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  THE CAPTAIN’S FANCY

  An Ellora’s Cave Publication, March 2004

  Ellora’s Cave Publishing, Inc.

  PO Box 787

  Hudson, OH 44236-0787

  ISBN MS Reader (LIT) ISBN # 1-84360-675-5

  Other available formats (no ISBNs are assigned):

  Adobe (PDF), Rocketbook (RB), Mobipocket (PRC) HTML

  THE CAPTAIN’S FANCY © 2004 ANNIE WINDSOR

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without permission.

  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. They are productions of the authors’ imagination and used fictitiously.

  Edited by Martha Punches.

  Cover art by Christine Clavel.

  The Captain’s Fancy

  Annie Windsor

  Prologue

  Council of Worlds, Tower on the Tor, Old Earth

  Time Before Time

  “I cannot kill Barung.” Arda’s Ord’pa, the most fearsome and renowned executioner in the civilized worlds, shook his head. The black of his unfettered hair seemed deep and endless in contrast to the startling silver stripes on his taut cheeks. “He is too powerful. The energy he stored during his rising would disperse and destroy us all. Perhaps the known universe with us.”

  The expression he wore, of burden and seriousness beyond measure, was shared by Kaldor, First Priest of Kaerad, the eldest among the three. Kaldor sat at the Tower’s round table, a table Earth’s kings of men would one day hold dear. He used the circular structure to keep a healthy physical distance from his two fellow Council members. Kaeradi were empaths of the first order, telempaths, in fact. Not only could flesh-contact with an incompatible bring great pain or even death to the Kaeradi, but the projection of that pain could kill the innocent who touched them as well.

  Kaldor had a physical look similar to the Ord’pa, to the Ardani in general, but without the universe’s living substance etched into his flesh. He had instead a great golden stone set into his chest just above his heart. Gold was the color of a spiritually transformed leader, of a mystic who had achieved the highest disciplines. Gold was for the fire that lived in stone, and it was this gold flesh-rock he touched in a gesture of weary defeat.

  “So.” He sighed, sitting back. “We have contained the evil by a combination of our strengths, but we cannot destroy it.”

  “I refuse to accept that.” Myrddin of Perth, and now of Earth only since Perth was no more, stood and went to gaze out of the tower windows. Avalon stretched before him, bright, sparkling, and new. All that was good in this world frolicked on the verdant fields, both those with deep magik and those with the younger, wilder variety bred of this planet alone. Perthling, Ardani, Kaeradi, or halfling mingled with the lesser-developed humans of this world—it mattered not. All were welcome. All were joyous and free to be what the universe called them to be. Earth had fulfilled its promise thus far, as a haven for those fleeing the darkest necromancer ever to rise to power in the universe.

  Barung. Lord of the Dark. Eater of Light. Scourge of Souls.

  Such dramatic names.

  Myrddin sighed.

  Even now, he could feel the bastard’s malevolence radiating from the containment field established above Earth. The true horror came in how quickly people could forget such amorality. In a few generations, the children of Avalon would have no memory of evil as great as Barung. They scarcely understood now, even one generation removed from the devastation wrought on Kaerad, Arda, and his own destroyed world of Perth. Their blood would be mingled, and the unique gifts of each race lost—or melded to create something even more wondrous. Such things were not to be known until they happened.

  Well, the Kaeradi priest probably knew, at least in the sketchy non-descript colors of future emotion he could see, but he was wise enough not to share his vague predictive visions.

  “I know your grief is deep, Brother Myrddin,” the Ord’pa of Arda allowed. His accent made the name sound more like “Mertin” or “Merlyn,” which was how many of Avalon’s children hailed him already. “The loss of Perth was tragic, and the ripples will be felt in the fabric of time until the last breath on the last world at the last moment of time. Alas, despite the rightness of our vengeance, even I do not have the power to kill Barung. If we blended all of our great skills together, we would still be doomed to failure.”

  For a time, silence claimed the round table in the round room, in the round tower on the round hill.

