The Fell Sword (26 page)

‘Just me, Cap’n,’ said Lucius. He had a large, sharp axe with a spike in the base of the haft, and he did as de Marche had done, spiking each sheet of canvas as he passed it.

The waist was empty, and they climbed warily into the aftcastle, weapons at the ready.

There was no one on the command deck. It was damp, and when de Marche knelt and touched the deck with his fingers, he smelled something like fish, and something like copper, and a curious sweet, oily, tree smell. His mind struggled to identify it. It was something familiar. Even pleasant.

‘Uh!’ grunted Lucius, behind him.

He whirled.

The man held up a hand. ‘Sorry. Look.’

Everything appeared distorted in the moonlight, and it took de Marche a long breath to understand what he held. It was a finger, still encased in good armour – very expensive armour. The finger had been cleanly severed from a gauntlet. The man’s flesh was still inside.

They went back down the ladder to the waist. There was a door in the side of the forecastle – the main hatch to the living spaces.

Something was moving in there.

The two men listened, and then de Marche moved carefully to the right of the door while Lucius moved to the left. He was a small man with heavy muscles; he raised the axe over his head.

‘What’s happening, there?’ called the boat keeper.

The call came up over the side and echoed against the cliffs that lined the cove.

Happening there happening there hap there there.

‘We could just leave it,’ Lucius said.

‘It is just something swaying to the rhythm of the sea,’ he said. He put out a hand on the bronze-bound hatch and shoved.

It was latched.

He put his hand on the latch.

The ship swayed – the tide was rising – and he tripped the latch. The door shot back and something inside came forward as if it was flying. It had wings spread on either side of its corpse-like head, and—

Lucius’s axe slammed into it with a crunch like a butcher dividing a carcass. De Marche’s arming sword went into its face.

Its horrible wings swept forward, wrapping wetly around them as it fell to the deck. Both men screamed.

It was clear what had happened – the Etruscans had been caught unawares and massacred. But not by silkies. Whatever had perpetrated this massacre had claws and teeth.

And a horrible sense of drama.

The ‘creature’ that had ‘attacked’ them was the corpse of a sailor, hung from a meat hook in the doorway of the sleeping cabin. His lungs had been pulled out through his back to make wings. He had died horribly, and the marks of his agony were written across his face. His eyes bulged. His mouth was open.

De Marche took the time to recover from his fear. He used his dagger to scrape the disgusting mass of the man’s lung off his shoulder, and he went to the side and threw up. After a long time, he saw that the oarsmen had moved the ship’s boat all the way to the lee of his own
Grace de Dieu
and he hailed them.

They didn’t want to come back.

There were twelve more bodies, but he and Lucius cleared them away like men springing traps. He offered double-shares to the oarsmen and they finally came – slowly, but they came – and backed him as he cut corpses down.

Even after a day of horror, de Marche was capable of making a profit. He took the ship’s papers for their masters – there was no need to offend the men in Ruma and Gennua and Venike with whom he traded, and they would want to know what had happened to their spring fleet. Fortunes would have been lost, as well as lives, with these ships.

He took the trade goods out of the two smaller ships and put them in the larger after hearing the same tale from Ser Hartmut, and they threw all the dead over the side. His own sailors, having survived the Eeeague, were cocooned in their own fears – throwing dead men into the deep didn’t trouble any of them. And every man knew he was richer by a share or two as they counted the trade goods – bales of good velvet, and fine woollens.

And bows. Bales of fine mountain yew from Iberia, carefully split and roughed into shape.

Nothing the Etruscans carried tallied with the items his sources had told him to bring for trade.

They lay to in shallow water at dark, in a small cove with a shelving rock beach. As the moon rose high and full over the greasy sea full of kelp, and the water roiled like a living thing, de Marche sat on the sterncastle as Lucius spread olive oil on his burns.

‘Wasn’t fucking silkies as did for the Etruscans, was it, Cap’n?’ he asked.

‘No, by God and all his saints, Lucius.’ He winced as the man’s rough fingers pressed too hard on a burn.

‘How come these things live out here, and not at home? Eh?’ Lucius was talking to hear himself.

‘I don’t know, Lucius. The King’s magisters probably have something to do with it – and the power of the Emperors. And God.’

‘Does that mean God’s writ don’t run here? Or in the Nova Terra?’ asked Lucius.

