“Shut up. The nails, fool, have twisted free. Spirits unleashed, wailing spectres and wraiths, yet one has risen, yes, above all the others. Clawed hands snatching. Souls grasped-oh hear their shrieks in the ether! Grasped, devoured, and the one grows. Power folded in, and in, layer upon layer, grim armour defying banishment-sweet in its multitude of nostrils the scent of mortal life, oh how it now hunts, to take all into its fang-filled, slavering, black- gummed and unpleasantly-smelling mouth! Lo, I hear skull bones crunching, even now!”
“You addled, child? What is this old hag’s voice that comes so wrongly from your young lips?”
Bena Younger blinked. “Mother,” she whispered, nodding towards the corpse. “She speaks, she warns you, yes-why look upon me so strange? Why ignore her terrible glare so fixed upon you, sir? Bena Elder warns us-there is one below! Most terrible, oh, we have nowhere to go!”
Grunting, Emancipor Reese sat up and began loosening the knot at his ankle. “You’ve that right, Bena Younger. Nowhere at all.” He knew to tread now with great care with the hapless girl, whose mind had so clearly snapped, imprisoned up here in this wicker basket with a mother who was weeks dead at the very least. The gulf of loneliness, of abandonment, had proved too deep, and into the cauldron of madness she had gone.
Bena Elder reappeared in the manner of suddenly bared teeth on her daughter’s face. “Everyone shall die. Except me and my daughter-when the one comes, scaling the mast, and reaches so sure into this nest, it shall be your throat it shall grasp, Luckless. And we shall watch as it drags you over the edge. We shall hear the snap and crunch of your bones, the gurgle of your blood, the squishy plop of your eyeballs-”
“Think it won’t smell you two up here? Your daughter for certain, her life blood, the heat of her breath-all a tender lodestone to an undead-”
“I shall protect her! Hide her! In my embrace, yes!”
Emancipor struggled to his feet, leaned against the basket edge. “Might work. I wish you both the Lady’s tug. As for me, I’m going back down-”
“You mustn’t! Hear them down there! Insanity! And the one stalks, drinking deep on terror-”
And, as if to confirm the horror of all Bena Elder described, more shrieks from below. Renewed, redoubled, repeated. Nether, despairing, primal.
The mast and crow’s nest rocked as if buffeted by a giant’s fist. Sharp, splintering sounds. They heard a yard slide from rings then crash onto the deck below.
“Hood’s breath!” Emancipor gasped, clutching the edge, then twisting round and squinting downward. Shadows flitted here and there across the deck, more nightmarish than real. A body was sprawled near the hatch. There was no sign of what had struck the base of the main mast, but Emancipor could make out white lines to mark the splitting further down, almost luminescent against the tarred wood. “Something hit us down there, maybe even at the step down in the hold.” He glanced back to warn Bena Younger of the risk, caught a blurred sight of a knife pommel, flashing for his head.
White light!
It’s the bells, Subly! Can’t you hear the damned bells?
Oh, wife, what did I do now?
Beautiful, this rocking motion, so gentle, so soft. Birds Mottle, whose left breast was a white sphere devoid of all pigmentation, in splendid, eye-widening contrast to her dark skin everywhere else, and hence her name’s origin, a detail regretfully not as secret among the crew as she’d have wanted-but gods, trapped aboard with all these gruff sailors and the few women among ’em uglier than a priest’s puckered arse, and well, what else t’do and besides, she was earning coin, wasn’t she. Coin, aye, most useful, since who knew if they’d ever get away with what they were trying t’get away with. Birds Mottle, then, was reluctant to prise open her eyes.
Especially with all the screaming up near the foredeck. And was that a splat of blood or just a bucket of salt water, rivulets running down the steps now, maybe, and well there’d be no use to getting wet now, would there?
And so she opened her eyes. Sat up, found herself facing astern, the cabin hatch slightly off to her right.
