The Archman

Chapter 18 - A Hostile Encounter, Part 1

"Should we say a prayer?" Eira stands in front of the grave, which is now completely covered. It would have looked like some ordinary unsuspecting heap of wet sand, but the knowledge that two dozen bodies that lay underneath made it impossible to see it as anything less than a shoreside crypt.

"If there are any gods out there, I'd rather keep them out of my affairs." The Archman puts his leather jacket back on, keeping the front unbuttoned. He gathers up his pistols, rapier, and sash of bullets off the ground and returns them to his person. The last items he grabs are the shovels, one from the ground, the other from Eira.

"Then why bother burying them?" Eira follows the Archman to the shoreline, where his dinghy is resting in the tide.

"Would you leave a corpse lying around your home? If I left them out, they'd spread disease and filth everywhere." The Archman tosses the shovels into the small boat.

"Right." Eira nods as she steps into the dinghy, taking a seat towards the bow of the vessel.

The Archman pushes the dinghy into the water until it is afloat, then climbs inside. He takes the two oars and starts rowing the small watercraft across the cove, back to his ship. They make their way past the abandoned pirate's ship, floating lifelessly in the cove.

"What are you going to do about this?" Eira looks up at the ship as they pass by.

"I'll have to drag it out. Getting the anchor up will be an issue, though." The Archman thinks through the problem out loud. "Or perhaps I'll just set it ablaze instead." He says with a subtle smirk.

It was strange for Eira, seeing the Archman in anything resembling a pleasant mood. It could be that it only seemed pleasant compared to his scornful demeanour when they'd arrived, but even before coming here, he rarely showed any sort of amusement. Eira wouldn't be all that surprised if the spree of butchery he'd just engaged in had lightened his spirits.

The Archman rows the boat to the stern of his ship, where three hooks are dangling beneath the overhang of the upper deck, hovering about a foot above the water.

The Archman secures the three hooks to three steel rings on the dinghy: two in the stern, and one in the bow. Beside one of the hooks is a thick rope, which the Archman takes hold of and starts pulling downwards.

Eira looks up at the system of ropes and pulleys several meters above them. She'd seen the system operate once before, when the Archman brought her from the ship to the cove several hours beforehand, but she still marveled at the way it functioned so seamlessly.

The ropes attached to the three hooks are pulled taught as the dinghy is slowly lifted out of the water, being hoisted upwards by the three hooked ropes. The Archman keeps heaving the rope downwards with a consistent hand-over-hand motion. Eira now understood where the defined muscle tone in his forearms came from.

After a minute more of tugging, the dinghy has lifted several meters into the air, until it is hanging in place beneath the upper deck. The Archman keeps a single hand on the rope, reaching out with his other hand to pull a lever above his head, locking the pulley system in place.

There is a wooden platform jutting out from the side of the ship, acting as a kind of midair dock for the dinghy. The Archman steps out of the dinghy, onto the wooden platform.

"Mind the gap." He says as he turns back to Eira.

Eira stands up in the dinghy carefully, as it sways slightly under her feet. She goes to step onto the wooden platform with the Archman, but as she shifts her weight, the small airborne vessel lurches beneath her. Her foot catches on the gap between the dinghy and the platform, causing her to lose her balance.