The Sea Taketh – David Guymer Read online

  With a roar, he smashed his warhammer into an aelf’s chest.

  The blow shattered the swordsman’s armour. The aelf crashed back to the decking a dozen feet back and did not rise.

  ‘Da!’ Thalia screamed in exultation, but he did not hear her.

  His full attention was on his enemy.

  Seawater was seething up through the planking of the jetty, causing the downed aelf’s arms and head to lift up. Thalia gasped, for she was well used to the horrors of necromancy, but this was different. Wasn’t it? Something compelled her to keep watching as a ghostly light shrouded the body. It seeped into the aelf’s skin through the half-heart brand on his forehead, and mere seconds after hitting the deck a ruin, the aelf was vaulting athletically back to his feet. Armour hung off him, but the bruises over his ribs were already fading. He butterflied his moonlit blade.

  Her da scowled and hefted his hammer.

  Thalia’s mind was racing, faster even than she was as she tore onto the boardwalk.

  A very different-looking aelf warrior emerged from the sea on the crest of a solitary wave to be deposited onto the boardwalk beside her da. His armour was scalloped and studded with jewels, heavier and finer than that worn by his warriors. His helmet was tall and fluted, inhumanly ornate, and entirely without any openings for eyes or ears. Only the mouth was visible and it was thin-lipped and cruel. In his hands, he bore a long-handled weapon with a serrated edge that fell somewhere between scythe and spear. A small lantern globe hung from its head. There was something about its light that pulled on Thalia, behind her eyes, inside her chest, that was desperate to take leave of her and be one with the source of that light.

  The newcomer turned his spear, his light towards her da.

  His eyes softened as the light bathed his face. He lowered his hammer as though arms could no longer lift it. He stared into the light. Something horrible and golden seemed to lift from his shoulders, streaming towards the aelf’s lantern.

  Then her da collapsed to the deck.

  ‘Da!’

  Small and desperately quick, Thalia darted through the melee, avoiding friends and hard-faced aelves both as she splashed onto the flooding jetty and threw her arms over her da. She shook him, crying. ‘Da. Da! Da.’ His eyelids quivered as if he were asleep and dreaming. His chest rose and fell beneath her body. Relief choked off her sobs. He was not dead. He was not dead. She wiped the tears from her eyes, feeling the sting of seawater. ‘Wake up, da.’ Taking a shoulder in each of her hands, she shook him. ‘Wake up!’

  ‘I think that I am… feeling,’ said the aelf with the light, looking down on Thalia and her da through the faceless metal of his helm. His lips remained straight lines, but he steepled a hand over the ridged plate of his breast and turned his blade aside. ‘Pity. Sorrow.’

  ‘It is understandable, soulrender.’

  Another magnificently lithe aelven warrior strode down the boardwalk. She was perfect, a queen of austerity, dark haired and pale skinned, armoured in black, as cruel as the ocean waves.

  ‘Away from the crush of blackness and cold, what can we do but feel as we were made to? Trust instead that soon it will be done, and that oblivion awaits us all beneath the waves.’

  The one she had named ‘soulrender’ lowered his head. ‘It is rare to find such wisdom in the souls of the akhelian. The martial council chose well in electing you our queen.’

  Thalia’s lip was trembling, but she knelt defiantly upright between the aelf queen and her da, brandishing the inch-long filleting knife that was still in her hand.

  ‘I like you, child,’ the woman said, though neither her voice nor her face expressed any emotion. ‘I would see my namarti children take souls like yours.’ With a scimitar that glowed the colour of rose coral, she tilted Thalia’s jaw so that their eyes met. ‘My name is Pétra. Queen of the Mor’phann, protector of Aighmar, and reaver of souls.’

  Thalia was suddenly painfully aware that the sounds of fighting had stopped while the aelf queen had been speaking. A tear glistened in her eye, in defiance of her pride.

  She wanted her da.

  ‘Speak to me of the one that took from my ocean.’

  Jonsson woke to the crash of waves.

