1633880583 (F) by Chris Willrich

Author:Chris Willrich [Willrich, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633880597
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2015-06-14T21:00:00+00:00

Bone had only one goal. Doomed or saved, he must stay with Gaunt. He grabbed her as the surge hit.

The force of the wave made him lose her in the dark waters. But when he resurfaced, she was nearby, as was the broken mainmast. It was she who helped him clutch it. Other hands joined theirs.

“Is it—” he gasped. “Is it gone—”

“Bone.”

He looked where she looked, and a gasp went up from the survivors aboard ship, for the half-ship approached, and the shambling shape in its midst had nothing but a ruined cave for an eye. It bore down on the mast nonetheless. Crowbeard was not to be seen.

He had his foamreaver death. Bone felt a tiny comfort at that.

But in the next moment a shape reared up from the Draug-ship, something Bone had taken for a collection of rags, and it seized the harpoon-arm of the Draug with berserker fury.

Muninn Crowbeard grasped the weapon with a howl of mad glee.

His hands shook, but they drove the harpoon true, stabbing the Draug

through the ruined cave of its eye socket. The metal burst out the back of the seaweed-covered skull, spraying an ichor like molten gold.

It was as though the Draug’s chilling screech sliced open the clouds, for light blazed through the storm, and the sun lit the rain to dazzling streaks. The Draug seized its harpoon from Crowbeard and jabbed the foamreaver through the heart, sending him at one stroke to the halls of the valorous dead.

But even in its victory it turned its cavernous eye-socket to starboard, as though in that blaze of sunlight even its wound could see.

There raced another ship, a vast galleon of cedar and teak, with golden sails and a flag of black with the sign of a prism splitting light into many colors.

The Draug hissed and shook its harpoon, and Crowbeard’s body slipped into the sea; but the monster was at last broken, and with a final defiant stare at the ruin of the Raveneye it sank with its half-ship into the frothing waves.

Crowbeard’s corpse bobbed in the forsaken waters.

“No, Bone,” Gaunt said, but he was already swimming, getting his arm around the body of his betrayer. Soon Gaunt was there, and others from Raveneye helped, its captain among them.

“Hail!” Erik Glint shouted to the new vessel.

And an answering cry went up upon the galleon’s deck, for they had seen the valor done upon the deep. Ropes were flung into the waters, and now Bone saw clearly the black, mighty mariners of faraway Kpalamaa of the savanna and jungle, come like something out of a fever dream, to their aid. And in their midst one he knew.

“Eshe,” he said. “Eshe of the Fallen Swan. Priestess. Wanderer. Cook.”

“Spy. We are in trouble, Bone,” Gaunt said.

“That is for certain. But at least we’ll be dry.”

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