Dark Water (Minnow/Duane)

((This was commissioned. It becomes explicit once you see Minnow's butt scroll by, be forewarned! Otherwise it's mostly cute.))

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Upon departing one of Alderode’s most prestigious pymaric Academies after matters relayed to the reader in another tale, young Duane Adelier had turned towards the military, in the hope he’d be sent south after his brother, to the scorched wasteland of Avelpit and the Foi-Hellick rebellion there. He’d fantasized of it for weeks in Camp Maefhel, running laps, stickfighting with new comrades, gashing his leg open on a sword he’d been given by a well-meaning old man who’d not realised the gangly teenager was a spellwright (and in some emotional turmoil).

But after his armour had arrived and his last letter home had been written, orders directed him west instead, to the quarantined plagueland of Fachlyne.

Four months later, Duane began to worry that enlisting had been a mistake.

“I thought there would be more fighting,” he confided to his friend Jon, each supporting one end of a bloated corpse they’d retrieved from an offal-streaked cart. Always Duane seemed to get the gory end. This poor bastard’s face was sticky and dark, old blood purged from its orbits like the eyeblack of a woman in the rain. Flies discussed their political opinions in its mouth. Such sights no longer gave Duane offense, though he had yet to grow numb to the smell. 

“It won’t be longer than another month,” answered Jon breezily, “Quarantine enforcement is a tour for novices. You are no longer a novice and I am all but an old boot.”

They swung the body in time. One! Two! Three! And then into the flames. It landed with a whump of embers and bugs. Two soldiers nearby swore and swatted at their uniforms, putting a touch more space between themselves and the conflagration. But not too much. On a night this cold, at least a man could find warmth by the corpse glow.

Duane scowled. “Aye, old boot; your experience is why I was so comforted when you said it would be no longer than a month three months ago.”

Jon shook his head. “Betimes even the well-worn boot missteps. What does Ssael say?”

Duane leaned close and hissed: “‘He said you said it would be no longer than a month three months ago!’”

Jon laughed. “Well then, what does Duane say?”

“Duane says he is tired,” said Duane, “There is an exertion that wears upon the limbs, and a crueler exertion that cramps the intellect. And the soul. I am tired in my soul, hethllot.”

Jon smiled sympathetically, his white hair all peppered with ash. His eyes were bloodshot too, and his normally tidy uniform smeared and befouled with substances at which even a Materials master might scratch his head. Plats were small but Jon was particularly so, his boots too big, and the plague mask casually pushed up his forehead refusing to stay in place. Of course, in comparison, Duane made most people look small.

He murmured the perfunctory prayer over the crumbling, fire-eaten silhouette of the corpse, touched two fingers between his own eyes, then punched Jon in the arm. “Is that the last body?”

“Whoreson, I’ll have you killed and you’ll not be missed.”

“Fantasize! Do! You know I will outrank you soon. I should outrank you now.”

Jon rolled his twinkling, pretty eyes, “Aye, and you would if you’d not thrown it away on some lad in a coat closet-”

“Some LADY,” protested Duane hotly, for the fifteenth time, ”Some LADY.”

“Ah, I remember now! That lady named Jeremy!” But the Plat had mercy, and waved one dismissive hand. “I’m meeting Elward and Madd at the Barley for drinks if your throat tickles.”

“That explains the mask. I’ll fetch mine and see you there and duel you and I’ve already killed one Plat, you know.”

“Stone drunk, wasn’t he?”

Duane imagined he looked a dusty-faced, soot-blackened fright, but he didn’t change from his uniform upon stopping into the barracks. The Barley was a rat trap; a local pub just shy of the dark zone where a pitiful family of Fachlynian Soud watered the local garrison for coin and favours. In a cruel but inarguably successful bid to keep the terrifying Weeping Plague contained, Alderode had allowed no civilian to leave Fachlyne city in ten years, sick or well. Over time the city had slowly attracted criminals, pirates, and even Black Tongues, all fine with risking the plague if it kept them out of the Aldish government’s reach. It had become necessary not only to enforce the quarantine with soldiers, but to establish a military police force to maintain some semblance of order.

