Page 28 of The Devils

Fire on the Water

It’d been a busy few weeks for Alex. She’d been declared heir to the Throne of Troy, met the Pope, been attacked by pig-men and a burning sorceress, watched a mob calmed by a speech about dumplings, and seen a severed head talk. You’d have thought she would’ve been past surprises.

But somehow she was always caught trousers down.

It was a woman. Two arms. Two legs. But her skin had a scaly, shiny look. Her way-too-wide-set yellowy eyes and her flattened nose and her downturned pouty mouth all had a fishy air, too. Oh, and there were the gills. Flaring open with each breath to show the frilly pink insides of her throat. It was ridiculous. Almost a joke. Not a funny one, mind you. The barbed sword she held in particular raised no laughs.

‘Oh God,’ moaned Alex. Noises came through the thickening pall of smoke. Steel, pain, fear, and fury, just like at the inn. But on the sea. Everything’s worse at sea!

‘Can you swim?’

Alex whipped around. Sunny squatted on the rail, one hand on the net of ratlines that led up the mast, calmly as if she’d been born in the rigging of a ship under attack by fish-women.

Alex swallowed. ‘Not very well.’

‘Not very well or not at all?’

‘Not at all!’

Why hadn’t she been learning to swim in Venice instead of learning to walk, write, or talk about Carthage? It’s hard to impress with your knowledge of ancient history as your lungs fill up with seawater.

Ahead of her Jakob backed off, shield up. Beside her Vigga backed off, Brother Diaz cowering at her shoulder. Behind her Balthazar and Baptiste backed off, fishy figures lurching through the haze of smoke beyond the tightening crescent, bedraggled braid glittering on sodden uniforms. Nothing would’ve pleased her more than to back off herself, but there was nowhere to back off to.

‘Where do we go?’ she squeaked.

Sunny looked upwards.

With very great reluctance Alex tipped her head back, too, following the wonky grid of ropes vanishing up into a dizzying nightmare of flapping sailcloth, cobwebbed cables, and creaking spars. Her knees felt weak just looking.

‘You’re joking,’ she whispered.

‘I have no sense of humour,’ said Sunny, holding out her free hand.

Alex stood a moment longer, making a kind of desperate mew as she watched the fish-people close in. One seemed to have a piece of coral growing out of his head. Was there an eye on the end? It was looking right at her!

‘Go!’ growled Jakob over his shoulder.

‘Oh God.’ Alex caught Sunny’s hand, wobbled up onto the rail and, with one glance down at the churning sea, swung herself around the net of ropes and started to climb.

Up the ratlines. What could be more fitting for a rat like her?

The fish-man loomed forwards, huge lips wobbling, making a weird blubbing sound. To Brother Diaz it sounded a little bit like ‘ Help me ,’ but that was a sentiment at odds with the huge axe it was raising high. Or was it more of a hook on a pole? Not that it matters what shape the metal is once it’s buried in your skull.

Brother Diaz tottered one way and the blade whistled past, chopping splinters from the rail on his right. He reeled back the other way as it hacked into the rail on his left. He blundered into the mast, bounced off with a gasp, slipped on the tilted deck, his satchel flopping open and scattering unsent letters. The railing hit him in the backs of the legs, he made a despairing grab at it and achieved nothing but to tear one of his fingernails half-off before he tumbled over.

He was readying a scream as he plunged towards the sea, but had only got as far as a breathy whoop when he crashed side-first into wood. He sat up, one hand to his throbbing skull, squinting into the smoke. He must’ve tumbled off the aftcastle and only fallen the few feet to the deck.

He was about to count that quite a piece of luck when the fish-man sprang, nimbly as a leaping salmon, and thumped down before him, hook raised high.

He wriggled back, heels kicking at the planking, struggling to scramble away and get up at once and achieving neither, raising a hopeless arm to fend off the inevitable blow—

‘That’s my fucking monk !’

Vigga crashed down on the fish-man knees first, ramming him into the deck in a crumpled heap. She must’ve got at some carpenter’s tools, a heavy hatchet in each fist. Now she brought them whipping down with a double thud, blood spotting her snarl.

