It looked foreign, with eyes painted on the prow, 'Fished 'ern all out, have you? I'll take my trident to you, you bottom– feedin' scum that y'are!' 'May you be consumed by a thousand devils, you damned person!' The other boat glided closer. 'I knows that's you, you thieving foreign bastard!' The oars stopped. Solid, squinting hard, could just make out the shape of another boat, heading towards him. 'What're we going to use for wind, Dad?' It was then that they heard the splash of oars, 'I reckon we ought to be getting out of here,' Solid said. Now that was something you didn't often see. The stars twinkled on the surface of the water, too. But the stars twinkled softly and there was not a cloud in the sky.
It felt as if there was going to be a storm. The boat rocked a little, but that was with their movement, not from any motion of the waves. ‘ ‘Course we are,' he said, but certainty edged away from his words. The boat bobbed gently halfway between the two. The other horizon glowed, too, with the lights of AnkhMorpork. There was a faint glow in the sky that indicated the city of Al–Khali, on the Klatchian coast. 'You sure we're in the right spot, Dad?' Solid squinted at the horizon. 'Not a thing in half an hour,' said Solid. He laid down his trident and walked to the other end of the boat, where his son Les was also gazing intently at the torchlit sea. It had been making through the water extremely fast in a straight line. There weren't any other fish either, and usually there were a few attracted to the light. There was not a single interested eyeball to be seen. Solid Jackson's problem was that tonight, a moonless night in the spawning season, when the squid were especially curious about everything, the chef seemed to have been at work on the sea itself. This made them very much in demand in a certain kind of restaurant where highly skilled chefs made, with great care, dishes containing no trace of the squid whatsoever. The Curious Squid were very small, harmless, difficult to find and reckoned by connoisseurs to have the foulest taste of any creature in the world. It was a very long way to this fishing ground, but for Solid the trip was usually well worth it.
Unfortunately, they weren't very good at making connections. The Curious Squid were extremely curious. Some of them even became curious – very briefly curious about the sharp barbed thing that was coming very quickly towards them. Shortly after they got curious about the lantern that Solid had hung over the stern of his boat, they started to become curious about the way in which various of their number suddenly vanished skywards with a splash. That is to say, their curiosity was the curious thing about them. He fished for Curious Squid, so called because, as well as being squid, they were curious. It was a moonless night, which was good for the purposes of Solid Jackson.
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