Dragonoak (22 page)

“Go!
Help people!” Varn said, claiming the sword for herself. “Gods.
Don't need to be a necromancer to know it reeks of death around
here.”

There had to be a hundred of them. Gavern wasn't sending
negotiations, this time, wasn't sending a ship with a skeleton crew
to make some sort of point. What wasn't burning had been reduced to
rubble, and the women of Port Mahon fought as if they had been
fighting for hours, for days; as though I was the only one who
realised this had started
minutes
ago.

“Felheim!” someone bellowed from across the street. It was a
woman I knew, a woman who'd helped me haul in nets full of writhing
fish, only now, there was more than sweat on her brow.

She
brandished her blade, ready to strike, and stood guard over someone
I didn't recognise. She was slumped against the side of a crumbled
wall, unmoving and empty, and all because of the dagger in her
chest. Fights were unfolding and concluding all around me and
people were starting to take notice of me; I couldn't waste any
time, couldn't afford to be gentle.

My knee
scraped against the ground and I gripped the hilt of the knife,
pulling it loose and seeing, in my mind, the blood run and run,
spilling without end. I froze for half a second, but my powers
moved without waiting for me. The wound sealed shut, barely
spilling a drop, and with a gasp, the woman startled herself back
to life.

Dropping
the knife, I kept on running.

Port
Mahon shook, and as clearly as though I was there to see it happen
before me, I knew what had become of the jail. It'd been struck by
cannon fire. The walls had come crumbling down, and the jailers
would be too busy fending off the attack to stop a solitary
prisoner from escaping. I bolted towards the jail, weaving between
fights breaking out and burning buildings, unable to bring myself
to ignore cries for help. I worked so quickly that I couldn't tell
who I was healing and who I was reviving, needing to get to the
jail, needing to stop her.

I didn't
falter. What could she do that I couldn't, without her chains and
knives?

I
rounded a corner, heart in my throat, and stared up at the jail as
I skidded to a stop.

There
wasn't a scratch on it. None of the walls had been knocked down,
the door wasn't beaten in; the scaffold in front of the building
wasn't burning.

Immediately doubling over, I clutched at the front of my
shirt, trying to catch my breath. If I had found the jail split
open, prisoners pouring out, I don't know what I would've done,
other than watch them escape, frozen.

Climbing
from the back of a cart onto a stack of crates, I found a foothold
in the form of a window frame and managed to scramble atop one of
the roofs. The fire hadn't spread this far back, nor had the
fighting; it was bad, but not as bad as it had first seemed, out
there on the docks. As Gavern's ships sunk, sides splintered by
cannon fire, the pirates of Port Mahon turned from defensive to
vicious, no longer interested in holding anything back, now that
the buildings around them weren't being turned to
rubble.

Death
took the city, and I had to wade my way through it; had to work out
how many of the dead counted amongst our numbers, how many there
truly were to save. I remained up on that roof until the fighting
finally turned in our favour. Gavern's men tried to retreat, only
to be chased down by a handful of pirates at once, and the only
ship of theirs remaining had been claimed by our people.

Time
wasn't a factor, not for me. If someone was dead, they could wait.
I stayed on that roof for a full half an hour before daring to slip
down, as terrified of Gavern's men as any unarmed person would be,
and once I was on the ground, sought out the injured and the dying
first. I went where I was needed, skin dulling as I washed away
burns and closed slit throats, moving onto the next person before I
could feel the wounds rattle around my own bones.

“Oi,
Felheim,” someone called from above me. I was knelt on the floor,
in the midst of bringing back somebody who'd had her head beaten in
with what looked to be a rock, and looked up to find Cal blocking
out the sun. “Didn't I ask you if you were a necromancer a couple
of months back?”

“Yeah,”
I said, attention back on the dead woman.

Hand on
her shoulder, I started piecing together her shattered skull, and
Cal crouched down next to me.

“Why you
been hiding it away?” Cal asked, more angry than curious. “I've had
to toss the bodies of friends in the sea, 'cause that's as good of
a funeral as you're gonna get around these parts, when all the
time, you could've helped 'em. They'd be here right now, if not for
you. What's your excuse, then? Where were you the last time Gavern
hit Mahon?”

“I—” I
started, tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth. Cal grabbed my
arm the moment my patient was alive again, and pulled me onto my
feet.

“That
all you gotta say for yourself? Not that it'd make the blindest bit
of difference—unless you wanna go fish their corpses out,” Cal
sneered, face pressed close to mine.

People
had gathered to watch me work, and after all I'd done for Port
Mahon that day, over the past few weeks, they weren't going to let
Cal push me around. Someone took hold of her shoulder and said,
“Easy, Cal,” as they pulled her back, but her eyes were still fixed
fast on me. Stepping back, I made no reply. There was no way to
defend myself, and I knew that plenty of the onlookers surrounding
us agreed with her.

People
had died, and not just because of Gavern. Dozens of people had been
lost throughout my stay in Mahon, yet I hadn't done a single thing
to help them when I could've.

Ignoring
the pull of what remained of Gavern's men strewn through the
streets, I made for the docks, where it had all started.

“Posing
as merchants,” one woman spat, “Started unloading and then razed
the place.”

The
docks had been burnt clean through in the centre, and what remained
on the outskirts was hardly safe to walk on. Those who weren't
injured or fighting gathered on the edge of town, and I pushed my
way through the crowd, towards the screams. In the centre, three of
Gavern's men were being restrained, and a fourth went flying across
the hard ground as Varn swung a crowbar at his head.

“Where
the hell is Gavern!?” she demanded, pulling the crowbar over her
shoulder and bringing it back down against his skull before he had
a chance to answer.

