“Elisa! High arc!” Marco yelled. “Put one on the deck!”

Elisa yipped in joy as she realized what was being asked of her. The next cannonball she sent up drew a steep parabola that only traveled several yards horizontally, just enough for it to drop between two cannons and set that entire part of the deck ablaze. Two small explosions rocked the ship a few seconds later as the fire got to whatever reasonable, safe-ish amount of powder they had out in the open.

Marco hugged the ship tight against the enemy’s hull, actually hearing the boards scrape at points as the cannons ripped them to shreds from almost point-blank range. Elisa couldn’t miss, either catching their upper hull or their decks with inferno shots every time she fired. By now, the captain had called guards to his side to block the arrows, and Aethe was having a wonderful time covering the lesser fighters with arrow fire until they fell.

At some point, they were so close to the enemy that Riv’s good-bad-idea generator kicked in. He ran to Marco’s side, leaving his cannon to autofire for a moment.

“Are we pretty sure we won’t be boarded?” he asked. “How sure are we?”

“Nine out of ten.” Marco said. “We are moving too fast right now.”

“Ah,” Riv said. “Good. Can you take us real close to one of the holes I poked in the other side of the ship, please?”

Marco nodded as he cut a tight triangle around the prow of the enemy, bringing them back to aft. As they passed their initial damage, he saw Riv’s club glow.

“Oh, no,” Marco said. He had no idea what this would do, and the glow was only slightly less bright than his orb-slaying hit had been a few hours ago. He didn’t have time or the will to protest, though. They took risks this size all the time.

Riv’s club hit hard. Against the weight of the other ship, there were only two places for it to go. The first was to dissipate via the evaporation of the other ship’s structural integrity, which definitely trimmed off a lot of it. Splinters and cracks went flying as the better part of three feet of hull was reduced to a ragged hole Marco could have jumped through.

The second place it could go was pushing Riv back. He had matched his own swing to the curvature of the other ship, which meant the force was pushing him slightly down into the deck when the recoil hit. Riv was up to the challenge of standing up to that force, but the deck itself wasn’t. He went rocketing through the boards, slamming into some below-decks region unknown as he disappeared through a Riv-shaped hole.

Elisa, bless her, did not lose sight of the goal. With a perfectly timed shot, she filled the inside of the enemy ship with fire and bottled-up stress. The latter was more a morale thing, but the former was more than enough to ignite some of their barrels of black powder. Marco had luckily already been pulling away from the fight to give them room to check on Riv. Otherwise, the resulting explosion would have probably taken them out all by itself as gouts of flame came bursting out of the hole like breath from a dragon’s mouth.

“Do we need to go back?” Aethe asked. “I was doing pretty good at attrition. Lots of dead guys up there.”

“No.”

“Really, because I can…”

The other ship chose that moment to break in half. Aethe sighed.

“I see. Too bad.” She gave Marco a kiss on the cheek. “Thank you. That was really fun.”

They spent a while moving back and forth across the water, looking for survivors that might have told them something about Quill’s plans. The captain had died in either the blast or the resulting catastrophic structural failure of his own ship, which Marco could confirm from notifications. After a half hour of looking, nobody from the opposing crew turned up to prove they had beaten his performance in that regard.

“It’s a shame,” Elisa said. “Even a swabby would have had some idea what they were up to. We don’t have any more intel than we otherwise would have.”

“We did learn some things,” Aethe said. “Like that it’s still possible for Riv to get splinters.”

“Har,” he tried, using a pair of pliers from Marco’s toolkit to snag an exceptionally large piece of timber from inside his arm. “Hardeeharhar ow.”

“At least we got repair materials from the other ship,” Aethe said. “We took more damage below decks than you’d think. It’s all cracked around the rudder.”

“We were making really sharp turns,” Marco said. “Apparently we only have so many of those, for now. Now, Elisa, what’s the plan?”

“We go back to see Quill,” she said. “We still don’t know how strong he is, but he doesn’t’ know how strong we are, either. He’ll probably just pay us and give us another job.”

“He can’t possibly,” Riv said, yanking another near-log out of his leg. “He has to know we are getting stronger.”

“Maybe. But my feeling is he won’t want to risk a direct fight. His whole class is built around illusions. He’s been successful with it so far. You don’t get that way without being careful. But I said he’d give us the job. I didn’t say we’d do it.”

“So we take our pay, accept the gig, and then what?”

“Then we flee,” Aethe said. “I get it. We find somewhere else to go. We make more friends.”

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“And we gather evidence. Anything that backs up our story,” Elisa said.

If there was any question about exterminating Quill and everything he stood for before, there wasn’t now. They had just seen an island that seemed to have been built to eat crew after crew of adventurers like fried potatoes. Nobody had to discuss that to know that they were all on board with converting him to toast by whatever means necessary.

“Fine, then. We go back, we run, and then we gather an army,” Marco said. “A navy. Whatever.”

—

When Quillton finally rose on the horizon, it was hard for any of them to put their fingers on what exactly was wrong with it. It looked the same. It was a bit run-down, the paint was flaking a little, and everything still looked like the town they had first arrived at except for a general loss of gloss they had already noted. Still, it was vastly different in a way nobody could explain, even though they could see it from miles away.

It was Riv who finally figured it out.

“It’s distorted,” he said. “Like all the buildings were built off plumb.”

“If they were built by people who were just a little bit out of touch with reality, that’s possible” Elisa shook her head. “It’s eerie to look at.”

