Swords v. Cthulhu

by Jesse Bullington

  After dinner, Jinny searched the ship for the captain, and finally climbed high above the mainsail to find her in the crow’s nest. Wordlessly, she lifted Pyrena’s hand bearing the ruby ring and held it to her own chest. Then she embraced the woman. Annoyed, Emalee flew off. Jinny held Pyrena firmly until the sobbing ceased, and into the night.

  As they sailed past Hlanith into the Cerenarian Sea, Jinny gently turned Pyrena’s head, arms reached back around her neck, and their lips sealed together, trembling at first. The warm ocean wind tried to part them, but they pulled closer as their yearning hands and tongues revealed and fed their starved passion.

  Barely able to pause their ardor, they descended the rigging. Once behind the locked cabin door, they slowly undressed each other to unwavering eyes. They embraced again in the canopy bed, as excited touch provoked warming skin and roused thrilling breaths. Three times Jinny’s pleasure peaked, and three times she cried out in intractable joy.

  She tried eagerly to return the bliss, and with Pyrena’s patient instruction, found success.

  Long after the launch of Pyrena’s purring snore, Jinny found herself awake. She untangled their limbs and stood nude by the window in the nocturnal sheen, scowling at the moon. Thinking there would be no answer, she whispered, “You said two daughters, but only wear one ruby.”

  “Well, Emalee is with me every day.” Pyrena sat up in bed.

  Jinny turned and tried not to stare.

  “She’s only seven years old.” Pyrena gestured at the winged creature on the perch. “She visits her father when our travels take us near Oriab Isle.” Then her smile faded and her voice filled with sorrow. “Before her, there was Babette.” She touched her red jeweled ring. “Babette was taken on her thirteenth birthday. I lost her in the market crowd in Dylath-Leen. I searched for hours and came to the docks just as they pulled her wailing aboard a black ship.” Her forest eyes burned brilliant with tears and resolution. “Two years later they tried to sell me a ruby in the same marketplace. The stone screamed to me. I stole it and ran.”

  “And her father?”

  “I was pregnant when I arrived here. He never followed.”

  Jinny returned to bed, her body shaking with fury. “Pyrena. I will help you to change the tide.” But even after her lover’s breathing calmed, she did not sleep.

  They trained and sparred for hours each day. In time, Jinny learned not just to swing, but a dexterous flow with many swords: epée, cutlass, spadroon, and hwandudaedo. She learned to spin and hook the crow’s bill pickaxe, strike fast with lathi sticks, make sing and snap the qijiebian chain whip, and hurl from bow to stern the barb-tipped sibat spear, planting it squarely into a penny’s face. The weapon with which she forged the strongest bond was the forward-curved panabas axe; it became an artful extension of her arm, and of her emboldened will.

  Captain Bloodrose’s bedside cabinet contained many lewd implements that Jinny also learned to wield, from the clockwork resonating slender (in both manual and wearable forms) to the undulating mollusk glove, from the incandescent feather to the pulsing lambency baton. On one voyage Pyrena diverted their course to the cultured city of Celephais, where she procured a few customized items from her favorite shop.

  On the days that followed those late nights of pleasure, the combat training seemed doubly fierce.

  On her twenty-first raid, boarding a black biota cargo ship east of the Sunken City, the two war dames of the Arkham Rose swung each other by the arm into the melee, placing themselves back to back and laughing as they traded foes, when Jinny noticed the sparse crew, many of whom fled overboard. The exchange finished quickly.

  It took the mauls of two crewmen to break the lock on the hold. Before the latch was lifted, the hatch erupted open and a giant shaggy beast roared onto the spar deck.

  Covered in dreadful black fur and serpentine scales, taller than three men, it brayed glottal rage at the sun through a vertically split mouth of gnashing yellow teeth. Whipping two powerful arms that ended in four taloned claws, it rent a sail and bludgeoned a dozen fighters, sending them rolling across the deck in a volley of snapping bones.

