The Fox (27 page)

Cocodu
had drifted forward to stay free of the burning caravel, which was still showering down bits of burning wood and sail.

Vixen
glided under the trysail’s lee. Inda jumped onto the
Vixen
’s deck. The brothers were both at their posts, tending sail instantly; Jeje handled the tiller, ignoring blood staining the side of her tunic.

“Where are the Chwahir?” he asked. “And Nugget?”

“Took the gig. Went aboard number two,” Jeje said, breathing hard. “Didn’t see ’em leave.” It hurt to talk, so she decided against saying that the gig had also carried something covered by old sail. Didn’t seem relevant.

Inda again caught the pungent rotting garden smell of leddas oil drifting over the water and said, “We’d better get everyone away from the caravel. It may blast again, and we don’t have enough people to be putting out fires the wind might start.”

Jeje waved to the brothers. One sent up the single whirtler alerting them to a flag signal and the other raised the flag for dispersal.

Jeje clamped her forearm against her ribs as she surveyed the ships. Pirates forced over the sides into the boats—crew tending sail, putting out fires—everyone busy with at least one task, if not two. But why did Thog leave like that and go on board the second pirate ship?

No one to ask: Inda was gone, scrambling up to the deck of the third pirate ship, a raffee-rigged brig with a broad hull that had probably begun its sailing career as a luxury merchant vessel. As he reached the captain’s deck there was a splintering sound and the nailed hatchway flew apart in chunks; Tcholan and his band had hastily hammered most of the pirates below before dealing with the hands in the tops who’d dropped down to fight.

Pirates surged up, weapons brandished, surrender forgotten. They vastly outnumbered Tcholan’s band and the hottest fighting of the night broke out.

Inda grabbed up a boarding ax and a short staff and led the way into battle. Dasta took up shield arm position at his left.

Hot, ferocious joy suffused Inda as he whirled and struck, blocked, whirled, struck again, fast and deadly, so fast and deadly no one stood long against him.

Again he was subliminally aware of an attack behind him—like a poke inside his skull, warning him. Every time he heeded that inward poke he was just in time to ward off a deathblow.

From the trysail Fox watched Inda through a glass, amazed at the astonishing change that came over Inda in fights to the death. In practice he was formidable, but Fox was better. In combat, Inda fought as if he were two men— as if he had eyes in the back of his head. Before his ceaseless onslaught the press of pirates began to retreat.

And Tcholan’s and Dasta’s attack bands, small as they were, backed him perfectly. No pirate passed that drilled, lethally effective line. The ones at the back, seeing their mates falling, wavered, some diving overboard.

The defeated pirates were forced down into the longboat. Many of them stared up at Inda, grim, some desperate, but he stood on a barrel, one foot propped on the rail, sword ready. Splashed with other people’s gore. No one was willing to try him again.

When the last one tumbled into the longboat the craft was full pirates struggling for space, the railings barely clearing the black water. Inda turned away as the distance between the boat and the ship widened.

“I’ll oversee cleanup,” Tcholan croaked, fire from the caravel reflecting in his black eyes.

“I’ll scout the cabin.”

In the captain’s cabin Inda found water in an ensorcelled basin and stuck his entire head in, sucked up mouthfuls of water until his nose stung, a cut—unnoticed till now— stinging his temple. A scan of the cabin revealed charts, a log book, a chest of clothing, and, far more to his interest, an entire closet full of arms.

Through the open scuttle came Dasta’s voice, “Hai, what’s going on?”

“Who gave them orders?”

That was the raspy voice of Sails, once the first sail-mate of Walic’s fleet, now second in command in Dasta’s attack band as well as
Cocodu
’s first sail-mate.

Inda dashed out, ax in hand. He emerged topside as the longboat reached the middle pirate ship, the one with the fallen foremast and ruined rigging. Smoke and fitful light from the caravel drifting southward made it difficult to make out anything but silhouettes running about on deck.

He dashed to the binnacle and found a glass. The second ship, empty before, was now crammed with pirates—and his own assigned prize crew nowhere in sight. Had the pirates retaken the ship? Wait. There was the prize crew, in the rowboat hooking onto
Cocodu!

