The Fell Sword (25 page)

‘Master Louis, the lookout is to be listed for punishment,’ de Marche snapped. He sprang on to the rail, swung up into the rigging, and climbed a stay, hand over hand despite the weight of his mail, until he stood on the small platform at the midpoint of the tall, single-piece aft mast. ‘Where away?’ he shouted.

The lookout in the mainmast fighting top pointed. ‘West-north-west,’ he shouted, obviously eager to be forgiven for his dereliction. ‘Bare poles,’ he called. And then, almost to himself, ‘And I’d have seen ’em sooner if they carried any sail, anyway.’

De Marche found them quickly enough. He watched them as long as his eyes could stand the sun-dazzle, and then he watched the water below his feet. From this height, he could see the great dark shapes of the whales, and the smaller shapes flitting in and out among them. Herdsmen? Tormenters?

The red flag burst from his own gallery. The
Grace de Dieu
heeled and began to turn, picking up the wind on her quarter she turned south – but round ships didn’t turn particularly well, and the whole process was glacial.

Two miles astern, another red flag flashed; after a few heartbeats, the middle ship,
Saint Denis
, answered.

Men with crossbows were lining the sides of his fore and aftercastles. A round ship was a ship shaped like half an egg, with great towers built fore and aft to raise archers and crossbowmen, and give them the height advantage they needed, whether they fought men – or things.

Amidships, in the low waist, the men-at-arms and their squires and pages, already armed, waited with axes and spears.

De Marche picked a halyard, made sure of it, and then lowered himself to the deck, landing neatly just two Gallish cloth yards behind Ser Hartmut. The giant knight turned when he felt the wood under his feet move, and found the merchant captain, wearing his hauberk, bowing to the deck.

‘Master Etienne!’ he shouted. ‘Ask your master if he has fought Eeeague.’

The steel giant raised his visor.

Etienne appeared. ‘Never,’ he admitted.

De Marche shrugged. ‘Neither have I. I thought they were something that the Etruscans made up, to warn us off their trade. None in the Middle Sea? Nor Ifriqu’ya?’

De Vrieux looked a question at his master, and spread his hands.

Ser Hartmut spun his pole-axe. It was so small, compared to the man himself, that it looked like a toy. Close up, de Marche could see it was almost half again the size most of the marines carried.

‘Come, sweet friends, and let us say a prayer together!’ Ser Hartmut called out, and all of his men-at-arms and their people knelt on the deck. ‘Let our sweet and gentle Jesus send us a good fight and a worthy enemy! Amen!’

De Marche ran back up the ladder to the aftercastle, and two of his mates got his breast and back on him and closed it. The buckles took time – too much time.

‘Oh Christ,’ said a sailor behind him.

Crossbows snapped – the strings sang with almost the same sound that a sword blade makes when it strikes the pell. His men had heavy arbalests, capable of putting a bolt right through a ship’s side – or through a man in armour.

‘Sweet Jesus Sweet Jesus ohmygodohmygod,’ moaned a sailor behind him.

The tine of the last buckle under his arm slipped home, and his man Lucius slapped his back. Master Henri had his steel helmet, an open-faced bassinet with a sun-bill of steel, and a fine steel chain aventail. He got it on de Marche’s head even as the sailors behind him began to scream.

Lucius put his bill-hook into his hand and he turned.

Half the sailors at the rail were already dead.

He almost missed the arm coming for him – and then he cut with the bill-hook. He had a hard time grasping the shape of the creature – it was nearly transparent, a ghastly pink and green mottling over glistening translucence.

He slammed his bill into the thing’s organic centre – if that was its trunk, and not a continuation of its limbs – it was difficult to register its physiology in combat. His bill splurted into the trunk and blew out again in a satisfying shower of gore – but every splat of the thing’s corporeal form that touched metal ate away at it, and Lucius tore his own helmet from his head and cursed.

The head of his bill began to deform, flaking away and rusting even as he slammed it into the thing for a second time.

The port-side crossbowmen were snapping their heavy bolts into the creature from a range of a few feet – spattering their hapless mates with the sticky, deadly gore, and sometimes with the bolts themselves, and doing the thing little harm.

It uncoiled something – an arm? A weapon? – at him, and he batted it aside with nothing but the headless shaft of his bill.

