Sailing Ether Tides

Sailing Ether Tides

Book 2: Dirt Diver’s Dance

As An Old Memoria: Ch: 1

Out on a cold, misty mountainside, far above a lonely camp, glowing softly among the trees and foggy wisps, three Adventurers stalked a silent predator through the night.

The clouded leopard’s soft, fluffy pads made no sound as he moved among the scattered pines and rocky slopes. A thick mat of old needles silenced even his human minions’ heavy footfalls.

Shiro smelled the thick, cloying scent of old blood and decay, and the sharp stink of rusty iron, mingled with something filthy. The stench rose from the darkest of the hillside thickets, polluting that sacred space with foulness, something hiding behind a glamor… a really shitty one.

Amy, Maya and Dannyl circled around to the east, slipping among the trees, finally catching their own sample of the scent of old, clotted blood on the breeze.

In silence, they followed Shiro, the bright white, black ringed tip of his tail flashing in the fog like a beacon, but one only apparent to those in the know.

In a shady little dell, under the close packed trees, he pointed them out; rank and foul, his mistress’ prey…

As they got closer, the three humans split up, Amy with her familiar, while Maya and Dannyl spread out to close off any escape.

A bright green, glass bottle appeared in Maya’s hand, sealed with wax, inscribed with tiny runes of durability and unbreakability.

With her thumbnail she scratched through the marks, her Will cutting the spellwrought charms neatly. A moment later, the suddenly very fragile glass bottle smashed to flinders among the trees, releasing a cloud of spore wasps; a stinging tree fungus monster that even hardened Adventurers gave a wide berth, when they could.

“You die, Redcaps! We’re the Ward clan!” Amy shouted in rage, as she fell on the little shitbags with terrible fury. “Screw you, assholes!”

The roar of Dannyl’s whip drowned out most of the fight, except for the screams… those rang out loud and high, but not for very long.

#

Benny bashed the last gnomish cannibal cultist flat with his bronze headed warclub, splattering the little bastard’s final thoughts of bloody meat, all over the thirsty soil, where they wouldn’t trouble anyone.

The creature’s rusty, blackened cleaver fell to the ground with a dull clank, shortly before the rest of the wretch did, well most of him…

A good chunk of scalp and skull was hung on a gorse bush, a situation Benny was profoundly unbothered by.

“If this shitbird goes to the next thing bald, that would be pleasing.” The big man mused, as he tipped the corpse off the cliff edge, to become a part of the landscape far below.

The faint splatting crunch was satisfying, when it drifted up from the mist shrouded gulf.

The wretched cleaver and tiny, spiked iron shoes he picked up with a forked stick and a flat sheet of pine bark and brought back to camp for disposal.

“Anybody get cut? Even a scratch is a problem with these turds.” Frankie called to the returning warriors.

He had a bandage around his forearm where he’d been bitten by a screaming, deranged little woman wearing only her red cap and a string of… trophies around her neck.

“The berserkers are the worst…” Wilf rumbled in agreement. “Those trophies were exactly what you thought; poor sods, whoever they were.”

“Cocks?” Maya asked, as she wiped something that looked like brains from her long, deadly, iron flute. “I found one with a bull’s sack full of gnards… They were salted and sugared…” She shuddered all over at the memory.

“That’s him, stubbornly clogging a fingerhole, still a rancid little shit.”

She poked the stray bit of brain out with her cleaning brush and gave the instrument an experimental tootle-oo up the scale. Frankie couldn’t resist answering with his own far less combative instrument. Soon, a post battle jam sesh started, easing the group’s jangled nerves with sweet, summer jazz.

“There were about sixty of them… we got the leaders and seized their ‘sacred’ bag-o-balls, so that should be that.” Count Liam muttered in the main tent, weighing the hefty ballsack in his hand with distaste. He tossed the grisly thing into one of his familiar’s gaping flower maws and smiled when she snapped it up. Sending those remains back into the world through her root system had a dignity all its own… and holding rites for a bag of mixed nuts seemed just weird.

“I’ll send word to step up the local patrols… Your younger brothers will probably sign up for that.”

“Oh, yeah, they’re ready and eager… But finding a supervising journeyman and a healer who can both keep up and keep them in line is going to be tricky.” Ivy muttered crossly.

