by Tom Stacey
“That’s how they caught us so quickly,” said a Sturmon accent and Callistan noticed the Captain at his shoulder, bloodied and dishevelled, but still brightly coloured. “I should have guessed she was a galley. You can usually smell the stench from the rowing decks. Who would use oars in such waters?”
Callistan held the lantern high. Sure enough, several slaves closer to the hull lay dead, crushed by the swing of the oars as the raging sea fought back.
The Captain elbowed his way through the press and took the lantern from Callistan’s hand. He knelt by the side of the nearest prisoner. “Your ship, man. Tell me her name.”
The prisoner looked up and his eyes, rimmed with purple bruises, rolled into the back of his head. His lips were dry and cracked, so the Captain called for water and asked again. This time the man managed a reply. “The Fallow…” he said and gulped greedily from the waterskin.
“The Fallow Deer, I know her well. She is part of Illis’ flag fleet. She was based at Kressel, no?” The prisoner nodded. “Tell me of your captain.”
“Dead,” the man croaked. “They’re all dead.” His eyes grew wide and he swayed in his seat. “They came…over the sides. Took us without…a fight.”
“And Illis,” Beccorban stepped forward. “Was the Empron with the fleet?”
The man nodded. “Most of the fleet got away, but the rest…” he trailed off and began to cry. Several of the men looked away.
“And the city?” Beccorban prompted him. “How did they breach the Sea Walls so quickly?”
The prisoner sniffed and looked at him in confusion. “They breached the Sea Walls?”
“You were there, man. You tell us,” said Callistan.
The prisoner shook his head. “No, we got away.”
“You abandoned the city—” Beccorban began but Callistan spoke over him.
“You said they came over the sides. If you weren’t in harbour, why had you stopped?”
The man took another drink. “Sabotage. Rudder cable was cut.”
Callistan felt cold sweat bead on his neck. “Who cut it?”
“The captain.”
“You should have brought a lantern,” mocked Barde. “He could be anywhere, waiting for you to shuffle past in the dark.”
“Go away!” hissed Loster aloud.
“You don’t want that, Los. You need me. You always will.”
Loster shook his head and carried on. Barde was right, it was pitch dark down here, but Loster was too afraid of being seen. It meant that he had no idea of where he was going. If he could only catch a glimpse of the sailor…
There was a great crash like the world ending and the ship jumped violently sideways. Loster was thrown into a bulkhead and he fell to the floor with a grunt. Something metal clattered to the deck nearby and Loster heard a curse and frantic movement. He froze. There! Ahead of him, a dim orange glow fluttered briefly. He’s re-lighting his lantern! he thought, unsure of whether that revelation belonged to him or his deceased brother. All the lanterns on a ship were shielded to prevent the light spilling where it should not. The sailor must have opened the gate to reignite the flame.
Loster climbed slowly to his feet. The orange glow had gone now but he heard a metallic clack and then the squeal of a hinge. He walked forward, feeling out with his hands until they touched rough wood. The corridor he was following went right for a few paces until stretching on again down the length of the ship. He felt his way to the corner and peered around, catching the faintest hint of the lantern ahead as the sailor disappeared into more darkness. He rounded the corner and slid his feet out so that they touched the wooden bulkheads on either side. It was slower but it kept him upright, allowing him to ride the swells. If he fell, he would alert his target and then he would never find him.
“What are you going to do when you catch him?” sneered Barde. Loster tried to ignore him but Barde would not be stilled. “You haven’t even got a weapon — not that you’d know what to do with it. Hammer’s son, indeed. Go on, make the priest proud!”
Loster made his way along the corridor and stepped through the low doorway where the sailor had disappeared. He was immediately struck by the smell of horse: grass, dust, dung. He was in the hold. A snort made him turn his head. Though it was still dark, his eyes had adjusted just enough to make out the silhouette of a long face. Crucio!
