Shipshape

by Trey Myr

  “What is this?” Mable asked hesitantly. “I don’t think it came out of Henry’s cellar.”

  “Oh no. This is from an old dwarf I met in Whitecliff. I like human ale just fine, but sometimes you need something with a little kick.”

  “I hesitate to think what you would consider a little kick,” I said, eying the mug suspiciously.

  “Doesn’t matter. Drink. We all need it.”

  “It is a very dwarven solution, I guess,” I said and took a careful sip, my eyes watering at the harsh taste.

  “No more than it is a human solution,” Mable disagreed. She took a sip from her own mug. “Wow, that’s a rough one.”

  “Dwarves like it rough,” Marjory snickered at her own joke, and between the awful innuendo and the warmth that was spreading in my stomach from the dwarven ale, I found myself joining her in my first laugh since the ruined Outpost first came into my sight.

  The vile taste of the drink made me remember better ales and better times in the Boar and Barrel, and I raised the mug in a toast to Agnes and Henry. Mable answered with a toast of her own to some of her fellow serving girls who were too young for the raiders to take, and before we knew it we were trading stories about dead or missing friends and family members, and our dinner had transformed into a wake for the town of Gerald’s Rest.

  I ended up drinking just the one mug, taking no more than a sip for every toast. That dwarven hooch was without a doubt the worst drink I’d ever tasted, and since that one mug was enough to get me a little beyond buzzed, I didn’t feel any need to drink more of it. Marjory assured me that proper dwarven ale was superior to any human drink, but apparently you couldn’t get the proper barley for it out of the dwarven cities. And apparently, when a dwarf was making hooch they made it from whatever was available, and you never knew just what it would taste like before you tried it.

  Whatever it was made of, however, it was always a lot richer in alcohol than human-brewed drinks, since every dwarf could use their vim to distill the brew and concentrate it.

  Mable, who’d been affected by the attack far more than Marjory or me, didn’t show even close to the same restraint, and managed to match Marjory drink for drink for a truly impressive amount of time. But even the tavern girl’s well trained constitution had a limit, and by the time the barrel was empty I had to carry the passed out woman to bed.

  She was still out of it when I woke up the next morning, and so was Marjory. It’s a good thing that the nights in winter are longer, since we stayed up talking and drinking for at least a couple of hours, and there was no way that I’d have managed to get up at first light If it came earlier. And I would have hated to lose the time, especially considering the absurd speed the raiders were managing to move at.

  The weather had cleared during the night, and the morning was sunny and yet crisply cold, and despite the fact that I was back to eating a cold breakfast of stale bread and hard cheese, and that there was still no sign of the raiders, I was feeling far better after our impromptu wake.

  The raiders’ trail didn’t lead directly into the wilds, so we weren’t following the same river I followed when I was looking for wolves, but we were still moving further away from the settled lands, and I expected to reach their hideout fairly soon. After all, they couldn’t raid the border very effectively if they were a months’ march away. Unless, of course, they were always moving so much faster than they should be able to. But if they could move that fast all the time, I’d have heard about their raids from the soldiers in the Outpost nearer Whitecliff as well.

  It was around midmorning when Marjory finally emerged from her cabin and joined me at the bow. I’d brought a crate of jerky up to the deck on the first day of the chase to sit on it while directing the Sailor to follow the trail, and it brought my head down to the perfect height for the dwarf to grab it and kiss me. It occurred to me that we hadn’t really touched each other since we found the destroyed Outpost. On the way to Gerald’s Rest we’d both been worried and too much in a hurry, and after that… neither one of us had spared a thought to anything other than catching up to our kidnapped friends and family.

  I wrapped my arms around her and just took a few moments to just enjoy the feel of her body against mine and the taste of her lips, then leaned back with my arms still around her.

  “Thank you for last night. I really needed it.”

  “We all did. You and Mable probably more than me, but we all needed to take our minds off things.”

  She settled down on deck in front of me and started to use her vim to boil a pot of water, and I noticed that she was wearing a simple canvas shirt and pants instead of her leathers, so I reached down and began to rub her broad shoulders. Marjory’s muscles were a lot denser than a human’s, and I had to exert a fair amount of force in order to knead them properly, but the dwarf’s approving moans and the feel of her smooth skin were more than reward enough for me to continue.

  I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed to take her longer to heat up the water than it usually did. She couldn’t possibly have been low on vim, so the only explanation I could think of was that she wanted to prolong the shoulder rub. Not that I minded, of course.

  Slower than usual or not, however, it wasn’t long before the water was boiling, and Marjory brewed us both large mugs of hot, sweet tea. I was still not as bothered by the cold as I should have been, but the hot beverage was very welcome, and we sat down companionably to drink.

  I’d drank about half of my tea when a pained groan from the direction of my cabin announced that Mable was awake, and apparently not very happy about it. Marjory poured a third mug of the hot tea and rose to her feet, giving me another kiss before heading towards the stern to help Mable get over what sounded like a very nasty hangover.

