‘I’ve tasted your wife’s cooking, Spenratter,’ Maskelyne said. ‘And I find that remark grossly unfair to the samal.’
The three of them laughed.
The lamp mechanism around the crystal continued to point unerringly towards the island. And soon the veined and gas-filled bladders were looming over their hull. The host flesh had been stretched and distorted over the centuries into new and grotesque forms, hillocks of bone enmeshed with red muscle and rumples of skin in which gleamed teeth. Mounds of diaphanous bubbles trembled in the breeze and gave off such hellish aromas as to make one cry out in anguish. The land throbbed and glistened and seeped and shivered. Rivulets of pink fluid trickled between pale mounds beset by black rot. And among this post-human morass there grew clutches of botanic life. The roots of grasses and other small plants found purchase in all manner of moist and yielding surfaces and so clung there and thrived. Tangles of undergrowth drank the sweat of unusual soils. And, further into the heart of the island, Maskelyne could see trees.
Trees.
Through what hives of nerves and memories did their deep roots plunge?
Spenratter eased back the throttle and the boat’s engines dropped to a murmur. For several dozen yards they coasted along muscular banks packed with knuckle-like protrusions, until Spenratter spotted a suitable place to land. Here the shore was scalloped and shallower and the Tutu’s bow slid up onto the sticky fabric of the island. It may have been Maskelyne’s imagination, but he thought he saw the entire bank give a shudder.
He stepped out onto the island.
The ground was surprisingly firm underfoot, and yet quite as glutinous as its appearance suggested. The earth clung to his soles like moist lips and educed from each step a faint supping sound, his boots parting from the soil as a bandage parts from a wound. At the top of the bank lay an expanse of red and black mounds rising three to six yards high with channels of greenery crammed between them. The substance of these mounds was not immediately identifiable, although to Maskelyne they looked like tumours. He perceived black veins under the skin of the land. Beyond these mounds there loomed an enormous grey and yellow sac, or lung, that rocked slightly in the breeze.
They dropped the boat’s anchor cautiously and tied her bowline to a stout branch, before setting forth to explore this strange place.
Maskelyne climbed the bank with Spenratter and Pendragon close behind him. The defiles running between these earthen tumours were too congested with branches and vines to permit easy passage and so he clambered up on the first of the mounds themselves. The living ground under his boots felt as hard as packed earth. He stopped at the summit and shielded his eyes from the sun. His breaths echoed in his helmet and already he was blinking back the sweat. He consulted the locator. The source of sorcery lay to the north.
‘Look, there,’ Pendragon said, pointing down into the green channel below them.
Maskelyne spotted a white tendril moving out of the undergrowth. It was snaking towards them across the darkly mottled surface of the mound. A further two, then four tendrils appeared out of the vegetation. Each one was barely thicker than cotton string and yet they crept unerringly towards the three interlopers, guided by unseen intelligence.
Spenratter cried out suddenly and raised his foot. Another filament had crept up on him unnoticed and wrapped itself around his shin. He wrenched his foot away, but it would not release him.
Maskelyne took out his knife and cut his companion free. He did not want to use his lance until they had no other choice. ‘Let’s not linger here,’ he said, urging his comrades onwards. ‘Keep moving. And keep to the high ground.’
The three explorers proceeded by short scrambles and leaps from mound to mound, careful to keep ahead of the searching filaments that reached out from the green gullies. The geology of the landscape continued in this fashion around one side of the bruised yellow gas sac and then sloped downwards and levelled as the mounds became smaller. Behind the sac they discovered a great pink crater wherein there lay entrenched a sodden cluster of bones. It appeared that the bones had been partially unearthed from this wound in the earth, or else partially absorbed. From the enormous size of them Maskelyne supposed they could be the remains of a whale. But then they might well be part of the same unfortunate creature upon whose back they now walked. He could not know for sure.
