It’s the bells, Subly! Can’t you hear the damned bells?
Oh, wife, what did I do now?
Beautiful, this rocking motion, so gentle, so soft. Birds Mottle, whose left breast was a white sphere devoid of all pigmentation, in splendid, eye-widening contrast to her dark skin everywhere else, and hence her name’s origin, a detail regretfully not as secret among the crew as she’d have wanted-but gods, trapped aboard with all these gruff sailors and the few women among ’em uglier than a priest’s puckered arse, and well, what else t’do and besides, she was earning coin, wasn’t she. Coin, aye, most useful, since who knew if they’d ever get away with what they were trying t’get away with. Birds Mottle, then, was reluctant to prise open her eyes.
Especially with all the screaming up near the foredeck. And was that a splat of blood or just a bucket of salt water, rivulets running down the steps now, maybe, and well there’d be no use to getting wet now, would there?
And so she opened her eyes. Sat up, found herself facing astern, the cabin hatch slightly off to her right.
From which something wet, slick and murky was creeping into view, heaving over the steps. A chaotic scattering of small, black, beady eyes across a misshapen, mottled, lumpy surface. Slick, wet, yes, wetly slick, scrabbling and skittering noises as of minute claws on the wooden steps, faint slithering sounds, the pulse of organs now, throbbing beneath transparent, leaking skin. Half a face, below a purplish bulge that might be a liver, a glassy eye fixing on Birds Mottle momentarily before the next heave pitched the entire face down and out of sight.
Random locks of greasy hair, black and straight, blonde and curly, brown and kinked, each emerging from a seamed patch of native scalp. And was that a lone brow, arching now above no eye, arching indeed above what might be a gall bladder, as if gall bladders were capable of ironic, inquisitive regard, when everyone knew gall bladders could only scowl Birds Mottle then realized that she wasn’t simply conjuring this slurping, twittering monstrosity out of her modestly equipped imagination. Oh no, this was real.
And it was flowing onto the deck, as if its bulk rode centipede legs, and eyes black and glittering that now, she was certain, glittered directly at her, rife with rodentian avarice. And was that a snaggle of toothy jaws, snapping and slavering above pink noses bent every which way though each lifted up to test the air cute as buttons while the jaws clacked and clicked ominous and minuscule?
Whimpering, she crabbed back across the deck.
A brawny human forearm flopped out from the apparition, from an inconvenient location, and on its wrist gleamed a vivid tattoo of gamboling lambs. A second arm pried loose from folds of organs, revealing a snarling black wolf tattoo. Nails popped off from fingers clawing along the deck as the thing dragged itself forward, intent as a giant slug bolting towards a lump of fresh dung.
Then all at once, its bulk was clear of the steps, and the enormous nightmare scuttled forward, shriekingly quick-as Birds Mottle proved with her open mouth and vocal chords seeking to shatter glass-and, twisting round to gain her feet, she pitched sideways as her left hand and left leg both plunged into the hold hatch.
She vanished into darkness, bouncing once, twice along the length of the steep steps, and thumping heavily onto the gangway. A swirl of stars spun across her vision, corkscrewing into a burgeoning black maw that then swallowed her up.
Beautiful, this rocking motion…
Captain Sater dragged an unconscious mipple towards the foremast and left her propped there. Sater’s longsword was in her gloved right hand. Spatters of blood streaked across the torn remnants of her blouse. Would that she had gone to her own cabin and strapped on her armour and maybe run a brush through her hair-which was what she normally did after sex, something about potential tangles and knots that could yank her head askew-but too late now and regrets were a waste of time.
Especially when that damned lich kept rising out of the solid deck to fold far too many withered limbs about sailors, dragging them back down amidst terrible screams-through splintering wood until all that remained was a hole no sane person could have thought a grown body could be pulled through. But they had been, hadn’t they? Right down, the savage edges of wood gouging and tearing away chunks of muscle and shreds of skin and clothes.
And not once, pushing through the panicked mob, had she been able to reach them in time. In the gloom she had seen enough of this lich to know that her sword was likely useless against it. Half again as tall as a man, a massive, elongated melding of corpses wrapped in parchment skin. A dozen or more arms. Jutting, snout-like mouths emerging from shoulder, hip, back of neck, cheekbone. Red-rimmed, unblinking eyes gleaming dull from countless places. Each leg a conglomeration of many legs, the muscles all knotted like twisted braids, a ribcage thrusting forward box-like, with a solid rippled wall of ribs-and cutting through that would be impossible, she well knew. Even a thrust would be turned. And the head-was that Ably Druther’s head?
But oh, how Sater wanted to start hacking off those damned arms.
Wister was crawling past in front of her, weeping worse than a babe in soiled diapers, dragging his belaying pin behind him like a giant rattle.
How many were left?
