Deadhouse Landing

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

The time had finally come for her to visit her … well … distant cousins. So far she’d avoided it, staying out of the city and keeping to the hillsides. Her needs were few: a small fire, a blanket against the chill. But she could delay no longer, even though the very idea of such a confrontation troubled her like few others. And so Nightchill steeled herself and walked down into the city of Malaz, heading for the waterfront.

She would have to be very careful; any escalation here could engulf the entire area in a conflagration of power that would scour the island down to the bare bones of its rock. Of course her … cousins had every reason to be suspicious of her approach. Over the ages they’d been attacked countless times by powers seeking the might, and the secrets, that they guarded.

Walking the empty rainy cobbled streets she reflected upon the many theories that had been suggested regarding their mysterious … withdrawal.

Some said they’d foreseen something; some event or arising so terrifying that they determined they needed to prepare for it. Others suggested mere greed: pig-headed hoarding of the most selfish kind. Of the true reason even she, one of their few remaining relations, had no idea.

They had withdrawn, turned within, and now none had any understanding of their motives or goals. For if the Azathani were regarded as strange and alien by the humans they now walked among, the Azath structures constituted an order far beyond even them.