by Sparks,Cat
The raiders’ main weapon of choice were big curved blades. Others swung fighting staves or boarding pikes.
There was a clank and hissing, followed by more rounds of peppershot fired from the attacking vessel. An explosion knocked her to the deck again. A pungent stench filled the air, along with thick, choking plumes of smoke.
Nene’s field kit had been bumped from her shoulder, and smoke blurred her vision. As she propped herself up on grazed elbows to cough, a figure approached and stood over her, his face obscured by a khafiya. The knives in her boots were too far away. There was nothing to grab hold of, let alone use for self defence.
He reached out his hand. “Come on, girl. Get up!”
She stared at him stupidly.
“Come on! Ship’s under attack. Ain’t got time for fooling.”
A voice so familiar, as was the hand reaching down to her and something else. A gut feeling. She gripped his hand and he hauled her up. Let her go and tugged the cloth from his face.
“Lucius!”
“Shhh. You don’t give your name away out here. You don’t give nothing away if you can help it.”
“Where have you been? I thought I saw you on the docks but then you were gone and—.”
“No time for chitchat. Get behind me and stay behind me. They’re slinging pipe bombs. Damn pirates mean business.” He unclasped his sand cloak and kicked it out of the way, revealing the lance concealed beneath its voluminous folds. Now free, he swung it with practised ease. Just in time. A thick-set man vaulted over the side and came at them screaming. Star yelped in surprise, then ducked as Lucius struck and crushed the attacker’s windpipe with one deft stroke.
The body thudded to the deck, the man’s eyes staring, hard and glassy. No time for gawking. Another bomb went off nearby; more noise and smoke than anything. A second pirate followed the first rappelling over the side. This one did not go down so easy. When Lucius swung at him, he parried with a long, curved blade. The smoke made it difficult to see.
“Get behind me!” shouted Lucius.
There was no safe space behind. Another of Quarrel’s tankerjacks wrestled with a stranger twice his size, both reaching for knives as they came crashing to the deck. Blood gushed from a severed artery. Whose, she could not see. She reached for one of her own knives and gripped it tightly, for all the good such a tiny blade would do.
More smoke, more shouting. Bodies slamming hard against the deck. To the front of her, a choking, guttural growling. She turned to see Lucius tugging his lance from the second pirate’s throat. The dying man’s arms twitched as he gurgled wetly.
Lucius wiped his lance on the downed man’s trousers. “There was a time when chasing tankers was a respectable profession,” he said, shouting to make himself heard over the din of clashing steel, the creaking of timbers, and the shrieking of the wind. “Orderly. Professional—not this damn fool mess. You sailed the Black and you took your chances. Takes teamwork to survive a single day.”
There was no safe place. Nowhere to stand that was clear of fighting. The deck was growing slippery with bright blood, the ship stalled at an uncomfortable angle, wind ripping viciously at its sails. Two crewmen crawled high in the rigging, desperately attempting to stow the mainsail. They weren’t fast enough. The ship began to lurch and lift.
People slid and tumbled off their feet. Star scrabbled for purchase, rolling to keep clear of streaks of blood and the loose sacks sliding all over the deck.
She watched Lucius fight like a man half his age, despite the deadly slanting of the deck, the blood, and everything else.
Lucius was good, but Quarrel, he was something else entirely. The big man was in his element: breaking jaws with a single punch, lifting pirates off their feet, casting them screaming over the vessel’s side before they had a chance to swing a blade—or even yelp.
The strength of ten men. Ten or twenty. That could only mean one thing.
The wind changed. The boom swung around, and the raised wheel came crashing back down upon the Black. The deck reverberated. Timbers snapped as Star’s blade was sent flying from her grip. She scrambled on to all fours after it, punching and kicking her way through a morass of unsecured objects, splinters jabbing into her knees and hands.
Quarrel—where was Quarrel? She found him fighting with a stave yanked from the hands of a dead pirate. His arms flailed like lightning blurs, more storm than man, fighting with the ferocity of an army. Not hard to imagine him with bones made of metal, his head filled with reliquary and wire meshed with meat like the innards of a rogue tanker.
The great wheel lifted up a second time. This time she was ready for it. She braced herself and grabbed the rail, her knife back in its boot sheath.
Yells from above as the sails were finally furled. The wheel slammed back on the Black where it belonged, the ship back under control. Cries as pirates were beaten down, then hurled over the side like bugs shaken off a branch.
She had to look. She could not help herself. Below on the Black, battered figures writhed in pain, broken limbs akimbo. She steeled herself. She couldn’t help them. Feeling sick, she turned away. There was nothing she could do.
Quarrel’s crew had taken the upper hand. Safe for the moment, however long it might last. But the ship was damaged. It would not be limping far without repairs.
A word was being whispered from mouth to mouth. Templar.
Lucius approached, soaked in sweat and stinking of death. Blood splatters fouled the front of his shirt. “Don’t get comfortable. Ain’t over yet,” he said.
Snipers were positioned, both on deck and above it.
