Snake Heart (25 page)

“Shark, Yanko.” Arayevo pointed behind him.

He sensed the large hammerhead approaching and flung an image of fire into its mind before realizing that would probably mean nothing to a shark. He replaced the fire projection with one of killer whales chasing the shark, though he had no idea if they actually were a threat to the fearsome predators. He did not stop swimming long enough to look back and see if his ruse had worked. Instead, he added a shield behind him to deter creatures from taking a chomp from his legs.

“Duck,” Lakeo yelled, pulling her head down as a cannonball shot past, barely a foot above them.

Before Yanko could figure out how to get into the strange dinghy without tipping it over, Dak grabbed him under the armpits and hauled him out of the water as if he weighed nothing.

A hand latched onto his shoulder before he had fully landed, the slender and thin-hulled boat rocking upsettingly. His legs dangled over the side, as he landed on his back between Dak and Lakeo. Arayevo crouched in the bow, all of them pressed in so closely that they touched.

“Seriously, Yanko. Some magical cannonball repellent would not be unappreciated right now,” Lakeo said, her fingers digging into his shoulder.

One of those cannonballs was arcing straight toward them, and Yanko did not have time to respond, not with words. He compressed the air between them and the ship firing at them, creating a wall. The cannonball bounced off as surely as if it had hit solid rock.

“Good,” Dak said, as talkative as ever. “Keep it up.”

He patted Yanko on the chest, then immediately set to rowing.

Yanko pulled his legs into the boat and scrunched them to his chest, finding a spot where he could sit in the puddle on the bottom, between Dak and Lakeo. The puddle hardly mattered since even more water dripped from his robe and hair. He could see the pirate ships from this new vantage point, but did not find the view inspiring. A second vessel had turned its side toward them, gun ports on display, smoke wafting up as more cannons fired. The artillerymen had gotten their range down, and those iron balls hurtled through the air, landing alarmingly close to the boat. Yanko kept his defenses up, shielding them as Dak rowed, though it was not easy. He found it simpler to block a fireball for a few seconds than to maintain a barrier. Maintaining it was hard since the mind tended to fool itself, thinking it had not lessened its effort at all, only for it to be revealed that it had when a ball sailed through to land a foot off their stern. A huge wave of water sluiced over the edge, and Lakeo cursed as it hit her in the back.

“
Yanko
,” she protested, swatting him in the shoulder.

“Considering you almost wrecked me along with my moth—Pey Lu’s ship, you should be delighted that I’m shielding you at all,” Yanko said, though he felt abashed and redoubled his efforts.

“
I
wasn’t the one firing at the ship. That was Dak. He said you were tough enough to survive a few
mugra
.”

“If those are the giant pointy cannonballs that explode, I don’t think anyone can survive a direct hit with one. Never thought I’d see something like that on a Kyattese vessel.”

Without pausing in his rowing, Dak offered a rare smile. It reminded Yanko uncomfortably of a wolf chasing after his prey.

“As I told you,” Dak said, “the underwater boats were designed by my people. They have many means of defense.” His smile turned to a grimace. “Though I wasn’t expecting to encounter a mage who could simply crush the craft with his mind like a sardine tin.”

“
Her
mind.” Yanko sighed. “That was my mother.”

Yanko eyed the boats around the wreck, hoping Pey Lu was distracted with saving her people. This lifeboat was flimsy, and it would not take a powerful mage to destroy it.

The boats had lifted most of the pirates out of the water, but were still collecting a few stragglers. The sharks circled, not scared away by the booms of the cannons, or the rifles and pistols being fired. The one Yanko had been fleeing was not far away, its fin visible to the port side of Dak’s boat.

“Did you get to talk to her?” Arayevo peered around Dak to look at Yanko. “Was she amazing?” That longing in her voice came through, even though water dripped from her hair into her eyes and she appeared as bedraggled as he.

She was still beautiful, even in that state, with cannonballs arcing toward them and sharks circling. Perhaps a touch crazy, but beautiful. The old familiar longing returned to Yanko’s heart, and he wished he could give her an answer that wouldn’t disappoint.

“She was... something,” Yanko murmured, not sure what else he could say.

