Called to Battle, Volume 1

by Larry Correia

  At first he thought something must have broken loose. It had that sound—men shouting and running about belowdecks, a thump of something heavy heaving into a wall or support. But then the shouts turned to screams. He shouted as well and scanned the fog-shrouded deck for the nearest able body to spell him on the wheel or to at least find out what was going on, but he couldn’t see anyone. He heard one of the lookouts up in the rigging shout down, “What’s happening?” and he called back that he didn’t know.

  Oddly disconnected by the fog, the alarm bell started up. The wheel was wrenched from Corley’s hands and began to spin, and the ship listed toward the looming black rocks beside them. He grabbed it back and had to haul on it for all he was worth to get the ship righted again. Above his hammering heartbeat he heard more shouts and screams, what he thought was the captain’s voice cursing, and then the unmistakable crack of rifle fire—not one of the blunderbusses the crew had on board either, but a real rifle, and the men down there packed into tight quarters.

  Then, as suddenly as the sounds had started, they stopped. It was dead silent on board the Demetrius and all was eerily still. Corley thought about tying down the wheel so he could investigate. He knew that was what he should be doing, but he felt rooted to the spot, his pulse racing and a knot of dread in his stomach. He slung one arm around the wheel, putting his shoulder into it, and held his free hand to his chest to press his palm against the Radiance there. He whispered a fervent prayer to Morrow and to Ascendant Doleth, who was supposed to look out for sailors and all those who plied their trade upon the sea.

  Behind him, he heard footsteps on the deck: running footsteps, then stumbling ones, then two thumps, like a man dropping sacks of provisions. He tried to look over his shoulder, but all he could see was a shadow-shape moving in the fog. “Who’s there?” he called and was surprised to find his voice nearly gone, just a croak. Now there was another sound, one that reminded him of the iron tread of a laborjack on the docks. His mind raced. There wasn’t a ’jack on board, and even if there had been, why would it be crossing the deck toward him now? And where was everyone else? Were they under attack? They had seen no other ships approach.

  His thoughts might have kept running like that, spinning over and over like slipped gears, if the shape hadn’t come out of the fog and into his sight. He saw its eyes first, red glares, hard and hot, like spilled blood turned to crystal. Great horns jutted from its head and shoulders, and its flesh was a green so dark it was nearly black. In one hand it held an axe two men would have struggled to lift and whose blade was clotted with gore. A smell rolled from it, the carnivore stench Duggan had described.

  When Corley was a child, he’d been afraid of grymkin, of monsters under the bed. Living near the ocean, he’d heard stories of Cryx, of the terrible things dwelling on the blighted isles. His grandmother had always come in after his nightmares, soothed his fears, and left a candle burning on his bedside to keep the horrors away. Looking into those red eyes, those vicious teeth, he knew what stood on the deck with him now was the monster he had always feared as a child, and no candle on Caen could keep it at bay.

  To Corley’s surprise, the monster didn’t kill him. It came closer and closer until it was near enough he could smell the hot animal reek of its breath. He stood frozen, one hand gripping the wheel with knuckles gone white, the other clutching his Radiance hard enough that its points drew blood from his hand.

  Though Corley had worked alongside ogrun and even ’jacks in his day, the monster seemed in that moment to be the largest thing he’d ever seen. It towered over him as if he were a child. Bony spurs jutted from it everywhere, and its skin looked hard as stone. It held its great axe at ease, like a sailor holding a belt knife, and it slowly lowered its face to his. He expected it to bite off his head. He realized he was praying rapidly under his breath, almost nonsensically, and he squeezed his eyes shut in preparation for feeling that hot breath close around him, followed by those jagged teeth. Instead, the monster spoke.

  It took him a moment to realize what was happening. It spoke Scharde, and Corley’s was a little rusty, but when it repeated itself, the blade of its axe hovering over his head now, he caught the words, the voice like stones rolling around in a barrel. “You can pilot the ship, priest?”

  Duly, Corley nodded. It was a moment from a nightmare where the hideous creature pauses in the midst of feasting on the entrails of the dreamer’s family to ask, “Do you know the time?”

