Nyebi murmured something into Gerad’s ear, never taking her eyes off Kilai.
“My lieutenant tells me you carry something with you. A vial.”
She couldn’t stop the way her body stiffened. “I do not know what she is talking about,” she said, her voice wooden to her own ears.
“I do not believe you.”
“Throw them overboard, Captain!” came from somewhere in the crowd. The shout was followed by a chorus of agreement, others piping in. Kilai bit her lip, the fear hard to fight. With the way the storm was building around them, they would never survive it. This time they were miles and miles from the nearest land. There would be no washing up to shore.
“What say you, Lieutenant Nyebi? Should we give them a proper sailor’s farewell?”
Nyebi dug the blade in a little deeper, a trickle of blood trickling Kilai’s over sensitive skin. Her throat fluttered. “It would only be fair.”
“But first I want to know what this vial is. Seize it.”
And Kilai could do nothing as two bulky sailors approached her, reaching out with grubby hands. She recoiled as fingers roamed her flesh, unable to fight off their wandering grasps or hot breath against her face. Not until the strike of a fist smacked against the bone of the closest sailor’s nose and he stumbled back, nearly falling into his companion. Breathing heavily, Ivor looked mad. Like a man possessed. Blood dripped from his knuckles onto the deck below, black in the pitch of darkness. The first drops of rain fell from a sky saturated with violent cloud, so heavy they looked like they might crash down from their perch above.
And then Ivor’s eyes began to glow red.
A curse sounded behind her as the ship lurched to the side so suddenly she crashed to the deck with a thud that knocked the air from her lungs. Breathless, Kilai scrambled through the tangle of bodies for a hold, her hand catching on a lichen slick rope only to slip. Tumbling, she crashed into Makku and the two of them rolled until they hit a barrel. Head spinning, she looked up from her arms only to see a blur of churning black waves and glowing red veins shining beneath before the ship rocked once more, and she plummeted down the slope the other way. Shouts resounded around her, the rain thundering down.
“You should have let it lie!”
It took her a moment to work out which direction was up but Kilai managed to lift her heavy head once more, vision spinning, until it landed on the only person upright on the entire ship. Wreathed in moonlight from the one break in the clouds, Ivor looked magnificent and terrible. His beard glowed as blood red as his eyes, an aura of pure red flame dancing around his form. He had always been a physically imposing man but now he looked something other. Something more. Even through the thick material of his coat his muscles strained, jaw flickering and clenching.
In the back of her mind a memory clicked into place. She had been on a ship much like this one, running from another fraught situation. The rain had crashed down like it did now, pelting her exposed skin with tens of thousands of tiny ice cold needles. The wind had howled and shrieked; a warning of their impending doom. The deck had rocked and trembled between the merciless play of the waves, knocking them from side to side. And the black sea had bled red before that creature had risen from the depths, as ancient and wicked as Var Kunir himself.
“Ivor!” she tried to shout but the rain stole her voice. “Johan!”
A pistol went off, a flash of smoke quickly dispersing in the rain. Kilai screamed as the bullet pierced Ivor’s flesh, clawing herself along the freezing cold deck with numb fingers. But he did not fall. Briefly he faltered, the red light in his eyes flickering, only to amp up even brighter, a ghastly grin spreading across his face. He took a step forward and the sailor on the deck blanched, desperately trying to crawl away. Over the pounding rain Kilai heard him whimper.
Ivor continued walking, heedless of her cries. He looked like Rook had when she had been lost to The Rook, or like Viktor to the phoenix, eyes blank and glassy and his walk wooden. When he reached the sailor who had shot at him, he hauled him up by the collar until he dangled from one hand, Ivor tilting his head to look over him. Pleas fell from the sailor’s lips but Ivor paid them no mind. Kilai watched it from where she lay winded on the ground as he pulled his arm back and then tossed the sailor with a mighty throw. The man’s limbs flailed as he soared and then he disappeared past the railing, nothing but a splash of water to replace him.