In that endeavour, the state had seen less success. The city was a miserable pit. Some Alds believed the entire ginnal should be razed, but its scrappy Ssaelit population also elicited its share of sympathy from at least half the country. For all Duane’s grousing over his inglorious post, he was happy for the few opportunities to put his Seminary training to good use ministering to the tragic characters he’d found here. Of course there wasn’t much solace or wisdom to be gleaned from an eighteen-year-old priest, but many of the locals were happy enough to see a healthy looking Soud from the outside who spoke good Tainish and always had a friendly smile for them, even if they couldn’t see his eyes.

That was the God-damned trouble, really. Inside the dark zone there were just no God-damned eyes.

Duane slipped the mask from his travel trunk and twisted it over the top of his head. It looked very much like a Crescian helmet that extended too far down his face, terminating in a pair of black glass goggles. With it strapped tight, he could see only the brightest lights, the rest of the world a ghostly vista of dark silhouettes. Since the Weeping Plague spread through eye contact, masks were the surest way to avoid infection.

And it was miserable. More miserable than the burning corpses and the inescapable stink of death and all the little Fachlynian children who, as far as Duane could determine, had no future. Whether they died of the plague here or not. More than once he had prayed for Ssael to reveal some path out of it all, but Ssael, as ever, kept His secrets to Himself.

Before curfew blackened the streets at ten bells, Fachlyne city was lit up a bright, fiery orange, to aid the masked. Half-blind, with two hours left of light, Duane hobbled as quickly and carefully as he could towards the sound of waves and the smell of the sea. His uniform caused the locals to give him a wide berth but more than a few elbows were knocked as he went. The Barley was right on the water. There, at least, a man could tilt his nose into the sea breeze and trade one Godless stink for another. Anteit Vaosa, but even their watery beer would be a blessing tonight--

At Rue Gaer, an unnatural hiss pulled the soldier up sharp: the sweaty susurration of a Tainish spellsong. No honest spellwright cast a spell in the same tone used for hissing an oath. Badmen about bad business! Duane paused in the twilight world of the mask, perking his ears, and his senses too. The Barley was only a few city blocks ahead. He should make for it, and its watery beer, and the bravado that would come from Jon after adequate imbibition of it. Instead Duane turned sharply to his right, down a close alley, and followed the flaring of put-upon khert-lines.

Ahead: “Don’t let her touch you!” a man barked in Tainish. Another whisper then, and Duane felt an instantiation of Temperature somewhere twenty feet beyond, in the darkness. Someone - a female someone - whimpered in pain.

“I thought you couldn’t cast on a senet.”

“You can cast on godsdamned anything if you do it indirectly, my boy. Make the fire, move them into it, haha. Same way one grills a bit of fish. Hoi. Turn her over, then, we’ll sizzle the other side if she doesn’t stop her fighting-”

The woman shrieked! Without consciously deciding to act at all, Duane felt himself swivel out of the alley, palms spitting moonglow and hackles raised! Against a small fire he saw three dark figures: A masked brute, a masked spellwright with hands aglow, and a tiny female someone or other hunched over at their feet. Heat rose in Duane’s chest and face, and he barked: “Back away from the lady! Or I fry for her delight a nice dessert out of you both, ye Geffie halfwits-!”

The spell-wielding badman laughed through his surprise but was too wise to waste words with a retort. His hand rose, and Duane listened to him cast even as he began his own unspoken reply.

Bullets of Solidity sourced from... the wall to Duane’s left! Fast! Too fast! And too many khert-lines in play to catch them (and he was not so well-practised yet!). Duane rose his own Solidity instead, an abrupt wall that punched high towards the sky. Against it, the bullets pinged and shattered. The badman gaped, not understanding how the soldier had conjured such a thing without opening his mouth. Some pymaric-?

No pymaric at all!

The tacit-casting Adelier exploited the other’s shock, rolling past his brutish comrade’s club and into the spellwright’s legs. The tug of an ankle brought him tumbling to the pavement. Duane dug through his collar and touched his throat, leaving him temporarily voiceless, then turned and uppercut the brute with a slice of poisonously flickering green. Spitting a groan he fell atop his friend, and Duane flipped tidily back to both feet. He kicked the spellwright in his temple for good measure and, just like that, the alley was quiet.

