"You have everything you need, then?"

The question made the gray-robed mage jump, and turn to regard the seaman giving him a quizzical look. Rough of face, salty of hair and stout of body; there could hardly be more differences between the grizzled deck hand and the Wave Dancer's newest recruit. Corwin Shadowkill was young, slight, with unkempt hair of midnight and watery eyes of blue. He couldn't be more out of his depth if he'd missed the gangplank entirely, and walked straight off the pier into the Rhydin harbour.

"Yes," he answered belatedly. "Yes, I have all of my acoutrements with me. I travel light." He held up the satchel that held all of his worldly belongings, barring those kept in and under his mage's robes. Seven years spent out of the world, out of time, had left him very little in the way of personal items. Those he retained, or had picked up in his brief return to Rhydin, easily fit into the enchanted satchel.

"Alright, then," the seaman said dubiously. "Cap'n said he wanted to see you as soon as he came aboard. If you'll lay to his cabin aft - that's the flat end-"

"Yes, thank you." Corwin cut him off before he could get another lecture on the layout of a ship. One had been quite sufficient, especially after they'd pointed out the craplines at the pointy end, where a man was expected to - suffice to say, he had looked into some slightly more dignified options. He made his way aft, trying not to stop and stare at the men running about willy-nilly, pulling on ropes and tying or untying them from cleats and hardpoints on the rails and deck. Maybe with time, he would be able to puzzle out the exact meaning behind their actions, other than that they intended to get the ship moving. It was going to be a long journey...

The captain emerged from his cabin as Corwin approached. He was a lean man, gray of hair and face, who looked as though a life spent under the relentless sun and ocean spray had ingrained him with that same salt. He nodded at the mage, his thin lips pursed in an expression of disapproval Corwin was beginning to think was habitual.

"Our young mage," he observed. "That all you have, then?"

"I don't need much," Corwin said again, feeling somewhat self conscious. Should he have gone out and purchased a sea bag and hammock, despite not requiring them?

"Very well," the captain said, turning away and climbing the stairs to the deck above. Corwin wasn't sure if they actually called it the 'poop,' but he was certain he wouldn't use that term until he'd heard someone else say it first. "You'll dine with the officers in their mess, and you'll be bunked with our second mate. You won't be required for watches, but you'll be expected to use your - talents - as the ship requires, and if you hear a pipe for 'all hands' you'll turn to with the other idlers." There was more activity on the deck below, and Corwin turned his head at the sound of harsh bellows, and the pounding of feet. The lines that held the Wave Dancer to the pier were being turned loose and drawn in - the ship was coming away, and with a sick lurch of his stomach Corwin realized that this was it, and he was well and truly at sea.

"Last line, sir!" Someone bellowed. A slightly less rough looking gentleman - one of the officers, perhaps - took up the cry, which was passed down the ship until it reached the waiting captain. The thin man nodded, apparently pleased for the first time since Corwin had met him.

"Shift colours," he said, and turned away to the rail. After a moment, he paused and looked at Corwin. "You may go, mage." The curt dismissal was obvious.

Corwin felt his cheeks redden. "Ah, yes. Right, then." And he looked around, not entirely sure where it was he was to go. Just then, a hand fell on his shoulder - or nearly so, although its owner didn't seem to notice that her touch fell perhaps half an inch shy of actually connecting with him. He looked back - and then down. The woman looking back up at him was easily half a foot or more shy of his own less-than-six, and the deep blue eyes staring back at him were less than amused.

"Come along, idler," she said. "Let's get you to our cabin."

Corwin blinked and would have frozen, except that the hand on his shoulder gave him no recourse but to follow. "I beg your pardon?"

"Name's Vandergrief," she said over her shoulder. "I'm the second mate aboard. I stand the port watch, but I'll try to keep from waking you; I know how you magic types need your beauty sleep."

