Butcher of Gadobhra Chapter 202 Rough Draft (Patreon)

As Woodrat looked on, Ozzy was trying to form a harpoon out of smoke. He had the general shape down, and his captain was instructing him on how to move the smoke into the creation and strengthen it. "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. "Exactly! You're a fast learner Mr. Ozzy, and we'll turn you into a fine first mate yet."

Ozzy had taken advantage of the discount on buying the upgrades to Chain Making and Throw the Chain. With Smoke Weaving he could how try to make constructs like his 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 tools he needed for hunting.

Woodrat gave instruction while he kept on lookout. About an hour later he saw something in the distance and nudged the sails to that direction. "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."

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. "Not the same. What a void shark used to be before normal hunger was 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. "I think I agree with you captain, on the practice part."

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 we can keep sailing along between sharks."

It took 17 tries for Ozzy to hit the slow-moving shark that didn't know it was being hunted. But finally, he managed to hit it, the harpoon sinking deep into the shark which found itself pooled rapidly to the raft. Disoriented, it was easy for Ozzy to hit it in the head several times until it stopped moving. He went to tie off its mouth but Woodrat told him otherwise. "Take it's 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 a sudden 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.

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 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. "I need you to make me something, Captain, like this." Ozzy blew out smoke and created a round image of a two foot long and four-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."

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

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 herding 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 Sensewas working to let him know how to protect them better.

The spear throwers that Woodrat made worked well after some practice. The 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.

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 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 feed.