Salveran Tides Ch. 02

“You can’t bullshit a bullshitter, Yess.” Scarlet moved back over to the counter. “You know as well as I do that these Church bootlicking hicks see your ears and that’s all they’ll ever see. Why you thought this place would be a good idea eluded me then and still eludes me now.”

“It’s on an elvish smuggling route...” Yesseil said in a quiet voice. “That’s how I get my materials.”

“Materials are fine and good but only if you sell things to make room for more. Surprised you haven’t been threatened yet.”

Yesseil thought for a moment, doing the super cute head-tilt-slight-pout face that she always did. “Does a bucket of coals on my front stoop count? That happened the other day; I used them as fuel for my forge upstairs.”

Scarlet blinked slowly. “Aye, yes, that counts.”

A moment of comprehension flickered across Yesseil’s face. “What have you done?” she groaned.

“More like what’s been done to me,” Scarlet said. “Lady Sanguine’s been stolen, Lexaeus is facing the gallows, then there’s the mermaid-”

“Wait wait wait, what?“ Yesseil’s eyes bugged out.

“Look, I can explain everything in due time, I just need weapons right now. And your arse on my ship.”
“Scarlet, no.“ Yesseil waved her hands back and forth. “Well, okay, yes to the weapons, because spirits know I’d like to see someone use these things, but no to me. I hung up my seaboots. I can make this work here, I just need a little bit more-”

Glass shattered, making both women turn their heads. A small round metal ball bounced off the floor once before rolling to a stop. Scarlet registered the Flame Church seal on the side, along with the lit fuse, and that was all she needed to see before tacking Yesseil to the ground. The bomb exploded a moment later, a plume of fire dousing the front part of the shop. Scarlet covered her face to shield herself from the heat. “If you were gonna say time, Yesseil...”

Yesseil spat something in her native tongue that sounded like a curse, scrambling out from under Scarlet. “Oh, come on!” she yelled, her pointy ears canted backwards. “I just finished a bunch of those!”

Two more glass panes shattered, followed by two more explosions. Fire took hold on the front half the room, smoke rapidly filling up the space. “Time we make an exit!” Scarlet said, holding a hand over her mouth.

Yesseil vaulted over the counter, and came back up with two large sacks. “Grab what you can!” She took off up the stairs.

Scarlet ran to the walls and grabbed as many firearms as she could jam into the sack. Banging sounded on the door, like someone trying to force their way in. “Shoulda done that before lighting the place on fire, dipshits!” she called. A blunderbuss was the last thing she managed to get in the sack before the fire grew too intense to remain close to, and Scarlet took off. She ducked behind the counter and rummaged underneath, finding small pouches full of shot. Those went in the big sack as well, as well as several pouches full of longer shells for the blunderbusses. Armed and ammo’d, Scarlet sprinted up the stairs towards Yesseil’s space.

The elf was finishing up loading up her own sack full of essentials. She looked around the small space with a sad look on her face. “And I’d just gotten it the way I liked it, too.”

“We’ll get you a bigger room, love,” Scarlet said, ruffling Yesseil’s dark hair. “Full of far nicer things than this.”

Yesseil took a deep breath. “Just like the old days.”

“Hey, they were only a year ago.”

Scarlet opened up the window and vaulted out, hanging onto the sill for a moment and then dropping to the ground below. She set the sack on the ground, then held out both of her arms. “Come on! Like the Traverse!”

“That was far less high than this!” Yesseil said, her eyes back to being wide and spooked.

“Jump or burn, Yess, your call!”

The elf muttered something, then threw herself out the window. Scarlet took a step and caught her on the way down. It was an easy thing when the elf weighed about a hundred pounds soaking wet. Scarlet set Yesseil down, then pulled one of the pistols out of her sack. It was one of Yesseil’s custom models, with a revolving chamber that could hold eight shots before being reloaded. She dumped iron balls into each along with a dab of gunpowder before snapping the gun shut. “Missed having one of these on me,” she said, shouldering her sack of weapons. “You make ‘em better than anyone else.”

“Lavish praise on me later, please,” Yesseil said, scampering down the alley behind the buildings as the fire began to lick at the inside of the upstairs windows. “Weren’t you the one who said we needed to pick up the pace?”

