Around him, the officers and crew, ignoring the Twinmoon, backed away. No one wanted to be in Redrick’s field of view when the demon sailor finally shifted his gaze from the heavens.
‘Captain Blackford,’ he said finally, ‘are you familiar enough with the charts to see us through this Northeast Channel?’
‘I’m sorry, sir, but I am not.’ The captain winced, looking as if he expected his insides to boil out of his orifices, or his flesh to ripen into pus-filled sores at any moment.
There was a thin covering of ice on the main deck and coating the lines. It would melt after sunrise, but right now the Bellan glowed moonlit-silver, the colour of cold. Redrick’s tunic was torn and his chest was bare, yet he wasn’t troubled by the icy temperature – indeed, he appeared to be positively enjoying it. He sniffed and caught the aroma of something dank – a swamp, or a stretch of water that has stood too long in the sun. It was certainly not the smell of anything common to winter on the Ravenian Sea.
Eventually the demon sailor blinked and asked, ‘What was I saying?’
‘Uh, you were asking about the passage, sir.’
‘Yes, very good,’ Redrick looked distracted again. ‘Check to see if any of these fellows knows how to see us through – and if they do claim to know the way, assure them that I will hold them personally accountable for every scrape and scratch we get while running north. If none of them feels up to that challenge, hail the Souzett and have their captain guide us through.’
‘Right away, sir,’ he said, trying not to let the pleasure of such a relatively simple assignment show in his voice.
Redrick stopped him again. ‘Did you feel anything odd today, Blackford?’
‘Odd? I’m sorry, sir, but I’m not sure what you mean by odd.’
‘Today, when I finally managed to kill Steven bloody Taylor and that band of milksops he hangs about with. Did you sense something curious about that?’
‘I don’t- I can’t-’
‘Never mind, Blackford, never mind,’ he broke in impatiently, staring north again. He pointed beyond the topsails. ‘Those moons up there are actually worlds and worlds apart.’
‘Yes, sir.’ The hairs on Captain Blackford’s forearms stood up; this sudden contemplative mood made him nervous.
‘But from this far away, they look like they’re about to butt heads. It’s funny what a little distance can do to one’s perspective, isn’t it?’
‘It is, sir.’ Blackford ventured a bit further. ‘Plenty of things appear different when examined from far away.’
Redrick’s more common look of vacuous disengagement returned as he whispered, ‘Yes, they do.’
‘I’ll make arrangements for the passage, sir,’ Blackford said, sweating inside his cloak.
Redrick snapped his attention back to the frigate. ‘Let me know when we enter the passage. I enjoyed that run last time.’
As Blackford backed away, he heard Redrick murmur, ‘There was something odd about those spells… almost as if…’ Redrick turned and strode into the aft companionway, leaving the moons to their rendezvous in private, still mumbling to himself, ‘-would look different up close-’
In the Viennese swamp, something large moved quickly past Mark. It didn’t stop to consider him, as foreign as he was to this environment, but sloshed briefly in the pool at the dark end of the Gloriette, scurried through the bushes on the opposite side of the bridge and then splashed again in the water off to Mark’s left. It was like spilled mercury, quick and insidious.
The entire swamp seemed to gasp when the shadow passed through. There had been evil in here before – the coral snake with its ruined head, the poisonous serpents, the tadpoles moving in that ungainly crawl to feed on Redrick Shen – but those things were the kind of evil one expected from a haunted swamp. This newcomer, already gone, was worse, for this would have been evil anywhere; there was no force of goodness strong enough to mitigate it. And Mark suddenly understood from where Nerak had summoned his almor hunters and his acid clouds.
‘What was that?’ he said, confident whatever it had been was gone already, the chill in its wake weakening.
That? Just a bit of insurance for me.
‘Planning to take up bungee jumping?’ Mark wanted the lights on; he needed to move between two more of the columns to reach the little bridge. It wasn’t far and wouldn’t be long, but he didn’t want to risk the slippery coping in the dark; if he stepped in the water, the swamp’s retaliation would be swift and terrifying.
Some things just look different from far away. Moons, mountains, and magic spells, especially.
‘Where are you sending… whatever that was?’
I’m not sure, Mark, that’s why I’m sending her. Perhaps she’ll rid me of your irritating roommate, or maybe she’ll just eat a crew of my own navy. Wouldn’t that be ironic? Ah, well, you can’t make an omelette without killing a few sailors, can you?
Mark didn’t answer. Hugging the column, the same one Jody Calloway had pushed him up against when she grabbed his crotch on Herr Peterson’s class trip, Mark closed his eyes and waited.
THE TAN-BAK
The tan-bak gripped the brig-sloop’s hull with webbed fingers. The journey had been brief but exhausting. She had paused along the bottom to feed on soft-shelled booacore scuttling beneath rocks and clumps of seaweed. The miniature crustaceans had been tasty, but the tan-bak would need more sustenance to remain on the light side of the Fold. On a previous trip outside her obsidian prison she had fought with abandon, although she hadn’t fed for days. Now, thousands of Twinmoons later, she was getting older and feeding was the only thing she intended to do this time.
Her webbing slipped on the slimy, barnacled planks of the old ship’s belly so she abandoned the webs, sprouted a fistful of talons and dug in, heaving herself nimbly up the side. She glanced at the Twinmoon and her flesh dripped dry as she considered this curious place: wet below but dry and windy above. The tan-bak had come across images inside the Fold – mostly lost thoughts and drifting memories – but had never imagined how it would feel to swim in seawater.
Gills closed as puckered lungs opened. Pupils shrank and toes split into claws. As she clung to the starboard bulkhead, her smooth leathery skin reflected the moonlight. The tan-bak looked like the twisted offspring of a spider, a black-haired monkey and a lithe, sinewy woman. The appendages she had used to locate and reach the ship, now useless, had been reabsorbed into her malleable flesh, vanished like forgotten vestigial organs and replaced by fingers and toes, resilient bones and opposable thumbs.
Almost as an afterthought, the circular tympana she had used to hear the booacore fleeing across the sand ruptured and caved into the side of her head, forming primitive ears. That was better; there was less background noise. Now she heard them: breathing, snoring, rolling over in their blankets. One farted, another coughed. They were nestled together inside a cabin, somewhere below the forward mast, but there were others, just a few, above decks. One stood in the bow, the tendons in his joints creaking with the rolling swells. Another, a woman, waited at the helm; the tan-bak could smell her musty aroma.
She listened. There was another back there, a man, breathing in slow, barely audible sniffs through his nose.
Him she would take last.
The rest would be easy.
She would deploy a team of scouts below to locate hidden defences, weapons or magic she hadn’t sensed while she dispatched the woman at the helm and the rickety sentry in the bow. She pinched one of her fingernails, a barbed talon, and wrenched it off. The pain was immediate and excruciating, and the tan-bak whined, biting back a scream. She had been too loud. She froze in place, listening for the woman or the forward watch.
At the helm, Sera cocked an ear towards the starboard rail and peered into the half-light. She waited, but heard nothing more. She made a mental note to warn Captain Ford that something might be coming loose somewhere below the scuppers.