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It was a 4 hour boat ride to the location Eliot had found, located in what they were calling the north-east part of Kabberjaw.
Initial reconnaissance showed the ‘hide out’ was through a fracture in the side of one of the main rib bones. The bone itself was about 80 kilometers wide at the water's surface, where it had been fractured, and the gap in the bone was only about 100 meters wide. The space beyond that gap, beyond an arched, carved tunnel, contained a massive lake 20 kilometers wide and a whole city carved into the walls, into the depths of the bone.
It had multiple levels, up and down the inside hollow. It had airdocks and great forests. It had bars and people drinking beer and throwing darts at targets, and it had other… terrible things in the back. In old mansions that had been retrofitted for horror. Men and women chained to beds. People with limbs cut off and forced to serve food to guests. People who got their insides played with while they were still alive.
Most of the place was normal, but some parts of it could use an Inquisition.
Eliot had found it because he pinged off of human remains and metal in that area, right near the crack in the bone.
That initial ping returned images of corpses and one living person stuck in metal cages, exposed to the sun and sea and with tiny lights overhead, barely illuminating them at all. Just bright enough to keep them alive in the dark. The single remaining person looked to be half-dead, though he would survive until Mark and them arrived. And when they arrived?
Well...
Mark saw human trafficking in the back rooms, horrific things in the front rooms, entire ‘villages’ contained behind walled off parts of the original interior city where bad things happened, and stolen goods everywhere. In some of the larger offices, Eliot spied plans for more thievery drawn up on desks. For raids upon Aluatha, for raids upon cities out there Endless Daihoon. Eliot took down the names of a good 25 ‘major’ cities out there, most of which weren’t on Elkatracks’ map at all.
And then there was the target that they had come for.
Eliot’s giant purple and white grav crystal floated in the center of the space, tied up to an air dock on one of the higher levels of the interior city. Everyone saw it. Everyone thought of it as an afterthought, considering what they found all around that crystal. Mark was going to go into there, probably with just himself to start, and he was going to…
Mark knewwhat he was going to do.
He had done it enough to all those goblins for most of a week.
He didn’t want to think about doing that to humans, but… But sometimes bad people deserved bad things, and Mark was going to be that bad thing for some of these people.
Lola pointed out how some of the captured people were being sacrificed to demons for power from Thrashtalon. David had agreed with her assessment, and then delivered a proclamation.
“Death to every cultist,” David said.
Lola nodded. “Agreed.”
Mark had to get some air after that, so he flew into the sky.
It was noon. They were an hour away from the raider’s nest. From the coming horror.
But for now, the world of Kabberjaw… Mark would have liked to spend a lot of time here, really. The water looked great. Dad would have loved it here. Mom, too.
The ocean didn’t look like ocean right now.
Mark gazed at the noon-time ocean in amazement. Almost everyone was doing the same, at least a little bit. Tartu had gone back to work with his little plants and Isoko was far, far overhead, getting a much larger view of it all as she flew, as she saw. Lola, David, Sally, Andria, and Eliot were standing on the edge of the deck, looking down at the transformed ocean.
It was 56 kilometers deep. Super fucking deep, really. It should have been solid blue down there. Once you got past around 1,500 then even the most clear water in the Two Worlds turned blue. Opaque. But Kabberjaw was different.
The Dreadnought flew across a layer of pure water that was as clear as the sky except where the surface tumbled with small waves. The light of the sun flexed upon those ripples and waves, casting ribbons of deeper light into the clear depths, sending shimmers all the way down.
Flying across Kabberjaw’s noontime ocean was like flying across a liquid sky.
Mark gazed down, all the way to the stony brown bottom, where volcanic red cracks, like veins, pulsed bright red and then softer orange. Fish swam everywhere, at every layer of the ocean, in the deepest depths only visible to Quark and Eliot’s cameras, and at the surface, where ‘islands’ of floating seaweed formed biomes replete with sharks and silver fish and all sorts of species that Mark had never seen before. It was impossible to be able to see that far through water. Mark loved the impossibility of it all.
