* * *
They ran up the stairs and down corridors meeting little resistance. A couple of unlucky pirates who wanted to see what the commotion of running feet was all about, met a deadly, painful fate in the form of a bolt between the eyes and a stiletto in the nether regions. Not so silent but rather deadly, Ned and Winceham searched for the sisters, like a wild swirling dervish would dance about a desert of stone. The keep was almost empty, it suddenly occurred to them. And the sisters were nowhere to be found, or seen.
Until they heard a different voice, in a very different way.
The top of the tower, if you please.
“Did you hear that?” asked Ned.
“I’m trying to quit,” said Winceham reflexively, in a purely defensive voice. He then realised that Ned had heard it as well.
“Top of the tower?” asked Winceham to make sure they were hearing the same voice.
“Speaking in our minds? What devilry is this?” asked Ned in disbelief.
“I’m not sure, but it could be a trap,” said Winceham nodding.
“What choice is there?” said Ned with a shrug. Winceham added:
“True, but I felt compelled to say that, just to make my point when things go horribly wrong.”
Ned placed a hand on Winceham’s good shoulder and told him with ardor:
“Hurry, Wince. Be on your toes; try to hide yourself in the shadows up there.”
“Believe me when I say that would have been my first choice as well,” said Winceham and sighed.
The two of them ran up the tower expecting some kind of surprise on the way, but nothing obstructed them. Soon, they emerged at the tower’s top, the night sky glistening with starlight, the clouds below a soft, tempting, milky white mattress. They noticed alarmingly that the ship was missing, along with any signs of Theo and Bo.
What really caught their eye though, was the way the sisters stood, not far away from the tower’s edge right in front of the staircase. They were frozen like statues, the intensity of their plight drawn on their living faces. They looked as if a last, stilted breathe remained in them.
Parcifal stood with Encelados blaring white hot above her head, both hands on the hilt, her face scrounged up in a mix of terror and hate.
Lernea was right beside her, calm like the sea, determined and unyielding as she was about to let an arrow fly; yet the bow’s string remained taut, and Lernea stood there as if petrified.
Right behind the sisters stood an extremely tall, lavishly robed man with a beard, ruffled hair and a sharp, too sharp too be real, icy blue gleam on his eyes. Winceham tried to meld into the shadows, taking small back-steps to the nearest ledge of the tower, his hood over his head. The bearded man spoke then with a rolling, deep voice that sounded like stony reeds alongside a foaming river:
“Now, now, Mr. Abbermouth. That would be futile, as much as it may hurt your ego.”
“Hobb,” stated Ned coldly.
“Well, yes. Among others,” said the man, the torch in his hand casting wild, creepy shadows of the two sisters as he silently and uncannily walked between them. Winceham noticed an unsettling thing about him: He wasn’t actually walking; he was gliding a couple of inches above the stone floor.
“I hold you responsible for my father’s death,” said Ned and glared at him, heedless of how peculiar the man’s voice and looks were, apart from the fact he was levitating. Hobb came to a stop a few yards away and smiled thinly:
“Weird things, humans. You blame me for your father’s death, while Culliper pulled that trigger. Still, you couldn’t kill him.”
“How do you know that?” asked Ned with uneasy suspicion.
“I know many things. But what I crave right now is one: the amulet.”
Hobb’s voice had a deadly finality to it. It took great composure and strength of character for a man to simply talk with that man around, yet Ned found in him the audacity to talk back.
“I’m not a jeweler; you have the wrong person.”
Hobb’s face suddenly got screwed up horribly and stretched impossibly. With another twist of its flesh and a growling, the human face was torn away, evaporating instantly.
In its place, an elongated head was now visible. Grey-blue skin shone slick in the starlight and a flock of stubby, short tentacles like anemones writhed around a circular, sharp-teethed maw. The hands had turned into webbed claws, sharp like scythes. Hobb, it turned out, was literally some kind of monster out of a nightmare. The creature that had disguised itself as Hobb looked at Ned with an irritated curiosity and blared ominously, its voice now grating:
“Don’t play coy with me! I know about your little escapades, and I’ve seen these females pathetic dreams! I couldn’t care less. Where is the amulet?”
