She urged him onwards. ‘Quickly, set the crew to work. No time for talking.’

‘Yes ma’am.’ Jute ran for the Silver Dawn. Drawing near, he waved, shouting: ‘Push off! All crew! Now!’

First Mate Buen appeared at the side. He shouted back, ‘What’s that?’

Jute came stumbling and slogging through the mud. ‘I said get the crew out, damn you!’

Buen gestured to the bay, now shrouded in dense mists. ‘It’s too foggy to set out. Can’t see a thing.’

Jute nearly screamed his frustration. He drew the shortsword at his side – the first time he could recall ever doing so – and pointed it at his mate. ‘Get everyone over the side now! We’re leaving or we’re dead!’

Buen raised his hands. ‘All right all right. What’s the big rush?’

‘Just do it!’

The mate turned away. ‘You heard the cap’n. Over the side.’

‘But it’s muddy out there,’ someone complained. Dulat, perhaps.

Jute leaned an arm against the slick planks and rested his head there in disbelief. He glanced across the flats: Lady Orosenn stood in the muck next to her launch, facing inland. Her oarsmen, stiff figures in rags, hardly stirred a muscle. Something about them made him jerk his gaze away to examine the Resolute. Tyvar was of course making far greater headway than he. His crew had jumped down and even now were crowding around the bows to push.

We’re going to die, he told himself.

Movement up the slope caught his eye. A lone figure, running, arms waving. It was a sailor by the rags he wore. ‘Take me!’ the man bellowed, his voice cracking. ‘By the merciful gods – take me with you!’

Buen appeared in the muck at Jute’s side. He pointed. ‘Who in the green Abyss is that?’

Jute glared, then shoved him to the planks. ‘Push, damn you!’ More of his crew came jumping reluctantly into the clinging mud. ‘Push, all of you! Push!’

‘Please take me wi—’ Something choked off the man’s call and Jute turned to look.

Coils of mist enmeshed the sailor. As Jute watched, those ropes and scarves lifted the man up into the air where he struggled in eerie silence. Then the ribbons of shifting gossamer fog about his middle yanked tight. The man vomited – but not the normal stomach contents. The very organs themselves came bursting from his mouth in a rain of escaping fluids to slap to the ground as a mess of pulped viscera. Jute fought his own gorge. The corpse, nearly cut in half now, a blood-red organ dangling from its mouth, jerked as the banners of mist yanked each limb clean off, one after the other, the arms first and then the legs.

One of Jute’s crew gagged and vomited.

The tendrils then lashed like whips and Jute ducked as the dismembered parts of the corpse came flying at the Dawn to bang against the hull. The torso thumped wetly to the deck.