by Rab Foster
in Issue 144, January 2024
A wind sighed over the Sea of Quan. When they came in sight of the fleet, that wind seemed to raise a low mist. From their position to where the ships huddled on the horizon, the sea looked like it was smoldering – exuding huge, flat streams of purple smoke.
They were twelve in number. They rode on obloctrians, a type of camel common in these parts, distinguished by its shaggy fur and the small, third hump it had at the base of its neck. The mist was really a purple dust. It’d formed on the dried seabed after an unexplained cataclysm had drained the Sea of Quan of its waters. Now the dust swirled about the camels’ flanks, hiding their legs and the ground underneath. Perched in their saddles above the dust, the riders could imagine they were on boats crossing a still-existent sea, amethyst in color, and the ships ahead weren’t stranded wrecks but buoyant ones, moored over the deep.
The lead rider signaled back, the caravan halted, and he used a telescope to study the horizon. Then he passed the telescope to the second rider in line. It showed them the ships’ decrepitude, their masts skewed and toppled, their yards broken. The sails, banners, and flags that’d once billowed from them were rotted flitters and shrouded them like cobwebs.
Framson returned the telescope, unwound a scarf from his head and shook the dust from it. “I’m still skeptical,” he said, “that the Dashya didn’t discover those ships long ago and loot them. That’s there’s anything left in them.”
The lead rider, Morgyle, reattached the telescope to a belt amid the folds of his robe. Other things hung from the belt’s hooks: an astrolabe, a compass, a tube of furled maps. His scarf covered his head save for a circle where his eyes, nose, and mouth were. The scarf’s tight, round outline suggested a head that was hairless and almost fleshless. “I greatly doubt that. They’ve never stopped fearing her. She was a terror to them when this was a real sea. After the waters bled away, and they traversed it on camels rather than boats, they remained in awe of her and kept clear of this area. I told you, that’s how I knew her fleet was marooned here.” He tapped the tube of maps. “If you all copy their modern trade-routes across the vanished sea onto one chart, you get what resembles a spider’s web with a hole in it. Some routes twist and bend to avoid this place, though logically they’d go straight through it.”
Framson mused, “A formidable woman, this Pirate-Queen Lamvula.”
“She was.” Morgyle gave the horizon a mock-salute. “Wherever your soul resides now, hail to you, Magaferadeen Lamvula.”
The caravan continued. As the day ended, the wind died, the dust subsided, and its purple color dimmed. The sky that straddled the edges of the sea like a vast, upturned bowl took on a dark shade of blue. Stars pierced through it and a scimitar-shaped moon appeared. The starlight and moonlight made the night strangely lucid.
They halted again when they reached the first ship. Its bows had broken off and its bowsprit lay across the dust. Beside the bowsprit was the ship’s figurehead, an eight-foot-long block of timber carved into a creature with a man’s head and body but an eel-like tail below the waist.
Framson gestured behind him. Another rider came forward, a lithe figure whose robe was topped by a peaked hood. A pale face lurked in the hood’s opening and a few locks of jet-black hair protruded past its edges. “If we’d arrived earlier, we’d have the wind’s dust to cover us.” The speaker, a woman, pointed to the firmament. “Though it’s night-time, we’re more visible now thanks to this celestial light.”
Morgyle replied, “It’s unlikely that someone’s lurking in those ships. But if there is, they’ll be used to the dust-storms. You aren’t. Imagine fighting amid one of those. No, it’s better you have this illumination. If anything comes at you, you’ll see it.”
The woman climbed out of her saddle and slid down the fur on the camel’s side. The other riders did likewise. “In the past we’ve fought in fog, and snowstorms, and rain so heavy we scarcely saw our hands in front of our faces. But rather that than be in the open, easy targets for arrows. Still, I shan’t argue. You’re the one paying the money.”
Framson reassured her. “This should only be a formality, Rook. My client feels it’s best to take no chances. Carry out your sortie and let us know when you’re satisfied.”
“Very well, Framson.” She sounded more respectful of him than of Morgyle.
She returned to her nine companions, who were removing their saddles and packs from the gaps between the obloctrians’ treble humps. Morgyle asked Framson, “Why ‘Rook’?”
“They’re named after animals. Things like Rook, Lynx, Jackal, Snake. Have you heard of the Legion of Beasts?”
“No.”
“They were a fighting force composed of mercenaries. A regiment for hire. Each member bore the name of an animal. Several years back, far west of here, the Legion of Beasts was almost destroyed. It fought a rear-guard action against the Veleedran army, trying to buy time for the inhabitants of some city so they could evacuate and escape. Rook and her nine friends survived but were separated from what was left of the Legion – if anything was left of it at all. Since then, they’ve been trying to locate it again. They’ve taken on jobs during their wanderings, to keep themselves fed. For the last year, they’ve worked for me.”
