“We can’t win,” Corley said quietly. “Have you seen it?”
“We can,” Renny replied, the iron in her voice obviously put there with great effort and not very convincing. “We have to, because what’s waiting for us when we get where we’re going is worse by a league than anything he’ll do to us.”
Hearing her echo the thoughts that had been rolling through his mind actually comforted Corley. Maybe Morrow was guiding things after all. And wasn’t this how Morrow was more likely to work, through the intervention of his fellow man? “You have a plan?” he asked her, his own voice taking on strength.
“I do,” she said, “but it’s going to take all of us to pull it off.”
Corley looked up again sharply into the dark, even though he’d been told not to. He thought he saw her there, huddled in the rigging, small, like a child. He wanted to scrutinize her to see if she was telling the truth, if she really believed what she was saying, but he knew it didn’t matter. He remembered the stories he’d heard as a child about the Molgur and the Orgoth, about how monsters came in the night and no man could stop them but how ultimately men banded together, built walls, and kindled fires to drive back the darkness. One man alone couldn’t stop a monster like the one now commanding their ship, but the lesson was that together men could do more than endure—they could overcome. Wasn’t that right?
He turned his eyes back to the front and renewed his grip on the wheel. His head felt clearer than it had since the moment the monster had first emerged from the fog. “Tell me what I need to do,” he said, and he was speaking as much to Morrow as to Renny Atbridge.
Renny’s plan was simple enough, but putting it into practice proved more difficult. The men were only let out a few at once, and it took time to disseminate the information among them. Worse, Renny couldn’t be directly involved in the action. She’d kept her rifle, and she needed to be at a vantage to shoot when the time came. This meant Corley had to be the one to organize the plan, set it in motion. There was no one else.
Corley wasn’t a fighter. He never had been. He’d trained for boarding actions and the like, but he’d never had to test his skills. He’d never been in combat of any kind, not even a proper fistfight, and the one time his compatriots had started a bar brawl, the first blow that landed had knocked him out cold. Many of the men he sailed with had taken to the sea because they were too rough for the land. A settled life in towns and cities, it couldn’t hold them, wouldn’t tolerate them. They were hard men, and fighting came naturally to them. What came naturally to Corley was piloting a ship. He’d become a sailor not because there was no life for him on land but because he only really came alive himself when he was on board a ship. With the sea beneath him and the wind in the sails, the ship became a part of him, and he became a part of it. He’d succeeded on board in spite of his passive nature precisely because he was such a good pilot, and it was probably these two factors that made the monster spare him now, let him stay loose while the others were penned. He was a better helmsman than anyone else on the ship, and the creature would never see him as a threat.
All the better, then. He would show the monster. Show it what men were capable of when they banded together. When they believed in one another and in a higher power. He could overcome his own fear, his own reticence about bloodshed, and in so doing, they could all overcome the beast holding them prisoner.
When the time came to spring the plan, all Corley had to do was distract the monster while the two men on deck—Gilroy and Bray, men who had served on board the Demetrius longer than he had, men he knew well—released the other prisoners. One man couldn’t do it; the monster had barricaded the door with crates of cannonballs, something even the strongest man on board couldn’t move. Two men together could, though, at least enough to get the door open a crack, assuming Corley could keep the beast’s attention long enough. Once the men were out and armed with whatever weapons they could find, they would come up on deck en masse. Between them and Renny’s sharpshooting, they hoped it would be enough. Not to kill the creature—none of them really thought they could manage that, not anymore—but to knock it off balance, drive it over the side of the ship and into the churning sea.
When the hour was finally at hand and the signals were given, Corley had the irrational fear he wouldn’t be able to find his voice. His stomach seemed to shrivel inside him, and he felt as if he’d drunk a gallon of cold water. Still, after false starts when his voice stuttered and died on his lips, he was finally able to get the monster’s attention. He had thought again and again of what to do. He had thought of begging for water, of pretending to faint. He had thought of a million ploys, but when the time came, he acted on none of them. Instead, when the monster was standing before him and Corley knew Gilroy and Bray were creeping through their mission, he surprised himself by asking the towering beast a question.
“You call me priest,” he said. “Do you have a god?”
The look in the monster’s glaring eye said it was surprised as well, and it seemed to consider the subject a moment before it replied. “I follow in the shadow of the Dragonfather. He doesn’t need my worship. He is strong without my prayers, and I follow him because he is strong.”
“I don’t pray to Morrow to make him strong,” Corley replied, surprising himself with his own nerve.
“No,” the monster replied, “you pray because you are weak. You pray to your god to ask for what you want. To spare you from hardships. I expect nothing from my god. My hardships are my own. I suffer them gladly, and they make me strong. The Dragonfather is stronger yet, and so he deserves my devotion. That is all.”
Corley wasn’t sure what to say. It hadn’t been the answer he was expecting, and he found his concepts of the creature starting to change in ways that discomfited him. It came as a relief when the monster’s eyes suddenly shifted away from him, and then he heard footsteps on the deck.