Anger scorched through Inda, smothering the aches and exhaustion as the longboat pirates swarmed up the sides of the second consort, calling greetings to their mates. All around the ship launches and gigs tossed on the sea, some of them swamping. Someone had broken their bottoms with an ax. Aboard the ship laughter and invective echoed over the water.

Between
Vixen
and the consort Thog stood up in the sternsheets of the
Vixen
’s gig. Uslar sat at her feet, Nugget behind, busy wrapping an arrow. The girl handed her arrow to Uslar, who bent briefly over it, then raised a smoldering fire arrow to Thog. She took it and raised her bow. Efficient, swift—and orderly.

Inda rubbed smoke-burned eyes, coughing as his thoughts ran in too many directions. He needed to get reinforcements to the second consort. He needed to understand what the two Chwahir and Nugget were doing in that damned gig.

Thog raised the bow, took aim, and shot.

The glowing arrow landed squarely in the middle of the great foresail, sending curiously blue flame out in swift runnels. As if the sail had been splashed with whiskey. Whiskey?

“Thog?” Inda shouted, running to the rail.

If Thog heard him, she made no sign. The next arrow landed in the middle of the longboat, the only one afloat. The third arrow hit the mainsail, the fourth the mizzen.

For a moment nothing happened.

Then flames flashed up the foresail, blue, sudden, and bright as lightning, and again on the mainsail. A heartbeat later a terrible fireball swelled skyward from the captain’s deck, and fire exploded in all directions. Pirates shrieked in terror. Within a dozen heartbeats the entire ship was ablaze. A blast of hot air struck and the sails above Inda thundered.

The light was so intense it reflected off every shocked face on the remaining ships, from Jeje on
Vixen
to Mutt at the helm of
Cocodu,
his mouth open in astonishment.

“Jeje!”

She wrenched the tiller, bringing the
Vixen
alongside.

The screams of the burning pirates dashing wildly about on the deck of the burning ship rose above the roar of the flames. Many dove overboard—where Thog, standing in the gig, shot them one by one.

Inda leaped onto the foredeck of the
Vixen,
white-faced with anger. He gripped the bloody boarding ax. “
Who ordered that?
If Fox countered my orders—”

Thog’s gig bumped up against the
Vixen
. She and her two helpers climbed aboard, Nugget pale, her pupils huge in widened eyes as she shrilled, barely audible, “One got Jeje, but I shot him! I shot him right here!” A smack to her chest. “He fell right off the masthead!”

Inda let her stream of words pass through his mind and out as Uslar climbed up behind her, head lowered, expression closed in the way peculiar to Chwahir in times of stress.

Thog crossed the little deck and stood before Inda, stiff and pale.

Thog stated, “It was not Fox, it was I.”

Icy needles of horror prickled through Jeje.

“What?” Inda yelled, staring down at her.

Thog trembled, her face lit by the glow of the firestorm she had created. “I ordered Uslar and Nugget to help me spill the oil and the whiskey on the ship,” she said distinctly. “I told Tcholan you wanted him on the third consort. I sent the prize crew to the raffee. We brought up the casks of whiskey to the deck, under my direction, and spilled half on the deck and then righted them. Open. So that they would explode. I poured more down the sails, and I went from boat to boat telling pirates to board. I shot the arrows.”

“Why?” Inda’s tendons stood out as he gripped the ax.

Her voice was low and hoarse, “Because I know the people they slaughtered in my homeland.
I can name them. One by one
.”

Inda gave a groan and flung himself around, staring helplessly at the burning ship. Already the cries were fading; those few who had made it overboard before the fiery blast bobbed about in the water, their faces pale blobs as they waited for either death or rescue. The longboat slid below the surface, briefly glowing orange and then vanishing.

The ship began to sink, smoke billowing up in a thick black column against the slowly lightening sky, the oily, vile burning-meat smell dying away in the freshening wind.
I will be blamed for that,
Inda thought.
Even if I kill Thog, that act will be laid against me wherever people talk about this action.

A whirtler went up from
Cocodu
. Jeje raised her glass, saw the lookout on
Cocodu
’s foremast pointing to the southeast, where the bleak blue light of predawn smeared the sky.

