The Tower of Death

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: The sea-spawn

The sky hung low in a veiling threat that glowered on the little band of Danes and Sueves. Not even the setting sun was visible. Armoured and well-armed, the silent men accompanied their dark leader onto the dock and aboard the scapha modified to conceal them. Well equipped with grapnels on stout cords the coaster was, as tough to be turned from merchantish pursuits into piratical ones. Spears, too, had been laid aboard, and the sail was of deepest blue.

Though he claimed that no superstition interfered with his excellent mental processes, their Eirrin-born leader had caused the flat-bottomed skiff to be given a name. It had been painted along her hull in green: Sword of Lir. Scapha had become spatha.

The sun that was only a cloud-fronted glow was setting when they eased the square-sterned boat out of Brigantium Harbour and set her big dark sail. At the steering oar was Ivarr of the keen eyes, not he who was surely the best steersman on all the ridge of the world, Ordlaf son of Skel of Dane-mark. Ivarr ruddered the ship out past the lighthouse, then back in shoreward. The tower was unmanned, and its beacon dark.

An the volunteers aboard Sword of Lir saw aught of beacon-light this night, they would know at once that it emanated from their unknown and surely unworldly foe, whether wreckers or sirens or… Ran’s Daughters.

The glow of Behl’s Eye left the sky. Unusually subdued men exchanged looks and glanced this way and that, though from their concealment it was precious little they could see. The world about them went the colour of slate, and then darker still. Their coaster rocked gently amid waters that made lapping, slurping sounds. The men were silent. All knew their vulnerability. The inexperienced Sueves, hardly accustomed to the sea, felt it more than their Danish shipmates. All knew that in full armour as they were, any man who went overboard would sink like a stone and not return in this life.

The sky went indigo-and-black, shot through with streaks of azure and jet and grey-bellied clouds. The sail was hardly lively, in a breeze no more than a zephyr. Seagoing pirates and land-loving horse soldiers alike, the crew breathed deeply of salt-scented air. Crew? Nay; concealed war-men they were; marines.

Cormac stood forward, gazing steadily, moving his head back and forth, back and forth. Beside his left foot lay his helmet, upside down. His deepset eyes moved always, in a roving questing gaze. He strove not to strain his eyes to pierce the dark; any light would be easily seen, this night. Sword of Lir hardly more than drifted along. Across the water came the sounds of insects amid the woods ashore. A frog that must have been fist-sized glugged in a voice deep as the sea.

Behind mac Art men waited, concealed by the new additions to Sword of Lir’s simple construction. Hardly normal soldiers these, in their byrnies of steel or metal-studded leather; with their heavy round shields of good linden rimmed with iron; their vicious, newly-sharpened axes and long swords slung from baldric or waistbelt. Each man’s sponge-lined steel pot or iron-covered leathern cap lay close at hand.

They waited, looking up at their foreign leader’s back and at the dark, unconcerned sky. Only four men were visible along with mac Art; unhelmeted men. They knew their duties. Insofar as words could tell, they knew what to expect. They too watched, and waited. The breeze drifted gently, riffling their hair and only stirring the sail. The Gael’s black mop stirred and he jerked his head when a lock tickled his cheek.

A light appeared. A light flashed, a spot of citrine in the night.

“Cormac!”

“I see it. It’s the beacon, lads-the false one, low to the water. Stand ye by for the fearful, and see ye’re not affected as they expect. Ivarr-we’re being seduced. Gudfred, Hermanric-they wish to lure us from the shore. Let us be succumbing.”

They succumbed. The flat-bottomed boat was lured willingly away by the rocking yellow glow. The scapha, nigh immune to rocks no matter how close they rose to the surface of the water, closed as if naively on that beacon of treachery. Adam’s apples bobbed as men swallowed. Darkness ensorcelled the world in a night haunted by the unknown. They knew death lurked in strange form, awaiting them.

The coaster slid over the gently tossing bracken sea toward whatever inexorable end the Fates held in store for her and her crew. Mac Art stared ahead, a dark-visaged statue wrapped in sombre anticipation. The spot of yellow grew, and now he could see that it was a dancing yellow flame.

“Closer,” he reported. Behind him there were rustles and clinks as grim-faced men removed baldrics and belts and held steel naked in their hands. An they went into the sea, they’d be encumbered at least by no leathern straps.