“Are you quite all right, Miss?” Duane asked, turning from the knot of limbs.

But there was no one else there.

“Miss? Miss?”

Where had she gone? His mask wobbled over his eyes as he swiveled his head left and right, squinting through the dark for an opening in the walls. It was so tempting to lift it away and restore his vision, but he could think of a thousand better ways to die than the Weeping Plague.

Was that a patter of feet he heard down that bottle strewn passage? Duane thought he should leave her, go back and report-- but instead he gave chase.

Through brick-lined alleyways crooked and ancient he ran, kicking up a storm of tin cans and broken pymarics. Glut butts and spent bliss phials crunched beneath his soles, and he very much did not wish to trip and fall palm-first into them. Once his boots left pavement and thudded instead onto rickety boards, Duane thankfully found himself on a strip of abandoned dock. There was no moon. He could not see even the stars through the black glass of his mask. He froze, afraid of misstepping into the sea. Ach, what if the woman, in her panic, had done exactly that?

“Miss?” he called again, towards the water.

There was something sinister about how small and thin his voice sounded bouncing across it, sinking into that wicked and unimpressed sea. How swiftly even the pinnacles of the gods’ garden lost their petals when taken from their comrades, their cities, their bulwarks-

There came a tiny, not unpleasant touch upon his neck.

Duane’s next utterance was even smaller - a single weak syllable - and he melted to the ground. All the strength was gone from him! He could see nothing, nor move, nor express further audible displeasure over either matter. He felt two fists dig themselves under his belt and begin to pull. To drag.

The collapsed staff on his belt made a great clamour across the boards. His head slid roughly over each indentation. Thunk, thunk, thunk. In his wake his wallet split open and spilled his last week’s pay in a glittering comet trail. Then the ground fell away beneath him, horror swallowed up his thoughts, and with the most inelegant splash he dropped into the black brine beneath the dock!

“Be quiet,” whispered the female someone or other. Duane had no choice in the matter, paralysed as surely as the dead man he and Jon had committed to the flames. But he was not sinking. Somehow, the sea did not seem to want him. It rotated him about until he was bobbing upright beneath the dock, head above the waterline. Shallowly gasping he hung suspended in its embrace like a bit of pickled coney in the fancy aspics his mother would make when he was very small.

Above, heavy treads shook the boards, and barnacle fragments fell and pinged off Duane’s mask. A group of rough men - a dozen, maybe two dozen - thundered above and past their hiding place. At their tail end Duane heard the spellwright from before, his voice slurred with concussion.

“Nn, I can’t… I can’t believe you lost her!”

“ME? You couldn’t outcast some pissmop grunt? Gods, d’you know how much Elyier’s offering for one of those tarts? Do you have any idea how much we’re out?!”

Elyier? This was a sizable gang. Duane wondered where they were nesting, and who they were after to have dared an assault outside the dark zone, in a place so near the barracks. Harold’s lads? Maybe the remainder of those Crescian pirates they’d routed from the cannery last month. He was running names and possibilities behind his eyes until the last of the voices died away. Then he felt the hand again, small and tender on his jaw. His vocal cords unstuck. He was able to spit out the seawater from under his tongue.

“Eww!” said the female someone or other. Duane gibbered.

“F-forgive me!” he hissed at the darkness, “Why are they after you? Are you all right?”

Where was she?!

There! Just a blacker silhouette against the blacker darkness through his mask. She reached for him abruptly, possessively - was she laughing? - but Duane still could not move his body! And then she dove.

Whatever further apology or inanity or question he might have attempted was swallowed up in lips so powerful and so warm and so salty-sweet that they tore every possible protest from his thoughts. He could see little - a slash of faint blue where the nightsky waited beyond the dock - but it didn’t matter. Sensation flooded him, brighter than sight, more colourful than the sky, whiter than the sun. A thousand shades of blue as hot strength pressed against his mouth and chest. The lips flew from there and over his jaw, claimed his left ear. Little teeth chewed on it and he laughed, delighted, mystified. Was he dreaming?

