Surviving Arkadia

Of course it was tentacles. Why wouldn’t it be tentacles?

My first thought was Giant Squid. It would explain the damage to the outside of the Infirmary. Unlike octopuses, the giant squid has a bony, serrated ring as part of its suckers. The serrations on those would be perfect for making a lot of parallel scores. The weight of the tentacular clubs hitting the deck would explain the splintered boards. The way the arms of a squid move would explain the curved paths of the scratches.

Then I realised that it couldn’t possibly be a Giant Squid unless that meant something very different on Arkadia. The deck of the Idyllic was simply too far from the water and, unlike the crabs, a Giant Squid couldn’t climb. Probably.

I couldn’t see where the tentacles were coming from. The night was suddenly very dark. It wasn’t that the sky was dark, or that the stars and the aurora were blocked with clouds, it was more that all the lights were dimmer. As if the air itself was darker. As if we’d been engulfed by squid ink that formed a cloud around us the way that ink clouds water.

The air was thick and greasy. It was harder to breathe. I picked up my axe and went to the rail. I was trying to find where the tentacles were coming from. I still thought that they must have come from something in the water even though I was beginning to suspect that we were in much more trouble than that.

I couldn’t see anything in the water and there were no tentacles aft of the Forward Sun Deck. I didn’t dare investigate any longer because there were so many more screams and I had to get back to the others.

The air was getting thicker, the lights were getting dimmer, and I crept forward. I didn’t want to risk running given the poor visibility and the slippery deck. Eliza emerged out of the darkness ahead of me. Her mother was carrying her away from the struggle. I directed her to the nearest door so they could get away from both the fight and the cold.

The next person I saw was the Chief Steward. He was bleeding from deep cuts and he was putting himself between a tentacle and one of the children. As I got closer the tentacle darted towards the child behind him and he grabbed it. It tried to wrap around him, causing even more wounds from the serrated sucker rings.

“Hold it!” I shouted.

He pinned it in place and I hacked through the pale flesh. Greasy black blood flooded from the cut stump and onto the deck. The damaged tentacle retreated. The Chief Steward threw the end down and I kicked it away.

The Doctor appeared, seemingly from nowhere but likely just out of the foggy darkness to give him some kind of healing potion. The Doctor gave me a professional look up and down and handed me a small black vial.

The Doctor said, “It will remove your Fatigue and Exaustion but you’re going to feel it in the morning.”

“If it will help me live until the morning I don’t care how I’ll feel.” I downed it in one and the effect was almost instant. The tiredness fled my body as if the tentacles had chased it away. I felt like I could run a marathon and fight Muhammad Ali.*

The Chief Steward patted me on the shoulder, “Don’t worry, the Captain has a plan. It won’t be long now.”

Before I could ask him what he meant he’d run back into the fray and was peeling a tentacle off an Engineering Cadet. I ran after him and began hacking at the tentacle. After that we were too busy for me to ask him anything.

I don’t know how long the fight went on. I didn’t tire, presumably because of the stuff from the Doctor. I knew that the ship was moving, I could feel that, but I couldn’t tell how fast. Wrapped in darkness, as we were, I couldn’t see where we were headed, and I couldn’t gauge our speed.

I didn’t realise that we were close to land until I finished off a couple of tentacles and there was a brief parting of the clouds of darkness and I saw something huge and green beyond it. My first thought was that it was some vast monster, perhaps the source of the tentacles. Then I realized that it was a mountain and I knew exactly where we were.

We were rapidly approaching Tjornvik on Pharo More, the biggest of the Pharo Isles.

#

I fear it’s time for another tangent while I explain a few things that most outlanders probably don’t know. I apologise, but you need to know this to make sense of what happened next.

The first thing you need to know is that whales have never been endangered in Arkadia. It’s not that they’ve never been hunted, it's just that the hunting is sustainable. Magical skills mean that there’s many easier ways to find food than hunting whales for meat and there’s never been much demand for whale oil.

On Earth the Industrial revolution created a huge need for oil. It was used for lighting and for lubrication. Sperm whales were hunted for Spermaceti - the liquid in their huge heads - to be used as a high grade industrial lubricant. Other whales were hunted for their blubber that was rendered down into oil for burning or as a lower grade lubricant, and their baleen for use in corset making.

In Arkadia the Alchemists can make any lubricant you need and the Druids can grow canes or bamboo into any shape you need for corsets. The only reason to hunt whales is for meat and in most of the world there are far easier sources.

The only places where they eat whale meat are places where there are no easier sources. Like the Pharo Isles. The soil is thin, there’s little flat land and the growing season is short. They do keep flocks of hardy sheep and goats for milk, and wool but they don’t kill them for meat until they’re past milking and their fleece is growing thin. By then the meat is tough. They eat a lot of shellfish and seaweed and half the adult population fishes at least some of the time.

Tjornvik is a small town at the head of a deep rectangular bay created by an Earth Mage generations ago. It’s a whale trap. The water is very deep at the entrance and the sea floor rises gently until there’s a sudden reef with deeper water again on the shore side. Whole pods of smaller whales get driven up the bay by Pharoan whale hunters until they cross the line of the reef and are trapped against the land.

