Despite Rigger’s pessimism, the lifeless, limp jaws washed open and the
Freewind
limped forward another yard. We were moments away from doom, but moments do matter.
“Get every sail up,” said Mako.
“There’s no damn wind without mother!” screamed Rigger.
“He’ll have a harder time washing us down his gullet if we’re fully rigged,” said Mako.
“Or if his jaws were frozen shut,” I whispered.
“You’re thinking of Purity’s sword?” asked Sorrow, kneeling beside me to examine my missing leg.
“I’m thinking of the Jagged Heart!”
“Do you know how to activate its powers?” she asked, as she grabbed a belaying pin from the deck. She began to fashion a peg leg from the wood to restore my mobility.
“Not a clue. But I watched Aurora summon a wall of ice thick enough to survive a direct blast of Greatshadow’s breath using the harpoon. It’s worth a try.”
“And if you succeed, we’ll simply be staved in by an iceberg rather than chewed to bits,” grumbled Rigger.
His words were almost drowned out by ropes dancing through every block and tackle on the ship, raising all the sails in great, noisy flaps. Despite his dour attitude, Rigger was doing what he could.
Sage stood nearby, watching the sails unfurl. I felt a stir of optimism as I saw her black curls flicker in a breeze. However, although the yards of canvas settled into position, they remained limp. The only breeze had been that caused by the sails unfurling.
Sage shook her head sadly as she stared into her spyglass. “Two minutes,” she said to Rigger. “If I’m calculating the undulations of the body on the currents correctly, we have two minutes before we get gnawed again. We have to gain some speed!”
“We’ve just enough time to puff our way out of this if we all take deep breaths,” said Rigger, with mock cheerfulness.
Sage chewed her fingernails as her gaze shifted from her spyglass to the sails to the bow, where Infidel and Menagerie strained against the rope. Her eyes widened as she watched Menagerie’s frantic flapping. Without warning, she bolted across the deck, toward my fallen notebook and the bottle of ink that lay nearby. She didn’t waste time locating a quill, but simply popped the stopper free and pressed the tip of her index finger to the bottle as she upended it. She smeared something quickly upon the page as she ran back to Rigger, still standing at the wheel.
“Wings!” she cried, holding the book open before him. “We need wings! You can make them!”
Rigger furrowed his brow as he tried to decipher his sister’s strange babblings. The crude thing she’d scrawled on the page wasn’t helping him understand her. I dragged myself up on my new leg, off-balance as it was a good two inches shorter than its more carefully-formed mate.
I limped toward the wheel, and saw that Sage had drawn what looked like a banana with two big ovals coming off it. Luckily, the fate of the ship didn’t rest on my understanding her gist. At the instant when I was most completely baffled, Rigger’s eyebrows raised up. “I’ve never tried anything like this!” he said, sounding excited. “It will destroy the sails and the rigging just to –”
“Try!” screamed Sage. “We don’t even have a minute before it hits us again!”
Rigger let go of the wheel and threw his hands toward the mainsail, as if he were grabbing it in his mind. He gave a violent sideways tug with his hands and suddenly the ropes rigging the mainsail shattered the thick block-and-tackle housings that held them. The ropes flew in opposing directions, jerking the mainsail completely taut. With a sickening sound no sailor ever wants to hear, the mainsail began to rip, splitting right down its center.
“Rigger!” Mako shouted, dropping the barrel he was throwing overboard and running toward his brother. “Have you lost your mind?”
Rigger didn’t answer. His face was contorted, turning red, his jaw clenched as if he were straining to lift an impossibly heavy weight. The ropes pulled the split mainsails toward opposite sides of the boat, the canvas taut as kites. The ropes stayed taut even as a wave rippled through them, unleashing a powerful flapping sound as Rigger threw his arms back.
The boat surged forward with enough momentum that I had to grab the wheel for balance.
The drawing suddenly made sense.
“Wings!” Sage shouted at Mako. “We’ve turned the mainsail into wings!”
Rigger brought his hands forward once more, the sails dancing like flags, until they caught air as Rigger spread his arms as if he were doing a breaststroke.
