Chapter 13 The Gold Thief of Lake Dumast #2
“It’s more of a myth.” She stared unblinking at the floorboards, a haunted look passing over her face, like a hundred ghosts had suddenly flocked to just her vision and she couldn’t look away.
Morfran waved his hand in front of her eyes.
Brim began snapping his fingers. She blinked.
“It couldn’t be true, though. I’ve sailed these waters for over thirty-five years. Haven’t seen an inkling it exists.”
“Oh, good,” Morfran said.
“But folklore says it can be roused to the surface by someone with great power.”
“Oh,” Morfran repeated, this time more irritably. “Wonderful.” He didn’t like where this was going. “Does it say this creature creates whirlpools?”
“It does,” Elena admitted. “The whirlpool sucks you in, and then, right before you hit the bottom, it bursts from the center and eats your ship.”
He and Brim glanced at the whirlpool, which had expanded to an uncomfortable size. The ship was already starting to snag into its pull.
“Well, what type of great power are we talking about?” Brim asked, tugging his beard as if he were a tad bit concerned.
Elena shot Morfran a black look. “There are only two people I can think who carry such power.”
Ah, him and his ex-wife. Well, he’d abandoned his power to live the life of a goat farmer.
Which meant Ravana was the culprit. But how did she know where they were?
There couldn’t possibly be a tracking spell on him.
That was one of the reasons he’d ditched his magic—Ravana couldn’t use hers to track him.
There was always the possibility of spies, or perhaps one of her men who’d spotted them leaving off the coast and had used some form of divination to tell her.
It was all making Morfran’s head hurt, and he just wanted to lie down and eat those pirate biscuits that were a little bit flaky but still tasty. Instead, he had to face the possibility of his own death.
Oh, and the deaths of all his crewmates and other ships following them, but he didn’t really care about them.
Yet Benjamin was also on the line.
The wind had picked up, and now the ship was starting to creak and turn, the sails jerking in the gusts. Elena was trying to fight it, as were her sailors. The one in the crow’s nest lowered his spyglass and screamed, “There’s something inside it!”
Storm clouds poured across the sky like gravy spilled over a countertop.
The ship was tilting to one side so hard barrels were rolling across the deck and hitting the railing.
Some were launched over. One man puked. The vomit landed on another man, which provided just enough force to knock him over the railing, too.
He hit the whirlpool with a fat splash, probably half-relieved to wash the vomit off, probably half-horrified that he’d been flung overboard.
That was when Morfran saw it—the bubblegum-pink tentacle emerging out of the water, circling around the bobbing head of the man in the water.
His arms flailed as he screamed, “Help me!” The tentacle latched around him like a fat, gooey arm.
Then he vanished beneath the swirling black waters. Only a lone boot rose back up.
Morfran frowned. “Did anyone else see that, or…?”
Brim was pasty white. His eyes were decidedly not sparkling. “Bernard,” he murmured quietly. “I can’t swim.”
“What? Not even the doggy paddle?”
“I sink like a boulder in water.”
“Could you at least stay above water with the help of one of those colored noodles? Or a pair of water wings?” He flapped his arms like a chicken. Brim shook his head. Morfran huffed. “At least tell me you haven’t eaten anything in the past half hour.”
Brim’s face sagged as he held up half a ham sandwich. Well. That was too bad. Out of all the peasants he’d met, Brim was one of the more tolerable ones.
Elena jerked Morfran towards her furious face by his collar. Her expression was mildly terrifying. “This is your ex’s doing. You’re going to find a way to stop it.”
“I don’t even know what it is yet.”
Morfran was soon to swallow his words. Right after he spoke, the ship careened nearly onto its side as it entered the enormous whirlpool, which swirled in a massive circle at least as large as a sizable cow pasture.
Morfran and Elena grabbed hold of the steering wheel to keep from spilling into the lake.
Brim had grabbed hold of a stair post, wrapping his legs around it like a clingy toddler on a parent’s leg.
Down, down, down the whirlpool was taking them, and only when they were reaching the eye of it, and when Morfran was seriously wondering just how deep the lake went, did a massive, starlike shape bolt into the sky, spraying water down onto them like a sponge being wrung out.
They all looked up.
“It’s a bird!” one man shouted.
“No, a shooting star!” another said, to which he received bewildered glowers from his crewmates.
