Sword and Sorcery, a Novel

12

“You have come to sow chaos, to disrupt His Majesty’s ride!”

“No, I… I don’t know what's happened, but…”

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At the Tipsy Lord, a jilted (but well-fed) assassin checked base through the shadows. It seemed that his orders had changed. No great matter to him, and nothing personal. In no real hurry, he used the last dregs of Serrio’s blessing to savor his wine and his food (for so very long, just a dim memory).

Then, as contract and fate clamped down, Mandor the Charmer dropped a pile of gold coins on the table. Left a polite review in the tavern’s ether, too: Best meal I’ve eaten in five hundred years that wasn’t served screaming and fighting.

That done, the assassin changed forms, becoming an icy mist that coiled and swirled its way through the startled patrons and servers. Could have slain any or all of them, but toothsome roast meat… dripping with grease and still sizzling… fresh, hot bread slathered in golden butter, sharp cheese and (most of all) wine had brought satisfaction and peace. Let them all live. They’d earned it.

He might even have lifted his paw and allowed the young mouse to scurry away for a bit. All part of the fun. Guest-right held for three days, after all, binding even one such as Mandor. But the scoundrel had fled first, taking that by-catch lass along with him. The assassin could feel them both, some fifteen miles to the west of Karellon. They’d darted off to the imperial palace, it seemed, as tightly warded a spot as the Constellate House. Well enough. Mandor had time, and the start of a plan.

Out through the tavern he drifted, lightly brushing its patrons; aging this one, healing that one, doubling the other’s small stash of coin, as his sense of fitness and humor dictated. Then, up through an unshielded smoke vent and out to the street once again.

There, across a wretched and holy river, he encountered his colleague. Fallon had tracked their mark from the other side of the Bogg Street barrier, trapped by its clean, running water. She was in shade form, so horrific of aspect that Mandor was thrust right back to his physical shape. Her awful face stopped the last feeble beat of his heart, as well. Warmth vanished. Utter stillness settled within him again, driving away his brief flush of life.

“You let him escape,” accused Fallon, her terrible voice withering greenery and summoning nightmares for five miles around.

Mandor shrugged.

“He had help. The gods are involved, or I am a fool, and the dragon is coming as well. Surely that blessing struck even you.”

As a tortured shade, Fallon normally had just one expression, that of her death. Now, that frozen terror and shock altered slightly. Her appearance changed and her wounds seemed to heal, as well.

“I was a kitten again,” she whispered, in almost a calm, gentle voice. “I was playing at darts with my brother, in the time before everything happened.”

“Mmm…” mused the vampyre, nodding. “And… has your contract ‘slipped’ just a bit? Wording faded somewhat?” he prodded cautiously.

Out in the moonlit street, a murdered tabaxi princess nodded.

“It has,” she admitted. “I am still bound… yet there is room in the collar to turn, now.”

The folk of Low Town whimpered and huddled behind their sealed shutters, their triple-locked doors. Those who lacked better shelter crouched beneath trash and junk in the alleys, for death stalked the city this night. Fallon reached through the streets and the shanties, searching.

“One mark lies dreaming still, in the house of Oberyn. The other has hidden himself yonder, in the palace of elves,” sang the banshee, eyes blazing sapphire-bright in the darkness. She could hold physical shape for only the space of thirteen breaths, ordinarily. Some of Serrio’s blessing must have lingered, though, for Fallon Deathsinger was able to stay in her own ravaged flesh; a half-grown kitten, still wrapped in tattered wedding finery.

Mandor stroked his chin with one hand, considering strategy.

“Luck is with us tonight,” he decided. “I can feel that old charlatan, Oberyn, loading the dice. Perhaps we follow our orders up to a point. Perhaps we help heaven…”

“…and heaven helps us?” scoffed Fallon. “A thousand years after the last bloody prayer? The last cry for rescue? Why? And why now?”

It had happened before. Time after time, the cycle continued, and both of them knew it.

“I’m not sure,” Mandor admitted, glancing west, where the topmost spires of a beautiful palace caught and threw back the moonlight. “But I feel as though something has finally shifted, Fallon… and an egg may be cracked many ways.”

She was melting at the edges, dissolving back into shade form. But it was a tabaxi kitten’s voice, not a banshee’s wail that replied,

“We shall see.”

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Space and time fold; all of a piece, but quite rumpled and packed, as though stuffed within very tight boundaries. Point being, folk and events far distant in time, linearly, can be almost on top of each other when seen from a higher dimension. Draw a line on a napkin, then crumple the napkin up in your fist. Sometimes that line nearly crosses itself, bringing disparate things close together.

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Inside of the dark, shuttered airship, Miche went hunting, searching for Dark Cloud’s engine room. Marget followed behind him, so close that she bumped right into the elf when he suddenly halted. That happened four times, as Miche sorted through traces of long-vanished folk and old tragedy.

“I do not care for this ship,” growled the orc, smelling strongly of worry and pre-battle stress. “It is thick with death. Walking its halls is like stirring a pot of cold slave-porridge.”

Nameless didn’t like it much, either. The marten stayed hidden in Miche’s cloak hood, small head on the elf’s right shoulder, claws hooked tight into fabric and flesh.

