by Jon Skovron
“Cut the lines!” shouted Vaderton.
Crew grabbed axes and swords and hacked at the rigging that threatened to take the mainmast down with it.
“You stay focused!” Vaderton snapped at Jilly, pulling her attention away from the men desperately trying to free the broken mast. “I need to know the second that Bane has cleared the beach, so we can pull out of here.”
“Looks like that navy gaf is finally starting to take the heat off us,” said Gavish Gray. “Only half the cannons are firing now.”
“Good,” said Brigga Lin as she smothered a small fire that had sprung up after a cluster of shot had struck a pile of rope nearby. “I’m getting tired of—”
An image opened in her head of a cannonball headed directly toward her.
“Hard to port!” she yelled.
Gray moved instinctively, spinning the wheel with his whole weight. The ship twisted and several crew members staggered around to keep their footing. But a moment later, a cannonball struck the water where the quarterdeck would have been.
Gray’s eyebrows rose. “How did you see that coming so fast? You weren’t even looking in that direction.”
“I saw it before it was fired,” said Brigga Lin.
Gavish Gray grinned as he leveled them off and pointed them toward the shore again. “I’m suddenly glad to have you aboard!”
She regarded him coolly. “You weren’t before?”
Bleak Hope watched many of the soldiers that had been manning the cannons on shore hurry off toward the north end of the island. Vaderton had done it. Now only half the cannons were in use.
“Time to head for the shore,” she told Finn.
He winced. “Are you sure about this?”
“We don’t have much choice,” said Hope. “And I promise, fixing her will be our top priority.”
He patted the wheel and nodded glumly. Then he pointed the bow directly at the shore. The advantage to a head-on charge was that it offered the smallest possible target. Many ships, including the Kraken Hunter, also had the most reinforcement on the bow.
As they approached, cannonballs splashed down on either side. Occasionally, one glanced off the bow hard enough to slow down the charge, but they had a strong quartering wind, so the ship quickly recovered her speed.
The crew were all under cover to keep casualties down. Hope had her sword drawn and fended off debris that threatened both her and Finn. He held the wheel with tears in his eye as they closed in on the shore.
“Brace!” he yelled.
Hope grabbed the rail, but it still wasn’t enough. When the Kraken Hunter slammed into the beach, the impact knocked her over the railing. She barely managed to land feetfirst on the main deck.
Her ship cut a deep wedge into the shore. When she heard the wooden ribs groan under the sudden weight, she felt its pain.
“Add it to the rest,” she muttered, and leapt over the bow onto the wet sand.
Brigga Lin stood leaning over the base of the bowsprit as the Rolling Lightning bore down on the fortified coast. Cannon shots sang past. Occasionally one of them threatened the ship, but those she felt a premonition about and called out to Gavish Gray.
It was just as Yammy promised. They had worked together for days without stop and Brigga Lin hadn’t felt even the slightest ripple of foreknowledge. She had been so frustrated. But Yammy had assured her it would come in time, probably in a heated moment of self-preservation. It was still not totally under her control, but when she was threatened physically, she could feel it as one feels the wind on her face. Yammy had called it the Breath of Destiny.
“Are we close enough for you to do your thing with the cannons yet?” Gray shouted up to her.
Brigga Lin squinted at the fortifications, but she still couldn’t see the cannons themselves. “Not yet.”
“I’m not running my ship aground like Bane. This is my whole livelihood and I’d sooner die.”
“We might need to fall back on that other idea of yours, then. Is your crew in place?”
“Of course they are, my Lady Witch.”
“Lady Witch?” asked Brigga Lin as she hopped down from the bow and walked back to the quarterdeck.
“Well, you said not to call you a biomancer.”
She nodded. “I suppose Lady Witch is preferable, although I’ll never understand the New Laven compulsion to give everything multiple names.”
“Call it a sign of admiration if you like,” said Gavish.
“I see. Well, let’s begin your reckless plan, then, Captain Gray.”
