Chapter 1: Break
In the morning, she trains with Ice-Over-Snow. In the afternoon, she rest in her cabin, trying to soothe her growing headaches and weariness with attempts at sleep and meditation.
At night, she wanders the ship. She passes the night-watchmen without a sound, and climbs over the railings. She peers in on the hold full of slaves, chained in long lines and wallowing in their own waste. She feels her blood boil, hears it thrum in her ears, and she knows what must be done. It's all so simple, now that she has resolved on it, and the only real challenge is forcing herself to wait until they are close enough to Wu-Jian.
Finally, finally, the islands loom on the horizon, buried under what seem to be endless towers of tenements and closely-clustered shacks, built atop grimy stone. Endless rope bridges and ratlines run from rooftop to rooftop, window to window, until the whole island seems to have been colonised by giant spiders. At the bottom, no sunlight has been seen for centuries, while those at the top lounge in their rooftop gardens. The wealthy don't even live on Wu-Jian proper, having instead colonised the gateway island, where once there were farms.
Drowned Wisdom smiles. They are on their approach, and Ice-Over-Snow is in their cabin, getting ready to depart. She ambushes them and ties them tight, then seals their door. She would rather not have to fight them.
The guards below decks try to bar her passage. She kills them, and breathes deep of the Essence released from their delectable corpses. Her headache eases a little. Her mouth waters. There is no alarm, not yet, for she is quick and quiet enough that the only noise was the wet snap of bone as she twisted heads around until necks broke. The guards do not carry keys to take them further into the holds, for there is no trust within the Guild. She offers a brief prayer for their souls, then she presses a palm to the dead men's chests, and they rise again, take up position on either side of the door as she instructs. You could almost believe they were still alive.
She punches the lock out of the door and walks into the upper hold, where she is surrounded by drugs from every Direction, silks and furs and jewels; she ignores it all. She descends again, and she can ignore the smell no longer. Despair and sickness, strangely sweet, and she knows that if she were still alive she would be vomiting. The tears and moans have long dried up, now, and all she can hear is the slosh of the waves against the hull and the counter-splash of the filth lining the bilge.
The slaves are still there, though. She can taste their life through the door, waning as it is, and she wastes no more time. She kicks the door open and strides into the hold, wading through the vile soup that comes to her ankles. The slaves, men and women and children and beastfolk, all sizes and ages and colours, cringe back from her entrance. They are sickly and exhausted and so bone-deep afraid that every motion makes them flinch, and she feels her head go fuzzy with rage at the sight. There are dozens of them, all of them people, all of them reduced to this.
All of them broken.
"But I love the broken, and the living, and the dead," she whispers, and it lights a fire in her stomach. She feels flushed and giddy.
"Do you want to be free?" she asks, not loud, but the question echoes. "Shall I break your chains?"
Silence falls. A woman stands, fierce and proud and still so scared of Drowned Wisdom that she shakes uncontrollably, but she stands, and she speaks.
"Yes," she says, her voice rasping. "I want to be free again."
Drowned Wisdom approaches her, and she smiles, and her forehead heats and stings and red trickles down over her face and into her eyes. She takes the chains in her hands and they bend and break like they're made of dry twigs instead of steel.
"Be free," she says. "Who is next?"
She works her way down the lines, breaking chains and dripping blood into the filthy water at her feet. Her hands are bruised and cut and she feels wrung-out and tired enough to sleep on her feet, but she is content with this. She is doing good, for once in her life, of her own choice and with her own hands. The freed slaves stand there, not really sure what to do, until a battered and whip-scarred lion-woman bares her fangs and limps for the door. The others follow, in a slow but steady stream of the sick and the injured, but they leave none behind. Those able carry those who cannot walk. Drowned Wisdom slithers through them to the front of the crowd, and halts them at the door up to the top deck.
"We are nearly to Wu-Jian," she says. "And I will clear your path to the city, if you will let me."
"I'll not leave this ship," the lion-woman says. "Until the bastards who brought me onto it lie dead in my claws."
Drowned Wisdom smiles wider. Her stitches are beginning to tear, and her teeth show through her cheek. She wants this. "I can steer us well enough to make landfall. Let's clean the decks, shall we?"
The lion-woman grins in response, and then they are flooding out onto the top deck. The slaves are tired and sick and weak, but the sailors and guards are taken by surprise and cannot match the sheer fury of the freed. Drowned Wisdom darts from fight to fight, slaying with raking, clawed hands and bone-snapping kicks. Her hunger grows. They lose some of the slaves, of course, for every side in every battle owes a tithe to the Underworld, but they stand victorious and blood-drenched before the sun is directly overhead. Her head aches and her hands tremble and her face is a red and sticky mask, but she is well enough to take the wheel, and the ship is simple enough to keep pointed in the right direction.
She knows this city from maps and long, boring tutoring sessions, from conversations with older relatives and the endless whining complaints of her sister. It is old knowledge, and half-useless, but she knows enough to take them in so that they do not attract Realm naval attention until it is too late. She lashes the wheel in place, collects her luggage, frees a furious and frightened Ice-Over-Snow, and laughs as the ship hammers into the dockside and beaches itself in a thunderous cloud of splinters and sand.
There is a guard response, but they come too late to catch anything other than shocked onlookers and a slowly-tilting Guild vessel, keel snapped, deck red, and holds empty.
What now?
[] Get the freed slaves settled and organised. Her very own gang!
[] Hunt down leads for any potential agents of the Weeping Daughter.
[] Figure out how to stop being in so much pain and so tired.
[] Write in.
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