Hard to tell who was winning-oh, no, easy to tell. Korbal Broach was being beaten to a pulp. Amazing he was still standing, but standing was a good thing, for as long as he stood there the demons weren’t bothering with them, and as soon as they got out past the threshold, well, they’d be saved!
Assoon as the God-thing’s head cleared the rail, Bauchelain stepped forward and swung his sword. Edge smashing into the creature’s snout. At the blow, something spat out from the mouth.
Line, hook and ear.
A giant taloned hand slashed in a lateral sweep that Bauchelain not quite succeeded in evading, and the curved claws raked slashes through his chain hauberk. Black links pattered like hail across the aft deck.
He chopped down at the limb as it passed, felt the iron bite deep into the wrist, slicing clean through at least one of the bones.
The god wailed.
Bauchelain caught but a glimpse of the other arm, slanting down directly from above, and so he brought up his sword in a blocking parry that was, alas, unsuited to the downward force of the fist’s blow, akin to a blacksmith’s anvil dropped from a tenement roof.
Blow struck.
Wood crunched, the fist pounding onto the deck, and Bauchelain was no longer on the aft deck.
He landed, amidst showering splinters of wood, in the strongroom.
A Sech-kellyn lunged at him. Instinctively he stop-thrust and watched the demon impale itself on the sword. It cried out, chest shattering like a chunk of marble beneath a mason’s spike.
That cry was heard from above. Bellowing, the god began tearing away the aft deck.
The five remaining Sech’kellyn all looked up. Childlike squeals erupted, and all at once the Sech’kellyn was scrabbling up toward the ever-expanding hole. A huge hand reached down and the homunculi climbed it as if scampering up a tree.
A cacophony of screams from just outside the strong room door. Rising, a bloodied mass of wounds, Korbal Broach shook himself, glanced once at Bauchelain, then walked out of the strongroom.
Birds mottle stared up at the looming lich. She was still trying to scream but her voice was gone, completely gone, and now she was-absurdly-making sounds virtually identical to the lich.
Briv, Briv and Gorbo tumbled into her, the relief on their faces transforming in an instant to mindless terror upon seeing the lich, still looming as dastardly monsters were wont to do.
At that precious moment, with death mimed by every spasmodic clutch of those all-too-many clawed, skeletal hands, with eyes of lifeless black inviting the blackness of lifelessness, with the princely overbite and nasal, wheezing haw-hawing of what was probably intended to be gleeful triumph-at that moment, aye, the lich looked up from its intended victims.
As Korbal Broach strode up to it, stepping right over Birds Mottle’s despair-numbed legs, and, smiling, closed his thick-fingered hands to either side of the lich’s misshapen head.
A sudden twist to one side, a sharp snap.
Then another sudden twist, to the other side, and grinding sounds.
A twist the other way again, then back again, faster and faster.
With a dry sob the lich’s body dropped away beneath the head, clattering onto the gangway in a jumble of limbs, brows, mouths and stuff.
Korbal Broach held the head before him. Still smiling, he turned about.
And looked over to Bauchelain, who appeared in the threshold and was now brushing splinters of wood from his shoulders.
“Look!” piped Korbal Broach.
Bauchelain paused. “I see.”
Tucking the mangled head under an arm, Korbal Broach walked to the steps, and up he went.
Emancipor Reese looked down on the wreck age that was the Suncurl. Oh, the damned thing still floated, and that was something. The giant reptile thing and its pallid pups were gone, back over the ruined stern, back down into the wretched waters of Laughter’s End.
Captain Sater was drunk, leg-sprawled with her back against the prow step, with Cook beside her intoning some discordant declamatory drivel the genius of which was so loftily profound that only he had the wit to comprehend it. Or at least pretend to, which in this world and all others was pretty much the same thing, amen.
He saw Korbal Broach emerge from the hold hatch, something tucked under an arm and guess what that might be-no need, oh no, but guess anyway-and followed a moment later by four sailors all watery with relief and then Bauchelain, who was not quite as solid on his legs as was usual.
To the east, the sky was paling, moments from painting the seas blood-red but too late for that, hey?
A raspy voice cackled behind him, then said, “Mother did what needed doing. We’re safe, lass, safe as can be now!”
Emancipor Reese glanced back over a shoulder, then sighed.
Fools.
Groaning, with a last look back at Bena Younger, Emancipor Reese clambered out of the crow’s nest and began the climb down.
Korbal Broach reappeared briefly on deck only to descend into the hold once more. He emerged a hundred heartbeats later grunting under the weight of a massive, misshapen bladder-like thing replete with limp rat tails and tiny clawed feet all curled in tragic demise. And hundreds of dusty, wrinkled, tiny black eyes none of which took note of the small crowd of staring sailors while Korbal carried it to the foredeck.
Once there he unhitched a grappling hook, checked its knot at both ends, then, crouching down, he impaled the mass of meat on the hook, straightened with a grunt and heaved the mess over the side. A loud splash, then the line paid out for a time.
Standing nearby, quite apart from the crew and their captain who’d watched with mouth hanging open and now a thread of drool dangling, Emancipor Reese frowned at his master at his side. “Uh, fishing with that…”
Bauchelain gave a single nod, then clapped his manservant on the shoulder-making Emancipor wince as a bruise flared beneath that friendly blow-and said, “Think even a dhenrabi, crazed as it might be in this season of mating, would pass up such a sweet morsel, Mister Reese?”
Emancipor shook his head.
Bauchelain smiled down at him. “We shall be towed for a time, yes, to hasten our journey. The sooner we are freed of the lees of Laughter’s End, the better, I should think. Do you not agree, Mister Reese?”
“Aye, Master. Only, how do we know where that dhenrabi might take us?”
“Oh, we know that, most certainly. Why, the dhenrabi breeding beds, of course.”
“Oh.”
“Stay close to the prow, Mister Reese, with knife at the ready.”
“Knife?”
“Of course.” Another savage clap on the same shoulder. “To cut the rope at the opportune moment.”
Emancipor squinted forward, saw the line’s sharp downward angle. “How about now, Master?”
“You are being silly, Mister Reese. Now, I think I shall take my breakfast below, assuming Cook is willing.”
“Willing? Oh, aye, Master, he is that I’m sure.”
“Excellent.”
Gust Hubb opened his remaining eye and found himself staring up at Heck Urse’s face.
That now smiled. “Ah, awake now, are ya? Good. Here, let me help you sit up a bit. You lost more than a bucketful of blood, you need your food and Cook’s gone and made up some gruel just for you, friend. No ears, no nose, half a foot and broke bones, you’re a mess.”
“Bucket?”
