The Mad Voyage of Prince Malock (34 page)

How are we going to get out of this?
Malock
thought.
I can get out, of course, but Jenur can't. Unless I
give her up, but I can't do that. I'm not going to betray her
again.

“Any ideas?” Malock muttered to Jenur, who was
clinging even more closely to his body than before.

Jenur winced when the Lightning Goddess flashed
again. “No. I'm pretty sure we're both gonna die.”

“That's encouraging,” said Malock. “You're just a
barrel of sunshine, aren't you?”

Jenur glared at him in annoyance, which looked more
threatening than it should have when the Lightning God's light
reflected off her eyes. “Hard to be a barrel of sunshine when there
are three very hungry gods that want to eat you for dinner.”

Malock shrugged. “Good point. Still, I would have
thought you would have come up with something by now. You showed
some quick-thinking when you defeated the Gray Pirates back
there.”

“This time, my mind's shot,” said Jenur.
“Sorry.”

“We can't stay here forever,” said Malock, looking
at the circling gods. “We'll die of starvation or get tired or
something else will happen. And you certainly can't cling to my arm
forever.”

“Yeah, I know,” said Jenur with a gulp. “I really am
starting to wish that I'd learned some magic back home. Or that
Bifor was with us.”

“Maybe I can bargain with them,” said Malock.
“Surely they must be reasonable beings who—”

Jenur put a hand over his mouth. “Don't.”

Malock ripped her hand off his mouth and glared at
her. “What?”

“They aren't reasonable,” Jenur said, wincing as one
of the Leaf Goddess's leaves scratched her cheek. “They're nothing
more than forces of nature. You can't reason with a lightning bolt
or a cloud.”

Malock didn't want to admit it, but she did have a
point. As far as he could tell, the three deities didn't even speak
Divina. He could tell they were listening to their conversation,
waiting for the right moment to strike. He was not going to let
them find that opportunity, not if he could help it.

Beyond the circling gods, Hana continued to lean
against the table, her arms folded across her chest and her face
alight with the most arrogant smirk Malock had ever seen on another
being. She seemed unlikely to aid them and her mistress, the
Mechanical Goddess, probably wasn't going to do it, either, because
it was obvious that the Mechanical Goddess had taken Malock and his
party deep into her body so they couldn't escape.

She must feed them,
Malock realized.
The
Mechanical Goddess lures in mortals so her brothers and sisters can
feast without having to hunt them down themselves. Very sly, that
one is.

Of course, that realization didn't help him. All it
told him was that the Mechanical Goddess was a cold-hearted bitch
whose only concern, perhaps, was how to clean up the bones and
blood that the other gods left behind. Maybe they would be dumped
into that 'Maw' that Hana mentioned earlier, though as far as
Malock could see, the room only had two exits, the door behind him
and the window above him, and both were out of his reach.

He glanced down at his feet and noticed something
odd about the square of floor that he and Jenur stood on. Though it
appeared perfectly flush with the rest of the floor, he noticed the
tiniest of hairline cracks around it, like a square. It almost
looked like a trapdoor, but why would the Mechanical Goddess have a
trapdoor built in her dining room like this?

It's probably the trash compactor,
Malock
thought.
If it opens, Jenur and I will be shredded into pieces.
Would that be better or worse than being eaten alive by a bunch of
hungry gods, I wonder?

Of course, Malock had no way of knowing whether that
actually led to the Maw. What it if was actually an escape hatch?
It might lead outside the palace, perhaps even outside the ice
walls. If that was true, then he needed to figure out a way to open
it. He couldn't open it, however, because he would have to move to
open it and if he moved then the gods might try to attack Jenur. He
saw no way out of it.

As it transpired, Malock didn't need to do anything
because the panel fell out underneath them on its own. Malock and
Jenur had only a brief moment to exchange a look before they fell
screaming. The Lightning Goddess hurled a lightning bolt at them as
they fell, but luckily it only skirted the top of Jenur's hair.

