Where Loyalties Lie

Chapter 34 - Starry Dawn

Elaina had never seen the remains of a town burned to ash and bones. It was a devastating sight, and no mistake. She’d taken ships, slaughtered crews, and seen dead bodies piled high on decks awash with blood, but this was something else. Men, women, and children all cut down in the streets, in their homes, in the taverns and brothels, on the beach, and in the surf. Lillingburn would never have claimed to be the biggest of the pirate settlements, but by the number of dead littering its carcass, it couldn’t have been far off.

“Don’t like it here, Cap,” said Pollick, and Elaina couldn’t help but agree.

“There’s nothing left to fear, Pol.” Elaina said with a sorrowful sigh. “They’re all dead.”

“Don’t mean it ain’t rightly creepy, Cap.”

For months Elaina and her crew had been sailing the seas around the isles, attempting to find some prey. When they’d finally caught a little cog, with barely enough plunder worth taking and all of it perishable, she’d taken Starry Dawn straight to the nearest port, only to find the nearest port was no longer there.

“This reminds me of me old soldiering days,” said Alfer Boharn, the ship’s new quartermaster.

Elaina poked at the lifeless body of a child with her boot. She liked Alfer, and he made for an excellent, fair quartermaster, but the loss of Corin had left a hole in Elaina’s chest. It made it worse that she knew what sort of Hell her friend was being put through day after day. After three months, Elaina wondered if there was even anything of her friend left. Lucy had a way of destroying a person’s mind, and her father had a way of destroying a person’s body.

“Why’s that?” Elaina stared at a grisly picture of a woman and two young boys still hand in hand, lying dead on a bed of red sand.

“Notice how all the bodies have been decapitated?” Alfer said.

“Creepiest fucking thing about it all,” Pollick said, taking off his eye glasses.

“Five Kingdoms folk did this,” Alfer said confidently. “Bastards always chop off the heads of the dead to make certain they don’t come back.”

“This ain’t makin’ it any less creepy, Alf.” Pollick spat into the sand and backed away from the nearest body, as though it might reach up and grab him if he didn’t.

“This?” Alfer pointed at one of the bodies and took a step towards Pollick. “This ain’t nothing, lad. You wanna see creepy, you go visiting the Land of the Dead. I been there.” He took another step. “Seen an army, must be a thousand strong, all dead and rotting. Some of ’em little more than bones, but they marched on all the same.”

Pollick was holding his ground, staring at Alfer through watery eyes. Elaina found the scene funny despite the carnage all around them. It was doing wonders to cheer up her dark mood.

“The walking bones ya think would be the worst, what with the lurching steps, chattering teeth, and the lack of any flesh holding ’em together. But no. Worst is the recently dead children, lad. Toddlers, some looking only just off their mother’s tits.” Alfer was just a few steps away from Pollick now, and his face had taken on a long, drawn, colourless aspect. “They travel in packs, only as high as ya knees, and they let out little person-like cries, as if they just want to find their parents. But they’re strong, ya see, stronger than they ought’a be. And once they got hold, they bring ya down, little mouths biting, eating at ya flesh.”

“Fuck, Alfer, stop,” Pollick wailed, turning and staggering away to empty his stomach of its most recent meal.

They were joined by the three pirates Elaina had sent deeper into the small town. “Find anything?” she said.

Ed shook his head solemnly. “Nothing but corpses. Seems whoever did this…”

“Five Kingdoms,” Alfer interrupted.

“Fair enough,” Ed said. “Seems they killed everyone. Pinched anything worth having, and burned everything not.”

“Third town they’ve done this to,” Alfer said, and Elaina glared at him. The last thing they all needed to be reminded of right then was how they were being hunted down. “Just saying what we’re all knowing,” Alfer muttered.

Pollick let out a strangled scream and stumbled backwards, tripping over the body of a dead man and landing face down in the breasts of a nearby dead woman. They all turned to stare at the spectacle, Ed pointing and laughing. Ignoring the mockery, Pollick scrambled away from the bodies and pointed towards his friends. “The fucking dead. They’re walking. Just like ya said, Alf!”

As one, all the pirates looked about at the bodies littered around the town square. Elaina saw plenty of corpses, some dead in the street, others little more than charred hands poking out of the ashen bones of a burnt-out building, but none of them appeared to be moving.

“Uh, Cap.” Ed’s voice was unusually high. “He ain’t wrong this time.”

Elaina followed her navigator’s shaking hand and finally saw what Pollick was talking about. People were coming towards them from the island side of the town; they looked dirty and gaunt, and some of them were definitely injured.

“They dead?” Elaina asked Alfer, who appeared to have some experience with walking corpses.

“Fucked if I know, Cap. Why don’t ya ask ’em?” Alfer whispered, apparently finding some courage as he stood behind his captain.

“Right bloody brave, the lot of ya,” Elaina said, summoning every ounce of bravado she could muster.

“Are you all dead?” she shouted out to the approaching figures as loudly as she could.

There was some dissension among the ranks as a few of the townsfolk turned to the others, as if they were debating the answer to the question. Elaina had never met any living dead, so had no idea how cunning they could be, but if they could pass themselves off as living it could present a real problem.

“Um, no.” The answer was shouted by a man at the front of the group, which was around fifty strong. “Are you?”

“Do we fucking look dead?” Elaina yelled back.

“Do we?”

She sighed. “This ain’t getting us nowhere. Pol, go up there and see if they’re dead.”

