Chương 30: Prison Break

Cormac's plan was impossible, but at least it presented a different set of problems than the current impossible ones.

"The man is daft," Róise declared, straining to hold the sails aligned. The canvas bucked and roiled, with her constantly adjusting against the shifting winds to keep them taut.

"It was going to be suicide with a full crew. We had planned to stop and train the maneuver for weeks before attempting it. And, it may have escaped you, but Cormac and I aren't exactly seasoned sailors ourselves. We're sort of flying blind here."

"So what's your idea?" Róise snorted.

"The same as I always have. Just decide to follow his dumb idea. I'm pretty much helpless while I'm up here, and so is Maitiú. You need to solve the first problem with his Majesty the Captain."

"Which problem was that again?"

"Getting to the Gate before Ultán." Miriam walked back to Cormac, running her mind over the problem. Ultán could ignore the wind, but his ship was still moving forward - meaning some sort of wind must be having an effect upon the vessel. They might be able to assume that he was providing the pushing power himself, which would indicate a frightening amount of fórsa, but it also meant that unlike the Líadan, he would run out at some point. Perhaps they needed ways to sap his strength?

"Do we have any ship-to-ship weapons on board? Cannons?" she yelled to Cormac. The rain was coming down now and the entire world was quickly becoming a wash of thunderous sounds and blinding water.

"We have a single ballista, but it's downstairs in pieces," he said.

"We… uh, we jettisoned the cannons not too long after our original crew tried to kill us. We thought it was more likely they might get used on us or the ship should the next crew also prove mutinous. Which they did!"

"Well, that isn't helpful. Can Róise or Maitiú use any sort of ranged attacks?" Cormac shrugged.

"Róise has thrown some fórsa knives at people before, but neither of us was ever an archer. It's likely Maitiú knows how to use a harpoon - most sailors in this part of the sea do a stint whale hunting - but we don't have a harpoon." Miriam chewed on her bottom lip.

"Even if we did, we can't ignore the wind, like Ultán can." Her eyes got big.

"Maybe we don't need a harpoon! Maybe we need a torpedo!"

"A what?"

"Well… ok, clearly I have shown you that I have more than one Fórsa Nature. We can get into that later, but I can command Life and Water. What if I made a giant harpoon out of Life Nature materials, threw it into the water, and then Maitiú and I used water fórsa to slam it into Ultán's ship?" Miriam was already sketching out designs in her mind.

"I saw some particularly nasty pirates do something similar, but in their version they placed explosives on trained dolphins."

"I don't know what dolphins are."

"They're like demodrams."

"That does seem needlessly cruel." Miriam shrugged.

"I'd consider doing it myself now if one were available. Did we throw out the gunpowder with the cannons?" Cormac shook his head.

"Not all of it. What is left is stored in a safe in my cabin."

"Could we attach some powder to the torpedo?"

"We'd have no way to light it." Miriam raised an eyebrow.

"Can't your luck help with that?"

"What? No." Cormac held his hands out, gesturing as if to demonstrate.

"My luck doesn't create favorable situations out of nothing. It just nudges the factors available in any situation to my benefit. In this case I can't imagine there is any situation in which a submerged bag of black powder ignites."

"Does Ultán's Pathfinder ability work the same way?"

"Yeah, they are actually pretty similar in some ways. Mine is a bit stronger naturally since it's the basis of my entire fórsa nature, but at his level it doesn't matter. Main difference is that he sees possible options and chooses the best one - he still has to follow it precisely. For me, I give it a general direction and it just sort of… happens.

But similarly he probably can't direct his Pathfinding ability to 'find me a path to fly into the sky and pounce on the Líadan' because that is not really possible for his ship to do. There would be no path." Cormac ducked and another knife clattered to the deck.

"How does he have so many knives?" Miriam nodded.

"Then that works perfectly for what we need. We need to create a situation where there is no path where he can intercept us - or at least no reasonable one." Cormac looked doubtful.

"You think this torpedo of yours will do it?"

"I don't know. But if we can at least siphon off more of his fórsa he's likely to run out at some point right?" Cormac looked grim.