“They don’t have real names? Only animal ones?”
“They have real names, but those are known only to other Legion members. Not to outsiders. It’s their tradition.”
Morgyle showed no more interest in the mercenaries who, once they’d roped together their camels’ front legs and tethered them, set off into the ships on foot. He took the astrolabe from his belt and aligned it with a certain star near the northern horizon. Framson noticed that the pin at the astrolabe’s center was studded with an emerald. Then, since it was night-time, he wondered how he was able to identify it as an emerald. With a prickle of unease, he realized the stone was emitting a hazy green light.
The mercenaries disappeared amid the wrecks and for a long time Morgyle and Framson sat in silence. Unlike other types of camels, obloctrians had mild tempers and their mounts stood deferentially still. Slowly, the sapphire’s light went from being hazy to being a precise, green point.
Morgyle suddenly announced, “I have you, Magaferadeen Lamvula.”
“Magaferadeen Lamvula,” repeated Framson. “That’s interesting. Since sighting her fleet, you’ve used that term twice in your excitement. I haven’t studied the Dashya’s lore and history like you have, but I know enough of their language to understand Magaferadeen. It doesn’t mean ‘Pirate-Queen.’ It means ‘Witch-Queen’.”
Morgyle turned his head from the astrolabe. “And?”
“I also know that in Dashya culture a witch-queen is no minor matter. The word denotes a woman of immense power. Immense, terrifying, supernatural power.”
“How astute,” Morgyle purred. “I thought you were a simple businessman, Framson.”
“I’m a businessman but I’m also protective of my employees. Throughout this expedition, you’ve claimed there was no chance of any Dashya venturing near the fleet. Nevertheless, you insist on sending my people in first, in case there might be outlaws, rogue Dashya, hiding among the ships. Now I think there is something dangerous in there, though not necessarily outlaws. And you want to draw it out and observe it.”
“As you explained to that Rook, I merely wish to take no chances.”
Meanwhile, using his left hand, the hand not holding the astrolabe and on the side of him away from Framson, Morgyle eased a dagger out of a sheath.
A minute later, Framson fell from his saddle and thumped against the ground. Blood leaked out of a wound in his back and made a dark stain in the dust beside him. His startled camel lurched away. The mercenaries’ camels gurgled in sympathy but, as they’d been tethered, were unable to get up and lurch after it.
As if under a spell, Morgyle’s animal remained still and silent.
On the ground, Framson thought: The mercenaries… The Legion of Beasts… I need to warn them… But he could barely move. A coldness radiated from the dagger-wound and overpowered him. Then, looking up at Morgyle, he saw how the glow from the astrolabe’s emerald had expanded and become a fountain of green light. It rose into the air above Morgyle, turned, and drizzled down around him, forming a luminous green cloak over him and his camel.
Suddenly, Framson heard sounds on his other side. They resembled… whispers. He managed to twist his head towards them. He was in time to see the fallen ship’s figurehead, the eel-man, do the same thing. Its timber head twisted sideways and looked across the dust at him.
Mercifully, Framson saw nothing more. The coldness from his wound, and an accompanying darkness, engulfed him.
The ships tilted around the mercenaries like buildings whose foundations had subsided and made them sink into the earth. The sea’s dried sediment was heaped against their sides, in places almost as high as their decks. Above, festooned with shreds of sail, the still-standing masts resembled giant scarecrows.
Meanwhile, the ships’ figureheads glared down at them. These were monstrous combinations of the human and aquatic. A bearded fish-man held a trident while a scaled carapace rose from his skull like a grotesque helmet. A sea-centaur reared up, a chimera that started as a fish, became a horse, ended as a bestial-looking man. Another creature had a human torso and limbs but also a fish’s tail and head, its head tapering into a long, sharp bill, a jagged sail sprouting along its neck and back.
When they reached what Neela the Rook judged to be the center of the site, she had them stop. They held a brief conference in the darkness below the bows of a hulk. Looming over them was a figurehead with human legs and a human midsection, which then bifurcated into the necks and heads of three snarling sea-serpents.
The air was free of dust now and Neela the Rook pulled back her hood. Both her pale face and black hair were discernible in the limpid light from the stars and moon. One by one, her companions revealed themselves too.
The oldest mercenary was a white-haired man with a flinty face and aquiline nose who, appropriately, was called Keptar the Hawk. He asked, “Is it possible? Could someone be hiding here?”
Another woman, called Sharn the She-Snake, commented, “A cockroach couldn’t survive in this wasteland.” She had one snake-like feature, a serpentine braid of blonde hair that hung from the back of her otherwise-shaven head.
“According to Morgyle,” said Neela, “there’s a chance bandits might be here. Renegade Dashya. They’re a peaceable people, but they have rogue factions like everyone else. He maintains that chance is slight, though.”
