Guild Wars: Sea of Sorrows

by Ree Soesbee

  “We’ll catch them,” Isaye said through gritted teeth. “Come on, come on . . .”

  “We have to!”

  “We will.” Throwing a glance down at her pilot’s compass, Isaye grinned fiercely. “There! We just crossed into the harbor current. Now it’s our turn.”

  “Our turn to what?” Cobiah asked, but as he got the words out, he felt the Nomad II shudder. The ship began to pick up speed, slowly at first and then faster, her prow rising as it bit deeply into the harbor’s waves. “What’s happening?”

  “We’ve caught the warm inbound current, the one that heads westward. It’ll push against the Indomitable, slowing her down. That’ll make it damn hard to steer the Nomad, but she’ll be faster in her passage, that’s for certain.” Though the increase in speed built slowly, it was notable. Bit by bit, the distance lessened between the two. “Make ready!” Isaye called to the sailors on the deck. The norn had cleared it of creatures, but several men and women aboard the ship were injured. Even Bronn was hurt, twisting a scrap of sail around his arm to bind a long slash. “Tenzin?” Isaye shielded her eyes and looked up.

  From the upper yardarm, the dark-haired Krytan waved. The sailors had rigged a bucket of harpoon rifles near him, each loaded with a thick grappling hook and a long reel of hemp line. Grymm and Rahli prepared the sailors: one group under the norn, ready to fight off the undead, and a second mustering at Bosun Rahli’s command to heave the lines once hooks pierced the enemy’s deck. “Once we get the ropes clamped down,” Isaye commanded, “we turn the Nomad west, toward Claw Island’s fortress. We’ll still be in the current, and that should help with our leverage. We need to get the Indomitable within range of the island’s guns.”

  “Acknowledged, Cap’n.” Rahli relayed the orders to the crew.

  Before she’d finished speaking, the Indomitable opened fire. The boom of cannons rang in their ears and the smell of scorched gunpowder filled their noses. Shrill whistles accompanied the heft of cannonballs as they hurtled through the air, hurling up white-foamed spray where they struck the water, ripping wide rifts in the Nomad II’s sails and landing with shuddering explosions against her hull.

  “Return fire!” Isaye shouted, and her crew was quick to obey. The Nomad II’s guns were fewer than those of the Indomitable but had greater range, and Cobiah saw breaches tear open along the black ship’s hull where Isaye’s gunners struck their mark.

  The wounds to the Indomitable’s hull wouldn’t slow her, nor would the Dead Ship take on water as the Nomad II would. But as they closed on the black-sailed ship of the line, Cobiah found himself counting. They had nineteen seconds until the Dead Ship’s cannons could fire again.

  The Nomad reached her in sixteen.

  With a steady heave, the smaller clipper ship pulled alongside her enemy’s deck and blasted her first grappling lines through the Indomitable’s hull. The proximity prevented either ship’s cannons from doing damage; neither could fire their big guns on such a close target without doing equal damage to their own hull.

  Her crew was another matter. Undead sailors swarmed the gunwale, leaping across the gap between the vessels before planking could be laid between them. The rotting, filthy corpses of once-living men had no fear of falling, nor of water, nor of the beasts that lashed about beneath the fetid waves. They wielded rusted swords or swung bare fingers with sharpened bones protruding through the tips of greenish flesh.

  Pistols fired aboard the Nomad II as the living sailors defended themselves. Bronn followed the first rush of flying lead with a long swipe of steel. His massive great-sword sliced through flesh, bone, and all, chopping through undead as they leapt onto the ship. He managed to skewer one on the tip of his sword, but it did not stop him—after a few more chops, the zombie body fell in pieces from the blade.

  Not to be outdone, Grymm plowed into the fray with a yell, sounding for all the world like an avalanche tumbling downhill. He lifted one zombie bodily, snapping it in half with his bare hands. The big bearded norn shoved another of the walking dead from the ship, but its clutching hand gripped his shirtsleeve. Defiant, Grymm placed his hand on the zombie’s shoulder and heaved, ripping dead cartilage from shattered bone. He grabbed the dead sailor’s arm and began to beat another zombie with it, caving in the rotting sailor’s skull.

  Cobiah emptied his pistols into the enemy, aiming for eyes and joints. The bullets would do no significant harm against raw flesh, so he had to use them sparingly. Once the guns were empty, Cobiah drew his cutlass from his waist and set his feet firmly.

