“Orders, orders, orders,” someone whispered over and over, and those who heard order, order, order gripped that thought hard despite the looming threat of chaos and death.
At the bow, under a shield-covered net, Inda stood with his glass trained on the enemy, closer, closer, until he could see faces in the last of the light—
“Wait . . . wait . . .” Range. “Now!” Inda yelled.
The rail bow teams popped their heads up, the masthead teams leaned out, and arrows hissed over the black water, each aimed at a living target. Silhouettes tumbled from mastheads, booms, and yards as the Death drew near, nearer. Inda gauged the boarding crews lining up eagerly along the rails of the lead ships. “Disperse!”
Signals screamed skyward. Sails flashed. The ships behind the Death fanned out.
Inda’s head ached, but he kept the glass to his eye. Barend, Tau, and Tcholan sighted on that tight line of pirates, and checked that the sails had been tightly bowsed in place before they emerged from the rocks, the sail crews dropping aft to the boats on the lee side.
The three watched the Death, nearly hidden in the black-lined cloud of arrows concentrated on it, hearts thundering in their ears.
Sailing, too slow—
—sky—where’s the wind—
—need to pee—
thirsty—
water?— wafer?—
sweat—ice—dive will kill me—
Jeje, where are you?
Shaking hands slipped waiting ropes over the helms, binding them hard in place, and Tcholan and Barend almost at the same moment dropped a bucket of smoldering, rum-soaked knotted rags below the open hatch where whiskey fumes rose. And then, their bows nudging between pirate bows, they crawled—shielded from view by festoons of old netting—to the stern rail. Last each kicked over the waiting fire buckets onto the oil-slick decks, and then, under the deadly sheets of arrows whizzing overhead, they dove overboard.
Foosh! Barend’s and Tcholan’s ships torched skyward at exactly the same moment. From the pirate ships on either side rose a roar of shock and fear, followed by the blow and curse-punctuated commands; Tau’s ship sailed on— had the oil not been enough? It winnowed between two big brigantines under a thick shower of fire arrows, pinpricks of gold arcing through the dark from both sides— then it too exploded into a sky-scorching tower of flame, the shock sending clots of burning sail, rope, and blocks dropping onto the brigantines’ decks.
Inda jammed the glass tighter to his eye. Yes—a slim form dived from the stern just ahead of the firestorm, golden hair briefly fire-limned.
Instinct yanked at him—he flipped up his waiting shield. Arrows thudded against it. Beyond question, he swept his glass round, called out two more commands, sent up signals, and then pirates closed on the Death, a boarding party swung down, and Inda’s detachment vanished into an eternity of shouts, steel, the stink of blood and shit, the grip of pain and fear.
“Hard over!” Fox shouted.
They slipped between a burning trysail and a huge brigantine with cut booms extended. Brigantine!
Inda twisted around, whipping the glass up. Marshig’s ship is a big rake-masted brigantine, named the Bloodfire, with black and gold fire on the red foresail, Swift had said.
Red sails, but the device was two crossed swords.
Fox called out another command. Inda felt the deck lurch under him as the helmsman threw the ship hard over. The sail thudded, then tautened. Two big forecastle caravels bore down. Though Inda had the current, the pirates now had the wind. They edged closer, boarders ready.
“Assault crew!” Inda yelled. “Signal the Vixen!”
Inda’s picked crew of fighters lined the rail, weapons gripped. Vixen cut close and they dropped in, the deck shuddering under each thud. Loos had the sails taut as the last four jumped down, and Vixen plunged into the dark waves, gaining speed with each surge.
Inda led the way up the tumblehome of the first caravel before the pirate boarders could swing over to the Death. Inda launched straight into the attackers.
Fox watched pirates fall away before that steel-hot savagery; those who ran were chased and cut down by the assault crew.
Leaving his band to finish the pirates, Inda leaped over the rail into the tender, sweeping the horizon with his glass.
Fox also did a sweep. But—so far—no Venn. He watched Inda again. What does he see? Is it possible to make sense of smoke and noise?
“Two trysail on the weather beam!” called the lookout.
Ah, Fox breathed. I don’t see the shape of battle, but I do see an immediate fight. He ran to the weather rail and began shouting orders.
