In the Ruins (Crown of Stars 6)

“I think we have time. The second wave did not approach until we had walked all the way from the old fort. If you have ever sat upon the sea’s shore and watched the waves, Captain, you will have seen they have a rhythm of their own. These great waves need time to approach.”

Fulk had stood firm through many terrible events when others quailed and faltered, and although the prospect of drowning clearly horrified him, he did not fail Sanglant now. “Very well. I’ll come with you, Your Majesty.”

Sanglant grinned and strode forward. The ground was not hopelessly muddy because the tide had come up and receded too swiftly to soak in, but damp ash made the ground slick and debris from the forest caught about their ankles and snagged in their leggings. It was not silent but uncannily still, with no sign of life but their own soft footsteps. The hissing fall of ash serenaded them. Maybe it would never stop raining down. Perhaps the heavens themselves had burned and now shed the soot of their destruction over the earth. The throttling gurgle of the sea faded in the distance as the tide receded back and back beyond the tidal flats, although it was difficult to see anything clearly through the haze. Now and again they caught the scent of rot.

They walked out onto the plain, glancing back at intervals to see the forest, farther away each time, and the troop clustered at the fringe of the trees, obscured by falling ash.

“Are you sure Lewenhardt saw anything, Your Majesty?” Fulk asked at last. “It could have been the wind. It’s hard to see anything with all this cloud and ash.”

“Hush.” Sanglant held up a hand, and Fulk fell silent, not moving, chin lifted as he, too, strove to hear. But few men had the unnaturally keen hearing that Sanglant possessed, and Fulk could not hear the faint sounds of splashing. “It sounds like a fish flopping half out of water. There!”

A ditch had captured something living that now thrashed in a remnant of seawater. They came cautiously to the edge and stared down into a pit filled with a murky blend of mud, water, and scraps of vegetation. A corpse was fixed between the axles of a shattered wagon, face mercifully hidden by one wheel, legs gray where they stuck out of the scummy surface.

“Ai, God!” cried Fulk, stepping back in horror.

The tide had trapped a monster from the deeps. Sensing them, it heaved its body fully back into the water with a splash, but it had nowhere to hide. They could distinguish its huge tail sluicing back and forth. At last it reared up out of the mud defiantly, whipping its head side to side and spraying mud and flecks of grass and leaves everywhere. Its hair hissed and snapped at them, each strand like an eyeless eel seeking a meal out of the air. It had a man’s torso, lean and powerful, shimmering with scales. It had a face, of a kind: flat eyes, slits where a nose should otherwise grow, a lipless mouth, and scaly hands webbed between its clawed fingers.

“It’s a man-fish,” whispered Fulk. “That kind we saw on the river!”

It was trapped and therefore doomed, washed in and stranded by the tide, but a fearsome beast nevertheless and therefore not worthy of mercy. Yet Sanglant frowned as Fulk drew his sword. The creature stared boldly at them. Sharp teeth gleamed as it opened its mouth. And spoke.

“Prinss Ssanglant. Cap’tin Fulk.”

Fulk jumped backward. “How can this beast know our names!”

“Prinss Ssanglant,” it repeated. The eels that were its hair hissed and writhed as though they, too, voiced a message, one he could not understand.

“Can you speak Wendish? What are you? What are you called?”

“Gnat,” it seemed to say, yet it kept talking in a language he did not understand, although he had heard it before.

“That’s Jinna.”

“It’s too garbled, Your Majesty. I can’t tell.”

“Can you speak Wendish?” he said slowly, because he knew no words of Jinna. He tried out the other languages he could stumble along in. “Can you speak Ungrian? Can you speak the tongue known to the Quman? Can you—”

“Liat’ano,” it said, lifting a hand in pantomime to shade its flat eyes as would a man staring into the bright sun.

“Liathano! Do you speak of my wife, Liath?”

The creature hissed, as in agreement.

“What does this mean, my lord prince?” whispered Fulk. “How can such a monster know our names?”

“I don’t know. How could such a creature have learned to speak Jinna?”

“Jinna!” The creature spoke again at length, but they could only shake their heads. Impatience burned at him like fire as he wondered what this creature knew and what it could tell him. Did Liath live, or was she dead? How did it recognize them?

“Are there any in our party who can speak the language of the Jinna?” asked Fulk.

“Only Liath,” he said bitterly. “That’s why she took those two Jinna servants with her. She was the only one who could understand them.”

“What do we do?”

“Drag it back to the sea. If it can speak, then it is no mute beast but a thinking creature like us.”

“What if it is our enemy? You see its teeth and claws. I heard the stories the ship-master told us—that it eats human flesh.”