Star checked her pockets. The spyglass remained, thankfully in one piece. Yeshie’s amulets—she’d forgotten all about them. But the rest of the contents of Nene’s field kit were scattered all over the deck—or trodden into it. She picked up all the pieces she could find: cracked pots of salve, herb packets now sodden with blood and useless. The spool of thread and Nene’s precious needles had survived by being sheathed in a leather pouch.
Quarrel stood on the poop deck, still as a grave marker, making no effort to clean the blood from his clothes or skin. A feeling came over Star, a sense of surety that every crazy-sounding campfire story she’d ever heard whispered about Templars was true. That they were soldiers, hundreds of years old, birthed in factories deep in the bowels of the Earth. Grown from human seed that had been tempered, forged, and hammered into something new. Soldiers who fought with the strength of armies, roaming the sands, searching for fallen comrades, long lost lovers, people who owed them coin. Proudly completing battle missions for long dead generals, not knowing that the old wars were long over. Forgetting everything: who they were and what they had been fighting for.
She shuddered. Not human. Not by a long shot.
= Twenty-nine =
Ancient, weathered Marianthe stood upon a half sunken cement slab known as the Peninsula by all who lived in the shadow of the Temple of the Dish. It jutted out at an irregular angle. A place where people could pause and reflect when communing with the dead, or committing prayers and ashes to the winds.
Marianthe limped the length of it, her followers hanging back out of respect. She whispered a few prayers of her own, then commanded all but three of her drones to launch themselves and fly across the sand, directly into the path of the sky anomaly: a shimmering ripple scarring the horizon in front of them, bending light, refracting it in multiple directions.
It had began to form three weeks earlier, appearing first as a disfigured cloud, no more than a blemish. But birds would not go near it, an early indicator that something was not right.
She touched the casing of each drone gently before she let it go, whispering blessings, healing spells, and wards, hopefully enough to protect them on their journey.
When the last of them
had become a tiny speck in the sky, she turned and hobbled back along the rock-edged path that wound its way back along the Peninsula to the Dish. Those of her followers who were, by virtue of past deeds, permitted entry, pushed their way into the cramped Sanctum, a private place that normally would have been forbidden to most of them. But not today, not with so much at stake. More and more of them kept pushing in through the doors, whether they had permission or not. Normally she would have called out, “That’s enough,” and shooed most of them back outside. But the entire settlement was invested in the plight of her little drones; the journey they were making, the visions they would be sending back in streams.
“Don’t touch!” she called out, slamming her walking stave down hard on the console altar, and knocking over one of her precious frames. Nobody picked it up. Nobody dared do anything but stare at the screens and the grainy images they had to offer, letting out oohs and ahhs of exclamation every time there was something to see aside from sand and rocks.
Mighty tankers were on the move, travelling in tight formation grids. Working together, not attacking each other. Not something you saw every day. Those mechabeasts had once roamed wild and free, following their own whims, their own flights of fancy. But something had changed. Something had gotten hold of their minds. Synchronous rhythm locked them into step. For Marianthe, the sight brought on a stream of flashbacks: glory days, when command and strategy spiked through her arteries like a virus. Like a drug. A platoon full of hearts beating in syncopation. You could feel your brother and sister soldiers, know they had your back, your breath, your sweat.
A couple of kitchen girls had managed to sneak inside the temple unnoticed. One of them blurted out mouthfuls of poetry, words she had memorised by rote. Sentences describing things she had never seen. Each verse uttered as a ward to protect them through the tension and the terror.
Then there was silence, as the drones flew on and the tankers fell out of view. All the screens showed were patches of uncertain sand, with occasional flashes of sky at awkward angles. And then, finally, something different. An embedded black shape, gradually enlarging as machinery, cocked and bent, clawed at the sand surrounding it.
“Pull back,” Marianthe snapped. At first the drones failed to comply, so she issued the command again, with greater urgency. All of a sudden there was a wider view, from a completely different angle. Low to the ground, hurtling towards the partially unearthed chunk of granite that was so dark, it appeared to be sucking light into its surface.
Assorted gasps and murmuring. The shuffling of feet. The tang of sweat and fear mixed in with hope. People pressing against each other, craning necks for a better view of the tiny screens.
More anxious muttering: prayers and wards and incantations. That dark granite surface was familiar. She’d seen something like it before. More than one of them, back in the Lotus Wars. Late in the piece after so much of the damage had been done. The blocky granite concealed the tomb of a mighty war machine. A marker warning people to stay away.
She swore under her breath. She had once known more about this deadly manufactured creature, she was certain of it, memories scrubbed from her prefrontal cortex leaving her with nothing but resonance and ghosts.
“What do the visions mean, oh great mother?”
The question came from one of the gardeners, a woman better suited to weeding than words, but a good worker nonetheless. One who commanded her respect.
“The visions mean that everything will change,” said Marianthe. “Everything. Mark my words.”
= Thirty =
The last of the pirates had been flung over the side. The fighting was over, the crew licking their wounds. The pirates might have been defeated but something significant had changed—along with the sky, which was shifting from purpled bruise to sickly green.