Behind us, the massive jaws were once more closing.
“Just one more yard!” screamed Sage
Rigger gave a third flap, then dropped to his knees. Behind us, Rott’s jaws closed on empty air.
The wing-sails suddenly went limp, dropping into the water.
“I can’t hold them any more,” Rigger groaned as he fell on his side. “Without the aid of the pulleys, the weight is too much! I feel as if I’ve torn every muscle in my body.”
“Cut those ropes and sails loose!” Sage shouted. “They’ll cost us our speed.”
Mako and Cinnamon drew swords and ran to the taut ropes hanging overboard.
“You did good, Rigger,” said Sage, kneeling beside her trembling brother. “We’re moving faster than we were, and bodies in motion want to stay in motion.”
Indeed, we were moving forward, though barely at the speed of a good walk. Now that the ship had been given a nudge by the makeshift wings, the Gloryhammer’s magic proved sufficient to maintain our momentum. Rott remained too close for comfort, and flies still covered the ship, but even without waiting for Sage’s new calculations, I could see that we were putting precious inches between us and the dead thing at our tail.
“I command you to keep pulling!” a voice shouted from the front of the ship. “Know that the royal family salutes your courage!” It was Bigsby, posed heroically upon the bow, waving his fist at Infidel and Menagerie. “When I return home, my father will reward you handsomely for your heroism!”
But instead of finding encouragement in the dwarf’s words, Infidel shouted back, “My damn arm’s about to come out of its socket! I can’t do this much longer!”
Back at the mainmast, Jetsam suddenly dropped to the deck. Dark circles of sweat stained his black shirt under the arms. “I’m spent,” he whispered.
In truth, I doubted he’d added much to our speed.
Our gains were only temporary and I had the only plan that might maintain them. I headed for the hatch to retrieve the Jagged Heart. My idea was to weigh down Rott with so much ice that he couldn’t move. What could it hurt to try?
But before I could go down the hatch, I was met by a woman heading up the stairs. It was Gale Romer, her hair drenched in sweat and twisted back behind her ears in a crude bun held in place by a few pins. Stray strands were plastered to her neck, which sported a half dozen bite marks. Rather than the modest nightgown she’d worn when last I saw her, she was dressed in Brand’s white silk shirt, which was cinched around her waist by a braided leather whip. Her cheeks were flushed red, her lips swollen and dark.
The oversized shirt hung to the middle of her thighs and her legs were bare. For a woman almost my age, her limbs were rather shapely; I was particularly struck by the superb design of her feet and toes. The Divine Author was also an excellent architect, though it could be that my thoughts were pushed in this direction by my stumbling attempts at movement now that one of my ‘feet’ was no bigger around than a coat button.
Gale climbed onto deck and wasted little time accessing the situation. A strong wind filled the remaining sails and pushed us forward. “Mako, take the wheel!” she barked. “Where’s Rigger? What happened to the mainsail?”
“Rigger’s hurt!” shouted Sage, as she cradled her brother’s head in her lap. “He pushed himself too hard and it’s all my fault!”
“We’re being pursued by Rott,” Sorrow said to Gale. “I advise that you take us back to the material realm. Perhaps Abyss can intervene to halt his restless advance.”
“And I advise you to go back to your quarters and wait,” said Gale. “A full span of daylight must pass between our jumps. We can’t make the journey back until nightfall.”
“Six hours to go,” said Brand, glancing down at a pocket watch as he emerged onto the deck. He was as sweaty as Gale, and his shirtless back was covered with scratch marks.
Suddenly, there was flapping overhead. I looked up to see Infidel and Menagerie coming toward me. “If we’ve got wind, I guess I’m done,” she said.
Bigsby didn’t approve of them quitting. He chased after them, shaking his fists, yelling, “I didn’t tell you to stop!”
Gale casually stuck out a leg to trip Bigsby as he ran past. She pinned him beneath her foot as she said, “Anyone want to tell me how this dwarf got on board?”
