The Empire's Ruin, page 61
Three days since the keelhauling, and each day the ocean had grown rougher. That roughness, most likely, was the only thing preventing Jonon from returning for Rat. It was possible to torture a person in the middle of a storm, but not all that smart. One wrong pitch of the deck, one unexpected roll, one slip of the knife, and there was your irreplaceable prisoner, bleeding out all over the table.
On the fourth day, a sudden lurch tossed Gwenna and Rat clear across the brig, slamming them into the far bulkhead beside Dhar.
“It grows worse,” the Manjari captain observed.
“No shit,” Gwenna muttered.
She slipped the belt from her waist, looped it around Rat’s, and lashed the girl to one of the steel rings set into the floor. The tingling air pricked at the hair on her arms. She could hear, muffled through the thick hull of the ship, the growl of thunder, far-off but approaching.
“Hold on,” she said, guiding Rat’s hand to the ring, then taking a firm grip herself.
The strain hurt. She was still bleeding from a dozen gashes, and the muscles of her ribs and shoulders felt ready to tear. Those injuries weren’t going to kill her, though. The growing storm, on the other hand …
“Hamaksha,” Dhar said. His face was grim.
“Does that mean oh shit in Manjari?”
“It is a kind of storm.”
“Just feels to me like we’re being rolled downhill in a barrel.”
“There is a rhythm.”
Gwenna sure as shit couldn’t feel any rhythm. She’d also never heard of a hamaksha.
“I thought the Manjari didn’t sail this far south.”
“We do not, but sometimes the storms come to us.”
“How do your captains handle them?”
“In the same way that a wise captain handles any storm.”
“Which is?”
“By avoiding it.”
Gwenna coughed up a laugh as another violent roll tried to hurl her across the brig. “Yeah. Well. Doesn’t seem like Jonon agrees with the Manjari wisdom.”
She meant it as a joke, but Dhar shook his head. “Since the Treaty of Gosha, the Annurian fleet has not left the Ghost Sea. Your admiral has never encountered the hamaksha.”
“He’s seen storms.”
“None like this.”
She raised her brows. “That bad?”
Dhar looked toward her from across the brig. “Do you pray, Gwenna Sharpe?”
The question caught her off guard. “More swearing than prayer, I guess.”
“You think this pleases the gods?”
“I think the gods have better things to do than worry about my language.”
The captain nodded as though that settled the matter, closed his eyes, placed his palms together in the manner of Manjari worship, and began to pray. At least, that’s what it looked like he was doing—Gwenna could see his lips moving, but she couldn’t read the words. Maybe he was doing some cursing of his own.
“Bad?” Rat asked, staring blindly at Gwenna in the darkness.
Gwenna put her free arm around the girl’s shoulders, tried to hold her against the worst of the ship’s rolling. She was shaking.
“It’s just a storm,” she said. “Just a storm.”
As the day wore on, however, the storm grew steadily worse.
Up above, the wind screamed through the rigging, thrumming the lines, making the whole boat shiver and moan like some discordant instrument. Toward the stern something had come loose—a crate or chest or barrel—and was sliding back and forth, battering into the bulkheads with each shift of the sea. Gwenna was growing exhausted from trying to hold on to both Rat and the steel ring, but letting go would mean disaster. As the Daybreak climbed each swell, she and the girl were pinned against the stern bulkhead; then, as the ship tipped over the top and careened down the far side, she found herself sliding down a deck grown steep as a Romsdal roof. On the other side of the brig, Bhuma Dhar endured the same battering, clinging to his own ring as he rode out the swells. He seemed to have stopped praying. Whether that was a good thing or not, Gwenna had no idea.
If she bothered to, she could sort the individual voices clattering down from the deck above.
… Fix that line …
… Sweet Intarra’s light …
… Jessik, get over here. Jessik …
… Man overboard!…
That last hit her like a fist in the gut. She had no idea who had gone overboard, but she had a sudden vision of a single sailor thrashing in the vast, foamy black of the sea. She’d heard people say that drowning was a peaceful way to die. They were wrong. Every Kettral cadet was half-drowned in training. It fucking hurt.