He did not follow it up with the next statement that came to mind, that Pey Lu might take Arayevo into her crew if she asked. For one thing, Yanko did not want to give Arayevo up. True, she was not his, but he would never get his chance to confess his feelings to her if she ran off and joined Pey Lu. No matter what happened or where Arayevo went, Yanko knew beyond a doubt that
he
couldn’t join his mother’s crew. He could never become a pirate. He couldn’t do that to his father or to his people.

“Halfway there,” Dak said, his rowing never faltering.
He
would never be distracted by longing.

“Is the underwater boat utterly destroyed?” Yanko asked.

“Utterly,” Dak said. “The Kyattese finance department will probably find out and have a bill sent to the Turgonian embassy before I return.”

“How could they know?” Arayevo waved at the sea. “Unless the pirates tell them.”

Dak’s lips compressed in displeasure or maybe acknowledgment of the possibility. Did he know that Pey Lu might have been hired
by
the Kyattese?

The cannonballs grew less frequent as Dak rowed the dinghy out of range. Oddly, none of the ships were chasing after them. Perhaps Pey Lu realized that recapturing her wayward son would be inevitable—how could he escape from an island? Maybe she planned to let him assume the risk of finding the lodestone first and then take it from him later.

“Who’s that?” Arayevo pointed toward a figure swimming away from the ships and toward the island.

Yanko recognized the white clothes, the long black hair streaming behind as powerful strokes moved her through the waves. She was a strong swimmer and ought to make the island if nothing befell her. He didn’t spot any sharks following in her wake.

“Sun Dragon’s assassin,” Yanko said, wondering if he had done the right thing in freeing her. No, it had definitely been the
right
thing—he believed that. He just wasn’t sure if it had been the
smart
thing. “She tried to kill me.”

“And failed?” Dak asked.

“I’ll try not to find it disheartening that you sound surprised by that.” He scratched his jaw. “We never figured out how she got on Pey Lu’s ship.”

“The ironclad.”

“What?” Yanko asked before remembering what he referenced. The ship that had rammed the
Prey Stalker
before Pey Lu had moved away and it had exploded. Had it delivered a passenger before blowing up? “Oh.”

“Does that mean Sun Dragon is on his way then?” Lakeo asked.

And that he would distract Pey Lu by attacking her fleet again? Wishful thinking, Yanko decided. Sun Dragon’s ships had been destroyed in the last confrontation, and unless he’d had a few more hiding on the far side of that island, he couldn’t have followed them here, even if he
did
have a way of tracking his assassin.

“If you want to kill her,” Dak said, tilting his chin toward the swimming figure, “this would be the time.”

“Kill her?” Arayevo protested. “After she’s survived so far?”

“You don’t make it far in life if you don’t kill the assassins that are after you.” Dak said the words as if reciting some common Turgonian phrase. Maybe it was one. His people weren’t reputed to employ assassins often, but their emperors and military leaders had certainly been the targets of assassins—even Nurian mage hunters—over the centuries.

“She owes me her life,” Yanko said. “I’m hoping she’ll decide to thank me by not killing me.”

“Wouldn’t Nurian honor demand that she fulfill her mission no matter what the extenuating circumstances?” Dak asked.

“Yes,” Arayevo and Lakeo sighed together. Lakeo added a comment of, “Jellyfish brain,” and smacked Yanko again.

Yanko held back a sigh of his own, though he did not disagree. Jellyfish brain, indeed.

Chapter 18

D
ak led the way up a rocky incline that climbed steeply from the beach area. This island had a tree-covered butte in the middle, the remains of a volcano that had blown its top during some past century. Yanko hoped it was a dormant volcano and that hunting for the lodestone wouldn’t involve any trips through lava tubes. He’d had enough of that.

A desire to get to the artifact propelled Yanko up the slope with alacrity, and he and Dak outpaced the women. Of course, part of that was Yanko’s desire to avoid being smacked by Lakeo again. She kept glaring at him and calling him a fool for letting the mage hunter escape. Fortunately, with Dak’s powerful rowing, their group had reached the island first. The pirates hadn’t yet sent a team to land, either, though Yanko suspected that would change soon, and that the beaches would be besieged with his mother’s people by noon.