“Ah, right,” said Brand, running his hand through his hair. “You weren’t really yourself when I made introductions. This is my, uh, my... sister. Princess Innocent Brightmoon.”
I stopped paying attention. I’d already heard this conversation, and I happened to know that the true Princess Innocent Brightmoon was present and accounted for. Infidel landed, and I threw my arms around her. She hugged me back, though only for a brief instant. “Sorry,” she said, turning her face away, her voice catching in her throat.
“Are you crying?”
“Gagging,” she said. “You kind of stink. Like, seriously. Some of that dragon goo has seeped into you.”
Sorrow approached. “Indeed. I saw it – and smelled it – when I examined your leg. I’ll continue to repair your physical form while I can, but I fear you may not last much more than another day or two. The wood I crafted you from is rotting at an accelerating pace. I can replace bits as they fall off, but as the last fragments of the original binding decay, so too, will the enchantment fail.”
“Speaking of binding...” said Infidel, dropping the shaft of the Gloryhammer into her gauntlet with a rather menacing
slap
. “What have you done to my husband, Sorrow?”
“In fairness, I didn’t know he was your husband. He was merely a wandering spirit discovered at random by my soul-catcher. A lost soul was required to animate my golem. He didn’t reveal his true identity until later.”
“Because you wouldn’t let me write!” I protested. “For that matter, you could have built me with a tongue.”
“Conversations with lost souls are tedious affairs,” Sorrow explained.
“Stop saying I was lost!” I said. “I was following Infidel.”
“I knew it,” Infidel said. “I could feel you beside me. I never had any doubt.”
“The two of you should be grateful to me for making this brief reunion possible,” said Sorrow, crossing her arms.
I began to peel off my clothes. They fell apart at the seams as I tugged on them. “Tossing these rags overboard will help with my general ripeness. I’ll also dip back into the Sea of Wine to try to wash more of the stink off me; the wine didn’t hurt me before. Maybe alcohol will slow my decay. That was my theory in life, at least.”
“Cold also slows decay,” said Sorrow. “We can use the Jagged Heart to chill you after you return from your bath. The cold shouldn’t harm you. But let’s not fool ourselves. We’ll never completely remove Rott’s curse. Decay was built into your body from the start.” She looked down at her withered left hand. “Just like everyone else. Now that you two are reunited, I advise that you treat your remaining time together as brief.”
Sorrow took one last glance at me as she turned away. Then, she whirled back around, her eyebrows raised as she examined the staves of my barrel chest. “By the thirteenth nail,” she whispered, sounding dazed. But while her eyes were fixed and motionless, her hand was busily searching the folds of her cloak. She pulled out a small silver rod which melted in her grasp, flowing like mercury to coat her hand with a thin glove of precious metal. She gingerly probed my chest to wiggle free a black shard embedded in the boards. Her gauntlet instantly turned dark gray with tarnish.
“What is it?” I asked.
“A fragment of Rott’s tooth,” she whispered as she looked at the object, roughly the size and shape of a man’s middle finger.
“Yeah. He snagged me as I first went in.”
She produced a golden coin and coated the black shard with a thin layer of the precious metal. “Gold will seal it,” she said. “It can withstand corruption better than any other metal.”
“Funny,” said Infidel. “I thought gold was the chief cause of corruption.”
I almost asked what Sorrow intended to do with the shard, but decided I’d rather not know the answer.
“You should see to your bath,” said Sorrow, not looking at me.
Infidel assisted as I tied a rope around myself and slipped down into the wine. The ship was now moving at a good clip through the waves. The water buffeted me, and I climbed out mere moments after I went in, lest the current tear me apart. As I inched my way back up the rope, I watched with morbid fascination as pale white worms writhed free of the wood of my limbs. The wine had left them drunk or poisoned. They fell away, vanishing into the burgundy beneath me, leaving me filled with tiny holes.
I made it back to the deck, sodden with wine.
“How do I smell now?” I asked, as the dark fluid puddled around me.
“Just like you used to,” said Infidel, as she wrapped me in her embrace.