There was a moment of morbid curiosity where I contemplated thrusting my head underground. I’d discovered while exploring the pygmy tunnels as a ghost that, in pitch darkness, I could see the faint aura given off by all material objects. Given that mirrors weren’t any use to me now, it might be interesting to see my face once more.
Instead, I clenched my fists of fog and turned away, floating upward. Some things are best left unseen. Above me, the boldest stars were starting to glow in the darkening sky. I drifted on the sultry wind that flowed down from the jungle slopes, the moist air redolent with a thousand species of orchids. I rose nearly a mile before I spotted Commonground, roughly twenty miles away. Even at this distance, the city was aglow with the lanterns of countless ships. The beaches around the bay blazed with funeral pyres. It had been weeks since Greatshadow attacked the city, but new corpses washed ashore with each tide.
I set off for Commonground at a leisurely pace, lost in thought, wondering if Infidel had done the right thing by sparing the dragon. I was shaken from my reverie by a faint high-pitched wail. I scanned the horizon. Was it some sort of bird? It sounded almost human, and it was definitely getting louder.
Then I spotted what looked like a man flashing toward me against the darkening sky. At first glance, it looked like Battle Ox, tumbling head over heels through the firmament. But the flying figure hurtled closer, and I made out a heavyset man dressed in a bearskin vest and wearing a horned helmet. His thick sinewy hands were clamped tightly to a two-handed axe. As he tumbled past, I saw that his beard was flecked with vomit, and he shrieked at a much higher pitch than one would expect from such a bruiser. In his wake, he left a strong odor of piss. I had the distinct impression that his flight was neither voluntary nor welcome.
I could have given chase, but I was more interested in who had launched the man into the atmosphere rather than where he was going to fall back to earth. Ordinarily, if there were bodies flying this sort of distance, Infidel was involved.
Though Commonground was thick with ships, it didn’t take long to spot the
Freewind
. The vessel was a long, square-rigged clipper with three masts, with a distinctive burgundy hull. I’ve heard that the boards were soaked in red wine before it was assembled. This isn’t a standard building practice among the Wanderers, and I have no idea what advantage it might have given the ship, but I must admit it helps the boat stand out in a crowded harbor.
To my utter lack of surprise, the
Freewind
was under attack. While Commonground was a sanctuary city among the Wanderers, meaning that even the
Freewind
wouldn’t be molested while at port, the attackers plainly weren’t from around here and probably didn’t understand the rules. Two long ships with figureheads carved to look like angry dragons had pinned the
Freewind
against the docks, rendering the ship’s legendary speed moot. The attacking boats had hulls wrapped in what looked to be oily hides. At least a hundred burly men wearing bearskin vests and horned helmets swarmed from the boats, running along boarding planks or climbing the numerous grappling ropes that now draped the
Freewind.
They were roaring deafening battle cries at a much more dignified and manly pitch than the shrieker who’d passed me seconds before. While I didn’t understand the language, the raiders matched the description of a race of warriors from lands north of the Silver Isles who called themselves Skellings. The only thing I really knew about them was that they were supposedly cannibals. Since their homeland was two-thousand miles away, it was doubtful they’d come this far looking for dinner.
At first glance, it looked as if the Skellings were launching their assault on an empty ship, which had to make it all the more embarrassing for them that they were failing to get on board. Those climbing up ropes had the bad luck of having the knots slip free from their grappling hooks inches before they reached the railing. Those attempting to run up gangplanks were suddenly snatched from their feet by hurricane-force winds on a bay that was otherwise calm. The waters around the ships grew crowded with flailing bodies.
One of the grapplers, however, had managed to leap for the railing as his rope broke, and I watched as he climbed aboard the all but empty deck. Suddenly, a child dropped out of the rigging, hands first, grabbing the warrior by his horned helmet. The Skelling staggered around, cursing, as the slender figure maintained a perfectly balanced handstand. As I drew closer, I saw that the mysterious gymnast was a girl, perhaps ten years old, with a very stern grimace on her face. Curly black locks spilled out from a wine-red beret that marked her as a member of the crew. Her agility at riding her unwilling mount was all the more remarkable for the fact that she was wearing a belt studded with lead sinkers that had to weigh at least fifty pounds.