The next thing that happened was so quick Kilai thought she had hallucinated it. A huge black shape rose past the railing, a colossal set of jaws filled with rows of long pointed teeth snapping together. Stripes of red blurred in the sky before the beast disappeared, leaving her disorientated, head throbbing. The cold, cold rain seeped into her bones until she couldn’t remember what it felt like to be warm. Would she ever feel warm again? Her teeth clacked together with the strain it took to keep herself awake, whole body trembling.
Another sailor yelled, running towards him with her cutlass out. She swung but Ivor ducked easily, moving so quickly he blurred before Kilai’s gaze. Her cries were weak, swallowed by the torrent from above. As Ivor jabbed his elbow into her temple, grabbing the blade and flipping it so he could catch it by the handle, and then tossing her overboard like she weighed nothing, Kilai had the strangest sense of time looping around on itself. Like she had seen this all before too many times and was none the wiser on how to stop it.
“Heed my judgement,” he roared over the downpour, voice layered with a deeper tone she did not recognise. “Those I find wanting shall feel the mercy of the Locker.”
As if on cue a huge tail appeared before slapping back into the water, sending a colossal wave of water crashing down upon the deck. Kilai buried her fingers in the gaps between the slats, where the wood had rotted and worn away, the shock of the freezing water enough to stop her heart for a beat too long. Eyes stinging with salt, she gasped desperately for air, the world around her blurry and obscured. More screams pierced through her waterlogged ears and she realised Ivor was tossing more of the sailors into the ocean.
“What’s happening? What in the Locker is happening?”
She couldn’t see him properly so she patted out at the fuzzy shape until she found Makku’s deathly cold grip and squeezed with the little strength she had left. The Locker. The veins of red light. Ivor’s judgement. And when the end comes the ocean will bleed with the blood of those Var Kunir deems unworthy. Those sinners will face the judgement of the Locker beneath its treacherous depths. Those were the words from the holy book, the Zorshir. In one chapter it detailed the end of the world, when all souls would be weighed. The wickedest of souls were sent to a dark place of nameless horror below the sea to be tortured for the rest of eternity.
“How do we stop him?”
Using Makku’s grasp to help her sit up, the two of them clinging to one another as the ship rocked back and forth, she swiped at her eyes and coughed. “I don’t know that we can.” The only thing that had stopped Viktor was Rook but Kilai did not have any connection to the otherworld. She could see riftspawn flit around the sky, beads of colour amongst the unrelenting darkness, but she could not affect them. Beneath their flurried activity, two figures danced around one another, steel clashing against steel. Both were quick, sure-footed despite the rain, matching blow for blow. She recognised the white hair of Nyebi, plastered to her head as she quickly dived, Ivor’s blade bouncing off of her own before they both whirled once more.
But Ivor was quicker. Stronger. Trailing wisps of pure red, each strike of his stolen cutlass hit harder than the last, his grunts of fury loud enough to be heard over the thundering of the rain. The other sailors were frozen around them, as if merely the background set dressing in some classic painting by Yormir or one of his fellow artists of that era. Only Kilai would have said the red was metaphorical, had she not been observing from the deck of the ship as it happened before her very eyes. It could have made a perfect mural. Var Kunir, terrible with his red eyes and his beard of flame and his flaring aura as he flung
his body at the sailor he had weighed his judgement upon. The lightning fractured a sky of deepest black, pointing towards the scene of such a divine battle. Kilai gulped, scarcely able to believe it. But it had to be. Even if the explanation left her numb with more than the cold.
“He’s going to – he’s going to –”
For a soldier Ivor had never seemed particularly violent. Irate, perhaps. Bitter, most definitely. But never violent unless truly desperate. To see him now she barely recognised the man, face contorted in such fury it pulled the air from her lungs. She could almost see it happen before it did, like she had taken in one of those terrible creatures and gained clairvoyance, as Ivor kicked at Nyebi’s arm. The blade glinted before disappearing somewhere in the splash of their spinning feet. The woman did not even have the time to turn and see her looming death, back bowed and hair a limp curtain sheltering her from the horror on her crewmembers’ faces.
