by Ree Soesbee
Livia’s strange, pale eyes scanned Cobiah and the rest. “Kryta has a fleet, but no commanders with knowledge of how to defeat this threat. You are a commander with no fleet at your disposal.” Despite the bells clanging and the shouts and curses of the Balthazar’s Trident’s crew, the exemplar of the Shining Blade maintained her calculating composure. “You must do what you do best, Commodore. Bridge the divide.”
It was a bitter pill to swallow, but Cobiah nodded. “I don’t see that we have much of a choice.”
Livia looked over her shoulder at him, the stripe in her scarlet hair falling around her face. “Precisely so, Commodore.” The exemplar turned on her high heel and strode toward the stairway. “Make your way toward the lifeboats. The Nomad is not far. You’ll have to avoid the Seraph, but if you can make it to the lifeboat, you should be able to reach your ship. We’ll speak again once the Orrian fleet has been defeated. Otherwise”—Livia crossed the room and ascended the stairs, heading for the upper decks—“I suppose I’ll see you in the Mists.”
The small group made their way through the ship, ducking from room to room, hiding behind swaying hammocks and piles of cargo. It was fairly easy to avoid the Seraph, who were all rushing to the gun ports and the upper decks to defend the ship. The noble passengers fled through hallways, some screaming, others trying to take command of the situation—mostly by ordering everyone else around. Cobiah ignored them.
Tenzin reverted to his military training, bluffing the few soldiers who crossed their path. The Balthazar’s Trident was as fat on the inside as she’d seemed from without, with layers of labyrinthine passages that led to opulent chambers, private dining areas, and at last, a balcony. Bronn looked up, pointing at a lifeboat that hung some distance above them. “If we could cut that down, we’d have our way back to the Nomad.” The norn’s words met silence. “No?”
The others weren’t listening. They were looking out across the ocean, where the armada of Orr was under full sail. Though still some distance away, Cobiah could tell it was a massive fleet—larger than he’d ever seen arrayed against Lion’s Arch in the past. The Orrian ships had blackened hulls dripping with broken coral and clinging barnacles, the wood broken and rotting where the sea had taken her due. Some rose from the waves even as he watched, black sails unfurling with the wind as they broke the plane of seawater. At their fore sailed three mighty ships. Two were xebecs, ships of ancient Orr, with scarlet silk hung in long triangles and lateen sails upon their tilted masts. These were far larger than the clipper, the Harbinger, that Cobiah had seen in the Fire Island straits so long ago. These two were warships, warded with magic so foul that Cobiah could see the buzz of lightning and the rise of viscous steam wafting from their hulls.
The third vessel, the one leading them all, was the Indomitable.
At Cobiah’s side, Tenzin murmured, “My father told me of the day he fought the Orrians at your side, when the Pride captured the Salma’s Grace—and then turned to fight the true enemy. He described it to me in great detail. Even though he’d fought waves of their ships defending Lion’s Arch, he told me that the first time you see them—the first time you realize that ‘Dead Ship’ is more than a fanciful name—you’re never the same.” The Krytan had gone pale, his eyes wide and staring at the dark vision on the horizon.
“Don’t worry.” Cobiah gulped, trying to calm himself even as his knuckles turned white on the balcony rail. “You never get used to it.” The two men shared a terse smile.
Creatures with wings of sea-foam and spittle glided above them, distant voices singing maddened, ancient songs. The stink of fetid flesh rolled in on the wind, striking Cobiah’s nostrils with a fearful stench.
In the distance, a swell of magic rolled up like a tide before the two Orrian galleys. Even from here, Cobiah could see dead men in articulated armor swarming their decks. Sixty cannons glowed like demonic eyes, thirty to a side, rolling out thunder and balled lightning from the snarling mouths of their guns. “What are those?” Tenzin pointed, squinting to see them more clearly through the cannon smoke.
“They’re Orrian vessels called xebecs. Like our ships of the line, but instead of cannons, they rely heavily on ancient magic. I’ve fought one before, about half the size of one of those.”
“And you defeated it?” the Krytan asked hopefully.
“I defeated one. Half as big,” Cobiah repeated. “And it nearly took us without a scratch on its hull.” He shook his head wearily, watching the massive red-sailed ships cresting the waves amid the Orrian armada. “I can’t imagine defeating two of them that size. Their enchanted guns alone . . .”
