by Dante King
I fastened the silver bracelet around my wrist, then held it up, examining the tiny, intricately carved skulls.
“An entire soul will fit inside this little thing?” I asked dubiously.
Odette gave me a bemused look. “Many people think souls are vast things,” she said. “It’s the vanity of all those who consider themselves to be ‘civilized beings’. Just because something is small does not mean that it can’t be infinitely intricate and complex. Size is no indicator of importance, Mr. Mauler—though that is a very male way of looking at things.”
I laughed at that.”I suppose you’re right. I fell into a bit of a cliched trap there, didn’t I?”
“The bracelet will draw the soul into the skulls like a magnet draws iron filings,” Odette said.
“So, as long as I am the one to land the killing blow, the bracelet will do the rest?” I asked.
“Yes,” Odette said, smiling encouragingly.
We stood at the bottom of a wide, barnacle-covered gangplank that stretched out from the tip of the peninsula and extended out to the main town of Buccaneer’s Finger and looked at the town.
There were people—pirates and sailors—staggering about the streets already. It looked to me like they hadn’t so much got up, as stayed up.
“Now, whatever you do, do not openly ask for the man we seek,” Odette said.
“You mean Va—” Barry began to say.
“Come on, Barry!” I said exasperatedly. “Are you fucking serious? It’s probably only a matter of time before we’re up to our necks in excrement, and you want to bring it down on us prematurely?”
“Nothing good ever came prematurely,” Idman growled.
“I recall my dear mother said I was born prematurely,” Barry said musingly.
“Like I said,” Idman muttered, the one eye that wasn’t hidden behind an eyepatch glancing this way and that.
“We just need to keep our ears open, and I ’ave no doubt that we will eventually ‘ear our target’s name crop up,” Odette said. “Don’t you think, Mortimer?”
“I would be inclined to agree with you, Odette, yes,” Mortimer said. He was gazing about, looking like a sailor as he searched for someone in the slowly growing crowd. Somehow, he looked far less out of place than the rest of us, even disguised as we were.
“Let’s stroll about a bit then, eh?” I said. “Maybe find a quiet spot to listen in on some gossip and see if we can locate our mark. A beer would go down nicely as well.”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Enwyn said.
We walked through the wooden-planked streets. It paid to keep one eye on the path ahead, as the chances of going through a rotted board were pretty high. All around us, pirates cursed and spat and joked and laughed and brayed. It was fucking bedlam. Not the sort of place that you’d take your grandma for a relaxing long weekend away.
Whores of all different races draped themselves out of windows, calling out to potential customers and swearing at them when they passed by. I caught flashes of red breasts and green breasts, big breasts and petite breasts, and every jug in between.
As we walked past one of the many, many alehouses, there was a crackle and roar of magic-fire and a couple of flashes of bright orange light from inside. To my everlasting delight, an elven pirate came smashing through one of the broad lead-paned windows and landed heavily in the thoroughfare. The tips of his ears were smoking, and his face was covered in black smuts.
Not a single person walking past paid him any heed whatsoever.
The elven pirate groaned and got to his feet just as another pirate—a huge female Frost Elemental wearing a coat with the arms cut off—climbed through the window after him.
“That’s the fucking last time you try and distract me with a drink and a joke so that you can take a peak at my fucking cards, Alrond,” she said, in a surprisingly girlish voice.
The frazzled elf made a move, as if he was going to cast a spell, but the Frost Elemental was too fast for him. She hit the singed pirate in the chest with a giant snowflake that was like a spinning circular saw blade. Alrond the elf cried out once, then his body was engulfed in ice, his frozen expression a picture of pain and fear.
More pirates had filtered out from inside the alehouse, and a number of passersby had gathered to watch the altercation.
“Here’s a fucking joke for you, Alrond,” the Frost Elemental roared. “What do you call a pirate with no fucking arms and no fucking legs?”
With brutal strength, the Frost Mage smashed the elf’s frozen arms from his body. Then she pulled out a cutlass that looked more like a meat cleaver and hacked his legs off at the knees. Then, she picked up the elf’s frozen torso and tossed him off the nearest pier.