“Thank you,” said the female someone or other. She caught up his right wrist and guided it through the friendly, gelatinous water up, up, up. Duane’s gloved fingers twitched helplessly, but were free enough to conform a hand around a sudden breast. Soft. Soft and slick and made to fit his palm. And oh so warm. All the water around them was warm. Senselessly warm, impossibly warm this far north, with the midwinter festival just behind them. Warm as the baths in the upper class ghers; warm as the water he drew for his father when he wasn’t feeling well enough for the public bath house.

Duane tasted the invisible stranger’s lips again, then dipped into the darkness for his own investigation. It was awkward around the bulky mask, but he found her ears, too, and-- what was this? Her hair was unnaturally short; rough cut with a knife, by the feel of it. He licked the sea water from the strands, cleared them from the back of her neck and nape. She giggled and held both hands against his chest, as if waiting for something.

Her neck was tiny, tendinous and delicate. Duane had only one other female neck to compare it with in his memory, but Sarthos’ had been stronger, thicker. The short hair, though, put him in mind of her, and their doomed tryst, and their doomed friendship. Where was she now? Was she safe? Was she alive? Ach, but he could not hang on to the thought. Regret had no place here, somehow, when his head swam in the most intoxicating way, his body held happy hostage to this little female someone or other, and the whole of the ocean she somehow seemed to effortlessly command and he had to find her iips again, taste her lips again, feel her lips again-

Wait.

Waaaait.

Her neck was too tiny.

Duane tried to flinch away, but somehow his chin was hooked on some soft, warm strand stretching from her jaw to her.. to her… to her what?

Oh, God’s Beard, it was her windpipe. And this other was her bloody esophagus!

“Llemkaimasa!” he whispered. Storm Bringer!

He could see in his mind’s eye the monster that was in the water with him: the blue skin, the fierce eyes, the raw and gory nothing-space between her clavicles and jaw, and her nacreous insides all rainbow-streaked and glistening. Deep inside, the glint of her soulless Core-thing like some chaos seed, older than all the world and calling to the most base desires of Man, and the slits of her gills, making all the waters her breath and her blood and her body!

Llemkaimasa,” he said again, “Llemkaimasa”!

“Yes!” she whispered in return, right against his ear like a midnight lover, “I bring things to some people here and I will not tell you who because you soldiers don’t just keep the bad out; you keep the good in. Those men were waiting for me, and they would have cut me to pieces and sold me to collectors. But you saved me.” Her Tainish was rough, but good. And old, very old, like his great grandmother’s.

“I thought you were a woman!” protested Duane fearfully.

“Maybe you wanted a woman,” she answered. Was she mocking him? “Is that why you were so brave? Were you hoping for a tumble, soldier?”

“How dare you! I would have rescued anyone-”

“You would not have rescued llemkaimasa,” she challenged, and something dangerous and playful was there in her sea-dark voice, “Maybe you would have captured me for yourself, if I’d given you the chance.”

“I would never,” Duane said, “The senet beasts are our cousins, no less abused and abandoned by the unjust gods. Even you shameless sea tarts-”

Don’t let her touch you, the spellwright had called! An important warning indeed. With one feathery brush of her ungodly fingers this waterwoman could stop the blood in his heart, or flood his lungs with his own vital fluids. She could-

She could unbutton his trousers!

“Stop that!” he sputtered.

The thickened water seemed to squeeze him tighter; to flush with warmth. It was almost hot! Steam rose from their private pocket of ocean beneath the dock, white and sinuous in the cold air. Her unseen fingers parted his fly with practised precision, and into that opened passage all the ocean seemed to pour. Flesh-hot pressure twisted bodily around him as if he were a great wet towel being wrung out at both ends. Under the leather breastplate of his uniform it insinuated, up the cuffs of his shirt into his gloves and boots. Then it swelled, and his boots popped off his feet like pistachio shells, fluttering down into the darkness to rest with old wagon wheels and soda bottles.

“I’m sorry!” he apologised, battling rising panic and inscrutable lust. Was she going to kill him? No, she would have done that already. She surely would not have hidden him from the pursuing gang if she wanted him dead? Right?! “I did not mean to offend-”

“I’m not offended.”

A moment of consideration passed. Then Duane felt a small hand navigate past the front of his opened trousers, and touch his most tender part.