“Not reckless. Daring.” He turned to his first mate. “Fisty, take the wheel.”
“Sir.” Fisty hurried over.
“Give it about fifty yards to impact before you drop anchor,” said Gavish. “But then do it quick.”
“Aye, sir.”
Gavish held out his arm to Brigga Lin. “Shall we, Lady Witch? Your carriage awaits.”
She had to suppress a smile as she took his arm. “This hardly seems the time for idle flirtation.”
“Clearly you haven’t been doing piracy properly,” he said.
They hurried over to starboard, where the lifeboat had been hung over the side, suspended by ropes on pulley arms at either end. The small boat was packed with sailors, all of them armed with guns, swords, and knives. There was barely enough room for Brigga Lin and Gavish Gray to fit as they all hunkered down low. Brigga Lin leaned over the side and stared at the water that streamed past directly below.
“You’re sure this will work?” she asked Gray.
“Sure and we’ve done this a few times, haven’t we, wags?”
They all grinned and nodded.
As they neared the shore, a billow of cannon fire was followed swiftly by the sound of breaking wood coming from the deck of the Rolling Lightning.
Gavish winced. “That’s going to be an ugly one.” Then he turned to the men who sat next to the lines that held the lifeboat suspended. “On my mark.”
They each drew a knife and held it against their rope.
“Drop anchor!” they heard Fisty call from the helm.
Two massive anchors were flung off the stern.
“Now!” said Gray.
The men cut the lines to the lifeboat just as the anchor chains went taut and began to drag along the sandy sea bottom. The Rolling Lightning jerked back and the lifeboat shot forward, skipping along the surface of the water.
Brigga Lin stood up as the cannons came within view. This was something she couldn’t do sitting down. But the boat was still bouncing and she fell backward. Gavish’s hands shot up and steadied her, each of his large palms finding a firm grip on her butt.
She snarled at him and he replied with a mockingly innocent look. But she didn’t have time to eviscerate him right then, so she turned and let the anger out on the cannons. The microorganisms around the gunpowder combusted all at once, and the entire line of fortifications went up simultaneously.
She turned slowly back to Gray. The chain of fiery explosions that continued from the powder stores framed her silhouette as she glared down at him.
“It was an accident, I swear!” he said.
“You’re lucky I need you alive,” she said. “For now.”
As she turned back to examine her handiwork, she heard him mutter to one of his crew, “A happy accident.”
“They’re clear!” Jilly shouted over the bombardment. “We can pull back!”
“Swing us around!” Vaderton said to Biscuit Bill at the helm. “Fly whatever canvas we have left. Let’s get the hells out of here!”
The ship began its slow turn away from Dawn’s Light and the endless roar of cannons. Those crew that weren’t wounded set every last bit of sail that hadn’t been punched full of holes, and even some that had.
Jilly wished she could help, but Brigga Lin and Dire Bane might need her to coordinate their rendezvous at the center of the island.
“Piss’ell,” growled Vaderton. It took Jilly by surprise because she�
�d never heard him swear like that. He had his glass trained back toward the coast. “I was afraid of that.”
“Of what?” asked Jilly.
“They’re giving chase. Both frigates, looks like sixty gun each.”
“Sixty? Can we outrun them?”
“Normally, I’d say it was possible, what with our head start and a favorable wind. But with only one mast up, we don’t have a prayer.”
Jilly scanned the waterline in front of them. To the north, off the starboard bow, was the open sea. To the west, off the port bow, rose the Breaks.
“Could we hide?” she asked. “Maybe in there?”
He frowned thoughtfully. “Hide? Probably not. But they’d have to be suicidal to follow us into the Breaks with ships that large.” He turned to the rest of the crew and raised his voice. “All hands, throw everything we have overboard. Anchors, cannons, shot, anything that’ll go!” He gazed back at the approaching frigates for a moment, then said, “Except the gunpowder!”