The cutlass pierced through her like she was made of paper, the blade slick with blood when it appeared through her chest. Kilai balked, a shaking hand pressed over her mouth. Once Nyebi crumpled to the ground it was over. The sailors sensed it. She had no idea whether the captain still lived or not but it seemed not to matter; Nyebi had been their best fighter and if she had been felled by Ivor, the rest of them stood no chance. No one moved as he picked up her body and tossed it over the side, the sea swallowing her whole.
“Will he… would he hurt us, too?”
Her mouth moved but it took a beat for her voice to catch up with her commands. “I don’t know. When Rook and Viktor lost control, sometimes they could not distinguish friend from foe.”
Makku’s eyes widened and he ducked behind a loose barrel. “We’re going to die. We’re going to die. Lai Kusok save us, we’re doomed.”
“Does anyone else dare challenge my will?” snarled Ivor, the remaining crewmembers cringing back.
Kilai felt the strangest trickling of warmth through her chest. She frowned, scraping her numb fingers through her sodden shirt as the feeling grew until her body buzzed with a sudden vitality, like she could swim all the way to shore if she really wanted to. Was this adrenaline in response to the fear? Or perhaps it was her body’s way of fighting against the way it was shutting down against the freezing rain. Her finger hit something sharp and she jerked it back to see blood well on her fingertip. She gasped. Digging into her pocket she found no vial, only fragments of shattered glass. The whole trip’s endeavour… it was gone, dripping from her fingers in drops of deep crimson.
But Kilai felt no pain and when she pulled her finger from her mouth the cut had sealed shut, nothing but the faintest line to suggest she had been hurt at all. She frowned, glancing up only to jerk back in fright. The faint wisps of red around Ivor had coalesced into a frightening beast nearly unrecognisable in shape but for the gaping mouth of endless teeth and appendages somewhere between fins and tentacles. The beads of colour sharpened into distinct forms of riftspawn; she could discern faces and shapes and colours like she had never seen before. Even the rain lashing her skin was different. She registered that it was cold in a scientific way but she could not feel the knowledge.
“Kilai? What’s wrong?”
“The vial – it shattered. Makku, what is it?” She gripped his shoulders and shook him, hard enough that his skull cracked against the barrel they hid behind. “Makku? Makku, are you all right?”
He groaned, rubbing at his skull. “I don’t really know. It’s supposed to be important to this war because, well, because it gives you an edge.”
“An edge?”
“I don’t know the details! Strength. Heightened senses. That kind of thing.”
That explained it, then. But not a soldier by training, Kilai was clumsy with her newfound abilities. Her body itched with the need to move but she did not know what she could possibly do in this situation. Ivor’s footsteps thudded against the deck, so loud she could feel the reverberations sing through her. A group of crewmembers attempted an assault all at once but even with five of them crowded around him, they didn’t stand a chance. He was too strong, grabbing another’s sword so he could cut through them in sweeping circles of flashing steel and red flame. Her grip tightened on Makku’s hand until he squeaked and tugged from her grasp.
“You’re going to turn my bones into paste.”
“I don’t think he’s going to stop.”
Beyond the safety of the ship the beast lurked, gobbling up the fallen sailors that Ivor tossed into the sea. A slithering tentacle crept up over the side of the deck, slick black flesh snaking across the deck until it latched around the ankle of a hapless man cowering away from the scene of the battle. In a flash he was gone, dragged over the railing and into the ravenous waves below. Kilai shuddered. It was going to devour them all. She almost thought she could feel its greed; its incessant desire to consume.
Then another tentacle replaced the first, followed by another. Faint wisps trailed from its flesh like red steam. It was able to control Ivor somehow, able to take over his mind and puppet him towards violence to feed its hunger. But if Ivor was truly Var Kunir – in some way, in some form – did that not mean this was his true shape? A creature of the blackest heart, of indescribable terror, lurking beneath the waves and preying on the sailors above.
“Kilai! Kilai!” Makku bucked and shoved himself backwards as a probing tentacle chased his kicking feet. Kilai glanced around and snatched a fallen cutlass coated in a sticky substance that could only be blood. Pushing down the nausea, she shoved him out of the way and sliced the blade through the tentacle, snarling when it caught in the tough flesh of the appendage. It fought her, curling around to try and knock the blade from her hand, but she held on with her newfound strength. Hacking and hacking, she grimaced at the foul smelling liquid that squirted across her face and with a final cry, she sliced the tentacle clean off. It flopped to the deck, still wriggling, and she rolled out of the way with a sigh.
