8
THE SCREAMS from forward were more than human; Locke scrambled up the quarterdeck stairs on his hands and knees, straining to see what was going on. Brown shapes were flailing about within the packed masses of Zamira’s “legions” along the larboard side. What the hell was that? Drakasha herself dashed past, twin sabers out, running for the point of greatest chaos.
Several sailors aboard Rodanov’s ship hurled grappling hooks across the gap between the vessels. A team of Drakasha’s crewfolk, waiting for this, hurried to the larboard rail to sever the grappling lines with hatchets. One of them toppled with an arrow in his throat; the rest made short work of every line Locke could see.
A sharp, flat thwack told of an arrow landing nearby; Jean grabbed him by his tunic collar and hauled him all the way onto the quarterdeck. His “flying company” was crouched behind their small shields; Malakasti was using hers to cover Mumchance as well, who manned the wheel from a crouch. Someone screamed and fell from the rigging aboard the Sovereign; a second later Jabril cried, “Gah!” as an arrow struck splinters from the taffrail beside his head.
To Locke’s surprise, Gwillem suddenly stood up in the midst of all this and, with a placid look on his face, began to whirl a bullet overhand in the cradle of his sling. As his arm went up he released one of the sling’s cords, and a second later a bowman on the Sovereign’s quarterdeck fell backward. Jean pulled Gwillem back to the deck when the Vadran began to reach for another projectile.
“Boats,” hollered Streva. “Boats coming around her!”
Two boats, each carrying about twenty sailors, were pulling fast from behind the Dread Sovereign, curving around to approach the Orchid ’s stern. Locke wished mightily for a few arrows to season their passage, but the archers above had orders to ignore the boats. They were strictly the business of that legendary hero of the plunging beer cask, Orrin Ravelle.
He did, however, have one major advantage, and as usual its name was Jean Tannen. Sitting incongruously on the polished witchwood planks of the deck were several large round stones, plucked laboriously from the ship’s ballast.
“Do the brute thing, Jerome,” Locke shouted.
As the first boat of Sovereigns approached the taffrail, a pair of sailors armed with crossbows stood up to clear the way for a woman readying a grappling hook. Gwillem wound up and flung one of his stones downward, opening a bowman’s head and toppling the body backward into the mess of would-be boarders. A moment later Jean stepped to the taffrail, hoisting a hundred-pound rock the size of an ordinary man’s chest over his head. He hollered wordlessly and flung it down into the boat, where it shattered not just the legs of two rowers but the deck of the little craft itself. As water began to gush up through the hole, panic ensued.
Then crossbow bolts came from the second boat. Streva, caught up watching the travails of the first, took one in the ribs and fell backward onto Locke, who pushed the unfortunate young man away, knowing it was beyond his power to help. The deck was already bright red with blood. A moment later Malakasti gasped as an arrow from the Sovereign’s upper yards punched through her back; she fell against the taffrail and her shield went over the side.
Jabril pushed her spear away and yanked her down to the deck. Locke could see that the arrow had punctured one of her lungs, and the wet-sounding breaths she was fighting for now would be her last. Jabril, anguish on his face, tried to cover her with his body until Locke shouted at him, “More coming! Don’t lose your fucking head!”
Gods-damned hypocrite, he thought to himself, heart hammering.
On the sinking boat below, another sailor wound up to toss a grappling hook. Gwillem struck again, shattering the man’s arm. Yet another rock followed from Jean. That was it for the remaining Sovereigns; with the boat going down and corpses crowding the seats, the survivors were spilling over the side. They might be trouble again in a few minutes, but for now they were out of the fight.
So was a third of Locke’s “company.” The second enemy boat came on, wary enough of the stones to keep well back. It circled around the stern and darted for the starboard side, a shark with wounded prey.
9
ZAMIRA PULLED her saber from the body of the last valcona and hollered at her people along the larboard side, “Re-form! Re-form! Plug the fucking gap, there!”
Valcona! Damn Rodanov for a clever bastard; at least five of her people lay dead because of the bloody things, and gods knew how many more had been injured or shaken. He’d been expecting her to try and go broadside-to-bow; the beasts had been waiting like a spring-loaded trap.
And there he was—impossible to miss, nearly the size of two men, wearing a dark coat and those damned gauntlets of his. In his hands, a club that must have weighed twenty pounds. His people flooded around him, cheering, and they poured against her first rank through the gap Rodanov had somehow contrived in his starboard rail. The point of decision was exactly the mess she’d expected: stabbing spears, flailing shields, corpses and living fighters alike too pressed by the crowd on either side to move, except downward. Some slipped through the ever-changing gap between ships, to be drowned or ground to a pulp as the two vessels scraped together again.
“Crossbows,” she yelled, “crossbows!”
Behind her spear-carriers, nearly every crossbow on the ship had been set out and loaded. The rear rank of waiting Orchids seized these and fired a ragged volley past the forward ranks; eight or nine of Rodanov’s people toppled, but he himself seemed untouched. A moment later there was a return volley from the deck of the Sovereign; Rodanov had had the same idea. Screaming men and women fell out of Zamira’s lines with feathered shafts in their heads and chests, not one of them a person she could spare.
Sovereigns were attempting to hurtle the wider gap to the right of the main fight; some of them made it, and clung tenaciously to her rail, struggling to pull themselves up. She solved that problem herself, slashing faces and cracking skulls with the butts of her sabers. Three, four—more of them were coming. She was already gasping for breath. Not quite the tireless fighter she’d once been, she reflected ruefully. Arrows bit the air around her, more of Rodanov’s people leapt, and it looked as though every single gods-damned pirate on the Sea of Brass was on the deck of the Dread Sovereign, lined up and waiting to storm her ship.
