Free The Obsidian Dagger (Horatio Lyle) by Catherine Webb

heavy boxes sat, sliding loosely on the floor of the ship, weighed down by their contents. Something cold brushed Lyle’s ankle and he jerked, torch slipping in his hand and starting to slide downwards. An eel, slim and dirty, wriggled past him and into the gloom of the ship. He took a hasty breath of air from the pipe and swam to catch the torch and hold it up again, half-blinded by the stinging water and the cold that seemed to dull colour and thought.
    The circle of faint light in which he swam fell on something lying half-open in a corner. He pulled himself towards it, feet now numb from the cold, and heard again the agonized creak of the dying ship, felt the weight of water above and below, and heard ringing in his ears and the incredible weight of his own limbs dragging him down.
    The thing that was half-open looked like a coffin, made entirely of stone. It was dull and crude and slab-like, and looked as if it was designed to contain a figure slightly larger than Lyle, in both height and width. But instead of tapering towards the toes it was square. On the lid was a very large, slightly crooked cross. Lyle ran his fingers over one side of it, but his white fingertips, tainted pale blue, couldn’t feel anything. He swung round gracelessly, clinging on to the edge of the coffin, and dragged himself bodily down until his nose almost touched the sarcophagus. He saw what his fingers were too numb to feel - the small marks around the centre and edges, where a crowbar had been inserted - and felt almost relieved to see a sign of foul play. Heavy on the floor lay half of a broken stone seal. He half-swam, half-bent down and picked it up, turning it this way and that to see again the crooked cross, shattered in two. He dropped the seal, brought the torch closer until he imagined he could feel its warmth on his cheek, and peered at the coffin lid. Inside the lid, underneath the giant cross, there were hundreds of little scratches.
    And there it was. The sense of dread, a deep, old suspicion, colder than the ice in his blood, began to settle over him. He ran his hands over the inside of the coffin lid, but it was a futile gesture and he knew it. Even if his fingers couldn’t feel precisely, he could count the marks - five parallel lines here, five parallel lines there - and knew that hands had clawed at the inside of this lid in the past, trying to get out. Lyle suddenly felt very alone and exposed, his mind drifting into places where the rest of him didn’t want to be.
    About to push away, his eye caught, just in one corner, another very small mark. He moved closer and peered at it, no larger than the area inside his hooped finger and thumb. The light from the torch began to flicker erratically, the hissing flame drawing down lower. But as the white magnesium flare began to die, he saw by the dirty yellow light two cogs, one set inside the other, counting down the minutes to midnight, or noon, whichever one it was, and he thought of the ring he had pulled from Stanlaw’s dead white hand, and shuddered through the frozen weight of his own skin.
    He turned to swim away, and a pair of eyes, stone cold, angry and hateful, glared back at him. He choked on his own cry, bubbles exploding from his nose and mouth and briefly blinding him, and kicked out instinctively. His foot struck something hard and sharp, which rolled away, spinning off into the darkness, taking the hate-filled eyes with them. Something went thump in the dark. He hesitated, leaning back into the shadows of the alcove which held the stone coffin, his lungs suddenly burning and the ringing in his ears rising to a new and insistent pitch. He held the pipe to his mouth and breathed, until the pipe was just a thin contracted rope behind him, all the air sucked out.
    The warmer air was calming, but not much. He swam, very cautiously, torch held out at arm’s length, until he saw the eyes again, this time glaring up at the ceiling. They belonged to a small stone