“There,” Inda shouted, pointing at a cluster of smaller ships attacking Swift’s Swift. Jeje and Loos yanked the tiller over, feeling the wood vibrate through their hands.
“Bows up,” Inda croaked. “Each cold shot to a target. Each fire to a sail. Right down the middle, steady, steady . . . Ready to board!” His voice cracked on the last word, and Nugget appeared at his shoulder, holding a cup of water, grinning as though they were on a picnic. Inda gulped it down; despite the thin, freezing sleet he was hot, sweaty, trembling with fatigue, but his heart thumped fast. No Venn...no Venn...no Marshig, unless he was on the other side of the battle.
He picked up his bow. As they neared the first of the red-sail schooners, he put a foot up on the rail, slapped an arrow against his bow, and took aim at the man at the tiller—
“Loose!”
It was Nugget’s arrow that arced out first, twanging overhead. Inda ignored the thrum of bows and peered up at the tiny masthead. “Get a shield!” he yelled at Nugget.
She waved her bow, laughing.
“Fire arrows ready,” Inda shouted. All around him was the clack of firepots, the hiss of sleet on smoldering leddas oil, the rattle of arrows against bows. “Shoot!”
Five volleys, each hitting a target. The schooners heeled before they could prepare the sixth. But Inda had already forgotten them. He’d spotted their leader. “Boarders!”
After they took the schooner flagship, he climbed up the mast, sweeping the seas. No Venn. No Ramis, either.
Where was Marshig?
He slid down, signaled for his crew to assemble on the bloody deck. Jeje had sailed to Dasta’s aid so they lowered the schooner’s launch, one of the new hands at the tiller, Inda in the bow with his glass, sweeping, sweeping—then using it to point. “There! Two closing on Silverdog—” He could get there faster than Moon—
Dawn lit the undersides of vast clouds, a cold, wintry pale light; smoke drifts obscured tangles of burning ships. Tattered sail of red and white. Struggles surging back and forth on decks. Little boats with oars plashing—some fleeing, some reinforcing. Inda, wearily leaning on the taffrail of the high-sterned scout craft they’d just taken, fumbled again for his glass.
He blinked away the sting of sweat and ash and stumbled around in a circle to survey the entire field. Ah, there were the black sides and white trysails of the Death, which was shockingly damaged, its lines blurred from the number of arrows protruding from hull, masts, every surface. But then it was the flagship—it would be the main target. Fox was a tall silhouette on deck, difficult to make out in the haze of smoke as he supervised the crew dousing fires and repairing lower sails.
Inda searched next for Jeje, trying to remember when the Vixen had parted from them. There’d been that brig on the other side of the schooner, and he’d taken his boarders directly over, and oh, yes, there was a whirtler from the Death, and Vixen had sailed away as Inda was in the middle of hot fighting. By that time he and a squad of Chwahir boarders, appearing out of the smoke and fighting grimly and brutally with straight swords, had taken the brig. Both the Death and the Vixen had vanished into the murk.
So Inda had gone aboard the Chwahir flagship, and then—
He scrubbed his sleeve over tired eyes. He couldn’t remember the next fight, or the ones after that. Didn’t matter. He was here. And he was ready to swear he
had done a full circle of the battle, without sight of Marshig.
He whipped around the glass for the thousandth time.
North. Mostly clear of ships.
East: clear, too, except for burning wrecks—the flames, so bloodred and sinister at night, now pale but just as sinister. Several red sails against the horizon, running for the coast in the freshening wind from the southwest.
West? Burning ship, beyond which little else could be made out; fog drifted over the water in the middle distance, worming softly to the northeast.
Back to the trysail.
A break in the fog revealed the fire-scorched captain’s deck. Fox leaned on a sword, cloth twisted around both arms and one leg. He scanned in the opposite direction, then swung around and straightened up. He lifted a hand in salute, which Inda returned. Fox was not unhurt, but he was alive.
Then the fog drifted aft and the Death faded to a vague silhouette. Inda swept his glass again, counting sails, each now backlit in the rising sun: white, red—no, that wouldn’t matter. He couldn’t remember how many had he boarded on his own, leaving sketch crew on each to hold it. Impossible now to determine who had taken what. Or who lived.