  They tried to drive the brute back with spears and atlatls, but the behemoth stormed across the deck, great claws scraping the planks.

  All the other crew fell away, and soon Captain Bloodrose found herself trapped against the railing. She looked up at the monstrosity, and swapped hands with her sword. With a thunderous downward fist it crushed the captain’s left arm against the stout wood in a spray of blood and splinters. The captain staggered to one knee and dropped her weapon, panting weakly.

  Jinny slid between them, slashing her blade into the giant fiend’s crotch. When the monster convulsed forward, she cut again, two-handed, and severed the terrifying head into the sea.

  The pulverized bones of Pyrena’s hand were beyond healing, and she did not cry out or weep when they sawed it off at the forearm, nor when they applied the searing hot iron.

  When the sweats abated, Jinny stood before her partner and took a deep breath. Her feelings became a maelstrom inside her. “Captain, I request to stay my nights in the bunks among the crew.”

  “It’s ‘Captain’ now, is it? If that’s your wish.”

  “I don’t want the crew seeing me different.”

  “Is that all?”

  “I… don’t want to become soft.”

  “These are all choices. What do you really want?”

  “You were showing off today. You could have died.”

  “I saved my good arm. What is it you want?”

  “I want my own ship. I want to sail you to the moon and hack it to pieces.”

  “I’m very proud of you, Jinny.”

  Jinny was on her way to speak with the captain about building a fast corvette when she saw her invite one of Leng women to her cabin, and heard the lock turn. Jinny stood on the deck of the ship for a long time, reminding herself of her choice, and barricading the tears. Then she relieved the wheelman at the helm. As the sun set behind the endless waves, Emalee glided in to perch on her shoulder.

  When they acquired a second ship, Pyrena gave its command to Richard, despite his nocturnal proclivity.

  Jinny spent more time with Richard, listening to his grunted poetry. She stayed up all night with the men and women of Leng, downing mugs of zoog rum and bellowing sea shanties of old Sarkomand with the natives of Parg. She read most of the ship’s library, from the expansive Pnakotic Manuscripts to the living fables of Vemoqi and the Crystal Leaves erotica. She spent hundreds of hours at the forecastle hearth with the old serpent man Ophidian Drake, until she could forge a blade folded with ebon ore from the Peaks of Thok. When finished, the honed steel coruscated darkly even in the high sun.

  For a seven-year campaign, they raided, fought, and pillaged. It took that long to build a loyal company and fleet of a dozen vessels. They slew many. When they finally chanced upon the elusive plateau of Leng, none of the native crew wanted to depart.

  Jinny’s skill with a blade was now unmatched. In all those years, she could not remember sleeping. When they finally launched the crusade for the sinister moon, she captained her own craft and an elite guard of cats.

  “Onward now!” shouted Admiral Bloodrose from the bowspirit of the Arkham Rose. “We leave Kadath far astern!” She thrust forth the iron point of her hooked hand.

  The thirteen red ships sailed through the basalt pillars and lifted from the ocean waters, past the horizon’s cliff, they rose into the cold breadth of space, their figureheads aimed at the moon.

  They would lose many, but once the lunar beasts were conquered, they would be free to sail beyond, to anywhere, into new dreamlands.

  Jinny adjusted the jib of the New Orleans, and made calculations. Her palms were damp on the wheel. She was alarmed to see the commander’s ship had broken formation and slid alongside hers. Just yards away, the admiral was looking only at her, puffing on her pipe. Jinny did not recall her smoking, but the aroma was very familiar. />
  A flash of sadness crossed Pyrena’s face, and she smiled tearfully. “So soon, my love…” she said, her face shrinking away.

  She dwindled with every surrounding detail, losing vividness and color, out of view.

  Jinny realized herself falling, away from the ship and the moon, ripping through dark and light, silence collapsing toward nothing.

  All was gone, replaced with something new.

  She woke on a dirty cot in a humid shack.

  “Oh, Jinny,” said the black woman dabbing her forehead, “the fever all broke now.”