After balancing on the Skelling for a few seconds, she dismounted with a somersault. The second her fingers left the helmet, the confused warrior shot into the air as if he’d been launched from a catapult. He vanished into the night so swiftly that he was gone from sight before the girl’s feet even touched the deck. She bounced as if she had springs in her toes, with her hands stretched overhead. As if by magic, a rope swung toward her. She grabbed hold as it lifted her once more into the rigging.
Perhaps the phrase ‘as if by magic’ is a bit too coy, since I knew damn well that every member of the Romer family that owned the
Freewind
had been given magical powers as a gift for rescuing the mer-king’s daughter. Though I normally avoided sea-travel, Infidel had done a stint aboard the
Freewind
not long ago as a sword-for-hire during the so-called Pirate Wars. The Romers were serious, hard-working people who neither drank, gambled, nor trafficked in stolen merchandise, which meant I didn’t know them personally. Luckily, thanks to Infidel’s tales, it wasn’t hard to piece together who was who.
The girl had to be Poppy, the youngest Romer. The mermen had given her one of the stranger magical abilities I knew of. Basically, anything she pressed down on would spring into the air with a hundred times the force she’d applied to it. From what Infidel had told me, Poppy was ten years old, and something of a tomboy.
The ropes were being cooperative with Poppy and uncooperative with the Skellings thanks, no doubt, to another family member – Rigger. He was only seventeen, and purportedly something of a worrywart. I’d likely find him at the wheel. I flew to the back of the boat and found what had to be him, along with two other family members. All had the same kinky black hair and red berets, along with sharp noses and blue eyes. Rigger had a narrow face adorned by an unflattering scraggle of a beard. With his slender limbs, he looked like a puppet, with a score of thick ropes wrapped around his arms and legs. He was drenched with sweat, his teeth clenched, as he drew upon his mer-gift, which was the ability to manipulate ropes with his mind. Ordinarily a ship the size of the
Freewind
would have required a crew of at least twenty, but Infidel told me that Rigger was capable of sailing the boat alone.
He wasn’t alone in defending the boat, however. Standing beside him was a young woman holding a long spyglass pressed to her right eye. She was a bit younger than Rigger, perhaps fifteen, and was staring into the glass with the same sweating intensity Rigger showed in manipulating the ropes. Perhaps the fact that she had the cover over the lens explained her effort. But even with the cap she was seeing something, since she shouted out, “Another grappling hook starboard! Three men on the rope!”
Rigger nodded. “Anyone else? Should I drop them?”
“Wait... there’s a fourth climber getting on... now!” She looked pleased as the screams of men falling into the water reached the wheel. It was a reliable guess that this young woman was Sage, the clairvoyant of the Romer clan.
“The attacks are slowing down,” shouted the third person at the wheel, an older woman with streaks of gray in her dark hair, her skin tanned and deeply lined by a life at sea. This was Gale Romer, matriarch captain of the
Freewind
, and the reason that the Skellings kept getting gusted off their gangplanks. Gale had the power to control winds even before her encounter with the mer-king, which helped explained the
Freewind’s
reputation for speed. She looked at Sage and cried, “Give me a count of the dead!”
“Thirty-seven,” said Sage. “Mako and Jetsam are making short work of them.”
“How’s Infidel doing against those ice-serpents?”
“Hard to say,” Sage answered. “The Gloryhammer is so bright I can’t see through the glare.”
“What’s that about Infidel?” I asked, forgetting I couldn’t be heard.
Fortunately, I wasn’t kept in suspense long. The hatch to the cargo hold was wide open and suddenly a bright beam of light shot up from the guts of the ship as if the sun had just risen inside.
