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This was a very good contender for ‘worst day of recent history’. And when you were an Antioch – however reluctant you might be to acknowledge it sometimes – that really was saying something.
Isabel swung around, driving the vicious curve of her cutlass through the half-rotten side of the pigman’s throat and sending the creature toppling sideways, where it was definitively ended by an axe swing from the next crewman in line. The already-crumbling husk had been the last of that assault wave, and she took the moment of respite to peer back up at the Pimple’s beached hulk, sweeping charred hair out of her eyes in the vague hope that this might improve the view, or situation.
The newly-airship was wedged between two spires of the red-bone rock of this plane, her top mast now little more than an aggregation of wannabe-matchsticks. The gas bags either side were deflated, although probably still intact, given that their unplanned arrival in this burning nightmare had been while afloat. That was something to be thankful for at least.
The massive, black-iron chains that had swarmed up over the sides of the ship – magically animate and dripping enchantments like ichor – to tangle themselves into a caging knot around the vessel, were rather less ideal.
Isabel’s gaze tracked back over the rest of the cavern. The word was a thoroughly inadequate description of the massive, gore-hued space, floored with a lake of lava like something out of an elemental fever-dream, and absolutely crawling with the horrible denizens of the realm. She wasn’t new to the Nether or its inhabitants, but it had never been her favoured landscape. And now…
“Captain!” The shout broke through her dark contemplation and Isabel looked up, a moment before realising that the shout hadn’t come through the air. She pressed a finger to the side of her head, for concentration, as she felt the little communication spell unfurl again. It had been a good idea – once you’d gotten around the worry of letting that robed lunatic cast anything on your head – but it was taking a bit of getting used to, hearing the crew’s thaumically-carried voices appearing in her mind.
“Angus, stay down. I said – ”
“Arr, t’girl’s gone up the ruddy mast!”
Her old friend’s voice was laced with panic, and Isabel rounded again, dodging back across the flat area of netherrack that they had barricaded off in front of the hull, and squinted up through the nest of chains. Sure enough, a small flicker of blonde and green could be seen somewhere in the twisted mess of ironwork, and she tried to adjust the focus of her spell.
“Daisy – what the hell are you doing?” she snapped, her mind whirring, playing horrible possibilities at fast-forward speed. Bad enough the girl was here, but if she got herself killed now…
“We can’t get anywhere with these chains, can we?” Daisy’s voice filtered back, slightly hesitant, and Isabel rolled her eyes.
“That’s the point of a trap, yes. Get down!”
“I can fix this.”
Isabel half-went to reply again, when another warning cry from the barricade dragged her attention back to defence. Only the pigmen had reached them so far; the dried husks of half-porcine monstrosities that lunged and clawed at them with a determination that made even overland zombies seem shy and retiring, but it was a close even now thing. There were two large lumps of obsidian - warped and swirled in unpleasant ways, but usefully solid - either end of their beachhead, so at least they weren’t being flanked yet, but other shapes were massing beyond the thick smoke that swirled beneath the cavern-roof.
Isabel had had one ear on the background mewling sounds, so when the first one rose in pitch she had time to dive aside, catching the crewman beside her around the waist, and slam them both down into the crumbling stone – as part of the barricade where they had stood rocked violently with fireball impact.
Ghasts. Why did it have to be ghasts? Isabel picked herself up, shaking dust and charring hair out of her face, and tried not to panic. When the portal had opened around them, dropping the entire craft in a cloud of sudden briny steam and shouting, everything had happened too fast for panic. But now she had had time to think.
They’d been dropped - literally - into a hellish trap. She could see the edge of the portal high above them, still open and still utterly impossible in its size, but whatever had animated the chains that held them now wasn’t likely to leave a way out in play for very long.
“Any luck on the chains?” she asked, generally into the comm-spell, but was met by a stomach-churning lack of reply. A few of the more magically inclined crew had started trying to cut through the thick metal, but it didn’t seem like they were having much luck. Isabel bit her lip as she hauled herself back onto the barricade, taking another swipe at the next advancing figure. Looking out across the lava lake, she could see other shapes moving against its surface. Everything here was annoyingly fireproof.
“Damn. Right, I want anything that can carry linked up to those gasbags. We're going to have to aban - ”
“Give me time!” Daisy cut in across her words, the girls voice tight-pitched, and Isabel’s lips thinned. She sliced at her current opponent again – in punctuation, almost – planting a kick hard into the already-degrading remnants of the creature’s chest, and sent it crashing back onto the slope below.
“We’re out of play time,” she snapped back, trying to keep the crack out of her voice, trying not to see the colour drain a little further out of the nearby faces at her words. “I’m not losing people just so you can pretend to be useful.”
