by C. Vandyke
‘Here it is, boys,’ Hellion said. His face cracked into a broad grin. ‘We’ll never have to raid again.’
A silver casket rested on a bier. Covering the casket were countless emeralds, rubies, and diamonds. Greed ate their fear. Like a seagull plucking the eyes from a corpse, Tobias unsheathed his knife and started prying at a gem, a lozenge-shaped emerald as long as his thumb. Shark joined him.
Soon, the three men were picking away at the casket, pocketing gemstones like boys picking seashells from a beach. Corvin stood back, watching as they desecrated the casket.
‘Come on,’ Tobias said, pausing from levering out a sapphire as big as his fist. ‘Don’t just stand there.’
Corvin nodded, but his attention was drawn to Hellion, staring enraptured at something on top of the casket. When Corvin joined him, he saw what consumed the Captain.
It was a ruby, carved into the shape of an unblinking, red eye. Big as a fist, its worth was incalculable. Corvin shuddered. When the light from his bracers hit it, it lit up Hellion’s face crimson, making it look as if he wore a mask dipped in blood.
‘Magnificient,’ Hellion breathed. He began digging his knife into the silver setting.
At that moment, the barge shuddered, throwing them all off balance. A loud crack sounded, followed by a gushing noise.
‘What was that?’ Shark asked in a monotone. His attention remained on ripping as many gems from their mountings as he could.
‘Nothing,’ Hellion said. His voice sounded distant, distracted, as if the only thing of importance in the world sat in front of his eyes. He continued digging. More noises. The barge shuddered again and again.
By this time, Shark and Tobias had filled their pouches and pockets to bulging. There was a manic gleam in their eyes. Despite the shuddering and cracking, it looked like they were prepared to stay on the barge even if it sank beneath the waves.
‘We have to go,’ Corvin shouted above the shuddering. The sound of timber groaning and shattering somewhere in the darkness filled him with panic. Gone was his earlier bravado. He sensed the approach of a horrible death, far from the light. At that moment, Hellion freed the ruby and brandished it triumphantly. Above the tortured sounds of the barge coming apart, they all heard three knocks.
Shark went white. He backed away from the casket. ‘Did you hear that?’
Tobias shook his head as if to deny what they had all heard, but he too stepped away. Hellion, who had been closest, laughed. His eyes gleamed red. ‘We have what we came for. Now we go.’
Laden with jewels, they moved unsteadily towards the stairs. All around them, the barge shook. Timbers creaked and groaned, the mournful sound like a lament for the dead. Last to leave, almost choking on terror, Corvin looked back. His heart stopped. He saw the casket limned in a crimson light. The barge shuddered. The casket lid shifted. A shadow seemed to seep from the gap. Even if Hellion hadn’t bawled his name, Corvin was already halfway up the ladder.
The men staggered onto the deck. Only a faint crimson line on the horizon gave a hint that the sun had ever ridden the sky. The Maiden’s Kiss was a distant shadow. Everywhere, the lights had gone out. The men shuffled across the deck as if approaching a gallows. Hellion clambered down the rope, a smudge in the darkness. Shark and Tobias followed.
The curtain of twilight that surrounds Brig Island drew near. Corvin saw the shadowy outline of the island itself and the distant glimmer of the Lighthouse. Awkwardly, he climbed over the railing and slithered down to the rope, where Shark and Tobias helped him into the longboat. Hellion sat in the stern, looking at the ruby cupped in his hands, while Shark cut the rope.
The barge, a great slab of darkness, started to drift off course. In moments, its bulk was lost to view.
‘Get us back,’ Hellion said distractedly. He was staring raptly into the ruby.
More tired than he realised, Corvin raised another breeze, and in a few minutes, they were welcomed back to the Kiss by a cheering crew. All thoughts of bad luck and ill-omens vanished when Shark and Tobias piled gemstones onto a rumpled blanket. The cheers flitted about in the rigging as darkness claimed the world.
Unable to shake the unease that had settled into his bones, Corvin looked for Hellion. He found him, squatting beside a barrel, staring into the ruby’s depths. A bloody gleam of light played across his face. Slowly, Hellion looked up, his eyes blank and hungry. The covetous smile he gave Corvin chilled him to the marrow.