The fall quickly transformed into a slide, but it
was narrow and reeked of blood and filth. It was also extremely
dark, especially when the hole from which they fell covered itself
again. The slide twisted and turned, Malock and Jenur clinging to
each other to avoid being separated. Malock didn't know where this
tunnel led or why it had opened. Nor did he think about the fact
that they were in the bowels of a goddess, albeit a mechanical
one.

At first, the slide was silent, save for their own
screams and shouts. Then, the further they went, the louder certain
sounds became. Even with the wind rushing by, Malock thought the
noises sounded like the drums of Grinf, but the closer they got,
the more he realized they were the sounds of machinery at work,
pounding and beating against each other, but he couldn't see the
machinery and frankly he wasn't sure that he wanted to.

Not that he had much of a choice in the matter. With
the sounds came light, a dark, reddish light that made Malock feel
woozy. The light revealed just how narrow the tunnel was; the
ceiling couldn't have been more than a few feet above them. The
light itself seemed to be coming from up ahead, causing Malock to
raise his head just high enough to get a look at what it was.

Up ahead—steadily drawing nearer every second—was
what looked like the maw of a giant monster. Huge metal teeth
clanged open and closed so rapidly, Malock figured he and Jenur
would be turned into little more than scraps of skin and bone if
they passed through them. Even worse, there was no way to stop, no
way to halt, no way even to slow down, no way to save themselves
from their inevitably gruesome fate.

But at the last minute, another route opened right
next to the compactor and the slide shifted abruptly so they went
down that way instead. That miraculous bit of luck surprised
Malock, but he quickly became worried that this route would take
them to a worse place. He imagined a pit of molten lava, like the
kind he had read about in history books back on Carnag, which in
the past had been used to torture or kill prisoners.

Yet the tunnel slide simply went on and on, becoming
narrower and bumpier, but otherwise not ending in death. They did
pick up speed, but Malock felt no increase in temperature and saw
nothing to indicate that death was just around the corner.

They rounded a corner and immediately a light
appeared at the end of the tunnel. The next minute, he and Jenur
went flying out of the tunnel, tumbling through the air, and landed
in a shallow pit of water. The water was ice cold and made Malock
gasp and shiver, but he quickly recovered and got to his feet,
helping Jenur up as he did so. Then they looked around at their
surroundings, trying to figure out exactly where they had ended
up.

Much to Malock's surprise, it was the same cove
where they had landed their rowboat several hours earlier. Not only
that, but the rowboat itself was still there, causing Malock to
actually hug the rowboat's prow, saying as he did so, “We're saved,
we're saved, thank the gods we're saved!”

Jenur tapped Malock's shoulder. He looked up at her
and saw that she was looking out at the sea. “What's the problem,
Jenur? Aren't you happy that we miraculously escaped? Kano must
have rescued us.”

Jenur nodded, still not looking at him, perhaps not
even listening to him. “The ship ...”

Frowning, Malock looked out over Stalf Bay,
wondering what Jenur was talking about. But when he finally spotted
the
Iron Wind
—saw that it was missing its mainmast and that
its port had been ripped off entirely—any good or happy feelings
he'd felt since escaping the Mechanical Goddess left him entirely,
leaving a hollow, horrified emptiness in the pit of his
stomach.

***

T
he rowboats were designed for four people to
row, so it was supremely difficult to row it across Stalf Bay with
only two people, even when Malock and Jenur put their backs into
it. Nonetheless, Malock and Jenur rowed forth with all their might,
although the
Iron Wind
was in such shabby condition that he
wondered if anyone was still alive on the ship at all.

As it turned out, there were still people alive on
the ship, but not nearly as many as when Malock first left.
According to Banika, who had a makeshift bandaged wrapped around
her head, a giant monster calling itself the Tusked God had
attacked the ship with a small army of baba raga. The men had been
on the losing end of the battle before Kinker fired a cannon at the
Tusked God, forcing it to retreat, but not before they lost a
staggering twenty sailors, about eleven humans and nine aquarians.
The wounded were far greater, encompassing nearly every member of
the crew that hadn't been killed in the battle.

