by Mike Brooks
There was a thunk as the blade sliced through flesh and sinew to bury itself a finger’s breadth into the log, immediately followed by a piercing scream from Ganalel that only increased as Gador grabbed his shoulder and pushed it forwards, forcing the severed end of the man’s forearm into contact with the glowing blade. After a moment or two of obscene sizzling Gador relaxed his grip, and he and Ita hastily undid the clasps holding the pillory shut. Tevyel stepped forwards with a small cauldron giving off the sharp smell of liquid resin, a clean scent that cut through even the stench of burned flesh beginning to fill the air, and Gador plunged Ganalel’s arm into the cauldron so the warm resin could bind the wound closed.
Daimon breathed out, trying to hide the shakiness that had overtaken him, and fight down his nausea. The crowd had erupted into shouts of angry jubilation or abuse of Ganalel, so Daimon turned to them.
“The sentence is done!” he shouted. “Ganalel has paid for his crime! He is still of this town, and shall be treated as such!” He waved his hands at them. “Now go! We must prepare for the Feast of Life!”
RIKKUT
THE STORM HAD finally blown itself out. The Sea Spite had foundered a day earlier, its deck deluged by one too many huge waves, and the sail left too full for too long. A screaming, malicious gust from the wind spirits had pulled the mighty vessel over, sending bodies spilling into the water. Most had been recovered even from those treacherous seas by neighbouring ships swinging in close to help, but some were lost. The Dark Father always took his price, sooner or later.
That had been yesterday, though. The last angry clouds had finally scudded off north, taking their drenching, bone-chilling rain with them, and there was nothing left but the blue swell of the ocean under the clear blue of the sky, both of which gradually turned gold as the sun sank in the north-west, on the start of her journey to the depths. Rikkut stood in front of the deckhouse and stared her down, letting her light fill him. She was growing stronger, and Father Krayk was swallowing her for less and less time every night. Rikkut felt much the same, but unlike her, when he reached his Long Day he wouldn’t fade away again.
A shell-horn sounded behind him, then another one. It shouldn’t have been possible for shell-horns to sound scared, but the soundings were tremulous, shaky, as though panic had nearly prevented the sounders from getting their lips into the right place. Rikkut turned, blinking away the pale after-image of the sun’s disc.
“What?” he shouted. He could make out other crews gesticulating as their vessels began to veer away. What was the problem? The Brown Eagle clan could be the only others abroad on the oceans with anything like enough ships to threaten his raid, and they would have the old, young, and infirm amongst their number, whereas his raid was fully crewed by warriors and sailors, no dead weight. It would be a slaughter, and besides, Sattistutar would be coming from the west if she was coming from anywhere, and he’d been facing west, he’d have seen them…
A sudden incongruous swell astern was the only warning the Red Smile had before the water erupted and a monstrous head, half as long again as Rikkut was tall, clamped its jaws around the yolgu’s flat deck with a jolt that shook half the crew off their feet.
“Krayk!” Juhadzh Kaivaszhin shouted, as though someone could have fucking missed it. “Krayk!”
Had the krayk been attracted by the blood from Sarika’s corpse, and followed them from there? Or had the Dark Father sent it after them as a new challenge? Every Tjakorshi, even the ones who didn’t sail much, knew what would call a krayk. You didn’t clean your catch out on the sea as you sailed, lest you leave a trail of fish guts the Dark Father’s trueborn children could follow back to you. You bound and stitched wounds as soon as you could. If you ran down another vessel and boarded it, you didn’t linger over your prize: you took what you wanted and left again on your own, hopefully less bloody ship. Far too soon, dark shapes would gather in the water, drawn by blood dripping through cracks in the deck and leaking from bodies drifting downwards. Sharks were bad, but sharks fled from the krayk.
Everything fled from the krayk.
It was the first time Rikkut had seen a full-grown adult. Its hide was the familiar dark, pebbled grey scales of the sea-leather armour the clans turned it into when they got the chance. Its teeth were as long as his hand. Its eyes were surprisingly large, and were as dark and featureless as a cloudy sky during Long Night, yet somehow seemed to fix on him. Rikkut felt the unfamiliar swell of fear in his stomach as the boards of the Red Smile began to creak under the immense pressure of jaws wide enough to swallow a man whole.
