Shipshape

by Trey Myr

  “What have you been drinking, and why aren’t you sharing? That whitesteel was worth at least three gold, and we’ve got what? Nine silver, two dozen coppers and a small fancy box? How in the name of the long drop is that enough to cover it?”

  “You’re thinking of it in terms of modern coins and craftsmanship. Those coins are worth about fifty times as much as their mint for the right collector, and the box is solid silver and recognizable as old-world work. I’d put it at about five gold if I sell to Darren. More if I could find the buyer myself, but I really don’t have his connections.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding. Who’d pay that much for old coins and a box?”

  “Rich people with nothing to spend their gold on,” I shrugged. “And rich scholars who want to learn about the old-world. There’s never a shortage of buyers.”

  “You humans are crazy,” the dwarf shook her head. “Not that I’m complaining, if this is really worth as much as you think.”

  I followed the now much more enthusiastic gunner up to the top floor of the tower. The entrance was closed off by a much sturdier door than the ones we’d encountered below, and the lock was still intact. Not that it stopped my gunner, of course. Marjory seemed to truly enjoy kicking down the door, and I had to grab her shoulder to stop her from entering the room before the Deckhands.

  The room at the top of the tower was once a combination library and some sort of alchemical workshop, but lay in absolute ruin when we entered. The leather covers of books were strewn everywhere, and I could see rips and tears that were most certainly not caused by the mere passage of time. Glass flasks and pipes were thrown from the work tables and cabinets and shattered on the floor, and priceless alchemical reagents that should have survived indefinitely sealed in jars were ruined and useless when those jars were thrown against the walls and broken.

  An enraged hiss was the only warning we got that whatever rampaged through the room was still there before an emaciated and yet somehow still animate corpse leaped from behind a ruined table onto the first Deckhand to enter the room. Its arms were so thin they were barely more than bones covered by skin, and I could see each of its ribs clearly through its sunken chest. Shriveled lips exposed broken teeth below where a nose should have been, but only a hole remained. Milky white eyes that should have been blind nevertheless looked straight into the Deckhand’s eyes under a hairless scalp as the creature hissed again, and I could feel it pull at the vim from the Deckhand and start to drain it.

  “Ghoul!” I shouted at Marjory and reached over my shoulder for my arquebus. “Whatever you do, don’t let it touch you!”

  Ghouls were among the most dangerous creatures one could encounter. It was theorized that they were related to warped, since both types of monsters were created when vim refused to dissipate properly. But while a warped was created when a living person or beast gained more vim than they could hold, a ghoul was created when something died and for some reason kept its vim. Ghouls existed to devour more vim and grow stronger, and could drain it out of Shapes, or even living beings. A Shape that lost too much vim to a ghoul would lose its Pattern and be destroyed permanently. A living being that lost too much vim would die.

  The ghoul kept draining vim from my Deckhand, and I could feel it when the Shape began to dissipate, the last of its vim flowing into the undead monster. Marjory, who was waiting for an opportunity to attack, acted the second the Deckhand was gone, and her cannon whoomphed and launched a ball of lead at the ghoul.

  I thought that would be the end of the fight, since ghouls were not known for their resilience, but the dwarf’s shot crashed into an invisible barrier surrounding the monster. It was still enough to stagger the ghoul, but did no visible damage.

  “It’s got a shield spell!” Marjory yelled at me while frantically reloading her cannon.

  “It’s been locked here since it died,” I answered and sent my Deckhands to attack the ghoul until she was ready. “It can’t have too much vim! We just need to make it exhaust what it has so the shield will fail!”

  The ghoul tried to grapple another Deckhand, but I managed to keep all three out of its grasp. A few seconds later, Marjory was ready to fire and I ordered the Shapes to retreat and give us clean shots. I fired my own arquebus as soon as I could, and our shots struck the shield almost simultaneously. The ghoul hissed in anger and tried to attack Marjory, but I had one of the Deckhands tackle it and got all three to attack again with their daggers.

