***** Broohn’s POV 8:40 PM*****

“What about that one? Does that look like a pirate ship to you?” I asked Guildmaster Marybothane as I glided along at 17,950 feet above the sea. Any higher and I’d be in the airspace reserved for commercial aircraft, but I was still high enough that people would have a hard time noticing me. There weren’t any aircraft for me to be concerned about, but this is my usual cruising altitude, so that’s where I stayed.

One of the nice things about working with the Guildmaster is that she can provide her own air supply so I don’t have to, for which I was grateful. I’ve never understood why, but those kinds of spells always annoyed me. It’s not that they were difficult or anything, I just don’t like them – at all.

“Possibly. Why did that one catch your eye?” she asked in reply standing on my shoulder using an enchanted spyglass.

After I’d offered to help with some pirate hunting, and they accepted, Guildmaster Marybothane decided to come with me to help me figure out what is truly a pirate ship and what isn’t. This meant we had to make a brief detour to The Palace to drop off The Prince and his prisoners, but that only took about half an hour.

“This ship is acting suspiciously, just like the other three normal pirate ships we found earlier today. Instead of continuing on its merry way when it spotted another ship, it has turned towards them and used some wind magic to chase it down,” I said.

“True. It is also lacking the markings, equipment, and various enchantments that would be on a navy vessel. Even a disguised pirate hunter would have some significant anti-fire wards as sailing ships are notorious for being floating fire hazards,” she replied.

“I’d forgotten how flammable wooden ships were. Now that you mention it, there doesn’t appear to be any fire wards of any kind on the ship. Even the pirate ships we dealt with earlier had some sort of fire-ward, even if it was only on the stove in the galley.”

Some of the smaller boats hadn’t had them, such as the single-mast three-man fishing vessels I’d seen from time to time, but this pirate ship had three masts – which is more than large enough to have decent fire wards.

Suspicions aroused, I started circling lower and using a little bit of glamor to listen in on my target and ensure that they were pirates. The distance wasn’t an issue, not with my father’s blood in my veins. I may not be able to ignore planetary distances the way that he can, but I can do a couple of hundred miles easily – a couple of thousand feet was child’s play. It was a simple matter of bending the reality around my ears so that the sound in it matched the sounds near the captain of the suspected pirate ship.

At least I assume he’s the captain – he’s the one wearing the fancy hat after all.

I was immediately swamped with a bunch of nautical jargon that I couldn’t make heads or tails of, mostly because I knew absolutely nothing of sailing ships. Fortunately, we didn’t have to wait long before he pulled out some sort of sound amplification device and started making demands of the other ship.

“I am the Dread Pirate Windmane! Hand over all of your women and gold and I will make your deaths quick and painless!”

The other ship must have been expecting this because they responded immediately through their own amplifier. “Never you filthy pirate! We will fight until every last one of us is dead, and you still won’t get our gold!”

“Yup, that’s a pirate ship. Windmane is on the top of our most-wanted list. I’ll go protect the merchant while you capture the pirates.”

“Do you want me to drop you over their ship?”

“Nah, you just go for the pirates. I may not be able to fly on my own, but I can definitely fall with style.”

“Oky-doky! Diving in 3… 2… 1… Drop!”

I folded my wings and dropped out of the sky, aiming my dive for a couple of hundred meters behind and just barely to the side of the pirate ship, where I pulled up just above deck level and shot forward parallel to the waves. At the right moment, I switched to human form while maintaining my velocity such that I landed on the middle mast about three meters above the deck. I could have kept far more of my kinetic energy and smashed through the mast, but that would have been counter-productive, so I made sure to specify how much of my kinetic energy I had relative to the pirate ship when I transformed.

As I landed, I covered the entire ship in an anti-fire ward and a general protection ward, so the pirates don’t fall over and break their necks or something when I followed up with one of the strongest sleeping spells I know. I was trying to capture the crew alive and the ship intact after all.

To my surprise, the instant the sleep spell hit, something hidden inside the ship reacted, triggering two different sets of enchantments with a two-second pause between them. The first punched through my general protection ward and triggered suicide spells in the entire crew. I could have probably blocked this if I had been ready for it, but alas, I wasn’t, so the entire crew died before I knew what was happening.

This just ticked me off.

The pirates were my prisoners, therefore they were mine to protect and someone had just killed them. I may have been taking them to their trials and then their executions, but it was still my job to protect them until then.

Given the manner of their deaths, I knew without even thinking about it that whoever had set this up was about to try and steal the ship from me as well, most likely using the second leg of the enchantment below.

Not on my watch bucko.

