5-9
Vyrsa’s grandiose speech was met by a reaction that Gilead found rather distasteful, but one which was very characteristic of Scrapyard: two of the crewmen aboard the Arnhem lowered their muskets and fired.
The jeweled rapier didn’t move. Movement would imply that it changed position by some continuous process of displacement. No, the rapier simply was where it needed to be, shedding afterimages as it bounced from place to place. Vyrsa herself looked caught off-guard, both by the bullets and by her own ultrafast parry, hopping backwards with a shrieking yelp.
“Hey! That’s no way to treat a pirate queen! Shooting me with guns, seriously?”
The two shots landed somewhere behind her, in four bursts of splinters.
Captain Govarts, his own pistol clasped in-hand, responded with an almost maternal level of disdain. “I don’t care if you’re the damned patron saint of pirates! You threaten my crew, you’d better back up those threats.”
“Yeah, you and what army?” Cried one of the crewmen.
Vyrsa, apparently bored of this, planted her rapier tip-down in the wood of the deck and casually leapt onto the sticking-up hilt, balancing effortlessly on one toe, the blade not even bending under her weight.
“Oh, it’s just me. Didn’t want to get my boys in danger. Isn’t that right, boys!”
Vyrsa’s pirate crew made no response to her shout-out.
But the pirate queen wasn’t too badly hurt. She switched positions, trading out her one-toe balance for one using the heel of her palm, legs kicking in the air. “I hate killing people, I really do. So I’m going to ask again: your valuables and your fighters, hand them over.”
Her eyes were on Captain Govarts and her rapier was indisposed, which meant another one of the crew thought it was the perfect opportunity to raise his musket to his shoulder. Before he could even fire, Vyrsa had him. She thrust out her free arm in his direction and shouted, “Cryo!”
One of her cufflinks surged with violet energy and something transparent hurtled through the air towards the man. Just before he could pull the trigger, frost condensed around him and he collapsed to the floor. He was frozen, hypothermic, as though exposed to arctic conditions for the better part of an hour.
Captain Govarts remained stoic in the face of the wounded man’s plight, allowing his crew to bear the burden of caring for him. “Joinery? The Kingdom is on our side!”
Vyrsa flipped back onto the deck, drawing her sword from it in the same motion. “And I’m not with the Kingdom! That was me holding back, so this is your last chance to surrender before someone gets hurt!”
“What was that?” Gilead muttered.
“Joinery, a special magic of the Kingdom Forest. Simple, but very reliable and extremely dangerous.” Sara explained the situation quickly, then pulled out in front of the line of battle. “Captain, you should surrender now. We’ll take care of this. First Pretense: Watch the World Burn.”
A second later, “First Pretense: I’m Alive.”
Gilead had never seen Qi Zhen’s First, and was faintly unnerved by it. String puppets were not meant to have the same size as a human being: the physics of the movement were wrong. Even still, Qi Zhen maintained perfect control over their stance.
“It’s four Pretenders against one, Vyrsa,” Sara continued. “Enough showing off: it’s time for you to seriously consider how well this is going to go for you.”
Gilead drew his sword and shield, remembering this time to manifest Duranore’s armor. Considering the tight quarters and many bystanders, his own First would be a double-edged sword, for use as last resort if at all. With nowhere to run to but the salt sea, Zahra had to prepare to fight as well, shrinking behind Gilead even as her body began to glow.
Vyrsa, though, looked confused. Glancing around as though looking for the director to remind her of her lines. “Wait, how do you know I’m a Pretender?”
She did seem like the type of person to make jokes before a battle. Gilead knew the type well: comedy was how they banished the mounting horror. Except that this joke wasn’t funny.
Sara didn’t find it funny either, lowering her guard a few degrees. “You cut two bullets in half with your sword just now?”
The rapier perked up in Vyrsa’s hand, and she glanced down at it simultaneously. “I suppose I did!”
Gilead and Qi Zhen were moving into a pincer maneuver while Sara, the most comfortable at range out of all of them, hung back to protect the center. The sword was the greatest problem: if Vyrsa could access even a fraction of its parrying speed when using it to cut and thrust, it would make for a nigh-unstoppable attack. But the sword could only protect her from the front.
Except that Vyrsa wasn’t even in a combat stance: she had her rapier slung over one shoulder while she surveyed her surroundings.
“Who’s first, then, wood or plastic?”
“Neither,” Qi Zhen growled. “I was thinking we’d all beat the shit out of you at the same time, pirate!”
Vyrsa threw her head back in an exaggerated pirate’s cackle. “Nuh-uh, you big morons. You don’t get to decide that. Third Pretense: All For One And One For All!”
A Third Pretense. Only twice had Gilead ever run into someone who had even made it so far as a Second, those being Rutter and the succubus in Port Gebe. Not even Sara had a Second, so far as he knew. But a third? In the split instant between the words leaving Vyrsa’s mouth and her first movement, a hundred kilograms of despair settled over Gilead’s shoulders.
