by Simon Archer
“Will the cannons do much of anything to him?” I asked.
“Not without magic,” Ember answered. “I shall go and help.”
“Me as well,” Nagra volunteered.
“Right,” I said with a nod before turning to the other magic-workers. “What of ye, Mary, and ye, Adra?”
“I can make things more difficult for them,” Adra said with a strange smile, her eyes following the fire witch and the young orc. “But I must prepare. By your leave, Splitter of Skulls?”
I nodded and waved her off. “Aye, go. I mean to wait for them here.”
“You know you’d not live without me,” Mary announced with a fey smile as the shamaness strode off into the fog, humming a tuneless ditty.
“Me, too,” Jimmy added, and his assent was followed by a nod from Shrike and a grunt from Kargad.
“Did ye think we’d leave ye alone to face yon blackguard?” Tabitha demanded. “At the very least, we can keep his folk off o’ ye.”
“And I mean to deal with his witch,” Mary said fiercely. “Again.”
Jenny Nettles grinned and shouldered her musket, then looked over at Mocker. “Ye want to make a game of it, pirate?” she asked. “We go up on the wall and see how many we can shoot before they get here?”
“I’m game,” he replied, then looked over at Mary and asked, “Can we hurt them?”
“You can try,” my witch said. “That is all any of us can do.”
“We best do more than try,” Kargad rumbled, then slammed his right fist into his left palm with a satisfying crack.
I grinned as I looked around at my crew, my friends, my clan. They were ready to stand with me, live or die, in the face of one of the most fearsome things a sailor could face at sea. It made my heart swell with pride and wiped all the questions and worries from my mind.
No matter what came, we could conquer it together.
Tiny let out another roar off in the distance as the storm overhead finally broke. Buckets of rain beat down on Insmere, lightning flashed, and thunder echoed over the stone buildings and cobblestone streets.
Cannons began to fire from the emplacements around the harbor and were answered by shots from out to sea. The return fire howled like the damned and threw up tongues of sickly, green fire when they impacted.
“Ready yerselves,” I told my companions. “Methinks all we can do now is slow the bastard down.”
Most of the others scattered to take positions flanking the door, up on the battlements, or hidden within the guardhouse while Mary and I moved to the rough center of the courtyard to wait. I wondered how long it would take for Arde to make landfall.
The ships all had orders to stand down. We wanted the undead bastard on land and away from his ship. Our crews would harry him a bit as he came through Insmere, but I didn’t want them to risk themselves any more than necessary. Even now, I resisted the urge to march down to the docks and meet the Commodore there. His cannons obeyed no rules as they rained blistering fire upon the fortified gun emplacements where Bord’s cannon crews and two witches did their best to make unlife difficult for the horror that swept into the harbor.
I didn’t expect them to stop him, but I didn’t expect what happened next, either. A howling shriek rose over the town, audible even through the raging storm. Pain spiked through my head, and icy fingers wrapped around my heart. Mary cried out and dropped to one knee, tears of blood running from her eyes.
Around the courtyard, I saw my crew and clan suffering from that call. Then, as it reached a crescendo, another voice rose in challenge, and the pain and sense of impending doom receded. The dark cry continued, but now it fought with the clear, primal notes of Ligeia’s powerful voice. Siren magic warred with the powers of the dead and emerged triumphant.
The dark song fell silent, but the siren’s voice continued. A sense of wonder washed over us and renewed our determination. The cannonfire from The Indomitable faltered for a moment, then silenced as a great crash rose from the waterfront. Lightning rained down in a path directly from the docks to the gate of the keep, followed by peals of thunder like the footfalls of an angry god.
All through Insmere, a great moan sounded, a tormented cry rising from hundreds of throats. Shots began to ring out from Jimmy and Jenny, crouched beneath the scant roof that protected the battlements from the force of this storm.
Mary glanced up at me, her eyes were ringed with bruising, and blood tracked from the corners of her eyes, but she shot me a fierce smile, drew her knives, and turned back to the gate. Across the courtyard in the nooks and crannies, hopefully hidden from the dead, were the rest of my closest friends and allies.
