Sword and Sorcery, a Novel

11

Trespass meant spiderling-crap when there was no place at all you were welcome. When “Keep moving, Drow!” was the politest greeting you got; a sword-point, the commonest.

To return was death. To stay on the surface, a constant fight for survival. An unending hunt for revenge. Kaazin was very well suited for stealth (and maybe the Flying Cloud let him get through).

He stalked the airship’s dark corridors without making a sound, barely seeming to trouble the air in his passing. Followed the route he’d mapped out from the cell using shadow: two quick lefts, a brief straightaway and there, in a shallow alcove, was Glassy.

She stood very still, just an unblinking crystalline statue now. Her animating spirit had clearly withdrawn, leaving the transparent pirate as lifeless as stone. Kaazin struck Glassy's face with the hilt of his dagger. Evoked a brief, ringing chime but no other response.

He trapped the sound in his cloak of darkness, seeking to trip no alarms on this ship of the dead. And death was certainly present. Cold spots, odd stains and half-glimpsed, splintered bone spoke of a crew quickly and violently murdered. (Perhaps by the airship itself.)

Twice, Kaazin caught sight of himself in the Cloud’s polished brass. Paused to look closer, seeing a very pale drow-mix surrounded by hovering shades. These seemed bound to the place of their death, still bearing terrible wounds. He shone among them unmarked. Alive, for the moment and prisoned in brass.

Thing was, he should not have had a reflection. Not while still wrapped up in darkness and silence. Obviously, the Cloud could see him; knew he’d escaped from his cell. Meaning… what, and why for? Kaazin ceased walking to send shadow down-corridor, searching the ship a bit further. There was at least one living day-pudding left on this ghost scow, and he didn’t have much trouble finding her.

Hatches formed and bulkheads shifted, guiding the silent albino to a small central cabin. It was locked, but not sealed to one with Kaazin’s deft skills. Took him a heartbeat or three to work out the hatch’s pins and its stiff, balky tumblers (all with the sense of someone just over his shoulder, watching all that he did).

Scouted with shadow as the lock clicked open. Next, he dogged the wheel and got through; sword in hand, ready to fight. The cabin was small, as shadow had sensed, containing only a washstand, a desk and a bunk. And there, huddled in filthy blankets, paler almost than Kaazin, lay a very ill human girl.

She had thirteen winters at most and smelled like food for the wargs. (Having learnt from his mother’s folk, he had a good eye for the worth of a captive. This one was strictly: discard, feed to the pack or the usable slaves.)

“N- No!” she gasped, coughing up spittle and blood, one side of her head grossly swollen. “Get out! Cloud, get him away from me!”

She must have received a response, as day-crawling officers did. The girl shook her bulging head. One brown eye burned hot with fever and pain. The other was pressed nearly shut by an overgrown skull and taut, shiny flesh.

“NO! I don’t want him here, Storm. We’re fine by ourselves! We’re just FINE!”

Almost a howl, that last bit. Kaazin resheathed his sword and edged cautiously forward, readying pockets and spells, driven by part of himself that wasn’t pure drow. Day-walkers traded casual names and lineage on meeting their kind, but Kaazin hadn’t the time or the interest.

“You are dying,” he stated. “An eater has taken hold in your head.”

She coughed once again, her skeletal body wracked nearly double. Recovered enough to straighten and hurl a knife at him, which Kaazin caught in midair, faster than thought. Something skittered and pressed at the edge of his mind, seeking entrance. Trying to speak.

He held the knife by its blade for a moment, then flipped it up into an overhead beam, where it stuck fast with a THUNK and low Hummmm.

“Again, as I said, you are dying. I could finish the job… but I sense that your vessel seeks other doing. Healing, probably.” Mortals fell ill very easily, but weren’t much trouble to cleanse, if one had the interest and tools.

That skittery feeling tickled the base of his thoughts once again, joining up with the airship’s vibration, the stench of mortal illness and the silent shriek of the dead to prod Kaazin forward. The bunk was narrow and low, bunched up with a very sick girl and foul blankets. The eater…

…was there. It looked like a dark-glowing, tendrilled crab, denned up inside of her skull, pressing her brain nearly flat. Its parasite strands reached from that base and spread through her body: draining, weakening, killing.

His quarry, Bonesetter, would have said: “Such demons must be driven away, before the body may heal.” Kaazin shook his head, thrust aside memory. Aloud, he said,

“It seems that your ship wants you set to rights, whole and unmarred, day-hen. That, I can do, with or without your consent.”

Only her right eye made tears. The other, swollen and gummed, could no longer cry.

“We don’t n- need you,” she spat, weak as a starving kitten.

Kaazin shrugged. Made as if to turn and depart. Only, the air seemed to congeal around him, tightening like a fist. Meanwhile the hatch disappeared entirely, sealing them inside.

“Cloud, nooooo!” wailed the girl. “We don’t need a frek drow, or anyone else!”

That tickling pressure was more like a headache, now (which struck even elves and their kin, sometimes). Kaazin turned back. Made an impatient, green-trailed sign in the air and snarled,

“Paralyze!”

