Out Through the Attic

by Quincy J. Allen

  The lantern moved back several paces as the silhouettes of two skinny rats stepped into the cell. The Raelish sailors grabbed Plat’s arms and yanked him to his feet, but his legs didn’t hold. He crumpled with a scream.

  Muttering curses about the weakness of lesser races, both rats heaved, dragging Plat out of the cell. They dragged him down a hall and up several flights of stairs, out into the bright, open air of a cloudless afternoon.

  Dozens of Raelish sailors lined the main deck in neat rows. At the head of them stood Caan, a triumphant look upon his face. The rats dragging him did as instructed, slamming him down upon the deck at Caan’s feet.

  Plat let out a groan and managed to roll over onto his back.

  Caan chuckled, clearly delighted at Plat’s condition. Behind him waited another sailor holding a large steel hook attached to a rope looped through a pulley high above in the rigging.

  The peal of seagulls filled the air above and aft of the vessel, and Plat noted a single specimen of those seaworthy avians perched high atop the mizenmast. It appeared to be staring at him. He gave a smile and let the sun soak into his tortured skin. The sunshine was a balm, soothing Plat’s injuries, and the scent of the sea invigorated him.

  Plat looked up at the sun, squinting in the brightness. He wondered where they might be … and how long he had been unconscious. The sun was halfway down the western sky on its way to setting, and the ship appeared to be on a southwesterly track. There isn’t much to the southwest from Hamerheim aside from the Tristan Chain, islands inhabited by headhunting cannibals, Plat thought. He suddenly got a sinking feeling that he was being served up for someone’s dinner.

  Plat’s eyes rested on Caan, and the fire of vengeance flickered to life once again within his breast. His face went stony. He tensed and rolled onto his stomach without so much as a whimper. Drawing upon strength he didn’t know he had, and fueled by his hatred for Caan, he got his hands in front of him … his knees underneath him. He pushed slowly, his muscles screaming, but the only sound was that of chains rattling. He clamped his bill together tightly, ignoring the pain, and stood … defiantly. His breathing came in short, hard breaths, but he never showed a moment of weakness to Commander Caan.

  Plat turned his eyes upon the jailer and two rats that dragged him up from his cell. “I guess I had the strength after all,” he said, cocking his head to the side.

  Fury blazed in their eyes.

  The sound of clapping, like a metronome cadence to a waltz, floated across the deck.

  “Bravo, Captain Plat. Bravo,” Caan said. “To the last you play the defiant trickster. But it is a small thing.” Caan took a moment to size up his prisoner. “I’m going to give you one last chance … to decide your own fate, as it were. If you tell me where your ship is, I’ll let you live.”

  Plat snorted. “I know damn well that you’ll never let me go, Caan, so choke on it.” Plat was tired and in agony, but he wasn’t stupid enough to believe anything that passed Caan’s lips.

  “Oh, I’m not promising to release you, just let you live. In prison. For the rest of your life.”

  That much Plat did believe, but he wasn’t prepared to give up his crew or The Kraken.

  “The alternative?” Plat asked

  Caan’s smile dripped malice. “You drown, or you become a feast for sharks, and barring those, a feast for cannibals.” Caan turned and faced the bow of the ship. “As you may have already surmised, we’re headed for the Tristan Chain. I mean to drop you in the water, still chained. Even if you manage to avoid being swallowed by the waves, even if you avoid being swallowed piece by piece down the gullets of sharks, you most certainly won’t be able to avoid being swallowed by something.”

  Plat sighed and looked once again at the sun. A subtle smile crossed his lips. He’d always said he wanted to die at sea, and he suddenly found greater appreciation for the phrase, Be careful of what you wish for. He reached his decision.

  Slowly, stoically, he raised his chains as far as they would go … inviting the hook.

  “Caan…,” Plat said, locking eyes with the Commander, “I’d rather be torn to pieces than give you or any other Raelish son of a whore what you want. Some day you and the rest of your misbegotten species are going to get what’s coming to you.”

  Caan let a disappointed sigh slip out and then nodded to the man with the hook. Returning his eyes to Plat he said simply, “Not by your hand.”