Brother Diaz blundered up, coughing, blinking, coughing again. Could he see figures in the murk? Two wrestling on the floor. Another pair struggling over a spear. A glint of metal—

‘Left!’ he screeched. Vigga dropped, a halberd sailing over her head, the spike on its end missing Brother Diaz’s nose by a whisker. A soldier charged at him, a hint of a gilded helm, greaves, bared teeth.

Vigga darted in, impossibly fast despite her bulk, hooked his leg away with the head of one axe, reared up as he flew squealing into the air, hacked him down into the deck with the other so hard his head shattered the planking.

‘Right!’ shrieked Brother Diaz. Vigga dodged around another soldier, axe whipping in a circle, staving in his helmet and flinging him cartwheeling past Brother Diaz to take a chunk out of the rail and flop bonelessly into the sea beyond.

‘Italian crap,’ grunted Vigga, tossing the splintered haft of one of her axes over her shoulder.

‘Archer!’ screeched Brother Diaz. Vigga spun and threw in one movement, hatchet twittering end over end to bury itself in the forehead of a bowman on the platform with a sharp smack. He loosed his arrow high into the sky as he toppled backwards.

‘You see that throw?’ she yelled, grabbing Brother Diaz’s habit and giving him a triumphant shake.

All he could say was, ‘Eeek.’ Rising from the smoke behind her with arms outspread was the most revolting thing he’d ever seen.

It had the body of a man, its smart uniform stained about the embroidered collar with goo, since instead of a head it had a great damp jellied blob with two orange eyes the size of collection plates, a mass of curling tentacles dangling from the front. Could he see through its skin? Was that its brain floating about like a nut in jelly? As it bore down on Vigga the tentacles flared wide to reveal rows of purple suckers, and where they met a great black beak popped out, and opened, and gave a furious, agonised, ear-splitting wail—

Cut off in a resounding thud as Vigga sidestepped and punched the thing in its gut, folding it in half and lifting its highly polished boots clear of the ground. It staggered a step or two, dribbling black vomit from its beak, then Vigga caught it by one wrist and a tattooed fistful of tentacles, and in a flash heaved it off its feet and rammed it upside down into the mast.

It dropped in a writhing mess of jelly and Vigga fell on top of it, sinews straining from her tattooed neck as she sank her teeth into its throat where human met sea creature, twisting and growling, until she finally tore free, wiping her ink-black mouth on the back of one arm, spitting out a lump of rubbery meat.

‘Ugh,’ she snarled. ‘I hate seafood.’

Balthazar had little fondness for the decks, cabins, or messes of ships. Cramped, squalid, malodorous places in which the least appealing members of society were crammed together, constantly drunk and grunting at one another in streams of incomprehensible nautical jargon. So it was saying something that he was even less enthusiastic for their holds, and this one in particular, since the galley’s giant ram had made an unwelcome visit right in its midst, seawater gushing through the splintered hull around it in bubbling fountains.

Belowdecks had seemed a superb notion when above decks was a smoke-shrouded battlefield, but Balthazar was forced to wonder whether it was really such an improvement on a ship that was patently sinking.

‘This does not appear promising …’ he murmured. An utterance he could equally well have applied to any moment over the past few months. The hold was already knee-deep in brine and the foaming waters were rapidly rising, bobbing with wreckage, loose barrels, and the corpse of an unfortunate cabin boy who must have scurried down here for safety. Balthazar hoped they would have better luck but would not have liked to gamble his life on it.

‘This way!’ hissed Baptiste. ‘Maybe we can climb out through the breach!’ She waded towards the rays of daylight coming in around the ram, shoving floating cargo aside with one hand, a drawn dagger in the other.

