by Simon Archer
“I will guide you,” she instructed. “Close your eyes and relax.”
I did as she bade and forced myself to relax. It wasn’t easy, especially since I’d just come from battle. My body wanted food, drink, and sex to wind down. It didn’t want to cooperate, but I did my best to make it, anyway. The cool water worked to chill my hot blood and literally dampen my ardor.
“Good, good,” the shamaness muttered. “Listen to the air and the water, feel their touch upon your skin. Breathe in, breathe out, and let the elements reach out to you. They will tell you secrets and show you sights that they have seen.” She paused to let me drift further into this odd calm.
My heart beat like a slow drum, and a light touch caressed me. I began to grow comfortably warm.
“They will also lie,” Adra whispered in my ear, her breath hot against my skin.
My eyes opened someplace else.
I stood on a rocky shoal, water up to my knees, while a storm darkened the horizon. Lighting danced through the clouds and arced up from the water below. For a moment, my heartbeat sped up. I had gone through a vision quest long ago in the northern reaches of Eldrath, as part of my rite of manhood. This was akin to the same thing, and the nearly-lost memories of it came rushing back.
The place I found myself was the same one as that long lost half-dream. Only at the time, I had never seen the sea, let alone set foot on one of the tall ships that I saw in the distance. Ships that were conspicuously absent in this vision. Back then, I had heard the song of the sea and felt the pull of the water drawing me out into the storm-dark waters. The ships themselves flitted about like fireflies, and indistinct shapes waved and beckoned to me.
All of that was gone, now. The song was there, but now it mingled with another one, a whispering melody that danced through the air and howled like a hurricane. The water swirled around my legs and rose, slowly, creeping up like the tide until it reached my waist. Below my feet, a ponderous pulse throbbed as the strangely warm silt drew my feet down into itself.
I spread out my arms, palms up, and raised my chin to gaze up and out. The air and water around me stilled with a kind of anticipation. Even the dancing lightning and the swirling clouds froze. Time stood still around me, and I knew what I had to do.
“Spirits of Earth, Sea, and Sky! Unquiet souls of the dead! Little gods of the plants and animals! I am Bardak Skullsplitter, and I am here! Come to me and let us speak as equals!” My voice rang out like thunder in this place, sending ripples and waves through the silt beneath my feet, the oddly still water, and the very air.
All the activity that had ceased returned in an instant. Thunder boomed around me, and I was engulfed for a moment in a blinding, blue-white light. When my vision cleared, they had come.
11
S hapes darted through the water around me, danced in the clouds above, and squirmed slowly beneath my feet. My hackles rose at the feel of unseen eyes watching me from everywhere.
“Let us show you something,” the wind whispered in my ears, and I was whisked away.
Sea and land and sky whirled madly together as I was drawn up and up into the clouds and away. My stomach churned, but I swallowed hard and forced myself to keep my eyes open as best I could through the rushing turbulence. I found myself, a minute or a lifetime later, gazing dizzily down from the heights atop a massive cliff overlooking the exit from the Aigon Straits.
Down below, a robed figure stood alone aboard a small, one-man sailing boat. The figure raised its arms in supplication, and I clearly heard the words he, for it was a male, spoke. The words were in a language I didn’t know, but I understood them all the same as the man spoke an invocation that called on names I preferred not to think about. He called out to the gods of death and the deeps, bloody demons spoken of only in legend, and ended with a cry to death itself.
“Watcher in the dark! Morbid angel who sees us born and guides us into the darkness at the end of our lives. Keeper of the gates of Oblivion. I ask you… I beseech you… grant this boon and usher the dead man Sebastian Arde from the silent halls and back to the land of the living.”
The sky darkened, and thunder boomed in the distance while the boatman below cocked his cowled head to listen. Below me and some distance from the tiny sailboat, the water began to churn.
“Thank you, dark mistress!” the robed man cried. “Sebastian Arde! Be welcome back from the Quiet Lands!”
