by Dante King
“Was that gunpowder that the fighting floor was marked out in?” I asked Barry, who was floating nearby and looking around the dark and hazy joint with a tear in his ghostly eye.
“Aye sir, of a kind,” he said. “It’s bloodlet powder, that stuff. Burns bright blue for as long as the fight lasts, and only goes out when a decent bit o’ blood touches it. That marks the end of the fight, you see.”
“From what I can see,” Enwyn said, “there are no regeneration runes…”
“No, miss,” Barry agreed.
“So, it’s a fight to the death?” I asked. “I thought pirates had, like, a code and stuff.”
“Oh aye, captain,” Barry said, wagging his chin, “we have a code right enough. The code states: the winner taketh all. That includes the other person’s life, sir. You don’t get broker than dead.”
It was hard to argue with that.
“Barry,” I said, “why don’t you float that piratical ass of yours over to the bar and order a round of drinks? There’s so much smoke in this room that I swear that I’m getting a little high. I need something to sharpen me up.”
“I’ve just the thing, captain!” Barry said. “You can’t set foot in an alehouse the likes of The Shark Bait Tavern without sampling the wares.”
“None of that brainkiller grog though,” I warned him. “I need to sharpen up, but not cut the blood circulation from my head.”
Barry bobbed off through and over the crowd, and I turned back to the fighting arena. It was, as I had seen a few times before now, a very simple affair. Two contestants get into the circle and only one contestant leaves.
“So,” the soft, cultivated voice of Mortimer Chaosbane spoke into my ear, “have you given much thought as to how you are going to accomplish your goal, Justin?”
I managed to stop myself from jumping, but only just. The man was as quiet as a church mouse in his movements, and even though the tavern attendees were almost deafening in their anticipation for the fight, Mortimer’s voice seemed to bypass my eardrums and go straight to my brain.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” I said with a nod. “Liquidating someone isn’t something most people do without thinking it through.”
Mortimer nodded understandingly. “Yes. Indeed. It just strikes me that things have become somewhat more problematic.”
“How so?”
“Well, your target is fighting to the death in front of at least two-hundred intoxicated and hot-headed ladies and gentlemen of fortune.”
I looked sideways at Mortimer. His face was very close to mine, whether because he was making sure that I could hear him over the pandemonium in the room or because he had no notion of personal space I couldn’t say. I could feel his breath on my cheek, and I had expected it to smell fetid or poisonous—as I imagined Death would smell. However, it seemed old Mortimer was a stickler for dental hygiene because all I got were wafts of minty freshness.
“Yeah, this whole public fight thing has made things a bit knottier,” I admitted.
Mortimer made a little noise of agreement in his throat. Then he said, “It is worth pondering on, certainly. Remember, you must be the one to take the life of Vakash. Otherwise, all the time we have spent here will be wasted. If any other kills him—this Bung-Eye Jeppi for instance—then the soul energy will float away, untapped, out into the universe.”
It was weird how he made the death of someone sound almost beautiful then. Still, killing Vakash was going to be exceedingly difficult.
“Could I kill one of these other pirates?” I asked, nodding up at the room. “Surely some of them have a death warrant hanging over their heads.”
Mortimer did a single shake of his head. “I’m afraid that, even if they did, none of them look strong enough to fuel your little bracelet there. It’ll have to be Vakash.”
“I was thinking,” I said, “that I would wait until the fight has started and then get a good old-world tavern brawl started.” I gestured around at the hoard of hammered maritime hoodlums surrounding us. “This lot is a powder keg of testosterone, resentment, and drunken aggression. All they need is a spark to set them off.”
Mortimer steepled his pale fingers in front of him and considered his perfectly manicured nails.
“I find your plan a good one,” he said agreeably, fixing me with those dark, intelligent Chaosbane eyes. “I will gladly help you in your distraction.”
“Cool,” I said. While Barry was busy at the bar and the fight was yet to start, I explained my plan to Enwyn, Odette, and Idman. They all agreed to it, Idman being the most excited at the prospect of a brawl. I figured that, having been out of his prison for a few days now, he was sorely missing dealing punishment to criminals.
