Steel Crow Saga

by Paul Krueger

  “Wait up!” the prince called behind her.

  She ignored him. “I don’t take orders from you.”

  “A monster from the depths sinks this ship with a headbutt, and you’re worried about chain of command?”

  They emerged on the middle deck to find it in disarray but bearing no evidence of a fight. There were no dead bodies, no puddles of blood, not even the gouges in the wood that would’ve pointed to shades’ claws. So it was all hands on deck, then, Tala thought grimly with a glance upward. Next to her, Beaky croaked, and a trickle of fear spread into the stream of emotions she was getting from him.

  The prince appeared similarly unsettled by the empty deck before them. “Gun,” he said.

  “Not likely,” Tala said, creeping toward the next staircase. This one, she couldn’t afford to take at a run.

  “You have two! You can’t possibly use them both!”

  “And you can’t possibly use one.”

  “My people are metalpacters, able to commune with the very bones of the world,” he said, nodding to the shiny metal barrel of her rifle. “That means I can shoot better than you.”

  Tala scowled, then holstered her sidearm with a showy twirl. “No one can shoot better than me. Shut up and come on.”

  The searing heat of flame raked across her skin as she crossed the stairway threshold. Everywhere she looked, fires consumed the Marlin: on its deck, across its railings, even up in the crow’s nest.

  The deck was slick with spilled blood, and as far as Tala could tell, all of it was Sanbuna. Mangled marines in equally mangled green uniforms littered the deck. The few remaining survivors fought valiantly alongside their and their comrades’ shades, but already the odds looked overwhelmingly against them. She saw Private Ompaco empty shot after shot into a huge green snapping-turtle-shade, only for the bullets to thud harmlessly into its shell with little green sparks of magic. As Ompaco fumbled with her rifle’s bolt, a vast white shape unfolded from the night sky: an owl-shade, far larger than Beaky, which pinned the private to the deck and ended her life with a flash of its beak.

  “Spirits take me,” Prince Jimuro muttered in Tomodanese, his shrill fear replaced with muted horror. Tala, however, had no room for horror. If she gave horror even the smallest foothold, it would swallow her whole. So she beat back the darkness with the flames of her anger.

  Something flashed up on the quarterdeck. There she saw Maki fighting with liquid grace, machete in hand. A tiger-shade bore down on him, but none of its swipes could slip past the steel curtain Maki wove with each flick of his blade. As the beast tried to get around Maki, it presented an open flank to him. It moved so fast that, against most warriors, such exposure wouldn’t matter. But Maki was not most warriors, and the shade roared as Maki’s machete ran it straight through. As the wound magically closed around the blade, Maki whipped up his sidearm and emptied an entire clip into the beast. On the seventh shot, its body burst into orange energy and dissipated, streaming toward a man on deck in the thick of the fighting.

  Something moved in the darkness behind the captain. Tala saw it before he did, and even though the battle howled around her, she called out, “Sir!”

  Maki whirled around, his machete just catching the owl-shade that had killed Private Ompaco before its talons could sink into his shoulder. As he parried it, he shot Tala a nod of gratitude. “Nice catch!” he called to her.

  Every shred of Tala yearned to rush up to the quarterdeck and stand with him. But the captain was as good a swordsman as he was a sailor, and she still had a duty to her own troops.

  Nearest to her, Private Kapona wrestled on the ground with a snake-shade as thick as Tala was. It had wrapped itself around Kapona’s body, and her arm shook with the effort of keeping the creature’s snapping jaws away from her face.

  Without a moment’s hesitation Tala fired a shot and blew the creature’s head into ruin.

  Magical energy sprayed into the air, then dissipated as the snake-shade’s head began to re-form. But that injury was just what Kapona needed to haul the creature off herself, vault to her feet, and throw it over the burning railing with a roar. “Sir!” she said. “We thought you’d jumped ship!” Her gaze slid past Tala to the prince, but she didn’t comment on his presence. There was a grim understanding between them that the situation had officially grown dire.

  “Who’s doing this?” Tala said, scanning the deck for any sign of human hostiles.

  But even as Kapona raised her arm to point him out, Tala’s gaze fell on him.

