‘Captain,’ said Cabal, quietly, at his side, ‘if you give up the ship, you and your men will be slaves within the hour, and dead within a month. I intend to fight.’ He drew his rapier, and awaited Oleander’s decision.
Oleander took a moment to reach it, not least because every reasonable outcome ended in death. All that mattered now was choosing which particular path was most acceptable. ‘Men!’ he shouted. ‘Stand by to repel boarders!’
It is a strange moment when one realises that one’s life is now measured in minutes, and that whatever great plans might have been laid are now all moot and pointless and – in the great burning clarity of the instant – trivial. Cabal did not know what the others were thinking of, neither did he care. All he knew was that the course of his life had long been nothing more than a list of calculated risks, and that, finally, his luck had run out. All the work, all the hardships, all the sacrifices – both personal and of livestock – had been for naught; his work would never see fruition. He would never see her again. But that was not his fault, and he regretted nothing.
He gave the situation one last appraisal before committing to what would likely be the last decision of his life. Behind him, Shadrach tried to look dignified, but was leaning on the mainmast to support him as his knees turned to water. Bose had given up any pretence of bravery and was huddled in the angle between the quarterdeck steps and the rail, trying to will himself into invisibility. Corde held his sword in his hand, and was looking at it with new eyes, as if realising that the skill with which he might wield it would mark the difference between a fast and dishonourable death, or one drawn out a few seconds longer. It would mean at least that he hadn’t died meekly and mildly, a sacrifice to alien gods.
Oleander and his men were armed and ready, facing the enemy with determination on their faces and not a whit of hope in their hearts.
Cabal felt something fluttering in his chest, and applied himself to crushing down the rising panic. Panic would only result in a confused, meaningless death. He would remain calm and rational to the end. The Phobic Animus would not have him for its prey in his last moments. He would continue being his own man to the final second. He could expect nothing less of himself. And so he stood, resolute and perhaps even a little heroic, as one of the approaching black galleys suddenly threw its tiller hard over, turned to port, and smashed into the forward side of the next galley.
Cabal blinked in astonishment, and as he blinked, so did the Dreamlands. There was a sense of waking from a nightmare, only to find oneself still in it. The harbour, the ships, Dylath-Leen, even the sky and the sea, seemed to flutter indecisively between possible meanings and the collateral paradigms. Cabal’s sword became a pistol, then a sword, then some sort of extraordinary long gun, and then it was a sword again. The Dreamlands were changing, but in awkward, inelegant, stuttering steps. He suddenly realised that they weren’t changing nearly so much as
Then he heard the screams, and around him the world gelled back into something similar to what it had been. Now, however, one of the attacking galleys was up to the bowsprit in the hull of its neighbour, and the wounded ship was
But, then, the whole world was screaming. Everyone, even the galley slavers in their shapeless black robes were looking to the sky and screaming, or howling, or sobbing. For the blue morning sky had burned back in a ragged hole, through which could be seen the Dreamlands’ Moon, and the Moon, too, was burning.
Chapter 12
IN WHICH THERE ARE MONSTERS AND CATS, WHICH IS TO SAY, VERY MUCH THE SAME THING
‘What is happening?’ bellowed Oleander, over the fearful cries and the rising note of a strengthening wind. ‘What have those devils done?’
By
The men who looked upon these horrors felt their sanity shift, and minds broke in that moment. Corde gave a shriek like a terrified child, and backed away, shaking his head to deny the existence from which his eyes could not be drawn, Bose still lay bundled up in the corner of the deck, his shoulders heaving with his sobs, and Shadrach made no noise at all. Cabal looked around to find the cadaverous Shadrach, and found him clutching futilely at his throat. There, the first guard’s severed arm had him, the great gauntleted hand almost encircling his neck. Shadrach made no sound, but his face was dark and his eyes were starting from his head. Cabal started to run towards the stricken man, but he knew that it was already too late. The hand was not merely strangling Shadrach: it was crushing his neck. Cabal was only a matter of two yards from Shadrach when there was a percussive sound of collapsing cartilage, and the crunch of failing bone. Shadrach’s face became slack, and he fell back against the rail, then over it. Cabal reached it just in time to see the splash and Shadrach’s discreetly expensive shoes with the curled toes disappear beneath the water.
Cursing at an avoidable loss – he should have dealt with the arm after those limbs’ tendency for awkward autonomy had already been demonstrated – he turned back, but the tableau had barely changed, beyond becoming fractionally worse. The fires on the Moon had changed from wide clouds into distinct red points of light, indicating a series of simultaneous explosions across the surface. They showed against the pale lunar rock like buboes on a dead man’s face, and Cabal guessed that these were the cities of the Moon things, the creatures whose agents were even now standing awestruck, venting glutinous polysyllables of arcane vulgarity.
He went to Oleander and shook him roughly by the arm until he gained his attention. ‘The sky,’ said Oleander, a vacant look of shock in his eyes. ‘The sky is broken.’
‘So it is,’ said Cabal, pointedly ignoring it, for the wise man avoids falling through the ice by never setting foot upon it. ‘Oleander, you have to pull yourself together. The slavers are directionless at present, but we don’t know how long that will last. We must press the advantage while they are disrupted.’
But Oleander would only murmur, ‘The sky . . . the sky . . .’ with a terrible expression of haunted loss upon his face, so Cabal hit him, which worked very well. He suddenly focused on Cabal like a startled drunk, and was drawing back his blade when Cabal grabbed his sword hand in one of his own, Oleander’s jaw in the other, and shouted in his face, ‘Time, Captain! We are running out of time. Burning skies and exploding moons are all very well, but aliens with a mass of
Oleander shook himself free of Cabal’s grip and tried to rally the forces of his routed sanity, searching for a