The Empire's Ruin, page 24
He turned his attention back to Gao Ji.
“Are you going to kill us?” he asked, stepping forward, trying to put his body between Bien and the nearest of the flatbows. “Murder us the way you murdered everyone else at the temple?”
“I wasn’t at the temple,” the man replied mildly. “I don’t like mobs and I don’t like idiots. The people who killed your friends were both.”
“You didn’t stop them.”
Ji shrugged. “The Sixteenth patrols the whole eastern end of the Serpentine. We can’t be everywhere.”
People had died the night before, died in terrified agony, and all this man could muster was this logistical platitude. We can’t be everywhere.…
Ruc moved forward.
“Nic,” Ji said. “If he takes another step, shoot him in the chest.”
Ruc matched the man’s stare. “You’re going to kill us anyway.”
“I was hoping I wouldn’t have to.”
“Then why all this?” Bien asked, gesturing. “The bows, the spears?”
“When word of your temple’s burning reached Vang Vo, she sent orders that I should look for survivors.” Ji smiled. “The Three appreciate survivors. You could serve a more elevated end than bleeding out in the mud of the Serpentine.”
“The Worthy,” Ruc murmured.
Bien twitched, as though bitten by something venomous.
The soldier smiled. “Indeed. I have no idea whether you are worthy, of course, but there’s only one way to find out, and the bronze blades tell no lies.”
15
At first Gwenna wasn’t sure it was a ship. She’d caught just a flicker at the edge of her vision, a glimpse of something that might have been a flag, gone as soon as she really looked. The sailor in the raven’s nest hadn’t cried out, and he was holding a long lens. On the other hand, like everyone else on the ship, everyone except Gwenna, he’d probably been watching Raban as the sailor climbed the final few paces to the top of the mast. Her heart thudding inside her, Gwenna fixed her gaze on the razor’s edge of the horizon and waited. It might not have been a flag at all, she told herself. It might have been a cloud, a swell, a gull darting down to take a fish. It might have been a phantasm of her busted imagination. Hull knew she’d been walking the world for weeks in dread of her own shadow.
There shouldn’t have been a ship. Not out there. Not if the Daybreak was following the course she thought it was following. The Treaty of Gosha had put an end to naval warfare between Annur and the Manjari, and part of that treaty stipulated that no Annurian vessel of any sort was to travel west of Cape Arin. They were way west of Cape Arin, out into waters the Manjari had no reason to patrol. The thought had been that by swinging wide enough west, they could avoid the coastal traffic—merchant and military—altogether.
Gwenna gazed into the blue until her eyes hurt. If the Daybreak was discovered this far into Manjari waters, it could start a war.
She’d half convinced herself that she’d imagined the shred of flag when she saw it again, a little higher this time, a little clearer, stabbing into the sky, then gone.
She slid down the lines so fast that she was forced to let go a few paces from the ship’s deck. She hit hard, grimaced at the pain lancing through her knees, then straightened.
Jonon lem Jonon studied her, his face unreadable. It wasn’t clear whether he’d been able to see the fight that transpired in the rigging, and at the moment it didn’t much matter, not with a fucking Manjari vessel hoving up over the horizon.
“There is a ship,” she managed. She was still breathless from the climb, from the fight, and the words came out ragged. “To the west.”
Jonon’s lip turned up. “Already you are making excuses for your loss.”
“It’s not an excuse, it’s a ship flying Manjari colors, and it’s getting closer.”
“I have a man aloft,” the admiral said, indicating the raven’s nest with a raised finger. “A man with a long lens. A man whose only job it is to watch the horizon.”
“The horizon’s a circle. He can’t watch all of it at the same time.”
“We are well west of the Manjari shipping lanes.”
“Sometimes ships don’t stay in their lanes.”