  He could hear Tenzin’s harpoon gun above him, its unmistakable report cracking through the sound of battle. The sharpshooter lay along a high yardarm, reloading and firing the rope-bearing harpoons as quickly as he was able. Already, six ropes stretched from the Nomad II to the Indomitable, their far ends tangled tightly around the galleon’s rigging, sunk into her hull or through the rotting boards of her ribs. Another flew out as Cobiah watched, the sharp hooks of the grapple shredding sail and wrapping tightly around the Indomitable’s rear mast.

  “Make ready to pull!” Rahli yelled as she cracked another zombie with a belaying pin. “On the captain’s command!”

  But as she called out the order, a terrible voice cut through the chaos, with power behind it enough to rattle the ship’s boards. “There’s only one captain here, mortal woman.” The sound was inhuman, chilling Cobiah’s blood to ice. “I am he.”

  On the deck of the Indomitable, a horrific figure lowered the flintlock it held in a putrid hand. Its skull was square of jaw, the flesh rotted from it entirely, leaving greenish bone open to the salt of the sea. A once-pale coat, now stained with seeping black blood and festering mold, clung to muscles stretching tautly over jagged bone. Ruffles hung at the nape of the creature’s neck and at its wrists, antique lace fluttering in the bitter ocean wind. No more the sheepish schoolboy, Captain Whiting had, with the corruption of Orr, become an abomination.

  Cobiah staggered back, his breath torn from his chest.

  “Chernock,” the captain hissed. “Do your duty.”

  A second figure approached the gunwale. This one had skin like taut leather, a dried mummy of flesh stretched over a warped skeletal frame. Her grin was frozen in a rictus and her hands glowed with a sickly magical chill. “Aye, Captain Whiting. It’d be my honor.”

  Aubrey Chernock still wore her service medals, but now they were sewn to her skin, the Krytan coat lost somewhere to the sea. She hissed and leapt high above the gunwale, arching up like a shot and then down again, claws spread wide with feral glee. Grymm managed to get his fists in the air before she landed, but her claws seared through flesh and bone, ripping the norn’s forearms open with the barest touch.

  The norn yelled in pain, lashing out with a fist. The strike caught Chernock’s jaw, snapping her head to the side with a jarring crack of bone. But instead of falling to the ground, the vicious creature simply paused and cracked its head upright once more, the sinews and broken vertebrae in her neck restoring themselves as wormy ropes of flesh crawled out of her skin and lashed themselves around the wound.

  “Grenth’s mercy,” Isaye choked out, falling back to the ship’s wheel.

  “The ropes are in place!” Tenzin cried out above them.

  Though she was clutching one of the wheel spokes in a white-knuckled hand, Isaye quickly took up the cry. “Haul the lines, men, and draw her close. The current will do the rest!” She grabbed the hoop of the rudder line and wrapped it over the wheel spoke to hold course northward into the Lion’s Arch harbor.

  Captain Whiting fired his gun, the pistol’s report cracking like the snap of a rigging line. The bullet hurtled through the air, leaving a trail of black fumes in its wake as it sped toward Grymm Svaard. “Grymm! No!” Bronn Svaard leapt in front of his brother. The shot struck the swordsman, spinning him in a complete circle, knocking him to his knees.

  “Brother!” howled Grymm. He tried to push past the snarling Chernock, but her claws carved deep
into his flesh. Pinned by the awful wight, Grymm struggled and fought but could find no way to reach his twin.

  “Haul the lines!” Isaye was yelling over the chaos, and her sailors risked and lost their lives to obey. But with every heave on the thick hemp rope, the Indomitable and the Nomad shifted closer together, drifting along the tide toward the fortress on Claw Island.

  Cobiah spun, unloading his pistols at Captain Whiting. Both shots tore into the rotting captain’s coat, shattering bone and spewing pus from beneath the putrescent flesh, but the Orrian monstrosity didn’t flinch. Instead, it began to laugh, recognizing Cobiah at last.

  Captain Whiting extended a filthy, blackened finger toward Cobiah. “Marriner.” The beast’s eyes glowed, greenish pinpricks within the skull’s dark, moldy sockets.

  “You swore to serve my ship for a full tour, Marriner. Her voyage has not yet ended. You escaped the Indomitable once, at the mouth of Orr. Again when we seized Port Stalwart.