“That’s a really ugly way to ask for things,” said Ned, while he noticed Winceham stood silent and immobile as a rock. Ned realised he was suddenly a little bit outmatched but carried on, trying to understand the foe in front of him and think of what to do next, really really fast. The creature approached him with unnerving silence and stood hovering in the air a few feet away. Its blue-on-blue eyes had the colour of the deepest sea.
“The comedian. Humor. How infantile. Not unlike your race.”
“Better infantile than have a mop for a face,” Ned told him and pointed to the maw.
“You mock me? I am beyond mocking,” replied the monster with a rumbling voice.
“Yes, I see mopping really is beneath you,” said Ned grinning, gesturing at the tentacled maw.
“You puny little human, you cannot begin to fathom the eons that have born me.”
“No, but I’m pretty sure you bore me,” said Ned and noticed Winceham’s eyes twitch.
“I was hoping I did not have to feed tonight; your minds sicken me,” the creature said and hissed.
“Well, I could say the same thing about your face but that would be a compliment in your case,” replied Ned, and saw Lernea’s hand spasm ever so slightly.
“I’ll have what is mine, Ned Larkin, and you’ll have what you deserve!” said the monster as he lunged forward with a gaping maw, aiming squarely for Ned’s head, its powerful long arms springing to catch Ned in a deathly embrace.
But it was right at that time that Lernea’s arrow struck him in the back, causing it to turn around reflexively and growl, its maw tentacles writhing like the feet of a millipede. Ned slid away and ran towards the wheeled platform where the ship had docked. From the corner of his eye, he saw Lernea was trying to move and Parcifal’s hands were trembling. Winceham too, could move his head again.
“I will find great delight in sucking your skull dry, Larkin!” cried the creature as it hurled himself against Ned, its robes fluttering in the night breeze.
“With your sense of humor, that’s a no-brainer!” yelled Ned gleefully and saw Lernea, Parcifal and Winceham suddenly unfreeze completely. Without a second look at their surroundings, their weapons were being trained against the creature. Their angered shouts and brave cries rose into the night air.
“By Skarla, we’ll have vengeance!” yelled the sisters, and Winceham asked before rushing towards the blue-skinned terror:
“Ya think you’re tall, eh?”
With a wave of its hand and a low-keyed hum from its maw, all three of them were pushed back in the air. They landed hard on their backs, their weapons flying off their hands. The monster turned its attention squarely at Ned, before it added gleefully:
“Where is the humor now, human?”
The last word had the subtle hints of sounding exactly like a writhing mass of worms would. Ned smiled coolly and retorted:
“You just keep asking yourself, don’t you?”
The creature let out a terrible sound between an infuriated growl and a cacophonous gurgling laughter before it reached for Ned.
Right when there was nothing funny to joke about, right about when Ned could see the others were still trying to get up, too far away to act, he saw Bo, the bunny with the flaming
eyes jump right in front of him. Bo grinned at Ned widely and hopped back out of view in a split second, right before a hot molten cannonball hit the monster square across the face and embedded what was left of him and his smoldering robes in the tower’s stony floor, a few feet away.
He then saw the ship wobbling uncertainly, sails rippling with small gusts of wind. Theo hurried to man the helm, while the bow cannon cooled with a red after-glow on its lip. A thin wisp of smoke wafted westward, where the wind blew.
Ned smiled broadly and sighed with relief, while Winceham yelled as he looked around him, waiting for confirmation:
“Did ya see it? Did ya see the bunny?”
The sisters got up on their feet, nursing aching muscles and perhaps a couple of displaced bones. Lernea was about to say something to Winceham, but she lost her words when she saw a bright flash and an uncanny oval slit appear right above the tower floor in mid-air, at the place where the creature should have met its demise.
The slit made things look as if peering through a strange, stained looking glass, all broken and uneven. It was like someone had pieced together parts of another night sky; as if another place lay beyond that oval slit. The monster was limping heavily; it glanced at Ned and said nothing. Its eyes flashed suddenly, before it crossed into the oval slit, which then disappeared as strangely and abruptly as it had appeared.
Ned stood there unable to really understand what had happened. So did the others, apart from Theo who, seemingly unfazed, settled the sloop near the platform a bit awkwardly. He jumped off the ship and quickly tied her down to the tower with a mooring line. He sounded awfully excited when he rushed over by Ned’s side.
