Riven Isles

39 | Another Bullet Cowers. Another Bullet, Coward.

His head violently tosses as she sucks hungrily on his lower lip. Her tongue slithers into his mouth and comes out bleeding as he tears it with his teeth and throws the smug, wild-eyed madwoman a yard off. In the second I had closed my eyes, she had put him on his back and straddled him, though his sword's steel stuck like a stake through her back, shining a grotesque red sheen.

Darling lays on her side with the hilt quivering by her seizing breasts and though her back is to me, I can tell by the shaking of her shoulders and the bouncing of her curls that as this woman dies, she is laughing. Her voice does not reach the cone device, but the hollow, haunting trill of her taunting titter reverberates, imagined, through my empty skull. How? I blink, over and over.

The captain staggers to his feet, dragging his heavy sleeves desperately across his lips, spitting, hawking. He cries out and throws his fists against a wall, cracking the clay. Forgetting his crutch, his steps blunder across the square, unbalanced. He falls into the arms of Increas Langley as the officer runs out from the shadows to catch him, his so often cold features flushed and expressive. He speaks, but his accent is so thick in the rush of his words that I pick up nothing.

I grab my rifle and stand.

Two men—her men—emerge with grave faces.

I must get down there. Cobbe grabs my wrist before I can get away and holds me back. I stumble. Tears on my lenses turn everything to oil paint, swirling with every motion. The goblin gnashes his teeth at me.

"Yeu ain't had orders yet, boy."

"But, the poison!" I exclaim. "I must help. We must induce vomiting right away. He could recover before it takes effect."

He pulls on my arm to stand and raises his rifle to my chest. His fingers wrap around my stringy bow-tie and he yanks me to his height. I feel I belong here. As if my back will never straighten again, I hang with my eyes fixed at the point between his and his gun's muzzle. It is little more than a steely blur.

"What yeu must do is wait fer orders," he snarls.

I choke, swallowing.

"The antidote!" I hear the captain demand. I look over, to where his hand raises the taller of the pair of strangers by the ruffles of his blouse. "Where is it kept?"

"I do not know, sir," the man replies, fingers splayed. As if they were not enemies. As if his leader were not dead on the ground by his feet. "She beds in the Moon Spire. She drinks... She drank the poison with her coffee in the morning, with her liquor in the day, with her moonshine at night."

"Then the antidote must be close."

Increas was already searching her person, turning her body like a doll's and rifling through each and every pocket with haste.

"No, Captain," the shorter man says. He fixes his pistol into its holster and shakes his head, spreading his hands. Why are they so acquiescent? Why do they bow their heads before him, and address him as if he had always led them? Pirate codes and pasts I know not of. "We seen her drink the poison, for certain. What we ain't seen in years is her drinking the antidote."

The captain wets his lips, chest heaving, expression unfathomable. Sweat beads on his bloody brow. He points towards the center of the small village, to where a large bronze bell hangs still on stilts of wood. "Raise the signal, now, Mr. Hewitt."

The shorter man bows obediently and withdraws.

"Increas," the captain summons, "search the Moon Spire. Find the antidote."

"Aye, Captain."

He turns slowly, then sprints with his hand against the scabbard on his waist towards a distinct twisting tower with two crescents built at its point which cup the sky where the moon might hover in the night.