“The Manjari do. They travel from Freeport to Gosha, from Gosha to Uvashi-Rama. Sometimes they trade in the smaller villages along the Sea of Knives. There is nothing to the west but open ocean and the benighted northwestern tip of Menkiddoc. There is no reason—”
The cry from the raven’s nest sliced through his words.
“Flag! Flag to the west!”
Jonon’s face hardened. For half a heartbeat Gwenna thought he was going to hit her.
She’d known, of course, that it was a mistake to be right. Worse, she was right out here, on the deck, in front of the first mate and however many sailors. A man like Jonon lem Jonon wasn’t accustomed to being wrong.
To his credit, he pivoted immediately to face the situation. However much Gwenna might hate him, he’d risen to his rank honestly, through years of capable command.
“Stations, please, Rahood,” he said, his jaw tight. “All hands.”
Half the sailors had already paused in their work to watch the race to the mast top. They’d heard the cry from the raven’s nest, and so by the time Rahood—the first mate—thundered out the order, many of them were already moving. Jonon had run station drills every day since leaving port—it had been impossible not to hear them, even cloistered in her cabin—and the sailors and soldiers took up their positions with admirable efficiency. The legionaries—Gwenna could make out both Pattick and Cho Lu—formed a line to the great chests at the center of the deck where the boarding pikes were stored, began distributing the weapons. Sailors swarmed aloft, flatbows in their hands.
She found her own hands aching for her blades. The twin swords were in her cabin, stowed in the sea chest along with her munitions, but it would take only moments to dart below and retrieve them. After that she could find a position amidships, or maybe atop the forward castle. Maybe in the rigging. It didn’t really matter. What mattered was that after weeks mostly confined to cabins and brigs, weeks shut up in the dark spaces of her own mind, weeks chewing through her mistakes while she was awake, and nightmares every night of Talal and Jak dying over and over and over, after weeks of being able to do precisely nothing, finally she could fight someone, stab something, kill someone.
She was baring her teeth, she realized, in an expression that might have been a snarl or a smile.
“Two ships!” bellowed the lookout. “Two ships. Both Manjari!”
A babble of curses and questions washed the deck.
Jonon, his jaw tight, stepped into the rigging, extended a hand. Rahood passed him a long lens.
“Anything out here,” the admiral said as he scanned the horizon, “anything moving from that quarter, is coming from Menkiddoc.”
It was still strange to hear people mentioning the continent so casually. Until Kiel’s discovery of the map, no one in Annur had even known that the northwestern tip of the continent was out there, almost a thousand miles west of the Manjari empire. The thought lodged like a broken bone in Gwenna’s mind.
“What would the Manjari be doing in Menkiddoc?” Rahood asked.
“Let’s hope they’re trading,” the admiral replied grimly.
“Why?”
“Because it’s easier to sink merchant ships than naval ones.”
That the ships would need to be sunk was not in question. If they returned to Badrikas-Rama with word of an Annurian naval vessel several days’ sail past the line of the Treaty of Gosha, it would mean war. Strange that the fates of empires could hinge on the vagaries of the wind, but there it was.
“Throne ships!” The sailor in the raven’s nest stabbed a finger, as though that would help the others to see.
Jonon dropped down out of the rigging, slammed the long lens closed. His face was a wall.
“So,” he said. “It would appear as though the easy option has just been denied us.”
Throne ships were the pride of the Manjari Navy. They were just barely smaller than the Daybreak, but plenty large enough to attack it. Worse, they were faster and more maneuverable. And there were two of them.
“We’ll run with the wind,” the admiral said. “They’re still on the horizon. We can stay ahead of them until dark, then double back. They’ll find it more difficult to coordinate by moonlight.”
The first mate nodded, but Kiel was staring up at the sails. He shifted his gaze to the horizon, closed his eyes for a moment, then shook his head. “No.”
He said it with the confidence of a man who’d been commanding sailing vessels his entire life. Another piece to the puzzle, but one Gwenna didn’t have time, just at the moment, to fiddle into place.