Scarlet caught up to her, then took the lead down the alley between the buildings and the northern wall of the town. They almost made it all the way to the end without obstruction, until a Church Knight rounded the corner in front of them. He wasn’t one of the sea-based types that Scarlet was used to dealing with that wore lighter armor for maneuvering between ships. This slab of pious was wearing full plate armor, a broadsword in his hand and a lit firebomb in the other.

“They’re here!” he called, before cocking his arm back to throw the bomb. Scarlet took aim with her pistol. Not wanting to go for broke with trying to get the iron ball between the eye slit in his armor, she aimed for the unarmored underside of his wrist on his throwing hand. Yesseil’s pistols always banged a little louder than others, and this one was no exception. The weapon kicked in her hand, and for a moment Scarlet worried she’d missed.

The worry was alleviated a moment later as the Knight dropped the bomb and howled, clutching his wrist. Scarlet was on him a moment later. She scooped up the lit bomb in her hand, then jammed it into the gap between his helmet and neck gorget. “Have fun with that!” Scarlet yelled into his helmet grille, before swiping another bomb off his belt and running away. Heat flared against her back as the bomb went off, the whoosh quickly fading and being replaced by the Knight’s screaming as he cooked inside his armor. She chanced a glance behind her, and saw the full force of the mob at their heels. At least threescore, dressed in the white robes of the Church, several of them armed with long rifles. Yesseil and Scarlet rounded a corner just as bullets chunked the stonework behind them.

“They’ll chase us all the way until dawn unless we shake them,” Yesseil said, breathing heavily from hauling the sack over her shoulder. “Any ideas?”

The firebomb she’d stolen off the Knight was solid and familiar. “Aye,” Scarlet said. “Answer an impulse I had on the way in, and give them something else to worry about. Head for the cliffs on the north part of the island and wait for me there, I’ll be along in a moment.”

Yesseil cut away perpendicular to the street they were on, keeping low as she made for the cover of the trees. Scarlet turned and stopped for a moment. The moment one of the mob rounded the corner behind her, she shot him. “Come on, you miserable louts!” she taunted as the man fell, clutching his side. “Scarlet Rydell’s running rings around you tonight!”

Her name was like an addictive narcotic to Church warriors. Who knew what glory awaited the one who took down the only Templar to ever abandon the Church and live to tell the tale? The entire mob came after her, not even seeming to realize that their other quarry was no longer there. Scarlet turned on her heel and ran like hell up the main avenue to the front steps of the cathedral.

Flame Church cathedrals, by name and nature, always had a plethora of combustable materials left on their altars between services. They were meant to ferment between weekly services, becoming more potent, to “better burn and reveal the Sacred Flame’s guidance” as her old mentor had said. Nowadays, Scarlet imagined those barrels of oil and buckets of kindling not as preparations for sacred rites, but as fuel waiting for a spark.

She cut to the side, taking the firebomb in one hand and her pistol in the other. The firebomb fuse was thin and greased with a substance that caught easily. Scarlet held the end of the fuse near the pistol chamber and fired, the bullet whizzing off into the forest somewhere. The shower of sparks from the powder combusting lit the fuse, and it began to burn down rapidly. Scarlet lobbed it over her head at one of the stained-glass windows, hoping that she’d put enough force behind it to get it where it needed to be. Then she forced her legs to go faster.

The explosion was bigger than she’d thought.

Force knocked her off her feet as the firebomb blew up near the barrels of oil on the church altar, and simultaneously ignited the fuel inside said barrels. Scarlet rolled over in time to see the gout of fire mushroom out above the church steeple, orange flames billowing out the windows and pouring smoke. A terrified howl came from the mob, and all but a few lost interest in her immediately, turning to save their hall of worship. Four men kept racing up the hill after her, faces contorted in rage at what she’d done.

Scarlet got to her feet and took off into the woods, laughing as she did. They were like dogs, all of them, easily redirected. It was far from the first church she’d set on fire, and would be far from the last. For all the harm the Church had done to the people of Siraglia, she considered it a public service.

It took her a bit to reach the cliffs, but when she did she cut to the side, easily able to outrun the island bumpkins. A little while later, the bluffs she’d climbed up upon arriving at the island came into view, along with Yesseil pacing at the edge of the cliffs. “There you are!” the elf said. “What did you do?”

“Lit the cathedral on fire,” Scarlet said, pausing for a moment to catch her breath. “All we have to do it get down there, swim a little, and we’ll be on the ship.”

“Is it a little single masted cutter with a cabin on the aft deck?”

