The crowd broke up, but Renalt remained with Bonecutter Jute. ‘What is it?’ he asked the old man. ‘You’re always soused, but not this bad.’
The oldster hugged the bottle like a floating timber in a storm. His eyes remained resolutely squinted shut. After a time, Renalt gave up and followed the others. Alone, Bonecutter Jute let out a long breath and raised the bottle. When nothing emerged from its mouth he frowned anew and returned to hugging it. Little beady eyes gleamed in the dark around him as rats came edging out of hiding. He whispered to them: ‘I drink when I’m afeared. And I’m greatly afeared o’ something.’
*
Above decks, Lars quickly opened the door to the ship’s main cabin – the captain’s, which the stranger had taken as his own – and locked it behind him. He immediately began coughing and blinking in a thick miasma of sweet-smelling fumes.
‘Is there a fire, m’lord?’ he gasped, rubbing his eyes.
‘No,’ came a low hoarse answer through the dense scarves of smoke. ‘No fire. Why do you disturb me?’
He remembered his panic. ‘The crew! They’re coming for you – us! I was listening! We must get the captain behind us. Perhaps with his support we can turn some of the crew…’
A ghostly shape emerged from the smoke: the stranger adjusting his mail coat and hitching up his long leather weapon belt. Lars felt a strange shiver of preternatural fear at the sight, as if he were witnessing the visitation of some hungry revenant, or ancient spirit.
The stranger, Kallor, picked up a burning smudge, or candle – the source of the dense fumes – and extinguished it with his fingers. He set it aside, saying, ‘That won’t be necessary.’ He asked, conversationally, while adjusting the set of his archaic, two-handed sword, ‘What minimal crew – in your opinion – is necessary for the handling of this vessel?’
Lars blinked at the fellow. Had he gone mad? He stammered, ‘Some forty, I should think, m’lord.’
The stranger raised his iron-grey brows in surprise. ‘Forty? Really? You do not think that is an excessive number?’ He stepped up to the door and Lars shifted out of his way; he grasped the latch, and turned to Lars. ‘We could get by with twenty, do you not think? Now, let us go and face our assailants, yes?’
Lars could only swallow, utterly terrified. ‘I will remain here and guard your possessions, if you do not mind?’ He meant the man’s riches, which he imagined must be hidden somewhere in the cabin.
‘Suit yourself,’ the fellow answered, shrugging, and he opened the door on to the darkness of the night and strode out, his armoured boots clanking on the wood decking.
Lars shut and locked the door behind him to stand panting, his mind racing: what to do, what to do? How could he ingratiate himself with the crew? Hang back and deliver the last blow to this Kallor’s back and thereby win some credit? Or should he find and hide the riches? No, not that – they would only torture him to discover them then do away with him. He rocked in place, his hands at his own throat. How could he survive this? There must be a way!
Then he decided: side with the crew – it was the only possibility. He pressed an ear to the thin planks of the door, waiting for his chance. He heard voices in muted conversation: the lazy delivery of the stranger and the tense clipped demands of the crew’s spokesman: the mate, no doubt.
An ear-shattering scream threw him away from the door and on to his back. The thump of multiple crossbows releasing punched the air. More screams – these now tinged with terror – and the stranger’s armoured boots clomping as he marched about the deck. Panicked thumping of bare feet drummed the decking as well. Someone pounded the door, screaming, ‘He’s killing us all!’
A length of bare iron punched through the door’s planks, red-smeared, and withdrew with an ear-tearing screech. Whoever had been spitted on it sagged to the base of the door. The armoured boots clomped onward, slow and steady. Lars pushed open the door, shoving the corpse aside; was he too late already?
Outside, the deck was a heaving horror of sloshing blood and gore. Bodies rolled from side to side as the Tempest lolled, unmanned. A chill wash of watered blood and other fluids splashed over Lars’ hands and knees as he crawled. Of the stranger he saw no sign; his hunt must have taken him below decks.
One sailor, female, sat back against the mizzen, a line firmly wrapped about one arm. She was alive, but slouched red with blood from a savage slash across her face down to white bone.
Another sailor sat against the side, hands pressed to his own face where blood streamed down his forearms to run into his lap.
He’s marking them, the thought came to Lars. Marking the spared.
A new figure emerged from the companionway, tottering, unsteady. It was the Tempest’s old bonecutter and sometime sea-mage, whose name he couldn’t recall. The old fellow walked hugging a jug to his chest, the wind whipping his long beard and grey hair. Seemingly oblivious of the charnel wreckage all about, he came stepping over corpses to pass close by.
Pausing, the oldster peered down at him, blinking his rheumy eyes. ‘Ancient evil has returned,’ he announced, and crossed to the side where, to Lars’ disbelief and horror, he threw himself straight over the rail to disappear head over heels.
Lars wasn’t certain, but he might have passed out for a moment after that. When he next looked up the stranger’s gore-smeared armoured boots faced him and he raised his gaze up the long hanging mail coat, gleaming with others’ blood, to the man himself, regarding him somewhat quizzically with his grey dead eyes.
The stranger cleaned his long blade by wiping it across the back of Lars’ shirt. ‘You can sail?’ he asked.
Lars nodded frantically. ‘Oh yes! Most certainly, lord.’
‘Good. Join the others. All hands will be needed now, yes?’
Lars could not stop his manic nodding. ‘Oh yes, lord.’
The stranger, Kallor, gestured to the sailor leaning up against the side, commanding him to approach. Blinking, near unconscious with pain and shock, the fellow levered himself up and shuffled to them through the wash of blood-stained water.
‘You are mine,’ the stranger told him. ‘The Marked. Clean up the vessel then set course due west.’ The sailor nodded miserably, both hands pressed to the savage gash across his face. ‘Oh,’ Kallor added, ‘and do not toss the bodies over the side. The way is long and supplies are short. You may have need of them.’ And he laughed, low and long, as he clomped his way to the cabin and shut the door behind him.
A cold rain began to fall from high clouds and Lars stood feeling the chill drops run down his face. He was beginning to wish that he hadn’t taken those gems.
Chapter 9