“Ah, gods of my fathers, Wulfhere spoke true,” their commander reported. “A barge, lads, broad and flat as this save with no hold or shelter-but a deck just above the water. Aye, ’tis plain now-constructed all of dead white bone yon craft is!”

“And-women?”

Cormac stared. “Something disports itself in the water about the barge. Many of them. Large, methinks-Crom’s beard, those heads-their faces are men and fishes all at once, lads! It’s some creatures called up from some damned kingdom ’neath the sea we’ll be facing, and do ye remember who has weapons and who-or what-has none!”

The Gael continued to stare ahead while his unlikely craft closed on the unnatural one. Aye, he saw them now… women, or something like, of womanly form. The hair at the back of his neck stirred as though someone stood close and puffed air on it. Eerily phosphorescent were those beasties sporting about the bone-ship, and huge and round and without colour their eyes, save for the spots of black that were their pupils.

The unnatural fire did indeed burn on that dead white deck, and around it, close as though they were freezing or it a flame of cold fire, lounged… crew? Passengers? Mac Art did not know. Strange unearthly women these were, with large eyes that glowed like twinned lamps in every face… and those colourless eyes were blank, inhuman, fishlike, noctiluminescent glims staring and expressionless as death itself. Robed all in greenish-bluish-greyish sea mist these feminine creatures were, all slim and sylphlike and gleaming. Peradventure that raiment, mac Art thought, protected the unworldly creatures from the heat and dancing flames of their deck-burning beacon. If flames those were.

Lounging, they stared unblinking at the approaching scapha.

Slim, and lifeless and unblinking… like…

Like my lady Queen Venhilda, Cormac thought, staring back. From time to time he lifted his voice in command to his four men on deck. He saw arms draped impossibly in sea mist lift, stretch toward him all aglisten; saw the loveliness of parting lips in piquant, point-chinned faces; saw the misted outline and swell of tiny, dainty girlish breasts that called to a man and sought to kindle his rut with visions of nubile youth.

He spoke low. “Now lads, remember. These… women expect the bemazement of their very appearance to draw us in… the horror of those eyes to ensorcel and panic us so that we may be capsized and drowned with ease. Such must be their way and their experience. Only Lir’s son is after knowing how many they’ve thus murdered. Be ye prepared. Flinch not, but remember that it’s deadly enemy they be-and that things be not always as they seem. Surprise is with us, this time. For we expected them… and it’s hardly the ordinary sailors they expect we are!” And he added, “Trim sail. Rudder aport.”

And his men obeyed.

And steadily, whilst fish-things cavorted in the water and made strange croaking sounds that rode the night air with ugglesome eeriness to prickle a man’s nape, the ungainly craft yclept Sword of Lir slid toward the barge of bones.

The cold dead colourless eyes of those… sirens seemed to brighten with anticipation. The sea-creatures about their barge slowed their activities, staring. Waiting for the scapha’s approach.

Then Cormac seemed to go mad.

He shouted, and his voice lofted high. “Five more on deck! Run about as if moon-struck, lads! AH, GODS AND BLOOD OF THE GODS! Aegir and Mamannan aid us! Wulfhere-all sail, all sail! Hard by steerboard!”

But Wulfhere was not aboard, and at the steering-oar Ivarr knew better than to obey: the calling of the absent captain’s name was the signal they’d agreed upon hours agone. And Ivarr seemed too to go mad, even while five men sprang up from below. Unhelmeted they came, and bearing no shields. Given the order to swing hard aright, Ivarr ruddered leftward as if in panicky confusion.

With men running screaming and arm-waving about her deck, the scapha rolled in toward the unearthly craft.

Ever closer they manoeuvered, and each time Cormac called out Wulfhere’s name before his command, that order was carried out in reverse. And the women aboard the bone-ship smiled, smiled and seemed to yearn toward Sword of Lir…

“Close enow!” Cormac bawled. “Grapple fast and haul us in to her, lads! Helmets and shields and fistful of steel! And by the blood of all the very gods, remember how many good men these creatures have done to death!”

Grapnels flew like steel claws from the hands of men whose sanity had been regained on the instant. Inexperienced Hermanric, unsteady on his feet on the bobbing craft, overthrew. A hideous shriek rent the air as one clawing fluke of his grapnel tore down the arm of one of the women on the bone-barge, and another sank to its back-hook in her shining white thigh.