The man
grunted and gurgled and, frustrated, Varn gripped him by the
throat, knelt on his chest and hit him over and over, inviting
death in with every shriek. Everyone gathered watched unblinking,
but even the hardiest pirates were fighting not to look away. Face
and chest splattered in blood, Varn stood, kicked the corpse and
shouted, “The rest of you better be a lot fucking more
cooperative.”

Sneering, she wiped the crowbar off on her shorts, and picked
her next victim. The interrogation was barely a swing under way
when Kouris cut between the two of them, gripped the front of the
man's shirt and lifted him four feet off the ground.

Kouris
grinned, all of her fangs lining up inches from the man's face, and
I saw him pale in a way he hadn't at Varn's treatment of his
comrade. He fought to get out of Kouris' hold, futilely kicked his
arms and legs, and it dawned on me that he didn't know what she
was. All he saw were tusks and horns and golden eyes, a clawed
giant who could surely do so much worse than a woman with a
crowbar.

“Tell us
where Gavern is,” Kouris growled, words thicker than they needed to
be, “Or I'll eat you.”

The
women crowded around did their best not to make a sound, but the
man wouldn't have noticed had they broken out into fits of laugher.
All he saw was Kouris, all he heard were her words echoing through
his skull. I'd intended to stay and watch, but knew there must
still be those needing my help. My mind was like a map that someone
had scrawled lines on, pointing me towards every path as well as a
few roads they'd made up, and so I headed off blindly, not caring
where I started making sense of it all.

Reis was
on the beach, close enough for me to spot from the outskirts of the
town. They stood still, shoulders hunched, and I felt the corpse at
their feet before I saw it.

No, not
a corpse; it was Tae. Throat torn open and empty eyes fixed on the
sun, blood and colour alike drained into the sand. A few feet from
them, one of Gavern's men was crumpled in a pile, bullet hole
neatly placed in the centre of his forehead.

Reis
didn't notice me approach. They stood there staring, not at Tae,
but at a sea-smoothed stone resting by the side of her head. I
wrapped my fingers around their wrist, squeezing it to ensure they
were still with me, and without crouching, held out a hand and
curled my fingers towards my palm, closing the gash across Tae's
throat.

She
coughed the colour back into her face, not choking enough on the
residual blood in her throat to warrant a second revival, and
clawed through the sand for her sword. Only then did Reis react.
Tae moved to get to her feet but Reis shoved the tip of their cane
against her shoulder, knocking her back down.

“Ow
, Cap, what—” Tae said shakily,
still too disorientated to piece together what had
happened.

“What the bloody hell was
that
, Tae?” Reis said, teeth grit.
“I taught you better than that.”

“Cap!”
Tae protested, fingers twisting in clumps of bloody sand, but Reis
already had their back to her.

They
didn't thank me. They said, “This is gonna be a nightmare to fix,”
as they headed towards the docks and left it at that.

I
hurried ahead of them, sure that the bodies would be brought to me,
now that the fighting was over, and found that the crowd had
scattered. Three of the men were still alive, chained to posts and
watched over by a mountain of a woman with a mace in her hands,
while the man who'd been beaten with the crowbar remained smeared
across the pavement.

“Rowan,”
Varn said dryly, twisting her bloodied fingers in the back of my
shirt. “Come on. Time to get moving. We know where Gavern
is.”

“What?” I asked, spinning around. “We're doing this
now
? I
thought...”

“Got
somewhere better to be?” Gripping my elbow, she dragged me along to
the boat she'd set her sights on. “Gavern's in Ioane Point. Gods
know how long he's gonna be there. He's got a habit of jumping from
one place to another. Go on, guess why we ain't managed to catch
him yet.”

“But I
just brought dozens of people back to life,” I protested
weakly.

A week
hadn't been enough for me. The minutes it'd take to reach Ioane
Point were already slipping between my fingers.

“Want a
medal?”

I was
following her. I was actually following her. Varn was covered in
blood and grime and the stench of what she'd done clung to her like
a curse, but she wasn't stopping to lick her wounds. She was
exhausted, lungs burning and eyes stinging, but she was still
striding forward, doing all she could to protect Canth. Cal was
right. I should've been helping Port Mahon all this
time.

Realising that no one else was going to take my place, I
found myself on the back of the small, sleek boat Varn had claimed
for her own. Akela was at the docks, fast fading in the distance,
voice too small to reach me, and the ocean, the only thing that'd
kept me calm throughout my time in Canth, became a cage. There was
no turning back, no swimming without drowning.

The boat
skidded like a stone across the surface of the sea, but Varn guided
it across the waves, Ioane Point coming into view. It was a narrow
stretch of land that had once been part of Canth itself, but when
the seas rose it was cut off from the rest of the country, and its
inhabitants retreated inland. Mere decades had passed, but the
ruined buildings stood against the horizon as relics from a past
age, crumbling beneath the pounding sun.

And
there, framed between two misshapen towers was the largest ship I'd
ever seen, draped in sails of green and blue.

CHAPTER IX

“Remember the plan?” Varn asked.

The wind
had taken her side, launching us towards Gavern, and something akin
to my old sea-sickness swirled within me.

“I have
information for Gavern. I know how to get to Reis and how to turn
Port Mahon against them,” I said dryly.

It
wasn't much of a plan at all, but it was all we had.

“That's
the thing about Gavern. He's smart alright, but he's got an ego,”
Varn told me. “He won't get too close to any town he's attacking,
but he won't let anything happen without his supervision, either.
Met him once. He likes showing his face 'cause he don't let anyone
escape. Usually.”

I
nodded, eyes fixed on the ship. I'd wished for storm clouds to stop
us, and here they were, manifested in the form of Gavern's ship.
The wood was stained black and as we drew towards it, I was certain
it would swallow us whole, for the way it blocked out the
sun.