The bony visage of King Death.

  Sesto gasped in terror, but at the next flash, the figure had gone. Sesto scrambled away through the undergrowth, hoping he was heading for the beach.

  The figure rose up suddenly in front of him, and Sesto slashed out with his sword. The blade rang hard against a cut-less blade.

  ‘Put up thy pig-stick!’ Ymgrawl yelled above the storm.

  ‘I saw–’ Sesto began.

  ‘What? What didst thee see?’ the boucaner snarled, dragging Sesto on by the collar.

  ‘I don’t know. Something. A daemon.’

  Ymgrawl stopped and checked himself, touching gold, bone and iron – a ring, a necklace and a button – to ward away the evil.

  ‘Care o’er thy tongue, for it spits ill luck!’ he hissed. ‘Did thee scream out?’

  ‘Scream?’

  ‘Just that past minute or more?’

  ‘N-no! I heard the scream and was looking for the source when I saw the… the…’ Sesto swallowed hard and touched iron himself. It was difficult to make himself heard over the raging elements.

  They pressed on, assaulted by the storm-driven forest. After another minute or so, Ymgrawl hollered out, and Sesto saw Benuto, Saint Bones and Pepy coming towards them, heads down.

  ‘Who screamed?’ Benuto yelled.

  ‘Not us, bo’sun!’ Ymgrawl replied.

  ‘Where be Chinzo and Leopaldo?’ Pepy shouted.

  There was another eye-wincing flash of lightning and an ear splitting peal of thunder. The stunning display heralded the appearance of Roque and Jager.

  ‘What see you?’ demanded the master-at-arms at the top of his voice.

  ‘Not a hell-damned thing!’ Benuto shouted back.

  ‘There!’ sang out Saint Bones who, from the top-basket of the Rumour, could spy a sail at twenty sea miles. ‘I saw a man!’

  ‘Where?’ snarled Roque.

  ‘In the trees there, just there!’ Saint Bones insisted. ‘But he is gone now…’

  Together now, the drenched and shaken men moved forward, calling out. They came down the slope, across a gushing stream that had not been there on the way up, through a grove of cycads and swaying date palms, hacking back vines that swung at them from the moving trees.

  In the next root cavity, swollen with water, they found Leopaldo. He lay on his back, pressed down into the wet, black earth. From his hairline to his waist, the front of him had been torn away. Some massive, clawed forest beast had done this. Some daemon from the cursed dark.

  Ten paces away, Chinzo was sprawled on his side against a tree trunk. His sword lay beside him in the mud, broken in two. He was dead, but there was not a mark on him.

  Roque turned the body and Sesto saw Chinzo’s face. He knew in a moment that Chinzo, brawny warrior that he was, had died of pure terror. He also knew he would never, ever forget the look on that dead face.

  ‘Get to the boats!’ Roque yelled over the constant storm.

  ‘We cannot row in this!’ Jager cried in dismay.

  ‘Get to the damn boats anyway!’ Roque retorted.

  They turned to move.

  The figure was behind them.

  It was there and yet not there, flickering in and out of the darkness as the lightning flashed. To Sesto – to them all – it looked like a pirate mark come to life: a crude, white figure of dead bones stitched to a black cloth.

  It smiled, and the smile broadened, and broadened still into a screaming skull mouth. The howl, partly the sound of a man in agony, partly the sound of an enraged animal, and partly the sound of angry, swarming insects, drowned out the storm. A rotten breath of putrefaction assailed them. The figure raised its arms as it howled, long, bony arms, impossibly long, famine thin, ending in spider fingers as sharp as sail-cloth needles.

  It came for them, whip fast, stinking of grave rot. Roque and Saint Bones lashed at it with their swords and both were struck aside, flying back into the air away from it like a vodou bocoor’s puppets. Ymgrawl threw himself headlong and brought Sesto down hard, avoiding the next slicing rake of the daemon’s needled hands.

  Jager was nothing like so fortunate. The daemon slammed its taloned fists together in a clap that caught the rating’s head between them. Jager’s skull burst like a ripe pumpkin.

