Edge of Destiny

by J. Robert King

  “Fifty by forty?” Magnus said. “It’s hardly twenty-five by twenty!”

  “I’m using asuran feet. More accurate,” Zojja said. She glanced at his boots. “I’d never measure in norn feet!”

  Huffing in annoyance, Magnus reached down to cup the asura’s backs and shuffle them out of his quarters. “How about we look in the hold? Plenty of room in the hold for golems.”

  “The hold!” Snaff gazed admiringly at the captain. “Where you hold things. You maritime types are quite literal, aren’t you?”

  Captain Magnus shepherded them across the deck, ignoring the sniggers of his mates. He jabbed fingers into a wooden grate and yanked it upward. “There it is—the hold of the Cormorant, big enough for a thousand large crates.”

  Snaff and Zojja waddled up to the hatch and stared down into the huge, dark hold, loaded with crates and casks. The asura began muttering back and forth.

  “A thousand large crates? I’d say ten thousand large crates.”

  “He’s talking norn-large, not asura-large.”

  “Ahem,” Captain Magnus interrupted. “How does it look to you?”

  “Most suitable!” Snaff pronounced with a grin. “Of course, we’ll have to off-load all this cargo, and you won’t be able to man the cannons you have down there, and we’ll need to cut six new hatches, three along each rail, with trapdoors—”

  “Cut new hatches? With trapdoors? The crew will fall through!”

  Sighing, Snaff climbed up on a nearby barrel so he could look the captain in the eye.

  “What is it?” Magnus asked.

  “Eir said we needed to turn your ship into an undead destroyer,” Snaff explained patiently. “This is how we’ll do so.”

  Captain Magnus stroked his black mustache. “I suggest a change of plan. You’ll not be turning Cormorant into an undead destroyer. You’ll be doing it to that ship.” He pointed to a vessel moored nearby. “A barque.”

  Snaff dubiously scanned the ship. “Bark like a dog?”

  “No, barque like a ship. You should know barques. They’re asuran. Just your size.”

  It was not just small. It was decrepit.

  “Hmm,” Snaff mused. “Looks burned.”

  “Part of it is. But, look, it’s seaworthy. It’s got a solid hull. That’s all you really want, right?”

  Snaff sniffed. “It’s too small.”

  “Take two, then,” Captain Magnus said, gesturing to a second barque docked in the shadow of the first. It was somehow even shabbier.

  “Where’d you get them?”

  “Saved them—but only just—from Morgus Lethe,” said the captain. “Both crews—asuran crews—were lost.”

  “Sadly, asuran krewes are often lost,” Snaff said reflectively. After a few more moments of thought, Snaff jabbed his hand out toward the captain. “We’ll take them. Very soon, those barques will be barking at Morgus Lethe!”

  Smiling ruefully, the captain took the asura’s tiny hand and shook it.

  The preparations for war took two months.

  While Snaff and Zojja labored away to retrofit the pair of barques, Eir, Logan, Rytlock, Caithe, and Garm learned the ways of the sea. Captain Magnus took them out in the Cormorant for training expeditions.

  They learned how to keep their feet on rolling decks, how to climb ratlines in a gale, how to furl and unfurl sail, how to hurl grapnels and board ships and fire blunderbusses. More than once, a companion ended up in the drink, and sadly for Rytlock, no hyenas were near at hand. After his first plunge, sinking like a stone, Rytlock was required to wear a safety line tied around his waist. Of course, when they used it to to haul him out of the sea, he rose backside first. Rytlock quickly learned to swim, if only to shuck that embarrassing line.

  He also learned to keep down his lunch, though he would often be a little green beneath his dark fur.

  Meanwhile, Eir learned the charts, the currents, and the hazards of the local seaways, as well as the lairs of their enemy. Captain Magnus made sure they never approached the unholy sanctum of Morgus Lethe, for to do so would be to draw him out, but he showed Eir on the charts where it lay. It was a maelstrom above a great graveyard of ships. To go into those waters would be certain death—unless they were prepared.

  At last, they were.

  The galleon Cormorant breasted through gray waves beneath a gray sky. Her sails snapped white overhead, straining with the elemental wind that Zojja had called up to carry them across the sea. The deck of the ship groaned beneath four hundred boots—crew at battle stations. Gunners loaded cannons, fighters drew blunderbusses, and necromancers readied vials of enchanted acid. Grim-jawed, they braced for war.