  She staggered out into the yard, and was assaulted by the scene. The colonial white columned house surrounded by draping magnolias and live oaks, the song of cicadas, the smell of fresh tobacco leaves, and the branding scar on her calf. The awful familiarity of every sensation rushed back, as reality petrified around her.

  The white-suited man on the great wraparound porch stood from his wicker chair and stared at her, removing the pipe from his mouth. Seeing Mr. Hightower’s face, the burning lacerations flared on her back. And seeing his mischievous young son Trevor standing next to him, she remembered the missing silver butter knife and every one of the thirty lashes and why she would no longer work in the house.

  Jinny howled at the sky and the hidden moon. Let them think her mad.

  She worked every day in the fields from sunrise to sunset, where blisters became calluses, her arms grew hard and weary, and the true world annealed. The scars on her back closed and settled to a distant gnawing.

  She fell to exhausted sleep each night, but could not find the key to her dreams. The coast of the Six Kingdoms eluded her; no more did she smell the spindrift of the Cerenarian Sea, or feel the rise of the main deck beneath her feet. When she wept, she kept it behind her eyes.

  Time got on, until one day in the spring, when Jinny cultivated the tobacco seedbeds at dusk and a wide shadow passed over the field. The workers all looked up in fear as a black galleon slid impossibly across the face of the rising full moon and swept around out of the sky to ground among the crop rows. The overseer fell from his horse and scampered away toward the big house with the rest of them, every soul on the plantation quaking with terror… save one.

  Jinny dropped the hoe and took up the overseer’s fallen machete and pistol. She advanced on the reeking dark warship as the gangplank lowered to the earth.

  She would paint those black sails a hot glistening red.

  The Thief in the Sand

  M. K. Sauer

  Her execution was not set for dawn, as she had hoped, but rather at midnight — the coolest part of the day. She was to be a spectacle — something she had tried hard to avoid since she was a girl — to keep the denizens of the sandy desert capital occupied with gore and grandeur, instead of the scorching heat of the midsummer drought.

  The palace, so barren and stark on the morning of her sentencing, was now lavish with expensive silks the color of the clarion sky set against the harsh orange of the surrounding sands. They twisted in the wind; an effusion of fabric that threw shadows across the polished floors. So many torches were lit that she had to blink in the half light to see her accusers. They stood before her like a row of statues in lavish, serpentine clothes, and looked down on her prostrate, ragged form.

  Her last sight of this earthly realm would be the faceted jewels inlaid in the stone floor, while waiting for a wicked curved sword to slice through her neck. She wished the shadows didn’t show the silhouette of the executioner quite so clearly. She could feel the greedy eyes of a thousand spectators settling on her back.

  “Last words?” the hooded swordsman asked, his black eyes gleaming with the promise of a swift death.

  “Mercy,” she responded in a parched voice. Her lips cracked and even the blood dripping from the cuts felt sluggish in the midnight heat.

  “Mercy! Mercy!” A few wailing voices took up the chant until her ears rang with their cries.

  “Where was your mercy for the victims of your deft fingers? How many lives has your unscrupulous thievery ruined?” The shah’s disinterested voice carved through the sounds of a thousand people rearranging themselves. His large beard and necklaced chin moved with the practiced fluidity of one who had sent many to their deaths. Rings around his fingers tinkled as he fidgeted on his pillowed and perfumed throne. One of his sons yawned, as another picked at his nails. She was nothing to this mighty ruler, this deity of the desert.

  “Mercy! Mercy!” the cries continued until the word no longer made sense to her ears.

  “Still,” the shah returned, finally sitting up in his throne to give a proper look to his people, “even a thief deserves a respite, as the gods decree.”

  Why the crowd wished to see her spared baffled her until she saw the shining ladle coming toward her. The entirety of the crowd became silent — so much so that she wondered if perhaps she had gone deaf. The water, straining against the edge of its container, had ensnared all of the hungry eyes and taken their voices. A single drop spilled and a thousand throats groaned with fevered anticipation. They didn’t want to see her live — mercy meant water, not life. They ached for even a glimpse of it on a faraway platform that might as well have been the heavens, it was so distant.