Gilroy and Bray had done their job well. The remaining men came pouring up onto the deck armed with a variety of belaying pins, gaffs, and whatever other weapons they could find. Though there was only a handful of them, to Corley they were an army. The monster looked back at him with narrowed eyes, then smiled as it turned to face the onrush of men.
The net seemed to appear from nowhere. The men must have taken one of the nets used to lash down barrels, and now they cast it forth like a living thing eager to be upon the monster. But the monster was faster, and though the net wrapped around it and with weighted edges bore it down to the deck, the brute caught hold of the snare with a free hand and held it up to avoid becoming entangled completely. With a terrible bellow, like a foghorn mere inches away, the beast swept its arm out, tangling the net around its forearm and lifting the weights from the deck. These it swung like a chain at the men who scattered before its onslaught. Without pause, the monster followed the net with its axe, sliding its grip down the long handle and sweeping the weapon out in a great arc. Corley saw the axe bite clear through Bray’s left arm and nearly chop him in half. Bray fell to the deck, spitting blood and leaking guts.
In a moment, the makeshift battlefield was transformed. What had initially appeared to be a glorious charge became a terrified rout as the men slipped in the blood of their comrades in their efforts to flee. Then a crack, loud and sudden, shocking even to Corley who had known it was coming, came from the rigging above their heads. It struck the monster in the neck, and the bullet emerged from the other side to dig a divot into the wood of the deck. But the creature didn’t turn to trace the bullet, didn’t even slow down. With two more steps, it was upon the men. It turned their own weapon against them by hurling the net to trip them up and impede their retreat. Its axe swung out in hungry crescents, and blood poured onto the deck like wine from a tipped cask.
Corley’s knuckles turned white on the wheel, and he looked away, the bile rising in his throat. From above there came another crack, and then another. A bullet caught the monster in the shoulder and then one in the back. Corley imagined
Renny working her rifle, the rotating chambers spinning to empty their deadly cargo. He imagined a bead of sweat running down from her temple as she tried to kill the beast fast enough to save at least some of the men.
But it was in vain. The last axe blow fell, the last man lay in a twitching pile on the deck, and the monster turned its red-eyed gaze, still not skyward but back to Corley. Even from this distance, he felt the hate in its eyes, felt it pin him to the deck like an insect to a board. His guts turned to ice, his knees buckled, and only his grip on the wheel kept him from falling.
Another crack, another roar of unnatural thunder rolled across the deck and out to the horizon. It was almost as if Corley could see the bullet descend, see it punch into the monster’s face just below its left eye, see it come out its cheek on the other side. Surely that would kill it. Surely no creature could survive such a repeated onslaught.
But the monster didn’t fall. It didn’t even stagger. It looked up, the ragged hole in its face leaking blood to stain its teeth as red as its eyes, and then it lashed out with its axe to sever a rope. The sail suddenly moved, the boom swinging, and Renny Atbridge fell from the rigging where she’d been positioned. She crashed down with a crack almost as loud as the report of her rifle, and her weapon slid away from her across the deck. Squaring its shoulders, the monster advanced on her.
Corley saw all this, saw Renny lying there, the air knocked out of her, her bones likely broken, and he knew she was their only hope. His only hope. Without her, he had nothing left. He knew without her he wouldn’t survive this, and he knew the monster was going to get to her before she could recover. Before she had a chance to finish what she’d started, if she even could.
He did the only thing he could think of: he spun the wheel as hard as he could. The ship listed to port, tipping dangerously, and everything on board slid that way, including several loose barrels that careened across the deck and crashed into the monster. Renny’s rifle slid up against the railing of the ship.
The monster cast the barrels aside, splintering one with a sweep of its axe, but by then Renny was up and moving. She held one hand to her side, and Corley saw blood there, so he knew she had broken ribs, if not a worse injury. He hoped she could still fire. Sure enough, she was at her rifle now, hoisting it to her shoulder though he could see the grimace of pain on her face even from this distance. The monster was too far away to close on her before she got at least one shot off, and at this range, there was no way she could fail to hit. She would kill it, and somehow she and Corley would limp the ship back to Cygnar. Maybe things would never be completely okay again, would never go back to the way they’d been before, but Corley truly believed they could overcome this, that the others would not have suffered and died completely in vain.
Renny sighted along the barrel, but the monster drew its arm back like a child getting ready to skip a stone and hurled its great axe in a swooping arc. The blade caught Renny just below the sternum, lifted her up off the deck, and propelled her over the edge of the ship into the churning waters. Her rifle discharged harmlessly into the air as she fell.
The flame of hope inside Corley died like a candle being snuffed. Suddenly all the weariness and horror of the last few days, all the hunger and the fatigue, swept down upon him in a wave. His hands fell from the wheel, which spun heedless of him now, and he made no effort to check it. He sank to the deck, his spirit ruined, his body as hollow as everything he had fled.