  Captain Magnus the Bloody Handed manned the helm. His eyes glowed with the thrill of the hunt, and his hands held the wheel in a steady beat against north winds. Beside him stood Eir Stegalkin, slayer of the Dragonspawn. Logan, too, was there, assigned to guard Snaff and Zojja. The two asura stood nearby, wearing golden laurels and swaying slowly. Rytlock and Garm were stationed along the starboard rail, tasked with deck-to-deck fighting, and Caithe had taken up her position in the crow’s nest.

  Eir had planned out the whole battle, giving assignments to each of her friends. She had even asked Zojja to enchant every weapon aboard to strike hard and true against undead. Everything was in place.

  Now, they just waited for Morgus Lethe.

  “Do you think we’ve scared him off?” Eir asked, scanning the choppy waters ahead.

  Captain Magnus shook his head. “Lethe doesn’t scare off. The Cormorant gives him pause, aye, but only until we’re fully above his lair.” The captain nodded to the fore. “We’re approaching it now.”

  Eir perched a hand over her eyes and saw it—a hundred yards beyond the bow, a black maelstrom. A wide, roaring pit opened in the choppy seas, and water rushed down into some black abyss. “The lair of Morgus Lethe, champion of Zhaitan.”

  “Aye. That maelstrom swirls above a deepwater drop-off, where the sea falls away to a bottomless rift. It’s a maelstrom that drags ships down. Beneath that vortex lie a thousand wrecks, home of Morgus Lethe’s undead navy.” Captain Magnus lifted his ear, listening to the slap of waves before the Cormorant. “They’ll hear our bow wave, see the shadow of our hull. It’ll bring them up.

  Captain Magnus spun the wheel, and the bow shifted to point south of the whirlpool. Sails bellied full as they tacked into a run. “Split up the barques,” the captain commanded, “one north and one south.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Snaff and Zojja chorused. They closed their eyes, and red powerstones gleamed in their golden laurels.

  In the boiling wake of the Cormorant, a pair of asuran barques rode low in the water. They seemed to be heavily laden cargo vessels, ripe for the picking. In fact, they held a surprise—one linked to the golden laurels on the asura’s heads. As they sent impulses from the powerstones, one barque veered north and the other south.

  Caithe called down from the crow’s nest, “There’s something shifting in the maelstrom!”

  Eir went to the starboard rail and stared down at the green-gray waters. They sloped away into a deep vortex. The heart of the whirlpool was black, but in the swirling waters, Eir glimpsed shadowy figures. An emaciated arm, for just a moment, and then what seemed a knobby spine, and then a skull draped in ratty hair or seaweed or something. These shapes were distinct only a moment, pressing against the spinning membrane before vanishing again.

  Captain Magnus shouted, “Fighters to the rail!”

  Seamen stepped forward, cutlasses and cudgels raised. Rytlock dragged Sohothin from its stone sheath, and Garm shouldered up beside him.

  Eir meanwhile brought her bow into position and nocked three arrows. She trained them on the waters that sucked away just to starboard.

  There were more glimpses—here, a half-rotten leg, there, a battered rib cage, and then across the inner curve of the whirlpool, a long line of skulls pressing up through the film of water and rising. Vacant eye sockets gushed brow
n water.

  Eir released the bowstring. Three shafts whistled away to crack through three decaying faces. Still, the creatures rose, fletchings jutting from nasal cavities and cheekbones. The monsters emerged from the whirlpool as if the water had no grip on them. They rushed the gunwales of the Cormorant, and their skeletal fingernails clawed its boards. With daggers in their rictus grins, they climbed.

  Eir released three more arrows, which snagged in three more skulls without destroying the monsters. Eir slung her bow on her shoulder and pulled a great mallet from her belt. “Here we go.”

  With a gurgling roar, the first line of rotting creatures reached the rail.

  The crew of the Cormorant replied with a roar of their own. They attacked, blunderbusses blasting and cutlasses swinging.

  Heads rolled from shoulders, but bodies climbed on. Sailors hacked hands from wrists, and arms from shoulders. The bodies merely fell into the whirling soup as more Orrian undead emerged.

