Authors: Jude Fisher
It was vast: at first she thought it some sort of whale, though of a far larger species than any normally caught off Rockfall’s waters, or even the great grey whale that had washed up on the northern coast of the island some years back, that had kept them all in meat and oil the whole winter and more. But when it raised its head out of the sea, she knew it was no whale, nor any other natural thing.
Its vast, bulky body was variegated in every shade of grey and green so that it looked as though it were patched with lichens and moss; indeed, as it drew down upon the
Snowland Wolf
, great swags of vegetation – kelp or weed – were revealed, clinging to portions of its anatomy as if growing on sea-washed rocks, trailing out behind it in long clusters like the ragged hem of a vast robe. An array of fins alternated down its knobbly spine with what seemed to be the tentacles of some enormous squid that it had somehow absorbed into itself, digested and then partially expressed. The forked tail which Katla had spied flicking through the waves served only to deceive the eye as to the true size of the thing: for it was only one of many small appendages attached to the creature, and each completed itself in a different manner: soft fronds, an ugly knot; what looked almost like a hand. Its true tail, if it had one, remained below the water; but clearly some huge device was at work down there beneath the visible monster, for a great vortex of sea churned and sucked behind it, producing an alarming whirlpool in its wake. As the creature rose out of the waves, its maw opened to reveal a black cavern of a mouth fringed with lethal-looking teeth surrounding a leprous purple tongue liberally furred with grey. Katla, suddenly and inconsequentially gifted with a moment of utmost clarity, saw how some parts of its skin were as sheeny and smooth as the skin of a seal, repelling the water in great sheets and beads; whilst other patches – all mottled and boggy with retained moisture – appeared to be porous, as if the thing were only partly adapted to life in its ocean home.
Up it came – fully twenty feet into the air, its silhouette red-lined by the failing light – to reveal a livid green and white belly studded with further mouths. Behind her, Katla was vaguely aware of cries of horror and despair from her crewmates, then Tam Fox was at her side, a reversed oar in his hands, his hair wild in the sunset. Someone cast a fishing spear into the monster. It buried itself neatly in the creature’s back, in one of the porous patches of skin, and water and other foul liquids gushed out around the puncture. Something silver flashed past Katla’s head; followed by another and another. Katla turned to see that Min Codface had shimmied halfway up the mast and, with one arm and one leg crooked around the pole, was delivering her throwing knives with murderous accuracy at the brute, all the while yelling with great snarls of defiance: ‘Get back, you vile squid, you hagfish, you overgrown guppy; you abomination of a megrim! Back to the depths, to the ocean-cracks where you belong!’
In a trice, a dozen separate gouts of blood had erupted from the monster’s hide and it roared its distress with a bellow like thunder. For a moment, it seemed that the crisis might be over, for the great fish now turned tail and dived beneath the ship, a red tide bubbling in its wake. Katla had time to turn and scan the faces of her fellow sailors – aghast, excited, terrified, or in Min’s case, utterly elated.
‘That taught the foul morwong its business!’ The knife-thrower slid down the mast, her eyes shining. ‘That great garfish won’t be back in a hurry!’
She was wrong. A moment later there came a hideous grinding sound and every timber in the ship groaned in protest. Water sprang up between the boards at Katla’s feet. Someone tumbled past her, cursing. The ship tilted dangerously, then righted itself with a booming crash. Displaced water shot skywards like a fountain, then rained down on them so that they were splattered with a glistening mixture of brine and fishblood, and the sunset reflected on them, turned them all into red things.
Katla felt instinctively that, against all the odds and despite all she knew of the great fish of the oceans, the beast had deliberately tried to overturn them instead of fleeing for its life. This was, clearly, no ordinary creature. She remembered suddenly the rash of superstitious tales that had recently been told around the cookfires: tales of bizarre sightings, peculiar corpses washed up on deserted beaches; strange objects netted in the midst of a catch of herring. The creature was not going to leave them alone: something must be done.
People were running this way and that, trying to save oars and belongings, chests of clothing and tradegoods that had been dislodged and strewn around the deck. In the midst of it all, the handfasted couple clung together with Jenna’s head buried against her lover’s shoulder as if by this means she might shut out the horrible reality beyond. Others were strapping on swords and sharpening oars and staves under Tam Fox’s command. He strode around the deck, issuing orders like a man born to lead, the short stabbing sword he carried habitually – a brutal enough weapon at close quarters – beating against his thigh as he went.
