The Butcher of Gadobhra

Woodrat was keeping most of his attention on the smoke, but spared his mate a glance or two now and then, along with a helpful word of advice or two as he struggled with shaping smoke into something other than a chain. He was making good progress, not that Woodrat was going to tell him that. Currently Ozzy was working on a harpoon. He had the general shape of a short spear with a wicked barbed head, but it was a wobbly thing and would come apart as soon as it was thrown. The Captain was instructing him on how to move the smoke into his creation and strengthen it. "Keep the image in your mind. Force it forward in your head until you see it right in front of you. Then fill it with your smoke and your will. Force more and more smoke into it, pushing it around so you don't have weak spots. Keep doing it until you think it's strong enough to hold its form."

"It's the same as how I make something out of wood. I have to use smoke to bend the wood to its new form, and then reinforce the material with more smoke."

Ozzy looked at him with a raised eyebrow. "So, just like you do with wood, except no wood."

Woodrat clapped him on the back. "Yes, that's exactly it! You're a fast learner Mr. Ozzy, and we'll turn you into a fine first mate yet. Just a few things more to learn like running the chains on the mainsail, hauling in an anchor, and handling a ship's longboat."

Ozzy pointed out that they didn't have a mainsail, anchor or longboat. Woodrat countered by pointing out that since they didn't, he had more time to work on Smoke Weaving, and he shouldn't be wasting it.

Ozzy had taken advantage of the discount offered by the system on buying the upgrades to Chain Making and Throw the Chain. With Smoke Weaving he could now try to make constructs like a harpoon, and with Chain Binding he could attach the harpoon to his Trammelian Chain. If they had to deal with a shark, he wanted to have the right tools for hunting it.

Woodrat gave instruction while he kept on lookout. The weathered sailor seemed to always have something else to tell him about sailing on the smoke. Sadly, most of it was on large ships, which the Splinter would never be accused of being. About an hour later the captain saw something in the distance and nudged the sails to that direction. Using sails in the smoke was an art. The sail didn't require wind to push it, just a supply of heat. The sail would slowly lose heat throughout the day and need to be replenished each dawn.

What direction you went was a combination of the sails shape and size, its orientation to the ship, and the rudder at the rear of the ship. With a square sail, a raft would move straight ahead, slightly turning as a rudder bit into the smoke. The triangular sail that woodrat preferred used one mast at the front of the ship, which slanted backwards over the ship. A thin spar at the bottom of the sail, and a chain along the third side were the boarders of the sail. He could adjust the sail at different angles by controlling the chain with one hand and his other on the rudder. It was a simple affair, but let him turn the ship in much sharper turns than a square sail.

"Look alive, Mr. Ozzy, we have a bit of practice for you and hopefully dinner. We ate the last of the fish yesterday so unless you want to be fishing again, I suggest you pull in something with that harpoon you've been building. Shark is good eating. Tastier than most fish and good for building fuel."

Ozzy stood and stared out across the smoke. He saw a small pod of porpoises swimming about, and near them a dorsal fin just cutting the surface. "I don't think that's the same one. Not feeling the menace from it."

Woodrat agreed with him. "No, not the same. That one is what a void shark looks like before normal hunger is replaced by an insatiable need to keep feeding and growing. That shark over there is dangerous, but it's not what we're worried about. Still, you need some practice." He slowly brought the raft closer and closer. Ozzy waiting for the shark’s path to come nearer the raft.

Ozzie held the harpoon, concentrated on the Trammelian chain, and threw the harpoon. The smoky weapon crossed the distance and hit the smoke ten-feet away from the shark, trailing a line of chain. Ozzy pulled it back in with Chain Drag, catching the harpoon in his hand. "I think I agree with you captain, on the practice part. I'm going to need a lot of it." The shark didn't even seem to know it had been threatened.

Woodrat sat back to watch. "Luckily for you, we shouldn't have a lack of sharks for you to practice on. Strength is one thing you have an abundance of. But to hit your target takes a good eye. Keep throwing. Time is something we have a lot of and if we don't have a shark for you to play with, then we'll sail on until we find one. I think it's important to be prepared. A void beast lives to eat and it has our scent at this point. Yours especially, with that huge furnace you have burning. It would find you to be a tasty treat indeed."

It took 17 tries for Ozzy to hit the slow-moving shark. The first 16 tries were off target enough that they didn't alert the predator that was being hunted. But finally, he managed to hit it, the harpoon sinking deep into the shark which suddenly found itself being pulled rapidly to the raft. Disoriented, it was easy for Ozzy to hit it in the head several times until it stopped moving. It wasn't huge, only about five feet long from fanged maw to the tips of its tail. He started to wrap it in smoke for cooking, but Woodrat told him otherwise. "Take its smoke. Steal it."

Ozzy hesitated and Woodrat repeated the order. "Don't waste it, do it! I'll tell you why after." Ozzy gave in and put his hand on the wound that was leaking smoke, and stole all of the shark’s life for himself. He had the feeling of moving through the smoke, not hungry yet, but aware of his prey, both the swimmers and the tasty two-leggers on their little boat. The thought of killing something soon was appealing to him. Then pain, confusion, and death. The feeling faded away.

Woodrat began cutting up the shark to eat. "You’re hunting the creatures. That means you need to know how they think, how they move. If you know how a shark hunts, it will be easier for you to hunt it instead."

Ozzy recognized the truth of that statement. Hunting... He was hunting the Void Shark. Stalking it. Learning the habits of its lesser cousins. An image a lithe, blond haired woman came to his mind and he saw her nod.

