Weekly Drabble #343: It Tolls for Thee (Patreon)

This week's prompt comes from Xpholia with 'a payment for passage', continuing the requested addition to a setting we've seen already. Enjoy!

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It Tolls For Thee:

Captain Ragnheld stared through his telescope, a serious frown etched onto his face. The crew of the Princess Kathryn kept to their duties, knowing better than to bother their captain while he was on watch like this. They were coming up on the Splinters, possibly the most dangerous stretch of the Deep Passage there was. Up ahead, the land rose into sheer, rocky cliffs and jutting promontories on either side of the great river. There were no inlets, beaches, ports or safe havens here. Once you committed to the Splinters, you either passed through them or...

‘Or’ indeed.

In the distance, Ragnheld could just barely make out the first of the breakers and the white water that Kathryn was approaching. The Deep Passage was normally open sailing, but the Splinters were a different animal entirely. Here, the massive, continent-splitting waterway narrowed abruptly, the water flowing far faster than normal. It would have been manageable if the Splinters went as deep as the rest of the great channel, but the Deep Passage didn’t live up to its name here. This stretch of water was dangerously shallow for most ships and worse, as the river narrowed and rose, sediment was hauled up creating an ever-changing labyrinth of sandbars that you could easily run aground upon.

That was not even the worst of it; jutting from the water and giving the Splinters its name, were many sharp rock formations and ironbone reefs. Catch the wrong side of the current and you would be driven into one of them, impaled or ripped open. Rescuing a ship within the Splinters was even more dangerous than traversing it and more than one crew had been left to their fate rather risk losing another vessel.

With the rapid currents, unexpected reefs and rocks and shores that no man could climb up, the chances of a stranded crew surviving were small indeed, but there was no way around the Splinters. You went through them, or you turned back. For ships whose destinations lay on the either side of the continent, that was rarely an option. The delay caused by circumnavigating either side of landmass could lead to onerous penalties, and for some cargoes delay simply wasn’t an option.

So for generations, men had thrown their lot in with fate to chance the Splinters and despite the dangerous, many ships had emerged on the other side unscathed, or battered but intact, their crews breathing a sigh of relief. Many others had not, and the Splinters were strewn with the wrecks of their hubris.

The fierce currents rarely left these broken remains intact for long, but some ended up protected, cradled in the reefs, skewered on the rocks out of the current or buried in the shifting sands. Though it had been more than two hundred years, you could still see Azuyama’s Triumph, the gilded flagship of the fallen Ostejin Empire, from where it now lay crushed into the embrace of the rock formation men now called the Kingbreakers.

Though it had spilled an empire’s wealth into the shallow waters around it, and its own collapsed decks still held untold riches, the Triumph lay untouched by men’s hands. The Splinters guarded their prizes jealously. Though it tempted every soul who passed it by, no one had lived to carry off even a single chest from Azuyama’s Triumph’s hold. Pieces of the ships who’d tried were scattered about the Kingbreakers in turn. Though Ragnheld would dearly love even a tithe of a tithe of that fortune for his own, he knew better than to tempt fate, especially within the Splinters.

Other wrecks were as much a hazard as the reefs, rocks and sandbars, with vessels becoming entangled in the remains of their dead cousins, often suffering the same fate. To travel the Splinters was to take your life in your hands every time. A good ship, seasoned captain and loyal crew would only get you so far. Lady luck had to be courted too, and she could be mercurial.

Fortunately, there were others that you could court.

~

Princess Kathryn was flying a modified version of the Kilo flag. Normally a yellow and blue vertical stripe, the blue had been replaced with red. In international naval parlance it meant ‘I wish to communicate with you’, and here the message was largely the same, but yellows and reds were more attractive to its target audience.

At first, navigating the Splinters had required a great deal of prayer, fortune and determination. Some larger vessels would put out smaller launches to range ahead of them and take depth readings to ensure a given passage was safe to traverse, but the Splinters were just as dangerous to small craft as they were their larger host ships. A sudden eddy could dash a pinnace into the rocks, a whirlpool could suck it and its personnel down without a trace or far darker fates could take them.

A clan of sirens lived in the Splinters. The cliffs were filled with caverns created by millennia of tides, some opening up into the land, giving the serpentine half-humans direct access to the water. They were wilder than most and for more than a century had been as great a threat to passage as the Splinters themselves. Archers on the cliffs could riddle a small vessel with arrows before its crew had any chance to seek shelter, and the sirens seemed to have a preternatural ability to safely navigate the Splinters, attuned to the currents and shifting substrate.

Fifty years ago, a trade vessel came across a badly injured siren. The crew had insisted on killing it, but the captain’s daughter begged her father to let her try and save the wounded creature. Though at the time his decision appeared to be based more on his heart than his head, the captain agreed, even letting his daughter feed the snake woman from the ship’s own stores.

The crew’s discontent finally boiled over into mutiny, but before they could set upon the captain, his daughter or the siren, the creature proved she had not been as ill as she had let on. With a screech that left the mutinous crew reeling and vomiting, captain, daughter and siren fled into the ship’s launch.

Instead of seeking shelter on the nearest shore, the siren urged the humans into the Splinters. With their former ship bearing down upon them, muskets already cracking and shot whining through the darkness towards them, the captain once more put his faith in his daughter and the siren she’d saved.

His trust proved well-founded as the siren directed them through lanes and currents safe for their little pinnace, but left the larger ship beached and helpless. To this very day, you could still see its remains, the broken wood ribs and tattered remnants of its sails announcing the passage men called Traitor’s Gap.

Since that day, the compact between man and the sirens of the Splinters had become more formalized. The captain and his daughter returned year after year, met by the siren they’d saved and who had saved them in turn. Now, the price for travel was well-established and a ship looking to pay it raised the red and yellow Kilo to announce their intentions.

Ragnheld’s frown lightened as he finally laid eyes upon what he was looking for. Well ahead of the first breakers of the Splinters he saw several long, snake-bodied forms pull themselves out of the water, peering back towards his ship. Many other vessels made this same journey and bartered for the same assistance, but none of them had as close a connection to the sirens of the Splinters as his family. Even from this distance, he could put a name to each of the serpentine figures that had emerged from the water, and a smile formed as he recognized one in particular, the same one he had met as a boy the first time he had travelled on this ship with his grandfather and mother.

His grandfather had passed, and his mother had not made the trip in many years, but he would carry on her legacy.