LEGACY LOST Read online

  From all of this they could be sure was that there was conflict aboard.

  And whoever was aboard might have known that they were coming.

  Gustav slipped to the front of their adventuring party and gestured them forward, down into what would have been, normally, the berth . . .

  But the interior of this ship was lined in glass-plated cabinets, crowded by colorful compositions of . . . everything. Creatures fantastic and alien. Sculptures of the tiniest, finest detail. Confiscated love letters and magic potions and lights which migrated within glass baubles like stars. Was this the force which lit the inside of the very balloon below which the ship was suspended?

  Erected along the wall was a platter of winged insects, glossy and vibrant, which seemed fake, perhaps cast in glass or jewels . . . but their carapaces were pierced through with needles, fuzzy, and so eerily detailed. Their bleak, black eyes forever frozen. At the bottom of this cabinet shelf was a skull with no jawbone, yellowed and authentic, eyes empty and dark, bookended by thick glass bottles labeled “ORACLE WATER” and “AMAZING CRAZING MIND AND HAIR ELIXIR.” A bejeweled spritzer with a pink perfume poof read, “SERUM FOR DEEP SLEEP.”

  Legacy reached out to touch it, to perhaps sniff the bottle, but then she jerked away.

  Next to this glass cabinet was a stuffed reptile carcass, dark green and scaled, the size of Legacy herself. Its slitted, yellow eyes gleamed with reflective light.

  She gulped. Its gaping smile was filled with jagged pieces.

  “Come on,” Dax whispered, bracing her elbow in his hand. The group clustered together as they tread deeper, like a gaggle of awestruck children, beneath gigantic feathers and waxworks of spiny, gaping fish.

  A wide, arched entryway led deeper, beyond a thick veil, and Legacy murmured to herself, “I wish I could see ahead of us.” Reminding her that this article was in fact an automaton, a tiny, spiraling periscope sprouted from its breast pocket like a popped spring. “Guys,” she hissed, plucking its tip from the fabric. “Let me go first. I’ve got a thing . . .”

  Legacy crept forward, ignorant of the way Dax grabbed for her in passing, and slunk up to the curtains. Hm. There’s that smell again. That sweet, syrupy smell from the swamps of Old Earth . . . Sniffing at the air, Legacy placed the tiny brass periscope to one eye and leaned into the drapery.

  Beyond lay another sprawling room of artifacts and wonders, vivid shells in twisted design juxtaposed with magnificent horns and tusks, all seeming to belong to archaic and terrifying beasts, the bloated yet skeletal carcass of a mermaid at the feet of a smooth china sculpture of a nude woman, heavy with child and blank-faced. A tangle of vines with pink flowers gaping apart, as fleshy and gossamer as a living mouth, fringed in a disconcerting ring of jagged green teeth.

  Next to this oddly attractive and repellent plant was a middle-aged man sitting comfortably in a rusted cage, spinning gently in place. A stiff, white safari hat was clutched between his fists, pillowy pants the color of sand and high leather boots drawn up to his chest. He was a shade overweight, which Legacy had never seen in a real person before. He was bespectacled, mustached, long-faced, silver-haired, lightly wrinkled. A glum expression pulled his face down even further and deepened the lines around his mouth and eyes.

  No one else was in the room.

  Dipping through the curtains, Legacy sprinted low toward the cage and gripped its bars, peering at the older man inside.

  The sharp rise and fall of bickering voices could be heard deeper in the ship.

  “Don’t you think I tried that?” a surly female voice demanded. “‘Look for the key,’ she says. That’s rich. Real brilliant. He ain’t got a key, ya brainless fart!” Another crash emitted from the room. “Shit, Tilde. We might need that part, you know.”

  “We’re here to help you, I think,” Legacy whispered to the caged man, glancing toward the source of the voices.

  “Well, are you or aren’t you?” the man replied, mildly annoyed.

  “Let’s just tell him we’ll kill him,” a high-pitched voice giggled. “I’ll go tell him right now.”

  “Then how would we get home?” the surly voice retorted. “Brains over here just tore off a lever! I’m sure it weren’t important, though!”

  “Then we could tell him we’ll tickle him!” the high-pitched one amended triumphantly.

