Free Ship of Dreams by Brian Lumley Page A

of Serannian but a ship of Death!
    Her sails were leprous gray and her hull and Kraken-carved figurehead were dull, lifeless black. Only the eyes in the carven octopus which served as a figurehead had any color at all, and they were of a baleful red. The flag she flew was the skull and crossbones, and lining her decks the crew was formed of silent, gray-robed, hooded figures whose half-hidden faces gazed emotionless and yet with dire intent upon the Cloud Treader where she rode, all unprepared, upon that ocean of the upper air.
    Then, feeling a terror within himself and waves of fear rising in his crew, the man-o’-war’s captain had ordered full sail—but too late. Even as Cloud Treader began to draw away from the pirate, so her strange black cannons opened fire. Fist-sized cannon balls struck Cloud Treader ’s hull and crashed through, and one shattered as it flew through the gunwales and onto the deck. It was filled with a gushing green vapor which quickly dispersed. No poison this, for those who saw and smelled it were neither offended nor made ill. If not an agency immediately inimical to life, then what?
    But now, amazingly, the man-o’-war began to list to starboard, tilting toward the pirate. Now too her gunners had recovered themselves sufficiently to aim their ray-projectors at the decks of the black ship and the leaden figures of her crew where they stood at the rail. Brilliant beams of light raked those decks, passed over the massed, unsmiling crew of the grim vessel—with no visible effect whatever! Those deadly beams, effective against all manner of evil and nightmarish life in the dreamlands, were utterly impotent where the black pirate and her crew were concerned.
    And at last the meaning of the green vapor became clear. For as more cannon balls entered Cloud Treader ’s hull, so the man-o’-war tilted further yet, and it was seen that the vapor must be a nullifying agent which destroyed the power of the ship to stay afloat on the air. While Cloud Treader wallowed and her crew uselessly blazed away with their ray-projectors, so the pirate circled around and began to pound her port side. And now it was plain that the man-o’-war was doomed.
    Down below, something broke in the engine which made Cloud Treader ’s flotation essence. The engineer, working frantically to restore life to the precious device, knew that he was fighting a losing battle. Slowly but surely the man-o’-war was sinking, drifting down through deeps of the sky, falling toward the surface of the Southern Sea far below. And the pirate fell with her, circling, firing her cannons; until the last, as the final dregs of Cloud Treader ’s life-essence were dispersed, she gave up all pretence of buoyancy and fell like a meteor from the sky.
    Dyrill Sim remembered little of that mad rush to the bosom of the deep green Southern Sea, except that he had been aloft and in the rigging and that when a sail ripped loose and fluttered free, he had flown with it. Then he remembered the wash of the sea, and how he had lashed himself to shattered planking, and a mad, half-conscious vision of the black ship sailing down out of the sky to alight upon slowly swelling waters.
    Now a voluptuous female figure rode astride the evil octopus figurehead, shouting commands as her crew of silent, gray-clad—zombies?—swarmed over the sundered wreckage of Cloud Treader, seeking something out. And finally, before darkness overcame him, Dyrill Sim saw Cloud Treader ’s essence-engine ripped loose and held up to the beautiful yet strangely enigmatic
woman where she sat astride the Kraken figurehead. She laughed with a voice that tinkled like bells and said:
    “Let the sea take it! It failed the so-called ‘man-o’-war,’ didn’t it? Well, then our engines are better. Zura’s engines are better, and with her engines and her cannons she will become queen of all the dreamlands. Princess of Death and Disaster I am already, and soon I shall extend my charnel