The Sea Taketh – David Guymer

by David Guymer

  ‘So, Nagash?’ She licked her lips. ‘Or Archaon?’

  ‘I’d prefer not to think about it.’

  The ogor picked up a blade from the loose pile of treasures to examine it more closely. It was a shortsword, its nacreous blade and cross-hilt plain, but fabulously ornate around the grip – as if it were intended to impress by touch rather than sight. In Murrag’s grip it looked like a supper knife.

  ‘Pretty.’ She looked up, hungrily. ‘Is there more?’

  ‘Aye, plenty more. There’s a whole city down there. The skaven have picked it over, but for a race of scavengers, they’re careless. You can send another crew though. I’m moving on.’

  ‘Moving where?’

  ‘Anywhere. Away. That was always our arrangement, Lady. If ever I feel there’s a prize I can’t handle then I pass it on. No fee. No trouble. That’s what I signed, and that’s what I’ll stick to.’

  Murrag frowned down at him, the enormous muscles of her face shifting. ‘The Deepkin scare you. Enough for you to tell me what our deal is.’

  ‘They’re coming for me. I can feel that they are. You as well now, I’m guessing.’

  The ogor delivered a booming, stinking gale of laughter and gestured to her guards. They stiffened furiously.

  ‘I feel very safe here.’

  ‘I’m not joking.’

  ‘Nor am I.’

  Jonsson straightened. ‘Well, then. I’ll take my due, then I’ll take my leave.’

  Rubbing her belly with one hand, Murrag carefully separated out the trinkets from the coral shards and drew the former towards her side of the table, using the blade of the Idoneth shortsword like an admiral moving ship tokens around a campaign map. Jonsson’s heart sank to see the coral being pushed back towards him. The mineral was clearly a repository for some kind of aelf magic and must have been worth a fortune to someone from the Collegiate Arcane, or even an arcanite cabal for all he cared. He wanted rid of the stuff.

  ‘Old things,’ Murrag growled, stirring through the pile of jewelled conches and ornate weaponry with the pommel of her sword. ‘That’s what I buy. That’s what I sell.’ She grumbled something in a hissing greenskin language to summon one of her attendants. ‘Cradz. Fetch the ledger. Five shares, made out for Jonsson.’

  Jonsson gawped at her.

  He could not sell his dirigible for five shares, even if Vorgaard, his pirate of a bosun, could have been persuaded to scrape off the rust.

  ‘Get the rest of it where I can’t see it,’ said Murrag. ‘I don’t like the way it smells.’

  There was something magical about gold. It was a long-standing physical principle amongst the aether-khemists and chirurgeons of the Kharadron that the placement of a sufficiently high denomination coin could cause a suppurating wound to close or a malignant growth to shrink. Meditating upon its glow could cure ills both physical and mental. Even just the weight of a coin in a duardin’s pocket could make his cares evaporate, making his soul feel lighter by a ratio corresponding unerringly to the value of said coin. Jonsson might have expected the miraculous effect to become even more pronounced once he had passed through the various stairgates and customs forts into the skydock proper and could safely remove his hand from his pistol holster.

  He felt no easing of his spirit.

  And did not move his hand.

  Something he could not tally, nor weigh out on a set of calibrated scales, had put his teeth on edge. The endrin of every patrolling gunhauler and monitor, of every skywarden and rigger, sounded to him like the roar of the ocean. From every street vendor and high-end duardin restaurant, the smell of decaying seaweed and saltwater made him want to gag.

  The skyport was not the Toba Lorchai that most of its inhabitants knew, but it was the face that the admiralty lords would recognise. Here were the stone-built docks erected by the first pioneers of Barak-Thryng, long before the locals had come to build a settlement at its base. Here, shipping magnates and lords of industry of all races comported themselves in gowns, flocked by equerries and viziers, while ship captains strode about the port’s wholesalers in armour.

  After removing himself from Murrag’s company – for the last time, with any luck – Jonsson had been of half a mind to pay a visit to a jeweller of his acquaintance in a last attempt at unloading the Idoneth coral before taking his final leave of Toba Lorchai itself. A master gemsmith of the dispossessed, his acquaintance was as famed for his honourable approach to the business as he was for his eye for a gem.

  Something persuaded him to err towards the direct route.