  He started, huge fists clamping around the leather steering grips of his endrin-cart and squeezing until both knuckles and leather were whitening. He breathed, letting the tension go slowly. Just a dream. Clearing the misted glass with a sleeve, he peered out at the bleakly forested hillside. The trees were stick thin, sparse black leaves rustling with a sound like that of the distant sea amplified through a conch shell. It was dawn. He had allowed himself to sleep for too long. The expedition to Aighmar had wearied him more than he had admitted to the girl. But he had not been prepared to linger in that village a moment longer than he had to.

  Cursing under his breath, he wiped the nightmare sweat from his palms on his trouser leg, and pulled open the door.

  A rush of chill morning air displaced the stale, fish-breath odour that had been allowed to stew in the cabin overnight.

  Too long.

  Too, too long.

  He clambered out, stretched his back, stretched his legs, then hurried around to the front of the cart to crank the endrin. Once the vehicle was awake and purring he hauled himself back inside and pulled the brake lever.

  He made it another six hours before the endrin packed in with a wheezing sputter. He got out again, tense and muttering, to crank it one more time.

  One last time. Another six hours ought to do it.

  He stopped for nothing. Not for food. Not for drink. Definitely not for sleep. When the sun again began to sink below the barrow hills, he got out to light the lamps and climbed right back in.

  Blackfire Bight was a vast and lawless expanse of grim hills, moribund coastline and bone-coloured sands, but it was neither banditry nor undeath that worried him.

  He had already slept too long.

  Jonsson did not know much about the sea-aelves. No one did. They were a myth, and in some cases even less than that, and from every scrap of information he had been able to uncover, they were quite brutal about ensuring that remained the case. ‘Deepkin’, some called them. ‘Idoneth’, those scant records suggested they called themselves. Some fragments of text claimed them to be descendants of the Cythai, the first, mythical race of aelves to have been drawn into the realms by their creator, the god of learning and light, Teclis. Legends. If there was even a nut of truth to them, then the Cythai had fallen a long way indeed. Such stories as existed in the inherited consciousness of coastal communities across the Bight were of settlements scoured overnight, ships vanishing, armies disappearing without a trace of an enemy, wars of migration as entire nations were driven inland by a sudden, inexplicable terror of the sea.

  Jonsson did not know much.

  He knew enough to move inland, fast.

  He tried to avoid thinking of Tharril and the girl.

  If Jonsson’s mind was a keenly running endrin, then his conscience was that oil-stained bit of machinery that presumably did something of tremendous import, and which Jonsson had managed very well by never interfering with. He patted idly at his jacket pocket, cursing himself for giving the girl a whole quarter-share. What had he been thinking? What was she going to spend it on? He scowled. This was exactly what his old endrinmasters had always tried to teach him. Know every bit of your endrin. If you did not, then it was liable to hiccup at the most inconvenient of times.

  The endrin-cart grumbled as it continued to climb.

  Walls. That was what he needed. High ones. And guns. And an airship. Grungni, did he want his feet back on his airship. The Deepkin were coming for him, he could feel it in his water, and the one place nearby that was as far beyond the reach of an angry sea as it was possible to get was Toba Lorchai.

  Skyport of the Kharadron.

  Toba Lorchai
was a thriving free port, a small city or a large town, depending on how one interpreted the finer Points and Artycles of the Code, and the stubbornly still-beating heart of Barak-Thryng’s various interests in Blackfire Bight. While trade was administered (and, more importantly, taxed) by the admiralty, it was a stridently independent frontier port in most respects. The bulk of its labour force were human, which was true of many such ports across the realms, with a sizeable contingent of duardin craftsmen, traders and oath-soldiers, as well as a peripatetic community of orruks of a more mercantile bent. They traded in meat and in bone, and in the spoils of their constant warring on the restless lands of Skulldrake and Wither and Deathrattle Point. Most Kharadron authorities would have run the greenskins off long ago, but as long as there were other foes to fight – and Toba Lorchai had plenty – then their belligerence was an even greater boon to the town than their trade goods.

