The Dungeoneers: Blackfog Island

by Jeffery Russell

  “It’s deciding if we’re edibles,” Skulk called. “Don’t let it touch ya!” He climbed onto the quarterdeck railing to avoid a tentacle curling its way up the ship’s wheel. “It can’t see or hear you.”

  Tentacles rose on the other side as well, branches slithering their way across the deck, swift silent snakes. They wrapped the ship from both sides now, smaller tentacles sprouting from their length, spreading like roots. Cardamon clambered on top of the barrel as a tentacle reached it and began wrapping its way around.

  “I’m runnin' outta places that ain’t tentacle!” Thud yelled. He had pulled his way up into the shroud rigging but the tentacles seemed particularly fond of winding around ropes and were encroaching faster than he could climb.

  Then Cardamon felt something cold on the back of his leg. A gentle touch as from a friendly grape jelly. Then came the sting. Like the snap of a wet towel on a bare bum. He squawked and jerked his leg away but he was not the only one that had been found. From all across the ship he could hear a chorus of yelps and curses. The tentacles darted back from the touch as well, coiling and weaving like cobras, waiting to see if there was a counter-attack.

  “Counter-attack!” yelled Thud. He dropped from the rigging and landed on the deck near Cardamon, tugging his mace from his belt. Cardamon wasn’t sure how well a mace was going to do. Like Thud, he always went armed. Thud did it in the name of preparedness. For Cardamon it was a matter of practicality. Something bad was always going to happen, best be prepared for it. And at sea that something bad was going to be tentacles, guaranteed. So he’d brought an ax.

  He dropped to the deck and chopped at the tentacle that had stung him, severing it at the base of the barrel where it began to coil around. Surprisingly, the severed portion of tentacle didn’t remain, twisting and writhing. It also didn’t regrow itself back into the host, nor did it begin growing and forming a new tentacle monster on its own. Which crossed expectations one through three off of Cardamon’s mental list. He hadn’t found it necessary before to maintain a list of more than three negative possible outcomes for an action’s reaction and realized that he needed to upgrade his pessimism preparedness policies.

  It turned into a curling white smoke, tinged with a jaundice shade of yellow, and smelled like the fart of a mud-flat. The wind caught it and whisked it away. Cardamon coughed experimentally. If the smoke had been poisonous it hadn’t been of the ‘stop you dead in your tracks’ variety. Expectation number one on the eldritch smoke list.

  Thud slammed his hammer down on another length of tentacle. It spattered. Wet glops sprayed across both of them, stinging where they touched, becoming stinking smoke moments later. Like being in the public baths with the Mondolanian High Council when they started debating. Cardamon had memories that he preferred remained repressed.

  “Maybe more with the ax and less with the hammer,” Thud said. “Hells, that musta been what you felt like that time with the Mondolan…”

  “Don’t remind me!” Cardamon said, axing another tentacle before it could get too familiar. “It even smells the same!”

  The injured tentacles had snapped back from the attacks. The rest of the tentacles flexed. The entire ship tilted beneath them. The deck angled precariously, boxes, barrels and dwarves rolling across it. Some caught on to tentacles to arrest their slide, the ones wearing gloves achieving more satisfactory results. The ocean beneath them looked almost like a wall swinging into view. And within an eye, huge and yellow, peering out from behind a curtain of water, three pupils skittering across its surface.

  Clink fired The Negotiator. The bolt entered the water with barely a ripple and punched into the eye. The impact of the water had taken some of its punch but a log in your eye was still the sort of thing you noticed. The eye vanished into the darkness of the deep with shocking speed. Tentacles all across the ship dissolved into smoke, leaving them in a blinding, noxious cloud. The two remaining giant tentacles, the sources of the others, snapped back like whips and vanished beneath the waves, the ship lurching back, over-correcting with momentum, rocking back again, tossing the deck like salad.

  “Dwarves overboard!” came a yell from Leery. She was one of the few dwarves on their feet and was sprinting to the port side. Cardamon could see someone in the water, Nibbly maybe. Several someones. They were wearing their bladder-buoys and bobbing about like ducklings.

