It dragged itself around the burning sword, accepting bifurcation rather than remaining.
Now, for the first time, with the sword illuminating its trunk, de Marche could see its entrails – see that it rode the side of the ship like a vast and opalescent slug, and its bulk continued over the rail and down all the way into the sea.
A whale rolled past, in easy bowshot. It showed its flukes and then, with a mighty stroke of its tail, it was alongside them – the ship shuddered and men fell to their knees. The whale ripped the silky off the hull – the ship shook again and a sailor fell from the fighting top to splash into the water.
The man vanished under the waves, dragged down by the weight of his mail.
There was silence.
Ser Hartmut stepped back from the rail. His helmet was ruined – it had holes burned right through by the thing’s toxic flesh, and pitting and tendrils of rust and decay trailed all the way down his armour. His cuisses and greaves were the worst, scattered with burn holes and trails of rust brown.
He pulled the ruined helmet over his head and hurled it, aventail and all, into the sea.
He turned to de Marche. He had burns all over his face, and his hair was rucked and tufted like a patchwork gown. He was smiling.
‘Now, that, monsieur, was the sort of fight a man can come to love.’
Habit caused the merchant to look for Etienne, but the squire was lying dead in his harness in the waist of the ship, his body armour ripped asunder by one of the creatures’ beaks and his entrails ripped from his body to twist about the deck like obscene organic ribbon.
De Marche nodded. ‘Thank you, my lord, for saving us,’ he said humbly.
Ser Hartmut spat over the side. ‘You saved yourselves – every one of you. You are all worthy companions, and I am honoured to command you.’
Sailors scared past their ability to comprehend – men on the brink of despair – braced up on hearing his words.
He smiled at them. ‘Well fought. Nothing we find in Nova Terra will be worse than that!’
De Marche allowed himself a smile. ‘By the sweet saviour, I pray not.’
‘We are cut from different cloth, then, merchant. Because I pray we find worse – larger, faster, deadlier. The more horrific, the greater the honour.’ He sheathed the sword that burned like a torch in his hand.
De Marche nodded, as one does when talking to a madman. He managed a smile.
Two hours later all three ships were illuminated with torches. The danger – the insane danger – of open fire on the deck of a ship was as nothing compared to the men’s fears of facing the silkies in the dark. There were open buckets of seawater at every station.
They caught up with the three bare-poled ships just a mile or so off the rock-bound coast.
De Marche boarded one himself. Ser Hartmut boarded a second. The third they left until morning.
He led. He had to. Despite Ser Hartmut’s words, the men were in the grip of terror – their sailors’ fears of the sea now given a physical focus – and the falling darkness made it difficult for him to get a boat’s crew to row him across to the bare-poled galleass. In the boat, he felt the terror himself – even the water appeared alien, black and oily, and the oar strokes were weak. The men couldn’t stop looking over the side. In the bow, a man stood with a burning cresset – a huge pine torch usually expended only in emergency repairs at night.
He climbed the side – heavily, because his body was exhausted – and he had to steel himself before he threw a leg over the bulwark to look down at the deck. The rising moon revealed a macabre tangle of fallen rigging and tangled sailcloth.
He got a foot on the deck and drew his arming sword – his good fighting sword was utterly ruined, a brittle shard of its lethal self. His arming sword was light in his hand, and he got a leather buckler on his left fist after he had both feet on the deck. The buckler had been soaked in whale oil. So had his sword blade.
Oliver de Marche was a rational man. The silkies could be hurt – he’d seen it. Possibly they could be killed. Their fearsome ichor could be diluted by seawater, and to some extent defeated by oil. They hated fire.
None of that rational, military thinking helped him a jot. He stood on the deck in the moonlight, and he was so afraid that his sword hand shook. He had to force himself to move – to take a step, and then another. With each step, he poked the downed sails – they had the same fluid and organic shapes that the Eeeague had.
He crossed the deck, his heart racing when he stepped on a rope and it squirmed under his boot; he jumped when he heard movement behind him, and whirled, sword in the high guard, ready for a heavy cut-
‘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.