The land behind the crater remained mostly level but was pocked by larger solitary mounds that seemed to be formed of a more elastic, greyish material. These expanded and contracted gently. The host’s lungs, perhaps. Clumps of vegetation clung to the scabrous ground in places but the men kept to the open areas between them. They crossed some kind of cracked grey scurf that resembled dragon hide, and it occurred to Maskelyne, now that he thought about it, that there was something else about this particular part of the island that reminded him of those great Unmer serpents. An unwholesome beauty? An aura? The air here smelled like the breath from a serpent’s lungs. He paused to get his bearings. To the north-east he could see three more gas bladders, these as red as gums, rising from low scrub. Closer, and to the east stood the trees he had spotted from afar. He was marvelling at the age of these specimens when Pendragon suddenly cried out.
He turned to find the young man on his knees, frantically hacking away with his knife at something near his shins. Maskelyne hurried over at once and immediately established that Pendragon’s predicament was exactly as he had feared: the sailor had become ensnared by yet more of the parasite’s tentacles. These ones had – Maskelyne now saw – emerged from between the scales of the ground. Those gossamer threads had already reached around Pendragon’s thighs and pulled him to the ground.
Maskelyne looked down at his own legs.
And there saw white tendrils curling around his shins.
‘Blasted things are everywhere,’ he said. He dropped to a crouch and drew his knife across the tendrils, severing handfuls of them. But for every dozen he cut, twice as many snaked out of the ground and curled around his boots. They moved with terrifying speed.
‘Stand.’
Maskelyne glanced over to see Spenratter with his dragon lance levelled and pointed at Maskelyne’s feet. He stood up quickly.
Spenratter squeezed the trigger and a gout of flame burst from the nozzle at the end of the weapon. Fire engulfed Maskelyne’s boots and lower legs for a moment, before Spenratter quenched the spray. The tentacles had all burned away, leaving the dive suit partially soot-blackened but otherwise undamaged. The dive master then turned his lance on Pendragon and burned those tendrils too. Maskelyne sensed a faint shudder under his feet. Had the island just reacted? If so, he wondered if that had been a shudder of pain, or fury?
‘We need to move more quickly,’ he said. ‘Use the lances whenever you need to.’
Now ejecting licks of flame whenever the parasite’s searching tendrils drew too near, the three men skirted the grove of trees and soon reached a raised hillock which offered a view of the entire island. Maskelyne checked his locator again only to discover that the source of sorcery was now somewhere behind them. They had walked past it.
Carefully, the men retraced their steps. Maskelyne now kept one eye on the locator, adjusting the lamp arm to keep the filament at its brightest. It was directing him towards the grove of trees.
‘How much fire do you have left?’ he asked Spenratter.
‘Not much,’ the dive master replied. ‘But I imagine there’s enough left between us. Unless you’re planning on spending the night here.’
Maskelyne indicated the tangle of trees and bushes ahead of them. ‘See if you can clear that scrub,’ he said. ‘Our target, it seems, lies in there.’
Spenratter nodded. He made an adjustment to his lance and then stepped forward of the other two. Then he squeezed the trigger.
A huge gout of fire burst forth from the weapon, engulfing the vegetation before him. Bushes crisped and went up in balls of flame. Spenratter kept up the onslaught until the fire had taken firm hold. The low
er branches of the trees now crisped and blackened as flames grew.
A violent shudder ran through the ground. Maskelyne staggered, but managed to keep himself from falling. Spenratter, however, was unbalanced by his lance and lost his footing. The stout man rolled and then scrambled upright again, helped to his feet by a hand from Pendragon just as a fresh network of tendrils snaked across the ground towards him.
Maskelyne aimed his own lance at these and burned them away.
The island moved a second time. Suddenly and with great fury, the land bucked, throwing all three men from their feet. As Maskelyne hit the scaly ground, he spied Spenratter roll a second time and leap upright. The dive master came quickly to the aid of Pendragon, who had fallen into a mass of tendrils and was now struggling against them. Every time it seemed he might pull away, a dozen more filaments reached over him, winding themselves around his legs and neck. The dive master drenched the young sailor in fire and then dragged him to his feet.
Then, suddenly, from the thicket came a vast and terrible moan.
Spenratter grabbed his arm, pulled him round.‘Look there!’ he cried, jabbing his finger at the burning undergrowth. ‘Hell have mercy, look at that thing!’