  Benuto and Pepy, the last men standing, opened fire into the face of death. Both men had three primed pistols apiece strung about them on ribbon sashes, and Pepy had an additional pepperpot piece tucked into his waistband. They fired each gun in turn, dropping them loose on their sashes to grab the next. Every ball hit him with a meaty slap. When his sash-guns were spent, Pepy wrenched out the pepperpot and blasted it at the daemon, point blank.

  It killed him anyway, plunging its needle fingers into his face. Benuto fell on his back in terror, crying out prayers of deliverance as the thing stepped up to tower over him.

  Luka Silvaro burst out of the storm.

  He hacked his sword into the daemon, striking it again and again before it could balance and turn, like a woodsman chopping at a tree.

  It reeled at him and lunged but, by then, Tende was at its other hand, swiping with his long-handled Ebonian axe. As it turned, Delgado attacked too, firing a wheel-lock pistol with one hand and thrusting with his tulwar.

  The daemon circled and howled again, fending off the three-cornered assault. It slapped and swung with its elongated arms, trying to find a target mark.

  Then it pounced. It leapt forward like a cat and buried the screaming Delgado beneath its rending, long-shanked bulk.

  ‘Move!’ Luka bellowed. ‘Move!’

  The survivors started to run. Ymgrawl and Sesto, Tende, Benuto, Saint Bones supporting the dazed Roque, and Luka himself. It seemed to Sesto an act of cowardice and callous fear to use Delgado’s fate as a chance to flee, but he did anyway. This was jungle, cursed jungle, and the rules here were dog eat dog and every man for himself.

  Delgado’s ghastly, fluctuating screams echoed after them as they ran, and then were lost in the storm.

  The seven remaining men broke from the forest line and onto the beach. Rain was sheeting down and the storm was locked, frenzied, above the cove. Breakers slammed into the beach. The fleeing men saw lights ahead.

  Tall Willm and Zazara were cowering beside the longboats with lanterns lit. They’d dragged the beached craft right up from the crashing waterline, almost to the trees. The men fell in amongst them, panting and shaking.

  ‘What happened?’ Tall Willm piped, lowering his musket.

  ‘Hell happened,’ said Ymgrawl.

  Luka, shaken to the core, checked the men. Terror and palpitations aside, everyone was intact, except Roque. He was semi-conscious and feverish. One of the daemon’s needle talons was embedded in his left shoulder.

  ‘That cannot stay,’ Tende muttered. ‘Fell magic poison soaks it.’

  ‘Do it!’ Luka snapped. He was already looking back down the beach and checking the tree line for signs of daemonic pursuit. ‘Ygrawl! Bo’sun! Get into the lea of the boats and load all the guns we have!’

  Benuto and the boucaner scrambled under the upturned shell of one of the longboats and started priming weapons in the dry, out of the wind and rain. Saint Bones gathered firearms from the survivors and passed them in under the lip of the boat.

  Sesto watched the activity, trying to calm his racing pulse. Tende carefully heated a dirk in the flames of a lamp wick and then swiftly and brutally cut the needle from Roque’s wound. The Estalian didn’t even cry out. The helmsman seemed reluctant to touch the needle. He grasped it with Benuto’s bullet-mold press and tossed it away into the storm as soon as it was out.

  ‘What was it?’ Sesto asked Luka, shielding his face from the gale.

  ‘The daemon? Oh, I knew it.’ Luka turned away and beckoned to Tende. ‘We’ll not last the night here,’ he said. ‘We can’t row out until the storm has died, and my marrow tells me that will not be before dawn. In the meantime, that daemon will come and kill us here.’

  Tende looked away, troubled by something Sesto didn’t understand.

  ‘You know what I’m asking, old friend,’ Luka said.

  ‘I cannot, Luka. I have sworn that all away, the day I joined the Rumour.’

  ‘But you still know!’

  ‘I know. You do not forget these things…’

  ‘Then for me… for these souls here…’

  ‘Luka…’

  ‘Tende… Remember the covens of Miragliano… Semper De Deos… the temple at Mahrak… the ash grey Shores of Dreaded Wo… all those deeds, all those adventures. I stood by you then. I ask this of you now.’

