Voidhawk: The Elder Race

by Jason Halstead

  He smiled and nodded. “What’s your company called?” He asked.

  “My company?” Dexter asked, staring at the remaining crew members he had left. “We’re shipmates, lad, not mercenaries. I’m the Captain of the ship Voidhawk, or at least I was a while back. We’ll see if it’s still there.”

  “If it’s not?” He pressed.

  “There’s no replacing the ‘Hawk,” Dexter said wistfully, “but we’ll make do finding something else.”

  “Dex,” Jenna said, her tone indicating she wanted to talk to him.

  Dexter looked at her and knew what was coming. “Lead the way, Tarin,” he said, motioning the boy ahead.

  Dexter walked slow, falling in step beside his first mate and consort. “You sure about this?” She asked him too quietly for Tarin to hear.

  “Until we find out otherwise, we still sail the Voidhawk and I’m still her Captain,” he said.

  She nodded. “Seems young is all.”

  “Rosh,” Dexter called out, drawing the big man’s attention. “How old was you on your first ship?”

  Rosh grinned, “9 I think, wasn’t none to good with numbers then though.”

  Jenna stared at Rosh, her lips parted and eyes wide. She turned to Dexter, “What about you?”

  “11, I confess I came to it late in life,” Dexter pined. “Wasn’t easy getting there though, damn parents kept catching me when I tried to slip away.”

  “Slip away?” She asked.

  “Aye, I knew what I needed to do, I needed to sail the void. They wasn’t having none of it though, so I had to run away from home. Took a few times before I slipped dock before they caught up to me though.”

  “You… you mean you’ve got a family?”

  “I suppose I do,” he mused. “I figure they disowned me or figured I got myself killed or something.”

  Jenna fell into a thoughtful silence.

  “That a problem?” He asked her, suddenly wondering if he should be concerned instead of proud at his youthful antics.

  “No, no problem,” she said quickly. “Just surprised me is all. I guess I did much the same, though later. I can’t imagine doing it so young is all.”

  Dexter shrugged. “No ship sailing the void that can’t use an extra pair of hands that don’t ask for nothing but some food and a place to sleep.”

  Jenna remained silent as they walked, lost in her own thoughts for all Dexter could tell. He knew from her tone and manner she wasn’t mad at him, so he put her troubles from his mind. Dexter was about to step up the pace when Jenna brushed his arm with hers and slowed down. Curious, Dexter matched her speed and let Rosh and the others advance ahead of them several paces.

  “What’s with Rosh?” Jenna asked him in a hushed voice.

  Dexter glanced at the subject of their conversation and shrugged. “Freak of nature mostly,” he said. “Might have been dropped on his head a few times as a child for all I know, why?”

  Jenna pursed her lips disapprovingly, which made Dexter smile. “I meant how hot and cold he’s been lately. Mood swings, you know?”

  Dexter shrugged. “I ‘spect he’ll come around in time,” he said after a moment of thought. He had no more idea what was going on with Rosh than Jenna did, but speculating behind the man’s back was just not something the Captain felt a need for. Finally, to mollify Jenna he suggested, “It’s no easy thing, losing friends.”

  Jenna stared at him, then nodded. “I keep forgetting,” she mumbled. “It doesn’t seem like they’re gone… I mean, nothing seems changed.”

  Dexter nodded. “Aye, so it feels. Truth of it is nothing’s got the right to last that long, not the elves and not us.”

  She nodded and fell silent, looking for all the world like she was lost in thought.

  “You all right?” Dexter asked her after a moment of silence.

  She nodded, then offered a faint smile. “Never thought I’d miss Jodyne’s stews,” she whispered.

  Dexter smiled and grabbed her hand to squeeze it affectionately, then he motioned towards the others and they hurried to catch up.

  * * * *

  Hewl was similar to Krestin, though not as large. The bustling activity from the port made up for some of the smaller size of the city. The market wasn’t as large though, given that the lake was small and Hewl was only there because no easier means of transport was available to Krestin from the lands beyond the jungle plateau.