  The sailor approached, hooked Plat’s shackles, and nodded to several men holding the other end of the rope. They pulled in unison. The rope went taut and yanked Plat violently from the deck. The shackles dug deeply into his wrists and ankles, drawing blood that seeped around the hasps. He swung out wide over the waves sliding quickly beneath him. As he did, he saw the seagull atop the mizenmast leap into the air and beat its wings northeast.

  Plat swung like a pendulum, rotating slowly in the breeze. In the distance ahead, he could just make out a small island. On a good day, a platypus could make it that far … but this was far from one of Captain Plat’s good days. He had little hope that he’d be able to make it.

  “Oh, and Captain Plat,” Caan shouted from the deck.

  “What do you want now?” Plat shouted back. “I’m busy!”

  “I wanted to mention that we know about your network … starting with Lana and those other trollops the Seagull Inn.” Dread tightened itself around Plat’s guts. “I’ll be rounding them all up and treating with them as I have with you and your first mate. I have little doubt that before they die at least one of them will tell me where your ship is.”

  Rage bubbled up from the depths of Plat’s soul like magma rising from the Earth. It erupted from his body in an explosion, a single, soul-wrenching, “CAAAAANNNNN!!!!!”

  Commander Caan nodded to the men holding the rope, a satisfied smile upon his lips. The sailors let go, the rope hissed through the pulley, and Plat dropped into the sea. Water enveloped him. He struggled against the weight of his chains, his muscles screaming in protest as he strained to reach the surface.

  He finally broke the surface and sucked in a deep breath. It took everything he had just to keep his head above water. It took only a minute for his muscles to weaken and finally give way.

  As the water closed around Plat’s bill, the weight of his chains pulling him towards the bottom, he spotted a shadowy flash of motion out of the corner of his eye. It darted and swirled in the murky depths below. Perhaps a shark already had him in its sights. He closed his eyes and waited for the pain of teeth tearing into his flesh.

  

  Darkness folded in on Plat as he sank, the pressure increasing with each passing second. He could hold his breath for a long time and take more pressure than most, but it would matter little if he couldn’t swim and even less if he was dismembered by sharks. A shadow filled his vision, and something grabbed the chain between his wrists.

  With a mighty yank, he felt himself pulled through the depths at an incredible speed in hard, fast pulses. He was being towed, and he realized that a pale hand gripped his chains while the shadowy, undulating swirl of tentacles behind propelled them through the water. Whatever it was pulling him, Plat was gratified that it wasn’t a shark.

  Hand?

  Tentacles?

  The reality slowly sank into his brain.

  It couldn’t be, he thought, bewildered.

  The darkness receded slowly as whatever pulled him along climbed towards the surface. It had long, flowing hair that slithered through the water behind a head he couldn’t see. It appeared to be wearing a long, leather waistcoat of some sort, but from the waist down it wore nothing at all, just the naked shape of purple and brown tentacles. It raised a question in Plat’s mind … a rather ridiculous one: Can one describe an octopus as naked?

  Plat still felt Faen’s pendant clenched tightly within his fist.

  Was it possible? His mind did its best to rationalize what was happening to him.

  Could Faen’s s
avior now be his own? There was little doubt that what had latched onto him was nothing more or less than at least half octopus. What else could it be? The inescapable conclusion was that the automaton god had rescued Plat and was taking him, presumably, towards an island full of cannibals.

  Well, though Plat, stranger things have happened. He smiled at how ridiculous his situation was and waited for them to reach the surface … or land … or both. He only hoped it was soon, because he was running out of breath.

  They were in fifty feet of water when they finally breached the surface. Plat let out his breath in a single blast and sucked in fresh oxygen. He panted heavily for several seconds, literally lying sideways upon his savior’s back. Her tentacles pushed them through the water with incredible force, and the water swirled around him, tugging this way and that. Ahead he could see an occasional outcropping of coral surrounded by sea swells. Beyond that lay a small island.

  “Take a deep breath!” the creature shouted without turning her head. It was clearly a woman’s voice, but mechanical in nature, not unlike Faen’s.

