Isle of Wysteria: The Reluctant Queen

by Aaron Lee Yeager

  “One of my hallucinations, Jhoss, has a message for your wife,” Odger coughed out between breaths.

  * * *

  “Athel, we have a problem,” Alder said as discreetly as he could when he walked up alongside her.

  Athel waved her flags and signaled the pirate ship to clear out. Heavily laden with gold, it sluggishly passed through the gate before it. “What’s wrong?”

  Alder fidgeted with his fingers. “Keep in mind this comes from Odger, so the source and reliablilty are beyond suspect.”

  “Yeah, I get it,” Athel coaxed as the next pirate ship sailed into the vault and she signaled Ryin and Hanner to climb up and begin instructing the loaders.

  “He claims to have overhead some casual conversations from other Stonemasters over the prism stream. From their comments, he concludes they are part of a force heading here from Kirdish.”

  “From Kirdish?” Athel shrugged. “Well, that would be the Navy reinforcements. We already assumed they'd be alerted first thing and worked them into our plans. We'll be two days gone by the time they get here.”

  “That’s the problem,” Alder pressed, leaning in discreetly. “Ogder says they left Kirdish days ago; they will be here in less than six hours.”

  Athel nearly dropped the signal flags. The color drained from her face. “But...how?”

  Mina and Captain Evere ran up, sensing something was wrong. “What’s the problem?”

  “Odger says the Navy reserves were alerted early somehow, they'll be here in six hours,” Alder repeated quietly.

  “What!” Mina yelled. Athel grabbed her snout and held it shut.

  “Keep it down, Mina,” she cautioned. “If the Guilds find out, we're all as good as dead.”

  “You've got that right, lass,” Captain Evere looked around ominously at the pirates loading gold into their airship. “All the Guild ships waiting out there will turn on each other and us to make sure they get their take.”

  “How many ships have we loaded so far?” Mina asked, shoving Athel’s hands away.

  “Only thirty-two so far.”

  “We've still got a lot of ships,” Alder recalled. “Couldn’t we just fight off the Navy when it gets here?”

  Captain Evere shook his head. “These are rival Guilds, lad. It’s a bloomin’ miracle your Queen got them to work together at all. There ain’t no way under the stars they're going to fight to save any skin but their own.”

  Mina looked at her husband, her lavender eyes deadly serious. “Allister, this might be a time to cut our losses and get out while we still can.”

  “No,” Athel insisted. “We've got to empty the vault or this is all in vain. We have to bankrupt the League if Wysteria is to have any chance of winning this war.”

  “I appreciate that lass, but there is no way to load that many ships with the time we have.”

  Athel groaned in frustration and placed her hands on her head. “How did this happen, anyway?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? Someone sold you guys out,” Setsuna announced as she appeared alongside them.

  Captain Evere placed his hand on his cutlass. “How long have you been listening in, lass?”

  With one hand, Setsuna wiped the chocolate cream off the corner of her mouth, and with the other she reached into Alder’s collar and pulled out a small metal ring. The inside of the ring swirled with a miniature gate. It matched the earring that hung down from one of her long pointed ears. “I've been listening in the whole time.”

  Alder reached up to his collar. “When did you manage to put that on me?”

  Captain Evere rolled his black eyes. “Hostage, patsy, now informant. You're really worth your salt today, aren’t you lad?”

  “Sorry,” Alder apologized.

  “Ah, don’t be too hard on the kid,” Setsuna said, flicking the point of Alder’s ear with her finger. “With a body like mine, I can distract any man long enough to plant a thing or two.”

  “Can you now?” Athel asked, eying Alder suspiciously.

  Alder met Athel’s judgmental gaze without looking away. “I would never.”

  Athel’s expression softened. “I believe you.”

  “I’d teach you how to do it too,” Setsuna teased, “but you really don’t have the thighs for it.”

  Athel’s mouth dropped open. “What the bark did you just say?”

  “Ladies, ladies, you are both pretty, there is no reason to fight,” Captain Evere rebuked.

  “We're not fighting,” Athel assured, crossing her arms.