Ozzy saw that he had gotten experience from killing the shark, both in Shark Hunting, and Smoke Stealing. It was going to be a slow grind though, unless he became a better shot. Another skill from the Hunter's Shrine came to mind. "I need you to make me something, Captain, like this." Ozzy blew out smoke and created an image of a two foot long and three-inch-wide bowl with a handle on one end, and an indentation in the far end. Woodrat looked at it and took one of their spare scraps of wood and began shaping it. "I can do that, but tell me why."

Ozzy tried to explain. "It's called a woomera, a type of spear throwing device. I think I need a little help to hit the sharks at that distance. The inside needs to be the width of the harpoon"

Woodrat took a second piece of wood. "I'm making two then, if it's a way to throw a harpoon better, I need to learn about it too."

Dinner that night was shark with a little of the salad they had left. Woodrat had dried the berries and ground them up to use as a spice. The shark had a nice flavor too it and was firm like a steak. Ozzy preferred it to the smaller fish. Woodrat saved the teeth, explaining that they had a number of uses. "Good as a knife for many tasks that need cutting or scraping. A few of the lads like to line a piece of hard wood with them to make some nasty boarding weapons. On ship they even double as money. A small shark's tooth is worth a copper penny."

The porpoise seemed to grasp quickly that Ozzy was hunting sharks. The pod stayed fairly close to the raft, and if menaced by a predator they ran back to it. Ozzy appreciated them leading the sharks to him, and the porpoise liked not being eaten by the sharks. Overall, it was a good deal. He even started getting a feel for where the pod was when he couldn't see them. Slowly his Herd Sense was working to let him know how to protect them better.

The spear throwers that Woodrat made worked well after some practice. A woomera worked on leverage, extending the throwers arm for two feet further. Ozzy had read that a spear thrown from one had four times the kinetic energy of a compound bow. After seeing the wounds he was putting into the sharks, he believed it. He was focusing on his aim and didn't need to throw nearly so hard. They hunted sharks when they showed up, and slowly sailed across the smoke during the day. Nights were for fishing, keeping watch, and making parts for the raft.

Twice they found bits of debris floating in the smoke, wreckage from one ship or another. The first piece was twelve-foot of wooden rail attached to some planking. The second bit of flotsam Woodrat recognized as part of a small galley. There was a substantial chunk of decking and hull, and three long oars still in their oarlocks. Slowly the raft was taking on a different look. The beam from the barn had been shaped into a keel, as had another from the galley. Each was over twenty-foot long when Woodrat was finished with it. The captain shaped the planks from the hull to form what to Ozzy looked like two long canoes. Both were floating next to the raft. Ozzy was fishing and keeping an eye out for sharks as Woodrat continued to bend the wood into new shapes.

"Are you making two ships, or one?"

"I can see how a new fish from the Conjunction could ask such a question, but no, we are making just one ship. I debated a long time on what to build, but we just don't have the materials for anything fancy, and we have a need for speed. I'm building a smokejammer. Probably something that you poor folk down in the junction never thought of with your funny wet seas. The two hulls keep us afloat on the smoke with a nice wide bit of hull and a lot more room for mast and sail. You'll see!"

Ozzy was put to work reinforcing the part of the raft that would become the main deck of the new ship. Woodrat explained that hands on a large ship spent hour after hour making sure the wood of the decks were smooth and hard with extra smoke. There was only one or two chores that were worse than deck work, and those were rowing scraping the hull of the small creatures that tried to make their home on a ship’s hull. Rowing was hard work, and hull scraping was dangerous as you hung over the side of ship, suspended by a think chain. But neither was as tedious as using your will to force ambient smoke into the wood of a ship.

A wood wright, such as Woodrat had spent his life being, had it much better. They used their own smoke to repair the ship and make changes in it. But at the end of the day, they could be sure of enough good food to keep their fuel full, and could even be given some heat from the sails if they had worked especially long hours. The crew working on the deck got no such payment and could only use what smoke they could gather to them and force into the decking. It was more mentally exhausting that any other job.

Over a few days the raft took on the look of an entirely different vessel, one Ozzy finally recognized as a catamaran. The two hulls were parallel with a raised area of decking between them, open to the air with only a bit of railing along the back edge where the rudder was located. A long mast was fastened at the front of the right hull and slanting back over the ship. Ozzy had constructed the chains and Woodrat had made a new sail for the Splinter. What had started as a clumsy raft was now a small ship that was many times faster on the smoke, and took less heat to move. Once finished, Captain Woodrat declared that the next days would be just fishing and eating to build up their smoke before they began sailing for the horizon in search of an island. Ozzy looked forward to both.

The work wasn't wearing him down physically, but there was a constant bit of stress caused by the uncertainty of being adrift on the smoke, and of not knowing either where to go or how to get home. He joked with himself that at least when Ben started telling pirate stories, he could both join in with his own, and actually know what the hell all the nautical terms meant.

By the second night they were prepared to leave. The ship was finished and they had several days of food on board in the form of cooked shark. Ozzy had a very good idea now of how the predator thought. It was worrying him more and more that the pod of porpoises was growing larger. They felt safe near the little ship and the two-leggers that killed the predators. He wondered if having so many in one spot wouldn't attack more than one shark at a time.

It was little towards dawn when something woke him. Woodrat was leaning against the mast, taking the last watch, gazing out across the smoke and waiting for dawn. Ozzy stood up, agitated and worried. The pod was moving around the ship, putting the young inside the circle. Something hungry had decided it was time to to have a snack.

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