‘I don’t know that, either.’ De Marche felt himself drifting into sleep, despite his fear and pain.

‘But the whales is on our side, ain’t they?’ asked Lucius.

‘Why do you say that?’ de Marche asked. ‘Leviathan almost sank us all standing. Carpenter still hasn’t come at the leak. If we didn’t have good land under our lee—’

‘I saw him,’ Lucius said, with absolute assurance. ‘You put that fucking thing, that Satan’s spawn, over the rail, and that big fish took him in his mouth and ate ’im. And then went deep. I saw it.’

De Marche took a deep breath. ‘My Etruscan friend told me that the mermen were the herders of the whales.’

‘He told you to bring cheap red cloth an’ crossbows, too,’ Lucius growled.

‘Good point,’ murmured de Marche.

‘What killed the Etruscans, then? Cap’n?’ asked Lucius.

He thought of the man with his lungs pulled through his back. ‘I have no idea,’ he admitted. ‘And I wonder where they are?’

‘Ser Hartmut’s coming up the side,’ Lucius said.

The Black Knight paused to look at the horrific ruin of the dead Etruscan. His handsome face did not change expression.

De Marche tried to stand straight.

‘Silkies?’ Ser Harmut asked.

De Marche shook his head.

Ser Hartmut looked around. ‘They would make valuable allies,’ he said.

De Marche’s expression made the Black Knight smile.

Beaver Lakes – Nita Qwan

The same full moon that rose over the lonely cove on the rock-bound north coast of Nova Terra rose a little later over a grassy clearing, far to the west, where Nita Qwan stood guard for the second night. He took the middle watch, because Ota Qwan played no favourites, and everyone took turns – bad watches and good.

Again, he smoked at the end of his watch – he was becoming quite fond of the smoke – and when he fell asleep, Ota Qwan was looking out into the darkness, his face just barely illuminated by the coal in his pipe.

In the morning they left their weapons, which troubled many of the men.

‘We won’t be able to carry honey across the swamp as well as our weapons,’ Ota Qwan insisted.

After a handful of pemmican, Ota Qwan led them to the edge of a huge beaver swamp – as wide as a small lake, with beaver houses the size of men’s houses.

‘Tick Chuzk,’ Ota Qwan said, pointing at the nearest beaver castle. ‘We call it the Beaver Kingdom. Sometimes they come, and sometimes they do not. Great beavers are touchy and proud and very fierce. Do not posture. In fact, do not speak!’

Men bridled. No Sossag liked to be told what to do, even when the advice was good.

A great stream almost the size of a river flowed through the meadow, and after carefully crossing the treacherous grass – it might look like lawn, but the unwary human would find himself in water to his hips – they stood on a sandy bank looking at a crossing as wide as two boats tied end to end. Not that they had any boats.

Staka Gon, one of the youngest, plunged into the ford – where he stumbled, gave a choked scream, and fell backwards.

Ota Qwan caught him before he fell. ‘Idiot,’ he said. He lifted the young man, who gave a long moan.

He had a sharpened stick right through his moccasined foot. Ota Qwan pulled it out, ruthlessly, and then used his own cloth shirt to bandage the boy. ‘Every tree and plant the beaver eat becomes a trap and a weapon,’ Ota Qwan said. ‘You
know
that.’

Nita Qwan had been told too, but he had forgotten. He looked at the stick – just a hand’s breadth long and red with blood. He looked away.

Later, when they had crossed, leaving Staka Gon at the ford, they stripped to keep their leggings dry and crossed a long stretch of wet marsh, carrying their buckets over their heads. The mosquitoes were ferocious, but Sossag warriors didn’t show irritation at such things.

Nita Qwan did his best to keep up appearances, but he hated insects.

After a painful league of walking and swimming across the great meadow, they climbed a low, fir-covered ridge, and lay on a great slab of limestone to dry. The smell of the honey was overpowering – almost rotten, and yet perfectly sweet.

Ota Qwan had waved into the bush. ‘Easier than last year. There’s a pool right here.’ He pointed across the swamp. ‘Gwyllch. Look – there and there. And there.’

Nita Qwan was tired. ‘Gwyllch?’

Gas-a-ho lay flat. ‘We have no weapons!’ he said. And indeed, they had none – the spears and bows and swords had stayed in camp so that they could carry their buckets when full.

