconveniently correct, did not bring any feeling of triumph. With a quick but incredibly loud CRUNCH
of distressed wood, the ship was neatly sliced in two.
The larger part was the one still within the barrier, occupied by a stunned Captain Scar and her crew. Outside was the prow, occupied by Meryl, the priest, Slippery John, Drylda, Drylda’s wheelbarrow, and me. And we quickly discovered that there’s a good reason why ships don’t get launched onto water when they’re only one-third finished.
The deck dipped sharply, and the wheelbarrow did what wheelbarrows do and began to roll forward, pulling me with it, catching my robe in the axle. Unable to stop or free myself, all I could do was glide towards the foaming sea and hotly curse both my choice of career and its impractical dress code.
“Jim!” cried Meryl, diving towards the runaway wheelbarrow, missing, and slipping right off the deck into the sea. I added her to the cursing list.
“Slippery John to the rescue!” cried Slippery John, who had been a fixture of the list for quite some time now. He bravely leapt forward, grabbed Drylda’s ankles, and hauled her into his arms with a jangle of wristlets and concealed daggers. Relieved of most of its ballast, the wheelbarrow immediately slid right into the sea, where it upended and remained buoyant just long enough for me to yell, “You bastard!” before the water closed in over my face.
EIGHT
Firelight from the burning town fluttered prettily off the waves as the wheelbarrow dragged me rapidly away from the surface. I could see the two halves of the Black Pudding disintegrate as they sank, the creaks and crashes of falling masts mingling with the grumbling of wet pirates fighting each other for floatation devices. Then the sound faded, and all was silent.
I strained until my brain bulged, but I couldn’t make so much as a finger twitch. Everything below the neck was so much dead weight. The most I could do was bug my eyes out and blow bubbles full of swear words.
Chests of loot and chunks of black-painted wood were raining down around me. And there was something else, a madly-shaped black silhouette coming straight at me. My imagination conjured all sorts of betentacled undersea disasters of nature before I realized that it was Meryl, swimming down towards me, her tattered dress billowing out.
In the semi-darkness I couldn’t make out her face, but I could see the desperation in her movements. The wheelbarrow was heavy, and pulling me down fast. The laws of physics were making it very clear that they’d prefer her to be going back up, now, and she was thrashing against them with all her strength.
My arms and legs were limp but outstretched towards her. She was close enough that I could make out every greasy strand of her fluttering pigtails. She made a savage burst of extra effort, and her fingertips came within inches of mine.
I probably shouldn’t have tempted fate by wondering if she’d actually reach me, as one of the cannonballs from the Black Pudding effortlessly overtook her at that point and planted itself squarely in my throat. I sank, and Meryl disappeared into the gathering darkness.
The blurry shadows of the deep became even blurrier and shadowier, then suddenly disappeared altogether. I couldn’t see or hear, and all I could feel were the pecks of bored fish and my body being occasionally shoved aside by something extremely big and distressing that made me grateful for the darkness.
The wheelbarrow bounced off some kind of reef, and I spun end over end for a while, intermittently scraping against jagged rock. The water pressure had been bad enough ten feet below the surface, but now it felt like an angry gorilla repeatedly slamming my skull between a pair of cymbals.
A grotesque slimy sensation trailed up my forehead and away. Perfect, I thought. On top of everything else, my eyes had just exploded. Anything else you’d like to throw at me while we’re on a roll, God? Giant squid, perha—
I dropped out of the water.
One second the pressure had been trying to compact my entire body into a perfect sphere, the next I’d fallen through some kind of ridiculous upside-down surface into . . .
. . . Air? It had to be. But it wasn’t like proper air. Proper air didn’t hang around at the bottom of the sea, for one thing. And this felt . . . thicker, somehow, like moving through clouds of dust. I was fairly certain I was still falling, but there was no wind, and not a single sound.
I looked around, confused and terrified, momentarily forgetting that my eyes were currently diffusing rapidly into the water somewhere above me. When I recalled that my confusion multiplied, because I could see something.
At first, it was a glimmering line far below me, a diamond-white string reaching across the abyss. As I fell closer, I saw that there were several of the lines. Then hundreds. There was a whole web of flowing white shoelaces hanging in blackness, stretching away endlessly in both directions.
Then I fell a little closer, and I saw that they weren’t just lines. They were queues. Queues of Deleters, every single one rushing along at an alarming speed to some mysterious errand, flapping their wings in perfect, silent unison. I wondered if I should have been panicking, but my attempts to scream made no noise, so I settled for being dumbfounded.
Then I fell closer still, and saw that I was falling straight towards one of the Deleters. My flailing hand had already scythed straight through it without stopping. Tendrils of lightning scuttled up my arm and drilled their way through the center of my forehead. Something ran across my brain in spiked running shoes. A spasm jerked my entire body, finally dislodging my robe from that damn wheelbarrow. My twitching foot kicked a second Deleter in its featureless face, sending another bolt of fizzling unpleasantness into my body.
The sensations passed, but something was left behind. There were words in my head, burnt into my brain in big, thumping letters, as clear and lucid as the memories of my first catastrophic fumble with Jemima from the healer school next door.
From: “Simon Townshend”
To: “Donald Sunderland”
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Population numbers?
Relax - im on top of it
-S
From: “Donald Sunderland”
To: “Simon Townshend”
Subject: Re: Re: Population numbers?
Simon, I’m REALLY angry right now. I already told you you can ONLY use deletion protocols on minor npcs, NOT quest characters and DEFINITELY NOT world architecture. Everything in the world is TIED TOGETHER on a VERY COMPLEX LEVEL. Rubbing out important things willy-nilly does BAD THINGS to other things in the world. Now the WHOLE of Yawnbore’s bugged out. We have to get rid of the WHOLE town and EVERYONE in it before too many npcs notice and then rewire ALL the associated quests.
From now on, DO NOT use deletion protocols. EVER. Get rid of Yawnbore within WORLD CONTEXT. Get some npcs to use demolition spells or siege weapons, break up the buildings, round up the inhabitants and we’ll put them in quarantine on murdercruel. DON’T **** THIS UP SIMON IF WE DON’T KEEP TO BETA SCHEDULE I’M TELLING BRIAN IT WAS ALL YOUR FAULT.
-Don
From: “Simon Townshend”
To: “Donald Sunderland”
Cc: “William Williams”
Subject: Re: Population numbers?
Found what was causing the numbers—some quest character was bringing minor npcs back to life who died before the entropy protocols were shut off, don’t know how he was swinging that but oh well, I solved the problem already, aint you lucky to have me around???
-S
From: “William Williams”
To: “Donald Sunderland”
Mogworld Page 14