Jazz: Monster Collector In: Promise Kept (Season 1, Episode 13) Read online

Jazz, Monster Collector in:

  Promise Kept

  season one, episode thirteen

  RyFT Brand

  Copyright 2014

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to

  persons living or dead are purely coincidental.

  JAZZ, Monster Collector

  Season One: Earth’s Lament

  RyFT Brand

  Episode-13: Promise Kept

  Seven hours to backlash.

  “Why on Mirth are you doing that?” Ship asked in his lilting, affected voice. It struck me just then how much he reminded me of Fred Schneider from the long forgotten rock band, the B-52’s. Funny, but I’d been thinking about Earth before the hostile takeover that turned it into an inter-dimensionally conjoined pair of planets a lot of late. Perhaps my imminent death was turning me sentimental. Of course I was still unsettled about having misjudged Mickey the Sasquatch as badly as I had. But that was no time to start going soft, to start caring. I had people that needed saving, less than seven hours to save them in, and going all mushy on the inside would not help me do the things that needed doing. I had to be ruthless and that meant being Jazz.

  “Would you stop already?” Ship shouted so loudly that the voice modulator crackled with overdrive. Sometimes he seemed intent on blowing that speaker. I don’t think he’d ever forgiven me for binding his demon soul to that little flycraft.

  “Are you listening to me?” Instead of answering, I let the uneven rumbling from Ship’s twin avi-star thrusters resonate in the little cockpit.

  “I swear by the unholy wrath of Lord Balish himself, that I will find a way to torture your pathetic human soul to a sevenfold degree that you’ve tormented me, human. Oh, the celebrations I’ll arrange in honor of your eternal suffering will have no comparison for grandeur and scale on this or any other realm, I promise you that,” he said.

  I think I’m fair in calling that a grudge.

  “Balance my dammed fuel mix, you moron!” he screeched tearing a hole in the speaker.

  “I will,” I said, waggling a finger in my ringing ear. “As soon as we pass the Faeitshire border.”

  “Faeitshire!” Ship attempted to shout, but the broken speaker left his voice thin, muffled, and fuzzy. It was funny, but I’d never had much use for laughing unless as a means to express sarcasm. “I can not believe you. You run me all the way to fairy-fairy land, and you know how the crystal tree harmonics play havoc with my nav-lab, just to drop off that broken little flower ward you don’t even like, you’ve got us cutting smack through the middle of the between lands, well aware that the Kriskrossa would love nothing more than to blast us, us meaning me, out of the sky, and now you tell me we’re going to Faeitshire! I always knew you were crazy, but this is madness even by your standards.”

  Ship was on a rant, which made him happy so I let him go. Besides, with the speaker punctured, it was a lot less annoying.

  “And what does throwing off my deeter-crystal mix accomplish? All you’re really doing, aside from giving me a belly ache, is wasting energy and making an awful lot of smoke…oh my dark-gods, you want to attract attention. You’re picking a fight. Well I won’t have it, no way, no how. I’m switching controls back over.”

  “First off, you’re royal nervousness, you don’t have a belly so it can’t ache, secondly, I don’t know what you have to be nervous about as you’re already dead, and thirdly, you switch the controls and I’ll kill you all over again.”

  “Sheesh, what a grouch,” Ship quipped. “I was only joking. Besides, if I get killed you get killed so it would be worth it.”

  “Sorry to disappoint but we’re crossing the boundary. I guess the Cranks aren’t looking for me all that hard after all,” I said, corrected the fuel balance and sent us into a steep decent.

  We dropped into a small gap in the trees and settled down onto a thick bed of pine needles. I was careful to cut the thrusters before touchdown to avoid a fire. Ship’s landing pads nestled nearly perfectly into the depressions we’d left the last time we were there. I cut the mallow flow and clicked though the shutdown sequence for the secondary systems. Ship could have done this himself, but I was giving my enemies time to get the jump on me.

  “If you’re going to see Mananama the vast, why’d you land so far from the city?”