  Legacy frowned and glanced back toward the uppity hostage. “That all depends. Are you being held captive, or do you simply enjoy close spaces?”

  The man sighed. Irritation was better than fear, she supposed. “My name is Augustus, Doctor Augustus Perry Kenneth Summat. I’m a professor of natural science, and collector of historical fineries and the grotesque, not – not perversions and absurdities!”

  “Forget it, let’s just kill him and take our own lil’ boat home,” a throaty female voice said. “There’s nothing any good on this blasted barge, anyway. Who wants a freaking feather?”

  “I wouldn’t mind a feather,” the high-pitched one said.

  Surly: “Shut up, Cookie.”

  Legacy, too, rolled her eyes. Maybe she and the surly one would have gotten along in another circumstance. “How many are there?”

  The others behind her, Gustav, Dax, Vector, and Liam, slunk in now, though they lost Vector to investigation of the monstrous Venus fly trap – “Ow,” he winced, even just touching its pink flower with one reddened finger, and the teeth snapped shut with artful precision. “Jesus,” Vector added.

  They also lost Gustav, distracted by the dehydrated mermaid corpse.

  “It’s not real,” Augustus informed him plainly. “There are four. Pirates. All women.” He grimaced at the acknowledgment.

  “Ah, I’ve got it,” the throaty voice announced. “What does the sad old loon love more than anything else in the world?”

  “Oooh, and I already saw the perfect feather for my new top hat!” Cookie piped.

  The sound of a slap trembled through the air.

  “No, you stuffed muffin,” the throaty voice sneered.

  “Sorry, Tilde,” Cookie whimpered.

  “The correct answer is: the bullshit all over these here walls!” Tilde barked. “We’ll destroy the shit of it, piece by piece, until he agrees to fix whatever the hell I just did and get us back to the cove.”

  “How can we get you out?” Vector asked him. “Wait! Haha!” He rooted in his pockets, first of his vest and then of his pants, screwed his face into a frown, and extracted the Cipher-Scope then from his utility belt. He attached the small box to the cage’s keyhole and turned, allowing its picks and hooks to get to work.

  Just then, a young, freckled blond in a top hat – long-legged, hardly older than eighteen, in an adorably overdone “I am a pirate” get-up complete with frilly garter – trod into the room, tending a bruised cheek and pouting. The entire group, Augustus still in his cage, went still with horror, although the whimsical girl hardly glanced at them. She paused to check her gaudy red lipstick in the reflection cast by an antique pot on display, and then, with surprising agility, she snatched the item off its shelf.

  “Oi,” the blond spoke, high-pitched. Cookie. She smiled down at her reflection in the shining bowl, her demeanor loosened into an oblivious swagger. “So, the order ‘ere is to dest–”

  She froze at the sight of the five new intruders and let out a mind-numbing shriek, comparable to the wail of a siren.

  Gustav moved forward first, with the confidence of an armed man though none of the five excepting Vector were prepared for combat. “Now, I don’t want to hurt–” he began.

  Cookie heaved the pottery at his head, where it shattered and lacerated his face. “Son of a bitch!” he cried, cringing downward and shaking fragments of glass from his shaggy hair as Cookie leapt onto the wall and scampered up a series of shelves with all the grace of a desperate cat. Gustav lunged after her.

  Two more women burst into the room.

  The first to enter was also overweight. What a wonder, two overweight people
on one ship! What were the odds! She had thick thighs, bare excepting the tattered, runny hosiery and frayed short shorts she wore, and her trunk was also generously exposed, garbed in a threadbare midriff sweater. Her hair, dark, short, and curly, sprouted from beneath a backwards beret. Her features were dramatically, garishly painted in earth tones. Umber cheeks. Wine lips. Sapphire eyeshade.

  “Oh, fuck me,” she groaned. The throaty one. Tilde.

  Vector, like Gustav, made the mistake of issuing a warning. He had put his blunderbuss, the glue gun, away, but now he gestured to his holster and remarked, “I don’t want to use this.”

  Dax, on the other hand, made no misguided move toward chivalry. He crouched and swept her legs out from under her, then pounced, and the two rolled across the floor, emitting a chorus of “Oof!” and “Guh!”

