The Adventures of Tobasco da Gama

The clouds were a flat gray, spreading across the sky like a ceiling. The buildings of the city became pillars, seemingly supporting some larger structure of which the earth around was merely one of many floors, the city but one room in it.

Tobasco da Gama knew now that the simile had more truth to it than any of the city’s inhabitants would care to know. He came from a time when the greatest cities of the world had buildings made of wood and brick, few of which over three stories. Only the churches reached higher, like lightning rods to attract the electric energy God’s holy spirit and disperse it amongst their parishioners. Now, the churches were overshadowed by buildings devoted to commerce — a commerce that he and his fellow explorers had helped to build –, or to homes for the inhabitants of the city.

After all that he had seen since being untethered from his time and set adrift on the seas of history, human and inhuman, he felt this was appropriate. He knew that the old churches of man were just as insignificant in their rituals as the buildings were next to the sky-scraping office towers. He knew that the world beyond the world dwarfed those towers just as the towers dwarfed the steeples of the churches.

It was a difficult thing for a man who had dedicated his life half to amassing the profits of the world and half to spreading the word of God and of His Holiness, the Bishop of Rome, to admit. But admit it he must.

For the towers of the city had not provided him his first glimpse of pillars that held up the sky. He had seen the pillars on the outside, in the void, the Mists of Time, the place where the damnable Dragon of Time lived, the same creature who had torn him from his moorings in normal time and left him thus becalmed, waiting for the next current or wind to take him to ports unknown. In that place, there was no horizon in any direction, just a roiling chaos that defied human understand, a writhing nothing like the shapes one sees when there is no light to carry images to the eyes. But then, one day, after the currents in this Mists had flung him to some unknown time and place in the universe of physical things only to once again pull him back, as if he were nothing more than driftwood floating on the tides, he had seen the Pillars.

The Pillars contained within them the same chaotic nothing that formed the background everywhere within the Mists of Time, but nonetheless they had a clear definition, the pattern of the chaos subtly different within and without them. Tobasco could see no beginning or end to them. They simply extended into the infinity of the Mists. As he drifted, the Pillars barely moved in his vision, as though immensely far away, which meant they must also have been immeasurably huge.

That thought brought him little peace when he saw something moving between the Pillars. The Thing held no fixed shape, but it was different from the other chaos he saw in that place. It moved with intention. It was, in some sense of the word that no mortal man could possibly hope to understand, alive.

Tobasco da Gama then felt something he had felt only a few times before: fear. Because he understood that the Thing was looking back at him, into him, through him, and that it now began to approach, with almost incomprehensible malice. It was coming for him. It would devour him.

Just then, in that moment of realisation, he suddenly felt the tug of the currents in the Mists pull him out and back into the physical world. It was then that he found himself in the midst of the city, pondering a different set of pillars in the sky.

He then had a second realisation that felt like the removal of a heavy burden or the first draught of fresh air a man breathes after nearly being suffocated by smoke.

If the Thing moved with intention, then it followed rules. It was bound by them as surely as he was now bound to the earth by its gravity. The rules might be forever beyond his understanding, the limits out of his reach. But the Thing had limits. The Dragon of Time must have them, too.

They could be fought.

The Sun rose like a drunk after a long night of trying to forget something. It peeked tentatively over the hills, decided today was probably not worth the effort, certainly not before noon, drew a blanket of clouds over itself, then turned over and went back to bed.

Tobasco did not have the luxury of sleeping in. Not today. There were things to be done. Things like getting out of this damned town, the faster the better.

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[Read Part I!]

Tobasco remained. His ship remained. The terrifying void remained. His crew was gone.

“They,” said a voice that Tobasco, in his current state, confused and off balance, at first could not be sure was not his own, “were not worthy. The Mists of Time are a stern judge and a harsh one. This may seem cruel to you now, but soon you will understand the mercy behind it.”

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If Tobasco felt fear now, his posture did not show it. He stood fixed, as if his mind had left his body to explore the horizon. Only there was no horizon here. Where the horizon should be, at the point where the heavens were cut from the sea, there was no sharp division separating the realms; there was only blackness, an inky dark that seemed to swirl and shimmer at the edges, at once illusory and horrifyingly real.

A less experienced sailor might pass it off as a freak storm, but Tobasco had been educated at the finest nautical academies of Coimbra and the rest of Europe. What the academies did not teach him, he had learned first hand in his many travels. This was not a storm, at least not a storm of earth. All the world’s finest learning did not theorise a storm such as this, not even in the maddest fancy of the mercury-addled brains of the half-scholar, half-mage alchemists.

“Maintain course.”

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[Ed: This should be a refreshing change from all the Serious Stuff. And, for those keeping score at home, that indeed is a Clash reference in the title.]

Tobasco da Gama advanced carefully with his sabre drawn. Taking a deep breath to steel his nerves, he rounded the corner to face a dozen lurching monsters, still animated and powerful and hungry even as the rotting flesh sloughed off their bones.

This could be Trouble.

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