  Ropes were thrown from the sides as the dwarves awkwardly paddled their way toward the ship. Everyone on deck kept a wary eye on the sea, looking for any sign of the Kraquid returning. More hauling than climbing was involved in getting them back aboard. As soon as the last dwarf flopped over the railing, Skulk was barking orders.

  “Full sail! Get those canvases snapping!”

  “Now we’re moving?”

  “It knows we’re here. No use hiding.”

  The ship jerked and shimmied into motion as sails began unfurling sporadically. Ween plied his limited expertise with the dwarves at the mainmast and the main yard sail was one of the first, giving them a strong start.

  “Is it coming back?” Cardamon asked. He wasn’t able to keep the waver from his voice. There were ugly red blotches on his skin where the tentacle had touched.

  “Can’t say,” Skulk said, or didn’t. “Here’s hoping it decides we didn’t taste worth the trouble. And that it doesn’t have a temper.”

  “Reload,” Thud yelled to Clink. Clink just gave a wave of his hand. The Negotiator was already reloaded.

  “Leery,” Skulk yelled. “I need you up in the crow’s nest with Catchpenny, calling out any scrap of anything ye be seeing.”

  “On it!” She started up the shroud. Cardamon was always unnerved watching her climb. It was like seeing a bird successfully wielding a pick ax. Some things just seemed impossible to fit together in your head. Dwarves and climbing were two of them.

  “Cardamon,” Thud said. “Pop your head below deck and check on things.”

  Cardamon nodded and hurried off before his to-do list gained more items. He unbattened his carefully battened hatch, holding his breath against the inevitable first waft of below-deck air. It had taken a lot of rats a lot of years to create that smell.

  He descended the ladder carefully, hopping from rung to rung. He’d seen Leery do an impressive slide down the ladder their first day out of port, just her hands and feet on the rails. He’d also watched her spend the next five minutes picking splinters out of her palms.

  Below decks looked as if it had been ransacked. Everything that had been stowed now wasn’t. Save the hammocks. Everything in a hammock or cargo net was fine. Gammi was there too, in one of the hammocks, apparently having slept through the entire sea battle. Cardamon made a mental note to hide in a hammock in the event of future attacks and started back up the ladder to report in.

  He reached the poop deck (his favorite part of the ship, for more than one reason), and froze. The sea behind them was a writhing forest of tentacles, wriggling against the sky, flickering with light. Thud was watching them, hands gripping the rail as he shouted to Skulk at the wheel.

  “Every time one goes down three more come up! Still comin' closer!”

  “We’re at full sail!” Skulk yelled back. “Trying to ride the waves for speed!”

  The tentacles were rising around the ship now, bursting from the sea in great explosions of water, seemingly everywhere at once. They sailed through a writhing forest of purples and blues, the light casting the deck in nauseating color and spinning shadow. The sea churned around them, sprays of foam twisting through the air.

  Then one rose beneath them and they left the sea.

  The ship flew like a penguin, lingering for an all too brief moment in a medium it secretly yearned for in its heart. The sails snapped back in surprise, flattening against the lines and spars at the unexpected burst of speed. The drag caused the ship to lean back precariously as it flew. Cardamon’s feet felt very light on the deck. He flailed his arms, reaching for something to hold tight to.

&
nbsp; The stern landed first, the impact sending it deep. Cardamon found himself prone against the planks with the sea above him. The ship rebounded as the water came down, the two forces combining into what felt like a full body punch followed by a very quick bath. Cardamon found himself threatening to drift airborne again as the bow dipped now, the ship struggling to level itself.

  Thud went sliding past him, somehow finding the presence of mind to tip his hat and give a “how d'ya do” as he went by. Cardamon understood perfectly. If they survived this then that hat-tip was going to make for a brilliant punchline in stories around the campfire. That was Thud, always looking out for him.

