The Sea Hates a Coward
An Abaddon Books™ Publication
www.abaddonbooks.com
First published in 2015 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.
Editor-in-Chief: Jonathan Oliver
Commissioning Editor: David Moore
Cover Art: Oz Osborne
Map: Nate Crowley
Internal Art: Joy Taney
Design: Sam Gretton & Oz Osborne
Marketing and PR: Rob Power
Publishing Manager: Ben Smith
Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley
Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley
ISBN: 978-1-84997-977-1
Tomes of The Dead™, Abaddon Books and Abaddon Books logo are trademarks owned or used exclusively by Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited. The trademarks have been registered or protection sought in all member states of the European Union and other countries around the world. All right reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Dedicated to Daniel Barker.
Happy Birthday, mate.
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.
I looked upon the rotting sea,
And drew my eyes away;
I looked upon the rotting deck,
And there the dead men lay.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The boy stood on the burning deck
His lips were all a-quiver
He gave a cough, his leg fell off
And floated down the river.
Eric Morecambe
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
W
HERE WAS THAT
bloody book? One of the high shelves, surely, where the old volumes were kept. The ones about history, or at least the really good legends. He was going to need the pole to get it.
The sun poured through the bay windows of the old library: even with his eyes shut, it blazed sepia through the lids. All around him was the sound of paper, dusty pages shuffling as the thumbs of the old fellows fumbled through them. It was louder than usual.
He searched for the hooked pole, the one for reaching the top shelves—and found it already in his hands. That was good. But he had forgotten the name of the book he was looking for.
Never mind. He knew it was on the top shelf, up there with the siegecraft and the politics and... the other ones. The ones with all the fish in them. He knew he didn’t want to look inside those ones very much. He would avoid those books.
His eyes were still shut, but that didn’t matter—he knew the row by feel. He just had to lift the pole high enough, run it along the spines of the old volumes and... there. That was the one. The leather was soft and the book was heavy, lent resistance by the pressure of old words around it, but it came loose from its row with a solid tug.
He held it in his hands, good and thick, maybe a little damp. That didn’t matter—it was the right one. Even with his eyes closed, he could read the title:
Schneider Wrack
. That was odd though, thought Schneider—the book had his name. And he’d forgotten it. That didn’t usually happen in dreams, did it?
The rustling of old thumbs on ancient pages grew louder all around him, almost aggressively so. Some of the readers had started murmuring as well; it was distracting. The flicker of pages started to make his own thumbs itch to open the book, and his arms began itching too. He wasn’t sure why, and it made him feel uneasy. It didn’t matter though: he had the book he needed.
But once he had prised open the cover, sticky against the frontispiece, he found he couldn’t read the words inside. They were there, rich and black and swarming, but they wouldn’t come into focus.
Of course! He had to open his eyes. But they’d been shut so long; he’d been asleep for so long. Schneider knew if he opened his eyes, he’d have to stop dreaming. That was alright, wasn’t it? If it meant being able to read what was inside the book, waking up would be worth it.
He struggled to ungum his lids, and the groaning of the old fellows grew louder around him. Like pulling a dressing from an old wound, he felt his eyelids begin to peel open. But then he realised, far too late, that the book had changed.
It wasn’t the book he was looking for. It was the book about the fish. The one he didn’t want to see inside. There were horrible things in there, blank-eyed and wounded and long-toothed. A dictionary of demons. He tried to cover the pages with his hands before his eyes could open fully, but it was no good. His arms moved slowly, and they itched so badly. The moaning around him grew into a howl; he felt cold spray against his scalp.
His eyes opened.
Schneider Wrack stood, knee deep in grey offal, before the hill-high carcass of a dying monster. In his hands, a twelve-foot length of gore-streaked wood; at its tip, a pitted blade hooked on a sagging strip of blubber.
Pebble-hard, briny rain smacked against the back of his scalp, his shoulders. A hissing wind snatched the reek of blood from his nostrils, then whipped back, loaded with decay so thick it seemed liquid.
Lightning smashed the image of a titanic rib against his retina, shrouded in strands of white flesh; something grey and chitinous scuttled, convulsing, across his left foot.
He wanted to scream, but he was already screaming—or trying to. His lungs pulled thick and wet against a closed throat, struggling against oneiric resistance, the paralysis of a dreaming body. But this was real, and he was awake.
At last the liquid loosened: his chest heaved in half a gallon of rotten air and roared it weakly free, the ghost of a shout: a foul, rotten hiss, the exhalation of a used body.
Shuddering like a new thing, Schneider rocked on his heels and stared at the soup of blood and grey fragments washing around his ankles. He screamed again.
This time, it came easier. A low moan, crude and primal against the base of his tongue. Salty liquid trickled from his lips, like the prelude to a drunken spew, yet no feeling came from his innards, just a long, frightened wail from the base of his chest.
As the noise trembled against the walls of the wound in which he stood, Schneider heard it echo back from his left. And then from behind, all too close. Even as he jerked away in terror, a fresh wail came from the right, and his head snapped round to see its source.
Schneider looked straight into the withered, wrinkled, old-fruit features of a corpse.
It was stooped, ruined. Drenched in black fluid, its eyes watery above a ragged mouth, while its hair hung slick like the pelts of storm-drain vermin. In its hands, a billhook like Schneider’s; on its back a shirt that was hard to distinguish from the skin sloughing from its torso.
Gasping, Schneider recoiled from the salty apparition, straight into the sodden arms of another. He thrashed to disentangle himself. Grey teeth gnashed and clattered inches from his neck, and he rammed the butt of his billhook backwards hard.
Scurrying back into the tattered cave of meat with his blade shaking in front of him, Schneider quailed before a sea of twisted faces, a crowd of ghouls that seemed to look straight through him with their cloudy eyes.
An echo of his waking howl rose black and dreadful from their throats, and the ring of faces began to close in. A blast of lightning revealed a thicket of arms, ablaze with crawling, actinic light, reaching out to pull him in towards the gaping mouths.
Schneider stumbled, his foot slipping on a fat-shrouded vein, fell on his arse and scrabbled back into the dark, away from the stretching claws. His billhook caught on something and fell from his grip, and he cowered from the monsters with his arms shielding his face.
But they weren’t after him; they were after the meat. Stepping over him as if he were so much offal, they waded into the carcass and began tearing flesh from the wound with their billhooks, with rusted knives, with their own hands.
Their hands.
Crouched into a ball as the ghouls surged over him, Schneider blinked hard to chase the rain from his eyes, and looked for the first time at his own hands.
While he already knew what he was looking at—the waterlogged grey prunes of his fingertips, the bloodless white gashes that streaked his forearms—it was a long time of shivering and staring before he could face up to what it meant. He was a dead man.
Schneider screamed once more; a wail of despair that rejoined the rolling chorus his first cry had triggered, that drowned in the sound of the thunder and the crash of waves. No longer conscious of his own voice as a discrete part of the cacophony, he threw back his head and moaned to let the horror out. But more only flooded in.