  The cabinet onto which Cookie, and then Gustav, had crawled came crashing down with a boom and shatter as the second woman entered. She had a wizened, narrow face, well-aged and bronzed by years in the sun. Her eyes were the palest, brightest part of her countenance, blood red hair cropped close to her skull. She wore form-fitting pants and blouse, which revealed her utter lack of body fat.

  Glancing between the dark-haired woman, who had been pinned by Dax and kicked wildly as her hands were being twisted with wire from Vector’s utility belt, and the blond, Cookie, who was scrabbling at the floor with her nails as Gustav yanked her from hands and knees and slung her over his shoulder, then to Liam and Legacy, the only unoccupied enemies, this woman – Surly, likely – weighed her options and raced toward Vector.

  Legacy snatched for any potential weapon on the shelf: a baubled, razor-thin, circular disc of glass the size of a large wheel. It was tagged: “Lightning struck this patch of sand twice!” Without a second thought, she whipped the disc toward Surly’s running legs – but just a few feet ahead of them. The glass disc whistled and shattered into the floor, only missing Surly by inches as she slid to a halt and whipped to face Legacy.

  Maybe it would’ve been smarter to free one of her companions, but Surly made a decision more vengeful than rational, and broke into a dash for Legacy.

  “Leg!” Dax called, eyes bulging.

  Legacy only had enough time to fumble another weapon from the shelf, a spiraled horn of smooth white, long and tapered like a spear, at which the caged doctor, Augustus, audibly groaned, “Not the narwhal tusk.”

  Still, Surly advanced, slower upon the now armed contender.

  “Wait, Legacy, no, wait!” Dax cried, both distant and frantic. “I’m coming!”

  “Dude, I can’t hold her on my own!” Vector countered.

  “Oi, you’re a right bitch, you know!” Gustav growled. Cookie was flexible enough to loop around the back of his neck and claw his already lacerated face.

  “I’ve got this!” Legacy yelled.

  “Do you, little girl?” Surly asked her, now striding forward with wide, careful steps planted into the ground.

  Legacy pursed her lips and tried to tell herself to be calm.

  Surly snatched an impromptu weapon from the shelf as well: the purported skull of a saber-toothed tiger. She drifted it in the air back and forth, distracting her adversary, making an oddly intimidating cluck in the back of her throat as she did so. As if she were already lamenting Legacy’s demise.

  Surly feinted toward her and Legacy dove deeply forward, passionate and reckless, foolish; her opponent shrieked with delight and dodged, then swung the saber-toothed skull hard and wide. “Red!” she cackled, spearing the forearm left exposed in the younger girl’s rash attack. “It’s my favorite color!”

  Legacy screamed, the skull withdrawing one reddened tooth in Surly’s grip, and a huge net descended from behind Surly, entangling the older woman before she could strike again. Liam held it by its hilt.

  The professor sighed. “My butterfly net,” he noted grimly.

  “Oh, what the hell!” Surly wailed, thrashing with the skull at the netting tangled over her head, shoulders, and torso.

  Vector didn’t miss this opportunity to fire the glue gun, spewing the intelligent adhesive onto the net, sealing it over her, her pin-wheeling arms pinned to her torso.

  Legacy stood, breathless, bleeding, and tallying. The doctor in the cage. Liam maintaining the pissy old pirate glued into a butterfly net. The voluptuous Tilde, bucking hard enough to require all of Dax and Vector’s combined effort to detain, Dax on one arm and Vector on the other, and Cookie, the blond slung over Gustav’s back, kicking her legs in the air and giving him a passionate wedgy.

  “I thought you said–” Legacy addressed Augustus.

  A tall, lanky shadow slunk forward, rising up behind Dax, Vector, and Tilde, a wicked, dangerous hunting knife in hand.

  “Look out!” she finished. But it was too late. The creature lunged into the trio, and Legacy saw that she was a woman. A lithe, muscular woman in a one-sleeved shirt, cargo pants, and boots. She possessed coal black skin, a shaven head, and eyes like jade stones. The hunting knife went between Tilde’s wrists, severing the wire which had held the throaty-voiced pirate captive.

  Tilde whirled immediately onto Dax and grabbed, of all the vulnerable parts, his rebreather. She tore the metallic coil – his potassium hydroxide scrubber – from its leather sheath, sending the damaged part skittering like a silver worm across the floor, the potassium hydroxide inside falling out in a white powder.

