by Max Anthony
“Has anyone disembarked?” asked Skulks.
“Goodness me, no!” exclaimed Slipper, sitting bolt upright. “We would be most remiss in our duties if we allowed anyone to disembark before we’d checked over their cargo manifests. Why there could be all sorts of tax implications! They could even be smuggling goods!”
Skulks smiled at Ferty Slipper’s sense of duty. The Chamber Council generally only employed the best, a few employees in the catering department notwithstanding.
“Captain Honey, might I make a suggestion?” asked Skulks formally.
“Of course you may, Captain Skulks,” responded she.
“Perhaps it would be for the best if I were to board the Blackened Crumpet in order to explore her hold, prior to any agreement being reached for her crew to disembark.”
“This seems like an entirely reasonable suggestion, Captain Skulks. Were they to be hiding any contraband, it would be in our interests if we had advance notice on the matter.”
“I shall head for the Blackened Crumpet forthwith!” he exclaimed.
“Please ensure you don’t come to injury,” Honey admonished him as he left the room.
It didn’t take long for Skulks to spot the Blackened Crumpet. It was moored at the docks, five ships along from the dockmaster’s offices. Skulks peered at it through the window of a baker’s shop as he munched on a warm pork pie. His stomach had been growling so ferociously that Skulks had been genuinely concerned that it might give him away or take so much effort from his Wielding to mask the sound that he’d lose concentration and come to trouble. A single pie was sufficient to quell his unruly stomach, but he purchased a second one to ensure things remained quiet down below.
As he left the shop, Skulks found himself confronted by the reality of his situation. The docks were currently a-bustle, for Hardened enjoyed a healthy commerce. It was also full daylight, adding to his problems because his Wielding did not allow him to become hidden when there were many pairs of eyes watching, particularly if it was light.
Not to be distracted by such minor complications, Skulks stole himself a rowing boat, though he had to make a short journey to the Upriver Docks in order to do so. Once out upon the river, he was able to mask himself from sight, only having to dip the oars into the water every so often to generate the necessary propulsion.
Below the decks of the Comely Wench, a sailor by the name of Gurner “Fruity” Nibbles was looking through a hatch and out across the river.
“Oi, Scrinchy,” he called out to his friend Scrinchy Crackers, who was lounging in a hammock nearby. “There’s a boat out here that’s rowing itself!”
“If you think I’m getting up for that, you’ve got another thing coming,” responded Scrinchy, steadfastly refusing to move from his comfortable hammock. “I remember when you told me you’d seen a Rainbow Kipper swimming next to the ship. You stupid tit.”
“There was a Rainbow Kipper,” said Fruity, continuing to look at the boat outside as it rowed itself serenely along.
“As I explained at the time, kippers are dead,” said Scrinchy patiently, knowing Fruity to be somewhat slow on the uptake. “So you can’t see a kipper swimming in the sea. ‘Cos it has to be killed and smoked before it becomes a kipper.”
“Look, I promise you there’s an empty boat rowing past us! I swear it on me ma’s life!”
“Yer ma’s dead. She died when you were born. Probably when she saw what she’d given birth to.”
“I’ll give you me rasher of Cow’s Piss tonight if I’m wrong,” said Fruity.
Scrinchy sighed, rolling himself from his hammock and getting to his feet. “How many times do I have to tell you that it’s ‘ration’, not ‘rasher’?” he asked his friend. He looked out of the hatch and onto the Ten Dams river. “Crumbs!” Scrinchy said. “It’s the cursed rowing boat of Purdle Seven Oars!”
With that, Scrinchy dropped into his hammock, covered his eyes with the back of his hands and quickly uttered a prayer to each of the forty-three different gods which were said to hold sway over the life and death of sailors.
As two sailors on the Comely Wench prayed fervently and extensively, Purdle Seven Oars made unruffled progress along the Ten Dams River towards his goal. It was known that Purdle Seven Oars, when he’d been alive, had favoured steak in his pies. Therefore, it seemed unusual that there would be a half-eaten pork pie on the bench of this particular rowing boat. This half-pie had somehow vanished utterly by the time the rowing boat knocked gently against the hull of the Blackened Crumpet, the crew of which had no reason to be looking river-side for an incursion by a sailor’s superstition. Having made its gentle collision with the larger merchant ship, the oars rowed no more and the rowing boat drifted slowly on towards the Deeping Sea.