This time, when they landed, they didn’t waste any time. Moving quickly through town, they made their way to Quill’s mansion unannounced, hoping to avoid any big confrontations. They managed it, somehow, seeing neither Bhul nor his brother on the way there. When Marco banged his hand on the door, Quill took much longer than usual to answer it.

“Oh, there you are.” The clawed man seemed genuinely surprised. It was almost all the confirmation Marco could have asked for that he hadn’t expected them to survive all that he had thrown at them. Then, just as Elisa had predicted, he gained control of his face and started talking about more work. “I’m sorry to do this to you, but I’m going to need you to go right back out. There’s an island a week northwest of here that hasn’t sent a ship in months. One of the dockworkers noticed it. It’s a small deviation from the norm, but it’s never been this long before. I’m worried about them.”

Marco looked at the team. They kept their faces fairly believable, at least.

“Oh, man,” Riv said. “I’m tired, though.”

“And I apologize.” Quill gave a slight bow. “But there’s no time. If they are in trouble, every minute might count.”

“Well, fine,” Riv said. “But this had better pay.”

“Ah, yes. Your pay. We discussed gold, correct?”

Elisa took this one. After years of dealing with a fearful, worried father, she was pretty good at just-dishonest-enough confrontations.

“No. Skill crystals. Two, remember?” She held up her fingers and looked for all the world like she believed Quill had genuinely forgotten. “And some gold on top of that for expenses. See? I have it written right here.”

“Of course.” Quill slapped his forehead with his palm. “I mixed you up with another job. Just one moment.”

Elisa turned her notebook around as he ran, pretending to make another notation on its pages. Instead, she wrote a message.

“Here you are,” Quill said. “A red and a yellow. I’m sorry. It’s all I have.”

“Then it will have to do.” Elisa took them from his hand, then opened her own money pouch as Quill dumped a few handfuls of gold into it. “We’ll get moving. What’s the name of the island we are looking for?”

“The island. Right.” Quill paused for a moment. “Moorington.”

“Then we’ll be on our way. Riv, don’t start. You’ll have days to sleep on the ship,” Elisa warned.

Riv started anyway, whining and complaining until they got a hill between them and Quill’s mansion. He stopped abruptly just after that.

“His mansion wasn’t distorted,” Riv said. “You saw, right?”

Marco startled a bit. He hadn’t noticed, not really. Quill had been too much and too close of a threat. But Riv was right. The pillars and windows were all straight as a pin.

“I didn’t. But I remember now. What does that mean?”

“It means the person who built that wasn’t insane,” Elisa said. “Come on. We’ll take another way back to the ship. I have something I want to check out.”

As they hustled through side streets and unfamiliar paths, Elisa was making notes. It was only when they were back on the outboat and moving towards the ship that she held up her notebook.

“Quill would have built his mansion first, right? And probably by himself or with trusted help. That’s straight. No sign of any problems with it. Other than that, the buildings by the docks would have been built last, since the closest good water supply is about the town center. It radiated out from there.”

“And?”

“And the buildings by the docks are the most warped of any of them. The buildings in the center are the least so. This isn’t like wear and tear. How a building is put up is pretty much permanent, especially if the people who live in it or use it can’t see it’s crooked.”

“And that means?”

“It means Quill is getting stronger,” Elisa said. “And he has been the whole time he’s lived here.”

The chickens were waiting for them when they got onboard, and were fed in a hurry as Marco pushed the ship away from the town as fast as he could.

“Curl around the island,” Elisa said. “Take a hard right and curl around.”

“Why?”

“Because they won’t expect it. By the time they notice where we went, we’ll get a few more minutes. And we’ll need them, I think.”

They made it around the island and well away from it before the first ship noticed where they had gone. It was a smallish cutter, bigger than their ship by a hair but not much so.

“It’s as fast as us,” Marco said. “We won’t outrun it.”

“Can we outmanuever it?” Elisa asked.

“Sure, but that makes no difference on open water. Elisa, should we stop and fight?”

“Can they catch up?”

“Probably not.”

She tapped her pen a few times on her notebook, huffing.

“No fighting then. We can’t spare the time. Quill seems like the kind of guy who would have invested in some way to handle long-range communications. We have no idea how many ships might be coming for us now.”

Marco spotted the next ship not long after, cutting in from a ninety-degree angle before falling in line with the cutter. It was larger, though not as large as the last ship they had sunk. It was joined soon by a huge trade ship, not so well armed but big enough to plow The Foolish Endeavor underwater if they ever made contact.

After that, it was all he could do just to find the right angles to keep from being hemmed in. Quill had never made clear just how much of a military he controlled, but it appeared that it wasn’t small. He was aiming a good part of it directly at Marco, apparently hoping to put down a threat before it got any stronger.

“Good job keeping away from them,” Elisa said. “Though I don’t think we’ll lose them any time soon.”

“No,” he said. “Which begs the question. Where should we be headed?”

“He said northwest, right? That part of the story was easy for him. It was the name of the island that caught him off guard.”

“Which means what?”

“It means something is there. Just not the island he says should be there.”

“It could be a problem, right? A threat?” Riv said. “Are we sure we want to head towards that?”

“Not directly,” Aethe said. “But she’s right. If that island was enough to take us out, he wouldn’t send this many ships to do the same job. Or he would have sent us there first. Whatever this is, it’s different.”