by Dan Abnett
And make it live once more.
It was so close now, so close. Luka gazed at the boy in the casket, saw the rude health in his complexion. Just another few measures of blood to drink, and he would live again. And unleash his woe upon the Old World.
Just another few measures. Ymgrawl, he would furnish plenty. And Casaudor and Benuto. Blood was blood. There was almost enough of it now. Gods, but it was hungrier than Sheerglas on a bad night. It wanted to drink up the world.
“Luka?” Ymgrawl said, staring at Silvaro, his bloody knife still raised. “Not thee too,” he sighed.
“Enough blood,” Luka mumbled. “Enough blood. There must be enough blood, or it won’t awake from its endless sleep.”
“Luka!” Ymgrawl yelled.
Clutching the amulet, Luka Silvaro staggered away up the hold steps, clambering up through the smoky bowels of the Butcher Ship to the deck. There, men and ghouls still fought in the swirl of the storm and the vile fog. As Luka stumbled across the corpse-littered deck, fresh blood flew up from the timbers and was sucked up into the golden amulet he clutched.
In the hold, the boy-king’s eyes flickered open.
Luka fell to his knees and struggled to the broken stern rail. He looked down at the amulet in his hands. It belonged to him. It needed him like he needed it, like an addiction, like a true love. The yearning was unbearable.
“Thirsty?” Luka said to it. “Are you thirsty?”
Yes, hissed the fragile voices. Down in the hold, the boy-king’s mouth moved and echoed the word.
“Drink this,” said Luka Silvaro, and hurled the amulet out, away from the stern rail, into the fathomless water of the Golfo Naranja.
XXXIV
With a terrible wailing, as if the distant, fragile voices in Luka’s head were now projecting out of each and every dry mouth, the ghouls collapsed. The red light faded away, like a mist curling off at dawn, and the Kymera became a rotting black shell.
The bodies of the fallen ghouls, clutching their cutlasses and pikes, shrivelled away, like the last ash from a fire at cold daybreak. Just a blackened, soaked and worm-riddled ark now, the Kymera began to founder. Its decayed masts fell, its rotten lines snapped and shredded.
“Luka?” Casaudor said, coming to his side.
“The curse is lifted,” Luka wheezed. “The Butcher is dead.”
“You men! Help the captain up here!” Casaudor yelled. Tende stumbled forward, and Saint Bones and Benuto.
“I’m fine!” Luka said, rising. “Get to the Rumour. Cut her free before this bastard sinks away.”
The Reivers ran to the port side, hacking away the lines and grapples, and leaping across the Rumours gunwales.
Luka turned and saw Ymgrawl behind him. The boucaner was holding Sesto’s body in his arms.
“Does he live?” Luka asked.
“Aye,” Ymgrawl nodded.
“Can we save him?”
Ymgrawl closed his eyes and shook his head.
“Take him! Take Sesto here!” Luka yelled. “Get him aboard the Rumour and get Fahd to see to him.” The Arabyan cook was all that passed for a surgeon on the Reivers’ ship.
Men ran forward and took Sesto’s limp body from Ymgrawl.
“Where are thee going?” the boucaner asked.
“To slice the Lightning Tree free,” Luka said. “She does not deserve to be dragged down with this accursed hulk.”
Luka limped away across the pitted, smoking deck. The boards under his feet were wet-black and decaying, and he stepped over mutilated corpses and damp scatters of bones and rusted armour.
Luka yanked a boarding axe out of the deck and started to hack away the grapple lines and stays that bound the Lightning Tree to the Kymera. He ignored the shooting pains in his side and his shoulder.
Water, cold and fast, began to bubble up through the Kymera’s hatches. The deck dipped. Luka cut away the last lines and leapt across onto the Lightning Tree. He looked back and watched as the Kymera sank straight down into the tide, water filling its guts and weighting it, dragging it into the measureless sound.
From far below, there came a scream, choked off, as from a tyrant boy-king, who had woken from eternity to find himself drowning in the deepest pit of the ocean.
The scream died away. The dark water frothed and churned.