"It's hard to say. Honestly, looking at your fórsa, I would say you've got the reserves of someone who is fourth or fifth ring at least - his will be equal, if not better. It will take a lot to drain him." Miriam didn't have any better ideas, so she conscripted Maitiú to help and they tried lobbing wicked-looking vine harpoons through the water.

At first they just bounced off Ultán's hull, but she started adding screw-like structures to the front and enhancing it with curved fins that caused the whole structure to spin. When it struck the hull, she and Maitiú poured a ton of Water fórsa into making the torpedo spin, digging into the wood roughly. Maitiú collapsed after that - it was completely draining his fórsa to manifest over such a long distance. But, the following ship did slow down as presumably Ultán had to deal with a new hole in his ship.

"How long to the Gate?" she asked.

"At least three hours," Cormac said grimly. You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story. At that Miriam despaired. She could never keep this up that long. She felt the sloppiness in her techniques, the fórsa spilling out and being wasted, but she simply did not have enough experience to do better. Meanwhile Ultán's manifestations likely didn't waste an ounce of power.

Meanwhile the darkness had settled into full night, the only illumination being the random flashes of light that illuminated the horrifying grandeur of the sea and the ever-shrinking distance between Ultán's ship and theirs. It didn't matter if they reached the Gate first, Miriam realized. They would never be able to traverse the dangerous route in full darkness.

"We need something else," Miriam panted. Cormac sighed. He'd been wrapping his threads around the torpedoes, and each one had found its mark, but he was also clearly getting tired. Miriam didn't know how Róise was still hanging on, but she could see that several of the sails she had been managing by hand were now held in place by permanent lashes - the pixie sacrificing control to maintain her stamina.

"We have nothing left, Miriam. I guess not all my luck is good. Not only do I get lost on a vampire ship, I get us killed before I even make it to the first gate." She collapsed onto the deck, the incessant beat of raindrops desensitizing her skin to the point of numbness.

"Why is this called a vampire ship anyway? That sounds incredibly ominous."

"It does, doesn't it?" Cormac shook his head.

"Honestly, it's pretty grim. There is a constant problem we have in the outer rings. Upper ring people like to slum it out here where they're the big dogs and we're just little puppies barking. It means a lot of them get up to a lot of… well, pretty bad stuff. But how do you arrest someone like that? Once you do, how do you punish them? Well, there are roving gangs of bounty hunters like our pathfinding friend back there who use their upper ring strength to level the playing field.

But if you want an upper ring criminal held by lower ring jailers, you need something that levels that playing field." He traced a circle on the wet deck.

"The Liaden was built to hold upper ring criminals and put them to good use. The ship has a strange, crystal core in the keelwell. It's almost sentient. It can hold commands, execute the contract rituals that binds captains to the vessel - navigate. What it also does is drain the prisoner it holds of a huge amount of fórsa - constantly. If that Selkie we have in the bottom of the ship were to escape, or die… well, it would drain us instead. In an instant.

But there's no other way to keep someone that strong held for the duration of their sentence." A crystal core? Did Eoin have something to do with the construction of these ships? It felt an awful lot like the Amethyst Reel - or even the smaller one currently pressing on her chest.

"You know, I never told you the full truth," Miriam said wistfully.

"I had an ulterior motive for coming on board this boat."

"Ship. And yeah, that was pretty obvious."

"There was a man who helped me escape from… from the Wisp that held me prisoner. In exchange I agreed to help him free his friend." Cormac sat up.

"The Selkie?" Miriam nodded.

"His name is Iohannes." He shook his head.

"I never saw the name Iohannes on any of the ritual contracts, though I admit I… may have skimmed them. Well, if you had freed him, we would all likely have died within minutes. Probably you too." Miriam was struck mute for a moment. Had Eoin known? Had he saved her just to send her to her death, an overly complicated pawn move just to put another piece back in play? How good a friend was this Iohannes anyway? And what had his crime been?

Suddenly she was relieved she had failed in her task - how many people would have died had she succeeded?

"That fancy little bastard," she said. Wait. Miriam sat up straight.

"What were you going to do with the prisoner when you reached your destination?" Cormac shrugged.

"We were going to set him free. The sea-faring is only the first part of the adventure and criminal or not no one deserves eternity submerged in an iron cage. We were just going to do it with everyone safely on shore first. We hadn't quite figured out how to get me off the ship before it started eating me, though." Miriam nodded.