With a very draconic snarl escaping my human lips, I poured my rage into both of the wards, ramping them up as far and as fast as I dared. Amping the wards up too far too fast would destabilize them, at which point I might as well burn the ship down myself. I would have thrown up more wards, but since I didn’t have them prepared beforehand I knew I didn’t have time to do so. Besides, the general protection ward was my best bet for stopping whatever method of destruction they might choose if they didn’t use fire.

Turns out that ramping up the anti-fire ward was a good idea as the second enchantment tried to burn the ship down, but only managed to char the ship in one location before my ward finished ramping up and suppressed it.

I couldn’t sense any other magics going on in the rest of the ship, so I set about securing the ship from anything that might distract me during my hunt. I started by putting all of the sails into my smart wrist bag, since that was faster than climbing up there and dealing with them properly, before dropping the anchor.

With the ship snow stationary, I closed my eyes and opened my mage sight, quickly yet methodically scanning the entire ship for spellwork. This was rather tricky considering I was still maintaining both wards at full power, but this wasn't the first time I'd done something like this, so I managed.

The first thing that I checked for was more contingency plans, and I didn’t find any. With that out of the way, I made sure that the fire enchantment wasn’t critical to the function of the rest of the extensive yet dormant enchantments. Since it wasn’t, I deactivated it by the simple expedient of pulling the power storage gems out of it.

With my victory complete and the ship now under my command, I stopped and roared my victory to the heavens, using the elation to banish my rage almost as quickly as it came. Letting it hang around when I didn’t need it was just asking for trouble. I have seen the beast that lives inside of me, and even he is afraid of what he could do if he got out.

I was still rather annoyed, but I’d be fine as long as I got to smash something sometime in the next hour or two.

My equanimity mostly restored, I started looking at the rest of the enchantments in detail, and what I saw confused me. Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait for even a minute before Guildmaster Marybothane came running over to make sure that everything was ok.

“What happened?” she asked.

So I told her what happened, still a little bit angry at whoever it was that had just killed all of my prisoners.

“Well, that is fascinating… What are they trying to hide?”

“The rest of the enchantments on the ship probably. I haven’t had too much time to look at it, but I can tell you it’s a teleportation type enchantment intended to move the entire ship.”

“What!? That’s insane! The teleportation spell is ridiculously dangerous! Unless you have a high-level mage at the top of their game the spell is probably going to fail. At that point, well, let’s just say that makes a gigantic mess and leave it at that.”

“Wait, you said ‘The teleportation spell,’ meaning that there is only one?”

“Yes, and it is intended for moving six people and their gear roughly 20 kilometers. Given the already ridiculous mana cost of the spell, I don’t even want to know what moving an entire ship would require.”

“In that case, I guarantee you that they’re using a completely different spell. I’m not entirely sure what parameters they were aiming for, but I believe the minimum range on this version is roughly 40 kilometers.”

“I thought that you said you hadn’t had a chance to look at it closely yet.”

“I haven’t, but this isn’t my first time trying to chase down an unfamiliar teleportation spell, nor is it the first time I’ve seen such a thing attached to a ship. Admittedly this is the smallest ship I’ve ever seen such a thing on by a factor of 20, but it still follows the same basic mechanics. I’ve seen a similar teleport spell before, the main difference is that this one has horrible fail-safes, and that one was slightly less accurate, but they’re both single jump fixed target spells.”

“Interesting. I have two questions: First, where were they supposed to go, and second, how many different teleportation spells do you have back home?”

“Unfortunately, the one spot on the ship that got charred was the coordinates, so I don’t know exactly where they were trying to go. Also, I don’t know what coordinate system they were using, so I can’t even make an educated guess,” I growled, “As for your second question, back home teleportation is an entire school of magic that overlaps with so many other schools that I’ve long since given up keeping track. Teleportation includes any type of magic that gets you from point A to point B without directly crossing the intervening distance quickly enough that it might as well be instant.”

Her response was a string of expletives that would have made a sailor blush while she started leaking fire.

“Guildmaster, are you ok?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine. I’m just fed up with these idiots who are trying to tear my home apart. These freaking cowards hide in the dark while other people do their dirty work. If only they would step out where I can see them!”

“When they finally do step out of the shadows, either they're ready for you or you’ve messed up their plans so thoroughly that they have nothing to lose. I know the feeling all too well.”

“I wish I could smash something! Ideally, it would be the head of whoever is behind this, but since they’re not here I’ll have to find something else.”

“That’s about how I’m feeling at the moment. Let’s finish searching this ship for anything that might give us a clue, then go find some rocks to smash.”

“That sounds like a plan to me! Let’s go.”