Swords of Steel Omnibus

by Howie K Bentley et al.

  The Northman’s eyes were aglow with the bear-sark rage as he engaged the great white ape. He drove his curved axe into the beast’s midriff with the force of a thunderbolt, the steel biting deeply into the scaled flesh. Howling in pain, the ape-thing lashed out at Gunnar with a great taloned paw, the glancing blow sending the blond reiver reeling to the ground. Spitting blood, Gunnar rolled instinctively to narrowly avoid a crushing fist which hammered the earth beside his head. He hefted his axe once more and surged to his feet, leaping beneath another vicious swipe of the monster’s bludgeoning paw.

  Instantly, Kattikouda vaulted to the creature’s massive back like a great jungle cat, bringing both of his short swords down in a deadly arc to pierce the beast’s hairy shoulders. The ape lurched forward and seized hold of the Nubian’s leg in an iron grip, dragging him free and hurling him effortlessly across the glade to crash heavily to the ground some twenty feet away.

  “This thing won’t die easily!” bellowed Malachi, running to Kattikouda’s aid and hauling the dazed tribesman to his feet. Three ragged gouges in the Nubian’s muscular thigh were pulsing with bright blood. Frowning, Malachi swiftly unslung his long matchlock rifle from his shoulder and opened the leather pouch at his belt.

  “Then it’ll die hard, laddie… but die it will!” Drustan growled, spinning his notched cutlass and loping towards the fearsome creature. “Together, Northman!”

  Gunnar ducked beneath another deadly swipe of the ape’s talons and thundered his axe into its massive forearm just as Drustan pitched headlong at the beast’s legs and drove his cutlass into one of its scaled knees. The creature bellowed another ear-splitting roar and lashed out again, its great fist striking Gunnar with a juddering impact and sending him scudding across the bone-strewn earth. Snarling an oath, Drustan spun and thrust his blade at the ape’s matted groin, the cold steel biting deep. Instantly a massive paw surged down and took hold of the clansman’s throat, lifting the red-bearded giant from his feet. Drustan found himself flailing mere inches from the creature’s nightmarish maw, feeling the ape’s foetid breath hot on his face. The vice grip tightened inexorably and shadows began to writhe before the clansman’s eyes.

  Suddenly a single resonant thunderclap echoed through the dell and the ape-thing’s head snapped backwards. The beast immediately released its hold on Drustan, howling with a cacophonous mixture of pain and fury.

  Gasping for breath, Drustan cast a glance across the clearing to see Malachi grinning broadly, his matchlock’s muzzle billowing with plumes of white smoke.

  “That’s one you owe me, old man!” the young mariner shouted gleefully.

  “Mayhap,” Drustan rasped, his tongue slick with blood. “But it took you long enough to fire that bloody noisemaker!”

  The shot had taken the beast square in the eye and staggered it, albeit only fleetingly. Lurching backwards several steps, the ape shook its shaggy head and grunted as the shock of the impact dissipated. Its eye was yet intact, and for all the dire and ruinous wounds the creature had suffered, still not a single drop of blood had escaped its hulking frame. The ivory behemoth bared its yellow fangs and beat a savage tattoo upon its granite chest, and another ear-splitting roar resonated throughout the glade.

  Suddenly, a black clad figure appeared before the beast like a shadow. Ryo sprung lithely at the giant ape, his katana shimmering in the sunlight. With preternatural speed, the assassin leaped and spun about the monster like a whirlwind, each razor stroke of his searing steel opening a gaping bloodless wound in its grey hide. Evading every swipe of the simian juggernaut’s paws with disdainful ease, Ryo wove a graceful and scintillant web of death around the creature, his sword striking pitilessly like an adamantine viper. Finally, the assassin delivered what should by rights have been a death blow to the creature’s bull neck, his blade singing with a single sustained note of crystalline beauty. But the great ape merely howled in rage and defiance at its diminutive assailant, its eyes aflame with feral hatred.

  “Yaiba, tanegashima… yakunitachimasen!” the assassin hissed, leaping gracefully back to the edge of the clearing. “This is not a natural thing. It does not bleed. It will not fall!”

  “Press the attack!” Caleb bellowed, discharging his snaphaunce once more to no avail. “Give no quarter!”

  With blood running freely from the ragged furrows in his neck, Drustan limped to where Gunnar was climbing unsteadily to his feet. “Can you still fight, lad?”