‘ Damn it,’ muttered Balthazar. Throwing oneself into the open sea is not a plan, it is what one is forced to do when all other plans have utterly failed, but he was obliged to follow, cursing noisily as he waded out into freezing water, through a complete absence of any better ideas and an overpowering reluctance to be left on his own. Baptiste was abrasive, but considerably less so than the barnacle-encrusted unions of person and sea creature that had invaded the vessel. Empress Eudoxia’s sarcomantic experiments were undeniably impressive from a theoretical point of view – and Balthazar was deeply curious to see what necromantic possibilities her blurring of the line between human and animal might offer – but he really had less than no interest in associating with the live specimens up close. They appeared to have next to no conversation and smelled appalling.

‘Here.’ Baptiste put one hand on the hawk-cast head of the ram as she ducked around it. ‘Help me with—’

Someone slipped from the shadows beyond and tapped her on the forehead. A tall, long-limbed man whose soaked robes clung to his body. Balthazar took a shocked step back, getting partly tangled with a loose cargo net, but Baptiste stood frozen, water foaming around her hips.

‘Balthazar Sham Ivam Draxi, I presume?’ asked the man, raising an elegant eyebrow.

‘You know my work?’ Balthazar could not help asking.

‘No …’ The man grinned. A particularly sinister and threatening example of the form. ‘But your name did come up …’ Baptiste slowly turned, wet hair plastered to her frowning face, to glare towards Balthazar with even greater hostility than usual. ‘On a list …’ There was a needle stuck in her forehead, and hanging from it a little scrap of bloody cloth with a single rune stitched into it. ‘Of people I have been asked to kill .’

And on the words ‘asked to kill,’ Baptiste spoke them, too, in perfect time.

‘God damn it …’ murmured Balthazar, reluctantly backing off the way he had so reluctantly come, colliding with a floating barrel and nearly going over in the chilly water.

The man was a phrenomancer. A manipulator of minds. A discipline Balthazar found particularly loathsome not only because its practitioners stole the free will of others, slipping into their flesh like a maiden into a new dress, but also because they invariably believed their insight into the realm of the mental made them cleverer than anyone else. He was Balthazar Sham Ivam Draxi. Cleverness was his stock-in-trade! Although, granted, he felt less than perspicacious as Baptiste waded towards him with daggers in her fists, murder in her eyes, and a rune of control pinned to her forehead.

‘Might I assume,’ said Balthazar, playing desperately for time as he stared about the flooding hold, surely the most unhopeful venue imaginable for a magical duel, ‘that I have the privilege of addressing a member of the Empress Eudoxia’s coven?’

‘You have,’ said Baptiste and the sorcerer, together.

‘Such a loss to the arcane community!’ frothed Balthazar. Preparation was the key to victory, and for weeks now he had found himself endlessly off balance, endlessly improvising, endlessly forced to rely on whatever rubbish chance handed him. ‘I understand she was among the leading practitioners of her generation. I have even been told she could throw lightning!’

‘I saw it with my own eyes.’

Balthazar believed it even less than the last time he had heard it. ‘I only wish I could witness such a feat,’ he muttered.

‘Unlikely,’ said Baptiste, ‘since Eudoxia is dead.’ Behind her, like a tall shadow, the sorcerer mouthed the words. ‘And you soon will be.’

He smiled, and Baptiste smiled. A smile that somehow did not fit her face.

Climbing the ratlines was harder than you’d think. Like climbing a ladder made of jelly. Didn’t help that the ship had heeled over when it got spitted on the ram, its decks made slopes and its masts leaning towards the gilded galley on a dizzying slant.

‘Oh God,’ Alex whispered as she climbed, ‘oh God, oh God.’ Divine intervention seemed like a long shot, honestly. God had folk packing into his churches and filling up his collection plates and living by his Twelve Virtues every saint’s day, and far as she could tell he rarely stepped in on their behalf, so the chances of him sending down an angel for a faithless piece of shit like her must’ve been close to nil. But she kept saying the words even so. ‘Oh God oh God oh God,’ hand over hand, foot over foot, her arms burning and her legs burning and her lungs burning, higher and higher.

‘Here.’ Sunny squatted on the yard above her. The lowest yard, which the bottom sail hung from. She caught Alex’s wrist and heaved with all her weight. She weighed about as much as a bag of carrots, but Alex was very grateful for the gesture. She finally clambered up and stood there, teetering on what was basically a big stick creaking with the wind, gripping the mast like it was her most prized possession.

