The Sword of the South - eARC (18 page)

Kenhodan sneezed on noxious fumes as Hornos bent over the after ballista, speaking quietly to his men. The heavy weapon crouched on its turntable like a vast crossbow, loaded with a long, vaned shaft. Its yard-long, hollow iron head was already loaded with deadly banefire—now Hornos stood ready to ignite the evil mixture of pitch, sulfur, naphtha, turpentine, and quicklime. Bahzell stood well forward, abreast the foremast with one foot on the bulwark, and the sun winked on the crossed sword and mace of his surcoat as he studied the enemy. Two halflings crouched over a dart thrower beside him, laying the five-foot, vaned javelins into the grooved firing tray. The heavy spring steel firing bar would drive all eight shafts at the jerk of a lanyard, and while the weapon was slow firing, at close range its missiles would pierce ten inches of seasoned oak.

Kenhodan searched for his special charge and saw Wencit leaning against the mainmast. He’d drawn his sword, but his expression was blank with intensity and his multihued eyes gazed sightlessly at nothing as mind and will sought for the telltale tendrils of sorcery directed against the ship.

Once certain of Wencit’s exact position, Kenhodan turned back to starboard and nocked an arrow. They’d enter longbow range soon, and—

His thoughts broke off and he blinked, almost staggering as a hammer struck his brain and sudden fury exploded within him. He shook his head drunkenly, fighting the shock of rage. It was the same anger he’d felt in the taproom, only stronger even than it had been then, and it was neither fear nor the zest Bahzell seemed to feel. It was a
personal
hatred, a loathing, as if the corsairs represented some hideous disease, and it was so much stronger than the hate of Brandark’s crew that his bones burned like ice. It lent him a frightening strength—strength all the more frightening because he didn’t understand it. Yet he saw its danger, as well, for this fury was blind. It could destroy him as easily as any blade…unless he could use it rather than be used
by
it. Berserkers made deadly foes, but they also expended themselves like unthinking weapons, and the thought of dying in a mad frenzy of butchery was almost as terrifying as it was seductive.

He knew that, sensed his capacity for destruction and a deep, almost ecstatic need to embrace his
own
destruction, and saw the maelstrom spinning its vortex of bloodshed and thunder at his very core. Its power appalled him, and he made himself breathe deeply, fighting for control.

He won—barely. His pulse slowed and the pounding in his temples slipped back towards normal. He took his hands from his bow one at a time and dried his palms carefully on his trousers, and the bloodlust bubbling in his brain had been chained to his purpose. It flickered like fire walled in ice, uneasy, unwilling to yield, yet it was his now, and he was no longer its. He still felt the crawling need to kill or be killed, but he commanded himself once more.

And just in time.

His lips drew back in a snarl as the corsairs swept closer. Little more than half
Wave Mistress’
length, they were low, lean, and wicked, and spray burst over their raked stems in green and cream as they leaned to the breath of their private tempest. Despite their smaller size, each carried almost as many men as
Wave Mistress
, even counting Forstan’s Axe Brothers, for their crews greatly outnumbered those of any honest vessel their size, and Kenhodan studied their sleek lines—lines that ruthlessly subordinated cargo space to speed. After all, he thought grimly, pirates sought small bulk, high-value prizes; they could afford the sharp ferocity of those speed-hungry hulls.

“Ready your bows!” Seldwyn ripped out the words and raised his hand, his feet spread wide for balance while his eyes measured the range, the pitch of the hulls, and the priority he should assign each target.

“The lead ship!” He shouted harshly. “Gut me those archers!”

Kenhodan felt the sun’s kiss, distant through the cold air, as his bow rose with the others. Salt, pitch, and hemp hung in his nostrils. One corsair had strayed four full lengths before her consorts, a temerity which marked her as the first target for
Wave Mistress
’ wrath.

“
Loooooose!
”

Kenhodan sighted, drew, and released. The string whacked his leather arm guard, and his bow lifted as a cloud of arrows snarled up, fletching howling, and hissed above the sea. They sheeted down on the foremost corsair, barbed heads hungry for blood, and Kenhodan grinned fiercely, rage snarling in his brain as he followed their lethal flight. Then black figures tumbled aside under the beat of the arrow storm, and his nerves quivered ecstatically at the sight.