When the ship was being attacked by a mass of sea creatures the idea of going to Tjornvik was brilliant. The Pharoans are at war with the sea and would have been natural allies. But now we were sailing into a trap, pursued by sky squid and a cloud of darkness.

#

At that moment all I could think was that we were about to run aground while going as fast as I have ever gone on a ship. And then I remembered that the infirmary beds all had wheels.

I ran forward, screaming to get everyone down. I had visions of the beds, carrying their precious cargo, being thrown right off the ship when we hit the reef.

I don’t know if they understood why I was screaming, but the Stewards tending to the children listened and reacted. They had pulled the beds over and sheltered behind them by the time the ship rammed the reef and sliced through it. Everyone standing was thrown off their feet, and a couple were knocked out. Thankfully, no-one was thrown overboard.

The ship made a terrible grinding sound as it was forced through the gap it had cut in the reef. She didn’t stop until the keel hit the shore. She cut into the sandy shore and rode up it before coming to rest with the prow reaching out over the roof of the temple and the Idyllic listing slightly to starboard.

It was only now that we had stopped moving that I realised that we’d been out-pacing the sky squid, or whatever it was. The darkness that descended on us then was like nothing I ever saw, before or since. Once I’d staggered to my feet I couldn’t see the deck beneath me.

I heard the snap of the Chief Engineer summoning one of the floating light orbs that the engineers used as mobile task lights. I found out later that he had up-cast it to his maximum level but all it did was produce a dim glow that told me where he was. It didn’t actually illuminate anything.

The tentacles emerged from the darkness. I had no time to save anyone else because I was too busy saving myself. I inched towards the glow, sure that we’d be stronger together, chopping at every tentacle that came near but not able to finish any of them off.

I reached the Chief Engineer. His light orb pushed the darkness back a little creating a circle of light that the defenders were packed into. The three feverish children were curled up on the deck at his feet.

I arrived in time to see one of the long hunting tentacles finally touch one of the children. His name was Jarn and he was a boy of twelve years old. He was the last of the children to fall sick but his fever had been the worst, almost from the beginning.

The tentacle tried to grab him but then jerked back as if burned. In the brief moment of contact it had broken his skin and blood flowed from a cut on his cheek. The boy’s eyes flashed open but it wasn’t the same as Eliza waking up. His eyes were wild and staring, his expression was enraged, and I wasn’t sure how much of Jarn was still in there.

He grabbed the tentacle that had hurt him. The moment he made contact I heard the flesh of the squid, or whatever it was, start to sizzle. The blood on Jarn’s cheek began to glow with the same warm yellow light as the light orbs, it was the same colour as the faint glow of the Etheric sails when they properly caught the Source winds.

The glow spread from the wound on his cheek to his whole body and from his hand to the tentacle he was gripping. Then there was a flash of blinding light and scorching heat. For a moment I was sure that we were all dead. It felt like being hit with a blast of air from a furnace. The moment passed.

When I could see again, Jarn was gone. There were just ashes where he’d been. I don’t know that the ashes were him. They could have been from his clothes and bedding and perhaps also the tentacle. I know his parents believed that he ascended and became one with the source and it could be true. All I knew for sure, in that moment, was that I wasn’t going to let anything wound the remaining two children.

Whatever happened to Jarn he seemed to have taken at least some of the tentacles with him. The darkness was also less oppressive. The Chief Engineer’s light orb glowed brighter. Perhaps we were facing more than one squid and Jarn had killed the one that wounded him.

We fought on, with greater determination but also greater desperation. More of the crew joined the fight. We could keep the tentacles from the children but we couldn’t drive them off. I’d hacked a few in half but somehow I never saw any stumpy tentacles and the numbers didn’t seem to change.

I heard the Captain’s voice, booming loud over the tannoy, demanding wind. She probably wanted a spell from the Second Mate who was known to be a Storm Witch but she’d been knocked cold when the ship hit the reef.

I thought we might be lost, doomed to fight on until we all fell to exhaustion, but then the Captain got her wind from somewhere. A blast of it, just above head height that tore apart the cloud of darkness and revealed what we were really facing.

I’d been expecting some kind of cloud squid, maybe with wings, maybe with a body full of hydrogen. What we saw was a tear in the sky longer than the Idyllic. It looked like something had slashed through from the other side. Through the open tear I saw bulky, pale bodies moving in the brief time before more of the clouds of darkness poured through.

I heard shouting from the shore and took advantage of the lull to look over the rail.

The people of Tjornvik had come out of their homes. Many of them had grabbed harpoons and whaling lances. It looked like they were ready to join the fight.

The wind spell seemed to have come from an old man in an embroidered nightshirt standing at the front of the crowd. I’d heard there were a lot of Storm Witches amongst the Pharoans and perhaps that’s what he was. A woman I assumed to be his wife came out of their cottage, and joined him at the head of the crowd. She stared up at the tear in the sky. She was carrying a staff with a large red gem in one end. She pointed the staff at the tear and screamed a word of power. I’d read about those but that was the first time I heard one used.

Something happened on the other side of the tear. I don’t know what it was but I know that it sounded exactly like the detonation of a fuel-air bomb**. There was an overpowering smell of burnt calamari and when the clouds cleared the gap in the sky had closed.