He’d charge or leap over a shieldwall, or take on an enemy champion in single combat without a second thought. He’d face down a storm and laugh at it, dare the wind spirits to do their worst, because life was short and he was nothing more to a storm than an insect was to him. If the Dark Father decided it was time for a storm to claim him then the storm would claim him, and nothing he could do would change that.
To see one of Father Krayk’s trueborn children, though… There was a difference between accepting the spirits of wind and wave might take you, and seeing a full-grown krayk coming for you. That made it personal.
Besides, Rikkut was no sailor to understand the dance of wind and wave, paddles and sail, but he knew blades and death. This was something he could fight back against. Just because the Tjakorshi feared and respected the krayk didn’t mean they never hunted them. Sea leather was sea leather, after all, the best armour, unless you stole or traded for metal with the Drylands to the east.
Rikkut staggered across the tilting deck to the outer wall of the deckhouse and lifted a harpoon from the rack of three there. It was a foolish yolgu captain who set sail without something to deter a krayk, even if they weren’t setting out to hunt the beasts. The harpoon must have been six cubits long, a shaft of spruce with a long, jagged head of laboriously sharpened bone taken from a leviathan, or another krayk. Rikkut didn’t know which and didn’t much care, either: so far as he was concerned, it was a weapon.
As suddenly as it had appeared, the krayk vanished. It opened its jaws, releasing the Red Smile’s deck, and the yolgu jerked forwards again as the stiff breeze was no longer counteracted by the monster’s weight. The krayk slipped back below the waves, out of sight, the water closing smoothly over its huge head like a lover’s embrace. Rikkut checked his stride, harpoon held ready, his eyes fixed on the splintered deck the creature had been savaging a moment before.
“You must have scared it off!” Juhadzh said, slapping Rikkut on the shoulder, too loud and too jovially to be anything other trying to hide his own fear. The man was a loose sail in a storm, lots of noise to no purpose, but behind the bluster he was actually a superb sailor. He’d been the natural choice as captain after Sarika’s death, for all that he made Rikkut’s teeth itch.
The krayk breached to the yolgu’s south.
Rikkut had a momentary glimpse of the beast outlined against the darkening sky, its huge head connected by a short, thick neck to an even more massive body, two front flippers like the ocean’s largest paddles. Then it crashed down on the deck, half in and half out of the water, and its immense bulk began to push the Red Smile under.
Rikkut was thrown sprawling. Men and women screamed as they tripped, slid and fell into the waves. He scrabbled desperately at the deck with his left hand, felt splinters from the wood digging under his nails, stabbed out with the harpoon, drove the point in, wrenched himself to a halt. The deck was tilting further and icy water lapped at his boots, but he wasn’t in the monster’s domain yet.
The krayk convulsed and lunged, shaking the ship again, and its jaws closed around the body of a paddler who’d been thrown off-balance. The woman screamed, and lashed out with her paddle, but she might as well have flailed at a cliff face. The krayk thrashed its head back and forth, and her shrieks cut off as her neck snapped. The beast’s jaws closed further and another shake of its head tore the upper part of her body free, in a welter of blood and bone. The gr
isly remnants flopped obscenely into the water by the krayk’s head, starting to stain it pink, and the monster gulped down her lower torso and legs, then turned in search of more prey.
It was facing away from Rikkut for a moment, and he saw his chance.
He didn’t have time to set himself properly; the deck was too unstable for that. He simply rose from his sprawl and took two quick steps, trusting to speed over balance to keep him upright, the harpoon gripped firm in both hands. Plunging the weapon downwards, he hit the krayk where the beast’s neck met what passed for its shoulders, with all his momentum and weight behind it.
The grey-scaled hide parted before the sharpened bone tip, and Rikkut felt a brief thrill of triumph as his weapon sank into its flesh. However, the strength of sea leather lay not in any curing process, but in its own formidable toughness. His blow didn’t penetrate deeply, and no sooner had he felt the judder of contact then the krayk whirled, clumsily but oh-so-fast for something that size half-hauled out onto a yolgu, its huge jaws snapping and gusting fetid air as it searched for its attacker. The Red Smile lurched still further and Rikkut lost his balance, lost his grip on the harpoon shaft, stumbled on the sloping deck, fell into the sea.
