A Triumph of Souls (8 page)

Those terrible spines helped first one leg, then another, to secure a grip on the boarding ladder. Turning itself sideways,
the visitant from the frigid ocean deep began to make its way upward. Muttering softly and swiftly to their respective chosen
deities, two more of the crew fled for the safety and anonymity of their quarters.

From claw-tip to claw-tip, the creature hauling itself up out of the water was no less than twenty feet across. Seaweed clung
to extruded spurs and hung from legs and eyestalks. Water dripped from its body while tiny bubbles oozed around the edges
of the multipart mouth.

Simna was at once fascinated by and disappointed in the nocturnal caller. “Your weed man was right, bruther. He sent to us
a king.” The swordsman made a disgusted sound. “A king crab.”

“A king crab, yes,” Ehomba readily agreed, “but is that all it is?”

His companion frowned. “I don’t follow you, Etjole. Not that it’s the first time your reasoning has left me blind, deaf, and
dumb.”

The herdsman continued his line of thinking. “It is a king crab, but is it also a king among crabs? Look at its head.”

“Must I?” Even as he objected, the swordsman complied. The longer he stared, the more his frustration gave way to dawning
realization. There in the dim glow supplied by the
Grömsketter’s
oil lamps he saw those spines and projections in a new and implausible light. Squint a little, squeeze the eyes tight, and
one could almost see those chitonous barbs and protuberances coming together to form, if not an actual crown, at least an
approximation of a comparable configuration.

“What now?” he muttered. “Don’t tell me, bruther, that you can talk to even so lowly a creature as this? Big as it is, it
is still only a crab, a creature that spends all its life grubbing in the muck and ooze at the bottom of the sea.”

“You have many good qualities, friend Simna, but you also have an unfortunate tendency to underestimate all
manner of living things based upon their lifestyle. I know of men who abide at rarefied heights yet who cannot be trusted
to tend to their own children, while others who live in the depths of poverty and homeliness I would charge with the safekeeping
of my own wife.”

Simna was not so easily rebuked. “Then if I underestimate, you overtrust, my friend.”

Ehomba smiled. “Perhaps between us, then, we may make one sensible human being.” He turned away as long, clawed legs came
clambering over the side of the ship. “You are right to say that I cannot ‘talk’ to a crab. But there are numerous manners
of speaking, Simna, of which the Naumkib know more than many other peoples. It is what comes of living in a lonely country.
You learn to make yourself known to whatever inhabits the same land as yourself, however many legs it happens to walk upon.”

The prodigious crustacean finally clambered over the railing to settle on the deck with a waterlogged
thunk
. Stalks swiveled bulbous eyes to right and then to left. Behind it, a captivated Stanager Rose spoke to Ehomba without taking
her eyes off the visitor.

“If this is what your weedy man meant when he told you he would try to implore a king to come calling on us, then he must
have believed you could communicate with it. I certainly can’t. I would know how to boil it, but not talk to it. I certainly
don’t see what other use it can be of to us.”

“Nor do I,” Ehomba confessed. “But you are right, Captain. The sargassum man must have had a thought in mind or he would not
have asked this creature to seek us out. I will try my best to find out what is afoot.” As soon as he stepped forward, the
huge crab scrabbled sideways to confront him. It was wary, but not afraid. Nor had it reason to
be; not with those enormous sharp-spined arms with which to defend itself.

“What is afoot not indeed, but aplenty,” Simna murmured to the hulking Hunkapa, who stood open-mouthed behind him. Unsurprisingly,
the shaggy mountain did not react to what the swordsman felt was his best sally in some time.

Behind both of them, the black litah stood and stared in silence. From time to time its long tongue would emerge to lick heavy
lips. The humans aboard were not alone in their fondness for the taste of crabmeat. The cat restrained the impulses that were
surging through it. Ehomba had scolded him before for trying to eat an envoy. It was, the herdsman had pontificated at the
time in no uncertain terms, not only bad manners but very poor diplomacy.

But oh, Ahlitah mused, what a meal this visitor would make!