  “Good,” Captain Evere said, taking his hand off his weapon. “Now, we really only have one choice. We can load up a few more ships, but then we'll have to leave. If we don’t give ourselves enough of a head start, the Navy will hunt us down.”

  Athel looked down at the tiny swirling gate in Setsuna’s hand. Slowly, a smile crossed her lips. “Or...we find a way to load the ships even faster.”

  Fifteen minutes later, after a particularly rigorous debate about what Setsuna’s extra compensation would be, which included a daily allotment of Alder’s chocolate crepes until she rejoined her Guild, the new plan was set into motion. An airship would gate into the vault and open its deck grates. Setsuna would create a gate, one end directly above the exposed cargo hold, the other end laying flat on the floor. Then, Setsuna would slide the gate along the floor underneath a pile of gold, which would fall down through and directly into the ship. After about a stack and a half the ship would be full and immediately sent on its way to make room for the next. With this new method, they were loading the ships in less than a minute. Once they got the flow going, they were loading the airships without even having them come to a complete stop. It was a perfect assembly line of theft on the largest scale ever accomplished.

  Of course, it didn’t always work. Oftentimes the pirate crews, confused at the change of plans, wouldn’t get the grates opened in time, and the gold would end up being dumped directly on the deck, spilling out over the sides in a waterfall of coins and bars. Drunken pirates occasionally failed to get out of the way and had gold dumped right on top of them, injuring some of them severely. Ironically, but severely. Dr. Griffin attended to their wounds, helping many of them until his eccentricities got the better of him and he was asked to stop.

  What was worse, many of the pirate ships were in poor condition, and that was putting it mildly. The keel of the Syrtir completely gave way when it was loaded with gold bars. The ingots punched a hole straight through and landed beneath her. The crew was beyond furious. Cannons were loaded, and Alder was grabbed and taken as a hostage for the third time that day. For a few tense minutes, it looked with things were going to come to blows, but Captain Evere was able to talk everyone down. The Syrtir was shuttled off to one side to make repairs on her keel, and Alder was sent back to the Dreadnaught to do laundry. The process continued.

  Despite the efficiency and the assurances to the contrary, the Guilds could tell something was wrong. Loaded ships began setting sail and leaving, instead of waiting for all to be loaded as was the plan, making the remaining ships even more skittish. The whole situation was hanging by a thread, and the crew of the Dreadnaught felt like they were spending nearly every moment playing politician. Athel checked the time obsessively. The Navy was bearing down on them. Their very lives now depended on Odger’s message, and he was as crazy as a bag of weasels.

  The pace became a blur of sweaty sailors, yelling captains, the passing of ships and the thunderous chiming of millions of coins. The rolling dunes of gold began to disappear so fast, it felt like they were clearing the landscape for some construction project that would never be realized. Whole fortunes passed by their faces as if they were no more than quarry stone to be shuffled off and out of the way.

  Athel checked the time again. It was getting close...or was it? She found it hard to do the simple math in her head. She was getting tired, and so were the others.

  The vault was nearly empty now as Setsuna slid her gate around, allowing coins t
o fall into it like a mobile hole. All of the larger stacks were gone and she was reduced to sweeping up the loose coins and bars scattered about.

  “Devil’s Luck, are you the last one?” Mina called out, double checking her list.

  “It’s hard to tell,” Reimay called back as he leapt down and picked up a stray gold bar off the deck, shoving it into his longcoat pocket. “Everything’s all pear-shaped out there. Ships taking off in every direction, rumors of every kind.” Reimay grabbed his wide, mouse-like ears in a panic, “Just what the blazes is going on in here?”

  Athel rubbed her eyes and looked up at him. “Oh, just rumors, everything is fine,” she said, faking a smile.

  From the other side of the gate there was the thunderclap of cannon fire, and iron shells struck the Devil’s Luck in the aft, splintering apart the captain’s cabin and the poop deck.

  Athel instinctively jumped back, a rifle bullet whizzing through the air where her head had been only a second before. “Of course, I've been wrong before.”

  “Is it the Navy?” Ryin asked, taking cover behind a pile of loose timbers left behind from repairs to the Syrtir.

  “No, those aren’t Navy guns,” Mina said, her keen, fox-like ears rotating this way and that.