Whatever response she had expected from the slim figure high above – balanced precariously between the writhing chains that grasped and tugged at the Pimple’s charring hull – a rough snarl of anger hadn’t been it. Isabel blinked in surprise as Daisy spoke again; there was something different in her tones now, a determination quite different to the shivering, taint-wan figure that she had pulled out of that cell a few short weeks ago.
“I am – ” Daisy said, and now her words clanged like an anvil themselves “ – the best darn blacksmith in this generation, of a family that even dwarves say have steel in their blood. My name isn’t on the door for decoration, Norris.”
There was another metallic sound, behind her speech, and Isabel blinked again as one of the huge chains shivered oddly. She squinted up with renewed interest, trying to get some idea of what was actually going on up there. The tangled knot of half-living metal did look less… certain, somehow, and she caught a couple of glimpses of a different kind of spark against the burning rust.
“Daisy – ” she started again, cut off as another ghast-shot splashed into the burning barricade mere feet away from her. “We don’t have – ”
“When I say I need time, get me time!” the retort came back hard, like a slap, and Isabel nearly swayed from it. And under her surprise, a jolt of something else, curling its own sudden heat across her cheeks beneath even the scald of this place. “You’re a troublemaker, aren’t you? Make some!”
The chain wobbled again and another of its fellows took up the movement. Something was happening up there. Isabel gritted her teeth, looking around quickly, and the seed of a mad plan sank into her whirling thoughts. There was something she could try; and they were dead either way, after all.
That helped, actually.
“Spacker.” She switched her focus, feeling the send-spell shiver under her jawbone as it adjusted. “I need a hole in that starboard rock, quick as you like.”
“What’cha playin’ at, lass?” The dwarf’s grave-rattle tone was severe, even for him. “We’re runnin’ outa damn near everythin’ ye can cram in a cannon.”
“Just blast it!” Isabel snapped back, as she darted forward, adding her shoulder to the dislodging effort against the latest patchwork shape to be scaling their failing barricade. The creature fell back soon enough, breaking apart as it hit the black rocks below, and Isabel just had time to flash the crew as reassuring a smile as she could produce, before there was a triplet-blast of cannonfire, and a chunk of the obsidian barrier right of the tangled airship blew apart in a rain of volcanic razors.
Right. Isabel sheathed her sword and drew pistols as she broke into a sprint, meeting the first dead-eyed figure that loomed out of the new gap with a bullet between the sockets; took the next one down with the barrel-impact; and swung herself up onto the broken stone, kicking a third in the face hard enough to spin it in place. Gnarled fingers snatched at her boots as she started to climb, but you didn’t spend your formative years on the run without getting pretty damn fast at scaling walls.
It didn’t take long to get up onto the smooth top of the wall, and a sprinted leap took her onto the rough-stacked cliff face behind that, jamming her fingertips into cracks in the gritty, weirdly yielding red stone. The netherrack creaked and crunched under her grip, but it was easy to climb, and she managed to get almost up onto an overhanging ledge before the first fireball whizzed past, close enough to singe her remaining braids.
The ghast’s wail was like a flood of ice, pooling around her stomach. Pulling herself up onto the ledge, she stood up and looked back out over the chaos. The Pimple was still beached, still encased in the spiral of thick chains – although the knot of links at the top was definitely looking a bit odd now, and several of the chains were rippling downwards. The crew was still holding out along the barricades below, but from that vantage it was even more obvious that they were tiring.
Isabel looked up, to where the massing ghasts hung like the worst imaginable cloud bank. Their sickly-pale flesh glistened in the lavalight, wreathed in smoke; other shapes moved between them and crawled along the stalactite forests of the huge cavern roof, all swarming down towards the entangled ship with a visible hunger. She raised her last pistol and braced herself against the ledge, her ragged skirts billowing and buffeting in the thermal winds, swinging the barrel out to aim at the closest of the bulbous shapes.
“Hey, ugly!” she shouted, even if her actual words were torn away immediately in the sulphurous air. “I take badly to being ignored.”
Recoil shuddered up her arm as the gun fired, and she immediately shoved the smoking barrel back into its thick holster, even as she saw the tiny ripple of impact on the ghast’s surface. The shot wasn't really enough to hurt it, but it was swivelling back towards her, and she tried to hold onto her composure as the distended, drowned-white face turned back round.
You remember how to do this, Isy. She reminded herself, as she drew her cutlass and listened to the ghosts of memory, the old feel of hands guiding her movements – instructing, if a little jokingly, about pivot and balance, and the trick to turning strength.
The ghast’s eyes tightened, its mouth dropping open, and Isabel tried to relax.
“Any Minute now,” she muttered, allowing herself a small grim smile at the nearly-pun – and the ghast screeched, a cut-off banshee wail to accompany the vomited fireball that hurtled towards her. Isabel counted heartbeats – each one thunderously loud to her, even over the chaos of everything else – and the world slowed, treacle-thick with the anticipation of it as she began to swing, bring her blade round agonisingly slowly as the glob of seething crimson plunged towards her.