"That's it. That's the way out." She jumped to her feet and took off down the stairs.

"Wait! Miriam, what is?" Cormac followed after, leaving Maitiú asleep by the wheel. Miriam slammed into the door to the keelwell.

"Cormac! Can you open this?"

"Ah… no." Cormac said apologetically.

"One, it would free the prisoner and two… I don't have the key." Miriam stared.

"You what?"

"I won the boat from a… very inebriated ship captain. We had to leave before he sobered up too much. I didn't even know about the key at that point."

"How were you going to let the prisoner out?" Cormac shrugged.

"Look, we didn't have every part of the plan figured out yet, ok?" Miriam shook her head.

"How in the world did you two even get this far?" He smiled.

"Luck?" Miriam rolled her eyes.

"That cannot be the punchline for every conversation you have, Cormac." She studied the door, then placed her hand on it.

"Iohannes. I don't know if you can hear me, but we need help."

"There is no chance he can hear you, Miriam. He's thirty feet below the sea."

"I have no other ideas, Cormac. Iohannes! We are being chased by a bounty hunter. We're all dead unless you can help us! We will set you free if you do!" Miriam shouted herself hoarse at the door, promising the world if the Selkie would help them. Iohannes would be a higher rank Water Nature - she suspected she could accelerate the ship away from Ultán.

"Miriam," Cormac said gently.

"It was a good idea, but it's not going to work. Even if he could hear you, his fórsa is blocked by the cage and devoured by the ship. He can't affect things outside of his own prison." Miriam sighed.

"Ok, then. Cormac, we're about to die, right?"

"Almost certainly."

"Then it doesn't matter too much if I do this." Closing her eyes, Miriam touched the wood of the door. Her fingers pressed against it. She could sense the grains in the material, the density of the fórsa. Like the ship itself it was Second Ring, but of a more complex construction than the dinghy had been. This was reinforced against fórsa techniques, and the iron lock sort of… held the fórsa's shape in place. It almost rendered it… dead was the word that came to her mind. Inert.

"Here's hoping volume can trump density again," she whispered and released the locks on all three of her fórsa natures. Funneling everything she had into her hand, she pushed into the wood. Cormac's face fell as he watched the wood start to bubble and warp, dead leaves carving themselves out of the lacquer, running lines of water erupting from the paint.

"Miriam, don't! You'll kill us all!" He began to weave his golden threads. He was too slow. With a roar, she broke through the wood, tearing a rift in the section furthest from the iron lock. Once the integrity of the door was breached, the entire structure began to collapse.

The area around the lock didn't turn into soggy, rotten tree bark like the rest did, but just sort of crumbled, like aged pressboard, but the lock still tumbled to the floor with a loud thump, where it began to sizzle against the fórsa-rich planks.

"Gods, Miriam. You've just turned 'almost certainly' into 'absolutely inescapable.'" Cormac leaned back against the nearest wall.

"He has no reason to help us. You've set him free while we're on the high seas. He can likely escape through the water with no problem, leaving us to the mercy of the Líadan, not to mention Ultán."

"I decided to trust, when mistrust would have been the wiser course," Miriam said, out of breath. Inside the door was a small room, ten feet by ten. The room had no floor, just a sloshing pool of water, above which hung a familiar purple crystal. Miriam touched her chest. They were the same. In the water, illuminated by the glow of the crystal, she could see a shape moving. It was a shadow, growing ever bigger until one clawlike hand breached the surface, followed by the most ragged person Miriam had ever seen.

He was dressed in rags that looked as if they had been nibbled by fish - little more than a frock of salvaged material at this point. He had a long beard infested with seaweed, matching an equally matted mop of hair - too sodden to make out the original color. He was pale and splotchy. He climbed up onto dry flooring, hacking water out of his lungs. Miriam noticed a set of gills vanishing into his skin as they dried out, and the man took one long ragged breath. Air in his lungs again, he looked up at Miriam.

"Miriam!" he said cheerfully. She couldn't help but recognize the smile, though the teeth were yellowed and grimy.

"You kept your promise!" Miriam's jaw dropped." Eoin?"