Part 23 (2/2)

'But you've fought them before,' Sol said. 'Seen them away. You know what to do.'

Drake stood back from the harpoon and nodded to the sailor manning it. He placed his hands on his hips and looked out to sea, where spray clouds threw up smears of rainbow light as the deep pirate made its way towards them.

'We can inconvenience it,' he said. 'A force this size, this many s.h.i.+ps, this many harpoons ...' He shrugged, rugged face haunted by fear. 'We can hope it's not too determined.' He looked from Sol to Gallan and back again. 'Now, will you let me do my job?'

Sol nodded, and Drake darted away across the deck to the next gun.

'Sparkhawks,' Gallan said. 'And if it comes close enough, perhaps we can get some dart worms into it.'

'I think this is Drake's fight,' Sol said. 'Him and those like him.'

Across the fleet, flag signals were pa.s.sed back and forth, and then the Spike attack s.h.i.+ps turned towards the west, bow-on to the imminent a.s.sault. The sound of the sea striking hulls changed, booms swung, sails emptied and billowed again.

The deep pirate's trail vanished.

'It'll come up from deep down!' Drake called. 'This b.a.s.t.a.r.d's already carrying a few broken harpoons, I'll bet.' He walked back and forth beside the s.h.i.+p's wooden railing, then froze and pointed across the waves. 'There.'

Sol could see nothing at first that distinguished one area of ocean from another. Drake was pointing at a s.h.i.+p a quarter of a mile south of them, its strong hull carving at an angle across the waves and booming, booming with each impact. Then he saw that the waves just before it were already breaking, and he could not hold back a gasp as the deep pirate emerged.

Rising straight up from the depths, the shape powered from the sea and seemed to hang for impossible moments in the air, a sculpture of nightmares made real. What Sol had heard about these monsters, and the few images he had seen, meant that he could distinguish the pirate from its mount, though where one began and the other ended was not so clear. The deep pirates rode a range of sea creatures, from red dolphins to much larger animals. This one attacking the Spike fleet rode a decapus. That in itself displayed the pirate's age, size and standing. And it was almost as large as the decapus, which only added to the surreal horror of the sight.

The pirate had human qualities merged with the worst aspects of the sea. Bare, thick torso spotted with sh.e.l.lfish, a large head with shockingly human features, long flowing hair which was said to consist of poisonous fronds, long limbs that ended in claws ten times larger than the most monstrous crab's, and thick legs that parted into powerful tentacles, each of them suckered and spiked. Its scale made it even more awful a ten times the size of a human, it was a blight on reality.

The decapus beneath it was a vivid red, its tentacles longer and more deadly, its beak clacking, and its huge eyes reflecting sunlight with an alien regard.

Even from this far away, Sol and everyone else on his s.h.i.+p could hear the monster's screech.

'By all the G.o.ds, how does something like that come to be?' Gallan said at Sol's side. 'A creature from the Pit, for sure.'

'It's no Pit creature,' Sol said. 'Just another challenge from the G.o.ds.'

Several gusts of steam drifted up from the pirate's target as harpoons were fired. Their impacts went unseen. The vessel lurched across a wavetop and the decapus curled its tentacles up around the bow, the pirate climbing its back and clamping around its head with its own limbs. The deep pirate screeched again, and then lurched sideward with surprising grace as another weapon was discharged, dodging the harpoon.

The pirate lashed with its arms, and something on the s.h.i.+p's deck came apart in a spray of red. It climbed higher, angling itself so that some of its tentacles could unfurl and reach across the s.h.i.+p. It plucked two struggling shapes away and backed down again.

'Poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds,' Gallan muttered at Sol's side.

'They'll fight all the way,' Sol said, because he could make out the pale leather of Spike soldiers. But whatever fight the deep pirate's victims had in them was meaningless. A glistening flap opened on the decapus's flank and the pirate dropped the unfortunate soldiers inside, then slipped back down its mount's back and sank quickly from view.

The s.h.i.+p fired several more harpoons at where the pirate had disappeared, but already the sea's surface had returned to normal.

'Drake?' Sol asked.

'Easy pickings,' Drake said. He scanned the sea's surface, eyes sharp, concentrating. 'It won't be leaving too soon.'