The tip-top of a mainmast rose from the water, slowly growing foot by foot as The Indomitable rose from its watery grave to float atop the rough, dark sea. Specters stirred upon the deck, pale reflections of the sailors and officers who’d died with the ship, and its Commodore.
She still bore the wounds that took her to the bottom, a black-edged hole that fair split the massive galleon in two amidships. That was where I’d rammed her with The Hullbreaker , and where the explosion of her powder had torn her almost in half.
From that gap in the ghost ship’s structure rose two figures. One, Sebastian himself, and the other, the nameless witch Mary had killed in a duel as we tried to fight our way to the lower decks.
The Commodore hovered over the deck and gazed down at the little boat and the dark-robed figure. He still bore his death-wound, a gaping slash that opened his torso from shoulder to navel, baring blackened organs and shattered bones. His eyes blazed with a cold, pale glow. Otherwise, much of his body was fleshless, revealing scorched bone and wrapped in a uniform that was as much ash as it was cloth.
His witch was equally terrifying. She was white as bone beneath the burned tatters of her clothing, more frightening now in her mostly naked state than she had been when I’d first faced her with my lovely, vicious little witch. A gaping hole opened in the center of her chest, and her heart was missing. One of her eyes was black as coal, and the other, like the witch’s heart, was missing. The bare socket was ringed with torn flesh that could no longer bleed.
For a moment, I felt a cold hand wrap its icy fingers around my heart. I couldn’t move. The wind was showing me these events, but I had no power to change them.
Not yet, at least. I put the Commodore down and sank his damned ship once, and I could bloody well do it again.
“I am concerned, Mister Lack,” the commodore spoke in a voice that was barely a whisper of its former self. “That you have at last overstepped your bounds.”
Lack, the robed man, sketched a bow. “I merely act upon the orders of one greater than the both of us.”
“The Admiral ordered this?” Sebastian seemed surprised. “Why?”
“He had not given you permission to die,” the sorcerer replied.
Sebastian snorted, and the witch beside him smirked.
“I suppose he didn’t, at that,” the dead man observed. “Do my orders stand?”
“They do. Destroy the orc and his fleet, and bring terror to the free towns of the Archipelago.”
Arde nodded slowly. “Return to our master and tell him that his will shall be done.”
The wind swirled around me once again, and I let out a frustrated bellow. I wanted to know more, damn it all! But the spirits had other ideas.
Once again, I found myself in the water just off the coast of the northlands of Erdrath, up to the waist in the cold sea as I growled, “Why did you take me away so soon?”
“We have more to show you,” the wind replied.
“Or rather,” the sea roared, “we do.” The waves rose violently around me, then something caught my ankles and pulled me down.
Then I was pulled, tumbling across countless leagues and into the dark depths. From this vantage, I looked up to watch merfolk and men in odd outfits and strange helmets tended to an immense, pale shape that floated on the surface of the sea above. There was nothing else this could be but The Pale Horse , Admiral Layne’s immense capital ship.
In the grip of the elementals, I was unseen, and they slowly lifted me up and up, until I was so close that I could inspect the structure of the ship more closely. Through their se
nses, I felt the enchantments and dark magics that bound the wood together as surely as nails and pegs and other fittings. She was a monument to the admiral’s obsession, and unless I missed my guess, would be nigh unsinkable by any regular warship.
Could the elves sink her? They wielded magics that were strongly tied to the natural order, much like a combination of shamanic workings and witches’ spells. Perhaps they could, but I had a strong suspicion, especially after fighting the warlock in Winemaker’s run, and witnessing the reanimation of Sebastian Arde, that Layne had delved into much darker realms of power in the name of creating this fearsome thing.
It was inevitable that I’d come into conflict with the Admiral at this point. His ship would sail sometime within the year, most likely, and she would be unstoppable, barring some miracle or weapon I currently had no knowledge of.
Maybe Bord’s odd idea for cannons might be enough? It was worth looking into. Dwarves were some of the greatest weapons-crafters of the Empire, and possibly even the world, especially when it came to cannons and other firearms.