“Wow! Did you see that? I think it left a crater on the floor!”
“Where were you?” asked Ned weakly.
“Well, that pirate was making weird noises like the ones people do when they die and Bo seemed really worried when the ship began to wobble real bad. He kind of insisted that I placed my amulet in this weird slot in that awful chair, and then all the wobbling stopped. But the pirate died,” answered Theo truthfully, his voice trailing off with sadness.
“No, I mean, where were you when all this happened?”
“Oh, I heard this weird voice in my head and it felt all wrong; I was in the ship, where you told me to stay. But for some reason, Bo was already gnawing on that rope we had tied and before I could convince him otherwise, the ship had drifted away. So I thought I’d give her a spin,” said Theo excitedly and added thoughtfully:
“You did say I should keep an eye on her, didn’t you?”
“Yes I did. I’m not sure though what would have happened if I hadn’t. Or just what kind of a bunny Bo is, really,” said Ned, ponderously gazing at Bo who was happily tucked away again inside Theo’s robes, his face barely protruding, his nose twitching as if he was about to sneeze.
“Well what about that? You might be actually funny, lad. I think it saved our lives, to be honest. I couldn’t flutter an eyelid, but everything you said, it just cracked me up for no reason! And then I could move again!” said Winceham as he nourished a bruised elbow, grinning as he approached Ned and Theo. The sisters followed close behind, bickering about which one’s fault some thing, or the other, really was.
“He, it, whatever, caught you by surprise!” Lernea accused Parcifal. The younger by one minute sister, replied in aggravated tones:
“Me? You were the one who said to go have a look! Your decision, your responsibility, your fault! I was simply carrying out your orders, my queen!”
“Only when it suits you, sister!” yelled Lernea, right about when Theo saw Culliper untying the rope that held the ship moored to the tower.
“He’s trying to get away!” cried Theo and began to twirl his hands in the air for no apparent reason.
“You didn’t tie him down?!” asked Ned in wild-eyed disbelief.
“You told me to look after the ship, not him!” replied Theo as the air between his hands began to fill with a warm, violet light.
“Amateurs,” said Winceham softly and picked up a loose cobblestone. He closed one eye and aimed at Culliper, just as he was about to start running back to the ship. Winceham threw the stone expertly and it connected with Culliper’s head at a very accident-prone spot; the back of his head. Culliper staggered for a couple of steps, before collapsing.
The violet light between Theo’s hands died down softly; he and Ned walked over to where Culliper lay. He wasn’t exactly unconscious, but he looked painfully disoriented. His face sported a furrowed grin, quite suitable for someone possibly brain damaged. Ned caught him by the nape of his jacket and told him more so, than asked him:
“We’re not done yet. Where do you think you’re going?”
“Tallyflop,” said Culliper drowsily.
“Where’s that?” asked Ned and Culliper simply pointed up in the sky. Ned asked again, his voice giving off signals he wasn’t in the mood for jokes.
“I’m not in the mood. Is that where the last shipment took the woodkin to?”
Culliper nodded like a drunken chicken would.
“Where is that?!” yelled Ned and still, a single finger pointed up into the sky. Theo asked rather calmly:
“The stars?”
Culliper smiled like a five-year old boy and happily crumbled down on the platform.
“It can’t be. Off-world,” remembered Ned.
“Why not?” asked Theo.
“Flying is one thing. But the stars?”
“Well I’m sure it’s perfectly safe.”
“What is?” asked Lernea, newly arrived over Culliper’s unconscious body.
“Flying to the stars,” said Ned and nodded.
“Ridiculous!” said Lernea with a scoff, while Parcifal commented with a curious smile on her lips:
“No-one in our history has done that before, have they?”
Winceham had only heard Parcifal speak, so he had to ask in turn:
“What’s never been done before?”
“Flying to the stars, to a place called Tallyflop, to save the woodkin and maybe get back at Hobb or whatever that thing was called,” said Ned, quietly gazing at the starry night sky. Winceham caught a glimpse of everyone contemplating this seriously, and after a moment or so of thinking, said with a sigh:
“Maybe, just maybe, if I’m lucky enough, I’m still just having a bad trip.”