“Sir?” asked Jilly. She wondered why he’d want to keep the most volatile thing on the ship if there was a chance the frigates would fire on them before they reached the Breaks.
“You just focus on keeping that connection with Bane and Lin,” he snapped to her. “We might need it after this.”
Bleak Hope hit the sand running. She didn’t have Brigga Lin here to disable the cannons for her, so she had to reach the artillery line before they reloaded. She could see them in shallow trenches behind a low stone wall.
As she sprinted toward them, she watched them swab the cannons. She could hear the hiss and crackle as the cotton touched the hot metal bore.
She was closer as they primed and loaded the barrel.
She was closer still as they tamped it down.
She could see their faces as they rolled the cannons into position and locked them in place. Those faces suddenly turned to fear as the canoneers took aim, only to realize that their deaths were already upon them.
Hope leapt over the wall. Two cannoneers died before her feet hit the bottom of the trench. She ran down the line, the Song of Sorrows humming its terrible tune as it flashed back and forth, killing soldiers still fumbling for their pistols.
Once they were all dead and her arm ached with the grief of their passing, Hope climbed up on top of the wall and waved back to the beached Kraken Hunter. A cheer rose up from within and her crew spilled out onto the surf, armed and ready for battle.
They ran up the beach and clambered over the wall past Hope as she stood and gave the Kraken Hunter one last look. She’d asked Missing Finn to stay behind and begin assessing the damage. She didn’t know what pained her more, seeing the ship leaning on its side like that, or knowing that Missing Finn’s heart had been broken twice in as many days.
“Are you ready, Captain?” asked Alash.
“You’re sure you want to come with us?” asked Hope. “You could have stayed behind with Finn.”
“I realize you don’t normally consider me a combat asset,” he said with such resolve that she wondered if he’d actually rehearsed this speech to himself. “But Sadie was in our crew and one of the most treasured people in my cousin’s life. I cannot sit idly by.” He held up his strange rifle. “Besides, I think with this I might be of some use to you.”
“Yes, your… repeating rifle,” said Hope. “I really hope it doesn’t blow up in your face.”
He looked genuinely insulted. “Have a little faith in my design, Captain. I’ve been working on this for months.”
She inclined her head. “My apologies, Mr. Havolon. Let’s go test it out. And remember, the evidence we found in the tents suggested the only way to stop these living corpses is a shot to the heart or the head.”
Alash blanched slightly, but nodded.
Hope put her hand on his shoulder. “These are the moments we show our true worth, Alash. No matter what happens next, you have come a long way since cowering in your grandfather’s mansion.”
He smiled. “Thank you, Captain. That means a great deal coming from you.”
Bleak Hope turned away from the ship and the sea and began the march into the interior of the island with a small but determined group of true wags at her back. The sun was high overhead now, but a cold wind blew up from the south, drying the sweat on the back of her neck and tugging at the bottom of her coat.
The terrain was fairly level, so it wasn’t long before they could see the circle of tents in the distance.
“God, there they are.” Alash pointed to the entrance of the large tent. A steady stream of walking corpses was already shambling out at a quick, uneven gait.
“I see them.” She turned to her crew, all of whom stared wide-eyed at the growing swarm of living death not more than fifty yards away and closing in fast.
“Today, we are not killers, or warriors. Today, we are angels of mercy, putting these suffering creatures to proper rest. Today, we are deliverance for the girls still alive waiting to be slaughtered. Today, we are vengeance for all of our friends and comrades that have been taken from us.” She held the Song of Sorrows aloft. It didn’t just hum; it sang in that hard southern wind. The blade flashed like lightning in the midday sun. “Today, we are the storm!”
The crew cheered and Bleak Hope felt the glory of it fill up her heart. She smiled fiercely as she turned to face the nightmare that bore down on them.
“Here they come.” Brigga Lin watched as a mob of the dead rushed toward them. It mostly comprised girls that had been taken from small rural islands. Many of them were not even full grown. But they were not frail or weak. These had been peasant girls who had probably done manual labor since they could walk. And now they were fearless, perhaps even mindless, with only the command of their necromancer echoing in their slowly rotting heads.