  Though he knelt, Tala could tell he was tall and skeletal. His black hair hung in a greasy curtain around his face, and the folds of his long purple coat pooled around him on the deck. In the firelight, she could make out a pointed, stubbled chin and bloodshot, hungry eyes. And then she caught sight of the bare torso beneath his coat and gasped.

  Every inch of his brown skin was covered in pactmarks.

  He knelt over the bloodied, broken body of Private Minip, who thrashed ineffectually against the hand wrapped around his throat. At the sight of one of her troops in danger, instinct jolted through Tala like lightning. She shouldered her rifle and fired a shot straight for his tattooed center mass.

  But a blur fell out of the sky, and the bullet slammed into it with a spray of yellow magical sparks. A large wasp-shade crashed to the deck, legs twitching as its entire body curled in around a gaping gunshot wound.

  The man looked up from the dying Minip and locked eyes with Tala. And then his eyes, like Kapona’s, slid past her to fall squarely on Prince Jimuro.

  He already looked gaunt and sunken, but at the sight of the prince he turned into a starving wolf. “Give him to me,” he rasped in Sanbuna. And then, more loudly: “Give him to me!” He threw an arm forward, and in a blast of yellow light a white-furred monkey-shade appeared: one with three whiplike tails, and a yellow star on its inner thigh…

  Kapona’s jaw dropped. “That’s…that’s Sunny.”

  Once again, Tala gritted her teeth and said nothing.

  “Well, can’t worry about that now,” Kapona said, though she looked as though she was worrying quite a lot. She pounded one fist into the other and bellowed, “Rematch, you hairy fucker!” before charging headlong to meet him.

  “Sergeant,” the prince said, “the landing boat is right over there. I must insist we get me off this ship.”

  But Tala had only just joined this fight. There was no way she was abandoning it.

  She pointed to the man. “Beaky!” The crow-shade was smaller than most of the others on deck, but Tala liked his odds against any of them. He was an agile flier, a fierce fighter, and more daring than any shade Tala had ever seen. She’d seen him fly into the face of massed Tomodanese guns with only a grenade in his talons, and come out of it with barely a feather out of place.

  But when she ordered Beaky to take on this mysterious man, the only response she got from him was a wave of absolute dread.

  She turned around in disbelief. Beaky was ornery, but she’d never known him to be unresponsive. Yet here he was, completely frozen in place.

  “Beaky,” she said again. “We both have to fight if we’re going to get through this.”

  But Beaky was unwavering. Something about that man absolutely terrified him, and the surge of panic he sent through Tala’s head told her he wasn’t going anywhere.

  That’s not true, she reminded herself. It was always possible for a shadepacter to override their shade’s will. Most didn’t; it was widely considered a virtue to build a strong friendship with the creature who was the other half of your soul. And Tala found the idea particularly heinous. Desperation clawed at her, though. This was a dire situation, and she needed to fight…

  But she caught sight of the prince, with his sneering Tomodanese face. And as badly as she needed to fight, she needed him to be wrong about her.

  She
threw out a hand. “Return,” she muttered, and Beaky turned into a cloud of purple energy before absorbing into her body.

  “What just happened?” the prince said. “Why did you send your sl—shade away? And you named him Beaky?”

  “Your Brilliance,” Tala said, working her rifle bolt to chamber another round, “I need you to—”

  “Give him to me!” The man in the purple coat barreled forward, slavering like a wolf with a sheep in its sights. Shades fell in beside him: the wasp-shade, now healed. A cat-shade, its brindled hide slick with blood. The snapping-turtle-shade, inexorable as a green tide.

  And against him, she had two guns, a useless prince, and a shade who couldn’t fight.

  A soft voice in the back of her head whispered: That’s not all you have.

  She glanced at the few remaining crew and troops continuing the fight. At the sea, whose surface grew steadily closer as its darkness folded around the Marlin. At the man in the purple coat and his conquering army.

  She exhaled. There was no choice. “D—”

  In the corner of her vision, the prince moved like a blue blur. Before she even realized what was happening, her sidearm was out of its holster and in the Iron Prince’s hands. Its report boomed in her ears as the prince leveled it off to the side and fired it—not at the shades bearing down on them, or even at the man behind them. He’d fired it at the crate lashed to the railing, straining against the ropes.