Then the flat of the cutlass hit home and time poured back in, accelerating until it was almost skipping across her awareness. There was the weight of the fireball, caught but not blocked, momentum and her own pivot, sending her spinning around with the seething mess hooked mere feet from her face. Then the jolt as it came free again, as she lunged forward, tilting precariously between aim and balance as she tried to give the slung-back fireball a better trajectory, because she wasn’t sure what she would do if it missed –
Even from there, the initial detonation knocked Isabel off her feet. The sword skittered out of her grip and she let it, curling her arms protectively over her head as the chain of explosions began, accompanied by harsh-punctuated wailing and the crack of breaking stone. Hot winds, peppered through with razor-edged dust, cut across her exposed skin, and she tried to press further into the narrow ledge as all hell broke itself loose.
It seemed an age before the madness subsided, but eventually she managed to persuade her limbs to untangle, and pulled herself gingerly upright to stare out over the scene. It was very changed. The extra ceiling of massing ghasts was gone – some were still intact, but were now trailing flames and wailing – and so was a lot of the roof; great chunks of shattered netherrack still raining down into the lava below, pushing out viscous waves that rolled threateningly around the now disarrayed advancing forces. Isabel pushed another dislodged handful of singed hair out of her face and let out a long breath.
Okay. Well, that did seem to have at least disrupted the direct assault. Now they had to see if…
She turned, quickly, as there was a series of much smaller detonations, the screech of sliding metal – and was just in time to see the pressed links of dark chain break apart at their knot, shedding small globs of molten metal. They fell about as well as could be expected; although she did wince as several of the larger links plunged into the Pimple’s deck with a series of splintering crashes, sagging the battered craft even further over, but everything seemed to have missed the gas bags. She could see the crew’s rapid figures already swarming across the deck, taking the ghast-blown moments of respite to pry out fallen links and haul slithering lengths of stilled metal over the side.
“Nice work, Ms Duke,” she said, quietly, and the comm-spell shivered at her throat again as the channel shifted. A light, rather pleasant giggle filtered back in response. She hadn’t heard the blonde laugh before.
“Nice distraction, Cap’t Norris. I didn’t think – ” Daisy cut off with a small gasp, as a new shudder ran through the ground. The shaking kept going, particularly ominously. Isabel turned, searching around, and her eyes widened as she looked up.
The purple-edged gash high above, the portal-mouth that had curved like a smirk over them, was closing, and white sand was starting to pour down over the shrinking edge. It pooled where it landed, on stone or lava, raising strange grey smoke around it, and even from there Isabel could see the strangeness to the movements; a writhing, near-fluid mass mounding up against itself. The nether-denizens were starting to move away – and that was particularly worrying.
“Get those gas bags up!” Isabel shouted, heart racing as she watched the nearest inrushing sand, inching towards the fallen chains a few hundred metres away from the Pimple, and accelerating. “We’re running out of sky.”
“Get’cha arse back down here, Captain,” Spacker rumbled – she could just about see his stout figure on the foredeck, peering up towards her. “We can – ”
“Go!” Isabel shot back, trying to ignore the leaden doubt that sank down through her gut, as she looked down at the crowd of dark shapes massing at the base of the cliff – and the thread of white already snaking across the space between her and the ship. Even if she was very fast…
Spacker blew a disgusted sound.
“How’s about no? Ye ain’t – ”
“You get my lady in the air, LeChuck, or so help me I’ll find enough skin on you to flog,” Isabel snapped, as she retrieved her cutlass and brandished it down at the distant shape. It made her feel a bit better, anyway, and she watched as smooth shapes began to fill out either side of the cleared – if rather crumpled – deck. At least the compressors already had a lot of heat to work with here. She swallowed, peering up at the closing portal. This was going to be a squeeze.
“Ah’m throwin’ a rope off the stern,” Spacker grunted again, and now she could hear the worry under his degraded voice. “Ye grab on good now, y’hear?”
Isabel nodded, possibly to herself. The ship was starting to rise, bobbing a little against its beaching groove, but it wasn’t the only thing moving. The largest aggregation of sand, heaped up in the centre of the lava-lake as through hundreds of tonnes of molten rock was little more than a puddle – even if it was going a little glassy at the edges – looked strange. Patterns were dancing across the surface, shifting under the piled sand in ways that tightened Isabel’s throat to look at.
“We’ve got company,” she muttered, and Spacker grunted.
“Ay, I see it.”
“Get them out. Right now,” she said through clenched teeth, and heard the dwarf laugh as the ship finally began to rise.
“Ye bloody Antiochs were right behind the door when they was handin’ out self-preservation. Blimey.”
“Spacker-!”