From which something wet, slick and murky was creeping into view, heaving over the steps. A chaotic scattering of small, black, beady eyes across a misshapen, mottled, lumpy surface. Slick, wet, yes, wetly slick, scrabbling and skittering noises as of minute claws on the wooden steps, faint slithering sounds, the pulse of organs now, throbbing beneath transparent, leaking skin. Half a face, below a purplish bulge that might be a liver, a glassy eye fixing on Birds Mottle momentarily before the next heave pitched the entire face down and out of sight.
Random locks of greasy hair, black and straight, blonde and curly, brown and kinked, each emerging from a seamed patch of native scalp. And was that a lone brow, arching now above no eye, arching indeed above what might be a gall bladder, as if gall bladders were capable of ironic, inquisitive regard, when everyone knew gall bladders could only scowl Birds Mottle then realized that she wasn’t simply conjuring this slurping, twittering monstrosity out of her modestly equipped imagination. Oh no, this was real.
And it was flowing onto the deck, as if its bulk rode centipede legs, and eyes black and glittering that now, she was certain, glittered directly at her, rife with rodentian avarice. And was that a snaggle of toothy jaws, snapping and slavering above pink noses bent every which way though each lifted up to test the air cute as buttons while the jaws clacked and clicked ominous and minuscule?
Whimpering, she crabbed back across the deck.
A brawny human forearm flopped out from the apparition, from an inconvenient location, and on its wrist gleamed a vivid tattoo of gamboling lambs. A second arm pried loose from folds of organs, revealing a snarling black wolf tattoo. Nails popped off from fingers clawing along the deck as the thing dragged itself forward, intent as a giant slug bolting towards a lump of fresh dung.
Then all at once, its bulk was clear of the steps, and the enormous nightmare scuttled forward, shriekingly quick-as Birds Mottle proved with her open mouth and vocal chords seeking to shatter glass-and, twisting round to gain her feet, she pitched sideways as her left hand and left leg both plunged into the hold hatch.
She vanished into darkness, bouncing once, twice along the length of the steep steps, and thumping heavily onto the gangway. A swirl of stars spun across her vision, corkscrewing into a burgeoning black maw that then swallowed her up.
Beautiful, this rocking motion…
Captain Sater dragged an unconscious mipple towards the foremast and left her propped there. Sater’s longsword was in her gloved right hand. Spatters of blood streaked across the torn remnants of her blouse. Would that she had gone to her own cabin and strapped on her armour and maybe run a brush through her hair-which was what she normally did after sex, something about potential tangles and knots that could yank her head askew-but too late now and regrets were a waste of time.
Especially when that damned lich kept rising out of the solid deck to fold far too many withered limbs about sailors, dragging them back down amidst terrible screams-through splintering wood until all that remained was a hole no sane person could have thought a grown body could be pulled through. But they had been, hadn’t they? Right down, the savage edges of wood gouging and tearing away chunks of muscle and shreds of skin and clothes.
And not once, pushing through the panicked mob, had she been able to reach them in time. In the gloom she had seen enough of this lich to know that her sword was likely useless against it. Half again as tall as a man, a massive, elongated melding of corpses wrapped in parchment skin. A dozen or more arms. Jutting, snout-like mouths emerging from shoulder, hip, back of neck, cheekbone. Red-rimmed, unblinking eyes gleaming dull from countless places. Each leg a conglomeration of many legs, the muscles all knotted like twisted braids, a ribcage thrusting forward box-like, with a solid rippled wall of ribs-and cutting through that would be impossible, she well knew. Even a thrust would be turned. And the head-was that Ably Druther’s head?
But oh, how Sater wanted to start hacking off those damned arms.
Wister was crawling past in front of her, weeping worse than a babe in soiled diapers, dragging his belaying pin behind him like a giant rattle.
How many were left?
Sater looked about. Here on the foredeck, she saw, huddled a dozen or so. Six gaping holes exuded horror around them in a neat, even circle. The foremast itself had snapped its step somewhere below and now leaned to one side, rocking with each tug of wind against the few luffing, wing-flapping foresails somewhere above. If a gust hit them… Damn, why did Ably have to get himself killed? That mast might just lift right up and out, or tear most of
