do and for what may yet happen. Permit me to attempt to atone with a final wisdom.’ She grimaced, her face going rock hard. ‘Hide.’
Before either of them could form an objection, opinion or question, the siren sprang to her feet and tore into the surf. With a graceful leap, she dived beneath the lapping waves and vanished under a blanket of sand and spray, her form sliding further up the coast.
‘Well.’ Asper coughed. ‘That’s . . . ominous.’
‘Greenhair!’ Dreadaeleon called, tearing off down the beach. ‘Wait! Come back!’
‘Dread, you fool!’ Asper hissed after him, but she could spare no more time for him.
Her attention was seized by the ship; in the moments she had been looking away, it had crept closer. So close, in fact, that she could now make out its crew.
Eyes the colour of milk. The sound of metal clanking against metal. Alien voices uttering foul indecipherables.
Restraint, Denaos thought, was a vastly unappreciated trait.
All tense situations relied on it, he knew from an experience that had been long and not fatal, which was more than most in his profession could claim. Restraint was the idea of being the centre of calm in a raging storm, so that while all around would be rent asunder by torrid winds and gales, the centre would remain unnoticed, unscathed.
It had served him well in every situation in which he had hoped to never find himself, from negotiations with watchmen clamping irons about his wrists to talking down a particularly passionate young lady with a sharp knife and an overzealous love of fruits.
Of course, he thought as he felt moist talons dig into his neck, those were all mostly reasonable people. As he glanced out of the corner of his eye at the Abysmyth regarding him dispassionately, he could think of more ideal situations.
And, he added with a sidelong glance at his fellow captive, more ideal companions.
Kataria, it seemed, had no talent or appreciation for restraint. Within the demon’s grasp, she writhed, snarled, spat and gnashed her teeth. While undoubtedly she thought of herself as some ferocious lioness, in the creature’s grasp she more closely resembled a particularly fussy kitten.
The frogman standing before them appeared to share Denaos’s thoughts. Leaning heavily on a staff carved of bone, it ignored the rogue to regard the shict with what looked a lot like haughty mirth. Denaos arched an eyebrow at that; this frogman’s face was twisted in a grin, distinctive from the legions of identical faces past shoulders bereft of their collective stoop.
‘Does it not hurt?’ he asked, and Denaos noted a distinct lack of needle-like teeth in his mouth. ‘Is the futility not agonising? Do you not despair to look upon the rising tide and know that you are so much froth in an endless sea?’
The rogue tightened his lips, regarding the creature suspiciously. He did not recall the frogmen having either a speech pattern unslurred or a penchant for obvious metaphors.
‘The tide cannot be stopped.’ The frogman shook his head. ‘But yours is not a plight without power.’ He leaned closer, his grin becoming more abhorrent than the needle-toothed smiles of the creatures behind him. ‘Surrender to the tide, flow with it as it flows over the world, and become a part of the endless blue.’
‘Drown in it,’ Kataria spat back, with as much force as her position allowed. ‘When you wash up, I’ll kick the crabs out of your carcass.’
‘Sun and sky have blinded you. Wind and dirt have rendered you deaf.’ He made a sweeping gesture and Denaos noted that all five of his fingers spread themselves into thin, pale digits, free of any webbing. ‘Open your ears to the song of Mother Deep. When the earth is drowned and the sky kneels before the sea, it will be far too late to repent.’
Her ears folded flat against her head as she bared her teeth at him and snarled. The frogman, undeterred, reached out with a trembling hand to cup her by the chin. It was with that gesture, that familiar quiver in the fingers which suggested needs far beyond those that could be satisfied by the company of demons, that the realisation finally dawned upon the rogue.
‘You’re human,’ he whispered breathlessly, as though it was some damning discovery.
The unblinking, symmetrical expressions of the Abysmyths and the frogmen beyond him indicated, however, that it was not. The creature himself did not so much as cringe