by Simon Archer
My eyes, protected by a second, clear eyelid, adjusted quickly to the dimness, sparkles of light penetrating from the dim, dawn sky above, and giving me more than enough to see by.
I could see in the darkest depths I could reach, where the pressure would crush the body of any air-breather without the gift of my kiss.
My heart quickened at the thought of Captain Bardak, and I burned to give him the gift of my kiss. He was something else, larger than life, with a strength about him that I’d never seen and yearned to taste. Perhaps I would offer, and soon.
I extended the finned spurs from my ankles and kicked off in the direction of Tiny. He was already tearing at the timbers of the sinking ship to get at the splashing, screaming prey, and I swam to join him. I was hungry and tired from singing in the thin air. Meat would certainly be welcome.
The blood-smell filled the water as I approached, Tiny must have managed to secure at least one of the promised feast. I paused and floated as I cast around. Above, several pairs of legs kicked madly, splashing towards the island’s shore. The blood and thrashing would soon call the grey ghosts of death, the sharks, with their fearless, soulless tiny minds and jaws that snapped and tore.
To see them in their feeding dance was beautiful and terrible, even for such as I. They would avoid my friend and me, compelled by my magic and his sheer size and invulnerability.
A corpse drifted by, then another. Not all the sailors had survived The Hullbreaker’s ram.
Like all my kind, though, I preferred warm, fresh meat. I passed the dead and swam for the surface. A moment later, I picked a straggler and yanked him down. He thrashed, of course. They always did, unless I had sung them to sleep or called them to the water with the promise of my body.
Dragging them down, though, was something else. It set my blood to boiling and stirred my hunger to new heights. Hunting, killing, and devouring were a thrill, and I was a predator of the highest order.
Bubbles filled the water from the desperate man’s struggles, and his eyes bugged out frantically as they lit on me in the underwater gloom. At the moment, he paused at the vision of my beauty. I grabbed his head then and kissed him, releasing a touch of my magic to fill his straining lungs with water and soothe his struggles. A siren’s kiss could kill, even upon land, filling their victim’s lungs with seawater, or it could grant the ability to breathe beneath the waves. Both were for hunting but to satisfy different kinds of needs.
The doomed sailor stilled, and I wrapped my arms and legs around him, our bodies sinking, entwined, as he drowned quietly in my embrace.
Then, I feasted.
When I was done, I let the remains go free and sprawled out on my back to stare up at the flashes of light from the now-sunlit waves. The sharks had come while I had been busy, darting hither and yon between me and the surface as they took their prey. Tiny had stilled, a dark blot the size of a ship off to my left and a hundred yards or so distant. He grumbled contentedly to himself and murmured a soft song. We were both pleased and well-fed.
I smiled and ran a hand over my swollen belly. It wouldn’t be so for long, but I had devoured perhaps half my weight in meat, and I was content for now to rest… and to ponder about these past hours.
What possessed me to bond with this orcish Captain? He was strong, determined, fearless, and, I had to admit, attractive. The smell of sex had been intoxicating when I’d left the lagoon to investigate. Had he and the witch even known their acts would call to me?
Whether they had or had not, it ultimately didn’t matter. They had been gracious, pleasant, and respectful. Rare qualities to be sure, and the pair had certainly distinguished themselves from the countless petitioners and victims that had filled my long life.
I smiled and closed my eyes, focusing inwardly on my heartbeat and the flow of water through my mouth and across my gills. There were so many smells, but blood was the most prominent as the sharks did their grim work.
One, a large male with pale silver-gray hide, swam down close to me and hovered, gazing at me with a dead, black eye while his jaws gaped and flexed. I returned his look implacably, one predator to another. He was the one who gave way and vanished into the darkness with a powerful sweep of his tail.
How long had it been since I’d given myself to a male of any species? Longer than I would like, though I still could feel the last one’s touch and caresses even now. I had happened upon a shipwrecked man, floating half-dead on a scrap of wood just over the horizon from Old Man’s Isle. My belly was full, and I was young and curious, so I swam him to shore and watched over him.