Time passed.
Soon, Mark was back on the front of the ship, looking down as the noon hour passed.
The bottom of the ocean disappeared beyond a gradual bluing, the red cracks vanishing into the depths. Soon, the water looked like water again. Still impossibly clear. Sharks and big tuna and sunfish and massive schools of fish still swam everywhere out there. The cracks of red were barely visible. But then the darkness of the deep crept up from the depths, and the depths vanished into blue.
The Dreadnought sailed under the shadow of the giant rib bone, slowing down, eventually reaching 10 kilometers out from the crack in the 80-kilometer wide bone. Mark got his first look of the place, in person.
It was hard to see if you weren’t looking properly, which is probably why most people missed it.
One of the other rib bones had fallen down and cracked against the interior of this one. Those remnant bones and a whole bunch of vertebrae were down there in the depths, mostly hidden by the blue, but some bones remained upright and jutted against the larger one. The arrangement formed a large cove, hidden from most of the world, and the crack in the main bone was completely obscured from outside by a cascade of water, pouring down from the bone overhead. The broken bone laying against the larger bone with the cavern inside, sticking up from the water, was completely covered with greenery, like all bones above the surface.
No visible buildings anywhere.
Mark flew just outside of the Dreadnought, looking down into the waterfall break in the bone, asking, “How many places are there like this around here?”
Isoko floated beside him, looking up at the rib bone, as it arched overhead like yet another impossibility.
Eliot said, “Tens of thousands of places like this. I’ve uncovered a good hundred other caches across Kabberjaw, some of which look like they’ve gone untouched for thousands of years. Old cities. Old hide outs. Everywhere. Some places are in constant use, though, like all of the boat-accessible ones around here.”
Isoko asked, as she stared upward, “Any cities on top of the bones?”
Eliot said, “Lots of places on practically every horizontal surface, and some even below the water. Anything on the rib bones and about 50 kilometers up is fully dragon-controlled, though. 20 kilometers to 150 is dragon territory. The Skybones people on the wingbones are the one exception. The dragons don’t seem to have any permanent residences on the flying wing bones. Everything on the wing bones is human-made. There’s this one really neat place I’m seeing on the tip of one of the flying bones. Looks like a terminal phalange bone. About 30 kilometers long and flying all by itself at the very top of the world. 1,770 kilometers up there. It’s got a little palace on it.”
Isoko’s vector aimed upward, as she softly said, “I want to see that… wow.”
Mark wanted to go up there, too, but he had a horror to fight. Mark said, “I’m going in alone. Isoko, you’re on ship duty.”
Isoko focused and flew back toward the ship, saying, “Do what you have to do, Mark.”
Mark flew forward, hating himself for having to say what he knew he had to say, even as he said, “Open battle mode, Quark.”
“For humans, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Understood, sir.”
Quark began signing Protects inside of his sphere of hands. If needed, he could sign invisibility-except-eyes and maybe a few other cantrips on a case-by-case basis. But for now it was just Protect. Mark usually didn’t have to clarify for Quark to do that when he was engaged with monsters, because Quark was under orders to always enact certain measures unless specifically told otherwise. Mark and Quark had figured out that much during the goblin ‘war’. This was the first time Mark had needed to tell Quark to activate those protocols when expecting to face humans, though.
As black scales flickered down into Mark’s adamantium body, Mark entered the cove’s airspace.
It was a big cove, maybe a few kilometers across. Water fell from on high, from cracks far, far overhead, streamed out over several somewhat vertical kilometers of fractured bone. Maybe there had been an original ‘water vein’ inside of the bone that had been much stronger, and that flow of water had crashed down and torn out the crescent harbor down below, but it was not like that anymore. Most of the waterfall didn’t even hit the cove. Mist flowed like soft rain, filling the sky with moisture and not much actual water.
Kinda pleasant.
Mark flew forward, into the cove, into the mist, his rotor ripping at the mist and furling rain into the air.