Up here, closer to the hull and invisible, I got a better look at the strange garb worn by some of the workers. It was a heavy, rubberized canvas outfit with a spherical metal helmet, inset at four points with portholes, and possessing a point at the helmet’s peak where a hose of some sort attached. Bubbles occasionally vented from the helmet, and they were equipped with what looked to be inflated swim bladders. Oddest of all, some mockery of fish fins, constructed of a canvas-covered frame, were attached to their boots.
With this contraption, workers were able to maneuver clumsily around underwater and oversee the activities of the merfolk, or perhaps it was the merfolk overseeing these ponderous invaders. Whatever the case was, these suits allowed the Admiral’s men to work underwater without having to surface for air, like an artificial version of my siren’s kiss.
They worked slowly, carving marks into the boards to serve as conduits for the magic that I sensed. The problem was that I had very little context for this work. Much of the bottom of The Pale Horse that I could see was already decorated with these sigils, but I had no way of seeing all of the damned thing. I still couldn’t shake the feeling that, while the city-ship was almost complete, it would still be nearly a year before she was ready to sail.
This thought seemed to be from the mercurial minds of the elementals surrounding me. Then, as the wind had done at the Aigon Straits, right as I reached for the answer to more questions, the water churned around me, and I was carried away, swearing in frustration.
My head broke water about a hundred feet from shore, this time, back on the empty, rocky beach where I’d first seen the sea as part of my original vision quest as a young warrior. I grumbled to myself as I swam to the shallows and once again stood in waist-deep water.
“Is there more I must know?” I asked aloud.
The storm still raged on the horizon, but the sea around me had quieted. Gentle waves lapped at the rock-strewn shore, and a wafting smell of brine and fish filled my nostrils.
The ground heaved, and all around me burst a whirling mass of roiling ectoplasm. A howl rose from countless throats as the spirits of the dead surrounded me and pressed in. My body grew cold despite my years of being inured to the temperature extremes that often battered ships at sea. I’d stood bare-chested on a glacier in the far north and baked under the sun in the southern seas of Milnest.
This cold, though, went even deeper. It was the chill of the grave, the fingers that reached out from beyond to grasp the living and pull them in. Mingled among the dead were faces I recognized, friends and enemies alike, ancestors and tribemates. The roar of their voices and the mad spinning of their ghostly forms disoriented and sickened me. I couldn’t close my eyes and block them out, nor could I cover my ears.
There was no escape.
No escape save one.
Adra had told me what I had to do. I ignored the sounds and pressing vertigo and focused on who I was and what I fought for. I thought about Mary, Ligeia, Kargad, Shrike, and Jimmy Mocker. I recalled Daka and Dogar, the twins, and the surly face of Bord, my cannon master. Then I sought my memory of Tabitha Binx, Adra and Nagra, Gol the Clanless, and the many men and women of my own crew and of the ships under my command.
I fought for them all. I fought for the free towns, where I’d found a home, for Sturmgar Ironhand, who’d taught me the ways of the sea, and for all the other friends I’d made in the archipelago.
Another face rose to mind, Bloody Bill Markland, likely the only equal I had among the pirates who remained free of both the Admiralty and my own growing influence. Perhaps we’d end up side by side or maybe face one another again in battle. I didn’t know.
Lastly, looming over everything in the vision, rose the near-skeletal face of Admiral Justin Layne, his eyes blazing with the fury of hell as he gazed down at me.
Around me was power. I just had to reach out and take it.
I stretched out my hands, fingers crooked into claws, and roared my defiance up at the giant face of the rider of the pale horse.
The world vanished in a flash of blue-white light and a thunderclap, and my eyes snapped open to gaze up at the serene face of Adra Notch-Ear.
“Much to see, hm?” she asked. “The spirits showed you things, did they not?”
“Aye,” I replied, not yet ready to sit up. “Many things… many concerning things.”