As Gwenna shifted, trying to get a better grip around Rat’s waist, a spray of warm water splattered across her face. She spat it out, stared across the brig to where Dhar was wiping his own soaked hair back from his eyes. Water was leaking in from half a dozen places. Leaking down.
“Bad luck,” the captain observed quietly.
That was a massive understatement. The brig was three decks down, so deep in the hull it was almost sitting on the keel. For that much water to be draining onto them, the upper deck had to be completely awash. As Gwenna stared at the ceiling, she could feel the ship crest another swell, tip, then race down the back of the wave. When it plowed into the trough, the whole hull shuddered, then rose slowly to the surface again.
“The waves are too steep,” Dhar said. “If he buries the bow enough times, she will come apart.”
“It’s bury the bow or breech.”
The captain shook his head. “He needs to ride the swells at an angle. Too sharp and he drives her beneath. Too shallow and she will roll. It is an art, feeling this angle.”
“Jonon is an arrogant ass, but he knows his work.”
“Not this work.”
“You can’t even see what he’s doing.”
“I can feel it. He is making mistakes.” He gazed into the darkness where she sat. His position hadn’t changed—he was still braced against the bulkhead, one hand wrapped around the steel ring, one planted against the bare deck—but there was a new readiness to him, as though some moment long awaited had finally arrived. “I can save this ship.”
“What? From the brig?”
“If you get me out of the brig. If you put me at the helm.”
Gwenna barked a laugh. “Get you out? You think I’d still be in here if I had a way out?”
The Manjari captain nodded. “Before, there was no reason to leave. Now there is.”
“Doesn’t change the fact that we’re on the wrong side of a locked door.”
“You killed a kettral. You were hauled beneath the keel five times and survived. I do not believe the door is an impediment.”
Gwenna started to object, then stopped, closed her eyes, forced herself to listen. She could hear Pattick and Cho Lu in the makeshift second brig down the corridor, their voices low, tight, frightened. Up on deck the sailors were still shouting to one another, though wind played havoc with the words. At the very edge of hearing she could even make out the shape of Jonon’s commands, though not their content. Directly outside the door to the brig, however—no one. They were unguarded.
She opened her eyes, stared at that door. Heavy strap hinges ran across vertically joined boards. Each board was as wide as her two hands held side by side. During the daytime, she could make out a faint light in the narrow gaps between them, gaps wide enough to shove a dagger through. If she’d had a dagger. Without tools, the only way past the door was to batter it down, kick the planking and keep kicking it until it split. Dhar was right. She could do it. Normally, of course, the racket would have brought a dozen sailors running, but in the madness of the storm she could probably hack a hole in the hull and no one would notice until the ship began to sink. She could break out, fight her way up to the helm, put Dhar in charge. She trusted him more than Jonon lem Jonon, that was for sure. Somehow, during the long days locked inside the brig, she’d come to believe in both the decency and judgment of the Manjari captain. With him steering the ship, they’d have a chance.…
“No,” she said, driving the word like a knife into the space between them.
Dhar pursed his lips, then nodded. “I understand. I am a foreign captain, your enemy.…”
She shook her head. “It’s not a question of enemies.”
“Then what?”
The ship slammed into the base of a wave, hurling them all into the bulkhead.
Rat cursed, Gwenna wrapped her arm tighter around the girl, waited for the Daybreak to split apart. Only when it started climbing the next swell did she answer.
“Back in Annur, before we left, the Emperor told me something I didn’t want to hear. She said I was a gambler.”
“Sailors and soldiers—sometimes we all must throw the dice.”
“Sometimes,” Gwenna agreed. “But I was throwing them all the time. I was throwing them when I didn’t need to. I was throwing them because I’d won so many times I’d stopped believing I could lose. And what I was gambling for—it wasn’t just my own life. I gambled with the lives of my soldiers, with the lives of my friends, and you know what? I fucking lost.”
