These short stories introduce the world of Project Arroa. Read the first part here.
“Lads!” I cried boldly to the crew of sixteen men gathered in the mess.
“The Swoop has found herself in a chase. This is not our usual sortie against the navy, this time we’ve angered someone dangerous. Our passenger has assured me we cannot win without her help.”
My men exchanged confused glances, then all eyes settled on the Kishari woman. She met their gaze, drumming her fingers against her leather satchel. “Be quick, Captain,” she urged me.
“How much time do you need?” I asked her.
“As much as you can give me,” she replied, rather unhelpfully.
“Alright, everyone listen up! We need all the speed we can rally so this terrifying woman has time enough to buy us a fighting chance. We’re two days from port, and our pursuers will be broadside before then. Unless you fancy swimming to the Wild Shore, we need to heave everything we can overboard.”
The men look about, clearly uncertain.
“I mean it! Rum, provisions, personal effects, anything that isn’t water or a weapon. We either survive to port or we die out here, savvy?”
Now I had their attention.
“I need those sails trim and catching every breath of wind. Each man needs a cutlass or an axe handy. Rolf will be handing out muskets and pistols to the best shots. There’s not enough for everyone, and there’ll be no arguments, or you’ll follow the rum overboard!
“We’ve had tight races before and we always pull through. Gods willing this will be no different. You all know your jobs, now hop to it!”
Men dashed about and the mess cleared, leaving me alone with the Kishari woman. She unslung her leather bag onto the nearest narrow table and released the buckles. She withdrew and unfurled a well-worn leather roll of tools. Within, there lay an assortment of ornately carved blades and needles, hammers, and even more obscure instruments. Their construction all appeared to be of polished stone and scrimshawed bone joined with fine leather strips. They looked to be artifacts from an era before humans discovered metallurgy. From a time before science or reason took hold.
“Remove your slops and shoes and lay down on the table,” she said. “Keep your arms by your side.”
I threw a roguish grin that bordered on a grimace. “The lady says to undress, who am I to counter?” She ignored my weak attempt at humour and continued unpacking her bag.
I stripped down to my drawers and stretched out on the mess table as instructed.
She lifted the lid of a wooden box, revealing some two dozen small bottles of dark glass cast into hexagonal shapes. Each had a stopper with a symbol that no doubt held meaning to those in the cutter’s trade. Her fingers drummed over the bottles. She first selected one, then several more.
“You should know this is typically the work of several weeks,” she said. “For the blessed who receive these gifts, these weeks are filled with much ceremony and meaning. But in truth, none of that matters to the process. Only the moments beneath my hands hold true worth. In the end, there is only skill and ink, and I have ample of both.”
“Reassuring,” I said, starting to feel cold.
She selected a bone needle and hammer, and unstopped her bottles. In a practised series of movements, she poured out small amounts from her tiny bottles onto a palette of inkwells, dipped a needle in one, and began tapping a design into my chest by striking the needle rapidly with her hammer.
“One always starts above the heart,” she said. This is your anchor to the soul, and all power flows through the ink from the heart.
“Is it supposed to burn like that?” I winced. I have other tattoos, but this ink felt hot and somehow alive. I could feel it worming deeper into my flesh.
“Be quiet,” she replied. “The activation rune above the heart is a simple thing, the work of mere minutes, but without it none of the following can take effect.”
Then, before I knew what was happening, she had picked up a bone scalpel and cut me deeply from chest to groin in one blindingly fast movement.
“Gods!” I cried, trying to sit up. The room swam around me, and she effortlessly pushed me back down to the table.
“Lay still!” She hissed and used a tiny spoon to gather some of my blood into another inkwell. She tipped a few drops of ink into the blood and stirred it with her spoon.
“Next we draw the mother lines, linking the heart rune to your extremities. This is the road by which all my work shall travel.” She dipped her bone needle in the bloody ink and tapped rapidly alongside the deep cut, working her way from my heart down the length of my torso.
“There,” she said after some time had passed. “Now I can begin.”
“Begin?” I whimpered.
For what seemed an eternity, she tapped and carved arcane symbols across my chest and back, my face, my arms, legs, and feet. She whispered constantly, words I did not understand, as I drifted in and out of consciousness like a sleeping child. Powerful hallucinations carried me through snowdrifts of colour like exploding stars. I remember keenly the smell of her inks. They might stink of rotten fruit or be sublime like sugar and cinnamon and toasted bread. But of the process itself, I remember little. I could not say how much time passed.
At last, she gently slapped either side of my face, rousing me from dreaming. I attempted to open my eyes and sit up, but my body could not obey.
