Ghost Ship Part 1

Unfortunately, no Glory Days this month. Like I warned before, sometimes short stories just... don't work out for me. (Maybe one in six or seven? Don't really keep close track.) Glory Days turned out to be one of them, unfortunately. So, like I laid out in the tier for these cases, going with the number two choice, Ghost Ship! Or, at least part 1 of Ghost Ship- it was already pretty late in the month when I gave up on Glory Days and started Ghost Ship, and Ghost Ship is going to be a fairly long one. (Part 2 should come early next month, at least!)

Ghost Ship is set four and a quarter centuries before Mage Errant.

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A few years before, the crew of the Kraken’s Maw, superstitious as they were, would have never voted to loot a ghost ship. They would have fled the instant they realized what it was.

A few years ago, though, times were still good for pirates. The rampaging warlords still fought one  another all across Ithos and its surrounding seas, most of them still carrying the mad dream of rebuilding the Ithonian Empire. In the chaos, there had been plenty of opportunity to seize merchant ships. Warlords had regularly fallen on land, driving their sea fleets to piracy to survive. Even many of the marine great powers had most of their attention focused on the land.

Then, all at once, it was as thought the dream of Ithos had finally died. The last few warlords who still carried that dream had fallen, seemingly all at once, replaced by warlords of petty, small dreams, who were content ruling patches of land that barely stretched past the horizon.

It hadn’t been the Calamity to crush the dream of Ithos, strangely. She had, bizarrely, withdrawn from her endless war against the Empire’s legacy, and announced the opening of her school of magic within the halls of her fortress to anyone and everyone. And, after she’d done so, the conquering warlords had, one by one, simply… failed. Their economies fell apart, their supply routes failed, their logistics collapsed, as though they had lost some hidden, secret backer.

The pirates of the Kraken’s Maw often debated whether the Calamity had slain that supposed backer or signed a treaty with them, but either way, the result had been the same.

The nations and great powers of the shore had been able to divert their attention away from fending off roving conquerers, and had been able to turn their gaze back to the pirates.

The golden age had ended, and the once-great pirate fleets had all been shattered. The fabulously wealthy pirate city of Turtle Bay, hidden in a secret bay on a seemingly inhospitable island, had been shattered by a half-dozen draconic great powers, leaving behind only a lava field that even now, two years later, was still cooling. The pirate empress herself had been hauled from the depths of the sea and stretched on the rocks to die in the sun, her dragon-length tentacles cooking in the heat of the empty scrublands northeast of Sica.

It was no time of peace, of course, and wars still raged aplenty on the shore. Few monarchs lasted more than a handful of years before being overthrown by wandering great powers or upstart archmages in their service, and dynasties were almost entirely unknown.  The powers of the land were far from being strong enough to wipe out piracy entirely, and more than a few ports still wouldn’t ask where your cargo came from.

But things were more stable, now, and land kingdoms had done more than enough to cripple piracy. For the first time in their careers, the pirates of the Kraken’s Maw ate lean.

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They hadn’t seen another ship in two weeks, nor seized one in a month and a half, when they came across the ghost ship. The draconic pirate hunters patrolled far out to sea these days, forcing the Kraken’s Maw to spend weeks and months searching for ships who had been driven off-course far out to sea. They hadn’t eaten anything fresh that wasn’t fish in weeks.

So, when they’d spotted masts on the horizon, the crew had been ecstatic.

Of course, when they got close enough to see the listing hull and the tattered sails, their enthusiasm dimmed enough that the captain called a vote on whether to continue. Jack Winethief wasn’t a particularly bold pirate when it came to his crew— he knew it was only their goodwill that kept him in charge. His healing magic certainly wasn’t strong enough to keep him in power by force.

Not that Winethief would want to, even if he could. The first ship he’d served on, a corsair under the command of a powerful kelp mage, had been a nightmare to serve on. And, for all her power, she’d still been assassinated by her own crew eventually.

No, Jack Winethief would stick to commanding with the consent of his crew, and if they voted him out of command, he’d accept it with grace. He’d still earn an extra share of any loot as ship’s healer.

When Winethief was sure he had his crew behind him, though, he was more than bold enough to please them.

The ghost ship was quiet as they approached. Not silent— the hull creaked and the sails rippled in the wind summoned by the pirate mages. But far too quiet to have anyone on board.

By the time they were close enough to see the ship’s name— The Three-Legged Mule— everyone on board was already convinced they’d stumbled across a smuggling ship. It was a lean, sleek clipper clearly built for mage-propelled speed, and even the Kraken’s Maw, one of the swiftest pirates still cruising the waters east of Ithos, never would have been able to catch up to it under normal circumstances. It was also hard to imagine why it would be out so far away from shore, if the vessel had any legitimate purpose.

