Upon the canted deck, figures were swarming.
Whuffine sighed. “What a busy day.” Picking up his walking stick, he set out on the trail, down to meet these newcomers.
Gust Hubb sat on a rock, hands over his bandaged ears as he rocked back and forth. He made low moaning sounds that the wind answered with glee.
Heck scowled at the man for a moment longer and then turned to look up at the keep. “I don’t like the looks of that place,” he said. “And somehow, Gust, now it’s just you and me, I’m thinking the farther away we are from those necromancers-and Mancy the Luckless-the safer we’ll be.”
“They owe uth!” Gust said, looking up, his working eye wild with the whites showing all around. “They owe me a healing! Ath leatht that! Look at me, Heck! Lithen to me! I want my tongue whole athain! It wath all their faulth!”
The wind was fierce and bitterly cold. Rain filled with sea-spray was spitting into their faces: proof to Heck’s mind that the world didn’t think too much of them, and didn’t give a Hood’s heel about justice and making things right. It was all one long slog up some damned storm-whipped trail to some damned tower with some damned light shining and offering the false promise of warm salvation. That was life, wasn’t it? As pointless as praying. As meaningless as dying when dying was all there was, somewhere up ahead, maybe closer than anyone’d like, but then, wasn’t it always closer than anyone’d like, no matter when that was? Well, it felt close enough right now, and if Gust was aching and moaning and too gimpy to finish this cursed climb, why, Heck wouldn’t complain too much, and might even secretly confess-to someone, but no-one nearby-that it was a whisker’s trim from death where they were right now, and one step up the wrong way would see their bodies cold and lifeless before the dawn.
No, he wasn’t sorry Gust was all done in, the poor man. Taking those necromancers aboard in Lamentable Moll had been the worst decision in Sater’s life, and the captain had paid for it with that life, and now the Suncurl was a gnawed, burnt and chewed up wreck, a sad end for the only ship to ever mate with a dhenrabi. Some things, it has to be said, just aren’t worth seeing close up, and that’s all I’ll say on the matter.
“Whereth Birdth?” Gust asked.
“Probably rolling in the furs with that sheriff,” Heck said, and just saying those words out loud made him feel suicidal. “She’s a love no man can hold onto,” he said morosely. “It’s my curse-maybe yours, too, Gust, the way she was eyeing that split tongue of yours-to love the wrong woman.”
“Oh, thut up, Heck.”
“No, really. I wish I was the kind of man who could look at a woman’s naked body and say, ‘nice, but it ain’t enough, ’cause you ain’t got the rest, so whatever it is you want from me, why, you ain’t gonna get it.’ If I was a man like that, appreciative and all, but with, well, with standards, I bet I’d be a happier man.”
Gust had dropped his hands and was staring up at Heck with his one good eye. “We need to thave her.”
“From what? She’s exactly where she wants to be!”
“But thath theriff wuth ugly!”
“Aye, ugly in that gods-awful lucky way some ugly men have, when it comes to women. Now, good-looking men, with those winning smiles and good skin and whatnot, well, I wish ’em all the evil luck the world can bring, but luckily, we’re not talking about them.” He shook his head. “It don’t matter anyway, Gust. She’s happy and it’s a happy without you or me and that’s what stings.”
Hearing boots crunching on the trail below both turned, momentarily hopeful, until it was clear that there was more than one person coming up on them, and as the newcomers came round a twist in the trail, stepping out from behind an outcrop, Gust rose to stand beside Heck, and both men stared in disbelief.
“You’re alive!” Heck shouted.
Bisk Fatter drew out his sword. “Aye, and we got a thing about being betrayed, Heck Urse.”
“Not uth!” Gust cried.
Wormlick asked, “That you, Gust Hubb? Gods below, what happened to you?”
“Forget it,” snapped Bisk, hefting the sword. “We ain’t no Mowbri’s Choir here, Wormlick, so save the songs of sympathy.”
“I’ll say,” said Sordid, revealing a thin-bladed dagger in one hand and setting its point to the nails of the other in quick succession. “You never could sing, anyway.”
Wormlick glared at her. “What would you know about it? I wouldn’t sing for you if you held my cock in one hand and that knife in the other!”
She laughed. “Oh yes you would, if I asked sweetly.”
“How did you survive?” Heck asked them.
“We shucked off our armour and swam to the damned surface, you fool! But you were already under way, vanishing in the night!”
“Not that,” Heck said. “I meant, how did you survive in each other’s company since then? You all hate each other!”
“Treachery carves a deeper hate than the hate you’re talking about, Heck. Now, we’re here for our cut and then we’re cutting you.”
“Ththill the idiot, eh, Bithk? Why would we cut you in on anything if you’re then going to kill uth?”
“That’s just talk,” said Sordid. “He wasn’t supposed to tell you we’re going to kill you until after you gave us our cut. That’s what you get from a fifty-six year old corporal.”
“And you take my orders!” Bisk retorted. “Making you even dumber!”
“I’ll accept that for the truth you just admitted to, sir.”
As Bisk Fatter frowned and tried to work out what she’d just said, Heck Urse cleared his throat and said, “Listen, there wasn’t no cut. We lost it all.”
“We never had ith in the firthth plathe,” Gust added, sitting back down and clutching the side of his head again.
“Sater’s dead,” Heck continued.
“Birds?” Sordid asked.
Heck’s shoulders slumped. “Not you, too?” He sighed. “She’s alive, down in that inn down there.” He gestured at the keep. “We picked up a cargo of trouble in Lamentable Moll, and we were just on our way to demand, er, compensation. Look at Gust. That’s what those bastards did to us.”
“What bastards?” Sordid asked, her sleepy eyes suddenly sharp.
“Necromanthers,” said Gust. “And if thath wuthn’t enouthff, they got Manthy the Thluckthless with ’em!”
“And you want compensation?” Sordid laughed, sheathing her knife. “Corporal, we chased these idiots across the damned ocean. It really is a contest in stupidity here, and this squad you’re now commanding could crush an army of optimists with nary a blink.” Turning, she stared out to sea, started and then said. “Oh, look, here come the Chanters.”
Her next laugh shriveled Heck’s sack down to the size of a cocoon.
With two ashen-faced servants dragging the dead cook away by the feet, Lord Fangatooth grasped hold of Coingood’s arm and pulled him out through the doorway, leaving Bauchelain and his manservant in the steamy kitchen.
“Did you write it all down?”
“Of course, milord-”
“Every word? And who said what?”
Coingood nodded, trying to keep from trembling while still in the clutches of his lord, and the hand encircling his upper arm was spotted with blood, since it was the hand that had driven a knife through the cook’s left eye.
“Find the clever things he said, Scribe, and change them around.”
“Milord?”
“I’m the only one who says clever things, you fool! Make it so I said them-is that too complicated an order for you to comprehend?”
“No, milord. Consider it done!”
“Excellent!” Fangatooth hissed. “Now, walk with me. Leave them to their baking-”
“He’ll poison it, milord-”
“No he won’t. He’s too subtle, and that’s what all this was about-making me look clumsy and oafish. That damned cook! Well, he won’t be messing things up anymore, will he?”
“No, milord. But … who will make the meals?”
“Find someone else. None of that matters now. We need to devise a way of killing them. But cleverly, just to show them. We need genius here, Scribe!”