  The Northman lifted his axe, wincing as a sharp pain tore through his midriff where his scale-mail cuirass had been riven. “Aye,” he said, grinning wolfishly. “A few cracked ribs I’ll wager, but I’ll yet go down hacking!”

  “We shall die here,” said Kattikouda, readying his short-swords as he prepared to attack the beast once more. “So, may we die well, and honour our ancestors!”

  Grim faced, Caleb suddenly holstered his pistol. “Stand down, mariners!” he boomed. “No mortal weapon can slay this beast.” With that, he hefted the argentate sword and strode to face the monster, the rays of the baleful sun glimmering in the weapon’s sapphirean pommel.

  “What makes you think that meat cleaver will do any good?” Drustan called to him.

  “Nothing else has worked,” Caleb replied.

  The simian colossus grunted, shook its huge head and immediately charged at Blackthorne, its mammoth fists striking the ground like iron mallets with each loping stride.

  Caleb adopted a fighting stance, his brow furrowing as he felt the hilt of the sword growing strangely warm in his grasp. The crystal pommel seemed to glow with a cerulean radiance, and he began to discern a low humming sound emanating from the blade. Then, he felt the bombinating sword tremble in his fist, and to his astonishment narrow tendrils of blue energy suddenly manifested to dance along the length of the glyph-scored steel. Smiling, Blackthorne looked up at the charging behemoth and raised the radiant blade high. And with a final deafening roar and a resonant snap of its jagged jaws, the ape-thing was upon him.

  A sound like a whip-crack abruptly rent the air, and with a blinding blue flash the ancient sword met the granite flesh of the colossal creature. Caleb channelled all his might into the ruinous blow, the force of the tremendous strike rendering his muscular arms momentarily numb. With a blossom of blue sparks, the glowing steel sheared through the beast’s shoulder and down to its sternum, cleaving the grey hide with preternatural precision. Blackthorne was pummelled from his feet by the impact of the clash, rolling beneath the ape’s legs and rising instantly to one knee, the sword still tight in his grasp.

  The ivory beast crashed thunderously to the earth beside him, sending up a cloud of dust and a shower of soil and shattered bone shards. The ireful mass of fur and sinew scudded along the ground for several feet, leaving a great furrow in the grassy terrain. A heartbeat later and the mammoth creature was finally still, save for a plume of acrid smoke which billowed from the terrible wound in its twisted, ankylosed frame.

  Blackthorne rose to his feet and warily approached the fallen monster. No blood issued forth from the riven carcass, and amazingly the beast’s flesh seemed to be petrifying before his eyes; transmogrifying into a dry grey husk devoid of any semblance of life or hue. Swiftly, the great ape crumbled to dust, leaving naught but a mound of fine dun-white powder upon the churned earth of the jungle clearing.

  For long moments, no one spoke. Then, Drustan bellowed joyously to the cloudless sky. “Thank the gods!”

  Kattikouda made the sign of the protective horn across his chest, and Ryo offered up a silent oath to the heavens.

  “There is more to that sword than meets the eye,” Gunnar said, gazing at the glimmering blade in awe.

  So it would seem,” Caleb replied. “Be proud, my sea-wolves. You’ve faced black sorcery this day and shown your mettle. But I fear we have little time to celebrate. Now, let us return to the ship and leave this thrice-cursed atoll behind us.”

  “I like the sound of that!” Drustan said, grinning broadly.


  Malachi shouldered his matchlock and stared uneasily at the great mound of pale dust before them. “What if there are more of them out here?”

  “Shut up, boy,” growled Drustan, and shoved the youth roughly towards the waiting perimeter of the shadowed jungle.

  * * *

  Blackthorne emerged from the tree line and stepped onto the narrow beach, shielding his eyes against the sudden glare of the sand. The return trek through the jungle had taken longer due to the wounds suffered by Gunnar and Kattikouda, and the sun now hung lower over the distant horizon. The ship’s pinnance waited, drawn up on the shore of a broad lagoon which had afforded the most secure sounding to make landfall.

  Drustan pushed his way clear of the undergrowth and halted beside Caleb, breathing heavily and tugging at his sweat-matted beard.

  “At last. I swear we’ve trudged thirty leagues this day, if a yard,” he muttered as the remaining mariners appeared from the dank perimeter of the jungle behind him.

  “And there she is,” Caleb said, pointing out to sea. “Not a more beautiful sight in all the world!”