I readied my gun-axe and the Huntsman’s Spear. This was it. Commodore Arde, his undead crew, and the black-eyed witch were coming, and there would only be one victor. I fully intended to make damn sure that it was me.
Commodore Arde would fall today, or we would all die trying.
36
“ O rrrrccc,” a liquid, growling voice called out through the darkness. “I am here for you.”
Even corrupted as it was, I knew the owner of it, but we weren’t forced to wait long for him to come. As if on cue, the soggy, rotting corpse of Commodore Sebastian Arde appeared in the shadows of the gate. His eyes glowed with green fire, a barnacle-encrusted pistol and a broken saber clutched in his sodden hands. Half of the blade of the sword was corroded metal, and the other half was the sickly flame that his shells had spat on impact. The man’s body still bore the horrific death wound that cleaved him from shoulder to beltline. I’d given him that wound during our fight on the cannon deck of The Indomitable after Mary had killed his witch and I’d virtually destroyed that deck with one of the ship’s cannons.
Even where I was, I could almost taste the sweet smell of sickness and decay. My fingers itched for my greataxe, but the weapons I had would serve well enough.
“Here I be, Commodore,” I called out. “Come and get me.”
Behind him, shuffling shadows gathered, and more eyes blazed green in the shadows and rain. Lightning flashed through the clouds above, and thunder boomed. Another figure resolved itself, standing beside arde. She would have been a beautiful, pale-skinned woman were it not for the blackness of her one eye, and the horrible wound and green flames of her other.
That was the witch who had led the coven Mary once belonged to, the one who had all but given her to Sebastian Arde, and the one my witch had killed on The Indomitable’s deck. Her name was Rhianne Corvis, and she’d been returned to unlife along with the mad Commodore. Interestingly, she had covered or hidden the wound I’d once spied between her breasts.
Rhianne locked eyes with the changeling woman at my side, and the pair glared at each other with a hate that was almost palpable. Her green eye blazed at the same time Mary’s evil eye flared with light. The very air between the two women rippled like a heat mirage, and raindrops hissed into steam as they fell.
Meanwhile, the Commodore only had eyes for me. He slashed his saber through the air, and it let out a shriek.
“Die!” he roared as he raised his pistol.
The dead surged forward and around him, only to be hit by my waiting allies. Kargad, Daka, and Dogar plowed into the tide of corpses with axes, pick, and cutlass swinging. Bodies and body parts flew. These things were the animate corpses of sailors, most in imperial garb, bearing their death wounds, but with glowing, hate-filled light spilling from their empty eye-sockets.
Fortunately for us, perhaps, the ghost ship had been crewed with corpses, and even if my people couldn’t kill them, they could certainly slow them down.
Next, Shrike darted in, his shortswords swung low to take out the legs of the shambling things. More fell in his wake, but they kept coming, and the numbers beyond the gate loomed like an endless tide.
Into the tide, Jimmy Mocker and Jenny Nettles placed shot after shot. They fired and reloaded with a desperate speed like nothing I’d ever witnessed before. Zombies dropped with their heads blown of
f or fell and rose again. To this, Tabitha Binx added her own twist. She emptied her multi-barreled pistol into the mass, drew a bomb from her belt, and lit it with a smoldering bit of fuze that dangled from one of her beaded braids.
The thing sparked up, even with the heavy rain, and the little Ailur hurled it over the gate and into the mass of undead beyond. A loud boom rattled windows and sent zombies sprawling while she readied a second.
Above the din and across the town, Ligeia’s voice continued her song, a strangely beautiful anthem for our terrible and bloody battle.
But all that was in the periphery of my attention, for, Commodore Sebastian Arde strode across the courtyard at me, his sole focus as he was mine. As he walked, he fired his flintlock. Green fire spat from the barrel, and a glowing pistol ball cut the air where I would have been standing if I hadn’t been on the move myself. Then he fired again, and again while I kept going. That terrible pistol didn’t obey the laws of man, seeming to need no reloading as he went.