  Tala was a truly superb markswoman, but splitting a rope with a single bullet would have been out of her league even in broad daylight, on a steady deck. Iron Prince Jimuro, however, was no mere marksman. He was Tomodanese, and with metal in hand his people could work terrible miracles.

  The rope snapped, and the crate thundered forward, aided by the sharp slant of the deck. The splintersoul threw himself clear just in time, but it bulldozed straight through the cat-shade and wasp-shade, reducing them to colorful bursts of magic. It ground hard against the snapping-turtle-shade, but its momentum shoved the creature into the Marlin’s wooden railing. The railing snapped under all that weight and inertia, and turtle and crate disappeared into the depths of the sea.

  “Hoy!” someone bellowed. Maki stood there, silhouetted by the raging fires behind him. He walked with a limp, and a thin trickle of blood issued from his mouth, but he was still on his feet. He leveled his machete at the splintersoul. “I’m gonna make you pay for what you did to my ship.”

  The splintersoul regarded him with impatience and contempt.

  “You don’t have what I want,” he rasped. But when he turned back toward Tala and the prince, Maki lunged forward, machete flickering like a tongue of steel flame. The splintersoul roared and sprang just out of the short blade’s reach.

  “Get him out of here!” Maki shouted as he pressed his attack. He whipped up his pistol, but the man in the purple coat lashed out with a high kick, and Maki’s shot echoed off into the night sky.

  Tala tried to aim a shot to help him, but he and the splintersoul were too close. And she couldn’t ignore the increasing number of shades that were moving to surround them all. “I’m not leaving you!” she shouted as she and the prince fired round after round into the massed ranks of shades.

  “We have our orders!” Maki shouted. “If he dies, all this was for nothing!”

  “Yes, what he said!” the Iron Prince added, firing off a shot that stopped a goat-shade in its tracks. “Two shots left.”

  “But…Maki…” Tala said, more to herself than anyone else. The ground felt unsteady beneath her, and not just because the ground at the moment was a sinking ship.

  Somehow, he heard her over the din of battle anyway. As he dipped beneath a high kick from the man in the purple coat, he grinned. “Wish you’d started calling me that sooner, Sarge! Now—”

  He stopped as the wasp-shade swooped down on him, angling a stinger the size of Tala’s forearm. But just before it could hit him, a white blur crashed into it: Sunny. Both shades spilled to the deck as Kapona—shoulders heaving, muscles lined with rivulets of blood and sweat—bulled her way into the fight. “Come on and fight me, you purple ponce!”

  As she and Maki set upon the splintersoul and his shades, Tala felt herself rooted on the spot. The whole war, she’d led from the front. The people who’d stepped onto the Marlin with her had done so because she’d led them there. To leave them now went against every fiber of her being.

  “Sergeant!”

  Especially if it was for the prince.

  She spat out a curse, then turned and ran for the boat. The prince had situated himself in it already, though he’d done nothing to unhitch it from the side of the ship. Tala rolled her eyes. The idiot.

  “Hurry!” the prince shouted. “We need—” Then he froze, his eyes wide.

  Tala had just enough time to comprehend the shape in the corner of her eye, but not enough time to defend herself as a spider-shade fell upon her from the rigging above. She tried her best to twist out of the way, but there was no mistaking the telltale pain up and down her arm as one of its fangs pierced her shoulder. It stung even harder as it hit bone, and she let out a shuddering gasp as a chill numbness spread beneath her skin like blood in water.

  She heard the familiar report of her own revolver. The spider-shade’s fang burst into a gaping wound as a bullet tore through the creature’s face. It squealed, and its disembodied fang disappeared in a burst of light, only to begin regrowing on the spider-shade’s face. Quickly Tala hefted her rifle and brought its butt down between the spider’s two sets of eyes, but even though it hit the chitin with a satisfying crunch, she could feel herself putting less force behind the blow than normal. Still, it was the opportunity she needed to run.