The sand erupted, twisting around on itself as a sinuous shape struck forth, glittering crystals at the edges as the sedimentary tendril scythed across the lava, missing the Pimple’s rising keel by inches. A few heartbeats later and the whole ship jerked sideways hard, narrowly missing another burning outcrop as all the cannons fired at once, blasting huge chunks of half-solid sand of the collected shape. The tentacle spasmed hard, snatching up for the deck again, but the broken sections didn’t twist properly and it fell back, as a furious screech broke through the air.
Isabel winced, clapping her hands over her ears – but there was something else behind the sound, a strange-pitched susurrus that sent prickling horror dancing through her mind as she looked up, and the curtain of falling sand seemed to have more shape to it than it had before. Lavalight gleamed on the flowing surface, condensing, running together with dreadful inevitability, until those eyes were suddenly there, sketched in hellfire and all at once, fixed so very, very closely on her.
-Isssabel-
She remembered. She remembered the twin points of burning bloodlight – the nightmare she hadn’t believed, not really – advancing through the room, gliding through punctuated darkness that seemed to clamp down around her, paralysing every muscle with the leaden inevitability. Before Tinman had intervened, before the moment had broken apart in sheared metal and screaming, when there had been no way out…
BOOM.
The canon-fire was like a hammer to her chest, pounding her halting heartbeat back into life as the face blew apart and Isabel gasped, lungs burning with hastily-drawn, ashy air – but at least everything was real again. She shook herself, slapping a few times at her forearm for the stinging focus, and looked up as Spacker’s wordless yell of near-panic broke into her attention. Rope. There was rope, dangling over boiling nothingness a few metres in front of her.
Best foot forward, Isy.
Even pressed right against the cliff-face, the ledge only gave a short run-up, and there were a horrible few moments as her boots left the crunching stone and she was swinging out across open air, with only the temporary disinterest of gravity between her and a short plunge into brilliant oblivion – and then her fingers closed on the rope, and she knotted her knees around it for good measure. There was a jolt, the repeated jerk of hand-over-hand as the line was hauled up and Isabel concentrated on not letting go. The ship rose, faster and faster and the whisper of sand was getting closer and closer, and the hemp seemed slick between her fingers even as slightly-charred wood thumped against her back. Then there were hands on her shoulders, pulling her up and the sand was screaming –
– and the airship surged upwards, pushed on the thermals of their almost-grave, as it cleared the torn-open edge of the portal with metres to space and swung up into clear blue sky.
“…bel?”
Her name finally managed to get her attention and Isabel blinked, realising that she had been staring blankly upwards for long enough to brand after-images against her vision. She was propped back against one of the canons, staring up into the impossibly-welcome sight of azure emptiness above, and her fingers were still clutched white-knuckle tight on the rope. The view was only slightly spoiled as Spacker’s greenish visage loomed over her – then improved somewhat more by a slightly-charred Daisy, looking down at her with clear eyes.
“We’re well away, Captain,” Spacker rumbled, and prodded her gently in the wrist. “…ye can let go ‘o that now.”
“Yes. Er, yes.” Isabel coughed slightly as she persuaded her fingers to – begrudgingly – loosen their grip on the rope. When she had pried herself free, she eased into a more upright position – not quite fully standing, as her knees seemed to have been replaced with exhausted jelly, but certainly propped into a more Captain-like stance. She looked round. The ship was battered, they were missing a mast, and there were a few bits of broken chain still wedged into the deck, but it was airborne and fairly intact.
There was also a wall of rather sooty faces crowded a few metres away, craning to look at her with a mixture of awe and concern. She raised an eyebrow at them, summoning as much of a smug grin as she could.
“Hell of a day.” It wasn’t funny, but it almost was, and that was enough. Once the laughter died back, Isabel looked around again – noting a few missing faces, a couple of gaps in the lineup that she couldn’t dwell on right now, and swallowed.
“This tub isn’t going to fix itself up, lads,” she said, quietly. Daisy looked a bit shocked at the statement, but the crew understood and began to disperse. There would be time to think about everything else later – but right now, there were jobs to do. Including hers.
Isabel bit back a groan as she pulled herself fully upright again, Daisy silently adding a shoulder in to the effort, and looked down over the side. Salt breeze, beautifully clear, ruffled her hair as she stared down at a blank expanse of bright ocean. There was nothing on the horizon either, and certainly nothing that looked like the shoreline that they had been following. She shook her head.
“Any idea where we are?”
“Nah,” Spacker shook his head and sucked unpleasantly at a loosened tooth. “I’ll pull out the charts when we got stars, but buggered if I can guess right now.”
“Okay.” Isabel shielded her eyes and looked down the damaged deck, where repairs were already starting, and her lips thinned. “Let’s make sure we aren’t going to fall out of whatever sky this is. And then we’ve got to find the others.”
Because there were going to be worse days than this – that, at least, she was sure of.