The Blacktongue Thief

30 The Pig in the Drink

Funny how an attack by a sea monster makes everyone less interested in a duel. It certainly diminished my enthusiasm. I grabbed Norrigal by the elbow, and we hobble-ran to my side of the main deck, opposite where the thing was climbing up, and toward the forecastle, where the oar-boat hung near the ballistas. Captain Boltch started yelling in Molrovan, giving orders about shooting the monster, I think, and abusing one panicked sailor who’d started toward the firepots.

The kraken spilled itself up on deck now with a sound like tons of wet muscle hitting wood. It tossed our anchor up on deck. When I saw that, I realized the shore was farther off than it had been—the beast had pulled us quietly, slowly out from the island without our knowledge, the better to sink us deep. I’d heard that krakens were vengeful, but it had never occurred to me that the one we burned and speared might have followed us, intent on making us pay for hurting it and taking its whale.

I was sure it was the same one, though, the same size and color, missing the tips of the same three tentacles from its fight with us. The most disturbing thing about the creature wasn’t its appearance; rather, I was discouraged by how smart it was, how clever in its destructiveness, how like us. It didn’t bother trying to shred the kynd-fish poking and cutting at it this time; rather, it reached its great ropy arms up to the mainmast boom and climbed it like a tree. The ballistas discharged at it, but two missed, and one only hit a tentacle, pinning it to the mast.

The kraken detached the tentacle and left it hanging, climbing ever higher. Malk stood near me, just as horrified and enraptured as I was, just as unmindful of the fact we’d been trying to kill each other moments before. The kraken was near the top of the mainmast now. Malk’s eyes went wider yet as the creature’s likely intentions became clear. I still hadn’t caught on. I went below to see where Galva had gone and found her trying to strap her shield to her back.

“Help me,” she said, and I did, buckling her sword belt on for her, too, working fast. I gathered my scant belongings in my pack, put it on my back along with bow and quiver, thought about taking my fiddle, but then grabbed Norrigal’s potion case instead.

As if to confirm our unspoken conviction that the ship was doomed, it rocked then, nearly knocking the wobbly Spanth off her feet. I wasn’t so steady myself, having very little strength left in any part of me. We got our gear to the top as the ship lurched to the other side. Sailors were yelling and pointing; they were shooting bows and throwing spears, all futile. A number of arrows hung limp in the mainsail, near stains where the thing’s blackish blood had spotted the fabric. The monster was at the top of the mainmast now, moving itself back and forth, rocking the ship with its weight, gently at first so as not to topple the mast and tumble into the sea. Frightening things, krakens. It had followed us, working on the problem of how to sink such a big ship, and it had come up with a solution.

It meant to capsize us.

And it would.

Now only the captain and a handful of optimists continued trying to shoot the kraken where it rocked the ship from the top of the masts. I say optimists because it was clear the captain still hoped to save his barnacled old pig of a ship—Korkala, less sentimental about Boltch’s vessel and brandishing a long bronze knife, led a trio of realists who managed to cut one of the thick rope stays keeping the mast up, hoping that even with the old magicker’s strengthening spell, the mast might break or come loose with that monster on it. Better to lose a mast or two and float than capsize—had the whole crew moved as one to that end, they might have prevailed, but alas, the kraken spotted them before the ropes could all be cut. The wicked black thing broke off part of the crosstree and whipped that down at Korkala, breaking her head and scattering the rest of them. It now draped itself out to embrace the mizzenmast as well, not wanting to crack the mainmast with its full weight, and it swung between them and rained water like the worst laundry ever.

Most of the crew who were able to pressed toward the single remaining oar-boat, hoping to launch it before the Suepka went belly-up, but they were too busy fighting each other to get much done. Now Galva, still sick with poison, did something unexpected and damned smart of her. She knew she was too weak to fight her way onto the oar-boat, so she decided to borrow her strength from another source. She rapped that staff of Deadlegs’s on the deck, and it turned into the clockwork branch-horse I had seen and ridden in the witch’s yards. She was up on that now, and though it skidded and slid back and forth as the doomed boat pitched and yawed, she made a zigzag course for the press near the rowboat, and though I could barely walk, I followed after her.

If the last thing the crew had expected was to see a kraken rocking their ship toward a capsize, the second to last thing might have been a cavalry charge, but that was exactly what those killing each other for access to the oar-boat suffered. Galva set on them in a flurry of stone hooves and wooden legs. The witch’s nag even bit at them with that ship’s prow head, and had soon scattered them well enough that Norrigal and I could press forward. Galva dismounted, turning the horse back to a staff, and drew her spadín.

The ship lurched and slid us all away from the oar-boat like beer-mugs across a bar. I grabbed an iron ring on the deck and held myself in the middle of the ship ’til it lurched the other way, and I let myself slide on my rump for the oar-boat. I got over and in at the same time as two others—Malk and the Ispanthian who’d likely poisoned Galva. The latter came toward me with a knife but, instead of trying to fight him, I said, “Help me launch this bastard and kill me after.”