For all the ominous air of the ghost ship, and fear of what might have taken the crew, their greed was stronger.

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The Three-Legged Mule was confirmed as a smuggler within minutes of boarding. The cramped cargo holds were packed with recreational alchemical concoctions, spices, and ancestral carvings from Sica— which, if a Sican ship caught you, earned a death sentence for smuggling them out of the ancient baobab city. Not even Ithonian rule had been able to wipe out all of Sica’s traditional practices.

There were no traces of the ship’s crew, no signs of violence or bloodshed. It was as if they had all just… vanished. Only one of the ship’s boats was missing, though, and there was no way a whole crew could fit into it— not even the tiny crew of a two-masted clipper like the Mule.

Normally, the captain of a pirate ship would find themselves hectically busy managing the looting of a taken ship, but with no prisoners to guard or interrogate, Captain Winethief left his quartermaster in charge of inventorying and seizing the cargo, and found himself drawn irresistibly towards the captain’s cabin of the Mule, seeking clues about the missing crew.

No one complained about the Captain shirking work, because what he found would decide whether they’d take the Mule as a prize ship, or leave it adrift.

It didn’t take much searching at all for Winethief to find what he was looking for— none at all, really.

The captain’s log of the Three-Legged Mule was lying right on the desk in the captain’s tiny, cramped cabin.

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Voyage Day 12:

…the quartermaster is still unhappy with my decision to take a wide arc route to Tsarnassus. We didn’t have much of a choice, though— the coastal waters are hardly safer for us now. We’ve merely traded pirates for armed patrols instead— and pirates are far more likely to leave us alive, instead of executing us for smuggling.

The deep sea route has its own dangers, but many of the local kraken packs and other monsters have been driven out of the area by some sort of undersea volcanic eruption. Our eight-armed friend has warned us not to get too close to the directly affected waters— according to him, rising volcanic gases can lower the buoyancy of the water itself, causing ships to sink on the spot, but he’s drawn us an excellent map with his own ink, which we can use to cut close, but not to enter the dangerous waters. I’ll be sure to bring him some sort of gift on our return voyage.

Johann’s complaining is just that, though. He’s always been sour and suspicious of change— though I’ve never met a quartermaster who isn’t.

Day 15:

We lost a crewman today, Laila Red. She had some sort of fit or seizure, and fell out of the drake’s nest down into the sea. Her head struck the ship’s railing on the way down, and she never surfaced again after hitting the water.

I’ve already ordered a cask of rum breached, and a funeral feast prepared. It will slow our progress, but better a few hours of travel lost than hurting the crew’s morale even more.

Day 16:

There’s something wrong with the horizon.

We almost lost another lookout this morning, but he managed to grab onto a backstay long enough to slow his fall, though he still badly twisted his ankle on hitting the deck.

When he landed, he was ranting and raving like a madman, claiming that something was eating the horizon.

I… did not take it seriously, at first. I was busy ordering the crew back to their stations, trying to divert their attention back to their tasks, when the lookout’s replacement cried out in terror and began retreating down the ratlines at astonishing speed. I’m quite amazed that she didn’t injure herself as well.

The crew was more interested in her identical ravings than her lack of injury.

What choice did I have but to climb up myself?

I am still, hours later, amazed that I didn’t throw myself back down the ratlines as well. 

The horizon really is shrinking. The higher I climbed, the smaller it grew, in utter contravention of the usual reality. A landlubber, so used to the broken, chaotic mess of a horizon they suffer, might not even have noticed anything, but it would be immediately, cripplingly obvious to any sailor. It was disorienting and wrong on some primal level.

My first thought, of course, was enemy action, that some illusionist was playing games with us. I’ve done it more than a few times myself to escape pursuers.

This was not light magic, though. I heard nothing with my affinity sense. And, though I’m no mirage mage, I’m more than capable of detecting their spells as well, and it is not one of theirs.

I may not have felt anything with my magic, but I did feel terror, however. How I not only stayed up, but forced myself to go back up later with equipment, to measure the exact degree of shrinkage, I am still unsure.

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Jack Winethief wasn’t sure why he stopped to pore over every line of the other captain’s calculations. They weren’t really essential towards finding out what had happened to the crew of the Three-Legged Mule. He justified it to himself as making sure that Captain Eliza Slate hadn’t been wrong.