Eliot’s drones had already scouted everything. Quark picked up what Eliot had put down, translating some new dots into Mark’s vision as he looked around, highlighting lookouts in hidden spots within the crack, high overhead and mostly hidden by water, and down below, in the cove and within the carved-out bone, inside of a cliff-like space. The lookout up above was little more than a pair of guys playing cards and not watching the window, or the telescopes, at all. The lookout below, inside the cliff, had a woman frantically yelling on her radio and getting nowhere, but not because Eliot had hacked it, though he absolutely had hacked it. Generally, according to Eliot, the technology here was 40 years old. Easy to crack. The woman lookout was having trouble of a different sort.
Woman: ‘That black fucker in that big boat is here! I’m telling you, he’s here!’
Guy on the other end: ‘Ah shut up, I’m too hungover for this shit—’
Woman: ‘Get me Captain Grey on the line! Get someone up and active! We’re being invaded!’
‘Oh FUCK NO I ain’t involving the Captain for your petty shit. Quit bitching! Madakarva will kill anyone who comes.’
‘Madakarva ain’t moving! He’s still up there, sitting and watching! FUCK! The black bastard looked at me! GET TO GROUND! I’M HITTING THE BIG ALARM!’ And then, ‘What the fuck? It’s not working? Why isn’t the button working?!’
Eliot said to Mark and everyone else on the Dreadnought’s line, “Because I cut it. Looking for whoever Madakarva is right now. Do you think he’s a dragon, or a person?”
Mark flipped backward, eyeing the horizon, also looking for—
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There. About 150 kilometers away.
The rib bone that held the raider’s cove passed overhead and connected to a vertebrae, before it connected to another rib bone that plunged into the ocean way, way over there. About 25 kilometers above the ocean’s surface, on that bone, was a dragon nest, barely visible. Mark never would have seen him. Quark saw him, though.
A green dragon was looking this way, wings down, just staring. The distance was too great for Mark to see without Quark or Eliot’s machines assisting him, but Mark bet that was the dragon Madakarva, and that dragon had no problem whatsoever seeing all the way over here. He had probably been tracking the Dreadnought ever since it came into view.
Mark told Eliot, “Figure out what the dragon Madakarva’s problem is.”
Eliot’s voice was a weird combination of sarcastic and fearful, ringing like gallows humor as he said, “Ah. Madakarva is a dragon. Obviously they have a dragon patron.”
“Proceeding with investigation,” Mark said, flying forward, into the misty air and toward the crack in the rib.
The crack was not big enough for the Dreadnought to sail through at all, but it was at least 100 meters wide at the largest point, which was maybe 500 meters above the surface. Down at the water-level entrance it was barely wide enough for a pleasure yacht. Down there, lay the caged corpses and the sole survivor.
About 20 cages hung from long chains, supported high overhead. Some cages were on the left side of the entrance canal, others were on the right side. All of the cages had human remains in them, but one of those ‘remains’ was still alive. Barely.
The survivor was thin and covered in exposure sores where the metal of the cage had bitten into his naked flesh. The waterfall overhead provided mist that collected on the cage’s rusted bars, allowing for water, but there had been no food for this man at all, so he survived, but barely. Exposed ribs, abdomen caved in, hair long and sun-bleached and eyes more sun-blasted cataracts than eyeballs. Every corpse was the same, but also rotted. Many cages were empty, save for a skull or bones. The cages hung like wind chimes, each of them about 2 meters above a shelf of barnacles and old bones.
One of the corpses had lost an arm; rotted off. Crabs swarmed the fallen arm, picking at the remains of what they could find. Not much left to pick at. It had probably fallen off a few days ago.
It was as plain of a warning to visitors as Mark had ever seen, and it made him furious.
There was nothing directly similar about this place to the human district of Goblinhome. The human district was all sunshine and free food followed by horrific mind control and ego death as Biggest Baddest rode the bodies of every human that they let out of that place.
