Corun had dithered when the fleet suddenly started attacking itself and it had taken the first officer’s presence of mind to persuade him to turn and chase down the Hart’s Heart and the Dark Princess in the hope of killing Samir and getting back to Lassos. And then everything had gone wrong. Somehow, despite being in the favourable position, things had gone so damn badly wrong that he’d had to stop in the middle of scalping some bastard from the Empress and jump into the sea to avoid capture and death following the sudden and surprise arrival of the Sea Witch and Faerus’ damn ship.
He’d seen a few dozen others hit the water around him. Some had been crushed between the hulls. Others had probably drowned, but he paid them no mind. Now they were no longer on the ship, it was every man for himself. A question of survival. And so he’d struck out for the rocks.
Of course, people said things about the reefs, and he’d seen the ghosts himself, but they were there to stop ships getting through, not individuals. It would take a long time for a man to get from rock to rock all the way to the island, but he knew he could do it.
The first rock felt cold and slimy. He slid his hands up the clammy surface until he could peer over the top. There they were in the mist: figures in grey, robed and threatening. But, just as he’d thought, none directly around him. They were a deterrent. They always appeared nearby, not on the rock where you actually were. A deterrent, pure and simple. They must be some sort of magic, as they couldn’t really exist.
He grasped the top with his fingers and hauled himself up.
The next rock was clear too. He’d make it there and then decide where to head next. Hauling against the wet, cold stone, he pulled himself over the crest to a dip beyond and found himself staring up at a grey figure.
His eyes widened as the phantom smiled and the effect, as that wet and rubbery grey face stretched and contorted to show a hundred needle teeth, was truly terrifying.
“Gharic?”
His heart stopped in shock, but not before the cold, dead, grey hands of the former captain of the pirate ship Hart’s Heart closed on his cheeks and the wraith fed.
Asima awoke to silence. She was clearly in some sort of hold. The bulkhead timbers and barrels reminded her of the room that Samir had last kept her held in. Well this time there would be no sweetness and complicity… Samir would just have to die. She’d like to do it slowly; to peel the flesh from his limbs while lightly salting him, but she might just have to go for a knife in the back. That hadn’t done for Ghassan, though. Maybe the neck. A blade straight through the side and then ripped out of the front; that would do it. Everything vital in one go… messy, but quick and sure. Ghassan may be deformed, but nobody could claim their throat was in a different place.
She moved and groaned.
How long had she been unconscious here? She could hear the lapping of waves but no voices. She moved again and realised that some of her discomfort came from the piece of wreckage under her head.
She squinted, her eyes gradually becoming accustomed to the dimness in here, a boarded up window letting in only minimal light. There was a shattered lump of wood she’d been using as a pillow; several broken boards torn from the wall of a building or some such. Her head tilted to one side as she examined the boards and sudden anger flashed deep in her eyes as she realised where they had come from, their origin betrayed by the elegantly painted slogan: Dark Empress.
She raged silently for a moment in the privacy of her head.
He was going to have to suffer, after all. No quick kill. Trouble or no trouble, Samir deserved slow and painstaking. She pulled herself up to her knees and realised that a note had been pinned to the bottom of the section of hull that had been torn from the side of Samir’s ship.
Angrily, she ripped the parchment square from the shattered timbers and straightened, stretching. Who the hell did that little monster think he was? When Asima got hold of him, she’d stretch his death to take days, or even weeks. She looked around the small cabin and noted the faint glimmer of light around the cracks of a door. A proper cabin on a daram, then, and not down below in the hold somewhere.
Unfolding the parchment and concentrating in the low light, she read the short note as she approached the door, her expression moving slowly as she read down the page from puzzlement to anger and finally to plain horror.
She read the last line and allowed the paper to fall from her shaking hands as she threw open the door to see not the corridor and deck of a daram, but a jetty marching back through the water to the harbour of Lassos, the black mountain hovering high above.
Her cry was heard by no living soul. Nor would any other she ever made.
My dearest Asima
I feel that the situation is painfully obvious, but I do believe that your arrogance blinds you to certain truths and so I feel the need to explain this to you.
My ship, the Dark Empress, is no more. Like the phoenix of legend, she has risen from the flames of battle and been reborn as the Retribution and, if you think just a little, I believe you’ll understand why,
The ship has a long history, and ‘Dark Empress’ is not the first name by which it was known. Back in the early days of the Emperor Quintus, the ship was commissioned under an Imperial order and, with its sister ships of that order, was named for members of the Imperial family. This ship took the name of Sabinia, the Emperor’s mother. She was, as you may be aware from your histories, one of the family line that fell foul of the hereditary insanity of the dynasty and it is when she began to manifest her vicious madness in acts of random and senseless violence and megalomania and was finally ‘disappeared’ for the good of the Empire that the Imperial ship of the line Sabinia became the ‘Dark Empress’, for that is what Quintus’ mother will ever be remembered as.
But the ship, like her captain and crew, has been redeemed.
We are reborn into Imperial service and the title of Dark Empress, passed from Sabinia to my ship, needs to be passed on, to divorce us from this wickedness.
But, and I imagine you can see where I am going with this, there is an obvious successor. Like Sabinia, a promising, beautiful and clever young woman who descended into vicious madness and megalomania, this new ‘Dark Empress’ has reached the point where she needs to be ‘disappeared’ for the good of the world as a whole.
And Lassos will be no more. No living foot other than yours will step on the cursed island ever again. You can no longer visit your evil upon the innocent people of the world but, like a soothsayer friend of mine once told you, you were destined to rule as an Empress.
I hope your Empire trembles at the sound of your commands.
I wish you luck in your rule. May it be long and peaceful.
Your friend,
Samir.