Luka limped across the Lightning Tree’s perilously-slanted deck. Smoke streamed through the air, and the heavy rain doused the last of the fires. There were bodies all about, tangled on the deck, cut to ribbons in the terrible fight.
Luka saw Honduro, dead with a cutlass through his heart. A score more at least. The carrion birds were closing in.
He found Tusk.
The old man had taken a pike though his gut, and he’d bled out on the quarter deck.
He was still alive, just.
“Luka?”
“Jeremiah, you old dog. You came back for me.”
“I was concerned. A matter of three times, and I was worried I had not matched them.” Tusk’s voice was tiny and distant.
“You’ve matched them all, and over again. I could ask no more of you.”
“Well, that’s good, then,” Tusk said. “I’ve no bloody more to give.”
Luka bowed his head.
“Did you get him?”
“Who?”
“The Butcher, Luka. Did you get him?”
“We got him, Jeremiah.”
Tusk slid back. He reached into his bloodied coat with his good hand.
“One thing, Luka, for you, now all I have is gone and done. Take it.”
Luka took the blood-wet fold of parchment.
“Do what I could not,” Tusk sighed. “Get out of this business.”
Luka was about to reply, but Tusk’s head rolled sideways. He was gone.
Tucking the parchment into his sash, Luka ran for the side. The Lightning Tree, as if sensing its master’s demise, was shaking and jolting. Planks burst and timbers tore away. In a terrible death-rattle of sundering wood, the Lightning Tree, scourge of the Tilean Sea for so many years, sank away into the flood.
Luka Silvaro dived headlong from the rail.
XXXV
It was a bright hot day, with a free wind, the last they would probably have before the winter. Luka Silvaro limped onto the poop deck of the Rumour, trying not to test the stitches Largo had sewn into his wounds.
Tende was at the wheel, with Benuto at his side. Casaudor smiled as he saw the master approach.
“To Aguilas?” Luka asked.
“In this chop, just a day,” Casaudor said.
Luka nodded. “Stay on, friend. I’ll be below.”
“Sir,” Casaudor said. “What of us now?”
“Trust me,” Luka replied. “I’ll never see the Reivers wrong.”
Luka thumped into his cabin, limped across the deck, and all but fell down in his seat. His wounds ached monstrously. Blood seeped out between Largo’s fine stitchwork.
“Oh, Sesto,” he sighed to himself. “What are we to do? We’ve pulled the stroke your father wanted from us, and set the seas free from the Butcher’s ire. And all for what? A promise of an amnesty? A reward? It seems so hollow now the seas are open. Such a desperate effort, and for what?”
The cabin remained silent.
“I said, for what?” Luka repeated.
“Sorry,” said Sesto, hauling himself up on his cot with a stifled groan. “I didn’t realise you were speaking to me.”
“I wasn’t,” said Luka. “Just thinking aloud.”
“Will you sail us homeward now, to Luccini? To collect your price?” Sesto asked, wincing at the pain from his slowly-healing wound.
“If you want to go home, of course,” Luka said.
Sesto smiled. “Don’t you want your amnesty?”
Luka shrugged. “I wonder, my friend, when all’s said and done, if I’ll not have trouble being respectable.”
Sesto smiled. “I can see how that would be a problem. Well, Silvaro, I’m just along fo
r the ride. Did you have something else in mind?”
Luka tugged the parchment fold from his coat and opened it out on the table. “Jeremiah willed me his cross. I think I might sail to it. I could then reward the Reivers better than any Prince of Luccini,” He looked at Sesto. “What say you?”
“I say my father would probably have you hanged no matter what my word. I say I am bored of my life at court and hunger for high adventure.”
Sesto smiled at Luka Silvaro. “Sail on and find that treasure. Sail on, and take me with you.”
“So tell,” Luka nodded, and began to shout his orders aloft.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dan Abnett is a novelist and award-winning comic book writer. He has written many novels and short stories for the Black Library, including the acclaimed Gaunt’s Ghosts series and the Eisenhorn and Ravenor trilogies, and, with Mike Lee, the Darkblade cycle. He lives and works in Maidstone, Kent.
Dan’s website can be found at wvw.danabnett.com
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