Much of the smaller scrub had burned away, allowing Maskelyne a view into the heart of the thicket. And what he saw there momentarily stopped the breath in his throat. From the ground there rose a great mass of bloated skin, in which could clearly be seen two enormous weeping eyes, a pair of fist-sized nostrils and a black gulf of a mouth as wide as a man. He realized he was looking at the face of the parasite’s host.
As the vegetation around it burned away, that gross visage coughed and sputtered and fixed its terrified eyes upon the three interlopers. It opened its prodigious maw and let out a baleful howl. And then it cried out in Losotan, ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it.’
Spenratter swung his lance around to torch the thing, but Maskelyne stopped him. A hundred more tendrils were snaking across the ground towards them, and he feared they lacked enough liquid fuel to see them safely back to the tender. He had a theory he wanted to test. He turned to the face and yelled, ‘Recall the tendrils.’
‘Please, I beg you,’ it replied. ‘I can’t breathe.’
‘Recall them, or we’ll scorch your skin.’
The great wet maw shuddered and cried, ‘No! Please . . .’
Maskelyne nodded to Spenratter, who stepped forward and raised his dragon lance a second time. Now it was pointed directly at the grotesque visage.
‘Last chance,’ Maskelyne said.
‘I’ll try!’ the face replied. ‘Please, don’t . . .’
It closed one enormous eye and its other eye fluttered and its monstrous brow furrowed, as though it was struggling to untangle some mental knot or puzzle. Was it, as Maskelyne suspected, in communication with the samal? Were the two minds connected? He got his answer a moment later, when the slender tentacles halted, and then drew back into the scaly ground.
Pendragon scanned the ground around them, and then seemed to relax. The face amidst the smouldering vegetation was now wheezing and weeping and spitting ash from its lips. Tears coursed over its great soot-smeared jowls. Its bloodshot eyes rolled and flinched.
‘You will note,’ Maskelyne said, ‘that our actions have been in self-defence. We have no reason to harm you unless you give us one.’
‘Father attacked you,’ the face said. ‘Not me.’
‘Father?’
‘What did you expect?’ it raged, suddenly furious. ‘It’s hungry!’
Maskelyne frowned. ‘Are you referring to the parasite? The samal?’
Rage faded from the face as rapidly as it had appeared. It looked momentarily confused, and then appeared to latch onto some sort of understanding. ‘Samal,’ it said. ‘That was his name once. We sailed from Losoto to fight at Galia. On the second day out it rained frogs.’
Spenratter gave Maskelyne a worried look, then circled a finger to one side of his brow.
Madness? Yes. Of course, the host was mad. Could anyone endure such profound and inhuman changes to their nature and remain sane? That this creature could still communicate with them at all was a far greater boon than Maskelyne could ever have hoped for.
‘Do you have a name?’ he asked the thing.
‘Tom.’
Maskelyne found himself smiling at the incongruity of it all; such a simple and common name seemed an unlikely match for a dribbling monster such as this. He said, ‘You fought in Galai, Tom?’
Again, the look of uncertainty crossed those gross and flaccid features. ‘And who claims that I didn’t?’ Tom replied. ‘That man is a liar. I fought, yes, and there were men who saw me fight. Is it my fault all those witnesses are dead?’
‘No one is claiming you didn’t,’ Maskelyne said. Then something occurred to him. This creature, hideous as it was, had retained enough humanity for Maskelyne to recognize its paranoia. It had been, he felt, rather too defensive. He added, ‘No one is calling you a deserter, Tom.’
The face reddened. ‘I was rowing towards the enemy!’ it roared. ‘The wind turned me about. The currents took me. I could have ended the war that night. An assassin’s blade in the dark of Rogetter’s cabin. That’s all it would have taken, but for the wind and the currents. And now you all accuse me of immoral conduct? Of siding with the enemy? I’ve done nothing wrong!’
Spenratter came alongside Maskelyne. ‘If he fought at Galai . . .’ he said.
‘Then he’s over six hundred years old,’ Maskelyne said quietly.
‘That’s a harsh sentence, even for a deserter.’