A subconscious hum took up residence in Katla’s skull; a zinging: a call. The Red Sword. She could
feel
its blade singing to her like a grasshopper in a thicket. Instinctively she knew its whereabouts: in the casket Fent had loaded onto the ship in the harbour at Rockfall, that she had thought would make a gift to King Ravn; but the mummers’ leader had clearly had other ideas. Dodging skittering pots and pans, snaking lengths of rope and stumbling companions, she found herself in the stern; and there was the casket, still securely lashed down. With strong fingers and raw determination, Katla undid the sea-wet knots, dragged the lid open and liberated the great blade. In the light of the setting sun, it gleamed a bloody red, as if already anticipating the damage it would do. The sword fitted her hand as she had always remembered, the polished beauty of the carnelian pommel contoured snugly against her palm, the crosspiece hard against her fist. Exhilaration filled her, an inebriating song which filled her veins, running from her right hand through her arm and shoulder, suffusing her neck and head; coursing down through her torso, heating her abdomen, running like molten iron through her legs. The Red Sword! With the weapon buzzing in her hand she felt invincible.
She shook her head, trying to clear the thrill of the metal’s spell. Wielding the carnelian blade was all very well, but she was hardly going to get close enough to the monster to simply run it through . . .
Grabbing up the cord that had lashed the casket down, she ran back towards the stempost, where even now the beast was looming up again, wrapped about by foaming pink surf, its spines and tentacles shaking in wrath, its great, blank forehead bearing down upon the prow of the
Snowland Wolf
, eclipsing its carved dragonhead entirely, like a snowy owl mantling over a sparrow. A discarded oar nearly felled her, and when she leapt it, caught her a numbing blow to the shin. Swearing hideously, Katla cast herself down beside the oar and set about it with her belt-knife. In mere seconds she had hacked out a sizeable chunk of the good oak. The violated inner wood gleamed palely amidst the deeper gold of the handpolished exterior, but Katla was in no mood to appreciate such aesthetics. While Tam Fox and his men fired arrows from the ship’s few shortbows into the monster, Katla fitted the hilt of the Red Sword into the gouge she had made in the oar-handle and lashed the two together using the cord she had taken from the casket and every swift knot she knew.
There came another huge thud, followed by cries of terror. The monster had rammed the vessel. Timbers shrieked in protest; then, with an ear-splitting crack, the prow of the ship sheared away. Katla looked up just in time to see Flint Erson fly over the side and into the weltering sea, where he disappeared soundlessly beneath the boiling, creamy surf. Enraged at the loss of one of his crewmen, and his best tumbler to boot, Tam Fox roared imprecations at the monster, and hurled his shortsword with such aggressive finesse that it sank without trace into the creature’s gill-striped cheek; but still the sea-beast came at them.
Katla leapt to her feet, makeshift harpoon in hand, and made for the mutilated prow. There, for an instant, she found herself staring into one of the creature’s eyes. At first all she saw was her own reflection, a horrible red parody waving a pathetic length of wood with a pin stuck to the tip; then her heart lurched horribly. She was looking, unmistakably, into a human eye.
The eye regarded her. It was the deepest velvet brown, the brown of a cow’s eye; but around the iris, white cornea showed, tapering at either end. The eye was fringed with lashes. It blinked as if startled at the intimate contact, and then Katla heard a strangely familiar voice in her head. It spoke her name, haltingly, pleadingly, so low as to be a subterranean rumble, coming not from the bizarre creature before her, but from a thousand and more miles away, deep below Elda’s surface. Then water filled the eye and it blinked again. What looked horribly like the largest tear in the world rolled slowly down the vast fish’s face. Katla found herself caught neatly between empathy and revulsion; but the Red Sword knew its task. Of its own volition, or so it seemed to a stunned Katla, her arm drew back the spear she had fashioned and released it with brutal power. Hard and true the carnelian blade flew, burying itself to the hilt in the monster’s eye-socket. For a moment, all was still. The
Snowland Wolf
settled itself; everyone took a breath. Then the creature reared up and its wail of agony rent the air. Up it went, propelled almost to the vertical by the frantic beatings of its many tails and fins, all of its mouths opening and closing in hellish concert, each uttering a different cry of hurt.
