Powder And Shot

by Dragon Cobolt

  “What?” She wiped at her nose. “I’m not fucking crying!”

  “You’re not...” Liam said. “Look at your hands.”

  Liv looked down at her hands.

  They were streaked with blood.

  Her migraine pounded harder.

  “Oh...” she whispered. “Huh.”

  Liv didn’t remember much about the trip to Tethis. She didn’t remember leaving the temple, though she did recall stumbling against a wall in an alleyway. She didn’t remember crossing around one of the large markets near the center of town, but she did remember the pain of her migraine as the noise of the market stabbed into her temples. She didn’t remember arriving at the small house with a wizard’s shingle out front. She did remember the expression on the gobliness’ face.

  It started off with a cheery smile and an excited expression on seeing Liam. “Oh, hel-” she had started, then she saw Liv leaning against Liam. Liv had rolled her head back, opened her mouth to say something...

  Then all she remembered was sprawling on a low slab. Tethis’ room was filled with scrolls and books and tomes and a small glow-crystal that provided a pale illuminations. Tethis and Liam were whispering to one another – but they had forgotten Liv was an elf.

  “I may hate her,” Tethis whispered. “But I wouldn’t overlook a brain tumor. It’s not a tumor.”

  Liam sagged, almost hard enough to drop him into the waiting chair set against the wall. Liv started to glare at the white stucco that covered the walls. This place was so... plebeian. Tethis was the court wizard of Babylon and she lived in this tiny place?

  “Then what is going on?”

  “I don’t know,” Tethis said. She looked at the table. “By Bastet’s tits, I would kill for one of those MRI machines you’ve talked about.”

  Liam sighed. “Well, you can make illusions. Can you make an illusion that’s like an MRI machine?”

  “I can work on it.” Tethis sighed. “But it’ll take time to get it working. But I can keep her alive, make sure the pain doesn’t get too bad.”

  “And maybe stop being mad at her?” Liam arched an eyebrow.

  Liv felt the sudden urge to pick up the biggest tome next to her and throw it at his head. She didn’t need him to fight her battles for her. She could beat Tethis all by herself.

  Tethis looked to the side. “I still have nightmares, Liam. Four men, breaking into my place, stabbing me... do you know what it feels like to feel your life blood pouring out of your thigh?” She paused. “I spent months hanging between life and death and do you know what I saw? What I felt?”

  Liam was silent for a time.

  “Nothing.”

  Liv blinked and craned her head up, her ears perking.

  “Nothing?” Liam asked.

  “No... no scales. No feather. No Ammit. Nothing but blackness and... and... and nothingness.” She shuddered from her pointed eartips to her toes.

  Liam considered. “I’m no preacher. But, um, you weren’t dead. You were just being kept in stasis. No need for your soul to go anywhere, right?”

  “That’s... that’s what I tell myself,” Tethis whispered, her hands sliding along her shoulders, trying to warm herself. She sighed, then walked over to Liv. She looked down at the other woman, her head cocked to the side. She held out her palm, channeling magical healing into Liv. It felt warm and fuzzy, and it washed away some of the pain that lingered inside of her head. “So. Having fun listening in on us?”

  Liv scowled. “I wasn’t spying or anything. That’s more Fizit’s job.”

  “Yeah, you were more of a passive accessory,” Tethis shot back, her voice growing sharp.

  Liv felt the immediate instinct to strike back. That was how she had been trained – in social life and in combat. Instead, she bit her tongue and rolled her head to the side, not wanting to look at Tethis as she muttered. “Sorry.”

  Tethis was silent for a while.

  Then she sighed. “Well, I’ll get you something to drink. And keep working on an imaging spell.” Turning to Liam, her voice was slightly cheerier. “And you? You have a ship to get on, don’t you?”

  Liam laughed. “One more thing before I go!”

  “What?”

  “How’s the work on the cure for Meg?”

  Liv closed her eyes – letting the wash of words that came from Tethis move over her like a tide. She felt so very tired. So very sleepy. The lack of a migraine felt like a weight had been removed from her back and put, instead, on her eyelids. She closed her eyes tighter and let herself go boneless and limp. But as she tumbled deeper and deeper towards sleep, she was bothered.