  I was trying to reload the arquebus as fast as possible, but Marjory was still ready to fire again before I could even insert the ball, and I had the Deckhands retreat again. The third time seemed to be the charm, and the ghoul’s shield shattered when the cannon shot hit it. It still slowed the ball down enough that it didn’t do too much damage, but with the protective magic down the Deckhands could actually damage the ghoul, and its hisses of anger changed into hisses of pain as the daggers slashed at it repeatedly. I was still working on reloading my arquebus when Marjory fired again, and her fourth shot smashed through the ghoul’s head and killed it.

  “Now this is more like it!” Marjory said enthusiastically. “I was beginning to think scavenging was boring!”

  “This is a little more excitement than I was going for,” I answered and slowed down to reload more carefully.

  It took a few moments for our breathing to calm down after the frantic battle, and I headed towards the dead ghoul to look for its shield.

  “Aren’t you going to syphon its vim?” Marjory asked and started towards the work tables to see if there was anything salvageable.

  “No shattering way!” I shuddered. “Not worth the risk of gaining mortis.”

  “Doesn’t vim lose its alignment when transferred from anything other than a ‘stone? I mean, if you could drain elemental vim from a living creature, I know that at least some Shapers would be killing my folk for it.”

  “Vi Mortis isn’t like elemental vim,” I answered and removed an ornate belt from the dead ghoul. “Vim vitae is life force. It’s generated by life and can be used by life. You can’t have death aligned life force. When a ghoul is created, the vim is corrupted into mortis, and it will be passed to my Shapes if I syphon it.”

  “Isn’t that a good thing though? Dwarves don’t tend to become Shapers, but even I know that elemental vim makes for stronger Shapes. Wouldn’t this death vim do the same?”

  “Oh, it certainly would. But if I ever Unshape the Deckhand the syphoned it, the mortis will transfer to me and turn me into a ghoul.”

  “OK, that’s definitely not worth it,” Marjory shuddered. “But you can always keep it in whatever Deckhand drains it and just enjoy a stronger Shape, right?”

  “I could, and I know that there are Shapers willing to risk it, but there are more than enough tales of Shapers turning into ghouls after syphoning mortis. And once I take it I’m stuck with it forever. I just don’t think it’s worth it.”

  “I see your point. Definitely not worth it.”

  “Yeah. It’s a shame I lost the vim from the Deckhand it got first, but there’s no helping it at this point. And at least we got this!” I showed her a fancy looking leather belt covered with abstract shapes stitched in silver thread.

  “Ooh. Is that the shield?”

  “Yeah. It’s not that useful for either of us since both of us use vim heavily, but it should fetch a decent price.”

  Spells were, in essence, miniature Patterns. The user charged them with his or her vim to activate it, and every time it was used it would exhaust the vim and require a new charge. Unlike Patterns and Shapes, a spell didn’t keep the vim used to activate it, and the exhausted life force was returned to the user and regenerated. It was a similar process to that used by the dwarfs to power their steam engines, but could give far more elaborate results.

  A shield spell was very powerful, but as a Shaper I was almost always out of personal vim, and Marjory needed her own fire aligned vim to operate her cannon. She could still use the shield
spell, but it would greatly reduce the amount of shots she could fire without rest.

  “That’s an understatement if I ever heard one,” Marjory smiled at the thought of her share of the shield’s price. “It doesn’t look like there’s anything else here, unfortunately. The ghoul must have destroyed everything else while it was locked in.”

  “It’s still more than worth the detour,” I said and started to head down the stairs. “And I’m thinking that I might have enough gold for more than two Archers when we get to Whitecliff.”

  We left the tower with one less Deckhand than we entered it with, and I really hated the fact that I lost its vim, but I still had enough to Shape five more rank I Shapes. With the gold from selling our new loot, I’d be able to Shape four Archers and return to five Deckhands, giving me a decent fighting force.

  I called down the Swift to pick us up, and we were just boarding when an extremely loud screech informed me that we had some more trouble coming.