‘Don’t look down,’ said Sunny.

‘What?’ Alex looked down right away, of course. Straw burned in the middle of the deck, smoke billowing from their ship, the wind carrying it sideways over the great galley. She could see men between its benches. Soldiers in bright armour, clambering towards its prow, jumping across and into the haze on the sloping deck. Constans was there, on his platform, waving them forward. Did he look up at her and smile? Saviour, you could’ve seen those fucking teeth from a mile away.

‘That bastard ,’ she snarled, but it turned to a desperate squeak as the mast lurched, tilting a little further. ‘Is the ship sinking?’

‘Well, there’s a big hole in it.’ Sunny peered down towards the galley’s ram, impaled in the hull. ‘And it’s below the waterline, so …’

‘We’re climbing the mast …’ Alex squeezed her eyes shut, trying not to take in the din of murder below. Trying not to notice the smoke scratching her chest with every breath. Trying not to think about the long drop. ‘Of a sinking ship.’

‘Best part of a sinking ship to be on.’

‘How do you work that out?’

‘It’ll be the bit that sinks last?’ Sunny shrugged, bony shoulders up around her ears. ‘Am I helping?’

‘Oh God,’ whispered Alex. They weren’t alone in the rigging. There were figures following them up the ratlines, moving fast. One was halfway to the yard already, and it was horribly clear, even with all the smoke, that he wasn’t quite human. He wore a uniform jacket, but it was all twisted and splitting at the seams around a bony oval body, with no neck and not much head. And he had claws. One little one and one huge one. Claws that seemed surprisingly well suited to climbing ropes. Or to crushing the heads of would-be princesses.

‘Crab-men,’ breathed Alex.

‘There’s one over there who’s more of a lobster, to be fair.’

‘Well, it’s nice to know exactly what kind of shellfish you’ve been murdered by ,’ shrieked Alex. ‘Where do we go?’

Sunny was looking upwards again. Up an even flimsier set of ratlines, past another set of flapping sails, narrowing towards the little split platform of the crosstrees at the very top of the mainmast, black against the blue sky high above.

‘Oh God,’ whispered Alex.

Jakob’s blade chopped into the fish-woman’s ribs with that familiar butcher’s block whack .

She dropped to her knees, her barbed sword clattering across the deck, blood welling from between her webbed fingers and turning her wet uniform an even darker red. Jakob swayed back, grabbed at the ship’s rail to keep from falling, every breath its own wheezing effort.

‘Blufutherbluther,’ she spluttered, blood bubbling from one gill and streaking from the corner of her mouth. ‘Blufuther.’

‘Wha?’ Jakob couldn’t tell if she was speaking a different language or couldn’t form the words for the fishy shape of her mouth, or if he couldn’t hear them for the thudding of blood in his ears.

A pendant had fallen out of her collar. A little enamelled flower on a silver chain. The sort of thing a lover gives as a gift. He wondered if she’d been given it before she became a fish, or after.

‘Bluth,’ she said, and flopped sideways, pointed head clonking against the deck.

Jakob would’ve quite liked to join her there. His shoulder was on fire. He could hardly hold his shield up. There were fishy corpses everywhere. The whole aftcastle was slippery with blood. It stank like a disreputable fishmonger’s.

He’d no clue what had happened to the others. The smoke made it hard to see, which had been his intention, and hard to breathe, which hadn’t. But once you set the chaos rolling, you can’t know where it’ll end. That’s the whole point of it.

‘Oh, for God’s sake .’

He saw a flash of movement, couldn’t do much more than lift his shield as something thumped into the deck.

Duke Constans, leaping from his galley and landing in a ready crouch on the aftcastle.

‘I’ve heard it said …’ Eudoxia’s third son slowly stood. ‘That if you really want something done …’ He picked an invisible speck of fluff from the jewelled honours crusting his crimson jacket and rubbed it away between finger and thumb. ‘You have to be prepared … to do it yourself?’