  The thought of just dumping the coral on a bench or in a doorway somewhere and foregoing his profit never occurred – to do so would have been a flagrant violation of the Code, and Vorgaard, his bosun, would have stripped him of his captaincy had he even suspected.

  Exchanging curt nods with familiar faces amongst the harbour watch, Jonsson hurried towards the docks.

  The sooner he was a thousand feet above sea level with his gold and the Idoneth coral securely stowed away in the captain’s cabin, the happier he would feel. He could sell it in another city. Preferably in another realm.

  Then, maybe, he would feel ready to move his hand from his pistol’s grip.

  Across from the imposing granite portico of the endrinmaster’s guildhall and bank, a fountain prattled. A scale replica of the Barak-Thryng ironclad Thallazorn, spouted water from her gun turrets into a pool. The sound grated on Jonsson’s nerves. A ring of metal benches surrounded the fountain. They were popular with lunching endrinmasters, but it was barely an hour after dawn, and there was only a handful of bleary-eyed longbeards nibbling on a belated breakfast.

  Jonsson sat down.

  It was only four thousand and nine steps from the Grundstod Gate to the docking tines, and he was practically a beardless scamp at a mere fifty-seven years old, but he was finding it increasingly hard going catching a breath. He let it out slowly, looking up in astonishment at the stream of transparent bubbles that issued from between his lips and floated up towards the sky. Schools of skeletal fish shoaled about the equally astonished skywardens.

  Trailing bubbles from his open mouth, he brought his gaze back down to port level, to where an allopex swam between the granite colonnades of the guildhall. The huge, grey-skinned sea monster was collared and bridled, barded in a rigid plate of darkly tinted shells. An aelf in elegantly streamlined armour and wielding some kind of net launcher rode in a standing saddle on the monster’s back.

  Jonsson’s first thought was that he had gone mad.

  The anxiety of his flight was bleeding into the reality of his five senses, his fear that the denizens of the deep ocean would come for him, and now he saw the ocean in all its horror right where it simply could not be. He would have laughed at his own broken mind had the beer-soaked endrinmaster on the bench beside him not muttered a drawled curse, tugged a volley-pistol from the expanse of grey beard bundled up in his lap, and opened fire.

  The hammer burst of shots snapped Jonsson out of his shock.

  He jumped up smartly, drawing his own single-shot firearm.

  The endrinmaster’s salvo tore into the allopex’s head. It crashed into the ground like a side of meat dumped from the back of a wagon, and crushed its rider’s leg to the ground beneath its mass. The aelf screamed, seemingly in anguish from being wounded, than from the pain itself. The endrinmaster casually walked over to the downed beast and shot the rider in the head, then belched an enormous bubble.

  Throughout the great concourses and plazas of the skyport, the impossible was spreading. Everywhere Jonsson turned he saw his nightmare writ in powder smoke and charging bodies. Aelven warriors flowed down the main thoroughfare as though borne along on a flood tide, sweeping aside all before them, while in the air allopex knights and grim-faced warriors mounted on fangmora, eel-like horrors that coursed with sparking energies, converged on the endr
inriggers working in their high nests.

  The Kharadron of Barak-Thryng, however, were far from defenceless in their home port, even when assaulted unawares. Shots rang out. The leaden booms of skycannons. The rattling chatter of aethermatic weapons. Every food hall and warehouse in view that had been host to a captain and his entourage had become a casemate from which decksweeper volleys and fumigator fire raked the aelves and their bonded nightmares. In the sky, amidst the endrin rigs and aethermatic hoists, the Kharadron spat back at the aelven cavalry with drillcannon and rivet-fire. Shields of crackling elemental power surrounded the fangmora knights, deflecting most of the incoming fire. A second contingent armed with energised spears swept past the first before the lightning shields had fully dissipated, sweeping towards the endrinriggers’ impromptu redoubts with the fury of a wave.

  Jonsson did not stop to watch.

  ‘Grungni the Maker,’ he breathed.

  The old master belched another large bubble, which Jonsson took for typical longbeard disdain before noticing the arrow embedded in his chest. He pitched backwards and into the fountain with a splash.

  Jonsson brought his pistol up as he quickly backed away, circling around the marble bulk of the fountain’s scale model ironclad.