Blood’s red enough, Cormac thought, and gave no thought to his own callousness.

Now the two craft were made fast, and up from the sea came horror.

Surely horror was the very name of these sea-spawned monsters of glistening, dripping, greyish-green. Scales plated their backs and shoulders like the hides of fishes. As fish-like were the enormous unblinking eyes that bulged from ugly piscine heads. Gills moved restlessly on either side their necks, sucking and palpitating.

When they rose up from the night-dark water to invade the scapha, their bellies were the dead pasty white of fish.

Hideous scaly beasts they were, with the thick-lipped, wide mouths of fish and yet a simultaneous resemblance to frogs. At the same time, their bodies were anthopomorphic, with the two-armed, two-legged bodies and chests of humankind. Rows of gleaming pointed teeth lined open mouths. All was as though man and shark had come somehow together in obscene mating and these monstrosities were their get.

It’s nests of these things there are all over the ridge of the world, Cormac mac Art thought, and knew not how such knowledge was on him. Nor knew he how he was sure these creatures had existed before ever humankind had walked this earth. Everything came once from the water, the seas, all and all of us; and it’s but little change we need to return to our ancient demesne. And he shivered.

Yet were these batrachian fish on their way to becoming human, or men somehow returning to that ancient home in the sea?

Up they came, dripping and shiny-slimy save for the scales on their backs. Huge pallid eyes stared from piscine faces above jaws like ragged bone shears. Like marbles were those eyes, with great black spots set in pearl-white sclera without other colour. And where their fingered paws gripped the deck to pull themselves aboard the coaster, horny claws left deep rents in the wood.

They came, and gasps mingled with the oaths streaming from the lips of frightened men.

Yet these were fighting men, and fearfulness was but a cloak to be hurled from them. Swords and axes moved in stout hands, and swung high. Their steel flashed in the light from the fire on the bone-ship’s deck. Danes and Sueves attacked in their numbers, for such abominations begged to be hacked and slain that men might feel they were indeed men, and clean.

The eyes of the attacking creatures, Cormac noted, never closed, not for so much as a single blink.

Swords and axes whined in the air. Sharp-edged steel struck with shattering impact on creatures spawned in brackish deeps. Demons vomited up by the sea were met by men become blood-mad demons themselves. Fishy skulls shattered and the blood that spurted was red enow. Fish-like heads, flew on wakes of scarlet for men ever loved the satisfaction of the broad beheading stroke. Arms, man-like and yet clawed and scaled above, sought to grapple and were chopped away.

A Sueve whose name Cormac could not call chopped deep into the side of a slime-sheened creature, even as its arms enfolded him and vised tight. Man and monster toppled overboard, nor was either seen again.

“It’s not here they want to fight us!” Cormac bawled, stabbing. “They be wanting. to grapple us and leap into their own demesne, lads! Strike, and strike!”

Men struck and struck. Creatures at once batrachian and piscine and anthropomorphic died and died. Again and again had surprise and horror won for them, so that their leprous home below must be floored with human bones. These men knew horror too-but little surprise. Nor were they taken unarmed and without armour. No bigger than men, the sea-spawn had neither mail nor weapons save claws and teeth and strength beyond the human.

Those who had so long and horribly preyed on men became the prey of men.

A gape-eyed thing reached for Cormac mac Art. So strongly did he hew in his horror that his sword sheared off an arm and was hardly slowed, the way that it cut the other arm to the bone. Baying, the creature came on. The Gael smashed its awful face with his shield. And all about, men cursed and chopped, grunted and hewed.

The sea-get were maimed, disjointed, unlimbed, beheaded. They died and died. Most of the blood that spattered the deck was theirs; the blood that splashed human faces and weapons and mailclad men came not from men. Cormac and his band did slaughter, and right happily. They slew inhuman foe that would have been less repugnant had they been less human.

The coaster bobbed on the waters of night, and the reek of fresh-spilt blood vied with the tang of brine and the stench of unnatural fish-things.

A hand was scratched. A face was raked open by whipping claws. An ax was torn from an arm that had swung not hard enough and a woman was widowed as monster and yelling Sueve plunged into the sea. Horny claws tore the cheek of another, but slipped and skidded over boiled leather bossed with bronze.