  “You will not evade commission a third time.”

  The crew pulled with all their might, hauling the ropes so fiercely that their hands left bloodstains on the fibers. The Indomitable scraped against the Nomad II’s side, her hull leaving stripes of black mold along the Nomad II’s weathered boards. Creatures crawled across the deck, rotting hands tearing at any sailors they could find. Red water drenched the deck as blood and salt mixed beneath churning boots.

  The Indomitable’s canvases hung in ruined tatters from her masts, and the wind swelled only the clipper’s sails. The Nomad II’s guns continued to tear at the Indomitable’s rigging, shredding the rotting fabric from her yardarms. On the deck, Chernock slashed at Grymm again and again with her taloned claws. The norn was berserk with rage. He punched the wight directly in her face, and bones cracked beneath leathery skin as he forced her to retreat across the deck. She was quick, though, and clever, leaping to attack at any opportunity, her claws slashing open the skin of his arms and raking across the pugilist’s chest. Grymm grabbed Chernock by the neck and snapped it roughly, and at last, the wight fell limp. Disgusted, Grymm hurled the creature away and raced toward Bronn.

  Chernock landed with a thump on the deck. Within moments, her head twisted back around, the bones in her neck crackling loudly, her flesh reweaving itself as the creature struggled to heal the wounds she had been dealt. She was down—but not yet out.

  Across the deck, Grymm fell to his knees, hands reaching to clasp his brother’s shoulders. He lifted his brother from the floor, tipping Bronn backward onto his knees. “You’ll be fine, old cuss,” Grymm said firmly, denying any other possible outcome. Bronn writhed in his arms, dark steam issuing from the gunshot wound in his chest. His mouth fell open, and more smoke wafted from his throat and poured from the norn’s nostrils. He made a low, guttural sound deep within his chest.

  “Bronn?” Grymm let go, drawing his hands back. His arms were bloody from Chernock’s aggressive strikes, and his long beard was matted with salt foam. “Bronn, can you hear me?” His brother’s head tipped forward awkwardly, and his eyes closed. Grymm wept openly, cradling his brother’s body to his chest. “My brother . . . my brother,” he murmured in grief and pain.

  But as it had been in the fight with Chernock, death was not the end of Bronn Svaard. His body twitched in his brother’s hands, startling Grymm, who stared down at the bearded norn in renewed hope. “Bronn?” he asked softly, touching the side of his brother’s face.

  The body in Grymm’s arms went stiff with a sudden rigor mortis, the limbs twitching and spasming as muscles contracted and released beneath the surface of the norn’s skin. Slowly, a hideous smile spread beneath Bronn’s mustache, a smile that was not his own. The swordsman’s eyes snapped open, a solid, inky black, and his hand lifted to clench tightly around his brother’s throat. “Brother!” Grymm choked out, horrified.

  The thing that had been Bronn gave a sick-sounding laugh. “No more.”

  —

  Near the gunwale, Cobiah raised his sword and focused on Captain Whiting, refusing to allow the green pinpricks of light within the monster’s skull to unnerve him. “I outrank you, Cap’n,” Cobiah snarled. “You can swab your own decks!”

  Dawn’s rays shone palely from the bone of Whiting’s skull and the exposed bone beneath his torn frock coat. “Bosun Vost,” the undead captain said with a smile. “Give him thirty-nine lashes as penance for his insolence.”

  A scuttling creature rose from the masses aboard the Indomitable. Its hands, from the wrists down, had been replaced with leathery tentacles, not suckered like an octopus’s, but serrated, like the teeth of a shark. His white hair hung in torn lumps from parchment-like skin, and beneath the skin, the muscles that shifted the creature’s frame were a moldy shade of bluish-white. “Aye, sir,” it rasped in a voice like sandpaper. “I’ll teach the boy a lesson, a’right.”

  “Cobiah!” Isaye screamed from the fore of the ship. Her sword swung free of one of the Indomitable’s undead sailors, tearing through its sternum. She placed her foot on the writhing corpse’s chest and pushed, heaving the body overboard.

  Cobiah struggled to keep down his bile as Vost crawled over the gunwale and onto the Nomad II’s deck. “I’m a bit busy, Isaye—” Vost’s arms lashed out, the tentacles slashing across Cobiah’s chest. Although he jumped back, the blow tore open his shirt, and where the undead bosun’s tentacles touched his skin, boils rose as if he’d been splashed with acid. It scalded fiercely, burning through his skin with incredible pain. Furthermore, the knife wound on his side had begun to bleed again, spotting the bandages across his rib cage with scarlet. This fight was not going well.