  Its streets were gutters for the filth of the realm, its timber buildings climbing roughshod over the black rock of the hills and each other, as inconsiderate as the people that lived within them. Factionalism was rife. Kharadron and dispossessed. Dispossessed and human. Orruk and absolutely everyone else. The detritus of brawls and base trades littered every doorway and corner. Draft animals that had to be blinkered and distracted with belled harnesses lest they go mad, lowed their distress in alleys. Giant vermin and hillfowl, war-bred beasts and skeleton birds, shrieked in cages. Smoke stuffed the winding lanes like a gag in the mouth.

  It stank of cheap spices, night soil, and endrin greases. It stank of ten thousand living, stubbornly still-breathing souls.

  Jonsson thought that Toba Lorchai was probably the basest and worst den of iniquity in the eight Mortal Realms. If a fellow traveller or sage had told him authoritatively that it was, in all truth, the basest in all of creation then he would have been amused, but unsurprised.

  But right then, that unpleasantly acidic burn in the back of his mouth was the taste of sanctuary. The timber stockade might have been ugly, but it was thick and it was high, and the populace, by virtue of being crooks and felons to a man, duardin, or grot, were satisfyingly well armed. Better even than that, however, was the sheer freneticism of the markets, of the bawdy houses, of the excise forts and the smithies. It killed the sound of the sea that had been rasping in Jonsson’s ears right up to the point that he guided his dying endrin-cart through the town gates.

  Brushing off the yellow tobacco-stained fingers of an ancient and drunk-looking duardin offering to trade a tale for a coin, Jonsson pushed into the bustle.

  Every grain of good sense was telling him to get back to his airship, but there was one duty he couldn’t leave without observing.

  The building that he was looking for was on the corner of a three-storey tenement in one of the most lightless and lawless wards of the lower city called the Greys. The skyports and grand houses of the Kharadron admiralties projected over the township beneath, like a gargantuan two-pronged fork suspended over their heads by the hand of Grungni himself. It cast large shadows and, situated right at the base of the old port’s supporting columns, there were few places where they fell deeper than in the Greys. The building seemed to sag. Its roof drooped, its walls bulging imperceptibly. As if it were a plant withering for want of a ray of light. Its gritted windows displayed a piecemeal collection of faux-Nulahmian crockery and antique tableware. A spiderghast grot stood on the porch step. His body had been painted entirely in lime-white, except where carapace and mandibles had been scraped from the underlying green. He slapped a cudgel in his small palm, glaring menacingly at the handful of passers-by.

  Most of the Greys’ residents knew Murrag’s place well enough to avoid it, but there was always the possibility that a stranger important enough to be missed might come innocently browsing for faux-Nulahmian crockery or antique tableware. The grot made sure that never happened.

  Jonsson had known Murrag for decades.

  When he had first deserted the venerable ironclad Angrin-Ha! (an incident involving a looted Nagashi idol and a few misplaced coins that the admiral had entirely overblown), it had been Murrag who had seen a place for him in her enterprise. Over the following decades, he had proven his eye for antiquities and his knack for acquiring them, generally from the cold hands of their former owners. The coin that had purchased him a small dirigible, the Fiskur, and a crew of his own, had been hers. Whenever he unearthed a treasure that he felt was too well-protected for him to handle, he made sure that word was passed along, and she would find someone with more guns or fewer scruples. Any acquisitions that he did make went first through her. Always. It was an agreement he knew better than to renege on, even had he not been Kharadron and contractual obligation writ into his blood.

  Aye, he knew Murrag well.

  The miniscule enforcer glared at Jonsson as he approached. The insanely potent blend of narcotics that was currently hollowing out the grot’s nervous system caused his eyes to cross and his head to jerk violently on his neck.

  ‘It’s me. Jonsson.’

  ‘S-s-s-s.’

  Jonsson was unsure what the grot was trying to say, but he shuffled aside obligingly. Jonsson pushed in the door.

  To one who had never ventured inside (and most would have considered themselves lucky to be amongst that group), the shop would have seemed surprisingly spacious. The interior walls had been knocked down to leave just one large front-of-house area and a small living area at the back. The ceiling had been elevated, abolishing the second floor entirely. Jonsson was not sure what had become of the third floor. He had never been up there, nor seen any sign of stairs.