Winethief suspected, however, that he was just afraid of what he’d find if he kept reading, and sought reasons to delay.

When he’d finished checking over Slate’s math, he could find no error in it— which, of course, still hardly ruled out her simply being mad.

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Day 17: 

The crew is deeply uneasy, and many are avoiding the deck whenever possible. I’ve never seen so many volunteers for bilge-work and pump duty before— even from sailors who had previously claimed they couldn’t cast the necessary cantrips.

I have to give them credit, though— they’re holding up far better under the circumstances than I had hoped. Hardly well, but they haven’t broken, which I’m sure many crews would under the circumstances.

None on the ship— not even I— can bear to be up in the drake’s nest for longer than a few minutes. Some atavistic part of us recoils in horror at the slowly shrinking horizon, forces us into irrational panic. 

As such, I’ve taken up long hours of scrying with my light magic. It seems… bizarrely unaffected by the shrinking horizon. As an experiment, I tried altering the spellforms, to function on a world the size of one with horizons as small as our newly shrinking ones, and the scrying failed miserably. Which, of course, tells me nothing other than that the world itself hasn’t shrunk.

Even if I wasn’t already confident that we were not dealing with mirage magic here, we have already traveled far beyond the maximum limits of a mirage spell— which are dictated not by the power of a mirage mage, but by the horizon itself. (Though only the greatest of mirage mages may reach so far with their magic.)

Which leaves few possibilities.

A skilled and powerful weather illusionist could produce effects like this— while they lack the ability to create many basic illusions, and are better known for creating fog-banks and imitation storms, I suspect that it’s possible to warp the horizon using massive lenses of water vapor and wind, in a similar technique to the way they create their sky-telescopes. The sky telescopes, of course, tend to have relatively smaller lenses— still enormous, of course, but no more than a league in diameter, and arranged in long chains for focusing purposes.

Weather illusionists who can create sky lenses are extremely rare, however, and the techniques are closely guarded. More, sky lenses are incredibly easy to detect for water and wind mages— and nineteen of our thirty-six souls still on board have one or both affinities.

We are not trapped in a colossal weather lens. 

The next possibility is a nightmarish one. If we’ve been trapped by a perception mage, there will be no escape for us, save until the perception mage inevitably goes mad— and they might well take us with them. Best to assume this isn’t the case, for there is nothing to be done about it if there is, and I will not be talking about this with my crew.

This leaves one most likely culprit. Oh, there are a few obscure illusion disciplines I’ve heard rumors of, but they seem most likely to be mere rumors. 

No, I’m confident that we face a dream mage at this point.

Dream magic is the strangest of the common forms of illusion, working by bizarre, shifting rules, convincing one that the abnormal is normal, or that one thing is another entirely. It can be seen through with preparation, foreknowledge, and focus, but the amount of each required grows precipitously with the skill of the casting dream mage.

And, if we are dealing with a dream mage, this one is a masterful one indeed, because I have been unable to see through their illusion.

There are other ways to beat dream magic, however. Most importantly, time. In my studies of illusion, one thing that every master illusionist I’ve read or spoken to agrees upon is that dream illusions shift and warp to an immense degree whenever their caster sleeps and dreams themselves— if they can even maintain the spell in their sleep. Few other disciplines, save for sleep mages, can do so, and sleep mages go mad or comatose early in their careers.

Not that madness is by any means uncommon for dream mages.

Even if a dream mage can hold an illusion intact for a night or two of sleep, it will warp more and more each time they do so. 

So, at the most, we can expect the illusion to break within three to four days, at which one of which has already passed. It seems likely that poor Laila Red was a victim of the illusion, which would make today the two-day mark instead.

We need only wait, and we will be freed from this damnable illusion.

The greatest question now is why someone would resort to a trick so bizarre. It seems a useless trick for a pirate or another ship tracking us— better to use illusions to simply conceal their ship.

I shall announce to the crew that I have solved the mystery, and explain that we have been trapped in a dream illusion.

I can only hope I am correct.

Day 18:

The illusion still shows no sign of breaking. The crew is still uneasy, but my announcement seems to have done some good.

The horizon is still shrinking, though. Up in the Drake’s nest, it is a third smaller than it should be, and the effect has become noticeable even farther down— the shrinking becomes visible a third of the way from the top now.

Day 19:

The illusion hasn’t broken, and the crew begins to mutter now.

Andras the quartermaster has proposed we make a break for it— put all our mages to task in a madcap effort to flee the threat. Little in the ocean can keep pace with us at top speed— even sea serpents at a sprint would struggle to keep up.

