Andrew Offutt: The Tower of Death

It’s nests of these things there are all over the ridge of the world , Cormac mac Art thought, and knew not how such knowledge was on him. Nor knew he how he was sure these creatures had existed before ever humankind had walked this earth. Everything came once from the water, the seas, all and all of us; and it’s but little change we need to return to our ancient demesne. And he shivered.

Yet were these batrachian fish on their way to becoming human, or men somehow returning to that ancient home in the sea?

Up they came, dripping and shiny-slimy save for the scales on their backs. Huge pallid eyes stared from piscine faces above jaws like ragged bone shears. Like marbles were those eyes, with great black spots set in pearl-white sclera without other colour. And where their fingered paws gripped the deck to pull themselves aboard the coaster, horny claws left deep rents in the wood.

They came, and gasps mingled with the oaths streaming from the lips of frightened men.

Yet these were fighting men, and fearfulness was but a cloak to be hurled from them. Swords and axes moved in stout hands, and swung high. Their steel flashed in the light from the fire on the bone-ship’s deck. Danes and Sueves attacked in their numbers, for such abominations begged to be hacked and slain that men might feel they were indeed men, and clean.

The eyes of the attacking creatures, Cormac noted, never closed, not for so much as a single blink.

Swords and axes whined in the air. Sharp-edged steel struck with shattering impact on creatures spawned in brackish deeps. Demons vomited up by the sea were met by men become blood-mad demons themselves. Fishy skulls shattered and the blood that spurted was red enow. Fish-like heads, flew on wakes of scarlet for men ever loved the satisfaction of the broad beheading stroke. Arms, man-like and yet clawed and scaled above, sought to grapple and were chopped away.

A Sueve whose name Cormac could not call chopped deep into the side of a slime-sheened creature, even as its arms enfolded him and vised tight. Man and monster toppled overboard, nor was either seen again.

“It’s not here they want to fight us!” Cormac bawled, stabbing. “They be wanting. to grapple us and leap into their own demesne, lads! Strike, and strike!”

Men struck and struck. Creatures at once batrachian and piscine and anthropomorphic died and died. Again and again had surprise and horror won for them, so that their leprous home below must be floored with human bones. These men knew horror too-but little surprise. Nor were they taken unarmed and without armour. No bigger than men, the sea-spawn had neither mail nor weapons save claws and teeth and strength beyond the human.

Those who had so long and horribly preyed on men became the prey of men.

A gape-eyed thing reached for Cormac mac Art. So strongly did he hew in his horror that his sword sheared off an arm and was hardly slowed, the way that it cut the other arm to the bone. Baying, the creature came on. The Gael smashed its awful face with his shield. And all about, men cursed and chopped, grunted and hewed.

The sea-get were maimed, disjointed, unlimbed, beheaded. They died and died. Most of the blood that spattered the deck was theirs; the blood that splashed human faces and weapons and mailclad men came not from men. Cormac and his band did slaughter, and right happily. They slew inhuman foe that would have been less repugnant had they been less human.

The coaster bobbed on the waters of night, and the reek of fresh-spilt blood vied with the tang of brine and the stench of unnatural fish-things.

A hand was scratched. A face was raked open by whipping claws. An ax was torn from an arm that had swung not hard enough and a woman was widowed as monster and yelling Sueve plunged into the sea. Horny claws tore the cheek of another, but slipped and skidded over boiled leather bossed with bronze.

Mac Art bore a shield he hardly needed for defense. He used it offensively even more than was his wont, smashing scaly arms and flat ichthyoid faces. He cried out and tried to get to them, but two creatures bore Hugi the Nimble into the sea and they clawed and chewed him even as they bore him down. They returned in scant minutes, and the Gael derived an almost s berserker pleasure in chopping away the head of one and the forearms of the other as they sought to remount the skiff.

Three men had met their weirds, the while more than a score of their attackers died or were so sorely maimed that death was inevitable. The kelp had been worse menace than these creatures that defied nature-yet to sailors unready, these had been death, sure as the jaws and talons of tigers. Here and now, the sea-spawn came on and on, and died and died, and fell hideously maimed back into the sea amid the bedlam of shouting men and hacking blades and stamping feet.

Shrieks rent the salty night air. On the barge, the “sirens” danced in rage and hurled curses in a name Cormac did not know; it was k’Tooloo or something like. What man could know the meaning of such cries as “k’Tooloo fhtagn?”

While their beastly killers were defeated and annihilated, the mist-clad mistresses of dying demons bethought them to flee. They began striving to dislodge the grapnels binding them to the scapha. Three of four they had cast off ere a Dane noticed; so blood-spattered and a-drip was he as to be unrecognizable. Yet no wound was on him.

It was he who shouted and pointed, with dripping sword. He yelled orders without pausing to consider his right to command.

The last four fish-things were being chopped into bits by men on whom the blood-madness still lay, the way that panting men were left foeless on a deck gone slippery with blood. Others were booting hideous corpses back into the sea that had birthed them. Those bloodied men snatched up grapnels. The hooks flashed over, trailing walrus-hide ropes, and the two craft were linked anew.

Barge and skiff wallowed in the swell, six times linked, side by side.

Now was not curses the women yowled down on their attackers, but shrieks for succor in the name of the monster they served. Cthulhu; those lure-sylphs called desperately. Cthulhu! Save your servants who have sacrificed to you for centuries uncounted!

Asleep in R’lyeh, he whom the Philistines knew as Dagon and others called Aegir-without knowing his true nature-stirred not.

And Cormac mac Art bounded onto the white-gleaming barge. His sword stood out before his white-knuckled fist, and it slew even as his boots struck that rocking deck of bone.

Was then ended the illusion of fair, beckoning women like naiads.

A daughter of Ran she was not. No one of the Sirenes of the Hellenes was she either-unless those Greeks of old had never thrust steel into one and seen her change from a willowy beautiful lure-woman to… a horrid amphibious servant of the monster-god Cthulhu who slept in drowned R’lyeh.

Completely loathsome was the thing that slid off Cormac’s spitting sword, part fish and part frog and aye; obscenely, revoltingly: part human as well.

Again, sickened seamen stared. Again they recognized their relationship to such a beast, and were revolted and as if tainted by that knowledge. None could know how old these creatures were, for none of the toad-looking fish-people things died, ever, save by violence. Were they, like some werewolves, born with the amphibian taint that later led to the horrid changelings? Or had they ever been human at all? Or, still yet again, might these barge-creatures include both those groups, as well as some that were victims of curse or spell of ancient origin?

Or , Cormac mac Art wondered, changed and summoned by chants in an old temple to Dagon?

And even then he noted that the false beacon fire on the barge’s deck gave off no heat… O’course not. It’s afire of sorcery this be, for cold-blooded creatures from the sea could not otherwise tolerate such a fire so close!