“I assume those pirate crews contained women.” The group’s largest member, Tormyn the Boar, was talking now. Straggles of brown hair almost veiled his face. Holstered on his back was an axe he’d nicknamed the Tusks because of its unusually cleft and curved blade. “Could they have stayed with their ships after the stranding and created a colony here? Started families, had children and grandchildren, bred generations of offspring?”
Sharn the She-Snake was derisive – perhaps offended by the idea that a female pirate, fierce as any man, should turn into a wife and mother the moment a calamity occurred. “And how would those generations have survived? What would they have eaten? The occasional Dashya trader who strayed too close to this spot? Also, I doubt if their bloodlines would have been… healthy.”
The group’s smallest, most furtive-looking member shuddered. “Cannibalism and incest,” said Melk the Rat. “If that’s the case, they’re not going to be the most civilized folk now.”
“Rat, they weren’t the most civilized folk back then.” Neela’s voice became authoritative. “Right, we’ll work in two groups. She-Snake, Lynx, Jackal, Scorpion, Crow in one, checking the western half of the area. The others with me, checking the east. Search the ships that remain intact. Avoid the ones that have broken apart because they’ll be death-traps inside. And ignore any stuff you find in them. That’s for Framson and Morgyle to deal with tomorrow. Tonight, we’re looking for people.”
Keptar the Hawk queried, “What about light?”
“Yes, the interiors will be dark. Two torches for each group. Torchbearers, be on your guard. If we have foes here, they’ll see you first.”
A mercenary called Jask the He-Snake, who’d been mute all his life, carried a staff with a fire-pot dangling at its end. He removed the pot’s lid. Four torches were dipped inside and flared into life.
Before they split up, Keptar echoed what Framson had said earlier. “The thought of bandits being here now doesn’t trouble me. What does is the possibility they were here in the past. And when they left, they took everything in the ships with them – this fabled pirates’ treasure Morgyle hopes to find.”
Neela replied, “He still has to pay us, treasure or not. And though Framson’s an honorable man, he’s tough. He’s good at getting customers to pay up, if they owe him money and he thinks there’s no acceptable reason for it.”
Melk the Rat chuckled. Inside his mouth, the light from the torch he was holding reflected on two chips of silver he had instead of front teeth. “And he’s got better at it since he started employing us.”
They arrived at a ship smaller and daintier than the others. Its figurehead was a mermaid, the gracefulness of her figure offset by the savagery of her face, her mouth crammed with fangs. This ship too wallowed amid banks of dust and sand. They scrambled to the top of one and found themselves by the hull above where the waterline had been. Its wood was engraved with patterns of pentacles, hexagrams and heptagrams. Occult shapes, thought Neela uneasily.
Carved more deeply into the hull were rungs, which took them the rest of the way to the main deck. “The flagship,” said Keptar. “The Pirate-Queen Lamvula’s floating palace.”
Tormyn the Boar picked a round, pale thing off the dust-carpeted planking. “And I’d thought the descendants of her crews might be living here.” He tossed the skull aside. “But She-Snake was right. This place wouldn’t sustain a cockroach.”
As the others – Keptar and Melk bearing torches, Jask the He-Snake still carrying the fire-pot – moved off to explore, Neela detained Tormyn by the port-side rails they’d climbed through. She pointed out a green light she’d noticed. It glimmered mysteriously at the edge of the fleet’s resting place, beyond the forest of crooked masts and tattered sails.
He remarked, “That looks like the spot where we left Framson and Morgyle. They’ve probably lit a fire.”
“A green fire? I don’t like it, Boar. Stay here and keep an eye on it. Alert us if it moves or gets bigger.”
“I might be more use below decks. Aren’t you being too cautious?”
“Don’t dismiss caution, Boar. It’s kept us alive all these years.”
She joined Keptar. Minutes later, exploring a corridor, they pushed back the door of a storeroom. Their torchlight revealed dust-covered mounds and, when they brushed some of the dust away, the light gleamed on gold and silver coins. Piled in another room were items of jewelry and, after the dust was swept off them, the light glinted on precious stones. A third room contained heaps of begrimed goldwork and silverwork – plates, utensils, vessels, figurines, masks, ornate boxes, incense burners.
Neela marveled, “These are only three rooms in one ship among a fleet. Probably the Pirate-Queen kept the pick of the plunder on her flagship, but still. The wealth here is massive.”
Keptar shook the dust off an opium pipe. It was made of wood, embossed with silver, and studded with rubies. “Our aim was always to find and re-join the Legion of Beasts. At least, what’s left of it…”
“Hawk, there might be nothing left of it.”