Cold. Icy, flesh-chilling, bone-numbing cold. His lungs contracted involuntarily and he had to fight to keep his mouth shut to prevent a gasp from escaping him, and the ocean flooding down his throat in exchange. He fought upwards, struggling against the swirling mass of his furs, trying to get back to the surface before they became truly waterlogged and dragged him down.
There was a surge of pressure in the water next to him. His head broke the surface and he once more heard the screams and shouts of men and women, the splintering of wood and, closest of all, the stentorian rumblings of the beast. He shook the water from his eyes, reaching out a hand blindly. His fingers met a familiar, rough surface that shifted under his touch. It felt like sea leather.
He’d surfaced right next to the damned krayk.
He was on its right flank, between the front and back flippers. His first instinct was to turn and swim away, furs be damned, try to make it to open water where one of the other ships might dare to come in and pick him up. The Red Smile was foundering, unable to stay afloat under the weight of the monster as it lunged to and fro, trying to catch more prey. The harpoon was still stuck in the krayk’s shoulder, but didn’t appear to be troubling it at all. Most of the crew were already in the water, either involuntarily, or having jumped in on the far side of the yolgu to escape the beast’s jaws. The few that remained on board were clinging to the deckhouse to avoid being tipped downwards towards the thing destroying their vessel, but the ship itself was clearly doomed. They’d be in the water before long, whatever they did.
Rikkut felt rage, shame, and fear rising inside him. The Red Smile had been his ship, gifted to him by The Golden for this voyage so Rikkut could enact its will. To lose it would be the worst of omens. The other captains might haul him from the water, sodden and shivering, but they’d never respect him again. They’d claim the Dark Father had marked him, that to follow him further would see them all go to the depths.
He’d have failed.
Rikkut snarled, drew his spearfish-bill dagger and dug it into the krayk’s flank. The tip didn’t even penetrate the thick hide, but it gave him just enough purchase to lever himself up onto the beast’s back. The scaled skin was chill to the touch, seemingly no warmer than the water he’d just clambered out of. Krayk were truly the children of the ice-cold deeps.
The krayk shifted beneath him, becoming aware of his presence on its back, but then someone in the knot of remaining crew hurled another harpoon at it. The throw was weak, and the weapon bounced harmlessly from the side of the monster’s snout, but it distracted it for a moment and brought its head whipping back around. Once more, Rikkut saw his chance. Once more, he took it.
He scrambled to his feet, ran forward a few steps along the ridged plates of the krayk’s back armour, and threw himself down at the back of the beast’s neck before he lost his footing and was dumped into the water once more, where it could turn its jaws on him, or swat him with a powerful foreflipper. The krayk hissed an exhalation so loud it was nearly a roar and started to thrash, but Rikkut managed to straddle its neck and hold himself in place well enough to start stabbing at it with his dagger. The point skittered harmlessly off its hide once, twice, as the huge beast’s head jerked from side to side.
Then the point found an eye.
The spearfish bill sank deep into the socket, and the krayk went berserk. Rikkut lost his grip on his weapon as he grabbed at the beast’s neck, cold wet hands trying to find purchase on cold wet scales, lest he fall back in and be crushed by its flailing. The krayk floundered to its left, towards the side it could still see on, further destroying the Red Smile as it did so. Then, with Rikkut still clinging to it, it dived.
The water rushed up, forcing its way into his nose and mouth as he instinctively tried to take a breath, pulling him loose from the back of the creature and leaving him stranded just below the waves. He kicked upwards again, broke the surface for a second time and shook his head to clear his eyes of water. The Red Smile was going under. At any moment he expected to feel the water surge beneath him as the krayk came back to claim him, piercing his body with savage teeth, then shaking its half-blind head to tear him apart…
“Chief!”
A yolgu was closing on him. Rikkut tried to swim backwards as it approached, but he needn’t have worried: the paddlers were experts, and they swung directly alongside without any part of the ship striking him. He reached up a hand, felt it clasped by another, was towed through the water for a few cubits, then hauled aboard.
