Scimitar Moon

by Chris A. Jackson

  Mouse leapt from her shoulder to bat at the thing’s eyes with his tiny fists, but another tentacle snatched him away. A cry tore from the little sprite’s mouth, so high-pitched that even the beast cringed. The answering roar left Cynthia gaping in panic as the tentacle brought the struggling seasprite toward its black maw like a tidbit.

  “No!” Cynthia cried. She grabbed at the slimy limb, her hand slipping down its length until the two of them grasped the struggling sprite.

  The tentacle holding her wrist and the knife bent until the blade pointed at her own stomach, inching toward her skin. Remembering Koybur’s fate, she struggled to open her hand, to drop the blade, but the tentacle had wrapped around her fingers.

  Cynthia called out desperately to the sea for aid. A geyser erupted at her back, dousing the entire ship in a salty wave, hammering against them, but the beast that held her did not notice.

  The tip of the knife pricked her stomach, and she gasped sharply. Her eyes watched as the blade pushed slowly into her flesh, inch after inch of cold steel, stealing the air from her lungs with waves of agony. The beast’s horrible laughter rose as its slavering mouth neared her face. She closed her eyes against it, feeling her life bleeding away. Something jerked her hard, and through a haze of pain she felt herself falling.

  *

  “Bloody witch!” Bloodwind cursed as he sighted down on the embattled pair and pulled the ballista’s release.

  The bolt of iron and hardwood struck the creature low, impaling it against the bulwarks. It thrashed on the bolt, flinging Cynthia Flaxal over the side. As her torn body hit the water, the waterspout collapsed upon itself. The weight of the water released from funnel cloud fell like a tidal wave, tossing the ship like a toy. As the deck finally stilled, the creature ripped itself free from the ballista’s shaft, howling in rage, tentacles writhing as it turned toward the new threat. Bloodwind stared in awe as the massive wound in its abdomen closed.

  Curse of the Gods, he thought. What manner of creature has Hydra released? But it bled, and if it could bleed, it could die.

  “This isn’t good!” He drew his cutlass and ordered the ballista crew, “Load it again, and make this one count.”

  The captain of a nation of pirates stepped forward and leveled his blade at the mass of squirming tentacles. “Hydra! Enough!”

  “Hydra is gone, Captain Bloodwind.” The voice nauseated him, its power a wall of visceral hate. “And I am unlikely to thank you for helping her keep me imprisoned for half a century.”

  “I’m not askin’ for your thanks, beast. I’m tellin’ you, this is over! Now stand down, or I’ll have you spitted like a hog on feast day.” He glanced over his shoulder toward the ballista, but his men were still cranking the heavy weapon’s cocking mechanism. The rest of his crew gripped weapons, lining up around the creature in a loose formation. Not a faint heart among them, he thought, pride swelling his hopes. This, at least, was a threat they could face.

  “The only way this is going to end, Bloodwind, is with your heart in my stomach.” A tentacle lashed out farther than he thought it could reach, but Bloodwind had survived on little but treachery and betrayal for two decades. His cutlass flashed and the tentacle’s barbed tip fell onto the deck. The severed piece dissolved in a noisome puddle, but the other end quickly grew another double-barbed hook.

  “Boarding pikes!” he commanded, and a dozen iron-tipped shafts thrust forth. Tentacles grasped several, but many more struck home. It roared and snapped the pole arms, leaving the iron heads lodged in its body.

  “Crossbows!” A dozen shafts buzzed past the waving arms to pierce the beast to the core. This onslaught affected the creature less, its grey-green flesh closing up over the feathered shafts as if absorbing the bolts.

  “Cutlasses! With me!” Bloodwind lunged forward, sweeping aside the writhing arms in sprays of black blood. Men screamed as hooked tentacles grasped them, pulling them into crushing embraces or the beast’s murderous teeth.

  “Ready, sir!” came a call from the poop deck.

  “Ballista!” he cried, and his men flattened themselves onto the deck. A blazing shaft of hardwood slammed into the thing, dousing it in burning pitch. Where blades and arrows had caused it only minor pain, fire sent the creature into an agonized frenzy.