  The Starfire was anchored beyond a jagged outcrop of volcanic rock, floating serene and splendid in the sparkling blue water. A heavily modified carrack, the ship was seventy feet long and armed to the teeth. Her deck bristled with a bewildering array of guns, all cast of bronze or iron. The arsenal of cannons, demi-cannons, culverins, sakers and falconets studded the vessel’s oaken body, the larger weapons thrusting menacingly from the gun-deck’s ports and the smaller armaments swivel-mounted on the rails. The ship was square-rigged on the foremast and mainmast, and lateen-rigged on the mizzenmast. Her stern was high and rounded and sported a lofty aftcastle behind the transom. She boasted a low forecastle with a slender bowsprit jutting from her blade-like prow. A figurehead of an ornately carved dragon adorned the stemhead, fashioned after the fearsome serpents of the ancient northern drakkars which once prowled the rivers of Blackthorne’s ancestral city of York.

  And high on the masts and stern of the sleek warship, the far-feared blazon of the Starfire fluttered in the gentle breeze; a grinning, helmeted skull with two crossed battle-axes behind it. That ireful red and sable flag was known far and wide across the trackless waves; the dreaded pirate’s bane… the legendary scourge of the seven storm-wracked seas!

  “Aye, she’s a blessed thing, to be sure,” Drustan said, gazing at the distant ship with an expression akin to love.

  “She’s firing!” exclaimed Malachi, pointing to where a cloud of white smoke had suddenly billowed from the ship’s gun-deck. Scant seconds later, the sound of the cannon’s salvo reached the mariners, and their eyes followed the arcs of the cannonballs as they sped out across the waves.

  “There!” Gunnar growled. “From the witch-fog!”

  Caleb stared out far beyond the jagged outcrop to where the low bank of eerie, nebulous mist perpetually encircled the island. Slicing the blue water like a ghostly leviathan, the Black Ship suddenly emerged from the fog, its ragged sails billowing, its iron bow guns blazing.

  “That spectral hulk’s found us!” Drustan bellowed. “I feared as much!”

  Get that bloody pinnance in the water!” Caleb thundered, racing to the shoreline. “I’ll be damned if my girl’s going to trade broadsides without me on her deck!”

  * * *

  Standing at the bow of the great black galleon, Maalech Xul fixed his rutilant gaze on the Starfire and the verdant isle beyond. A cannonball howled past the black mainmast and pitched into the azure water at the dark vessel’s stern. He raised a gauntleted fist and pointed to the anchored carrack. “Cripple that damned ship!” he seethed.

  A black clad mariner with pallid alabastrine skin and glazed, lifeless eyes moved to stand beside the armoured giant. “And the crew?” the sailor rasped.

  “There is one whom I seek. I want him alive. The rest can feed the sharks.”

  Xul gripped the hilt of his curved black sword tightly. “Haul him before me in shackles, if needs must! But bring me Caleb Blackthorne!”

  Part III

  The Scion at the Gate of Eternity

  Caleb Blackthorne surged through the acrid cannon smoke beclouding the quarterdeck of the Starfire and felt a rush of adrenalin course through his lean, muscular frame. His basket-hilted broadsword was scabbarded at his side and his ornate snaphaunce pistol was thrust into in his wide leather belt, along with his slender double-edged dagger. In his hand he brandished the scintillant silvern sword which he had seized from the hoary shine deep within the verdant vaults of the jungle atoll, its platinum bound hilt thrumming gently in his calloused grip.

  The visceral thrill of battle shone bright in Blackthorne’s blue eyes as he felt his ship’s keel lurch beneath his feet and heard the rattling and luffing of her great sails high above him.

  “Fire!” he bellowed, brushing several errant wind-whipped strands of greying hair clear of his furrowed brow. “Give the foe a full broadside!”

  The fearsome array of bronze and cast-iron cannons studding the ship’s starboard gundeck spoke as one, hurling a keening storm of death out across the cerulean waves where the black galleon was cleaving the water towards the Starfire like a tenebrous leviathan. Three balls hammered home into the fore-peak and jib boom of the vessel, sending up razor blossoms of wooden shards and iron fragments. The rest of the ordnance plunged into the roiling surf.

  Blackthorne leaped past the capstan to the gunwale where a burly mariner clad in a tallow-stained jerkin and goat leather breeches hung precariously over the rail, his powerful hands gripping the ship’s knotted oakum ropes.

