The Shattered Lands - Chapter One

There's always a predator with sharper teeth...

“On three…”

Shylo nodded and took a deep breath. Her fists tightened around handfuls of the dead captain’s tunic.

“You wipe your hands?” Dann muttered.

“Yes, I wiped my buggering hands!” Shylo snapped.

“Good! If you drop this one, I’ll kick you over with him.”

Shylo swallowed, and glanced over the side of the airship railing.

The abyss was only broken by a scattering of barren, floating rocks, specks of brown and grey against the purple sky. Some were the size of mountains, others as small as travel packs. Hitting any one of them on the way down would be lucky.

Shylo could picture it all too vividly. When her body hit rock she would splatter almost instantly, and it might not even hurt if she hit right. Head first, that was the trick.

The alternative was to fall. Fall and fall and keep falling, spinning and tumbling around the Core for eternity.

She would starve first, probably, or maybe her mind would snap immediately and she would be too mad to notice that she was dying. Maybe a dragon would swoop around and snap her up, or a flock of ravens would peck her to pieces.

Maybe she would freeze, when she fell too close to the Void, or burn when she fell too close to the Core, and be cut to pieces by the dense smattering of islands and rocks around it. Maybe one of the ancient pantheon of dead gods would come back to life and rescue her, on the proviso that she apologise for every horrible thing she had done since becoming a pirate.

“Oi! Wake up, Shylo!”

She shook herself. “Sorry,” she mumbled. “On three?”

“On … fucking … three!”

Shylo nodded, and took the corpse’s weight.

“One … two … three!”

With a loud grunt, the pirate pair lifted the merchant captain and tossed him over the railing. He tumbled and flopped, quickly becoming a limp speck, then dropping out of sight completely to join the rocks and other members of his dead crew.

Dann licked his finger and dipped it into his pouch of assorted powders. He snorted it up with a howl, practically stuffing the finger halfway up his nostril. Cosak hurried over, his eyes bloodshot and wide, pupils so huge that Shylo couldn’t see his irises. He ducked down and knelt next to the dead captain’s belongings, pilfered from his pockets before disposal. A dirty collection of small silver and bronze squares. Four pistol-bore bullets, still wrapped in their brass cartridges. A leather hip flask, that disappeared into Cosak’s dirty, cracked hands.

Dann’s boot stamped down on his grey and brown stained fingers. There was a pathetic snap as two of them broke. Cosak squinted up at him. “Oi, piggot!”

“Oi to you, Cosak, you filthy fuck! Get your own spoils.” Dann sniffed a trickle of blood back up his nose.

“Got ‘em. Got meeya tasty lil’ flask for m’ brews.” He sniffed again and stumbled up. “Yous’ll pay for them fingers you broke, piggot.”

“I ain’t no piggot, you skinny git.”

Gorth and Jann tossed another corpse over the railing, and growled over at them. Both fighters, the blood they had spilled from the airship’s crew was not yet dry on their mismatched pauldrons and dirty bracers.

“Yer both fucking piggots!” Gorth shouted. “There’s still four o’ these dead gits to chuck over. We fucking killed ‘em, you fucking chuck ‘em, got it?”

“Tell ‘im then, Gorth!” Dann protested.

Gorth’s voice dropped. “You keep on, the Captain’ll hear ya. Get on with it.”

Shylo glanced over to the hatch that led into the cargo hold of the merchant ship, and then over to their own ship, The Cold Bich, nervously, floating next to the wreck of their prey. There was no sign of Captain Vriess, yet, he was still in the hold. Coby, their helmsman, was at the Bich’s wheel, glancing over at them in fear. When Dann and Cossak got on the powders, they were as likely to knife you in the gut as they were to piss themselves laughing at an innocuous comment you made in passing, rolling around on the floor and seizing up.

The Cold Bich was hooked on with the harpoons they had used to spear the unsuspecting merchants. The barbed tips were firmly buried in the hull, and the two were locked together with guide ropes. While they were picking the carcass clean, Coby had trimmed the sails on either side to float them close to a hulking, lifeless rock, and moored them down to an outcropping with a grapple. They were surrounded by rocks equally as lifeless, out of view of the shipping lane two aerial miles away.

Shylo hissed as the sun dropped below the merchant vessel’s patchwork balloon above them. Jann walked back and checked the burner, to make sure they were staying at the same elevation, and that they weren’t running out of fuel. The Captain had commanded them not to land, so they could manoeuvre more quickly if spotted.

By the time Shylo looked back down, Cosak had swiped two of the silver bits from the spoils, and swiftly gained a mouthful of Dann’s boot. Cosak drew his stiletto dagger, and the brawl was on.