The engraving on Vyrsa’s metal eyepatch lit up white, then exploded outwards in a twisting spiral whirlpool in the air, connecting her to her target: Qi Zhen. Then she moved. Her whole body was now invested with that bullet-flight speed, and it seemed impossible that Qi Zhen could possibly deflect; but they did. Easily, in fact. While Gilead struggled to keep track and Sara detached a hand for bombing, Vyrsa and Qi Zhen dueled at incredible speed. Dozens of blows and counters were launched every second, the dust devil of their single combat careening heedlessly around the deck.
“Qi Zhen? How?”
“Oh hell, it’s time manipulation!”
And indeed, even as he asked the question, Gilead found his mind catching up with his senses. It was not merely the reflexes of the two combatants that had accelerated, but everything they did. The pace of Qi Zhen’s footwork, the rise and fall of Vyrsa’s chest as she breathed, all of these were hurried to impossible speed. An entire duel, reversal after reversal and play after counter-play, unfolded before Gilead’s eyes in a matter of seconds, all while Sara and he could not possibly keep up.
Qi Zhen lost. Vyrsa’s climactic blow was a blue blur, impossible to follow, but when the final strike in the combination punched through a microscopic gap in the plating over Qi Zhen’s neck, both fighters slipped into the normal flow of time simultaneously. Qi Zhen dropped to their knees.
“电池电量过低了百分之二十。请尽快充电。”
Low batteries. Vyrsa, sweat-covered and grinning with satisfaction, turned her eye to Sara. “Third Pretense: All For One And One For All.”
The same process repeated. Sara and Vyrsa were trapped together in unconscionable speed, a duel whose maneuvers took place slipped in between the passage of heartbeats. The difference was Sara’s bombs. Though Gilead felt as if he were watching an illusion pass him by, the truth was that the rapid-fire duel was quite real, and that included Sara’s bombs. Each blast let out a shockwave at normal speed, tearing holes in the decks and sending the remaining crew scattering. More than once, Vyrsa tricked Sara into threatening the life of one of the crew with a bomb.
But Gilead knew Sara well. Her heart was hardened against death, and she was not going to give up merely because she had erred. If her showing against the vampires had been any example, Sara was more than clever enough to battle even the most powerful opponent.
The duel quickly outlasted how long Qi Zhen had been able to endure under the same conditions. Zahra tried to interfere once or twice, sunbeams lancing towards where Vyrsa would be in a fraction of a second, but they were absorbed rapidly into the fight and it was tough to say who had been hit. Explosive blasts rocked the Arnhem, rolling thunder that all but deafened Gilead with their sheer number. Once or twice the battle even found its way up into the rigging, acrobatic pirate and lumbering bomb-creature duking it out in the high masts, threatening to obliterate the Arnhem’s sails with a single false move.
And then Sara burst into flames. Hazy orange fire engulfed her torso, licking down her legs, threatening the deck with every step. Every sailor knows to fear flame most of all, and this fire was no exception: the crew, those who survived, immediately ran for the buckets, all thoughts of combat forgotten.
Time resumed for Vyrsa and Sara. Even though she had won, setting her foe aflame, the Pirate Queen was still badly injured, bleeding from the lip and favoring one leg. She extended a hand and wheezed “Cryo!”, extinguishing Sara’s burning less than a second before she flickered back to her Zeroth and collapsed.
“Sara, no!”
Zahra pushed her power through the palms of her hands, forming a growing cone of luminous energy.
Vyrsa didn’t even bother using her Third. Wounded though she was, that had only reduced her speed and acuity from impossible down to extreme, and she crossed the space between herself and Zahra at an athlete’s sprint. Zahra couldn’t hope to defend herself: Vyrsa slammed the hilt of the jeweled rapier into her head, then aimed a green jewel on that same hilt down onto the fallen child.
“Sleep!” she commanded. And Zahra slept.
Only Gilead remained. He raised his shield and advanced on the pirate queen, recalling all the odds that were in his favor. She had been greatly weakened, whereas he was fresh. Unlike Sara or Zahra, he had a great deal of experience with blade-fighters; a duel of this sort was his element. If all else failed, he could turn into a dragon with invincible scales.
Gilead slowly faded away, dissolving into the forms that had been taught to him, ink soaking into the pages of the fighting manuals. To think, to exist, would be only to detract from the possibility of victory.
And then he was pulled back together by the taut sensation of scales spreading underneath his skin. Gilead had nearly managed it, to repress the knowledge of the first of the two new abilities he had gained after the fight in Port Gebe, but repression could not stop it from manifesting when the battle-fugue came over him.
They were not like the scales of his First, those thick and rugged crocodilian ridges. From without, they were almost invisible. Soft, opalescent snakeskin grew like moss under his human dermis, invisible if you didn’t look carefully and thin enough as to provide next to no protection against physical injury. What they were, however, was cold: no flame could pierce Gilead’s scales once they’d been brought into being by concentrated killing intent.
