The Sentient Fire (The Seven Signs)

by D. W. Hawkins

  One of Mikael’s men was already in the bucket, and with the two of them both inside it they were tight quarters indeed. The man pushed himself against the side of the bucket wall and looked down at Dormael’s leg with interest. Following his gaze, Dormael saw that there was blood leaking from the bottom hem of his pants. He had opened the wound again on the climb. He cursed inwardly.

  “Are you well, Blessed?” the lookout asked him. The man had a small crossbow slung over his back and his expression was one of surprised interest and worry.

  “I’m well enough, good sailor. Listen, I’m going to be doing a few things up here, and if you’re going to stay then I’m going to need you to keep your head down and not cry out. You will not be harmed, that I promise you,” Dormael instructed the lookout.

  “I’ll leave the bucket to you, wizard,” the sailor laughed, “I’ll tie into the rigging and see how many Galanians I can shoot from there.”

  “Good man,” Dormael slapped the sailor on his back, and the lookout swung agilely out from the bucket and down into the rigging. Dormael watched him descend a bit and then find a spot to sit against the wet netting without falling. The man trained his crossbow on the galleon and waited for a shot. Dormael smiled at his exuberance and stood in the bucket to begin his work. He embraced his magic.

  He reached out once again into the storm, but this time he did not immerse himself completely within its raging energies. He reached one arm toward the sky, as if he could pull down the clouds themselves with his bare hand, and waited for the galleon to come within range of his power. On cue, the fighting ship turned alongside Seacutter on the starboard side, and Dormael began to enact his spell.

  Up from his outstretched hand he sent his magic, a swirling area of charged air. He charged it with just enough energy to attract that which he was trying to call down from the stormy skies. He weaved the charged area down around his shoulders and down his other arm, which was pointed directly at the ballista on the bow of the Galanian galleon. He reached deeper into the sky and called forth the elements he would need to send destruction raining down on their aggressors. He reached for the lightning.

  With a defiant cry of rage, he sent his magic into the storm, and felt that connection with the thing he was looking for. With a deafening crack and a blinding flash of bright bluish light, a bolt arced down from the sky and contacted Dormael’s spire of magic. It flew with blinding speed down the bolt of magic and out the other side of Dormael’s pointing hand.

  The lightning crashed into the ballista in a split second, sending shards of splintered wood flying though the air and setting fire to the deck itself. Men who were standing around it or manning the machine were thrown into the deathly cold water below or tossed onto the deck of their own ship. Most were dead before they hit the deck or the water.

  The lightning arced again before Dormael could turn his hand toward the ballista at the stern of the galleon and contacted the deck of the pursuing ship. More splintered wood, more fire and more dead men were tossed about on the ship, and with one final crack the third bolt crashed into the second ballista, destroying it utterly. The flaming remnants of the two death machines were sent flying around the deck of the ship and out into the sea around them. Men rushed to put out fires that had sprung up in the wake of the lightning, and Dormael released his hold on his power and ducked once again under the protective sides of the crow’s nest.

  His hearing had been affected by the crack of the lightning around him, but as it came back he could hear cheers erupting from the men aboard Seacutter. The clatter of crossbow bolts hitting the galleon sounded as Mikael’s men fired upon the crippled galleon, whose men were still trying to get their bearings after being attacked with Dormael’s magic. Dormael shook his head to clear it after having done his work, and then chanced a glance over the side of the bucket.

  The galleon was full upon the starboard side now, and without the ballistae to fire upon Seacutter her men were swinging boarding hooks as the fighting ship came in close to Mikael’s own vessel. The seas were rough, though, and with the two ships constantly riding up and down swells it was hard to aim such a hook and line with any accuracy. Dormael watched for a few seconds more as arrows were fired back and forth, none finding a mark, before hurling himself over to climb down the rigging. His leg protested his every movement, but he paid it no mind.

  Reaching the deck after his painful climb, he found D’Jenn and Shawna on the starboard side, and D’Jenn tossed Dormael his staff.

  “Impressive, cousin!” D’Jenn complimented, “nice way to use your environment.”

