going, you’d be long gone. Now, get out of my sight.”
“Aye, sir!”
“Cook’s a poet,” said Birds Mottle as she sat down opposite her friend.
Heck Urse nodded amiably, but said nothing as he was stuffing his mouth with food. Few others around in the galley, which was how Heck, Birds and Gust Hubb preferred it. Gust had yet to arrive, which left the two of them and only one other and that one was on his own bench, staring down at his bowl of grub as if trying to read in the jumbled mash his future or something. Which wasn’t a thing a man like Mancy the Luckless should be doing, as far as Heck was concerned.
But never mind him. They’d been months now on this damned stolen ship, and while things had been a little rough at the start, it had settled out some-all the way until the harbour of Lamentable Moll. But now, Heck had come to realize, things were getting rough all over again. Mancy the Luckless was the least of their worries. The damned ship was haunted. No other possible explanation. Haunted. As bad as the Catacombs of Toll’s City, voices and wraiths and whisps and creaks and crackles and shuffles-no, wasn’t rats neither, since no one could recall seeing a rat since Moll. And when rats jumped off a ship, well, that was bad as things could get, or nearly almost, by Heck’s reckoning.
Rough at the start, aye, for Sater and the three of them here now no different from any other salts. But none of them were. Salts, that is. Not Sater, whose captaincy had been in Toll’s City palace guard-before the Night of Chants, anyway. And not Heck, nor Birds nor Gust, all of whom had been sentries at the city’s southeast corner gate that fateful night. The fifth in their motley group, Ably Druther, they’d picked up at Toll’s Landing, but only because he knew stuff about sailing and he’d had the runner they’d needed to cut loose of the Stratem mainland. And he was handy enough with that cutlass so that stealing the Suncurl had proved a whole lot easier than it probably should have been.
Ably Druther. Just the name made Heck scowl over his empty bowl. “Liabilities,” he muttered.
And Birds Mottle nodded. “Captain’s own word, aye. And this is where we are, Heck, sure as the clock-lock chunks on. Wonder,” she added, “if those dhenrabi are hungry.”
But Heck shook his head. “Word is they don’t eat during mating season, which is why all those sharks are staying close instead of whirling away so fast they break the waves like they was trying to fly. The males will fight once we’re well along the Red Road, and the sharks will get fat. So I’m told.”
Birds Mottle scratched at her short hair and squinted with her bad eye, which was what she did when struck by some unpleasant thought. “I ain’t never hated the sea more than I do now. It’s like we’re trapped here, as good as in any prison, and day after day the view don’t change one bit. And with all the creepy sounds we’re hearing…” She shivered, then made the Chanter Sign with her left hand, “it’s no wonder we’re all having nightmares.”
Heck leaned forward. “Birds, best keep that signing to yourself.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Chances are,” Heck said by way of mollification, since he loved Birds with all his heart, “nobody here has heard of the Chanters. But best be safe anyway, since we don’t none of us want to be… liabilities.”
“You got that right, Heck.”
“Besides, I found us a good answer to those damned nightmares. I got us switched over to night watch.”
“You did?” That bad eye squinted even tighter.
“What’s wrong?” Heck asked. “Don’t it make more sense-after all, sleeping during the day and the nightmares won’t be nearly so bad, right?”
“I’d wager the ones you traded with are dancing on the boom right now, Heck. You shoulda come to me first, so I could put some reason in your head. Night watch, Heck, means maybe coming face-to-face with what’s scaring the runnels outa us.”
Heck Urse paled, then made the Chanter Sign. “Gods below! Maybe I can switch it back-”
Birds snorted.
Sagging, Heck stared down at his bowl.
At that moment the third Stratem deserter, Gust Hubb, bolted into the narrow galley, his eyes wild and so wide the whites were showing on all sides. One hand was clamped over one ear and there was blood running down that hand. His pale fly-away hair waved about like a frenzied aura. He stared at Heck and Birds for a moment, his mouth working, until words came out: “When I was sleeping! Someone cut off my ear!”