Scarlet narrowed her eyes at the elf. “You got some mind-reading magic you never told me about?”

Yesseil simply pointed down at the ocean. Scarlet followed her finger. Her hands balled up. “Son of a...”

The ship she’d stolen from the smugglers was currently being lashed to the rear of another, larger cutter with two masts. A crew of about a dozen men moved between the two boats. Scarlet’s eyes flitted back and forth, trying to find the most important thing. A moment later, she spotted Leona’s thrashing tail being carried by three men down into the bilge of the larger cutter.

“Friends of yours?” Yesseil asked.

“No, a bunch of dead men.” Scarlet unburdened herself of the gun sack. “Wait here, I’ll sort this out.”

Scarlet ran back the way she came until she was sufficiently out of sight of the ships, then picked her way back down the cliff as quickly and quietly as she could. Simmering anger carried her forward - how dare these two-bit seamen try to take what was already hers? She chided herself. Leona wasn’t property. She was valuable, worth her weight in gold in fact, but she wasn’t some inanimate object to be bartered or traded. Old Templar habits still reared their ugly head sometimes.

The water welcomed her back, and Scarlet swam out a ways before cutting right and swimming towards the two-masted cutter. She used the bow of the ship as cover, but kept an eye on the rigging in case someone scampered up to the crow’s nest. As she drew closer, she heard voices. A posh accent was yelling orders. “...keep her where someone can keep an eye on her. That mermaid will make us a pretty gold when we sell what’s left of her off.”

Keep dreaming, arsehole. Scarlet made it to the bow, yanking her knife free of her belt. The cutter bobbed up and down with the cliffside tide, and on its next downward motion she sank her knife into the timbers. As the ship rose, it pulled her free of the water with it. There was a figurehead at the front of the ship, a comely wooden woman wearing a dress that threatened to spill of her shoulders and expose hollow wooden knockers. Scarlet kicked out and got her boot into the gap between the curve of the figurehead’s legs and the main spar of the mast behind it. From there, she pulled herself up, using the wooden woman as as ladder to climb onto the deck. “Pardon me,” she muttered as she used one of the well-carved breasts as a handhold on the way up.

She peeked over the railing along the side of the ship to survey the deck. Some of the crew were still back on her ship, and all the ones on this ship had their backs to her. Scarlet tried to pick out a leader among them, and figured it might be the one with the nicest-looking scimitar thrust into his belt.

Scarlet hauled herself over the lip of the ship, holding her knife low by her side. She prowled forward, waiting for her moment. When the guy in charge angled his head slightly further away from her, she pounced. A kick to the the back of the knee brought the man low, and she wrapped one arm around his mouth while putting the knife to his throat. “Shh shh shh shhhhh,” she hissed. “Let’s go have a chat with your friends, eh?”

A knee to the small of his back made him stumble forward a little, and Scarlet frogmarched him around the helm towards the aft deck. One of the other men took notice of her. “Oy!”

Every other man on the ship turned to look. Scarlet gestured with the business end of her knife. “Hello gents. That’s my ship and my cargo you’re helping yourself to. Mind rethinking that idea a little bit?”

The man who’d shouted looked around at the little inlet. “C’mon, love, it’s just a little boat left all alone with a pretty mermaid tied to the mast. What impression were we supposed to get?”

“You can’t steal what’s already been stolen,” Scarlet said, kneeing the leader in the back as he tried to wriggle free of her grip. “Now, unless you all want to find out what the depths look like up close and personal, here’s what I propose. All of you scramble back to my little cutter, and let me keep this big one and the mermaid. Then we go our separate ways and all’s well. Savvy?”

The man looked around at his allies. They were decent-sized men, all of them. “There’s a dozen of us and one of you. I think I like our odds better.”

Scarlet dug the edge of the knife into the leader’s neck. He went stiff as a board. “Don’t think I won’t do it.”

The man looked around at the other men again, as if he was waiting for an objection. When none came. He pulled out a pistol. “Sorry, Captain,” he said with a shrug.

Then he took aim.

Scarlet let go and dove to the side just as the flintlock cracked. She hit the deck and rolled, scrambling back behind the cabin as the former captain hit the deck with a heavy thud. “Get her!” the man said, and the command was followed by the rasp of swords clearing sheaths.