  “Quartermaster O’Rourke!” Caleb shouted. “Grand job! You beat to quarters like true dogs o’ the sea. Never yet has any scurvy sloop caught my girl at slumber!”

  O’Rourke flashed a black-toothed grin which creased his swarthy, wind-weathered face. The quartermaster’s salt coarsened hair was bleached white from years of sailing the sun-seared seas of the world. “The lookout on the mainmast spotted her, cap’n. Hands to braces and anchor hauled before she got off a shot! Our thirty-two pounders had the first word, and have been hot since you clambered o’er the tumblehome!”

  Blackthorne clasped the man’s broad shoulder. “You’ve earned your grog tonight, old horse!”

  Then he gazed out to sea at the black ship which was swiftly closing on them, watching its ragged sails billowing in the sultry dusk wind. At just over a hundred and forty feet, she was twice as long as the Starfire, and boasted a jutting rostrum and an oddly gnarled bowsprit. All four masts were rigged to the gallants; square rigged on the fore and mainmast, lateen rigged on the mizzen and bonaventure, and everything from the freeboard to the gunwale was darker than pitch and midnight. The fore and aftcastle were similarly hued, and the ship’s cannons were bared like the blackened teeth of some abyssal devil of the briny deep. And yet to Blackthorne’s battle-seasoned scrutiny, something about her was very wrong indeed. The ship looked ancient and mould-mottled, as if it had been dragged dead and rotting from the very bottom of the ocean. The sails were nigh on ruinously tattered, and how the wind caught them sufficient to drive the hulk onwards to rend the waves was beyond his ken. Strangely, the myriad cracks and fissures in the sea-sodden timbers also seemed to glimmer faintly with an eldritch viridescent luminescence, the source of which Caleb could scarcely guess at.

  With a start, Blackthorne suddenly caught sight of the mariners who were positioned along the ship’s deck and hunched in her jibs and rigging. They were pallid and emaciated shades; gangly wraiths cast crudely in the forms of men with skeletal frames and scabrous flesh acoil with a plethora of slithering and skittering denizens of the fathomless deeps. Clad in rags and the long-corrupted garb of the sunken dead, the cadaverous crew of the ghostly vessel were seemingly devoid of all semblance of light and life. And then, Blackthorne spied the stygian giant who stood like a carven marble titan behind the black bowsprit. Encased in jagged chitinous armour and wielding a fearsome serrated
sword he recognized from his waking dreams, Caleb knew in an instant who it was that commanded the benighted argosy.

  “Maalech Xul! The demon from my darkest visions!” Blackthorne hissed.

  “Volley inbound!” bellowed O’Rourke, as the twin bow guns of the galleon suddenly blazed with a relucent green radiance. Two black spheres howled from the corroded cannons of the foe and arced inexorably towards the Starfire. The first shot sailed cleanly between the masts to crash into the water beyond the gunwale, but the second thundered into the aftcastle with explosive and ear-splitting magnitude. Wood and bone shattered at the point of impact, cloven timbers and riven flesh scattering across the oaken deck in a viscid red rain.

  “Topsails and gallants!” barked Blackthorne. “Boatswain! Get the wounded below-decks to Butcher Tavistock! They’ll bleed his sawdust red, but his surgeon’s knives might yet save their blessed hides!”

  The crimson bearded clansman Drustan lumbered to Caleb’s side, his bull neck still red raw from the talons of the great white ape which the mariners had faced on the jungle isle.

  “She’s a fell ship,” the Celt growled. “Will our cannons avail us against this witchery?”

  Caleb’s blue eyes narrowed. “We’ll sink that bitch with iron and faith, my friend!”

  “How many guns do you think?”

  “At least fifty, by her size and how she sits. I’ll wager twenty demi-cannon, twelve culverins, some eight demi-culverins, with the rest being sakers and fowlers.”

  “We’re outgunned.”

  Blackthorne scowled. “But not outmatched!”

  “She turns!” O’Rourke boomed. “Seeking to bring all her guns to bear!”

  “Hard to larboard!” Blackthorne thundered. “Hands to braces and we’ll show them our mettle!”

  “We can yet outsail her and batter her hull to shards,” Drustan said. “We’ve a reload time of a minute flat with six men per gun.”

  “She’s fast, for such an ungainly hulk,” mused Caleb. “She’s got a good rate of knots on that keel, wind be damned. Something unnatural propels her. But my gut tells me she doesn’t aim to sink us. They mean to board.”