Driftmetal II

by J. C. Staudt

  Thorley gave me a grim smirk.

  I handed him the blade, carefully. “If anyone else has it in mind to bother you, this thing should convince them not to.”

  I trudged up the hill, scanning the ground for signs that the earth had been recently disturbed. The burial site was as plain as the tusks on a ridgeback’s face: a circular patch of loose dark brown in a sea of dense tan. I dropped to my knees and began to dig, searching the sky from time to time for any sign of our approaching liberation. There was none for several minutes.

  Many of the villagers had run down into the canyon to mourn their loved ones and tend to the casualties. Rindhi was trying to reason with those who were left—and having limited success, by the looks of it. I didn’t know what he could’ve possibly been saying to keep them from tearing him apart, but for now, it seemed to be working.

  I saw Thorley and Eliza begin making their way up the hill toward me, guiding an ambivalent Nerimund along behind them. As long as the Galeskimmer showed up eventually, we were going to be fine. If not, we were going to be a lot poorer—and maybe a lot deader, too.

  By the time the three crewmembers reached my position, Rindhi’s talks of peace were no longer going so well. Ridgebacks were milling about him, shoving him around and getting rough with him. I had to give the guy credit—he was braver than I would’ve been if I’d had the misfortune to be born a Mani-Panian.

  A moment later, I looked up to see the surging crowd swallow him. I saw his body fly up over the rooftops, tossed into the air like a child’s plaything. There was a sickening splorch as he landed—not on the ground, but in the midst of a dozen tusked ridgebacks who began to fling him back and forth like a volleyball. When his body went limp, they lost interest and let him fall to the dust.

  The raucous herd began to weave through the village toward us, their temperament now more reminiscent of wild beasts than ever. The pack dispersed when they came to the hillside, devolving into a monstrous, thundering stampede. They were a fearsome sight, roaring and howling like savages, Rindhi’s blue-violet blood spattered like war paint across their faces.

  “Dig,” I shouted, still on my hands and knees.

  Nerimund stood there chewing his finger, staring at the stampede as if he thought the ridgebacks might forget we were there and take a detour around us. Eliza and Thorley dropped and began to scoop handfuls of loose dirt aside as fast as they could.

  “Why are we doing this instead of getting out of the way?” Eliza yelled.

  “Because I’ve got one more trick for these animals,” I said. “Trust me. Dig.”

  We dug until my eyes beheld the glorious sight of burlap wrapped in twine. I heaved out the first bag of gravstone, searching the sky again and finding it severely lacking in Galeskimmers. I did have another trick up my sleeve, but it would only work if the boat got here soon. I only had so many sleeves.

  From the space between the seventh and eighth ribs on my left side, I slid a six-inch-long metal rod. It was dark and coppery, with a sliding door along one side and a switch beneath. I drove the rod into the ground on the front side of the burial patch, slid open the door, and rested my thumb on the switch.

  The ridgebacks were almost to us. I could feel the ground shaking under the crush of their hooves, but I remained still and stared straight ahead. I waited a long time—or what felt like it—until the moment when the distance was just right. Then I turned and spoke loudly to my companions. “Everybody duck, please.”

  They did, and I flicked the switch.

  A blue dome of energy flickered to life around us, a miniature version of the protective cracklefield around Pyras. The first three ridgebacks slammed into the dome and convulsed backward in stunned surprise, as if they’d just run into a sheet of electrified plexiglass. The next few wised up, slowing before they arrived and trying their weapons on the barrier instead. The weapons fared no better, of course, and the physics of electrical conduction made sure those ridgebacks didn’t enjoy themselves either.

  I, on the other hand, was enjoying this very much. But Chaz had only been able to put a few minutes’ worth of charge into the tiny device, so I knew we didn’t have long.

  “What did Sable say when you talked to her?” I asked, when Thorley and I had lifted the last bag of gravstone from its grave.

  “She said she’d be here as soon as she could.”

  “That may not be soon enough,” I said. “Quick poll. How does everyone feel about fighting off a horde of ridgebacks with their bare hands?”

