Skinner turned to the priest who scanned the wreckage, then pointed to one side. Mara took the opportunity to throw on her one robe and tie it off at a shoulder. She pushed back her mass of hair. Petal cleared his throat in a signal for attention. She and Skinner turned quickly; the mage indicated a heap at the gunwale. It was a desiccated corpse. Some ferocious blow had slain the Meckros citizen. The wound had shattered the bones of the forearm and swung on, cleaving ribs to sever the spine. Few men could have delivered such a blow. The viscera were gone now, a feast for seabirds, but the sinew and dried muscle of the carcass remained, heaving with maggots.
Mara straightened from her examination of the corpse. So, not just a natural disaster …
She and Petal shared a significant look and both readied their Warrens. Skinner rested a hand on his sword grip. The priest scampered out on to the broken slats of some sort of platform that crossed to the next vessel. Here gnawed human bones and the stains of spilled fluids offered further testimony to the violence that had taken the city. Skinner knelt to pick up a bone that he examined before holding it out to Mara: it was the upper portion of a femur, still bearing a mess of sinew. Something had crushed the bone, splitting it. Something possessing extraordinarily strong jaws. It reminded her of a large predator or scavenger such as a Dal Hon plains hyena or a Fenn mountain bear. Yet out here away from the shore?
The priest led them on, scampering over fallen rigging and splintered timber. The light of the day waned, but slowly, lingering in a long twilight tinged by green from the arc of the lurid glowing Banner, the Visitor, foretelling whatever apocalypse one preferred. Considering the nature of their own errands, it was now hard for her to continue to dismiss these dire predictions as nonsense.
As she climbed over the ruins of the Meckros city — just the first of many calamities to come? — she wondered whether it was their own actions that were in fact calling the Banner down upon them. After all, it was said that the Shattered God had fallen from the sky ages ago, drawn down by humanity’s hubris and blindness. Could they not be somehow contributing to a second Great Destruction and the annihilation that was said to have followed?
She paused on a canted platform of decking. In fact, why should I believe I would even survive such a world-shattering impact and conflagration? Disavowed or no?
Petal arrived at her side, panting, his shirt stained dark with sweat. ‘You are troubled?’ he asked, studying her.
‘Yes. I am quite troubled …’
‘I feel it too. Many eyes upon us. But I cannot get a grip upon them — their minds are strange.’
‘Tell Skinner.’
‘Very good.’ The big fellow moved on awkwardly, using handholds to steady himself.
Mara watched him go without really seeing him. Could their actions be ensuring this Banner’s impact? Could she be complicit in a second Great Fall?
And why by all the gods had she not considered this before?
She realized she’d fallen behind and hurried to catch up.
She found Skinner confronting a cringing anxious priest: the man was wringing his hands and peering about for escape like a cornered dog. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked Petal.
Skinner raised an armoured finger. ‘This man has been leading us in circles for hours.’
‘It’s moved, I tell you!’ the priest shrieked. ‘It’s moving.’ He thrust out a hand. ‘It’s behind us now!’
‘Moving …’ Skinner mused within his helm. He swung a gauntleted hand, smashing the priest to the decking. ‘You fool! You’ve allowed it to lead us exactly where it wants us!’ The priest lay mewling, wiping at the blood streaming from his squashed nose. Skinner’s blade slid soundlessly from its wood sheath.
Mara and Petal put their backs to his, forming a rough triangle.
‘How many?’ Skinner asked Petal.
‘Many.’
‘Mara?’
‘What can I do on this unsure footing? Everything’s split already!’
Their commander growled his displeasure. ‘Well … let us see what we’ve walked into.’
Mara eyed the surrounding canted huts, heaps of fallen equipment, and platforms and decks all of differing levels and angles. From among this maze shapes emerged. The deepening purple of twilight lent them an even greater horror. Malformed humans they were; shambling, so distorted as to be near caricatures of the human form. Many possessed huge curving crab-like claws as long as swords and now she understood the many cracked bones scattered across the wreckage. ‘What are they …?’ she breathed, speaking her thoughts aloud.
‘The influence of the shard, no doubt,’ Petal answered, as literal-minded as ever.
‘Can you affect them?’
‘Barely, I suspect.’
Damn. I dare not let loose myself — this wreckage would fly apart beneath us.
The creatures shambled forward and she saw now that she was wrong in her first suspicion that these were the poor unfortunates of the Meckros city now transformed by the Crippled God’s contamination into monstrosities of claw and shell carapace. No human form could endure such fundamental deformities. Six limbs? Backward-bending joints? Gaping mouths full of worm-like appendages? Surely these must be local denizens of the reef, crab, lobster, prawn and other crustaceans, warped now into mockeries of the human form. Such a conceit must have amused the Shattered God — what mattered the shape of the flesh when all was alien and strange?
It also explained why Petal’s Mockra-based magics would have so little effect: these minds were not human to be clouded, confused or broken.
The creatures were however still flesh and blood, and Mara gestured, drawing as lightly as she could upon D’riss. A bare few of them staggered backwards. The priest, she noted peripherally, was nowhere to be seen.
Skinner stepped up. His mottled black and magenta blade blurred. Limbs fell away in gushes of clear fluids. Carapaces sheared off, cut through entirely. The mob of anatomical impossibilities swerved before him and she and Petal ducked away to give him room to lay about himself fully. She climbed up what might have once been a deckhouse while Petal heaved himself into the rigging of a tilted mast.
Skinner wrought havoc among the creatures but more and more came dragging themselves up, many still wet from the lagoon. Enormous crab claws grated across his glistening scaled coat, unable to catch any purchase or penetrate its invested metal. A great pincer as hefty as a bastard sword closed on the man’s thigh and he snarled his agony, slicing through the shell exoskeleton. The jagged-toothed pincer fell away as it too was not powerful enough to break through Ardata’s sorceries. Yet Skinner limped now, the leg perhaps numb.
A sharp whistle sounded, cracking like a whip across the decking. It was followed by a strange series of poppings and cracklings. The creatures all backed away. Some new figure came pushing its way through the monstrosities. So strange was this thing that it took some time for Mara to understand just what she was looking at. It was a jerking, walking mechanism of rusted metal bands and wire. Its creaking and whirring reached her like the sounds water clocks and other such automata make as they run and turn. Yet this was not the most eerie thing about this manifestation: what was ghastly was the fact that it wore over its metal torso, like a cape or a robe, the flayed skin of a human being. And stuck on a metal rod jutting above the body lolled a rotting severed head.