The Briny Deep by Simon Archer

Author:Simon Archer [Archer, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

20

Sebastian Arde

T he wind moaned in the sails as if the very touch of The Indomitable caused it pain. Undead crewman, still wearing the flesh they’d worn in life, roamed the broken deck, carrying out a grim mockery of their duties while I stood at the helm, one hand on the damp wood of the ship’s wheel. I drew no breath, and my heart was cold and still in my shattered chest. The mortal wound dealt me by that damnable orc pirate, still gaped where it split me from shoulder to belt.

Whatever dark magic animated me held me together, though, and it amplified the rage and indignation I felt towards Bardak Skullsplitter. I could sense him, far to the south but growing ever closer. Overhead, the sky darkened as The Indomitable passed beneath it, storm clouds gathered to mark our passage, and nothing would stop us.

Lines flapped loose in the cold wind that drove my ship forward. The tattered sails billowed and danced, nearly useless, but more than enough. It wasn’t anything natural that propelled the ship, but the cold breath of the goddess of death herself.

“Lack went too far,” Rhianne hissed from beside me. The witch always stayed at my side, now, an odd, forlorn expression on her beautiful face with its ruined eye.

“We live, after a fashion,” I observed. “And we will have our revenge, in the Admiral’s name.”

What would I do to the orc? A portion of me leaned towards flaying him alive, then keelhauling him. But that might be too quick unless I could somehow keep him alive, trapped in the half-world between life and death.

I would happily torture Bardak Skullsplitter forever for what he did, but first, we had to catch him and defeat him. My gaze slipped sideways to the witch. She was cloaked in shadow almost entirely, but for the green fire burning in the socket of her missing eye. Since our return to the land of the living, she had said nearly nothing, only the occasional morose observation about how Lack went too far by bringing us back.

“You want the witch, do you not?” I asked her, my voice gurgling with the liquid that half-filled my dead lungs.

“Perhaps,” she replied. “Maybe that will free me. Although…” Her voice trailed off.

“You feel it, do you not?” I grimaced. “The power he gave us. It is beyond imagining.”

“Can you also not feel how the world itself rejects us, Sebastian?” Rhianne murmured. “We should not be here.”

“And yet we are,” I snorted a liquid laugh and gazed out to the fore. The air around The Indomitable rippled, like the smooth water on a pond when a drop of water hit it. Despite my confidence, I sensed what the witch sensed; the reluctance of the living world to give us passage. Instead, we forced our way through, like a knife through flesh, and reality bled behind us.

A sudden flash of awareness came to me. Life. There was a ship nearby, the dozens of little lives within it called to me and I felt a surge of something that I hadn’t felt in what seemed like ages.

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