It had been nearly an hour and a half since the ships disappeared into the grey haze. The deck crew crowded along the railings, peering into the formless gloom in search of dark shapes that could prove to be another ship. There were no friendly vessels in a storm like this; a collision with another corsair would be just as deadly as one with a Bretonnian and equally sudden.
Malus shivered beneath the heavy weight of his cloak. Despite layers of protection the icy wind found its way to his bare skin, soaking him to the bone in moments. Ice rimed the edge of his hood and crackled across his shoulders. He stood clutching the starboard rail not far from Urial, peering into the haze like everyone else. The highborn could tell the difference between sea and sky only in subtle gradations of grey. Everyone was tense, many fingering the hilts of their swords and dreading the sight of a dark shape looming from the haze in front of them.
Gritting his teeth, Malus turned away from the grey murk and cast his eyes over the crew instead. Bruglir still stood by the helm, ramrod straight in the face of the wind. White ice crusted the front of his cloak and the toes of his boots, but for all that he seemed unfazed by the howling fury of the wind. The helmsman beside him clutched the wheel in a death grip, trying to emulate the example of the captain. Urial stood with his retainers just a few feet further down the starboard rail, partially shielded from the icy wind by the tall robed figures of his warriors.
Hauclir stood at Malus’ shoulder as ever, one hand steadying himself on the rail. The former guardsman had his hood back and stared bare-headed and slit-eyed into the storm. Malus leaned towards him. “Do you want to lose your nose and ears to frostbite, you fool?”
The retainer shook his head. “I’ve had frostbite more times than I can count, my lord. A bit of my mother’s blackroot poultice and the skin’s as good as new. No, I can’t stand not being able to see all the way around me in a situation like this.” He hunched his shoulders. “The hair on my neck is standing straight up, like there’s someone out there pointing a crossbow at me. How long are we going to stay in this?”
Malus shrugged. “Until the captain is satisfied we’ve slipped past the enemy. It will be dark soon, so I expect he’ll try to head out to calmer waters then.” Though I have no idea how he’ll manage it, the highborn thought. “We’re through the worst of it,” he continued, trying to reassure himself more than Hauclir. “Every moment likely carries us further away from the Bretonnians—”
Just then a splintering crash echoed distantly over the howling wind to starboard, turning into a long, grinding crunch of breaking wood. “A collision!” one of the sailors shouted, pointing uselessly off into the haze. “Something’s hit the Bloodied Knife.”
“Or two fat Bretonnian scows kissed hulls in the mist,” another sailor offered weakly.
“Silence on the rail!” Bruglir hissed like a rasping blade. The men fell silent. Malus looked back at his older brother—and saw the great, dark shape coalescing out of the murk on the opposite side of the ship, bearing down like a thunderbolt on the unsuspecting corsair.
Every man on the port rail seemed to cry out at once and Bruglir leapt into action without thought. “Hard to starboard!” he roared at the helmsman, adding his own hands to the wheel and spinning it for all it was worth. The ship began to heel over, but slowly, too slowly. Malus watched men flock from the port rail like a flight of black birds startled from a bough. “Hang on!” he bellowed, reaching for the rail and then the Harrier bucked like a bitten mare as the Bretonnian ship crashed alongside.
Wood splintered and snapped in a long, rending groan as the two ships met and the deck of the Harrier pitched further and further towards the heaving sea as the heavier human ship pushed her over. Black-clad sailors clung desperately to the icy rigging as the spars of the ship’s three masts sank closer and closer towards the hungry sea. Malus held to the starboard rail with both hands, feeling his guts shrivel as it seemed as though the ship would be borne over and capsized. Then at the last moment the Harrier hit the bottom of a wave trough and started up the next and the hull heeled back to port, biting back at the flank of the human ship.
Bruglir’s last-minute course change had saved them. Rather than be struck nearly amidships by the Bretonnian’s prow the corsair had shied away and been scraped along her entire length instead. Yet now the two ships were stuck fast, their spars tangled together in one another’s rigging and Malus watched as the human crew recovered quickly from the impact and flung boarding lines across the rail of the druchii ship. Already the Bretonnians were rushing forward, axes and billhooks in their hands as they prepared to come to grips with their prey.