When he awoke, he charmed me with his ways and thanked me profusely for his life. He was a young man, human, with a will and a wit to him that made me question myself and the ways of my kind. Humans feared or hunted sirens, as we hunted them, luring them with our songs and bodies to sate our lusts and our bellies.
This one, William, had been different. He treated me like a goddess, and we made love many times. I shared things with him that I had never shared with even my sisters. I taught him many secrets and showed him many treasures. I even showed him my greatest pride, my comb, though I couldn’t bring myself to tell him what it was for.
That was a good thing for, in the end, he betrayed me. While I hunted one day, William took my comb and fled. With it, he stole that piece of my soul that I’d placed within it and vanished back among his own kind, then out to sea, far from my lagoon.
In the years that followed, I hunted him with Tiny’s aid, but there was no trail, no hint of William to be found. It was as if he had vanished, taking my secrets with him. Despite it all and despite the urgings of my sisters, I could never bring myself to hate him… but I also vowed never to let myself love again.
William Markland had wounded me to the core, and I did not want to face anything like that ever again.
The orc captain, though… My heart started to pound, and a strange, warm feeling crept through my lower belly. I couldn’t help but want him. Just from the brief impression I’d had of the man, he struck me as someone worth setting aside my old fears for.
I needed him to keep his word, though, and find my comb. With it, I would help him rule the seas, and maybe, just maybe, if it were his hand that struck down my thieving lover, I would finally be free.
Oh, William, how I wish I could hate you.
Slowly, I let my body rise from its resting place in the silty seafloor and let out a series of clicks followed by a long, plaintive moan. It was time to earn our keep, though the captain hadn’t asked it of us. I wanted to take advantage of the speed Tiny and I could swim at in order to scout the distance for any other Admiralty ships.
I did know the Admiralty. All of my sisters and the other children of the seas had dealings with them, one way or another. They recruited sea witches and sirens, bound merfolk and selkies as spies and scouts, and generally tried to dominate everything. Them, I could hate.
Perhaps the men Bardak and Mary had killed were on their way to bind me. I hadn’t seen any sign of magic with them, but the one I’d killed had seemed to know more than he was willing to let on. He hadn’t even tasted all that good, either.
I swam up and situated myself in my nook on Tiny’s shell as he descended to meet me, called by my sounds, then we set off, his massive flippers propelling us through the sea at a speed many times that of the fastest sailing ship.
It would take the Captain and his ships a while to resupply, even with all the help Jetsam was likely able to offer. We couldn’t finish off the one ship, the one Bardak said belonged to the Commodore, as it was defended by magic. Once I had my comb, though, the little witches and their hexes would be nothing to me. I would be the goddess of the seas that I was meant to be.
A dreamy smile touched my lips as I let myself relax. Sight, even for me, was limited underwater. Sound, though, traveled for incredible distances. Once we were far enough away from Old Man’s Isle, I’d be able to scan for vessels heading in our direction and give a warning if neces
sary. Like the dolphins and whales, I could actively make sounds that would help me navigate my surroundings in the dark, but this listening was different. Sailing ships made sounds of their own, slaps against the waves, the creak of timbers and the rattle of chains. I could listen for these sounds without making any sort of noise myself.
We picked the most likely direction by parallelling and passing the Commodore’s limping vessel. His men and his witches were hard at work, and even I could feel the spells being used to patch the vessel and return it to, as the air-breathers would say, ship-shape, whatever that meant.
All ships were ship-shaped, yes?
Whales sang in the distance, their songs so much like those of my sisters and me. It would be easy to just lose myself and swim with the gentle giants for a time, so long as I could keep Tiny from making a meal of one. He was a good friend, but he could, and would, eat anything he could bite.
Behind us, the faint sound of creaking timbers and slap of water against wood faded as we drew away from the damaged ship and plunged into deeper water. There were anomalies in the currents and a faint tingling of residual magic in the water as we approached what would have been the outer edge of the great storm my allies… my friends… feared.