  Alone on the deck again, I settled down to watch the trail ahead of us and direct the Sailor, who’d taken the wheel again. The day had started out quiet, with only an attack by a pair of flying lizards to stave off the boredom, and even those were dispatched easily by my Archers, with the aid of the Marine and the Swift’s arbalest. It was a little shocking to me how routine the lizards had become, considering the amount of trouble they caused me on my first trip into the wilds. I’d grown a lot more powerful in the short amount of time since I lucked into finding the Boat Pattern, thanks to a combination of having my own Pattern with which to cycle vim and the greatly improved mobility of the flying Boat.

  I didn’t want to stop the Swift every time we brought down a lizard, but I still hated to see the vim go to waste, so after the first attack I recalled one of my Hawks from its position ahead of the Boat, and had it stay close by to syphon the vim from any further battles.

  The quiet morning left me with a lot of time for idle thought, and at some point, while I was directing the Sailor to turn the Boat more sharply into the wilds, it occurred to me that the Swift’s steering made absolutely no sense. The wheel was located at the bow, and while the Boat had a rudder under the stern, the rudder couldn't have been connected to the wheel and even if it was, it shouldn't have worked since we didn’t have the greater drag against the water to offset the far greater sail area. The only thing I could think of was that the same process that used the air aligned vim to keep the Boat floating must also be responsible for steering her, since she would have been forced to travel in the wind’s direction otherwise.

  My Archers had just finished taking out another solitary flying lizard when the second Hawk’s screeching alerted me to the fact that we were getting close to our quarry. I stopped the Swift and immediately took her high enough that her light blue hull would be impossible to see from the ground. The women must have felt the change in the Boat’s movement, since they came running out of my cabin as soon as we started to rise.

  Or, at least, Marjory came out running. Mable was clearly not fully over her hangover, and stopped at the cabin’s door to raise a hand and block the sun from reaching her reddened eyes.

  “What’s going on?” my gunner asked a
s soon as she saw how high we were. “Did we find them?”

  “I don’t know yet. The Hawk saw something, and I wanted us out of sight first thing.”

  “So what now? They can’t see us up here, but we can’t see them either.”

  “I can see through the Hawk’s eyes, but I’ll need to stay still and concentrate while I do it. I’ll need you to keep watch while I do, since I’ll be completely oblivious to anything happening here.”

  “I’ve got it. Go ahead.”

  I went into my cabin and lay down on my cot, to ensure I wouldn’t fall while disconnected from my own body. Every Shaper was connected to all of their Shapes and could command them telepathically at any time. That same connection would also allow me to use any of a Shape’s senses, and could even let me possess the Shape and use it like my own body. The downside of it was that a human mind was only capable of handling one set of senses, and I would be left completely senseless while I was watching through the Hawk’s eyes.

  The drawbacks made the ability very limited in its utility, but using a Shape to scout while the Shaper was in a safe place was one of the commonest uses for it, even if it was one I myself had never had the occasion to try before.

  I closed my eyes and felt inside me for my connection to the Hawk. I had a dozen Shapes at this point, but I had an instinctive understanding of which Shape related to which connection, and it only took a few seconds to mentally grasp the Hawk and pull its senses to myself. There was a moment of disorientation while my mind struggles to make sense of eyes that were many times sharper than my own, but the view quickly snapped into focus, and I found myself looking down on what was obviously an old world-ruin.

  It was a single building, and looked high enough to have about three floors. One side of it had collapsed during either the fall of the old world or the centuries that had passed since, but the rest of it looked sound, and was big enough to hold at least a hundred people comfortably. There was only a single entrance to the building, and two scruffy looking men stood guard outside. They were armed with crude looking bows and ill maintained swords, and wearing mismatched leather armor that they were clearly not the original owners of.

  They were also leaning on the walls to either side of the door, and paying as little attention as possible to their surroundings.

  The door itself was big enough for three people to walk into side by side, and looked to be made of relatively new wooden planks, and more planks covered up the many windows that dotted the walls.

  I sent the Hawk to circle around the building, but there wasn’t much else to see. The building was surrounded by the same grassland we’d been sailing over for the past day and a half, and the trail we’d been following terminated about two hundred meters from the door, leading into a large perfect circle where the grass had been burned down, leaving blackened and dead soil.

  “There’s just no way that a force large enough to raze Gerald’s Rest can fit in there,” I told the women after I withdrew my consciousness from the Hawk. “And that’s without considering the fact that the Ogres would never fit through the door.”

  “It might have an underground section,” Marjory offered. “With a bigger entrance for the Ogres.”

  “I had the Hawk look around. There’s nothing but grassland for kilometers around. And the Ogres would have left a trail that I’d be able to follow. It’s like they, and a large part of the raiders’ force, just vanished somehow.”

  “They could have Unshaped them, right?”

  “Sure, but that’s a lot of vim that the Shaper would need to use for something else. And it wouldn’t have left that scorched circle in the grass.”

  “So what do you think happened there?”

  “I have no idea. That’s precisely what is bothering me.”

  “Does it really matter?” Mable asked hesitantly. “We know at least some of the raiders are here, so we can go to Whitecliff and have the soldiers take care of it, right?”

  “I’m not sure. If the Ogres and most of the raiders aren’t here, than are we sure that the kidnapped people are? It’d take us three days to reach Whitecliff if we sail through the night, but it would take months for an army to get here. And if this is the wrong place, we’d have wasted those months.”