He reached out to stroke the beast’s muzzle but Crucio drew his head back and snapped at Loster’s fingers. Loster swore softly and tried to focus on Crucio. The horse was terrified of something. He was pawing the floor and his eyes were wide and white. Crucio whickered and snorted again and then something nearby hissed like a snake. Loster felt his skin explode into goosebumps. He dropped low into a crouch and held his breath. Crucio too had fallen silent, though Loster could hear him moving about restlessly in his pen. The hiss came again, further away this time. A cat? he thought. No, warhorses don’t fear cats.
“Turn back,” said Barde. “This is man’s work and you haven’t the stomach for it.” Loster clenched his teeth. The nape of his neck was wet with fear-sweat; he could feel it dripping down his back.
He stood and his legs threatened to give way underneath him but he pushed on, whispering one last assurance in Crucio’s direction. There was a dim light in the hold, courtesy of the crack between the two great doors in the ceiling. Loster could make out barrels and wooden boxes, coils of rope and sacks of foodstuff, all packed neatly in piles as high as two men. There was a wending path through the middle and it would carry him straight through that curtain of light. Somebody above shouted as metal rang against metal, and Loster felt a stab of fear in his gut at the thought of losing. If Beccorban was killed, it would not be too long before those tall grey knights made their way down here into the shadows. If that happened then this chase would all be for nothing. It was like being back under the Widowpeak and he felt like he was going to vomit.
Something heavy fell across the doors above and the light was cut into two thin columns. Loster quickly stepped through, sticking to the shadowy patch in the middle. Ahead was another low doorway. There was no sign of the lantern light ahead. The door in front of him was a circle of wood with a high lintel that he had to bend almost double to step over. Once inside, he found himself in a small compartment with yet another ladder leading down into soupy darkness. “Down, down, down you go, little Loster. Nothing but rats and the black down there.”
Quickly he climbed below and gasped as he discovered that the last few rungs were in cold seawater. He had reached the bilges. There was nothing now between him and the Scoldsee except a few planks of swollen wood and a layer of pitch. Something fizzed behind his eyes but he knew he could not go back now. He shivered and his breath tried to escape him as he stepped down into the water. It reached up to his thighs and lapped with sharp knives at his genitals. Carefully he waded forward, trying to be as quiet as possible. He imagined that he was in the lair of some great spider and any ripple would alert it to his presence. The wood beneath his feet was slimy with something and he nearly slipped more than once.
Ahead was another circular door but this one was wreathed in a halo of orange light. Whoever he had been following, whatever had hissed at him in the darkness of the hold was behind that door. The hull beneath him began to curve inwards and upwards as he neared the stern. This was it. A dead end.
“Nowhere to run.”
As he approached, he could see that the door was partly open. A sawing sound was thrumming through the open gap. Loster placed one hand on the door and eased it fully open. There was the sailor, bent over one of the huge rudder cables, a rope as thick as a grown man’s waist. He had read somewhere that the orphans of Kressel twisted the great ropes from hundreds of individual strands of hemp. Now the sailor was doing his best to cut through their hard work, hacking and slicing with a serrated blade.
“Go on. Say something…”
“Stop,” he said aloud and the sailor tensed as if struck. “Why aren’t you on deck?�
�� He knew the question was absurd in the circumstances but he needed to say something if only to boost his confidence. In an echoey room in his mind he could hear Barde laughing.
The sailor stood and his arms hung loosely by his side. He was powerfully built, like some ape from the Heatlands. He turned to stare at Loster and his eyes were bright with lantern-lit madness.
“Back away, Loster,” said a voice behind him. He twisted his head to see Riella, knife drawn, one hand still gripping the ladder. Loster stepped backwards and the sailor followed, mouth open. The sailor hissed again and Loster cried out with fear.
His heel caught on something and he fell backwards. He crashed down into the icy bilge water and it poured into his open mouth. He pushed himself up above the surface and spat it out. Something rushed past him and he blinked to clear his vision.