10
LOCKE’S “FLYING company” was now engaged at the starboard rail of the quarterdeck; while Mumchance and one of his mates wielded spears to fend off swimmers from any other angle, Locke, Jean, Jabril, and Gwillem tried to fight off the second boat.
This one was far sturdier than its predecessor; Jean’s two hurled rocks had killed or injured at least five people, but failed to knock holes in the wood. Rodanov’s crewfolk stabbed at them with boat hooks; it was an awkward duel between these and the spears of the Orchids. Jabril cried out as a hook gouged one of his legs, and he retaliated by stabbing a Sovereign in the neck.
Gwillem stood up and hurled a bullet down into the boat; he was rewarded for his effort by a loud scream. As he reached into his pouch for another, an arrow seemed to appear in his back as though by magic. He sagged forward against the starboard rail, and sling bullets rolled onto the deck, clattering.
“Shit,” Locke yelled. “Are we out of big rocks?”
“Used them all,” said Jean. A woman with a dagger in her teeth vaulted acrobatically up to the rail and would have made it over had Jean not bashed her in the face with a shield. She toppled into the water.
Jabril frantically swept with his spear as four or five Sovereigns at once got their hands up above the rail; two let go, but in a moment two more were rolling onto the deck, sabers in hand. Jabril fell onto his back and speared one in the stomach; Jean got his hands on Gwillem’s sling and threw it around the throat of the other, garroting the man, just like old times in Camorr. Another sailor poked his head up and shoved a crossbow through the rails, aiming for Jean. Locke felt every inch the legendary hero of the plunging beer cask as he kicked the man in the face.
Rising screams from the water told of some new development; warily, Locke glanced over the edge. A roiling, gelatinous mass floated beside the boat like a translucent blanket, pulsing with a faint internal luminescence that was visible even by day. As Locke watched, a swimming man was drawn, screaming, into this mass. In seconds, the gelatinous substance around his legs clouded red and he began to spasm. The thing was drawing the blood out of his pores as a man might suck the juice from a pulpy fruit.
A death-lantern, drawn as ever to the scent of blood in the water. A gods-awful way to go, even for people Locke was actively trying to kill—but it and the others sure to come would take care of the swimmers. No more Sovereigns were climbing up the sides; the few left in the boat below were frantically trying to escape the thing in the water beside them. Locke dropped his spear and took a few much-needed deep breaths. A second later an arrow hit the rail two feet above his head; another hissed past it completely; a third struck the wheel. “Cover,” he hollered, looking around frantically for a shield. A moment later Jean grabbed him and dragged him to the right, where he was holding Gwillem’s body up before him. Jabril crawled behind the binnacle, while Mumchance and his mate mimicked Jean’s ploy with Streva’s body. Locke felt the impact as at least one arrow sank into the quartermaster’s corpse.
“Might feel bad later about using the dead like this,” hollered Jean, “but hell, there’s certainly enough of them around.”
11
YDRENA KOROS came over the rail and nearly killed Zamira with the first slash of her scimitar. The blade rebounded off Elderglass—still, Zamira burned at the thought that her guard had slipped. She struck back with both sabers; but Ydrena, small and lithe, had all the room she needed to parry one and avoid the other. So fast, so effortlessly fast—Zamira gritted her teeth. Two blades on one, and Koros still filled the air between them with a deadly silver blur; Zamira lost her hat and very nearly her neck, parrying only at the last second. Another slash hissed against her vest, a second sliced one of her bracers. Shit—she backed into one of her own sailors. There was nowhere else to go on the deck.
Koros conjured a curving, broad-bladed dagger in her left hand, feinted with it, and swept her scimitar at Zamira’s knees. Zamira released her sabers and stepped into Koros’ guard, putting them chest to chest. She grabbed Ydrena’s arms with her own, forcing them out and down with all her strength. In that, at last, she had the advantage—that and one thing more. Fighting dirty usually prevailed over fighting prettily.
Zamira brought her left knee up into Ydrena’s stomach. Ydrena sank; Zamira grabbed her hair and slammed her in the chin. The smaller woman’s teeth made a sound like clattering billiard balls. Zamira heaved her to her feet and threw her backward, onto the sword of the Sovereign directly behind her. A brief look of surprise flared on the woman’s blood-smeared face, then died with her. Zamira felt more relief than triumph.
She fetched her sabers from the deck where they’d fallen; as the sailor now in front of her pulled his sword from Ydrena and let her body drop, he suddenly found one of Zamira’s blades in his chest. The battle ground on, and her actions became mechanical—her sabers rose and fell against the screaming tide of Rodanov’s people, and the deaths ran together into one red cacophony. Arrows flew, blood slicked the deck beneath her feet, and the ships rolled and yawed atop the sea, lending a nightmarish shifting quality to everything.
It might have been minutes or ages before she found Ezri at her arm, pulling her back from the rail. Rodanov’s people were falling back to regroup; the deck was thick with dead and wounded, her own survivors were all but standing on them as they stumbled into one another and fell back themselves.
“Del,” gasped Zamira, “you hurt?”
“No.” Ezri was covered in blood; her leathers had been slashed and her hair was partially askew, but otherwise she seemed to be correct.
“The flying company?”
“No idea, Captain.”
“Nasreen? Utgar?”
“Nasreen’s dead. Haven’t seen Utgar since the fight started.”
“Drakasha,” came a voice above the moans and mutterings of the confusion on both sides. Rodanov’s voice. “Drakasha! Cease fighting! Everyone, cease fighting! Drakasha, listen to me!”