Standing alone before the visitant, aware that those watching viewed it from perspectives as wildly different from one another
as from his, Ehomba considered how best to proceed. The type of talking itself was no stranger to him. He had known it since
childhood, albeit with a considerably lesser degree of eloquence. He simply did not want to get off on the wrong foot. Offend
this noble creature and it would doubtless plunge itself right back into the depths it had risen from. It was not for nothing
that its kind were called crabs.

Raising both hands, he began to wiggle several of his fingers in a certain manner. Though when it came to sheer number of
limbs his counterpart had him outgunned, not all could be used simultaneously for conversation. Out of
the water, at least, several had to be used at all times to support the weighty body.

“Well would you look at that!” Not for the first time Simna was all but struck dumb by an unexpected talent of his lanky companion.
This time there was no question that sorcery was not involved. It was, as Ehomba had tried to explain, simply a different
kind of speaking. One that made use of hand signs, or in the case of the crab king, foot signs, to express notions, emotions,
and ideas.

After several minutes the giant crustacean and the tall human were practically shouting, so rapid and intense had the movements
of their respective limbs become. It was certain that much was being said, but what, not a man jack among the crew had a clue.
Neither did Simna ibn Sind, or the black litah, and certainly not the utterly engrossed Hunkapa Aub, who had to pause to ponder
the meaning of any sentence longer than ten words.

Eventually the frenetic exchange of signs slowed. Bending low, Ehomba extended a hand. It was met by a thorny claw. They did
not shake, exactly. The crustacean’s armature would not properly allow it. But there was a definite physical meeting, following
which those remarkable legs proceeded to carry their owner once more up over the railing and down the side of the ship. Rushing
to the rail, those members of the crew who had remained on deck watched as the spiny, starlike shape sank once more beneath
the wavelets, swallowed up entire by water the color of blue-black ink.

Direct as always, Stanager was first to question Ehomba. “Are we to make anything of that? Or was it no more than an unlikely
dialogue?”

Turning to her, the herdsman smiled. “They are going to
try to help us. Not because it is in their nature to do so, or because it would ever happen under ordinary circumstances—but
because the sargassum man asked it of them. As fellow creatures of the sea, it seems they have a compact of sorts that is
very old, and inviolate. The king was reluctant, but as soon as he saw that I was able to speak with him, his last uncertainties
disappeared.”

“I’m glad they’re going to try to help us,” Simna put in. “If not, I’d hate to think we let such a superb meal just walk away.”

Ehomba glanced over at his friend. “Odd you should say that, Simna. The king was thinking the same about you. About all of
us. His people are quite fond of the taste of man, having dined on numerous occasions on the bodies of sailors drowned at
sea. At the bottom of the ocean, it seems, nothing goes to waste.”

The swordsman envisioned himself sinking, slowly sinking to the soft sands below, his face turned blue, his eyes bulging in
a manner not unlike the crab’s. Saw himself settling to the bottom, to be visited not long thereafter by first one small crab,
and then another, and another, until dozens of tiny but sharply efficient claws were ripping at his saturated flesh, tearing
off bits of meat to be stuffed into alien, insectlike jaws, there to be ground into…

“Like I said.” Simna swallowed uncomfortably. “I’m glad they’re going to try to help us.” He blinked. “Hoy, wait a moment.
Who are ‘they’?”

“The king and his minions, of course. Apparently he commands a substantial empire, even if all of it is hidden well beneath
the waves.”

“I don’t understand.” Stanager’s expression showed
clearly how much she disliked not understanding. “How can they help us to leave this valley?”

“The king did not say.” Ehomba looked past her, to the east. “He told me that we should wait here until morning, and then
we would all see if the thing was possible.”

Her tone was sarcastic. “That we can certainly do! It’s not as if we had plans to be anywhere else.” Nodding past Terious,
she indicated the hopeful, attentive crew. “Set the watch, Mr. Kamarkh. All crew to be sounded to quarters if anything, um,
unusual should start to happen.” Raising her voice, she addressed the others herself. “All of you, hear me! Get some sleep.
With luck”—and she glanced at the studiously noncommittal Ehomba—”tomorrow will find us freed of this place.

“Though how,” she murmured as she turned and strode past the herdsman, “I cannot begin to imagine.”