She helped me up and held me steady, almost tenderly as a mother would.
“The weakness will pass quickly,” she said. “Here, drink something, you’ll soon be on your feet again.” She passed me a tin cup of water, which I drank from most greedily.
“I’m cold,” I said as shivers started rolling up and down through my body. I felt like I was vibrating top to toe.
“It will pass.” She draped a blanket about my shoulders. I felt a sudden rush of love, unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. I would die a thousand times to save her.
Finally, I could stand. I half-staggered to the nearest water barrel, ladled more into my cup, and drank deeply. As promised, my legs became sturdy within minutes. I noticed my flesh had already healed to pink knotted scar tissue. My body still felt to be vibrating, but this no longer alarmed me.
“I would ask you a question,” I spoke.
She began cleaning and packing away her tools, and did not reply at first. Finally, she said “I had believed the ten thousand gold dragons for your services included no questions asked”.
“Why did you flee Kish’Ra?” I continued, undaunted. We were far beyond our initial agreement, as she well knew.
“There’s no one thing,” she said after several long moments had passed. “The beginning stretches back to before I was born, and we don’t have the time. But I made up my mind after the emperor executed my husband.” She paused. “They wanted to punish me, but I was too valuable to them, so he paid the price in my stead. Risking escape was preferable to remaining in that life any longer.”
I saw a sudden flash of gathered crowds, and of a man being hanged near death then revived to be placed upon a rack. He was stretched and disembowelled, flayed, and slowly quartered until his final, cruel moments of life escaped him.
“You’re the artist’s wife?” I asked. I somehow knew. My mind was racing, making connections it had not drawn before. “I was in the city when… the day it happened. I was in the crowd. I remember a woman crying out to him. Trying to comfort him as he screamed. That was you?”
“They made a spectacle of him,” she spat, blinking away tears. She had finished packing away her tools and now sat facing me, her hands balled tightly upon her lap.
“That they did,” I agreed.
Just then, I saw a vision of trees burning and could hear popping sap. I shook my head to clear it. New knowledge sprung forth in my mind, things I could not possibly know. My blood ran cold.
“I wonder…” I started. “Are you still too valuable to punish?”
“No chance. I meant to punish them in return, so I set the Arbory ablaze in my escape.” She studied me, unblinking. “You just saw that in your mind’s eye, didn’t you?”
The Imperial Arbory was a five-hundred-year-old grove where the Dyer’s Guild cultivated rare plants for their magical pigments and other properties. The Dyer’s held all the secrets to producing the inks in her little bottles. If she had destroyed this, she had not only dealt a blow to the Kishari Empire but cut off the source of her own craft for a generation or longer.
“More. I can hear the Dyers screaming, trying to put out the blaze. I can smell the smoke.”
“Good, your sight is opening. It means my work is taking hold. Tell me something else.”
I felt dizzy. Suddenly I saw her doubled. A ghostly blue outline of her stood up, as if leaving her body, and crossed to the water barrel. A moment later, her physical form stood and did the same. Her ghost poured water, then her true hands followed the same path.
“I am seeing things move before they truly move,” I said. My head throbbed.
“Good. Tell me something else.”
“I can feel the sky above. As if I could pull down lightning with my fists.”
“Good. What else?”
“I can feel the texture of the wood surrounding us, the direction of its grain. As if I could reach out and crush it with my mind. Or set it alight. Gods! What have you done to me?”
“I’ve given you what I need to defend against someone with a lifetime of my finest work on their skin. It’s going to be a tough fight, even with the gifts you now possess.”
My strength had returned, and I saw no point in remaining. I dropped my blanket to the ground, as I no longer felt cold. I climbed back above-deck into the late afternoon sun, still wearing only my drawers. Some of the men gasped as they witnessed the artful butchery she had wrought upon my flesh. Dry blood, scars, and fresh ink in equal measure are scrawled across my body. Most peculiar of all, my fingernails glowed with the setting sun.
The hunter’s ship had closed more than half the distance between us. He would join us in under a day now. I was frightened before, but now felt only calm despite my new understanding of what was coming for us. We were far from prepared for this fight. The men on deck would be corpses tomorrow, practically guaranteed. It did not bother me, all that mattered was the Kishari woman survived. This was the single essential objective looming in my mind. I spared not one moment to consider how my new-found love for her might had taken root, only that her life must be preserved at any price.
“Lads!” I cried out, my voice booming with impossible volume. The men shrank away from me. My face split into a wide grin.
“I hope you’re ready for a fight!”