“Bob!” she said.
We left the sound of raucous laughter behind us and continued on our way.
There was no cohesion to any single part of the town, and I kind of liked that. I would have bet money that the word architect had never even been uttered in the town, let alone anyone having actually employed one. It was almost as if the buildings had been just cobbled together out of whatever washed up on the beach.
“Is that a hollowed out whale?” Enwyn asked, grabbing me by the sleeve and pulling me around to face the long, low, gray, whale-shaped building down one street.
“Yes,” Odette said. “From what I’ve ‘eard, that is one of the more popular taverns in town. The pirate mage who made it towed the whale into Buccaneer’s Finger one day, with the notion of parting it out and selling it. It became quickly apparent that no one ’ad the wits or money to buy any bit of the whale so, instead of leaving it for the gulls, ’e carved it ‘ollow and froze it with a very complex bit of magic.”
“And turned it into a pub?” I said.
Odette nodded.
“That ain’t entirely accurate, miss,” Barry said.
“What’s not?” Odette asked.
“Your tale,” the poltergeist said. “The salty dog that brought that there whale in did in fact manage to sell off one piece of it before he got to boring through it like a damned maggot.”
“And how do you know that?” I asked.
“I was bloody here, wasn’t I?” the poltergeist said shiftly.
“What bit did he manage to sell, this enterprising renegade?” Idman asked as we stepped aside so that a group of extremely inebriated dwarf pirates, rebounding off everything and everyone in their path, could stagger past.
Barry muttered something inaudible.
“What was that?” I asked.
“He sold some bloke the pecker,” Barry said.
Enwyn cracked a grin. “He did not,” she said.
“He bleedin’ did too, and for an exorbitant price, now that I come to think about it,” Barry said, tugging at his new bushy beard.
“Barry,” I said seriously, “please tell me that you purchased a whale dick.”
“Aye, I did,” Barry admitted.
All of us—except Mortimer Chaosbane, who kept the same indifferent and well bred look on his face—laughed at that.
“But why?” I asked, voicing the only pertinent question.
“I thought that a whale would have a bigger mainmast than what it had,” Barry said defensively. “It was a speculative business enterprise. I was going to build a brothel out of it, using the same sort of magic that the original seller used, you see.” He shook his head, as if the memory still pained him. “I had the cock, with the option to buy the balls later at a discounted price. ‘Course when I saw the size of that damned one-eyed serpent, I knew that I didn’t have enough to build a brothel from. So, I hollowed it out and made the smallest alehouse in Buccaneer’s Finger.”
I shook my head. With everything that was going on, the fact that Barry had purchased a whale schlong and turned it into a pub was too much to process right now. It was almost as if it had ruptured my internal hilarity gauge.
“What was the name of this fine establishment of yours?” I asked the poltergeist.
&nb
sp; Barry looked at me; the very epitome of the helpless entrepreneur.
“Moby’s Dick,” he said.
“Stop, Barry,” I said. “Stop. That’s enough now.”
In one sweep of my eyes I could see: a couple of pirates tag-teaming one very eager, quite hideous half-orc whore down an alleyway, two pirates—one of which was throwing up—engaged in what must have been an octopus eating contest, a Dark Elf pirate with a peg leg rifling through the pockets of a drunk or dead halfling, and a host of other sights that might have been considered, in more sophisticated places, to be crimes.
The thing was though, if this place was hell, then I wouldn’t have minded spending the rest of eternity there.
It looked like a decent bit of fun, especially if heaven was the sort of place that I thought it might be—one giant hippy drumming circle with people dressed in moo-moos and singing kumbaya.
We had resigned ourselves to traipsing through this pirate wonderland with our fingers crossed, hoping to hear a whisper, a hint, of where Vakash the Vile might be holed up.
Some time after, we turned a corner and found ourselves in a street lined with crudely-drawn posters that had been nailed to any and all available surfaces. The street itself was packed with every breed of drunken, stinking bilge rat motherfucker that I could care to imagine. The noise was deafening, the smell a miasma that overwhelmed the nasal passages.