“True. Anyway, even if Morgyle takes the greater share of this and gives Framson a fraction… And then Framson pays us with a fraction of his fraction… We’ve probably no need to continue searching. We can forget the Legion. Why fight again? Why work again? The ten of us can spend our remaining days comfortably, doing nothing.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“I should feel overjoyed. But strangely, I don’t. The Legion was my life, Rook…”
Then a shout from the end of the passageway brought them running.
Melk and Jask had found the flagship’s main cabin. This was at the ship’s stern and in its far wall was a large, circular window. The grime on the window failed to hide its stained glass, displaying geometrical patterns like those carved on the hull. The cabin’s other feature was a grand bed. Melk leant over it, having pawed aside the dust that’d covered the object on the pillow. From his look of disgust, he wished he hadn’t.
He croaked, “She was a right old horror.”
Neela approached the bed. Most of its occupant was hidden by encrusted blankets and, in the torchlight, the outline under those blankets seemed oddly twisted and shapeless. White hair fanned out across the pillow and a tiny, mummified face rested at the hair’s center.
“Considering the time that’s passed,” she told Melk, “Her Majesty doesn’t look so bad. After she died, someone must have embalmed her…”
Keptar interrupted. “Did you see that?”
“What?” Melk demanded.
Keptar moved towards the window, his eyes fixed on its dusty glass. “For a moment, outside… The starlight and moonlight cast something’s shadow on it.”
They heard a splintering noise, which came from the bows of the ship, rather than here at the stern. The noise escalated into a crash, and at the same time the flagship quaked around them.
No sooner had the crash and quaking subsided than the circular window shattered. Three long prongs hurtled into the cabin, struck Keptar in his stomach, pierced him, and burst from his back. Three plumes of blood sprayed across the shrunken thing in the bed. Neela rushed to him but the trident, which the prongs were part of, was yanked back. Keptar, transfixed on the trident, went with it through the window.
Neela leant through the maw of broken glass, but saw only the neighboring wrecks. Lowering her gaze, she spotted Keptar’s dropped torch. It burned on a sandy slope that rose to the stern below the window. Its light flickered over a trail of footprints twice the size of any human ones.
She turned her head, followed the footprints, and was in time to see something disappear beyond the corner of the stern and port side. “Quick,” she shouted at her two comrades. “Out on deck!”
They ran from the cabin. None of them noticed that on the pillow, speckled with Keptar’s blood, the shriveled face had opened its eyes.
Neela bounded down from the quarterdeck to the main one and almost slammed into a figure that loomed several feet above her.
Melk was beside her and the light from his torch gave her a glimpse of a fanged face. She lunged forward with her blade, but it struck something hard and bounced back. At the same moment, she heard a sound… No, sounds. A chorus of voices seeped out of the thing before her. Those voices didn’t speak, but whispered, all at once and incoherently.
She retreated a step and felt a violent waft of air as a massive arm swung past and tried to swat her. Also, she saw a handle protruding from the thing’s chest. When she lunged forward again, she not only hacked with her blade but grabbed and wrenched at the handle, hoping she could unbalance the mass it was attached to.
The mass was the mermaid figurehead that’d adorned the flagship’s bows. Somehow, it’d been transplanted to the main deck, where it balanced upright on its fishtail and launched blows at her with impossibly-animate arms.
Three things happened. First, her blade snapped as it hit the timber body again. Second, the handle came back in her other hand because the steel wedge at its end, which’d been embedded in the figurehead, was prized free. And third, the great arm swung the other way and caught her this time. It caught Melk too and sent them sprawling across the deck.
As Neela regained her wits, she realized the torch had flown from Melk’s hand and lay burning a distance away on the deck-planks. Its glow showed a hirsute figure lying huddled beside it.
Neela sat up. “Boar?”
Momentarily, she feared Tormyn the Boar was dead. But then he managed to raise his head off the deck and return her gaze. From what she saw through his curtain of hair, he was in pain. His eyes were narrowed and his mouth was a rictus of gritted teeth.
There was a new commotion. Jask the He-Snake had sprung down from the quarterdeck and faced the figurehead too. He smashed his staff at the thing, but the fire-pot at its end rebounded as ineffectively as Neela’s blade had. Undeterred, he ducked back, loosened the pot-lid, and swung the staff again. Burning coals spilled down the figurehead’s front but caused no damage. It was made of oakwood. Only a fire many times bigger and hotter could make it ignite.
Then a giant hand swooped, seized Jask, and hoisted him off the deck. The other hand took hold of his head, twisted it savagely, and snapped his neck.
Neela scrambled up. She flung her sword aside when she observed the inch-long stub left of its blade. Her other hand held the haft of the Tusks, Tormyn’s cleft-bladed axe, which she’d pulled out of the figurehead.
Melk’s voice sounded behind her: “Fighting that thing is useless, Rook.” She glanced back and saw him wrestling himself up, using the rails on the ship’s starboard side for support. “We need to jump.”