“Sa’an’ishar!” Bruglir roared into the howling wind, brandishing his sword in the air. “All hands repel boarders!”
The Bretonnian ship was broader in the beam but lower to the water and so the corsair’s citadel deck rose above the enemy’s main deck. Sailors scrambled back to the port rail, hacking at boarding lines with short-hafted axes, but on the main deck below a wave of boarders surged over the rail and came to grips with the stunned druchii sailors. In the rigging above, topmen cut at the enemy’s rigging and traded crossbow bolts with Bretonnians fighting to keep the two ships bound together.
Malus drew his sword, trying to work some feeling back into numbed fingers as he gripped the leather-wrapped hilt. He turned to Urial and the sailors standing around him. “Down to the main deck! Keep the humans from the citadel stairs and drive them back to their own ship!”
Urial understood at once what Malus was saying. He raised his rune-inscribed axe high, its razor edges crackling with a nimbus of crimson energy. “Blood and glory!” he cried and threw back his head to howl up at the storm. A jolt like lightning surged through the gathered corsairs, galvanising them to action. They took up Urial’s cry and raced for the stairs, weapons held high. Malus pushed his way through the press, knowing that every moment that passed meant a dozen more boarders climbing aboard the embattled Harrier.
The surge of men for the stairs created a bottleneck at the top of the stairway. Malus beat at the backs of the men with the flat of his blade, but they could move no further or faster. Snarling, he pushed his way to the railing that looked out over the main deck and saw that the humans had driven a broad wedge of men onto the corsair, almost completely isolating the fortress deck and the citadel from one another. There were enemy boarders fighting at the base of both citadel stairways, keeping reinforcements from reaching the embattled pockets of corsairs surrounded on the deck below.
Hauclir pulled up short, peering over Malus’ shoulder. “They’ve almost got us,” he said. “What now?”
“Follow me!” Malus cried. He leapt onto the rail and hurled himself at the men below, screaming like a raksha.
The humans barely had time to look up before Malus crashed onto them, bearing down three men with his own armoured body and splitting the skull of a fourth with a downward sweep of his blade. They fell to the deck in a welter of shouted curses and a tangle of thrashing limbs. A man’s face bellowed at him and Malus ground the pommel of his sword in the human’s eye. A hand tried to reach around and grab his throat. A blade clattered off his right pauldron and someone kicked at his hip. The highborn thrashed like a landed fish, slashing wildly in an attempt to clear a space where he could stand. Then came another pounding impact as Hauclir landed almost on top of him, laying about with his own sword and a three-foot cudgel in his left hand. Men cried out and scattered from the highborn as his retainer killed or maimed every man he could reach, his face as calm as a butcher’s as he went about his work. The highborn rolled clear, pulling his feet up beneath him and surging to his feet close by the staircase.
The din was incredible. Scores of humans and druchii shrieked their war cries and hammered at one another with furious abandon, the clamour blotting out even the howling wind and ringing in Malus’ ears. His feet slipped and skidded in a slush of blood and ice as the enemy boarders recovered from his reckless attack and surged towards
him, hacking with short, heavy cutlasses or trying to get a billhook around one of his legs. A gap-toothed human lunged at him with his cutlass and overextended, burying the point in the wood of the staircase. Malus opened his throat with a swipe of his blade and shoved the man backwards with the heel of his boot. Another boarder grabbed at his ankle and tried to pull him from his feet; Hauclir, to his left, spun on one heel and struck the man’s hand from his wrist with a powerful stroke of his sword.
Crossbow bolts snapped through the air from all sides, fired from men in the shrouds or from the decks of both ships. A human in front of Malus coughed up a gout of dark blood and pitched over, a black druchii bolt jutting from his back. A boarder lunged for Hauclir, striking the retainer a glancing blow across his temple with a cutlass; Malus buried the point of his sword in the man’s armpit, sliding past muscle and joint into the vital organs beyond.