  Rytlock rammed Sohothin into one, lighting it like a lantern. Fire sizzled in its eyes, and it plunged away into the water. Sohothin punched through the rotting chest of another undead, roasting its heart, then slashed down the midline of a third.

  Beside him, Garm bit the head from a skeleton and spat the skull into its body. The decapitated creature plopped down into the whirlpool. With a sick growl, Garm chomped the rib cage of another creature and shook his head, ripping the bones apart.

  The Cormorant was pulling clear of the maelstrom, but the sea beyond boiled with even more undead.

  They lunged up en masse, clawing toward the rail.

  Three swift strokes of Eir’s mallet reduced three of the foes to greenish paste on the side of the ship. Then she stepped back. “Keep them pinned down,” she called to Rytlock and Garm. “I’ve got to help Logan guard the asura!”

  The charr and the wolf tore through many more.

  Eir retreated to join Logan beside Snaff and Zojja. “How’re they holding up?”

  “See for yourself,” Logan said.

  Snaff and Zojja swayed hypnotically. Their eyes hung wide, and the red powerstones in their laurels flashed.

  Eir glanced aft toward the two barques that her friends controlled. Both had sailed past the whirlpool, but both were now swarmed by rotting corpses. They clambered up the gunwales and vaulted over the rails and shambled across the decks—only to drop into a clever set of trapdoors. The spring-loaded hatches dumped the undead belowdecks and slammed closed again, ready for more. Meanwhile, beneath the planks, gears spun and bones splintered and meat ground into a gray paste, which oozed out the portholes. The two barques were golems of a sort, steered from afar. Instead of cargo, their holds contained powerful meat grinders.

  Snaff and Zojja destroyed undead by the hundreds. Even Morgus Lethe could not hope to raise the chum that poured from the barques.

  A nearby roar brought Eir’s attention back to the aft deck of the Cormorant, which now swarmed with undead.

  Eir smashed one to the deck and spun to kick another in half and turned to fling a third over the rail. It was heavy work, like shoveling sand from a pit that kept filling.

  Logan meanwhile painted blue aura in the air around the asura, making a shield that would guard them. He spun around and pounded skeletons like tent pegs. His hammer crashed into their heads and drove their spines down to scatter across the deck.

  But wherever two fell, three more rose.

  Worse, yet, before the bow of the Cormorant, another ship lurched up from the depths. It was a ship of the undead, huge and hoary, with black masts like burned-out pines and a riddled hull and sails hanging in tattered ribbons. It disgorged the sea from its decks and hull and rose up, tacking toward the Cormorant.

  Captain Magnus saw the ship and the monster at its helm: Morgus Lethe. “They’re coming alongside! Load cannons. Hoist grapnels. Prepare to board!”

  As the undead ship hove up alongside the Cormorant, gunnery teams lit fuses and stood back. Cannons blew. They shot crystal orbs filled with acid, which broke upon the ship and sprayed out over it and ate at it. Still, the vessel bore on. Boarders hurled grapnels, the metal weights thudding to the decks and rattling as they dragged back to lodge in the ship’s rail. Heaving mightily, the men hauled the ships together.

  “Board her!”

  The men cleated off the lines and leaped for the deck of the undead ship, careful to avoid the spots eaten by acid.

  Rytlock and Garm went with them, bounding side by side onto the enemy vessel. Their feet left solid wood and landed on rot and slime.

  “Squishy,” Rytlock said.

  Garm’s hackles rose, sensing enemies, though the deck was clear.

  “Where are they?” Rytlock snarled, holding up Sohothin to light the darkness. “Show yourselves!”

  The hatches flew back, and undead sailors stomped up in greatcoats emblazoned with ancient heraldry.

  “Pistols!” shouted a nearby seaman.

  The sailors lifted blunderbusses and discharged them. The shots ripped through the undead to pepper the waves beyond. Tossing aside their guns, they slashed with cutlasses. Though blades cleaved flesh and bone, the undead came on.

  Fingers of death, cold as the grave, pierced the sailors’ flesh and ripped it warm from their bones. They screamed as they came apart. At the moment when each died, though, the screaming stopped, and what was left of their flesh turned gray.

  The shivering cadavers then spun about to join the ranks of the undead.

  “Not good!” shouted Rytlock, swinging Sohothin like a torch to keep the undead at bay. Garm circled behind him, snarling at the wall of monsters.