Jakob ran his tongue around the salty-sour inside of his mouth, teeth bloody from a shield in the face, and spat into the sea. It didn’t quite make it and spattered on the rail beside him. ‘Uh-huh,’ he grunted.

‘I will confess my mother’s creations aren’t the most competent soldiers.’ Constans pranced between the fishy bodies, and the corpses of a couple of dead sailors. He was bulky, crimson fabric straining about the highly polished buttons on his jacket, a little roll of flushed fat around his gilded collar, but he moved with a twinkly grace even so, up on his toes like a dancing master. ‘To be fair they were a theoretical exercise for her, she was fascinated by the soul, you know. Where it was located. How to release it. What became of it when you did …’

He stopped beside the creature with coral growing out of its head, on its back in a pool of blood. ‘She never intended them for military use. That was Marcian’s idea.’ He dropped his voice, putting on a baleful frown and weakly shaking one fist. ‘Repurpose the bastards! Fearsome half-animal warriors! Breed an unstoppable legion! Reconquer the Holy Land and show the elves true horror!’ He sighed as he squatted beside the malformed thing. ‘My brother wanted to turn everything into weapons. Ever since we were boys. He’d make an unstoppable legion of the peas on his plate, I swear.’

He somewhat sadly adjusted the coral man’s uniform, which had an embroidered hole around the shoulder for a knub of coral to grow through. ‘I tried to give them a bit of pride, you know. Bit of class.’ He patted the polished buttons, very much like those on his own jacket. ‘What the Carthaginians used to call legion’s honour!’

Jakob took a long wheeze in, produced a long wheeze out. He’d lost track of the number of megalomaniacal speeches he’d had to endure down the years. But if it gave him a chance to catch his breath, have at it. ‘Uh-huh,’ he grunted.

‘Well. A work in progress, I suppose.’ Constans stood, glancing around at the bodies. ‘I must admit, this is all … terribly impressive work on your part, though. Is that …’ He wagged his finger, a hefty ring glinting as he counted the huddled, sprawling, leaking shapes. ‘Seven? No – eight! I do you a disservice. That’s two more over there.’

The helmsman had done for one of those two, in fact, before they killed him, and Vigga for the other, but Jakob saw no pressing need to correct the arithmetic. A couple here or there wouldn’t make much difference to the butcher’s bill he’d run up down the years. ‘Uh-huh,’ he grunted.

‘ So. ’ Constans drew his sword, jewels glinting on the gilded hilt, steel gleaming mirror-bright. ‘A duel to the death?’ He raised his arms, sword dangling languidly from one plump hand. ‘On the listing deck of a stricken ship that’s burning and sinking at once ? I mean, it’s a little lurid, but you can’t deny the drama .’

Drama made little impact on Jakob these days. He’d been through burnings and sinkings aplenty and the phrase to the death didn’t carry quite the same thrill for him that it did for other men. ‘Uh-huh,’ he grunted.

Constans looked mildly disappointed. ‘I must admit I was hoping for a little badinage while we were at it.’

‘Once you’ve done as many of these as I have …’ Jakob waved at the corpses scattered about the aftcastle. ‘It’s just the same jokes over and over.’

‘A sad indictment of the world we live in that we run out of jokes before we run out of enemies.’ Constans twitched the legs of his tight-fitting trousers up with his free hand and bent his knees into a waiting crouch, sword point perfectly levelled. ‘I should warn you … I fear this will end badly.’

‘Well.’ Jakob pushed himself away from the rail. ‘If you leave it long enough …’ And he took one more breath, and blew it out. ‘Everything ends badly.’

People often rushed to conclusions about Sunny. They spat at her or called her an enemy of God or tried to cut her ears off, and it was no fun at all. So she tried hard to be polite and not judge people on their appearance.

But you could not have called this crab-man a looker.

