Shadowdeath wind episode.., p.1
Shadowdeath Wind: Episodes & Excursions: Book 1, page 1
Shadowdeath Wind
Episodes and Excursions: Book 1
Dan Edelman
JChris Publishing LLC
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Contents
1. Helldiver, Now
2. TWO
3. THREE
4. FOUR
5. FIVE
6. SIX
7. SEVEN
8. EIGHT
9. NINE
10. TEN
11. ELEVEN
12. TWELVE
13. THIRTEEN
14. FOURTEEN
15. FIFTEEN
16. SIXTEEN
17. SEVENTEEN
18. EIGHTEEN
19. Interlude I
20. Last Spring in the Gloaming
21. TWO
22. THREE
23. FOUR
24. FIVE
25. SIX
26. SEVEN
27. Interlude II
28. The Dead Boy’s Song
29. TWO
30. THREE
31. FOUR
32. FIVE
33. Interlude III
34. TWO
35. THREE
36. FOUR
37. FIVE
38. SIX
39. SEVEN
40. Omen, Six Years Ago
41. TWO
42. THREE
43. FOUR
44. FIVE
Helldiver, Now
ONE
Cinnamon Rogue leaned back on the side bench of the shallow-drafted launch and shut her sunburned eyes against the blazing horizon. Bored, anxious, and achy, bum numbed from the sea-worn leather-wrapped padding, she’d been watching since before dawn for an armada reputed to be ten, twenty, a hundred times larger than all Myriadian fleets combined, depending on who spun the tale. A tale growing from some convoluted prophecy.
The Shadowdeath Wind, Sei Javala called it, all full of gravitas. “A tempest howling the end of all things,” he’d said matter-of-factly, “bringing the Darkness.”
Her launch drifted on the Aestiva nearly three hundred leagues to the north of Helldiver’s Ghost. Out on that vast sheet of shifting gold plate, so gods damned far from the ship, she gave some leash to the fear that the prophecy, howsoever swollen with hyperbole, spawned within her. Cinnamon hated the feeling, but it felt worse to batten it down all the time among the ship’s leery-eyed gobs.
Her right foot rested on one of two small oval green tanks strapped to the polyfiber motor housings. Boosters these tanks were called, designed, they said, to get you out of trouble as fast as you got into it; warnings covered them in prim modern L’Endish script, a variation of written Myriad L’Endish although spoken the same, if with slatternly accents. Back in the day, when the West thought it might find influence in the Myriads, its minions had skulked over the islands like a morning fog with gifts of technology and materials that no sun had burned off. The crass gargling idle of the launch’s two powerful Western engines worked unpleasantly on her head, an insistent reminder of the residue of war machines the West had strewn across the Isles as if casting coins into some fountain for luck or wishes.
Ever restive, the Aestiva’s long, placid rhythms carried a predatory stalk. With its sudden squalls and great swarms of sea drakars and basilisks and kraken, the northern seas—even here at their most southern edge—belonged to no one. This far north, the nearest land fell some two hundred leagues away, the Uk-Ushga, a spatter of atolls at the very tip of the Myriads named for the flesh-eating kelpies rumored to infest them. Not much of a comfort. The launch’s bubble screen, proven, the Westerners said, to protect vessels from aggressive wildlife, was, as usual, off; such a defense might have value in a quiet southern lagoon somewhere. In the northern seas, the pucker factor always ran high, Western tech be damned.
Cinnamon’s lids dragged tired grit over her slowly opening eyes. She sipped a bit of sweetwater from her canteen and slid a hand under her purple scarf to agitate her scalp. A few loose strands of coal-black hair waved across her field of vision. The evening breeze teased glittery points from the sea. Her attention fell to the north. A blue-grey line foamed with a burly lather of bloody clouds. Her eyes narrowed. The light was wrong. The fire was gone, the sky hemorrhaged. But this far north, the sun could not have set already. It hadn’t. The horizon had risen. Cinnamon blinked several times to be sure.