Morfran tilted his head, hair whipping into his eyes. It did indeed look somewhat like a star…although it seemed like they were staring at the bottom of it. And if it’d propelled itself out of the water like a spinning top, then…
“It’s a flying squid.” He sighed and looked straight ahead at nothing. Yes, this was Ravana’s doing.
“A Giant Flying Quid-Stealing Squid.” Elena was still wrestling with the steering wheel. Her tricorn hat was long gone, her red-brown hair sopping wet against her head. “Folklore says it thirsts for gold. It can smell it from miles away.” She grimaced at this.
“Let me guess,” Morfran complained. “You have gold on this ship. You didn’t pay an ounce of your taxes to me, did you?”
“I was an evil pirate back then, you two-tongued snake,” she snapped. “Did you expect me to pay taxes?”
“It would’ve saved our butts here now. And I could’ve used it to buy a yacht.”
“That’s criminal, you cretin.”
“I was a wicked leader,” Morfran defended. “That’s how you’re supposed to spend taxes.”
The Giant Flying Quid-Stealing Squid was falling back out of the sky now. Its shadow fell over the ship like a vulture hovering over a carcass.
“Brace for impact!” Elena shouted out to her crew, all of whom were death-gripping various bits of posts and ropes and railing to keep from falling overboard. Brim was still hugging the stair post, spouting off swear words and how he was going to take up swimming lessons if he ever survived this.
Then the creature’s tentacles went stiff like a spear.
It pivoted in the air so its head was facing the water.
Morfran caught sight of all thirty feet of it in a flash of three seconds—bubblegum-pink flesh, gelatinous eyes as large as cannonballs, a large beaky mouth that was snapping like pincers.
With a dive into the water that Morfran would rate 8.
8 considering the stormy conditions, it plunged deep into the whirlpool and began riding the swirls, all of its tentacles amassing about it like a soupy pot of spaghetti noodles.
Then those same tentacles rose out of the water, lashing onto the mast and hull.
It rammed its beak into one of the side windows, and with a horrendous squeal, began slurping.
Morfran surmised that’s where Elena stashed all her chests of gold.
“Well,” Morfran screamed through the winds, “maybe it’ll just eat the gold and leave us be.”
“Ravana summoned it, didn’t she?” Elena screamed back. “That means it’ll come to devour our gold and then us. You’re going to kill this thing, Morf, and when you’re done, I’m going to kill you.”
Morfran grumbled a few words about incentive and the lack thereof. That was when they heard a door slam open, and an individual began slowly dragging their way up to the quarterdeck.
It was Gueldefore, his blue cloak and bright gold hair whipping ferociously in the gusts of wind. He looked majestic and heroic, and he didn’t even need to hold any beams to stay upright.
“What needs to be done to slay this dangerous beast?” Gueldefore shouted.
Morfran scowled at him. Did the bastard really think he was going to tell him?
Morfran knew exactly how to stop Giant Flying Quid-Stealing Squids, because Ravana had bred them during her mad-scientist phase when she’d invented a horrendous collection of peculiar monsters.
He’d been the one to suggest giving them a weakness in case they turned on them, and she’d nodded with her goggles still on her head and said, “Clever as always, dearest.”
Morfran began stomping across the quarterdeck, ignoring Gueldefore’s inquiries as he tried to get to the stairs to the main deck without being flung off the ship.
Gueldefore followed him. “I said, what is the plan?”
“It’s a plan that doesn’t involve you.”
“Make it involve me! I have fought bears and boars barehanded before, so I will be most useful in slaying this beast. Now, again, I implore you to include me in it.”
Morfran stared at his head for a second before shrugging. “Follow me, then.”
Together the two clambered up the mast’s ropes and managed to reach the crow’s nest. From this vantage point they could see the squid much more easily, and see that it was still rifling through broken ship windows, trying to suck out the last crumbs of gold from the treasury rooms.
Gueldefore shouted, “What next?”
Morfran turned to him. “Stay here.” Then he climbed back down, cutting the net with a small dagger so the knight was stuck up there.
Down in the cabins below deck all furniture and items not bolted to the ground had been thrown against the walls.
Papers fluttered through the breezy air.
A loud howling noise pierced his ears, like a great hurricane was plowing through the ship.
Morfran waded through the halls, shoving wailing men aside as they screamed they didn’t want to die and tried to cling to his legs.