Archive of Our Own ^beta

It was a fine day after a fine haul. The merchant vessel they’d found had been so hopelessly lost along the Dragon Weave Shoals that they’d put up no resistance when the crew of the Fulmar boarded them. In fact, they seemed happy enough at having been found that the captain of the ship had made it clear that as long as there was no violence and they were left with enough supplies to return home, he and his crew would offer no resistance.

There was an air of celebration on the decks of the Fulmar after that and the majority of the crew were quite jovial as they went about their many tasks, for there was precious little downtime on board any well run pirate ship.

Kester had taken detailed notes of the cargo that they had taken, mostly spices, bolts of vibrantly colored silks, no doubt bound for the capital city, and a fair number of gold coins and the green glass trade beads favored by the natives of the frigid southern islands. Kester took his duty as the ship’s accountant gravely serious, for his position was largely superfluous. His cousin had been the first mate on the Fulmar until he’d died in some manner so horrible that none of the crew were willing to talk about it. An incident that had left the captain feeling indebted to him. So when the ship had returned to port the captain had approached Kester, found that he was sorely in need of a job and had brought him on board.

Unfortunately the nautical life quickly proved to be a poor fit for Kester and he had found himself relegated to managing supplies, assessing the value of their cargo and seeing to it that the spoils were divided evenly to the crew according to their station.

Kester never dared ask what his share was, knowing that his being tolerated was largely a formality for the sake of his deceased cousin. Someday he hoped to find out exactly what the man had done, but until that time came he was intent to do his job of inventorying the Fulmar’s profits and cargo.

Given that today the weather was what passed for a clear and sunny day on the southern sea, Kester had taken his notes and documents on deck and was busily estimating values of their plunder and taking into account the items already claimed by crew members so that the value of said items could be subtracted from the shares of the men who’d claimed them.

It was challenging work, but intellectually challenging rather than physically, so Kester thoroughly enjoyed it. The seas were calm, the winds steady and any time he started to feel ill, which fortunately wasn’t that often, all he had to do was stare out to the point in the distance where sea met sky and he swiftly felt better.

On a day like today he almost didn’t mind the situation he’d ended up in.

Happily working through a particularly challenging division of percentages on his abacus, a lovely affair of exotic hardwood and beads of carved and polished shell, Kester was lost to the world, intent only on numbers and figures.

He didn’t even hear the lookout’s cry of alarm until the Fulmar turned sharply starboard.

Nearly losing his notes overboard, Kester scrambled to retrieve the papers and looked up to see sails in the distance.

Sails and scarlet and purple flags waving proudly above them.

It was the Revenant, the most feared ship on the southern sea, or any sea for that matter.

Belonging to the Empire, the Revenant had been built with one purpose in mind, to rid the southern trade routes of pirates. So far it had done a good job of it, having managed to pursue and sink no fewer than half a dozen vessels. It was said that no ship could hope to outrun it and that the timbers of its hull were made of trees harvested from jungles far to the west and that cannonballs would bounce right off of them.

The Revenant was heading straight to them, sails somehow managing to catch a wind that shouldn’t have been possible.

Unless the stories of the lengths the Empire was going were true and they’d brought one of the Brass Men onboard to work magic.

If that were the case there truly was nothing the crew of the Fulmar could do, though the captain didn’t seem to see things that way.

At his orders they turned as hard as they could, towards a series of distant black specks on the horizon – the Eight Spinsters.

Named for a coven of hags that was said to have once inhabited them, the string of eight seamounts rising up to break the surface were the stuff of legends.

Countless ships had met their doom near them, dashed to bits on the seamounts thanks to the unpredictable currents around them, or sunk and vanished without a trace. Harpies and all manner of fearsome mermaids made the Spinsters their home and for a ship to approach was to risk doom.

And the Fulmar was heading straight towards them, the Revenant rapidly gaining.

It was a race then, where both victory and defeat would likely mean death.

Kester could see the logic of the captain’s decision, that the Revenant might abandon the chase as they approached the dreaded Eight Spinsters, but that did nothing to make the situation any less terrifying.

The worst part was that there was easily that there was nothing Kester could do about the situation, so he did the only thing he was able to.

He continued to work at his task of divvying up shares of the cargo they carried, on the off chance that they survived. With any other task he would only be getting in the way.

Fingers shaking so hard that he was barely able to slide the beads from one side of the abacus to the other as he checked and double checked his calculations.

