He had aimed for Deray’s throat, but the man had grasped his own error and tried to evade the counterattack. The Bowie knife sliced through shirt and vest and cut into the man’s skin. A line of red droplets flew into the air and was whipped away by the wind.
Deray howled and lashed out with his free hand, catching Grey across the mouth with the side of a closed fist. The blow was far more powerful than Grey had any right to expect from a normal man. The force of it sent Grey skidding across the deck toward the cabin wall. With a snarl, Deray leaped after him, slashing in a long diagonal line to try and catch his enemy between blade and wall. But Grey took the impact and went with it, shoving himself even faster and harder against the wall so that he struck and rebounded. He jumped to the right and the tip of Deray’s sword scored a line through the wood.
Without pausing, both men closed in for their next attacks — Deray with another diagonal slash and Grey with a lateral cut that would have disemboweled the necromancer. However the combined speed of their attacks brought them together into a bone-jarring crash that truncated each cut. They immediately locked arms around one another to prevent a close-quarters slash, and grappling like that they went into a staggering dance across the wet deck.
It became immediately apparent that Deray’s blow had not been a freak accident of angle or chance. As Grey had surmised before, he was immensely strong. It was like being wrapped by a steel band. The air was being squeezed out of his lungs and Grey could feel his bones grind. It was rare for him to fight someone substantially stronger and he knew that this level of strength could not be accounted for in any natural way.
It was twisted science.
Or, more probably, it was sorcery.
As they struggled, Deray’s face was lit by a grin of delight. He was taking great pleasure in the surprise that must have registered on Grey’s face. The necromancer leaned close until his lips were inches from Grey’s ear.
“You are nothing, Mr. Torrance,” he said. “You are less than a nuisance. You are nothing at all.”
Grey tried to break the grip but it only tightened as they turned and stepped and fought for balance on the deck of the storm-tossed frigate.
As they turned, Grey nearly cried out when he saw that the deck — which had only been littered by the corpses of walking dead — was now filled.
A knot of figures stood by the freely spinning wheel. Pale faces in bullet-pocked clothes.
His men.
And her.
Annabelle.
The ghosts stood watching as he was slowly being crushed. There was no expression at all on their spectral faces. The two men turned and turned, and as they spun Grey heard Deray grunt in surprise. He’d seen the ghosts, too. For just a moment, the man was distracted, staring with wrinkled brow and frown of consternation at the strange figures.
Grey took the moment, seizing the last chance he had.
He head-butted Deray, catching the man on the ear and then again on the corner of his eyebrow. It was a hard blow that exploded lights in Grey’s own eyes. Deray flinched back, and that lessened the pressure by the slightest amount. Grey darted his head forward and clamped his teeth on the corded tendons on the side of Deray’s neck and simultaneously brought his knee up to smash into the muscles of the man’s thigh. Once, twice, again and again as he tore at the necromancer’s flesh with his teeth.
Deray screamed.
He thrashed like a madman, no longer trying to crush Grey but going wild to try and escape him. Deray kicked back, catching Grey in the stomach with a sideways knee. The air whooshed from Grey’s lungs and the impact knocked his teeth loose. He staggered backward, spitting blood and falling hard to the deck. Deray chased him, kicking Grey again and again, in the stomach, the chest, the face.
Grey felt his bones break. His ribs detonated like firecrackers. Bits of broken teeth clogged his throat and he collapsed sideways, dropping his knife. Deray kicked the weapon overboard and kicked Grey over and over again until Grey flopped back, bleeding and shattered.
Then Deray reeled in the opposite direction, blood boiling from a terrible wound. He dropped his sword to clamp his hands to his neck to stanch the flow of blood. From the force of the blood loss, Grey knew that he had nicked something important when he’d bitten Deray before. An artery.
Good. Let him bleed out like a stuck pig.
Even as he thought those words, Grey felt like he was drifting and for a moment he thought he’d fallen off the ship. But it was his consciousness that seemed to be tearing loose from his body.
I’m dying, he thought, and he knew it to be true.
So was Deray.
The ghosts began moving toward him. Toward both of them, their eyes filled now with a strange and awful hunger.
They’re coming for me.
But they stared past him to the necromancer. Deray used one bloody hand to dig into an inner pocket. He produced a flat disk of polished ghost rock that was set in a silver frame. Strange symbols were carved into the rock and Deray began hastily muttering something over it in a language Grey had never heard.
“Da’k gugt r’un ftaxung sha tsa’t haaft shx ta’ans shas ha nax thunghiaa’ shut latsuftansuaft ghu’ftg ang ta’a us ial un s’uftiasa,” intoned the necromancer. “Bx sha aftga’ gugt I l’ax.”
Above the ship, the storm suddenly intensified and in his delirium Gsrey thought he saw strange, vast, impossible shapes leer at him from within the depths of the clouds. Monstrous eyes glared at him from a head that was lumpy and misshapen. Instead of a mouth and chin, there were dozens of writhing tentacles that whipped within the ferocious winds. Fires, ancient and endless, ignited in those eyes, and it seemed to set fire to the whole of the sky.
“Lu’g ur ghatsat ang ’angaantha,” roared Deray, his blood gurgling in his throat, “haaft na su fta shx unts’ianans!”
Lightning, red as blood, slashed across the sky. Snakes of electricity crawled all over the envelope above the frigate. While behind the hideous face a vast pair of leathery wings seemed to reach outward, each one stretching for miles and filling the whole of the sky. Below, the fighting stopped and everyone screamed. Even the walking dead.
Grey used what little strength he had left to climb to his feet. He coughed and spat dark blood onto the deck, and inside his chest he could feel bones shifting in all the wrong ways. He stared at the great god of all monsters and spat at it, too. But the wind whipped it away, and the god did not even take notice of the dying gunslinger. Red lightning struck the ship and enveloped Deray, and for one mad moment Grey thought that the necromancer was somehow being consumed by his own dark magic. That fate had stepped in to rebuke the hubris of this madman.
But the fire did not burn Deray. It writhed over him and wherever it found a cut or a wound, it glowed like the deepest heart of a blacksmith’s forge. Grey recoiled, throwing a hand across his eyes and crying out as the light burned his eyes. Even the ghosts by the wheel recoiled, and the glow seemed ready to wash them out of all existence.
Far below Grey heard Jenny cry out his name.
“Grey!”
Why she called him now was beyond his ability to understand. The light was so bright that it beat at him like hammers. Her voice though — just the sound of it — triggered a memory. Something that the vampire witch Mircalla had said to him. Something Veronica had repeated.