“Thank you for coming after me, Dak,” Yanko said quietly as they scrambled up bare lava rock. They had already risen five hundred feet or more above the beach, leaving the ocean and the pirate fleet within clear view. The morning sun rose behind the volcano, burning down through the stunted vegetation. This island was dryer than the last, and the trees were not as dense, the leaves not as thick.

“Thank the women. I wanted to go directly to the island. The journal identified this as a staging area for the bandit.”

“Ah. They overpowered you, did they?”

“With nagging, yes. Even the strongest warrior would succumb to that.”

“Some warriors might simply have locked them in that closet. You’re stronger than both of them put together. Don’t tell Lakeo I said that.”

Dak snorted. “I
will
tell her, so she can switch her nagging to you.”

“That’s already happened.” Yanko glanced back, not at Arayevo and Lakeo, but at the beach, fearing he would glimpse the mage hunter. He could not see anyone, but that did not mean much. The assassin had probably reached the island by now and disappeared into the interior. “Also, I don’t think you’re supposed to call it nagging when a woman argues with you. It’s derogatory. They prefer the term
discussing forcibly
.”

“Your mother tell you that?”

“My brother. He was catnip to the ladies in our village.”

“How old is he?”

“Almost twenty-one.”

Dak stopped his climb and frowned down. Yanko thought he would offer his opinion on the worth of getting advice on women from someone half his age, but he pointed at something. Yanko picked his way up the slope, which had become nearly vertical. To Dak’s right, a human skull sat wedged into a fissure, looking out onto the sea below.

“The remains of someone who discussed forcibly with the wrong woman?” Yanko asked, attempting levity, though those empty eye sockets were an unwelcome reminder that his last attempt to get to Heanolik Tomokosis’s stashed goods had not gone well. The yellowed and wind-worn skull had been there for years, if not decades, but it remained an effective warning.

Dak continued climbing. “I chose this route, figuring it would be less likely to be booby-trapped than the gentler slope on the other side, but keep an eye out.”

Yanko waited on his rocky perch, so he could share Dak’s warning with the others.

“This is fabulous,” Arayevo announced when she drew even with him, gazing out upon the sea and the tiny ships below. “Such an amazing view.”

Yanko pointed to the skull.

Arayevo blinked, but then shrugged. “You don’t think he agrees?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“That someone who met your assassin?” Lakeo asked when Yanko pointed the skull out to her.

“Doubtful. That skull has been here a long time, and the mage hunter didn’t look much older than me.”

“Maybe she’s inexperienced then.”

Yanko remembered the kills the woman had claimed, twenty-seven mages. “Let’s not assume that.”

He scrambled after Dak, accidentally kicking rocks free as he ascended. He was relieved when the slope grew less vertical, since he did not trust his ability to manipulate air to save himself from a deadly fall. Dak might have climbing gear in his pack—he was the only one who had retained all of his belongings—but he had not pulled it out. What was a near-vertical slope to a Turgonian? A warm-up climb, no doubt.

They reached the top of the butte, but Dak did not head into the trees. He helped Yanko over the edge and waited so he could do the same for the women. Or maybe he was waiting because of the sight of what lay ahead.

The trees at the top of the butte were stunted and skeletal, only a few sparse leaves adorning their branches. The trunks of some of them twisted, as if affected by some vortex. As the breeze swept across tufts of grass and lichen-covered rocks, clanks and thuds came from the skeletal forest. It took Yanko a moment to find the source of the noise, and then he wished he hadn’t. More skulls. They danced on old, frayed ropes, swaying in the wind and bumping against each other and against the tree trunks. There had to be hundreds of them.

“Did the journal mention this?” Yanko asked.

Where had Tomokosis found so many human skulls?

“No, but another book I researched called this island the Fate of the Fallen, a name the natives of this archipelago gave it. It said nobody lived here, that it was reserved for burials.”

“Unless people were buried in trees, it looks like Tomokosis dug them up to, ah...”

“Scare people away would be my guess,” Dak said. “According to the map in the journal, his cache is supposed to be at the highest point on the island, under a skull-shaped outcropping of rock.”

“Do you know anything else?” Yanko asked. “You mentioned traps. Did the journal speak of them?”