Mac Art bore a shield he hardly needed for defense. He used it offensively even more than was his wont, smashing scaly arms and flat ichthyoid faces. He cried out and tried to get to them, but two creatures bore Hugi the Nimble into the sea and they clawed and chewed him even as they bore him down. They returned in scant minutes, and the Gael derived an almost s berserker pleasure in chopping away the head of one and the forearms of the other as they sought to remount the skiff.

Three men had met their weirds, the while more than a score of their attackers died or were so sorely maimed that death was inevitable. The kelp had been worse menace than these creatures that defied nature-yet to sailors unready, these had been death, sure as the jaws and talons of tigers. Here and now, the sea-spawn came on and on, and died and died, and fell hideously maimed back into the sea amid the bedlam of shouting men and hacking blades and stamping feet.

Shrieks rent the salty night air. On the barge, the “sirens” danced in rage and hurled curses in a name Cormac did not know; it was k’Tooloo or something like. What man could know the meaning of such cries as “k’Tooloo fhtagn?”

While their beastly killers were defeated and annihilated, the mist-clad mistresses of dying demons bethought them to flee. They began striving to dislodge the grapnels binding them to the scapha. Three of four they had cast off ere a Dane noticed; so blood-spattered and a-drip was he as to be unrecognizable. Yet no wound was on him.

It was he who shouted and pointed, with dripping sword. He yelled orders without pausing to consider his right to command.

The last four fish-things were being chopped into bits by men on whom the blood-madness still lay, the way that panting men were left foeless on a deck gone slippery with blood. Others were booting hideous corpses back into the sea that had birthed them. Those bloodied men snatched up grapnels. The hooks flashed over, trailing walrus-hide ropes, and the two craft were linked anew.

Barge and skiff wallowed in the swell, six times linked, side by side.

Now was not curses the women yowled down on their attackers, but shrieks for succor in the name of the monster they served. Cthulhu; those lure-sylphs called desperately. Cthulhu! Save your servants who have sacrificed to you for centuries uncounted!

Asleep in R’lyeh, he whom the Philistines knew as Dagon and others called Aegir-without knowing his true nature-stirred not.

And Cormac mac Art bounded onto the white-gleaming barge. His sword stood out before his white-knuckled fist, and it slew even as his boots struck that rocking deck of bone.

Was then ended the illusion of fair, beckoning women like naiads.

A daughter of Ran she was not. No one of the Sirenes of the Hellenes was she either-unless those Greeks of old had never thrust steel into one and seen her change from a willowy beautiful lure-woman to… a horrid amphibious servant of the monster-god Cthulhu who slept in drowned R’lyeh.

Completely loathsome was the thing that slid off Cormac’s spitting sword, part fish and part frog and aye; obscenely, revoltingly: part human as well.

Again, sickened seamen stared. Again they recognized their relationship to such a beast, and were revolted and as if tainted by that knowledge. None could know how old these creatures were, for none of the toad-looking fish-people things died, ever, save by violence. Were they, like some werewolves, born with the amphibian taint that later led to the horrid changelings? Or had they ever been human at all? Or, still yet again, might these barge-creatures include both those groups, as well as some that were victims of curse or spell of ancient origin?

Or, Cormac mac Art wondered, changed and summoned by chants in an old temple to Dagon?

And even then he noted that the false beacon fire on the barge’s deck gave off no heat… O’course not. It’s afire of sorcery this be, for cold-blooded creatures from the sea could not otherwise tolerate such a fire so close!

“It’s no lovelies these be, lads,” he called. “See what ’tis I’m after slaying! Come aboard-be ye fighting men or children to stand agape and tremblous?”

And the other women rose up then, to come for Cormac mac Art, and a Sueve from the coaster leaped across to stand at Cormac’s left. And others came. At their leader’s feet lay, twitching, a scaled thing of nightmare. Finned and gilled it was; web-footed and web-fingered it was, razor-toothed and claw-fingered… as the other “lovely women” now became!

As they commenced a hissing, croaking advance, out of the night came bellowing a mighty stentorian voice that might have been Father Odin, save for the words it shouted.

“Look to yourself, ye son of a Gaelic pig-farmer, and drag your hide off that accursed floating boneyard!”

Every man saw the appearance of Raven, drawn by the witchfire on the barge of horror and death. Plowing through the darkness came the ship, as Cormac and Wulfhere had planned-and told no one at all lest the Power behind the false beacon and these “sirens” learn of it. Impelled by all oars good speedy Raven came hurtling, and a great furl of foam billowed back on either side of the pirate vessel’s bow. She plunged through the water toward the barge like an attacking shark, and it starving.