  “It would seem the odds are against us,” said Thorley.

  “Heavily,” Eliza chimed in.

  “Heavy odds,” said Nerimund.

  “Wait a minute,” I said.

  Nerimund had given me an idea.

  The cracklefield generator was a stripped-down version of the ones Vilaris and Blaylocke had equipped their hoverbikes with. When I’d shot my grapplewire at them, the cracklefield had drawn it in like a magnet. But the cracklefield hadn’t been the only thing at work. The hoverbikes had also had gravstone clinkers.

  I’d made plenty of clinkers in my time, including the ones I’d fashioned while I was fixing the Galeskimmer on our way here. I didn’t have time to make a clinker, but I did have the next best thing. “Hand me a chunk of gravstone,” I said.

  Thorley spun open one of the bags and tossed me a fist-sized piece.

  The ridgebacks were pacing around outside the cracklefield, either wise enough to know it couldn’t last forever, or stubborn enough to wait that long. With an underhand swing, I sent the gravstone down the slope and watched as it tumbled toward the edge of the blue dome.

  The stone hit the barrier and stopped. The cracklefield warped in around it, latching onto some unseen tension, like a finger touched to a stream of running water. Then the whole dome brightened, and it was as if the sky had just turned three shades bluer.

  Fun things started to happen. The ridgebacks’ armbands and necklaces began to pull away from their bodies and snap off. Their piercings ripped out of their faces and flew toward the dome, sticking there like flies to glue paper. And most importantly, their clubs twisted away and escaped their hands, drawn to the dome by their iron spikes.

  There was a reason this stuff was the rarest and most expensive element on the planet. Even I hadn’t discovered all of its many uses yet. The outside of the dome now looked like a blue lollipop after it’s been rolled across a dirty floor. The ridgebacks were astonished, but they knew there was little they could do. Some tried to wrest their things away from the cracklefield, but it reminded them of its faculties in no uncertain terms.

  “Now give me my winch back,” I told Thorley.

  He handed it over. I snapped it into place and closed my arm. Then, the worst possible thing that could’ve happened, did.

  The cracklefield winked out.

  4

  Everything that had been magnetized to the dome crashed to the ground.

  I wasted no time, taking up a spiked club in each hand and getting to work. I heard Thorley activate the augurblade behind me and join the fray. The clubs were nowhere near as effective as the augurblade, but they worked well enough against my unarmed foes. They also had the benefit of being vastly superior to Two-Pigs’s arm.

  The ridgebacks were aggressive, despite being without their clubs. After all, they did have weapons on their faces. They flooded into the empty space which had formerly resided within the dome, charging us with their tusks as they had done with Rindhi a few minutes prior.

  Something buffeted me from behind. I took a second bashing an instant later from the rear left side. The ridgebacks cut across our midst like brush strokes across a painting, ramming us from every direction and following through with their tusks. I tried to keep up, but even the medallion couldn’t afford me the reflexes I needed to anticipate so many attacks coming from so many different sources.

  I felt my legs leave the ground as a sturdy pair of tusks lifted me. I landed on the high ridge of my ass
ailant’s backbone, then rolled forward and felt the broad muscular neck fling me into the air like it was a flipper in a pinball machine. Before I knew it, I was flailing on my back, looking up into the sun as I got tossed around on an unstable bed of sharp objects.

  The Galeskimmer sailed into view over the canyon wall, Sable at the helm and Mr. McMurtry on one of the four-pounders. Thomas was clinging to the gunnel, looking green in the face and less than pleased to be aboard. Dennel swiveled his sights, trying to find a good target. When he realized the cannon wasn’t going to accomplish much in a situation like this, he gave up and drew his cutlass.

  Sable brought the Galeskimmer in low, having trouble, with no one to man the sails and no turbines to control the boat’s speed. The turbines were mounted, alright—I could see the rectangle of clean wood and rivet holes where they’d removed the old ones—but the engines weren’t running. Maybe they hadn’t had time to flight check before Thorley bluewaved them.

