the foredeck with it as it toppled. Either way would be trouble, she suspected, and as captain she should be thinking about such matters-oh gods! Was she mad? A damned lich was eating her crew!
“Listen! Wister, get on your damned feet!” She pulled a ring of keys from her belt. “Weapons locker, floor of my cabin! Take Heck Urse-Heck! Never mind bandaging up Gust, he’ll live-go with Wister. Break out the cutlasses-”
“Pardon, Captain, we don’t have any cutlasses.”
Sater scowled at Wister. “We don’t? Fine, break out the truncheons, pins and the spears for propelling boarders-”
“We ain’t got those neither.”
“So what in Hood’s name is in my weapons locker?”
“You ain’t looked?”
Sater took a half step closer to Wister, the sword in her hand trembling. “If I knew, you brainless mushroom, I wouldn’t be asking you now, would I?”
“Fine. Old Captain Urbot, he kept his private stock of rum down there.”
Sater clawed at her face for a moment. “All right,” she sighed, defeated, “break out the rum.”
“Now you’re talking!” Wister shouted, suddenly animated. “C’mon, Heck, you damned deserter! No time to waste!”
The two leaping down onto the main deck, boots thumping, skidding, then returning just as fast. Wister’s face was white as a churning chop. Heck’s mouth worked but no sound came forth. Snarling, Sater pushed past them to the edge of the forecastle and looked down.
Something like an abattoir’s rubbish heap was crawling across the mid-deck, just skirting the edge of the hatch. It had tiny eyes, dozens of them. And hundreds of short slithery tails snarling out behind it. Arms, partial faces, wayward locks of hair, scores and scores of tiny snapping jaws. It was, in truth, the stupidest monster she had ever seen.
With another snarl she leapt down onto the main deck, strode up to the thing and with one savage kick drove it over the edge of the hold hatch. A chorus of piteous squeals as the absurd mound of flesh plunged into the inky darkness. A splatting impact below and more squealing, and maybe a faint shriek-she couldn‘t be sure and who cared? Spinning round, Sater glared up at Wister and Heck Urse. “Well, what are you two waiting for?”
In the hold, near the head, the lich was arguing with itself. Souls once bound to the iron nails that had been driven into their corpses now reveled in the miasmic concatenation of flesh and bone that was the lich. The world was meat and blood and to be in the world demanded fashioning a likeness of the same. All too rare were those occasions when the ether was so saturated with sorcery that such conjuration was possible. Such luck!
To be meat and blood, one must devour meat and blood. Worldly truths, oh yes.
Fragments of identity persisted, however, each insisting on its right to an opinion, each asserting its claim to domination over all the others. And so voices tittered from the lich’s various mouths where it stood amidst dismembered, half-eaten sailors, most of whom were dead. Voices, aye, yet one remained silent, ever silent, even as the argument continued to fill the shadows with a menagerie of once-selves.
“Merchant trader! Why, the hold’s big enough, and if we eat all the sailors, why, the grand conjoining of spirit and flesh should prove more than sufficient to crew this modest ship!”
“An undead entrepreneur can only be some malevolent god’s idea of a joke,” said another soul in tones of gravel underfoot, and the strider of words ground remorselessly on, “Is this what we’ve come to, then, after countless generations of dubious progress? Your presence, Master Baltro, is an affront-”
“And yours isn’t?” rasped a vaguely feminine voice, and rasp was a truth indeed, if one were to take a sweet womanly utterance and run a carpenter’s tool over it, should such things be possible and why not? “Sekarand did you in long ago and yet here you are again, chained to us goodly folk like a morally dissolute abscess-”
“Better than a wart!” shrieked the wizard who had been murdered by Sekarand in Lamentable Moll long ago. “I smell your reek, Hag Threedbore! Victim of disgruntled salamanders-no other possible explanation for your ghastly persistence-”
“And what of you, Viviset? Sekarand fed you into a tomb so warded that not even memory of you escaped! Why-”
“Please, please!” cried Master Baltro. “I must ask of you all-who else smells his own flesh somewhere nearby?”
A chorus of muted assents tripped from the lich’s score mouths.
“I knew it!” shouted Master Baltro. “We must find-”
“As noble born,” spoke someone else, “I must claim priority over the rest of you. We must find my self first-”
“Who in Hood’s dusty name are you?”
“Why, I am Lordson Hoom, of Lamentable Moll! Related to the king himself! And I too sense the proximity of some crucial part of me-on this very ship!”
“Crucial? Well, that eliminates your brain, at least. I’d wager a piglike snout.”
“Who speaks?” demanded Lordson Hoom. “You shall be flayed-”
“Too late, fop, I already was and before the rest of you even ask, no, I’m not from Lamentable Moll. I don’t know any of you, in fact. I’m not sure I even know myself.”
“The nails-” began the once-wizard, Viviset, but the stranger’s voice cut in.
“I’m not from any damned nails, but I swear I sensed the rest of you arrive. Including the one who refuses to speak and that refusal is probably a good thing. No, I think I was aboard long before any of you. Though exactly how long, I can’t really say. One thing I can say: I preferred the peace and quiet before all you arrived.”
“Why you inconsiderate snob-”
“Never mind him, Threedbore,” Viviset said. “Look at the opportunity we now have! We’re dead but we’re back and we’re all damned angry-”
“But why?” Master Baltro asked in his weedy voice.
“Why are we angry? You fool. How dare other people be still alive when we aren’t? It’s unfair! A grotesque imbalance! We need to kill everyone on board. Everyone. Devour them all!”
Souls yelled out in suddenly savage assent to such notions. Lips writhed with various degrees of muscular success in conveying their bloodlust, their hatred for all things living. All about the lich’s misshapen, horrid body, mouths sneered, snarled, licked hungrily and blew kisses of death like lovers’ promises.
At this moment something huge thundered down from the hatch, the impact reverberating the length of the keel. More voices cried out, these ones thinner, plaintive, pained. Then, in the relative silence that followed, came the snipping and clicking of jaws.
Viviset hissed in horror. “It’s that… thing! The thing hunting us!”
“I smell spleen!” squealed Lordson Hoom. “My spleen!”
At last, the silent one, whose silence had been, in truth, the fugue of confusion, the incomprehension of all these strange languages, finally ventured its opinion on matters. The Jhorligg’s bestial roar sent selves tumbling, flung about in the cold flesh and cooling blood threads of the lich’s manifold body. Stunning all into mute terror.
Mostly incoherent thoughts from the Jhorligg thrashed with the fury of a storm. Eat! Rend! Flee! Breed! Eatrendfleebreed! And up rose the eleven arms of the lich, torn, bloody fingers bending into rending positions, tendons taut as cocked crossbow cords. Weapons readied, the creature spinning round to face the monstrosity now crawling ever closer up the length of the wooden walkway.
That monstrosity was dragging something. Something that kicked booted heels against the hull. Kicked and scraped in frenzied panic.
“My spleen!” cried Lordson Hoom again. “It wants to eat me!”
“Life is like a clam,” Birds Mottle’s father once told her. “Years filtering shit then some bastard cracks you open and scrapes you into its damned mouth. End of story, precious pearl, end of story.”
They’d lived by a lake. Her father had fought a lifelong war with a family of raccoons over the clam beds he’d staked out, run fences and nets round, and done just about everything else he could think of to keep the masked thieves from his livelihood. In terms of intelligence and raw cunning, the raccoons had old Da beat, and they drove him both mad and into his grave.