“They don’t listen to me, the way you kids do…” Dannyl said to Amy, with a patronizing smile designed to provoke her.

“Get bent, Danny… We’re rebels now!” She sneered, before kissing his cheek and scooting off to bed.

“We have a long day of trouble making and not following directions in front of us, need our rest!” She yawned hugely and sealed her tent, while Shiro stalked out of the firelight on his own mission.

“Team Ragamuffin!” Six young voices all sang out from their bedrolls.

“Wait… how did I end up on watch?” Count Liam asked Audrey, who was busily finishing off her pile of fresh deadcaps.

They smelled even worse than when they were alive, but they were much easier to eat without all the struggling and pitiful screaming.

She burped and vomited up a small crusty, rusty iron knife that had been missed in the search of the corpses. The giant snapdragon shrugged her very expressive plant shoulders at him; before she snuggled down in a patch of soil and went to sleep… Those things were so filling.

Songbirds and the whisper of the morning breeze among the pines woke the sleepy band of Adventurers. They rose to the welcome scents of coffee, beans, biscuits and bacon.

“Mmm, whistlefruit, wadding and lick… just like old Mickkel used to make…” Dannyl murmured happily. “Takes me back.”

Sweet pinto beans, slow cooked overnight in a brown sugar and tomato sauce poured silkily over fluffy white biscuits, steaming from the camp oven. He topped that with a thick stream of black molasses, drenching the mess and smelling divine.

Strips of crispy wallowbear bacon finished off a feast fit for any wandering Adventurer with miles to travel before finding a bed and a wide open sky above him to dilute his farts.

The ginger giant staggered out of his massive pavilion and stretched as though he might actually reach the sun in the sky, while yawning wide enough to catch low flying birds.

“Mmm, smells good, where’s Ivy?” He asked warmly, searching the camp for his tiny wife.

“Gross, there’s a chunk of…something in that bush… is that the top of a skull?” Ivy demanded, when she stepped out of the shrubs, re-buckling her armored trews.

“Yeah, it didn’t seem worth the effort last night.” Benny apologized weakly. Even as he was speaking, a long, slender green tendril of thorny plant matter slipped behind the cranky mage and snatched up the morsel; carrying it away to one of Audrey’s many, hungry mouths. It rooted around in the soil under the bush for a moment, stealing away something of Ivy’s that everyone pretended to not notice.

“We have our porta pottie…” Amy complained at her auntie, sounding a little sulky. She pointed at the discreet pop up shelter on the edge of the camp, her face screwed up in mild annoyance.

Inside was a simple seat, placed over a hole dug in the earth, holding a clot of the family’s special fungal mycelium blend. It was dryad and ent approved for sanitary, healthy wildland waste disposal.

“Kiddo, the only thing worse than a cold, camp shitter seat, is a warm, camp shitter seat.” Ivy declared firmly. “I have standards.”

#

A couple miles up the wide, flat mining road they’d been following, the team took a game trail that was rutted, bumpy, rocky and narrow; Wilf and Amy couldn’t be happier.

Maya kept up, since that was her role, but Benny and the rest were having a better time at their slower, less bone jarring pace.

They followed that old abandoned wagon trail, nearly obliterated by time and weather and completely overgrown in places for a few bumpy miles.

The lead team chopped, cleared and cut the way through, while the tail team left blazes, erected trail markers and double checked for missed threats, like sharp sapling stumps hidden in innocuous seeming bushes.

Wilf and Tallum spent an hour after lunch, bridging a narrow gully with a rocky, rushing stream a few yards below. Their primitive construct of green timbers and scavenged dead wood would rot away in a year or two, but that was a ‘later’ problem. They had a right now issue, just a half mile later.

Wilf rolled around a bend in what had been a very well preserved section of road and came within a few yards of crashing into a massive granite boulder, inconveniently blocking the entire route and slowly, ever so slowly chewing its way through the road bed, headed for the crumbling edge.

It was a question of when, not if the embankment carrying the road would collapse and take the tremendous stone on a journey to the valley floor so very, very far below…

The plunge into the valley of battling bugs was long and terrifying, so no one was interested in climbing the unstable thing. Likewise, no one wanted to try and slip behind it, since there was no telling how much of the hillside would be joining the boulder on its final leap.

