Free A Triumph of Souls by Alan Dean Foster

stalks that weaved slowly from side to side.
    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 allmanner 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 tobe; not with those enormous sharp-spined arms with which to defend itself.
    “What is afoot not indeed, but aplenty,” Simna murmured to the