  “It was definitely a sight,” Shawna agreed, “and it scared the wits out of the Galanians, that’s for sure. It killed a fair number of them as well, I’ll wager.”

  “Yes, well we still have the ship herself to deal with, and more fighting men than Mikael has aboard Seacutter,” Dormael said, and his companions nodded. Turning his attention to the ship on their right, Dormael saw with dread that the Galanians were coming in close now to their starboard side. The fires aboard the galleon had been put out, and more and more boarding hooks were being thrown at Seacutter in an attempt to pull her close. None found their mark, however.

  “Captain!” Dormael shouted over the din, “Have your men aim for the Galanians with the boarding hooks!”

  “You heard him,” Mikael shouted to his crossbowmen, “put those bolts right through their hearts!” Mikael’s men obliged him, and soon bolts were firing at the men swinging the boarding lines. Few fell, about three in ten, and more men came up to replace the ones that took bolts, but they did damage, however little.

  Soon, arrows began to fly from the Galanian ship, and with dread Dormael watched as a few arrows found their marks in Mikael’s men. They were dragged to safety by their comrades and their places were taken, but each man aboard Mikael’s ship was a needed member of a crew. They didn’t have the luxury of losing fighting men.

  “We need to keep them from firing upon us!” Dormael shouted to his cousin. Nodding grimly, D’Jenn looked around quickly for an idea. Snapping his fingers, he rushed to the side of the railing, exposing himself momentarily to the arrows flying over the side of Seacutter’s railing. One of them grazed his upper arm, and he cursed loudly though Dormael lost his wording in the noise of the storm. Gathering himself up once more, Dormael felt D’Jenn’s own power awaken.

  Suddenly there was a great hissing noise, and steam began to rise quickly from the surface of the ocean between the two ships. In a matter of a few seconds, there was a wall of white steam obscuring the view of the galleon from the men aboard Seacutter, but it also served to do the same for the other men as well. A few arrows still flew through the steam, but they clattered harmlessly onto the deck without finding a target. Dormael felt a momentary relief.

  “Nice job, cousin,” Dormael complimented D’Jenn and D’Jenn answered with a short theatric bow in his direction. Their relief was short lived however, as clanks and thudding sounds of grappling hooks hitting the deck sounded up and down the starboard side. The galleon had finally aimed their hooks in the right spot, and blindly.

  “Cut those lines, you bastards!” Kennick’s voice rang out, but it was too little too late. Mikael’s men bustled up and down the deck trying to cut the lines, but there weren’t enough cutlasses to go around. Shawna even brandished her own weapons and began slicing through lines where she could find them, but soon a grating sound lifted up over the din of the storm on the starboard side, and the steam cleared. The galleon had closed the distance, and the men on her decks were hastily readying boarding ramps. Dormael filled himself with his power once again, and gripped his quarterstaff tightly in his cold, wet hands.

  Arrows lanced through the air onto the deck, and Mikael’s men were forced to take cover as the boarding ramps clattered into place on the deck of the Seacutter. Dormael ducked quickly under the railing to avoid being taken down by an arrow himself, and when he lifted his eyes he came face to face with a leather
armored Galanian. The fighting man rushed him, sword drawn.

  Dormael turned aside the man’s first attempt at slashing him, and aimed a well-placed swipe at the man’s sword hand, but this was a practiced soldier, not some thug in an alley. The man dodged it easily, accounting for Dormael’s strike. What the man didn’t account for was the gout of flame that blossomed from Dormael’s hand directly into his face. He went down screaming, but still alive.

  Dormael had no time to finish him off, for as he fell another Galanian took his place, and then another. He was hard pressed now, leaning heavily on his injured leg which hindered his movement greatly and depleted his fighting ability. It was all he could do to turn aside the attacks that the two Galanians aimed at him. Just as another man joined the two, and Dormael thought that he was done for, Shawna was there.

  A silvery blade blossomed from one of the Galanians’ chests as she danced lithely into the fight. Spinning with agility that Dormael had not yet seen from the young woman, she pulled her sword from the first man backhanded, and swiped aside a clumsy attack from another man just as her second bloody blade came around and emptied his stomach. The third man tried to rush her and bowl her over, but Shawna rose up on her toes and smacked his sword upwards into the sky, just as her second blade found a home in his guts. He fell with blood leaking from the corners of his mouth.