  I searched around and above us for the source of the screech, and saw it almost immediately. The bird might have been an ordinary eagle, except that as I had estimated earlier, it was indeed as long as the Swift and had a wingspan of about twenty five meters. Its feathers were brown, except for a white head and neck, and its beak looked big enough to bite a horse in half.

  “Rukh!” Marjory yelled, and I could hear a trace of fear in her otherwise steady voice. “We can’t let it hit the Swift. It can probably break her in half if it dives at us!”

  “I’ll take her up above its dive as soon as it commits,” I answered. “We can’t afford the time for the Swift to integrate your cannon again, so you’ll have to fight it as is, or use the bow arbalest.”

  The giant bird started its dive, and I pulled the wing sail lever as far as it could go to lift us out of its path. The giant bird missed us by a decent margin, but the wind from its passage rocked us enough that Marjory’s shot missed it too.

  The rukh was now beneath us, and managed to pull up before it smashed into the flying island. It was still extremely fast, but had to lose a lot of that speed when it started circling to regain its height.

  “It’s out of range,” Marjory called from her place on the starboard side of the Boat. “I need you to get me closer so I can shoot it!”

  The Deckhands were still busy unfurling the sails, and by the time the Swift was ready to sail, the rukh had climbed to nearly our altitude. I aimed the bow at the bird and scrambled to the loaded arbalest, and as soon as we got close enough my bolt joined Marjory’s lead shot, both of us hitting the giant bird.

  The bird’s thick coat of feathers absorbed Marjory’s attack and diffused a lot of its energy, but my bolt managed to pierce through it and wound its flank. It wasn’t by any means a serious wound, but it still caused the rukh to screech in pain and anger.

  Marjory swore in a language I didn’t understand and shucked off her large weapon, which the Swift immediately began to absorb.

  “I’ll take the blasted arbalest until the cannon is ready,” she yelled at me. “The mobile version doesn’t pack enough punch!”

  I nodded at her and ran back to the wheel, and my gunner scrambled to her position in front of the arbalest. This was the first time I had to pilot the Boat while the bow arbalest was manned, and I was thankful that my gunner was a dwarf, because a human would have blocked my forward view. Knowledge from my Attire hinted that the pilot didn’t necessarily need to see, and would normally accept direction from a lookout or the captain, but for that to work I’d need a ranked up Deckhand to take the wheel.

  Marjory’s enhanced strength proved to be an asset, and she had the arbalest reloaded in half the time it would have taken me, and a second bolt pierced the bottom of the rukh’s wing mere seconds after she took over. The giant bird didn’t seem to be affected by its minor wounds, and I hastily raised the Swift higher to prevent it from reaching a high enough point from which to dive again.

  We climbed in tandem for a few minutes, the rukh mere meters above the Swift’s mast. It couldn’t get high enough to attack from and didn’t seem willing to just slug it out at the same height, but the arbalest wasn’t doing more than enrage it. Time, however, was on our side, and I soon got a feeling that the aft cannon was ready.

  “Cannon is up!” I shouted at Marjory, who quickly abandoned her spot and ran towards the stern. The mounted steam cannon used larger ammunition than the mobile version, and shot it at a far higher speed, and I could hear the giant bird’s hollow bones crack when it hit its left leg. Her second shot slammed into the rukh’s right wing, and the crippled bird began to spiral downward towards the flying island. Marjory didn’t relent, and shot after shot smashed into the bird’s back. By the time we got back down to the island, the rukh was nothing more than a battered corpse, which my Deckhands immediately set to drain of its vim.

  “Now that’s more like it!” Marjory enthused. The dwarf rushed over and caught me in an almost bone crushing hug. “Thank you for the new cannon, captain! And you too, Swifty.”

  I was somewhat amused to see the happy dwarf pat the wheel of the Boat affectionately, and more than a little flushed by the hug. It was hard to see underneath her leather outfit, but Marjory was at least as well-endowed as Mable, and she’d pressed herself to me really hard.