I shut down that suggestion immediately. Moving at high speeds to escape an illusion is intensely risky— not just for the risk of hitting an obstacle, which, admittedly, seems slim this far out in the ocean. I doubt there is anything else nearby but the enemy illusionist— and I have no idea how they pursue us. At this point, our water mages would surely have noticed any ship following us. No, the greater danger is one unique to dream illusions— escaping them at speed is similar to being woken from a dream abruptly, but can be far more dangerous, sending victims into confusion or delerium. 

The effect is random and sporadic, and no dream mage has been able to reliably replicate it or weaponize it, but I will not risk the odds, not on a ship like the Mule, which requires absolute control and precision to maneuver at high speeds. That sort of loss of control on the part of our mages, even for just a few seconds, would be enough to kill everyone on board the ship. There is a reason most who attempt to set speed records at sea die— the ocean is more hostile to high speeds than the land or sky.

If we had only been trapped in this illusion a short time, the risks would have been far less, but we’ve been in here for days now.

Still, the risk of temporary delirium can’t help but remind me of the risks many dream mages put themselves through. I’ve seen more than a few of them drive themselves mad— my own teacher eventually lost the ability to distinguish dream from reality, and took my left eye flailing a dinner knife in confused panic. 

I thank magic every day that madness is not the curse of light mages. We sometimes drive ourselves blind with incautious light magic, and blindness is nothing to dismiss, but I will accept the risk of blindness over the risk of madness any day.

After I shut down his proposal, Andras then proposed that we fill the sky and sea around us with battle spells to flush out the illusionist, but my first mate shut down that suggestion before I could.

The Mule relies on stealth and speed to deal with foes— we don’t have a battle mage worth the name on board.

Andras should have known that, at least. The shrinking of the horizon is wearing on him, worse than most, and it brings out the worst of his already ill temper.

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Winethief’s reading was interrupted by shouting.

“Captain, you’re going to want to see this!”

Winethief carefully marked his place in Captain Slate’s log, then tucked the little book in one of his pockets— he didn’t want anyone else reading it before he finished it.

When he stepped out on deck, it was entirely transformed from when he’d stepped into the cabin. Great piles of cargo lay stacked about the deck, and the crew of the Kraken’s Maw was bustling about as they hauled the loot over to their ship and inventoried it.

Though, at the moment, most of them were focused on the cabin boy, who was leading the captain down into the depths of the ship.

Said depths weren’t particularly deep— the Mule was a small ship, after all, meant for transporting small, high-value cargoes. Still, as the cabin boy led Winethief through the cramped cargo hold, it felt like they were delving into some murky, dusty, forbidding cave, with some immense monster lurking deep inside it.

Finally, dodging around tightly-stacked and bound piles of crates and great bales of unknown and likely illegal herbs, Winethief found his first and second mates, along with the ship’s tinker, waiting for him in the farthest reach of the cargo bay, a secluded corner that you could only reach by squeezing and crawling past other cargo.

There lay the ship’s vault.

It looked to be a solid metal box, ten feet to a side, but when Winethief rapped on the side, he could tell it was thin and light— he doubted that the whole thing put together weighed more than a single sailor. Once they got it open, they’d surely find powerful reinforcement enchantments or wards worked into the back of the metal.

It wasn’t much of a wait until they got in— their tinker might be a drunk and a fool, but she could break through any lock, ward, or enchanted door ever put to sea with her wire magic.

Winethief wouldn’t be ashamed to admit he spent the whole wait fantasizing about what might lay inside. Gold, most certainly. Silver, quite likely? Jewels? Possible, but it was always amusing to Winethief how often popular tales of piracy overestimated the number of jewels shipped at sea.

No, what he was really excited about was the possibility of enchanted items. There wasn’t anything more valuable you could haul, pound for pound, and they’d surely be kept in the ship’s vault.

When the tinker finally cracked open the door, Winethief wasn’t let down. Everything he’d expected lay within the vault, except the jewels, of course. There looked to be a half-dozen enchanted weapons off to one side, at first glance.

There were two things in the vault, however, that Winethief hadn’t expected.

The first was the horrible stench of rotting meat.

The second was the rotting corpse of a woman with a plumed captain’s cap, a woman with a glass left eye.

Winethief had no doubt he’d found Captain Eliza Slate.

His first question was why she was chained to the wall of the vault.

His second question was why the key to her chains lay just out of her reach on the floor in front of her.

His third question, the question that immediately made him put his hand in his pocket to make sure the captain’s log was still in it, was what could possibly have terrified Slate enough to kill herself with an enchanted dagger.