  “Are you alright?” she asked him quickly, and Dormael could only nod in return. She gave him another quick smile, but this one was touched with a little worry. She seemed to catch herself doing it, though, and wiped the expression from her face. Offering him a quick salute with one of her blades, she danced off into the swirling, fighting bodies. It was beautiful.

  D’Jenn spun and stomped through the deluge, his morningstar crushing men left and right. It was obvious to Dormael that D’Jenn had laid some sort of Infusion upon both of his weapons, for every time his gauntlet found the face of a man he flew three feet before hitting the ground. With every crushing blow from his mace men crumpled to the ground in broken, bleeding pain. Eventually, men began to surround him though; catching on to his game of dancing in and out of fights, and Dormael could see the fight turning, which could bode ill for his cousin. Abandoning his staff, Dormael drew upon the magic once more.

  He gathered the rain that was falling around him into spinning balls of water that hung around him in midair. Pumping them full of energy, he heated them to boiling temperatures. With a hissing noise for each projectile, they flew directly at each of the men surrounding D’Jenn and splattered into their exposed faces and necks. Cries of pain issued from each man, and many of them dropped their weapons as their skin was scalded by the boiling water.

  D’Jenn smiled at his cousin, and winked. That had given him all the time he needed. He began immediately lying about with his mace and as it thudded into the skulls and chests of the soldiers around him, those men fell one by one.

  The fight raged on for what seemed like an eternity. More and more men came at Dormael through the fight and each one he dispatched with fire, ice, or threw them bodily into the ocean with his magic. He began to grow tired as he expended his energy on using. He saw that D’Jenn was again being pressed hard, and though Shawna danced around and dealt death with both hands, it just wasn’t enough.

  Mikael’s men fought valiantly, but they were no soldiers, and he watched more than one fall with a bloody wound. He began to lose hope that they would escape this unscathed, and he began to take a few wounds himself as his power started to wane. He took another short gash on the leg, a kick in the gut, and even once narrowly avoided being stabbed though the chest. Just when it seemed that all was lost, though, he heard something that turned his blood to ice in his veins.

  At the edge of his hearing, there was something strange lilting through the air; something strange, but something familiar. The alien song of the armlet drifted through the air like a mist, but inside of it, entwined with it, was another familiar song. It was Bethany’s own melody. Dormael turned his eyes to the entrance toward the stern.

  The little girl appeared at the entrance to the steps that ran below decks like an eerie ghost. Her long brown hair was floating in midair as if she was underwater, and her feet were not touching the ground. She floated up onto the deck, almost serenely, and looked around with a scared but determined expression on her tiny face. Around her left arm was Shawna’s armlet, entwined like a silver creeper vine around the girl’s upper arm. It was shining with a deep red light, and it emitted a faint miasma of that light like a reddish fog around the youngling.

  Dormael was struck by the sight of her, and he couldn’t find any words to reach out to the young girl. She looked at him, and as their eyes found each other Dormael’s heart almost stopped. Her eyes had changed to a deep ruby-red, and they were also emitting that strange miasma. With his magical senses, Dormael could feel the power swirling around the youngling, and it scared him.

  A Galanian rushed toward the girl from her right side, and she didn’t even see him. Dormael tried to make it to her, but was waylaid by another soldier. He shouted her name into the deluge of storm and battle, but it was as if he were screaming against a hurricane. Bethany’s eyes never left Dormael’s.

  As the man came within range of the girl, he suddenly burst into flames. White-hot fire erupted from underneath his armor and he had just a few seconds to scream before he was reduced to a smoking, charred mass. Bethany looked towards the charred man surprised, and Dormael realized that she wasn’t doing the magic. It was the armlet.

