Discordant Chords

The smell of scorched sulfur could not hide the steady, mechanical grinding deep in the cedar floorboards. Teruo set his dented copper water jug against the bulkhead and jammed the bronze butt of his spear against the companionway post, feeling the shudder travel up the ash wood shaft into his collarbone. A dozen paces behind him in the dark steerage hold, his sister's linen shroud rested on shelf three. If the creature wedged in the ladder frame kept broadcasting its rhythm into the keelson, the swarm gathering in the cracked mud outside would chew through those lower planks before the night was out.

Sayano stood stranded on the middle deck landing above the collapsed rungs, gripping the chain of her empty dragon censer. Her silk hem was black with soot, her knuckles white around the cast bronze. Between them, wedged into the shattered ladder hatch, the alpha burrower flexed its boneless bulk. The creature was three times the girth of the scout Teruo had impaled in the bilge. Thick plates of calcified shale armored its dorsal hump, overlapping like river slate, but beneath that crust, two pale acoustic stalks pulsed against the load-bearing rib of the ship. Each expansion drove a rhythmic hammering straight through the cedar spine.

"Hold the upper landing, Mourner," Teruo called up through the splintered timbers.

Sayano coughed on the thinning brimstone smoke, bracing her boots against the frame. Her ceremonial robe was torn at the elbow, revealing gray smudges of soot along her forearm. "Its hide is wedged into the timbers. Every spasm loosens another joint."

"Keep your footing," Teruo said. He planted his sandals into the slick cedar decking and adjusted his two-handed grip on the spear, watching the pale stalks flare and contract. Each pulse drew answering scrapes from the mud beneath the hull, a rising chorus of claws gouging dry silt. The sound was spreading toward the stern, following the grain of the wood.

A sharp, hollow twang echoed from the overhead ventilation flue. Metal scraped against seasoned cedar, followed by a discordant shriek that vibrated down the companionway framing.

"Teruo!" Botan's voice drifted down the square shaft from the upper deck, reeking of pitch and dry cedar dust. "The bronze bridge pegs are seated into the flue frame. Tell that bloated slug to stop thrashing—its shrieking is flat by half a tone, and it is entirely ruining the fifth chord of the imperial requiem."

"Play the chord, Stringer," Teruo shouted back. "Hit the cedar hard!"

"A barbaric request," Botan muttered, though the sound of his harp's heavy gut strings tightening carried clearly through the shaft. "This instrument was crafted for palace courtyards, not for serenading ditch worms."

Above, Botan struck the tuned gut strings of his harp with a heavy bronze plectrum. The sound that poured down the ventilation flue was a vicious, jarring clash of intervals, amplified by the box-like cedar flue until the narrow corridor hummed with bone-rattling force. The acoustic pulse struck the companionway like a physical blow, vibrating the moisture on the walls into a fine mist.

The alpha shuddered violently. Its eyeless, gray snout whipped toward the ceiling vent, sensory ridges flaring wide in confusion. The discordant vibrations seemed to blind the beast, scrambling whatever acoustic feedback it relied on to map the hold. It hissed, exposing three concentric rings of translucent teeth, its armored tail thrashing against the bulkhead planking.

Teruo lunged.

He did not waste strength on the armored head or the thick shale plates along the spine. Instead, he timed his step to the creature's recoil and drove the bronze point straight into the fleshy root of the left acoustic stalk. The spearhead sank four inches into pale cartilage. Thick, oily ichor with the reek of stagnant marsh-gall sprayed across Teruo's chest and arms, burning his skin like hot tallow.

The creature let out an ear-splitting whistle that shattered two dried cedar laths in the companionway wall. It whipped its heavy neck around, its bulk tearing free from the shattered rungs to snap at the spear shaft.

Teruo braced his back against the opposite doorframe, using his full weight as leverage. He twisted the spearhead, cutting sideways through the tough fibrous core until the cartilage node tore completely free from the dorsal plate. The pale stalk tore away in a wet spray of gray fluid. The creature's rhythmic hammering against the keelson ceased instantly, replaced by a chaotic, spasming rattle.

"Again!" Sayano yelled from the upper landing. She swung the dragon censer on its heavy chain with both hands, slamming the thick bronze belly of the vessel squarely into the beast's exposed snout. The heavy blow crushed the creature's breathing siphon, bursting soft mucus across the bronze scales of the metal dragon.

Topside, Botan struck another violent, dissonant progression, the bronze pegs hammering against the flue timber until cedar dust rained down from the rafters. The jarring pitch sent visible ripples across the creature's gray flank, completely paralyzing its forward instincts.

Blind and disoriented by the noise above and the blunt blow in front, the alpha reared back, opening its pale throat. Teruo stepped inside the sweep of its boneless appendages, lunging upward beneath the collar of shale. He caught the second acoustic stalk on the return stroke, punching through the joint and severing the nerve cluster with a savage downward pull.

The beast's connection to the swamp mud went dead. The rhythmic calling had stopped, cutting off the acoustic signal that guided the burrowers outside.

For a heartbeat, the narrow companionway went dead silent save for the hum of Botan's dying strings and the rasp of Teruo's scorched lungs.

Then the alpha went mad.

Deprived of its acoustic senses and bleeding from its shattered snout, the colossal creature hurled its massive body sideways. It thrashed in blind agony, slamming its calcified bulk straight into the central load-bearing pillars of the dry-hold.

A cedar upright as thick as a grown man's torso snapped with a sound like a ballista firing.

The deck beneath Teruo's sandals dropped two inches with a sickening crunch. Above them, the middle deck ceiling groaned, the cedar beams splitting lengthwise as the heavy floor of Prince Sukenari's burial chamber began to sag. Splinters the size of hunting knives showered down through the choking dust. The wounded beast coiled around the remaining pillar, its thrashing weight threatening to drag the entire middle tier down into the flooded bilge.