Katla stood teetering on the gunwale where her cast had brought her, engulfed by the monster’s shadow. Even with the thing hanging in the air above her, she found she could not move.
‘Katla!’
She heard the voice, but it sounded far away, swallowed as it was by the cacophony of the wounded beast.
And then it pitched down.
Halli’s free hand wrapped itself firmly around Katla’s ankle, dragging her backwards, just as the sea-creature plunged. Flying backwards, barely registering the pain of her landing on her elbows, her back, her left shoulder, Katla watched as the monster crashed down upon the
Snowland Wolf
, watched as the splintered stempost pressed delicately for a second against the mottled skin of the beast’s belly, puckering the area between two gaping mouths. Then the pale skin gave up its futile resistance and swallowed the spar, impaling it down the full length of the shattered prow. With a final mournful bellow and a gush of vile-smelling fluids, the monster died.
But the worst was still to come.
Under the weight of its new burden, the ship tilted violently. There was a moment of uncanny calm, then the sail came free of its rigging and, flapping wildly, swept Bella and two other tumblers over the gunwale. Barrels and boxes tumbled headlong; the iron cauldron and its tripod rolled the length of the ship, gathering speed, and caved in the other half of Urse’s smashed head. Down the creature went and the
Snowland Wolf
went with it, inexorably bound for the vile maelstrom of the beast’s death-throes.
With a groan, the mastfish – fashioned two centuries ago by the Master of Hedebu from the heartwood of the greatest oak in his ship-grove – split asunder. No longer firmly anchored, the mast wavered desperately, then plummeted to the deck, carpeting the ship with the great sail, which writhed as those trapped beneath it tried to fight free, so that the wolf and the serpent appeared to do battle for the fate of the world once more. Then the ship tilted crazily again and the mast, sail and all, slid sideways and crashed through the larboard gunwale, taking another half dozen shrieking figures with it. In its wake, two men lay screaming amidst a wreckage of tortured wood and rope; Katla could see the white of their legbones shining through a mess of cloth and blood.
The last thing she saw as water flooded into the fine old ship that had been the
Snowland Wolf
was her brother, with Jenna plastered against him like a drowned kitten, sawing desperately at the well-knotted bonds which tied the pair of them together. Then the sea rushed in and carried them all away.
Twelve
The Master
Abandoned by the thing he had made, the thing he had stolen and the beast in which he had stored much of his magic, the Master paces his chambers in the icy fastness of Sanctuary like a madman. For lack of any other society, he has over the passage of the last few months attempted to create new companions for himself – with spit and earth and a little, just a little, of his own blood to give them life – but without the presence of the cat, they have proved to be hopeless experiments, shambling, misshapen creatures who bumble into walls and knock off pieces of their new anatomies, who drown in the lake, or stumble away into the snowy wastes, never to be seen again; or simply grind to a halt, staring into space as though they have discovered some new existence in an entirely other world. He makes no effort to patch them up or reanimate them; indeed, he makes no effort even to tidy their remains away, so that the tunnels and grounds of the stronghold have become littered with these failed creatures in varying states of decay. The long sleep seems to have sapped all energy and will from him, and now he has given up his experiments; since even the best of his creations have barely been able to string two words together. It is discourse that he craves, he lies to himself; the lively interplay of minds, and not mere company – he has the wailing seabirds and the visitations of corpse-whales and seals to serve the purpose of mere fellowship. But at night, in his fitful rest, it is the Rosa Eldi’s body he sees, pale and gleaming, lithe and inviting, always ready for him, never questioning, her lost will bolstering his own. And each morning he awakes more enervated than he had been before pitching into the night’s sleep.
Most of the time it is as much as he can do to forage through the neglected gardens that Virelai used to tend and there procure himself sufficient ingredients from which to make a meal. There is not much left, after the unadulterated arctic winds and the feral things he made and then forgot to dispose of have had their way. More often than not he eats what he finds raw, gnawing upon it like a rat, and when he is able to summon the vigour to boil turnips or roast onions, it is always without artifice or condiment. Everything tastes of ashes to him: what point can there be in disguising the taste of the truth? – that he has failed in all he has attempted. For he held a whole world, and what should have been the recipe for eternal happiness, in his grasp and yet allowed it all to fall away from him. Lost, lost, forever lost.