As if speaking of them had triggered the weapons, one of the xebecs fired a broadside at a nearby Krytan brigantine. Green lightning flickered and danced over the water, floating neither high nor low, but rushing forward in a straight line. Like relentless motes of pollen, they raced toward their target, exploding huge sections of its wooden hull from upper deck down to the waterline. From the crackling explosions, great arcs and tentacles of lightning burst outward to cascade over the deck of the ship. Cobiah could see figures leap from the deck of the xebec to the brigantine, dark shadows launching themselves onto screaming Krytan sailors. Weapons swung and pistols cracked as howls erupted from the combat. Cobiah could imagine what was happening to those sailors. Flesh melting from electric assaults, souls shriveling. Just like the sailors aboard his ship. Like Tosh, and Vost, and Sethus . . .
Isaye grabbed Cobiah’s arm and twisted him to face her. “I know what you’re thinking. You think it every time the Indomitable is part of an attack. Don’t look, Cobiah. Those things aren’t your friends.”
He stared at her, trying to pull his thoughts away, but all he could see was death. A death he’d escaped, a fate that had taken his friends and turned them into monsters. “They were,” he whispered.
“You aren’t responsible for their deaths, Cobiah,” Isaye said, her hands bracing his shoulders. “Don’t think about the dead. Concentrate on the living. We need you.”
“I won’t give up if you don’t.” He blurted the words without thinking, and his face reddened with the admission. “I—”
“Deal,” she said immediately, and smiled.
Despite everything, so did he.
“Heeee-yaaaaah!” Bronn and Grymm had climbed up onto the rails of the balcony, untying the boat above from its moorings. As the little boat fell, they pushed it out, away from the Balthazar’s Trident, fighting with gravity and balance to make sure it didn’t crash against the balcony, get stuck on a porthole, or crack its keel falling into the water. Unfortunately, in the tumult, Bronn slipped off the balcony, arms spinning over the railing. He tumbled, howling all the way down into the waves.
When he came up again, the mustached norn threw his hand over the rowboat’s side and waved. The norn’s smile faded as he cast a look back at the two doomed ships. “The Nomad’s waiting. Come, let us away!”
—
The small craft made good time, plowing through rising waves in the gray of a cloud-covered morning. When they reached the Nomad II, Isaye’s crew was rushing about in a furor, loading the cannons and readying her wide sails. Her bosun stood at the gunwale, a thin, reedy woman whom Isaye greeted as Rahli. She had neither Verahd’s creepy style nor Henst’s burly sense of threat but carried herself with the chilly, straightforward efficiency of a schoolmarm.
“Captain!” Rahli grasped Isaye’s hand and helped her up onto the deck. “We received a message from the Shining Blade to expect you. I’ve never known them to lie, but I have to say, I didn’t believe it until I saw the rowboat approaching.” Bronn boosted Cobiah up, helping him scramble aboard the Nomad II. Tenzin followed, and after him, the two norn climbed up as easily as if they were scaling cliffs in the Shiverpeak Mountains. “Even so, Prince Edair left several of his guard aboard the ship to ‘watch’ us. We ‘watched’ them to unconsciousness with belaying pins and detained them in the hold. I hope that’s acceptable.”
“I’d have thrown them over the side, armor and all,” Isaye growled. She paused to sigh and rubbed her eyes with a shaking hand. “No, I wouldn’t have. But I’d have wanted to. That’s fine, Rahli. Be sure our sailors are armed, ready the sails, and await my command.”
Rahli hurried off to carry out her orders. Isaye turned to Cobiah as a sailor brought him a sword. “What do we do?”
The Krytan fleet had engaged the Orrian armada but fought in scattered clumps. Here and there, a captain had enough hold over his crew to keep them fighting, but other ships broke the line, fleeing, the rotted ships of Orr at their heels.
“Sail straight for the Orrian line.” Cobiah drew the sword. “We’ve got to get their attention.”
“Who?” Isaye’s eyebrows shot up. “The Krytans or the Orrians?”
“Both. We need the Orrians to concentrate their fire on the Nomad, and we need the Krytans to see that we can withstand it. If the Krytans get their courage back and start to follow our tactic of assault, we can still turn the tide.”