  Tiny flashes and sparks and motes of color seemed to dance in the darkness of her closed eyes.

  She had no idea what they could possibly be.

  But she was dolefully certain that they couldn’t be anything good.

  ***

  “All hands, atten-shun!”

  The voice of the chief petty officer of the BSN Constitution boomed out and brought every sailor to attention as Liam stepped off the gangplank. He looked around the ship with a slow, casual glance...and inside, felt his inner nerd squealing. The Babylon Surface Navy was a motley collection of triremes and longboats purchased from the Aesir and Hellenes during times of peace, and new ships being put together by Babylonian shipwrights. A mixture of cultures and technologies and magics, from every part of Purgatory and from distant Earth, had all been used to create the Constitution.

  But the name had been all Liam.

  Like her earthly sister, the Constitution had three layer wooden hull. They hadn’t the same white oak as the American eastwest, but experimentation and exploration in Purgatory’s rain-forests had found something that could withstand cannonfire to the same level. But the true pride and joy was the fact that she did not have a single mast or sail. Her decks were dominated by turrets for archers, musketeers and cannons to be used, allowing her to fire in all directions, with her lower gun-decks providing the broadside punch that sailing ships of the 18th Century used.

  In the end, it was a terrifying amount of firepower, and the perfect sort of thing to sail through the Platonic Sea to the Pesdjeti kingdoms. There, they could pick up Anubis and bring him back home in style and safety.

  The captain of the Constitution was a short, leanly muscled goblin man who Liam had met a few times before – Harold of Thorheim had been Aesir before he had moved to Babylon, and retained the long ponytail that was common there. The rest of him was all Babylon; the blue uniform of the navy was cut neat and trim, and he saluted Liam with the discipline that Liam’s naval board had hammered into their crew.

  Liam himself had had no idea how to organize a navy but almost every admiral that he had managed to find for Babylon had adored every single bit of military history and protocol that had been stored on his iPhone’s broad range of books.

  He had simply let them do as they wished, gave them the money to accomplish it, and watched.

  “Welcome aboard, Free Lord,” Captain Harold said. “Do you wish a tour of the ship, or do you want to head to your state room directly?”

  “A tour, if you’d be so kind,” Liam said, trying to not grin like a loon.

  Harold, for his part, managed to restrain himself to a slight smile. But Liam could see the pride sparkling on his face as he walked Liam and his two bodyguards (hand picked by Fizit) along the decks of the ship. The crew went back to their duties the instant the boatswains started to blow their whistles, and the bustle of the ship filled Liam with heart. It wasn’t enough to have a cutting edge ship.

  It helped to have a cutting edge crew too.

  But then Harold led him to the steam engine and it took every bit of Liam’s two years of practice at being elected head of a growing city-state to not leap and shout: Fucking sweet!

  The steam engine was made of carved and fitted crystal (for the parts that needed to be sturdy) and brass (for the parts that needed to bend.) The boilers were a pair of large crystal spheres, and
the magic that had made them sturdy had also made them clear enough to see the water and steam within. The surging, boiling liquid writhed around a pair of small sparks of light that glowed brightly enough that it was hard to look directly at them. The steam rushed out to drive pistons and gears and connected levers.

  “And they never stop boiling?” Liam asked.

  “Never,” Harold said. “The real issue is when we need to sit still, like in port, or if we start running low on water for the boilers. Fortunately, it’s easy enough to get water in the Platonic Sea. Cleaning it with magic, then dumping it into the system is one of the tasks the crew has to do.”

  Liam shook his head in wonder.

  It was a simple idea. But to see it executed still made him giddy. Essentially, the watch stations that gave Babylon it’s perfect reconnaissance and communication had to be protected by spells as they floated so near to Purgatory’s miniature sun. Even when it was shut down during the night, that sun radiated immense amounts of heat.

  That heat was shunted from the watch stations…

  To at least two of these beads, sitting in the boilers.

  “It’s more like a nuclear submarine than a 20th Century steamship,” Liam muttered.

  “That’s what the designer told me,” Captain Harold said. “Though the more I learn about Earth, the more I think we need a lot of catching up.”

