Elsewhere and otherwhiles…

Pyna followed Umin’s disconcerted gaze to a space above the brewing, molten fire-mounts and their restless, sulphurous smokes. 

There, billowing against the Great Lower Sea’s false horizon, loomed the booming apparition of a peculiar sail, which rippled and purled like a pool of distended quicksilver.

Its motion unlikely, and its shape unnatural. 

A windsail upon a windless sea.

Broad and voluminous, it dragged with perilous, creaking languor, a monstrous vessel of eccentric proportions - with a girth at least twice that of Lord Emberbole’s undergalley - across the aphotic depths.

Ungentle fires of febrile autumn, mad reds and diseased yellows, swung and sparked across its ropes and rigging, 

illuminating the craft’s lumbering, imminent progress through the doleful brume.

Pyna’s uncanny eyes fixed, with a waxing unease, upon the odd vessel’s arabesque lines, as it cut through the soupy, black waves. 

Without a word she swung out from the watch-nest and dropped down breathlessly, bouncing off the rope-lines to alight like a beautiful, bloodless bird of the deep, upon the bitumen-stained planking far below.

Umin frowned, and followed hand over hand, clambering down the rigging.

Lord Emberbole had already made his hulking, but nimble progress, across to the listing rails in order to peer with a jaundiced eye at the perfidious abomination to port.

“The Carbunkled Ones fence us…

I think it’s a Droon…

Unlike any I’ve seen.”

He spat into the gunwales and bellowed orders at the granite-faced helmsman. 

As men moved to arm themselves.

The undergalley then shuddered and pitched with the abrupt adjustment in course, as the Shir’s mournful, and discordant keening crescendoed, thrumming through the decks below.

“Sea reavers? 

In such a craft?”

Umin squinted at the abominable vessel, as it adjusted its apparent track in kind, matching the undergalley’s course and speed with what seemed eldritch ease and alacrity.

Not a single soul could be seen aboard. 

There was no movement across its stacking, ziggurat-like deck-mounts or its roping and raveled shrouds.

Pyna stood aside Umin, on bare tip-toe sniffing at the sluggish air.

Her posture was feral and stormy-still. Like a beast wound tight at the edge of springing, hackles raised.

Her perennial mask of mocking, marmoreal placidity marred by warring sparks of fear and malice that filled the brightness of her eerie eyes.

I know this

I know this 

Reek…

I know

She utters swiftly and low, over and over with a silky feverishness as though, abruptly beguiled.

Umin turns to study her with an expression of deep discomposure.

“Pyna…

Who is this?”

A sudden crackling exclamation from Lord Emberbole unwinds the tightly knotted restlessness of the waiting air.

“She’s coming about! 

With such unnatural swiftness, I-”

His words are abbreviated by what is at first a feathery humming, followed by a rapid hail of umber-fletched arrows. Sickly yellow and crimson shafts, crashing into wood, cloth, steel, and through skin and bone.

Seamen screamed, and scrambled to find succor behind and beneath anything.

One soundlessly tumbled like a shredded rag from out the watch-nest, to lay broken and unmoving upon the forecastle, bristling with shafts.

Lord Emberbole and Umin moved with haste to shelter beneath the enshielding rails.

Pyna alone stood coldly facing the monstrous vessel. A baroque and bloated nightmare, wallowing upon the breast of the listless and black wash.

Now looming a mere ship-length to port of the undergalley.

One shaft had clipped Pyna’s ear, and torn at her wheaty locks, leaving diminutive daubs of thick crimson across the snow-soft of her cheek.

Another arrow had come to pierce her forearm. 

She peered with a flat anger at the slim, protruding projectile as though it were some manner of tedious and vexing insect, before plucking it out and cracking it in twain. Casting it into the coal-dark and yesty surf below.

“Lord Emberbole! Do you live?”

A voice, all grinning and grim self-assurance…

Reverberated from both near and far, as though projected through a great horn, across the shrinking distance between the monstrous vessel and the undergalley.

The two craft moved abreast of one another now, with exacting speed. 

Bobbing across the wavelets like overfed capons.

“Lord Emberbole! 

I will send your craft to the bottom! 

Show yourself, if you are yet able.”

Lord Emberbole stood up and leaned out from the rail, roaring across the narrow distance.

“I live!

And you have assailed the admiralty of the Marquis Meshmin, Lord of the Gate of Candles!

Account for yourself, before I put a hole in that ugly belly of yours!”

A few surreptitious hand-signals from Lord Emberbole, and soon the fire-ports have quietly been rolled open.

The rigging and rails now full of seamen broadly armed and upon a battle-footing.