Shylo scurried back as the powder-fiends’ wide, wild swings came close to catching her across the face. Both were too high to make any meaningful connection, but the cursing and hollering was more than offensive enough. Jann and Gorth jumped in to separate them, gagging them with hands clad in rough leather gloves. They knew well enough that powders made you bite.

Barely over the scuffle, there was a sound that Shylo couldn’t place. Like a distant roll of thunder, it washed over the Cold Bich and the dead merchant airship, and it seemed she was the only one who noticed it over the screeching of the pirate crew.

“Shut up!” Gorth was bellowing. “Both of you, shut the fuck up before you get marooned on that rock! Got it?”

Neither had a chance to answer before the hatch on the merchant vessel’s deck flew open with a bang.

The crew fell silent immediately. Captain Vriess’s thunderous face appeared first. His broken teeth, filed to points, were grey, and prominent in his snarling mouth. The tattoo on his bald head, the spiral of black that every captain under Lord Gourvan was made to have, seemed to swirl and twist all by itself. His body was the same scrawny wire as the rest of the powder-fiends, but with an outline of muscle, and eyes that were alert and beady.

Vriess got the best armour, as captain: thick boiled leather. He had the most reliable pistols. He got the best food, he didn’t have to sleep under the stars. He could drag whoever he wanted into that cabin with him. Sometimes Jann. Sometimes Shylo. Sometimes Coby. Sometimes Gorth. Sometimes a combination of two or three of them at once. The only ones he seemed to never want to touch were the other two powder-boys.

“You’s two are fitting to join the crew of this pissant air-boat,” Vriess hissed at Dann and Cosak. “Chuck the dead ones over, ‘fore I take your powders off you and let you shake and shit yourselves until it’s only blood coming out.”

Both of them went pale. Cosak began chewing, probably the inside of his mouth, as he did when the powders and the captain made him nervous.

Dann fixed his eyes to the deck.

“Give your spoils over. You don’t get ‘em.”

Dann and Cosak handed over the coins, bullets and the flask, the latter of which Vriess chucked over the side of the ship with a snort. Cosak watched it spin away with a mewl.

Vriess’s head turned on a swivel, so quickly that it seemed to move between blinks. His eyes fixed on Shylo, and she swallowed. She knew what was coming.

“Good spoils down there, little Shylo. Good day. Good days mean I have my appetite up. You’re first in the cabin once we’re away.”

Shylo nodded meekly, but said nothing.

Vriess grinned, and his grey teeth did nothing to shield her from his rancid breath.

“Jann, Gorth, rig this piece of shit for towing, you’ll be on it with Cosak. Coby! Get us untethered from this fuckin…” Vriess stopped talking suddenly.

Shylo followed his gaze to the helm. Coby was gone.

At first, she thought he must have ducked down to tie or untie a line, or adjust a sail, or any number of things. Then she noticed the splattering of red on the handles of the helm wheel.

Captain Vriess gave a sputtering exhale, and staggered backwards. As Shylo turned to him, the strange sound of thunder came again, rolling and washing over them.

Blood was mixed with the Captain’s spittle. He looked down in shock at his chest.

There was a hole, right over his heart. It was the size of the rim of a goblet, the hole out the back of him the size of a dinner plate. Vriess’s black heart had likely been turned to vapour.

Shylo could see straight through him, through that gaping hole. The tattered remains of his lungs quivered as Vriess tried to breathe. Blood gushed down his armour and trousers, and his bowels released in shock.

The crew gaped at their captain as he tipped backwards and fell in his own blood. Cossak shrieked like a banshee with a stubbed toe.

“Get down!” Gorth shouted wildly. “Fucking get down!”

Cossak ignored him, standing there with his mouth gaping so wide in madness that his jaw dislocated. He didn’t stop howling, he couldn’t stop.

Shylo threw herself to the deck. Jann and Gorth were laying flat against the railing. Dann bolted onto the Cold Bich with a scream.

“Did you see it, Jann?” Gorth hissed.

She shook her head. “Single gunner. Voidways, must be Downwind and higher than us.”

“I heard the shots,” Shylo volunteered. “I think…”

“Can’t do shit without the cannon if we’re tied to this piggot ship. The rifles won’t reach ‘im. Shylo, get us untethered from the wreck, and everyone get on the Bich. Once we’re loose, Jann, take the helm.”

Jann vaulted the railing and jumped onto the Cold Bich with a grunt. Shylo followed her, but fell short with her jump, winding herself on the Bich’s rail and flailing her limbs until she flopped over.

The second she hit, she was confronted by Coby’s slumped corpse. He was on his side, sprawled. His head was gone, aside from the bottom jaw and tongue, lolling into the smashed remnants of his skull. Bits of it were all over the helm and the aft.

Shylo began shaking. She curled up in a ball and whimpered, until a meaty hand dragged her to her feet. It was Gorth, frowning at her, mouth turned down in a grimace.