But more replaced it; large, ringed with suckers and lines of a deep red running along inky black skin. The stench grew stronger, pungent enough to choke on. Kilai kept her grip tight on her cutlass, struggling to her feet against the swaying deck, and battled the battering rain and wind for sight of Ivor. With his red aura he was not difficult to spot, walking straight towards her with his eyes locked upon her. She had angered him, by harming the beast. It wanted revenge. It wanted to see her torn apart in the deepest dark of the ocean.
The Locker.
The thought struck her just before the first swing of Ivor’s blade. Her eyes tracked the movement and she ducked out of the way just in time, sucking in air and rainwater with her hair matted to her skull. Somewhere around her Makku screamed her name. Everything narrowed down to the pair of flaming red eyes set upon her, two beacons in the dark of the storm. Kilai could not possibly hope to fight him off. She did not know the first thing about sword fighting, the blade cumbersome in her hand. She had nowhere to run. There was little she could do.
“The Locker knows your name now,” he said.
The Locker. She flicked her arm up, teeth jolting as the crash of steel shuddered up her arm. Whirling, she dived out of his blow, blade jamming between the slats of the deck. The Locker was not a place. No, the Locker had to be that thing beneath them. The writhing tentacles and reams of needle-like teeth, trying to pull every man upon the ship to their watery doom. The sailors of old must have grown the stories from somewhere. What would the guides of the church say to that, if they knew the truth? Kilai was barely given a moment to catch her breath, let alone contemplate the implications.
With another roar, Ivor lunged at her. It was only with her enhanced senses that she had the clarity of mind to skip away, feet skidding on the slick mix of blood and saltwater. There was no clarity in his eyes. No recognition. Whatever had come over him had taken him completely, the way Rook had become when she went beserk.
“Ivor!” she yelled over the endless rain. “Ivor, remember who you are! This isn’t
you!”
He paused, blade hovering in the air. Then a smirk curled his lips, head tilting, and he swung again, striking out as quick as a spotted viper. This time she wasn’t fast enough, the tip biting into the exposed flesh of her torso. It cut across her side, sharp enough to cleave skin and the meat beneath. Gasping, she clutched at the warm spurt of blood and stumbled back.
Before she could fall a shoulder nudged her back up, a hand looping around to support her back. Makku’s brows were furrowed, his lips pale and trembling. But still he stood beside her as they faced the demon wearing their companion’s face, his sword turning lazy circles in his hand. He was just toying with them. It turned her stomach, making her blood boil. The only emotion she could cling to when all else had failed her; Kilai nursed it until she felt hot despite the freezing cold. Perhaps this was how Viktor felt before he lost control. It was certainly a heady feeling, to disregard all but the sheer rage at her situation.
“One of us has to distract him.”
Makku gaped at her.
“One of us has to stop him.”
“You’re going to kill him.”
She chose not to say the words she thought. I do not think he can be killed. Perhaps he could, perhaps he couldn’t. There was no definitive answer to be found, other than to try it and see what happened. It was that or lie down and die and Kilai would never dare.
“Go!” she commanded, shoving him by the shoulder.
Slipping and sliding, Makku waved his arms in the rain. “Hey, big guy! If you want your beastie to eat me you’re going to have to catch me first!”
Ivor’s red gaze swung to Makku, jaw clenching. He strode in the other direction, allowing Kilai to steel her nerve, angling the blade and picturing in her mind’s eye how she would attack. All the fights she had witnessed up until now had been little but a blur to her. She didn’t know where to put her limbs or what ways she should move the cutlass. The only thing she knew how to do was to creep upon his exposed back with the sharp end of the blade pointed at him and hope it would be enough. She had the strength and speed to do it, her blood singing with so much energy she bounced on the balls of her feet, aware of the slightest shift in the wind and the zip of spiritual currents surrounding her.
The Rising Tide Page 37