  However stunned Corley was by the creature’s initial query, he was doubly shocked when it took his nod as sufficient answer and turned away to move down the deck the way it had come. “Then you pilot the ship,” it said over its shoulder. “I will bring your new heading.”

  Corley sagged against the wheel. Dizzy, he realized he hadn’t been breathing, but he didn’t have time to suck in more than one ragged breath before the monster spoke again. It didn’t turn but merely stopped for a moment before it disappeared back into the fog.

  “If you leave the wheel, I’ll gut you and eat you.”

  It wasn’t until the next morning when the fog cleared that Corley learned what had happened. Duggan had been right all along: the monster had been on board ever since they left Highgate, lurking in the lower decks and waiting to attack until they were well out to sea, away from the Cygnaran Navy or anyone else they could signal for help. Far enough out that jumping overboard would be committing slow suicide.

  As the dawn light found Corley barely standing at the helm, his body wracked by shakes from fatigue and adrenaline, the monster returned from the captain’s cabin where it had retired for the night. It gave him a heading and didn’t wait for an answer before walking past him.

  As best he could while manning the wheel, Corley turned to watch the monster make its way across the deck. For all its size, it moved smoothly, not exactly with grace but with terrible confidence. It was clearly a hunting animal, a predator. Watching it, Corley felt cold fingers trace up and down his spine.

  After the monster had disappeared into the hold, there came another series of sounds from below, accompanied by another scream. Corley let go of the wheel to head belowdecks. He walked three paces, then turned and went back. Whatever was happening below, he wouldn’t be able to help. Not yet. The Radiance beneath his shirt felt warm against his skin, and he put a hand against it before taking the wheel up again.

  Shortly the monster returned, pushing forth two of the men to work the ship. It stood and watched until convinced they were working and not likely to try anything, and then it came back to Corley. It stood on the other side of the wheel and looked him up and down, appraising him like a man looking to buy a horse. Quick as a flash, quicker than Corley would have imagined so massive a thing moving, it gripped his chin in its enormous hand. “This ship is mine now,” it said. “Do you understand? You are all my prisoners until I no longer have use for you, and then you become food. Your job is to pilot the ship, priest. As long as you can pilot the ship, I have use for you. When you can pilot no longer, I will put you to a different use.”

  It dropped its hand but didn’t turn away. The bones in Corley’s jaw ached where the giant fingers had held him, and he struggled to stand up straighter, to grip the wheel tighter. He tried to meet the thing’s red-eyed gaze. “I’m not a priest,” he said, his voice very small in his own ears.

  “You carry the symbol of your feeble god, yes? You say prayers?” it asked. When Corley nodded numbly, it said, “That’s priest enough for me.”

  The rest of the story, Corley picked up in bits and pieces from the men who were shuffled out to work. When the monster wasn’t watching, they moved near Corley and whispered a snippet of what had happened, and gradually he was able to piece it together. How, under the cover of the fog, the monster had appeared from out of nowhere. How most of the men had been taken by surprise, requiring little violence to defeat them, but the soldiers had tried to resist. They were well-trained long gunners and rangers, and their rifles were deadly at
a hundred yards, but they’d been no match for the monster. It had thrown them into chaos and forced them into tight spaces where their guns were useless. Those few who had managed to hit it had seen their bullets glance off or pass through its body without even slowing it down. “He killed them,” Bray said, his voice shaking. “Then he ate some and put the rest in the larder for later, as if he were storing smoked pork.”

  Bray called it “he,” though Corley couldn’t bring himself to think of it in such terms. To him it was a monster, not a person.

  It had killed the captain as well, though he hadn’t resisted once the soldiers were dead, had begged for his life, and had offered the monster the ship. But he’d died anyway, his throat torn open by the monster’s claws. Then it had rounded up the other men except for those it let out to work the ship, and it had put them in one of the holds.

