Free 01 - The Burning Shore by Robert Ear - (ebook by Undead) Page A

spilled down, some over Florin’s face, some into his mouth.
    Lorenzo squeezed the water skin and realised that it was empty.
    He cursed again, and looked resentfully at the tightly sealed door of their
cabin. The skipper had promised to send water into them twice a day. He’d
promised soup too, come to think of it. But for the past few days there’d been
no sign of water, or of soup, or anything else.
    For all Lorenzo knew he and Florin were the last survivors of a ghost ship.
The two of them would rot away in the squalid isolation of this tiny cabin
whilst the Destrier swept to her doom.
    He tore his thoughts away from that disturbing idea and instead indulged
himself in a brief fantasy, a dream of impossible comfort that involved nothing
more than curling up in his bunk and waiting for the storm to pass.
    A horrible squeaking groan from the ship’s innards snapped him back to
reality. He knew that he no longer had a choice. Without water Florin’s fever
would devour him, and he’d no more allow that to happen to his friend than his
friend would allow it to happen to him.
    Struggling out of his jerkin and leaving it in the dryness of the cabin
Lorenzo hung the four water skins he’d managed to scrounge across his chest and
opened the cabin door.
    The storm, it seemed, had been waiting for that very moment. With a deafening
roar it pushed past him in an arc of salt spray and howling wind, the force of
it scouring the inside of the cabin.
    Lorenzo, head bowed down as he struggled out of the cabin onto the lifting
deck, swung the door shut behind him. The slam of wood on wood was lost in the
cacophony. The spray that lashed across the pitching deck was thicker than rain,
and the manservant found himself spitting out bitter mouthfuls of sea water as
he seized one of the ropes that lined the Destrier ’s gunwale and pulled
himself forward.
    He tried not to look over the side into the thrashing abyss that waited
below. Beneath the weight of the storm clouds the sea was black and bruised, the
mad flecks of foam that scudded across its surface a dull grey. It looked alive,
Lorenzo thought, tearing his eyes away. And hungry.
    With tears streaming down his face he pulled himself along the gunwale
towards the hatch that led to the water casks below. The Destrier, meanwhile, lurched drunkenly from one side to the other, now filling Lorenzo’s
field of vision with the ravenous depths of the sea, now hiding everything but
for torn rigging and boiling skies.
    Somehow, despite the weakness in Lorenzo’s knees and the rolling in his empty
stomach, he ignored the twin monsters of sea and sky and pulled himself forward.
By now his hands had frozen into petrified claws around the rough hemp of the
rope. Blisters grew and popped as he slid his palms down the unforgiving
surface.
    “Come on then,” Lorenzo roared in tiny defiance of the elements. “Gome and
get me.”
    The storm snatched at him in response. Dragging himself ever onwards, Lorenzo
laughed with a hard edge of hysteria in his voice.
    By the time he’d drawn level with the hatch his hands were pink with a
burning compound of blood and seawater. Although his destination was only a
lunge away he made himself wait as the Destrier rolled to the left,
bringing her side down close enough to the sea’s angry surface for a sudden wave
to rear up and slap him a numbing blow across the back.
    “Rot your bollocks,” he snarled defiantly and waited for the Destrier to right herself. The second she did so he unclenched his hands from the rope
and dived across the deck.
    As soon as he left the support of the gunwale his feet slid from under him
and he fell onto his knees. But it was too late to give up now. Crawling across
a slick of polished wood and running water, sliding this way and that, he
struggled desperately onwards towards the oasis of the hatch.
    He almost made it on the first attempt. Almost. But just as his fingertips
brushed against the