As the rowing boat made its journey into the vast expanse of the sea, Tan Skulks, for it was he, rather than Purdle Seven Oars, climbed over the gunwale and onto the deck of the Blackened Crumpet. The deck was surprisingly free from activity. Normally, Skulks would have expected a newly-berthed ship to be a hive of activity, as the Captain and his crew made preparations to unload their cargo and re-fill the hold with whatever products they would carry with them on the return journey. Not so on the Blackened Crumpet, where there was no sign of the Captain and only two members of the crew could be seen, sitting upon the forecastle deck. They had their backs to Skulks so he could not make out their demeanour, but he was sure they were lacking in motivation.
With his Wielding powers keeping him hidden, Skulks took advantage of an open hatch to drop into the space below deck, forgoing the use of the ladder. The space he found himself in was dark, but Skulks could see that he’d entered the passenger area of the vessel. Merchant ships often made just as much profit ferrying people as they did from transporting cargo, so many had a portion of their storage space given over to provide comfortable cabins for those who would pay good money to cross the sea.
There was still no sign of the crew and Skulks was starting to feel that this was unusual. A ship of this size would normally require in excess of thirty men to handle it.
“Maybe they’re all sleeping off their grog somewhere,” he told himself.
There was a thumping noise, coming from somewhere deeper within what Skulks had assumed to be the passengers’ quarters.
“Perhaps that’s Zera Graves, falling out of her hammock,” he said to himself with a sailor’s disdain for landlubbers, even though Skulks certainly preferred a life on land to one on the sea. Skulks didn’t need to walk on his tip-toes to remain silent but he found himself creeping through the ship in just such a manner. He had decided to head for the hold first in order to inspect the ship’s cargo for anything illicit, with a mind to stealing anything his eye took a fancy to, having told himself that it would be purely on the basis of taking a sample as part of his investigation.
The hold took up almost half of the ship’s interior and smelled of damp wood, salt and fish. It wasn’t lit and there were no portholes. A large hatch had been installed above, to allow the stowed goods to be lifted out onto the deck for carriage to the shore. This particular ship had been built to carry smaller cargoes and the hold was partly filled with a variety of barrels and wooden boxes of different sizes. Skulks knew that valuable goods tended to be stored in smaller boxes, so he pulled one container down from a nearby shelf and used the tip of a dagger-sword to pry away the lid, fervently hoping to find something valuable. If the contents were not valuable, he hoped they would at least be edible or interesting. None of these three hopes came to fruition, for this particular box played host to a dozen harmonicas, an instrument that Skulks personally disliked. He pressed the lid down again and pushed the box back onto its shelf. A second box contained a similar quantity of harmonicas.
Being very short of attention span, Skulks was already becoming dispirited, so levered off the lid of a barrel to see what other cargo the ship was carrying. The lid came off easily and a slithering noise followed as half a dozen salted silver fish fell
out of the over-filled barrel and landed on the floor of the hold, one of them ending up on Skulks’ boot. The smell of fish become stronger.
“All looks normal so far,” Skulks thought to himself as he turned to seek out a likely-looking crate to open. Instead, something caught his eye in the fish-filled barrel and he checked more closely. It wasn’t a fish that caught his eye, but the tips of human fingers poking through these preserved snacks. Not being squeamish, Skulks scooped more of the fish away onto the floor of the hold in order to get a better look. His rummaging confirmed it: these fish were naught but a thin veneer to hide a more sinister cargo. Skulks tipped the barrel over onto its side. There were more slithering noises as fish and human limbs spilled out onto the floor of the hold. This barrel held mostly arms, ranging in colour from pale white, to grey and some were brown. There were legs also, but these were outnumbered by their upper limb compatriots.