The press of bodies was lessening. Malus found he had more room to swing before him and to his right more corsairs were forcing their way down the staircase and joining the battle. Then he saw a knot of black-cloaked figures surge from the base of the stair, their great draichs whirling in crimson arcs as Urial’s men tore into the enemy. A great cry of despair went up among the human attackers and Malus responded with a bloodcurdling cry of his own as he surged forward, sword ready.
Suddenly Malus’ vision blurred and his stomach heaved as a wave of vertigo crashed over him. The roar of battle echoed and re-echoed crazily in his ears, as if he were hearing not one but multiple versions of the same tumultuous din. The men before him doubled, trebled and quadrupled in his eyes. It was the same feeling he’d experienced earlier in the day, in the very same place by the starboard staircase.
All at once a premonition of doom swept over him. Without thinking, Malus dropped to one knee, bracing himself on the slick deck with an outflung hand. The highborn closed his eyes and shook his head savagely, the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end as he expected one of the boarders to try and take advantage of his confusion. But no blow fell and after a moment the world seemed to settle back onto its moorings. Malus surged to his feet and saw the boarders in headlong retreat, falling back to the portside rail as the two ships began to pull apart. As they did, they parted like water around a luminous figure in their midst, her naked body clothed in a raiment of steaming blood and Malus realised at once what had happened.
Yasmir had emerged onto the deck in the midst of the enemy, her twin knives in hand and heedless of her own life had danced among them like a temple priestess, taking a life with each sinuous stroke of her arm. Awed and terrified by the beautiful, deadly figure, they fell away from her on every side and that allowed more sailors to join the fight by rushing down the portside citadel stairway. These men had started hacking at the boarding lines connecting the two ships. Within moments the Harrier had been cut free and the boarders, who moments before had thought themselves on the verge of triumph, now found themselves facing the dire fate of being trapped aboard a druchii raider. Already men were clambering onto the port rail and hurling themselves through the opening gap between the two ships, preferring to risk death in the deadly waters below than to be captured by the vengeful crew of the druchii ship. Yasmir stood amid heaps of the enemy dead, bathed in gore and laughing with sheer, mad joy at the slaughter she’d wrought. The attackers had laid not a single mark upon her.
Malus took a few more steps towards the routed enemy and stopped, suddenly weary. He lowered his bloody sword and gasped for breath in the freezing air, watching the Bretonnian ship heeling away to port. Someone on the citadel deck had trained the portside bolt thrower on the ship and had shot away her wheel, leaving the vessel at the mercy of the storm. A terrible wail went up from the survivors as the broad-beamed ship rolled helplessly in the waves and was swallowed by the swirling haze.
The highborn surveyed the scene upon the main deck. Bodies lay everywhere, steaming in the cold. Druchii sailors moved among them, dispatching the enemy wounded and throwing the bodies overboard. The corsairs moved hesitantly, almost reverentially, as they pulled at the corpses surrounding Yasmir. She watched them with something like a murderer’s serenity as they worked. Urial and his men approached her and fell to their knees. The former acolyte’s face was a mask of holy ecstasy.
Malus turned away in disgust. His left hand felt like ice. The highborn looked down at his blood-soaked palm and a shiver went through him. I’ve seen this before, he thought, feeling the cold hand of dread settle over him.
Like a man in a dream he walked back to the starboard stairway. Just short of the staircase he stumbled over the body of one of the enemy dead, catching himself with his left hand as he fell against the stair.
Next to his hand a black crossbow bolt jutted from the wood. It was at chest height, right where he’d been standing just minutes ago.
Here is where I died, he thought. Or would have died, but for the premonition I received. How was this possible?
The laughter of the daemon was his only answer.
Chapter Fifteen
THE BLACK SAIL
It was only an hour past dawn when the lashing storm lost its strength and the clouds gave way to early spring sunshine. They found themselves well out to sea, with no trace of land in sight, bearing north by north-west on a general course towards Ulthuan. Dark sails of human hide caught the freshening wind and soon the Harrier was flying across the waves like a bird on the wing.
Bruglir took the ship north and east, following the northern raiding route around the eastern coast of the elven homeland. They reached Ulthuan within several weeks, passing it late in the night; Urial stood a watch of his own then, peering into the darkness like a wolf, lost in private thoughts of fire and ruin.