Why were they all staring southwest, into the wind?
Inda turned to the southwest, stumbling as his head swam. He braced his feet on the wet, cold deck; he couldn’t see anything past the high sides of a burning brigantine. Aft rode the schooner that he’d taken before dawn. Gillor leaned at the helm, her long, silky blue tunic slashed and tattered, her blood-soaked sash wound around one arm. He caught her eye. She gestured and three of his secondary boarding crew started hauling the mainsail around while Gillor pulled the wheel over.
Inda bent to the tiller of his scout, wincing as a cut he’d gotten sometime during the night protested the movement. His left arm was mostly numb, but he hauled the tiller over with his aching right, and then peered again, and his jaw locked when he saw the fleet of six big brigantines tacking up from the eastern side of the Narrows, huge red sails belling in the brisk west wind, the lead ship with fire in black and gold on the foresail and streaming in a long banner over the ship from the mizzenmast. Brigantines untouched. Fresh, ready to fight.
They’d been hiding. All night long.
“Inda!” Fox shouted across the water. “He’s coming for me—I’m sending up screamers for a defensive line.”
A quick sweep of the glass showed Inda what Fox was not saying: there probably were not enough ships left whole for anything but a token defense.
“Signal for the small craft. Keep the consorts busy,” Inda hollered back, his shoulder sending lances of pain up his neck and arm at every word. “I’m going after Marshig.”
He motioned to one of his crew to take the tiller. Behind him an arrow arced up, whirtling into the wind. A second from the trysail, fainter, a third from farther out; the Death ran the single-stripe flags for small craft, and those within sight began to haul around. Ragged, exhausted, his fleet was still following orders.
Marshig had waited in a hidden bay on the east side of the Land Bridge, watching through the night and counting on the wind to rise with the sun, his plan to attack whoever was left afloat. He likes to be in at the kill. Inda had underestimated what that meant.
You think you’ve won, Inda thought. But if I can get to you I’m going to kill you on your own deck. He threw down the glass, not caring that it shattered, and groped around for his sword—for any sword.
Then a low cry from the schooner off their weather beam caused him to look up, stumbling against the tiller rope.
“Where did that come from?” It was Gillor’s accented voice—he still couldn’t figure out what her accent was, and she wouldn’t tell anyone. She too sounded hoarse as a crow. “North, Elgar. North by northwest.”
Inda fumbled his way forward and stood on the bobbing bow, oblivious to the cold white spray drenching him. He stared as three ships sailed out of drifting wisps of fog to the north: two schooners, led by a square-sailed warship with a high, curved prow. On the masts of all three, etched against the bleak gray sky, black sails.
Black. Not white or red. Few pirates flew black sails for long; the sun and weather tended to turn them a ridiculous streaky green, but these were the black of a starless night, and as Inda watched in skull-numb amazement, all three flashed their sails with thrilling precision, and the three slanted southward toward the six oncoming brigantines.
“That’s Ramis and the Knife.”
Someone else, farther aft, croaked in terror, “He’s comin’ after us.”
“No,” Gillor called. “No, he isn’t. Look!”
Inda looked down. Vixen—fire-scarred, hull bristling with arrows, its summer mainsail now flying, its two winter sets having been destroyed—had pulled up on his lee. Jeje had a bow slung over her shoulder, her clothes were grimy from smoke, and around her lay arrows in a moat.
Inda looked for his glass, realized it was broken.
“Here.”
Vixen glided closer, and, judging the waves nicely, Jeje tossed her own glass over the surging seas. Inda glanced down, distracted: there was one brother, where was the other? Why was one of the new hires at the headsails? Inda’s left arm did not work; he caught the glass in his right, raised it, focused on Marshig, who was instantly identifiable.
Marshig stood with his feet braced apart on his captain’s deck, his glass trained north on the Knife. A tough-looking older man, gray hair, short, squat, powerful arms, but now he looked afraid—Inda could see the diamond-studded hoops at his ears trembling and winking in the dawn light as he turned his head and shouted orders to the mate on watch.
They were about to see Ramis in action.
Before Inda could form an order, the Bloodfire’s sails began to haul around in jerks, and the ship leaned heavily as it plunged around to the east—and the mouth of the Narrows.