In this life, the Devil takes the hindmost.
The disappearances began that night. Glass lanterns hanging fore and aft cast a gloomy light across the deck, where, after the celebratory feast degenerated into raucous singing and several drunken brawls, many of the crew slumbered.
Corvin didn’t. Head full of the stuff of raw magic, he wandered the deck in a daze. The bracers felt icy to the touch, but even then, the night remained hot, made worse by a warm breeze riding in from the south. Clouds scudded across the moon, its skull-like features grinning idiotically down on the Maiden’s Kiss. There was something about the light—
Corvin froze. A shadow slipped from a doorway. His heart pounded and he felt the bracers binding his wrists grow warm. A lurching moment, as if the deck suddenly yawed, then Corvin saw it was Jantos, the oldest crew member, coming up from below decks. Jantos half raised his hand in greeting when the shadows suddenly pooled and clotted around him. One moment Jantos was there, and then, he was gone.
White noise filled Corvin’s head. He felt a surge of power ripple through him, dissipating just as quickly as it came. Staggering, he kept his balance with an effort. Looking around, Corvin saw he was the only one awake. No one else had witnessed the disappearance.
He was about to wake the nearest sailor when a hand clapped him on the shoulder. He turned and saw Hellion looming by his side. In the glow of the lamps and the moon, Hellion’s face looked cadaverous. Hellion grinned, but there was something wrong with his eyes.
‘Come with me,’ Hellion said, his voice barely above a whisper. Something essential had been leached from the man. His hand tightened painfully on Corvin’s shoulder. ‘Now.’
Corvin found himself pulled through a doorway beneath the quarterdeck. Inside, Hellion moved with confidence along the pitch-black corridor. Within moments, Corvin entered Hellion’s cabin, which was lit by a single candle.
Corvin felt trapped inside a dream, one where he desperately wanted to scream a warning, but where only silence emerged from his gaping mouth. He watched Hellion pull something from the inner pocket of his shirt. A thick crimson radiance spilled from the ruby, rendering his face into valleys and peaks of black and red.
‘It speaks to me, conjurer,’ Hellion said. His face twisted as if he was struggling, and his awed voice turned into a hitching sob. He clutched the side of his head with his free hand. ‘In here, it speaks to me. Why?’
As Hellion held the ruby aloft, shadows chased themselves around the room, crawling up the walls and across the ceiling in ceaseless waves that gradually coalesced behind the captain. Fearful now, remembering how the shadows devoured Jantos, Corvin inched towards the door.
The crimson radiance grew deeper and began to throb. Hellion, frozen in rapture, vanished as shadows swarmed over him in a black tide, leaving behind only the floating ruby, settled within shadowy folds. Corvin sensed an intelligence glaring at him from within those shadows. Ancient. Malign. Hungry.
Searching for the door, Corvin stumbled around and tripped over a chair, his fall seemingly endless in the dark. He hit the floor with a grunt. Terror consumed him. Shouting, he crawled in what felt like endless circles as whispering laughter filled his head. He found the door. Throwing it open, Corvin scrambled into the corridor and ran. Pausing on the threshold, he saw a wave of crimson-tinged darkness surge from the captain’s cabin. Corvin threw himself through the door onto the deck.
His cries roused some of the revellers from their drunken stupor. Backing away from the doorway, Corvin stumbled into Shark, who blinked b
learily at him.
‘Watch where...conjurer? What’s wrong?’
‘The captain...’ Corvin panted with fear, words dying in his mouth. By then, he didn’t have to explain, only point in terror at what surged onto the deck.
What remained of Hellion was a smear of flesh across a red-tinged shadow bulging with other human features. Formless faces pressed against the inside of the shadow, mouths opening in silent screams as wide eyes blinked blindly, leaking crimson light. Another crew member, awoken by the noise, suddenly screamed as shadows swarmed him. He fought against them, but it was like fighting air. The shadows ate away at his body like waves against a sandcastle, reducing the flesh to tatters in the moonlight before the man completely vanished.
Pandemonium ensued as the crew, those unlucky enough to awaken to the screaming, found themselves attacked on all sides. Corvin watched Copper be overrun, his shuddering body slipping from existence in the time it takes a man to draw breath. Corvin backed away from the shadows, stepping over sleeping crewmen too drunk to know death was bare moments away.
