Newsgroups: alt.pub.dragons-inn From: hutch@ibeam.intel.com (Steve Hutchison) Subject: [Storm] Kadrys: Bat Out Of Hell Message-ID: References: Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1993 06:04:23 GMT [ADMIN] For you who don't remember what came just before: Kadrys felt a sudden burst of air pressure clamp down all over his body. Though he fought it with the last pitiful rags of his strength, slowly his sole wing was unfolded, dragged out by rushing air until it was at its fullest stretch. With terrible deliberation, the air pressure increased until it almost splintered his remaining ribs. Then, the crushing body of air started to shear: slowly but surely, Kadrys was being pulled limb from limb. He spent the last breath in his body in a savage scream of hatred and defiance. It mattered not at all. [ADMIN] This is posted for Andrea Evans A black and tattered scrap of flesh was dropped, forgotten utterly as the marid was distracted from its game. The broken thing fell toward the thrashing waves, a toy instantly discarded as soon as the marid saw new playfellows. Two of them. Spoiling its fun, kicking holes in its watercastle. Gonna hit them hard. Make them pay. --- Awareness rushed back to Kadrys in a roar of wind and a sickening sensation of falling. But the terrible sense of crushing air pressure, of a mind, vast in might but somehow petty, taking idle pleasure in his pain, was gone without trace. Even the winds had faded away, and the airs were for the moment no more than naturally turbulent. 'Great.' Kadrys thought, 'Now all I have to worry about is the stopping.' The phrase echoed ludicrously through his head: "It's not the falling you have to worry about, it's the stopping..., it's the stopping..." 'Damn your soul, Gytr,' he laughed, weakly, hysterically, as the world spun round and the waves rushed up to meet him. 'The last thing I think about is NOT gonna be one of your bad jokes...' Sobering, he estimated the nearness of the waves from the hazy blur of grey water and grey sky, then looked over at the red ruin of his chest, his lung only now starting to regrow, his other wing still little more than a melted spike of bone. 'Not enough time. Not even close. I'll just have to risk it. At least the winds're gone. Hell, it isn't as if I've got a choice.' He gathered his strength, concentrating. Fifty feet. Ten. Five. One. >From out of the sky, a falling shape, a dark, winged thing, strangely crippled, plunged like a stone. It struck the surface of the waves, vanishing in a burst of spray which swirled in the air like mist. Mist. He had made it. He had transformed, and the winds had not returned. Kadrys had not resorted to the mistform earlier, despite all his pain, for he knew that as a mist he would be utterly vulnerable, helpless in the grasp of the demon-winds. There would not have even been the chance to outfly them that the bat shape had afforded. As mist, he would simply have been dispersed across all the airs of the world, losing himself atom by atom to the relentless force of the wind. And it might not even have ended there. Who knows, had he died as a mist, perhaps such a being as that storm could have somehow enslaved his essential self, or worse still, absorbed or destroyed his soul completely. But he had no time, and no cause, for feelings of relief. He had to heal. He had to feed. And he had to get out of the reach of that storm, before it caught up to him and decided it wanted to finish playing with him. An onlooker, had there been any amid the deepening gloom and rising waves, would have seen a wisp of white sea mist, hovering in place over the water for some time. Then in an instant the mist vanished, replaced by a bat, which flew fast but low and somehow furtively, almost wave-hopping in an effort to stay out of the wind. The path it took led directly toward the shoreline that still lay beyond the horizon to the east. --- The outriding breezes, natural echoes of the unearthly winds that lay behind them, helped Kadrys on his way. He pounded onward, no more than a wingspan above the whitecaps, at once taking advantage of ground-effect and also hopefully remaining unnoticed. The knotted wingmuscles on his chest and back were by now burning slabs of concentrated fatigue, his left wing and chest were both still throbbing from their recent regrowth. After his recent exertions, his earlier superabundance of energy was now quite exhausted. Though he could never have survived had he not been so charged in the first place, he was now aching with desperate thirst. And from horizon to bleak horizon, there was no living thing in sight. Until that fleck of white on the rim of the eastern sky. A ship. Kadrys blinked in disbelief as he drew nearer. 'A heavybellied trader. With all sails set. Trying to ride the winds in to port, the blind fools. They've taken it for a normal storm, close to, when it's hell's own hurricane, far off now but coming in like a dragon on the stoop. The way that storm's roaring east, unless they drop their sails, their rigging, hell, their masts, they're not going to have a hope. Any winds travelling at that speed, malicious or mindless, will grab anything projecting above deck and use it to shove her under...' Kadrys' bat muzzle snarled in hunger and impatience. 'So what? I drink my fill, I leave, they get what's coming to them. Stupid, to have their sails up. Stupid to mistake it for a normal storm. What're they out here for, a joyride?' And that last thought stopped him cold in his attempts to assuage his guilt. 'A joyride. Well that's what _you_ were out here for, wasn't it, Kadrys? Yeah, it'd feel great to ride the winds of the storm. Suuure did feel good, didn't it. For a moment. How did the rest of it feel, ehh? Well worth the trip out, wasn't it? Wasn't it? And now, when you went out _looking_ for excitement, though you bloody KNOW better, and damnnear copped more of it than you could live with, _now_ you're gonna come over cautious and wise? Now you're out of the worst of it, you'll just run and let a shipful of poor sods drown?' He sighed. If he was healed enough to feel that sort of self-loathing, he'd just better help them. Or he'd never quite let himself hear the end of it. 'I _am_ a damned fool.' he sighed wearily inside his head. 