“Whatever happened is long past,” soothed Miche, reaching up to stroke Nameless. “And we are in great need of shelter and transport, Meg.”

“If it doesn’t decide to kill us, first,” grumbled Marget, who trusted her own splayed feet over any accursed machine.

The elf half-turned to regard her, placing his hand now on Marget’s right arm.

“Cloud will not kill us,” he promised. “It is near to the final silence, itself, from ages-long waiting. I seek a thing called the ‘engine room’, where its heart may be started again.”

The orc muttered something unkind and mostly untrue in reply, but relented, snarling,

“Be swift, Old One. These walls seem to close and the ceiling to drop with each step.”

‘Bulkheads’ and ‘overhead’, corrected the part of Miche that was Lord Erron. (Silently.) This ancient wood vessel was primitive from his perspective, but it felt very good to be striding a deck once again; alive, free and whole.

“This way,” he said aloud, guiding them into a starboard passage. Ships being ships, the engine room would be placed low and aft, situated so as to grant mechanical advantage to the airship’s drive system.

Down corridor next, and into a narrow ladder-well, which he took at a slide, gripping its smooth metal handrails while pressing his boots in, as well. First shouted,

“Coming down!”

…though there were only the wispy dead to take notice. Marget clumped through more cautiously, having to drop her axes and sword to the elf, first. He caught them with feather fall rather than have his brains dashed out all over the deck. Steadied the orc as she squirmed and grunted her way down the ladder. Quite an extensive vocabulary, she had.

“How am I meant to get up there again?!” Marget demanded, red-eyed and panting, once he’d eased her onto the lower deck.

Miche shrugged.

“A coat of grease?” he suggested, half seriously. “Transformation spell? You might make a very nice songbird.”

She snorted like an aurochs, growling,

“I will hunt down and slaughter all of your rebirths, Vrol, until at last I grow weary of hearing your shrieks. No grease, and no transformation. A Free Person I am, and a Free Person I stay. We find something else, or I make a new path, with my muscle and axe.”

She meant it, too. Had retrieved her weapons from their resting place in midair and stood there ready to swing. Dark Cloud had enough strength to create a new hatch in the passage, providing a shortcut. The starboard bulkhead first thinned and then parted, with a noise like splintering timber. The newly formed portal creaked slowly open, looking more like a set of raggedy jaws than a doorway.

Miche and Marget ducked through, avoiding its crisscrossing shards and razor-edged pipes. All of that brass displayed weirdly distorted reflections. Sometimes of them, more often of others long dead.

“No ship at all, but a tomb," snapped Marget, as she struggled to free her long braids from shattered dark wood and old bones. On the other hand, once Miche had helped disentangle his furious heart-sister, they very soon came to the engine room.

He ignited a mage light as they opened the hatch and stepped in. A rippling glow blossomed at Miche’s tense word, revealing the long-silent heart of Dark Cloud.

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Elsewhere (far distant in one sense) a hurtling junk-claw plunged like a thunderbolt. Pilot reacted, very nearly too late. In that chaos of flashing lights, crunching metal, shrieking alarms and titanic machinery… that intense foundry heat… he had time and wit just to port himself upward, over the onrushing bucket. Hung in tipsy midair for an instant, then landed hard on its plummeting surface.

First day, new body, and very few linked cyborg parts. He lost his footing and balance. Twisted an ankle. Fell sideways, scrabbling for purchase on rough and unyielding metal. His fingers were flesh, now, and the pilot could not magnetize cyborg feet he no longer possessed. His boot soles were Sure-Grip, though; shifting their contours to match any surface he needed them to.

Only just didn’t slide off and fall to his death on the heaped, squirming junk-pile below. Dangled, briefly, clinging to one of the bucket’s huge teeth by a riveted seam and his well-placed boot. Caught his breath and then flipped athletically upward. Landed on top once again, this time right by the bucket’s immense, rusty chain.

Next drew a sign in the air, grunting, “Slow time”, which… did not come from personal files or any show-vid he’d ever seen. Worked, though, as the air turned to fiery pudding around him, and everything slowed to an overclocked crawl.

The pilot’s heart was unregulated, now. There were no chemical squirts or music loops to calm its wild thumping. Nothing to gentle his harsh, ragged breath. He clung to the chain. Pivoted, looking up and around for something… anything… to halt the bucket’s descent. Spotted the mechanism controlling the junk-grabber; all slow-blinking lights and massive, meshed gears. Good enough.

Working fast, Pilot traced another sign in that syrupy air, leaving a red-golden sparkle in the wake of his moving finger.

“Lock,” he commanded, on what Boomer would have called ‘a hunch’. The strategy worked, stopping the bucket’s motion entirely. Its corroded jaws spread out just inches shy of the writhing discards, but didn’t bite down. Its swing had knocked something aside, though; a dented old hover cart. Below that lay part of a battle-mech torso. From its torn wreckage projected a flickering lavender advert.

“I got Behuggled at Bide-a-While Station!” it flashed, almost too pale to be seen. V47.

Pilot cried out; completely unheard over all of that hellish, thundering noise. Slid, dropped and scrambled, finally porting himself to the shattered remains of his partner. His friend.