“Are those beached whales?” Cruxer asked.
“Orholam have mercy,” someone said.
The wind brought a blast of putrefying flesh and blood to the skimmer and Kip almost gagged. He felt funny. Not just sick or disgusted, but trapped. He wanted to jump into the waves and swim. He wasn’t even sure where. It was a crazed, caged animal feeling.
“Commander,” one of the Blackguards said, “I don’t feel so good.”
“It’s just dead fish,” Ironfist said. “Kalif and Presser, draft us some oars.”
They drafted oars and oar locks and the Blackguards rowed the ship in. When they got within forty paces, the villagers finally noticed them. Some fled outright, while the others merely watched them with hooded eyes.
A tall older man with some kind of long-bladed spear that he had been using to cut into the thick whaleskin stood on a half-butchered whale with one hand on his hip. “Well, the sea she brings us all sorts of insanity, don’t she?” he said.
“Are you the conn here?” Commander Ironfist asked.
“Such as we have,” the man said.
“I’m Commander Ironfist of the Chromeria Blackguard.”
“Ironfist? Aye, we’ve heard that name here. Curious boat you have. I’m Conn Mossbeard.”
He didn’t, so far as Kip could tell, actually have moss in his beard, but it was dyed a pale lichen green.
“What happened here?” Ironfist asked.
“Something’s been building for a couple weeks, though it’s not near so strong today,” the conn said. “Livestock acting like there were coyotes in the yard, but none were, you know what I mean? Plowhorses and oxen shying from their harnesses. Horses spooked. Pigs attacking like all the sudden they thought they were javelinas. We had people injured by the score, by beasts they’d known their whole lives. We’re farmers and fishermen here, we knew something wasn’t right. Still don’t know what, though. They say great powers clash, small folk suffer, I don’t know.” He spat.
Ironfist didn’t interrupt, gestured for the restive Blackguards not to speak either. If the stench of the decaying whales hadn’t been so overpowering, Kip would have jumped off the boat.
What’s gotten into me?
“Whales beached yesterday. Heard of it before. Never seen it, and never heard of so many doing it at once. Handy placement if they’re going to do it, I thought at first. We could get enough meat and oil to last us years, but…” He pulled his tunic up and Kip saw that he had a bandage around his side. It was bloody. “I started giving orders, like I done a thousand times. People here know you got to work together for big jobs like this. But they attacked me instead. Men and women I’ve known my whole life. Attacked me and run off. The animals are gone, too. It’s like a madness came. ’Cept it didn’t hit us all. The steadiest men and women, we’re all still here. Coro over there, he used to be an idiot, had fits when he didn’t get exactly one biscuit at dawn, exactly two pieces of bacon at lunch. Now he’s as right as you or me. But them’s were normal, most of them are long gone. Don’t know where. Don’t know what to do but butcher what we can and hope this all blows over like a squall.”
“Did any of the people act… um, oddly before they went?” a Blackguard named Pots asked. He turned to Commander Ironfist. “Your pardon, Commander.”
“We’re good people here,” the conn said. “Decent. Devout.”
“People do strange things when they’re not in their right mind. Things that aren’t truly their fault,” Pots said.
The conn grimaced. Spat again. “Seemed like folk lost all sense of dec… of decoration, if you take my meaning. I saw… I saw.” He spat again. Avoided eye contact. “Folks were rutting like animals. Folks walking about nekked. Folks grunting and howling and barking. Barking. You heard people called barking mad? I thought it was jus’ something people say. I saw men I’ve known forty years barking at each other. Scared me half to death. Like they was made animals in all but body.”
“Whatever it is, it’s driving the animals mad, too,” Commander Ironfist said.
“You feel it?” Pots asked.
Most of the Blackguards mumbled agreement.
“I think we better leave,” Commander Ironfist said.
“Kip, you feel it?” Pots asked.
“Absolutely,” Kip said.
“Nerra, you?” Pots asked.
“No.”
“Commander?” Pots asked.
“Maybe a little.”
“Wil, you?” Pots asked.
Wil swallowed. “I feel half mad, to tell you the truth.”
“It’s the greens,” Pots said to Commander Ironfist. “It’s something wrong in green. Lust, loss of self-control, rebellion against authority. The Color Prince has poisoned green.”
“Atirat,” someone mumbled ominously.
“Whatever it is, it’s not only affecting drafters; it’s hitting munds and even animals,” Pots said.
“Mossbeard!” Commander Ironfist called out. “We’re doing what we can to stop it. Your folk may come back yet. All may be restored to you yet.”
Conn Mossbeard looked at them with steel eyes. “Restored? I caught my wife with another man, and when she saw me, she just laughed and kept on. I looked into her eyes and couldn’t tell if it was madness plain and simple or if the madness was letting her do what she’d always wanted.”
Ironfist said nothing.
“Go play at your wars. Go visit your plagues on someone else. It’s always the little man as pays the piper. I killed my wife, sir, the woman who stayed with me through drought and blight and fire and the death of four daughters for twenty-four years. There’s no restoration here.”
They rowed away and Mossbeard went right back to slaughtering the whale he stood on without giving them another look.
“Greens,” Commander Ironfist said without looking at any of them, “you tell me if it gets too bad. If you feel like you’re going to turn on us, tell us. I’m not going to lose anyone today, through madness or death. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” Kip said with the rest of them.
They went all the way up the Atashian coast that day, almost as far as Ruic Head, and they sank half a dozen ships. On many of them, the sailors were in disarray, unwilling or unable to follow orders and act as coherent units. It made them easy targets, and they sank them without any trouble.
It was, frankly, frightening how easy it was. With the combination of their speed and the explosive power of the hullwreckers and the fact that the ships they were preying on were distracted and had never seen anything like the sea chariots—much less prepared for them—they sank ship after ship. But their feeling of invincibility was broken when Pots took a ball in the shoulder. They bound him up, and made it all the way to Ruic Head, where a fort towered on top of the red cliffs there, bristling with artillery that could reach far out into the narrow neck of the Ruic Bay. They approached only close enough to look at the fort’s flags—it was still flying the Atashian colors.
Commander Ironfist turned them back toward the fleet, and they made it back an hour before dusk, which was a good thing, because it took them another hour of consulting the sextant and compass and skimming and guessing and consulting the sextant and compass again to find the fleet, which was making good progress toward Ruic Head. Three days out now. Kip and the other greens were relieved to get away from the Atashian coast, though, and he could feel the madness receding as they got farther away.