  The first time it had returned, that morning when Corley had heard the scream, the men had tried to overpower it and force open the door of the hold. But the monster had simply slammed the door shut, its weight against that of more than eight men. “Like it was nothing to ’im,” Gilroy told Corley. “Lucas’ hand was caught in the door when it shut, and we could hear the bones in it being crushed. We tried to back off, to let him out, but that thing put his back into it and the door shut and Lucas’ hand was gone.” Then the monster had opened the door and stared down the cowering men inside. Lucas had already passed out, his skin turning a bloodless grey. The monster picked him up by his ruined arm and threw him into the larder with the bodies.

  On the second night, the monster came and watched Corley steering once again. It said nothing, just stood openly appraising him. Corley worked up his courage, put every ounce of steel he could muster into his spine, gripped the Radiance under his shirt, and cleared his throat. “I’ll need rest and food if I’m going to steer the ship much longer.”

  The monster eyed him, and he thought he detected the hint of a smile on its misshapen face. “And if you don’t get them?”

  “Then I’ll stand here at this wheel until I can’t anymore, but I’ll not be steering as well as I could, and in these waters that might well end with this ship on the rocks and all of us in the sea.”

  Now the creature did smile, an expression more unsettling than its fierce glowering had been. “You’ll get two hours, priest,” it said. “Pick the man to spell you, and make sure he’s good. But not too good or I might not need you any longer.”

  It was one of the newer men—Hitchens, who had come aboard the Demetrius from another ship—who made the first attempt. Hitchens wasn’t well liked among the crew. He had a sour disposition and seemed to brandish the nasty scar that covered most of one side of his face. Word had it he’d once been a prizefighter. He was a hard worker, though, and nobody ever fought him more than once.

  He didn’t discuss his plan with any of the others. Didn’t give any indication he had a plan at all. Maybe if he had, his luck would have been better.

  As it was, when it was his turn on deck, he abandoned his duty to crawl into a spot above the captain’s cabin and wait for the monster to emerge. When Corley and Duggan, the other sailor who had come out, saw what was happening, they exchanged a look but didn’t say anything, because what was there to say?

  When the captain’s door opened and the monster stepped out, Hitchens pounced. Somewhere he’d gotten hold of a cutlass, and he swept it at the monster’s head. Corley saw the attack from where he stood at the wheel. It was a skilled attack. Hitchens had a fighter’s instincts, and he was as quick as a jungle cat, but the monster was something else altogether. Even as Hitchens sprang, it turned and raised one of its huge hands. Hitchens’ blade sliced through two of its fingers and bit into a third, and then the monster closed what was left of its fist around the blade and Hitchens’ hand and wrist along with it. Dark blood pooled on the deck as the monster squeezed, and Hitchens screamed.

  The huge axe the thing carried was still clenched in its other fist, and Corley expected it to split Hitchens in two with a flick of its wrist. Instead, it held him up by the arm, buried the head of its axe in the wood of the deck, and then broke the arm it was holding. It did this calmly, casually, as easily as if it were a child plucking petals off a flower. After that arm, it snapped the other, and then both Hitchens’ legs at the knees. It then dropped him unceremoniously.

  Hitchens crumpled to the deck like a sack of broken sticks, whimpering, his mouth working as if to continue screaming but with only ragged breath coming now, and the monster looked around. Duggan stared, his arm wound in a length of rope now dangling untended at his feet. Corley stood gripping the wheel, fighting the lurching nausea in his stomach. Once the monster was sure both of them were watching, it lifted Hitchens by one of his legs, opened its mouth wide, and began to eat.

  Now Corley was sick. He stumbled to the side and heaved, though his stomach had little enough in it to vomit and he ended up spitting mostly bile into the ocean. He could hear Hitchens’ wheezing breath and his choked attempts at screams before the man finally lost consciousness, and then all Corley could hear was the wet smack of the monster’s jaws. When he turned back, the monster was still eating and Duggan was still watching, frozen to the spot, the color drained from his face so it seemed made of wax. But it wasn’t Duggan that mesmerized Corley, and it wasn’t even the monster’s working jaws as it devoured Hitchens—it was the monster’s hand. Its two severed fingers lay in a pool of blood on the deck. As Corley watched, the wounds where they had been moments before closed up and scabbed over. Before the monster had eaten its fill, the fingers had begun to grow back.

