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CHAPTER TWELVE

Roth awoke to distant screams.

The captain sat bolt upright, his good eye gummed with some nameless residue.

Beneath him, the warship was barely moving. The creak and luff of the sails was all but masked by a strange wailing that came from nowhere and everywhere at once.

Roth cautiously took a lungful of air. The stink of dead fish, mildewed timber and rotting corpses hung all around. His nose creased in disgust. The captain peeled his sickle-hand from the deck. A faint pinkish film, marbled with white streaks, stretched from the arm of his coat to the planks below. The strange residue was shrinking away as Roth watched, melting into the wet mist above.

All across the warship’s deck, Roth’s men were regaining consciousness. Some cried out or drew their weapons. Most simply clambered to their feet, too stunned to say a thing.

The sky roiled sickeningly and the mist stretched into screaming faces as it rose upwards, dull silver one minute and bile green the next. A growl of thunder receded in the distance and magenta lightning flickered and danced on the horizon away to stern.

Roth shook his head clear and barked the order for attention, summoning a swelling crowd of men to his side. He clanged the solid curve of his sickle-hand against the barrel of a nearby cannon over and over again, a harsh but familiar sound that brought men out from below decks and from every corner of the ship. The deck was soon crowded with hundreds of unwashed sailors, every one of them bewildered, frightened or angry.

“We’re here,” called out Roth, scaling the stairs to the forecastle so that his men could see him. “Look around you. This is the work of Noctilus, all of it. We’re in the beast’s lair, lads. We made it through.”

“Aye, but how do we make it back?” shouted Dallard, flinging his arms outward.

“We’re in the Graveyard a’right, a blind man could see that. But where are the others? Are they still alive? Are we still alive?”

“Aye, where are the others?” echoed Will o’ the Waves, always the sycophant where Dallard was concerned.

Roth made his way further up the stairs at the side of the gun deck and looked out at the vista before him. Mounds of twisted bone jutted from the dirty blue-grey water, thousands of skeletons fused together into scattered peaks that crested the surface all around, forced together by some alchemy of the afterlife into a grotesque coral reef.

Of sails and warships, however, there was no sign.

“I don’t know,” said Roth.

A great commotion went up from the decks as his men harangued and protested and yelled.

“You’re a chip off the old block, I swear!” shouted Oath, the second mate.

“Where’s the wind?” protested Freier, the rigsman. “If there’s no wind, and no steamboat, we’ll be stuck here! We’re sitting ducks!”

“What about the Swordfysh, sir?” said Ghow, fear etched on his face.

“Yes, where’s the Swordfysh?” called Burke. “Don’t tell us we’re the only ones made it through!”

Dallard pushed forward to the front of the crowd.

“You senile old fool,” he shouted, face contorted with rage. “You’ve doomed us all!”

The pistolier marched up the stairs towards the captain. The men shouted in support, surging forwards with malice in their eyes. Dallard’s hand disappeared inside his greatcoat, and Roth heard the tiny “click” of a flintlock.

Before Dallard’s pistol could clear its holster, Roth whipped out his own weapon and shot the man in the face, spraying blood and brain matter across those at the foot of the stairs. Before the body could fall the captain lunged forwards, caught it with his sickle and flung it bodily over the side of the warship. A sudden wind whipped up and the sails above him cracked full with a low boom. Roth stared down imperiously at his men, coat billowing.

“Listen to me, all of you,” he shouted. “We’ve come this far, and by Manann’s teeth we will see this through to the end. Revenge, remember? We came here to punish that bastard Noctilus in the name of our friends. Our families. The scum-raddled dives we drink in. Would you rather we killed each other and ended up like that?”

He pointed towards the nearest reef. Dallard’s headless body had hauled itself out of the water and climbed onto the protrusion. His flesh falling away, his body began to fuse with skeletons that studded its sides, hands turning into claws as the muscle sloughed off them. Beside him, a hundred bony arms waved and clawed at the sky.

“Nah,” said Will o’ the Waves, sullenly. “We just want to kill you.”

Roth met his gaze with a burning scowl and after a second the weasel-faced mariner looked away.

“I’m your best hope of getting out of here,” hissed Roth. “You all know it in your hearts. We need to find the others, do what we came to do, and get the Magus to work his magic. Then we’ll loot the largest galleons we find and head back for open seas, richer than Greasus. This haul will make Zandri look like pocket scrapings.

You’ll see.”

At the mention of loot, the mood changed. Hushed conversations broke out in the crowd. Roth’s raids had always held a reputation for being dangerous, but extremely profitable. For the survivors, at least.