The crew had fought bravely, but it was Quarrel who’d saved the ship with his super-human strength and lightning reflexes. Quarrel who had assured their victory. Without him, the pirates would have vastly outnumbered the crew of their rickety ship.
“Templar!”
Quarrel stood like a statue on the deck, calm and still
Bimini spoke up. The only one of them who dared challenge the captain, Star noted. “What in the name of the Seven Hells are you?”
A rough wind seized and rattled the ship’s battered masts and hull.
“Mop up the blood,” was all Quarrel offered in response.
“Answer her,” said a man called Grellan, one of the burly pale-skinned jacks whom, to Star’s eyes, might have all been blood kin. “Else you can sail this nameless junk bucket on your own.”
Murmurs of agreement from a crew too dazed to fight. They were wounded and scared, but their fear appeared to have given them fresh courage.
Quarrel’s stony gaze betrayed no expression. “Call me Templar if you will. Call me anything you like, so long as you do it on your own time. We’re here on a mission and I intend to see it through. If anyone’s changed their minds, then get off my ship.”
Nobody said anything for awhile. The wind slapped angrily at the tight-furled sails, punctuated by creaking, groaning timber.
“Ship needs fixing,” said Quarrel. “Sitting here, we’re anybody’s meal.”
“What this ship needs is a name,” said Bimini defiantly. “Sailing with no name’s bringing bad luck down on all our heads.”
A murmur of agreement echoed from the rest of them. No ship sailed without a name. None that expected to make it back to port.
Star watched as Quarrel looked from face to face, from wound to wound, and then up along the main mast to its furl of dirty sails.
“Dogwatch,” he said after some consideration. “Dogwatch is her name.”
A couple of sailors positioned close to Star muttered under their breaths about such a name being an insult and how good men shouldn’t be standing for such a thing.
But when Bimini nodded, nobody else had anything to say, either for or against. The ship was named and that was all that mattered. Their captain was a monster—but he was the only reason they were still alive. Anyone who didn’t like it would have to live with it.
Quarrel signalled up to the man in the crow’s nest. Goja, they called him. Goja signalled back, eyes hidden behind wind-scored goggles.
“What is Dogwatch?” whispered Star.
“The dog watch is what sets everything else straight,” Lucius answered. “Good a name as any for a bucket of rust and wire such as this.”
She waited, but that was all the explanation she was going to get. The ship had its name and the crew had work to do. Spilled blood needed to be swabbed off the deck with sand. Scrapes, breaks, and burns needed to be patched up. The ship needed to be powered back up again before anyone—or anything else—attacked.
Blood abounded from the peppershot and blades. Star’s heart sank. Her skills were nowhere near sufficient for what was required. She was used to tending injuries on the Van, the accidents and stab wounds that accompanied fights. A broken arm or leg to set. Mysterious fevers that came and went of their own accord. Food poisoning. Heatstroke. But not this overwhelming, bloody carnage.
She spied what looked like an uncracked pot of salve wedged under the corner of a sack. She dropped to all fours and went after it, then sat with her back against the fabric. Her hands shook uncontrollably. People were going to die today and there was nothing she could do to prevent it. Some of them had died already—had their bodies been pitched unceremoniously over the side as well? She didn’t ask.
A shadow fell across her face. Bimini crouched down, her features hard and grim.
Star searched for the woman’s wounds. Two were clearly visible: a deep graze on her shin, and a burn—not too deep—running down the length of her left arm.
“What are you doing?” the woman said.
Star opened her mouth to snap back with “what I always do.” What they always did, her and Nene. Finding ways to help the injured. But Star wasn’t helping anyone. She was shocked by the sight of so much blood. And now she couldn’t find the words she needed to explain. The woman frightened her. They all frightened her, everyone but Lucius. These people were at home on the Black, with all its violence and its strangeness and a monster at the helm. She was not. She never should have come here.
Bimini’s features softened. “You need something? I’ll get it for you.”
“Salt,” Star blurted out. “Alcohol and water. Powdered garlic for burns—and something to tear up for bandages. My own are gone,” she added. “I don’t have enough.”
She didn’t have anything, that was the truth of it. Just a pouch of needles and thread. Her carefully prepared garlic and cinnamon bark salves, witch-hazel and yarrow flower tinctures, and antibiotic moulds were smashed all over the deck. There wasn’t even any willow bark for pain. All she might have was salt, perhaps, if they had brought enough of it, and urine for sterilisation, normally only used as a last resort.
Bimini nodded and got to her feet without a word. She came back with a bucket of water, a few ingredients wrapped in cloth, and what looked to be shirts torn roughly into strips. Bloody flecks indicated the shirts had been taken from the dead. Star was relieved to find in her pocket’s depths the pair of red-handled pliers Nene had once salvaged from the basement of a ruin, a rusted box filled with rusted tools, all perfectly usable once the corrosion had been scoured off.
The wounded bore their injuries in stoic silence. Helping each other where they could, none of them wanted Star fussing over them. They cleaned and dressed each others wounds like they’d apparently done so many times before. Blood mingled with blood. Star knew the wrong of it, but there wasn’t time for sanitary precautions. Embedded metal fragments had to be removed to cut the risk of infection.