Dannyl sighed fondly, when the kids fantasized about dropping the boulder on the buggles down below… but the chances of nailing one or better yet, both of the things presented fantastically slim odds at best.

“Let’s clear the road and let what happens, happens…” Tallum rumbled, as she stepped up to the boulder. Bigger than a small house and roughly egg shaped; it leaned against the hillside on a precarious angle, perched on a pile of broken stone that lay under the road’s baked clay surface.

The red haired giant eyed the unstable mess from a safe distance, then scooted up the slope for a peek at what was happening from above.

“Super unstable. I have something for this, but I need Audrey’s help…” Tallum rumbled, when he clambered back down the hillside. “She might risk a few tendrils on the job.”

“She says that’s fine, she has a lot of new… Biomass, we’ll call it… to… let’s say, process.” Liam answered awkwardly.

“It’s not cannibalism, she’s a plant!” He argued with no one at all.

Tallum passed his leafy, cheery snapdragon a burlap bag and a waterskin covered in brightly painted runes and glyphs. “Just put that under the boulder, then dump the water on it… Be sure to get out fast, it could happen really quickly. And please, don’t lose the waterskin, it’s my wife’s.”

Audrey nodded a flower head and took his offerings in her vibrant green tendrils. With surprising speed, the shoots slithered through the rocky wastelands and down below the boulder carrying the objects along in swift, unerring flight.

The vines vanished among the lesser boulders and loose scree holding up the big honker and spent a few long seconds fiddling around.

Her vines emerged from beneath the giant stone, just as it began to groan and teeter, accompanied by the sound of grating, breaking stones and a soft rushing roar.

Lost among the moving stones and sharp edged rocks, Audrey’s vines dragged, tossed and flung the empty waterskin between themselves. They passed it back and forth, as vines got pinched off, crushed, pinned or ground to paste in the slow building landslide, headed down the mountain.

The battered, dusty sack landed on the road at Tallum’s feet, stained with sap and plant juice. “Ohh, sweety! I shouldn’t have said…” The big man moaned piteously until Audrey hugged him and gave him a consoling pat.

“Her tendrils are like a human’s hair, they get cut and just grow back, brother… It’s how she hunts and captures prey…” Count Liman murmured quietly. “More importantly, what was that? Some alchemical explosive?”

“Gods no, that stuff’s dangerous. That was a bag of Gary’s garden soil, a skin of his bath water and a few shatterstone kudzu seeds.” The giant smith rumbled happily, since he was being mercilessly tickled by the snapdragon.

“The bath water was the tricky part. Gary made a haunted waterskin for this gag. He’s nuts, but the results…”

“Yeah… he’s nuts all right.” Liam muttered thoughtfully. “I need some of those seeds…”

He watched the boulder and a few hundred tons of assorted hillside fall down the sheer granite slope and crash down in the ruined valley far, far below.

The noise brought the two bug combatants back together from their neutral corners of the narrow vale they were battling over and resumed the conflict. Sadly, neither was pulped by the landslip and tumbling boulder.

What was left of the road was hardly passable for a horse and rider and useless for any kind of cart… For kids on bikes and a lord astride an all terrain snapdragon, it was more than enough.

#

The old mining road dropped down off the ridge and carried them over a few elevation changes, before ending at a sheer crevasse that cut back into the mountain a score of yards. A causeway had spanned the gap long ago, but it was long since rubble in the valley below.

The remnants of a sad, tattered rope bridge sagged down against the far rock face, dangling from the old bridgehead masonry in a few rotten strands.

“This is where I free climbed the gap.” Dannyl murmured calmly, as though that act were anything but a terrifying cry for help. “I left some anchors and marked the way, so this should be easy.”

The Ward kids groaned and began shucking most of their armor pieces, while bikes got checked, double checked and neatly stowed away in the big lad’s shadow. By the end, he was looking tired and in need of a break, so they set up for a slightly early camp on the wide stone shelf that footed the former causeway.

A few weathered ruins snugged close against the mountainside suggested there had been some kind of semi-permanent camp here in the distant past, perhaps a mine office or toll station… in any case there was too little left to say.

Tallum and the boys nosed around in the rubble for a few minutes and the big man did find something of value… An old ceramic mug with a black wolf emblazoned on it under a line of faded script that read:

Property of the Iron Wolf Mining Cartel

Return for deposit.

