The Empire's Ruin, page 25
“What’s your name, sir?”
“Aron Dough.”
“Dough? Like the stuff bread is made out of?”
“Don’t bother with the jokes. I’ve heard ’em all.”
“Dough, I’m not trying to be a burr in your asshole.” She leaned in, careful to keep her voice private. It wasn’t hard, with all the chaos surrounding them. “I’m not trying to pull rank in front of your men. I don’t even have a fucking rank anymore, as I’m sure you’ve heard. What I do have is over fifteen years’ experience in Kettral demolitions. I’ve blown up bridges, buildings, barges, temples, towers, fucking trees. I’ve spent years of my life studying how things burn and how to make them burn faster. That’s why I’m asking you to have your men get more water. If they don’t, this castle is going to burn, and we’re going to burn along with it.”
The dead bodies rose in her vision once more. Once more she shoved them aside.
Dough grimaced, then spat onto the deck.
Gwenna shook her head. “That’s a start, but it’s not going to get the job done.”
The man looked at her, caught the joke, then broke into a grim chuckle.
“The admiral will have me whipped bloody for listening to you.”
“Who says you’re listening to me?” She took a step back, raised her hands. “This water thing is your idea.”
He looked out over the waves to where the two Manjari vessels were bearing down on them, glanced back to the sterncastle, then met Gwenna’s eyes and nodded.
“How much water?”
“Fill every bucket you have. When you run out of buckets, start filling boots.”
As Dough called out the orders, Gwenna crossed to the wall. Kiel was already there, gazing out over the waves. He’d found a bow somewhere, though he hadn’t bothered to string it. Instead, he was watching the enemy ships.
“How intriguing,” he murmured.
“Intriguing.” Gwenna stared at him. “Not the word I would have chosen.”
Back on the Islands, the cadets had spent most of their precious free time at a beach over on the eastern side of Qarsh where the waves were biggest. It was possible, if you waited for the right moment, then swam very fast toward the shore, to catch those waves, to ride them on your stomach as they hurtled toward the sand. She hadn’t surfed a wave like that in years, but she remembered the sensation, the frantic paddling, then the water rising up from below, lifting, lifting, then shoving you inexorably forward, the quick spike of fear when you realized it had you, that there was no way out, followed by the rush of the speed. She felt that same rush as she stood there watching the foe come on, buoyed up and carried onward by the momentum of events.
Of course, she remembered too the way those rides sometimes ended. Sometimes the wave overtook you. Maybe you didn’t paddle fast enough. Maybe you didn’t hold your body just right. Maybe you just had bad fucking luck. Whatever the case, she’d never forgotten that awful feeling of her body slowing, getting dragged back into the shadow of the breaker, then that whole awful wall of water closing over her head, crushing her, grinding down, down, down into the airless, directionless dark. She could feel that weight above her as she stood atop the castle, suspended, ready to fall.…
The Manjari vessels were less than a mile off, close enough that she could see the tigers on the bowsprits, the individual sailors clambering through the rigging, racing around the decks, readying their own castles for their attack. That there would be an attack she didn’t have any doubt. Jonon had been running with the wind, trying to give his own men time to prepare, but the Manjari ships, though slightly smaller, were sleeker, faster. They were going to catch the Daybreak, and soon.
She turned to consider the situation atop the castle. Dough’s men had dug up half a dozen empty hogsheads, arrayed them near the center of the space, then started a bucket line down to the pumps. The commander himself was walking the wall, speaking quietly with the soldiers, checking weapons, cracking jokes.
“Dough,” she shouted, crossing to him. He turned. “I need two of your men.”
“For what?”
“A boarding party.”
He stared at her.
“We got barely enough people to hold this ship, let alone take one of theirs.”
“I’m not going to take it. I’m going to sink it.”
“With a three-person boarding party?”
“Yes.”
The man shook his head. “I know you’re Kettral, but that’s insane.”
Insane.