  Meanwhile, I was being punched full of holes myself. What had started out like a bit of rough crowd surfing now made me feel like I was the birdie in a game of badminton being played with meat tenderizers. I only put up with this for a few seconds, of course, before I triggered my wrist spikes and began giving the ridgebacks a taste of their own medicine. I hoped Thorley and the others were faring better than I was.

  Sable slowed the Galeskimmer but kept her aloft, hesitant to set down in such hostile territory. Dennel vaulted over the gunnel and into the thick of things. I saw him slashing his way toward me, and felt my living trampoline begin to dissipate as the ridgebacks shied away from my spikes and shifted their focus onto their new adversary.

  The bottom dropped out, and I fell into a sea of hooves and clouded dust. Dennel was a better swordsman than I would’ve given him credit for, though it was hard to have a proper duel with enemies who preferred charging to swordplay. The ridgebacks were starting to overwhelm Mr. McMurtry, even as his towering form made its way toward me through the dust.

  I picked myself up and felt the medallion reroute pulses of pain through other avenues of my body, as if it were trying to make me forget I was hurt. Sable finally let the Galeskimmer stutter to rest further up the hillside. The canyon was prone to sudden gusts of wind, and I imagined it must’ve been harder than it looked to keep her steady without engines. Not that it had looked easy.

  No sooner had Sable landed than ridgebacks began to clamber up the sides of the hull. I followed them, knowing Thomas would get along about as well as a lost sheep surrounded by a pack of wolves. When I got to the deck, it was even worse than that.

  He was running from them, scrambling around the ship like a scared cat. The pansy didn’t even try to defend himself; no blunt objects used as improvised weaponry, no desperate wild swings or kicks. Just sheer terror and more crying than any grown man should have a right to do.

  Sable drew her cutlass and swung down from the quarterdeck, trying to save Thomas. She landed in the midst of the oncoming swarm and cut them down as they came, but she couldn’t reach him in time. He scurried to the starboard railing—the uphill side of the boat, facing away from the village—and froze for a moment as he considered the distance to the ground. He flung himself over the side just as the first wave of ridgebacks arrived.

  “You couldn’t have gotten here like ten minutes ago?” I asked Sable.

  “Sure, if you’d bluewaved us ten minutes earlier. I was halfway through filling my chamber pot when we got Thorley’s call.”

  “I did not need to know that many details,” I said. The spiked clubs I had picked up back on the ground had long since found their way into things they were not coming back out of, so I snatched up a pair of belaying pins and started clunking ridgebacks on their flat ugly skulls.

  I worked my way over to Sable and put my back to hers. The ridgebacks were every bit as tough as they looked, and I soon found myself having to do more dodging than hitting. Hemmed in on the main deck, I was starting to lose my advantage. Then I remembered my solenoid. “Watch your back for a minute,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

  I launched myself toward the yardarm, but only got high enough to grab on with my hand. I let go of both belaying pins and hung there, clinging for dear life. When I looked down at the ship, something strange was happening. Nerimund, the little duender whose purpose on the crew I’d been wondering about since I came aboard, was finally making himself useful.

  Dead things were coming alive. Not dead people or dead ridgebacks—dead things. Wooden clubs were getting up and walking on spindly little legs. My belaying pins went soft and began to slither like snakes. Even the ship itself was waking up.

  I saw Thomas emerge from the boat’s shadow as he scrambled up the hillside, pursued by the handful of ridgebacks who’d followed him overboard. He was going to get himself gored if he didn’t start moving a little faster.

  Down near the village, Nerimund was standing with his head bowed and his arms spread wide, the most intentional pose I’d ever seen him strike. Eliza stood behind him as the ridgebacks swarmed in, hugging herself and flinching every time one of them came too close. I began to hear their hoarse, braying screams as all the little wooden creatures crawled and slithered over them, wrapping themselves around necks and limbs to snap bones and constrict windpipes. Curved planks whipped out from the hull to clothesline others as they ran by.