We were about a half-day out for us, perhaps three or four days for a fast ship, and near a very large island when I began to notice specific sounds that I recognized. There were ships, true, but there was more. I pitched my voice to carry no further than Tiny’s ears, then sang for him to stop and surface while I closed my eyes and focused all my attention on listening.
There it was! Merfolk, lots of them, were coming this way, preceding a large number of ships. Were they friend or foe?
Once my head broke the surface, I forced the water out of my chest through my gill-slits and took a long, deep breath of the clean, salty air. An odd, very lost seagull cried its lonely call high above, body silhouetted against the pale gray, cloud-filled sky. The sounds vanished in the air, but as I peered towards the distant horizon, dark shapes resolved out of the demarcation between sea and sky, looming between me and the island beyond.
There were the ships I had heard.
Aside from the magic of our songs, all sirens could work magic with water. Our skills, of course, varied wildly, but I had some talent left that I hadn’t lost with my comb.
I mixed some seawater with my spit and stretched it between my circled thumb and forefinger, then peered through the filmy lens at the distant ships. This farsee, as I called it, let me see them much better. I think it worked much like what the sailors called a spyglass.
My stomach dropped with what I saw. Dozens of ships rode the waves between me and something that seemed to be half sailing ship and half city. It was a massive thing that shone in the wan sunlight. Where most ships had perhaps two or three masts, this vessel had several times that, all square-rigged. Like the rest of the fleet, it rode at anchor, but it sat near the island, just out of the shallows, and was surrounded by barges and scaffolds. There was an unfinished look about the ship, too, despite its fearsome appearance.
Every vessel was armed to the teeth with cannons, and many of them, the large ship included, bore rams on their prows akin to the one on The Hullbreaker. From the tallest mast of every ship flew banners I knew from my years in the islands. They were the flags of the Imperial Admiralty, and they were too close for my comfort.
“We have to warn them!” I shouted to Tiny. “Dive, my friend!”
As if understanding my sudden panic, the Dragon Turtle sank silently beneath the waves and turned to set off unerringly back towards Old Man’s Isle and, I hoped, my Captain. Whatever that city-ship was, it felt dangerous, and more, there was a small army of merfolk with it. Had they finally joined completely with the Admiralty? If so, then it was only a matter of time before the seas in the archipelago were truly conquered, and there was no place left to hide.
In the face of such danger, my comb could wait.
16
“What’s our course, Cap’n?” Kargad asked.
Three of us, Shrike, Kargad, and I, were in The Hullbreaker’s War Room, poring over one of my faded maps of the archipelago. This was one of my newer ones, drawn, perhaps, during the last ten years or so and copied many times.
I grunted and scanned over the map. There were over a hundred islands to the archipelago, with about a quarter of those having towns of any real size. Surprisingly, though, only a handful was home to Imperial loyalists while the rest were free towns.
Imperial power, though, was such that taxes and tributes were collected by the Admiralty from among every town in the islands. In return, the fleets provided protection. Though often, the Empire took more than the pirates.
Admiral Layne and his fleet ruled the seas with an iron fist. Commodore Arde was his right hand and his most loyal lackey, a lackey we’d just given a black eye. The dog would limp off to his master and whine, then the master would take his stick and come out to the yard.
I didn’t know how long we had until the Admiral sailed out to war in his city-ship, The Pale Horse. It was just being built at the time at the largest shipyard in the archipelago and was a gargantuan thing, bigger than the largest man o’ war with enough sails and cannons and witchy magic to outfit a fleet all by itself.
“Layne usually anchors here.” I tapped one of the larger islands, a good three days sail from Old Man’s Isle. “At Avione. It’ll take the Commodore a few days to reach port there and report. We want to be as far away from the island as we can be by then. If he manages to roust the Admiral, he’ll stop at nothing to send us down below.”