Maskelyne turned to look at him. ‘I disagree.’ He turned back to study that huge distorted face; it was agitated, breathing quickly and sweating profusely. And then he examined the crystal locator. Could this hideous creature be the source of such powerful sorcery? Why, then, had the Drowned brought him so many keys? Maskelyne felt sure he was looking for a container of some sort. He thought for a moment, then said, ‘We’ve come for the box.’
Eyes like ship-floats glared back at him.
‘Let’s do it the easy way,’ Maskelyne said. ‘There’s no need for you to endure any more suffering, Tom.’
‘Father won’t let you have it,’ the face replied.
‘Then he’ll have to watch you burn.’
The face squirmed with despair. ‘Please,’ it said. ‘The box keeps us warm.’
‘If it’s heat you want . . .’ Maskelyne nodded to Spenratter, who raised his dragon lance.
‘No!’ the face cried. ‘You can have it. Take it and leave us be.’
Spenratter lowered the lance.
The ground shuddered again, and the face became a scrunched mass of flesh, as if it were enduring some new, internal agony. A moment later, the lamp filament on Maskelyne’s locator began to flicker. The source of the sorcery was moving. The land around them bucked, not as fiercely as before, but enough to rattle the scorched trees and bushes.
With another ominous quake, the ground before the three sailors suddenly opened. The skin of the land split and drew back, revealing a deep mass of glistening red muscle-like material. Brine sprayed up through this newly formed crevasse, like a whale’s exhalation, and spattered the surrounding land. Maskelyne edged towards the opening and peered down.
Through the gloomy waters he perceived a squirming mass of pale tentacles. Most were as slender as the roots of young trees, but a few were as thick as a man’s waist. These could only be the veins and gullets that connected the host to the parasite in the sea below. They writhed in that poison like an endless nest of snakes. In the depths far below, Maskelyne thought he glimpsed the great dark shadow of the samal itself.
The tentacles convulsed and shifted suddenly. Something appeared below the hole. Maskelyne stepped back as the parasite thrust the object up through the gap and held it there, ten feet above their heads, in a hundred writhing tentacles.
It appeared to be a coffin, fashioned from dull grey metal. And i
t was hot. Even from where he stood in his suit, Maskelyne could feel the immense heat radiating from that box.
The samal set the box down on the ground to one side of the hole, and then its tentacles unravelled themselves from the object, and withdrew, flailing wildly as they disappeared back into the hole. With a final shudder and exhalation, the hole in the ground slammed shut like the mouth of a predator.
Maskelyne approached the container. ‘And where, may I ask, did you find this?’
The face appeared to recover from its ordeal. It rolled its tremendous eyes upon the three men. ‘Father picked it up,’ it said. ‘Long ago. From a place with buildings.’
‘What sort of buildings?’
‘The sort with food in them,’ the face growled. ‘Take it and leave like you promised.’
Maskelyne held his hand over the container for a moment, then pressed his gloved hand against its metal lid. It was too hot to touch for more than a few moments. He wandered around it. It clearly resembled a coffin. It was made of metal, with a handle at each end, and utterly unadorned as far as he could tell – which was itself unusual for an Unmer creation. He tried to lift the lid, but it would not shift. Then he located a keyhole in the middle of one side.
‘Oh my,’ he said.
‘What?’ Pendragon said.
‘Why would anyone build a coffin with a lock in it?’
‘Bone thieves,’ Pendragon said.
Maskelyne looked at him. ‘Are there such things?’
‘You can get thirty gilders for a sorcerer’s skeleton.’
‘Really? Why?’
‘Elixirs.’
Maskelyne grunted. He wondering which – if any – of the millions of keys the Drowned had brought him might fit that lock. For this had to be the source of their queer behaviour. A sorcerer’s coffin submerged in the ocean. By leaving their keys on his shore, the Drowned had been sending him messages about it for years.
But whatever was compelling them to do so?
He had no intention of trying to find the correct key, if it even existed. He had gas cutting-torches aboard the Lamp. ‘If we slide the lances through these handles,’ he said, ‘we should be able to carry it between us.’