  Liam shook his head. “You know, for the first year I spent on Purgatory, I thought that making references to technology and TV shows that no one else had ever seen would drive me crazy.” He grinned at the goblin. “Now, I kind of miss it.”

  “I don’t,” Captain Harold said, chuckling. “I love those Drizzit books.”

  Liam snorted.

  The two of them turned, starting to head up and out of the engine room, leaving behind the fusion of Earth science and Purgatorian magic. Utterly unaware that, settled in the corner of the room, covered by a tarp and resting near a box of spare parts and machining tools, was a tiny keg of gunpowder. Affixed to the top was a dull, glowing crystal, etched with runes.

  The runes throbbed and glowed as, in the city of Babylon itself, the conspirators clustered around the key that was tied to the runes. It looked like a thin dart of crystal with a simple rune etched in the middle. The woman holding it breathed slowly in, then out.

  “This is for my son, you bastard,” she whispered.

  Standing at the door to their hiding room was the lilin who had brought them news of Liam’s planned expedition to Uten-Ha. She wore a dark cloak that concealed all of her face, save for a fanged grin. She withdrew a small bomb from her belt pouch and tossed back her hood.

  Agent Rao, one of Fizit’s oldest and best spies, tossed the bomb casually onto the table. It sparked once and exploded with a roar and a flash of light as Cross Guard kicked in the door, shouting and bellowing. Conspirators staggered and clutched at their faces. Many were clubbed to the ground. Others were kicked.

  Rao stepped over, looking around. The bomb had been made to destroy magic as well as blind, laced with null-crystal. She saw bits of shattered crystal from the bomb casing and the key, spreading across the scorched table top. She nodded, then grabbed the blinded woman who had been holding the key. The woman coughed, gagged, swallowed to clear her throat, then choked out: “You bitch!” Her voice sounded as raspy as if she had eaten sandpaper. Considering she had been facing a flashbomb filled with null-powder, Rao couldn’t blame her.

  “Hey, think of it this way,” Rao said, clapping restraints on her wrists. “At least your judge will be even handed.”

  And she shoved the conspirator to the door, with the rest of the group of guild masters and disgruntled civilians.

  Unaware that the key rested, not in fragments on the table, but deep in the woman’s belly.

  Safe.

  Waiting.

  Primed.

  Four

  The Morrigan’s Kiss sailed into Melos with its standards flapping in the wind and its crew whooping, jeering and hollering abuse at the other ships that had cast up against the harbor. The world of Purgatory had changed in uncountable ways over the past two years, but Melos remained as Melos ever had been: hideous, ramshackle, prone to burning down, and the only place that Kailey and Quinn could find true peace. Quinn leaned against her lover as Kailey caressed her hair. The Tuatha demigoddess looked like she was already counting coins in her coffers, her grin wide and greedy. But Quinn was more contemplative.

  “We’re not rich yet,” she said.

  “Mmmhmm.”

  “We’re going to need to suck up to Pleon the Fat,” Quinn muttered, her fingers touching one another in a fluttering pattern – tip to tip. She pursed her lips. “You should do that.”

  “Because I can throw him through a wall?” Kailey asked, perking up.

  “Mm, yes, that,” Quinn said, then squirmed. “Come on. Let me up.”

  Kailey did no such thing. Instead, she held Quinn closer to her chest and kissed her cheek, then her neck, then captured one of her pointed ears. She sucked and nibbled, then, finally, released her. Quinn stood and adjusted her shift with a quiet humph. But she was smiling as she walked off, heading towards the forecastle of the Kiss. As she stomped off, Thaddious bellowed orders at the crew who were casting lines to the docks, while others leaped off the ship to tie down. As they worked, Kailey’s sharp, sharp eyes spotted a standard being borne by a slave with broad shoulders and bronzed skin. He was standing beside an open topped sedan chair carried by a quartet of ugly looking lizards.

  It announced the emergence of Pleon the Fat from his little fortress at the heart of Melos.

  Kailey sighed.