The girl froze at once, only the pulsing-dark eater inside of her head still moving; still drawing life from her small, scrawny form. The albino half-drow pulled a certain dagger and needle out of their cross-plane sheaths. Both were poisoned, tainted with spider venom potent enough to lay waste to a city, if plunged into its water source. Particularly strong against eaters, who also feared light.

“You may speak,” he allowed, after reaching to turn the girl’s head. “What happened here? What became of the crew?”

Needle, rather than dagger, he thought. Better for delicate work, when survival mattered. The demonic parasite had sensed him; was draining the girl even harder, now. She gasped, ragged as bloody bandaging. Then,

“Mutiny. After our ship… after Mia’s Joy was attacked… mum shoved me into a locker, but I saw… I saw… There was nothing aboard but some books for a mage on Epona. No dream dust or gold. Nothing of value but a little jewelry. Dad an’ mum got killed trying to fight. I wasn’t worth selling… Cloud’s crew were m- mad. Three dead, and no profit.”

Kaazin was genuinely interested, not knowing enough about airships (pirates, especially) to gauge his own peril. Found the best spot on her head from which to approach. Made another glowing green sign in the air, saying,

“No feeling.”

The needle was only a finger long, but extensible, as not every target was elven- or human-sized. At his muttered command it expanded in length and sharpness. Then, using shadow to guide him within, Kaazin pressed its poisoned tip to the swollen flesh at the base of her skull.

“They mutinied,” he prodded. “Then what?”

The girl hissed aloud, feeling nothing at all, but sensing his movements.

“Then they ganged up and killed the captain at table, while he was eating. Stranded the mate on a little floating island to die, h- handed me around for a while, then locked me up in the brig to sell, later.”

Kaazin nodded. Such stories were frequent and sad… for the victim. This time around, he’d kept himself out of raiding and slave-trading. Not that it mattered. He pushed the envenomed needle in, holding her tear-stained chin in one hand as he drove in that bright mithral point.

“You were locked up. What happened afterward?”

The girl sniffled.

“They got really drunk, all of them. Broke into the rum stores and had a big party, got themselves blind, stupid, staggering dak-faced. Cloud spoke to me in my cell. I couldn’t much hear him, at first. I was… it… Anyway, Cloud told me to hold on tight. Then he climbed and rolled over, so everyone passed out on deck just fell off and died. The ones still inside, Cloud killed with splinters or squashing the walls together… three with a passageway fire… two just trapped in a cabin till they died of thirst. All the bones are still here, someplace. They’re part of the decks and the hull, now.”

Kaazin grunted sourly. As his quarry had often put it, ‘Spin the wheel, take your chances’. They’d spun and they’d lost. Badly. Their problem. Not his.

The eater attempted to shrink away from his probing needle, but guided by shadow, Kaazin could not be evaded.

“Thy choice,” he said to the parasite, switching to high-elven healers cant. “Flee or be slain.”

Emotion and memory stayed in their tight mental bonds, clearing his head for the task at hand, which wasn’t a simple one. Commanded but not accepting it, that demonic parasite lashed with its tendrils. Fought to infect him with some of its mote-like parasites, but… elf or drow… Kaazin could not be harmed by such nightmares.

“The pirate crew died in their stuporous sleep. What happened next?” he demanded, as the needle at last reached that quivering mass. He pressed the probe’s base injecting spider toxin into the eater, but not in the girl.

“Then… Cloud took care of me in my cell, sending food and water till they were all dead and… and ‘absorbed’, he said. After that, he let me out and made me the first mate. He’s his own captain. Says he won’t ever have one, again.”

She’d stopped crying at that point, as sometimes dragging things out into torchlight or day-shine robbed them of power. Sometimes.

“And then you turned your hand to piracy,” he guessed. “Never went back for that stranded officer?”

“No,” admitted the girl, as the eater inside of her shriveled from pulsing black to pale, shredded grey, then to nothing at all. “Cloud didn’t want anyone aboard that might tell him what to do. Said Salem could look to herself.”

Kaazin nodded again.

“It seems that she did,” he remarked, carefully withdrawing the needle. “That was her that you froze, aboard Falcon.”

“I thought so,” said the girl, sounding sleepy. Then, “Am I still going to die?”

Kaazin shrugged. Cleansed the envenomed needle with sigil and word, then put it away. Released the girl’s chin and dropped paralysis, saying,

“Sooner than later, as you are mortal… but none of us gets a contract chiseled in stone. I live to kill someone. After that…? There is no place or purpose for Kaazin, who likely will die.”

“Cloud thinks you’ll do,” murmured the girl, settling back onto illness-stained pillows. Bonesetter would have called it a job well done. Bonesetter was going to wish he was dead, many times over. Sooner, rather than later.

Kaazin cleansed the girl, her bedclothes and bunk with a spell. As she drifted to sleep, he heard:

-Thank you, Quartermaster, - inside his thoughts. A sere, no-nonsense voice. One he’d be hearing a lot, in the days to come.