“Bugger off.”

Elaina laughed, and after a moment her crew joined in. “Don’t know much about the dead, Pol, but I’m fairly sure they don’t talk.” She looked at Alfer, but the man only shrugged back at her.

Elaina started forwards, striding up the corpse-littered street towards the survivors and trying not to look at all the bodies that lay in her way. At one point her boot caught on something, and she glanced down to see a little girl’s head, her eyes blank and lifeless, rolling away. Refusing to dwell on the horror, Elaina kept walking.

As she got within talking distance, a young woman, dishevelled and looking barely old enough to bleed, rushed forwards despite a nearby man’s attempt to catch her and pull her back.

“You’re Captain Black, aren’t you?” the girl said in a rush as the man caught up with her.

“Aye,” Elaina said warily, her hand resting on the hilt of the short sword buckled at her hip.

“I knew it. Get off me, Da. She’s come to save us.”

Some fifty sets of eyes turned Elaina’s way, and most of them had that pleading look about them that she’d often seen on the dying. She had no idea how she was supposed to go about saving them; she couldn’t exactly magic a town back into existence or bring the corpses back to life. Whatever they wanted from her was far beyond her ken or her ability.

Elaina raised her voice. “We just stopped by to sell some loot. Saw the place… well, like this. Figured we should see if we could fathom what happened.” She stopped to clear her throat and found it a little dry. “We ain’t come to save any of ya.”

Murmuring erupted through the crowd. The young woman didn’t seem deterred; she wrenched away from her father and ran up to Elaina. There was the sound of old, battered metal clearing a scabbard behind Elaina, and she held up her hand to stay her crew. Whatever the woman was about, Elaina would put money on it not being threatening.

“But that’s how she works,” the girl said. “She gave you the reason to come here just when we needed it most.”

“She?”

“Rin.”

Elaina laughed. “I ain’t exactly a priest of the sea bitch or owt, but far as I’ve seen it, she ain’t really that cunning. She wants ya somewhere, she don’t dangle a carrot on a stick, just beats ya with the stick ’til ya bloody well go.”

The young woman stared on in silence, her big brown eyes pleading and hopeful.

“So what happened here?” Elaina raised her voice in the hope that anybody else might respond. If there was one thing she couldn’t abide, it was zealots who believed everything that happened was the will of some god or another. “How did all of ya survive?”

“Sally saw the sails on the horizon a few days ago,” the woman said, still staring up at Elaina as if she were her own personal saviour. “We thought it was one of ours, or possibly one of Django’s traders come to pick up from the warehouse.”

A young man with a pretty face took up the story. “It wasn’t until she launched her dinghies full of soldiers that we realised she was flying a Five Kingdoms flag. By then it was already too late. Even if we’d had the men and the weapons, there was no way we were fighting them off in those numbers.”

“We hid in the caves,” the woman chimed in, directing a baleful glare at the young man, “while they were swarming the beach and murdering everyone. Lilling is a desolate little island, but we got caves that are hard to find if you don’t know they’re there. Those of us could make it took what we could and hurried there.”

“We didn’t have time to gather supplies though,” interrupted the young man, “so we’ve been starving ever since. The soldiers took everything they could and burned the rest. There’s no food left on the island. When Lille here spotted your sails, she said she knew it was you, and you’d come to save us.”

“I saw you when you stopped by last year,” Lille continued. “I’d know Starry Dawn anywhere. She’s so beautiful, just like her captain.”

Elaina groaned. She now understood the look in the little woman’s eyes; it was awe. The foolish girl looked to Elaina as a hero. The truth was, she was anything but.

“I ain’t come to save no one,” Elaina repeated. “We’re only here…”

“We should have gone with Captain Stillwater when he warned us,” said Lille’s father.

Elaina reckoned there was little else the man could have said that would have cut her off quite like that.

“What?”

“He warned us this might happen and offered to take as many of us as he could to New Sev’relain.”

“What?” Elaina repeated, her voice breaking.

The man looked confused; it was the look of someone talking to a simpleton, unsure of quite how to get their point across. Elaina realised she had a hand on her sword hilt, which undoubtedly wasn’t helping.

“Stillwater was here?” she said slowly. “When?”

“Couple of months back,” Lille said happily, and Elaina’s stomach turned to butterflies at the confirmation that Keelin had survived the massacre at Sev’relain.

“He warned us that Sarth and the Five Kingdoms were burning towns here in the isles,” the pretty young man said. “Said he had a safe town, one they didn’t know about. Called it New Sev’relain.”

“Where?” Elaina took a menacing step forwards.

Lille started to answer, but the young man rushed towards her and clamped a hand over her mouth. For her part Lille looked terrified, and Elaina had it in mind to save the poor girl, though not entirely for her own benefit.

“You take us there and we’ll tell you,” the man said, hope and desperation giving his eyes a strange, feral light.

“Deal,” Elaina said without thinking. She didn’t care about the terms. If Keelin was alive, she wanted to see him. Needed to see him. He at least would understand her pain over Corin’s fate.

“Cap,” Alfer said from behind her. “There’s a good fifty folk here, an’ we ain’t exactly flush on supplies.”

“Then ration them, quartermaster.”

Elaina turned back to the group of Lillingburn refugees. “Ya know who I am?” She waited for their nods of assent. “Ya best not be lying ta me over this, or I swear I’ll find the nearest sea beastie and feed all of ya to him.”