The sailors were mostly aft, ensigns tending the ting chart and sending their own tings, as Erkric had commanded through the king. If Durasnir went up in a blaze, Erkric would instantly be able to take command.
Erkric motioned the Yatars close. “The forces are well engaged. Let’s loose the magic now. Give both sides a demonstration of power. Yatar, you contact the mages. I’ll finish preparation of my gift to Elgar the Fox.”
The plunge into the water was shocking cold, sending bubbles tickling up Rajnir’s flesh. He opened his eyes, catching a glimpse of his white robe billowing before a sharp sting made him squinch his eyelids closed and kick hard, striving upward for air.
He broke the surface, gasping. Damn, damn! It was supposed to be easy to drown, or was that in ice water? Two small, cold hands closed on his wrist, and in the weak light reflected from the torches of the raider slipping farther and farther away, Rajnir made out Halvir’s round face, yellow hair plastered to his boyish skull, his eyes wide with fear and anxiousness.
“Come, O my king,” the boy gasped, then coughed. “Come, you can float if you turn over. I will guide you. We’ll swim for my father’s ship—it’s that one over there.”
Rajnir assented aloud, even as he schooled himself to fight instinct, to sink, to shed this meaningless life.
Erkric braced himself against the rail, closed his eyes, and began putting together the spells he’d already prepared. This was a volatile, dangerous accumulation of spells, but—
“. . . O my Dag.”
The interruption became more insistent, and a brief, bitter heat puffed as Erkric lost one of the spells. “What is it, Yatar?”
“There is no return contact.” The man held out his scroll-case, which should have the blue glows of acknowledgments on it. There were none. The case was dark, except for the faint beat of rosy fire reflected on the gold edging.
“That’s impossible,” Erkric whispered.
The two stared back at him. He’d chosen them because they were obedient, not because they were intelligent.
“Try again.” He mentally held the Fire Spell, though it was taxing. But he’d got used to these constant interruptions.
Yatar whispered the control spells, tapping his scroll-case for each message: three, four . . . nine. Each of the nine caused a brief yellow-white glow of a magical contact.
The three stood there, looking down at the case. And not one blue light glowed in it.
Where were the dags with the Norsunder magic?
Erkric whirled. Dag Byarin aboard the Cormorant was one of them—where was his spell? Was it possible he . . .
Disbelief turned into a vast unease. “Check on the king,” Erkric snapped, though he hardly knew why.
But when the nephew returned moments later, his face stricken, Erkric knew his instinct had been right.
“He’s gone. So is the boy.”
“Unshroud the Erama Krona. They will search—and die if they’ve lost him,” Erkric promised.
Within a short time the Erama Krona, armed with brilliant glowglobes, began a methodical search of the ship. And when they came back, the leader saying, “There is no sign of the king—” Erkric knew he’d been betrayed. He whirled around, aimed the half prepared spell at the flagship, and transferred it.
“Die, traitor!” he screamed, as blue fire erupted along the rails of the Cormorant and sheeted up to the sails.
The crew of the Cliffdiver stared, thrilled and appalled, at the gigantic conflagration—except for the Erama Krona, whose single thought was their life’s purpose: guarding the king.
“Here, Dag Erkric,” one cried, pointing toward the water a distance away. The light from the flagship’s fire radiated out, revealing two swimming figures drifting on the current. “Men overboard!”
A weird tearing sound, and a smell of bitter gases from deep beneath the ground were the only warning to those aboard the Cormorant. Hot wind scoured the ship, knocking everyone off their feet, leaving them gasping from the stench; all around fire blazed and crackled with terrifying suddenness.
“Magic attack—” Valda croaked, sneezing violently, and then heat and a glaring, searing light punched through the scuttles and knocked the dags to the wardroom deck.
Stars burst across Valda’s eyes as her chin smacked the wood. She shoved herself up, knowing what had happened—what to do—mostly driven by instinct and a maddened desire to fight. She flung her hands up, fingers cupped toward the sky, and whispered the words to draw water. Magic hummed through the reeking, smoky air, bringing a mass of water in a sheer wave, up, up, high over the side, to smash across the upper deck. Then she scrambled to her feet, ignoring the blood running from her cuts, and hastened up the ladder to the weather deck.