"I- do you mean to say- you're?" Coherent sentences were apparently beyond him. At the first sight of their cabin, speech entirely was gone. He'd been in restroom stalls that were more spacious. Two bunks, one above the other, against the wall in a cubby that was barely large enough for them both to squeeze in at the same time without one of them lying down in their rack.

"You're Shadowkill, right? Think I remember you. You worked on an air-ship few years back, yeah? You were the Molly's friend." The deck shifted under their feet, and some of the whipcoil tension in the woman's shoulders eased. "Ah, good... we're past the breakwater and out to sea."

Corwin could only shake his head...

A day out to sea, and then two. Nothing stable, everything fluid. The floor beneath your feet - the deck - tossing in the pounding waves that the second mate dismissed as "a light chop, nothing to lose your brekkie over, yeah?" The walls - bulkheads - separating his and Tirla's cabin from the next over were so thin they did little to block the sounds of people moving around, sitting down, chatting. Vandergrief snored, too. He wasn't going to tell her - it was clear her nose had been broken at some point in the past and must have been improperly set. He didn't want to risk the same issue by offending her. He'd seen her - entirely inadvertantly - mostly stripped down, and the woman seemed to consist of little more than muscle and scars.

She was hardly the only woman in the crew. The others - a handful - were cut from the same mold she was, hard women, rough women, counterparts to the men on deck. Except the one who worked in the kitchens - galley - who seemed to go out of her way to be a beacon of light in the gloom. They'd exchanged maybe a dozen or so words between them, and when he'd asked about her Tirla had rolled her eyes. "Passenger," she said contemptuously. "Lay about and enjoy the weather. Looking for a lost cousin or something. Don't know how she expects to find him between here and the Avadar, ain't much out there but rocks and gulls."

Not much work for a mage, so he found his own. The sight of the men with ice frozen in their beards and spray across their oilcloths offended him as he stood in the lee of the bulwark - out of the wind at the side - and watched them scamper about their duties. Freezing cold, sheets of rain; it was a terrible time of year to be at sea. He obviously hadn't thought this thing through, and they seemed resigned to endure through it since there was little more than a jigger of rum to help them keep the cold off. So he... helped, as he did, with a murmur of words that could only be heard and forgotten, and a twist of his fingers. It was a simple enough spell, hardly a drain on his energies at all; an invisible cloak of warmth wrapped around the men working in the rigging until they came down again, keeping them from frostbite and hypothermia. Some of them didn't notice. Some did, and appreciated it. One of them would have taken a belaying pin to Corwin's head, if Tirla hadn't turned up from apparently nowhere to tell him to knock it off.

Corwin made it a note to avoid that one - a dark skinned, burly man with the eyes of a fanatic - in the future.

And the ship sailed on...

"That water has to be nearly freezing; it's January in the northern seas. This is barbaric." Corwin folded his arms across his chest as he watched the brawling seaman get thrown back into the water.

"Ah, lighten up." Tirla hit his shoulder - or tried, again apparently not noticing that her first stopped about half an inch sort of the gray mage's flesh. He rocked satisfactorily with the force of the blow, so perhaps she'd gotten what she wanted out of it. "We have to do something to make these days go by, and he shouldn't have lied about sharks."

"Barbaric," Corwin said again, frowning after the man they were towing behind.

"As if you're not cheating," she accused. The wizard flushed.

"I'm sure I don't know what you mean," he stammered. She wriggled her fingers, then her nose at him.

"He should have been hypothermic when we hauled him in last time," she said. "And yet he could still splutter just as loud as anyone on deck. You're doing your mage thing again."

The mage looked away and refused to answer, which was in and of itself a testament. Tirla grinned.

"It's no worry, not with him anyway. I'm sure he'll find some way to make it up to you-" Before she could launch into a ribald story or joke - the woman seemed to have a thousand of them - the cry on deck took up again. Not a shark. Something worse.

"I have to get to the gun," Tirla said, suddenly cold, and rushed away. Corwin stared after her, and then at the shadow behind them - a shadow many times larger than the ship it trailed. He swore softly, under his breath.

"Big fish," someone said nearby.

