“What happened to you?” she said.
He realized she’d seen his upper arms—the blackened edges of the holes in his shirtsleeves that showed the marks beneath. There weren’t many of them, but she looked more livid than the burns did.
“You can tell,” he said. “It’s not import—”
A deep grinding split the air, a sound like a tree trunk being crushed between a giant’s millstones. Lera spun around, the grappling iron bouncing against her knee, but nothing was in sight. The sound went on, a low crunching rumble, and he heard shrieks as well, all coming from the western side of the island.
Lera stood where she was, staring at something or nothing in the distance. He wasn’t even sure she was breathing. “You know what that is?” he asked.
“Yes. I’ve only ever heard a ship run aground once in my life, but it’s not something you ever forget.”
“Does that mean what I think it means? The ship’s beached?”
She spoke so fast the words seemed to tumble over each other. “It has to be Princeps. Garser wouldn’t do that—he needs to go back home. I mean, go back to Dagre. Someone steered that ship onto part of the island and tore out its hull—but now they’ll reach us all the more quickly.”
“This is it, then.” They didn’t have time to look for Garser’s men.
She nodded. “Let’s move.”
No one except Voyjole would come with him. Richard had guessed the crew wouldn’t take too well to the ship being deliberately run aground, and in any case, half the crew were too injured to be of much use. But some of them weren’t hired sailors. There were footmen who’d grown up in the house he’d once owned, and the bailiff who’d worked for him, but they refused to meet his eyes when he called for men to accompany him. One muttered that they couldn’t eat gold.
Richard longed to tell them it wasn’t about gold, it never had been. It was about standing strong against people who’d seized an authority they didn’t deserve and were misusing it into the bargain. But it occurred to him that if he said so, someone was sure to reply that they were doing the same thing, by refusing his orders. Half the crew was still able-bodied, and Voyjole couldn’t fend them all off. Best not to risk it.
“Then stay there,” he said, hoping they would all remain on the ship, and be swept away by the wave when he unleashed it.
He and Voyjole made the torturous crossing to shore. The ship leaned at an angle, having come to rest on rocks submerged chest-deep, and he had to use those as stepping stones. Not being able to see where he was putting his feet was nerve-racking, though the prospect of a shark nearby was far worse.
Telling himself the water was far too shallow for a shark to attack him, and hoping desperately that he was right, he kept moving. He couldn’t use one arm for balance since he’d brought a lit torch from the ship, and that had to be held well above the water’s surface.
The two of them finally reached the shore. Richard was shivering—from the water, not for any other reason—but the sun and exertion would dry him out. Neither of them spoke as they made their way inland.
The eastern side of the island sloped up gradually into hills that became the cliffs, but the western side was much steeper. Though when Richard had hired men for the excavations, they’d discovered steps cut into the sheer walls of rock. He had ordered the island scoured, but there had been no indication that any shipwrecked survivors were hiding there, and the steps themselves were overgrown with moss, meaning they hadn’t been used in a long time.
“The map,” he said. Voyjole extracted the map from a waterproof case and led the way ahead, to the base of the cliffs.
They found the first dead man there. He had fallen a hundred feet and lay crumpled in the branches of a tree, attended by a swarm of flies. Richard used the burning torch to keep the insects off and climbed the steps quickly. He felt sick to his stomach, although the man wore a deep blue uniform with gold trim and was obviously one of Garser’s crew.
The rolling stretches of rock showed blood trails where living men had run or dragged themselves away, and birds flapped up from the occasional corpse. Richard ignored them all as he headed for the main fuse, the one connected to all the caches. The long walk was exhausting, but he told himself that once he’d dealt with that, he could rest. He certainly wasn’t going anywhere afterwards.
The main fuse was just over two miles from the edge of the cliff, but as he drew closer to it he saw piles of crushed rock ahead, beside dark hollows like uncovered wells. Garser’s men had found two of his caches, though Voyjole went to them and came back minutes later to tell him it was all right. The explosives had been uncovered but not dug up. They were still there, fuses and all. Richard breathed a little easier.