An orotund laughter bubbled across the shrouds.

“Ohhooohoo…

Account for myself, I shall! 

I would tell you though, that the hull of this vessel is not easily penetrated…”

From out the concealing curvature of the juggernaut’s beetling quarterdeck, rose a startling, rubious figure.

Its stately accoutrement a seamless cassock and smock of cardinal, within shades of bloody cardinal, unto the high, affected peak of its tapering cowl, rippling like spilled wine.

While its face was secreted behind a ghastly, widely grinning polished and particularized mask of redly-gleaming copper.

Umin watched with an odd sense of dismay, as Pyna shrank against the rails. 

Her limbs, loose and hopeless like that of a collapsing marionette. 

No, no.

You are no-

“Yes, yes! Little blood-worm…

For over a century, you have lived, and eluded me! 

From the Above, unto the here, Below.

Perhaps, I have not given your cunning its due. I remember. 

How you so ruined my puppet…”

Lord Emberbole’s glower moved from Pyna to the figure, with a squint of recognition.

“Eikoon! 

The Burning Houses have no rule here. You know the Writs!

You have overreached!”

The wine-painted figure snorted in response, like a cracked steam-pipe.

“Eikoon, is an idiot full of intrigues.”

With its outstretched incarnadine arm, the figure composed a wide, slow circle of slowly diminishing sorcerous flame against the ponderous scrim of engirding dark.

“No, Lord Emberbole…

I am the Burning Houses. 

They descend from me! 

I have made no bargains with any…”

Its reaching, tightly red-gloved finger is then leveled at Pyna with accusatory rancor.

“You know what she is, Lord Emberbole!

Your Marquis, and his forebears, have nurtured pacts, with detestation and shame.

With seeds of the Paper God.”

Lord Emberbole’s perpetual frown furrows and exhales a weary huff.

“The Writs are clear, whomever you claim to be!

The Gate of Candles yields no authority to the Burning Houses! Above all, when unjustly assailed! 

You risk war!”

The figure lowers its outstretched hand, its copper mask bobbing twice, thrice.

“Then I will spare you the mercy of the Singing Flame.”

Immediately an obscene noise arises, squelching and tumescent. Accompanied by an odour, like to that of something drawing itself arduously out from a mucky fen. 

As precipitously, nearly shapeless and flaccidly dark figures clambered and plodded over the gunwales of the undergalley, all knives and nidorous claws.

Seamen shouted and scrambled, snared in the throes of an abrupt struggle.

As Lord Emberbole barked orders like a frothing lion, then slashed at the nearest mucky apparition that crested the rail with his short basket-hilt blade. Tearing away soily filth and bone. Hurtling it back into the inky wash. 

Still, Pyna hung like an unstringed moppet from the rails, her face a blank mask, as the hurly-burly of horrors boiled aboard the undergalley from all quarters.

Umin turned to gently but urgently grasp her arm. 

Her refulgent, cracked-glass gaze, lost in some middle-distance of secret anguish, rose to meet his eyes.

Falling

Churning

Burning

Cinder

I remember…

Her words are a tepid whisper.

Something atrous and oily, bearing an edged and serrated shard plastered with a putrid filth, appears and thrusts at Umin’s flank.

He arches aside and cuts out with his own long-knife, sending the squelching thing to reeling.

Pyna blinks and exhales.

Within a quarter-heartbeat, she is then simply there. 

Her terrible Innulian blade drawn, and breaking through bone and black, seeping ordure like a hand passing through still water.

Her other diminutive fingers lashed out, turning what might have been a bitumen-caked skull into a pasty, overripe burst of sickening ruin. 

Still the unspeakable figures ebbed and flowed.

Pitched battles between knots of seamen and black putrescence in the shape of rotting men, stormed across the decks of the undergalley.

Still they clotted, and grasped and cut and stabbed and oozed. Pulling hapless and isolated seamen here and there off the decks and into the drowning churn. 

A great number of the obscenities had gathered near Umin and Pyna.

Too many even for her at the last, who laid countless to ruin before they had pressed her to the rails, and then bore her - as she fought, and bit and cut and ripped - overboard, down into the insouciant, ebony waves…

Umin had only a heartbeat to peer over the rail at the roiling, inscrutable froth. 

His eyes then momentarily flicked up and met those of the cavernous copper mask of the cardinal figure, as it gazed on with overbearing placidity.

“Guildsman! You-”

But Umin doesn’t hear the wine-colored personage’s final exclamation, as he plunged after Pyna’s swiftly sinking and struggling shadow.

His only thought before the Great Lower Sea’s unending duskiness wetly swallowed him up:

What is this madness of mine?