  “How long until word gets out here?” Jenna asked Dexter as they made their way to the docks.

  He shrugged. “Less time if we stop to ask about it,” he said. She shot him a look but he ignored it, heading instead towards the dock of one of the transport ships that ferried passengers from end of the lake to the other.

  “’Hawk ain’t here,” Rosh observed, staring out over the docks. The landscape had changed but they knew they were at least in the same place the ruins had been a few days ago. A few days ago for them, at least. It had been safely beached a few hundred yards off shore, but now there was nothing but smooth blue green water and the boats that plied it.

  “Figured that out on your own?” Jenna asked him. It was Dexter’s turn to shoot her a disapproving look. Jenna frowned and looked away, suitably rebuked for her unwarranted retaliation.

  “Careful next time you’re lying with her Cap, seems something else already crawled up in there,” Rosh advised.

  Jenna’s eyes narrowed dangerously. Dexter stepped between them and glared at them both. “Time’s not right for you two to be getting twitchy with each other,” he said sternly. “Save it till we’re done here, then if’n you’d like I’ll lock you both in a hold and wait till only one of you’s left standing.”

  Rosh snorted scornfully at the idea. Jenna scowled but said nothing. “Good,” Dexter said, “then let’s figure out how we’re to be getting them ships off the bottom of the lake!”

  “Sir… Captain?” Tarin said, braving the interruption.

  “Aye lad,” Dexter said, shooting a final warning glance at his first and second mates.

  “The bottom of the lake? Nobody’s ever found it. It’s deep, and legend tells of what happens to those that dive down there… they don’t come back, at least not alive.”

  Dexter nodded. “Course not,” he muttered. “Why would they? That’d make this too easy.”

  Jenna smirked at his response but Xander looked suitably alarmed. “I was going to offer to see if I could learn an incantation to allow us to breathe water… but now…”

  Dexter chuckled. “But that’d take weeks, right? Even if there wasn’t no trap or monster down there?”

  Xander nodded.

  “You’re starting to read like one of your books, wizard,” Dexter said. He turned to Tarin, a new idea coming to him. “This wasn’t always a lake was it?”

  The boy looked confused at the suggestion. “Always,” he said, nodding his head. “Long as I know, anyway.”

  “Captain, we’ve been gone a while and it was a lake when we were here,” Keshira offered, surprising him with her volunteering of information.

  He looked at her and asked, “You learning to have opinions now?”

  “I defer to your will, Captain,” she said, her smile infuriating to him. “I thought you might have forgotten that detail based on your question.”

  Dexter nodded. “Thanks,” he muttered. “Didn’t forget, but they seem to have legends before us. I was hoping.”

  “A priest might know,” Tarin offered. “They know the legends inside and out.”

  “Had enough of priests,” Rosh grumbled.

  Dexter nodded. “Aye, me too.”

  “Tarin, is there a river or a stream that the lake feeds?” Xander asked suddenly, surprising Dexter with his near interruption.

  Tarin nodded. “In Heynt there is a river.”

  “Heynt is the city at the other side of the lake?” Dexter asked.

  Tarin bobbed his head up and down enthusiastically.

  “What’s your mind?” Dexte
r asked, turning to Xander.

  “The elves dammed the river ages past to flood the valley. If we can open the gates of the dam and release the water, we might find the bottom,” Xander explained.

  Dexter nodded slowly at first, then faster. He smiled and clapped the wizard on the arm. “Keep this up and you’ll land a more important job,” he offered.

  Xander frowned as Dexter turned away. “More important?”

  “Aye, I seem to be without a helmsman.”

  Tarin showed them to the transports. After bartering for a bit Dexter chartered passage for them across the lake. It took a few extra coins to get him to leave without a full load of passengers, but it was gold Dexter was happy to spend. The crew of the Voidhawk remained largely silent as they stared into and around the lake thoughtfully. They sailed for nearly two hours, four oarsmen aiding the small square sail set amidships. Heynt seemed little different from Hewl, save for it being larger.