"MAGE!" The captain, calling him to the rear - aft of the ship. Corwin hurried, fear giving his feet wings. "Do something about this," the senior officer ordered, gesturing at the thing trailing them. "Lure it away, or - or dispose of it."

That's not how this works, Corwin wanted to say - but wisely didn't. He looked at where Tirla was manning the cannon uncovered on the deck, the stern chaser. He fought his way through the intervening crowd of lookie-lous and rubberneckers to her side, whispering words that could only be heard and forgot and slapping his hand against the barrel of the gun - which glowed, briefly, as the eldritch energies he channeled took hold.

"What'll that do?" she asked suspiciously.

"Makes sure you won't miss," he said. "Although-"

The gun went off with a roar, and every head whipped to watch the trajectory of the shot. Arrow straight, it slammed into the shape below the water... and bounced off. The fish breached, the entire front half of it swiveling open to expose a gaping chasm more than wide enough to swallow the ship whole, and lined with ten thousand razor teeth. A smell worse than the harbor at low tide engulfed the ship, and men swore, cursed, and vomited.

"I was afraid of that," Corwin muttered. Tirla's head swiveled 'round, pausing in the task of reloading.

"Afraid of what?"

"Its skull - look at it. It's like an armor plate. Any shots from the front and above will only ricochet," he said, gesturing. "We have to get around it - or better yet, inside. If it opens its mouth again..."

He blinked as he felt something fall around him, and looked down to see Tirla tightening a rope around his middle. "What in Nine Hells are you doing?"

"Going fishing," she said - and grinned.

"Ye gods and little fishes," Corwin swore - missing the irony. The ship was damaged - he and Tirla had been tossed from their feet with the last attack, and he'd barely managed to grab the lithe sailor before she rolled off the side, into the frigid waters. Others hadn't been so lucky. The line she'd dropped around his waist for her 'fishing trip' still held him to the ship, so if he fell in, he'd be dragged behind until he could cast himself back aboard - or until he froze or drowned, if he couldn't maintain consciousness.

Somewhere, someone was singing. Corwin could taste the magic in the air, see it when he adjusted his glasses - someone was stimulating the men, stoking their will to fight, to survive. He felt a rush of energy through himself and noted, distantly, that he wasn't immune to the effect, either. Maybe that's why he grabbed Tirla's elbow and hauled her back to her feet.

"Okay!" he shouted. "Get ready - it's about to charge again!" People were dying. There was no time to think this through, no time to weigh his options, to plan, to prepare. Barely enough time to take a deep breath, meet Tirla's eye as she grabbed the line around his waist and fed out the slack - and then turn and leap.

He's no chronomage, so he knows it's only adrenaline that makes time slow down to a gelatinous pudding around him - that makes his leap seem like it's taking years, slows the charging monster down to a slow crawl. Tachypsychia, they call it. When the entire world has gone to hell, it's there to guarantee you have the leisure to enjoy the ride. He feels like he's floating, like the spindrift that flecks the air, roused from the waves and torn to fury by the rushing monster. He's lighter than a feather, for just a moment that lasts into eternity - a moment where he can count the scales, and the teeth, that face him. The bloody crater where an eye had been - the blind, staring orb of the other. Creature from down as deep as this, it hardly needed eyes to hunt... they may not even have been connected, still, to the brain deep within that armored skull. Men, screaming, were sucked into the gaping maw.

Corwin gestured once, sharply, and then the jaws closed around him and he was lost from sight.

Aboard the Wave Dancer, the line in Tirla's hands snapped taut and nearly jerked free. Moving quickly, with the surety of long experience, she took a turn on a nearby cleat and called for the hands manning the gun to abandon their charge and take up the line. Accustomed to instant obedience, they did so - barely hearing the captain's voice roaring, demanding they fire again, demanding somebody do something to stop the thing about to destroy the ship-

And the massive fish suddenly checked in its path as though it had run full-length into a wall, started to dive - and burst like an overinflated balloon, the blast knocking the men and women on the deck off their feet as gobbets of meat and splatters of blood fell in a gory rain.