  A handful of heavily intoxicated grots lounged about on chitin-stilt chairs that were small even to Jonsson, but in the context of this space seemed positively minute. It was as though they, the grots, and Jonsson had all been shrunk and had ventured into a normal-sized room.

  The effect was as disconcerting today as it had been the first time he had been admitted.

  The grots largely ignored him, gazing in wonderment at the ceiling or eyeballing each other, a competitive spiderghast custom that Jonsson knew from experience could go on for days. One of them, however, was sufficiently lucid to lurch upright and stagger towards the knuckle-bead curtain that partitioned off the back of the shop.

  Jonsson waited, fiddling nervously with his pistol grip. He did his best to ignore the ingrained fungal aroma. A muffled squawk and a crunch sounded from the other side of the curtain. He did his best to ignore that too.

  ‘Ingdrin Jonsson.’

  Murrag swept aside the curtain and, leading with the vastness of her belly, stomped into the shop.

  The gaggle of opiated grots sprang suddenly to attention.

  They saluted.

  Murrag was the undisputed sovereign of all semi-legitimate and downright illegitimate business in antiques, artefacts and relics in Blackfire Bight. Her word was law, her utterances waited upon with baited breath, her needs, wants and every interest catered by any man who cared for the distinction between life and death, rich or poor.

  She was also an ogor. And huge.

  Each of her arms was thicker than Jonsson’s waist. Her hands were like shovels, studded with bracelets and torqs that she wore as rings. He had once seen her rip a man in half. Literally. In half. And then eat him. Her gut was gargantuan. It was almost a second entity, as if she had smuggled a handcart full of ripening produce under the mountain of her skirts. Her eyes were jet black spigots, furrowed down into a slab of brow. Her hair was coarser than goat’s wool, braided and decorated in the Kharadron style. Her appearance was brutal, but she was clever, very clever. When first they had met, Jonsson had thought he would be clear of her debt and free with her dirigible in a month. He had underestimated her, as almost everyone did. Her insatiable greed was just another manifestation of her ungodly hunger.

  She was chewing as she entered.

  Amongst unlice
nsed traders and petty crooks in every port of the realms, an ogor bodyguard was the ultimate symbol of status. The grots, then, had always been Murrag’s idea of a poke in the eye to convention.

  ‘Gnollengrom, Lady Murrag,’ said Jonsson, unclasping his hands to give a respectful tug on his beard. He bowed.

  ‘I always liked you duardin,’ Murrag rumbled. ‘So respectful.’

  Jonsson bowed so low that his beard swept the floorboards.

  ‘You are back so soon, Ingdrin. You found it then.’

  Jonsson nibbled on his lip, trying to ignore the grumbling noises coming from Murrag’s belly, so powerful they were shaking her skirts. ‘Aye, lady, I did. Aighmar. Home of the Deepkin aelves in Blackfire.’

  She gestured Jonsson towards a side table. ‘Show me.’

  The table was scaled for the anatomy of an ogor, and Jonsson was forced to stand on a chair in order to tip the contents of his satchel over the table. Rings and chalices and blades and glittering chunks of coral spilled over the polished wood. Murrag picked through it.

  ‘Aelves under the sea,’ she mused. ‘I had tasted the rumours. The Undying King hunts for them, you know? And the one with Three Eyes. Stealers of souls to one. Exiles of the Dark Prince to the other. They hide from them, but not from Murrag. She crunches the bone and gristle of legend and myth, devours through to truth inside.’

  Jonsson bowed again.

  ‘How did you find them?’ she asked.

  ‘We waylaid a skycutter flying the colours of Barak-Zon. Its own fault for straying so far from the patrolled lanes. Anyway, they had recently boarded and scuttled a Skye clan ruinship that had been running repairs after a battle of its own. They didn’t know what they had taken from its holds – not everyone reads Queekish – but it was a written record of a skaven invasion of Aighmar.’

  ‘Records?’ Murrag’s brutalist features slipped into a broad grin. ‘Not very… skaven.’

  ‘Very detailed records too. The site was easy to find once I’d translated the skins. My guess is that they meant to pass them on to someone.’