  The other major difference was the docks. They were built along the edge of the lake and a series of serpentine ramps led down a hill so steep it was nearly a cliff to the larger city below. Water fell over the rim of the lake in a low spot to a series of other waterfalls, some dropping the water more than thirty feet. Combined together, Dexter estimated a fall of at least three hundred feet.

  “Captain, if the elves dammed the river to make a lake, it’s going to be 200 – 300 feet deep,” Xander said, not knowing Dexter had already guessed something similar. “That’s a lot of water.”

  Dexter grunted, studying the dam from where they stood on the topmost section of the many. “See any way of opening it up?”

  “Captain… you’d need to open up the entire side here!” Xander said, peering down along the length of the waterfalls. “It would take a meteor falling from the sky to do that!”

  “Best get your fingers to wiggling, wizard,” Dexter said.

  Xander gave him one of the most patronizing looks he’d ever seen from the man. Dexter chuckled in spite of their dire predicament. “All right, then get to thinking. I mean to get off this rock and the only way seems buried under all that water.”

  “The elves!” Xander hissed after a moment of thought. “Their magic is incredible. It’s orders of magnitude more powerful… Just from what I’ve learned thus far, they have almost as much trouble understanding why I use magic the way I do as I have trouble understanding how they are able to do the magic they do!”

  “Aye, and I’m having trouble not smacking you for talking in tongues,” Dexter told him.

  Xander snapped out of his faraway look and looked at the Voidhawk’s Captain. He grinned sheepishly. “Sorry, I just meant that my magic seems like something a child would play with to them, and I can’t fathom how they are able to do the things they do.”

  Xander paused, realizing he wasn’t explaining things very well. Finally he seized upon something. “Ah! Think of this… A while back on Azmea we secured material for me to enlarge our holds, remember?”

  Dexter nodded. It had proved handy in many of their more mundane shipping runs to Deepingdale some time back.

  “I thought it was extra dimensionality, but now I realize what I did was really just compressing the space within it,” Xander explained. “Sort of like folding a sail to store it in a smaller place?”

  Dexter nodded again, that much made sense, though how he could fold the air and contents of a cargo hold to make them smaller escaped him.

  “What the elves would have done would have been to make the very hold nothing but a portal into another place altogether. A rift into another pocket dimension, you see?”

  Dexter shook his head and saw that the others were similarly out of sorts with the wizard’s explanation.

  Xander nodded. “Yes, yes, me too at first! It’s ingenious, really. Instead of dealing with the space you have, they went and made a new space for it. The cargo hold would have just been like the opening of a sack that you pass items through when you store them! The actual contents are safely placed in another place altogether, one with all the room you could ever need!”

  “Wait,” Jenna said, holding up a hand. “I think I understand. It’d be like walking through a door but not really stepping into the room on the other side, I’d be somewhere else altogether?”

  He nodded. “Yes! Yes exactly like that!”

  “So what’s your point?” Dexter asked, tired of not understanding what he was talking about.

  Xander deflated at that. His shoulder slumped a little and the excited gleam in his eyes dimmed. “Well, I just… I mean, that was an example of how differently they think and do magic. Assigning a space to a placeholder and transferring anything that comes across it into the space and back without any notice of the transport.”

  Dexter shook his head. “So find me a way to magic all that water somewhere we’re not needing to be.”

  Xander stared at him, lips parted. Dexter raised his eyebrows, asking the unspoken question of what was wrong with Xander. Xander stopped gaping and nodded slowly, then smiled. “Captain, you’re brilliant!”

  “I get that, usually from the ladies,” Dexter quipped. “Now care to be figuring out how we’re going to skin this rat?”

  Jenna swatted him on the arm, which drew a smirk from Rosh. Xander shook his head though and held up a finger. “No Captain, that is the solution! There’s no earthly way we can move all this water, and if we did flood the city, well, there’s a flooded city and a town full of drowned or angry people.”