Abandoning the battle.
Gillor cried, “Blood and death! Watch him run!”
“What’s happening?” Jeje cried in a high, sharp voice completely unlike her own as she leaped to Vixen’s low prow and balanced there, staring.
No one answered. All stared southward, battles ceasing, fires smoldering, as the air over the bay at the mouth of the Narrows began to shimmer.
The shimmer was vast, glimmering with eerie sparkles high up in the wintry sky, a sinister glistening that intensified as exhausted combatants wiped eyes and tried to force a sense of familiarity onto the strange rain that was not rain.
Desperate human cries echoed from the distant palisades as Ganan Marshig, Commander of the Brotherhood of Blood, screamed orders. Inda and his squads were too far to the north to hear, but Cocodu and the Chwahir at the southern extreme of the battle heard the harsh voice echoing off the rocky cliffs, the keening note of terror making everyone’s nerves sting. The six brigantines’ sails jerked then filled with wind, bows plunging with the rising swells. Though the helmsmen strained, the six ships sailed straight for that gleam, which now began to hum, a high sound that became a deep, steady thrum that caused bones and teeth to vibrate.
Lightning flared, ripping down from the scattering clouds to the water, sending spray high into the glimmer where for a moment the suspended drops glowed crystalline, and then the whole vanished, leaving a gaping fissure into an utter absence of light.
Only the water seemed undisturbed, though one could not see it past that vast and terrifying opening. One by one the six ships sailed from light and life into an unknowable, and final, tenebrae that would thunderstrike the dreams of those who witnessed for the remainder of their lives.
And when the last ship had been swallowed into that ineffable void—its crew screaming as they ran about, some flinging themselves overboard to be swept along by the foaming waters—the opening between the living world and Norsunder’s timelessness vanished, leaving waves, clouds, and the wheeling seabirds high above.
Dripping blood onto the deck, Inda lowered the glass, too stunned for thought.
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Jeje shuddered, sucked in a deep breath, then deliberately turned her back on the bay. “Inda,” she called across the little distance between Vixen and Inda’s craft.
He looked down into her face, usually a smooth brown, the straight black brows that always signaled her emotions without evasion or falsity. Inda took in the dark marks under her brown eyes, the stress lines emphasized by smoke grime, thinking, So she will look when she is old.
“You should know this,” she said, her naturally low voice rough as a hunting cat’s growl. “After I left you I got a whirtler from the Garth, which had gotten separated from Cocodu. Seems they were on the far south wing, where you put them, and some local in a little ketch came up. Rowed up. Said they had pirates hiding in galleys in two of the inlets over yonder, waiting to attack any boats that tried to land.” She waved vaguely at the rocky coast, where Inda could now see smoke lazily rising to brush against the underside of the clouds. “So Tau led a few of ours to fight ’em.”
Inda knew Jeje had to have a reason for speaking as she did, though he was too tired to find it. “And?”
Ramis’ ships tacked, all at once, sails flashing yet again. Jeje kept her back to them, as if not seeing them would ward against an attack; a battle she could face, but against that terrible magic she had no defense. If Ramis intended to smite them through that black rent in the universe, she did not want to see it coming.
Inda would face it, and fight it if he could. So he squared his stance as the three ships tacked steadily in his direction, cutting off the Death from view.
“Tau?” he asked sharply.
“Hasn’t returned that I know of. I have Barend below. Mutt patched him up. He’s asleep.”
“No he’s not.” Barend emerged, smoke-blackened, arm bandaged. “You better wrap that,” he added, in a steadier voice, pointing up at Inda’s left arm.
Inda looked down. Oh. “It can wait,” he observed, as if of the weather. “The right hurts worse,” he added, flexing his fingers, which sent a throbbing from wrist to shoulder.
Then Jeje gasped. “He’s coming here . . . he’s—I think he’s after you, Inda.” She scowled at the Knife as if a glare could drive it back. “How can that be? The pirates all went after the Death like you thought they would—everyone thinks you’re on the Death.” She considered what she’d seen during the time she’d sailed beside the trysail in case it needed aid or transport. “They think Fox is you. Wherever he was on the ship, that’s where the arrows all flew, and the boarders tried to get to him—”