  A glimmer of hope pulsed through her for the first time since being caught.

  She felt a shift beneath her skin: a tunneling, excavating force that made her limbs rigid and begin to tremble. Her dry lips opened like leaves greeting the rising sun as another hooded man brought the small mouthful of water to her shriveled maw.

  She wished she could taste it — how long had it been since she had tasted water? But before any reached her tongue, a million squirming parasites burst through her taste buds and pores, crowding to get a single drop to power themselves into a hurtling frenzy. A small explosion of worms rippled down her throat and spread to the very corners of her body. She felt her flesh spreading open — revealing the innermost tissues and delicate organs to the biting air for a brief second — before the whole world folded and she was heaved elsewhere.

  The sky was no longer a caliginous cerulean, but a stormy miasma of sick-looking, pale green clouds and clawing creatures careening through the atmosphere. A large tentacle the thickness of five men abreast lazily dropped from above and laid waste to a desiccated landscape in exasperated fury. It was searching for her. As soon as she had shifted into this dimension, she had felt it begin to look for her. Six more tentacles threw themselves from the clouds as she appeared.

  She had to escape quickly. It had been too long since she had appeased the creature, and it wanted her blood. Not too different from the situation she had just left, she mused, calculating how long before the few sips of water burned through her system. As soon as the precious liquid was absorbed, she would be stuck in whatever world she happened to be in. Pushing herself outward, straining at the very bonds that separated the two dimensions, she oozed her way back into the palace, an arm’s length away from the shah. A brush of a tentacle whiffed by her dark hair before collapsing into the spaces between worlds.

  Her reflexes had been sharpened by her years on the streets and she drew the decorative sword at his side and pointed it at his throat. Dull as it was, it was still sharp enough to cut him open — especially as the rush of escaping the creature rocketed through her tendons and muscles, strengthening every part of her.

  Within seconds the court erupted, and the thief could feel the numberless eyes on her again. Many recoiled in fear at her now green and scaly skin. Gills had formed around her jawline, her eyes were large and bulbous, unblinking in the torchlight, and webs had taken over the spaces between her fingers.

  “Djinn!” the astonished shah choked out, as she drew her arm back to strike a blow that would take his head.

  A sword clanged against hers. The vibration set her bones to aching, but she held on, only to be met with the grim face of one of the previously bored princes — the one who had been picking his nails. His eyes were alive now.
His entire body reverberated with frantic intensity.

  The prince let out a bellowing war cry and brought his sword down for a glancing blow across her face. She blocked, but the very end of his sword glanced off her brow and drew a small line. Thick blood crawled rather than dribbled down her face. As she turned to launch her own attack, she crushed the few escaping worms with her palm.

  This needed to end quickly — only a few seconds more before all of the water was used up and her strength would falter. She swung downward — such a long and unwieldy weapon compared to her sharp daggers — and almost cleaved into the prince’s shoulder before he rolled out of the way. Scanning his movements, she knew where he intended to stop and allowed herself to slip into a gap between dimensions. She barely missed the crushing weight of a large, squirming tentacle before landing exactly behind the prince. Her sword was at his throat before he could do anything.

  “Weapons down,” she barked to the guards who were just now coming to his aid. Their fight must have been done in mere seconds. Time became a sluggish, gargled thing when she traveled. The palace guards paused, weapons still drawn, but not daring to move. The prince’s panicked noises finally drove his father out of his stupor.

  “Do as she says,” he whispered, and the clangs of dropped weapons echoed throughout the halls. He turned to speak to her with lips ashen and drawn. “Please, don’t hurt him.”

  She thought of him seconds ago, a king in all domains, secure in the knowledge that only death could touch him, but that his death would be further away than any other. She wished to see him grovel, to know the pain that plagued her, but even the cleverest of traps could be reset, given enough time. The stalemate would have to be broken.