Portrait: Captain Krill

Captain Krill

In the port of Kraken there are goblins who drink...

"A what?!"

"A biographer, Cap'n Krill. He says he wants to tell your adventures."

Slouching in the smokiest corner of the Three Gourds, one of the countless watering holes in the port of Cadwallon, Captain Krill wasn't in the mood for doing job interviews. In spite of it all, he made the effort to turn around to throw a glance at the small and chubby fellow waiting at the tavern's entrance, visibly not used to the virile atmosphere of this kind of place.

"Tell my adventures? To who?"

"Don't ask me, his children maybe, to put them to sleep... "

Krill shot a menacing glance at his first mate.

"Bring that fool over here instead of making smart remarks. And hurry up before he gets eaten alive, standing there looking like an egghead graduate from the N.B.A."

A moment later Dhypter was back accompanied by the small man who seemed more and more ill at ease. As he walked by, the motley crew of regulars ogled at him as if he were a roast coming out of an oven.

"So? What does four-eyes want from me?"

No one was quite as good as Captain Krill at making people feel at ease. The small man sputtered some incomprehensible excuses concerning his impertinent audacity before very quickly making a speech that he had surely learned by heart for the occasion.

A few minutes later the clandestine gambling room installed in the tavern's basement was emptied of its patrons and Captain Krill settled in with Thelonius.

"So? Where do we start?" asked the captain, eagerly looking forward to singing his own praises.

"You can tell me how you became a pirate, for example," answered Thelonius.

"Ah, well... "

Captain Krill leaned back into his seat and began telling his story with all the haughtiness that only a bona fide teller of tall tales is able of conjuring.

"At the time I was serving Emperor Izothop. Well, I say 'serving,' yet being the Generalissimo-in-Chief of the imperial armies, I didn't take orders from anyone and especially not from a puppet emperor like that usurper Izothop! In short, I was the boss of the army and I can tell you that I didn't fear anyone! Believe me, under my orders everything went smoothly, and I won more victories than any other general, be he from Akkylannie or anywhere else. Have you ever heard of the Battle of the Beryn Hills?"

"Yes, of course," answered Thelonius. "That's where the Eleventh Legion of Akkylannie was decimated. That was during the Wars of the Levant, wasn't it? I thought that it had been slaughtered by the ore clans of northern Bran-Ô-Kor... "

"Ores? And why not squirrels while you're at it?" the captain shouted. "By Rat's warts! It was me and my buddies who were there, not a gang of brawlers in fur loincloths! We gave those religious nuts the thrashing of their lives! I can tell you that on that day their god really must have regretted being unique, seeing how many of them we sent him!"

"I see, captain... but let's get back to your... vocation as a pirate. How did this happen?"

"Will you give me a second, OK?! I'm getting there. Now... It seems that my popularity among the soldiers must have really begun to scare those wimps who were supposedly governing the empire. Izothop must have worried that I throw him off his throne with a few kicks in the rear end, so he made sure that I would never return from my next mission."

Krill paused for a moment before he continued with his story.

"We had organized a raid to subdue the Wolfen packs of the east of Diisha who had become a bit too unruly. I left with two divisions to scout the terrain. Four regiments were supposed to meet me there three days later, yet nothing went as planned. After two days all the packs in the area pounced on us, warned of our presence by who knows which miracle. We defended our camp with everything we had while hoping to hold out until reinforcements arrived. Obviously, they never showed up. They had never even left Klûne, as l learned later on. Most of my soldiers fell over there. Me, I managed to miraculously escape with some of my best men."

Captain Krill paused again, visibly shaken by the painful memories. It was Thelonius who pulled him from his somber thoughts.

"What did you do then?"

"At first I wanted to return to Klûne and wring the neck of that stinking hyena Izothop. But I'm not crazy. I was well aware that all of the country's assassins were surely waiting for me to show my face over there. So, I swallowed my anger. Well, I at least placed it in a corner to keep it for later. With my men we went to the only place where we were sure to go unnoticed: over here to Cadwallon. Luckily we still had our war plunder."

"What do you mean?"

"You can imagine that when one spends I5 years ransacking and pillaging towns and villages, one puts some of the booty aside for old age. ln any case, it was enough to see us through. At the beginning we had a bit of a good time, but on the long run I began missing action. At first I had thought of founding a company of mercenaries, yet there was already too much competition in the area. So I had another idea."

"Piracy?"

"No, knitting, you varmint! Obviously, piracy! With our loot I armed a vessel and hired a crew. Most of my men had remained with me. As for the others, I found more sailors over here than I needed."

"Did you know anything about sailing?" asked Thelonius.

"The principle is not to sail but to prevent the others from doing so," answered Krill with a loud guffaw. "And at doing that, I'm the best,” he added with a fierce expression. "To date I have sent more than 150 old tubs to Davy Jones' locker. Either with or without their crew... I can't help it, I just ain't very patient. If anyone starts making a fuss, I just kill 'em all. If they're lucky, I only sell them as slaves. And when I say 'if they're lucky' it depends on who I sell them to. If they end up sold to those nutcases of the Scorpion, they usually miss the company of the barnacles."

Thelonius suddenly interrupted Captain Krill's story.

"Captain, there is a strange rumor going 'round about you. They say, as unbelievable as it may seem, that you are extremely scared of water. What's the truth on this?"

Thelonius had approached the subject jokingly, expecting his interviewee to take it with humor and detachment, two words that didn't exist in Captain Krill's colorful vocabulary. The latter squinted his right eye and stared at Thelonius with his jaws clenched. This was a characteristic tic of his, which his underlings knew well, and was the sign of an imminent and generous distribution of slaps and kicks in the butt. At that moment Thelonius realized that he had forgotten with whom he was talking. Cold sweat suddenly ran down his back and he worriedly awaited his interviewee's reaction.

Krill's jaws suddenly opened wide, flashing his fangs with a grin whose meaning could either be "good joke" or “I'm going to pull your guts out with my teeth."

The blacksmith's eyes popped wide open.

"A one-and-a-half-meter big fishhook? What in the world do you want to do with that?"

"It's for very fat bait," answered Mister Dhypter laconically.