She was still unsteady, but she stumbled over to Tormyn and helped him off the deck. Rising, he cried out. His right arm, the one with which he wielded the axe, hung shattered at his side.
She steered him towards the rails, his bulk teetering over her. Meanwhile, the figurehead dropped down and advanced towards them, dragging itself with its arms and propelling itself with its tail. Its movements were stiff and erratic. Whatever force animated it didn’t give its timber the dexterity of flesh. As it drew nearer, the whispering became audible again.
Neela got Tormyn to the deck’s edge. “Jump!” Melk shouted and, leading by example, launched himself over the rails.
She had no idea if sand was banked against this part of the hull. If it wasn’t, she’d plummet to the dried seabed and dash herself against it. Nonetheless, before the figurehead could catch up with them, she leapt across the rails and yanked Tormyn after her. She tossed away the Tusks, afraid she might land on its cleft head.
She fell briefly. Then she rolled down another slope, not stopping until she was near the bottom.
As she lay there, she heard noises elsewhere. Timber cracked and snapped while things freed themselves from the bows of other vessels. Voices shouted distantly, voices she recognized as those of her comrades in the other group. Then she noticed closer sounds – crunching footsteps made by something heavy, plodding in her direction. She raised her head fractionally but kept still otherwise, hoping the night was sufficiently dark to hide her.
She saw another figurehead silhouetted against the starry sky. This was the human-sailfish hybrid with the sword-like bill and the frill on its back. Stiffly, like a giant clockwork automation, it approached along the sandbank by the flagship’s starboard side.
A groan came from the sand nearby. She turned her head and made out Tormyn’s prone figure. He stirred, then convulsed as he felt new pain from his arm, surely even more mangled after his jump and roll down the bank. He took a deep, gurgling breath, as if preparing to expel a scream –
Neela sprang onto him and clamped her hands over his mouth. He shuddered beneath her, but she reduced the scream to a whimper.
She looked towards the hybrid figurehead again. It was alarmingly close, enough for her to discern whispers like those emanating from the mermaid. But suddenly something thudded beside the hybrid. Another body, the lifeless one of Jask, had landed on the sandbank. It stooped awkwardly and took hold of the corpse. Dragging it behind, the hybrid descended the sandbank and lumbered around the ship’s bows.
The mermaid stood at the edge of the flagship’s main deck, from where it’d thrown the body to the other figurehead. Then it shifted back and disappeared.
Moments later, while Neela still lay on top of Tormyn, something touched her from above. She lunged upwards and seized a throat A frightened squawk – “It’s me!” – told her Melk was standing over them.
She released him and clambered to her feet. “Damn you, Rat.” Then: “Give me your rope.” Melk kept a length of rope coiled around him from shoulder to hip – like the animal he was named after, he was a skillful climber. He unwound it and handed it over.
By now Tormyn was fully conscious. He’d sat up and unbuckled a belt from his waist, and was attempting to wrap it around his upper arm as a tourniquet. A shard, a snapped bone-end, protruded from the arm-flesh below. Already, blood formed a dark puddle on the ground beside him. Neela took over. She made a tourniquet with the belt. Then, using Melk’s rope, she fastened the shattered arm to his side, reducing the chances of it moving and suffering more damage.
Tormyn endured the process with some pained grunts. When Neela had finished, he whispered, “That arm’s beyond help. It’ll have to come off.”
“We’ll worry about it later. We’ve enough to deal with right now.” To Melk, she said, “Take Boar back to the camels. Saddle up eight of them. Cut their legs free and keep them only on their tether-ropes, so they’re ready to go.”
Shouts had continued to echo out of the night. Once, there’d been a scream. “Eight?” Melk repeated doubtfully.
“Yes. Assume eight of us still live.”
“And Framson and Morgyle?”
“If they disbelieve your story, don’t waste time trying to convince them. The Legion is getting out of this cursed place. That’s all that matters.”
Tormyn struggled upright. His rope-bound silhouette looked like it was missing an arm already. When Melk came forward to help him, he growled, “I’m staying with Rook.”
The smaller man protested, “With one arm? What use is that?”
“I can’t swing an axe, that’s for sure. But I can help her somehow.”
He didn’t specify how he could help, but neither Neela nor Melk chose to argue. The latter hurried off alone.
Neela told Tormyn to wait. She scaled the sandbank again and hunted around until she found the Tusks. When she descended, and Tormyn saw the axe in her hand, he commented: “I hope you’re planning to use that.”
“I am, Boar. I lost my old weapon.”
“So? Do we seek out the others?”
For a minute Rook didn’t reply. She listened. The noises made by the other group had ceased and the night was ominously silent. Reluctantly, she said, “No. We go after the thing that took He-Snake. If we can find out what it – they – want with his body, maybe we’ll be closer to understanding what’s going on. And closer to defeating the evil at work here.”
