“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 fluttering in the breeze.
Focusing, aye.
As Korbal Broach worked the severed ear onto the barbed iron hook.
Then flung it over the side and began letting out loops of line.
The nails creaked with the coming of night, and those creaks were the language of the dead. There had been much to discuss, plans to foment, ambitions to explore, but now, at last, the voices grew in urgency and excitement. Trapped in the nails for so long now, but release was coming.
The red road that was Laughter’s End beckoned, and wave by wave, the thunder of cloven swells rumbling along the timbers of the hull, wave by wave, they drew yet closer to the grim vein, the currents of Mael’s very own blood.
The Elder God of the Sea bled, as was the way of all things Elder. And where there was blood, there was power.
As night opened its mouth and darkness yawned, the iron nails bound to the ship Suncurl, nails that had once resided in the wood of sarcophagi in the barrows of Lamentable Moll, began a most eager, a most hungry chorus.
Even the dead, it is said, can sing songs of freedom.
“If you would, Emancipor Reese, extract my chain armour. Scour, stain and oil. If I recall, no repairs are necessary beyond these simple ablutions, and given your present condition, this is fortuitous indeed.”
Emancipor stood just inside the cabin door, blinking at his master.
Bauchelain’s regard remained steady. “You may now heave yourself into motion, Mister Reese.”
“Uh, of course, Master. Armour, you said. Why, I can do that.”
“Very good.”
Emancipor rubbed at the back of his neck. “Korbal Broach is fishing.”
“Is he now? Well, as I understand, he has acquired a sudden need for shark cartilage.”
“Why, do his knees hurt?”
“Excuse me?”
“Squall witches swear by it, sir.”
“Ah. I believe, in Korbal Broach’s case, he has in mind some experimental applications.”
“Oh.”
“Mister Reese.”
“Master?”
“My armour-no, wait a moment.” Bauchelain rose from where he sat on the edge of his bed. “I believe we have arrived at something of a crisis in our relationship, Mister Reese.”
“Sir? You’re firing me?”
“I trust it need not come to that,” the tall, pale-skinned man said, adjusting his brocaded cloak, then reaching up to stroke his pointy beard. “This voyage has, alas, seen a marked degradation in your skills, Mister Reese. It is common knowledge that excessive use of durhang has the effect of diminished capacities, of chronic ennui, and the obliteration of all ambition in the user. Your brain, in short, has begun to atrophy. You proceed in your waking period through an unmitigated state of numb stupidity; whilst your sleeping periods are occasioned by an inability to achieve the deeper levels of sleep necessary for rest and rejuvenation. This has, alas, made you both useless and boring.”
“Yes sir.”
“Accordingly, for your own good and-more importantly-mine, I am forced to confiscate your supply of durhang for the duration of this voyage and, if necessary, from now on.”
“Oh, sir, that would be bad.”
A single eyebrow arched. “Bad, Mister Reese?”
“Yes, Master. Bad. It’s my nerves, you see. My nerves. They aren’t what they used to be.”
“And what is it, Mister Reese, that so assails your nerves?”
Well now, that was the question, wasn’t it. The one all the durhang was letting Emancipor avoid, and now here was his master demanding a most sordid level of sobriety, in which all escape was denied him. Suddenly mute, Emancipor pointed at a massive wooden trunk set against one wall.