  The encounter with the huge warped bird more than made up for the vim lost to the ghoul, and a quick exploration of its nest revealed the remains of several travelers, netting us several rusted but salvageable weapons and a smattering of modern copper and silver coins.

  It was getting late in the day by the time we left the island, but I didn’t want to stop too close in case the rukh had a mate. We sailed onward for another couple of hours before I deemed it far enough to stop, and I took the boat high into the air before furling the sails and heading off to sleep, expecting to reach Whitecliff towards noon the next day.

  Chapter 8 - Whitecliff

  The city of Whitecliff lay at the edge of a mesa. For over a century, it marked the border between the settled lands and the wilds, using its eponymous cliff as a natural barrier against both warped and raiders. It was only when Gerald Forrester, Darren’s grandfather, lead a large force of Shapes and mercenaries to pacify and claim his own territory that the plains under the mesa were rendered safe for travelers.

  Back when the city marked the end of the settled lands, it was surrounded by imposing stone walls from three sides, and any enemies from the wilds would have had to climb up the single narrow road under a constant barrage of fire from the defenders. In the years since Gerald’s Rest had been established, however, the city had grown beyond its obsolete walls and even down to the cliff face itself. The city had always reached all the way to the very edge of the mesa, and once the danger of the wilds was pushed back, it spread both outward and down, and the buildings set into the cliff face itself had turned what was once a single snaking path up to the city into a sprawling vertical quarter.

  As an older and more central settlement than Gerald’s Rest, Whitecliff was significantly larger and saw a lot more traffic, which meant that there was no way to keep the Swift out of sight. Not unless we disembarked a week away from the city and went on foot. I was still leery of revealing the existence of the Boat Pattern, but I was fortunate enough to be traveling with a dwarven blue hair, and Marjory and I had settled on a plan long before Whitecliff appeared on the horizon.

  We approached the city at noon on the third day after we left Gerald’s Rest. The city was built almost entirely of stone and painted a brilliant white color, and combined with the fact that I’d never seen a vertical city before, I found it to be a magnificent sight. Marjory, who was used to the dwarven underground cities, was much less impressed at the sight.

  The White family had chosen the location of their city for purely defensive purposes, and it was one of a handful of cities not located near rivers. And since there wasn’t a convenient dock for us to approach, I chose to land the Swift just outside of town on top of
the cliff. Our approach was obviously noticed, and by the time we settled down and deployed the gangplank there was a whole crowd of curious locals waiting for us, barely held back by a small contingent of guards.

  The guards’ leader, a lieutenant according to the bars on his shoulders, met us at the bottom of the gangplank.

  “Halt! State your names and purpose here!”

  “My name is Marjory, daughter of Meredith,” my gunner took the lead as we’d agreed earlier. “I am taking my new boat, the Cerulean Swift on its shakedown cruise. Captain Baker here is a Shaper and has business with Simon White, so we’re stopping here for the night.”

  “You built this boat? I always thought dwarves didn’t like boats.”

  “We don’t. That’s why I have a human Shaper to crew her for me. But inspiration falls where it wills, and thus I have a flying boat.”

  “I see. Welcome to Whitecliff then, ma’am. I will have to caution you that I don’t have the manpower to guard your boat, and I’d strongly advice that you not leave her unattended.”

  “That is not an issue, Lieutenant?”

  “Oh, please forgive me. Everly. Mark Everly.”

  “Thank you. That is not an issue Lieutenant Everly. My captain will send the boat back up before we leave.”

  I took that as my cue and had the Deckhand at the wheel raise the Swift up and out of sight, accompanied by cries of wonder from the watching locals. I already had the artefacts from the tower in my backpack, and Marjory had her cannon with her. Lieutenant Everly had to clear the way into the city for us, since the watchers were still looking up to where the Swift had vanished from sight.

  “Do you know any good taverns around, Lieutenant?” Marjory asked after we were finally free of the crowd. “Captain Baker needs to talk to Mr. White, but I really don’t have any interest in their Shaper talks, and would much rather get my hands on a cold mug of ale.”