floor shift beneath her feet as the ship rocked violently. A din rose from above, a shrieking howl mingled with what sounded like polite conversation. A discernible roar answered the call, a chest-borne thunder tinged with unpleasant laughter.
Something had happened on the deck, and whatever had happened had also met Gariath. Another noise reached her through the ship’s timbers.
From the cabins beyond the mess in the ship’s hold, she heard it: the sound of an iron porthole cover clanging to the deck, two water-laden feet squishing upon the wood, a croaking command in a tongue not human, nor shictish, nor any that she had ever heard.
Something had just crept into the ship.
Something crept closer.
Her hand quivered as it reached for her staff. Lenk’s hands wouldn’t quiver, she thought. Her breath was short, her knees quaking as she trudged towards the cabin’s door. Kataria’s knees wouldn’t knock. Her voice was timid, dying on her lips as she tried to speak. Gariath wouldn’t squeak.
Lenk, Kataria and Gariath were somewhere else, though. She was here, standing between the noise and the Lord Emissary. When her hands wrapped about the solid oak staff, she knew that at that moment, the warriors would have to leave the fighting to her.
‘Lord Emissary,’ she whispered, stepping towards the hold, ‘forgive me for my transgressions.’
‘Go as you must.’
She cringed; it would have been easier to justify staying behind if he had been angry with her. Instead, she took her staff in her hands and crept into the gloom of the Riptide’s timbered bowels.
Miron turned from the portal towards the foggy glass of the window. The frogman was gone, slid off to join its kin on the deck. No matter; a black void spread beneath the water’s surface, a mobile ink stain that slid lazily after the ship as it cut through the waters.
‘She sent you, did she?’ he muttered to the blackness. Absently, a hand went down to his chest, tracing the phoenix sigil upon his breast. ‘Come if you will, then. You shall not have it.’
He turned, striding from the mess towards the shadows of the hold, intent on reaching his cabin. In his mind, a shape burned: a square of perfectly black leather, parchment bound in red leather, tightly sealed and hidden from the outside world.
‘They shall not have it,’ he whispered.
There was a sound from the shadows, a masculine cry of surprise met by a voice dripping with malice. Someone screamed, someone ran, someone fell.
The man tumbled out of the shadows, the broad, unblinking whites of his eyes indiscernible against the swathes of bandages covering his face. He croaked out something through blackened lips, staring up at Miron as Miron stared down at him, impassively.
A webbed foot appeared from the darkness. A pale, lanky body emerged. Two dark, beady eyes set in a round, hairless head regarded him carefully. Through long, needle-like teeth, it hissed.
‘Priest.’ It raised its bloody dagger. ‘Tome.’
The thing peered through the jagged, splintering gash in the ship’s hull that used to be a porthole. Only shadows met its black eyes as it searched through the gloom for another pale shape, another thing similar to this one. Quietly, it slid two slender arms through the hole, a hairless head following as it pulled a moist torso through the rent in the timbers.
The hole was no bigger than its head. Absently, the thing recalled that it should not have been able to squeeze through it.
It set its feet upon the timbers, salt pooling around its tender, webbed toes. Slowly, it bent down to observe a similar puddle upon the floor where similar feet had stood just moments ago. And yet now there was no sign of those feet, nor the legs they belonged to, nor any sign of that one at all.
‘It is a stupid one,’ the thing hissed. It recalled, vaguely, a time when its voice did not sound so throaty, a time when a sac did not bulge beneath its chin with every breath. ‘“These ones stay together,” these ones were told, “stay together”. That one must not have run off. That one must stay with this one.’
This one remembered, for a fleeting moment, that it had once had a name.
That memory belonged to another one. This one knelt down, observing the traces of moisture clinging to the wood. That one had taken two steps forwards, it noted from the twin puddles before it. It tilted its head to the side; that one had stopped there . . . but not