She considered the word a moment, wondered if he was right. The desire to fight—the need—was a blaze inside her, hot and implacable, gnawing through every thought, every other emotion. It wasn’t rational—that much was obvious—but then, with the Manjari attack drawing closer every breath, maybe it was the right insanity for the moment. Either way, she was boarding one of those ships.
“I need…” she said, casting about the deck, “them.”
Cho Lu and Pattick stood in the bucket line a few paces away, ferrying water up from the pump. Pattick looked serious, intent. Cho Lu was taunting the others to work faster, but she could hear the nerves in his voice. When he saw her pointing, he passed the bucket to the next man, grabbed Pattick, dragged him out of the line.
“You looking for us, Commander?” he shouted.
She shook her head. “I’m not your commander.”
“You board one of those ships with two men,” Dough growled, low enough that the legionaries wouldn’t hear, “and you’re going to die. All of you.”
The fire in the Purple Baths raged through her mind, the vision of Quick Jak hacking his way into the throng of Greenshirts, of the sword slicing down into the back of his neck.
The two young men joined them, chests heaving, eyes bright.
“What’s the plan?” Cho Lu demanded, looking from Gwenna to Dough, then back again to Gwenna. “You’ve got a plan, right?”
Gwenna imagined him falling from the rigging, his lean body shattered on the deck of the ship below. She imagined Pattick’s ugly face torn open by a flatbow bolt.
“No,” she said, turning away from the legionaries, from the trust in those wide-eyed faces. “I’m going alone.”
“Going where?” Cho Lu called as she stepped into the rigging.
She ignored him, but Aron Dough did not. “She’s going to board one of the thrones. Alone. Some crazy plan to get herself killed.”
A crazy plan to get herself killed sounded more or less right, but at least it would be just her doing the dying.
“Hold the ship,” she shouted without looking down. As though it were her order to give.
“Wait!” Cho Lu shouted, but she didn’t wait.
Waiting was too close to thinking, and she didn’t want to think.
She pulled herself into the ratlines, rope chafing her already shredded palms. The pain was good. It kept her in the present, kept her from thinking of the dead bodies she’d left behind her, or the ones that lay ahead.
A light wind threaded the rigging, drawing the ship over the lazy swells. The lean didn’t feel like much down on the deck, but halfway up the mast she found herself ten paces out over the ocean. The yards were aswarm with sailors, some prepared to pile on more sail or trim it as Jonon demanded, others armed with flatbows. A few glanced over as she passed, shock scrawled across their faces; most were too focused on the approaching vessels to notice.
As she climbed, she studied the scene. The Manjari ships had split. The quicker of the two was almost even with the Daybreak, but a quarter mile distant and carving through the water under full sail. Naval tactics had never been Gwenna’s strength, but the play seemed obvious. The lead ship would overtake them, turn hard, cut across the Daybreak’s bow, leaving Jonon with a choice. He could ram the other vessel, crippling both, or he could turn with her, spilling speed and wind at the same time. Unless he was a madman, he’d turn, at which point the second ship would close while her sister, lagging back, approached from the other side. The Annurian vessel would be caught between them, cinched tight with grapples, and then things would get ugly. Against one ship, the Daybreak could hold her own. Flanked, she’d be fighting for her life.
Gwenna ran a sweat-slicked hand over the munitions at her belt, checked her strikers, then reached back to pat the handles of her swords. The waiting was the worst. The world felt too close, too bright, too real. She should have been rehearsing her plan—if you could call a single, simple thought built atop a wobbly tower of luck a plan—working through the contingencies, considering variations and escape routes, but she didn’t want to rehearse. Something like this—it came down to training and luck. Either she’d catch a stray arrow in the gut or she wouldn’t. Either she’d carve her way into the hold of the other ship, or she’d be cut down. No way to know without going for it.
Her smile felt like a snarl.
“Commander! Commander! Sir!”
She didn’t realize until the fourth time that someone was calling out to her.
“Commander!”
She glanced down between her legs, felt her heart clench.