  I kicked my boots out of the flight straps and unbuckled the five-point harness, then lounged in the high backed pilot’s seat and pulled off my leather flight cap. “The wood elves hate demons, they hate that I attached a demon soul to a flycraft, an act they see as an atrocity against the sanctity of life, and they hate you. I bring you anywhere near the city and they’ll sick their trees on you.”

  “Humph,” Ship said with as much indignity as the broken speaker would allow. “First off, Mrs. Listmaster, the wood elves hate humans way more than demons, secondly, they’re right to hate you for what you did to me because it’s an atrocity against un-life, and they hate you way, way more than everyone else so you’re a fool to come here at all. So there.”

  “Yeah,” I said, although my attention was focused more on my flightcap than my untrustworthy companion. “Guess you told me. Anything on close-range sensors?”

  “Jerk,” Ship quipped. “Lots of magical interference here, giving me static. Hold on, adjusting filters.”

  I turned the leather cap back and forth in my hand, watching the chin straps smack my wrist. The helmet had been a gift from my uncle, someone who’d died protecting me, and one of the few humans who saw the hostile takeover for what it was, an imperialist dimension launching an invasion. Along with the flightcap—a relic from the First World War, from back when the pre-Mirthin planet had separate countries—he’d given me my street cycle, his favorite shotgun, and the courage I needed to carry on despite our easy and utter defeat. Man, sometimes I missed him more than—.

  See, getting sentimental again.

  “Jazz,” Ship said in near panic haste. “Someone’s approaching my—”

  Said someone rapped hard against Ship’s floor to ceiling canopy with a knobby shillelagh. I’m embarrassed to say that I flinched away and banged my head against the folded engagement screen.

  “—starboard wing.”

  I moaned and massaged the side of my head. “Yeah, thanks for the timely warning.”

  “Oh go drop yourself in a fiery pit of molten bog thrashers wearing nothing but your underpants, you ungrateful lout.”

  I sucked my bottom lip off of my upper, making a loud smack, and then glanced at Ship’s chronograph. “Less than seven hours to backlash, doubt I’ll have time, but I’ll take it under consideration,” I said and dropped the flight cap. I slid on my helmet and popped the canopy release.

  “Oh just shut up,” Ship said.

  Ship’s tall, forward facing canopy slid out then up. As soon as it cleared the cockpit a half-dozen neff-crystal spear tips lowered in my direction.

  “Hello, Truvinn. Nice to see you too.”

  Truvinn stepped around the side of my flycraft, set a fur-boot up on Ship’s black and yellow striped shoving bumper, and rested his shillelagh across his leg. He narrowed his naturally narrow eyes and flipped the long, ash colored pony tail off his broad shoulder. “You best have a head or two in there, Monster Collector, or I’ll bring the king yours instead,” he said in a thick, cockney accent. The forest elves had first learned English in the British countryside, back when there was a Britain.

  “Ship?” I asked.

  “Mallow charge is at full pressure. All ejection valves are closed, and the exhaust ports are funneled to minimum aperture, as o
rdered, Captain.”

  The cedar-skinned elves and I all reeled at Ship’s voice. Me because of Ship’s use of the accursed title, but I had to let it slide and the demon knew it. The elves because to them there could be no worse apparition than a demon soul bound to a human-designed, mallow made machine.

  “’an what does all that nonsense mean, girl?” Truvinn, the forest elves’ warrior leader, asked with a garnish of growl.

  “That means,” I said resting back and setting my interlaced fingers behind my head, “That I’ve just effectively turned Sip into a highly volatile mallow bomb, one powerful enough to waste the wilds and everything in it, including Forestdeep.”

  Truvinn took a step back, dropped the shillelagh, and drew his long, serrated edged sword. “You’re lying, your kind always lies. Even you wouldn’t dare,” he said with vile disgust in his voice and hate in his eyes. He leveled the sword in my direction and his warriors moved their spear tips so close that they pressed into my battle armor.

  I didn’t move, I didn’t even allow my eyes to blink; all I needed