  I pulled myself onto the yardarm and looked down again. Rifts were opening in the Galeskimmer’s decking to catch hooves and snap ankles, bringing the affected ridgebacks to their knees. Sable strode across the deck, hacking away at the trapped beasts. The planks that had moved to hinder the ridgebacks smoothed out and solidified beneath her feet.

  The ship was starting to look like furniture that had been left out in the rain. But the warped, knotted planks began to let go as the ridgebacks died, resuming their curves and mending their straight lines, even tighter than before. Up the hill, Thomas was still running from his pursuers, who’d been too far from the ship to be affected by Nerimund’s weird hocus-pocus. Down the hill, Nerimund collapsed.

  I slid down the mast and crossed the deck to the railing, giving Thorley the hurry-up signal to start throwing me the bags of gravstone. He heaved them up one by one, then retrieved Nerimund and came aboard with Eliza and Dennel. Another crowd of ridgebacks was making its way through the village toward us, mourners coming back for vengeance.

  When Sable saw the condition Nerimund was in, she dropped to her knees and took the little duender in her arms, stroking his clammy forehead with a blood-caked hand. She looked up with tears in her eyes. “Take the controls, Mr. McMurtry. Thorley, hoist the main.”

  I manned one of the four-pounders, even though Sable hadn’t ordered me to. I lit off a shot in the direction of the horde, if only to cause a stir and buy us a few more seconds. The cannonball missed the crowd and ripped through the closest lodge instead, ruining the stone wall and stirring up a dust cloud. We had already begun to lift off by the time I realized, with sudden disdain, that Thomas was still running away up the hill.

  I crossed the deck from port to starboard. There was Thomas, scrambling up the incline below with ridgebacks right on his heels. In a perfect world, I would’ve looked the other way and pretended not to notice. But this world was ruled by a bunch of law-lovers, and Thomas, while cowardly and stupid, was no law-lover. So I was going to help him. Not because I liked him, but because I knew it was what Sable would’ve wanted, had she been in better sorts at the moment.

  I shot the frayed grapplewire into my hand and lashed it around the mast. I was getting more use out of this thing now than I had before Gilfoyle had cut the grappler off. The winch whizzed inside my arm, trailing metal rope behind me as I ran, hit the railing, and leapt.

  I spun halfway around in the air and locked the wire, swooping in to catch Thomas in a fast-moving bear hug. We crashed into the group of ridgebacks and bowled them over. Then the hillside fell away, and we were swinging like a heavy pendulum, th
e wire wrapping itself around the underside of the boat.

  When we reached the apex of our swing, the line went slack. For one sickening moment, Thomas and I were floating at the end of our rope like kids on a swing set. Then the Galeskimmer lurched sideways and tilted in beneath us.

  To this day, I’m not quite sure whether it was Dennel’s sharp piloting, or some favorable gust of wind that put us where we needed to be. But somehow, when we began to fall again, we found ourselves destined not for a long swing back, but for the painful safety of the deck. We landed flat on our faces, smacking the planks within inches of the side railing. A less-than-graceful display, maybe, but it got the job done—although the sensation was not dissimilar to what I imagined a belly flop into an empty pool might feel like.

  Dennel saw that we were safely aboard and began to bark orders, commanding Thorley and Eliza to cut the sails loose. I didn’t understand how Eliza was still standing, let alone doing any work, except that some single-minded desperation seemed to be pushing her onward. Dennel turned the Galeskimmer, and we began to drift over the village, heading back toward the canyon on a soft wind. I didn’t have time to lay down and rest.

  kept moving below us

  I checked to make sure Thomas was alive, then peeled myself off him and threw my body overboard. The winch chugged, but not fast enough. My feet slammed down onto the roof of a stone lodge, my knees and ankles crackling like fireworks. I began to jump from rooftop to rooftop, the grapplewire trailing behind me as though I were flying the Galeskimmer like some gigantic kite.

  The ridgebacks began to pull themselves up onto the rooftops beside me, but even with the abuse I’d taken, the medallion made me faster. I stayed as close to the Galeskimmer as I could, but I was running out of time. Her sails cracked as she turned into the wind and began picking up speed. I was about to start running out of rope very quickly.