  “What else could we do? The trail ends here.”

  “We could go in,” Marjory grinned. “See if the people are here or not, and find something that can tell us where the rest of the raiders are.”

  “Go in?” the serving girl squeaked. “But you said there are a hundred people in there!”

  “I said there could be a hundred people in there,” I corrected her. “We don’t know how many of them are actually there.”

  “You’re not actually considering it, are you Jacky?”

  “I am, actually. We’d be fighting inside the ruin, which is what I’m good at. There will probably be narrow corridors, so they won’t be able to overrun us, and if it does look too dangerous, we can sacrifice the Shapes to give us time to escape.”

  “Besides,” Marjory added, “you’ll be safe up in the Swift.”

  “Oh no. no no no. You are not leaving me alone here. I don’t… I don’t think I can stand it.”

  “We’re going to be fighting down there, Mable. Jack and I are used to it, but you should stay here, where it’s safe.”

  “I can fight!” Mable shouted at the dwarf. “I’ve spent half my life in a tavern, don’t you think I can handle myself in a brawl by now?”

  “I’m sure you can, but this isn’t a tavern brawl between drunken scavengers and farmers. These are raiders, and they’re going to be armed.”

  “I don’t care!” Mable screamed, and wrapped her arms around her stomach as her voice lowered into a whisper. “I can’t stay here alone. I just can’t.”

  I put my hand on Marjory’s shoulder to stop her from answering. “That’s enough. If you really don’t want to stay here alone, you can come with us. But once we’re down there, you’ll do everything we say, got it?”

  Mable nodded her head jerkily, and I went down to the hold to get the shield spell we took from the ghoul. I was suddenly really glad that I didn’t find a buyer for it in Whitecliff, and that there hadn’t been a chance to sell it since then.

  “Take this,” I handed the belt to Mable. “It should protect you from most attacks as long as you have enough vim.”

  “You’ve got an artefact that protects you from attacks and neither one of you is using it?”

  “It’s fairly useless to us, unfortunately. I’m almost always out of vim, and Marjory needs hers to use her cannon, so we don’t have any for the spell.”

  “Wait, this is going to take away my vim? Isn’t that dangerous?”

  “It won’t take away your vim. It just uses it to power the shield, and then returns it to you.”

  “But if it returns to me, than why can’t you two use it? Or at least Marjory, if you don’t have vim at all.”

  “Because it exhausts the vim,” Marjory answered. “Think about it like this: vim is like steam inside a boiler. When you are born you have a boiler inside of you that can hold twenty kilograms of steam and every year you pour one kilogram of water into it. The boiler heats it up and turns it to steam, and it accumulates inside you.

  “When a Shaper like Jack uses a Pattern, he takes some of that steam and puts it inside the Pattern, and it creates the Shape, and that vim stays in the Shape. But when a dwarf like me uses her vim to power up our machinery, we connect a pipe to our boiler and the steam flows and powers up the device. Since you’re using its energy to get work done, the steam cools down and turns back into water, and the water flows back into your boiler to be reheated.

  “The belt is just like my cannon. You put it on and it takes some of the steam to power up the shield, and then it returns the water back to you to be reheated. So you don’t lose your vim, but if you get hit too much you’ll run out of steam and the shield will stop working.

  “Oh, and you can’t stop ad
ding water every year, so after you’ve added the twenty kilograms, you have to hope your safety vent is working, otherwise the pressure will warp your boiler.”

  “I think I understand,” Mable said hesitantly. “So you can’t use the belt because your steam will run out faster and you won’t be able to use your cannon until you rest, and Jacky can’t use it because he doesn’t have any steam, right?”

  “Precisely.”

  Something about Marjory’s explanation nudged at one of the things that bothered me about the people who were taken. Because it was twenty kilograms on average, but…

  “Shatter it!” I shouted as things fell into place. “Eighteen to twenty eight is the age range were people can warp!”

  “Huh?” both of the women turned towards me.

  “A normal human can hold somewhere between fifteen and twenty five vim, and it takes about three more vim before there’s enough pressure to warp. That means that everyone below eighteen has too little vim to warp, and everyone over twenty eight won’t warp because their safety valve is working properly. The only people taken from Gerald’s Rest are the ones that have a chance to warp soon.”

  “That’s a really disturbing thought,” Marjory said, “but it really doesn’t change anything, does it? We still need to find them, and our only lead is still in that ruin.”

  “You’re right,” I answered. “It’s just been bothering me since Gerald’s Rest. I knew there was something about that age range, but just couldn’t remember what it was.”

  Chapter 12 - Raid

  We waited until night fell to approach the building. The raiders’ guards were doing a far from exemplary job, and had even gone so far as to light torches as soon as the sky began to darken, making it completely impossible for them to see anything further than a few meters away. Even better, the light made them perfect targets for my Archers.

  We approached with the Swift until we were well within the Archers’ range, and I gave the order to attack. The Archers and Longbowman fired in the eerily precise synchronization only Shapes could achieve, and the two guards fell without even knowing what hit them.