“I think this is going to be my new favorite coffee mug!” Ivy announced happily, holding her man’s grand find up for general admiration.

It only took a half hour of slow paced jackassery and goofing for Wilf to recover enough juice for the ritual. Soon, the whole gang was seated, shoulder to shoulder in a ring, holding their favored instruments, while the familiars watched over the little group.

They began a slow, plaintive drum and guitar piece, thrumming, thudding and strumming slowly, like a slow building landslide. Amy’s clear, strong voice rang out in crystalline, icy highs, while Wilf, Tallum and Benny rumbled along, way down low. Frankie and Maya took the lead, crooning the desperate, longing lyrics out on ragged, hopeful tones.

Ooh, a storm is threatening

My very life today…

If I don't get some shelter

Ooh yeah, I'm gonna fade away!

The Rolling Stones were a little outside the kid’s usual preferences, but it was too perfect to skip after the day they’d had. Amy giggled a little when the song ended, leaning on Rio and Wilf, while Becky sighed wistfully at the stars.

“Feels kinda like old times…” Dannyl murmured to the little green moon, high overhead. “While he was… gone, sometimes I imagined he was standing right there…”

“Yeah, just out of sight around the next corner, waiting for me with that goofy grin.” Kermal sighed, patting his sword with fondness.

“That’s your Contract Items…” Amy whispered into the sky, from the circle of close kin. “They’re probably a big part of what let the gods bring him back to us… and the connection he has with Shai.” She laid back to gaze up into the endless void of jeweled stars and moons.

“Otherwise he’d be scattered ‘across the everything, everywhere and everywhen’ That’s what Shiro says, anyway.”

The kitten murred and purred for a moment, nestling himself between her breasts with a satisfied little chitter.

“He says there’s copies of him scattered around, building new lives for themselves on a whole bunch of worlds… that’s a weird thought.” Amy sighed softly at the Madman’s moon.

“There’s more debts owing, more than we can ever collect…” Wilf said with an unfamiliar note of cold, steely fury in his usually mellow and pleasant voice. “Blood debts.”

“Enough maudlin musings, into the houses, I need a bed, a bath and a warm boy…” Ivy complained, while grabbing her husband around his massive arm to fulfill part of her prescription.

She made a beeline for the baths, steaming merrily in the triangle formed by Wilf’s, Rio’s and Amy’s places. Poor Frankie was too tapped out from the ride to call his home forth from the eternal never, where his cozy farmhouse hid.

#

Morning slipped in without warning in the narrow valley, high up on the cliffside. It was cold, foggy and dark, way later than even the veterans expected, when the sun finally touched the little cluster of cottages.

In the clear light of mid to late morning the crevasse looked even less inviting.

The flapjacks with butter and syrup Amy was dealing out held far more allure. Dark and seductive, sexy mistress coffee whispered that they should sit a while and consider the morning’s beauty, before ruining it.

Breakfast ran later than usual, even considering the late start, since no one wanted to hug those rocks, ‘til the sun had warmed them a mite.

Eventually the time had to come… The kids dressed in their tight woven, snug fitting spidersilk arming suits, leaving only gauntlets, elbow, knee and head protection in place, they ditched the rest into Wilf’s shadow for safekeeping.

Climbing harnesses of flat braided spidersilk and forged bronze emerged from their shady storage boy and were buckled onto everyone except Audrey, quickly and efficiently.

Open topped bags of chalk slung from their hips and rings, spikes, toggles, binders and pegs hung from their harsesses as they began carefully spidering their way across.

It took a tense and awkward twenty minutes for the climb team of Dannyl, Maya, Amy and Rio to clamber over and back, stringing a spider silk rope ‘bridge’ over the gap for the party’s non monkeys to ‘safely’ cross.

The dreadful thing was one thick, braided line to walk across, strung with cross ropes to a pair of slender ‘handholds’ and a long, uninterrupted line across the top for ‘safety’. Each person had to clip into the upper line before making the otherwise suicidal crossing. Even so it felt more like a foolish dare, than a sensible means of crossing the gap.

Tallum found the whole idea horrifying and absolutely insane. Only Ivy, who scampered across and began imperiously tapping her toes at him, could move the big man onto the slender, gossamer bridge.

“This is soooo ssstuuuupiiiiid!” He wailed as the bridge swayed, bucked, creaked and generally complained about how much the giant weighed.