Every single human walking around Goblinhome was trapped in a cage made of their own body. And then there was the district itself; 5,000 humans used as a renewable resource and then all of them were sacrificed to a goblin ritual. Mark could do nothing to save those people, because they were always slated to die, if anyone should ever assault Goblinhome at all. But it was either assault Goblinhome and kill 5,000 people, or go to total war and lose millions.
Mark looked past the guy in the cage, to the raider’s home beyond. There were people in there, far beyond his range, that were trapped and kept as a resource by those in charge. It made him sick.
Too sick.
Mark breathed hard, falling to the barnacles, crunching the little animals with an uncaring weight. Ah. He didn’t mean to do that. Ah… Oh well. The survivor barely moved at Mark’s landing, his vector quiet, internalized. The dead didn’t move at all. The survivor was on his way out. Two or three more days. Hard to say. The others had died a while ago.
Crabs and barnacles were everywhere.
A wind blew and some of the cages clinked against each other, sounding like gongs for the dead.
Mark went to the survivor and fed him a gentle drip of Good and Bad; enough not to hurt him. He was so far gone that too much healing, too fast, would kill him, as some systems rebooted and came back on line and others couldn’t keep up fast enough. Stuff broke when healing the truly damaged, if you healed too fast.
This guy did not die, but he did stir, dark bruises turning even darker as blood was digested by the body, purple spreading out into his massive yellow swaths of thin, sickly flesh. Mark fed him Sustenance, taking from the forests beyond the entrance. The guy stabilized a bit more. Then Mark fed him a full throttle Good/Bad and clipped through his cage, tumbling the metal cage to pieces as he also held the guy upright, letting his body stretch out onto a layer of adamantium.
The guy groaned in pain both physical and mental. He wondered if he was finally dying, and he welcomed that death. Mark kept him alive, though.
Mark moved up into the air, across the waters, rushing back toward the ship, guy in tow, inside of a black oval of adamantium.
The guy recovered as Mark set him down onto the ship, eyes unclouding, sight returning, vector flexing outward in a desperate wonder. He was a lot younger than he had appeared at first. Maybe 25. A rough life had carved deep wounds into his body, and his health.
He asked, “Wha… what?”
Mark flexed Good into the guy, and suddenly the guy jolted, healed as much as could be done for now. He’d take a few more hours to heal properly. Someone else could do that.
Mark said, “Hello. Tell me why you were in that cage, and do it in 1 minute.”
The guy looked around at the broad, open deck of the Dreadnought, and then up at Mark. His eyes went wide. “Are you… The Dragon King?”
… This might not work how Mark wanted it to work. The guy was clearly unwell in multiple ways.
Could Mark force him to sanity? To speak the truth? Maybe, and also yes. Kinda.
Mark didn’t know much about sanity restoration, because a Union of Good/Bad usually did that well enough. But as for truth… A while ago, not that long at all, Lola had once told Mark about Unions of truths and lies, after Mark had interviewed Goofy Goblin. Mark couldn’t do that himself. He needed someone else to do it; to take Falsity into themselves and give Integrity to everyone involved in the interrogation. Such an interrogation needed to be done over many different sessions. Mark had none of that kinda time because he was going right back into the raider’s cove and soon. He didn’t want them to be tooprepared.
So Mark just stared, and calmly said, with knives of adamantium floating around him, “Tell me why you were in the cage, and don’t lie.”
The guy faltered, stared at the knives, and then he looked down, breathing out toward the ground, frantically keeping it together as he said, “This is because I didn’t kill the kid, isn’t it. Just like Captain Grey said would happen. I didn’t kill the kid, so he reported on us, and now Stronghold sent out some… some phantom…” The guy paused. “Or maybe I’m still in one of Grey’s Warps. Or… Or was everything else a Warp?” He looked up at Mark and his face was stricken with hope and horror, as he asked, “You’re not real? This is all a Warp?”