I suppose I should have expected that.
As I kept up the zig-zagging dodge, I brought the barrel of the gun-axe to bear and fired off a shot of my own in the brief moment before Arde pulled the trigger again. I would never beat Arde in gunplay like this, so I didn’t aim for the monster himself. The heavy gun roared and spat, but it shot true.
The rotted flintlock went flying out of the Commodore’s hand to land several feet away, a smoking ball embedded in the wood just below the barrel. Arde cursed in that eerie, liquid voice of his and just charged me, his saber aimed at my heart.
I knocked it aside with the Huntsman’s Spear as I dodged and swung the gun-axe at his middle. The hit was a solid one and sunk deep in the soft flesh of the dead man.
He let out a liquid chuckle, and something cold and slimy spattered across my shoulders. “Is that the best you have, orc?” he whispered raspily, then dodged back as I slashed wide with the spearhead.
Almost immediately, the Commodore stepped back inside my guard, the point of his glowing blade flicking at my eyes. Step by step, the bastard pushed me back. He was strong, and I felt no desire to be on the receiving end of that green-burning edge. On the other hand, he had no fear of my gun-axe, taking hits from my swings like they were nothing. However, he dodged or parried every blow I tried to land with the Huntsman’s Spear as if he feared it.
It was magical, after all, so that made sense. Beyond my battle, chaos raged in the gateway and beyond. Some even spilled into the courtyard where the witches fought a battle of curses and hexes. The pair moved like dancers, eyes flashing as they directed their dark forces at each other.
I barely dodged a thrust of the green burning saber as Arde took a shot at my head. Perhaps he believed me distracted, but long years of fighting while keeping track of what went on around me kept me alive. Thinking to disarm him entirely, I swung the axe, and it cracked into the bones of the undead’s wrist, just behind the thumb.
Somehow, the bastard kept ahold of his saber and didn’t even flinch from the blow. Hells, instead of losing his hand, the rebound of the axe numbed my fingers for a moment. At least I knocked aside his follow-up, which made an opening that I was all too happy to take advantage of as I thrust my spear forward.
Unfortunately, the bastard was too damned fast. Death had certainly improved the Commodore’s skill at arms. It couldn’t have hurt that he was not in thrall to the spear I now wielded. He dodged my lunge and tried to counter, but I parried again with the gun-axe.
We seemed evenly matched, but as a dead thing, eventually, Arde could wear me down so long as he was patient. I needed to tip the scales somehow. But how, I wondered as we exchanged a few more strikes and counterstrikes. My rage wouldn’t serve me against a foe who could ignore half my blows in order to focus on defending only against the spear.
Then it hit me. The damned storm that came ashore with Arde just might not be entirely under his control. Hell, it might not be his at all, but a response from the world against something so wholly unnatural that its very existence was an affront to the elementals and to life itself.
It would be a risky move and take a bit of my attention, but it could be worth it. I opened my senses a bit to feel the rage of the storm, the interaction of all four elements above and around me. While I retreated under the Commodore’s sudden onslaught, I reached out to the water and wind, the first elements that responded to me, and drew on them. All of a sudden, my footing on the slick stones grew certain, tiny bursts of wind aided my movements, and water sheathed both of my weapons and lent additional force to my blows.
A fierce elation rose within me. Using this and my natural vigor and rage, I should be able to turn the tide.
Mary suddenly let out a scream that broke through Ligeia’s song. It was a fierce, primal thing, like an eagle as it plunged upon its prey. A quick glance showed her charging at Rhianne with her knives as the other witch staggered back.
I would have loved to have watched the ending of that, but Arde let out a sudden yell and began to hammer at me with his saber to force me to defend myself. He must have realized that there was little time left for him to end our fight, and I had a similar idea.
A feint of his blade caught me, and while I still parried the sword that followed, I took a painful kick to the side of my knee that sent me down for a moment. The Commodore dove away instead of launching another useless attack to sweep up his fallen flintlock in his empty left hand.
