Authors: Scott Lynch
The three attack birds launched themselves through the air and landed amidst shields
and polearms, laying about with their beaks and their dagger-sized claws. Orchids
screamed, shoved against one another, and caused utter chaos in their desperate struggle
to either swing at or flee from the ferocious beasts.
Rodanov grinned fiercely. They’d been worth it—even though they’d cost too much in
Prodigal, even though they’d stunk up the hold, even though they’d be dead soon enough.
Every Orchid they mutilated was one less for his people to face, and it was always
impossible to put a price on making your enemy shit their breeches.
“Away boats,” he yelled. “Sovereigns! On me!”
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.
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.
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.”
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!”
RODANOV GLANCED at the arrow sunk into his right upper arm. Painful, but not the deep,
grinding agony that told of a touch to the bone. He grimaced, used his left hand to
steady the arrowhead, and then reached up with his right to snap the shaft just above
it. He gasped, but that would do until he could deal with it properly. He hefted his
club again, shaking blood onto the deck of the
Sovereign
.