for the man to ask of him, but he wasn’t about to offer his aid, in any case. Sebast took the hint and stalked off across the deck. It was only when he was a thin, stoop-shouldered outline against the shadows of the companionway that a question occurred to Lenk.
‘What was his name?’
‘Whose?’ Sebast called over his shoulder.
‘The young man who died today.’ Realising his mistake, he corrected himself. ‘The one killed by . . . by that thing.’
Sebast hesitated, staring at the wood beneath him.
‘Moscoff, I think . . . some young breed out of Cier’Djaal. Signed on to make some silver when we last set out from that port.’ He suddenly glanced up, staring out over the evening sky. ‘I think his name was Moscoff, anyway. It might have been Mossud . . . or Suddamoff . . . Huh, you know, I can’t even remember any more.’ He smiled at a joke only he understood. ‘I can’t even remember his face ... isn’t that funny?’
Lenk did not laugh. Sebast did not, either; even his faint corpse of a smile disappeared as he turned and trudged down the steps into the ship’s hold.
It only occurred to Lenk after the first mate had departed that his declaration that their work was done had been incorrect. There were still many corpses upon the Riptide’s deck, save that these still moved and drew some mockery of breath.
The Riptide’s crew traipsed across the deck without purpose, half-heartedly pushing mops over stains that would never disappear, picking up discarded weapons.
Privately, Lenk yearned to see them crack a joke, curse at each other, even brush up against him with a hearty greeting and a full blast of their armpits’ perfume in his face. Instead, they muttered amongst themselves, they stared up at the darkened skies above and made unintelligible remarks about the weather. They did not look at each other.
There was no blaming them, he knew. Their hearts were heavy with the deaths of their comrades, their minds trembling with the strain of comprehending what they had seen. He could hardly wrap his own mind about the events as he stared at the splintered dents in the deck.
The creature should not have been. It should have stayed in drunken ramblings and ghost stories, like any other horror of the deep. But he had seen it. He had seen its dead eyes, heard its drowned voice, felt its leathery flesh. Absently, he reached for a sword that was not present as he recalled the battle; he recalled the creature, unharmed by the blows dealt to him by Gariath, himself and Moscoff.
‘Or was it Mossud?’
At once, the sailors paused in their menial duties to look towards Lenk. He saw their own lips soundlessly repeat the name before they turned back to their chores.
The moments after the creature had fled returned to him in a flood of visions. Asper had run to tend to the fallen sailor, kneeling beside his still body, looking over his slime-covered visage. He remembered her grim expression as she looked up, shaking her head.
‘He’s dead,’ she had said. ‘Drowned.’
Lenk found his knees suddenly weak, his hand groping for the railing to steady himself. Drowned on dry land, he thought, that doesn’t happen.
Where did such a creature come from? What sort of vengeful God had spawned such a fiend that shrugged off steel and drowned men without water? What sort of gracious God would permit such a creature to exist in the world?
Gods, he had found, were seldom of use besides creative swearing and occasional miracles that never actually occurred. He leaned on the railing and cast his gaze out over the sea like a net, trawling for an answer, some excuse for the horrors he had seen. He knew he would not find one.
Kataria watched from the upper deck, a deep frown on her face as she observed Lenk.
His melancholy unnerved her more than it should, as the battle had unnerved him more than it should have. Bloodshed, she knew, had been a big enough part of both of their lives that pausing and thinking about it afterwards was no longer instinct. That he now stood unmoving, barely breathing, eyes distant, caused her to do the same.
She noted the icy glow in his furrow-browed gaze. His thoughts lingered on the dead, no doubt. He did not mourn; Lenk never mourned. The young sailor’s death was not a tragedy in his mind, she knew, but a conundrum, a foul question with no decent