“Back! Back on our scapha, and chop free the grapnel ropes!” Cormac yelled, while Raven bore down on the barge he now knew was builded of human bones and the cement of sea-snails.

He pounced backward from attackers and made of his sword a silvery blur before him, and he saw his men off the bone-barge. One of the nightmarish sea-get pounced. Cormac managed to catch its claws in his buckler even as he chopped into the thing’s neck. Then he had to lop off the arm of that dying obscenity, to free his shield-arm of its hampering weight. So deeply were steely claws imbedded in the painted, steel-braced yew wood. Another dived in low at him. Cormac struck like a madman, missing his own toes by the breadth of but a finger or two. That monster croak-screamed, its paws gone amid gouting blood… and wallowing handless, it strove to get at his booted leg with its teeth. The while, on the scapha, axes fell on walrus-hide ropes.

Cormac wheeled, ran three strides, and leaped out over the widening gap betwixt barge and scapha.

He came down flat-footed on the coaster’s deck, squatting to absorb the fall until his hinderparts nigh touched the planking.

For an instant his balance was in question on the blood-slick deck. Then he was up like a catapult and spinning to hack through the rope holding the last grapnel. The vessel of men and that of monsters were no longer linked.

Hideous baying croaking fouled the air as the servants of the human-hating god saw Raven bearing down on them with the swiftness of a falling meteor.

Raven’s copper-sheathed prow slammed highspeed into the barge of horror.

“UP OARS AND HOLD ’EM HIGH! Brace yoursel-”

The booming shout of Wulfhere Skull-splitter was broken off by impact. With a great snapping splintering of bone cemented by sea-snail, amid stricken croaking, the hell-sent barge was smashed to white splinters. The coaster so nearby was rocked violently and it fell out that a Sueve saved a Dane from going overboard. A flying chunk of splintered white bone, three forearms neatly joined lengthwise, came end-over-ending through the air so that Cormac ducked to save his head. Catapulted, one of the sea-creatures flopped squashily athwart the skiff’s gunwale. Another shard of flying bone brought a yelp from a seasoned pirate of Danemark. Slowed but not halted by the tremendous impact, Raven crunched on, cutting the bone-barge into halves and more. Two flopping helpless sea-spawn tumbled to her decks, and with great joy Wulfhere and Gudfred Hrut’s son chopped them to pieces.

In fragments, the barge sank as though those bones of murdered men were filled with lead.

Dark waters rose over the deck-fire that had lured so many men to their doom. Once again the hair of Sueves and Danes and aye, one Gael among them, stood on end; for the fire remained eerily ablaze for many fathoms as it sank, until the darkness of the nighted water blotted it from ken.

One of the awful amphibians clung to Raven’s dragonhead. A savagely laughing Wulfhere clove it in twain with an incredible sweep of his ax that splashed blood over ten men-who promptly cursed their captain, that now they must clean their armour.

The scapha was wallowing the way that those aboard must brace their legs and set them well apart. Nevertheless Cormac was glaring at the last of the monsters when it turned in the sea to utter a hissing, croaking malediction. With disgust on him rather than fear, Cormac mac Art snatched up a spear and hurled it. So had the men of Eirrin long fought, and the long steel-tipped stave rushed straight to its mark. Cthulhu’s creature and spear vanished together; no man could be certain whether Cormac had struck it well. As for the Gael, he could only hope with fervor that Crom of Eirrin had guided his powerful throw.

The scapha tilted now, and men fell. The craft had suffered some little damage of the creatures, and more of the ramming that had slammed a large section of the barge into its squared stern. Too, a great chunk of bone splintered from the other craft stood forth from the skiff’s hull, just at the waterline. Cormac’s Sword of Lir was dying under his feet, and he wished he’d named it else.

Silent, grim-faced men on Raven aided silent, blood-splashed men from the coaster in transferring to the ship. Her bow plated for ramming, the Dane-built pirate craft was unharmed. Swung upward in instant response to her master’s command, not one of her oars was damaged.

Pirates and Suevic Galicians, almost in silence, swung the ship out and rowed toward the harbour. Behind, the ungainly scapha floundered amid lapping wavelets, a floating marker to the graves of three men, and the monsters of Treachery Bay.