by Mike Wild
Inside the first cage, Red Deadnettle caught a glimpse of her face and was about to holler out when Kali put her finger to her lips, silencing him. The huge poacher nevertheless moved eagerly to the bars, Hetty Scrubb and Pete Two-Ties squeezing in beside him. At their rear, Kali could just make out Martha DeZantez tending to the stretchered Dolorosa.
“How are you?” Kali whispered, glancing sideways to keep an eye on the guards.
“Could do with a drink,” Red shrugged.
“Me, too,” Kali agreed.
“They could have given me a cryptosquare, to pass the time,” Pete Two-Ties moaned.
Kali smiled; the man lived to complete his cryptosquares.
“Nihc,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“Chin up.”
“Oh, ha,” Pete responded, dryly.
“Personally, I would like to rip off their balls,” Hetty Scrubb hissed. The tiny herbalist was never at her best when unable to sample what she sold, and every sinew and tendon thrust prominently through her parchment skin. “Rip off their balls and ram them in their eyes.”
“You’ll both have what you need soon,” Kali said. “I promise.”
Red stared at her. Giant that he was, it was amazing how much like a child he looked. “Then you are not here to get us out?”
“Soon.”
Swallowing, she checked the positions of the guards once more, ducked momentarily into shadow, and then moved across the aisle to the opposite cage.
“About time you showed up,” Jengo Pim said. “We need out.”
“There are what?” Kali said. “Twelve of you? Twelve thieves locked in a cage and you can’t escape?”
“You can see that this is a rune-inscribed lock,” Pim hissed.
“Even so. I really should report you to your union.”
“Funny. Now are you going to find a way to get us out of here or not?”
It was only at that moment that Kali realised the reality that she had so far been denying to herself. Had denied to all of them. It was a reality she didn’t particularly like.
“I... I can’t.”
“Can’t?” Pim repeated.
“Think about it, Jengo. We’re outnumbered two, maybe three, to one on a ship we don’t know how to control, heading for a destination only Redigor knows the location of.”
“We can handle odds like that. And unless I’m mistaken, didn’t you and your people once take control of a spaceship? How hard can the Black Ship be?”
“If we take them out, we might not have enough people to run the ship.”
“Then we force some of them to run it for us. And Redigor must have charts.”
“We can’t take that risk.”
Pim thumped the bars, then eyed Kali carefully. “Just between you and me, these are just excuses, aren’t they?” he said quietly. “You want Redigor to get where he’s going.”
Kali swallowed. She should have known it wouldn’t take someone as astute as Pim long to work out the truth. “I didn’t know you were all going to be here, okay? I honestly didn’t. But I have to reach Trass Kathra.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Pits of Kerberos.”
“Trust me, Pim. I think this ship needs to get where it’s going, for all of our sakes.”
“Even the old lady? What’s her name? Dolorosa?”
Kali took in a sharp breath. “Even Dolorosa.”
Pim took a second and then nodded reluctantly. “Promise me one thing. That you get us out of here before the shit hits whatever fan it’s going to hit.”
“Nothing’s going to happen until this ship reaches Trass Kathra, I’m sure of it. And when it does, I’ll have you out of there, okay?”
“Okay.”
Kali hesitated, bit her lip. “See you later, Pim.”
“I hope so.”
Reluctantly, Kali left the prison deck and made her way back the way she had come, all the way to the stern. Her second destination, Bastian Redigor’s cabin, awaited. The only problem was that Redigor didn’t leave his cabin. Not then and, when Kali returned, not for the whole of that day. Nor the next. Nor the one after that. Eventually Kali concluded that, for whatever reason, the elf was going to spend the entire voyage in isolation, and resigned herself to the fact that the information she wanted would have to be sought later.
Kali didn’t go back above decks for the remainder of the voyage, returning to her nest in the ballast bulkheads and spending her time foraging for discarded food, sleeping – as best she could on the violent seas – and befriending and feeding two sodden and sorry looking floprats she named Makennon and Munch. She also read through the journal Merrit Moon had given her in the World’s Ridge Mountains. Kali flipping the pages eagerly, as intrigued as much by the old man’s journey of discovery as the one she herself was on. The chamber from which she had rescued Moon was, according to his notes, the first of three which together formed the passage through the World’s Ridge Mountains he had speculated existed. The Hall of Tales was the first, the Hall of Howling Faces the second, and the third the Hall of the Mountain... thing.
Obviously he hadn’t managed to translate that last bit.
A few events distracted her during this time. The first was the ramming of an untershrak herd against the hull, sometimes so powerful she expected their triple-jawed snouts to punch through the watertight plating beside her head. The second an attack by the Great Blob itself. No one knew the exact nature or intent of this much feared aquatic denizen, though it struck Kali as being fundamentally benign – an observation based on its plaintive and almost befriending cries as it circled the Black Ship, occasionally rubbing itself up against it. Kali didn’t interfere as the Faith fought the creature off – how could she? – and felt monumentally saddened when the blob’s cries turned pained and then faded away into the distance.