  Circles, Myrddin thought. Powerful and yet powerless.

  Kaldor cleared his throat. “We could…banish him, could we not? Bind him in his own squalid energy and send him into other dimensions to find his way back—if he can?”

  “And visit his evil on some other peoples? Leave him to return and destroy our children eons hence?” Myrddin snorted even as he saw a dawning agreement on the solemn face of the Ord’pa. Perthling blood ran hotter than Ardani blood, without doubt. Arda was about balance—this with that, strength with restraint. Perthling blood ran hotter still than the blood of the Kaeradi, who had more power than any, and an even greater reticence to use it. Perth’s greatest wizard wanted death for his people’s vengeance. More than that, Myrddin wanted a permanent end to the threat.

  “Come, Myrddin.” Kaldor’s tone took a definitive depth, an absolute command only a Kaeradi could achieve without offending any listeners. “Acknowledge this as our only choice. You cannot deny the truths before us.”

  “I will not doom the worlds of tomorrow to the fate Perth suffered.” Myrddin turned and rapped his fist on the round table. A sound like thunder burst through the room as wild magik skittered over wood, then stones.

  Instinctively, the Kaeradi priest and the Ord’pa flung up their hands and concentrated their energies on blocking Myrddin’s rage-spell before it did harm.

  The Tor’s tower trembled as the magiks met and intertwined. A few of the stones exploded, leaving menacing, crackling black holes where they once stood. The air took on a sudden smell of burning and melting, and a light smoke curled above the round table in the unmistakable shape of a feather.

  Kaldor watched the display without passion, but the Ord’pa narrowed his eyes at the smoke-feather, at the flashing streaks of magikal light, in truth, a brief harnessing of the living substance of the universe. Myrddin knew the Ardani was thinking. He could almost hear the man’s scientific mind observing, planning. Perhaps “plotting” would be a better word?

  Myrddin narrowed his own eyes, studying the executioner. The Ardani were a crafty lot. Great thinkers and innovators, much as Perthlings had developed a reputation as naturalists and healers. Kaeradi were deep into emotion, the spiritual arts and the rhythm of the universe. All three races bred virulent warriors, though their weapons were decidedly different. Arda fought with science and the focused energy of the mind, Kaerad with the fire of the heart and resolve of the spirit, and Perth with the force of the body and natural elements.

  “What are you contemplating?” Myrddin asked quietly, in deference to the Ord’pa’s renewed alertness.

  The Ardani clenched his hands before him in the gesture of a supplicant. “Our joined powers cannot defeat Barung…now.” The silver stripes on his cheeks glittered with sudden manic energy. “We would have to banish the blackheart, yes. For now. But with forethought and cooperation, we could deliberately crossbreed our races and mingle them with the wild energies of this world to build the strength we need. We could also use Perth’s destruction to good ends, laying the proper traps in the energy signature of the universe where the planet once orbited…”

  “That would take thousands of years,” Myrdd
in said carefully, measuring each word so that Kaldor and the Ord’pa might heed him instead of humoring him. “Time carves memory like sand carves stone. How can we be certain tomorrow’s children will know that we existed, much less that we planned for a disaster we doomed them to endure?”

  “Nothing is ever certain, Myrddin.” Kaldor’s calm galled Myrddin, but he kept his mouth clamped as the old Kaeradi spoke. “Better we leave our children many healthy years—and some hope—rather than none, yes?”

  For that question, Myrddin, despite his powerful passions to the contrary, had no good answer. He closed his eyes.

  When he opened them a few seconds later, the Ord’pa was busy drawing pictures, his long graceful fingers borrowing liquid energy from his silver tattoos to create wispy designs on the round table and in the air. A triangle, with three planets—Earth, Kaerad, and Arda—at the corners. In the center, the Ardani sketched a dark hole where Perth should have been, and showed how, with a few alterations in solar winds and the pressures and energies of space, an unsuspecting ship or even an entire world might be sucked into that void and crushed into nothingness. Much the way Barung crushed Perth, in fact. With the weight of the universe itself, turned on a single point.