  The massive Ebonian nodded. He walked away from them, and started to pace out a wide circle around the huddle of men and the drawn-up boats. Sesto saw he was kicking the sand, gale blown as it was, to scribe a pattern on the ground.

  Tende did this for almost half an hour, all of which time Sesto spent watching the trees and quaking with terror. Every now and then, above the storm, he heard the howl, the insect buzz, the dire sound of the daemon that stalked them.

  Tende rejoined them, cutting his left palm with his dagger and marking with his blood the sides of the boats with strange sigils that Sesto shuddered to look at. He marked each man in turn too – Sesto resisted his touch until he was brought up by an angry bark from Luka. With the Ebonian close, Sesto could hear what he had not heard before. The helmsman was muttering soft, necromantic incantations against the night.

  Then Tende dropped to his knees in the centre of the circle, chanting louder and more forcefully.

  ‘Have a care!’ Benuto cried.

  By then, all the men except the comatose Roque were crouching at the edges of Tende’s ring, arms ready, watching the dark as the storm blew down across them.

  They all looked as Benuto pointed.

  The daemon had arrived.

  IX

  It was lurching down the beach towards them on all fours, trotting like a limping wolf.

  ‘Are you set?’ Luka called to Tende. The Ebonian helmsman continued to chant, ignoring his captain, his back to the loping fiend that bore down on them.

  ‘Tende! Are you ready?’ Luka repeated more urgently.

  The thing came on. Zazara vomited in terror and Tall Willm gasped ‘Manann’s tears!’ and raised his musket to fire.

  Luka dragged the barrel down. ‘No! Don’t break the circle!’

  The daemon reached them. Sesto felt his bowels turn to ice as it prowled around them, as if not daring to cross the invisible line that Tende had marked. He could smell its fetid corruption. It bounded around the circle on all fours, whining and grinning. It was so big, so thin, so hideous.

  ‘Tende?’ Luka hissed, covering it with his pistol.

  Tende stopped chanting and rose up to join them, averting his eyes from the daemon. ‘My dear friend Luka,’ he said, ‘I hope you are ready. This is what you asked for.’

  Sesto felt his spine crawl as if bugs were scuttling up it. He writhed, his ears popping. The storm raged and–

  –ceased. Silence suddenly. No wind. Blackness was still all around. Pelting rain was frozen in the air as if arrested by the gods. The scene was illuminated by a lightning flash that had begun but never ended.

  The daemon hesitated.

  Incandescent green phantoms came spiralling out of the sea behind it, out of the deep oceans. They flashed and glowed, writhing like snakes in the stilled air, and fell upon the daemon.

  It grunted and hissed as they tore into it, pinning its limbs and pulling it down. Some of the lambent green phantoms were like coiled wyrms, others writhed like squids, others like stunted, naked men with heads like goats. Some had no heads at all, just thick outcrops of twisted horns. They swarmed over the daemon, clawing, ripping, bearing down on its struggling limbs.

  In the breathless hush, Luka looked out of the circle and said, ‘Hello, Reyno.’

  The daemon shook and growled under the weight of the glowing phantoms that held it fast. One of the goat heads got its fingers into the daemon’s mouth and pried it open.

  ‘Hello, Luka,’ the daemon said, its voice like metal scraping stone.

  ‘What happened to you, my brother?’

  ‘Evil happened. Pure evil…’

  ‘Tell me, Reyno! Tell me!’

  The daemon gurgled. ‘The Butcher Ship did this to me. It murdered my beloved Sacramento and slaughtered the crew, and with its final curse made me into this!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Reyno.’

  ‘Sorry? Sorry?’ the daemon’s aching sob echoed down the unnaturally stilled beach. ‘I am sorry for Delgado and Jager and Pepy and all the other sound men of your crew I have preyed on this night. I did not mean to…’

  The voice trailed away.

  ‘Reyno? Are you still there?’ Luka called. The phantoms Tende had summoned fought to keep the daemon trapped. After a while, the daemon’s voice floated back.

  ‘Luka? I can’t see you any more. What will become of me?’

  Luka looked at Tende. The Ebonian shook his head.

