They watched the ship of the dead. They would do so forever.
They had arrived the moment our fate had overtaken us.
Suddenly, as one, twelve heads jerked. Yellow eyes peered into the thinner fog overhead. One short screech filled the heavy air. Dark pinions drummed a frightened bass tattoo. The birds fled clumsily into the granite fog.
I had never seen them fly. Never.
A shadow, as of vast wings, occluded the sky without actually blocking the light.
I suffered my first spate of emotion in ages. It was pure terror.
III
The caravel no longer revolved. Its battered prow pointed an erring north-northeast. A tiny swale of jade bowed around her cutwater. A shallow depression bordered her stern.
Vengeful D. was moving.
Dark avians wheeled round her splintered masts, retreated in consternation.
Our captain lay on the caravel's high poop, beneath the helm, clad in rags. Once they had been noble finery. He still clutched a broken sword. He was Colgrave, the mad pirate.
Not all Colgrave's wounds had come in our last battle. One leg had been crippled for years. Half his face had been so badly burned that a knoll of bone lay exposed on his left cheek.
Colgrave had been the worst of us. He had been the crudest, the most wicked of men.
Our fell commander had collapsed atop several men. His eyes still stared in fiery hatred, burning like the lamps of Hell. For Colgrave, Death was a temporary lover. A woman he would betray when his time came.
Colgrave was convinced of his immortality, of his mission.
Stretched on the high forecastle deck, in rags as dark as the loss of hope, lay another man. A blue and white arrow protruded from his chest. His head and shoulders lay propped against the vessel's side. His hating eyes stared through a break in the railing opposite him. His face was shadowed by ghosts of madness.