‘Do something,’ Shark shrieked, his pointed teeth gleaming wet in the moonlight. He waved a cutlass around, the weapon utterly useless as the shadows gained strength and size.
Amidst his fear, Corvin sensed his bracers go icy cold. Magic pulsed through the aether all around him. Closing his eyes, he sent his senses ranging out, drawing the magic to him. It was tainted with that hellish crimson darkness, raw and pulsing with desire. Then, crying out lustily, Corvin lifted his arms to the sky and crashed the bracers together.
In an instant, a crackling bolt of lightning shot down from the sky. It filled the air around Corvin, a cage of light that turned night into day. For a moment, the shadows were gone, leaving only a bleached-out deck filled with dead and dying men. Then, the light vanished, and smoke filled the air. Utterly spent, his mind a shattered wreck, Corvin staggered about until he collapsed against a railing and watched the Maiden’s Kiss catch fire...
Death comes for us all, and not in the ways we imagine.
The crackle of flames brought Corvin back to what remained of himself. He reeled across the deck, heedless of the embers burning his bare feet. Already, the mizzen mast had collapsed, bringing with it a tangle of burning rope and tackle. Flames licked the length of the mast, smoke spiralling into the sky. He looked down and saw the ruby in his hands.
‘I see you,’ he muttered, his face fixed on the shadow watching him.
A cold wind issued from it. Corvin glimpsed the cold wastes between the stars within that formless shape, and what he saw broke him. Titan beasts, inimical to humanity, travelled through the inky void, indifferent to anything but their own gigantic appetites. The vision slammed shut, leaving only the shadow. Corvin heard whispers infiltrate his head, formless words that flitted like bats in a cave.
‘Do you want it?’ Corvin said, his eyes wide. He hugged the ruby to his chest tighter, a secret, cracked smile stretching his blistered face. Bloody light leaked from between his clutching fingers, fingers that had scrabbled unthinkingly through the ash after the lightning had seared the shadows. Tears tracked down his face when he heard an answer inside his mind, an answer that rocked him to his sundered soul. He looked around; the crackle of flames had grown to a roar, and everywhere there was fire. The crow’s nest plunged into the ocean, trailing smoke like a comet. Distantly, Corvin saw the beacon on the Lighthouse at the End of the World gutter into darkness. Hope died in his chest.
‘Do it, then.’
The shadow flowed over him—into him—like water. Drowning, Corvin struggled to find the surface, to find himself. Instead, the darkness clutched him tight, dragging him deeper into formless shadow. He hung suspended for an eon, a tiny spark foundering in a well of darkness so absolute it contained infinity. Then, in the distance, a flare of red grew into an onrushing tide of hellish light that consumed him in an instant. When sentience returned to him, the brigantine had sailed into legend.
There is a tale now, of a burning ship that sails the oceans of the world. Only on certain nights can it be seen, a distant beacon of flame, riding the horizon. While those who live a soft, safe life on the mainland scoff at sailors' superstitions, those sailors know better. At night, when the sun dies and darkness claims the world, many remember the tale of the Crimson Eye. That if it turns and bears down on you, best prepare for death. And on that burning quarterdeck stands a shadow in the shape of a man, who sees all with a single glaring crimson eye, an eye that hungers for souls...
Prince of the Porthole
Ian Barr
Saltskiff Bazaar let off a symphony of creaks with the shifting currents. The pale lanterns threw jagged shadows against the sinister patchwork of shipwrecks, the grandiose structure more akin to a mad man’s puzzle box than a man-made island. Bastian swung through the rigging of a moored ship, timing his jump with the listing of the cog, and planting his feet on the top yard. He leaned against the mast to catch his breath. It was a humid night, and he was pouring sweat, feeling as though he’d been climbing through thick soup. Sweat stung his eyes, and he was looking forward to a frothy pint back at The Porthole, but he forced that thought away lest it get too comfortable. Any thief worth their salt knew when ships docked in Saltskiff’s only private mooring there were shadows to be skulked.
