“Oh, aye, Gust, more than a bucketful-I saw the bucket, I did.”
Heck Urse then spooned some slop into Gust Hubb’s mouth.
He choked, fought back a gag reflex, swallowed, then swallowed some more, finally coming up for a gasp of air.
Heck Urse nodded. “Better?”
“Aye. Cook’s a poet, Heck, a real poet.”
“That he is, friend. That he is.”
Dispersed, nay, flung away like so much dross, souls found themselves once more trapped within iron nails embedded in wood.
“I told you a mercantile venture would’ve been better,” Master Baltro said.
“I’m not ready for oblivion, oh no,” hissed Viviset. “Once I escape-”
“You won’t escape,” cut in the one voice (apart from the Jhorligg’s and they’d heard just about enough from it, thank you very much) that didn’t belong to any nail. “Dead currents are cutting into the Red Road now. Our chance is lost, forever lost.”
“Who in Hood’s name are you, anyway?” demanded Hag Threedbore.
“I wish I knew.”
“Well, go away,” said Threedbore, “we don’t like your kind around here.”
“A mercantile venture-”
“Something’s nibbling my spleen!” cried Lordson Hoom.
Through the scarred crystal lens, the sun curl wallowed fitful and forlorn, and the huge man standing at the prow of the Unreasoning Vengeance slowly lowered the eyepiece. He turned about and studied his eleven brothers and two sisters, not one short or even of average height, not one not bound in massive muscle-women included-and he smiled.
“Blessed kin, we have them.”
All fourteen now set to preparing their weapons. Two-handed axes, two-handed swords (one of them a three-hander thanks to an overly ambitious but not too intelligent weapon smith back in Toll’s City), falchions, mattocks, mauls, maces, flails, halberds and one very nasty looking stick. Armour glinted as it was wont to do in morning sunlight; helms were donned, indeed, jammed down hard over thick-boned skulls. Silver-sheathed tusks gleamed on a few of the men who betrayed more than the normal hints of Jhag blood.
Around them swarmed the crew, all undead since that saved feeding and watering them and they never slept besides, while down below in the hold enormous, starving beasts growled and roared in frenzied hunger, pounding against their cages.
Tiny Chanter, the eldest in the family and so its leader, unslung his own weapon, a two-ended thing with one end a crescent-bladed axe and spike and the other a studded mace that had the word SATRE painted on it in red, because Tiny couldn’t spell, and then scanned his kin once more.
“We have them,” he repeated.
And he smiled again.
All the Chanters smiled.
One undead sailor, noting this, screamed.