As they drew nearer, the Revenant still closing in on them, he could hear the cries of the white winged harpies as they widened their endless circling of the seamounts to investigate what manner of fools would approach so closely.

Immune to the hypnotic calls of the mermaids, harpies were drawn like vultures to doomed ships, always looking for anything of value in the flotsam. It was said that their nests were lined with all manner of treasures and that the sides of the seamounts glittered in the sun from their finds.

Kester didn’t look up to see, though he did duck every time the shadow of a harpy passed over the deck.

One of the lookouts gave a cry of alarm.

Something was swimming alongside the boat, keeping down too far to be seen clearly.

Hopefully it was just nothing more than a shark, which were also common in these waters, but if it was a mermaid they were in trouble, for it was a large one.

A very large one.

Kester jotted down his latest calculations, sure that he would need to double check his math later, if there was a later, for addition and division were difficult when one’s mind was occupied with the thought of impending doom at the claws and fangs of fearsome mermaids, for the creature had been spotted again and all that could be agreed on was that it was a mermaid.

At that point Kester was tempted to look up for he had never seen a living mermaid, though he’d seen a few dead and dried ones of the smaller sort. The shriveled, monkeyish things with their rough scaled tails had been horrifying, though he’d heard that some of the larger ones were hypnotically beautiful.

Cries of alarm followed by a snatch of song that was, despite the situation, soothing, rang across the deck.

The mermaid had begun to sing.

Suddenly things seemed better.

That the Revenant was close enough that any moment it was likely to open fire on them didn’t seem to matter.

They were far enough away that there was a chance that they might still escape, and if they didn’t…

For some reason that thought didn’t bother Kester anymore.

The captain’s yelling at the crew to keep focused sounded distant, the seas felt calm and Kester was quite pleased to realize that for the first time in as long as he could remember, the faint queasiness that he felt even on the best days at sea, was gone.

The mermaid’s song rose and fell, cutting in and out as it leapt in and out of the water alongside the ship.

When the song ceased there were moments of clarity where Kester was fully aware that death was the most likely outcome at this point in things.

And when it resumed he went back to his math because working with numbers was relaxing enough and it wasn’t as though there was anything more important for him to be concerned with.

Other than a momentary hitch in his counting, forcing him to re-add his estimate of the value of some of the uncut precious stones that they had managed to get early on their voyage, Kester hardly reacted to a thunderous crash, like the end of the world, on the deck near him.

It might have been a cannonball splintering timbers, but it wasn’t.

The mermaid had managed, with a particularly powerful jump, get high enough to land on the deck a short distance away.

Or she could have flown. The rippling fins along her sides and back resembled the wings of a bird while the rest of her was an alluring combination of the best features of woman and powerful, graceful fish.

And her song…

It was the loveliest thing that Kester had ever heard.

Hearing it he wanted to throw himself into her arms, never mind that the six fingers on each of her hands ended in cruelly sharp claws that left deep gouges on the deck as she dragged herself towards him. She smiled, rows of fangs hardly noticeable and quite forgivable in an otherwise lovely face.

Forgetting his figuring entirely Kester’s fingers began to move of their own accord, pushing beads back and forth across the abacus so that the ticking of the beads as they slid across the wires fell into the tempo of her song.

Breath taking yellow eyes, like those of a cat locked on Kester and he smiled back at the mermaid.

She pulled herself closer to him, her smile stretching back farther and farther, showing more and more teeth.

Those fangs of hers were very large, though it made sense given the size of her

Whoever had first seen her and said she was a large one had been correct, the more human half of her, flat chested and streamlined, rippling with muscle beneath thick gray hide, was easily as long as Kester’s entire body and the fish half of her…

He understood how, going by size alone it was possible to mistake her for a shark, even though her powerful fish looked nothing like that of a shark.

The mermaid blinked, eyes going milky white as a membrane slid over them.

She leaned in so that her nose was inches from his fingers and then she stopped singing.

Kester gasped, suddenly seeing her for what she was, and gripped the beads of his abacus to hold them steady. His hands were shaking so hard that the whole thing rattled and clattered in his grip, the beads that weren’t held in place sliding back and forth.

Without her song the mermaid was loathsome, lank gray hair clinging to her back and shoulders like seaweed, her skin pale as a dead thing and greasy looking. Jagged, sharp edged scales covered her lower half, scraping against the deck as her tail swept back and forth. Barnacles dotted her skin and scars covered her face and arms, from fighting with her fellows judging by the shape and size of them compared to her curving, yellow claws.