Wary, lest these limbs sprout spider-legs and make a leap for his throat or clutch at his buttocks, Skulks stabbed his dagger-sword through the nearest arm, pinning it to the deck. He then gave it few experimental kicks and pushes with his steel toe-cap, in order to determine if it posed any threat to his wellbeing. The arm remained still and Skulks was pleased by this, for he had only come here to snoop, rather than fight off a horde of onrushing arms and legs. Using the side of his boot, he kicked a few of the most prominent limbs into the shadows beneath a shelf and righted the barrel. There were several dozen similar barrels in the hold and he picked another at random.
“More limbs,” Skulks thought to himself as he looked within. “Similarly hidden beneath salted fish, doubtless with the intention of concealing the smell.”
Skulks was good at mental arithmetic, owing to the practise he’d gained from counting cards, or working out the value of goods he’d stolen. Because of this prowess, he was able to quickly estimate there to be in excess of fifteen hundred severed human limbs in the hold of the ship.
Leaving the barrels, Skulks turned his attention to the larger crates, stacked at the far end of the hold. He was saved the effort of climbing to the top of the pile because two of the crates were at floor level. Once more, a dagger-sword worth five kings’ ransoms was used for the mundane task of prying off a lid. With the crate lid off, Skulks looked inside and brightened immediately. The crate contained not arms, legs, torsos or heads, but dark brown bottles cushioned with straw and adorned with labels proclaiming them to be Bu’Jo Pale Ale. Skulks glanced around furtively, a habit of his when he was about to do something he should not. He lifted a bottle free and made a play of studying it. Then he used the blade of his dagger-sword to knock off the bottle’s cap.
“The smell of these fish is making me thirsty,” he told himself as he raised the bottle to his lips. In his mind, a whispering voice told him that a little taste wouldn’t do any harm. Before he could drink, a smell assailed his nostrils – a sharp, acrid odour, unmistakeably coming from the bottle. He brought the bottle closer to his nose and took a second sniff, disappointed at being denied his rightful drink of ale.
“This doesn’t smell like ale at all,” he thought. “In fact, it smells like something from the cellar with that unpleasant mound of limbs that almost killed me and stole my diamond.”
In order to reassure himself of this, he tipped the bottle upside down and let the fluid glug out onto the floor below him. It was most certainly not ale. More in hope than expectation, Skulks opened the adjacent crate, which was also full of bottles. He opened one from this second crate and was not surprised, but nevertheless still disheartened, that did not contain ale. This bottle was also upended for the contents to slosh onto the planks of the floor.
As Skulks stood in quiet contemplation of that which he had lost, the fluids from the two bottles followed the gentle slope of this lower deck, coursing around Skulks’ boots as they made their way to the salted fish and limbs disgorged from the first barrel he’d opened.
“Perhaps I should get back to Captain Honey,” Skulks told himself, before he instead decided to reach for another of the smaller boxes on a shelf to one side. When Skulks had set his expectations that there’d be something worth stealing, he didn’t like to leave empty-handed. Behind him, the Bu’Jo Pale Ale flowed over and around a number of the salted fish which had been tipped from the barrel. These fish fizzed and flopped, the noise quiet and lost amongst the creaking and groaning of the ship. As Skulks looked inside another box and discovered more harmonicas, these fish sprouted short spider-legs. Several of the spider-fish wandered in circles, while others collided with crates or barrels. Several more scuttled silently over the floor in the direction of Skulks.
As he turned to leave the hold, Skulks had only a moment to ponder the source of the crunching noise beneath his feet as he trod upon three slippery spider-fish. His feet went out from under him and the normally dextrous Skulks fell backwards atop the nearest crate of Bu’Jo Pale Ale. The wooden wall of the crate broke away and fifteen or twenty of the bottles fell onto the deck. Bu’Jo was not renowned for its glass-making and eight of the bottles smashed. As the contents of the bottles flowed briskly away, spider-fish did their best to harm Skulks, a task which they found difficult because they had only fed on plankton during their brief time alive. They were enthusiastic if not effective and it took Skulks a few moments to drag three spider-fish from inside his trouser leg. Another two had found their way over Skulks’ tunic and one industriously sucked at his throat while another tried to force its way up his nose.
