He had been kneeling on the foredeck, staring accusingly at everyone else, all of them mocking him with their perfect faces, their rosy noses and squid-hued ears all perfect in their delicate folds and cute lobes. But now he toppled to one side, curling up as agony tore through him from an ear he didn’t even own anymore.
And now nipping bites affronted his other missing ear and this, dammit, was very nearly the worst night of his life.
Heck Urse crawled over, brandishing a knife and Gust recoiled upon seeing it.
“Idiot, I ain’t gonna cut you or nothing! This is protection, for when that lich pops up again-gods, you’d think its belly was full by now. Look at Mipple, she’s only now come round-missed all the fun, didn’t she? I hate it when people do that. Anyway, I come to give ya this-” and he showed his other hand, this one gripping a clay jug. “Rum!”
Captain Sater downed another mouthful, then flung the empty flask to one side. Where had it all started to go wrong, she wondered. Sure, stealing a half-dozen Sech’kellyn statues was probably a bad idea, the way tales of terrible curses swirled around the damned things. They’d been found buried in a neat little row beneath the foundation rubble of Avoidance Alley just behind Toll’s Keep, ghastly squatting figures of some foreign, chalk-white marble now stained and mottled by a century or two of kitchen refuse and royal sewage. The expressionless, gaunt faces were all the more chilling for their black iron eyes and black iron canines-seemingly immune to the ravages of rust-and their strange limbs with too many knobby joints, the twice bent knees framing the forward-thrusting heads, the raptor-like, elongated fingers and, most peculiarly, iron collars enclosing their thin necks, as if the six creatures had been pets of some sort.
The court mage-calling them Sech’kellyn, whatever that meant-had claimed them at once, and Sater herself had been among the hapless fools lugging the things up to the sorcerer’s beehive apothecary perched atop the city’s lone hill. A week later she’d helped carry them back to the keep, down into some long unused storage room barred by a newly installed iron door into which the mage gouged so many warding glyphs and sigils the door looked like a flattened crane nest by the time he was done.
The poor sorcerer went mad shortly thereafter, and if there was some kind of connection then no one official wanted to talk about it. Sater hadn’t been alone in paying coin for a ritual cleansing at Soliel’s Temple behind Cleanwater Well-every other soldier who’d set hands on those statues had done the same, with the exception of Corporal Steb, who’d been picking his nose with a dagger point and, walking up to a door that suddenly opened, drove the point into his brain-amazing the dagger ever found it, truth be told. But then, things had mostly settled and it looked as if they’d escaped whatever curse there’d been. When the mage drowned himself in a bowl of soapy water, well, he’d been mad by then, hadn’t he, so it was no real surprise.
Some bright wick had then decided to offer them as gifts to the Crimson Guard-who were, it was said, deep into the arcane stuff anyway. But maybe, Sater now wondered, they’d been less a gift than a not-so-noble desire to get rid of the ugly things.
So then she went and stole them. Why? What insane impulse had taken her then, like a bony hand round her throat? Over the side they shoulda gone, aye, right over the side.
Was it the curse that had conjured to life the miserable lich?
She needed to get rid of them. Now, before it was too late An eruption of screams from below-so awful that even her rum-heated blood went icy cold-and the thunder of some collision, as of two massive forms slamming into one another, and the entire ship shivered. More screams, the thumping of blows delivered with savage strength and ferocity.
With hammering heart, Sater glared around, saw a trio of sailors crowded up at the prow. “Briv! And you too, Briv! And you, Briv! You three, here, take my strongroom key-”
“Down below?” one of them shrieked.
“At the stern and it’s all quiet there. There’s six wrapped statues-I want ’em up here, understand? Up and o’er the rail! Quick!”
All at once a figure was standing at her side. Tall, hulking, a flabby, round, childlike face peering down at her. The thick lips licked beneath bright, beady eyes. “Statues?”
Briv, cook’s helper, glanced over at Briv, carpenter’s helper, then back at a snuffling Briv, Rope Braider, whose orange mane of hair was strangely tousled, almost askew. He saw terror writ plain on their faces, as much as he himself must be showing on his own. Descending the steps in front of them was the scarier of the two passengers (three if counting the manservant but nobody ever counted the manservant), the oversized one with the round face and thick lips and tiny voice.
Seemingly completely unafraid, which meant he was insane.
Their escort to the strongroom, rustling in full-length chain beneath a thick woollen black cloak. Pudgy, pale hands folded together like he was a damned mendicant or something.
We’re all going to die. Except maybe him. That’s how it always is. People in charge always survive, when everyone else gets slaughtered. No, he’ll live, and so will Cook, because no one likes to cook and that’s just the thing. Cook’s a poet.
No, really, a poet. He sure as Hood ain’t a cook.
Now if only he was any good at poet stuff. Can’t sing, can’t play an instrument, can’t make a rhyme because rhyming, well, laddie, it’s beneath him.
“I dreamed this thing
This thing of dreams
An army marching close
Each soldier cut off
At the knees
Which was strange and all
Since they were
Foot soldiers.”
Aye, Cook’s latest, his morning paean to the slop he shoveled into the bowls. That pompous face and that rolling cadence, as if the tumbling refuse of words coughed out from his throat was some kind of profound thing- why, I’ve read poetry, oh yes, and heard plenty, too. Said, sung, whined, gargled, mewled, sniffed, shouted, whispered, spat. Aye, what seaman hasn’t?
But what do we know? We’re no brush-stroked arched brow over cold, avid eye, oh no. We’re just the listeners, wading through some ponce’s psychological trauma as the idiot stares into a mirror all love/hate all masturbatory up’n’down and it’s us who when the time comes-comes, hah-who are meant to gasp and twist pelvic in linguistic ecstasy.
Yeah, well, Cook can stroke his own damned ladle, know what I mean?
Briv, Carpenter’s helper, gave him a nudge. “Get on wi’ya.”
“Leave me be,” snarled Briv, Cook’s helper. “I’m going, all right?”
And down they went, the steep steps, down into the hold, where horror did abide-up near the head, that is. And all three seamen (or two seamen and one seawoman who was, in fact, a seaman), desperately needed to go to the bathroom.
Briv, carpenter’s helper, stayed one step behind Briv, Cook’s helper, and one step ahead of Briv, Rope Braider, who, if she braided ropes as bad as she did her hair, would probably better serve the ship as Cook. Since Cook was a poet.
But then, without a rope braider, things would get unraveled and that wouldn’t do. And listen to those demons scrapping near the bow-if he bent right down to look between his own ankles, through the gap in the steps, he might see something of that snarling, hissing, snapping, thumping battle. But what good would that do him, hey? None a whit. They was just up there bashing the precious hull, bruising the wood, punching out the caulk and gouging nasty gouges and if reefs and shoals and rocks and deadheads weren’t enough trouble, here they had unmindful demons doing all kinds of damage.
Now, if Carpenter had knowed his business, well, it’d be all right, wouldn’t it? But the man was a fool. Killing him had been a gift to the world. Funny, though, how that one death-cry seemed to unleash all the rest of what showed up and now people were dead everywhere and there, see, that was Ably Druther, his body at least, sitting