Ota Qwan crouched, unperturbed. ‘Without weapons, we will simply have to be careful. Which is wiser than a pointless fight anyway.’

Nita Qwan gave half a smile. ‘Who died and left you all this wisdom?’ he asked.

Ota Qwan shrugged. ‘Tadaio. Those are boggles, Nita Qwan, my brother. See them?’

He did indeed. They were moving like an army. And they were between the men and their weapons.

It took long minutes to fill the buckets. Wild honey was seldom pure – the great bees who made it often fouled it themselves, and the sugary stuff gave off a mighty odour of organic decay – sweet organic decay. Animals became trapped in it and died; insects became stuck and perished by the thousand – plant mould, sugar fungus, and whole dead trees fell in the honey deposits.

Gas-a-ho was expert at filling them, though, and he crouched on a sticky rock with Ota Qwan’s arms around his belly and scooped each bucket full. The cleaner the bucket was at delivery, the more it would fetch in price. And the more honey a man fetched the richer the profit.

Nita Qwan heard a sound like a trumpet, and the Sossag all stiffened as one.

‘Bee!’ Gas-a-ho said.

Ota Qwan looked at the sky. He sprang to his feet, ran back up onto the limestone outcrop, and stared east under his hand. In Alban, he said, ‘Shit.’ He came back to the nervous warriors.

‘Hurry,’ he said. ‘We need to get young Gon out of the ford before he becomes someone’s lunch.

Nita Qwan felt his brother’s eyes on him. He sighed. ‘I’ll fetch him,’ he said.

Ota Qwan flicked him a hard smile. ‘Good. You won’t have to carry your buckets.’

He ran – and swam – back across the meadow to the ford, after a long look at the moving line of boglins. There were hundreds of them, and they were making no attempt at concealment but were passing along the eastern edge of the meadow.

They were heading for the ford.

He beat them to it.

Despite a hard summer of constant conditioning, he was breathing hard when he splashed through the water. The boy was lying flat, already rigid with terror but doing his best to conceal it.

Nita Qwan looked at the water’s edge – then at the far distant wood line to the east, and to the north, and made his decision.

‘They are on their way to cross here,’ he said. ‘We will go north. Around them. Come – I cannot carry you.’

The boy nodded grimly and they began to burrow into the dense alders that ringed the ford. Crawling through alder was almost impossible. The sight lines were less than five yards, and in Nita Qwan’s vivid imagination it seemed ideal terrain for the little boggles. He could all but see one coming, its horrible mandibles spreading wide to show its tooth-lined pink throat—

They crawled anyway, and when they had crawled for some time, they began to hear the rustling of the boglins. They were heavy enough to break the sticks forming the little beaver dams that filled the meadow, and quiet enough otherwise to make only a rustling noise as their sinewy legs passed through the grass.

‘Faster,’ Nita Qwan whispered. The nearest boggle was a short bowshot away.

They went down a short bank and were back at the stream – or another feeder stream. But the bottom of the stream was firm gravel, they didn’t have to crawl, and the icy cold water seemed to make walking easier for Gon, who didn’t complain despite the red blood he left on every wet rock as he went.

Their stream bed wound back and forth in short twists like a swimming snake. In no time Nita Qwan lost his bearings, and attempts to look over the side of the stream were fruitless – the tangle of tiny fir trees and alder bushes and fifty species of marsh grass made seeing any kind of view impossible, and the babble of the brook at the bottom of their course obscured all noise.

Nita Qwan cursed the other men, who were doubtless better at this and should have volunteered. But he kept going, as he had no other plan, back and forth up the stream bed.

Suddenly he stopped.

He could
smell
the boglins. The hard metallic scent – he remembered it from the siege of the rock.

‘Down,’ he hissed.

They curled up under the bank.

Even over the babble of the brook, they heard the rustling.

The boy’s heart was pounding so hard that Nita Qwan could feel it in his back. He was curled tight against the boy, his feet braced against a long-dead birch log, his arms wrapped in the roots of a still-living fir that sheltered them. The two of them were pressed tight into the roots, covered in swamp mud, but the boy’s foot continued dripping blood.

Nita Qwan’s thighs were burning with the effort of holding the boy up against the roots. He counted to one hundred.