completely insane. No one listens to him. No one even comes out here. Even if he had someone to tell, they’d never believe him. That’s the beauty of this, my friend. It’s so far outside of anyone else’s imagining. That ship has rested there for years. Years! And no one ever thought of this before…’
His voice dwindled, and was damped away by the muffling fog and the shush of the waves.
‘No!’ Paragon shrieked out into the night. He reached back with his fists to drum and batter on his own planking. ‘No!’ he cried again. Denial and defiance. And hopelessness. They weren’t listening to him. No one ever listened to him. That had always been the problem. They’d ignore everything he told them. They’d take him out and he’d have to kill them all. Again.
‘Serpent!’
Althea’s voice rang out clear and cold as the night that surrounded them. She clung with near numbed fingers, her feet braced against the lookout’s platform. Her eyes strained through the darkness to track the creature even as she heard the thundering of the crew’s feet on the deck below, heard her cry passed on. Hatches were flung open as all hands hit the decks to do whatever they could to withstand this latest attack.
‘Where?’
‘Three points off the starboard bow, sir! A big one.’
They were all big, she reflected bitterly as she strove to tighten her weary grip. She was cold and wet and tired, and the healing injury on her scalp still throbbed all the time. In the cold of a night like this, the throbbing became a dull agony as the chill tightened her skin. The fever had passed days ago, and Reller had snipped and tugged the stitches out when the itching had become unbearable. Reller’s clumsiness and coarse jokes about her pain were infinitely preferable to the guarded tenderness she saw in Brashen’s eyes whenever she chanced to be near him. Damn him. And damn him again, for here she was thinking of him when her very life depended on her focusing her mind on her task. Where had the serpent gone? One moment she had seen it, and now it was gone.
In answer to her question, the ship gave a sudden starboard lurch. Her feet slid on her ice-rimed perch, and she found her life depending on the clutch of her numbed fingers. Without even thinking, she wrapped her arm about a line and held on. On the deck below she could hear the captain cursing and demanding that the hunters do something, shoot the damned thing before it took them all to the bottom! But even as the hunters with bows drawn ran to one side of the ship, the serpent had doubled back and nudged them from the other side. It was not a sharp impact like being rammed. It was a strong upward push, like a shark nosing a dead carcass floating on the water. The ship heeled over and men scrabbled across the decks.
‘Where is it?’ the captain demanded furiously as Althea and the other lookouts strained their eyes into the darkness. The cold wind streamed past her, the waves heaved and she saw serpents in the curve of every swell. They dissolved into fear and imagination when she tried to focus on them.
‘He’s gone!’ one of the other lookouts cried, and Althea prayed he was right. This had gone on too long, too many days and nights of sudden random attacks followed by anxious hours of ominous cessation. Sometimes the serpents crested and writhed alongside the ship, always just out of reach of a bowshot. Sometimes there were half a dozen, hides scintillating in the winter sun, reflecting blue and scarlet and gold and green. And sometimes, like tonight, there would be but one monstrous creature, coming to mock them by effortlessly toying with their lives. Sighting serpents was nothing new to Althea. Once, they had been so rare as to be legendary; now they infested certain areas on the Outside, and followed slave-ships through the Inside Passage. She’d seen a few in her time aboard the Vivacia, but always at a distance and never threatening. This proximity to their savagery made them seem new creatures.
Between one breath and the next, the ship heeled over. Hard. The horizon swung and suddenly Althea’s feet were flung from under her. For an instant she flapped from the spar like a flag. On the canted deck below sailors roared and flailed wildly as they slid and tumbled. She hitched her belly tight and kicked up a foot to catch a ratline. In a moment she was secure again even as the ship tilted further. The serpent had come up under the ship, and lifted it high to roll her hard to starboard. ‘Hang on!’ someone roared, and then she heard a shrill cry cut short. ‘He took him!’ someone shrieked, and the cry was followed by a confusion of voices, demanding of one another, ‘Did you see that? Who did he get? Picked him off like a ripe plum! That’s what the thing is after!’ The ship righted itself and through the chaos of voices, she clearly heard Brashen cursing. Then, ‘Sir!’ His voice rang desperate in the night. ‘Can we not put some hunters on the stern, to keep him off our rudder? If he takes that out…’
‘Do it!’ the captain barked.
There was the clatter of running feet. Althea clung to her perch dizzily, feeling sick not with the sudden lurching of the ship but from the abruptness of death that had visited them. The serpent would be back, she was certain. He would rock the ship like a boy shaking cherries from a tree. She didn’t think the beast was powerful enough to overturn the ship completely, but she was not certain. Land had never seemed so far away. Land, solid land, that could not shift beneath her, that did not conceal ravenous monsters who could erupt at any time.
She remained at her post, hating that she could not see what was happening on the deck right below her. She did not need to know, she reminded herself. What she did need to do was keep good watch and cry a warning that might save a man’s life. Her eyes were weary from peering into the darkness, her hands no more than icy claws. The wind snatched the warmth from her body. But, she reminded herself, it also filled the sails and pushed the ship on. Soon, they would be out of these serpent-infested waters. Soon.
The night deepened around the ship. Clouds obscured both moon and stars. The only light in the world was that of the ship herself. Down on the deck, men worked at fabricating something. Althea moved swiftly and often, a small spider in a web of wet rigging, trying to keep some warmth in her body as she maintained her futile watch. All she could hope to see was some disturbance in the faint luminescence of the ocean’s moving face.
Eventually the ship’s bell rang and her replacement came to relieve her. She scampered down the now familiar rigging, moving swiftly and gracefully despite the cold and her weariness. She hit the deck cat-lightly and stood a moment kneading her stiff hands.
On the deck, she was given a crewman’s measure of rum thinned with hot water. She held it between her near-numb hands and tried to let it warm her. Her watch was over. At any other time, she would have gone to her hammock, but not tonight. Throughout the ship, cargo was being lashed down more tightly to prevent it shifting if the serpent attacked again. On the deck, the hunters were constructing something that involved a lot of salt meat and about fifty fathom of line. They were both laughing and cursing as they put it together, swearing that the serpent would be sorry it had ever seen this ship. The man who had been devoured had been one of the hunters. Althea had known him, had even worked alongside him on the Barrens, but it was hard to grasp the completeness of his death. It had happened too swiftly. To her, the curses and threats of the hunters sounded thin and impotent, the tantrum of a child pitted against the inevitability of fate. In the darkness and the cold their anger seemed pathetic. She did not believe they could prevail. She wondered what would be worse, to drown or be eaten. Then she pushed all such thought aside, to fling herself into the work of the moment. On the deck was a hodge-podge of items jarred loose by the serpent’s attack. All must be carefully re-stowed. Belowdecks, men worked the pumps. The ship had not sprung, but they had taken in water. There was work and plenty to spare.
The night passed as slow as the flow of black tar. From alert vigilance, all decayed to a state of frayed anxiety. When everything was made as tight as it could be, when the bait was readied and the trap set, all waited. Yet Althea doubted that anyone save the hunters hoped the serpent would return to receive