  The ship had more or less recovered and was now climbing its way up the face of a massive wave thrown up by the tentacled turbulence. It hung for a brief moment of peace at the top. The sea before them was still and calm. They were at the edge of the tentacles. Rather than crashing and dropping them like a stone, the wave beneath them shrank in the sudden calm, down to a swell and then scarcely a ripple, the ship descending gently. The Kraquid had stopped advancing. The clump of tentacles lay behind them, still massive and terrifying but receding. The ship slid forward into calm seas, the respite stunning in its suddenness.

  “Why’d it stop?” Thud said. He was laying on the deck, legs up against the wheel post. Skulk was slumped beside him, having roped himself to the wheel at some point.

  “No idea but I’m not exactly displeased about it,” Skulk said. “Look, they’re onto something else out there.” He pointed. The most distant tentacles were writhing about, darting back and forth at something Cardamon couldn’t see. “Think maybe they found the pirate ships.”

  “Head-check!” Thud shouted.

  There was a retching sound from above in the crow’s nest.

  “That was Keezix checking in,” Catchpenny called down.

  Cardamon’s head-check partner was Gammi and he was pretty sure that he was right where he’d been a few minutes earlier. ‘Pretty sure’ didn’t count for much when head-check was called, however. He made his way back to the hatch on wobbly legs and poked his head down.

  Still snoring, swinging away in his hammock, Gammi’s bald egg of a head tucked into his chicken feather pillow that he’d somehow found room to bring. He’d given a similar pillow to Cardamon once which was how Cardamon had learned what chicken allergies were.

  He called out the check-in then made his way back to the poop deck. Thud and Skulk were contemplating the tentacles behind them.

  “Decided it didn’t want us,” Skulk was saying. “We were just another thing floating in the water.”

  “Might be we just left its territory,” Thud said. He turned to look at the flat silent waters that lay before them. “Or entered something else’s.”

  Chapter Nine

  The sea was eerily still.

  The mist lay over the water and it looked like they were sailing across a cloud. Drifting across it, rather. The sails hung limp and the ship moved slowly with the steady current. None of the moons were up and the stars were so bright Thud felt like squinting when looking directly at one.

  They were still piecing the ship back together from the attack. Roping barrels and crates back into place, replacing ropes that had been melted from the tentacle’s touch, patching holes in both deck and dwarf. Thud watched as Doc made his way from person to person, applying snails to the red welts the tentacles had left on exposed skin. He wondered if Doc kept the snails after using them or if they’d be on Gammi’s menu tonight. Clink was oiling The Diplomat, Mungo examining the bladder-buoys that had gone overboard, Leery and Catchpenny swinging around in the rigging doing Gods knew what. The tentacles behind them had slipped back into the sea, one by one. Thud didn’t know why the beast had stopped following. Nor what had become of the pirates. Had they encountered the Kraquid as well?

  He’d have preferred if they’d had a bit of wind to put distance between them and it a little more rapidly but at least there was the current pulling them away.

  “Starboard bow!” The elf’s voice, calling from the rigging high above.

  Mungo came running up to him, eyes even larger than usual.

  “It’s there. Look!”

  Thud looked but didn’t see anything.

  “What am I looking for?”

  “The island! Blackfog!”

  Thud realized he was looking for black fog on a moonless night and felt that he might as well have worn a pair of sun-goggles for the added challenge.

  “There!” Mungo pointed. “Look along the horizon for a place with no stars.”

  “Only way I can tell there even is a horizon is by where the stars ain’t,” Thud said but even as he was speaking he saw it. A hemisphere of darkness on the horizon, like something had risen from the sea and taken a bite out of the edge of the sky. It was easy to see how a ship sailing at night would sail straight into it without even noticing. He started to turn but froze. Had that been something else on the horizon? Another dark shape against the stars, but gone now? Trying to listen for a splash over the soft rippling noise of the sea against the hull was like…well, looking for black fog on a moonless night.