Once the gasping, pale giant was on the other side, Ivy clapped him on the back and grinned. “You win the prize tonight, big guy…”

“Oh, great… now go get Rio to push my ghost back inside… I feel awful.” The giant slumped down to the road bed and wheezed for a while.

“Lunch?” Wilf asked eagerly.

Rio looked a little embarrassed and shrugged at the count. “We didn’t get very far…”

“Son, my best wildland explorers said it would take four days to get this far… carry on, kids.” Liam murmured happily from the cozy nest his familiar had coiled into, his pipe smoldering merrily.

Dannyl, Maya and Benny checked their bikes out of Wilf and took off up the road, scouting ahead, while the rest got lunch underway.

Far below, on the far side of the valley, where the mud, water and shattered trees had created a deep bog of churned filth, the monsters still raged at each other, the intruding boulder long forgotten.

Tallum and Ivy sat on a boulder… a stationary one, watching the seemingly diminutive bugs battle, huddled together in the cool mountain breeze.

“Gary has some poisons that would kill them pretty quickly, but he says it would be something called an ‘ecological disaster downstream’...” The big man mumbled.

“He’s pretty serious that he won’t use them.”

“What about siege engines? With him along, Liam and Shai could carry enough equipment to pound those things flat.” She whispered.

“Shai’s adamant, he’s not going into danger in his condition. Just being near a fight would kill him as he is.” The giant whispered.

“His gifts can’t not touch our souls when we’re in trouble; it’s instinct; and that’s what empties his Mana and Stamina. When his Animus slips outside his aura or tries to enter his shadow, he comes undone.”

She sat and watched the insects for a while, considering the options until the scouts rode back... “Well, shit. I’ve got nothing, let’s eat!”

#

The team traveled in close order on the barren mountain road, where it slipped into the near permanent shadow of the jagged peaks all around. Here, the path was cut into the barren stone backside of the mountain, a shallow crease across its ancient cheek, carved by man, but in many ways, reclaimed by the mountain.

The surface looked sound, if a little uneven and steep, but on closer examination it was dangerously slick; coated with a gray-green mossy growth that was difficult to spot.

“That’s a long way…” Wilf muttered, looking at the wrinkle in the mountain’s backside. “...down.”

Anyone slipping down that slope would have a grand adventure for about two hundred yards of nearly glass smooth, gently sloping slab…

Until it debauched onto a sheer drop, into a field of broken, jagged stone, terribly far below.

“This is a little tricky.” Dannyl understated, as he smiled at the wide, slippery stretch. “I climbed up the summit, out onto the bare rock up there, but that was… chancey. I’d not try it again solo, forget taking a group.”

“So how do we pass this?” Tallum asked, disliking the prospect intensely.

“That… brother, is something I considered, when I was last here; before my trouser soiling, death defying and final return trip across that summit.” Dannyl cheered, as he pulled a long spool of spidersilk cord from his coat.

“Kermal… would Sasha mind terribly flying this little leather tag over and dropping it through the anchor ring I drove in last time I was here?” He asked sweetly, as he rustled a bag of something in his palm.

“Then it’s just a simple matter of flying back over with my tag to claim your prize.”

“Are you bribing my familiar, rather than just asking me?” Sir Kermal asked, feeling a strange sense of embarrassment and unease. “That feels… wait! Sasha! I wasn’t done with you!”

#

Silent dusky wings flitted through the cool evening, her silken blindfold in place and her furry, feathery antennae standing out proudly. She was going to get those snacks!

#

Dannyl grinned like a massive asshole, as he slowly pulled a thicker cable through his anchor ring, following the slim thread Sasha had flown over and back so adroitly.

The hero of the hour was perched upside down on a pine tree, savoring a nugget of crystalized monster bee honey, blithely disregarding her bonded companion’s complaints.

“...other people shouldn’t be able to just hire you to do things…” Kermal whined. “...About my feelings, when you just fly away at someone else’s command, for what? A few morsels of… oh, that is very tasty… yes’ I’d love one…”

A few seconds later, Kermal came sulking up to the smiling ginger Adventurer, looking beyond sheepish.

“Do you have any more of those candies…?” He mumbled around a golden nugget in his mouth.

“For my familiar…!”

#