  Plat obliged with a quick inhale, and they dove beneath the surface once again. A magnificent coral reef spread out beneath them, and the creature dove straight down towards a massive ledge of coral. They passed beneath the ledge and reached the sandy sea floor. The creature turned left along the bottom, obviously in search of something. A short time later, the dark maw of a cave loomed ahead.

  They passed within, and to Plat it appeared as if it had been carved carefully from the living coral, although by what he couldn’t imagine. Darkness closed in on them, the entrance behind a circle of illuminated blue set in an ocean of black.

  Impossibly, they broke the surface into cool air as still as a tomb and just as dark. By Plat’s estimation they were still forty or more feet beneath the ocean. His savior let go of his shackles, and several tentacles wrapped around his arms, pushing him forward. He touched upon a ledge of coral, although it seemed carved into the precise angles of a stair. His hand reached up and encountered another. As he put his legs down, he encountered more stairs beneath him.

  “Where are we?” he asked. His voice echoed distantly off the walls of what sounded like a very large chamber.

  He heard a swirl of water behind him and to his left. Her reply, mechanical but distinctly feminine, drifted across the water, “An ancient place. Built by an ancient people.” There was more swirling in the water behind him. “At the top of the stairs and to the right you will find supplies, crates and equipment … among other things. About ten feet in you will find a table upon which rests a lantern and matches that should still work. Take whatever you want. It’s all yours … as payment for what you’ve done for my people. You may even find a way of releasing your shackles.”

  “Where did it all come from?” he asked.

  “The bottom of the sea,” she replied without further explanation. “I will come for you again … soon.” There was a swirl and a splash. The sound of water churning continued for several seconds, the echoes of it fading until all that remained was a quiet drip-dripping somewhere further within the chamber.

  Plat slowly climbed the rough stairs, struggling against the shackles and pain until he ran into what felt like a duffle bag. Further probing revealed crates, furniture, and sacks. Finally, his hand brushed up against a table leg. Running his hand up the leg, he found the surface and the lantern upon it. Groping across the table, he located a metal cylinder. He shook it and heard the distinct sound of matches within. With a twist of the cap, he extracted a match, lit it and then, lifting its cover plate, lit the lantern.

  He faced a smooth wall made of white stone obviously not carved from coral. To the left and right piles and piles of … well, everything that could be carried upon a vessel … spread out, from the edge of the stairs all the way back into the darkness beyond the lamplight.

  Plat turned around to see what else waited for him, and a gasp froze in his throat.

  “Good god!” he whispered.

  

  A wax disk spun slowly upon a hand-cranked phonograph as a quiet symphony reverberated throughout the perfect acoustics of the cavern. Plat sat comfortably in a high-backed wooden chair he’d placed next to the table. The phonograph and chair, amongst a few other knickknacks, had been salvaged from the hoard stretching back into the cave for a hundred yards. The lantern glowed warmly upon the table, and next to it lay a long object wrapped in oilskins and tied securely with thick leather straps.

  Plat sighed contentedly and stretched his sore but healing muscles. His head still hurt from Caan’s beating, but that too was fading. He was taking a brief respite from his long labors. He wore black, woolen trousers and a silk shirt of shimmering ebony found in an old sea chest. Amidst the stores he’d discovered a full-length, crimson leather coat that fit him perfectly. He’d also uncovered matching leather boots that came to his knees. A wide, black leather belt completed the ensemble, and with it, Plat felt mostly himself once again.

  There was water and food, and even an assortment of cooking pots and utensils, but to his regret, amongst everything and despite his best efforts, he found not a single tin of tea. Plat would have killed for a decent cup of tea down there in the darkness, although the two-hundred-year-old brandy he found in an iron chest was a passable substitute. He’d opened the chest with the same bit of bent wire he used to release himself from the shackles.

  In that cool darkness, broken only by his single lamp and a barrel of ship oil, time lost all meaning. His belly had told him to eat nine times, and his body had convinced him thrice that it needed sleep. Beyond that he had no idea how much time had passed. When he wasn’t eating or sleeping, he’d occupied himself with sorting and stacking the piles of goods that surrounded him.

