Oily black blood from the torn finger dripped into the water and a moment later, the first of her assistants pushed through the meaty flesh, and crawled, trailing a length of sticky afterbirth, onto the brig-sloop’s hull. Two more followed, then the tan-bak replaced her talon. The soft sucking sound as it reattached was lost in the wash of wind and water. The huntress gestured to her scouts and watched as three tiny spider-beetles, their exoskeletons black with demon blood, scuttled over the rail and crept across the main deck, searching for the cracks Captain Ford had meant to fill with tar just as soon as he and the Morning Star’s crew returned to Southport.
Before the evening’s attack had ended, one of the tan-bak’s scouts was dead, crushed underfoot. Another found a berth and a folded blanket, where it waited. The third, the most fortunate, had dropped through a hatch onto someone’s shoulder, crawled under a forest of flaxen hair and, undetected, inserted itself into the twisting canal of a sleeping partisan’s ear. An irritated scratch and a shift of the pillows was all the resistance the creature encountered.
Now the tan-bak, matching the ship’s colour and texture perfectly, rubbed a healthy talon over the grainy wood. She straddled the gunwale and leaped into the rigging like a fugitive shadow, looked around and chose her target, then sprouted a mouthful of fangs and dived into the night.
Sera struggled to stay awake. Run downwind had been Captain Ford’s final order an aven earlier; that had been his only order for days now: push north for the archipelago. Tubbs was in the bow, also standing the middle watch. The fire in the watch brazier winked periodically; so she knew he was still moving about, still awake. When the old sailor caught a whiff of her Pragan tobacco – she had no use for fancy Falkan leaves – he would wander back, purloin a pinch and then retake his position between the catheads. The two had stood the middle watch together for more Twinmoons than Sera could recall.
She was waiting for him to join her for a smoke when the tan-bak struck. The creature plunged a clawed fist wrist-deep into her chest and Sera, neither shouting nor releasing the wheel, looked down in amazement, as if witnessing a marvel of ancient magic. Her eyes, half-closed against the cold and wind, flew open as her jaw clamped shut, biting straight through the hand-carved pipe.
A yellowed tooth distracted the tan-bak, who tapped at it with a claw, thinking it might be a piece of something Sera had been chewing, or perhaps even one of the insect scouts, far out of position. With her hand still buried inside the woman’s chest, the tan-bak plucked Sera’s fingers from the Morning Star’s wheel, leaped back to the starboard rail and dumped the yellow-toothed woman over the side.
She heard the man approach before she saw him; his knees and ankles were so noisy, it was a wonder the old man could still get himself around the deck.
When Tubbs reached the quarterdeck, he found the wheel abandoned and the little ship beginning to spin with the wind and the current. He turned a quick circle. He couldn’t call for Sera – Captain Ford had a special connection with the brig-sloop; like many captains, his sense of the Morning Star went beyond the merely tactile and he could sense the tug in a line, the draw on a sheet, the pressure against a plank in the hull, as if the ship was a living, breathing thing. If he called out, Tubbs knew Captain Ford would be dressed and on deck in two breaths. Instead, the old mariner took the helm, steadied it – changes in course were enough to keep Ford awake for a Moon – and continued his silent search for the ship’s navigator.
*
The tan-bak was thrilled with the acrobatics she was able to perform on the shifting vessel. She dived from the shrouds, touched down on the rail, leaped for the main spar and tumbled out of the darkness to tear Tubbs’s throat out with one vicious swipe. Before his body struck the deck she was on him, feeding. The blood was warm and salty, delicious, but the meat – ah, that was something inhabitants of the Fold dreamed about. And inside the Fold, there was ample time for dreaming.
The captain stirred. It didn’t take much to wake him. He sat up and strained to hear anything out of the ordinary. A wave lifted the Morning Star… it wasn’t right. He had left orders for Sera to keep the old ship running before the wind and from the way his cabin rolled over that last swell, he could feel that they were at least a few points off their tailwind.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked the empty cabin. ‘Why is my boat running sideways through the water? Is that odd to anyone but me?’ He lit a candle in a hurricane glass and dressed quickly, then picked up the lantern and hurried into the companionway.
Steven bumped his head against the bulkhead. He rolled over, fluffed up the blanket he had folded into a pillow and drifted back to sleep.
When another wave rolled him into the wall, he sat up, careful not to knock himself senseless on the berth above. He yawned and tried to stand when a third swell rolled him back into his berth.
‘Christ, who’s driving this thing?’ he muttered, finally rolling free of his tangled blankets.
‘Ssh,’ a voice whispered.
‘Who’s that?’ Steven said, lighting the lantern beside the bed with a thought. ‘Gilmour? What’s wrong? It feels like we’re going over in these waves.’
The Larion sorcerer was crouched near cabin door. In the lamplight, his face was pale. ‘I want you to stay here,’ he whispered.
‘Why? What is it?’
‘I’ll handle it,’ he said firmly.
‘No,’ Steven insisted, ‘we’ll do it together, like everything else. You can’t just leave me in the car like a first-grader. Is it Mark?’
‘Not Mark,’ Gilmour said. ‘I’m worried that the watch are already dead.’
‘What?’ Steven’s voice rose. ‘Jesus, Gilmour, let’s go – what are we waiting for?’ He pushed past, tugged the door open and stepped into the companionway.
‘Steven, please!’ Gilmour hissed, but Steven was already halfway to the deck when the magic roared to life with such force he nearly lost his balance.
The phantom white shrouds, the black spider-web rigging and the masts scraping the night sky all melted into a watery curtain dangling from an overhead spar. He watched a rolling, tumbling cloud of red and black pass over his vision, and then everything was waxy, slippery and insubstantial.
‘Holy shit,’ Steven said, ‘what’s out here?’ He tensed for whatever might be haunting the foredeck. In the distance, near the helm, the blurry backdrop was broken by a flickering candle, protected somehow from the wind. He guessed the light represented whatever had Gilmour so frightened. Ducking low, he crept silently astern.
The tan-bak didn’t wait for the newcomer to reach the quarterdeck. She was surprised that anyone had sensed her arrival and understood there would be no time for her scouts to report back. No matter; they knew what to do in the event that they were unable to rejoin their mistress. Peering down from a topgallant spar, she chewed on a lump of the old man with the noisy joints. She flattened her back teeth to grind sinew and fat into masticated mush, then gave herself a makeshift oesophagus, just for the sheer thrill of feeling the meat pass down her throat. She bored a ragged flap-covered nostril in the centre of her face and inhaled with each bite; it was tastier with a bit of sea air.
When the two men appeared, the tan-bak wrapped a footrope around what was left of her meal, storing it for afterwards, then, diving for the topsail, she used the billowy sheet as a springboard to catapult herself into the fight. One of the newcomers looked young. Curious about the difference in flavour, the tan-bak decided to eat him too.
‘Up there!’ Steven screamed, an instinctive response to a half-glimpsed dark patch, a quick-moving blur that was somehow out of place. He lashed out with whatever he found on his fingertips, a wild, roundhouse punch.
The tan-bak had never been hit by anything before. The pain as the young man’s magic ripped into her chest was wonderful. Thrown backwards over the stern, she careened in ungainly tumbles, splashed down and started to drown. The huntress willed her lungs closed, recalled her gills and webbing and swam in powerful lunging strokes after the fleeing ship.