Sater looked about. Here on the foredeck, she saw, huddled a dozen or so. Six gaping holes exuded horror around them in a neat, even circle. The foremast itself had snapped its step somewhere below and now leaned to one side, rocking with each tug of wind against the few luffing, wing-flapping foresails somewhere above. If a gust hit them… Damn, why did Ably have to get himself killed? That mast might just lift right up and out, or tear most of the foredeck with it as it toppled. Either way would be trouble, she suspected, and as captain she should be thinking about such matters-oh gods! Was she mad? A damned lich was eating her crew!
“Listen! Wister, get on your damned feet!” She pulled a ring of keys from her belt. “Weapons locker, floor of my cabin! Take Heck Urse-Heck! Never mind bandaging up Gust, he’ll live-go with Wister. Break out the cutlasses-”
“Pardon, Captain, we don’t have any cutlasses.”
Sater scowled at Wister. “We don’t? Fine, break out the truncheons, pins and the spears for propelling boarders-”
“We ain’t got those neither.”
“So what in Hood’s name is in my weapons locker?”
“You ain’t looked?”
Sater took a half step closer to Wister, the sword in her hand trembling. “If I knew, you brainless mushroom, I wouldn’t be asking you now, would I?”
“Fine. Old Captain Urbot, he kept his private stock of rum down there.”
Sater clawed at her face for a moment. “All right,” she sighed, defeated, “break out the rum.”
“Now you’re talking!” Wister shouted, suddenly animated. “C’mon, Heck, you damned deserter! No time to waste!”
The two leaping down onto the main deck, boots thumping, skidding, then returning just as fast. Wister’s face was white as a churning chop. Heck’s mouth worked but no sound came forth. Snarling, Sater pushed past them to the edge of the forecastle and looked down.
Something like an abattoir’s rubbish heap was crawling across the mid-deck, just skirting the edge of the hatch. It had tiny eyes, dozens of them. And hundreds of short slithery tails snarling out behind it. Arms, partial faces, wayward locks of hair, scores and scores of tiny snapping jaws. It was, in truth, the stupidest monster she had ever seen.
With another snarl she leapt down onto the main deck, strode up to the thing and with one savage kick drove it over the edge of the hold hatch. A chorus of piteous squeals as the absurd mound of flesh plunged into the inky darkness. A splatting impact below and more squealing, and maybe a faint shriek-she couldn‘t be sure and who cared? Spinning round, Sater glared up at Wister and Heck Urse. “Well, what are you two waiting for?”
In the hold, near the head, the lich was arguing with itself. Souls once bound to the iron nails that had been driven into their corpses now reveled in the miasmic concatenation of flesh and bone that was the lich. The world was meat and blood and to be in the world demanded fashioning a likeness of the same. All too rare were those occasions when the ether was so saturated with sorcery that such conjuration was possible. Such luck!
To be meat and blood, one must devour meat and blood. Worldly truths, oh yes.
Fragments of identity persisted, however, each insisting on its right to an opinion, each asserting its claim to domination over all the others. And so voices tittered from the lich’s various mouths where it stood amidst dismembered, half-eaten sailors, most of whom were dead. Voices, aye, yet one remained silent, ever silent, even as the argument continued to fill the shadows with a menagerie of once-selves.
“Merchant trader! Why, the hold’s big enough, and if we eat all the sailors, why, the grand conjoining of spirit and flesh should prove more than sufficient to crew this modest ship!”
“An undead entrepreneur can only be some malevolent god’s idea of a joke,” said another soul in tones of gravel underfoot, and the strider of words ground remorselessly on, “Is this what we’ve come to, then, after countless generations of dubious progress? Your presence, Master Baltro, is an affront-”
“And yours isn’t?” rasped a vaguely feminine voice, and rasp was a truth indeed, if one were to take a sweet womanly utterance and run a carpenter’s tool over it, should such things be possible and why not? “Sekarand did you in long ago and yet here you are again, chained to us goodly folk like a morally dissolute abscess-”
“Better than a wart!” shrieked the wizard who had been murdered by Sekarand in Lamentable Moll long ago. “I smell your reek, Hag Threedbore! Victim of disgruntled salamanders-no other possible explanation for your ghastly persistence-”
“And what of you, Viviset? Sekarand fed you into a tomb so warded that not even memory of you escaped! Why-”
“Please, please!” cried Master Baltro. “I must ask of you all-who else smells his own flesh somewhere nearby?”
A chorus of muted assents tripped from the lich’s score mouths.
“I knew it!” shouted Master Baltro. “We must find-”
“As noble born,” spoke someone else, “I must claim priority over the rest of you. We must find my self first-”
“Who in Hood’s dusty name are you?”
“Why, I am Lordson Hoom, of Lamentable Moll! Related to the king himself! And I too sense the proximity of some crucial part of me-on this very ship!”
“Crucial? Well, that eliminates your brain, at least. I’d wager a piglike snout.”
“Who speaks?” demanded Lordson Hoom. “You shall be flayed-”