The Crooked Key, Chapter 17: Tricks and Trinkets
The Crooked Key by Kyle Marquis
Chapter 17: Tricks and Trinkets
They ran for it, of course. When the banisher looked back, he saw Nowan de Valc being lowered on a broad wooden platform, the way larger ships would lower a launch. Two starfish giants flanked him. Then one of the dragons opened its mouth and vomited forth another, smaller dragon, with a dog-like scarlet head and shimmering blue scales. It joined the Mollusk Knight as he reached the beach.
Then Skaithness and the banisher crested the coppery hill. The castle rose above them. One of its lower levels was ablaze, hammered by the catapults of Nowan de Valc’s galleys. Even as Eilo watched, a galley shot a ball of flaming pitch over the walls. A moment later the castle’s own artillery answered: a bombard-shot, perfectly aimed, arched up into the cloudless heavens, then fell right in the middle of another galley, obliterating it. Burning mercenaries fell into the water.
But most of the enemy fleet had reached the dock. Mercenaries and monsters raced up the beach toward the castle’s main gate. Archers and arquebusiers kept up a steady rain of fire, but as more horrors climbed out of the water, the banisher did not know how long Lady Ryphonia could hold out.
Below, Nowan de Valc followed the path of the crooked key as if he could smell it.
Eilo and Skaithness hurried down the slope toward the western beach. Their copper boat was still there, half-covered by a tarp.
“Can you, I don’t know, use the key on it?” the banisher said as they both ran down the rocky slope, trying not to trip. “To, I don’t know, give it a sail?”
“I don’t think so,” Skaithness said. “I think I’m supposed to use the crooked key in the control room. And there’s only one control room.”
“Well, there have to be two,” Eilo said. “That’s why Nowan is following us.”
The vomited-forth dragon crested the hill, wiggling like a mudskipper. One of its eyes flashed blue. Eilo shouted a warning and hurled himself behind a slab of copper a moment before a blue beam tore across the beach. A wave of superheated air made him gasp. The blast hit Skaithness and sent her flying and bouncing over coppery rocks, to land in a stunned heap near the water. The beam had annihilated every part of the rocks except, Eilo saw, some of the copper filaments, which remained like tangles of wire. It had missed him by inches.
The banisher kept running, using the glaive to leap from stone to stone as he headed for Skaithness. At one point, a rock exploded behind him and he nearly lost his balance. Turning, he saw Nowan de Valc where the dragon had just been, holding a smoking arquebus. With everything else, he also had a gun?
Eilo resolved to consider the unfairness of the situation later. He reached Skaithness just as she rose, dazed but determined, and stumbled down the beach toward the boat. Eilo wanted to help her, but she was still moving at least as fast as him, fueled by terror even as her armor’s vigor drained away.
“Where’s de Valc?” Skaithness gasped.
“Behind there!” Eilo said, pointing with his glaive toward a spoke of copper. The Mollusk Knight and his starfish guards were moving to flank them as the dragon closed in. Eilo and Skaithness hurried toward the boat, then the dragon appeared from out of the water.
Eilo kicked the boat over and they both hid behind it. The dragon’s eye-blast vaporized the tarp and hammered the boat. It forced them back, but they held on, and they were not harmed. Except that all the bouncing around had freed the crooked key from its pocket in the armored woman’s skirt, which was now nothing but a few tatters of silk.
“Almost lost it!” she said, grabbing it off the beach.
But then the banisher peaked his head out and said, “No, leave it.”
“But—”
“Just trust me.”
They hurried away from the boat, leaving the crooked key under it, and hid among the rocks nearby.
Eilo peered out from behind cover. Nowan de Valc strode out onto the beach, reloading his musket with calm and practiced motions. Eilo could see a handgonne of similar design at his belt. He turned and said something that Eilo couldn’t hear. Then the banisher ducked, because the helmet kept him from seeing where the Mollusk Knight was looking.
“What’s he doing?” Skaithness whispered.
“Get ready,” he said. “Do you still have the cutlasses?”