The second soaking had done it for his furs, and the cold had leached the strength from his limbs. He struggled to rise from the deck, and couldn’t tell if he was weighed down more by his waterlogged clothes, or the grim knowledge of his own failure.
The crew around him started chanting.
“Krayk-killer! Krayk-killer! Krayk-killer!”
SAANA
THE HOUR WAS late, and Saana was drunk.
It hadn’t been a deliberate decision, but this feast was so unlike the last it had happened naturally. Barely two weeks ago, Tjakorshi and Naridans had been sitting in uncomfortable stillness, separated by language, culture, and deep ancestral enmity. Tonight, the air rang with laughter and music, and although most people still didn’t speak each other’s tongue there was at least some sort of understanding. The clan had sung one of the Songs of Creation, and despite the Naridans not knowing the words, many had joined in with the stomping or the clapping, once they’d worked out where it went. The Naridans had brought out drums and reed whistles, and set up a racing, skirling tune that some of their younger folk started dancing to. There were lots of complicated steps involved, which hadn’t stopped some of the younger Tjakorshi joining in, much to everyone’s amusement.
Saana laughed and clapped along with everyone else, but there was a hollow pit in her stomach every time a new peal of merriment rang out. Her ears seemed focused on what wasn’t there, always straining to hear the raucous, tearing sound of Rist’s laughter, the sound she’d never hear again. Its absence took her mind to dark places. Perhaps that was also why she’d drunk faster than usual.
Perhaps, too, it was connected to Zhanna. Daimon had explained quietly that he didn’t yet feel his people would be happy with her no longer being his hostage, but she could join them for the festivities. Saana had been delighted at first, but in truth Zhanna hadn’t spent much time with her. After all, they’d seen and spoken to each other several times since she’d been shut inside the Blackcreek castle, whereas Zhanna had had no contact with anyone else in the clan. She was currently trying the Naridan dance next to Tsennan Longjaw and a Black Keep boy called Lavit, apparently the adopted son of Samul the carpenter. Samul was on the other side of the square, sitting very close to a man named Menas, and Saana had resolved to try not to think to
o much about that.
It didn’t help her mood much when Daimon Blackcreek joined the dance. She’d expected him to stay aloof and removed, as before, but the usually staid Naridans had loosened up for this particular festival, at least, and the normal barriers of rank and position were less rigid. That didn’t make it any easier to watch him spin and wheel so close to where he’d killed Rist. She’d mainly managed to push her bitterness to the back of her mind, but this was too sharp a reminder.
She tried to think about it fairly. Daimon was trying to set an example for his people. That was what their whole scheme with the Great Game had been about. Besides, he wasn’t actually much older than most of the others dancing. He’d locked his father up and abandoned his own honour to save his town, an action apparently almost incomprehensible to the Naridan way of thinking. He could be excused this time of levity.
The dance changed, and Daimon ended up next to Zhanna. Saana’s daughter was clumsy next to the sure-footed young thane, and he began to guide her through the steps.
Saana muttered a curse to the Dark Father under her breath, drained her tankard of sour Naridan ale, and stepped away from the table.
She heard a rough cheer to her left, and her feet took her towards a crowd of mainly Tjakorshi backs around another table. Moving closer, she saw Inkeru wrist-wrestling with Menaken. The Naridan was holding his own quite well, his jaw clenched with effort. Inkeru, meanwhile, appeared to be trying to sap his will purely through her stare. The spectators clapped and cheered each minute gain or loss, until suddenly Inkeru let out a hiss of frustration as her arm gave way and Menaken slammed her knuckles to the wood. Menaken whooped in triumph and Inkeru shook her head ruefully, then touched two fingers to her brow in salute. Someone slid a wooden tumbler of shorat in front of Menaken, who raised it to Inkeru before throwing it back. Saana smirked, expecting a reaction as bad as Daimon’s on their first night in Black Keep, but to her surprise the guard simply blinked a couple of times. The Tjakorshi roared their approval and someone slapped Menaken on the back, which inconvenienced his breathing far more than the shorat had.