Fennec screamed and tried to kiss his grotesque again, but the Brucolac reached him and punched out, straight-fingered, lancing his hand into Fennec’s throat.

The strike sent Fennec caroming to the deck, supine, fighting to breathe. The Brucolac fell with him, his eyes burning. Still Fennec tried to bring the figurine toward his face, and with a kind of contemptuous ease, the Brucolac snatched Fennec’s free hand and held it effortlessly. He raised his foot (with humbling speed) and brought it down on Fennec’s right wrist, stamping savagely, pushing it into the deck and shattering it.

Fennec screamed in a high, silly vibrato as his ruined fingers spasmed. The statue spun across the wood.

He lay on the splinters and howled, blood leaking from his mouth and nose, and from a wrist torn apart. Fennec screamed in agony and terror and paddled his legs uselessly, trying to get away. He was fully corporeal again, broken and pathetically there. Uther Doul appeared, leaning into his field of vision.

As he floundered, Fennec’s shirt tore and flapped open, baring his chest.

It was mottled, clammy, and discolored in great patches of dirt-green and white. It glowed unhealthily like dead flesh. Here and there were ragged flanges, extrusions like catfish whiskers, like fins.

Doul and the Brucolac took in his alterations.

"Look at you…" murmured Uther Doul.

"Is that what it was all about?" hissed the Brucolac, looking at the statue Doul held.

Fennec continued to scream, snottily. The stone doll stared inscrutably at Uther Doul, winking at him, its open eye limpid and cold. It hugged itself with its unclear limbs cut from freezing stone, green-grey or black by turns. It gurned at him with its horrible round mouth, showing its teeth. Doul fingered the flap of skin that was folded down the statue’s back.

"That is a puissant thing," the Brucolac said to Fennec, who shivered as shock set in. "How many Armadans has it killed?"

"Bring him," said Doul to his unwounded men. They came forward, pausing nervously when the Brucolac did not move.

He had interfered despite Doul’s orders, and perhaps had saved his life, but Doul denied him any rueful or apologetic thanks. He simply stared at the Brucolac coldly until, defeated, the vampir moved back.

"He’s ours," whispered Doul to the Brucolac, hefting the figurine.

There were yeomen dying in incomprehensible agony across the deck. Their comrades hefted Fennec without any shade of pity, grabbing him roughly, ignoring his screams.

The citizens at the outer edges of Dry Fall and Thee-And-Thine shivered to hear the sounds from the haunted quarter, and made warding signs.

"That’s like nothing I’ve heard before," they whispered, or similar words, as the screams rang out thinly in the night. "That’s no ghast or ghul… That’s something new, that’s got no business in there."

They could tell it was a man.

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty