Chapter 37: What's Lost to History
A quill pinched in between her delicate, thin fingers, Queen pressed it to the sheet of parchment on the desk before her, every one of her movements precise and controlled as she wrote out the details of what had just transpired over the past few days. The report, naturally, was addressed to the Supreme Commander, in reply to the one that she had sent.
The one she had sent expressing the dire need of a solution.
Queen was unsure as to whether sending reinforcements as of now was the correct decision – she was a specialized clockwork, built to analyze reactions to an authoritarian rule as Kane had been. Rooke would be more knowledgeable in other such matters.
She could not send any forces, not now – but at least the delivery of this report would assure Prima that they were aware of the situation, that they had not abandoned her on that wretched spit of land yet again.
The time in between when she had first received Prima's report and the current moment had been entirely spent on research – Deacon's criminal records of the more well-known pirates of Skull Island, accounts from soldiers who had witnessed the ambush on the Lord Kane – even Prima's own reports, her stacks and stacks of notes on human behavior and reactions.
The formula that could predict the unpredictable.
I can report, Commander, she started off, that Cadiz has dedicated its full effort to clarifying the current situation in Skull Island as much as possible.
The criminal files of Underhill and her crew had only told her so much.
Who was she –
Where did she come from –
And why would she do it?
Deacon had those answers, too.
"Follow me, Excellency," he had said, his hand accompanying in a beckoning motion as he led Queen down to the back corner of the records room and opened another small, cramped door – this one leading to a narrow, but endlessly long hallway of shelves and scrolls and old bound books.
She did not question his methods of organization, even though Queen herself could not make head nor tail of how he had done so. Instead, she just followed, stopping when he stopped and holding out a hand to accept the bound pile of papers offered to her.
They exited the hallway and returned to the main chamber of the records room. Queen laid the bound papers out on the central table and opened it – a cloud of dust flew into the air. This had obviously not been touched for a long time.
"What is this?" Any remnants of a title or label had been faded or worn away long ago.
"Her background, Excellency."
The first page was a sketch of an intricate coat of arms, lions and serpents – together! – posed just so.
Queen turned the pages. The dates were archaic, far before the the first of the clockworks had ever been assembled, before Gazpaccio had been born, even –
But her lineage, Sydney Underhill's lineage, stretched back further, dwarfing their existences. From the moment that the territories of Marleybone had been established, they had seized power over the Isle of Fetch, and thus the first Lord Underhill was named so.
Queen continued to read.
Pages upon pages of families, descendants, at one point, an enormous family tree with text that was far too small and intricate to read precisely without the aid of magnification, even for a clockwork.
"They're this buried in Marleybone's history?"
"It certainly appears so," Deacon replied, coolly as ever. "They've commanded great influence for centuries."
He paused.
"Which is, if you remember, the exact reason that we set out to eliminate them when Valencian forces first invaded Marleybone."
"But Sydney still lives?"
"Yes, Sydney lived through the attack – I do not believe, judging from the Supreme Commander's description of her, that she is still living now. Her mother and father were terminated. The manor was destroyed."
"And she was not there?"
"No. It is most likely that she had already escaped to Skull Island by that point."
Queen turned back to the table, pulling the sheet of parchment that was Sydney's criminal profile down on top of the history of her own family.
"She must have been…no more than twelve years old…"
"Hence why we had not thought that her disappearance from her family's manor would become such a dire crisis."
Yes, that disappearance had ultimately led to the growth and development of one of the most ingenious and dangerous privateers of the resistance, and the incapacitation of the first Supreme Commander.
"There is also this."
Deacon reached out, dropping a small leaflet of about eight pages overtop of everything that was already piled on the table.
Skull Island Privateers
It had been either torn or saved from one of Prima's many records – she had been closer to them, on average, than any other soldier of the Armada. Queen turned the pages. These weren't nearly as dusty as the previous ones – probably because it was referenced so much when creating and analyzing the profiles of known rebellion leaders.
If Sydney had been classified as one, this was bound to give her more information on what her motivations might have been.
Strategical geniuses, one paragraph said, and that was probably true. She had launched an assault, and a successful one at that, with the aid of only two people and a singular clockwork. There was also the looming, unanswered question of how she had swayed the loyalty of Custos Quintus, but they had not come any closer to figuring it out since the very day of the attack.
They had so little information about the humans – how they worked, how they thought, things only Prima knew, and for the past three years she had spent almost all of her time either positioned on or imprisoned in the pirate haven.
It was as if Deacon could tell what she was thinking – he had been programmed to directly follow the thought process of a being, after all.
"Excellency, we have no answer in regards to the clockwork. Bishop had planned to use Presidos Decimus, the variant, as an experimental subject in his attempts to uncover it – but as you likely know, he escaped during the attack."
Decimus was Prima's clockwork – she had not made him, of course, but she had protected him and argued for him when none other would, when Kane himself had directly opposed her. And she had won. Prima was the one clockwork that Kane would consult and truly consider, and when she had vanished on the island Queen had found herself constantly thinking that operations would be so much easier if they had their Commodore back.
"We have, however, recovered some traces of background material on her crewmates."
"Oh?"
"Samantha Hawkins trained on the docks in her youth – as an apprentice, most likely."
That explained a lot, Queen thought – it wasn't exactly easy to shake the structure of a Valencian clockwork to the point of paralysis, much less that of the former Supreme Commander. If she had pulled in ships from her teenage years, it was no wonder that she possessed the strength of fifty, even a hundred men.
"And the other?"
"Jewel Zabra? I do not believe that is her true name – she is from Mooshu, and was the daughter of the imperial apothecary – both husband and wife. They were terminated years ago."
"After she had joined Underhill?"
"I believe so. But it is not certain."
Queen lapsed into silence, mulling over the influx of information that had just been shoved at her all at once.
"And their motives, Deacon? Has there been any progress made on that?"
"I fear not, Excellency. With humans, their motives are not always shared."
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Queen signed the letter with a graceful, but controlled flourish. It was almost underwhelming, the results of her extensive digging – they had found every piece of information possible regarding Underhill and her crew, and still, they were clueless as to what caused her to engineer such a plan, or how she had seized the allegiance of a clockwork soldier.
Folding the paper over itself into thirds, Queen took the stick of partially molten wax and let a small pool of it fall over the edges before stamping her insignia into the middle of it.
There should have been more that she could do.
But she had not been given the permission, nor the cause (Prima's letter had been somewhat vague in its description of Underhill's abnormal state) to send reinforcements – thus, this was the most that she could do, assure the Supreme Commander that the fortress was aware of the situation in Skull Island.
Queen left her chambers, the letter clutched in her hand, and turned to the Captain of the messenger ship who had delivered Prima's report. He had waited for the duration of time that it had taken her to write her response. She held it out to him, and he relieved her of it.
"Captain – is your ship ready?"
"Affirmative, Excellency. We are prepared to set sail at your notice."
"Excellent – then, as soon as possible, deliver this back to the Supreme Commander. And take caution as you sail – I need not explain why."
There are strange things in the sky. Sydney Underhill, who has destroyed a ship –
Who has ripped apart hundreds of her own kind –
Her jaw unhinging, rows of TEETH - !
Use caution.
"At once." The Captain saluted, turned, and marched away. Queen followed at her own discretion – it would do to see them out, she would at least watch until they had passed through the stormgate to Hammamitsu.
Thus, she stood on a higher floor as preparations were made to set sail – the gears checked, the anchor raised, the gangplanks brought away. With a mighty groan, the Armada ship drifted out of the docks of the fortress, past the gates, and into the Skyway. From the wide window that stretched laterally across the room, Queen could see them pass into the windlane, nearing the stormgate. All was going well.
And then the stormgate had emitted a loud blast of sound, as if trying to eject some great disturbance and Queen turned –
Only to see a battered, enormous black galleon emerge from the whirling winds, the crossed sword and hatchet still evident on its tattered, ragged sails.
"It's the Fife!"
What Prima had seen, and witnessed, and warned them about –
It was this. It was this ship and its Captain. Spinning on her heel, Queen turned to face the pair of guards at the door just as an entire squadron of marines marched in, one of them forcibly pulling her away from the window and into the middle of the formation.
"Excellency, it is not safe to remain so close to the exterior. A dangerous enemy ship has been spotted in the skyways – "
"Yes, I know – the messenger ship just set sail, they should be warned!"
"Your majesty – "
"Where is the General?!"
"They are too far gone to be reached in time, majesty. Not without sacrificing more of our own."
Queen froze. For a clockwork to make a statement like that, the outcome must have been certain.
"Let me through."
The marines, having been given a direct order by their appointed and acting regent, did not resist as Queen shoved past them, pressing her palms against the window. The Grand Fife had now caught up to the messenger ship. The blasts of the messenger ship's cannons could be heard as they attempted to fire, to ward her off, but they did not seem to have any affect on the ship's speed whatsoever –
And without any further effort on the Fife or her Captain's part, the Valencian vessel was abruptly yanked back to come alongside of the enormous corpse-littered galleon, drawn to it like a magnet.
The Fife destroyed our patrol ship without any struggle.
There, yes, she could see Sydney now – she could see the Captain, her focused and precise optical mechanisms allowing her to see every rip and tear in Underhill's long coat, every tangle in her hair, and the sunken, purpled areas around her wide eyes as she leapt from the helm and approached the edge of her ship.
All at once, the clockworks of the messenger ship charged directly at her, wielding halberds and firing charges, and yet the cuts dealt to her yielded no blood, and the charges that smacked into her torso did not even so much as sway her.
Sydney laughed, a terrible, dissonant sound that Queen could hear as clear as day, even through the thick walls of the fortress and over the distance that separated them.
And then, just as the Supreme Commander had described in her report, Sydney's jaw unhinged, the skin upon her face splitting as her eyes faded into black, as claws – talons, even – sprouted from her fingertips and rows upon rows of sharp, shark like teeth came into view.
She fell upon them, the clockworks of the messenger ship, and they did not stand a chance as she crushed their masks in her hands, as she tore apart their processors and what remained of their terminated frames with those sharp, serrated teeth. Another several brocaded uniforms joined the rotting figures on her deck.
Queen was frozen in place, hardly able to process what happened.
As she watched, the letter that she had handed to the Captain fluttered away from his frame, over the railing of the ship, and down into the depths of the Spiral, carried by the rushing wind. Sydney's mouth closed, the fluid that ran through the clockworks' bloodpaths staining her lips and throat and chest and cheeks. She licked the rest of it off of her fingers, and although she was nowhere near the helm, the Fife began to move, sailing away and disappearing back into the stormgate that she had come out of.
It was all true. Everything that Prima had said, the danger that she spoke of – it had now been seen firsthand.
Queen faced the soldiers that had now rushed into the room, every one of them dead silent.
"Prepare reinforcements for the island – NOW!"
I hope you enjoyed, and do be sure to leave a review!
- Severina