Tormyn gave a sour chuckle. “So much for that caution you were fond of.”
She thought of Keptar, and Jask, and others who were possibly dead, and felt a desire for vengeance. “Caution be damned.”
They followed the hybrid’s footprints and soon caught sight of it. The corpse still dragged in the dirt behind.
The figurehead passed the end of another ship. This one was in ruins, its hull partly collapsed, wreckage spilled onto the seabed. The mainmast leaned drunkenly over the bulwark and strands of sail dangled from it, making it resemble a gallows prepared for multiple hangings. The hybrid changed direction and disappeared behind the wreck. Because it would no longer see them if it looked back, Neela and Tormyn sped up, reducing the distance between them and their quarry. Tormyn grunted unhappily as the faster pace caused his arm to move slightly within the bindings of the rope.
They drew level with the wreck. Then Neela heard whispers from the shadows pooled beneath it. Before she had time to even utter a curse, another figurehead lurched out of those shadows, where it’d lain in wait for them.
It was the sea-centaur they’d observed earlier. Like the mermaid, a wriggling fishtail drove it forward, but it had two horse’s legs where the aquatic section of its body ended, and their hooves dug into the ground and gave it extra propulsion. The human part that rose above its equine one was only approximately human. Horns jagged up from its head, its arms were overlong, and its fingers ended in talons.
One taloned hand slashed at Neela. She managed to lift the Tusks in front of her and the impact of the hand striking the cleft blade knocked her flat. Scrambling up again, she found the sea-centaur hunched over her. Both hands were raised, hook-like fingers ready to plunge. Excited by the prospect of the kill, the whispers sounded like swarming bees.
Something veered into her field of vision, smashed into the face above her, and snapped apart. The sea-centaur’s head jerked sideways. Neela looked that way too and saw Tormyn. In his untied hand he held a plank, a fragment of the ship he’d picked off the ground. Its end was a mess of splinters. He staggered from swinging it, steadied himself, and hurled the rest of the plank as if it was a truncated spear.
“To hell with you!” he roared at the figurehead. “You stupid, timber bastard!”
With another lash of its tail and thrust of its horse-legs, the sea-centaur lunged at him. But Tormyn spun around and bounded along the side of the wreck. He swayed while he ran, unbalanced by the fact that only one of his arms could crank at his sides. The figurehead gave chase. He got to the mound of wreckage lying at the breach in the ship’s hull and struggled up it. Beyond the mound’s top, tatters of sail drooped from the leaning mainmast. Crying with exertion, he launched himself off the mound and into the shredded sails. His free hand seized a strand and he swung there. The strand tightened as it took his weight, but didn’t rip. The ropes lacing it to the spars above stayed intact too. But the mainmast, also feeling his weight, creaked…
The sea-centaur scrabbled to the mound’s top. From there, it pounced into the torn sails, intent on reaching Tormyn. Its arms became entangled amid the sail-strands. The mast made louder sounds as it suffered the greater weight of the figurehead – sounds of wood fracturing and splitting.
Then Tormyn, the figurehead, and the lacerated sail dropped and the mast crashed down on them.
That wasn’t all. As the mast collapsed, it hewed another section out of the deck and adjacent hull. More timber ruptured, then cascaded from the ship and onto the ground. The pellucid night-air, suffused with the light of the moon and stars, became dark around Neela as the falling mast and disintegrating ship created a fog of dust. She clutched her face to stop that dust invading her eyes, nose, and mouth.
The dust settled and she saw the outline of a new mound of wreckage. She heard faint whispers coming from beneath it, but there were no signs of movement. Tormyn’s ruse had worked. The sea-centaur was buried and, despite its strength, couldn’t dig itself free.
But the ruse had meant Tormyn’s burial too.
“Well,” she muttered, half-sorrowfully, half-angrily. “You did find a way to help me.”
Neela returned to the trail of footprints and resumed her pursuit of the other figurehead.
The footprints led back to the central area of the fleet where, earlier, she and her fellow mercenaries had had their conference. As if in a conference themselves, the hybrid figurehead stood there with another one, the fish-man with the trident. She was dismayed to see Keptar’s body hanging on that trident, skewered by it.
Neela hunkered down, hoping she was at a distance where she could watch the two figureheads without being noticeable to them. Worryingly, she had no idea of the powers of sight they possessed.
Gradually, more figureheads arrived from different directions. Those whose lower halves were human walked clumsily. Those with fish-parts at the bottom wriggled and dragged themselves on the ground. Sometimes a figurehead appeared carrying or hauling a corpse, which made Neela’s heart drop deeper in her chest. She eventually counted seven corpses amid the assembly.
Only me and Rat now, she thought. Only two.