“I knew you would be very big,” she said, gauging what she found. Did it please her? Duane could hear her smile even if he could not see it. He could hear her teeth flashing; imagine them clacking together and apart again like some great shark’s. “Tall spiderpaws are big. And tall spiderpaws make big noises.”

He was already immodestly presenting, swollen and curious from kisses he had no memory of ever deciding to allow. But he had allowed them, and returned them, and is that why she thought now it was quite within the bounds of acceptability to take whatever else she wished?!

Yet the words: “Do not,” found no purchase on his tongue. And his prick certainly was not protesting.

From its head, her two fingers traced along its length, towards his quivering stomach. He felt every detail of those small questing digts: the hard curve of pearlescent nails; the hot terminus of each digit, the delicate corner of their knuckles as they came to a rest on his belly. Then, the most indescribable sensation rose in the pit of Duane’s stomach. His heart skipped. He felt suddenly light-headed and giddy. He murmured a protest. If the water had not been propping him up he surely would have sank into a swoon and been drowned.

A moment later, her hand closed in a fist around his member, and he felt himself grown excruciatingly swollen, long, and steaming hot as a red poker.

“You could have asked,” he growled, trying to curl around the sudden intensity. He could not. She chuckled through the darkness.

“I don’t like to.”

It was not to his taste to be spoken to in such a manner, but she ate the protests from his mouth. His head knocked against a piling as she roughly swallowed him up in a kiss. What a kiss! She kissed like a Composer wrote spellwork; like a prima donna sang arias. Duane tried to wrestle for himself the lead but there was no strength in his neck to do so. And he was only a novice in her presence! She kept his head where she wished it, gave no quarter to his lips, drank the very air from his lungs until he was breathless, gasping, but not entirely unhappy. No, not unhappy at all. What a tonic, these lips!

If only he could... Surely she would not be so cruel!

‘“I need... I need to...”

He tried to flex his hips; to apply some pressure, some relief to his throbbing, maddening erection. His belly burned, and his thoughts went away in a wild panic of need. Her fist had not moved from around his member however. She held him prisoner, unable to relieve himself, as she put another stamp of ownership on his mouth.

“No,” said the waterwoman, “Not yet.”

What did she mean? Not yet?! It was not going to listen to either of them! Duane thrashed his head back and forth in torment.

“I’m- I’m...!”

Yet he was not!? How was he not?!

She laughed at his distress, but it was not a cruel sound.

From every direction at once, the water impressed upon him, and Duane simply could not move. The small hand at his belly vanished, climbing instead to his throat. Tender touches at the arteries there sent his heart hammering, and the queerest, most pleasant confusion put his thoughts in a scramble. The terrible urgency seemed to unfocus; spread; blanket him in an unhurried euphoria.

The warm palms of the godless and unnatural waters crept closer. Around his member curled a hundred seeking sea urchin strands. Duane groaned as they danced over the tip, and squeezed his length with the most knowing and delicate touch. He tried to pump into that lacey sensation, and found that he could! Obligingly the water contracted closer, tighter, hot as a woman.

Blind with need, he pumped wildly into the accommodating aura. It was unnervingly smooth, utterly indiscernible. Yet it closed so tightly around him he could feel his own pulse thudding as he thrust. He quickened his pace, but the sensation was wrong. Wrong! But not unpleasantly so? His body did not sharpen to a crisis; instead, all remained enveloping and indistinct. Each stroke exploded from his lap, down his legs, up his belly. It was exquisite, but he needed... oh, God, he needed to...

The fingers at Duane’s throat collapsed into two hands lightly circling his neck. With a chortle, her mouth was in his again, all sweetness and brine. He bent again and again into the water, frustratedly seeking a finish. Did she want to swallow his moan as he came?

“Not yet,” she whispered, breaking the kiss.

Duane tried to bellow into the night air - roaming gangs be damned! But only a dying dog yelp came out of him. Desperation invigorated his arms even as his prick screamed. The water retracted! He was free! He reached through the gelatin sea for some purchase, some target!

A dark female someone or other was caught up in his grasp! Yes! She did not fight him - in fact she laughed! Laughed and laughed the spiciest honey laugh, and it melted whatever ire had threatened Duane Adelier’s heart and hooked his fingers. Perhaps it was whatever her touch had done to his blood, but he loved her so fiercely at that very moment that he would have killed for her. Or died for her? Oh, he’d never again wonder at all the old sailor’s tales that warned a man of what a stormbringer could do.