I
t was not a perfect morning, but it would do. As was his wont, Ehomba rose with the sun. Normally one to sleep in, even aboard
ship, Simna ibn Sind bestirred himself as soon as he sensed his rangy companion was awake. Whatever was going to happen, he
was not about to miss it. And if nothing happened, as he half suspected it might, why then he would have a fine excuse for
returning early to bed.

Hunkapa Aub was already awake, it being hard for him to sleep long in the cramped space he had been provided in the hold.
There was no sign of Ahlitah, there being little that could rouse the big cat from its rest. Hands working against one another
behind her back, Stanager Rose nervously paced the helm deck as she stared out to sea. She manifested more anxiety than she
intended when Ehomba finally showed himself.

“Anything?” Shading his eyes against the sharpness of the early morning sun, the herdsman scanned the surrounding waters.

“Nothing. Nothing at all, unless you call the presence of a hundred or so flying fish significant. I hope your crab was
not keeping you hand-talking so long merely because he valued the opportunity for conversation.”

“I do not think so. And he is not my crab, nor the sargassum man’s. Whatever happens, he was most definitely his own crab.”

A cry came from the lookout. It was indistinct, perhaps because the man was choked with surprise. But his extended arm, if
not his foreshortened words, pointed the way.

Rising from the calm surface of the sea beneath the bowsprit was a line of crabs. All manner of crabs. Every type and kind
and variety of crab the sailors of the
Grömsketter
had ever seen, as well as a goodly number that were new to them. Ehomba recognized some they did not, and there were many
that he had never seen before. There were blue crabs and stone crabs, snow crabs and lady crabs, rock crabs and green crabs.
There were tiny sand crabs and fiddler crabs, each sporting a single grotesquely oversized dueling claw. Pea crabs vied for
space in the line with hermit crabs, while pelagic crabs shared the water with benthic crabs that were utterly devoid of color
and nearly so of eyesight. There were king crabs, too, but of them all were subjects and none visibly a king.

The line they formed was a good two feet wide and stretched across the surface as far as one could see. Stretched all the
way across the valley and up the nearest aqueous slope, in fact. Claws linked tightly to claws while spiny legs entwined,
the chitonous queue continuing to thicken and grow even as those aboard the trapped vessel gathered to gaze at the astonishing
sight.

“Millions.” Much as he liked the taste of crab, Simna found he was not hungry. He remembered all too clearly
what Ehomba had told him the night before about the crustaceans’ traditional taste for the flesh of drowned men. “There must
be millions of them!”

“Tens of millions,” the herdsman agreed. Beneath the bowsprit the clacking of claws and scrape of shell on shell was almost
deafening.

“How does this help us?” In her years at sea Stanager Rose had seen many strange things, but nothing to quite match the crustaceal
armada presently assembling beneath the bow of her ship. “What do we do?”

“I know!” Never one to hesitate at venturing expertise in matters where he had none, Simna spoke up enthusiastically. “Etjole’s
going to magick them so that they carry us on their backs. As soon as enough have congregated, hoy?”

Ehomba eyed his friend dolefully. “There is no magic in this, Simna.” Looking past him, he smiled encouragingly at Stanager.
“When a hundred million crabs present themselves at the ready, Captain, I think it might be advisable to throw them a line.”

“Throw them a… ?” For the barest of instants she gazed back uncomprehendingly. Then she turned and barked orders to Terious
and the rest of the waiting crew.

The strongest cord on board was made fast around a fore capstan. When the mate was convinced it could be knotted no better,
the unsecured end was heaved over the bow. It landed with a convincing splash just to the right of the line of floating crabs.

Immediately, those forming the end of the line nearest the ship swarmed over the rope. At any other time and in any other
place they might well have tried to eat it, but not this morning. Sharp claws dug deep into the thick hemp, legs burying themselves
into the folds of the triple weave.

“Line going out!” one of the crew monitoring the capstan shouted.

Stanager glanced briefly at Ehomba. He did not react to the warning and continued to lean over the bow watching the frenzied
crustaceans. “Let it go,” she directed the crew tersely.