DragonKnight - Donita K. Paul [36]
A skittering sound roused him from his slumber. With eyes open, he lay still, for he felt certain the noise had come from within his cabin. His hand moved to embrace the handle of his hunting knife. He slipped the finely honed blade out of the sheath.
A slight thump on the mattress puzzled him, and he almost quit breathing in order to listen.
Mistress Seeno’s small voice whispered in his ear. “Squire Bardon, get up and arm yourself. A quiss has come on board.”
12
A RENEGADE QUISS
“Meet me on deck when you’re dressed,” Mistress Seeno said as she jumped to the floor. Her gray blue cape fluttered around her chubby form as she scampered across the wood planks and slipped under the door.
One quiss? I thought they traveled in hordes. He pulled on his britches and stuck his feet in his boots. I suppose it is possible a quiss could be this far inland. It could have become disoriented and followed the river. But alone? I thought they came out of the ocean en masse every three years. He buckled on his sword belt, stuck his hunting knife in its sheath, and grabbed a short quiver full of darts. Don’t quiss harass the northeast coast, not the southwest? He opened the door and entered the dark hallway. Perhaps it isn’t a quiss at all.
He crept up the ladder and surveyed the deck before stepping out of the open hatch.
How am I supposed to find a little minneken before I find this intruder?
A movement along the wall caught his eye. Jue Seeno emerged from the shadows, scurried across the wood deck, and leapt for his leg. He found it disconcerting to have her scramble up the outer seam of his britches, up the side of his shirt, and onto his shoulder.
She panted. Tiny puffs of hot air tickled his jaw line.
“One dead. Around the corner. Very unpleasant sight.” She shuddered. “I believe the quiss has gone to the stern, toward the quarterdeck. We must hurry if we are to save lives.”
Bardon had never seen firsthand what the ocean creatures could do, but he’d come across accounts in books and heard tales from seasoned warriors. As one of the seven low races, quiss rivaled the blimmets in their ability to quickly destroy a target. However, blimmets fought with more vicious, mad-animal vigor. Quiss moved slowly. The danger lay in their numerous, boneless arms. Quiss encircled their victims with these muscular appendages, each having three rows of suction cups running from shoulder to tip. In the center of each cup, a sharp and hollow tongue the size of a large needle squirmed, tasting the air, searching for flesh to penetrate.
Bardon edged to the corner and cautiously peered around. On the deck a heap of clothing marked the spot where a seaman had gone down in the clutches of the intruder. Nothing moved in the area, so Bardon crept toward the figure. At first sight of the dead man’s face, he swallowed to keep the bile from rising in his throat. He no longer doubted that a quiss lurked somewhere on the ship.
The victim’s flesh and blood had been sucked from his body. An empty bag of skin draped the skeleton. Pinpricks in the center of inch-wide, red circles lined the corpse wherever skin showed.
Bardon tried not to breathe. His ears strained to hear the slight swish of an almost entirely boneless body. Only two appendages from the trunk of the body contained enough cartilage to be used as legs. He remembered gruesome tales told in the dormitory. They usually ended with a quiss arm writhing out from a dark corner and snatching a helpless boy.
Once a victim fell into the clutches of a quiss, the thousand tongues stabbed. Hopefully, the last thing the unfortunate soul felt was the pricks of the beast’s tongues. The quiss then injected its poisonous saliva, which broke down flesh into a soft mush, and sucked all the soft tissue until the skin was nothing more than a sack for the bones.
Each hair