Skaithness had one, though the dragon’s eye beam had burned away its leather sheath. That would have to do. Eilo spread the last of his banisher’s wine along the edge of the cutlass, hoping it would adhere to the weapon, and told Skaithness where to position herself.
Nowan de Valc stared at the copper boat. The dragon climbed onto a rock behind him, then hesitated. Its eyes looked dim now, and it sniffed the air.
“It’s there,” Eilo heard him say. He took a step forward, then hesitated. “Go get it.”
The two starfish giants lumbered across the beach. Stupid creatures, they seemed to consider the flipped-over boat for a full minute as the banisher waited in an agony of suspense. Then one picked up the boat, and the other reached for the key.
That’s when Eilo jumped down off the top of the coppery cliff, and Skaithness slipped around the other side. Glaive and cutlass made short and brutal work of the two lumbering creatures, who splashed the rocky beach with their green blood as they fell. Skaithness yelled in triumph and grabbed the key.
The blast of the handgonne was deafening. It slammed Skaithness back against the cliff, and a ricochet clipped the banisher’s morion, knocking it askew. He pushed it out of his eyes in time to see Nowan de Valc draw his handgonne. He shot the banisher in the chest, slamming him onto the rocky beach. His glaive skittering out of reach. Eilo tried to rise, but though the handgonne ball had not pierced his armor, his ribs felt pulverized. He managed to remove his dented helmet. He had vague plans to throw it at the Mollusk Knight.
“That was well fought,” Nowan de Valc said. “And you fought to the very end, which is commendable.” He flipped his pistol around to hold it like a club and struck the busted morion from Eilo’s hands. Still cautious even in victory, he inched around the fallen banisher and retrieved the crooked key.
Skaithness’s gauntlet had closed around the keychain, and even as weak as she was, nothing seemed able to release her armor’s grip on anything. So Nowan de Valc just ripped the gold chain. Links splashed into the tidal pool where Skaithness lay. The Mollusk Knight held the wavy, crystalline key up to the midday light. Eilo could feel bombard shots shaking the earth as the Mollusk Knight stepped carefully away from them. He was about to say something when more of his followers arrived.
“Do you have it?” he asked a man who still wore the armor of a hexguard. Eilo remembered him from the Mollusk Temple. He carried some kind of irregular shell not unlike de Valc’s helmet. In answer, the fallen hexguard waved for two more of the starfish giants to approach. They carried between them a palanquin, and on the palanquin was an enormous, perfect pearl, marred only by a single golden inlay about one-third of the way down from the top. A Baristoc naval officer, looking entirely ordinary and armed only with a cutlass and a one-handed handgonne at his belt, followed the giants. He saluted the fallen hexguard and the Mollusk Knight, then swiveled the gold inlay up, revealing a keyhole.
“Where’s the artillery?” Nowan de Valc asked.
“Taking aim now, sir,” the fallen hexguard said. He checked the shell in his hand as if it were a pocket watch. Was it telling him the location of the artillery? Had it sensed the crooked key?
The shell hissed faintly and air swirled around it. The banisher thought he knew its function, since he had read of similar devices: it was the sorcerer’s trinket that had stolen the wind. Then the naval officer stepped between him and the hexguard, keeping his eyes reverently on the huge pearl.
Eilo remained silent, because he wondered if he might go unnoticed, and also because his chest hurt so badly that if he said anything, he feared he might scream. Skaithness was still, except for one gauntleted hand slowly opening and closing. The tide was coming in, filling up the rock pool where she lay.
Nowan de Valc looked down at the armored woman. Then he had the naval officer remove Eilo’s glaive, Skaithness’s cutlass, and even a stray piece of driftwood big enough to use as a cudgel. The officer tossed everything behind the giants. The dragon swished its tail back and forth.
“I’m sorry that we can’t both get what we want,” the Mollusk Knight said. “I truly am. But you understand that if you had finished turning that key while wearing that armor, you would have died, right? The tower would have eaten you up, used your mind and body to finish creating itself.”
“I would have made something new,” Skaithness said weakly.