Breath caught, his feet flashed against the wood. Stepping deftly to avoid knotted ropes, he leapt from the end of the yard and bucked himself through the night air. Wind rushed around his ears as he hurtled towards the next ship in the line, a smaller local skiff called Washer, and snapped his fist around a line fluttering in the breeze, sliding down onto her deck. Bastian hammerfisted the lone watchman as he landed, crumpling him with a grunt. Fist still curled, he looked around to ensure he was alone, then crept across the silent deck.
The private mooring, surrounded by high walls made from half a dozen battered hulls, sat silent and still under the pale moon. He could only see the stern of the ship there, Dusk Trader painted on the aft. It was too far to ship-jump, and he’d have nothing to grab onto if he tried. Armed sailors walked the shadowed deck at regular intervals, ready to defend something valuable enough to warrant the only real security Saltskiff had to offer. He doffed his shirt, knowing there was only one way he was going to make it onto that ship. He’d worn his selkie skins for a reason, after all.
The water was bracing, salty knives prodding his skins while debris jostled against him. There was always shit floating around Saltskiff, usually ending up in Wakewash as the island drifted. His strokes were clean and strong, and quieter than a mer could’ve managed. Treading into the mooring, he veered toward the anchor chain, glistening with sea slime and dangling kelp. Carefully, he began to climb.
At the main deck, he peeked and counted ten guards. Bastian lowered himself back down a rung, considering. He was a good skulker, wispy and agile, but ten guards was a gamble of long odds with only a belt knife. His pause allowed voices to catch his ear.
“How’s it, Rav?”
“Dull as Cookie’s coddle,” another replied. “Ain’t we supposed to have word from Braddock already? Cap’n was sayin’—”
“Who fuckin’ knows? I just hope those bastards riding the Scythe don’t think they’re coming aboard…”
Boots stamped as the guards moved off and Bastian shook himself, realizing there was a tightness in his chest from an old, bubbling anger. If the men spoke true, Braddock–Captain King Braddock since the recent Conclave–and the Midnight Scythe were coming to Saltskiff. A mischievous smile cut through his maelstrom of emotion. Braddock was coming for this ship, for whatever was on it, and Bastian got there first.
His nose twitched at a whiff of acrid smoke.
Looking down, his grin broadened. Someone had hauled open one of the gunports, a thin line of smoke drifting out. Bastian shimmied down the chain, the slick links eager to let him slide instead of cling, and came level with the gunport. He planted his feet, calculating and hoping, then leapt. F
ingers closed on the edge of the port, a small noise of surprise coming from within, and he swung in feet first, taking the pipe-smoking sailor under the jaw with his heel. The woman crumpled, the still-burning pipe spilling as she fell. Bastian trod over the glowing embers, moving into the hold.
Dusk Trader was packed to bursting with crates and barrels, some branded with the names of islands or ships they would be moving to, others marked with symbols Bastian had only ever seen in the Magician’s Market. He frowned, wondering what could be for Braddock, when movement sent him scurrying into the shadows.
“... there on the morrow,” said a deep voice, resonant and brusque. “You will bring my goods to the Scythe before mid-afternoon—the trident first and foremost! I will take no risks with that, Crofter.”
“Aye, Sire,” Crofter said. “We have the other goods you requested already in the longboat, but the trident is in my personal stores. It’s been naught but quiet here, Sire. T’won’t be no trouble.”
Jammed between a pair of crates, Bastian watched Crofter weave into view. A bandy-legged man, graying at the temples where most of his hair remained, he had his hat tucked under his arm. In his hand was a glowing orb, an expensive trick that Bastian had seen for sale in the magic shops. Held near the mouth, Crofter spoke into it and whoever held the orb’s twin replied, the ball pulsing violet.
“The trident is worth more to me than you are, Crofter. Contraband runners are a shilling a dozen; it’s your life if anything goes awry. See that it doesn’t.” The glow flickered out.
“As if I don’t know my own business, King Braddock,” Crofter sneered. “Don’t like the way I do things? You can bloody well freight your own contraband, Sire. Shilling a dozen, my hat! Nasty old…”
Crofter turned, and Bastian launched out of his hiding place. He latched onto the man’s ankle, pulling him over with a yelp and pressing a hand over Crofter’s mouth as they struggled. If there was something under lock and key for Braddock, that’s what Bastian wanted. Crofter was strong, but a knee driven into his groin left him wheezing, and Bastian came astride him, bearing down with all the menace he could muster.