Riella ran forward, knife raised, but the sailor blocked her attack with his forearm and rammed the heel of his hand into her breastbone. She flew backwards and landed with a splash next to Loster, dropping her blade into the murky liquid. She sat up, spluttering, but the sailor was on her straight away. He struck her with the back of his hand and she fell under the water once again.
Loster scrambled backwards and tried to stand. His hand curled around something hard and cold and he realised it was Esha, Riella’s knife.
“Use it! Use it! Use it!” Barde was screaming.
Loster staggered to his feet and tried to make out what was going on in the darkness. Riella and the sailor were no more than two shadows writhing around each other. He could not be sure which was which but he knew he had to act. There was another splash and a gasp of someone fighting for air and then one more splash. He’s drowning her!
He reached out with one hand and felt coarse cloth and the bunched muscle beneath. He twisted his hand into the fabric and then drove the blade into the space beneath. There was another hiss, this time of pain, and a flailing arm smashed into his face. He spun away to come up hard against the ladder, just as a huge shape plunged into the water next to him, joined quickly by another, smaller shape.
“Loster?” came Beccorban’s voice and Loster breathed out with relief. A strong hand gripped him by the arm and pulled him up. A lantern was shone into his face. He blinked with the pain and then Callistan swung the lantern out in an arc to reveal the scene. Riella sat up to her waist in the water, the corpse of the strange, hissing sailor across her lap. Esha jutted from his back.
Loster sighed and then dropped to his knees with a splash. He vomited in a hot rush that scorched his tongue.
“Pathetic,” said Barde. “You should have let it kill you.”
XXV
The last of the human prisoners died before nightfall, succumbing to blood loss and shock and whatever other suffering had been visited upon him. They burned the ship. The men of the Lussido told themselves it was out of respect but Riella knew that they also felt cleansed by it. She did too. She hadn’t seen the benches and the chains and the cruel iron spikes, but she had seen the men — what was left of them — as they were carried from the bowels of the enemy ship and laid out on the bloodied deck to die.
The burning ship would act as a beacon, so the Captain ordered them to set sail and then entrusted a lone bowman to start the blaze from afar. The smoke billowed out to join the fog which had been steadily thickening since midday. It felt like a cloak that the Blue God had placed over them to aid their escape. They saw no more sign of pursuit.
Riella tried to spend as much time as possible on deck. She couldn’t be confined in her tiny cabin, not without going mad. She knew she should be looking after Mirril but the girl seemed happy to irritate Droswain by sleeping on his bed, and he was just awkward enough around womenfolk to be utterly helpless. Riella’s body was still bruised and her chest ached with every breath — the legacy of the traitor’s weight kneeling on her breastbone. No one really seemed to know why he had tried to cut the rudder. That he was an agent of the enemy was clear but his motive was not, although Riella suspected Beccorban knew more than he was telling. Callistan had carried the misguided sailor’s body on to the deck of the enemy ship, making sure it would be consumed by the funeral flames that took the others. Nobody had questioned him. It was as though they were ashamed at their shipmate’s betrayal and would sooner his memory be buried in the Scoldsee. Since then, the blond horseman had been withdrawn, even more so than usual, and often disappeared below decks to tend to Crucio. She grimaced. Maybe Beccorban was right. He did spend an awful lot of time with that horse. She laughed and then caught herself as Loster eased past with his new entourage.
She rubbed her chest and nodded politely at him and he flashed her a nervous smile before marching on to wherever Droswain was taking him. To listen to the priest was to think that Loster had single-handedly saved them all. True, he had helped her — had rescued her, in fact — but she felt uncomfortable about the whole thing. He was still a scared little boy to her, no matter what Beccorban or the priest said. She sighed. Maybe she was being too harsh. You should show some gratitude, said a voice in her head. And how would she do that? She had only one thing that men wanted and those days were behind her.