  Myrddin watched in silent surrender as Kaldor invested in this far-future design, and began to speak of setting celestial events into play that would produce such a world-crushing void.

  Then the talk turned to creating and nurturing bloodlines, and how to establish and maintain channels of energy between the three planets that could one day ensnare Barung in Perth’s dead space like a fly in an Earth spider’s web.

  This is fantasy, Myrddin told himself, but as he studied the plan and listened to the Ord’pa’s hypnotic bass, a small hope caught fire in his heart. He thought about the relative nature of triumph over an evil as great as Barung.

  In truth, Barung was more creature than person. Barung created himself from his own evil intent, from the dark energy he drew from the very pit of the universe. It overwhelmed him, turned him into naught but a twisted, deformed channel, absorbing every negative thought in his purview, every wicked action. Violence, hate, cruelty—Barung became a living embodiment of all such bleakness. The Council had joined to bind him with their combined magiks.

  With our different commands of the energies of the universe, Myrddin corrected himself automatically, as the Ord’pa would have if the wizard had spoken aloud. Know and name the power you wield, lest your children forget it.

  Myrddin flexed his arms, wishing he could wield those powers to dispel the non-corporeal Barung himself.

  But he knew he could not. The Kaeradi priest and the Ardani executioner were correct. Destroying the necromancer would release every drop of that formless blackness Barung had absorbed, and the wave of dark energy would sweep the universe of hope and joy, light and life.

  Unless they could trick the beast into the void.

  And the void wasn’t created yet, nor the powers that might drive the beast to it without chance of escape.

  Banishment was the only option.

  But one day, Myrddin thought with increasing vengeance, Barung will return. He stared at the shimmering triangle as it turned from silver to gold in the waning daylight. The triangle with the dark center, even now flickering above and across the round table of Earth’s tower on the Tor. If the universe is willing, the Council will rise again then, stronger than ever.

  His mind turned to the writing of scrolls and books and sacred teachings, to the leaving of monuments in stone and iron and every conceivable medium—one hundred ways to pass the needed knowledge through the ages, in case something should happen to him.

  It was later that same night, still at the round table in the round tower on the round hill, that he penned the one scroll that the old Kaeradi could have told him would indeed survive, worlds away from its writing.

  When Barung returns,

  Six shall lead him home,

  Blended from the triangle,

  Joined by the stone.

  Let loose the gentle innocents,

  For music soothes the shield.

  Feed him on The People’s blood,

  And drive him to the field.

  From the Sacred Scroll of Myrddin

  Preserved by The People

  Chapter 1

  Arda

  Twenty-Second Century

  Krysta Tul’Mar, Captain of the Home Guard of Arda, hovered above whitecaps on the Western Sea in her compact battle speeder. The little vessel’s inertial seat held her snug and motionless despite occasional buffets from the air currents rising off the waves. Big sun and little sister, Arda’s daystars, had barely crested in the crystalline sky of her home world, and her senses still tingled from performing the Kon’pa, the sacred dance to honor the stars, the sails, and pa—the silvery living essence that connected all things.

  Because of a speeder crash during the Battle of Camford four stellar months ago, her own body bore a wealth of pa. It shimmered in her silver hair, which had once been obsidian like that of most Ardani citizens. It glistened white-gray in her eyes, which had also been as black as deep space.

  Her pa mark, the universe’s unique gift to those with Ardani blood, had been small and non-descript before the crash. Now glittering patterns traced her right cheek, trailed across her neck to cover her right breast, and tickled her nipple. From there, her mark plunged down her belly like an arrow sailing straight into her thick bush, turning it silver and giving the lips of her sex an almost continual humming charge. And it didn’t stop there. Her left hip and leg sported pa as well, all the way to her toes.

  Krysta frowned as she adjusted the speeder’s flight path.