The tension was suddenly torn by a series of distant booms. A volley of cannonballs whooshed overhead, one missing Roth by less than a yard. Starting back in alarm, Roth caught sight of a familiar castle-crested silhouette drifting through the mists on the far side of the corpse-coral reef. He snarled and jabbed the three-fingered sign of the trident in its direction.

“Hah!” exulted Roth. “The ugly bastard’s shown himself. Look lively, men.”

He clanged his sickle-hand on the cannon beneath him, its edge still wet with Dallard’s blood. Far above, the sally-bells in the Grand Templus took up the battle rhythm.

“Lads, look sharp. Ghow, get your crowsmen up into the sentinel houses, wipe the muck out of your eyes and shout up for sails. The rest of you, to your posts.

Master gunners, a hundred doubloons to the first whose team hits that thing amidships. Let’s sink the fiend and be done.”

The throng of pirates upon the decks scattered like rats in torchlight as they hurried to earn Roth’s reward.

The captain strode back to the helm, a grim smile on his face.

Noctilus was in for a surprise.

Leaning over the forecastle, Roth grimaced, sucking air through his teeth. The mist had thickened with unnatural speed, a cloying fog thick with corpse-gas that hid the deadly promontories of the reef from sight. One wrong decision and the great temple-ship would founder on the rocks, a wallowing target ripe for the Reaver’s cannons.

The captain prayed to Sigmar that the callers in the sentinel’s nests were sober.

The Heldenhammer heaved its great bulk around, narrowly avoiding a rocky spar clustered with the detritus of the drowned. Somewhere on the other side of the reef was the Bloody Reaver, a predatory beast waiting in the fog. Roth lifted his spyglass speculatively. The jagged shape of the monstrous warship sprang into focus, faded, and then appeared closer than ever before. Men o’ bones clambered from crypts and alcoves across its rocky core.

“To port, now,” came a tight-throated shout from the mainmast’s upper nest.

“Two degrees, no more.”

The Heldenhammer changed tack, its hull scraping hard against a bone reef with a sickening crunch.

“Steady as she goes,” cried the steersman. “Now three degrees starboard!”

“Manann’s scaly arse, she handles like a pregnant whale,” muttered Roth. “This is not going to be easy.”

“Five degrees port,” came the shout from above. “No more! Then straighten her up!”

Another crack-boom came from across the mists, and a volley of cannonballs tore into the corpse coral, sending a great spray of bone and seaweed toward the temple-ship’s deck. Only one cannonball made it through, smashing into the side of the Grand Templus and toppling a noseless statue of Grand Theogonist Esmer headfirst into the sea.

The mariners on the deck next to Roth flinched, clutching gullfoot talismans and fingerbones. Handgunners lined the decks, staring intently through the fog for any sign of the Reaver.

Roth’s eyes widened suddenly and he ran to the stairs. There was no clear shot to the enemy, but with so many guns at his disposal, there didn’t need to be.

“Starboard demi-cannons, blast the coral,” he called down to the decks below.

“Burke, great cannons to fire through the gap. Mortar batteries, maximum elevation, full charge. We know he’s on the other side, fog be damned. Get to it!”

As soon as Roth reached the deck, the demi-cannons at the base of the Grand Templus let fly. Cannonballs punched into the reef with every volley, blasting great chunks of rock and bone from it one after another. Slowly, impact by impact, a

gaping hole was torn in the bone-strewn reef that stood between the Heldenhammer and the Reaver.

“Burke, what are you waiting for? Fire, staggered decks.”

The boards under Roth’s feet shook as the starboard flank of the Heldenhammer split the air, deck after deck of great cannons rocking the warship in the water with shockwaves of percussive force. The first volley finished what the Reaver had started, smashing the entire protrusion of calcified bone into powder. The second and third batteries of guns hammered their cannonballs straight through the gap in the reef, hurtling into the Reaver as it prowled behind.

One of the dread warship’s castle walls came down in a silent landslide, the grand sail at its mizzenmast flapping loose.

“Yes,” cried Roth. “Have that, beast!”

The crump of distant mortar detonations prompted Roth to pan his spyglass across the castle-ship’s hull. Sure enough, puffs of white smoke blossomed across the length of its stony prow. Undead bodies were flung in all directions wherever the mortar shells struck.

The Bloody Reaver turned away from the Heldenhammer and its deadly guns.

“That’s right, run, you bastard!” Roth ran from gunner to gunner, shaking hands and patting backs.

“Well done, lads, good shooting. Double brandy each. Second and third starboard battery, split the gold with the mortar crews. No, belay that order—a hundred doubloons to each team.”

A great cheer went up from the Sartosan crew, all thoughts of mutiny buried by the thrill of battle and the lure of gold.

Roth’s heart sang. He was stranded in the realm of the damned, but he hadn’t felt this alive in years.