  “NO!” Legacy cried.

  Dax, too, clawed at the mask as if he could still have protected it through effort.

  Meanwhile, Tilde was still moving, as fluid as if the ripping of Dax’s mask was only an incidental gesture, an afterthought. She twisted the glue gun from Vector’s hand, his grip having gone slack in surprise, and fired it at him without hesitation.

  “Shi–” got out before his mouth was sealed shut, the epoxy attracted to its motion.

  The nameless newcomer, moving with the evasive skill of a shadow, darted along the wall without bothering to free Cookie or Surly. She was moving to depart, with or without her crew. Tilde, too, skulked purposefully across the room, glaring daggers at her attackers as she made a wide berth around their tense, shocked circle.

  But Legacy was on fire with rage. She couldn’t even let herself believe that Tilde really knew what she’d just done . . . but at the same time, it didn’t matter. She would have to kill her. She would have to hurt. Pain. Burn. Anything. Everything. Legacy was in a place beyond words and images, a place of pure emotion and instinct. The panic induced by seeing Dax so deeply, however indirectly, wounded caused time to stand still, details all etched in clear crystal, mid-air.

  Legacy grabbed the thick green stalk of a toothed flower, ripping it in half, and swung its decapitated flower at Tilde. Even though the weapon whipped limply forward, it spewed its corrosive sap from both ends in an arc that was sure to catch the other woman at least in part. A lick of its clear syrup lashed Tilde’s face and she howled, the sound bringing a sick satisfaction to Legacy made obvious by her expression.

  The woman staggered, stumbled, but continued to escape, following the retreating form of the nameless woman.

  Still, Legacy couldn’t let it go. Wouldn’t let it go. In truth, she’d forgotten about Dax . . . and bolted after his attacker again, her previous satisfaction already thinning, already gone. Her companions fell away, inconsequential, and only her enemy existed. The one who had hurt Dax. Mortally?

  Legacy sprang what seemed to be half of the room’s distance, colliding with Tilde’s back and sending them both sliding across the floor. The other woman rolled onto her side, drew her powerful legs between them, and thrust upward . . . propelling Legacy high into the air. She screamed, an automatic thing, legs cycling uselessly as she flew backwards and crashed into another section of glass cabinetry.

  It hurt. It sang and burned through her back and into her chest, an unbearable pain that wouldn’t end, that held her suspended in itself; simultaneously, gravity remained a law of physics, and
she crashed to the ground, surrounded by destroyed planks of wood and shards of glass. Around her, the contents of the shelf spilled and crumbled: exotic shells, the sculpture of a fabulous bird with paws, gemstones, bottles . . .

  The last thing of which Legacy was cognizant were the ghosts of feet on tile . . . and a pleasant liquid, like pale sky, seeping toward her, with the distinct, oddly sweet odor, almost like . . . like . . . the factories of the industrial territory . . . and what was that ringing, like a hive of mechanical insects swarmed loose in her skull . . .

  “It’s meant to hold my buzzard, Judas,” Doctor Augustus explained to the young adventurers when they returned to free him from the large cage. He thought he saw a flicker of judgment pass between some of them, as if he himself were the oddity, though he wasn’t sure why he cared what they thought. After all, one of them had copper springs in his terribly tangled hair, the jacketed one appeared drunk, and the girl, well, she wasn’t there anymore. She’d been collected and cleared from the area moments ago by her large, ginger-haired companion, the doomed, masked one shortly behind.

  The two remaining adventurers ignored Augustus, the tangled one unhinging the lock-picking device from the cage.

  “But Judas died a few years ago,” Augustus went on to fill the silence. “During a trip to the cold lands.”

  The tangled one deposited the lock-picking device back into his utility belt.

  “I hoped to excavate more narwhal habitats, but was blown off-course by a snowstorm.”

  And opened the cage’s door.

  “And became stranded at the top of an impossible mountain. Almost died myself,” Augustus rambled indulgently as he climbed out, dusting his pants, peering about with sudden academic formality. “Hypoxia, you know.”

  The tangled adventurer stuck out his hand. “Vector Shannon, inventor, mechanic, and airship captain,” he introduced himself. “I have my craft, the Albatropus, attached to your deck by companionway just now.”