Steam rose everywhere. The writhing figures caught by the flames fell into the surging, swirling water. Some looked stunned, others horribly burned and dying; those who had not been near the starboard rail forced shocked minds to think, terrified bodies to act, and formed bucket teams, under Durasnir’s roared stream of orders.
Valda braced her trembling body in the frame of the dripping hatchway, and brought another spout up and over the burning mainmast, sending up billows of hissing steam.
Durasnir appeared and plucked her up from the hatchway as if she’d been a child. He set her against the rail. “Thank you for saving our lives.” He coughed, nearly breathless. “But look. All those glowglobes. What is happening on the Cliffdiver?”
Loos and Viac hauled the sails breaking taut in the light airs as they floated slowly toward the big ship keeping a respectful distance from the lone raider.
“Want light?” Viac asked.
“Stay dark,” Inda said, glass pressed to his eye. “Whatever is keeping them from seeing us, well, let’s not test it.”
“Here,” Loos called from the tiller. “What’s that? Someone is overboard. No, there, a finger abaft the beam.”
Inda had turned toward the flagship. “Lee of the raider,” Jeje muttered. “I see ’em.”
Now boats were frantically being lifted from the hoists. Someone very important indeed was overboard, judging from the frenzied action aboard the raider.
Inda had just spotted the two struggling figures in the water when the air filled with a strange hiss. Light and wind tore wildly against nature, and the Venn flagship gouted upward in flame, as if it had been doused with oil, except no oil-doused fireship ever flamed blue-white like that.
The Venn guarding the flagship all put helms down and hauled wind, some of them nearly dismasting one another in their haste to put water between them and that terrible conflagration.
Whoosh, whoosh, water slid down the sides of the Vixen as they closed on the two figures in the water; it seemed the larger one was sinking, the smaller one tugging desperately at lengths of fabric.
“Here, grab this line,” Viac yelled. “And you—hey-o, is that a boy?” He dove overboard, pulling the line after him, which he tied around the weakly struggling man as the boy gasped and sobbed, clinging to Viac’s arm.
Inda and Loos hauled the man aboard, as Viac climbed after, the boy tucked under one arm. They set the man on the deck and Inda freed the line. The man looked like a beached sea lion dressed in slick white silk with streaming cornsilk hair. He sat awkwardly on the deck, next to the small boy who crouched, knot-jointed, near the mast.
The man seemed to have difficulty staying upright; in the few moments Inda and the crew eyed him, he sagged against the mast. In the orange light of the burning flagship, he coughed up seawater, his teeth chattering.
The boy bent over him, asking a question over and over in what sounded to Inda and the Fisher brothers like Venn.
While the shadowy figures stared down at him, Rajnir fought against the bitterness and humiliation of defeat—this time by his own body. The revolting taste of seawater, the sting, the suffocating sense of sinking in water—he had not been able to command his will sufficiently to drown, especially with the boy tugging so desperately a
t him to keep him on the surface. He had never imagined that he would be plucked from the water by a random fishing boat. His eyes stung as he blinked up at three male figures.
He said in Sartoran, as Jeje dropped a blanket around him: “You are?”
“Indevan Algara-Vayir,” Inda said—and grimaced. Too late.
Rajnir’s eyes widened. “Impossible. You are on the black-sided pirate—”
Inda said in Sartoran, without turning his head, “Who’s in command? That raider, or the big warship on fire?”
“I cannot say.”
“Can’t or won’t?” Inda grimaced. “Who are you, anyway?”
The boy struggled up, shivering violently. “H-he’s K-k-king Rajnir of the V-v-enn. And y-you won’t touch him. W-w-without g-going through me!”
“You forgot your sword,” Jeje said in her flat-accented Sartoran, and dropped a blanket around the boy.
From the Cliffdiver, Erkric had watched in head-pounding amazement as Rajnir’s enormous white form seemed to rise out of the water, then he realized what had happened: there was a ship out there with a Sight-warding Spell on it!
He peered at the water, and yes, there was a wake behind what seemed to be a smear in the darkness.