  Tendrils of flame suddenly arced from the ruby set into the armlet and flashed through the rain streaked air to touch the Galanians who had boarded the Seacutter. As the rain drops came into contact with the tendrils of hot fire, they boiled instantly into vapor, the fire untouched by them. The remaining Galanians shared the same fate as the man who had attacked Bethany, and were burnt to steaming charred masses almost instantly. It was a horrifying sight, and Dormael could sense the anger in the magic as the armlet carried out its deed.

  Mikael’s men were caught up in surprise at what had happened, and they stood in stunned confusion as the men they had each been facing were suddenly reduced to burnt corpses. The Galanians on the assaulting ship who were close enough to witness the event stopped their advance across the boarding ramps, and suddenly there was a mass confusion on the galleon. Dormael seized the opportunity and used his magic once again.

  The boarding ramps cracked in half as one, and fell harmlessly into the churning sea below them as Dormael destroyed them all at once. He felt D’Jenn’s power and looking over at his cousin he saw D’Jenn point his mace at the boarding ropes that were still hooked securely against Seacutter’s railing. Some sort of dark energy came misting from D’Jenn’s mace, and fell upon the first rope, turning it to dust. It then crawled quickly over the next rope and the next, until finally Seacutter was free of the galleon.

  “Stations!” Kennick’s voice called over the driving rain, and men all over the deck stowed what weapons they were carrying and hurried into position up and down the ship, “Push off! Oars! Heave!” And the oars came once again from somewhere below decks, pushing against the port side of the galleon and turning Seacutter’s nose slightly to the east in the process. A rhythm was established and soon Seacutter was heading south again under two sails and oar power.

  The galleon, though in a state of confusion, established some semblance of order as well, and soon her nose turned southward and she took up the chase again. Dormael was making his way to Bethany, who was still floating in mid air with the armlet letting off that miasma of power around her. She looked at him expectantly, and Dormael was almost to her when the armlet lashed out with its power one last time.

  Bethany reached out to Dormael with both arms as if to fall into the safety of the wizard’s embrace, and as she did Dormael felt an odd rushing sensation from the power surrounding her. Another fiery tendril reached out unexpectedly and flashed into the sails of the galleon, setting
them aflame instantly. As if that single release of power were all the armlet had left, Bethany suddenly fell from her midair position and into Dormael’s arms. The little girl was completely unconscious.

  Dumbfounded, Dormael could only stare down at Bethany as she lolled sleepily in his arms. Her face seemed serene and she was unharmed, at least in any obvious way that Dormael could tell immediately. Something cool and metal touched his hand, and Dormael looked down to see the armlet lying loose against the young girl’s arm, now back to normal size and dimensions. Its song could not be heard.

  “Get her below, cousin! I’ll help see to the wounded, and when I’m done we’ll have a look at her!” D’Jenn shouted over the storm.

  “What about the galleon?” Dormael shouted back.

  “She’s crippled, her sails are in ashes! She won’t be catching us again,” D’Jenn replied, and with that he turned to crouch at the side of a sailor who was moaning in pain. Dormael nodded and turned for the stairs that led to the quarters below the stern, and suddenly Shawna was right behind him, motioning him to move quickly. He did not argue with her.

  He laid Bethany down in Shawna’s room on the lower bunk, and she gave a little sigh as he laid her head upon the pillow, but offered no other signs of pain or consciousness as she was covered with the thin blanket that adorned the bunk. He reached out and took the armlet from her arm, and surprisingly enough it did not awaken when he touched it. He could still feel its power, but it was as if it was also asleep. He felt an empathic contentment from the object, and he shook his head as he placed it inside the silver box that Shawna proffered for him.

  “Will she be alright?” Shawna asked him.

  “I’m not sure,” Dormael replied, “I’ve never seen this before.” With that comment, guilt washed over Dormael in a wave to rival anything that was churning in the sea outside. He bowed his head and let it engulf him, for he felt that he deserved it. He was the one who had told the girl to listen magically to what was happening. He was the one who had opened the channel for the armlet to take hold of the girl. He sighed deeply, and without words Shawna placed a comforting hand on his shoulder, drawing him closer to her. This time he didn’t fumble or protest, he simply leaned into the woman slightly and they sat there comforting each other for a time, watching over the youngling that had fallen into their care.