  “Forward!” Bloodwind cried as he waded in, hacking at tentacles until he could bury his cutlass in the thing’s bloated body.

  *

  Cynthia felt herself falling through rose-colored water, shafts of light stabbing down from the surface through clouds of crimson.

  Pretty, she thought, the pain ebbing with her lapsing consciousness. Something twitched in her hand, and she saw poor Mouse, coughing up little bubbles, trying to breathe. She opened her hand and his little body floated away, hopelessly crushed. As he drifted free he looked toward her, his face twisted in astonishment.

  I’m sorry, my dear little friend, she thought, reaching out to him. Sorry it ended like this.

  Something large flashed past, and Mouse was gone.

  She blinked, coughing against the pain in her stomach, finally realizing that the crimson clouds were blood—her blood.

  Another shape flashed past, too fast to see details, only a glimpse of silver scales. Shapes moved at the edge of her vision, circling, closing, drawing near enough to see.

  Then a hundred hands grasped her all at once, and she felt herself being carried down into the depths.

  *

  The burning demon writhed, howling in agony, pierced by a score of blades, black ichor spraying from a hundred wounds. The tentacled arms had been cut short too many times to regenerate, and still the creature spat hate at them, a thousand curses in all the languages of the Nine Hells. Finally, it toppled forward, reaching out one last time, burning and gibbering, to grasp at Bloodwind’s legs.

  “Die, you useless hag!” Bloodwind drove his cutlass into its eye, forcing its loathsome head down to the deck. A crewman with a boarding axe chopped at the thick neck until the head came free.

  Gouts of black and green oozed from the severed neck, hissing on the hardwood deck.

  “Over the side with it!” he ordered, heaving the severed head into the sea.

  Pirates cheered and surged forward, levering the disgusting corpse over the side, watching it sink in their wake. Then their ardor faded as they beheld the mass of glittering shapes swimming beneath Hippotrin’s hull.

  “Prepare to repel boarders!” Bloodwind shouted, cringing as his much-diminished crew took up station along the gunwales. Between Hydra’s insatiable hunger and the battle with the beast, their number had been cut by half. And though they had turned back onto their original course toward the narrows, Orin’s Pride bore down on them, closer now than ever.

  “Captain!” The helmsman cried, pointing. “The reef!”

  Bloodwind barked orders, walking past Camilla without even noticing her kneeling on the deck, clutching her father’s maimed body. He looked forward, expecting to see the line of breakers marking the shallows. What met his gaze left him astonished beyond cognizant word or thought.

  “Holy mother of...”

  The sea ended less than two boat lengths ahead, a razor-cut line of nothing but rocky sea bottom several hundred feet below and exposed coral reefs on either side, a bare canyon waiting to engulf them if they sailed off the edge.

  “Hard over! Helm alee! Slack sheets!” Sails flapped as Hippotrin swung around to the north, her bow coming up through the wind.

  The hull shuddered as if a thousand hammers pounded into it from beneath. They slowed and stopped, perfectly still, the wind directly on their bow. At first, he thought they had run aground, but the northern reef stood a boat length from their bowsprit. Hippotrin floated in irons, held as if stuck in stone, unable to fill a single sail, with the dry canyon of the channel yawning less than a stone’s throw from the starboard bow.

  “What in all the Nine Hells?” Bloodwind swore as he strode to the rail and looked down. Beneath the surfa
ce, hundreds of merfolk surrounded the ship, the points of their tridents and lances thrust into the hull, holding Hippotrin fast in place. “Odea’s chosen…” he muttered, shocked beyond the ability to show any further surprise.

  As he stared, something shot out of the water like an arrow, missing his face by scant inches as it soared skyward, leaving a glittering trail of sea spray and stardust. It arced down and flew over the deck, straight as an arrow and blindingly fast.

  “A seasprite! What in the names of all the serpents of the deep?”

  It shot past him again, close enough to jerk several hairs from his beard in passing. It cackled in glee and snapped to a stop, hovering just out of reach, showing him the fistful of red hairs. It made a face and several very rude gestures before shooting off so fast he did not see which direction it had gone.