Finding the main fuse was easy too. A dead, twisted shrub stood atop a huge rock, and Richard oriented himself due east to it, took five paces away and had Voyjole dig. He soon found the fuse, and one slash of a knife parted the waxed covering.
Beneath it was the thick line which ran straight ahead before it met the individual fuses leading to seventy different caches. All were soaked in highly flammable oil to make then burn fast, but he’d still have time to run for cover. He lowered the torch.
“Stop!”
The shout wasn’t loud, but it was startling in the silence. Richard’s head jerked up. A man stood just beyond the open caches. Even at that distance, with the sun in his eyes, he knew it was Remerley.
“Richard.” Voyjole pulled his arm back before he could thrust the flickering fire into the hollow, against the fuse. “Don’t kill him.”
It was almost as much of a shock to hear Voyjole using his name as it was to be told that. Remerley was still shouting at him, but he barely heard the sounds. “What did you say?”
“If you spare him, he’ll speak for you. The Council isn’t going to stop hunting us down and we don’t have a ship any longer. They’re going to—”
“Put me in a cage for the rest of my life rather than killing me?” Richard wrenched away. “How is that any better? And where did you get this insane idea that he would…”
His voice trailed off as he realized something. “You released him, didn’t you?” He scrambled to his feet. “I wondered how he got loose. You let him go.”
Still on his knees, Voyjole stared up at him. “I’m trying to help—”
“You’re either on my side and you’ll do as I say, or you’re against me.” Couldn’t Voyjole see he only had one choice? If he couldn’t win, at least he would leave his enemies wondering if the price they’d paid for their victory was worth it. “Choose.”
The words seemed to be wrenched out of Voyjole’s throat. “I—can’t.”
Richard couldn’t even shake his head in disgust, because to do that he would have had to overcome his disbelief. Voyjole had always been there when he was needed, had always obeyed orders. He had been the single bulwark in Richard’s life. Now even he’s betrayed me.
He turned around. Remerley had taken advantage of his distraction to creep closer, but he was still within the blast zone of the explosives, unlikely to clear them in time. He kept yelling for some reason, though he sounded hoarse, and Richard wondered if he expected anyone to listen. What a fool. He went to his knees beside the fuse.
Voyjole let out an exclamation and bolted up. Richard spun around. Far to the left, standing on a high rock, was the Denalait woman.
The sun turned her hair to a fiery halo, and she whirled something around her head in a tight spinning circle. He hadn’t heard the faint whirring sound before, not over the shouts.
She flung her arm out. The grappling iron flew through the air and slammed into the back of his shoulder.
The shock was so great Richard felt only a sharp sudden pressure. He pulled away—or tried to. A stone turned under his foot and a yank on the rope finished the work of destroying his balance. He went down hard, landing on his back, and t
he barbed points drove deep.
They were made of white-hot iron. A pain unlike anything he’d felt before stabbed into him, and he screamed. The woman leaped down from the rock, and he opened his mouth to order Voyjole to kill her.
She grabbed the rope. Richard was dragged over the ground towards her. He fought back, seizing the coarse rope with his free hand and trying to pull. It made no difference; the woman seemed murderously strong. She braced her trouser-clad legs apart, wrapped the loose end of the rope around one arm and hauled.
The barbs were like a snake’s fangs digging into his flesh, so agonizing he couldn’t even cry out. Only the friction of his body against the bloodstreaked, rocky ground slowed her. He hadn’t dropped the torch, but it couldn’t burn through the rope quickly enough and there was nothing within reach as the woman reeled him in like a marlin.
Except for a corpse ahead, one of the mercenaries he’d hired. He didn’t want to touch a dead man, but that dead man might have a weapon.
