“You best not be lying to me,” Uryk Gullfeeder growled at the man kneeling on the deck of his ark.

The lobster trapper shook his head, his wet salt-stained braids slapping his shoulders. The old Ilithian’s dark skin was weathered from a lifetime of sun and seawater battering him, his lips cracked and bleeding. “Never, Baron,” he said. “I told it true. All’ve it.”

Rising a hundred feet above the sea, Uryk’s ark, Dreadwraith, was a behemoth of wood and iron and steel, a floating fortress. With five decks and ten masts flying sails darker than storm clouds, Dreadwraith struck terror in the hearts of every fishing, merchant, and civilian vessel this side of the Sapphire Sea. When the ark spotted prey on the horizon, their longships took to the oars and chased down their mark, swift as a swarm of piranhas. Today’s prey was no different.

The baron glanced over the bulwark down at the Ilithian’s skiff swaying on the waves, tethered to the longship Black Kraken that had caught it. An easy catch in truth. The trapper hadn’t tried to flee; he knew better than to attempt to outrow a hundred oars. His skiff had held the fruits of his labor, twenty ramshackle traps filled with lobsters. Presently, the traps were stacked behind the old Ilithian; caged and helpless, the crustaceans crawled around inside them, their sharp claws pinching at the woven netting and wooden slats. Gulls circled overhead, crying for a meal. Uryk’s birds would eat again soon enough…

Uryk Gullfeeder, Baron of Dreadwraith, rested his fist on the hilt of one of his sheathed cutlasses. His scarred brown skin was inked with bright white tattoos, savage runes glorifying his ark, his eyes dark isles in pale pools of milk. Five armbands carved from flint wrapped his brawny arms and a brace of flintlock pistols were strapped across his chest. Uryk glared down at the islander. “How many ships were at sea?”

Thinking hard, the lobster trapper furrowed his brow, deepening the creases in his dark forehead. “Can’t say for certain, but m-m-more ‘an half. More ‘an half were moored when me an’ the boy went out this mornin’.” The trapper glanced up at the boy, hanging from the bird feeder by a rusty meat hook. His eyes, nose, and tongue had already been pecked out by the seagulls, perching on top of a crossbeam covered in white bird shit. Although they hadn’t tried to flee, the foolish boy had felt man enough to pull a fishing knife on Red Mykk when the korsairs boarded their skiff, sealing his fate as gull food.

Uryk turned to his elemancer, Zaelyn Mistweaver. The water mage wore blue leather armor and his white scalp braids were patterned in crisscrossing rows that looked like chains of lightning. “The wave,” Uryk said. “Was the wave big enough?” He knew that it was—it had nearly hurled him from his hammock when it passed under his ark before dawn—but he wanted to hear it again from the mage’s mouth.

Zaelyn nodded. “Aye, Baron. The surge of arcana woke me from my dream. When the wave broke on Telia, it must’ve been a hundred feet tall.”

Uryk broke into a grin. Meaning the better part of the Telian fleet is at the bottom of the sea now, he thought. Their shore guard will be helping civilians, clearing rubble, carrying supplies to dry warehouses… A warm wind blew over the sea, stirring Uryk’s cloak of gray gull feathers and clacking the flint beads adorning the braids draped on the back of his neck.

“And your dream?”

The mage grinned. “Death raining down from above.”

Uryk nodded and faced the trapper. “You did good.” He caught eyes with Kyraka. She stalked toward the Ilithian, holding a rusty meat hook forged to a chain. “Feed the gulls.”

The lobster trapper’s eyes widened. “No!” He looked up at the boy hanging from the bird feeder, slowly rotating on his chain like a puppet with only one string left attached. “No, no, no, I—I told you everythin’! Everythin’, I swear!”

“And your island will bleed for all you told,” Uryk said. Perched up on the crossbeam of the gallows, the gulls squawked for the impending feeding frenzy. “Your death’s for them.”

Kyraka pierced the back of the islander’s neck with the hook, the barbed tip hooking around his spine. He cried out in agony. Rusty hinges screamed as Torryk raised an iron-barred hatch in the deck behind the trapper. The Ilithian glared up at Uryk. “Abyss take you, you Zarkoan bastar—”

The baron kicked the trapper in the chest, sending him flailing into the open hatch, the chain forged to the meat hook rattling as he vanished into the blackness below deck. A shriek came from the darkness and the Ilithian screamed. Uryk heard bones snapping, flesh shredding. The screams fell silent. After a moment, Uryk raised his hand. Torryk turned a winch, tightening the chain, and the trapper emerged from the hatch, dead and bloodied, pink entrails hanging from a savage slash in his gut, the hook hauling him up to the gulls on the bird feeder…

Uryk Gullfeeder boomed a laugh and roared to his korsairs. “To the oars!”