“You would have been a sacrifice,” Nowan de Valc said. His voice echoed in the banisher’s head. “I thought you were smarter than that, Skaithness. I thought you had a more purely focused will. The slimy things in that temple promised me the world, but I knew they would use me as fuel. The hexguards taught me to wield my will like a dueling knife, so when I create the new world, I’m not going to be its sacrifice. I’m going to be its god.”
He took off his mollusk helmet, revealing a strikingly handsome face with high, sharp cheekbones and long, braided hair in the style of the far-west duchies. At the time, the banisher guessed he was maybe thirty-five, though Nowan de Valc was almost ten years older. Though Eilo correctly identified the source of the faint discoloration beneath his skin, as he had seen it before in bog witches: an enchantment of the blood that rendered them as resistant to mortal weapons as any spirit. The banisher understood why Nowan de Valc had been so meticulous about removing their weapons. He put his helmet down on a convenient outcropping, then turned and said, “Set it down.”
“Here, milord?” the fallen hexguard asked.
“As good a place as any,” the Mollusk Knight said. “It won’t expand so much that it literally swallows that woman’s castle, but this position will be a defensible one, I think. If that even matters anymore.” His voice no longer felt like slime in Eilo’s brain. He had a rich, pleasant tenor. Hexguards were often drawn from the ranks of church cantors, and Nowan de Valc had been a notable singer in his youth.
The Mollusk Knight looked from the crooked key to the pearl, then turned and glared at the hexguard.
“Where the hell is that artillery? I know we’re not trying to build a clockwork world here—that’s the girl in the tide pool over there—but I expect some military precision from these fucking mercenaries.”
“Sorry, sir,” the naval officer said. “We…” He looked back as another officer appeared on the rocks, and nodded. “We’re ready, milord.”
“Do it,” Nowan de Valc said. Then he turned back to Skaithness and said, “I would say I’m saving your life by destroying that tower, but you were always just a wind-up girl with a fixed lifespan. You’ll be dead soon one way or another.”
Cannons thundered, rattling Eilo’s teeth. He did not see the half-formed golden tower fall, but he could feel it. Skaithness wailed as if someone had stabbed her in the guts, but she did not move, except to work her gauntleted hands a little. The noise of the bombardment continued; the banisher could not see, but the Mollusk Knight had deployed artillery from his ship to bombard the castle directly. He spoke with some of his officers, then sent them to finish the bombardment and make sure a sortie from the castle didn’t attack the ship.
The rattling impact sent pain through Eilo’s chest and he moaned.
“Be quiet, Eilo, and you might live to see the new world,” the Mollusk Knight said.
“I can’t believe a sorcerer shot me,” the banisher groaned, sitting up and getting his hand out of the freezing tidal pool.
“A sorcerer?” Nowan de Valc said. “Oh no, Eilo. I know a few tricks, but I’m not a sorcerer, not really. I’ve met sorcerers. A sorcerer is one truly willing to take the plunge, to identify oneself fully with a pattern of the world that seeks to usurp, degrade, or spiritually obliterate humanity; as a saint seeks to perfect, elevate, or metamorphose humanity. Maybe poor Skaithness is a saint, I don’t know.”
The banisher pulled off his sodden gloves and warmed his hands, then shifted his legs around so he could face the Mollusk Knight directly. Every rattle of the guns sent a shock of pain through his legs, but nothing seemed broken.
“And you don’t, what, identify with whatever powers you dug out of the swamp?” Eilo asked.
“I use them,” the Mollusk Knight said. “Knowledge and will, banisher: without one, the other is worthless. We’ll resume this discussion when I’ve remade the world.”
Nowan de Valc approached the pearl with the crooked key, turning it in his hand as if trying to figure out how to insert it. All eyes turned to him, as they awaited whatever grand metamorphosis the Mollusk Knight would bring about in the world. A new age. A new god. Everyone watched.
Eilo stood up, pulled the handgonne from the naval officer’s belt, and struck him across the temple with the pommel. He dropped into the water as Eilo flipped the gun back around.
Nowan spun. The hexguard tried to reach for his cutlass, but he still held the shell. The starfish giants drew their wavy-bladed swords, and the dragon growled, lashing its fishlike tail.