  The aelves were advancing through the columns of the guildhall. They came with an eerie, floating gait, bounding rather than walking. It was as if they moved through water even as Jonsson, a hundred feet away from them, was not.

  With a snarl, Jonsson aimed and fired.

  The pistol kicked hard, annihilating an archer’s shoulder and spinning him hard into the face of a column. The rest kept coming, loosing as they ran. Another old endrinmaster caught an arrow in the chin and in the eye and dropped with a gurgle, his weapon unfired.

  Jonsson did not even waste time reloading his pistol.

  Toba Lorchai had been good to him. He would miss the place, it was true, but for him home had always been just a port of call. And the Code was very specific on the subject of lost causes.

  Artycle Four, Point Five.

  He turned and sprinted for the aether-docks.

  The docks were Toba Lorchai’s beating heart, its higher purpose and its soul. Three great prongs of granite, like a colossal fork, protruded from the crown of the hill, busy with aethermatic winches and cranes, skyships docking or embarking, loading or unloading. They were a hive at any time. If not for the incessant drum of gunfire and the eerie wailing of the aelves, then Jonsson might have been able to force his way into the cussing mob of grundstok crew and longshoremen without noticing anything amiss.

  A very large (and very well-paid) garrison of grundstok thunderers had responsibility for the docking tines, with a contingent of orruk mercenaries that fluctuated in strength depending on the perceived threats of the times. Fire-duels crackled into life as the aelves advanced on the docks. Howling mobs of green-skinned and war-painted orruk berserkers surged from the grundstok stockades to engage the aelves hand-to-hand. The melees that broke out were ferocious. Seven-foot-tall orruks with bulging muscles hacked at the delicate aelven warriors in a frenzy. Scores of them fell in the first seconds of the charge, but the survivors neither cried out nor broke. They sang a flat, empty lament as they whirled into the attack with graceful, perfectly controlled strokes of their hefty blades.

  The anarchy consuming the tines themselves was, if it were possible, of a different order.

  Stevedores and endrinriggers fought one another for right of way. Harbourmasters bellowed red-faced at unyielding captains. Arkanaut companies beat terrified humans and duardin from their vessels’ boarding planks with the butts of their pistols. Frigates and gunhaulers launched with their moorings still attached, ripping giant hooks out of the granite, crashing into the back of other vessels that had not yet cleared the dock, all of it conducted under the gale-roar of cold aether-endrins being pushed hard to full power.

  Jonsson’s own dirigible, the Fiskur, was smaller than most, a humble three-gunner with an aethershot carbine mounted in the prow, port and starboard, and a bow-chaser in the aftcastle. The collection of armour-plated spheres suspended over the deck within a girder of metal housed an old but well-proven aether-endrin. The winged blades of its propellers were already humming. A crew of seven were already releasing the mooring lines and riveting the endrin-rigging for departure.

  ‘Don’t tell me you were about to cast off without me,’ Jonsson shouted over the rising howl of the endrin, striding over the boarding plank mere seconds before an arkanaut companion with a torn ear and an eyepatch dragged it in from under him.

  ‘As per Artycle Seven, Point Three,’ said Vorgaard Hangarik cheerfully. The leathery-skinned bosun wore a crown that he had lifted from a dashian tomb in Lyrhia at an angle he considered dashing, and which, on a duardin half his two hundred years, might well have been. He observed the frantic activity of his company with an unhurried ease, thumbs wedged under the belt that was buckled around his armour, sucking on the dry stem of an unlit pipe.

  ‘Point Three pertains to the incapacity, insanity, or death of the existing captain,’ Jonsson panted.

  ‘Well.’ Vorgaard withdrew the pipe from his mouth and used it to gesture towards the violence that was slowly breaking through the Kharadron defences and spilling into the docks. ‘What was any right-minded duardin to think?’

  ‘I…’

  Jonsson put his hands on his knees and coughed.

  ‘You need a moment to catch a breath, cap’n?’ said Vorgaard. ‘I’ve got time.’

  ‘Do we have clearance from the harbourmaster?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say clearance exactly.’

  ‘Good enough.’

  Blowing quickly and hard, Jonsson wove through the arkanauts and hurried up the sheet metal steps to the aftcastle. He nodded to the turret gunner, and took the wheel.