“By the gods,” she murmured and slipped behind the launch’s wheel. She powered up the engines and spun the launch around, flinging a silver veil of water that momentarily hid the chopped horizon rolling toward her.
Twin engines bellowed and the launch squatted on its foils as she laid into the accelerator. She hurled an incredulous thought at Sei Javala:
It’s coming.
TWO
Rodonovan Swords, captain of Helldiver’s Ghost, stood on deck beside a salt-coarsened signaling lamp, watching acrid black smoke roil over the swaying Aestiva. They called him Rodonovan the Pirate in Taelemone and the West. Everywhere else he was the Prince and Sultan and many other things, not all as kind as “pirate.”
The shattered prow of the Flying Sprite resembled a pyramid’s ruins jutting from the burning water. At the edge of the oil fire, which made the surrounding sea a fractured platter of copper and brass, frenzied sharks churned the vast blood patch, picking over sailors. Their screams were frail things, flitting about like the white-and-grey gulls already trolling for bits.
A large shark, easily twenty paces long, scudded by Helldiver’s Ghost, its man-high dorsal fin reflecting a zag of grey light along its ragged edge. The shark tilted, turning a dark eye up to regard Rodonovan, and nudged the transom, tasting the black corvette with its sandpaper hide. A flick of its tail and the fish drifted through the flotsam back toward the wreckage.
Rodonovan climbed the stairs to the overlook leading to the bridge. Pink curds spread across a bruised sky, falling upon the dying sun’s saber, and a keen anxiety clawed his gut. Sick of it all. Soon the West would again intrude on his world. He wanted no part of anything involving the bad-luck West. None of it. The idea of Myriadians on either side dying over Western troubles disgusted him.
The Flying Sprite slipped beneath the Aestiva with a frothy sigh, another specter to haunt the shallows while the reef patiently claimed it as its own. Beyond its sizzling print, another steam launch bobbed. Sailors were helping others out of the water with desperate yanks on outstretched arms. You could go down with your ship or take your chances in a lifeboat after losing a battle. A Myriadian crew generally split on that choice. And most would rather be killed in battle than choose between drowning in a squall or digesting in the belly of a fish.
Rodonovan was tired. Who’d once said that empires were forged from the fires of war?
Mantra swept past in a shimmer of motley scales to loop up toward the fruited sky. The little drakonnier peaked, hovered, and fell in a slur of speed toward the boiling blood patch. She struck the water and blasted skyward with a tiny shark in her oversized talons. A larger shark leapt clear of the water, narrowly missing Mantra’s rapier tail with a gnashing of water and cracking of jaws. The drakonnier’s warble seemed a taunt.
Some glib fool, Rodonovan knew, tracking Mantra’s path aft to the stern walk where she would feast. Some long-dead emperor who had ordered men and women into battle from a throne far removed from the carnage, amusing the court sycophants with his cleverness. Well, Rodonovan had never pursued empire. He wanted only to unite his people and return to Taelemone, the land his ancestors had been chased from after the War of Jeneary, a land he’d never seen but as a scar on the horizon. Lately though he was having trouble remembering why. Perhaps his disgust at the West was a flimsy shield of righteousness against a deeper repugnance. How long had he been fighting for his people’s right to a land none had set foot on? Really, though, the question was: how long had he been fighting his people for their rights?
Helldiver’s Ghost had nearly died this day, engine room gutted by one of the Flying Sprite’s ship killers. Six sailors killed, and eight out of a dozen engines damaged or destroyed, a gaping wound in the hull. Fortunately, his chief engineer, the only man in the Myriads and, like as not, most other places not in the West who understood Ghost’s propulsion system, was spared. It could’ve just as easily been Rodonovan and his men feeding the sharks.
Bangs and clanks and whirrs and zips, whooshes and wet slaps, curses and grunts and edgy laughter, the wheezy breathing of the pump spitting water from the portside vacuole in the engine room. The activity of sailors standing down. The familiar simmer. Sea wasp launchers lowered into their bays. Rotary cannon pods retracted into gun ports and their armored doors slammed shut. Hoses dowsed the base of the charthouse, damaged by a sea wasp fired by the Flying Sprite as it approached for its killing stroke. Just moments before the hostile—yet uninitiated—frigate struck the massive coral reef entwined with the blazing fumaroles stitching the Aestiva to give the Fiery Ring its name.
