The Sea Hates a Coward Read Online Free Page B

it.
    “Too ugly to live, too tough to die,” quipped the barker by the thing’s graveside, as he pulled down on its lip and made a half-yard of opal needles visible to the crowd.
    “Four hundred years old, they say, but will it live another week?” he cried. “Don’t pity it, folks, there’s no putting it back—its swim bladder burst like a bad prophylactic when those brave boys reeled it up!
    “Ten irons to put your hand inside—say you’ve been in the belly of a monster!” he had cried, using his baton to lift the flap on the monster’s ruptured flank. Thinking back on the sight of those opaque yellow eyes, that slimy wound, that laboured gaping, Schneider tasted the memory of the vomit that had rushed up that morning.
    It hadn’t been the pain of the thing, or even how horrible it had been to look at—it was the sense of something awfully out of place: one couldn’t look at it and not imagine the hellish, empty blackness it had hovered in.
    Another memory, floating slowly to the surface of his mind. There had been a book in the library, packed with illustrations. An aged bestiary of the commercial fish from Ocean, and a parade of its most frequently-seen monsters. The book was old and dust-reeking and tooth-yellow, its contents a blend of dry descriptions and workmanlike inking, with the occasional photo plate of something big and blood-streaked hanging from a crane.
    Schneider had spent an hour with the book more than once, looking for that awful thing from his youth as if hoping he had mis-remembered something quite ordinary. He never did find anything exactly like it, but he found plenty worse: the corpse-fish he had witnessed had not been some gruesome deepwater oddity, but just one of a world of lonely, hopeless monsters.
    Teeming eels, lampreys, piss-yellow jellies and listless squid. Rafts of spongy, elongate shrimp, clinging together on the surface over bottomless depth. Lost sunfish, ribbon sharks, Jenny Hanivers and haired snakes.
    Then there were the cash cows—the huge, sad benthoceti, the ricketfish with their trailing bones, the gasper, the arrostichthys, the traileyes in their numberless, blind shoals. All of them big as ships, able to suck in a man like dust, but docile as cattle.
    They were prey for devils.
    Those were the entries with no photographs or illustrations beyond guesswork scratchings—creatures too big or fierce to ever take a hook without taking a boat too; that lived under epithets rather than binomial classifications. The Big Dark, the Far-Looker, Glasscorpse, Bagthroat.
    Schneider shivered at the remembrance of those entries, of the great hungry orbs and maws staring out of the pages, of his mind nagging him to cover them with a palm as he read by candle, to look away from the open windows, even in the heart of the city.
    And now he was there among them, a world away from that soft candlelight. He was in Ocean.
    Schneider stood on the edge of the ship, wind blowing salt spray into his face from across a nightmare emptiness, trying to comprehend that he was stuck in Hell after all.
    All his life, Ocean had been practically a fiction. A distant realm, fished by the city’s heroic daughters and sons, brimming with riches beyond measure for those brave enough to face up to its perils. It was a place you didn’t think about, a shorthand term for ‘far away and nasty,’ a fate with which you idly threatened children.
    The bravest and the most reckless went to work the supply boats, came back with little to say or never came back at all. Certainly, nobody said anything about city-ships dowsed in salt rain, where the despairing dead worked as slaves to carve corpses big as tenement blocks for the bellies of the living. Every fish supper Schneider had ever eaten returned to the back of his mouth, cold and mocking.
    At that moment, there could have been nothing more welcome than the hand, cold and withered, that Schneider realised had been resting on his shoulder for some