As he brought it up, I hurled the spear with all the force the wind and water lent me, along with the battle rage that I’d held smoldering in my breast. My roar shook the foundations of Insmere Keep.
Time froze for an instant. Around me, my comrades at the gate fought determinedly against the tide of the dead, but slowly, they were being pushed back. Mary’s knives were imbedded in the chest and belly of the undead witch, and her evil eye blazed as she gazed into the green, burning orb of her opponent. Up on the battlement, Jimmy and Jenny alternated between shooting and reloading. Somehow they still had powder and bullets, but I suspected they were close to the end of their stash.
The Huntsman’s Spear shuddered in my hand as I threw it as the spirit bound within came to horrible life at the release of my rage. I felt, rather than heard, its howl of triumph as it shot across the distance between Commodore Sebastian Arde and me.
His burning green eyes grew wide as he realized there was no way out.
Then everything sprang back to normal speed. The spear plunged into the shattered chest of the Commodore, and he was thrown backward by the force of it, ending his unlife pinned to the inner wall of Insmere Keep.
“I was…” he rasped as the glow faded from his eyes, “... supposed to win…”
I spun and drew a second axe from my belt, then charged the gate. At my attack, the dead quailed back, and my allies took heart and redoubled their efforts. Tabitha speared a zombie’s head with the point of her cutlass, danced around, and split its skull in a fine imitation of my preferred kill.
Kargad grabbed one of the undead and swung it in a wide circle that sent several of the creatures sprawling. Daka and Dogar took the opening and bashed in a few more heads with one’s war pick and the other’s axes while Shrike kept up his low dance and sent another of the shamblers to the ground.
Meanwhile, I just hammered angrily away with my axes while I ignored the grasping hands and clawing, broken nails of the closest dead. It was easy to sweep aside the attacks of those that followed and split their skulls too.
“Mary, hold!” Rhianne hissed. “I can help!”
“Liar!” my witch snapped. A quick glance showed her sitting atop the downed form of the undead woman, both of her long knives buried deep in the creature’s chest. “Ye just want to save yourself!”
I dodged the swing of a rusty sword, hacked off a zombie’s arm, then caved in its head. The things hadn’t died with Arde, and they seemed to recover swiftly from any wound dealt them. Not even the headshots kept them down for too long.
“Mary,” Rhianne said. “Please.”
Mary froze and stared at the creature pinned beneath her. “How?” She demanded.
“The Lambeth Hex,” the undead replied.
“Damn,” I swore as a zombie grabbed me in that moment’s distraction. Kargad caught it from behind and sent it flying back into the bulk of the creatures.
“Hell of a fight, Cap’n,” he mused as we stepped up and struck down another charging group.
The gate kept them from overwhelming us, but it also kept us from making much headway. In time, fatigue would take us as surely as it would have taken me fighting Arde unless we changed the game. With that being the case, what did we have to lose by giving the undead witch quarter? If this hex worked like Mary said it did, it would definitely turn the tide.
“Mary!” I called out. “Let her try.”
Out in the city, fire blossomed, and a great moan went through the assembled horde as some turned and shambled back into the city.
“Fine!” my witch yelled back. “But she’s mine if she tricks us!”
I didn’t respond, I had my hands full with another rush of the dead. These zombies must have been Arde’s own crew. They were faster and bore weapons along with the decaying remnants of uniforms. Up until now, we’d faced the drowned and murdered dead that rose up in the Commodore’s wake.
“I ain't sure this be the best idea, Cap’n,” Tabitha Binx was at my side, suddenly, exchanging a quick series of parries and thrusts with a leering, undead sailor.
These monsters were intelligent, too. They’d waited for the cannon fodder to soften us up and wear us out, then slipped into the horde to see if they could trick us.
“I ain’t either,” I admitted. “Thing is, we need a way to put these damned things down for good.”
Another burst of fire flared out in the streets. The storm still lashed above, and I had a feeling that the hulk of The Indomitable rode the waves out in the harbor.