Sol looked from one s.h.i.+p to another, wondering which would be next. Perhaps it would be them. He closed his eyes, imagining the fate of the two soldiers plucked from the vessel and dropped into the decapus's insides. But they were beyond anyone's help now. They would be remembered, and their families honoured.

'I want it killed,' Sol said.

Drake snorted, still watching the sea.

'Everything can be killed,' Sol said, angry. 'And this is why you came.'

'It's old,' Drake said. 'That one, maybe four hundred years. It will have started young, maybe the size of me. Amphibious. Perhaps with a bit of humanity left over from its ancestors, perhaps not, but that will have quickly been erased by the waters of the Forsaken Sea. It probably hunted close to the Duntang islands to begin with, keeping to the shallows. As time went on, the deeper sea became its domain. It'll make its nest where it always has, and that island will be its own. Skeletons, there. Skulls. Thousands.' Drake glanced back at Sol, but only briefly. 'It'll add some more today.'

'It's a living, breathing thing,' Sol said.

'A travesty against the G.o.ds,' Gallan said.

'And yet allowed by them,' Drake said, smiling humourlessly.

Sol glared at Drake, but the fear he saw in the sailor's eyes was not for him. 'I want it killed.'

Drake's expression changed, the grim smile dropping. 'Here's your chance.'

Closing on Sol's s.h.i.+p, a trail across the waves quickly became a grey shape breaking water, riding something red, with trailing tentacles and wet hair flicking poison at the sky.

The decapus struck amids.h.i.+ps, the pirate screeched, and the fight began.

Throughout the battle, Sol could not help dwelling on what Gallan had said a that this was a creature of the Pit. While the decapus gnawed at the hull and flailed with tentacles not used to clamp it to the s.h.i.+p, the grotesquely huge pirate reared up to deck level and screamed its terrible, blood-freezing roar of fury. Its face was barnacled ugliness. Its large eyes were horribly human, pupils a deep black, surrounds a piercing green, and it blinked a leathery film across its eyes each time a harpoon was fired at it or a Spike soldier dashed in with a spear or fired an arrow. Its hide must have been incredibly thick to withstand such attacks a it twisted to deflect harpoons, and arrows ricocheted from its body a and Sol spied several old wounds that had turned to knotted scar tissue. Some of them still held the broken ends of harpoons, worn smooth over time. Rifles were fired, steam drifted, shot impacted and puckered its hide, or bounced off to embed itself in mast or sail.

The pirate dribbled and slavered, long teeth scoring across the deck as it took a bite from a sailor it had snapped almost in half with one of its huge claws. The man screamed as the pirate chewed at his exposed stomach, and Sol pulled his pistol and shot the man in the top of his head.

More harpoons, and two penetrated close to the pirate's neck. It roared and shook its head, long hair flailing across the deck. Another sailor screamed, hands pressed to his bubbling face. The beast's trailing hair scorched intricate patterns in wood and flesh alike.

As the pirate retreated at last, one of its flailing tentacles clasped Drake around the hips. He cried out and threw himself to the deck, grabbing onto a wooden hatchway, nails scoring the deck, timber and nails splintering as the pirate dropped towards the sea. The tentacle squeezed until Drake's scream of terror was crushed to a soundless gasp.

Sol and the others tried to save him. A creature of the Pit, for sure, Gallan had said, and as Sol slashed into a decapus tentacle, ducked closer to attack, and locked eyes with the pirate, he did have to wonder as he almost shrivelled beneath the thing's glare.

Then the terrible pair were gone, disappearing over the side and beneath the waves with an enormous splash. The last Sol saw of Drake, he had a knife in his hand and was struggling against the monster's grasp to open his own throat.

Sol hoped that, inside the belly of the beast, he might succeed.

Three more s.h.i.+ps were attacked before the pirate disappeared beneath the waves for the last time. No one pretended that they had killed it, but the bloodstains upon the ocean were plain to see.

'We saw it off,' Gallan said. 'Drove it away.'

'It's gone,' Sol said. 'I'm not sure we factored at all in its decision to dive for the last time.'

'We saw it off,' Gallan said again. He was shaking. Sol let him.

They sailed through the afternoon, and Sol put his Blade to work effecting repairs on the s.h.i.+p. They were not taking in water, but whole swathes of the deck boards had been crushed and splintered, railings had been ripped away and one of the sails hung in tatters, marked with the hand-sized imprints of decapus suckers. It was good to keep the troops occupied.

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