'What am I, in training for paladinhood?' But this time, his mental tone was one of ironic self-parody, rather than bitter excoriation. --- The two-masted trading vessel "Gentle Zephyr", returning from Rameshan with a full cargo of spices and oils, drove before the wind. It was making good speed, said the captain. No cause for concern. The Zephyr'd be in port saf and sound before the storm hit, the captain had said. But Deray the cooper sighed uneasily, putting down his mallet and leaning his weight absently on the mended barrel of cinnamon. Wrapped in his own vague forebodings, he didn't notice a faint wisp of mist forming behind him. He heaved another elaborate sigh, a luxury you didn't get up on deck where the mates could hear you. He muttered aloud: "Well I dunno. I dun' care _what_ Cap'n said, I didn' like th'look of tha' storm. Looked like a rarin' bad storm t'me..." "You're right..." a thready voice whispered and Deray spun round to see a - a monster, a dead thing, a lich standing behind him, clothed in tattered finery, but starved as no man could be and live: no more than a skeleton clad in skin and wasted strings of gristle and great writhing webworks of veins. Deray would have screamed at the sight, but their eyes had met, and now there was no need for sound. No need even for fear. Under the monster's burning stare, Deray relaxed and the horror faded from his face, replaced by a strange expression: a look of - of need, of desire, almost a look of love: a dim and dreaming echo of the emotions shining on the monster's face. In the galley, in the fo'c'sle, elsewhere on board it was the same: a man working alone, a stranger's quiet voice, startlement burned away in a fiery gaze. Until, swiftly, five men slept, pale and weakened but still alive. Until Kadrys was whole and well and strong for the efforts that yet lay ahead. He flicked into bat shape, flew straight for the mainmast. There was no time to explain to the captain, no time for talk at all. When he switched back to his true shape, there was a pause of silent disbelief, then a rising chorus of cries and curses from the men on deck below. Silhouetted against the lowering sky, his black hair and the white tatters of his shirt both flying ragged in the wind, he looked every bit the harbinger of doom. Without a pause, balanced on the rocking spar like a cat, he reached down and grasped a loop of cable holding the topsail to the spars. He snapped the cable like thread, then hurried along the spar to the next loop of cable, snapped that in turn. One by one, in less time than it takes to tell, the lines holding up the topsail were broken until the last few loops tore loose, the sheet of canvas billowing out into the air and away. When the sail was gone, Kadrys began kicking and wrenching frantically at the horizontal spars that had supported it, splintering and then snapping them off one by one before hurling them overboard. When the men realised what he was doing, their shouts redoubled, though no-one seemed eager to approach a man capable of such strength. But then, with the topsail and its spars gone, Kadrys had to move lower on the mast to deal with the mainsail. Down there, he was within easier reach of the men. The captain, a swarthy Rameshander, had vanished below, but had reappeared with a scimitar and was screaming curses at his men, threatening them with the drawn steel until some of the boldest were driven to climb up towards Kadrys. These unfortunates he simply froze, held with his mind before they could get close enough to be injured by the falling rigging. Soon, the mainsail and its spars had gone the way of the topsail. The captain, demented with rage, was pacing at the foot of the truncated mainmast, howling for Kadrys to come down on deck and be butchered in repayment for butchering his ship. Tempting as it was, there was no time to play his fool's games. No time at all. Flicking into bat shape, Kadrys swooped over to the foremast and snatched hastily at cables, ripping down the sails and kicking with ever- increasing desperation at the spars, splintering them gradually and heaving the fragments overboard, following them with chunks of the masts themselves. In the end, only two jutting lengths of mast each a little higher than a man could reach, were all that remained of the "Gentle Zephyr"'s rigging. Standing somewhat unsteadily on the highest remaining splinter of mast, Kadrys drew breath to explain his actions, and realised belatedly that it was no longer necessary. As he watched, the captain was 'sedated' over the head with a belaying-pin by the ship's doctor, who prescribed the patient enforced bed-rest in his cabin. Kadrys smiled his gratitude to the doctor. 'Thank you, Varner,' Kadrys thought, 'I knew you were a man of common sense. Glad to see you awake again so soon afterwards...' The first mate cupped his hands round his mouth, and shouted over the rising wind while pointing at the now visibly approaching mass of stormcloud. "We understand! Storm coming fast - too much for ship! Had to ditch rigging or we'd sink!" Kadrys smiled and nodded, allowing himself to slump against the mast in a moment of relief and weariness, gathering his energies for what lay ahead. He remebered the knowledge he had seen in his victims' minds: that the crew were seasoned men, unlike their captain, and had been through storms before. Kadrys had done what he could. The task remaining, riding out the storm, the crew could handle on their own. Now, it was out of his hands. If the ship sank despite his efforts, there would be nothing more he could do to keep so many men alive. "That's no ordinary storm!" he warned them. "Do everything you can!" He could of course have told them more, but he knew that there are times when you can say too much. Telling them about the evil and power of the thing inside the storm could well destroy their already fragile hope, make any attempt to survive seem doomed to inevitable failure. The mate nodded without surprise at Kadrys' words. Grinning with bitter sarcasm directed at the Zephyr's 'indisposed' leader, he transferred the man's title ironically to Kadrys: "Aye, _Cap'n_! Everything's secured..." And indeed as Kadrys concentrated he could hear the rest of the crew working like devils belowdecks, lashing the cargo firmly in place, sealing hatches and locking doors. Good. That left only those abovedecks who had seen his face at close enough range to recognise him again. "One last thing, everyone!" he cried. The words were meaningless of course. However, they had the desired effect: the eyes of all those on deck moved to his face. His eyes blazed suddenly, a single pulse like twin red novae, and one command was burned into all their brains: *** Forget me! *** Then the flash faded, and the men were left looking dazedly at the stumps where the storm had swept away the masts of their ship. A scrap of fog or stormcloud was torn away from the ship by the wind and vanished unnoticed amid the flying spray. Later, dark wings dwindled into the distance, heading for the shore.