Cabal blinked in astonishment, and as he blinked, so did the Dreamlands. There was a sense of waking from a nightmare, only to find oneself still in it. The harbour, the ships, Dylath-Leen, even the sky and the sea, seemed to flutter indecisively between possible meanings and the collateral paradigms. Cabal’s sword became a pistol, then a sword, then some sort of extraordinary long gun, and then it was a sword again. The Dreamlands were changing, but in awkward, inelegant, stuttering steps. He suddenly realised that they weren’t changing nearly so much as being changed. Somewhere, a great consciousness had placed them under the lens of its awareness, and the very act of being observed was making their reality waver, like a thumb flicking through a mail-order catalogue. He looked up, as if expecting an eye of cosmic proportion to be staring at him through the blueness and the high clouds.
Then he heard the screams, and around him the world gelled back into something similar to what it had been. Now, however, one of the attacking galleys was up to the bowsprit in the hull of its neighbour, and the wounded ship was screaming.
But, then, the whole world was screaming. Everyone, even the galley slavers in their shapeless black robes were looking to the sky and screaming, or howling, or sobbing. For the blue morning sky had burned back in a ragged hole, through which could be seen the Dreamlands’ Moon, and the Moon, too, was burning.
Chapter 12
IN WHICH THERE ARE MONSTERS AND CATS, WHICH IS TO SAY, VERY MUCH THE SAME THING
‘What is happening?’ bellowed Oleander, over the fearful cries and the rising note of a strengthening wind. ‘What have those devils done?’
By devils, he meant the masters of the black galleys, but even a glance was sufficient to assure anyone that not only were they not responsible for these new phenomena, but they were even more horrified by them than the humans of Dylath-Leen. The slavers tore away their stolen faces and threw them aside, pulling back their tagelmusts, thin white tendrils, the colour of cave fish, unfurling to undulate at the Moon like weed on the seabed. Then they screamed at the sight of the burning Moon, ‘Ph’nglui k’ytholo mfagnul oseer’akff!’ – a phrase that translates to something far shorter in English.
The men who looked upon these horrors felt their sanity shift, and minds broke in that moment. Corde gave a shriek like a terrified child, and backed away, shaking his head to deny the existence from which his eyes could not be drawn, Bose still lay bundled up in the corner of the deck, his shoulders heaving with his sobs, and Shadrach made no noise at all. Cabal looked around to find the cadaverous Shadrach, and found him clutching futilely at his throat. There, the first guard’s severed arm had him, the great gauntleted hand almost encircling his neck. Shadrach made no sound, but his face was dark and his eyes were starting from his head. Cabal started to run towards the stricken man, but he knew that it was already too late. The hand was not merely strangling Shadrach: it was crushing his neck. Cabal was only a matter of two yards from Shadrach when there was a percussive sound of collapsing cartilage, and the crunch of failing bone. Shadrach’s face became slack, and he fell back against the rail, then over it. Cabal reached it just in time to see the splash and Shadrach’s discreetly expensive shoes with the curled toes disappear beneath the water.
Cursing at an avoidable loss – he should have dealt with the arm after those limbs’ tendency for awkward autonomy had already been demonstrated – he turned back, but the tableau had barely changed, beyond becoming fractionally worse. The fires on the Moon had changed from wide clouds into distinct red points of light, indicating a series of simultaneous explosions across the surface. They showed against the pale lunar rock like buboes on a dead man’s face, and Cabal guessed that these were the cities of the Moon things, the creatures whose agents were even now standing awestruck, venting glutinous polysyllables of arcane vulgarity.
He went to Oleander and shook him roughly by the arm until he gained his attention. ‘The sky,’ said Oleander, a vacant look of shock in his eyes. ‘The sky is broken.’
‘So it is,’ said Cabal, pointedly ignoring it, for the wise man avoids falling through the ice by never setting foot upon it. ‘Oleander, you have to pull yourself together. The slavers are directionless at present, but we don’t know how long that will last. We must press the advantage while they are disrupted.’
But Oleander would only murmur, ‘The sky . . . the sky . . .’ with a terrible expression of haunted loss upon his face, so Cabal hit him, which worked very well. He suddenly focused on Cabal like a startled drunk, and was drawing back his blade when Cabal grabbed his sword hand in one of his own, Oleander’s jaw in the other, and shouted in his face, ‘Time, Captain! We are running out of time. Burning skies and exploding moons are all very well, but aliens with a mass of bavette for faces are our more immediate concern.’
Oleander shook himself free of Cabal’s grip and tried to rally the forces of his routed sanity, searching for a standard by which to gather them. He settled on pasta. ‘What is this “bavette“ of which you speak?’
‘It’s a form of spaghetti.’ Cabal could see the answers to Oleander’s next questions were in all likelihood going to be ‘Pasta’, ‘Italy’, and ‘A country’, so he cut sharply past such quizzical distractions with, ‘Of no importance at the moment. Action, however, is. The creatures are defenceless and vulnerable – you will never get such a good chance to kill the slavers again.’
Finally, the captain’s wits had their standard by which to regroup. The black galleys had long been distrusted among many of the races of men in the Dreamlands, but never before had their true nature been so publicly exposed, and never before had the opportunity for vengeance upon them been so advantageous. This would be a time of righteous glory, with a decent prospect of looting thrown in. It was too magnificent for any man with blood in his veins to resist. Oleander’s blood was red and hot, and he had a strong, no, irresistible urge to see what ran in the slavers’ veins. With a shout that overrode his crews’ terrors, he rushed forward at their head, throwing grappling lines to draw in the nearest galley, a vessel that so recently they would have done anything to avoid.
Cabal didn’t know what their chances were. If they died, at least they would be distracting the slavers as they did so, allowing him and his two remaining charges some precious time to make good their escape. The few inhuman guards scattered about the wharf were as fascinated and discommoded by the destruction of their home cities as the slavers, but how long that would last, he could not say. Neither did he care to bet his future safety against it being more than a few minutes. An alternative presented itself; if they got on to the northern harbour wall, they could follow it around until they were on the mole, then cut across and circumnavigate the edge of the city wall. Yes, there was a tower to protect the city against invaders performing exactly the reciprocal manoeuvre, but with luck they would be staring skywards with gormless expressions upon their pasta-like faces long enough. It was a gamble, but a lesser one than hoping to make it all the way through the city unchallenged.