One of The Shark Bait’s nymph wenches came over, followed by Barry. She plonked down five tankards on the table and stood with her hand out and an unimpressed look on her face. Odette paid her with a few copper coins, and the nymph left.
“Much obliged, miss!” Barry called after her, his eyes locked to her rump.
“What’s in these?” I asked, pushing tankards to Enywn and Odette and then taking one myself.
“Mermead,” Barry said. “Made from fermented seaweed and a few other marine bits and pieces. It’ll clear your head as well as a stiff sea breeze, sir.”
I was coming to trust Barry more and more, but when it came to alcohol, I still had my reservations. I took a tentative sip of the mermead and found, to my surprise, that it was just as Barry said; refreshing both to the mouth and the brain.
“This is a tasty beverage,” Odette leaned across the table so that I was able to hear her. Her tangle of beaded and carved bone necklaces fell forward, and I was confronted by the swell of a pair of large, firm tits.
“Yes,” I said, “yes it is.”
“I was expecting it to taste like minotaur urine in all honesty,” Idman Thunderstone said, “but it’s not so bad.”
I was just about to ask Janet’s father how he knew what minotaur piss tasted like when there was a loud rapping of wood on wood and yelling for quiet that cut through the din.
A stringy seadog clambered onto a table that had been moved to the center of the fighting floor. It was hard for me to take him seriously with him wearing the classic red and white striped shirt of the cartoon pirate, but everyone seemed to quiet down all the same. He raised his hands for attention, and in one of them was a wooden leg. He still had both legs, so it seemed he’d stolen the wooden leg from one of the patrons.
“A’hoy there, all you buckos and rapscallions! How about you quiet the fuck down. Then I can say my piece, and we can get back to the business o’ blood!”
There were some cheers and boos, but they died down quickly.
“We all know why the bloody hell all you hands are gathered in my house, The Shark Bait Tavern, today. You’re here for blood! You’re here to see two of the blackest knaves fight it out until one of them is fish food! You’re here to find out what sorry cove is going to be the chief and captain of the Pixie Partyboat Company!”
The volume of the audience rose again, and Stripey had to bang the wooden leg down on the table to restore order.
“Aye, that’s enough o’ your carry-on! Let me get on wi’ it, you heathens!” Stripey called grumpily.
There was a chorus of jeers but then noise subsided.
“On one side o’ the circle we’ve got an upstart picaroon, but one of the canniest sky-sailors as ever plowed a cloud, Bung-Eye Jeppi!”
There was a deal of cheering at this announcement.
A gnome—standing tall as gnomes went, at about three and a half feet tall—swaggered out from a back door and walked into the circle. He was dressed only in a pair of moss green pantaloons, a waistcoat of purple silk, and a pair of shark skin boots. As his name suggested, one of his eyes was about three times the size of his other one. It bulged from his face like a boil on the verge of rupturing, staring out in one direction while his other normal eye swiveled around the crowd. He was grinn
ing confidently, and I saw that half of his teeth were silver.
I saw a group of rowdy gnomes elbow their way to the front of the crowd and stare mutinously around. One of them handed Bung-Eye Jeppi a half-pint of cider, and he guzzled it back in one.
Those gnomes were about as far removed from Earthling garden gnomes as it was possible to be. I had to giggle at just how inaccurate our portrayal of gnomes were on Earth. They might have been short—about three foot or so—but that was where the similarity ended. They were scarred, black-toothed, and mean-looking. They would have been more at home with a harpoon than one of those little fishing rods that they usually carried on Earth.
“And on the other side o’ the circle!” Stripey continued. “We’ve an old hand in our midst. All you strumpets and scallywags put your hands, stumps, hooks and claws together for Vakash the Vile!”
Boos and cheers permeated the smoky air in equal measure once more. I craned my neck to make sure that I had a view of Vakash as he came out through another side door, and so I was looking right at him when he turned to face the crowd.