  The lizards moved with steady, ground chewing lopes that didn’t disturb their master and owner. Their slave collars glittered in the brilliant sun, and were all the more obvious when they knelt to the ground and bowed their heads forward so that they could hold position without their arms wavering. By the time Kailey reached the edge of the Kiss, Pleon the Fat was already speaking.

  Pleon the Fat was an example of what pure, pig-headed willpower could do to a man. Scarred and burned in some long buried vendetta, Pleon had cast off his name and his old allegiances and embraced the character of a pirate dockmaster. But what was most impressive was his single-minded obsession with gluttony. He was eating grapes as he spoke, spitting seeds into a metal bowl held by the standard bearing slave – and the efforts of his hard work bore fruit in the folds of fat that surrounded him, the bulbous swell of his neck, the rolls of his cheek.

  It was all the more impressive that Pleon was an elf.

  “Well, well, well-” spit, tink! “-if it isn’t my favorite sapphic marauders-” spit, tink! “-returned from bringing down the wrath of the one true god on my-” spit, tink! “-poor head. Oh, what words do you have to excuse this trouble, this woe, this-” spit, tink!

  “Have tales of our exploits traveled so fast?” Kailey asked, trying to sound polite. She was worried her disgust was curling her lips against her will.

  Pleon grinned. The combination of obesity with the normally narrow frame and lithe built of an elf was nearly as off putting as the glistening grape-juice that dribbled from his stained purple lips. But none of it had anything on the ugly burn scar that covered his forehead.

  “The world’s curvature did not hide it. Lord Vanderbilt isn’t the-” spit, tink! “-only man with a telescope.”

  Kailey ducked her head forward. Her mind worked quickly, calculating the angles. She grinned slowly, then lifted her head up, already about to speak. Then the hatch to the cargo hold burst open and Quinn thrust her head out, gasping. “Kailey! Kailey! Kailey! I figured out what the torcs do!”

  She ran forward – then skidded to a stop when she saw Pleon.

  Pleon spat another seed into the bowl.

  “H-Hello Pleon,” Quinn said, smiling.

  “Hello, my pretty.” Pleon made a slick, slurping noise as he licked his lips. “Are you two lovely, lovely women going to kiss?”


  “We’re not part of Arlan’s troupe,” Kailey said, jerking her chin at the nearest brothel on the island. “And we’re not here just to unload loot. We’re here to offer you a chance to never have to worry about bribing patrol boats again. Never having to rebuild after having the island burned to the ground around you again.”

  Pleon’s almost ludicrously avaricious facade slipped for a moment. For that moment, Kailey could see the cold-snake focus that had led him to build Melos, then rebuild it again after Zeus had sent a small flotilla to burn him out. He leaned slowly back in his sedan chair, the weight shifting on the backs of his slaves.

  “Go on.”

  Kailey grinned, then jerked her chin. “You’ll need to come up here to see it. Because if we just told you, you won’t believe us.”

  In the end, Pleon came up the gangplank on his own two feet, flanked by his slaves, each of them bearing a bared kopesh sword, save for the one who carried his standard. That one had the extravagance of a flintlock pistol – clearly Hellenic made by the shoddy quality of the firing mechanism. That wouldn’t keep it from killing anyone stone dead, and it made Kailey subtly push Quinn behind her back as she gestured Pleon to the cargo hatch. The slaves glowered at her crew, who glowered right back. Pleon though waddled forward, and then stepped down the hatchway.

  After Kailey went first, of course.

  Once they were in the hold, Kailey held up a mage light and Pleon’s eyes widened in his rounded cheeks.

  “Oh, by the gods...” he whispered.

  “This was what the Monodeists were carrying,” Kailey said.

  Despite his clear shock, Pleon quickly went straight to brass tacks. “You can’t possibly use all of these guns, not on the Kiss. I can take all but, say, four of them off your hands in exchange for, hmm, free use of port for a year and a day.”

  Kailey snorted and then spat on the deck. “Like hell.”

  The slaves, who had finished clambering down the hatch, growled at that.

  Pleon waved his hand to silence them. “For your life.”

  “We’re keeping twenty four guns,” Quinn said, reaching up to brush some of her luminously white hair behind one ear. “Twelve for a side.”