  Others might not have mentioned it for fear of being laughed at for seeing things that weren’t there. Years of dungeoneering had taught the dwarves otherwise. Rule #33 in the book: “If you think you saw something, damn well mention it.” Better to have jokes made about your eyesight than to lose your eyes altogether to a swarm of weresquitoes because you didn’t want to mention that you thought you might have seen a fly metamorphosing in the moonlight.

  “Eyes sharp,” he said. “Thought I saw something movin' out there.”

  “That pirate ship might be ‘round somewheres,” Ginny said. “This was where it was goin’ too, ain’t it?”

  “Aye,” Skulk said. “Assuming that she’s running dark like we are she could be even a few hundred yards away and we’d not see her. Keep yer voices soft.”

  “How close can you get us to that?” Thud asked, nodding toward Blackfog.

  “Current is carrying us toward it so I can get ya as close as ye please. It’s getting further away from it that’s me concern. I can slow us down with the rudder but unless we get a breath or two of a breeze soon we might be seeing that a lot closer than we’d like.”

  “We’re being carried in?” Thud asked. “And you’re just now mentioning it?”

  “We just now saw that damned island. Wasn’t really a concern before that. We been drifting ever since we escaped.”

  “How long, ya figger?”

  Skulk frowned at the arc of darkness in the sky. “Hard to say how far away that is. Could be half an hour, could be five.”

  “Sounds like we could use some more information ‘bout things in general, eh?” Thud asked. He turned to Ginny “Let’s get a pair of dinghies ready. I want you, Leery and Grottimus in one, Dadger, Mungo and Keezix in the other. We need to know how far away that island is. If you can get to it, give the edge a scout. Keep the boats roped together and one outside of the fog if ya can. You see anything at all that looks like something other than fog or water, get outta there and report back.”

  Ginny disappeared with a nod.

  “Ye’re not going?” Skulk asked.

  “Ain’t my place,” Thud said. “I try and put the proper folk on the proper job. You give Ginny and Mungo a glimpse o' somethin' and they’ll have it sussed out and figgered within minutes. Dadger and Leery are along for any creative problem solving needs doin' and Keez and Grott are there to shoot anything what might need shooting. Plus, you gotta have someone to work the oars.”

  ***

  The oars creaked and splashed, even with a cloth muffle on the oarlock. Blackfog Island was in front of them, looming larger and darker against the sky with each stroke. Ginny knelt on the fore thwart, hands on the gunwale as she strained her eyes against the darkness. How would they even know when they got to it? She’d brought a lantern but was hesitant to use it. A light out here would pinpoi
nt them for miles around.

  “Stop!” she hissed. Grottimus gave the oars a quick backpull, Keezix following suit in the other boat. Both rowers were facing forward to allow them to see exactly where they were in relation to the wall of darkness in front of them.

  Ginny had seen it. The water ahead, a rippling curve of darkness along it. The sky before them was pitch black. She had to look almost straight up to get a glimpse of the lighter shade of the actual sky.

  Her stomach was in a knot. She was head of the traps team. She was an engineer. The darkness before them didn’t look to be of any related category.

  “Rope up,” she said. “We’ll take lead.”

  They secured a twenty foot line between the boats, stern to bow. Ginny nodded and Grott gave a half-pull on the oars, easing them forward. Like it or not, Ginny thought, it was time for some light. She dropped a stale hunk of fairy cake into the fuel port on the lamp and, after a few seconds, a cool green light began spilling out as the pixie started feasting. She put one eye to the glass. It was the pixie she’d named Wink, on the account of him being the only male pixie lamp and he was in there with his winkie hanging ‘bout. She hoped he survived. She slid the top ring over the hook line on the end of her reel pole and lifted it into the air, lantern swinging. The fog was a wall of swirling black smoke in front of them. The green light flickered across it. She lowered the tip of her lantern pole and poked it forward into the darkness. The lantern was swallowed by the fog almost instantly, its light dimming to an ugly murk a moment before vanishing. She pulled the pole back. The light came back, lantern, pole and pixie still intact.