“Do you think they lied?” Adra rose to her feet and stretched with an arched back. Stars glimmered through the clouds overhead, and lightning flashed in the distance.
“No,” I said as I slowly sat up in the shallow water, the waves lapping around me. “I believe they told the truth.”
“Ha! Good!” she exclaimed. “I can train you further if you like.”
“What else do I need to know?” I moved slowly. My head still wanted to spin from that last encounter, and I didn’t want to embarrass myself by falling over.
“Rituals, mostly,” she answered after a moment. “You must learn how to call and appease the spirits when they are not paying close attention to you. Much of the time, they are eager and willing to do as you please, at least, the elemental ones are. If they are close to you, they will respond to your unconscious desires, which can be dangerous.”
“Useful, too, though.”
“Oh, yes! But they can be like overeager puppies who can fly and capsize ships, should the whim take them,” she explained. “You must learn to keep the ones close to you under control so that they only act as you will them.”
“What of the spirits of the dead?” I wanted to know. “They were troublesome when I encountered them.”
Adra nodded and motioned for me to follow before she started ambling away, back towards Winemaker’s Run. “They are the most dangerous,” she said. “Many of them just want to live again, and they want nothing more than to take control of a living body.”
“Necromancy?” I asked.
“Not as the humans reckon it,” she replied. “They need a living body, but if you are weak-willed, one of the spirits of the dead can drive you out, and then become you. Once you are trained, though, you can let them in, and work with them to accomplish much more than either of you could alone.”
I reached up and massaged my temples. There was no choice but to master this new aspect of myself, as distracted as I might be.
“What do I need to do?” I asked finally, and perhaps a little bit sullenly.
Adra cackled. “Become the student, Splitter of Skulls, and learn more quickly than you ever have before.”
12
N ight had fallen while Adra and I were away. The fires were out, and Winemaker’s Run was celebrating. While I questioned the wisdom of turning loose a bunch of pirates on the fruits of the town’s labor, I understood the sentiment, and I, like the rest of my crews, appreciated it.
The shamaness disappeared into the darkness with nary a word as I stepped out into the square. Pirates of all stripe raised bottles a
nd mugs and cups to me as I strode past with a shared salute. I had a lot on my mind, but I wasn’t about to deny anyone this celebration.
Even Ligeia had come ashore to investigate the strange customs and rowdy singing that likely reached out into the harbor where Tiny floated, snoring away as he digested his latest meal of ship and sailor. The siren had even clothed herself in a long, plain dress of maroon-dyed cotton that clung enticingly to her damp body. Where she’d gotten it, I had no idea, but it was likely the idea of one of the townsfolk.
She perched atop a barrel and watched with bright eyes as a group of musicians sawed and pounded away on their instruments, leading a chaotic and lively dance that occupied the most central portion of the square. Mary, Tabitha, and Shrike perched or stood nearby, watching the festivities. All of them also sported bottles, except for the siren. She had little taste for alcohol, I’d discovered, and little tolerance for it, either.
None of us who were there wanted to see a crying, drunk siren ever again.
“I like this music,” Ligeia announced as I came sauntering up.
The others raised their respective drinks, and Tabitha flashed a broad, toothy grin. “So, ye finally decide to grace us with yer presence, Cap’n?”
“Ye all had it well in hand,” I threw back with a grin and a shrug.
Shrike nodded and dipped a fresh mug in a nearby barrel of wine, then offered it to me. I took it, drank deep, and made a face at the sourness of it. It was good, but it was new and raw as opposed to well-aged, and hadn’t been tasted I expected.
“What were you doing, my Captain?” Mary asked, her smile and the smoldering look in her eyes promising much, and I knew the witch would deliver.
Tabitha just rolled her luminous eyes and hid behind her drink while Ligeia cocked her head curiously. The siren remained silent, though, for the moment. Had she sensed anything that Adra and I had done? Surely a creature of the sea could have felt the agitation of the elementals.