“What do you mean,” Jonon asked, his voice quiet, dangerous, “no?”
“The angles are wrong,” Kiel replied. “The wind is wrong. They’ll catch us when the sun is still two hands above the horizon.”
“You are a historian.”
Kiel nodded. “Among other things.”
“What’s the defense?” Gwenna asked.
Jonon didn’t bother looking at her. “You will clear the deck. Both of you.”
“If you’re going to fight,” she began, “you’re going to need every soldier.”
“You keep forgetting that you are not a soldier. Neither is this bureaucrat. You will go below and you will stay there, or I will have my men drag you to the brig.”
Before Gwenna could reply, she felt Kiel’s hand on her shoulder.
“Come, Commander Sharpe,” he said quietly.
She knocked the hand aside. “I’m not a commander.”
Kiel followed her down the three ladders of the sterncastle to the main deck, through the door, down the short passageway, then down another ladder to the lower deck. Outside her cabin he paused.
He was still standing there when she reemerged, as though he’d known all along she didn’t plan to stay put.
“Where are you going?”
“Forward,” she snapped, buckling the munitions belt around her waist. It held three starshatters, a few smokers, and two flickwicks. She already had her swords sheathed across her back. Normally, the familiar weight of steel and explosives would have steadied her. In the moment, however, all the straps felt too tight, as though they were constricting her breathing, cutting off her blood. “To the fight.”
Judging from the smell of him, the historian shared none of her eagerness. She could hear his heart measuring the blood in slow, steady beats.
“You don’t need to come,” she said, not looking back over her shoulder.
“If I’m to write an account of this expedition,” he replied, “I will need to watch the battle.”
Gwenna shook her head. “I’ll save you the trouble. The Manjari are going to catch us, flank us, rain down arrows, throw grapples, then try to board.”
“And in the face of this attack, you intend to…”
Gwenna ignored the hanging question. She felt light-headed, close to passing out. Her heart clenched inside her, as though it were ready to burst.
“Can you fight?” she demanded.
“I can,” he replied, matching her pace down the cramped corridor.
“What’s your weapon?”
“I am proficient in a variety of weapons.”
Gwenna forced down the obvious questions about historians and weapons proficiency. There would be time enough to interrogate the man after the battle was finished, provided he was still alive to interrogate.
“Great,” she said simply. “We’ll find something for you in the forecastle.”
“You will need to stay out of Jonon’s sight.”
“Jonon can throw me in the brig when this is over.”
“If he sees you he will be distracted. We cannot have him distracted.”
“What the fuck is it about this ship,” Gwenna growled, “that I’m such a big distraction?”
“The admiral does not have your discipline.”
“Is that a joke?”
“It is not.”
“If I had more discipline, I’d be back in my cabin, obeying orders.”
“There is discipline, and then there is discipline.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Gwenna replied, shaking her head. “Pretty soon, we’re going to be swimming in smoke, fire, arrows, bodies, and blood. Jonon won’t be able to see farther than the Manjari trying to scale his castle. Until then, I’ll wear a fucking helmet.”
In the short dash—galley, crew’s mess, bunks—Gwenna dodged around one sailor and plowed straight through another, but most everyone else was above, footsteps pounding, pounding, pounding, as though the deck had become one great wooden drum. She hadn’t been out of the stern since setting foot on the vessel, but the layout was standard for a Dominion-class warship, and the ladder to the forecastle was obvious. She took the rungs two at a time, up one level, two, three, out of darkness into the afternoon sun spangling the waves.
The castle was a scene of controlled chaos. Second Mate Pool Hent stood near the center, bellowing orders to the sailors swarming the rigging above. Hent was as small as Rahood was massive—a stooped, bowlegged man with a knack for carving ivory. He’d always struck Gwenna as someone who would look more at home on his own small fishing boat than on the huge Annurian vessel, but as the Manjari ships bore down she saw how he’d earned his rank. His orders were crisp, clear, decisive. When one of the sailors above bungled a line, he swarmed into the rigging, growling something about fixing the ’Kent-kissing thing his own fucking self.