Yasmir had retreated to her cabin once more after the last of the boarders had been slain. One moment she’d stood on the mid-deck among the piles of the dead, then the next she was gone. Her quarters were just down the passageway from the chart room where Malus tried to sleep; from time to time, always late at night, he heard faint whispers coming from that direction. Once, he’d risen from his makeshift bed and crept to the door. Peering into the dimly lit passage, he saw Urial kneeling outside her door, head bent as if in prayer and chanting softly under his breath, as though he knelt before a shrine to the Bloody-Handed God.
Amid the blood and mayhem of the confused battle in the storm it was a wonder that neither Tanithra nor Urial had been murdered, to say nothing of Bruglir himself. Of all the highborn on the ship, the only person to narrowly escape assassination that night had been himself.
And why not? They had little reason to fear him outside of the writ. Bruglir and Tanithra had a fleet of ships and men to avenge them. Yasmir had her suitors. Urial had the temple. He had nothing. The thought was enough to keep him in his own cabin after nightfall, drinking bottles of wine that Hauclir had pilfered from the galley.
He’d suffered no more dreams or waking visions since the battle in the storm. Malus suspected that the copious amount of wine he drank had something to do with it. It certainly seemed to keep the daemon quiescent, which made the effort worthwhile all by itself.
A week after breaking out of the Bretonnians’ trap the Harrier reached the Pearl Sack, a secret meeting point among the tiny atolls where lost Nagarythe once lay. By the time Bruglir’s ship arrived, the rest of the fleet lay waiting at anchor in the sheltered cove, riding indigo waters that threw back pearlescent reflections when the pale sun hung high overhead.
There were two ships missing. The Bloodied Knife was presumed lost, having collided with a Bretonnian ship in the storm. Another, the Dragon’s Claw, had simply disappeared. She’d last been seen sailing with much of her sails set; possibly she’d been lost, or perhaps so damaged that she’d been forced to abandon the cruise and limp back to Clar Karond. The fleet waited three days in the hidden cove, lookouts scanning the seas for telltale signs of approaching ships, but finally Bruglir declared he could wait no more and ordered his r
emaining ships under weigh. The sooner they dealt with the Skinriders the sooner they could set course for home.
“The problem,” Bruglir said, scowling at the chart spread on the table before him, “is that the Skinrider ships don’t carry maps.”
Sunlight slanted through the open windows in the captain’s cabin, carrying with it the rushing sound of the Harrier’s wake and the salty smell of the sea. They were four days north by north-west from Ulthuan, almost parallel with the straits leading to Karond Kar, some three hundred leagues due west. They were at the fringes of the wild northern sea; from this point forward, each day would carry them further into the realm of the Skinriders.
The chart spread across the pitted surface of the captain’s table was the best reference any druchii sailor had of the seas north-east of Naggaroth and to Malus’ eyes it said precious little of value. Lines depicting ocean currents made serpent trails across the open sea, weaving in and out among long chains of tiny islands without description or name. Coastal areas of the great continents were marked with the names of the twisted Chaos tribes that claimed them: Aghalls, Graelings, Vargs and others. The cartographer had drawn tiny depictions of tentacled things pulling ships apart or dragging them below the waves.
The highborn sat in a chair opposite the captain, drinking watered wine from a pewter cup. Since leaving Ulthuan most everything in the galley had begun to be rationed, as no one knew for certain how long the voyage would be. It was a prudent move, Malus knew, but terrible for the crew’s morale. It certainly wasn’t doing his mood any good.
“Come now, brother. I’m no sea bird like yourself, but even I know that’s impossible,” he replied sourly. “How do they navigate?”
Bruglir shrugged. “They have small hideouts on many of the islands in the area,” he said, indicating the spray of tiny dots on the page with a sweep of his hand. “I think they keep their charts locked away there. When their captains make port they study what they need to reach their next stop and press on. That’s the only possible explanation I can think of.” The captain’s moustaches twitched in an expression of distaste. The Skinriders are hideous, loathsome creatures, but they are clever in their own way.”