Seated a short distance away, Emancipor Reese, Mancy the Luckless, was jolted from his contemplation of myriad peculiarities by the sailor’s panicked entrance. Sure enough, once one of the others managed to get Gust to pull his hand away, the ear was missing. Deftly sliced clean off leaving a trickling streak of red and peeled-back skin, and how the man had slept through that was a true mystery.
Likely drunk on tipped-in illegal spirits and the victim of some feud in the crew’s berths, Emancipor concluded, returning his attention to the bowl of food before him. “Cook’s a poet,” one of the swabs had said, before wolfing the stuff down. Madness. He had sailed plenty of ships and had weathered the fare of a legion of cooks, and this was by far the worst he had ever tasted. Indeed, it was virtually inedible, and would be in truth if not for the copious amounts of durhang he had taken to stuffing into his pipe along with the usual rustleaf. Durhang had a way of making one ravenous, sufficient to overcome the dreadful misflavours of such malodorous staples. Saving that, Emancipor would now be nothing but scrawn and bone, as his wife Subly was wont to say whenever any of their spawn came down with worms and some pronouncement was required-although she was wont to say it with a tinge of envy in her tone, given her girth. “Scrawn and bone, by the blessed mounds!”
He might even be missing her right now. Even the urchins of questionable seed. But such emotions seemed as distant and left behind as the harbour of Lamentable Moll. Less than a hazy smear on the horizon, aye, and let’s have another bowl of durhang.
Listening in on the conversation of the swabs-before the arrival of their one-eared companion unleashed a flurry of shock, concern and then nervous speculation-had left Emancipor the vague sense that something was indeed awry with those three. Never mind the adamant opinions of the rest of the crew that these sailors knew a ship like a mole knows a treetop, and that maybe Captain Sater knew even less, and if not for the first mate they’d have all long ago run aground or into some dhenrabi’s giant maw. No, there was even more to it, and if only Emancipor could pull the thick webs from his thoughts, why, he might have an idea or two.
Eager hunger beckoned, however, slowly transforming this bowl of consumptive goat spume into a delectable culinary treasure, and before long he too was cramming the horrid stuff down his throat.
The bowl rocked and he leaned back, startled to find his meal suddenly done. And here he was, licking his fingers, pushing the ends of his moustache down into his mouth to suck loose whatever gobs had clung there, then probing past his lower lip with a still urgent tongue. He looked around, furtively, to see who might have witnessed this frantic, beastly behaviour, but the three swabs had left-rather quickly, he recalled, to seek out the ship’s medic. Emancipor was alone.
Sighing, he rose from the bench, collected the wooden bowl and, dropping it into the saltwater cask near the hatch, made his way onto the mid-deck.
A bucket of food was being hoisted up to the crow’s nest atop the mainmast, and Emancipor looked up, squinting in the glare. They all said she was pretty, the daughter, that is. But maybe mute-hence the eerie cries wafting down every now and then. And as for Bena Elder, why, a squall witch, she was, and had not come down, not even showed her prune face since before Moll-and life was better for it, aye. Well, strain as he might, he couldn’t see anyone up there.
Still, a nice thought to think the young one was pretty.
Smiling, he made his way aft. It was good to smile these days, wasn’t it. Belly pleasantly full and mostly quiescent. Fair sky overhead and a decent wind caressing easy swells on the sea. Subly far away and the imps with worms crawling out of every orifice just as far away, as, well, as Subly herself. Murdered employers and crazed killers and-oh, right, some of that, alas, was not so far away as any sane man might prefer.
Worthy reminder, aye. He found himself standing braced to the roll and pitch near the aft rail, pushing rustleaf in his pipe bowl, his blurry vision struggling to focus on the black-shrouded figure hunched against the stern rail. On the fat, pale fingers working with precision on the hook and the weighted line. On the round, pallid face, a sharp red tongue tip visible jutting up over the flabby upper lip, and those lank, low-lidded eyes, the lids and lashes