She jerked her thumb, and Inda turned. Notching the horizon were the slanting black silhouettes of three ships. He looked around for his glass, remembered he’d left it aboard the pirate raffee, and held out his hand. Jeje thumped her glass into it. He raised the glass to his eye. “Jeje, from now on you’ll wear armored quilting into battle, ” he said flatly, sweeping the ships.

“It was just a spent arrow. Only a scrape on the ribs. Hardly noticed.”

They both knew she lied; Inda said, “Take it as an order.”

“No. That stuff is heavy. I don’t want to drown.”

“Shit,” Inda said, too tired to get angry again. “You won’t drown. If you fall overboard, pull the laces and wiggle free.” He frowned, wiped the glass on his shirt, tried again.

The ships sprang closer, the exquisite curve of their taut sails clear in the pale blue morning light: Chwahir schooners, flying the best sails in the world.

Sailing to what, attack? Inda turned around to look again at his own fleet and those ships he’d captured, but then Thog stepped to his side. “They are coming to join you,” she said, with conviction.

Inda stared at her. “How do you know that?”

Her bony shoulders jerked up and down. “Everyone knows we were going after Boruin. They will have seen the light from the fire ship.” Her upper lip curved.

In the distance Fox shouted orders for defense bands to take their places.
Chwahir. Enemy, or not?

“They will want to fight the Brotherhood,” Thog said.

Inda watched the three ships cutting smoothly through the water, heeling over at exactly the same angle as dawn light stippled the waves with touches of gold and the blue smear in the eastern sky warmed to peach.

Inda could imagine his own crew’s heated talk. They’d divide sharply for and against Chwahir, they would divide over Thog’s fire ship, over who had done what, who would get what. And underneath it all was the question of command.

He saw it so clearly, despite his scorched lungs, aching head, stinging cuts.
It’s not a war game, you haywit
.

He dropped his head in his hands. The screams of burning pirates, the six dead from his own crew, his own voice, so easy that day in Walic’s cabin, “We’re going to fight pirates. ” And then Tdor’s voice again, from when he was eleven,
It’s not a war game, you haywit.

He raised his head, seeing Tdor’s face as he had in so many dreams.
Nobody else is fighting pirates. And I know how to fight,
he told that child—because Tdor was always twelve years old in his mind.
Maybe it doesn’t make your net, Tdor. But fighting pirates might save it
.

Even now, despite that inward moral struggle, his mind was busy assessing the battle. Pirates had no discipline. They fought hard and viciously, but they got in one another’s way, they didn’t listen, they stopped to loot. All that was so much a part of pirate life they couldn’t see it as weakness. Drill—and a clear chain of command—could beat them.

But he had to establish chain of command. Thog made that plain enough. Not by force. That was the pirate way. Instead, he thought back to his first year at the academy, and the scrub shoeing . . .

He turned his head. “Jeje, bring me to the trysail. Tie down the prizes, everyone to report to the trysail, which will be my flagship once we clean it up. Call Sails and the armorer. The Chwahir can come aboard if they want to talk. And afterward,” he said into her smoke-smeared, stunned face, “we’re going to mark our first Brotherhood kill.”

The conversation with the Chwahir was brief.

Three captains climbed aboard, all short, round-faced men with wide-set dark eyes and black hair, dressed in loose woolen tunics over narrow trousers belted at the waist. They looked around the deck, from which the dead, but not their blood, had been Disappeared.

The captains’ expressions were as blank as Thog’s, but Inda sensed approval. One said, “We came to help you against Boruin, but you did not need us. We will join your fleet if you are going to sail against the Brotherhood.”

“Not just the Brotherhood,” Inda said, putting to words the new sense of direction that had been so tentative. Words made it real—orders to act on. “We need a day or so to clean up and refit. Then we will set sail for Freedom Islands to take on more crew, supplies, and news. And then—”

They waited. Everyone listening waited, and he said it, so it must be true.
Hear me, Rig? Wumma?
“We will sail against Marshig himself.”

“We will join you.” The Chwahir’s expression changed, almost a smile. “As for sail, we can help.”

They left. The hands at the oars matched strokes beautifully, taking them back to their ships.