  Elise Ashton Tul’Mar, Krysta’s sister-by-marriage, said Krysta’s mark looked like beautiful cherry blossoms. Elise’s cousin Georgia, no doubt destined to be a sister-by-marriage soon, agreed. Cherry. An Earth word. Krysta liked the sound of it, but she wasn’t sure her excess of pa was beautiful. Absently, she traced its path from her eye to her chest, nudging down the zipper of her black soft-hide jumpsuit to caress her constantly hard nipple. It was damned distracting, always being stimulated. Ki and Fari, her brothers, thought her torture would abate when she found her soul’s mate and enjoyed a new depth of sexual bonding—but Krysta had her doubts.

  Every priest and warrior on Arda was intimidated by her, especially now that her overdose of pa had left her so thoroughly marked. Ardani citizens thought her a Lorelei, one of the legendary supernatural guardians of the Tul’Mar clan, which didn’t make her any more approachable in the eyes of potential suitors. Elise and Georgia also held that distinction and bore greater-than-usual pa marks, but they didn’t mind. They had found their shas, their soul’s mates in Ki and Fari—and besides, their marks didn’t keep them in an endless state of arousal.

  Krysta sighed and pinched her nipple harder. The flesh felt rough and hot in her fingers. She eyed the speeder’s hard rubber hand control with something like guilty longing. The joystick was perfectly positioned in front of the inertial chair, and she could ride it if she needed relief. She had done so many times in the past stellar weeks.

  “I wish I weren’t alone,” she murmured.

  But more often than not, brief sessions of pleasure with Georgia and invitations to Ki and Elise’s marital bed aside, Krysta was just that—alone.

  Truth be told, Arda’s warriors had always been hesitant with her, even before she achieved Lorelei status. After all, she was a Tul’Mar, daughter of the clan who had ruled Arda for eight thousand years. Her brother Ki was Arda’s Sailmaster, their leader, and her brother Fari was Sailkeeper, the bringer of laws and justice. Both were known for their fair-minded benevolence, but Arda’s available men seemed intimidated by her royal brothers. Most of them treated her like an unattainable princess. She often initiated sexual contact, and her chosen conquest happily obliged—but in the morning, the warrior would head back to the barracks or his home without a backward glance. All she got f
rom her adventures was a reputation as an insatiable and skilled lover and a few hours’ respite from her loneliness. Lately, all she’d gotten was a few moments of relief from the continual stimulation of her enhanced pa-mark.

  Akad, Arda’s enigmatic high priest, kept her supplied with firemylk, the brewed elixir used to subdue Ardani males during mating fervor, if necessary. She used it sparingly, though. It had almost killed her brother Fari when he took too much trying to hold off his desires for Georgia.

  “Damn Akad, too,” Krysta fumed to herself, switching on the speeder’s far-ranging sensors with her free hand. “His mind is in the stars.”

  The priest had always been a willing lover, and in fact one of the few who came close to satisfying Krysta—if any one man could. Lately, though, Akad seemed distracted. Krysta knew he had some attraction to Elise, Ki’s half-blood shanna—but his odd attitude had to be more than that. Something was troubling the man, and Krysta had wondered about his burdens more than once in the past few stellar weeks.

  On Arda, though, there was little time for worry. As Elise often said in her quaint Earth accent, Arda’s a paradise. Men and women equal, complete sexual freedom, no hunger, no poverty, almost no crime…

  “Almost no crime,” Krysta muttered, turning loose her nipple and leaning forward as her sensors chirped.

  The long-range probes fixed on what looked like a fleet of junk ships slowly entering planetary orbit. Her pulse picked up and her arousal faded to the back of her mind.

  Whatever this caravan of space-gypsies intended, it likely wasn’t friendly. All space-faring races knew it was tantamount to invasion to breach a planet’s outer boundaries without hailing for permission to approach. These beggars weren’t yet close enough for her to analyze life signals or make psi-contact, so she didn’t know who she was dealing with.