Salt Storm: The Salted Series: Episodes #31-35 Galvin, Aaron (classic fiction txt) 📖

knees, the elderly vice principal’s hands struck the ground before her.

In reply to the crowd, Malik Blackfin lowered his sword and rested its blade against the back of Ms. Morgan’s neck. “We have real truth to discern here today, hag . . . and I did warn you.”

“Aye, you did,” said Ms. Morgan. “Just as I warned you.”

“Scolded, rather,” said Malik. “Any last words before I send you to Fiddler’s Green?”

“Aye, boy. I have some final words left in me.” Ms. Morgan glanced up at her executioner with delight in her eyes. Then, before the killing blow fell, the vice principal of Tiber High School shouted her last with a purposed cry that Sydney knew would haunt her all the rest of her days. “Long . . . live . . . the queen!”

15

LENNY

Lenny Dolan stood outside the makeshift crematorium of Bouvetøya, numbed by more than the cavern’s Antarctic cold. So many dead. He thought to himself, glancing back at what remained of the crematorium’s shattered door, the jagged wooden pieces broken in by Jemmy T and Tom Weaver’s efforts to seek out further culprits of the Selkie massacre.

What they discovered within the mass-scale crematorium resembled much of what Lenny and the others had already seen outside – a collection of naked corpses, their bodies tinged blue and black from frostbite, their skin shrunk taut against their bones.

Of the living, the first that Lenny saw were a pair of starving walrus, their brownish skin clung tight against their ribs. Both were lashed together and crammed side-by-side in a ditch-like ring that had been carved out of the stone floor, now laced with ice and near filled with water. Like an old millhouse with a team of donkeys hitched to a wheel, left to walk in eternal cycle to grind wheat grains into flour, the walrus pairing swam in the only direction afforded them to turn their wheel of burden. The pulley that ran from their efforts acted as a crankshaft for a conveyor belt to creak and groan as it carried away the Selkie dead loaded upon it.

Lenny trembled as he watched the conveyor carry the frozen bodies up and away, all the way to the great urn at the crematorium’s center to feed the flames anew and keep them blazing.

There were also other slaves within – Selkie pairings in human form, tethered together in iron shackles. The chains between them both forced and handicapped the various slave pairings to act as a team in fetching corpses from the heaps and barrows to then place upon the conveyor belt.

A trio of Orc taskmasters kept their prisoners to the monotonous work. One had been in the midst of cracking his whip when Tom Weaver burst through the door with Jemmy T and Lenny close behind. Lenny could still hear the taskmaster’s gurgles as Tom Weaver strangled the Orc with his own whip.

Before reality settled in and Lenny had taken true stock of what he witnessed inside, Jemmy T had nocked one of his arrows. He set it loose to find its home in one of the other Orcs’ throats when the taskmaster dared to charge them.

The moment his fellows were dead, the lone remaining Orc cast his weapons aside and knelt to the floor with his arms raised in surrender.

Tom Weaver had the last of them slammed up against the wall in seconds. As his Orc prisoner squirmed, Tom looked to his nearest Selkie companion. “Jemmy?”

“Aye, brudda?”

“Search the place for any others,” said Tom. “Dolan, keep your eye on the door. Unless they’re one of us, make sure no one else comes in.”

Lenny nodded, but did not stir from his position. His gaze held on the shivering Orc in Tom Weaver’s grip.

“Pl-Please,” the Orc cried. “Don’t kill me. I surrendered, sir!”

“And what about all these here, hmm?” Tom asked him, jerking his head toward the dead and the Selkie living who attended them. “What did you do to them when they surrendered, I wonder?”

The Orc shivered. “I-I don’t know. I wasn’t there. They never sent me near the killing fields. I-I couldn’t do what the commander asked of us. Please, I’m a coward, sir.”

“Coward, eh?” Jemmy T put in from above, moving quickly down the catwalk of the second story, his bowstring drawn taut. “No, mon. Him be playing at one. Finish him, Tom.”

“Don’t!” The Orc screamed. “Please! I’ll tell you anything! Just don’t kill me.”

“Give me answers, then,” Tom growled. “What is this wretched place? Who are you?”

“My name is Yusuf,” said the Orc. “And this is the end of the world, sir.” Yusuf swallowed hard, his eyes dancing in search for aid, locking on Lenny. “The end for Selkies, at least. That’s what Commander Pohl said.”

Tom Weaver gave him a shake to draw his attention back. “Your commander lied to you, soldier. Us Selkies you see here? We’ve been to that true end of the world and back.” He glanced over his shoulders at the piles of Selkie dead before resettling on his captive. “And for all my years in that frozen hell, I’ve never seen anything like this. Not women and children cast into the fires.”

“Please, sir, I’m no soldier,” Yusuf wept. “I didn’t ask to be here, sir.”

Tom lifted his chin toward the pile of bodies and the slaves who stood wide-eyed and unmoving at the intruders. “Think they did?” he asked the trembling Orc.

No. Lenny knew, steeling himself against Yusuf’s continued whimpering with the horrors that surrounded him and those that remained in his mind, the loss of his father chief of all. None of us did . . . but I don’t see no Orcs in them piles of bodies.

“Please, sir,” Yusuf pled with Tom, his voice shaking nearly as hard as his hands were. “Mercy, please. I-I didn’t want to be here. I never wanted to be no Painted Guard, nor Violovar seawolf neither. They gave me no choice, sir! None of them. It was serve or die!”

Tom grunted. “Looks to me