… Mark was at least glad that this guy was guilty of notkilling someone. ‘Didn’t want to kill a kid’ ranked pretty high on the reasons that Mark was good with releasing someone from prison. The fact that this guy was in prison instead of Captain Grey damned everyone in that raider’s cove just that much more. Mark continued to Union with Good and Bad, making the guy’s body flex with strength, his mind repaired just a bit more. The guy was starving, though, so Mark switched to Sustenance again, and then the guy kinda relaxed.
And then the guy tensed. The guy realized that he was still alive, for real, and that Mark was healing him. He sat down onto the deck and then stared up at Mark, eyes wide, disbelief thick in his mind.
Mark glanced over to David, standing at the entrance of the castle, ready to pick up this guy and do some interrogating of his own.
Mark finished up his questions with a simple, “What should I know about the raider’s cove?”
The guy feared for his life, because somehow, some way, he was still loyal to the people who had put him in that cage along with 3 other people. The guy muttered, “I ain’t saying shit.”
Mark tried, “Then tell me this: Aside from those imprisoned, like you, why should I spare anyone in there? I see the cultist sacrifices. I see the whore house with men and women kept in chains on the walls, and on the beds. I see the displays of skulls carved with demonic runes in the back of the place. I see the demonic threat that this place poses, so, I ask again: Why should I spare the raiders Captain Grey, Mist Sister, and Bone-Knife?”
The guy faltered. “… Captain Grey is a great man. The pride of the traders—” The guy suddenly found his delusion, saying, “We’re traders, not raiders. This is Trader’s Cove! We sell what people want! It’s the chiefs who label us as raiders, but we don’t raid anyone here. This is our bed! You don’tshit in your bed, and Kabberjaw is our bed.” He looked down, saying, “This is our bed… and we lie in it. This is our bed and we lie in it...”
The guy mumbled the same phrases over and over, softer and softer.
Mark Unioned strongly with Good and Bad, taking in good mental health for both of them and shoving the bad away, breathing deep, saying, “Come on now, guy. Breathe with me. In with the good, out with the bad. In with the Good, out with the Bad.”
The guy scrunched his face, disbelieving, but also breathing with Mark—
The guy choked on a thickness in his throat that then poured out of him like dead flesh. Miasma, thick as tar, flowed out of his mouth and down his chest like thick fog rushing to get away. He shuddered and breathed and twice more, heavy miasma leaving him with every breath. The first one was the hardest. The second one was easier. The third one was easier still.
Heavy miasma left Mark, too. Not as heavy, but still present. Black and nightmarish.
Mark felt centered once again, and the guy stopped mumbling.
The guy stared up at Mark as soft light flowed into his nose and open mouth. He spoke with lightness in his voice, “You’re Freyalan.”
“Yeah, kinda. You know about the New Pantheon?”
“Captain Grey… They don’t allow that stuff in Kabberjaw. We have to go back to the D’Arctic Outpost for healing. Why… Why are you here?” The guy suddenly went wide-eyed and said, “You shouldn’t be here! Madakarva will kill you!”
Mark almost said something about ‘let him try’.
But then the guy suddenly paused, eyes going even wider as he looked up at Mark. He sawMark. He recognized Blackvein; even though the adamantium body, the face and body were the same. The guy was a little confused, but then he suddenly kowtowed, fearful and full of worry and not willing to question why Mark looked black these days.
“I’ll make this quick, and then my people can handle you,” Mark said, “Tell me about the raider’s cove, the setup, the history, and make it quick, because before we leave this land I’m dismantling the whole thing.”
The guy started spilling everything, including his name. He was Nokaro Lan Greyship; part of Captain Grey’s crew. Or at least he had been. Nokaro had been left out there in the cages, along with his sister, his cousin, and his best friend. All of them were dropped from the 350 person crew when they all conspired to hide that an 8 year old child had seen them at their last rendezvous at the D’Chicago settlement. That was how Captain Grey operated; no witnesses, and no cover ups.
According to Nokaro, Captain Grey was loads better than Bone-Knife or Mist Sister. He kept that cultist shit out of his fleet.
There was a lot more, but Mark had enough to go on.
Mark took to the air, leaving Nokaro under the care of David and Lola.