No time even to stutter an agreement, the cold rigidity in Lenk infected Dreadaeleon as well. His fingers knotted together in a gesture that was painful to watch, his lips murmured a language that was painful to hear. Lenk watched him open his eyes, watched the crimson energy flower from behind his eyelids as tiny electric sparks began to dance along his sleeves.
‘
Enemies.
’
‘Right,’ Lenk muttered, spying the hatchet-bearing pirates move to the chain on the
Linkmaster
. ‘Kat.’
‘Uh-huh,’ she replied, already drawing the fletching to her cheek. The arrows sang in ugly harmony, wailing from her string to catch them in the throat and chest. She wasted no time in turning a smug grin upon Gariath. ‘
I
win.’
‘What . . .’ Asper asked, her voice as hesitant as her trembling hands, ‘what should I do?’
‘What
can
you do?’ Lenk replied coldly, his mind focused on other things.
No cry had arisen from the
Linkmaster
, none of the collective panic that had plagued them upon Gariath’s appearance, not so much as a harsh word from Rashodd. The pirates simply took a collective step backwards, their expressions unnervingly serene. Even Rashodd appeared not at all displeased as failure loomed in his iron-clad face.
Why?
They parted like a wave of flesh, opening up a space at the railing. Lenk’s eyes widened.
The siege engine.
It rolled to the railing, a mass of iron and wood whose immediate purpose he could not decipher. A ballista? Of course, how else would they have got the chain across? Then why weren’t they firing it?
‘What are they waiting for?’
No answer was heard over the sound of Dreadaeleon’s chant as it rose to an echoing crescendo. The sparks that were birthed on his sleeves grew into full electric snakes, crackling eagerly as they raced down his arms and into his knuckles. He extended his fingers, trembling as though they sought to jump free of their fleshy prisons, and knelt down to press two single fingers against the chain.
‘
Yes ...
’
It came too quick for anyone to scream, the lightning leaping from his fingers and onto the chain with electric vigour. Men became insects in a hail of sparks, tattoos lost amidst the blackening of skin. They collapsed, fell into the water and were lost to the tide.
‘
Good.
’
‘Gariath,’ Lenk muttered.
The crimson hulk stared down at him for a moment, eyes narrowed, challenging him to give an order. Whatever the others had seen in Lenk that made them obey, he didn’t see it or didn’t care.
Inside his head, Lenk’s mind clenched, as if agitated that the dragonman would not obey. Whether he finally resisted out of inner discipline or pure fear, Lenk kept such ire from reaching his lips. He did not break his stare from Gariath’s black gaze, did not back down.
And when Gariath finally did move to the chain, he did not care why. He looked, instead, to the deck of the pirate ship and their siege engine. He spied the shadow there again, the man with the bone for a head who looked like some displaced spectre amongst the crowd. Again, the man met Lenk’s gaze, again the man smiled.
The dragonman hooked his hands into the mother chain’s clawed head, gripping it firmly. Snorting, he gave it a great shake, dislodging a corpse caught by the wrist in its links, throwing off the pirates who still tried to set foot on it. Lenk watched with narrowed eyes and empty thoughts.
Gariath grunted, muscles straining, wood cracking as he began to pull.
The shadow of a man held up a hand, waved it.
‘
No.
’
Sailors flocked to the railing of the
Riptide
, roaring challenges at their calm foes.
Two Cragsmen rushed to the engine, pulled a rope.
‘
No!
’
Gariath’s wings unfurled like great sails, the wind filled with a shower of splinters as the chain’s head came tearing loose. With a great iron wail for its lost charge, the mother chain collapsed into the sea and its little linked children followed, clinking squeals, while the
Riptide
drank the wind and tore away from its captor.
Men cheered. Denaos and Kataria shared an unpleasant cackle at the victory. Dreadaeleon managed a smile, looking to Asper, who managed a sigh of weary relief. Gariath snorted disdainfully, folding his arms over his chest.
It was too soon for Lenk to rejoice, not while his ears were fixed to a sound.
The siege engine came to life without boulders or spears or arrows. It shifted upon its wooden wheels, an iron monstrosity of spikes and blades, swinging back and forth. It sang.
A church bell, he suspected, by the look and sound, but forged from a mould more misshapen than was intended for any godly instrument. Its chorus was no echoing monotone droning, but something of many voices that sang out in horrid, discordant harmony.
A shriek banged against a moan, raucous laughter scraped against agonised weeping, a wistful sigh ground against a violent roar. The bell spoke. The bell sang. And it did not fade from Lenk’s ears, even as the
Linkmaster
shrank in his eyes.
‘That was it?’
Lenk turned to see scorn in Gariath’s eyes, the dragonman looking down at him with scaly lips pulled into a snarl. The young man regarded him coldly, forcing the horrid song from his thoughts long enough to meet him with an equally contemptuous look.
‘You got to kill someone, didn’t you?’
‘I barely bled,’ Gariath replied.
‘That’s . . . a problem, is it?’
Gariath regarded him carefully for a moment before snorting. He turned, forcing Lenk to duck the sweeping tail that lashed out spitefully behind him, and began to stalk along the deck.
‘Don’t call me again,’ he grunted, ‘unless there’s real blood to be spilled.’
‘One wonders,’ Asper said snidely as he passed, ‘just how much blood needs to be spilled before it qualifies as “real”.’
Gariath did not reply, did not even seem to notice her or the bodies he crushed under his feet. That only seemed to cause her face to contort further, teeth grinding behind her lips. Her voice still brimming with ire, she turned to Lenk.
‘I’m going to help the men remove the bodies, someone has to—’ She hesitated, flinching, and seemed to exhale her anger in one long, weary sigh, offering the young man something of a smile. ‘At least it’s over and we’re safe.’