“Get behind the-“ and his head popped like a overripe tomato hitting a paving slab. Hot red splashed over her face, into her eyes, into her mouth and down her throat.

She fell on her back, retching and coughing and vomiting and crying. Her own scream bounced off the great dead rock they were bound to.

The roll of thunder came again and again. Dann’s corpse tangled itself in a mooring rope, bleeding from a hole in his back. Jann fell next as she tried to chop through another rope with her handaxe, the bullet passing through her neck and almost detaching her head from her shoulders, only held on by a flap of skin and muscle.

Cossak screamed through it all. He screamed until his throat began to tear, as if he and the thunder were cheering on the slaughter.

Worst of all, Shylo’s own mind was howling with mad laughter at her and their deserved fate.

No-one would care that she and Vriess and his crew were gone. Those whom they had crossed, the ones that lived, would cheer or weep at the justice that the lone gunner had wrought upon the Cold Bich. The crew of the merchant’s ship would laugh from beyond the grave. The ghost of the merchant’s cabin boy, that Shylo had gutted like a butcher’s hog, would have some relief. The slave she had slaughtered in her blooding ceremony would have some relief. All of the dead she had helped push to the other side would be waiting for her.

Terror gripped her again. No. No, not today. The cannon. She needed the cannon, or the helm, the ropes needed cutting. The dead would have to wait for her.

She crawled to the railing and along it towards the wheel. If she was going to blast the fucker, she was going to need to see him.

She peered up over the railing, and scanned the Voidways sky. The purple was beginning to darken to the indigo of twilight, and it was bare. Aside from the first brush strokes of aurora that tinted the skies red and green and cyan, and the glow of the great Moon that travelled around the Core as the rest of the rocks did, it was devoid of any airship or balloon. They were being gunned down by an invisible marksman.

There was a flash of flame, a few miles away. Cossak stopped screaming suddenly. Shylo didn’t need to look to see why.

She squinted towards the flash, and a shape around it seemed to uncloak, now that she knew what she was looking for. It was a hot-air balloon, with massive sails attached to the sides of the basket. They and the balloon were the same shade of purple as the sky, and she could barely see the basket. She ducked down as the thunder rolled over her again.

***

One left.

Rand Irellian peered through the telescope and down at the pirate airship. The corpses littered the deck of both their craft and the craft of their victims.

Steady. The last one had definitely made it onto the Cold Bich. He had seen her peering for him.

She looked like a common brigand, mismatched leather armour, rusty weapon, young and stupid, a waste. Caught up in the excitement of the idea of piracy, or literally caught and forced into it.

“No mercy,” it whispered in his ear.

Rand’s arms pulled the stock of the mounted rifle in against his shoulder. He aimed along the pirate vessel’s railing, steadied in the bipod keeping it still, screwed onto the basket of his balloon. It was a heavy bore rifle, meant for hunting the big reptilian game in the thick jungles of Kal’Garga’Rak, or as some defence against an irate wyvern or drake. He used it for its extreme range, and its stopping power. It was probably wasted on people, but in Rand’s profession it was better to be sure of the kill than risk getting a blade in the gut from a pirate full of powders he’d mistaken for a corpse.

With the coming dark, the Scythe had probably been seen. The camouflage of the balloon and sails was most effective during the daylight hours, or at the dead of night. As the sky went from purple to indigo, and the wild colours began streaming above, he was illuminated like a flare.

She would go for the cannon or the helm. Fight or flight.

She appeared then, scurrying out of cover like a rat, and scrambled behind the cannon. It was a black-powder and ball weapon, mounted on a spinning turret, capable of targeting in every direction, even upwards to a degree, as long as they didn’t put a fatal hole in the balloon keeping them suspended above infinity.

It had no chance of hitting him at this distance, but sooner or later he would need to get closer, and the Scythe was quiet, not agile.

“No mercy.”

“I know,” he hissed. His finger curled around the trigger.

Through the scope, he watched as she dragged the cannon around to point at the Scythe.

“Just give up,” Rand whispered to her. “There’s no point. Just give up. There’s a second chance at all this waiting for you if you just give up.”

She pressed her eye against the cannon’s scope, and adjusted the aim.

He squeezed the trigger. The rifle kicked him in the shoulder, the blast of the shot echoed and bounced off the rocks around him. He watched through the scope as the bullet dipped, leaving a shimmering trail of hot air.

It shattered the cannon’s scope and buried itself in the girl’s right eye. The force of the hit made the right side of her head practically burst, spattering the balloon and the deck.

She spun, toppled onto the cannon, and rolled off, splayed out beside it.

“No mercy,” it sighed. The satisfaction of it made Rand swallow his distaste.

“No mercy,” he muttered. He fired the burner, and unfurled the sails on either side of the basket. The wind filled them, and with a creak, the Scythe crept closer to her master’s bounty.