Odette looked down at one of the posters she had torn from a support post outside of an opium den. She tried to communicate to us what was on it, but her voice was lost in the din of the crowd. However, she had no need to tell us what was on the poster because suddenly a magically projected voice boomed and crackled down the street.
“You ‘eard right, you ‘orrible bunch of flea-bitten sons of bitches!” the voice yelled. “The leadership of the Pixie Partyboat Company is to be decided today!”
A slobbering, drunken roaring bellow of delight rose from the assembled mass of pirates.
“That’s right, that’s right!” the announcer cried. “Under the eyes of all the brethren gathered in Buccaneer’s Finger in this fine morn, Bung-Eye Jeppi will take on Vakash the Vile in a scrap to determine who the fuck is leadin’ that miserable fuckin’ outfit!”
Someone started up with a mini accordion, and there was more shouting and cursing and wailing.
Another person further down the street started firing bolts of purple magic into the sky and soon everyone who had a vector was using it to light up the sky. The top story of one building that had once been a large ship actually caught fire as some callous reveler sent a Fireball into the roof.
“Well,” Enwyn shouted into my ear, “that was easier than expected!”
I nodded. “I hate to sound like a walking platitude, but it strikes me as a little too easy.”
Chapter Nine
There was nothing for it but to follow the tide of humanoids down the street, toward the building in which, apparently, this fight was to take place. The crush was tight. Probably a good thing, as it meant there was no room for anyone to swing a punch or point a vector at anyone else.
Even if we had felt like steering clear and avoiding the clash between our mark and this brilliantly named Bung-Eye Jeppi, we wouldn’t have been able to. We were being swept inexorably along, like half a dozen shipwrecked mariners in a riptide.
As we reached the center of the street, the cluster of eager and bloodthirsty pirates broke up a little, and I was able to take a look around.
We had entered a square—or a circle, if you wanted to be more structurally accurate—ringed by vendors. They were hawking all sorts of goods. There were weapons—both magical and ordinary—that looked so new I thought they must have been stolen off the back of a truck, or off the stern of a merchantman.
Other stalls were selling seafood of various descriptions. Tasty-smelling fish were frying on a griddle at one kiosk, while another enterprising vendor with two wooden legs was attempting to sell sea slugs that he had cooking over a bed of coals in a wheelbarrow.
They were probably the foulest smelling thing that had ever entered my nostrils.
As we moved through the crowd, being careful to keep together, I noticed that Barry was getting a few furtive glances from some of the oldest and crustiest pirates. One of these curmudgeonly nautical pensioners sidled up to us and addressed the incognito poltergeist.
“Ye there, ye’d be none other than Barry Chillgrave, would ye not?”
Barry froze in mid-float and looked down at the man, who was so stooped and weathered that he looked more than half barnacle.
“I think that there ye’ve ‘ad more ale than be wise, arr, matey,” Barry replied carefully. “Perhaps, ye've mistaken me fer someone else? Probably someone mighty ‘andsome.”
“Why’s he talking like that?” Idman asked me.
“I think he’s talking pirate,” I said. “Blending in with the locals.”
“Ah, ye can’t fool me, arr, matey,” the crusty old seadog said, trying to poke at Barry with his stick, but failing due to the fact that he was a ghost. “Me jolly, jolly grandfather’s jolly, jolly grandfather served as a cabin lad under ye. ‘e wrote ‘is adventures down in a journal, along with a mighty accurate description o’ ye. That there journal been ‘anded down from generation to generation.”
In spite of the fact that Barry was meant to be in disguise, he looked quite smug about this—that his life had been chronicled and handed down as some sort of family heirloom.
“Might be that there I ‘ave some passin’ resemblance to the legend,” he said nonchalantly.
I was just about to tell him to shut his damn pie-hole, when a subtle, feathery touch around my pocket regions distracted me. With the speed of thought, I summoned my staff, spun around, and brought it whistling down on the melon of the halfling that was attempting to pick my pocket. As I had previously noted, there wasn’t too much room to swing properly, but I still managed to drop the would-be pickpocketer like an armful of wet laundry.