  As the Devil’s Luck slipped out the exit portal, a new ship began to enter the vault. Far larger than the average pirate vessel, it was painted black, every inch of its surface adorned with bleached skulls hammered directly into the hull. Even the masts and maneuvering fins were lined with skulls, giving them the appearance of long spines.

  “It’s the Claw,” Captain Evere said.

  “They flew all the way back here?” Margaret asked in disbelief, hiding behind her command podium.

  “Well, it’s not like we sent them to the other side of the realm,” Setsuna explained as the small pile of coins beneath her disintegrated in a burst of mortar fire. When the smoke cleared, Setsuna was gone only to reappear at the far end of the vault, sitting atop an empty rack of chests.

  The crew of the Claw used the ship’s swivel guns to spray the vault with canister shot. Nails, crushed glass, and all sort of remorseless bits of material dug into every surface. Ryin tried to take a shot with the Dreadnaught’s cannon and took a hit to the shoulder for his trouble. Gripping his injury he managed to roll himself off the deck and down the steps before the sharpshooters could get a bead on him.

  Hanner appeared from behind a small stack of gold bars and pulled out his volley-gun. Triggering all six barrels at once, he cleared the entire foredeck with a spray of buckshot. “Oh, I like this one,” Hanner praised, kissing the weapon then handing it to Strenner to chew on.

  The Claw was about half way into the vault when Setsuna finished her incantation. The entry portal snapped shut, slicing the ship clean in half. The stricken forsection careened out of control, crashing down onto the vault floor and spilling out injured sailors in all directions.

  Mina threw a blizzard of frost and ice into the crash zone, Dr. Griffin tossed a few vials, covering the area with smoke of every color. Just as soon as it had started, the sounds of battle died down, leaving only the groans of the injured, hidden in the smoke.

  A lone figure emerged, his hands clasped calmly behind his feathery back. His deep-set eyes looked out calmly across his beak.

  “Anak, why attack us?” Captain Evere called out, his rifle readied. “There’s still enough gold in here for your ship to take its fill.”

  Anak’s claws scratched the vault floor as he came to a stop. “I’m afraid your Mr. Anak has been dead since the fifth of this month.” His body of feathers and muscle exploded, revealing a skeleton of black bones that reshaped themselves into a smaller form. Organs and tissues reknit themselves around the skeleton, finally growing a layer of skin.

  The man now before them had sharp features with eyes like needles, yet there was something oddly familiar about him.

  “Who are you?” Athel asked as the man yanked a filthy longcoat off an injured sailor and wrapped it around himself.

  The man breathed in deeply, as if he were savoring the injuries around him. “My name is Blair, and I have the rather mundane task of acquiring a live Treesinger. A task I inherited when you killed my sister.”

  Athel’s mouth dropped open as Alder ran up alongside her.

  “You're Mandi’s brother?” Mina gasped.

  “Who the squat is Mandi?” Hanner grunted as he reloaded.

  Athel placed her finger on her chin. “Wasn’t Mandi that short little Navy officer who attacked us with a construction golem?”

  “No, that was Ms. Recaldier,” Captain Evere corrected.

  “...Or was she the dog person who hit us with lightning?”

  “No, that was Murphi,” Alder corrected.

  Blair clenched his fist, unable to hide his rage. “The least you can do is bother to remember the names of the lives you destroy.”

  “Yeah, sorry, I kinda have a problem with that,” Athel teased, sticking out her tongue.

  Blair’s thin eyebrows twitched.

  Alder knelt down next to his wife. “You know, I’m sorry to admit it, but I’m beginning to get used to watching you make people angry.”

  Alder stood up and waved his bony little arms to get Blair’s attention. “Listen, we didn’t kill your sister, she stumbled and fell off a cliff.”

  Blair chuckled and ran his sharp fingers through his dark hair. “Oh, is that what happened? Well then, that changes everything. I'll just be on my way then.”

  Alder perked up. “Really?”

  “Of course not! You silly ink blot, I still have my mission to accomplish.”