The strange absence between her clavicles was not so horrifying now as Duane dropped upon her lips again. His limbs were his own and he covered her in them, crushing her warm body close. Buoyant breasts bobbed in the water, then brushed against his chest, nipples beaded and inviting. His hands circled her waist, then found the backside beneath it. Tight and slick, he kneaded his palms into each mound, easing her thighs apart.

She tasted like the sea; but the sea in stories. Not the sandy, fishy, icy, deadly darkness ringing Fachlyne city. She tasted like promises beyond the horizon and sunsets over red water in warmer climes. Duane slid his teeth away from hers and back along her jaw. He wished he could see her eyes.

“A moment,” he said, “My name is-”

“I don’t care,” she interrupted, and gobbled up his prick between her legs.

A moment of confusion - what a strange silk curtained her womanhood - but then oh! Bliss! Hot relief! Duane plunged with wild abandon, only half in control as she wrapped her thighs around his waist for purchase, rising and falling off of him again and again, with devilish cunning.

She felt nothing like Sarthos. The waterwoman’s tunnel was ridged and wild, betoothed and hungry; but, for the comfort of this welcomed guest, each tiny barb was kept curled harmlessly away. With every thrust Duane could nonetheless feel the nubs, and knew she could shred him if she liked. Even that terror had no hope of quelling his happy assault.

She laughed again, but there was no cruelty in it. Duane punched deep, then again, finding at each new angle a delightful ripple of moving texture. There was no bottom to this syrupy, hot draught. It was no wonder the badmen had wanted this. No wonder collectors would so dearly pay!

In his frenzy he could not determine if it was a sharper delight to thrust into her or to remain held and be squeezed and bullied. But then she decided for him. Duane found himself momentarily grasped from within, and growled as she undulated around him. It was almost too tight. Almost too sharp!

She oozed forward. Through his dark mask Duane saw the tiniest tongue break her profile, and lap ticklishly at his temple to taste his sweat. Then she let him tug himself free, but only for a moment. He thrust forward again to be squeezed, then back, then again, then back, and then it was too much and the ocean roared in his ears, or was that roar his own-?

“All right,” she whispered, touching his throat a final time. The blanket of euphoria lifted, and the knife of Duane’s need was deadly sharp. He exploded into the female someone or other with a ragged and breathless shout! She clamped her thighs tight around his hips, choking his sore and put-upon prick a final time as her passage twisted and strangled his every last spasm for her own.

Not a single gasp from her. Only her sweet and ancient laughter, like a windchime on a southern breeze. Duane’s heart hammered in his ears; he could not catch his breath.

Then, too soon: “Thank you, soldier,” she said, and lifted off of him and away.

Without further warning, the sea became like ice. It softened, melted, and Duane flailed within it, teeth chattering, reaching about for some saviour to offer a hand and rescue him from an ignoble, watery end!

“M-Miss!” he called into the night, desolate, “Miss!” He could think of nothing gentlemanly, sensible, nor even sane to say. “Miss! Do be careful!”

A thin voice from suddenly and impossibly far away, laughed the softest laugh.

Not so far down the dock Duane found a half-collapsed old ladder and was able to climb again onto the sea wall. Dry, and tidily arranged, his pants and boots were there waiting for him. He would have called further indignant imprecations at the water but God only knew where the deadly gang had gone. Pulling his dignity back over his hindquarters, he made his way quickly towards the lights of the main drag, and the more tightly patrolled streets outside the dark zone.

At the Barley that night, the beer was even more watery than Duane had been expecting. And it had somehow never tasted so good. Over the next week, everything tasted better, from the plain brown bread to the salted monny to the whipped potato cakes. The corpses were not so heavy. Jon’s jokes were not so irritating. And Duane thought that maybe the two of them would have a better chance of escaping their post if they could somehow prove they were capable of more than burning the dead and turning weeping people away from the gates. Now how might they do that? How might they show off what fine wrights they were when there were no fine enemies here to fight?

But that, dear reader, is a matter that will perhaps be relayed in another tale, at another time.