He saw it through the cloud of dust, a knife beside the corpse. Sheer terror had blotted out most of the pain by then. He snagged the knife, praying she couldn’t see him through the dust as he flung his arm up and sawed through the taut rope.
She did. He heard her run forward, but the knife was so sharp the rope was almost cut through. It fell limp and he struggled up, slashing out blindly at her. The knife missed, but she retreated anyway, keeping a safe distance. Richard reached back and yanked the grappling iron out.
The sun flared red. The pain almost sent him back to his knees, but the knowledge of what would happen if he failed kept him upright, fighting his way back to awareness. Blood trickled hotly down his back, but it didn’t matter; she didn’t have a weapon any longer and his torch was still lit. He dared a glance over his shoulder. If he broke into a run, he could reach the fuse and she couldn’t stop him.
Voyjole stood before it.
He stood between Richard and the hollow in the ground, stood straight and empty-handed in a way that told Richard he wouldn’t fight. Like a trained hound, he would accept whatever his master did to him. But he wouldn’t be moved from that point either, just as he hadn’t moved to stop the woman.
The thought of killing him flew through Richard’s mind, but Remerley had lunged forward while he’d been fighting for his life, and he would reach the fuse first. Richard ran towards the end of the cliff instead, towards the two open caches. If those exploded with enough force, they might detonate all the others as well in a chain reaction.
He heard a panicked, wordless shout behind him and knew it was Voyjole, but that only spurred him on. The torch trailed a thin banner of flame. He’d been thwarted too many times—by Remerley, by the Council and its lackeys, by the lying bitch who’d been promised to him, and finally by Voyjole. It was too much. He wouldn’t let anything keep him from fulfilling his last purpose.
He ran the last dozen yards on trembling legs. The sea was a spread of glittering blue beyond the edge of the cliff. His heart felt as though it would burst out of his chest. Before he could drop, the ground—weakened from digging—gave way beneath him. His feet scrabbled on a slide of pebbles and he crashed down into the nearest of the caches.
A choking cloud rose all around as he landed hard on the wooden surface of a crate. He raised himself with shaking hands, aware that below him was enough blasting powder to tear a ship apart. The wind had died, and he heard nothing beyond his harsh panting as he looked around. The torch, where was the torch?
A glow through the dust caught his attention. The torch had rolled away, beside the tube that wormed its way out of a crevice in the rock and led down into the crate. Either the outer covering had been torn away by the digging or the flame had licked through it, but thankfully there was no matching flicker in the fuse.
He snatched the torch away, breathing hard. Somehow being in the heart of the blast zone was terrifying. He wasn’t a coward, not at all, but he didn’t want his body shredded in the detonation. If he could get out and toss the torch in from some distance, that would be better.
He started to stand, and noticed a bright sparking at the edge of the crate. The fuse had burned far faster than he had expected, all the way down from the point where the torch had ignited it. The tiny flame disappeared into the crate, sinking into the mass of dark powder beneath him.
The cache exploded.
Through the shark’s eyes, Kovir watched Princeps run before the wind.
The ship headed south, and he hoped Captain Garser would order Nemesis to give chase, but then he remembered the jutting cliffs. If Jason was right and the explosives were hidden there, detonating those would bring tons of rock down on any ship beneath. Richard Alth might consider suicide worth it if he took Nemesis with him.
He sent the shark following Princeps as close as he dared, though, turning her course this way and that, taking full advantage of her maneuverability. An erratic path made her a more difficult target for bolts or harpoons. Every now and then, he let her head breach the surface for a glimpse of the ship.
Those quick looks were disorienting, because when the shark’s water-adapted eyes emerged into the air, it always took her a second to adjust. That was usually all the time she had before her weight took her back down. As a result, Kovir wasn’t certain he’d clearly seen Princeps’s stern. He thought he’d recognized Captain Vanze’s hair, but he couldn’t be certain.
Time to spy-hop.