He was a foul-looking orc bastard. He was the kind of person with evil swimming through his veins and vindictive cruelty blended through every fiber. His skin was the greenish hue of rotten meat, his long arms knotted with muscle, his head as bald as an egg and scarred as a butcher’s block. His yellow cat-like eyes were narrowed in a permanent squint of distaste, and his golden lower canines protruded over his upper lip. His left hand was a hook and, I guessed, his vector. By his side hung a well-used cutlass.
But he was older than the gnome, Jeppi. Anyone could see that.
“It’s a case of the young cub challenging the older lion, is it?” I asked Odette.
“So it would seem,” she replied.
Vakash was bent and bowlegged and so was only about a foot and a half taller than the gnome. They squared off in front of one another as Stripey rapped the wooden leg once more on the table.
“Winner taketh all!” was all he said.
“Winner taketh all!” the crowd parroted with one loud, beastial voice.
And so the table in the middle of the fighting circle was dragged away, the bloodlet powder lit, and the fight began.
Within about thirty seconds, it was clear that Bung-Eye Jeppi was going to mess Vakash the Vile up. It was merely a case of seeing how much the gnome would toy with the older orc.
Vakesh had the size, strength, and reach, but Bung-Eye Jeppi had the speed. He had speed in such prodigious amounts that Vakash couldn’t make use of any of his advantages, couldn’t so much as get his claws on the fleet-footed gnome. He drew his cutlass early in the proceedings and swung and chopped at the gnome, but failed to draw even a bead of blood.
Jeppi dodged and ducked and spun, evading Vakash’s attacks and then zipping in and delivering embarrassing slaps to the old orc’s big, bald head.
At one point, Bung-Eye Jeppi jumped nimbly over a low slash of his opponent’s cutlass and poked Vakash in the eye, sending the orc reeling back.
“I guess I ain’t the only bung-eye in this fight now, eh?” he crowed.
The drunken mob of watchers roared their approval. This was the sort of showboating that made a fight to the death particularly entertaining—no one liked fighters who took the damn thing too seriously, did they? The only way that Jeppi could have won them over anymore was by letting Vakash rip his throat out with his hook, because there was nothing more satisfying than watching a man get murdered while in the middle of peacocking.
“Justin,” Enwyn said, leaning in so that she could be heard over the animal bellowing of the pirate crowd, “we should kick something off soon. Bung-Eye Jeppi could finish Vakash at any moment. He’s just toying with him!”
“I heartily concur,” Idman said, his eyes riveted on the combat taking place in front of us.
I looked around, just as both parties used magic for the first time in the battle.
Vakash summoned a parrot composed of silver light to his shoulder. The bird squawked and then hawked up a small ball of sputtering lighting, which fired toward Bung-Eye Jeppi like a missile. The gnome rolled aside and the projectile punched into the floor leaving a black scorch mark.
I could see why Vakash had summoned his electric sidekick; it was buying him time to recuperate. Even though Bung-Eye Jeppi evaded the fizzling lighting balls with relative ease, he couldn’t get close enough to strike at his opponent. This was giving the old orc some much needed time to catch his breath.
Bung-Eye Jeppi, it transpired, was an Earth Mage, but with the same penchant for metals and minerals as Ragnar Ironskin.
The gnome rolled to one side and got to his tiny feet. He summoned half a dozen gleaming throwing knives that formed out of molten metal in mid-air. The summoned blades revolved around his waist, following him as he moved. Cartwheeling out of the way of the magical parrot’s lightning balls, Bung-Eye Jeppi grabbed a knife and sent it speeding at Vakash.
Rather than hitting the orc, the knife struck the parrot square in the chest. The summoned creature blinked out of existence, taking the knife that hit it with it.
“Okay,” I said to my table of comrades, “go, go, go! Raise some hell and keep it raised!”
The group broke up from the table and scattered through the immediate area, while the crowd pressed closer to the fighting floor, sensing blood.
