Quelya - Chapter 2: Blood in the Water

 Chapter Two: Blood in the Water

Dox was sitting in the rigging, low enough to the deck that she could continue her conversation with the dragonborn. They were discussing the difference in alertness at sea versus space, when she glanced off the port bow and the color drained from her face.

    “Pirates!” she screamed. “Pirates off the port bow!” She was already untangling herself from the ropes and dropping to the deck. As she ran past the cleric to get a better look, she added, “there’s going to be a fight, priest. Best suit up.”

    Before he could respond, she was up the ladder and on the forecastle. Turok stared at the approaching ship for a half a moment before bolting back to his cabin. “Galaine,” he cried, “my armor!”

    Galaine came stumbling out of the head, with a wide-eyed look on his bronze-scaled face. Like his master, the squire Galaine was brass dragonborn. A low-level acolyte in the Order of Kuyutha, Galaine was tasked with aiding Turok in his duty to the Council of Wyrms. He finished buckling his belt and hustled into their cabin just ahead of the cleric.

    Out on the deck, the sailors and marines were arming themselves. Where everything had been orderly and quiet just moments before, now the chaos of battle sounded across the ship like a death knell. Dox arrived simultaneously with Captain Ray, a deep-tanned old human with curly, sun-bleached hair and a thick beard.

    “Do we run, Captain.” She had her fingers crossed behind her back, hoping against it. Dox wasn’t the sort of woman most would consider evil; but she had been raised by murderers and assassins in the shadow of the God of Death, and it had been quite some time since she’d gotten to kill anything larger than a rat.

    “There’s no way we can outrun them,” the captain said. “And there’s no way they wouldn’t chase us. We’re done for, I’m afraid." He rubbed his brow. "If we surrender, they’ll kill us all. Grab a weapon, Doxy - if you survive the fight, they’ll probably let you live.” The captain, ordinarily a loud braggart with a carefree smile on his face, was thoroughly beaten. With the indifference of the damned, he drew his cutlass and stalked down the ladderwell to repel the boarders. "At least as a slave, you'll have the hope of escape."

    Dox made her way to the bow, and dropped off the front of the forecastle into a hiding place she’d found between it and the figurehead. As the pirate ship drew closer, she closed her eyes and smiled as she prayed to a god with no face. Her blades had never before tasted shark blood, and she hoped it would be as fun as it sounded.

    The Praedaren brigantine was a two-masted ship, like the Reizoko, but was nearly twice the weight. The black flag flying from her main mast showed a shark’s jaw with a pair of spears crossed in such a way that they appeared to be passing through it. The right spear tip featured a single drop of red, which must have meant blood, but the white drop on the left spear tip was anybody’s guess.

    The brigantine was fast, but the shark men were even faster. As the larger vessel came around to fire a volley from its cannons, a cry rose up from starboard: “boarders!” This was met with a chorus of unmistakable war cries that could only have issued forth from the mouths of sharks.

    At first, the maze of cargo on the Reizoko’s weather deck was a blessing. The larger Praedaren, the gray-skinned carvers with their blade-tipped tails and the hammerhead seekers were reluctant to fight in such tight quarters, and they stayed near the sides of the ship, and up on the poop deck. The smaller, goblin-like looters however, had no such reservations and ran screaming into the fray with cutlasses and shortblades held high.

    When the first cannons struck the side of the Reizoko no Tsuma, Dox leapt to her feet and launched herself off the ship and into the water. When she was under, she took a moment to scan the area, but if there were more sharks down here with her, they were beyond her vision. She began swimming toward the pirate ship, and as she did so, her lightly tanned skin began to darken and lose its color. The pupil of her green and brown eyes began grow and overtake the entire orb. Her mouth and nose stretched into a pointed gray muzzle, and her lithe human arms bulked up into muscular praedaren strength.

    When she began to climb up the side of the praedaren ship, the faceless assassin calling herself Dox had become one of the menacingly finned carvers. The blade on her tail was purely ornamental - she had almost no control over it, and it wouldn’t actually damage anyone if she knew how to swing it, but everything about the woman had changed. None of the Shark Men took notice when she climbed over the rail and assessed the battlefield.

    There were a dozen praedaren manning the cannons, with one exceptionally large shark with rippling muscles and an oversized maw shouting orders. Killing one of those would alert the others too quickly. About as many looters and carvers were gathered by the ship’s rail, though, waiting for the two boats to come close enough to swing over. These she could probably pick off and drop overboard, if she was fast and quiet. She’d get caught, but she could thin their numbers a little first. Anyone noticing might think they’d given into the battle frenzy and decided to swim across.

    What caught the assassin off-guard, however, was the small woman climbing over the rail at the rear of the ship. She was one of the sailors on the Reizoko. Dox thought her name might be Alina. She had long, silky black hair and big, black eyes, almost like the sharks they were fighting. She wasn’t human - or, at least - not purely human; and as many sailors had avoided her as tried to catch her favor. Now she was barefoot, dripping with sea water and drawing a long, basket-hilted sword seemingly from nowhere.

    The dark-haired woman with eyes like black pearls shouted something in an arcane tongue Dox didn’t understand. When she did, a thin streak of lightning burst from her off-hand and shot across the deck to envelop the smallest, nearest praedaren. All the sharks turned as one toward her and let out a collective shout of outrage and surprise. Dox ran up and snaked her daggers around the closest pirate’s massive, grey neck, slipping them into his gills and up into his head. He fell to the ground with a soft thud, missed by the rest of his crew, who were too preoccupied with the spellsword.

    They lunged at the woman, who deflected their blades with her own, and dodged every attack. Then the shark caught in her electric net slumped to the ground and with a flick of her hand, her spell jumped to the next smallest pirate.

    As the assassin slid around behind another shark and pierced its neck with each dagger, the spellsword saw what was happening and gave a puzzled look. Deciding not to question it, she cried out to stop them turning to follow her gaze.

    “C’mon you incompetent sea cows! I’ll execute every last one of you!”