When I had turned my attention from the little unconscious form—leaving him, no doubt, to be robbed in his turn by the swarms of opportunistic beggars and thieves roaming the wooden streets—I saw Barry doubled over in laughter.
“Ah, bless me soul, but’s jolly to hear some o’ the old tales dusted off an’ brought out into the light again!” the poltergeist said, slapping his spectral thigh. “I’d plum forgot that there I—meanin’ the fantastic Cap'n Chillgrave, o’ course—had done that there! Ah dear, what be yer name again, lad?”
The little old man seemed to straighten slightly, which was impressive seeing that he was bent like a bow.
“Faxon, sir,” he said.
Barry floated down a bit closer to the old timer. The move was more to convey the idea, I thought, that they were a couple of old coves sharing secrets than out of any real attempt to stop them being overheard. The noise of the crowd was still almost a solid thing, thudding against us.
“Well, Faxon, I appreciated the yarn,” the poltergeist said. “Now, tell me, where be it that there this here fight o’er the leadership o’ the Pixie Partyboat Company is bein’ ‘eld, eh? There be plenty o’ taverns that there I can see, but we want to make sure that we get there fore row seats to the main event, savvy?”
This took a little bit of translating in my head. By the time I had worked out that Barry was asking the crooked old pirate for help, the man was already responding.
“It’d be an honor an’ a privilege to guide ye an’ yer mates to the tavern ye seek, Cap’n. Follow old Faxon!”
And the decrepit old seadog began to push his way through the crowd, using his stick to jab holes in the throng of roisterers.
I signed for the others to follow me, and I trailed after the green glow of the, apparently, still famous Barry Chillgrave.
Eventually, Faxon managed to force his way, with many judiciously placed elbows and jabs with his stick, to the rear of a large, wooden building. The structure had been built in the shape
of a shark’s head—a blunt triangle that rose up at the end of the street.
Faxon led us to a door, which was half concealed behind a mountain of wooden crates.
“Ye just slip old Faxon a bit o’ gold fer ‘is troubles and to keep his trap shut, sir. Then slip the doorman a little more, an’ ye’ll be inside in two shakes o’ a lamprey’s tail,” the wizened pirate said to Barry.
Barry looked over his shoulder and said to Odette, “Miss, I take it that ye are the treasurer of this expedition. Could ye pay this man, please?”
Odette reached into one of the many folds of her skirts and pulled out a handful of coins. She gave half the coins to Faxon, who bowed and scraped in the proper feudal manner.
“And the rest is for your accomplice when he lets us in,” she told Faxon.
Faxon nodded and rapped hard on the wooden door. After a minute or so, it was pulled open by a bow-legged man with greasy ginger hair pulled into a ponytail. He had the most versatile and hideous collection of boils around his throat and jaw that I had ever seen on a human being.
He gave Faxon one look, and the little old man nodded. Boilhead—for thus I dubbed the unfortunate guy—held out his hand, and Odette dropped the coins into his palm.
“May th’ wind always be at yer back, matey,” Barry said in farewell.
Faxon inclined his head and swept his hat from a head that was as free from hair as an egg. Then, the old man turned on his heel and hobbled away.
We were guided through a series of passageways by Boilhead that smelled like rancid fish and spilled booze.
Eventually, we were shown through a thick curtain and into a smoky, low-ceilinged room that was filled with noise and the smell of beer, though it was definitely fresh beer this time.
Bawdy songs and chants were ringing out around the large space, competing with one another as those that sang them vied with others for vocal supremacy. The smoke on the air wasn’t tobacco, I didn’t think. It smelled a lot more like weed than anything else that I could think of.
Boilhead guided us to the edge of an arena—a fighting circle that had been marked out in chalk and, what looked to me like, gunpowder. He showed us to a large, scarred table. Enwyn and Mortimer sat on either side of me, while Odette and Idman took their places in front of me.