Impatiently he muttered the antidote to discover a scruffy fishing smack of some kind. The fishers—no uniform clothing—finished plucking a small figure out of the water, then bent over their rescues, as if they were not surrounded by warships.
Where had this fisher come from?
A magically warded fisher—
Betrayed again!
He whirled around, and jabbed a finger at the duty captain of the Erama Krona, who was still trying to comprehend how it could be possible to mislay the king when he and his men had been vigilant.
“Give me your five best men. No, three,” Erkric amended. He knew the limits of his strength: he could not transfer six people, and anyway, could three or four fishers resist three Erama Krona? They could not.
As the three were motioned aside, Erkric added, “Kill them all for betraying the king.” He waved at the open-mouthed crew, the two shocked dags.
And the Erama Krona, used to obeying Erkric, and assuming that the crew was part of the treachery that had led to the disappearance of the king, got to work.
On the Vixen, Rajnir and his rescuers were startled by a sudden outburst of screams from the raider. Inda snapped up his glass. “Those fellows in white seem to be—”
Air buffeted Inda’s face, and on Vixen’s foredeck a flicker of weird greenish light resolved into four figures.
Erkric staggered, pointed, yelled “Kill them!”
Loos Fisher was at the mainsail. He had a single heartbeat to remember his weapons lying just two paces away as the men in white attacked.
In the moment it took Inda to rip his knives free, the first man decapitated Loos Fisher in a single blow, then bore down on Inda. Viac Fisher abandoned the jib sheets and attacked the Venn who had killed his brother. As they grappled furiously, Inda was left facing two Erama Krona, one gripping the huge double ax of old stories, the other a sword. They closed. Light, sound, sensation spun into a blur of noise and motion. A lightning strike of agony from his right shoulder blanked Inda: habit carried him into a rolling dive that ended in a sprawl. The ax wielder lay bleeding from several wounds, Inda’s right-hand knife in his chest.
Inda sprawled on the deck, half-dazed, his right arm icy-cold and motionless as he stared up at two still figures. His back to the mast, a tall silver-haired old man held Jeje against him with a knife at her throat.
Her own knives were buried in the last two Erama Krona.
Near the waggling tiller, Viac stood with a knife at Rajnir’s throat, tears tracking down his face. Cowering in the bow was the little boy.
Erkric said, “Surrender the king, or she dies.”
Viac did not move. Jeje shaped the word, “No.”
Inda said, “Why should we believe you?”
Erkric smiled, a thin, nasty smile that everyone there—including Rajnir—could see in the glow of the distant fires.
A rope squeaked.
Inda and Viac knew the sound and stilled. Erkric did not know the sound. As he flexed his arm to cut the woman’s throat, Nugget swooped down from above. She cracked him on the side of the head with her belaying pin.
Jeje drove her elbow into the Dag’s midsection, and her heel hooked up to smash against his kneecap.
The Dag staggered, and Jeje wrenched free. He groped blindly, then raised a hand toward Jeje, fingers gathering an eerie greenish-yellow glow. Inda’s own rage propelled him forward; before the Dag could finish his spell Inda ripped his wristguard barbs toward the Dag’s throat in a backhand swipe. Erkric raised an arm just enough to keep Inda’s blades from causing instant death, but one barb ripped deep enough to cause blood to spurt. Erkric howled in rage as he clapped his hand to his neck, unable to concentrate on the Killing Spell—
A flicker of cold light snapped everyone’s attention to a tall, slender young woman whose dark eyes reflected the fires of the burning ships. Her firelit smile was vivid with malice.
Erkric had fallen to his knees, blood welling between the gnarled fingers pressed to his throat. “Yeres! S-save me!”
The woman looked down at the silver-haired man, hands on her hips, head at an arch angle. “You misuse what we gave you so unwisely.”
The Dag uttered in a hoarse voice, “I can win. Here—take them all—there’s Rajnir. Heal me—give me time . . .”
“More power? My dear, my dear. Did you not heed my brother when he told you that destructive magic must never be used defensively, only to take? And what do you have to offer us? A fat, brainless king and a bunch of fishers?” She kicked Viac’s Erama Krona with Nugget’s knife sticking up from his back. “Not even one of your famous fighters to play with!”