One last figurehead joined them. This was the mermaid from the flagship. It pulled itself along with one arm while its other arm cradled against its breasts a small bundle, something cocooned in blankets. With unexpected gentleness, it placed this on the ground in the middle of the figureheads.
A figurehead bearing a corpse approached the blanketed form. Then bones cracked and snapped, and flesh stretched and tore, as it pulled the corpse apart. Blood and body-pieces rained down on the blankets and their contents. The figurehead retreated, an apron of blood and grue covering its front, and another one with another corpse took its place. The ritual was repeated. More gore fell and doused the thing on the ground.
A veteran of many battles, Neela was inured to scenes of bloodshed and butchery. But she couldn’t watch her comrades’ bodies being defiled. She lowered her head and realized the split iron blade of the Tusks, in her hand, was glinting with reflected light.
Green light.
She turned. A cone of emerald-colored light, a dozen feet tall, was floating at ground-level towards the figureheads. It came from where she and the other mercenaries had come from earlier. Studying the light, she discerned within it the outline of a camel and its rider. While they carried out their grisly ritual, the figureheads showed no awareness of its approach. She guessed the light had supernatural properties and was shielding whoever was inside it from the force that animated them.
When she looked the other way again, the last corpse had been rent apart. Now the blanketed form was drenched in blood, buried in pieces of flesh, and surrounded by a red pool. The blood began to bubble, froth, and hiss. A red vapor rose from it, billowing around the figureheads’ waists, concealing what was on the ground.
Presently, something levitated out of the vapor – the figure from the bed in the flagship’s cabin, transported here by the mermaid. The figure ascended head-first, arms outstretched, and stopped when she was several yards above the ground. Despite the blood saturating her and the blankets, which still clung to her body, it was apparent she looked much younger now. Her face was no longer small and wrinkled, but full and smooth-skinned. Her hair had become black and luxuriant. Her eyes gleamed malevolently.
As the Pirate-Queen Lamvula hovered there, the blankets fell away and left her naked.
Neela gasped. Below her breasts, Lamvula wasn’t human. She was far from human. Her body seemed to transform into a giant hand, one with long, dangling fingers that were joined by flaps of membrane. The fingers were really tendrils, studded with suckers and flecked with sacs of glowing liquid that produced a blue phosphorescence along them. They ended in hooks as big as sickles.
Lamvula spoke. As her words resonated, the grotesque skirt of tendrils, hooks, and membrane expanded beneath her, changing from a drooping hand into an open claw. “There’s an imposter here.”
Neela saw that the cone of green light had almost reached Lamvula and the figureheads. Just then, it halted, the light vanished, and Morgyle was revealed.
He said boldly, “An imposter? That’s unkind, Magaferadeen Lamvula. I came as an admirer. Indeed, I facilitated the sacrifices that were necessary for your resurrection. If I hadn’t sent those people, those blood-meals, you wouldn’t be reconstituted now.”
The creature reacted with scorn. “You expect gratitude? From me?”
“No, Lamvula. I’ve studied the history books. I know your character. I’d be a fool to expect you to be thankful. And though I admire you for your wisdom, your sorcerous power, and the ruthlessness with which you wielded that power, I’ve come to destroy you. I want your knowledge and power for myself. To get those, I needed to awaken you from your slumbers first.”
Hatred contorted Lamvula’s face, making it look as monstrous as her lower body. “Kill him,” she shrieked. “Kill him now.” Her army of figureheads juddered into life again and began moving towards Morgyle –
And froze. For then the green light reappeared. It was no longer a cone, but a ray that streaked from the astrolabe Morgyle was holding to the middle of Lamvula’s ribs, above where her human part segued into her cephalopodic part. A moment later, the ray pulsed in a manner that suggested its light was flowing the other way, from Lamvula to the astrolabe.
As the light issued out of her, Lamvula writhed in pain. She remained suspended in the air but was too stricken to speak. The tendrils under her lost their glow and withered and curled, while the skin between them shriveled.
Morgyle continued. “Once I’ve drained you of your life-force, I’ll take the riches stored in these ships too. I have great plans for this world. But to execute those plans, I need to be properly financed.”
One by one, the incapacitated figureheads teetered and collapsed. The last to go was the mermaid, falling forward so that its fanged face slammed into the dust. Above them, at the end of the shaft of green light, the creature convulsed, shrank, and faded. She looked no more substantial than the tatters of sail hanging on the surrounding ships.
Neela was enraged by Morgyle’s boast that he’d brought her comrades here as sacrifices. She ran towards him, holding the Tusks with both hands. When she was close, she stopped, rocked forwards and backwards, and swung the Tusks behind her head. Then, with all her strength, she rocked forwards again and released it. The axe spun through the air and its cleft blade planted itself in Morgyle’s back. The man slumped and dropped the astrolabe. The green ray vanished as it left his hands. Then he toppled out of his saddle and thudded against the dirt.