Even wounded, Helldiver’s Ghost had quickly killed the foundering Flying Sprite, and now its sailors chummed the water, clinging to a thin loyalty born of greed. What a waste. With Red Sky Magus killed last month in the fall of Black Tombs, most fleets sailing under his standard had immediately and unconditionally declared their neutrality, willing to neither throw in with Rodonovan, who, in their eyes, had brought chaos to Black Tombs with Omen’s misstep six years ago, nor be drowned by same. They, too, were tired. Some of those fleets disintegrated—sailors held allegiances only to their ships—you lived and died on and for your ship—beyond the rails, though, fidelity was transactional, a matter of short-term interests. But the Flying Sprite had sailed under Hang-Low Christian’s Crooked Cross. Hard as it was to imagine, Red Sky had an actual friend. One who smelled some phantasm of power left in the wake of Red Sky’s death. One who had become a lingering nuisance. Rumor had it that Hang-Low’s armada skulked about the Desolate Atolls to the southeast. Goblin Rod’s juggernaut had been dispatched, along with a slew of airborne Westerners, a point he preferred not thinking too much about.
War polluted the scent of the Aestiva. So much blood spilled. The blood of men and women who’d followed Rodonovan or defied him. And what to show? Unity? This unity he had prayed to and preached about his whole life? The fleets had fractured, ships had scattered to the winds. Had everyone but him seen the utter emptiness of his pursuit? Irredentism. A high-brow concept wholly void of the passion, hatred, blood, and desolation that spoiled its reality.
The black deck vibrated with the reloading of weapons below. The next time those weapons deployed would be against someone other than Rodonovan’s own people. Other than human. Turning his gaze onto the curl of surf on the outer reef, revulsion at the thought held an edge of despair and shame, and failure limned with the faintest dew of relief, and little genuine solace.
In a shattering geyser of red water, a breaching sea drakar gripped a huge shark in its long spike-toothed jaws. It flopped back into the water with a boom, ivory belly up and an elongated, triangular fin of mottled blues and greys waving briefly in the froth. Panic resounded from the sailors in and around the other steam launch.
“A draksy inside the Ring?”
Rodonovan looked down at Squeezebox Davy, who squinted to watch the true Prince of the Aestiva take its full. The old first chief’s cheeks billowed like two fresh-baked buns around a mouth pinching an ancient whalebone pipe. His curly grey muttonchops climbed up under his black wool-knit cap and draped over ears bespeckled with tiny gems.
“None of this bodes well,” Rodonovan said, knowing he must avoid the indulgence of portentous musings with his sailors. And yet this waning afternoon, it seemed he had given in to that luxury.
“That launch is overloaded, Captain,” Squeezebox said with gravel in his voice and a spew of sweet blue smoke that shredded in the breeze. “It’ll either capsize on its own or the draksy will take it down.”
Hatred was the only thing in this world that persisted, Rodonovan knew. And he knew too that he still persisted after forty years not by showing mercy to those who hated him. A lesson reflected in the pool of blood spilled from the slash carved across his wife’s throat by a man once given mercy. Gone for so long now, Ambra persisted in the unhealing wound of her absence.
To the west, three frigates from his fleet stood down to reassume their picket positions; the ships to the east would be doing the same. When the Western war passed over the Myriads like some infernal squall, more men and women would die.
“We’ve fed enough critters for one day maybe?” Squeezebox said. “Surely some of them men’ll sail for you.” His tobacco-torn voice rolled out in an odd monotone that made Rodonovan look at the sailor. He couldn’t hold the older man’s earnest gaze for long before returning his own to the sea.