  ‘Reyno? Tell me about the Butcher Ship.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Tell me everything you know.’

  ‘Henri of Breton is the Butcher. Red Henri, the thrice cursed. He did this to me. He did this to me!’

  ‘Henri? Red Henri? How can it be true that my old friend is the Butcher?’ Luka snarled.

  ‘How can it be true that your old friend Reyno is a blood-hungry daemon? Eh? Flee, Luka! Flee! Henri’s warship the Kymera is the butchering ship, and it spits venom from its guns these days instead of shot. Venom! Look at me!’

  The wrenching daemon threw off several of the phantoms and rose up before Luka, the remaining phantoms trying to pull him down.

  ‘Luka…’

  ‘Reyno…’

  Tende looked at his captain. ‘I can’t hold him much longer.’

  Without looking back, Luka nodded. ‘Finish this.’

  Tende began to chant.

  Luka remained fixed, staring into the daemon’s fathomless eyes.

  ‘Goodbye, Reyno, my old friend.’

  The phantoms coiled and renewed their attack. They swarmed all over the daemon and began to pull it apart.

  The daemon – cursed Reyno – screamed as the phantoms shredded it. Its lingering howl lasted long after time unfroze and the gale began again.

  At dawn, the storm passed, they rowed the longboats back to the Rumour and the Safire, which had rode out the night’s tumult at anchor.

  As they clambered back aboard, Sesto noticed something inexplicable about Tende. The big Ebonian seemed smaller than he had before. Almost as if he had been shrunk and diminished by the sorcery he had been forced to use in order to save them.

  The ships made ready to depart. Prayers and charm offerings were made to the memory of the Rumour’s lost souls. Luka rowed back into the cove with jars of lamp oil, and set a torch to the wreck. As if grateful for the cleansing flames, the ship’s decks combusted swiftly, and flames leapt up into the billowing yards.

  ‘What happens now?’ Sesto asked Luka.

  ‘Now we hunt for the Kymera.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Yes, just like that.’

  The Rumour turned north-west, the Safire at her heels. Behind them, in the lonely cove of Isla Verde, the Sacramento blazed the bright tongues of its funeral pyre up into the morning sky.

  X

  Junio the storekeeper, may the four winds rest him, had been a man of methodical practice and scrupulous measure, and under his stewardship, the Rumour had been fully provisioned with clean drinking water, ale and edibles. But Junio the storekeeper was several weeks dead.

  His duties had fallen to Benuto, the bo’sun, and Fahd, the cook, in the way that a drunken man falls between two seats at a table. Gello, the lug-eared boy who had served as Junio’s pantryman, had tried to take up the slack, but he had not enough person about him to make himself heard. He was a gawky lad, with freckled skin that the sun punished terribly, and his ears, which abutted his head like a pair of staysails in full weather, were such a source of jokes that he could not appear on deck but to be mocked. To his credit, Gello made several attempts to alert the master to the growing deficiencies, but no one paid him any mind. He had, as it might be said, no one’s ear, which was passing strange, as he had ears enough of his own.

  Matters finally came to a head on the morning of the twenty-ninth day of sailing. It was before ten of the day, and the air was cool and brisk. A hot promise of stillness lingered in the edge of the sky, and the sea glittered, but there was a firm so’wester and plenty of air to fill the yards. They were threading through the maze of islets and reefs that decorated the Estalian littoral, as they had been since the grim matter of the Sacramento, and no sail or face had they seen but for their own.

  Sesto, who had been awake for several hours, tucked away against the foremast with a book of histories, heard voices raised, and went aft. Fahd was by the deck barrels, arguing famously with Largo the sailmaker. Neither man was large: both were wizened and hunched by age, weather and profession, but Sesto would not have crossed either one of them. The scale of their invective shamed typhoons for force. Largo retched out malingering curses and those barbed Tilean-style insults which slurred Fahd’s family members, the chastity of relevant women and the shape of several beards. Fahd, in turn, cited dubious parentage and unfortunate genital quandaries, all the while interspersing colourful Arabyan oaths, the sort of things that, when translated, lost all their poisonous force and meant something like, ‘I hit you on the head with a spoon, you monkey!’