Red Seas Under Red Skies (Gentleman Bastard, #2)

by Scott Lynch

On the water behind them, the old galleon groaned and creaked as the roaring flames consumed it from the inside out. Night was made day for hundreds of yards around; the hull was crisscrossed with the white-orange lines of seams coming apart. Smoke boiled out of those hellish cracks in little black eruptions, the last shuddering breaths of a vast wooden beast dying in agony.

The dead were as strictly sifted in death as they’d been in life, with each successive tier claiming a better class of corpse. It was a morbid mirror of the Golden Steps across the bay.

AT THE second hour of the next afternoon a warm soft rain was falling; a weak and wispy thing that hung in the air more like damp gauze than falling water.

Gray clouds necklaced the tall black mountain to the northwest.

“YOU ARE beyond mad,” said Locke after several moments of silent, furious thought. “Full-on barking madness is a state of rational bliss to which you may not aspire. Men living in gutters and drinking their own piss would shun your company. You are a prancing lunatic.”

Every muscle in his back seemed to slide painfully against those surrounding it, as though someone had thrown grit in between them.

You’re ten pints of crazy in a one-pint glass.”

“Fling arrows at all the strange things you see out here, Ravelle, and all you do is run out of arrows.”

You seem to have a real talent for improvised dishonesty.”

Malakasti, a thin woman with more tattoos than words in her vocabulary, had a shipwide reputation as a knife fighter.