“What’s our tactic?” Tenzin had grabbed a long-barreled rifle, packing it with gunpowder and shot as he listened to Cobiah’s plan.
“Draw their attention and pull them into the city’s harbor.”
“Toward Lion’s Arch?” Grymm looked concerned.
“Toward Claw Island,” Cobiah clarified. “Toward the guns and the fortifications of the city. Even if the Krytans can’t fight worth a damn, the fort can still hold its own.”
Isaye considered. “There are only two flaws in this plan. One, the city guns weren’t built to hold off a fleet by themselves. They can’t load fast enough, and if the Dead Ships storm the city, they’ll get within firing range and be able to blow out the cliffs. That’ll be the end of the gunnery emplacements.
“Two.” Isaye pointed out at the two massive, red-sailed Orrian xebec. “The Nomad has no elementalists. Those ships wield immense magics. If they catch us, we’ll have no defense at all.”
Cobiah could see only one path through. “The Nomad has to close and fight at close range with the Indomitable,” he replied. “Her guns are larger, but she doesn’t have the support of Orrian enchantments. If we’re brushing her hull, the xebecs won’t be able to use their magic against us without damaging their flagship.”
“Just like baiting a snow cat.” Grymm smiled broadly, cracking his knuckles as the Nomad II turned in her traces and spread her sails against the wind. “Once you’re up against its belly, you can gut it without fear of the claws.”
Bronn frowned. “If we have to stay that close, how will we get them to follow us to the city’s fortifications?”
“The hooks!” Isaye snapped her fingers. “On one of our last runs, we towed a stranded asuran paddle ship. We ran lines to it: ropes, tied off with iron grappling hooks stuck through into their hull. Tenzin.” She spun to him, her hair swinging, gray and mahogany, against her muscled back. “If we set those grapnels in the harpoon guns, can you hit the Indomitable’s low rigging with them? Tangle them around the masts or sink the hooks into their hatches?”
“I can use a harpoon just fine. It’s not so different from a rifle, once you have the weight and heft of it. I once used one to bull’s-eye a bosun’s pin from three ship-lengths away. Won fifty gold.” Tenzin tossed back his hair cockily and set the rifle on his shoulder. “I’ll have to set position somewhere high, maybe up on the yardarm. Keep the hook-loaded guns coming, and I’ll see that the grappling irons are placed solidly.”
“With the lines in place, we can tow the Indomitable.” Isaye turned back to Cobiah, her gold-green eyes alight. “We’ll never leave her side . . . and we’ll draw her straight into the city’s guns. When we’re close to Claw Island, we cut the lines, the Nomad pulls away into the harbor, and the fortress can open fire.”
“Won’t the undead sailors cut the lines?” Tenzin asked. “It’s what I’d do.”
Cobiah shook his head, considering Isaye’s idea. “They’re bloodthirsty. They want us close. One thing I’ve learned fighting Dead Ships for so many years is that most Orrians don’t do a lot of long-term thinking. If they see a target, they attack, and they don’t think about much else.”
Tenzin looked skeptical. “But what about leverage? Our ship’s smaller. All we’ll do is pull ourselves closer to the Indomitable.”
“It won’t matter who’s towing who so long as we can keep both boats within the current. The Nomad’s weight will pull them with us toward the island,” Isaye replied.
“There’s another problem,” Cobiah said. “We need to keep the undead aboard that flagship from slaughtering us all while the Nomad gives her a tow.”
“Leave that to my brother and me.” Grymm folded his arms, the muscles standing out as if they were carved from granite. While the others were talking, Bronn had demanded the sailors bring another massive sword from the Nomad II’s armory to replace the one the Seraph had stripped from him. He slid one hand up the glistening blade, testing the sharpness of the steel.
Cobiah turned to the norn. “You think you can keep the undead from swarming our deck?”
“Just tell the sailors to hold their own, Commodore.” Grymm Svaard smiled, tugging on his braided beard.
His brother’s teeth flashed beneath a thick mustache. “We’ll do the rest.”
A s the sun began to break through the gray fog of morning, Sorrow’s Bay was a tossing expanse of whitecapped waves, racing from the distant shore toward the depths of the sea. The tide was outbound, carrying with it traces of driftwood and washes of lingering foam. The chop of the sea was extreme, curdled by a thrashing wind and the wakes of multiple ships tacking left and right either to engage or to escape.