  “You’ve plundered your last merchant, Captain Bloodwind,” a soft voice said from the taffrail, drawing everyone’s attention like a magnet.

  Cynthia Flaxal stood there as if she had materialized from thin air, a puddle around her feet the only clue that she’d been tossed over the side like a rag doll only minutes before. Her clothes hung in tatters, a huge tear where the dagger had been thrust exposing her bare midriff. But no wound gaped there, no blood flowed, not even a scar marred her flesh.

  “Have I, indeed?” he asked, the wonder on his features subsiding as his ire finally centered once more upon something solid, something he could fight, someone he could kill. “I think not, Mistress Flaxal. Take her!”

  Wind and sea exploded over the ship’s transom, swirling around her in a tight column, fluttering her threadbare clothes but leaving her untouched. With a wave of her hand, tornado-driven sea lashed across Hippotrin’s deck, casting pirates into the water as if cleansing the ship of an infestation of rats. Where they splashed, the water boiled in a bloody froth.

  After a few moments, the torrent of Odea’s fury subsided, and only two people stood on Hippotrin’s deck.

  “I think so,” Cynthia said as she stepped forward, a slick of seawater carpeting the deck at her feet—her connection to the sea.

  He looked around, blinking dumbly. He stood untouched, his cutlass still in his hand, and she only four short strides away. He could kill her if he struck quickly. He had killed one demon today, why not two? He only had to get a bit closer.

  “I don’t understand, Mistress Flaxal.” He shrugged, letting the sword droop loosely at his side. “If you had this much power, why not destroy all of Blood Bay? Why not sink the entire island, for that matter? Why the charade? Why leave me alive at all?”

  “Because I want my ship back,” she answered, her voice tight with control. “And I want to take you back to Southaven. I want you to face the families of all the people you’ve murdered.”

  She had changed, he realized. Something about her was different from the woman who had fallen over the side. Perhaps the merfolk had done something to her. Perhaps she was no longer really human, or even alive. He hid his fear behind a chuckle and a sneer.

  “How very noble of you. I’m rather surprised, though.” He took a step to the side as if beginning to pace and turned, half a step closer. “You disposed of my crew readily enough. Why not exact your revenge on me personally?”

  “Because there are others who need it more than I.”

  “Families of dead sailors you never knew? I don’t believe it.”

  “Well, maybe there’s one I know personally.” She shrugged, ignoring him as he crept another half step forward.

  “Like who?”

  “Like me.”

  Camilla’s voice caught him completely off guard, and he turned in surprise. She stood there trembling, her tear-streaked face as lovely as ever, but her mouth was set in a hard line he’d never seen before. The seasprite sat on her shoulder, still holding its fist-full of red hairs. It grinned and blew the hairs at him, then made an odd little “ssst” sound, drawing its tiny thumb across its throat.

  “I don’t—”

  His cutlass clattered to the deck as all strength suddenly left him. He looked down at Camilla’s hand, the one holding the dagger… the dagger she had thrust into his heart.

  She let go and backed away. The blade’s hilt twitched with the last fluttering beats of the organ she had not thought he possessed.

  “But… I… loved you…” he said, falling to his knees.

  “But I didn’t!” she said, revulsion seething in her voice as darkness closed around him.

  Epilogue

  Seamage

  Rough stone warmed her bare feet as Camilla strode to the end of the pier and raised a hand in greeting.

  “Ahoy, Orin’s Pride!” she called as the stately schooner tacked smartly, setting a course for the pier. Feldrin Brelak grinned broadly and waved.

  The schooner tacked once more, approaching at a steep angle before turning upwind, backfilling her sails and drifting broadside up to the wide pier. Men clad in little more than loincloths and shell jewelry ran to catch dock lines and make them fast. In less than a minute the gangplank slapped down and the Morrgrey captain strode ashore.

  “Don’t you ever haul cargo anymore, Feldrin?” Camilla asked, accepting his huge embrace.

  “I am haulin’ cargo,” he said, releasing her and grinning. “Horace dropped off a load of metalwork at Keelson’s, and about twelve-hundredweight of bronze fittin’s for the yard here. He didn’t have time to deliver it, so I offered.”