  “You might want to rethink that,” Captain Evere said sternly as he aimed his rifle. “You're outnumbered, outgunned, and in the open. Best admit defeat now, before you get in a world of hurt.”

  Blair laughed. “Do you really think there is anything you can do to me that will be worse than what they will do to me if I fail?”

  Without warning, Blair charged at Hanner, his legs growing long, propelling him forward at alarming speed. Hanner triggered his volley gun and released a hail of metal, but Blair’s arm grew wide and bony, with a thick, tough hide.

  “Is that the best you've got?” Blair taunted. His arm protected him from the buckshot like a shield, and he caught Hanner with a kick to the shoulder that broke his volley gun in half and sent Hanner cartwheeling over the pile of gold bars.

  Captain Evere fired his rifle, and Mina released a silver blade of sonic energy, but Blair leaped high up into the air, allowing the attacks to pass beneath him.

  “Too slow,” Blair boasted. Dozens of holes formed on his shoulders and back, and when he hit the ground near them, he spat from within those holes hundreds of hissing black quills.

  Captain Evere and Mina dodged the darts as best they could by ducking behind the pile of timbers, but Mina caught two in the shoulder, and Captain Evere caught three in the leg. They screamed out in pain and clutched their wounds, already purple and swelling with venom.

  Athel took advantage of Blair turning his back to her, and fired her flintlock pistol. The seed rifled through the air, then at her command, erupted into a mass of stranglevines that enveloped Blair and held him fast. Blair’s body changed again and he secreted a layer of green slime that dried and dissolved the vines with acid. Free again, he reformed himself into a massive, four-legged lizard, as large as a house. With a deafening roar, he charged at Athel.

  She tried to turn and run, but her feet caught up with Alder’s and they tripped over each other onto the floor.

  “I've got you now,” Blair leapt at them, his maw full of razor- sharp teeth.

  Dr. Griffin flicked out his hand and from each fingertip whipped a wire, so fine that they were nearly invisible. The filaments wrapped themselves around Blair’s tail and legs, suspending him from the hooks in the ceiling like a marionette.

  Blair stopped, his dripping teeth just inches from Athel’s throat. Slowly, he turned his he
ad around.

  “Go ahead and try it,” Dr. Griffin goaded, placing a little extra tension on the wires. “If you pull against them these filaments will cut straight through you.”

  Blair’s reptilian eyes were full of mirth. “You know, if you had just stayed out of it I would have let you live. But since you insist on being the first to die, who am I to deny you?”

  Oblivious to the damage, Blair spun himself around in midair, yanking Dr. Griffin off of his feet and pulling him along the ground towards him. The wires cut off Blair’s tail and limbs. The severed chunks of flesh hit the ground and dissolved into ash. Before Dr. Griffin could right himself, Blair had regrown his severed limbs, and pounced on him. Blair wrapped his jaws around Dr. Griffin’s midsection and hefted the squirming man up in the air. In a moment, Blair would snap his reptilian jaws and cut the man in half. Blair inhaled deeply, savoring the fear in the doctor’s shrieks.

  Hanner managed to prop himself up on one elbow and fired his pistol. Alder scavenged up a blunderbuss from the wreckage and fired. Athel ran up and thrust her saber into the beast’s belly. But all of their attacks did little against the thick hide and bony scales.

  Blair bit down, but something glass broke in Dr. Griffin’s labcoat. A glowing green ooze splashed into Blair’s mouth, and the volatile reaction was so immediate and severe that he spat out Dr. Griffin from his maw.

  “What...what was that?” He asked, foam pouring from his mouth.

  Blair spit and coughed out as much as he could, but his body was already growing smaller.

  “What’s...happening...to...me?”

  His tail disappeared, his bony plates became skin, and within a few moments he was no longer a hulking monster, but a regular man, standing naked on the vault floor.

  “You...you have locked me in this form,” Blair coughed, his whole body trembling. “I can’t change. How? What was that stuff?”

  Pulling out her staff, Athel grew a pair of huge Juupa roots up out of the ground. They wrapped themselves around Blair tightly and pulled him to the floor.

  From her corner, lounging about some empty chests, Setsuna clapped slowly as she sucked on a candy stick. “Well done, team,” she needled them.