One night – on what she calculated was the twelfth night of the voyage and in relatively calm seas – music drifted down from somewhere above, a familiar melody that reminded her of Slowhand, and for the few hours until daylight came again she felt agonisingly homesick.
At last, a burst of activity on the upper decks signalled what had to be the end of the voyage. Kali stole from her hiding place, figuring that if it was all hands on deck she should be able to go unnoticed in the crowd. Sure enough, as she emerged into natural, albeit a stormy grey, light for the first time in two weeks, the decks were awash with so much activity that no one had time to give her a second glance.
Kali made her way to the prow, and immediately saw why. Couldn’t miss why, in fact.
The Black Ship was heading towards a stretch of ocean that could only be the swirlpools that Brundle had described, and while the dwarf had intimated these obstacles were dangerous, the word dangerous hardly seemed to do them justice.
Kali gasped. For what seemed like leagues ahead of them, and leagues to port and starboard, sweeping away in a broad band, the ocean was in upheaval. Great, circular eddies, hundreds of them whirling away, crammed together and crashing together, forming other, new manifestations of themselves, making the waters they were about to sail into seethe and boil and explode upward into the sky. Far higher than the Black Ship itself, these violent eruptions of ocean seemed almost alive, made of stuff more viscous than the seas that birthed them, somehow almost sentient in the way they hung there before plummeting whence they came, worsening the chaos beneath. It was like the ocean was at war with itself, and Kali knew instantly that to enter this battlefield would be deadly.
A shadow darkened her view. Redigor stood calmly by her side, hands holding the rails, as if they were two friends on holiday, enjoying the view.
“Spectacular, are they not?” the elf said.
“Personally, I prefer the banks of the Rainbow River, or the Shifting Sands of Oweilau.”
“Both beautiful, especially seen as I have seen them, awash with the blood of battle.”
“Thanks for reminding me what a f
ruitcake you are, Baz. You don’t seem surprised to find me alive.”
“Not surprised at all. I could feel you infesting the bulkheads like a filthy floprat. What is it you call such vermin these days? Pests?”
“Then why didn’t you subject me to pest control?”
“I had... other concerns.”
“I can tell.”
Kali studied the elf’s profile as he stared impassively beyond the prow of the Black Ship. His – that was Freel’s – condition had deteriorated dramatically even since they had met on the ship’s gangplank, and was presumably the reason he had locked himself away inside his quarters. His long black hair was thinning and billowing about his body like a shroud, his skin flaking away, peeled from him by the sea wind and trailing behind him to be slowly scattered amidst the grey, cloudy skies like ashes from a burnt-out fire.
The man was a ghost even though he wasn’t dead yet.
Not yet.
“It’s over, Redigor. Give this up.”
“I am touched by your concern for my health.”
“I don’t give a flying fark about your health, elf. It’s Freel’s health I’m concerned about.”
Redigor’s jaw tensed. “Forget your friend. He’s gone.”
“Not while I’m drawing breath, Mister.”
“Then I shall once more have to address myself to making sure that you don’t.”
Kali glanced casually down over the edge of the deck, saw the white of the angry ocean rushing by the plimsoll line. There was no way she’d survive that. And even if she did, where would she go, in the middle of nowhere, here, on the other side of the world?
“Shouldn’t you be ordering a full stop?”
“On the contrary. The island is my destination. I intend to reach it.”
“But the ship will be torn apart.”
“Yes.”
Kali gasped as a particularly violent surge caused her to lose her grip and she was slammed around, her back impacting painfully with the prow. It was in that moment that she realised something that she – and Brundle, wherever the dwarf was – had missed. The only thing that mattered to Redigor was that he made landfall, and to that extent the ship was nothing more than a means to an end. It had been built the way it had to be used as an ocean-going battering ram, to get them as close to the island as it could, and if it was wrecked in the process, he didn’t care.
He wasn’t going home. No one on the ship was going home.
This was a voyage of the damned.
“My god, Redigor, what have you got planned?”
“Salvation,” the elf said.
And with that he raised his hand, signalling those on the bridge behind him not to slow but to speed their knottage. The Black Ship ploughed ahead.
Heading straight for the swirlpools at ramming speed.
CHAPTER NINE
THE ELF TURNED suddenly away from the prow. “You must forgive me, Miss Hooper, but it is time for your friends to be released from their confines. You may help if you wish.”
Kali felt the Black Ship groan beneath her. Heard the bang of exploding rivets and creak of plating from its hull as it encountered the first of the stresses that the swirlpools presented. They had only just reached their edge.
“I don’t know what you’ve got planned but damn right I’ll help,” she said, following.
“Then be quick. There is no time to waste.”
The two of them made their way back below decks and down to the prisoner’s hold, Redigor enlisting men to help as he moved. Watching the elf dance his hand over the rune-inscribed locks of the cages, opening them, wasn’t exactly what Kali had imagined when she’d promised Pim she’d get him and the others out of there, but considering the unexpected development it would have to do. Pim gave her a glance as, along with his men, he was pulled from his cage, still in chains, to join the other prisoners being ushered onto the upper decks. All Kali could do was give a shrug that said, wait and see.