“Eventually,” Dhar replied, his face grave, “everyone loses.”
“Fine. But it doesn’t have to happen on my watch.” She stabbed a finger up toward the sterncastle. “Jonon’s the captain of this ship. He’s an asshole, but he’s not incompetent. What happens now, it’s not my call to make.”
The Daybreak pitched, sending more water down through the gaps in the decking overhead. Bhuma Dhar wiped it from his eyes. He smelled angry. Strange. He’d been in the brig for months on end, the captain of a Manjari throne ship made the prisoner of a foreign navy, shitting in a bucket, eating slops, locked in the darkness, and this was the first time he’d smelled angry.
“This,” he said quietly, “is the coward’s path.”
“No. It is the sensible path.”
“There are over a hundred men on this ship.…”
“Yes, Jonon’s men. They swore allegiance to him, not me. They’re counting on him to get them through this, not me.”
“He is not going to succeed.”
“That’s not my call to make.”
She’d come back for Rat, sure, because there was no one else to take care of the girl. She hadn’t come back for the whole ’Kent-kissing ship. Just because she’d survived up there in the mountains, that didn’t make her Kettral. It didn’t make her anything.
“You want to break out,” she said, gesturing to the door, “I won’t stop you. Maybe it’s your davi. I don’t know. What I do know is that there’s enough on my head already without the sinking of the Daybreak added to it.”
“Refusing to act is also an act. If this ship sinks when you could have prevented it…”
“I can’t. Fucking. Prevent it.”
“You are wrong.”
Gwenna shook her head grimly. “Not the first time, won’t be the last.”
* * *
It was another day and a half before the cry came to abandon ship.
Even buried deep in the hull, Gwenna could hear it, the admiral’s horn followed by the shouts of the sailors, the stampede of soldiers racing abovedecks to board the boats.
By that point, the water in the brig was five or six fingers deep, and instead of draining down into the hold below, it had started rising.
“She is foundering,” Dhar observed.
After the one brief argument he had spoken no more of breaking out of the brig or taking the ship. Like Gwenna and Rat, he held tight to the metal rings in the walls and tried his best not to be battered to death with every pitch and roll.
“A breach?” Gwenna asked.
He shook his head. “No. Or maybe many small breaches. She’s taken on more water than the pumps can handle. Or the pumps are broken. Or the men who should be working them have quit. It is impossible to know, from down here.”
“How much longer can she stay afloat?”
“I don’t know.”
“Guess.”
Dhar shook his head again. “Perhaps an hour. Perhaps a day, as long as someone remains at the helm to keep her pointed into the swells.”
“Jonon just gave the order to abandon ship.”
The captain didn’t look surprised. “Is your admiral the kind of man to remain at his post as long as there are souls on board?”
“He’ll get everyone off that he can, but his devotion is to the mission.”
“Then we are doomed. When he leaves the helm she will swing broadside to the swells and the sea will swamp her.”
Gwenna had seen ships sink. She’d been the one to sink some of them. When the Dombângans tried to run the Annurian blockade, she’d watched half a dozen vessels go down, desperate men scrambling over the decking like termites, trying first to work the pumps, then, as the ships listed and dipped, as the first waves washed over the rails, leaping into the water, even those who couldn’t swim, clinging to whatever they could cling to—broken spars, barrels, even things that obviously wouldn’t float like spears and coils of rope—made stupid by their terror. It would be worse for anyone trapped below. She imagined the Daybreak wallowing between hill-sized swells, the water pounding down, grinding it under. How long would the hull hold? A hundred heartbeats? Two hundred? Long enough, anyway, to hear the water snapping the timbers. She glanced down at Rat. The girl was ghost pale in the near-perfect darkness, clutching the steel ring with one hand, clinging to Gwenna’s blacks with the other.
“Jonon will send someone for us,” she said.
Dhar raised an eyebrow. “For the Manjari dog, the woman who crossed him, and a girl? I do not think so.”
“Maybe not for us,” Gwenna said. “But for Rat. She knows things that he needs.”