The return fire was late and short as their bitter points drove into the corsairs’ faces. Dozens of out-ranged shafts plunged into the sea in flashes of white, far short of
Wave Mistress
’ deck. To rate archer under Brandark Brandarkson, a bowman must be skilled with a longbow, rather than the short bow or crossbow most seamen favored, and his lieutenants were chosen as much for battle skill as sea craft. Seldwyn’s keen eye had gauged the range more accurately than his corsair counterpart’s, and his bowmen fell into the deadly rhythm of the Vonderland archer: twelve aimed shafts in a minute. Arrows slashed across the corsair like spume, sweeping the packed deck, heaping it with dead and writhing bodies and spattering it with blood.

The corsair archers were no match for that fire. They were cut down before they could reply effectively, but their consorts hastened to their aid. They began to find the range, and arrows whined and licked among the crew. Kenhodan heard them shriek in baffled rage from the Axe Brothers’ armor, but too many sank into flesh with dull, meaty thuds, and gasps and screams erupted as men fell about him. He saw and heard it through the fury in his brain, but it was distant, far away and happening somewhere else as he concentrated on the strength of his arm, the keenness of his eye, and the limber strength of his magnificent, killing Vonderland bow.

Two corsairs bored straight for the starboard side. A third circled, storming up to port, while the fourth—hull lined with pike-waving pirates—lunged straight for the stern, exactly as Brandark had predicted.

“Now, Hornos!
Now!
”

Brandark’s bellow split his crew’s snarl as they sighted the corsairs’ bare steel. The halfling coxswain’s hands slashed, and the spring engines thudded. Their long, slim missiles howled through shield and pirate alike, and Seldwyn’s remaining archers pivoted, hurling their arrows over the rail into the teeth of the boarding pirates.

But it was Hornos who unleashed the most devastating blow. Corsair arrows hissed among his men like feeding sharks, but they waited grimly as Hornos and the boatswain pressed torches to the banefire and leapt aside. Fire geysered and the artillery thudded far more loudly than the dart throwers had. The long missiles soared, trailing stinking smoke and flame in a smudgy line above the sea, and the gunners snatched up swords and boarding pikes and formed behind Hornos as their missiles streaked for their foes.

The boatswain’s shot slammed into the portside pirate’s bulwark. It smashed clean through the thick planking in a shower of splinters and porpoised across the deck, but the head failed to shatter. Liquid fire dribbled from it, but a howling corsair—mad with battle lust or supremely courageous—levered it over the side. The terrible substance ignited his clothing, clinging like death, and his flaming figure hurtled overboard behind the banefire even as his ship lunged across the final few dozen yards to
Wave Mistress
. His screaming body was crushed between the grinding hulls, yet his sacrifice saved his ship, and his mates surged up the side, pikeheads shining in the smoke.

And smoke there was, for Hornos’ shot had crashed into the oardeck of the lead ship to starboard, and crewmen scattered wildly as the projectile shattered into fiery fragments. Water was less than useless against the quicklime-charged banefire, and it spread too quickly for sand buckets to quench. Smoke billowed and fire licked up the masts. Sails and tarred rigging burst into towers of flame, and screams told their own tale as the pirate ship bucked out of control, showering the sea with charred flecks of canvas and burning paint.

The corsair sheared away, wrapped in destruction, and the wizard wind became a two-edged weapon, blowing her to her doom. Wind bellied the untouched sails and fanned the flames to furnace fury. Bitter heat drove the helmsmen from their stations, unable to control their hurtling vessel, and desperate figures flung themselves overboard, only to be smashed back against the hull and battered beneath the waves by their ship’s speed.

An ugly cheer rumbled from Brandark’s crew as the three survivors struck home. Grapnels whipped up to sink iron teeth in
Wave Mistress
’ timbers. Hulls groaned in protest, surging together in a thunder of oaken planking, and corsairs sprang up onto their lower bulwarks, thrusting at the defenders. Pikes crashed on armor as the pirates to starboard met the unexpected, plated axemen, but the other two ships disgorged hordes of howling warriors that frothed up too thick and fast to be stopped.