An alert ship’s boy acted on a hunch and poured a helmet full of seawater on Lucius, who stopped screaming.

Ser Hartmut vaulted up the ladder and stood like a tower of steel in front of the Eeeague. It turned to face him.

He drew his great sword, and it burst into flame.

A dozen sailors shouted, ‘The Black Knight!’

The thing snapped a tendril at him, and he batted it aside and cut back, right down the same line, into the monster. The thing had already endured fifty crossbow bolts and dozens of other blows, but now it screamed – and vanished down the side of the ship.

The stench of dead fish and decomposing flesh filled the air. There were six dead men on the deck, and Lucius was still having water poured over his head. He was as red as a beet and whimpering.

Just by their stern, a whale broached and a great fluke slammed into the water, showering every man on the aftercastle. The whale turned suddenly, and its great jaws opened.

Then closed.

In passing, it delivered a nudge to the great ship – one of the largest ships ever built in a Gallish yard – and the whole ship groaned, and wooden pegs carefully driven home with great oak fids sprang loose, and water sprayed in on the bales of bright red cloth.

It was too late to turn the round ship. And the whale was gone, hurtling away into the deep.

De Marche had never had to confront the three-dimensionality of the sea so forcefully, and he had a moment of vertigo as the whale vanished beneath him.

And then another of the tentacled things came at the forecastle.

By the fourth attack, two sailors had been thrown over the side, and the squires had fetched fire from the galley and made fire spears, wrapping dry tow dipped in oil around their boarding pikes and lighting them.

It was as well, because the fourth attack was the first one that seemed to be coordinated; six tentacled monsters came up the steep sides all together. Three of them went for the low waist of the ship as the easier target, and were greeted by Ser Hartmut. But the ship itself heeled – the things had significant weight. They were not just the spirits of damned and dead sailors, as had been shouted over the panic.

One went up the forecastle, but the forecastle was the highest point on the ship, rising sheer over the bow, and the creature, for all its hellish strength and speed, had trouble getting over the boarding nets, and was impaled with fire spears and fled.

But two of them came up the aftercastle. They screamed like dead spirits, and the Etruscans’ name for them – the Eeeague – was explained. And their coming heralded a wave-front of pure terror.

De Marche stood his deck. He put a spear into one thing’s trunk and severed what might have been a translucent tentacle – Lucius had an iron bucket of hot sand, and he threw it into the beast, and another sailor – Mark, an Alban – sprayed it with oil to no effect and died.

It came right over the rail and down – de Marche took a blow and the pain shocked him – whatever hit him went right through his mail.

Like water.

He screamed, stumbled back, and let go the spear.

A tendril caught a ship’s boy and flipped him over the side, screaming.

The trunk seemed to open and inside it had a red-orange beak like a raptor concealed in its jelly-like flesh, and the boy . . .

De Marche drew his sword. He whipped it along the deck where the oil had been spilled, cocked it back in his strongest guard, and cut at the thing’s trunk as hard as he could.

Unlike the concussive weapons, the sword cut
.
It felt like cutting through pig fat – but the blow was well formed, and he sawed as fast as he could even as the thing sprayed his face – he screamed, ripped the sword loose, and slammed it back again.

Lucius threw water into his face.

The smell was grotesque.

But it retreated back to the sea, leaving a great hunk of its gelatinous flesh on the deck, burning its way into the wood.

The other one had killed a sailor and paused to eat him, the beak exposed and glistening red, obscene and active. The thing had no face, no limbs. It looked like wet silk.

His blade was pitting before his eyes, but he cut into the second thing, cut and cut again. Lucius called, ‘Swords,’ and men drew them and hacked with the desperation of terror. A man fell screaming to the deck with a tendril wrapped around him, his flesh boiling from his body as he screeched his hopeless terror.

Two sailors, either more alert or less panicked, got the gobbet of severed flesh on their spears and flipped it over the side.

Again, Ser Hartmut charged up the ladder from the waist, his flaming sword a beacon of hope. He fell on the creature, showering it with blows, and it vented its pain with every blow, shrill screeches like birdsong. When it began to withdraw with the slickly lubricated speed with which it did everything, he slammed his sword forward in an overhand thrust that pinned it to the deck.

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—