Steven Erikson - The lees of Laughter's End

Gust Hubb yelped and clapped a hand to the bandaged wound on the side of his head.

Heck and Birds stared at him.

“Something nipped me!”

“Something nipped what, exactly?” Heck asked. “It’s a ghost ear now, Gust Hubb. It ain’t there, remember?”

“I’d swear…”

“Your imagination,” Birds Mottle said. Then she turned back to Heck Urse. “So what do we do now?”

Someone was coming up the walkway and they turned to see Ably Druther clambering closer.

“We did a search and all, sir,” Heck said as the first mate arrived. “Didn’t find nothing and no signs neither.”

Ably crouched, drawing them all into a huddle. “Listen, the whole damned crew is awake and eyes are rolling every which way-finding nothing won’t work-”

“They do a count?” Heck asked. “Who’s missing?”

“Rope braider Briv.”

“Sure it was her?”

“That’s what I was told. The short one with the orange hair and the stubbly legs-”

“Was Gorbo there?”

Ably Druther nodded.

Heck and Birds exchanged a glance. “You sure of that?” the former asked.

Ably Druther scowled. “Aye, he was the one reporting Briv missing.”

Birds Mottle snorted. “Was he now?”

“I just said he was.”

“And nobody else missing?”

“Well, just that fat passenger, the one always fishing.”

“Ow!” Gust Hubb clapped a hand onto the bandage again.

“What’s your problem?” Ably Druther demanded. “What’s with the side of your head?”

“Didn’t hear?” Birds asked, then continued, “Someone went and chopped off his ear-when he was sleeping, if you can believe that. And now it’s a ghost ear.”

“You can hear ghosts?”

The three ex-soldiers stared at the first mate for a moment, then Heck Urse said, “That he can, only sometimes they take bites.”

“What a horrible thing!” Ably Druther straightened and began backing away, fading with every step from the pool of lantern light.

Which was probably why none of the ex-soldiers crouched on the walkway actually saw whatever it was that rose up behind the first mate and bit off his head.

Like a blot on the turgid seas, the deck of the Suncurl was a stain far below Bena Younger and her cackling mother. Edges blurred, the blackness itself the only proof that the ship existed at all, as the swirling thrusts of spume on the seas broke and rolled out to the sides, blooms of crimson-tinged luminescence cavorting away into the night.

Sails flapped as the Suncurl drifted as if indifferent to the wind, nudged along on the currents of the red road. No one visible at the wheel. Only shadows caught in the rat-lines and rigging. No lantern swinging beneath the prow to light the way.

Close round the hatch to the hold huddled most of the crew. Reams of sand had been spread in a futilely protective circle, encompassing the hapless sailors, a detail that loosed hacking laughter from Bena Elder’s gaping mouth.

Overhead, the fitful wind shredded rifts through the thin shrouds of grey cloud, yet whatever world those rents revealed was naught but soulless darkness, bereft of stars.

Laughter’s End exuded lifeless sighs into this turning, alien night sky, and Bena Younger crouched down, knees drawn up, arms wrapping them close against her chest, shivering in waves of blind, despairing terror.

Whilst her mother’s desiccated head nodded in rhythmic reassurance, and she sang on in her crooning way. Lust and death this night, the murderous charade of love and treasures plundered! Oh, utopian circumstance as like a philosophe’s wet aspiration-yes, all the dancers pause as if pinned through their free feet by dread spikes of reason! Exalted music of procreation! The Luckless fool has perchance undone us all-must we bless the sackless madman and his lurking lurker in the locked trunk? But no, warded indeed is that child-by none other than the one lost to all cogency!

You and me, beloved, we shall survive this night, oh yes. Bena Elder promises! Safe from all hungry harm. Your dearest, loving mother is swelled to all decent proportions, for such are these exuding sighs that travel the red road, the whispered promise of rightful majesty accorded all things maternal, one hopes, and hopes, yes.

Cry not, daughter. Warm yourself in your mother’s unrelenting embrace-you are safe from the world. Safe and safer still. Virgin is your blood, virgin is your child mind, virgin yes, is the power of your soul-your sweetest kiss, yes, upon which the only one who truly loves you feeds, persists, endures.

You are mine ever and ever, even this night, and so I shall prove to all, no matter how hoary and dismal and desperate the challenge from below!

Let me sip each whimper from your lips, daughter. My strength grows!

One scream. a sudden widening of the eyes, a faint primordial shiver. The soul tenses, crouches, awaits a repetition, for it is in repetition alone that a face is painted onto the dark unknown, a face indeed frightened, frightening, wracked with pain, or-and so one wishes-in bright, startled delight. But alas, this latter entreaty is yielded up so rarely, for such are grim truths unveiled, one beneath another and seemingly without end.

One scream. Breath held, heart stilled. What comes?

Now, an eruption of screams. From three throats. Well that is indeed… different.

The hammer and thump, the wild pitching of inadequate light from somewhere down below. Boots on slick wood, the screams growing ravaged as tender tissue splits to the torrent of sound. And this, then, is the place and the moment when all totters on the knife-edge, precipice yawning, wind howling oblivion’s flinty echo-does madness arrive? Unleashing misdirected violence and random calamity? Vague figures charging into one another, mouth-stretched faces crushed under heel, shapes pitching over the rail, bones snapping, blood gushing, grimy fingers digging into eyes-oh, so much is uttered by the fates to the chant of remorseless madness.

A deep, reverberating shout-nothing more would have been needed-a commanding voice to tug souls back from the brink.

If only one was there, among that huddle of crew, of the fortitude and iron spine to seize that one moment of salvation.

But terror had swum the night’s sultry currents, seeping into flesh and mind, and now, in the wake of that terrible shrieking from below, chaos blossomed.

Life, as Bauchelain would well note-were he of any mind to voice comment-was ever prone to stupidity and, in logical consequence, atrocious self-destruction.

Of course, he was too busy spilling an endless flood of seed into a barely sensate and in no way resisting Captain Sater down in his cabin, and this, as all well know, is the pinnacle of all human virtue, glory and exaltation.

In wild whirling lantern light Ably Druther’s headless corpse continued kicking even as blood gushed from the ragged nightmare that was his neck. His hands waved and twitched about as if strung to belligerent puppets. Birds Mottle, Gust Hubb and Heck Urse had collectively recoiled along the gangway towards the head-not Ably’s, which had vanished, but the one at the bow-and in the process their feet had tangled, precipitating all three in a shrieking tumble down along one side of the mouldy hull, and there they thrashed, with Heck still holding the lantern high, in suddenly sodden clothes pungent with the reek of urine and, in Gust’s case, something worse.

If the slayer now sought their souls, the harvest would have been virtually effortless. But nothing descended upon them, and apart from their screams, and the thumping of Ably’s boots-and now, it must be added, the panicked thunder of feet from the deck overhead-there was no slithery, slurping rush to where they struggled and clawed, no hissing descent of slavering fangs.