The Mollusk Knight laughed.
“Take your shot,” he said, throwing his hands wide. His skin shimmered in the midday light. “I’m already half a god.”
The banisher had only fired a handgonne once before, so he knew he had to make it count. He squeezed one eye shut, looked past Nowan de Valc, and shot the shell that held the wind.
The explosion of air blasted him to the sharp ground yet again, knocking his breath away and rattling his teeth. When he could see again, a column of air rose hundreds of feet into the sky, roaring and swirling. Nowan de Valc had already regained his feet. He stumbled toward the pearl. He still held the key, but the pearl itself had rolled onto its side. The fallen hexguard was dead—completely gone—and one of the giants had been ripped in half.
Eilo forced himself up and lunged for Nowan as the wind grew less intense. The man howled with rage, his face torn by wind and flying scraps of copper, and hammered Eilo with a vicious punch. The banisher saw Nowan’s fallen arquebus and grabbed it, but the Mollusk Knight kicked it out of his hands so it flew into the water, then slammed him against a wall. Eilo escaped the Mollusk Knight’s deadly grip and stumbled back, looking for anything that might hurt his foe. Sorcery aside, the Mollusk Knight had fifty pounds of muscle on Eilo, and had received military training since boyhood. Even a fair fight would kill the banisher.
The Mollusk Knight charged, forcing Eilo into the tidal pool. Nowan smashed Eilo into another coppery outcropping, slamming him hard enough to dent his breastplate, then moved to grab his head so he could bash his brains out. Fighting to keep the knight’s hands away from his face, Eilo spared a glance for Skaithness, and saw her reaching for them. She couldn’t get up, only reach pitifully with her hands. Eilo took one step backward, dragging the much larger Mollusk Knight deeper into the tidal pool. Two steps. Then he fell to his knees, dragging them both down into the water. He fell to his knees; from here Nowan de Valc would simply strangle him.
Skaithness’s gauntleted fist closed around the Mollusk Knight’s hair.
The banisher wrenched free of Nowan’s grip just as he heard the giant thundering their way. He threw himself backward and the swords, once again sweeping through their blind arcs, hit his breastplate twice, slamming him to the beach. But when the giant repeated its four-armed attack, the banisher was ready: he rolled away, then regained his feet, dodged the final sword-swing, and got some distance from the brute. Eilo spared a glance at the dragon, but the creature’s eyebeams seemed to have drained it of any sense of sight. Even a blind animal was dangerous, but the banisher had a few seconds before the dragon found him. He rolled and grabbed the scorched cutlass. When the giant cycled through another of its limited attack repertoires, the banisher struck.
The edge of the cutlass had just enough banisher’s wine that Eilo was able to hack through the giant’s leg between the gaps in its armor. But when he brought the cutlass down in a finishing blow, it bounced off like a stick hitting a tree.
He abandoned the weapon and kicked his glaive up into his hands just as the dragon jumped for him. Its claws raked his breastplate and forced him to give ground, but when the giant cycled through its attacks again, its swords struck the dragon. Blinded and furious, even though the steel blades couldn’t hurt it, the dragon bit into the giant, then jumped on it and started to rip with its foreclaws.
In moments, the first giant looked little better than the one obliterated by the explosion. Eilo inched toward that dead giant as the dragon turned toward him, sniffing the air. The dragon charged, slithering and skidding across the coppery terrain, just as Eilo swept his blade through the dead giant’s guts. He lunged the second the dragon’s mouth opened, driving the gore-smeared glaive up through the dragon’s mouth, into its brain. It kept charging, forepaws kicking, tail pulsing, until Eilo stood waist-deep in water. Then it exhaled a final reeking breath, and died.
The banisher ripped his weapon free and waded back to dry land. It took him a moment to find Nowan de Valc. Skaithness had grabbed him by the hair and dragged him down into the six-inch-deep tidal pool she lay in. And she had not let go. By the time Eilo reached the Mollusk Knight, he was dead—drowned in the little pool.
*