From the waist down he seemed normal-ish – he even had some trousers and a belt with a brass buckle. But things went off course about the ribs. He’d had a nice jacket like the ringmaster used to wear at the circus, but it was all torn up by the rough edges of his shell-like body, which appeared to have a load of barnacles stuck to it, too. One overlong arm had a couple of fingers and a big pointy thumb on the end. The other was a great serrated claw, though he used it nimbly enough on the rigging. His head was a neckless lump, furry mouthparts quivering, one eye a bit like a human eye but the other sticking out on a stalk. The whole effect was really quite horrible. Especially since Sunny was within a few inches of him, clinging unseen to the other side of the ratlines.

Oh. He had strange little hairy legs sticking from his stomach. She really didn’t want to use the word underparts about anything right in front of her face, but what else could you call them? All wriggling and squiggling, so she had to squeeze her eyes and her mouth tight shut as he clambered past. Did he drip on her a bit? Did she have crab juice on her?

Crab juice was almost as bad as underparts .

Even with her breath held she caught a sense of his stink, one part burial at sea to two parts fish market on a very warm evening. He stepped on her hand as he passed with a big bare foot that had a length of moist seaweed trailing from one of the three hard toes, and Sunny had to bite her lip. But he didn’t notice as she swung around to his side of the ratlines. Didn’t notice as she climbed up behind him. Didn’t notice when she slipped the dagger from the back of his belt. He was fixed on Alex, not very far ahead at all now, muttering, ‘Oh God,’ to herself over and over.

Sunny paused.

The Saviour had definitely tended against killing, and she’d heard priests talk about murder like it was really the worst, but when she finally read the scriptures herself, she found God couldn’t go a page without smiting the shit out of someone. Then dead people might be a tragedy but dead elves are a punchline. No quicker shortcut to heaven than up a mountain of elf-skulls. You could be the most terrible bastard in the world but go on a crusade and fill a cart with pointy-eared corpses you came out a hero, fresh as daisies.

Alex glanced back, eyes wide and wild through the hair stuck across her face, only a stride or two between her heels and the bigger of the two claws.

In the end, it seemed to Sunny that right or wrong is mostly a question of what you can get away with.

So when the crab-man lifted one leg to find a new foothold Sunny stabbed him up the arse.

He gave a great bellow, but she was already swinging around the ratlines to the other side and swarming up past him, using what passed for his head as a step. She climbed up next to Alex, who looked very scared, which made sense since they were high up on wobbly ropes on a sinking ship crawling with murderous fish-people. Not everyone takes that sort of thing in their stride. Sunny let her breath out so Alex could see her, and she gave a gasp.

‘You’re there!’

She resisted the urge to ask where else she might be. ‘Yes.’

‘There’s a crab-man after me!’

‘I know. I stabbed him up the arse.’

‘He’s gone?’

Sunny peered down. Being stabbed up the arse would definitely make most people think twice, but perhaps not most crabs, because he was coming faster than ever, albeit leaking more juice even than before.

‘No, he’s still coming,’ said Sunny. She had to give him some credit for it, really. ‘Don’t look down.’

Alex twisted around to look right away. ‘Oh God!’ she whimpered, getting all panicked and tangled, which was why Sunny told her not to look in the first place. Why did no one ever listen to her? It gave the crab man time to close right in, and Alex started flailing at him with one foot, the ratlines jerking and wobbling, and at quite an angle, too, since the ship kept tipping further over.

The crab-man reached for Alex with his claw, mouthparts all opened up and hissing, and Sunny grabbed for the first thing she could, some heavy metal thing hooked to the mast. She leaned past Alex as she kicked again and flung it in the crab-man’s face, or where the face would be on someone who had one, and it caught him right in the eyestalk. With a despairing squawk he lost his grip and toppled from the rigging.

He fell onto the sail, flailing about, there was a great noisy ripping of cloth as his claw caught, slowed him a bit. Then he hit the yard at the bottom and went tumbling, the thing Sunny had thrown falling with him.

Which was when she realised it was a ship’s lantern. One of those they light at night to let other ships know where they are. The kind all filled with sweet-smelling and highly flammable whale oil.

She watched it tumble towards the smoking fire on the deck below, and bit her lip.

‘Oops,’ she said.