Redigor opened the cage holding Red and the others from the Flagons, and Kali quickly moved inside to help Martha DeZantez with Dolorosa. The sour stink of infection assailed her nostrils as she bent to wrap the old woman in her blankets, and Kali had to quash a flare of fury that Redigor had provided no medication for her wounds.
Dolorosa groaned and shifted as her stretcher was lifted, and a hand slipped free. A small object trailed from loose fingers onto the floor of the cage. The old woman’s prayer beads.
“Red, take her,” Kali said to the poacher, and turned to retrieve the beads. When she turned back the cage was empty and Redigor was standing by its door. He closed it with a clang, his hand dancing once more over the rune-inscribed lock.
“Should have seen that one coming,” Kali said.
“I believe you should have,” Redigor agreed.
Kali glanced between the cages to the steps where the last of the prisoners were being taken to the upper decks. At their rear, Red Deadnettle turned and looked at her hopelessly. As he did, the entire ship rocked, almost turned onto its side despite the stability of its twin hulls, and, rather disorientatingly, began to rotate.
They were entering the swirlpools proper, and, if the sounds of the tortured hull around her were anything to go by, the swirlpools would soon be entering the ship. A second later, a bulkhead beside the steps burst and a torrent of seawater began to flood the prison deck.
“Goodbye, Miss Hooper,” Redigor said.
And with that, he and the others were gone, the hatch to the upper decks shut behind them.
Kali thumped the cage bars, cursing her own stupidity, and as the floodwaters began to swirl about her ankles and then her waist, her hand searched instinctively for her breathing conch in the side pocket of her bodysuit. Feeling empty space, her mind flashed with the image of the conch dwindling into the depths of Gransk harbour, and she cursed again.
Then Kali remembered the small bag Merrit Moon had given her in the World’s Ridge Mountains. A few things that might help to keep you safe, he had said, so let’s see.
She dug inside, extracting first an elven memory crystal, second a small sphere that looked like one of the old man’s ice-bombs and which she wasn’t willing to risk finding out, and third an object that rattled and hummed in her hand but of whose purpose she had no idea at all. Fine. If she wanted to record herself being frozen in a solid block of ice while some kind of weird clockwork toy got on her tits, then Moon had provided her with the perfect tools. But if she wanted to use them to get out of here, she was bollocksed.
There was one more item. A small bag within the bag that had gone almost unnoticed in her search. She pulled it out, undid its drawstring, and then yelped in pain as a length of thin vine covered in tiny leaves wrapped itself tightly around her index finger, extracting more of itself from the bag as it did. Kali knew what this was. Tourniqueed. Back when, the elves had used it as dressing to staunch the flow of blood from wounds in battle, and it still grew to this day in the marshes of Rammora. Kali could only imagine that Moon hadn’t realised it was in the bag, a forgotten piece of a first aid kit he had perhaps used in his earlier adventuring days, but ironically it was of more use than any of the other objects he had given her.
The water having risen to her neck, Kali pinched the leaves of the tourniqueed, releasing it from her finger, and wrapped it instead around one of the bars of the cage. She pinched the leaves again and the vine contracted. Many an elf had lost a limb before he or she had come to realise how to stop the vine’s contractions, and left to its own devices it was strong enough to cut through anything, even metal.
It took time, though, and time was one thing Kali didn’t have. The seawater was splashing about her mouth and nose now, making her gag, and when at last the tourniqueed severed the bar she had already been submerged for almost a minute. Kali quickly snatched the vine from the water and reapplied it two feet further down the bar, and as it began to cut its way through once more she hammered the bar repeatedly, knowing she’d never survive u
ntil the tourniqueed had completed its job. She lost count of the number of desperate strikes she made, but she did know that her blows were becoming weaker each time, and finally she resorted to holding onto the surrounding bars, twisting her body and booting the face of the cage. Her vision was darkening and for a second she was only vaguely aware that the bar had become weak enough and was slowly spiralling away from her. She twisted and pulled herself through the opening it had made.
Kali swam directly for the steps and the hatch above, but as she turned the wheel to open it, it stuck fast. Redigor, or one of his men, must have jammed it. Kali’s eyes widened and she turned desperately, seeking another way out.
But there was none.
She pounded on the hatch, bubbles of air exploding from her, but who was she kidding? Who did she expect to come to rescue her?
Maybe the person who was now turning the wheel from the other side, opening the hatch to the equally flooded deck beyond.
Kali’s mind was so starved of oxygen now that it all seemed like a dream. Maybe it was a dream because the person who had opened the hatch – her rescuer – wasn’t a person at all. In the grey, murky waters, Kali found herself looking at the same creature she had encountered in Gransk harbour, possibly the same creature she had long ago encountered in the floodwaters of Martak. Whether it was the same or not, she didn’t know, for this time the creature did not speak in her mind, but merely took hold of her floating form and pulled her after it. Familiar ship’s corridors, their angles warped by the waters that filled them, segued by, and in what remained of her conscious thoughts Kali recognised that she was being taken to safety.
Thank you, she wanted to say. Please tell me, who are you?