  Rosh glanced down at Heynt, grimacing as he realized what Xander meant. He nodded and looked back. “Bookworm’s got a point,” he said. “I ain’t ‘fraid of killing them that needs killing, but it just don’t seem right, wiping out a whole town.”

  Dexter scowled. “You were willing to wipe out a whole world this morning.”

  Rosh blushed a little and shrugged, at a loss for words to describe his behavior.

  “Hey, my turn,” Jenna said, stepping between them. “Knock it off and let the guy talk!”

  Dexter and Rosh both stared at her. Rosh was, again, scowling. Dexter chuckled and nodded. “Let’s have it then Xander, or you’re to be setting the first blasting charge.”

  Xander did a double take at Dexter’s words. “Well…” He stalled, thinking furiously. “The problem is the location,” He explained. “The portal must be a fixed place, and likewise the destination must also be fixed… and I just don’t know of any locations in the ether to send it to.”

  “The ether?” Several of them simultaneously asked.

  “Yes… sorry, that’s what the space where nothing is, is,” he said, fumbling for words they might understand. “Like the void, except the void is something – it is a place we can sail through. The ether is more like a desk. It’s possible to put a piece of parchment on the desk and draw or write anything on that parchment. In my example the parchment would be the void, and a picture of the Voidhawk could be drawn upon it. Without the desk the paper would flutter away lost forever.”

  The mostly blank stares he received caused the wizard to sigh. “Reading books might do you a lot of good,” he muttered.

  “I like the ones with lots of pictures,” Dexter quipped.

  “Read me a book couple of times a few years back, didn’t learn nothing much from it,” Rosh said.

  All three of them turned to stare at Rosh in surprise. “You can read?” Jenna asked before she could stop the words from slipping out.

  Rosh glared at her. “Lots of things I can do,” he said to her with narrowed eyes. “Lucky you’re bedding the Captain or I’d learn you a few things too!”

  Jenna’s eyes widened in surprise at his threat. Dexter was tempted to chuckle, but he kept it in check and quickly redirected the subject. “So this location… the ‘Hawk’s stuck in place, why couldn’t you put it on a basket or something?”

  Xander considered the words carefully, then began to smile. “Captain, you’re not as ignorant as you let on,” he mused.

  �
��Thanks,” Dexter said wryly.

  “Okay, I could do that. It would take a long time to drain a lake this size with a mere basket though… and the problem remains of where to send it. I’m not sure how to address a location in the ether. By its very nature it has no characteristics, otherwise it wouldn’t be possible for the void to fill it as it grows.”

  “The void’s growing?” Rosh asked, surprised.

  Xander nodded. “It’s been theorized for ages, and the elder elves confirmed it for me. They say it stretches endlessly and, as the races of the void spread and explore the edges are pushed out and new void appears, sometimes complete with stars and planets.”

  Rosh stared at him, his expression one of frank disbelief.

  Dexter filed it away for later use; right now he had more pressing concerns. “Why you needing to send it to this other / ether place? Why can’t you send it from your basket to, say, the bottom of that cliff where the last waterfall ends?”

  Xander stared down over the edge of a wooden rail. He nodded his head. “Perhaps,” he said. “I’ve never done this before, it will take some time to prepare the spell and materials to prepare the locations.”

  “Tell me weeks again and I’m handing you a shovel,” Dexter warned.

  Xander rolled his eyes. “Captain, complicated magic like this takes careful preparation! One erroneous word and the world could be sucked into the rift and torn apart!”

  “All the more reason for you to do it right,” Dexter suggested.

  Xander stared at him, shaking his head. “There’s also the cost of materials,” he said. “I’ll need to imprint both portals with magical substance that connects them.”

  “How long?” Dexter pressed.

  Xander frowned. “Two weeks?” He asked.

  It was Dexter’s turn to frown. “Every day we’re spending not up there,” he pointed upwards, “is a day the elves are getting stronger and the elders aren’t. We still got us a five day sail back too,” Dexter reminded him.

  “All the time in the void will do us no good if I get us killed!” Xander snapped.