She looked at him, rows of gills down her neck and all the way down the ribs of her human torso flared wide.

She took a deep breath and…

All activity on the deck ceased as the crew waited to see what would happen.

The mermaid laughed.

Unlike her song her laughter was a horrible, choking noise, like the cry of a gull and there was no hypnotic magic to it.

Kester was frozen with fear as she reached out with a single claw, webbed hand loosely folded, and flicked a bead from one side of the abacus to another, blinking as it clicked into place.

Then she looked Kester right in the eye, as though daring him to do something.

And, if a moment of foolish bravery that might have been worthy of his departed cousin, he slid the bead back.

The mermaid slapper her hands against the deck and began to sing.

A collective sigh of relief was breathed, and Kester once again felt his movements fall into the pattern of her voice, sliding the beads of the abacus back and forth in accompaniment to her song.

The mermaid stopped singing and once again fear became real.

This time though, Kester was a little slower to stop moving the beads and the mermaid watched the movements of his fingers with rapt attention.

When he slid a bead too hard she blinked rapidly and let out another of her horrible laughs.

By this time several of her sisters had joined and though their singing wasn’t as powerful due to distance the soothing magic of it was still very much in effect.

Kester’s judgment wasn’t clouded by it, rather, free from concern, he had a moment of preternatural clarity. The mermaid liked the clicking of the abacus beads.

He moved them with more force, the noise actually seeming to counteract the song of the mermaids, allowing the crew to cautiously return to their efforts to escape.

The mermaid on deck continued to watch, taping her claws against the deck in time with the clicking beads.

He was leading the tune now and he did his best to improvise some semblance of music on the most improbably instrument.

Now the mermaid was nodding her head in time, laughing and hissing.

“Whatever you’re doing, keep it up,” the captain whispered to him.

Kester didn’t reply or even nod, afraid that anything he did would provoke the mermaid’s ire and without her song to obscure her true nature, she was every bit as terrifying as a monster should have been.

She smiled and laughed and clicked her claws, shuffling back and forth in a strange rolling dance before doing the most unexpected thing of all.

She dragged herself back across the deck and back into the water with a loud splash.

Kester stopped, only for the captain to glare at him.

“I told you to keep going! We’re not out of the woods yet. There’s a score of them at least in the water.”

A moment later Kester heard proof of that, for the cacophony of sharp hisses and clicks that came from the water couldn’t have been anything else than whole school of mermaids.

“Move closer to the side,” the captain ordered, “Keep playing. The big one seems to like it well enough.”

Kester struggled to his feet, trying to balance against the ship’s movement while continuing to move the beads of the abacus.

Moving close enough to the side that he was able to look over the railing Kester immediately wished that he hadn’t.

Countless gray faces with glowing yellow eyes looked up at him.

The largest mermaid, the one that had jumped onto the ship pointed.

At him.

All the mermaids laughed.

And then dove beneath the waves, past the Fulmar and towards the Revenant, which had stopped its pursuit, not out of prudence, but from the efforts of another school of mermaids.

Under the influence of so much magic there was nothing the crew of the pursuing ship could do.

Guided by a swarm of mermaids the Revenant once again began to move, right past the Fulmar and towards the seamounts.

Enticed by such an impressive catch, the harpies began to land on the deck, followed by some of the more eager mermaids.

Kester and the rest of the crew of the Fulmar watched in terrified awe as the Revenant drew closer and closer to the nearest of the Eight Spinsters.

They would have continued to watch it right to the end if not for the captain ordering them to get back to work and get the Fulmar out of there. Kester though, he was to continue to play his abacus just in case a mermaid tried to have a go at them again.

None did and they were able to make it to safety.

The Revenant though, there was no way it could have escaped.

Much later, after the shock and elation of surviving began to wear off, the crew realized what they had seen, the Empire’s prized ship sunk by mermaids. It was something that they all agreed that they weren’t going to take credit for, lest they tempt fate, but it was cause for another celebration.

The southern seas were once again safe for pirates, they agreed, or as safe as they could be, all things considered.

Kester didn’t join in though, for there was still work to be done, more than there had been before, as the captain informed him that he would need to recalculate his share of the plunder, a percentage much larger than Kester was able to believe.

It was also strongly hinted that he set aside enough of his earnings to get the largest, loudest abacus he could find just in case his highly unique and invaluable skills were needed again.