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Chapter 5

Blue Moon

There were several sightings of mermaids during the day, but they vanished beneath the waves before any of our archers could actually shoot at them.

“Bosun?” asked Kismet. “If we know the mermaids use it to climb aboard, why do we have netting on the sides of the ship?”

“Ah, lass. That’s because sailors who fall overboard need at least some hope of getting back on board.”

“But... Most of the deaths last night were because the mermaids got on deck.”

.....

“True, but you cleaned up a lot of their yellow blood, too. Did you not?”

“Well... yes.”

“We can fight them on deck better than in the water. Unless either of you is a legendary hero?”

We admitted that we were not.

“Well then ... I’m sorry, we lost good crew last night. We’ll lose more tonight.”

“We can help!” Kismet offered.

“No, you are passengers. Until we get you safe to Koputiki, just stay below decks.”

“Koputiki?” I asked. “I thought...”

Kismet reached down into my mouth and grabbed my tongue. “We’ll be happy to be below decks.”

I slowly closed my teeth around her wrist.

“Don’t you dare. I’ve literally got your tongue.”

“Owl go amew un.” I said.

“Fine.”

She released my tongue, and I released her hand.

“So what is this about Koputiki?” I asked.

The bosun shrugged. “Rumor is there’s free spider meat to be had.”

“I spend enough time in the galley. We could use more meat.”

“Just not mermaid.” Kismet said.

“Nor any other sentient creature.” Bosun Smythe confirmed. “Nobody needs gluttony that bad.”

“Why do people develop their sins?”

I sat down. This was going to be a long one.

“Having sins makes the body and soul resistant to taint.”

Or not.

“Okaaay...” She sat down by me. “So I know Cats, Dogs, Mice, Everywhere. But why are people so scared of taint?”

“Well, because of what it is, miss. Taint is similar to a magical attunement, but it can never be undone. It’s... it’s something wrong in the world, you see. It’s just not supposed to be here in the world. It’s the pure, concentrated wildness of chaos, the sinister essence of death, the mental spread of madness, or a physical distillation of evil. It’s all of those things, all at once.”

“It’s anti-life.” I added. “Anti-nature. It’s against everything that is, at least as we know it.”

“So it’s sentient?”

Bosun Smythe chuckled nervously. “Lass, if it ever becomes sentient, then we’ve got us a world-ending problem, and no nation has the legendary weapons to summon a hero with.”

“So it’s like acid?”

“It’s like acid if it grew stronger rather than weaker while destroying things.” I said.

“You seem to know something of it.” Bosun Smythe said.

“I’ve never seen it, but one of my instructors taught me about taint before he started teaching me necromancy.”

“Well, if you ever want to learn more, our resident expert is Sea-Witch Jeanne.”

“It’s icky and gross.” Kismet decided. “Keep it away from me.”

#

Sea-Witch Jeanne spent most of the day near the prow of the boat, under a parasol to protect her from the sun.

“You wish to know what a sea-witch does on board a boat?”

“Well, no. But we can start with that.”

“Edging toward?”

“Edging toward taint.”

She nibbled on her upper lip. “The first thing you need to know is that most types of magic will naturally be repelled by the touch of your soul. Your aura itself becomes more isolated, other people matter less to your thoughts and emotions.”

“The second is that taint inherently tries to expand. To infect others, to consume all that is around it so that only the taint itself remains.”

“How do I detect taint?”

“It is a simple spell. As I said, magic is repelled by taint. A minor variation of Detect Magic.”

“Uhm...”

She looked at me. “Your Detect Magic? No, don’t look at me like that. You are surely joking.”

“Truthspeaker.” I said.

She sighed, returned her sight to the horizon. “Let us begin there, then. Tell me what you know of magic.”

By the end of that, she was resting her forehead on the railing. “There is much you need to learn.” She said. “We will begin with detecting latent magic, magical flows, and magical nodes.”

Thus began my lessons, from after the swabbing of the deck for so long as Jeanne could withstand my ignorance.

Incidentally, merfolk aren’t all tainted. That night, one of us, I shouldn’t need to say which one, walked to the side of the ship and just jumped off. When a mermaid bit me, I bit back. With a cry, she pulled most of herself away, but I got just a small bit of scale, blubber, and muscle.

Evolutionarily speaking, merfolk are part fish, part human, and have little bits of shark and other sea creatures in there. Whatever the First Men did to add them to the world, it was masterful Life-Shaping. But there’s nothing unique in there.

Oh, and I didn’t get anything resembling the merfolk attunement to the ocean. But I didn’t have time to think on the repercussions.

Kismet may have objected, but I found the nets along the side of the ship to be a life saving handhold to the world of air, where merfolk are less agile.

It’s amazing how fast you can climb when carnivorous merwomen are chasing you. Don’t burn your Fleet of Foot; that’s only for running.

Kismet took a moment out of the fighting. “So, who’s not listening to the music?”

I muttered something, lost in the clamor of battle.

But then, there were merfolk, and battle, and somehow I had lost my entire belt including my sword.

I stayed to the fringes, and used claws and jaws. Before I’d understood what weapons were, they were what I used, after all.

“Rhishi! Possible taint! Stop biting them.”

Not all merfolk are tainted.

But some are, I reminded myself.

#

None of the blood spilled on the deck that second night was tainted, and we only lost three crew to two dead merfolk raiders.

“That was...” someone said, while we were swabbing.

“Yeah, I had to put down a dog who fought like that.”

Nobody other than Kismet wanted to swab near me, until Jeanne took my lower jaw in her hand, gazed into my eyes, and pronounced me free of taint.

It was an odd feeling, seeing the ocean in her eyes, feeling my own ocean mana come to my eyes in response. I saw...

I don’t know what I saw, my mind recoiled from it.

And when the ocean stopped focusing in my eyes, it was easy to convince myself what I had seen didn’t matter. It was still Jeanne, sea-witch and tutor.

The final night, they never made the deck. When the Siren’s song expired, the merfolk returned to the depths.

I looked up to see the edge of white peeking out from a blue moon.

.....

We were out of range of the volcano, if just barely.

The stench of mermaid blood seemed to linger long past the stains themselves. We scrubbed sage into the boards, but to no avail. We just endured it for eight days.

But I get ahead of myself; I did learn to call my magic to my eyes. It was weak, at first, and strained me greatly.

At the time, I could only do so with Water or Nature, and there were slight differences depending upon which I used.

But one thing remained constant.

“Jeanne, what do I see when I look at you through the Mystic Vision?”

She nibbled on her upper lip, and took a deep breath. “Taint.” She said. “You see that I possess a single point of taint. I restrain it, trapped inside a cage made of my own Envy. But the captaine knows that should I die, to soak my body in salt, and burn it on a bonfire topped with sage.”

“May I ask how?”

“I’m not ready to reveal that, not yet. But yes, taint is a horrible, indelible stain.”

I spoke to her of my spell, Purifying Water. “A wonderful concept.” She said. “But you would only spread the taint further, not remove it.”

“Does salt or burning remove it?”

“So far as I know, not even the gods can remove it. It is the entropic doom of the world made manifest. We can only combat and restrain the smallest pieces of it. The rest?”

She waved her hands to indicate the ocean. “The ocean is immeasurably large, but it is not infinite. The sky? Again, not infinite. Sooner or later, there will be enough taint that it encompasses the world. I think we sentient beings will be extinct by then.”

At the time of this writing, I have not discovered anything to help resist the doom by corruption posed by taint.

At the time, I had no clue how to even investigate it.

#