  What his savior (and he’d considered capitalizing that word more than once) had so easily described as ‘other things’ turned out to be no less than a miracle—two miracles, in fact—that would change the world.

  Yet she had not returned.

  The symphony lulled him to sleep.

  

  A surge and splash of water startled Plat out of a magnificent, glorious dream.

  “Your friends are here,” a metallic voice lifted up from the surface of the water, beyond where the light reached. “It’s time for you to go.”

  “May I see you?” he asked.

  “No. Please turn out the light.”

  He sighed, desperately wanting to see the face of his Savior. “As you wish.” Plat lifted the oilskin-wrapped object and slipped the strap he’d made for it over his shoulder. Then he dimmed the lantern, taking one last look at the yellowish gleam that spread out on the opposite side of the cavern from the crates and other supplies. Darkness folded in once again. He heard a swirling of water as his Savior approached him. “You said that all of this was mine,” he said, speaking towards the movement in the water. He hesitated, fearing the answer to his next question. “Did you mean it?”

  The answer came instantly. “Yes. The world needs someone like you. Someone willing to risk himself to save others. As yet, most of my people lack the programming to defend themselves.”

  Programming? he thought. He wanted to ask what it meant, but she continued on.

  “You may return any time you like and take whatever you need. I suspect a being like you might just be the savior my people … and your own … need.”

  He knew what she was saying … what she wanted of him in return. And he was more than willing.

  “Thank you,” he replied, humbly. “I will,” he promised. And it was a promise. He’d never thought of himself as a savior, but what he could see of his future led in a straight line towards the Raelish empire.

  He stepped gingerly down into the water, careful not to fall in the darkness, and felt tentacles gently run along his body. He took a deep breath, felt small, firm hands grip his own and then they dove beneath the surface.

  They flew through t
he tunnel. The pale circle of blue grew larger and larger as they neared the cave entrance. As they passed through, Plat’s savior released his hands and pointed towards the surface. With a swirl of tentacles and a bloom of dark ink that blotted out his vision, she disappeared, but not before Plat got one good look at it … at her.

  Pale brown hair framed an angular, simian face as smooth and pale as alabaster. Her eyes were blue, and the cut of her leather waistcoat exposed something remarkable. A circle had been cut out in the middle of her chest. Plat assumed it had been cut into her flesh, and while it might have been, what was exposed by that circle was not.

  Clockwork.

  Her insides were clockwork. Like Faen. Like the automatons. She was one of them … and a great deal more.

  Plat stroked hard towards the surface, his webbed hands pulling heavily at the water, his webbed feet kicking furiously as his wide tail swished to and fro. As he neared the surface, he spotted the gleaming, bronze keel of The Kraken. He’d recognize his own ship from any angle.

  He breached the surface with a splash, dazzled briefly by the bright, noonday sunshine as it reflected in blinding flashes off the sea swells.

  “Ahoy!” he cried, waving his arm high over his head.

  He spotted figures jumping and pointing on the mid-deck. Someone ran inside, and a moment later The Kraken veered towards him. She was a magnificent vessel, a submersible with long line, gentle curves, and sharp edges. Her pointed bow stretched like a spear in the sunshine, cutting through the water, and her short conn tower angled back towards the stern. A bronze railing surrounded the long mid-deck, and the stern rose slowly at a shallow angle that tapered off just above her massive screws.

  Plat wondered who was in command. A pang of pain and guilt laced its way through his thoughts. He’d managed to put Dimont far from his mind, down in the depths, but now there was no escaping the loss.

  The Kraken slowed as it approached, and Plat heard her mighty engines reverse as she pulled alongside him. He gripped a rung of the ladder set into the ship’s hull and started up. A motion above caught his eye, and he looked up into the blue eyes and striped, furry face of Lana. Upon her shoulder sat Clive. And Plat had never been so glad to see either a tavern maid or a bird in his entire life. He pulled himself up onto the deck and looked at what appeared to be most of his crew, undoubtedly above decks to search for him.