He sank deeper into the shark’s senses and halted her onward course. When he brought her head up out of the waves, her tail sank in reaction, flicking to tread water as best she could, her pectoral fins spread for balance. She only had a few moments before she sank, but that was enough for Kovir to see Captain Vanze at the stern.
The shark’s body thudded back in the water, and she breathed again. Kovir tried to think of some way he could help Captain Vanze, but when nothing came to mind, he let the shark wheel about. The last thing he needed was for someone on Princeps to spot a fin and kill Captain Vanze in retaliation—which, he supposed, was why they’d put her there in the first place.
Plunging, the shark swam faster and soon she was at Nemesis; she both smelled and saw the thick cast-iron links of the anchor chain before her. Above, two long dark ovals blotted out the sun, and Kovir guessed those were rowboats. Of course, the explosives were the priority, and one way or another, Captain Garser seemed determined to reach them.
The shark had taken a company of twenty men to the island over the previous night, staying under the surface because they had rebreathers. They’d been towed two by two, each holding the end of a rope passing through her jaws. Back and forth until she strained at his control. If she hadn’t been so worn out at the end of that endless night, he wasn’t sure what she might have done.
But it looked like she might still be better off than those men, because there was no sign of them. Kovir wondered if anyone on Nemesis suspected his shark was responsible for that, but even if they did, there was nothing he could do about it. At least Garser’s second company of twenty would reach the shore much faster, keeping together so they couldn’t be ambushed easily as they struggled up out of the water.
Nemesis was close enough to the island that the rowboats covered half the distance to it in a handful of minutes. The shark heard the coordinated thrash of oars. Kovir guessed once those men were safely ashore, Nemesis would sail around the north side of the island to intercept Princeps there. That would occupy Alth’s ship while Garser’s men on the island searched for the explosives.
Kovir wasn’t entirely sure that would work, since he suspected there was a cove or bay on the island’s other side, a safe place where Princeps could retreat and fight with more of an advantage. But Nemesis, despite the damage she had taken and minus forty of her crew, was overwhelmingly powerful. He didn’t need to either see or hear it to know that the cannons were being rearmed and the shot made ready.
He could only hope Captain Vanze wouldn’t be the first casualty of that.
Although he was far more in the shark’s head than his own, he still heard what was happening in the infirmary—as if from a distance, muffled through layers of cotton—so the second or third time someone said his name, he detached from the shark. A mess boy, much younger than he was, stood beside his bunk.
“’Scuse me, sir,” he said, “but Captain Garser sent me to say they’ve reached the island.” Yes, I know, Kovir thought a little blankly. “So your shark, she’s to go ahead of us to the other side.”
Oh. “Understood,” Kovir said, and closed his eyes. He wasn’t happy about the order, because he’d taken her into a trap once already, but scouts went ahead whether it was safe or not. He let her rise to take one final look at the beach. Not that he expected anything to stave off their having to obey, but there was no harm in staying at the surface now that Princeps was gone.
The boats had reached the shore and dark blue coats jumped out. The buttons on the coats threw off flecks of sunlight, and the shark dipped her head. Kovir took her up again, but let her roll half over so she could see the ship instead. Captain Garser was at a gunwale, watching; he’d borrowed Kovir’s crutch earlier, so it wasn’t a surprise to see him there. All right, time to—
Thunder shook the world. The explosion was deafening, but it couldn’t muffle the simultaneous sound of rock splitting apart, sharp and hard, as if it were cracking clear through his skull.
Shock tremored out through the sea. He heard a muffled whoom as water boiled up. On the beach, the men had abandoned the boats and were running for cover, but they might have been wading through quicksand. Everything happened with hideous slowness, even his shark sinking beneath the waves to flee, and the last thing he saw before she did that was the wall of water bearing down on them.
Easily eighty feet high, the massive comber turned to white fury when it hit the beach. Kovir pressed the shark down and the water closed over her head. She took off like an arrow, fueled by terror.
The Highest Tide Page 27