Inda’s vision smeared weirdly. He felt a hot line down the back of his shoulder, and realized he had not completely escaped that ax. He said to the woman, “Did he promise his soul to you in return for some kind of magic?”
She gave the scruffy fisher an indifferent glance; was that face familiar? No. “I love the quaint way you people put things. To answer your question: useless as he appears, the Dag is ours, alive or dead.”
Yeres uttered a soft laugh as the Dag sagged, his eyes wide and full of horror. She looked around contemptuously at the slovenly deck full of barrels and broken nets, the disgraceful sail, the small crew of scruffy fisher folk—one dead, three wounded, one missing an arm—and gestured casually. A thousand moth-wings of dark converged on the Dag, coalescing into lightless emptiness, and then he and the woman vanished, leaving a brief sough of bone-scraping wind.
Chapter Twenty-seven
INDA struggled to his feet, the most pressing desire in his shocked, pain-hazed mind to retrieve Loos’ head and return it somehow to its body. He would not leave Loos lying there so obscenely.
Then the air flickered again, and another woman appeared, this one old, wearing a ragged, stained blue robe that threw Inda straight back to the other side of the strait several years ago when he first captured Dag Signi.
“Where is Erkric?” she demanded, looking about, hands raised. Her fingers glowed faintly green.
“Dead,” Jeje croaked.
“Gone,” Inda added.
“Probably both,” Nugget put in, swinging down and alighting on the deck. She kicked free of her rope, belaying pin half raised. “Some woman came. Was she really from Norsunder?” She turned to Inda, who just lifted a shoulder.
“Was she named?” the old woman asked, leaning against the water scuttle to recover from the transfer.
“Yeres.” Nugget stared at her in fascination, as the woman hissed in shock. “Who are you?”
Valda struggled to make sense of things, to think ahead. “My name is Brit Valda. I am—was—Chief of the Venn Sea Dags. Who are you? Your accent is eastern.”
“Nugget Woltjen,” Nugget said proudly, t
hinking, We’re alive! We’re alive! “And that’s Inda Elgar, you may have heard of, and—”
Inda smacked his one good hand over his face. “Nugget. These are Venn.” Though without much force, since he’d already told Rajnir who he was.
“Oh.” Nugget blushed, then swung around, still dizzy with euphoria. Nothing seemed real, they were actually alive! “Why didn’t that Yeres take you to Norsunder, Inda? They must want you more than anybody!”
“She didn’t know who I am.” Inda slowly retrieved his weapons, though his right arm dangled.
“I thought they knew everything,” Nugget chattered on. “Had eyes everywhere. She certainly knew to come here to get that damned Erkric.”
Damned indeed. Valda was dizzy, her body throbbing with pain. She almost laughed, until she painfully turned to make certain Rajnir was safe, and discovered the knife still held at the king’s neck, the man holding the knife stark-eyed with fury.
“Erkric had granted her immediate access to him,” Valda said, working to keep her voice calm. Reasonable. “That would be part of his bargain. Even Norsunder has its laws and limits. Though not enough of them.” Her voice cracked, and she struggled to be heard, to be clear, though black spots drifted across her vision as she faced Inda. “As for you, she must believe you aboard your black flagship.”
“That was what everyone was supposed to think,” Inda admitted.
The little woman’s eyes were bird bright in the fire reflections. “Signi has spoken of you.”
“Signi,” Inda repeated, and addressed Rajnir, still in Viac’s grip. “I’m supposed to bring back your head.” He closed his eyes, breathed in deeply. “You don’t look like you could fight a duel any better than I could right now.”
“Worse,” Rajnir wheezed, wincing against the press of the knife. “Worse.”
Inda would never cut anyone’s head off. He’d had little inclination before, but the sight of poor Loos lying nearby hardened that conviction. Inda studied the sorry, sodden form of the Venn king. He was just as reluctant to plunge a knife into a man who couldn’t stand without aid; he did not want to give Viac the signal he knew Viac badly craved.
Treason's Shore Page 69
