Blightslayer by Richard Strachan

Author:Richard Strachan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-04-11T14:13:03+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

PIRATES OF THE PLAGUE

‘Why do you blow on that cursed thing?’ Lord Cholerax grumbled from the gunwale. He scowled across the deck at the Blightking who had pressed his diseased lips to the mouth of the ivory horn, which had pride of place on the forecastle of the Diphthemious. ‘Do you mean to alert every last mortal in the city to our presence, hmm? Damn your eyes for a pirate!’

He should have flown this distance on Thrax, his Rot Fly, rather than sink to the level of these scum. He could see Thrax resting on the quarterdeck, aft of the main mast. The bloated fly had tucked its wings behind it and squatted on its abdomen, its legs folded underneath it and its tripartite eyes staring as bright and bloody as three clustered rubies.

‘Quickens the sport of it all, my lord,’ Captain Pertussis said as he sidled near.

He clamped the rail with his lobster claw and stared with his solitary eye at the cave of Kranzinnport’s harbour. The ships were slipping in along the edge of the cliffs, taking advantage of the calmer waters on the other side of the harbour’s wider wing. Glutinous tears leaked from the captain’s eye, called out by the fresh salt wind. The mouth in his stomach yawned wide, strings of mucous stretching out between the teeth. The purple tongue lapped at the breeze as if tasting it.

‘We are not here for sport,’ Cholerax fumed. He could feel something writhe and wriggle in his throat and hacked twice to clear it, spitting out a maggot into the interior of his helmet. ‘Bilgeous Pox desires fresh meat for the pot, and it is our task to provide it.’

And provide it a damned sight more efficiently than you have done so far, he thought.

‘Take my word for it,’ Pertussis said, ‘the horn gets the fear right up ’em. All scrambling about and shouting and that, not thinking straight, and then we comes right in and sorts them all out. Har har har!’

He laughed long and loud – a grisly, guttural roar. Around him the other Blightkings joined in, snickering as they flitted between the ropes, drawing down the sails and shouting orders to the cultists chained to the benches below decks. Soon the oars were all slipped through the riggers on the lower hull. The sails were taken in, and the schooner began to slowly pivot towards the mouth of the harbour. The cliffs slipped by on their right, as grey as slate. Down below, the oars lifted and dropped from the hull, cutting smoothly through the water. To the left, three hundred yards away across the bucking sea, the Rust Scythe drew down its sails and dropped back to follow the Diphthemious’ path.

‘Tradition, lad,’ Pertussis said, in a confidential tone that was only partly undermined by his gurgling voice. ‘My ships have done ever thus, from the Amnios Sea all the way to Smuggler’s Haven, and don’t you forget it. There ain’t a village, town

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