  Corley had known men who’d worked alongside normal, natural trollkin, and he’d heard a little about the creatures. He knew they could survive wounds that would fell a man, that they could heal seemingly mortal injuries with enough food and time. But this was different, far beyond anything in even the wildest tales.

  When the monster was finished, it threw what was left of Hitchens overboard like a man tossing away an apple core, gathered up its axe, picked up Duggan as though he weighed nothing—though he was easily the biggest man on board—and carried him down to the hold. Duggan later told Corley that there it opened the door, pushed him inside, pulled another man out by the ankle, and decapitated him in one stroke before he could even plead for his life. “For every one of you who tries something, I kill two,” it said before dragging the newest body into the larder.

  True to its word, the monster gave Corley a couple of hours each day to snatch some food from the larder—which he had to do around the decaying and half-eaten bodies of his fellow crewmen—and catch what sleep he could. When the two hours were up, the monster itself would wake him with a poke from its great axe, and he would stumble back up onto the deck to resume the wheel.

  It didn’t take him long to lose all track of time, to measure its passage not by the rising and setting of the sun but by the times when the monster told him to sleep and when it told him to rise. He felt feverish, but when it was his shift he gripped the wheel and would not allow himself to slip. He would not allow his eyes to close; he even tried not to blink. He said prayers under his breath to Morrow and to Ascendant Doleth. The Radiance he wore felt warm against his chest, like sunlight breaking through clouds, and it gave him strength. He swore to himself, on the grave of his grandmother, that he would make it through this. That he would survive. That he would overcome.

  He wasn’t sure how much time they had before they reached their destination, but he knew it couldn’t be long. The isles of Cryx were not far, not nearly as far as the men of the mainland would have liked, and they had been at sea for days now. Already the black rocks around them grew more plentiful, the jungle-choked islets they sailed by grew larger, their aspects more terrifying. Soon, he knew, he would see the shores of Cryx itself rising on the horizon like some great behemoth of the deep. He had never seen the Cryxian islands, had only heard tales of them, but he imagined them as looking as evil, as foreboding,
as he knew them to be. He imagined black rocks as sharp as the teeth of the monster that now captained his ship, great cliffs upon which ships would dash themselves to pieces, cliffs topped with jungles as dark and hungry as any beast.

  Cryx was the end of their journey, Corley knew without being told, but it would only be the beginning of their torment. He’d never seen one of the undead monstrosities of the Cryxian armies up close, but he’d seen bodies left behind in the aftermath of the battle at Highgate and other places, and he’d heard plenty of sailor’s stories about revenant pirates and other, even more hideous things. He knew what awaited them on the black shores was worse than death, and he prayed that with Morrow’s aid he would find some way around it. Or, if he could not, that he would find the strength to drive the ship against the rocks at the last moment rather than surrender himself and his remaining crewmates to a living damnation.

  So intent was he upon these thoughts that when he heard a voice from the rigging in the dark of the night, his first thought was it was the voice of Morrow answering his prayers. Perhaps he had finally suffered enough. He turned his face up but saw only darkness above him, outside the reach of the lanterns lighting the deck. The voice hissed, “Don’t look around, idiot! Just keep facing front and listen.”

  “Who’s there?” Corley asked, his own voice almost a whisper. He wasn’t sure it would be loud enough to carry to the speaker. He wasn’t even sure there really was a speaker and not just his fever playing tricks on him.

  “The name’s Corporal Renny Atbridge, at your service,” the speaker said, and now he could tell it was a woman’s voice. Hardly more than a girl’s, really, and he remembered then a young woman among the soldiers, her red hair pulled back into a ponytail, a constellation of freckles across her cheeks. “Listen close, because I can’t talk long. I was in the hold seeing to the supplies when he took the ship. By the time I got back up where the action was, it was over, and I knew better than to spring my hand then. Or maybe I was too scared. It doesn’t matter now. What matters is, I’ve been hiding on board ever since, but now we’re almost to Cryx—we’ve got to be—and so the time for hiding is past. We’ve got to stop him here and now.”