Chapter Ten
Idman Thunderstone started off a scuffle in one corner of the room by simply barging one gnoll sailor in the back and then ducking out of sight. The gnoll turned, his eyes unfocused with drink, and smacked a barbarian-looking woman standing behind him square in the mouth, sending her backward over a table.
Enwyn surreptitiously set a table on fire, making the gathering of dwarves around it spring up and knock the drinks out of the hands of the sailors crowded around. The spilling of alcohol was a cardinal sin in an establishment like The Shark Bait Tavern, and the sailors set upon anyone within striking distance.
Mortimer, as far as I could see, was slipping through the crowd, not doing too much. However, I did notice that wherever he went, at least one person dropped bonelessly to the deck in his wake, which made me think he was thinning the number of people in the room.
Odette didn’t even need to start anything herself. An amorous and overweight elf grabbed a hold of her as she passed and attempted to stick his hand up one of her many skirts. In response, Odette summoned her bone spear and rammed it through the elf’s big fat stomach. The elf howled, and Odette ripped the staff free, sending guts slithering all over the floor. As the elf collapsed backward through a table—upsetting even more patrons—one of his buddies stepped forward to grab Odette and slipped over in the pile of fresh intestines that littered the floor.
It was pretty much all on after that.
The fighting spread from these hot-pockets of dispute like fire through a grassland until the entire bar was a mess of heaving, struggling mages and sailors. Spells and flashes of magical light snapped, crackled, and popped. It was pandemonium of the first order.
I watched in awe as a troll with an eyepatch threw a pale, handsome young man with protruding upper canines, who I reckoned must have been a vampire—the ultimate night watchman—along the length of the bar. The vampire sent glasses and tankards crashing to the ground as he was propelled down the filthy, slick bartop. He shot off the other end and crashed head first into a honky tonk piano. The troll bellowed happily at a job well done and then a wayward lightning bolt hit him in the stomach, and he blasted backward through the bar and into the wall behind it. Green glass bottles rained down and inundated the smoking troll.
A part of me couldn’t help but delight in seeing a proper bar fight unfold in front of my eyes. It was an awesome and chaotic sight, fists flying in all directions and magic being used with absolute disregard for collateral damage.
Then, I remembered what the fuck I was supposed to be doing.
My head snapped around as Bung-Eye Jeppi flicked a knife
toward Vakash’s chest.
My heart stopped.
Shit, I thought.
Vakash’s hand—the one holding the brutal-looking cutlass—shot up, as if he hoped to deflect the blade with his sword. The magical dagger thudded into the back of his meaty green hand and stuck there.
Vakash dropped his cutlass and snarled, his yellow eyes popping.
My heart started up again.
I summoned my black crystal staff to my hand and dashed forward, barging a pirate out of the way and sending him staggering into a pair of stick-skinned selkies who promptly started beating the crap out of him with their rubbery flippers.
Some enterprising individual tried to brain me with a barstool, but I blocked the blow with my staff. I ripped the chair from the pirate’s hand, touched the tip of staff to his thigh, and used my Crystallize spell to turn him into solid transparent rock. Not wanting to waste a nice bit of rickety furniture, I whirled about and brought the barstool down on the back of another pirate’s head, knocking him the fuck out.
I couldn’t really see my friends in the melee, but I did catch sight of Odette laying about her with her spear, with lethal efficiency. When she had cleared a bit of space around herself, she made a gesture with her hands and pointed at the big fat elf that she had killed a few moments before.
With a disgusting wrenching, convulsive movement, the fat elf’s skin split apart and his skeleton pulled itself free of his corpse.
“Now that is Death Magic!” I said to myself.
The skeleton walked jerkily toward a pirate who backed away from it, terror shining in his eyes. The skeleton grabbed him, while the man beat futilely at its skull with his bunched fists. With the slow, unstoppable force of a tectonic plate, the skeleton gripped the man by the bottom jaw and twisted his head right off with a horrible sucking, crunching noise.
I was almost through the crush of brawlers when Bung-Eye Jeppi raised another knife.