  Out on the open sea, the Krytan vessels were falling, one by one, to the Dead Ships. The two scarlet-sailed xebecs led the charge, their magic lashing out against the living fleet. As Cobiah watched, the red sails of one ship shivered and burst into flame, heat waves rippling out toward a Krytan galleon. The Krytan ship caught fire as the surge of heat passed, its hull spontaneously bursting into flame. He could hear the distant shouts of the sailors as they hurried to put out the fire with the pumps before it could spread, and saw them targeted by a hundred arrows launched from the xebec’s wide deck. Though the Orrian ships were less advanced than the Indomitable, their magic made them even more dangerous.

  —

  Bronn Svaard surged to his feet, lifting his brother by the neck. His black eyes blazed in sharp contrast to the deathly pallor of his skin. “Don’t worry, Grymm,” he snarled. “You’ll join me in the service of the dragon, and we will again fight as one. We will serve Zhaitan forever!”

  In panic and fear, Grymm raised his hands above his shoulders, bringing them down in forceful chops onto his brother’s collarbone. Once, twice, three times, he struck to either side of Bronn’s neck. On the third blow, the bone cracked, and Bronn’s hands loosened around Grymm’s throat. With a lurch, Grymm raised his feet to Bronn’s chest and kicked, separating the two with a massive shove. Grymm fell to the deck, and Bronn staggered back. Rolling to his side, Grymm roared to his brother. “Bronn! Fight it!”

  “No, my brother.” Bronn reached for his bloodied sword. Shaking the stain from its blade, he lifted the weapon and strode toward Grymm. “You cannot fight the inevitable. I feel it in my bones—in my blood. Zhaitan’s will is my will. His strength is my strength.” Bronn’s black eyes flashed. “The world will be reborn by the dragon’s will. Death is the beginning!”

  He swung the greatsword in a mighty arc, and Grymm was forced to roll aside. As the blade completed its forward sweep, Grymm gathered himself, lunging to his feet in the wake of his brother’s sword.

  “No!” Grymm raged. “You are not my brother!” In fury, Grymm lifted his hands, screaming a prayer to the Spirits of the Wild as tears welled in his eyes. “Bear, give me strength! Snow Leopard, lend me speed! Raven, let my hands be your talons!” As he shouted the words, his flesh began to transform, his body shifting, growing larger. “Ever-running Wolf, I am your son. Let me die i
f I must, but I cannot abandon my brother to this fate!

  “Spirits, be with me!” The last words were an almost inhuman roar. Grymm’s body had swelled to nearly twice its original size, standing eight feet high with massive shoulders. Silvery claws erupted from his overlong fingers, and cold starlight shone in his eyes. Part man, part wolf, Grymm raised his muzzle in a woeful howl. Then, with a surge of motion, he charged toward his undead brother once more, pitting claw and savagery against steel.

  —

  Two smaller Orrian ships cut across the Nomad II’s wake, guns blazing. They were chasing a swift little ketch flying the colors of Port Noble, her crew struggling desperately to keep up their speed. As the ketch tacked back and forth, the Dead Ships tried to follow, but their sails grew tangled in the constant shift of rigging and line. Foundering, they blasted their deck guns in a desperate attempt to slow their opponent, but the ketch spun on a lofty roll of wave and danced back toward them, evading their fire. She took one out with a full broadside of her nine-pound guns, the cannons rocking back on their braces.

  Yet for every victory, there were multiple defeats. One of the Dead Ships rammed the hull of a wide-berthed Krytan clipper, throwing lines over her side as the Krytans fired their guns, trying to ward off the Orrians. Chunks of the Dead Ship’s wooden frame blew off with each assault, but beneath the hull was a structure of bone and muscle, like a living underbelly that absorbed the shots from the Krytan guns. Although the wood peeled like flesh, the underside remained sturdy—and the brave little clipper could not be rid of her. Strange meaty tentacles, like mobile intestines, lashed up from clefts between the bony ridges and attached themselves to the deck of the clipper. The suckers on the flabby lengths clung to every inch of wood as the tentacles contracted, crushing the ship with hideous strength.