The drakar, easily a hundred paces from snout to tail—nearly the size of Helldiver’s Ghost—churned the bloody water. Dorsal fins slashed the water as sharks scattered around the oil fire; they’d soon find the other launch. Or the drakar would. “Some maybe. And what of the rest of them, Chief Squeezebox?” Rodonovan asked. Wind nuzzled through his hair to murmur in his ear. He’d already allowed that weird-eyed Ferracane—yet another Westerner—on his ship, much to his superstitious crews’ consternation.
Squeezebox scratched under his cap, smoked his pipe. “I’d wager they’ve had their fill of all this, Captain.”
“Chief Squeezebox,” Rodonovan said, figuring “this” meant his thing, his war, “I need a damage assessment on the charthouse and the engine room. I want the hull breach closed by sunset. I want a status report on all engines. Has the tender picked up the replacement blocks? I want all engines back online by sunrise, when we will honor our dead. See that all gun crews secure their stations. We will need ordnance resupply as well. You will also see to the care and housing of the Flying Sprite’s sailors. You are, as you’ve always been, the busiest man on this ship.”
“I was the busiest man on your father’s ship, too, so I wouldn’t have it any other way, Captain.” Squeezebox chortled and headed for the charthouse, a rotund ball of bustle barking orders and trailing drifts of redolent pipe smoke.
To Ensign Tommy Greensticks, Rodonovan thought, Please bring Ghost about. See that the launch bay doors are open and secure that last steam launch. I want those men.
Aye, Captain.
Captain…
The mellow thought of Sei Javala, Ghost’s healer and navigator, jarred Rodonovan coming so quickly on the heels of Greensticks’ terse reply. Yes, Javala?
We have a report from the north: The Darkness will arrive at dawn.
Rodonovan rolled his eyes at the compulsive melodrama infused in such things and turned away from the railing to head inside the bridge as three of Helldiver’s Ghost’s twelve engines idled up. Please bring Kai Ferracane to the bridge.
When Rodonovan entered the bridge, Greensticks barked, “Captain on deck!” Tara Eight Legs stood and saluted, while the Western fugitive, Dexter Revenant, managed to offer a turd-eating grin with the slimmest of smiles. Rodonovan waved a hand—at ease—and said to Sei Javala, “That Westerner knows more about this then he’s told us.”
Revenant tossed out a halfwit’s laugh. “Sounds about right.”
“Arsehole,” Tara Eight Legs murmured.
Panic shaded through Rodonovan, a queer sense of aimlessness. He gazed out the panoramic bridge window as the black corvette circled past the funeral feast of the sea drakar toward the overcrowded steam launch.
THREE
The engine drone waxed and waned in abrasive whines as the recon launch rode giant long-backed waves. Each sweeping rise and fall a brief forever under the moonless sky that intensified the chill creeping into Cinnamon. She skated south on the black water, a sense of hugeness made more gaping by the star spray overhead. She would have open water until she passed the Uk-Ushga and then the Ascensions to the east. To shrink that open space, to dull the dread wrought by the trouble following her, Cinnamon turned her mind to more mundane matters. Or if not so mundane, at least more palatable.
One of Caroline Monkey Spar’s frigates had fished Kai Ferracane out of the Aestiva about a dozen leagues off the coast of Taelemone as he gutted one shark after another in a losing battle. She’d ordered him—without a dram of passive aggressiveness, surely—delivered immediately to Rodonovan, seeing as how the Prince seemed to be collecting Westerners.
Standing on deck of Ghost with nothing but one of those Western tactical knives and a heavy pack on his back that he guarded jealously, blood from a massive wound sheeting down his leg, he wouldn’t say who he was or what he was doing out there. Or why he was naked. He’d been weirdly hairy, almost furred, and heavily, raggedly bearded like some Taelemonite warlord. Dexter Revenant, a fearsome man with a warrior’s posture, as intimidating and deadly as any sailor in the Myriads, despite his fondness for buffoonery, had breathed, “Kai Ferracane,” with a sort of superstitious awe. And the story in that utterance rang with the same epic resonance that the tolling in the rumors of this Ferracane. The two Westerners had exchanged an elaborate and fairly absurd handshake she’d learned was called a “dap.”