A wave of boarders broke into the cabins through the stern windows and boiled over the after rail. They were too close for bow work, and Kenhodan fired his last shaft into an officer’s mouth before he whipped out his blade. He backed quickly towards Wencit, desperate to protect the wizard from the steel fanging the press of fighting men, and the wizard’s voice rose behind him. His words were unintelligible, but the power crackling at their core prickled the nape of Kenhodan’s neck.

Wencit’s chant rose, yet for all its potency, the power in its words was hidden, pale beside the visible menace pluming up from two of the corsair ships. Twin darknesses loomed—fistlike, merging into one vast, tentacled mass of midnight-dark murder, pregnant with destruction and groping for prey like a living enemy, and the corsairs howled triumphantly at the evidence of their arcane allies.

They were protected from its touch;
Wave Mistress
’ crew was not.

A black tendril reached the ship, stretching out before its fellows, and brushed one of Brandark’s seamen as he buried his cutlass in a pirate’s chest. The black caress transfixed him. For a moment he stood, a rock of stillness in the whirling melee, and then he dropped his weapon at his hands fastened on his own throat.

He screamed in agonized terror as his own fingers throttled away his life.

Kenhodan looked away sickly, and the defenders wavered. Clean death was one thing; this abomination was more than mere courage could withstand. Yet they didn’t break, for a voice rose like sea thunder from somewhere forward.

“Tomanāk!
Tomanāk!
”

Bahzell Bahnakson’s bull-throated challenge roared upward, and a brilliant azure glow reached out from
Wave Mistress
’ planking. The tendrils of sorcery hissed, recoiling, disintegrating into smoke at its touch, and the crew’s resistance stiffened. Yet the spell was only baffled; it wasn’t dismissed, and it gathered its strength anew. The many serpents of darkness withdrew, merged, combined into a single mighty column…and then smashed into the protective blue radiance like a battering ram of steel.

The shield cracked. It didn’t fail, but, the battering ram slammed silently into it, and Kenhodan felt the hatred, fell purpose, and power radiating from it like the breath of a Dwarvenhame blast furnace. It opened a crack—a tiny thing, no bigger than a man’s hand—and the corsairs bellowed in fresh triumph as the blackness poured through the tiny breach, spilling onto the deck like oil, spreading like poison.

A lance of white light thrust suddenly into the darkness from the steel of Wencit’s sword—steel writhing with a crawling arabesque of red and gold runes. It ignored the blackness spilling across the deck; instead, the beam pierced the column which drove that blackness onward. It struck like a flaming arrow and tore through it, seeking its heart, and Kenhodan’s head throbbed to the sound of an animal scream of rage. It came, he knew, from Wencit’s sorcery, and it terrified him.

Madness raged as light and blackness met, and the cloud recoiled, hissing. The white light ripped deeper, flaming against the darkness, and Kenhodan stared in fascination as sorcery fought sorcery. The ebon poison on the deck dissipated, drawing back into the battering ram behind it, and that battering ram drifted away from the ship as Wencit’s voice rose higher. It was as if the light were a pole with which the wizard thrust danger away from the ship, but the blackness was only baffled. It was not yet defeated, and the balance wavered precariously back and forth.

The defenders gripped their weapons with renewed hope. As long as Bahzell and Wencit stood, they shielded
Wave Mistress
from the darkness, and as long as it was a matter of blood and blades, Brandark’s crew knew itself equal to any threat. But the corsairs knew who’d thwarted their allies, and they hurled themselves forward to reach and kill them both.

“
Tomanāk!
”

Bahzell’s voice roared out above the tumult as he met the rush sweeping up
Wave Mistress
’ port side forward of the mainmast. His enormous sword flashed, wielded one-handed despite its size and weight, and heads flew. His hook knife was in his other hand and it struck like a steel serpent as one of Brandark’s human crewmen went down beside him and a corsair leapt into the gap. His concentration never wavered, the blue glow around
Wave Mistress
grew stronger, and it made no difference at all to the lethality of his swordplay. His ears were flat, his brown eyes glittered, and blood flew in crimson spray as he reaped the gory harvest of a champion of Tomanāk at war.

Many of the corsairs gave ground as they realized what—and who—they faced, but others swarmed forward. Say what one might about the Shith Kiri Corsairs, there were few cowards among them, and desperation made them bold. They flung themselves at Bahzell, swarming over the crewmen about him, and those crewmen gave ground, driven back by sheer force of numbers.

“
Tomanāk!
”