The Nomad II valiantly split the waves as she sailed toward her opponent. Her sails were fully extended, shifted against the wind to set her forward at full speed. All around her, white puffs of smoke rose from Krytan ships, their cannonballs hurtling toward the enemy. Orrian ships returned fire, but instead of leaden balls, they fired skulls set alight by dark magic. Isaye gave orders to the sailors working the rudder, but the captain’s eyes continually followed the Balthazar’s Trident within the Krytan armada, though the galleon was still far behind the line of fire.
Ships were taking damage on all sides. Although the Krytans were excellent hand to hand, the Orrian ships weren’t closing. Only a few of the human ships had fighting aboard their decks, and those were the ones being swarmed by the undead crawling up their hulls from beneath the dark waves. Off the port bow, a Krytan frigate was shoved forward on the waves, masts collapsing, sails set alight by wicked purplish fire. She careened slowly into an Orrian clipper, smashing her prow into the rotted ship’s side. The fire quickly spread from the frigate’s masts onto the Orrian ship. Clearly, the Dead Ships were not immune to their own flame.
Isaye was giving orders to adjust the ship’s rigging, shift the rudder, and watch for undead rising from below. Her sailors leapt to the task, their faces white but their hands steady on the till. “Watch to starboard. There’s a shadow beneath the waves!”
“Acknowledged, Cap’n!” Bosun Rahli yelled, calling to the ship’s sailors. They rushed to the side of the ship and met the assault with flashing swords.
The things that crawled and slithered onto the Nomad II’s deck weren’t human. It wasn’t clear from their forms whether they had ever been human. Tentacles swayed from sockets, and reverse-jointed knees bent as their huge, hooked claws sank into the ship’s pine hull. One of the monstrosities had the rotting head of a shark, while another was made of seaweed-bound bone and sharp shards of coral.
Grymm strode into the beasts, gripping the shark-headed one by its wretched arm and driving his fist into the monster’s nose. His brother was close behind him, greatsword slashing out in a wide arc. It caught one of the tentacles as it passed by, severing the festering limb. Sliced away, the tentacle twisted and snarled on the oak boards of the ship’s deck.
Gunfire rang out from the yardarm
, and the creature of bone and coral jerked and spun from a blow to the shoulder. A second shot cracked almost immediately thereafter, and fragments of skull exploded from the monster’s head. It howled in rage, but Bronn’s sword caught it, lifting it as the blade cut through and tossing both halves of the horror back into the sea.
“There she is.” Isaye pointed just ahead of the Nomad II’s bow. “The Indomitable.”
The mighty ship of the line crested the waves before them. Her hull had blackened over the years, rot spreading in dark patches on the ruined wood. Fleshy mold clung to the keel and hull boards, and long threads of kelp fluttered like banners from the horizontal spars of her three masts. Her black sails shivered in the wind, pulling the galleon forward with the might of a foul-smelling gale. Rotted sailors hung from the Indomitable’s rigging, some firing pistols and others addressing the set of her yardarms. They sang, and howled, and caterwauled, the cries drifting across the rolling waves in an eerie cacophony. At the ship’s wallowing prow rode the brass lady, the demon with six arms spread wide in malicious glee, green tarnish blighting her features like a disease.
The dark galleon’s guns roared a challenge, blasting through a smaller ship in the Krytan armada as the Indomitable rolled toward the Nomad II. Her hull struck the side of the schooner with enough force to crack its keel, twisting the boards until the Krytan ship’s frame gave way. The brigantine broke apart, scattering boards to the tide and pouring her crew into the grasp of gruesome undead horrors beneath the waves.
They were running perpendicular to the Indomitable, and the larger ship was slower than the Nomad II. Still, the sea between them was wide and filled with writhing monstrosities. “Can we catch them?” Cobiah shouted to Isaye. She didn’t respond, glancing back at him with worry in her hazel eyes as the valiant clipper bore forward into battle.
“May Grenth shatter their bones!” Cobiah cursed, running his hands through his graying hair. “I wish we had the Pride’s engines,” he said, striding to Isaye’s side. “Or even that old clunker we had on the Havoc. I wish we had Verahd to give us the gale! We need more speed.” He glanced to the port side, where one of the Orrian xebecs was disemboweling a Krytan galleon.