‘Yes, isn’t that interesting?’ Denaos commented as he walked away. ‘Violence solves yet another problem.’
‘That doesn’t mean I have to like it.’
‘You don’t, of course,’ he replied, ‘but what would you have done differently?’
She looked down, rubbing her arm. ‘Nothing, I suppose. ’
‘Then let us content ourselves with the present, bloody and body-strewn as it may be.’
‘Don’t act like you’re some great warrior,’ Kataria snarled at his back. ‘You were more than willing to run away when it was still an option.’
‘I was,’ he said without turning around. ‘And if we had done as I suggested, there’d be much less dead and we’d
all
be happy.’ He offered a limp-wristed wave as he headed for the companionway. ‘Let us consider this the next time we all decide that I’m not worth listening to.’
Asper muttered something under her breath, fingering her pendant as she walked towards the sailors who were already pulling up bodies, sighing over their companions and tossing their fallen adversaries over the railing. Dreadaeleon made a move to follow, but staggered, leaning on the railing.
‘I can . . .’ He paused to take a deep breath, a thin sheen of sweat on his brow. ‘I can help. I’m . . . just a little winded, is all. Strain and all that. Just . . . just give me a moment.’
‘Take all the time you need,’ she said coldly. ‘There will be a lot of prayers to be said. I wouldn’t want you to subject yourself to that kind of ordeal.’
He made an awkward attempt to follow her after an even more awkward attempt to retort. Instead, he was left furrow-browed and sneering as he stalked the opposite way, leaning heavily on the railing.
‘As though it’s my fault I’m surrounded by the ignorant masses.’ He stopped, glowering at Lenk. ‘
You
swing a big piece of metal and make a mess on the deck and
you
get a smile.’ He poked himself hard in his sunken chest. ‘
I
electrocute
three
men as humanely as possible and
I’m
the heathen?’
‘Well,’ Lenk replied, admiring his own blade, ‘you must admit . . . it
is
pretty large.’
The boy’s face turned as red as his eyes had just been as he staggered past the young man and disappeared into some corner of the ship, muttering under his breath.
Lenk paid it no mind as he walked to the railing and the angry chew-mark where the chain had been dislodged. The
Linkmaster
continued to dominate the horizon, even as it became a black beetle on the water. Even as its prey continued to outrun it, he could see no hurry aboard, no frenzy of movement as orders were barked for the ship to give chase. It faded into the distance, until he could see nothing of the men aboard it, hear nothing of their voices.
But he continued to hear, continued to see. The bell’s song lingered, echoing inside his head just as loudly as if it were next to him. Just as if they were before him, he could see the black-clad man’s bone-white lips, twisted into a wide and knowing smile.
And, lingering behind them all like gently falling snow, the sound of a thought given a voice, muttering . . .
‘Are you aware that we won?’
He whirled about with a start to see Kataria smiling, leaning on her bow. Her eyes were soft now, two emeralds gleaming lazily under heavy lids.
‘If you want to cheer,’ she said, ‘I won’t think any less of you than I already do.’
‘If there’s anyone who should be cheering and demeaning themselves, it’s you,’ he replied, glancing at the cleanup taking place along the deck. ‘Lots of dead humans . . . must be a good day for you.’
‘Only a few over a dozen,’ she said with a shrug. ‘Barely a dent in their numbers. Nothing worth celebrating.’
‘You’re aware that I’m human, right? Because, really, I’m not sure how I’m supposed to take that remark.’
‘Well, it’s not as if any of the humans I
like
died.’ She followed his gaze as a drowsy-looking Quillian appeared to assist Asper. ‘In fact, several humans I don’t like survived.’ She sniffed the air, scratched herself. ‘Still, good day.’
Supposedly.
He suspected he should agree; a day that ended with someone else dead instead of himself usually qualified as ‘good’ for an adventurer. He suspected that his next thought should have disturbed him quite a bit more than it did.
This time, dead bodies just aren’t enough.
Had this been a chance raid, some simple act of piracy like he had originally suspected, of course he could take pride in the fact that he could still stab people and thus was still employable. But this hadn’t been a chance raid, there were too many factors screaming that this was something worse.
The calm demeanour of a famously bloodthirsty and deranged breed of murderers, a man who had no business being in the company of such towering and fierce creatures, a bell that sang instead of a ballista that shot.
A chill crept up his spine.
‘
Staring . . .
’
He could feel it immediately, almost heard her eyes turn hard behind him as they bore into him, digging under flesh, searching, studying. He gritted his teeth, tried not to twitch under her gaze. But something inside him lacked willpower. He felt something shift under his skin.
‘
Make her stop.
’
‘You’re worried.’
When he turned, her smile was gone. He saw her, then, without the heat of battle to cloud his mind. She was weary: sweat slicked her skin and seeped into the cuts on her muscular physique, her hair clung in dirty clumps and the feathers she wore whipped about her wildly. She was the very vision of savagery, the image conjured up when people spat the name ‘
shict
’.
And she was staring at him with eyes full of concern.
‘You’re thinking.’ Her ears twitched, as if hearing his very thoughts.
His breath caught in his throat at that idea. ‘We won,’ he gasped, ‘they lost.’
She nodded intently.
‘But they didn’t curse. They didn’t scream. Wouldn’t you have?’
‘If we had lost and I wasn’t dead, probably.’
‘They were calm.’ He turned a glower over the sea. ‘They shouldn’t have been.’
A hand was laid on his shoulder. He felt her through the leather of her glove and the cloth of his tunic, felt her heartbeat just as he knew she could hear his. Just as he knew he should pull away, just as he knew that she didn’t touch humans if she wasn’t pulling arrows out of them.