Twenty feet below, the two legionaries were ascending through the rigging. Cho Lu moved nimbly up the ratlines, but Pattick was awkward, white-knuckled and gray-faced. A wave of rage washed over her.
“Go back,” she said, stabbing a finger toward the deck.
Pattick paused. Cho Lu did not. “You’re going to blow up the ship, right?”
She hadn’t told him that. She hadn’t told him anything. Still, the kid wasn’t stupid. He’d obviously grown up on tales of Kettral derring-do, and a lot of those tales involved explosives. What the fuck else could one woman do, alone on an enemy vessel?
“I don’t need you here,” she shouted down at him. “I don’t want you. You’re better off below.”
“Dough left the decision to us,” Cho Lu replied.
“Well I’m not. Go back to the deck. That’s an order.”
The legionary shot her a wide, rueful grin. “Like you keep saying, sir. You’re not our commander.”
“You fucking idiots. I’m probably going to die over there.”
Cho Lu nodded. “That happens in war sometimes. If you’re going to blow up that ship, you’ll need someone to watch your back. Now. What’s the plan?”
Before she could reply, the Daybreak heaved over to port. The mast swung through its arc, then dipped toward the swells. Gwenna tossed an elbow around one of the ratlines, twisting with the motion. As she’d expected, the faster of the two Manjari ships was moving to block their escape. The sudden turn slowed both vessels, and the enemy wasted no time in closing the distance. The soldiers on the far ship readied their grapples and pikes, even a few wooden ladders, while around to port, the other vessel approached.
There was no time to argue with the legionaries, even if she’d known how to convince them. It was wrong to bring them. She felt that wrongness like a jagged stone settled in her gut, but there was no way to force them to return to the deck and no time even if there had been a way. They were grown men, Annurian soldiers. They had their own decisions to make just as she had hers.
“We’re going after this one,” she said, pointing.
Pattick stared. “How?”
“The footrope.” She drew her knife and pointed to the line running taut beneath the yard. The sailors stood on it when they were setting or reefing the sails, but no one was on it at the moment.
The legionary shook his head. “It doesn’t…” He gestured. “It just goes to the end of the yard.”
Gwenna flashed him a feral smile. “That’s because I haven’t cut it yet.”
She reached up and began sawing through the rope where it was tied off close to the mast. When only a few strands remained, she sheathed the blade, glanced down.
Directly below her, Kiel was at work with his bow. He looked like a man taking target practice out in the field behind his farm, aiming and loosing, aiming and loosing with an almost hypnotic regularity. When a Manjari arrow sprouted from the deck at his feet, he didn’t blink, didn’t hesitate, didn’t retreat. For a historian, he showed as much composure as the most hardened Kettral.
The other Annurians didn’t share his calm. Though they held their formation well enough, she could smell fear oozing up through the eagerness. Even the greenest among them could do the math: two Manjari ships to one Annurian. There was a hinge in every battle when the waiting was finally over and people started to die, and they had reached it. As she watched, another volley of arrows hit with a sound like hail on the deck. Like hail, except that this hail left one man screaming. The poor fucker—one of the unlucky four dozen stationed amidships—was splayed across the deck, the wooden shaft buried in his gut.
“No!” he sobbed over and over. “No. No. No.” As if that one little word could somehow unmake all the sad facts of the world.
Gwenna closed her eyes, clamped off the organs of pity and mercy, tossed the dying man’s cries onto the fire of her anger. More people were going to die before this was over, more people and more painfully. She’d tried to get Cho Lu and Pattick to back off, but they’d refused and so she was going to use them. Use them up if necessary.
“I’ll swing over,” she said. “I’ll lash the end of this line”—she nodded to the footrope—“to their rigging.”
Pattick’s eyes were wide. He seemed to realize that these might be the last few moments of his life.