Riella pushed herself up off the rail and brushed down her leggings. She touched something hard, and felt within a fold in her tunic. It was the little wooden horse that Callistan had dropped on the field by the farmhouse. She held it up to the light. It had been crudely but lovingly carved, the fine details of the tail and eyes engraved with care and then painted by a fine brush. She turned it over in her hand. It felt warm, and it made her feel odd. The tips of her fingers burned as she touched it. This horse was not hers. It belonged to Callistan, the strange man that had saved her life. One side of its face had been badly damaged, the paint scraped away and the soft wood rubbed smooth. “You look as beaten up as your owner,” she whispered to the little wooden horse and immediately felt foolish. It was a mystery to her why she had kept it so long but she told herself that there had not been much time to return it to its rightful owner. Yes, that was it. She looked around and tucked the toy back into her pocket. There was nothing for her to do up here. She went to go and find Callistan.
The smell of horse was comforting but it was more than that, he knew. Crucio was a bridge between his two worlds, the familiarity of his past and a companion for his future. The big warhorse whickered softly as Callistan scratched behind his ears and Callistan smiled. Good horse. He took a swig from the black bottle he held and winced as the raw liquid burned his throat. He had not had to steal it this time. One of the men had offered it to him freely and he had taken it with a nod of thanks. These were good men. They had fought hard and yet it could have ended so differently. It had been brave of the boy to tackle the slipskin by himself. Stupid but brave. In a way the boy reminded him of Runt, young and eager. He had not had time to truly get to know Runt but he had many opinions on Loster, and he had never considered courage to be one of the boy’s virtues. At least not until now. Apparently many of the crew felt the same way. Whereas before the young acolyte was ignored, now he was patted on the back or smiled at whenever he walked by. He deserved as much.
Callistan felt the need to consider the slipskin creep back into his mind, so he took another swig from the bottle, seeking to distract himself with the pointy end of sensation. He did not want to think about slipskins any more than he had to but the events at the farmhouse were still an open wound in his mind. There were more of them out there and he would not suffer any of them to live. They were a threat, more sinister and deadly than a thousand tall knights. He had to get back to Temple, to erase the abomination that wore his features, to claim revenge for his family and the theft of his life. He took another swig.
A flash of memory darted across his eyes and he saw again the thing masquerading as his son, a small boy tumbling in the grass. “Please, Papa! Let me go,” said a childish voice and he imagined that he could feel the rain beating down on him, for his face was wet.
“I’m
sorry, I can come back.”
Callistan spun away from Riella’s apology and cuffed angrily at his face. He coughed and tried to prop his voice up with steel. “What do you want?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I just wondered how you were. We haven’t seen much of you since the battle.”
“I am fine,” he said more harshly than he meant to. “I just prefer my own company.”
She fell silent but he could hear the sound of her breathing and it was deafening. “I found this,” she said at last, holding something up. It was dark in the hold but there was a lantern nearby and he unhooked it and held it up. She was holding the small wooden horse that belonged to Farilion, his son. He had thought it lost.
Gently he took it from her. “Thank you, Riella.” She looked up at him, and the lantern light caught the planes of her face, the high cheekbones and almond shaped eyes that promised sensuality and wisdom both. It was as though he was seeing her for the first time and he realised then that he wanted her. He blinked and suddenly she was Raiya, her long red hair glinting in the light, and then changing, morphing into a mass of wormlike tendrils, as pale and milky as exposed cartilage. His face grew grim and he hung the lantern back on the wall, marching from the hold without looking back.
“They are called Echoes.” Droswain waved a hand vaguely in the air and then continued. “I suppose that is not their real name — as we know, an echo is something that has been left behind. It is, however, the only reference I could find a source for, so I have little idea what else to call them. They are an elder race who walked this world when mankind was in its youth, and they are supposed to be long gone. The most recent mention of them is from a scroll dated during the reign of Overmarch Quenn of Dalvoss. For those of you who don’t know your history, that’s nearly twelve hundred years ago, before Veria was even a thought.”
