SHARKPUNK 2, a second anthology of killer shark stories, (to quote the Facebook page) is coming to Kickstarter today, to be published in 2017 by Snowbooks.

My story here, The Taste of Blood, is only my second to find a home outside of Black Library (after Plan B, which I wrote for Mantic Games' Drainpipes for Strike Posts last year) and the first that isn't part of someone else's universe.

Unless someone has IP rights to 1st Millennium Northern Europe...

Here's an excerpt.

"Oddi’s chicken bones rattled across the deck, the tilt and yaw of the longship causing them to skitter apart, tumbling and sliding towards the gunwale until they lost momentum and stopped. I watched the old seer crouch over them, prodding at a bone here and there, his lips creaking wordlessly as if to describe for his own mind what his fingers saw. His frosted-white eyes groped upwards for the sun, squinting in vexation.

“What do the gods tell you?” I asked.

Oddi had been seer to my father and before his blindness karl to my grandfather. Never in all those years had he given me or anyone else cause to doubt the strength of the gods or his skill at interpreting their words.

He shifted one of the bones a thumb’s width across the deck, then frowned over the new arrangement. “They don’t speak clearly. We are a long way from their home.”

The men that had joined me at the stern of the ship for the casting murmured their unease. Dann, Asbjorne, Hari the Finn; even my son, Thorvald Thorvaldsson, reached up to touch the silver hammer that Oddi had made for him when he had been a boy and that he now wore on a cord around his neck. I hissed at them all to be quiet, but as much for Oddi himself: the seer should know better than to talk of gods so carelessly.

“Bring me the Christian,” he said after a moment’s frowning thought.

The karls looked at each other, mentally drawing lots, then Hari gave a grunt and turned away, stomping between the rows of heaving oarsmen.

The sea here was said to be endless; the winds were cold and harsh and the waves high. Some of the rowers persevered with a rowing song, singing out the rhythm of the oars. On the ends of the benches where it was driest men took their moment’s rest, heads hanging, hair and beards bedraggling over their thighs. No one bothered Hari with a welcome. He was called ‘the Finn’ for obvious reasons, but my karls had plenty of names for him that they wisely kept for themselves. Hari the Beast, Hari the Mad, and Hari Redbeard were just three of the less insulting I’d overheard.

His forked beard was not even red, but that wasn’t how he’d earned the name.

A cross-spar had been set across the mast at about chest height. Hari stopped there, grunted for a moment with the knotted ropes wrapped around it, and then returned shortly afterwards with a thin, naked man lumped over one shoulder.

He was an Irishman, from a village several days sail further north along the west coast mainland. Over that time, he’d been sunburnt and salt-lashed until there was little left but a mange of hair that wasn’t red, crusted, and weeping.

“Where is the monastery?” I asked in Irish as he curled up into a ball at my feet. I held up my hand to prevent Asbjorne from thumping a boot into his kidney. The Irishman didn’t answer, but then I hadn’t expected him to. The question had already been put to him in more unfriendly conditions than this.

“Lift him,” said Oddi. Asbjorne and Dann each took an arm and hauled him up to his knees. “His arm.” The seer gestured with an open hand into the sea mist that sprayed in from the crash of waves against the side. With the other he drew a knife. The Irishman stiffened and tried to fight, but five days bound naked to a mast had a way of drawing the fight from a man. He moaned as Dann slowly drew out his arm over the rushing water.

“Please. I don’t know. I don’t know where it is. I swear I don’t. I don’t. Argh –”

He squawked like a startled hen as Oddi cut the knife into his wrist, gave a sharp twist, and then withdrew the blade. Blood slicked the Irishman’s wrist almost as soon as the blade was out. It trickled into the water and immediately began to disperse. The seer peered over, and despite his blindness appeared to be studying the spilt blood as the ocean and its hidden demons drank it all. I felt a prickle at the sides of my face as I watched it disappear, transfixed by it.

To this day I remember how my heart seemed to pause as I waited for it to give the seer the water’s answer. It’s clear to me in hindsight that the ocean gained a taste for blood that day.

The Irishman wept and prayed to his Christ as my karls let him retreat back into his curl on the deck.

“The Christian’s blood flees that way.” Oddi pointed confidently with his knife in a direction that was just a hand’s span to the left of our current heading.

“To our silver,” I smiled.

“You will find no joy in Sceilig Mhór’s meagre wealth,” said the Irishman. “It is easier to pass a camel through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter Heaven.”

“What’s a camel?” grunted Hari, to which the others laughed.

I laughed too, although not because I knew what a camel was or cared. I laughed because I had a sword in my hand, two longships full of sworn karls, and wore ten years of stolen silver on my arm. I laughed because I didn’t know then what fear was.

Hari looked at us all, nonplussed.

“The Devil will have you!” the Christian hissed Asbjorne and Dann bent to pick him back up. “Go to the monastery of Sceilig Mhór and He will have you!”

“Give him another day on his cross,” I laughed.

“You will find the Christ’s people there,” said Oddi as the man was dragged away, as certain as sky above a man’s head. “And their silver.”

And I didn’t doubt it."

The anthology features tales from fellow Black Library stalwarts Gav Thorpe, David Annandale, Josh Reynolds, and Guy Haley, as well as many others.

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