Something was there beneath the phantom waters—a narrow span some two feet long made of worn steel squares decorated with faded enamel.
Slipping his knife away, Van Resen dropped to his knees by the thing, and pulled it from the murk to gaze upon it unobstructed. Framed in rusted metal this armored sheet was pierced by a grated vent with ornate dials to either side that opened and closed the dampers.
Dials that had been worked into a familiar shape.
The scientist shouted in terror as the pieces of the puzzle fell into position in his mind, and arranged themselves in place. The truth began to take shape in his brain and its character filled him with horror.
“Impossible!” the scientist cried over the marker in his hands. “It cannot be!”
CHAPTER 26 – Death and Dreams
“So the River Demon is dead!” Capan Seetree barked in his hybrid Bakwaniri dialect, doing his best to master the fearful quaver in his voice. Even dead, the hideous thing held a dread fascination for those who looked upon it, or so he had been assured by the ship’s sir-jon.
Seetree certainly felt it.
The Johnnies had hung the severed head up from lines on the mainmast for all to see. Its single eye was open and unnerved any that its lifeless gaze fell upon, especially the capan. His dreams had been getting worse of late. About his daughter they were and the thing that ate her coming for him.
All that thinking of vengeance had put Seetree in the middle of it, and there were few nights he could sleep through without a belly full of grog.
But here the murdering beast was dead, and its other eye gone, with most of the face a drooling mass of decaying flesh.
As the prize had been set up for all to see, the demon’s mouth had dropped open to show long yellow fangs, and a rotten gorge that so many poor hearty maids had disappeared into.
Anger at his daughter’s fate caused the capan to growl whenever he looked at the demon’s head, but his rancor weighed slightly less than his fear.
It wasn’t any special trait to set him apart as coward, since few of his crew would go near the thing, so deeply had its bloody reign affected their minds.
“You must not touch this, Capan,” the sir-jon had warned him unnecessarily after studying it through his magical devices. “The sun will set soon and a dark spirit lingers that is hungry for your power. It is distant, but it would come for you, if it felt your presence.”
“I have taken precautions,” the capan said, pointing up to his hut where a figure stood on the overhanging porch. “The fust has returned to station, and so he will remain while there is danger.”
“Aye, Capan,” the sir-jon said, somewhat haltingly, casting a glance at the fly-covered demon head. “It is wise.”
The maggots at work beneath the thing’s flesh caused the skin around its remaining eye to twitch and Seetree almost cried out, of a certain he took a step back.
“The demon is dead?” the startled capan pressed his wizard, cold sweat trickling between his narrow shoulder blades.
“Its flesh is dead,” the sir-jon reassured, standing erect and holding his trembling hands high. “But creatures like this die slower than what comes of earth like you and me.”
“The River Demon is dead!” Capan Seetree shouted again the rallying cry to his crew, and to bolster his own courage with a bit of verbal froth and ballyhoo. Since the first announcement that morning, drums and flutes had been playing while singers chanted and roared.
Being already well into his own cups, Seetree set his fists upon his hips with elbows wide and danced merrily with the Johnnies and Hearties that formed a ring to pass the mainmast round as they’d done at intervals all day.
And the capan laughed heartily, though some that heard his laugh heard also the madness beneath it.
It had not come too soon this bit of fortune, and while he had yet to cipher how the hunting party had killed the River Demon and who had cast the killing blow, he was very pleased to finally put the curse into his wake.
For of late, the crew had been grumbling over his oath to kill the demon, and he’d come to having daily chatter with Johnnies who felt his search for the beast wasted lives and did nothing more—and so should go overboard. Crewmen were dying and disappearing on the hunt—some of the best with bow and spear—gone and never to return, and for what?
So the capan could avenge his daughter Meelana.
And instead of daughters, the River Demon could eat sons?
It was true that at first, the arms of vengeance had gathered many into its embrace, for the demon had killed the daughters of most families on the ship.
But as the years-long hunt began to take its toll, so did wisdom start to speak over the cry for blood. If the River Demon had not continued to eat Bakwaniri maids and had the beast not shifted its attention to the Johnnies on the hunt; then the desire for its blood could have kept the whole crew thirsty.
But it had only grown more dangerous as the crew struck deeper into the forbidden lands on the west for other Forest Demons came as the first fathers had said. A white one and a black with burning eyes and a taste for Bakwaniri flesh, these came to catch the hunters within those tangled forests.
Of course, survivors had laughed like brave and drunk darlings, but those same Johnnies whispered and connived together, and built up their doubts about the quest to kill the River Demon and the capan who longed for its head.
So at their last great feast and palaver the angry crew had gathered round to challenge Seetree, though none was certain of a new man to take his place; and just as talk of