Until this point. the camel had remained still and quiet, perhaps under some spell imposed by its rider. Now it panicked and staggered back. Neela dashed to it, grabbed a strap that hung loose from its harness, and tried to hold it firm. Meanwhile, though the axe-blade was embedded in his back, Morgyle struggled and raised himself from the ground. Pulling the camel towards him, Neela grasped at him with her free hand and managed to take the compass and then the tube of charts from his belt.
Morgyle looked up, saw Lamvula above him, and screamed.
With the green light gone, she needed only seconds to recover. She returned to her previous size and luminosity. Her foul skirt of tendrils and skin opened. This blossomed over Morgyle like a giant flower, its rim punctuated by the hooks at the tendrils’ ends. Then, shrieking deliriously, she plunged onto him.
The camel bolted. Neela hadn’t yet got herself onto its saddle and, clinging to its side, she let it half-drag, half-carry her. They hurtled away, passing between ships until, finally, the emptiness of the Sea of Quan spread in front of them. Neela let go of the animal. She made her way on foot around the edge of the marooned fleet until she found Melk at the spot where they’d left their own camels.
She received a surprise. Sharn the She-Snake had managed to elude the figureheads and had returned there too. The seventh corpse Neela had seen must have belonged to Framson.
Poor Framson, she thought. A good employer and a decent man.
They got on three camels and hurried out into the sea’s dusty vastness with the other animals strung in a line behind them. All the time, Neela brooded: Three out of ten. Perhaps only three left from the whole Legion of Beasts.
Amid the fleet behind them, while she feasted, Lamvula’s triumphant shrieks were a distant but nightmarish cacophony.
They found their way onto a route used by Dashya traders and after a few days came across one of their caravans. Their luck improved further. The merchant leading the caravan proved to be a rarity, a Dashya who was fluent in the Common Tongue.
“Lamvula had different titles,” he explained that night in his tent. “Pirate-Queen, Witch-Queen… But those titles hide the fact that she wasn’t human. She was the last of a race of vampiric creatures that once inhabited the Sea of Quan. Inhabited it until humans – my Dashya ancestors – destroyed them.”
The last of her kind, thought Neela and felt a pang of sympathy. But it was a pang she quickly dismissed.
“As a result,” continued the merchant, “she hated humanity. That hatred showed in her activities as a pirate. She’d capture ships, drain their crews and passengers of their blood and life-force until they were no longer sentient, until they were zombies, and put them to work. As slaves manning her pirate fleet. And that fleet grew larger and larger.”
Part of the tent was open, which allowed them to look out at a segment of the night-sky. The merchant indicated a particularly radiant star. “It’s said that our god Hawlstan, who’s believed to inhabit that star, became so disturbed by her savagery and evilness that he intervened. Hawlstan caused the cataclysm that drained the Sea of Quan and left her fleet stranded.”
Neela commented, “A drastic course of action.” At this point in the evening, the star he’d pointed to was swaddled in hazy green light.
“Indeed. But by then Lamvula had become so powerful she was threatening not just the seafarers and coastal communities, but all the kingdoms around the Sea of Quan.” He thought for a moment. “Evidently, once she realized she was trapped, she put herself in hibernation. The souls of her crews – what was left of them – she placed within the figureheads of her ships, ready to summon as help when she needed it.”
“So, those whispering sounds they made…”
“You heard the remnants of countless souls. Imprisoned inside those wooden forms, then used as a primitive energy to animate them… Well, that’s how Lamvula remained. Until the sorcerer Morgyle brought you and your unfortunate comrades there.”
“And now,” mused Melk the Rat, “Lamvula is up and about again.”
“It appears so.” The merchant smiled at the three of them. “Now might be a wise time to send a mission to destroy her once and for all. Before she causes further mischief.”
Melk shivered. “I don’t fancy going back there.”
“I do,” countered Sharn the She-Snake. “To get revenge on the bitch.”
“Obviously,” the merchant added, “my colleagues and I in the Trade Guild would pay much money for her destruction. We don’t want her lurking close to our trade routes, like a spider ready to pounce. Yes, we’d pay a handsome sum.”
Neela exchanged looks with her companions.
Caution? She remembered what she’d told Tormyn the Boar: Caution be damned.
“I think,” she said, “this is a job for the Legion of Beasts.”
© January 2024, Rab Foster
Rab Foster was brought up on a farm among the hills of southern Scotland, but now he works in education and lives far away from Scotland. His fiction has appeared in Aphelion, Blood Moon Rising, Fall Into Fantasy 2023, Legend, Schlock! Webzine, Sorcerous Signals, Swords & Sorceries Volume 3, Whetstone, and previously in Swords & Sorcery Magazine.