But they were a reminder of what he had become. Gilead was a monster, the scales a violation that could not be removed without flaying himself alive. He froze in place, heart pounding, flesh wrestling against itself and against the despair of loss at the same time.
He could not fight. How could he, against the force that had defeated both Qi Zhen and Sara? Gilead dropped his sword and knelt before Vyrsa.
“I surrender.”
A few moments later, a loud clatter sounded out as the crew of the Arnhem followed Gilead’s lead. A score of muskets and pistols and swords fell to the ground in unison. The deck was almost completely silent aside from the clacking of Vyrsa’s high-heeled boots as she came to take his weapons for herself.
When she pulled Gilead to his feet, her face was wrought with sadness. Disappointment. His scales retracted, but the miasma of self-loathing only thinned.
Vyrsa cupped her hand to her mouth and shouted in the direction of her yacht. “It’s over, lads! Come aboard!”
Time accelerated, but this time that slipping was to be found only inside of Gilead’s mind. Each person on board the Arnhem was brought to the deck, searched, then sequestered below, presumably under guard. Gilead didn’t get to see it, of course. As a Pretender, his wrists were bound behind his back with rope and he was held near the gangplank connecting to Vyrsa’s yacht.
At least he wasn’t alone. Asides for the others who Vyrsa had defeated on the deck, the list of captives were soon joined by Vilena brought up from below, Qi Zhen’s old nemesis Dano, and one other person. She was an islander, dressed in colorful cottons that indicated she had some degree of wealth, but unlike the sword-carrying Dano there was no external indication of what made her a warrior worthy of being taken as a captive. Thus, when Vyrsa and her crew departed from the Arnhem, they did so not only with a chest of coinage, jewelry, and watches, but with seven captives as well.
Sara must have been used to this. She maintained total composure, in spite of her injured state: she coordinated smoothly so as to rob the pirates of the satisfaction of getting to shove her around, while castigating every man she saw with a defiant gaze. Gilead wished he had that kind of strength. Or even the strength to be like Dano, who acted like a caged lion throughout the process; even with es hands tied, e treated every insignificant lapse in wariness as an opportunity for an escape attempt.
E earned several rifle-butts to the face for es trouble, and didn’t manage any sort of escape. But Gilead had to respect em for the attempt.
The captives ended up in the belly of Vyrsa’s ship, under the supervision of four armed guards and a man whose very attitude indicated that he was Vyrsa’s second in command, or at the very least a high-ranking officer. He was a pale, square-jawed man with thick muscles and a nearly shaved head, and merely looking at him made Gilead understand why Sara had mistrusted him so much when they’d first met. Gilead wanted to pull his own guts out through his mouth just looking at that brute.
“Right, two to a cell and there’s seven of them. The group of four who fought back, make sure none of them stay together.”
Sara’s composure broke. Her eyes went to Zahra, and she trembled in preemptive grief.
“The two Furati, the woman and the girl,” Gilead said. “They’re sisters, and the younger one is very sick. Please keep them together.”
He didn’t know why he’d said that; he lacked the strength to put any conviction into his voice, but his heart was hurting at the thought of silence. The first mate singled Gilead out, his heavy boots hammer blows on the plastic of the deck. He stopped perhaps ten centimeters away from Gilead.
“Do you think this is a hotel, Goldilocks? Do you think I am in the hospitality business?”
Gilead had heard this voice before. Not from this man’s lips, but when he was young, all too often he had been spoken to in this way, with the sadism of a man who sees a chance to prove his own manliness. Gilead started to drain away. His hands were behind his back, but that would not be the worst circumstances he’d fought in.
“Look at me when I speak to you, drama queen! I ask again, do you think this is a hotel?”
He cocked his hand back. In about two seconds, Gilead was going to break every bone in this man’s arm.
“At ease!”
Vyrsa’s voice filled the chamber, and the first mate instantly went to attention, clicking his heels as he turned, tucking both hands behind his back.
“Captain Valiente! I was disciplining the prisoner, ma’am!”
“I heard everything,” she said, taking the stairs one step at a time, “and I remind you, Mr. Shaw, that we are not in the military, and that our hearts are not made of ice.”
That last word drew Gilead’s attention away from his own feet. Vyrsa had, in combat, seemed so jovial, even her injuries merely a show of roughhousing. The venom with which she said that word, and the hateful sneer she gave to her own second-in-command, were exceptional.
“Keep the families together, separate the others.”
Sara and Zahra were locked in with the complete stranger. Qi Zhen was, of course, put in a cell with Dano. Vilena had succeeded in at least one thing that day: by acting as if she was a stranger to Gilead, she tricked the pirates into putting them together in the same cell.
As they passed one another, Sara paused to whisper into Gilead’s ear. “Thank you. I don’t forgive you.”