  “Good! I’ll tell Ghelfan. Dura will have a crew down here to help you unload.” She wasn’t fooled by his explanation. Horace would have added only a few days to deliver the fittings himself. Feldrin made landfall at Plume Isle whenever he had an excuse.

  “Bloody fine.” He looked around the harbor, formerly Blood Bay—now Scimitar Bay. To the north, where the shanty town once cluttered the beach, huts clustered against the jungle-clad hillside. To the south, the old pirate shipyard had been completely rebuilt, and at the dock, two former corsairs rested placidly beside Ghelfan’s graceful little smack Flothrindel. “The place’s shapin’ up nicely. Them fellers work like a nest of termites when they’re got real tools and someone like Dura to tell ’em what to do.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” she said, guiding him up the pier toward the palace. Bloodwind’s former lair had been cleansed and rebuilt from the inside out, every remembrance of the pirate eradicated. “She’s teaching them dwarvish.”

  “Dwarvish? You gotta be kiddin’ me!” He laughed long and hard, and Camilla welcomed the sound. “And how’s Ghelfan?”

  “Happier than a clam at high tide. He’s got the keel laid for the new ship, and the wood for framing is being cut. They don’t have a proper sawmill yet, but he’s making do.”

  Feldrin squinted at the new building as if he could pierce its walls to see what progress had been made on the new three-masted schooner. His gaze drifted back to the towering stone edifice carved into the mountainside.

  “Is she here?”

  Camilla didn’t have to ask who he meant.

  “Somewhere, I think. I’ll have Chula find her for you.”

  “No need,” he said, smiling and patting her shoulder. “If she’s here, I’ll find her. I’ll be stayin’ ’til mornin’ at least. Rowland’s got a hold full of provisions fer ya. Said he’d cook you a proper meal.”

  “Tell me he brought beef, and I’ll kiss you.”

  “Some, but it’s salted.”

  “I don’t care if it’s on the hoof!” She stretched up on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek, enjoying his blush. “You know your way around, Feldrin. If you want to look for her, your best bet’s the south beach. She’s usually there in the afternoon.”

  “Thanks, Cammy. I’ll be back fer supper.”

  He stepped off the pier and strode across the beach toward the trailhead. Camilla watched him go, wondering, as she did every time he visited, if he would ever truly find what he was looking for.

  *

  “Feldr
in!”

  His head snapped up at the two dark figures running down the trail toward him.

  “Chula! Paska! Hello!” Embarrassment darkened his already-dark features as Paska wrapped her long arms around him and kissed him soundly. Chula embraced him also, and seemed unperturbed at his wife’s display of affection. He would never understand their proclivities, but that didn’t make him like them any less. They’d stood side by side in combat, baptized in blood and fire. Petty differences meant little after a bonding like that. “You see Cynthia? Shambata Daroo?”

  “Ya! She swim. Skull beach. You go see her.” Paska latched onto Chula’s hand and pulled him down the trail toward the shipyard. “We go. You stay night, ay? I got frien’ for you, Morrgrey man! She big woman! Big like you!”

  “Another reason to sleep on Orin’s Pride,” he muttered, waving as they trundled off.

  Feldrin continued the long climb and the steep descent down the other side of the ridge to the south beach—Skull Beach, the natives continued to call it, but there were no skulls on the beach anymore. All of Hydra’s foul magics had been removed, all her curses and traps banished. Plume Isle was clean now, home to the Scimitar Moon, the seamage of the Shattered Isles.

  He paused in the shade, enjoying the breeze that rustled the palm fronds overhead while his sharp eyes scanned the beach. There were footprints aplenty, but no sign of Cynthia. He sat on a fallen log at the head of the trail; if she returned to Scimitar Bay tonight, she had to come this way.

  Feldrin’s eyes were sagging with the warmth of the day when a tiny blade thunked into the wood beside his leg. It quivered there an instant before a streak of stardust circled once around his head and Mouse dove in to snatch up the tiny weapon. The little seasprite snapped to a hover two inches in front of Feldrin’s nose, striking a fearsome pose, his tiny sword held at perfect guard position, his new crystal-gossamer wings a blur. The merfolk had made him whole again, as they had Cynthia.