At the same time, what looked like a quarter company of soldiers had taken to the small deck. Some of the men carried boarding pikes, others bows and flatbows. Their commander, a soldier Gwenna barely recognized, was chivvying them into place to port and starboard, alternating archers with polearms. It wasn’t the worst deployment, but “not the worst” wasn’t going to get them through the coming bloodbath. For a moment she had a vision of them all dead, bodies torn apart and scattered about the deck, sightless eyes staring at the sky. She squeezed her own eyes shut, forced the carnage to the side of her mind, made herself focus on the tactics of what was about to happen.
There were three ways to attack another ship: burn it, ram it, or board it. The Daybreak didn’t have a ram; she was designed for burning or boarding, and her two castles had been built accordingly: high, thick-walled, and, aside from the stern, almost entirely windowless. The top deck of the forecastle stood about fifteen feet above the main deck, and maybe another six or seven above the waterline. The castle itself was built of wood sheathed with copper. The weight of the metal made the Daybreak unstable in high seas, but it didn’t burn when people tried to light it on fire. Chest-high walls punctuated by arrow loops guarded the crew. The main defensive idea was pretty straightforward: use the high ground to rain down all manner of suffering on whatever miserable idiot approached. At first glance, it didn’t seem so different from defending a tower on land.
Which was why Gwenna dearly wished that the company commander had taken more than one ’Kent-kissing glance.
Holding a ship’s castle wasn’t the same as holding some stone tower over a mountain pass. For one thing, the other ship had a castle, too, one they could sail right alongside your own. The towers on the two Manjari throne ships were about the same height as those on the Daybreak, which meant the legionaries would be fighting men at their own eye level across a treacherous gap. Another problem was the masts. The Manjari would have men aloft, men with bows, men with even more height than those in the castles. Walls provided no cover against arrows loosed from above. Most dangerously, everything inside the castle’s walls was wood. The metal skin would keep off the worst of the burning arrows, but the decks, the walls, the ladders, everything they were standing on and hiding behind would burn if the fire found it.
A few strides took her across the deck.
The legionary captain was a gray-haired, grizzled man of around forty. Scars crisscrossed his face, and he was missing a finger and a half on his left hand, all of which Gwenna took for good signs. He’d seen fighting, which meant he understood the stakes.
“Sir,” she said, pitching her voice above the din. “My name is Gwenna Sharpe.”
He turned, blinked, then shook his head. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
“Neither are those Manjari ships.”
The man snorted, glanced over his shoulder toward the sterncastle, where Jonon was pacing back and forth across the narrow deck.
“I’m not here to fuck with your command, sir,” she said. “I just want to help.”
“You’re Kettral.”
“Not anymore.”
“You remember how to swing those swords?” He nodded to the twin blades sheathed across Gwenna’s back.
“You don’t need more swords right now. You need water.”
He shook his head, gestured to the wet wood beneath their feet. “The deck’s been doused. We’re ready.”
“No. You’re not. The incoming arrows will have heads wrapped in pitch-soaked rags, just like ours. A skim of water over the boards won’t put them out. You need more.”
The commander sucked at his teeth.
Gwenna took a deep breath. One of the first, most important lessons she’d learned back on the Islands had been patience. Well, she’d been supposed to learn it, anyway.
With demolitions, the patience came naturally; it was stupid to blow a bridge before the enemy had committed to crossing it. She’d been able to see that when she was six. It was harder to use the same wisdom in a fight—she always wanted to wade in with her blades swinging instead of waiting for the opening—but eventually she’d sort of figured out the trick. Talking to other people, though, trying to convince them of things—that was where she still struggled. Especially talking to other people while two Manjari throne ships angled in for an attack. She wanted to seize the captain by the throat and slam his head against a wall until he understood. Instead, she exhaled slowly.
