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“Go!” shouted Hereward to the remaining pirate, who needed no urging. She was halfway up the rope as Hereward knelt down, held his sword with both hands and whirled on his heel in a complete circle, the fine edge of his blade slicing through the lower points of half a dozen advancing starfish. As they fell over, Hereward threw his sword up to the wharf, jumped on the back of the starfish that was hunched over the fallen pirate, leaped to the rope and swarmed up it as starfish points tugged at his heels, rasping off the soles of his boots.
The woman pirate handed Hereward his sword as he reached the deck of the wharf. Once again the surviving quartet huddled close to him, eager to stay within the small circle of light provided by his brassard.
“Watch the end of the wharf!” instructed Hereward. He looked over the side. The huge starfish were everywhere below, but they were either unable or unwilling to climb up, so unless a new enemy presented itself there was a chance of some respite.
“She’s gone,” whispered one of his crew.
The Sea-Cat was indeed no longer visible in the tu
“The ground rising up has set her aback,” said Hereward. “But Captain Fury will land a reinforcement, I’m sure.”
“There are so many of them evil stars,” whispered the same man.
“They can be shot and cut to pieces,” said Hereward sternly. “We will prevail, have no fear.”
He spoke confidently, but was not so certain himself. Particularly as he could see the pieces of all the cut-up starfish wriggling together into a pile below, joining together to make an even bigger starfish, one that could reach up to the wharf.
“We’ll move back to the quay,” he a
The five of them moved back along the wharf in a compact huddle, with weapons facing out, like a hedgehog slowly retreating before a predator. Once on the quay, Hereward ordered them to reload, but they had all dropped their pistols, and Hereward had lost one of his pair. He gave his remaining gun to the gold-toothed pirate.
“There are stone houses above,” he said, gesturing into the dark. “If we must retreat, we shall find a defensible position there.”
“Why wait? Let’s get behind some walls now.”
“We wait for Captain Fury and the others,” said Hereward. “They’ll be here any—”
The crack of a small gun drowned out his voice. It was followed a second later by a brilliant flash that lit up the whole cavern and then hard on the heels of the flash came a blinding horizontal bolt of forked lightning that spread across the whole harbour floor, branching into hundreds of lesser jolts that co
A strong, nauseatingly powerful stench of salt and rotted meat washed across the pirates on the quay as the darkness returned. Hereward blinked several times and swallowed to try and clear his ears, but neither effort really worked. He knew from experience that both sight and sound would return in a few minutes, and he also knew that the explosion and lightning could only be the work of Mister Fitz. Nevertheless he had an anxious few minutes till he could see enough to make out the fuzzy globes that must be lanterns held by approaching friendly forces, and hear his fellows well enough to know that he would also hear any enemy on the wharf or quay.
“It’s the captain!” cried a pirate. “She’s done those stars in.”
The starfish had certainly been dealt a savage blow. Fury and Fitz and a column of lantern-bearing pirates were making their way through a charnel field of thousands of pieces of starfish meat, few of them bigger than a man’s fist.
But as the pirates advanced, the starfish pieces began to move, pallid horrors wriggling across the stony ground, melding with other pieces to form more mobile gobbets of invertebrate flesh, all of them moving to a central rendezvous somewhere beyond the illumination of the lanterns.
Hereward did not pause to wonder exactly what these disgusting starfish remnants were going to do in the darker reaches of the harbour. He ran along the wharf and took Fitz’s hand, helping the puppet to climb the boarding nets that Fury’s crew were throwing up. Before Fitz was on his feet, pirates raced past them both, talking excitedly of treasure, the starfish foe forgotten. Hereward’s own boat crew, who might have more reason than most to be more thoughtful, had already been absorbed into this flood of looters.
“The starfish are growing back,” said Hereward urgently, as he palmed off a too-eager pirate who nearly trod on Fitz.
“Not exactly,” corrected Fitz. “Forjill-Um-Uthrux is manifesting itself more completely here. It will use its starfish minions to craft a physical shape. And possibly more importantly—”
“Captain Suresword!” cried Fury, clapping him on the back. Her eyes were bright, there were several dark spots on her face and her ears were long and furred, but she evidently had managed to halt or slow the full transformation. “On to the treasure!”
She laughed and ran past him, with many pirates behind her. Up ahead, the sound of ancient doors being knocked down was already being replaced by gleeful and astonished cries as many hundredweight of loose gold and silver coinage poured out around the looter’s thighs.
“More importantly perhaps, Um-Uthrux is doing something to manipulate the sea,” continued Fitz. “It has tilted the harbour floor significantly and I can perceive energistic tendrils extending well beyond this island. I fear it raising the tide ahead of time and with it—”
“The eagre,” said Hereward. “Do we have time to get out?”
“No,” said Fitz. “It will be at the mouth of the gorge within minutes. We must swiftly deal with Um-Uthrux and then take refuge in one of the upper buildings, the strongest possible, where I will spin us a bubble of air.”
“How big a bubble?” asked Hereward, as he took a rapid glance around. There were lanterns bobbing all around the slope above the quay, and it looked like all two hundred odd of Fury’s crew were in amongst the Scholar-Pirates’ buildings.
“A single room, sufficient for a dozen mortals,” said Fitz. “Ah, Um-Uthrux has made its host. Please gather as many pirates as you can to fire on it, Hereward. I will require some full minutes of preparation.”
The puppet began to take off his banda
In the brief flash of light, Hereward saw a truly giant starfish begi
“Fury!” roared Hereward as he sprinted back along the wharf, ignoring the splinters in his now bare feet, his ruined boots flapping about his ankles. “Fury! Sea-Cats! To arms, to arms!”
He kept shouting, but he could not see Fury, and the pirates in sight were gold-drunk, bathing uproariously in piles of coin and articles of virtu that had spilled out of the broken treasure houses and into the cobbled streets between the buildings.
“To arms! The enemy!” Hereward shouted again. He ran to the nearest knot of pirates and dragged one away from a huge gold-chased silver cup that was near as big as he was. “Form line on the quay!”