Steven Erikson - The lees of Laughter's End

Commotion from the bow. Turning, Bauchelain squinted. The lich had struck again, the Jhorligg’s mindless hunger staining every soul with its desperate need. Misapprehension was ever a curse among the undead, alas. Although, given the emboldened strain of raw power curling through the currents on these seas, even misapprehension could acquire a certain… corporeal truth.

The lich devoured. And so grew in mass, in strength. A most curious evolution, quite possibly unique. Without doubt worthy of further study.

A final shriek wavered up from the latest victim.

Thrumming, as of a bass lyre’s string being plucked, drew him round once more. The fishing line was sawing back and forth, proof that something had been caught on the hook. A shark? Perhaps.

The line suddenly went slack.

Snapped? Most likely.

He saw dorsal fins in their wake, cutting the red-black water, rushing fast, then out, sweeping round the ship. Scores and scores. One of the sharks broke the surface barely a knife’s throw from the rudder-a creature two-thirds the length of the Suncurl. It twisted to avoid colliding with the stern, then slid past, buffeting the hull, its shiny buckler-sized eye flashing. Then plunged from sight.

The sharks, Bauchelain realized, were fleeing.

Well, these waters were indeed thick with dhenrabi-and there was one of the gargantuan segmented behemoths, breaching a huge, rolling swell a thousand strokes to the east. Astonishingly fast, he observed. Outracing even the sharks…

Bauchelain finger-combed his beard some more.

Gauze swaddled gust Hubb’s face just below his eyes and wrapping round his head in a thick band, the sun-bleached white material marred by three dark red blooms, one centre, the other two flanking at more or less the same elevation.

Noises assailed him. Chittering, snapping of jaws from one side, swirling water from the other. This was manageable, or so he had just concluded when, from the watery side, there came a devastating crunch and then vast, unbearable pain. The sudden assault was of such force that he bit down on his tongue and now there was even more blood, spurting from his mouth.

He had been kneeling on the foredeck, staring accusingly at everyone else, all of them mocking him with their perfect faces, their rosy noses and squid-hued ears all perfect in their delicate folds and cute lobes. But now he toppled to one side, curling up as agony tore through him from an ear he didn’t even own anymore.

And now nipping bites affronted his other missing ear and this, dammit, was very nearly the worst night of his life.

Heck Urse crawled over, brandishing a knife and Gust recoiled upon seeing it.

“Idiot, I ain’t gonna cut you or nothing! This is protection, for when that lich pops up again-gods, you’d think its belly was full by now. Look at Mipple, she’s only now come round-missed all the fun, didn’t she? I hate it when people do that. Anyway, I come to give ya this-” and he showed his other hand, this one gripping a clay jug. “Rum!”

Captain Sater downed another mouthful, then flung the empty flask to one side. Where had it all started to go wrong, she wondered. Sure, stealing a half-dozen Sech’kellyn statues was probably a bad idea, the way tales of terrible curses swirled around the damned things. They’d been found buried in a neat little row beneath the foundation rubble of Avoidance Alley just behind Toll’s Keep, ghastly squatting figures of some foreign, chalk-white marble now stained and mottled by a century or two of kitchen refuse and royal sewage. The expressionless, gaunt faces were all the more chilling for their black iron eyes and black iron canines-seemingly immune to the ravages of rust-and their strange limbs with too many knobby joints, the twice bent knees framing the forward-thrusting heads, the raptor-like, elongated fingers and, most peculiarly, iron collars enclosing their thin necks, as if the six creatures had been pets of some sort.

The court mage-calling them Sech’kellyn, whatever that meant-had claimed them at once, and Sater herself had been among the hapless fools lugging the things up to the sorcerer’s beehive apothecary perched atop the city’s lone hill. A week later she’d helped carry them back to the keep, down into some long unused storage room barred by a newly installed iron door into which the mage gouged so many warding glyphs and sigils the door looked like a flattened crane nest by the time he was done.

The poor sorcerer went mad shortly thereafter, and if there was some kind of connection then no one official wanted to talk about it. Sater hadn’t been alone in paying coin for a ritual cleansing at Soliel’s Temple behind Cleanwater Well-every other soldier who’d set hands on those statues had done the same, with the exception of Corporal Steb, who’d been picking his nose with a dagger point and, walking up to a door that suddenly opened, drove the point into his brain-amazing the dagger ever found it, truth be told. But then, things had mostly settled and it looked as if they’d escaped whatever curse there’d been. When the mage drowned himself in a bowl of soapy water, well, he’d been mad by then, hadn’t he, so it was no real surprise.

Some bright wick had then decided to offer them as gifts to the Crimson Guard-who were, it was said, deep into the arcane stuff anyway. But maybe, Sater now wondered, they’d been less a gift than a not-so-noble desire to get rid of the ugly things.

So then she went and stole them. Why? What insane impulse had taken her then, like a bony hand round her throat? Over the side they shoulda gone, aye, right over the side.

Was it the curse that had conjured to life the miserable lich?

She needed to get rid of them. Now, before it was too late An eruption of screams from below-so awful that even her rum-heated blood went icy cold-and the thunder of some collision, as of two massive forms slamming into one another, and the entire ship shivered. More screams, the thumping of blows delivered with savage strength and ferocity.

With hammering heart, Sater glared around, saw a trio of sailors crowded up at the prow. “Briv! And you too, Briv! And you, Briv! You three, here, take my strongroom key-”

“Down below?” one of them shrieked.

“At the stern and it’s all quiet there. There’s six wrapped statues-I want ’em up here, understand? Up and o’er the rail! Quick!”

All at once a figure was standing at her side. Tall, hulking, a flabby, round, childlike face peering down at her. The thick lips licked beneath bright, beady eyes. “Statues?”

Briv, cook’s helper, glanced over at Briv, carpenter’s helper, then back at a snuffling Briv, Rope Braider, whose orange mane of hair was strangely tousled, almost askew. He saw terror writ plain on their faces, as much as he himself must be showing on his own. Descending the steps in front of them was the scarier of the two passengers (three if counting the manservant but nobody ever counted the manservant), the oversized one with the round face and thick lips and tiny voice.

Seemingly completely unafraid, which meant he was insane.

Their escort to the strongroom, rustling in full-length chain beneath a thick woollen black cloak. Pudgy, pale hands folded together like he was a damned mendicant or something.

We’re all going to die. Except maybe him. That’s how it always is. People in charge always survive, when everyone else gets slaughtered. No, he’ll live, and so will Cook, because no one likes to cook and that’s just the thing. Cook’s a poet.

No, really, a poet. He sure as Hood ain’t a cook.

Now if only he was any good at poet stuff. Can’t sing, can’t play an instrument, can’t make a rhyme because rhyming, well, laddie, it’s beneath him.

“I dreamed this thing