Outside the brig, across the corridor, Cho Lu had begun hammering on the bulkhead.
“Let us out, you assholes! We can help. Let us out!”
From above, the slow groan, then awful crack, as when a tree collapsed under the weight of too much snow. The hull shuddered, then yawed violently to the side. Water sloshed into the angle between the bulkhead and floor, dragging Gwenna with it.
“The foremast has snapped,” Dhar said. “It is dragging in the sea to port. Soon, the weight will capsize the boat.” He cocked his head to the side.
Gwenna looked away from him, found herself staring into Rat’s eyes.
“Gwenna Sharpe,” the girl whispered, her words almost lost in the general cacophony.
In that moment, Rat didn’t look fierce or furious or defiant. She didn’t look preternaturally strong or fast. She looked like a small child far from her home, far from everyone and everything she’d known, lost and filled with fear. Her gaze was heavier than the weight of the whole ocean pressing in around them.
Gwenna cursed, turned away from the captain and the child both, rose unsteadily to her feet. It took her a moment to find her balance, but she’d spent days, weeks, half a lifetime balancing on the pitching decks of ships. After a few breaths she steadied herself, measured the distance, then lashed out with her heel at the center of the door. It shuddered, but held firm. As she stepped back up the slanting deck, the ship pitched, tossing her into the bulkhead. She caught herself, squared up against the door, kicked it again. This time a crack laced down one of the boards.
“Commander?” Pattick called, his voice tight. “Is that you?”
“Who the fuck else would it be?” she growled, lashing out at the door again.
Her heel hit wrong; pain lanced up her leg into her hip. The door barely budged. She took a deep breath, stuffed the pain down deep into herself, somewhere it wouldn’t get in the way, and slammed her heel into the wooden planks again.
“Listen to me, Dhar,” she said, kicking the door again, “as soon as we’re through, you get Rat to the boats. You get her on board one of those boats if you have to cut your way through Jonon to do it. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” the captain replied. “And you?”
“I’ll be right behind you. After I free Cho Lu and Pattick.”
Another blow opened a finger-width split in the planking. The water was rushing around Gwenna’s shins now, threatening to drag her down.
“Swear to me that you’ll get her to the boats.”
“I will do everything in my power to save the girl,” the Manjari captain replied. “This I vow in the names of Shava and Bhir.”
“Your gods?”
He hesitated. “My children.”
In all the long months, he had never once mentioned his children.
Gwenna took a deep breath. “Even better.”
She cocked her leg back for a final blow when something clanked on the far side of the door. She paused, and a moment later it swung heavily outward, slamming against the bulkhead. The gloom was deep, even for her eyes, but Gwenna could make out a figure standing in the passageway beyond. At first she thought Jonon had sent someone after all, a sailor or soldier to spring them free, then she realized the figure wasn’t dressed like a sailor or soldier, nor did he smell like one.
“Come,” said the imperial historian, gesturing toward them. “There is not much time.”
* * *
No time would have been a better estimate.
When Gwenna finally shoved open the hatch and staggered out onto the deck, the second boat was already away. She caught a glimpse of men dragging desperately on the oars, of Jonon half standing at the tiller, and then it slid off behind the curtains of rain and night.
“Those bastards,” Cho Lu swore, following Gwenna’s gaze. It had been only a matter of moments to free the two legionaries, although it seemed she’d done so only so that they could die atop the deck rather than trapped below it.
She swept her gaze over the ship. It had been frightening below, locked in the brig, unable to see what was happening. Out in the air, it was even worse.
Black waves loomed like hills on every side, higher than the remaining masts, their crests whipped to foam by the wind. The Daybreak shuddered between them, a toy boat lost in the immensity. Jonon had had the sense to reef most of the sail before the storm hit, but half of the canvas still aloft hung in tatters. Worse—far worse—Dhar was right. The foremast had snapped and dropped over the side. It was dragging along, partially submerged, tethered to the ship by the riot of rigging and ratlines, like some great net threatening to drag the whole vessel down.
