The corpse light of storm-wracked afternoon slid towards evening, and Sir George realized dully that they had somehow survived another day.
He was too exhausted even to feel surprised . . . and though he tried to feel grateful, at least, a part of him was anything but. Another night of horror and fear, exhaustion and desperate struggle, loomed, and even as he gathered himself to face it, that traitor part wanted only for it to end. For it to be over.
To rest.
But there would be rest enough soon enough, he reminded himself. An eternity of it, if he was fortunate enough to avoid Hell. He hoped he would be, but he was also a realist—and a soldier. And the best of soldiers would face an arduous stay in Purgatory, while the worst . . .
He brushed the thought aside, not without the wistful wish that he and Father Timothy might have argued it out one more time, and made himself peer about. The second ship was still with them, further away as darkness gathered, but still fighting its way across the heaving gray waste, and he could actually see a third vessel beyond it. There might even be one or two more beyond the range of his sight, but—
Sir George’s stumbling, exhaustion-sodden thoughts jerked to a stop, and his hand tightened like a claw on the stay. A cracked voice screamed something, barely audible over the roar of wind and sea yet touched with a fresh and different terror, and Sir George clamped his jaws against a bellow of matching fear as the shape burst abruptly and impossibly through the savage backdrop of cloud and rain.
He couldn’t grasp it, at first. Couldn’t wrap his mind about it or find any point of reference by which to measure or evaluate it. It was too huge, too alien . . . too impossible. It could not exist, not in a world of mortals, yet it loomed above them, motionless, shrugging aside the fury of the gale as if it were but the gentlest of zephyrs. Gleaming like polished bronze, flickering with the reflected glare of lightning, a mile and more in length, a thing of subtle curves and gleaming flanks caparisoned in jewellike lights of red and white and amber.
He stared at it, too amazed and astonished to think, the terror of the storm—even his fear for his wife and son—banished by sheer, disbelieving shock as that vast shape hung against the seething cloud and rain.
And then it began to move. Not quickly, but with contemptuous ease, laughing at the gale’s baffled wrath. It drifted over the more distant of the cogs he’d seen earlier, and more light appeared as portions of its skin shifted and changed.
No, they’re not “changing,” Sir George thought numbly. They’re opening. And those lights are coming from inside whatever it is. Those are doors, doors to chambers filled with light and—
His thoughts stuttered and halted yet again as more shapes appeared. Far smaller this time, but with that same unnatural stillness as the storm howled about them. Some were cross shaped, with the grace of a gliding gull or albatross, while others were squat cones or even spheres, but all were of the same bronze hue as the huger shape which had spawned them.
They spread out, surrounding the half-foundered cog, and then—
“Sweet Jesu!”
Sir George turned his head, too shocked by the lies of his own eyes to wonder how Father Timothy had suddenly appeared there. The snowy-haired Dominican was a big man, with the powerful shoulders of the archer he’d been before he heard God’s call decades before, and Sir George released his death grip on the stay to fasten fingers of iron on his confessor’s arm.
“In the name of God, Timothy! What is that thing?!”
“I don’t know,” the priest replied honestly. “But—”
His voice chopped off abruptly, and he released his own clutch on the cog’s rail to cross himself urgently. Nor did Sir George blame him.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” the baron whispered, releasing Father Timothy and crossing himself more slowly, almost absently, as an unearthly glare of light leapt out from the shapes which had encircled the other ship. Leapt out, touched the heaving vessel, embraced it . . .