They pulled him out of the water semiconscious and half-deaf, dazed from being at ground zero of the concussive blast that had rendered the terror of the high seas into so many fillets of sashimi. He wasn't alone; he'd somehow managed to reel in one of the sailors who'd fallen in before him, and he was somehow still keeping the burlier man afloat when Tirla and her crew regained their feet and were finally able to bring the line to a capstan and haul them aboard.

But the mage recovers quickly, and is soon back to work pulling in men from the chill grasp of the ocean; no need for lines or capstans, as long as he has clear line of sight and enough energy remaining... the captain eventually orders him below when it's clear he would work himself into collapse, and Tirla finds him sprawled on the floor of their shared cabin, fast asleep and pale as death. By the morning, he's recovered enough energy to stand at the funeral, swaying slightly, apparently oblivious to the looks the crew gives him - some awed at what he'd accomplished, others resentful that he hadn't been able to save everyone.

He does not cry as the bodies of those who died of their wounds are consigned back to the sea, to join those who were never recovered. He's not entirely sure he remembers how to.

The funeral ended, the moment of silence passed, the vessel resumes its journey - more somber now, and warier now that they've been forcibly reminded of what lurks in the depths beneath their keel. Corwin catches Vivian's eye as she stands near the rail, and joins her - moving stiffly, his limbs still somewhat numb and bruised from the harrowing experience in the maw of the fish.

"You play marvelously," he says - his voice a little overly loud, still, for he's still having some trouble hearing. Revisions will need to be made to his shielding spell to help filter out noise, obviously; he'd overlooked the prospect of sonic damage when he was designing it... "Although I'm sorry the occasion that called for it was so very grim." A moment's pause, and then: "I heard you, during the battle. Your song. It was very... inspiring."

"Magnificent?" A quirk of a smile, half amused and half bitter. "It hardly takes much work to get oneself eaten by a fish of that size." He shrugs off her praise, still steeped in self-recrimination and doubt. "I am... well enough, I suppose. Or I shall be." Dreams of being swallowed down, down, down into an echoing blackness had superseded even his usual demon-haunted nightmares, making an excellent change of pace in the litany of night terrors. Tirla had been far from amused, although she'd at least been understanding when she woke him up with a boot to the underside of his rack.

"Help it did," he nods politely. It had; he probably wouldn't have had the guts to throw himself into its maw without the impetus she provided. External attacks clearly hadn't been working, and checking something with that much mass using any sort of standard shield or force field would have been... difficult, to say the least. It was probably the only thing that could have saved the ship.

He tilts his head to one side. "Life at sea, I suppose." It had been something of a hectic week, trying to get used to the rhythms and routines of life at sea... even before they were attacked by the Mother of all Sushi.

"You mean the galley?" He grins as he walks beside her, politely at her elbow. "Sailors and their quaint lingo... I made the mistake of saying I needed to 'go downstairs' for something the other day. You would have thought I had defecated myself, the looks I received... I'm surprised they haven't made efforts to adjust your speech. They certainly take great glee in correcting mine." Of course, he's nowhere near as pretty as she is. Even the gray-robed mage has to admit that. "Not to be confused with an oar-powered vessel, which I believe is also called a galley... unless it can also be sailed, in which case it's a galleas. Or something along those lines, I'm afraid I haven't quite got it all worked out yet..." He ducks his head behind her. "Forgive me, I have a tendency to ramble..." ...when he's nervous, or out of sorts. He lets his face fall into the placid, serene mask of the mage.

"Why am I here? Work for hire." He shrugs, a little discomfited. "I had an... well, call it an accident. Lost my entire life's work-" Not that it had been that much, but that's neither here nor there. "-and had to start again. Hiring aboard as ship's spellslinger seemed the best way to get my feet back on solid ground - as it were."