  Vorgaard followed him.

  ‘Get my ship out of here,’ Jonsson bellowed into the pole-mounted speaker-horn that was welded to the deck plating beside the wheel. ‘Full power to the endrin. I want a thousand feet between us and the Deepkin before I can count down from the five aether-gold shares in my pocket.’

  A raucous chorus of ‘ayes’ rang out at the promise of gold as the Fiskur lurched into a sudden climb. Jonsson gripped tight to the wheel, pulling the dirigible’s course inland and upwards. The hull plating squealed and shuddered. The endrin-rigging emitted a long, tortured whine punctuated by bangs of stressed metal as the propellers dragged the ship away from the ground. The vast bow of an ironclad hove into their course. Grumbling under his breath, Jonsson hauled on the wheel, shaking his fist at his counterpart as the Fiskur sailed under the ironclad’s keel and continued to climb.

  Throughout it all, Vorgaard remained in a solid, wide-legged posture that he could hold unflustered through aether-storm or sky-battle. He cast Jonsson a sideways look.

  ‘Deepkin, you say?’

  Jonsson set his jaw. ‘Aye.’

  ‘The old legend?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Skat,’ Vorgaard swore.

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘I think we’re out of it,’ said Vorgaard, after a moment’s silence.

  Jonsson nodded and loosened his hold on the tiller, reducing the buoyancy in the aether-bags and levelling the pitch of the propellers. The dirigible eased off with her complaints as she levelled out of her climb, bar the occasional cough from the endrin that the endrinmaster quickly moved to tend.

  He looked back.

  The monolithic tines of Toba Lorchai were shrinking behind him. Even the gunhaulers and monitors that had been patrolling the sky lanes before the attack had been sprung looked small, coming about to add aerial support to the port’s defenders even as the Fiskur pulled ever further away. Just in time, Jonsson thought. He was not so high yet that he could no longer distinguish the dark, graceful tide of aelves from the splintering batt
le lines of the Kharadron and their allies. From up high it looked like a black sea coming in, sweeping away the sand fortresses and metallic pebbles that had been set up around the beach in its absence. They had already swept as far in as the tines. The fighting was even spilling over onto those ships still in dock, deck watches defending their gun ridges like the ramparts of a floating castle. Those that were not already fending off boarders redoubled their efforts to be aweigh, adding to the carnage in the slipways.

  ‘Good thing somebody had the endrin running,’ Vorgaard murmured.

  ‘It looks as though they’re sparing the township,’ said Jonsson. ‘Trust Murrag to get out of this in one piece.’

  He looked away, sick, and stared at the matt gunmetal of the ship’s wheel in his hands. He could not shake the dread that this was somehow not over, that the sack of Toba Lorchai was simply incidental. It was him the Deepkin wanted, he was sure of it. He did not know how they were following him, but he did not think they were going to stop here.

  Perhaps he could return to the skyhold of Barak-Thryng itself. Or Azyrheim. Gods, yes. Let the Deepkin pursue him all the way there.

  ‘New heading, bosun,’ he yelled, spinning the wheel, the prow following it slowly to starboard. ‘We’re heading for the Azyr Gate at Glymmsforge.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Vorgaard.

  One hand on the wheel, Jonsson shrugged off his satchel, the coral a lumpen weight in the bottom, as if he had a spiked mace against his back, and tossed it to Vorgaard.

  ‘Throw it overboard.’

  The bosun tested its weight in his hand. ‘Is it valuable?’

  ‘Cite me later. Throw it overboard!’

  ‘Aye, cap’n.’

  Vorgaard walked towards the aftcastle battlements, arm drawn back for an overarm hurl into the wide, blue aether, but then just stopped mid-stride. His arm dropped to his side and he just stared. Jonsson glanced over and swore.

  ‘As aether is bloody light.’

  In the sky dead ahead of their new course, in defiance of every scientific law that Jonsson cared for, there swam a gigantic armour-plated turtle. The behemoth was easily the mass of a fully gunned ironclad, but throbbing waves of distortion rippled from the howdah mounted on its back made it difficult to make out in detail, or to accurately count the swarm of allopex and fangmora knights that ran abeam of it like gunhaulers escorting a dreadnought.