“I been hearing about this for weeks now,” Gavish Gray said quietly. “First from the Black Rose, and then from you and Bane. And it wasn’t like I didn’t believe you, but…” He trailed off, his hard, weathered expression unreadable beneath his thick mop of gray hair.
“Seeing it for yourself is another matter,” finished Brigga Lin.
He nodded.
“Bane will be confronting a much larger group at the compound,” she said. “So we need to get through this as quickly as we can.”
“Then we best get started.” Gavish drew his cutlass and turned to his crew. “This ain’t pretty work, but it’s got to be done. The only sure way to put ’em down is to take off the head. Mind that you do. Now let’s go show them our own special type of hell.”
They charged forward while Brigga Lin hung back, as she usually did, to cast from afar. She wasn’t sure what would work on these creatures, however. As they drew closer she tried a few things. She burst open a rib cage, but the girl continued to shamble forward, her guts flopping in front of her like an apron. She tried turning one’s insides to boiling pitch, but the girl kept running, even as smoke billowed from her eyes, nose, and mouth. She tried a few other ideas as well, but nothing worked. What could she do? She was a master of the living, not the dead. When she’d expressed this concern to Yammy, the woman had said in that insufferably superior tone of hers: “You make too much of it. Life, death. It’s all part of the same cycle.”
The crew of the Rolling Lightning hit the wave of dead, hacking desperately at their blank expressions. Gavish was a sight to behold. A model of ruthless efficiency. He had already gotten past the shock of attacking dead little girls and hewed to either side with his thick-bladed cutlass, hacking off moldy little girl heads. But many of the other crew were not faring as well. The dead weren’t armed, but instead overwhelmed people first with fear, then with sheer numbers, driving them to the ground and tearing them apart, one limb at a time. Screams filled the air, and for once, it was Brigga Lin’s allies, not her enemies, who were suffering. The sound twisted up inside her as she watched with impotent fury.
But something nagged at her. She stared at a girl’s head, which had rolled to the e
dge of the battle. The girl’s eyes stared wide, her mouth slack, and her mottled skin shiny like wax. Brigga Lin noticed the fine green crust of mold that lined the girl’s temples. And then she finally understood what Yammy had been saying. Life, death, and life again. As anyone who had given serious study to the living processes knew, within hours, tiny organisms were already beginning the decomposition process. These brought other organisms, such as mold and fungi. All biological matter was ultimately nothing more than food for other biological matter. And where there was a food source in nature, there were living things to consume it.
She reached out and found the tiny spores of mold within every dead girl on the field. She called them forth, encouraged them to grow, to propagate, to dominate the host on which they lived.
The dead stopped moving forward. Their swaying, jerky bodies grew rigid, sometimes at odd angles. The battle suddenly came to a halt. Gray’s surviving crew looked uneasily at the posed corpses all around them.
Then great plumes of fungi burst forth from the mouths of the dead in blues, yellows, reds, and purples. The crew watched in astonishment as Brigga Lin brought forth a rainbow fungus garden in the middle of the barren field. She’d cast that much before, but never had it been such a pure act of creation. The call to life rang from her like a bell. And it felt glorious.
But then a dizziness swept through her. She felt the blood gush from her nose. Her mind was wrung out like a dishrag. The world around her dimmed and the ground rushed up to meet her.
“Whoa now, Lady Witch,” said Gavish Gray as he caught her moments before she hit the rocky soil. “Let’s not spoil that dress of yours.” He lifted her up and began carrying her, one arm under her knees and one cradling her shoulders and neck. “We still gotta meet Captain Bane, and I’d rather not face her wrath showing up without you.”
“You better not… make another grab… at my ass,” she muttered weakly.
“The thought’s already crossed my mind several times,” he admitted. “But in your current condition, it wouldn’t be very sporting. I do like a bit of danger, you know.”