If he could have thought about it at that moment, he would have said he was beyond fear. He would have said there could be nothing worse than what he had already seen and no true fear left in him. But when the monster turned, the gaping wounds in its face and neck still weeping blood, and started back across the deck toward him, he found there was still fear in him after all, still a deeper reservoir of it than he would have ever imagined, and now it came welling up from inside him, spilling out, overflowing. He clutched desperately under his shirt until his hand found the Radiance he wore, and he pulled it out and held it tightly. He had nothing else left, no faith in either men or their tools. He was a primitive being again, huddled near the campfire, and he had only his faith in the light to keep the monsters of the dark at bay.
He saw the monster coming for him across the deck, and he knew he was seeing the full predator. This was what would overcome in the end, not Morrow and not men. Not kindness or goodness, but the thing that would devour everything else and grow stronger by so doing.
It was right on top of him now, its hot breath in his face. He squeezed his eyes shut and held the Radiance, waiting for the killing blow. Instead, the monster did something much worse. It laughed, and then it closed its own gnarled fist around the Radiance and snatched it from Corley’s hand.
“You think this will protect you? Save it for when nightmares wake you in the dead of night. It is nothing against me.”
“You killed everyone,” Corley whispered, eyes wide, face ashen. “You ate them. What are you?”
“I am General Gerlak Slaughterborn,” the monster replied. “And we all survive by devouring what we’ve conquered. Let that thought comfort you, little priest.”
The Scharde Isles, Trineus 14th, 606 AR
Gerlak Slaughterborn stood on a spur of black rock, on a beach not unlike the one where he’d slain a warcaster all those years ago, watching the Demetrius depart toward the horizon. The little priest had expected Gerlak to kill him. And that had been his intent, right up to the final moment. Just as he was raising his axe to deliver the mortal blow, he had looked into the man’s eyes and had seen something there had changed. Something inside the man had been rent asunder to fall away. Now there was a hollow void where faith had once been, and Gerlak had surprised himself with his reaction to it.
He had pressed the bent and broken symbol of the human’s god back into his quivering hand, closed his fingers around it. “Your god isn’t here, little priest,” he had said. “The only one here is me.”
They were practically upon the shores of Cryx by then, and he had little need left for a helmsman, but he let the human live, and when their final destination was in sight he had given the empty man his final instructions.
“This is as far as we go,” Gerlak had said. “But I still have use for you. Take the ship back to where you came from. No ship of Cryx will harry you. When you arrive, tell this story. Let every man you meet know what happened here. Tell them my name. Tell them what Gerlak Slaughterborn has done. Tell them so that mothers frighten their children with my name. Tell them so that travellers repeat it in taverns in hushed voices. I want it on the lips of those I slay when I return. Do you understand?”
The man had nodded weakly, but Gerlak looked into his eyes and saw comprehension there. And now, standing on the beach and watching the ship head back toward Cygnar, Gerlak Slaughterborn felt a shadow cold against his back, felt the black spread of wings eclipsing the sun. He smiled at the sight of his own shadow spreading across the waves, growing larger and larger.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Orrin Grey is a writer, editor, and monster expert who was born on the night before Halloween. He’s the author of Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings and the co-editor (with Silvia Moreno-Garcia) of Fungi, an anthology of weird fungus-themed stories. He plays Gatormen whenever he can, and his website is at orringrey.com.
GLOSSARY
arcane turbine: A highly efficient and advanced coal-fueled generator that transforms energy produced by a steam engine into arcane energy. Arcane turbines used in warcaster armor are designed to tap into transform a warcaster’s latent magical power into a protective field.
arcanist: A trained arcane practitioner who manifests magic through force of will and the precise use of arcane formulae.
Archcourt Cathedral: The seat of the primarch and the Exordeum, who comprise the senior governing body of the Church of Morrow. Located in the Sancteum within Caspia.
ascendants: Saint-like individuals who have followed in Morrow’s footsteps and ascen
ded to serve his faith as beacons of enlightenment. Individual ascendants are frequently chosen as patrons by Morrowan worshipers.
bane thrall: Cunning and powerful undead warriors inscribed with animating runes and sigils of their dark rebirth.
Blackwater: A port city on Scharde, the main island of Cryx, that both facilitates trade with the criminal element of the Iron Kingdoms and serves as a safe haven and resupply point for raiding pirates.
blighted: A state of supernatural corruption and transformation, both physical and mental, that results from prolonged proximity to a dragon.
bloodgorgers: Blighted trollkin of the Scharde Island kriels who faithfully and mercilessly serve among the forces of Cryx.
bodger: Someone who repairs or creates machines and complex devices using improvised materials. Bodging generally refers to temporary or incomplete repairs used to make a machine functional as quickly as possible.
bosun: An officer in charge of a ship’s rigging, anchors, cables, and deck crew.
Brisbane, Markus “Siege”: A major and warcaster in the Cygnaran Army with a long and highly decorated service record. Nicknamed “Siege” after earning a reputation for demolishing enemy fortifications.
Broken Coast, the: The coastline and islands along southwestern Cygnar, including many of the outer islands of the Cryxian Empire. The Broken Coast is notorious as a haven for pirates and Satyxis raiders.
Caen: The world containing the Iron Kingdoms, Immoren, Zu, etc. Sometimes contrasted as the material world as opposed to the spiritual world of Urcaen.
Called to Battle, Volume 1 Page 11