Shortly the spider-fish were no more, for Skulks had not been gentle in his efforts to dislodge them from his crevices. This short interval where he had been otherwise distracted had provided sufficient time for the Bu’Jo Pale Ale to lap over a number of limbs and fish that Skulks had tipped out of the first barrel. Having disposed of several fish, Skulks was not greatly pleased to see fifty more and twenty spider-limbs in the hold behind him. He was even less pleased when he observed a spider-leg and a spider-arm take exception to each other and as spider-arm tried to throttle spider-leg, the latter kicked out, tipping over the second open barrel and scattering its contents onto the floor.
Fortunately, it appeared that there was insufficient of the re-animating fluid to bring these all back to life and the newly-spilled limbs shook and twitched a little, but sprouted no legs. Not wishing to try and run past the spider-limbs, Skulks instead climbed onto a cargo net which ran the length of the hold and was attached to the ceiling, with the hope of shimmying over them and thereby reaching the doorway. He had scarcely made it halfway to the exit door when one especially industrious and free-thinking spider-arm discovered the open crates of bottles. It picked a bottle up and hurled it at Skulks, who was able to knock it aside. The bottle fell to the floor and smashed amongst several legs which had thus far remained dead. Soon these legs were up and scurrying, eager to kick him in the posterior or his face.
More bottles headed Skulks’ way, thrown from below. The first spider-arm had been joined by three more, which had learned by example and were attempting to injure the climbing Wielder by means of hurled missiles. Their aim was lacking and Skulks watched as a number of bottles shattered randomly around the hold. Two bottles, thrown in quick succession exploded against adjacent barrels and Skulks looked on in horror as these barrels, which were evidently not water-tight, began to wobble and shake violently. After a few moments of wobbling and shaking, both barrels burst open, cascading a new wave of spider-limbs and salted spider-fish onto the lower deck.
Bottles continued to fly, with the two opened crates which contained them showing no sign of running out of supply. Five more barrels rocked back and forth as re-animating fluids came within. Before Skulks could enact his escape, the lower deck was awash with fish and limbs, leaving him stranded on the ceiling with his planned exit completely blocked by these creatures. If they’d possessed mouths, he was sure they would have been baying for his blood, but as there were no spider-heads in this particular swarm, the only noise was th
at of pattering on wooden planks, along with the sounds of jostling.
Dangling from his net, Skulks found himself beneath the cargo hatch, which appeared to open and close by sliding along metal runners attached to the roof of the hold. It was heavy and locked, neither of which would have normally been an impediment to Skulks with his Wielder’s strength and lock-defying capabilities. Usually he was able to operate unmolested, but on this occasion, he was not. The spider-limbs seemed possessed of an extremely rudimentary intelligence and many of them were trying to reach Skulks where he dangled, rather than milling impotently on the floor beneath him. Some spider-limbs climbed barrels and crates, from which they attempted to spring at Skulks, while others threw anything that wasn’t tied down in order to dislodge him from the net. One particularly cunning spider-arm even threw spider-fish at Skulks and several of these fish now ran up and down inside his tunic. The feeling was unpleasant but they had not yet managed to find a way to cause him any harm.
Ignoring the spider-fish wriggling insistently in his armpit, Skulks wrenched open the five heavy bolts that locked the cargo hatch from the outside. He took hold of one edge of the hatch itself and hauled it along its runners. It squealed and scraped most hideously, because the ship was old and badly-used. Once there was enough space to force his way through, Skulks pulled himself out onto the deck of the ship, just as a spider-arm grabbed him by the end of his boot. The spider-arm squeezed and squashed with all of its might, but found steel toe-cap to be stronger than its dead flesh and it was not able to make an imprint in the boot.
With his rump on the deck of the ship, Skulks gave the attached spider-arm a kick with his free leg. It was dislodged and fell back into the hold, landing in the midst of several hundred spider-limbs and spider-fish. The seething mass below seemed to collectively pause for a moment, before almost as one they scuttled over to the doorway through which Skulks had initially entered the hold.