The Sea Hates a Coward Read Online Free Page A

from him by a plunging wall of metal, without a staircase, ladder or rope in sight.
    And even from here he could see the docks were overrun with overseers, and free of wandering corpses. Bulky forms patrolled the loading platforms, keeping a watchful eye as conveyors and rails freighted crate after crate, barrel upon barrel, into the waiting holds of the boats.
    The industry of the docks was mesmerising; coming in fast, the smaller vessels were caught in docking cradles, then filled at incredible speed by hydraulic loading arms, before being ejected in reverse just minutes after arrival. As they turned to join the stream of lights, their wakes glowing white in the lamps of the great ship, the next boats were already pulling in.
    The river of cargo, visible as a bright, winding stripe like glowing ants, threaded across the black emptiness of the water, until coalescing into a solid thread somewhere near the horizon.
    Far, far out, where the lights of the boats were lost to distance, there was something else. Right on the horizon; a glow, like the edge of a dawn that would never come. Deep violet, a stain on the underside of the clouds that swelled in convulsions of distant, amethyst lightning.
    Schneider strained to make out more of that distant glow, until he realised it was not the limits of his vision he was straining against, but of his memory. This endless stream of boats, this bastion of metal in black water, that distant lightning. He knew it. He had seen it all before. He remembered.

 
    CHAPTER FOUR
     
     
    S UDDENLY, BUT ALMOST casually, as a low belch of thunder rolled in from the purple spark on the horizon, Schneider came to understand where he was.
    Realisation had been building for a while, as in a dream. The endless crashing of waves, the constant grumbling of the low sky, the dreadful industry of the ship, was all the formless stuff of nightmares—until he saw that swarm of boats.
    He had seen that procession, beetling back and forth under stacks of meat and palls of diesel smoke, before. Hundreds of times, in fact—seen it from another dock, where it meant food and safety and civic health; a never-ending stream of goods that kept home alive.
    Home. That immense walled city—its name escaped his death-muddled brain—buttressed by coastal cliffs against the permanent siege on its landward side. Unchallenged by sea, provisioned by its fleets, adoring of its fishermen.
    He would watch the boats go out, sounding their foghorns in farewell, off to bring food for ten million souls from a distant place. From hundreds of miles away; from a black stone gate, it was said, whose arch stood a mile clear of the waves and whose apex drew purple lightning from a perpetual storm.
    And through the gate? A world of infinite water, bottomless, and teeming with monsters: Ocean.
    Memories pooled around the word like blood swelling from a pinprick.
    Ocean’s produce had been everywhere in the city; the great casks of benthocetic tallow that came in from the docks to be rendered for vault-oil, the glass-waxy bows of fishbone as long as girders. But only once in Schneider’s memory had something alive, or at least near to life, made it through the gates.
    It had been an autumn morning at Exhibition Plaza; his mother gripping his hand as she clocked far too late that the pamphlets had put too rosy a gloss on things.
    “It still lives!” the mass-printed scraps had exclaimed, in curlicue font.
    And so it lived: a mouth like a half-collapsed tent gaping under weak sunlight, two eyes like hard-boiled yolks glaring sightlessly from furious pits of bone.
    Red and warted and spined, bloated and shapeless on the slab. Accustomed to a life so poor and dark and famished that it barely breathed; lived perpetually on the murky edge of death, even in its natural element.
    In open air it had gaped, and withered, and swivelled lumpen fins for four days, kept damp with buckets of brine and poked with billhooks when the motion went out of