Shrike laughed mirthlessly. “I’ve heard o’ that ship, The Pale Horse. Bill used t’ say Ol’ Layne sold his black soul to have it built, an’ that every board had been christened with blood.”
“Fear is for humans.” Kargad snorted and folded his arms across his broad chest.
I held up a hand as Shrike bristled a bit at the implied insult. “We cannot afford to do this now,” I growled. “We’ve got two ships with skeleton crews against the strongest fleet in the Empire. Fortunately, last I heard, The Pale Horse wasn’t ready to sail, yet. Hopefully, it still isn’t.”
Kargad scowled and looked down, chagrined. “Aye, Cap’n.”
“Aye, Cap’n,” Shrike said at the same time.
“Good,” I grumbled. “Now, let’s get back to the matter at hand. Shrike, ye said ye knew where to find Bloody Bill’s treasure. Ye also said Bill escaped with his witch when the Admiralty took ye.”
If we could reach the treasure and stay a few steps ahead of the Admiral, my plan to outfit a fleet of ships to fight could become a reality. Enough gold could give us a fighting chance against even the Admiralty, and if we could wrest Ligeia’s comb from the man, we’d have an even greater advantage.
“Here.” Shrike nodded as he pointed to a spot on the map off the shore between a large island and the wild northeastern shore of Milnest. “The Aigon Straits was where Arde caught up with us. We’d stopped here, here, here, and here on the way, Bill goin’ ashore with a band o’ hirelings from the gutters each stop.” Each time, he pointed to a different isle.
“Every time he returned, he came back alone, an’ without whatever chests or sacks he’d taken with him,” Shrike continued, leaning over the table with both hands on it. “We didn’t care, Cap’n. Bloody Bill paid us well, but, ye know pirates. The moment we left his service, we’d go lookin’ for his gold. We could start at one o’ these, methinks.”
“No,” I said with a shake of my head. “Tell me, Mister Shrike, where did Captain Bill Markland like to hole up when the storms came?” Shrike and Kargad fell silent, eyes on me as I let a grin creep over my face. “Ye get it now. We go and lean on Bloody Bill Markland himself, an’ he shows us the way to that treasure on each an’ every damned island in the chain.”
The two were silent for a few moments longer, then they both started to laugh. That laughter was cut off when someone suddenly pounded on the
door and yelled, “Cap’n! Yon siren’s back an’ screamin’ bloody murder! She’s callin’ for ye!”
My brow furrowed, and I gave a quick glance at both my crewmen before I headed to the door and out to the deck. The crewman who’d called me beckoned and pointed off the port side. I rushed over and gazed down to see Ligeia, perched on Tiny’s nose.
“Captain!” she cried. “They’re close!”
“Hold up, lass,” I called down. “Who be comin’?”
She paused a moment, and the Dragon Turtle snorted. I reached out my hand, and Tiny stretched his neck up a bit further so Ligeia could take my hand and clamber onto the ship.
“A fleet,” she said after a deep breath. “With a great white ship, and an army of merfolk.”
“Where?” I demanded as I started for the War Room with the siren in tow. “I’ve a map, and I need ye to show me where ye were.”
Ligeia nodded breathlessly, water ran out of her gills as they flexed, puddling on the deck as we hurried below to meet Kargad and Shrike coming out.
“What’s going on, Cap’n?” Kargad asked.
“Ligeia says she’s seen a fleet close by, along with Layne’s monster ship. She’s going to show me where,” I replied, pushing past them with her hot on my heels.
They fell in behind us, and soon we were all poring over the map. Water from Ligeia’s hair dripped on it, but fortunately, ink meant for documents at sea didn’t run if it got wet. “We’re here,” I said, placing a finger on Old Man’s Isle. “Which direction did ye swim?”
“That way,” she indicated.
I traced my finger along the map. “Can ye tell me where ye saw this fleet?”
“It was off the coast of an island, a very large one. The smaller ships were surrounding the big one, and the merfolk were below everything.”