  Behind the phalanx of undead, a figure strode down from the aft deck and crossed over amidships. The man was large and amorphous beneath a tattered cape—a norn warrior. He lurched forward on leech-covered legs and strode toward the fore of the ship.

  “That’s him,” Rytlock said. “That’s Morgus Lethe.”

  But to reach Lethe, they would have to fight through a wall of undead.

  While the battle raged on both decks below, Caithe began her invasion from above.

  She leaped from the crow’s nest of the Cormorant and slid down the ratlines, knocking off numerous undead on her way. Then she swung out onto the lowest spar and balanced lithely across it. The yardarm extended beyond the ship’s sides, nearly touching the boom of the undead ship. It was a simple thing, therefore, to walk out on a beam of solid wood and walk in on a beam of rot.

  Caithe reached the mainmast of the enemy ship and wondered at it, soft and slimy to the touch. “Weak points.” She drew an enchanted dagger from her hip and plunged it into the mainmast. It gave no more resistance than wet clay. She twisted the blade, wondering if it would—“Amazing!”

  The mast severed and tilted outward and plunged.

  With a great whoosh, the upper half of the ship’s mast dropped to the deck, smashing a dozen undead below. Staying in the tops, Caithe could cut down the mizzenmast and the fore and the aft—

  Except that undead were climbing the ratlines toward her.

  She winged a dagger at one of them, but the blade buried itself in the thing’s chest, and it just came on. That didn’t work. Caithe ran along the spar, slicing loose the lines that held the sail and gathering the cloth. She flung it around the ratlines, pinning the undead to it. She tied off her trap with a double-shank knot.

  On the other side of the mast, though, undead had topped the spar and were treading toward her. Caithe approached, cutting more lines. The first creature grasped her shoulder, icy fingers piercing her skin. Screaming, Caithe wrapped one of the severed lines around its neck, cinched it, and kicked the dead man from the spar. It jolted out, hanged in midair.

  This was fun. Why were the others so frightened?

  Hauling on another line, Caithe swung away from the undead that reached toward her. She landed on the mizzenmast and cut it down as she had the main. Then she grabbed a line and swung out and around, back toward the bow of
the boat, landing on the foremast. In moments, it, too, went tumbling. Now, only the aft mast stood, but no lines remained to swing to it.

  Caithe leaped down from the spar, striking the deck and rolling. She came up, ready to run toward the aft, but a huge, fetid figure rose before her: Morgus Lethe.

  He turned empty eye sockets toward her, and water streamed through his rotten cheeks. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “To the aft deck. I want to cut down the last of your masts.”

  “Don’t you know who I am?”

  Caithe lifted an eyebrow and said, “Captain Lethe?”

  “The same.” He reached beneath his tattered greatcoat and drew forth a cutlass that dripped with black ichor. “I have a blade that sucks the life out of any living thing.”

  Caithe nodded politely. “Only if you hit me with it.” She lifted her white stiletto. “I’m pretty good at killing things, too.”

  Captain Lethe’s vacant eyes turned toward the blade. “I’m sure you are. But you can’t kill me. I’m dead already.” He lunged for her, his cutlass spattering black ooze.

  Caithe cartwheeled away, careful not to let the ichor touch her. She leaped up on a nearby barrel and bounded out past a pile of rotten line. The black stuff spattered the deck just short of her and burned through.

  The captain stalked forward, swinging his cutlass. “I’m your destiny, you know. I’m the destiny of all living things.” He lunged for her.

  On the Cormorant, the battle had become brutal. Undead swarmed the ratlines and sails. The fight in the tops sent a steady hail of bodies down to pound the decks below.

  Those decks were awash in monsters. Logan and Eir stood back-to-back, smeared with gray flesh and black blood. Logan still painted aura in the air around them, but the undead clawed their way through it. His hammer smashed them back, and Eir used axes to tear them limb from limb.

  Between these two grisly defenders, Snaff and Zojja huddled, clinging to each other. Their minds spun as their meat-grinding golems ate up the things that swarmed their ships.

  But perhaps Captain Magnus had it worst. The undead formed a thicket around him. His axe cut through arms like branches. All the while that he defended the Cormorant, he stared at the enemy ship, at the creature that marshaled these undead.