Tome of the Undergates

It dangled in front of the window, pale flesh pressed against the glass as it hung from long, malnourished arms. To all appearances, it seemed a man: hairless, naked but for the dagger-laden belt hanging from its slender waist and the loincloth wrapped about its hips. Across its pale chest was a smeared, crimson sigil, indistinguishable through the smoky pane of glass.

Asper had to force herself not to scream as it pressed its face against the window. Its eyes were stark black where they should have been white, tiny silver pinpricks where pupils should have been. One hand reached down, tapped against the glass as a mouth filled with blackness opened and uttered an unmistakable word.

‘Priest.’

Miron rose from his seat. ‘That’s irritating.’

‘Lord Emissary,’ she whispered, perhaps for fear that the thing might hear her. ‘What is it?’

‘An invader,’ he replied, as though that were enough, ‘a frogman, specifically.’

‘Frog. . man?’

He hummed a confirmation. ‘If you would kindly inform your companions that their attention is required down here, I would be most grateful.’

Before she could even think to do such a thing, she felt the floor shift beneath her feet as the ship rocked violently. A din rose from above, a shrieking howl mingled with what sounded like polite conversation. A discernible roar answered the call, a chest-borne thunder tinged with unpleasant laughter.

Something had happened on the deck, and whatever had happened had also met Gariath. Another noise reached her through the ship’s timbers.

From the cabins beyond the mess in the ship’s hold, she heard it: the sound of an iron porthole cover clanging to the deck, two water-laden feet squishing upon the wood, a croaking command in a tongue not human, nor shictish, nor any that she had ever heard.

Something had just crept into the ship.

Something crept closer.

Her hand quivered as it reached for her staff. Lenk’s hands wouldn’t quiver, she thought. Her breath was short, her knees quaking as she trudged towards the cabin’s door. Kataria’s knees wouldn’t knock. Her voice was timid, dying on her lips as she tried to speak. Gariath wouldn’t squeak.

Lenk, Kataria and Gariath were somewhere else, though. She was here, standing between the noise and the Lord Emissary. When her hands wrapped about the solid oak staff, she knew that at that moment, the warriors would have to leave the fighting to her.

‘Lord Emissary,’ she whispered, stepping towards the hold, ‘forgive me for my transgressions.’

‘Go as you must.’

She cringed; it would have been easier to justify staying behind if he had been angry with her. Instead, she took her staff in her hands and crept into the gloom of the Riptide’s timbered bowels.

Miron turned from the portal towards the foggy glass of the window. The frogman was gone, slid off to join its kin on the deck. No matter; a black void spread beneath the water’s surface, a mobile ink stain that slid lazily after the ship as it cut through the waters.

‘She sent you, did she?’ he muttered to the blackness. Absently, a hand went down to his chest, tracing the phoenix sigil upon his breast. ‘Come if you will, then. You shall not have it.’

He turned, striding from the mess towards the shadows of the hold, intent on reaching his cabin. In his mind, a shape burned: a square of perfectly black leather, parchment bound in red leather, tightly sealed and hidden from the outside world.

‘They shall not have it,’ he whispered.

There was a sound from the shadows, a masculine cry of surprise met by a voice dripping with malice. Someone screamed, someone ran, someone fell.

The man tumbled out of the shadows, the broad, unblinking whites of his eyes indiscernible against the swathes of bandages covering his face. He croaked out something through blackened lips, staring up at Miron as Miron stared down at him, impassively.

A webbed foot appeared from the darkness. A pale, lanky body emerged. Two dark, beady eyes set in a round, hairless head regarded him carefully. Through long, needle-like teeth, it hissed.

‘Priest.’ It raised its bloody dagger. ‘Tome.’

The thing peered through the jagged, splintering gash in the ship’s hull that used to be a porthole. Only shadows met its black eyes as it searched through the gloom for another pale shape, another thing similar to this one. Quietly, it slid two slender arms through the hole, a hairless head following as it pulled a moist torso through the rent in the timbers.

The hole was no bigger than its head. Absently, the thing recalled that it should not have been able to squeeze through it.

It set its feet upon the timbers, salt pooling around its tender, webbed toes. Slowly, it bent down to observe a similar puddle upon the floor where similar feet had stood just moments ago. And yet now there was no sign of those feet, nor the legs they belonged to, nor any sign of that one at all.

‘It is a stupid one,’ the thing hissed. It recalled, vaguely, a time when its voice did not sound so throaty, a time when a sac did not bulge beneath its chin with every breath. ‘“These ones stay together,” these ones were told, “stay together”. That one must not have run off. That one must stay with this one.’

This one remembered, for a fleeting moment, that it had once had a name.

That memory belonged to another one. This one knelt down, observing the traces of moisture clinging to the wood. That one had taken two steps forwards, it noted from the twin puddles before it. It tilted its head to the side; that one had stopped there. . but not stopped. It had ceased to step and begun to slide. That struck this one as odd, given that these ones had been allowed to walk like men.

That one’s two moist prints became a thick, wet trail instead of footprints, a trail leading from the salt to the shadows of the ship’s hold. As this one followed its progress intently, watching it shift from clear salty water to smelly, coppery red, it spied something in the darkness: a tangle of pale limbs amidst crates.

That one was dead, it recognised; it remembered death.

It rose and felt something against its back. It remembered the scent of humanity. It thought to whirl around, bring knife against flesh, but then it remembered something else.

It remembered metal.

‘Shh,’ the tall other one behind it whispered, sliding a glove over its mouth while digging the knife deeper into its side. ‘No point.’ The other one twisted the knife. ‘Just sleep.’

Then it slumped to the floor.

Denaos grimaced as he bent down, retrieving the dagger wedged in the infiltrator’s kidneys. The last one hadn’t made half so much noise, he thought grimly as he wiped the bloodied weapons clean on the thing’s ebon leather loincloth. Replacing them in the sheaths at his waist, he seized the pale fish-man by the legs and dragged him behind a stack of crates where his companion lay motionless in a pool of sticky red.

With a grunt, the rogue heaved the fresh corpse atop the stale one.

They were skilled infiltrators, he admired silently; he would never have thought even a child could squeeze through the ship’s portholes, much less a grown man. Had he not chosen this particular section of cargo to guard, he would never have found them.

His laugh was not joyful. ‘Ha. . guarding the cargo.’

Yes, he told himself, that’s what you were doing. While all the men were dying to the pirates and the women were being violated in every orifice imaginable, you were guarding cargo, you miserable coward. If anyone asks why you weren’t fighting like any proper man, you can just claim you were concerned for the safety of the spices.

He caught his reflection in the puddle of water at his feet, noting the frown that had unconsciously scarred itself onto his face. In the quiver of the water, he saw the future: chastisement from his companions, curses from the sailors he had abandoned. .

And Asper. His loathing slowly twisted to ire in his head. I’ll have to endure yet another sermon from that self-righteous, preachy shrew. He paused, regarding his