David Mcintee - The Light of Heaven

The storm that smashed into the side of the Vigilant was pure, immense, power. It bit and tore like a starved prehistoric leviathan taking its first meal in months. Thick skeins of rain lashed against the timbers of the two-masted caravel, gouging at them as harshly as whipcord tore the skin and muscle from men's backs. Walls of water crashed down onto the deck with tumultuous booms to rival the thunder overhead. Lightning flickered among the clouds.

Any man with authority to give orders was screaming those orders at the top of his voice, but there wasn't a chance of anyone hearing a word over the storm's primal roar. The sails snapped and boomed overhead, and Captain Jonas Wylde wasn't sure whether his precious Vigilant could hold herself together. A tall and burly man with not much of a neck, Wylde had seen a lot of storms in his thirty-odd years at sea, but few as ferocious as this one.

He scanned the clouds for a glimmer of hope, and was rewarded with a razor cut of blue to the southeast. From the direction of the winds, it wasn't the edge of the storm, but the eye. If he could get the ship to it, and hold a matching course, he could sail along in the eye until the storm dissipated. Wylde cursed himself for sailing this far from shore. The Stormwall that surrounded the known world was not negotiable by any vessel that Wylde had ever heard of, and the Vigilant had sailed far too close to those lethally turbulent waters. Wylde had thought the faster northern currents would save them time between Sarcre and Allantia, and time was money when there was cargo to pick up and drop off. Money, he now realized, that he and his crew could never spend, if his decision led to the death of them all. It was as if a part of the Stormwall had taken exception to the ship, and separated itself to come after him.

As the ship pitched and rolled until the deck was almost vertical, Wylde sent his bos'un, Farrow, forward to relay his orders. In a minute or so, sailors were scrambling up the ratlines to tie off the sails in the desired arrangement, while it took two men with forearms like iron to hold the wheel in place. The Vigilant slowly heeled over, every plank creaking, and every hawser humming with the strain. The ship's tortured cries were audible even over the barrage of waves and thunder.

As the deck settled back to something resembling horizontal, Wylde kept his eyes fixed on the blue scar in the storm's swollen grey-black belly. Knowing that none of the men would hear him, he prayed quietly for the ship to stay in one piece long enough to reach the more gentle climes of the eye of the storm. The blue scar in the clouds opened wider, filling his heart with hope. When he had built up just enough hope to think he may have saved his crew, there was a sound from above that Captain Wylde could have sworn was a thunderbolt.

A hawser had snapped, and Wylde leapt aside as the lower part of the rope struck the deck where he had been standing, cracking the plank. The upper part of the rope whipped across the fore-topgallant, catching one of the boys on a ratline there beneath the armpits, and ripping him clean through. The lad's torso and legs crashed to the deck, his lungs and heart spattering across the wood nearby. The fore-topgallant flapped madly, and the Vigilant slowed her progress towards the eye. The crew worked as hard as they could to recover the sail. If any of them wept for the dead boy, those tears were blasted away by the rain and wind.

Then came what felt to Wylde like a miracle. The winds dropped, the rain abated, and a shaft of sunlight played over the Vigilant . The last boom of thunder faded and the sails puffed out as if catching their breath. The Vigilant had reached the eye of the storm.

In his dayroom a short time later, Wylde closed his eyes for a moment, enjoying the relative quiet. There was still shouting all around as the crew tried to repair the damage sustained in the storm. He plastered his thin hair across his pale scalp, and rubbed his eyes before looked up at Farrow.

"Casualties, bos'un?"

"Three men with broken limbs. Another four knocked senseless, but a spot of grog will bring them round right enough. We were bloody lucky, sir, if you don't mind my sayin' so."

"Lucky?" Wylde echoed. "We were more than lucky. And the lad on the foremast was the only fatality?"

"Cottell, sir, yes."

"Well, there's no denying it could have been worse. Much worse." Before Wylde could say more, there was a knock. "Come."

A fresh-faced youth of barely sixteen bustled in. He was soaked to the skin and wild-eyed. "Sir," he gasped. "There's another ship off larboard, perhaps a thousand yards."

Wylde was on his feet immediately. "How does their crew look, Midshipman Kale?"

Kale seemed flustered. "Can't tell, sir. Didn't see none."

"Lead on then." Wylde grabbed a spyglass from the desk. When he and Farrow emerged onto the quarterdeck, the other vessel was visibly closing, and clearly adrift. It was a Brigantine, out of Freiport, by her colours. Through the spyglass, Wylde thought it looked as if their lanterns were lit, but her sails were gone, leaving only a few strips of charred cloth hanging from the masts. The decking and masts were charred and blackened. Wylde then realised that the little orange lights weren't lamps, but the guttering remnants of fires.

"This doesn't look like the work of the storm," Farrow said.

"No, Mister Farrow." Wylde agreed. "Unless it was a lightning strike…" He shivered at the thought of fire on board ship. Fire at sea was a certain death sentence, and there was no shame in abandoning a blazing ship. He aimed his gaze at the peeling paintwork on the stern. It read: Belle . "Let's get alongside. If there's no answer to a hail, take a party across. She might be salvageable, though I doubt she'll bring too great a prize back in Allantia."

"Every little helps, sir."

Wylde allowed himself a chuckle. "True enough, Mister Farrow."

Farrow studied every inch of the Belle through a spyglass as they approached in the small relief boat. There was still no sign of life aboard, and charred corpses littered the deck. Any living men on the ship would have at least rolled them overboard, Farrow considered. He shivered as they reached the ship and climbed up the side, but made sure to be the second man to board, in spite of his fears. Going first would have looked foolhardy to the sailors.

A ferry to the pits of Kerberos itself couldn't carry anything more gruesome than the sight and smell that assaulted him on deck. Numerous charred and blistered bodies sprawled across the deck. Their melted flesh had half stuck them to the planks, so they didn't roll with the ship, but seemed almost part of it. The damage to the timber was strange, too; the starboard side of the ship was charred almost completely black, and still smouldered, while the larboard was untouched. The mainmast was black on one side, and polished brown on the other, all the way to the top. He stepped aside to run his fingertips along the undamaged side of the mainmast.

"There ain't no fire arrows stuck in the timbers. No sign of broken pitch-pots." Kale said as he studied the ship.

"Then she was struck by lightning in the storm. The sails caught fire, and — " Farrow began

"And no fire on a ship I ever heard of only burnt one side of her, however it started." The sailors who had accompanied him all looked at Farrow, and he could see in their eyes the same desire that was in his heart: to get back in the boat, row back to the Vigilant , and leave this cursed ship to sink and be cleansed by the ocean's depths.

It was an order he couldn't give, even if he had to bite his tongue to keep the words in. Wylde had given him his orders, and not carrying them out to the fullest would be a gross dereliction of duty.