Malock found out that Vashnas was not among the nine
aquarians who died in the assault (thankfully). Nonetheless, her
limp was far more pronounced now and she shook when he hugged her.
Still, she was alive and that was what mattered to Malock, who kept
her in his stateroom to heal up.

As for the ship itself, it looked ready to fall
apart at the slightest touch. Aside from the obvious missing
mainmast and port, the foremast and mainmast had also taken
significant damage. The deck had holes punched in it and several of
the stays had been cut. The foremast's sail had even been cut down
entirely, which had apparently crushed a sailor who had been
unlucky enough to be standing below it at the time.

The enemy, according to Banika, lost maybe a dozen,
possibly less. That seemed like a lot, until Banika informed Malock
that the baba raga had numbered three or four dozen, meaning it
wasn't quite as much as it could have been. Yet even that was not
the best news because the dozen dead baba raga were credited with
at least half of the crew deaths and more than half of the crew's
injuries.

It was after this that Malock realized he needed to
tell the crew about the true nature of the southern gods. He
gathered those who were not dead and told them all that the Loner
God had told him about the northern/southern divide, but most of
the sailors did not appear to be paying attention or to care and
those that did looked bitter, like they were wondering why Malock
had failed to tell them this in the first place. When Malock
thought about it, he realized that telling them this really didn't
help them in any way. All it did was encourage a few sailors to
toss their amulets overside, amulets that they had devoted to their
gods, and among those few sailors, more than a few swore never to
serve any god ever again.

From what Malock saw of the ship's damage, he did
not think that they could repair the ship. Before the Tusked God's
attack, they had already struggled to make basic repairs. With the
mainmast at the bottom of the sea, the port in the Tusked God's
stomach, and the rest of the ship in little better shape, Malock
was convinced that there was absolutely nothing they could do to
repair the
Iron Wind
. He was surprised it had not already
fallen apart.

True, Stalf did have a lot of wood, but they did not
have the tools necessary to chop down those trees or turn them into
wood suitable for sailing. Even if they could chop down the trees,
they had no way to haul the wood to the ship itself because almost
the entire crew was in no shape to be doing intense physical labor
of any sort.

For the first time on this voyage, Malock had to
admit that they were defeated. He fully expected the Lightning
Goddess, the Leaf Goddess, and the Cloud God to appear and finish
them all off. He saw no reason for them not to; after all, the crew
was in no position to fight back and even if they were there was no
way they could defeat three gods. So when he awoke the next
morning, he was surprised to find that none of those gods had
attacked.

Another first for Malock was his taking a real part
in the recovery efforts. Ranof and Bifor used their knowledge of
medicine and magic to heal as many of the men as they could, but
the two of them by themselves were incapable of making sure every
sailor got the aid he or she needed. So Malock volunteered to help
and put himself under Ranof's authority, doing whatever the doctor
ordered him to.

That was how Malock found himself, not long after
lunchtime on the first day after the Tusked God's attack, changing
the dressings on an aquarian sailor named Vank. Vank had a
squid-like head and had lost an entire arm to a particularly
violent baba raga during the battle. His 'dressings'— really just a
bunch of old dirty rags tied around his stump—needed to be changed
every few hours, which wasn't a very fun task because every time
Malock changed them, he got a good look at Vank's dried up stump,
and its smell and appearance made his stomach lurch.

They were in the middle deck, in the hallway. The
other rooms were full of resting wounded sailors, so more than a
few were forced to rest in the hallway. The wounded had been moved
below deck to keep them out of the snow that had started falling.
Even then, though, it wasn't perfect. The big gaping hole, where
the port had been, allowed the icy wind to blow through freely,
even after they closed the door to the cannon room.

At that moment, a particularly strong gust of wind
passed through the cracks in the door, making Malock shiver. That
was nothing in comparison to Vank, who shivered so violently that
he looked like he was about to die.