Scarlet pressed her back to the walls, hearing footsteps approaching from two sides. They were going to surround her from both sides of the cabin, pin her between three or more swords. She’d dealt with worse before. She waited until the steps on her side of the cabin drew close, then lunged out of cover. With a cry of effort she sank her knife into the throat of the leading man, pulling it free with another sharp motion. His fingers went slack, his cutlass falling free. Scarlet plucked it out of midair and blocked the swing of the man following the first, sending the point of his sword into the deck timbers. Her knife flashed twice, once inside the crook of the man’s sword arm and again across his throat. Blood spattered her eyes, but she didn’t dare stop moving. Getting pinched was a death sentence.

Scarlet ran down the length of the ship, scooping up the fallen captain’s pistols as passed his prone body. She spun, aimed, and fired at two different targets. One shot went wide, the other thudded into the chest of another of pursuers. He fell as well, his living allies scampering over his body to exact their vengeance.

From far above them came a loud crack. Scarlet looked up to see a puff of smoke dissipating from the clifftop, then whipped her head around as a splash came from behind her. The two seamen on the single-mast cutter had been trying to scramble back onto the other ship to help their allies; Yesseil had shot one off with a long rifle. Just as the second man hauled himself onto the deck, a follow-up shot from the elf on the cliff above dropped him.

The one who had double-crossed his captain threw his arms out. “Oy, hold!”

All of the other men stopped behind him, one running into his forearm outright, looking confused. “What’s the holeup?” one asked.

“The ‘holeup’ is that we’re down by half in under a minute and I just figured out who the red-haired bint is,” the man in charge said.

“Took you long enough,” Scarlet snarled. She raised her knife. A small bead of blood collected on the point, then dripped off to splash on the deck timbers. “Want to keep this going, or have we had enough?”

The man in charge held up his hands. “I’ll not tempt fate by continuing to go against the dreaded Rydell.” A murmur of recognition passed through the remaining men.

“Smartest choice you’ve made all day,” Scarlet said. “This ship is mine now, hear? Grab your dead and get the hell off it. Or else I’ll have my friend on the cliffs put a shot in you.”

The pirates scrambled to do as she demanded, Scarlet watching their every move. They cleared the deck of the slain, all save for the original captain. “You missed one,” Scarlet said, nudging the dead man with her boot.

“Oh, you can keep that one,” the man in charge said, one foot on the aft deck railing. “He was an arsehole through and through. Wanted to cook and eat the mermaid instead of selling her off for profit.”

Scarlet snorted. She relieved the dead man of his cutlass and other pistol before rolling him off into the surf below. “Now be off with you. And may we never meet again.”

The man in charge’s eyes lingered on her for a time, until he heaved himself over the back of the ship and descended out of sight. Scarlet sheathed her knife and threaded the cutlass into her belt. It was neither Wolf or Lamb, but it would do until she got her proper gear back. With one hand over her eyes to block the glare, she looked up to the clifftop and beckoned Yesseil. “Come on down, love, let’s shove off quick as we can!”

As an elf, Yesseil had grown up in Siraglia’s deep forests, which made her a natural at climbing ship’s rigging. Or, in this instance, a sheer rock face. Scarlet winched dup the anchor as the elf picked her way down the cliff, using the tide to carry her a bit closer to the rock. When the ship’s mast yawed near enough, Yesseil leaped off the cliff and grabbed hold of the rigging as she fell. Scarlet quickly turned the cutter’s wheel to angle them away from land, using her other hand to angle the rear sail a bit so it caught a breeze. As Yesseil made her way down to the deck, the sail snapped taut, and carried them away from the edge of the island. Scarlet saw their former ship, now loaded almost to capacity with the small pirate band, bobbing away around to the other side of the island. She had no illusions - those men would be back, looking to make a name for themselves. They always did. She’d be waiting for them with blade in hand.

“Figures that within an hour of seeing you again I’m out of a home and back to shooting people,” Yesseil said. She edged around a bloodstain on the deck timbers.

“Play to your strengths, Yesseil,” Scarlet said. She moved across the deck to the stairs leading down into the bilge. “Oy, Princess, you alive and splashing down there?”

“Yes!” came the plaintive reply. “Some assistance would be appreciated!”

Scarlet tromped down the steps. The pirates had shackled her to the lower part of the mast there with iron fetters. In a strange twist, the mermaid actually looked relieved to see her. Scarlet couldn’t remember the last time anyone had been grateful to see her. She was the devil the mermaid knew, at least.