<u>18</u>
Mar…get. Herself. She was not all the way changed. Still could think, act and fight. Especially fight, after the enemy struck and everything happened. After Vrol betrayed her.
First, touching the light-wall made sudden reversal come over them both. They had dropped from the sky as she stretched, bulged and turned monstrous, burning and roaring with pain. Feeling her mind going out like the stump of a torch. Not all the way, though. Her transformation had halted, leaving Marget able to think a bit and remember. Next landed hard inside… their fall had ended inside of a big, rusted structure.
There had been talk… others had come… Glass-cat, Brass Monkey, the small animal, and then Vrol had brought them back up to the ship of ghosts, where another change and attack came. The details were blurred by lingering soreness and rage. Easier to lash out than to try to remember… but unthinking beasts rush into traps and get killed. She could not give in.
Vrol had survived the second attack, changing partway again. He’d fled and returned… Marget remembered those things. There was a storm, but no one wanted to go below. Better the wind and lightning above than creaking and pitching darkness, inside of a floating tomb. Marget had clung fast to the rigging; roaring defiance and facing the gale head-on.
Vrol returned when the storm ended, looking quite small from her troll-sized vantage point. Like the others, she’d gone to meet him, only to find herself blocked. An unseen wall had sprung up between them, not falling to axe-blade, curses or blows. After that, the traitorous ship opened its wooden jaws to swallow her whole. Marget had fallen again; a stomach-lurch drop of ten, fifteen feet. She’d crashed onto her back with bruising force and a shower of splinters, while stars and bright lights swam through her head.
But Marget did not stay down. A warrior hits the ground, but always gets up. She’d rolled and tumbled as the ship formed a prison around her, pushing Marget far away from the others. With a goblins’ chorus of creaking, banging and splintering sounds, she’d been moved deeper into the ghost ship. Pipes squealed and bent all around her. Planks snapped like old bones, reforming again as her cell drifted past dark, musty hallways and dust-shrouded cabins. Weaving throughout was the voice of her “brother”, Vrol, telling Dark Cloud what to do with its prisoners.
Marget drowned out his treacherous words with thunderous roaring and curses, taking her fury out on the ship. She was bigger and stronger, now; barely able to keep ahead of own violent temper. Howling defiance, she lashed out at the cell, attacking its rippling, crackling walls with her axe and the two swollen feet that had burst right out of their boots.
Marget hacked and battered, destroying all that she could, until the cramped little prison whirled to plunge downward. It lurched to a halt after a few pounding heartbeats, spun wildly, then opened out to the hull. The gap wasn’t much, just a body-wide crack, but enough to bring even a rampaging troll to its senses. Cold air and starlight swirled in. Down below, patchy clouds and a dizzying smear of dark land hurtled by.
Marget roared, bracing her big, lumpy feet on both sides of that deadly opening. With one hand she clutched at a burning-hot pipe. It writhed in her grip like a snake. Vented shrill jets of scalding steam as its shining surface reflected hundreds of jeering ghosts. Marget’s flesh hand clenched the haft of her axe. Wind and rust swirled up through the crack, which widened to form a ragged, fanged grin.
‘Continue to rampage, and I will push you out to your death, creature,’ said a cold, mocking voice in her head. ‘I was told to deliver you to a derelict fortress in safety… but nothing is safer or calmer than death, and how will the captain know what I’ve done with his unwanted crew? Why would he care?’
Marget snarled, whipping her head around, trying vainly to drive out that sneering mechanical voice. She was not in a mood to be threatened, completely unwilling to cower. Instead, Marget twisted, half falling. Caught herself on the jagged edge of that grinning crack, then swung herself right the scrad out of her cell.
The airship’s bottom was rough, with many chinks into which big, half-troll fingers or construct digits could wedge themselves; lots of broad timbers an axe could bite into. Marget was big and heavy, but strong, fast and utterly fearless. She climbed out of under the ship and then swarmed up its side.
Vrol had done this. She had heard the words he spoke in her cell, ordering Marget’s imprisonment. He wanted the crew pushed out of his way as he went off to face what would certainly kill him, alone. The empty head of a male had no bottom, as everyone knew.
But Marget was female and mighty. She did not bow to the worthless plots of a cub, and she would <u>not</u> crouch in her cell and just wait to be carted off. She climbed instead. Fought her way upward, though the ship sprung its timbers and plating at her, making noise like a felled tree crashing through branches on its way down. Suddenly loosed on one end, that violently hurtling beam carried Marget out over nothing but death. Could not flick her off, though. She clung to the flapping end like a big, cursing burr, hanging over a thousand-foot drop, taunting the ship to try harder.This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
“Here I am still!” roared Marget. “You are old, weak, leaky and blind! A wandering <u>breeze</u> would me give more of a fight!”
There was no answer but wind and the creaking moan of stressed wood, as the spar that she rode snapped back into place on the hull. Then Marget’s ears filled with her own harsh panting and scrambling, the repeated <u>thunk</u> of axe into wood as she scaled the ship’s side. Halfway along, the Cloud leaned suddenly over, trying again to shake Marget loose.