“Then—”
Before she could finish the thought, the two ships came together with a vicious jolt that almost ripped her from the rigging. The Daybreak shuddered as though feverish, straining against the vessel pressed against her flank. The hulls scraped, wood and steel grinding against wood and steel, while Manjari grappling hooks clattered onto the deck. Both ships still had sail aloft, and though they’d spilled most of their wind, the breeze hauled on the masts, dragging them awkwardly through the waves. Things were breaking down below. Wood groaned and splintered, lines snapped, the metal sheathing of the castles screamed as shattered spars dragged across it. The Manjari and Annurian officers were all hurling orders, not that the orders mattered. The fight would boil down to two things: fire and blood.
An arrow whistled past, maybe two paces from Gwenna’s head.
The throne ship was also a three-master, the foremost of which had drawn alongside the Daybreak’s own. Like the Annurians, the Manjari had dozens of archers aloft. Mostly, they were shooting down into the forward castle, raining arrows on the soldiers. A few, however, had focused on the Annurian marksmen, and one man with tattooed hands was lowering his flatbow at Gwenna. He narrowed his eyes, steadied his weapon against the yardarm, and loosed. The bolt hissed by, a few feet from her face. It was a difficult shot. Both ships were pitching with the wind and the waves. She could probably hang there all morning without him hitting her. As long as the mast stayed up, hers was just about the safest spot on the whole ship.
But she hadn’t climbed all the way up there to stay safe.
She slipped a striker from her belt, then scraped a flame from its tip. The fire blazed with something like her own eagerness.
“Is that…” Cho Lu trailed off, his eyes wide.
“A smoker,” she replied, putting the flame to the fuse of one of the munitions still strapped to her belt.
The smoker hissed, then began billowing green-gray smoke. In the space of a few heartbeats it swallowed her, swallowed the rigging, blotted out the decks of the ships below, smudged the sun. Of the Manjari vessel, she could see nothing. Pattick and Cho Lu were shadows hanging from the ratlines below. Somewhere to her right, another flatbow bolt whined past.
“This smoke,” she said. “It’s made to burn, to taste bad, to make you feel like you’re choking.”
Even as she spoke she could taste the acrid tongue forcing its way down into her lungs. Pattick coughed. His breathing came faster, shallower.
“You’re not choking. It just feels that way. They’re designed to make people panic. Don’t. Breathe normally.”
She could hardly blame them for failing to follow the advice. Inside the cloud it was easy to lose track of up and down. When the mast dipped, it felt as though she was plummeting, and when it rose again a wash of vertigo swept over her. Far below, men were shouting, screaming. Some were screams of fury or encouragement. Others held nothing but agony. The ships were screaming, too, copper plating shrieking as the hulls ground against each other. Wrapped in the cloud of smoke it was easy to imagine those hulls buckling, water folding over the Daybreak and her attackers as they slipped—still locked in a fatal embrace—beneath the waves.
A flatbow bolt jerked her back to the present.
It tore through her blacks, ripped a chunk from her thigh, then clattered down through the rigging, its deadly speed spent.
She cursed, pressed her fingers to the wound. Trivial. The bolt had missed the bone, the artery, and most of the muscle. Still, it hurt like fuck. She ground her nails in deeper, harvesting the pain.
“I’m going,” she announced, not bothering to look down at Pattick or Cho Lu, half hoping they weren’t there, that they’d already retreated.
She wrapped a hand around the end of the footline, gave a strong tug to snap the last few strands, clamped her belt knife between her teeth, let go of the mast, and dropped. For half a heartbeat she plummeted straight down, out of the cloud of smoke and into daylight. The world was fire, blood, sunlight shattered across the waves, and flashing steel. Her stomach clenched as she dropped toward the deck.
Then the line went taut—burning across her palm, wrenching her shoulder—and she was swinging out and across the narrow, grinding gap between the two vessels. She caught a glimpse of the soldiers fighting below, going hand to hand at the rails amidships, stabbing one another with boarding pikes, brandishing cutlasses, hauling on the grapples to drag the vessels even closer. One man had slipped into the space between the hulls. He screamed horribly as the vessels shifted, then went limp. She didn’t see what happened next because she was already swinging through the bottom of her arc and up again into the Manjari rigging.