  The deck pitched hard again, and Tala nearly fell on her face as she sprinted to the boat. She didn’t jump the railing so much as throw herself over it, landing hard on the floor of the boat.

  “You certainly took your time!” the prince snapped. He tapped the metal hitch above the boat, and it immediately released the ropes suspending their vessel along the side of the Marlin. There was an unpleasant lurch as it fell, slapping hard against the roiling surface of the water.

  Tala’s gut churned as the venomous cold slowly spread up and down her arm. She eyed her wound warily. The prince had shot off the fang before the spider-shade could infect her with too much venom, but apparently some had gotten through. She sucked in an unsteady breath. She just had to hold on until they made landfall.

  She turned to yank the motor’s ripcord, only to see the prince already at the motor. He gave its surface a gentle stroke, and then it roared to life all by itself before settling back into a gentle purr. It kicked up a white wake behind it as the tiny boat sped away from the sinking, burning wreck that had once been the good ship Marlin.

  Tala strained to see the battle as they left it behind. Desperately, her eyes combed the fire for any silhouette of Maki. But all she saw was a swarming mass of shades, and she felt the pit drop out of the bottom of her stomach. If the shades weren’t disappearing, then the splintersoul still drew breath. And if he was still alive…

  That doesn’t mean Maki’s down, she admonished herself. Get a grip, soldier.

  “What happened with your—with Beaky back there?” the prince said. His glasses were flecked with seawater. Stray strands of his topknot had come loose, rippling in the wind. The folds of his kimono rippled open. “Why did he freeze?”

  Tala, who’d seen the prince freeze up at the sight of that spider-shade, bit back the obvious rejoinder. Now wasn’t the time for sniping, she decided. Not when her comrades were fighting and dying behind her.

  “I don’t know,” she said after a moment. “He won’t even go near them.”

  “I find the practice of slavery abhorrent,” said the prince, “but I have to wonder: What’s the point of having one if it won’t even obey you?” />
  Tala’s entire demeanor frosted over. She didn’t know whether the chill was genuine, or just the spider venom at work. She remembered her promise to shoot his ear off, but she needed him intact for now. That was the only thing saving him from a reign as Steel Lord Jimuro the Asymmetrical.

  Well, she thought with a woozy glance at her now-numb shoulder, that and the onset of fatigue from a wound brimming with spider venom.

  “Your Brilliance,” she said carefully. “Either we can both fight for our lives…or I can give you to him.”

  The prince shut up again and kept a hand on the motor.

  Tala turned back to gaze at the Marlin one last time. She’d meant to say a farewell of sorts, but when she looked, she saw a dozen flashes of light: the telltale signs of discorporating shades.

  Her jaw dropped open. He’d done it. Somehow, that handsome bastard Maki had done it.

  But then she saw someone leap over the side of the ruined hulk.

  Someone with a long, rippling purple coat.

  A great gray shape breached the water: one Tala knew all too well. She’d seen it pick off Tomodanese patrol boats, and devour any hostiles unlucky enough to get pushed over during a boarding party. It was Tivron, the fearsome hammerhead-shade from which Maki had gotten his nickname.

  And now, it had a new master.

  The splintersoul landed adroitly on Tivron’s back, wrapping his hand around a dorsal fin the size of himself. Tivron dipped back below the surface of the ocean so that only its rider was visible above the chop. They sped for the boat, and Tala knew perfectly well she could never outrun the scourge of the Sanbuna seas.

  She blinked, and fresh tears fell down her cheeks. Tivron had been a symbol of hope. Thanks to him, she and her countryfolk had swum safely in the same water that was instant death for the Tomodanese. Now his partner was gone, and Tivron was the enemy.

  “With this death, my line ends.” For a man staring down the threat of a giant shark with a homicidal maniac surfing on its back, Prince Jimuro spoke with remarkable calm. “An unbroken bloodline stretching back over three thousand years, since the First Spirit itself opened its great mouth and spat Tomoda onto the surface of the world. This is…not how I would’ve liked for it to happen.” He hefted her stolen gun experimentally. “Thank you for everything, Sergeant. I know we’re more foe than not, but you have a prince’s courtesy and gratitude.”