But this newest trick didn’t work. She wouldn’t let go. Wouldn’t fall. Not even a steep, twisting climb tore her free of the hull, though the moon spun drunkenly ‘round that twisting horizon and spiraling ship. The noise was a head-splitting mixture of screaming engines and rattling lines, shifting wind and terribly flexing wood. Marget vomited. She heaved up evil and shape-change magic in great, wracking spasms, but clung tight anyhow, insulting the ship between bouts. At last, Dark Cloud wore itself out and leveled again. The thunder of engines faded. Marget clung a bit longer, then clambered up and over the rail. Made it, to find a pair of armed construct people awaiting her.
The half-troll dropped to the deck in a fluid crouch, one broad hand splayed against wood, the other clutching her axe. She was smaller and smarter, now, if still very angry.
“I… am not minded… to die, today,” panted the warrior. “Nor to be made a prisoner, either. Vrol is a fool, and we will have words, soon.”
Except that he wasn’t aboard. He had left after giving Dark Cloud his last orders, that pair of constructs explained. The copper-wood-glass folk were a male and a neuter, newly brought forth from the Cloud’s well of trapped souls. So be it. Marget straightened, looming three feet over their uptilted heads.
“If he has gone, then I will hunt him,” she rumbled. “Try to stop me and see how you fare.”
There was sudden noise and commotion from below the ship’s scarred wooden deck. Marget’s lumpy face split into a savage grin as the sounds reached her ears.
“You have not caged the others, death-ship!” Marget gloated, thumbing her broken nose with a calloused thumb. “You cannot hold us. We have a world to defend, and all your planks will be kindling, if you put yourself in our way!”
The male construct folded both arms on its whirring-and-clattering, glass-fronted chest.
“Dark Cloud proposes a truce and a compromise,” said the male automaton. He alone spoke, for the other had turned away to run a hand along the ship’s dented brass rail. “There is an old tank-fortress a hundred miles further north,” he continued, adding, “We can be dropped off there…”
“You lot, not I,” cut in the neuter, shaking a head in which gears whirled, and sparks drifted. “I shall remain with the Cloud, to see that nothing dangerous attempts to board in your absence.”
“I do not care,” growled Marget. “Stay, fight or get out of my way. Makes no difference to me but mess and delay.”
As she spoke, the ship’s manna rose up like a fog to wreathe the glowering half-troll. She felt her thinking grow sharper. Bigger words came, as her angle to deck and crew shifted suddenly. Marget twisted and turned to examine herself. She was not fully an orc, yet… still bore that mechanical arm and a foot too much height… but almost. Nearly Margetta Thorn, offspring to Vlakist.
The forecastle hatch swung open, then, its resounding <u>BOOM</u> causing Marget to pivot; axe raised and ready. But it was Glass-cat, Brass Monkey and a lightning-like river of fur that burst from the hatch, armed with strength, determination and cunning nearly the equal of hers.
Marget shook herself. Her armor had shrunk. Her clothing was still closing tight and sewing itself, but her body was mostly orcish again. She took stock of the others as they gathered to join her. Glass-cat had lost part of her shimmering tail, and Nameless was scraped raw down the left side. Brass Monkey was dented and scored from battle, one of its eyes glowing a dimmer red than the other…
But all were present and mostly well. Vrol’s trouble, she reflected, jamming thoughts together with almost an audible click, was that he rejected help. He would thrust others away every time, rather than let them accept any risk. Well, he was a male, and stupid that way, but Marget would not let that stop her. She inclined her head, saying,
“I am minded to go after Vrol. He cannot take care of himself, much less fix all that is wrong in this place.”
Nameless squeaked something that sounded like laughter. It ran up Marget’s boot and her armor to take up a post on the orc’s broad shoulder. Said Glass-cat,
“I think that there will be work for all of us before this world is pulled free of its dive. Mrowr has been altered. We all have,” she glanced over at Brass Monkey, then. The hulking simian seemed to reply in her mind, for she nodded. “Over and over, indeed… but perhaps for the last time, if we are clever and lucky.”
Marget grunted. Turning to face the new crewmen, she said,
“We accept this tank-fortress, Metal Man.”
“Zak,” he corrected. “And I will come with you, she-monster. Someone must be there to point and laugh, when all of these schemes fall in on your heads.”
Marget leaned over to snuff at that faintly buzzing automaton, seeing her own reflection grow large and distorted. She sneezed explosively, freckling brass, wood and glass with bubbling orc-spittle.
“We shall see who laughs, Metal Man,” growled Marget, as Dark Cloud banked into the wind, changing course again.
The last smear of sunset was gone from the sky, but they had a plan. Heat-fiends ceased spinning down below, dropping their burden of leaves and debris. As for attack, a fallen steel titan shot at them, once, but its sputtering rays could not reach the Dark Cloud, and all of its missiles fell short.
Two candle-marks later they came to an armored and once mobile-fortress: a ruin of battle, indeed.
“Here we part company for a time,” said the airship, speaking through Shade, its genderless construct. “This life or next, though, we <u>will</u> meet again.”
Glass-cat uttered a soft yowl at Marget’s side, tail switching, shoulders rolling, staring hard at that neuter automaton. In an eternity haunting a ghost-ship, it seemed that the two had become bitter rivals. Marget stepped between them.
“We run from nothing and no one, puppet,” she rumbled. “Come seek us, whenever you finish hiding from battle.”
The five of them left shortly thereafter, swinging downward on lines produced by the Cloud. From haunted airship to derelict tank, they slid like ballooning spiders. Expected a fight and got one, too.