With a
whoosh
, Infidel flew from the hatch. She was completely enwrapped by what I can only describe as a python covered in thick silver fur. Three or four pythons, in fact, although it was difficult to tell where one snake ended and another began. Infidel had only one arm free of the tangle, but she had a death grip on the Gloryhammer as she rocketed into the sky, then dove, heading for the shore. I gave chase, unable to tell if she was in control of her flight or not. She flew directly for a large bonfire. In a flurry of sparks and flames, she dropped feet first into a pygmy funeral pyre, shielding her face by pressing it into the crook of her elbow. She stood there for only a second, protected by her armor as the serpents screamed. Their squealing voices were disturbingly similar to those of human babies as their oily fur ignited. Infidel leapt from the thick of the flames. The writhing serpents slipped from her torso to bunch around her legs. She rubbed her eyes and coughed for a few seconds, then spat out a gob of spit that looked blood-red, though that might have been due to the firelight. Without waiting to catch her breath, she shot off like a comet. The burning serpents couldn’t hold their grip against the acceleration and fell, crying as they tumbled.
In the blink of an eye, Infidel was back at the
Freewind
, barreling through a line of a dozen burly warriors who were struggling against the wind up a gangplank, tossing them like tenpins. The water below was thick with bodies. A boy maybe sixteen years old was running atop the waves, jumping and skipping over the reaching arms of drowning Skellings. He wore no armor and was armed with only a slender rapier, but his skill with it was, literally, eye-popping. This had to be Jetsam. He had the power to run on water as if it was solid earth, and from his relatively solid footing he was moving among the struggling barbarians and driving the tip of his blade into their brains. I’d seen my share of eye-gouging in Commonground, so I wasn’t too horrified by Jetsam’s battle tactics, but I was slightly put off by the fact that as he danced around the waves he was
singing
, a rollicking sea shanty I’d heard a time or two sung drunkenly in bars:
And all my enemies,
Will sleep beneath the seas
Around me waves turn red
As they sink down to their bed
While it was good to see a young man enjoying his work, I couldn’t help but think his light-hearted manner wouldn’t contribute to a long lifespan. Almost as quickly as I’d had that thought, a Skelling reached up from bobbing in the waves behind Jetsam to try to grab the young Romer by his leg.
I shouted out a warning, despite the futility. Then, with the Skelling’s fingers mere inches from Jetsam’s ankle, the sea boiled and a dark shape burst into the air. Before I could even understand what was happening, the Skelling’s hand was gone and all that was left was a bloody stump. Meanwhile, the shark that had bitten it off continued to fly skyward. Only, it wasn’t a shark. It was Mako, at nineteen, the eldest of the Romer children still calling the ship home. He was a large man in what looked like black cotton pajamas plastered to his skin. He was heavily muscled, with an angular face and a mouth twice as wide as it should be. His hair was long and perfectly straight, clinging to his muscular neck like a coat of black ink. From sheer momentum he’d thrown himself ten feet into the air. He twisted to face Jetsam as he fell back toward the water. “Be more careful!” he growled.
As the water swallowed his brother, Jetsam called out, “I saw him, Mako! I was about to take him by surprise!”
Mako’s head thrust back to the surface. “This isn’t play-fighting,” he growled. “These fools want to kill you!”
“They can’t touch me,” said Jetsam. “I saw him coming, I swear. I’ve killed twice as many of these guys as you have tonight.”
“This isn’t a game. We aren’t keeping score,” Mako grumbled as he sank back beneath the bloodied water once more.
“I bet we would be if you were winning,” said Jetsam.
Meanwhile, one of the Skelling dragonships had been completely capsized, thanks to Infidel’s aggressive hammer work. She, too, looked like she was enjoying herself. As the stricken ship sank lower into the water, she eyed the remaining vessel. She started toward it, until a blond-haired man with no shirt popped up on the deck and held his right arm overhead with his thumb pointed upward.
“I’ve got their boss!” the man shouted toward the
Freewind
.
Gale appeared at the railing of the boat in seconds. “Good job!”
She gazed out over the water. Only a few stragglers remained. One by one, they vanished beneath the waves, as Mako’s shadow flitted beneath the surface. Given that a crew of a half dozen teenagers had finished off a hundred heavily armed warriors without suffering a scratch, I could see how Jetsam might have developed his streak of cockiness.