He tilts his head to one side. "You must be very close to your cousin, to worry so. Was his ship also on the Avadar run?" Funny, he hadn't heard about any ships going missing along this route recently - and you'd best believe he'd done his research before signing aboard. He wanted to know just how much risk he was putting his life in... "I hope his ship didn't run into that great fish..." Run into, and been swallowed by. He shivers despite himself, the movement all but lost in his robes.

I couldn't bring myself to be swallowed like that. "Yes, well." He shrugs uncomfortably. "I must say I would not recommend the experience to anyone, nor do I intend to repeat it." He tilts his head as they discuss language, and then her cousin - and his eyes slide to the right, ever so slightly, at where her hand rests on/near his shoulder. Does she even notice that she doesn't quite touch him? Feel that slightly slick feeling, as though the mage has a thin sheet of glass covering his body? Some do... most don't. Her hand slides away, and he refocuses his gaze on her, barely watching where he's walking - not needing to, really, his steps as sure and graceful as a deer. "It's been a pleasure. It's a small vessel; I'm sure we'll see each other around." He smiles, the expression briefly splitting the serene mask with genuine humour. "I suppose I'd best away before one of your partisans spies me lingering near your door; I would hate for them to get the wrong impression. It's a long float home, after all." He bows to her, then, and departs.

*

The ship sails on...

Days pass, one into the next with little to differentiate them. The ship moves in its routine, the sailors standing their watches and busying themselves with maintenance - repairing lines, mending sails, hauling chain, keeping the decks scoured and clean. The mage works as well, learning what he can of seamanship from those who do not shun him outright. He learns to avoid some of the men, especially the dark-skinned man with the fanatics' eyes, who had survived the event with the fish unscathed and apparently resented the gray-mage all the more for it.

(2/3)

The captain was drinking in a little dive bar perhaps half a mile inland from the harbor, the sort of place where the drinks were cheap and life - especially a foreigner's life - was cheaper. The gray-robed mage stood out like a hammer struck thumb, but those who might have seen a thin, bespectacled young man in a flowing garment as a potential target were put off by the expression of cold, implacable fury on a pale face gone whiter with repressed rage. The room went quiet as he moved through it like a small storm cloud, eyes intent on the back table where the ship's officers were drinking. The captain looked up from his wine glass, his glazed expression not changing.

"Mage. I thought you were staying aboard the evening."

"Captain," replied Corwin in clipped tones. "I was under the impression that the ship would be returning to Rhydin."

The captain waved at the air vaguely. "It is, it is."

"Immediately. Not after detouring into the middle of gods damned nowhere." One of the men at the table - Corwin thought he might have been the gunnery officer, but he wasn't sure - reached up for the mage's arm, either intending to pat him calmingly or try to restrain him. A glance and a flicked finger, and the arm slammed back down to the table with a bone rattlin crash. "My contract states from Rhydin to the Avadar and back. No side treks."

"You'll get paid in Rhydin, Mage," the captain said, his voice firming up. Corwin squinted through his spectacles at the man, puzzled by the odd... filaments... running through his aura. Was that some sort of influencing charm...? Or - no, more than likely it was something caused by the dreamwine the man was guzzling like water. He eyed the empty bottles on the table, the half-filled goblets, with disgust.

"You're in breach of contract, captain." He folded his arms across his chest, not a defensive gesture - as it might normally have been - but because he was fairly well convinced that if he didn't lock his arms down right then and there, he was going to try to strangle the man. "I'll take my pay, and my leave of your company, immediately."

The captain laughed. "And go where? There aren't any ships going back to Rhydin until the spring, nothing except the Wave Dancer. Even a detour with us would get you back there sooner - unless you feel like spending your half voyage wages on a sky ticket home."

"You forget," Corwin said coolly. "That I am a mage, and I have other resources at my disposal. Do not make me remind you. My pay, captain."

The man stared at him, and his cheeks paled slightly as he took in the icy expression on the younger man's face. Perhaps he was remembering the dendan's fatal case of indigestion. "Purser," he said. "The mage will be departing our company forthwith. See that he's properly paid off."