A flailing tentacle nearly decapitated him, and the ship’s next lurch, which put us near sideways and spilled water on the deck, convinced him. Now Galva and Norrigal had made the boat, along with a harpooner. We freed our vessel and crashed down to the sea even as the Suepka Buryey, for all its piglike strength, squealed and tipped into the drink, its masts at last breaking, its men and women screaming, and that awful black prince of squidkind slipping into the water and wreckage with us.

“Row!” Malk said, which was little surprise, as that was his favorite word, and row we did. Just ahead of us, Captain Boltch, clinging to a piece of the mizzen yard, loosed the clasp of the waterlogged whitefox cape that threatened to drag him under, let go of the yard, and swam for us. The harpooner helped him clamber in, whereupon he sputtered and swore, but Malk slapped him and said, “Grab an oar!” and that’s what he did. We pulled for our lives. The shoddy rockpile of an island seemed a summer, fall, and gloaming away, but it was our only hope. I looked back toward the thing in the water, and I shouldn’t have done, because what I saw made me want to piss myself. I just lied. It did make me piss myself. It was floating almost leisurely amid the debris, shoveling my former shipmates toward its awful beaklike mouth, where it had made a sort of gurgling, bloody whirlpool. I hadn’t thought I had any strength left, but I found some and rowed yet harder.

“I’ve an idea,” Norrigal said and put her oar down to start fishing in her pack and potion case. “Row, girleen!” Malk yelled. “I don’t know where you think you are, you silly cow, but row!”

“Cow yourself,” I told him. “She’s a witch and a strong one. Let her work!” I didn’t know how strong she was, but some part of me was hoping saying it would make it true.

The kraken had run out of sailors to eat and, after swiveling one huge, too-smart eye in our direction, was floating toward us now.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I said, sorry I had no more piss to run down my leg.

It came up to the boat. Three tentacles reached into the sky, water sluicing down them.

“Weapons!” Malk cried, but he had none. I drew my dagger, feeling I’d do just as well to wave my manhood at it, had that not already shrunk itself as far in my body as it could go. Galva’s sword was out, and Norrigal fumbled with some bottles. The thing looked at all of us the way a fat man considers which cherry he first wants the pleasure of popping in his mouth, but the eye stopped on Yevar Boltch.

The captain drew a bronze knife and bared his teeth, and I saw the thing’s eye go from yellow to a fiery orange. Its gaze had locked on the captain’s neckchain. Of course.

He carried a silver-gilded beak on that chain around his neck.

A juvenile kraken’s beak.

And the monster knew what it was.

If it could have shrieked it would have, but what it did was to whip its arms about in fury, all but the three in the air, boiling the water around us white. The tentacles in the air, which I thought might pluck us one by one or thrash the boat as it had after the fight with the whale, now all reached for the captain at once, one grabbing an arm, one grabbing his head and the last yanking him up by both legs. It hoisted him aloft above us, and ripped him in pieces as he yelled, chucking the head like a ball and thrashing the water with the parts of him it still held.

We stood agape, transfixed by its power and fury, and by the awful end of Yevar Boltch. All but Norrigal. When it had tossed the scraps of the captain away, it set that fiery eye upon us again and readied another brace of tentacles. Norrigal pulled a cork out with her teeth and let the bottle fly. It turned over and over, spilling its cargo of silvery powder into the air as it went. I knew that powder and wrapped an arm over my eyes. She shouted, “Cover your eyes!” as an afterthought, too late for the others. I heard the thing thrash again, and this time, it dove with such force the wake nearly did for us, tossing us against one another. The others groaned and swore, one in Galtish, two in Ispanthian, and I saw why they were so troubled.

They were blind.

“Ha!” Norrigal said, still looking where the killing fish had slipped into the deep. “Ha!”

“Well done!” I said. “Brilliant!”

She went “Ha!” again, and I said, “Ha yourself! Now row, you magnificent witch! And you blind shytes row with me!”

They grabbed for the oars.

But I thought we could do with one rower less.

Norrigal’s eyes popped wide when I crammed my arm in the mouth of the Spanth Badger and stabbed him deep in the chest with the rondel dagger eight or nine times before he could comment. I grabbed his legs and dumped him twitching into the water. Norrigal pursed her lips and nodded at the rough justice of it—the treacherous knob had poisoned my friend, his own countrydam. I thought about killing Malk as well, but couldn’t bring myself to it. There he was, my countryman, rowing like a bastard, blind and faithful. Like he’d been his whole life. I didn’t know if any of us would make it alive to the shabby pile of rocks off in the gray distance, but I didn’t want my last act to be unceremoniously stabbing a man I’d just spent half an hour trying to kill bare-handed.

I can’t explain, but it made sense to me at the time.