The Gentleman Bastard Series (160 page)

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!”

12

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
.

Ydrena dead; gods-damn it, his first mate for five years, on the bloody deck. He’d laid about with his club to get to her side, splintering shields and beating aside spears. At least half a dozen Orchids to him, and he’d been their match—Dantierre he’d knocked clean over the side. But the fighting space was too narrow, the rolling of the ships unpredictable, his crewfolk too thin around him. Zamira’d suffered miserably, but at this confined point of contact he was stymied. A lack of brawling at the
Orchid
’s stern meant that the boats had probably fared the same. Shit. Half his crew was gone, at least. It was time to spring his second surprise. His calling a halt to the battle was the signal to bring it on. All in, now—last game, last hand, last turn of the cards.

“Zamira, don’t make me destroy your ship!”

13

“GO TO hell, you oath-breaking son of a bitch! You come try again, if you think you still have any crewfolk willing to die in a hurry!”

Locke had left Jabril, Mumchance, and Mumchance’s mate—along with the death-lanterns, he supposed—to guard the stern. He and Jean hurried forward, through the strangeness of air suddenly free from arrows, past the mounds of dead and wounded. Scholar Treganne stumped past, her false leg loud against the desk, single-handedly dragging Rask behind her. At the waist, Utgar stood, using a hook to pull up the main-deck cargo hatch grating. A leather satchel was at his feet; Locke presumed he was on some business for the captain and ignored him.

They found Drakasha and Delmastro at the bow, with about twenty surviving Orchids staring at twice their number of Sovereigns across the way. Ezri hugged Jean fiercely; she looked as though she’d been through a great deal of blood but not yet lost any of her own. Up here the
Orchid
seemed to have no deck; only a surface layer of dead and nearly dead. Blood drained off the sides in streams.

“Not me,” shouted Rodanov.

“Here,” yelled Utgar at the
Orchid
’s waist. “Here, Drakasha!”

Locke turned to see Utgar holding a gray sphere, perhaps eight inches in diameter, with a curiously greasy surface. He cradled it in his left hand, holding it over the open cargo hatch, and his right hand clutched something sticking out of the top of the sphere.

“Utgar,” said Drakasha, “what the hell do you think you’re—”

“Don’t make a fucking move, right? Or you know what I’ll do with this thing.”

“Gods above,” whispered Ezri, “I don’t believe this.”

“What the hell is that?” Locke asked.

“Bad news,” she said. “Fucking awful news. That’s a shipbane sphere.”

14

JEAN LISTENED as she explained quickly.

“Alchemy, black alchemy, expensive as hell. You have to be fucking crazy to bring one to sea, same reason most captains shy away from fire-oil. But worse. Whole thing goes white-hot. You can’t touch it; can’t get close. Leave it on deck and it burns right through; down into the innards, and it sets
anything
on fire. Hell, it can probably set water on fire. Sure doesn’t go out when you douse it.”

“Utgar,” said Drakasha, “you
motherfucker
, you traitor, how could—”

“Traitor? No. I’m Rodanov’s man; am and have been since before I joined. His idea, hey? If I’ve done you good service, Drakasha, I’ve just been doing my job.”

“Have him shot,” said Jean.

“That thing he’s holding is the twist-match fuse,” said Ezri. “He moves his right hand, or we kill him and make that thing drop, it comes right out and ignites.
This
is what those damned things are for, get it? One man can hold a hundred prisoner if he just stands in the right spot.”

“Utgar,” she said. “Utgar, we’re winning this fight.”

“You might’ve been. Why do you think I stepped in?”

“Utgar, please. This ship is heaped with wounded. My children are down there!”