by Джеффри Лорд
Clinging by instinct to his axe, he saw the water coming up, felt it slam him across face and body, and kicked out furiously the moment he hit. But he went far under, far enough to see the weeds wriggling on the sandy bottom, far enough so that when he turned on his back and looked up the surface was a silver roof over a gray-green cave. Then he was struggling upward toward the surface, kicking off his boots as he went, dropping his belt and trousers, coming to the surface clad only in his shirt. He stripped that off with two quick motions of his free hand and looked about him.
He had expected that the two remaining serpents would be on him the moment he hit the water, but he suddenly realized that Cayla might not have seen him hurtle through the air and plunge under the water. If that were the case, she would not know to call her allies off from their job of sinking Charger to comb the waters about her for Blade. As long as he was invisible to Cayla he might have a chance of safety. He turned his head and began scanning around him for Witch. The murk of gray-brown smoke, spreading now from other burning ships besides the flagship, ebbed and flowed across the surface of the water. It made his eyes sting all over again and reduced the ships about him to lurking wraith-shapes.
He saw Charger, her ram now jutting green and slimy from the water as the writhings of the great serpents dragged her farther and farther down, churning the water white about her now-submerged stern. Bodies and wreckage were floating away from her as she dipped lower. He saw no sign of Brora. But he knew that in the murk the half-sighted monsters would have little hope of detecting anything more than fifty feet from their scaled noses without their mistress’ aid. If Brora had clawed his way clear of the sinking ship, he might be hundreds of yards away by now and safe.
He turned back toward the flagship, in the direction where he had last seen Witch, and saw only the smoke and a skiff making her cautious way through the murk under oars. Then, turning farther, he saw two ships grappled together-a galley of Royth and a pirate galley beyond her-their decks a mass of struggling figures. He blinked water out of his eyes and looked again. Was one of the figures standing apart from the mass slim, with a head of hair so blonde and fair it gleamed even in the murk? Yes! His powerful legs churned the water behind him as he hurled himself through the water like a human torpedo toward the two ships. As he closed the distance, his few doubts vanished-here was Cayla, here was the final reckoning with the she-demon! Would tough and faithful Brora ever know about it?
The battle on the ships’ decks had risen to its climax as Blade pulled himself alongside the Royth galley. Every few seconds a living man or a dead body would topple over the side, to strike out frantically or sink or drift away. Blade seized a rope trailing over the side, braced his feet against the weed-slick planks of the galley’s bull, and scrambled up onto the deck.
He took a few seconds to size up the situation. In that few seconds the men ramping and struggling on the deck had time to turn and notice the apparition that had burst onto their deck-a colossal naked man, with skin burnt dark by sun and wind stretched over masses of rippling muscles, swinging an axe in one hand as though it were as light as a quill pen. Then he bellowed «Cayla!» in a terrible roaring voice and charged forward. Pirates and navymen sprang aside from his path.
Blade’s few seconds of observation had told his trained eye that here at least the pirates had the edge of it, having hurled the navy boarding parties back onto their own decks and then gone over to the attack. He crossed the galley’s quarterdeck in a half dozen long strides, the axe whirling in his right hand, and sprang down onto the main deck in a single bound. Once again he was a killing machine, and now the small part of him still fully rational knew that Cayla was almost within his grasp, and both reason and the urge to kill drove him onward together at a frightening pace.
A pirate whirled, aiming a sword thrust at Blade’s stomach. Blade danced to one side, brought the axe up, saw the head sink into the man’s stomach, and felt the handle smash into his arm. The man’s sword flew into the air. Blade snatched it from the deck and parried a pike thrust with it almost in the same motion. Another pirate ran at Blade, also wielding a pike. Blade feinted left with the sword, brought the axe up as the pirate responded, then leaped aside and brought it down on the man’s skull. The pirate was dead before he hit the deck and Blade sprang over the falling body to engage two more.
One of these had a shield and Blade launched a kick at the man’s knee to force the shield down, then thrust over the top into his face with the sword. Simultaneously he whipped the axe up in time to take the other pirate’s frantic downstroke on the axe-head. Sparks flew, metal clanged, the shock half-numbed Blade’s arm. But the other pirate’s sword flew from his hand and before he could leap back Blade swung his left arm with the bloody sword across and thrust the man through the belly.
Blade had now cleared a space around him, and the pirates were beginning to lose heart, while fore and aft the navymen were rallying. A pirate rushed at Blade with a mace swinging in both hands and died clutching at an arrow rammed through his throat by a navy archer on the foc’sle. Two more pirates fell off the foc’sle, landing hard enough to be stunned for a moment. Blade was on them in seconds, axe swinging. A reluctance to slaughter halfstunned men like pigs made him shift his grip on the haft just enough so that the fiat of the blade, not the edge, struck them down to the deck again.
Then from both forward and aft, the navymen charged out in a full-scale counterattack, the bowmen dropping their bows and pulling out daggers and swords and engaging in a fight so utterly entangled that even Blade was hard put to tell friend from foe. There was a wild moment of balance, when the kettle-mending sound of clashing steel rose to a deafening din. Thrusts and slashes came at Blade so fast that in that moment all even he could do was parry and dodge and occasionally wince as steel slashed his bare skin. He was bleeding from half a dozen minor wounds when a trumpet blared close in his ear. The pirates gave way, those who still could move fast enough. Blade saw them dashing for the railing, leaping up on it, and hurling themselves across to the comparative safety of Witch’s deck.
And beyond them, for the first time since he boarded the galley, Blade saw Cayla standing out straight and proud amid the swirl of battle and the retreat of her crew. With no thought of odds or anything else except coming to grips with her, he sprang onto the railing and leaped across onto Witch’s deck.
Once again, men drew back at Blade’s appearance. Naked, blood-smeared, eyes blazing with fury, he cleared a space around him by his mere presence, without a single stroke of sword or axe. But Cayla saw her crew giving way before Blade and screamed out in a voice raw and shrill with fury:
«There is only one, and he is only a man! Are you men?» As if wakened from a trance, the pirates sprang to life and hurled themselves against Blade.
He almost went down under the assault; there were at least fifteen coming against him, and he had already been fighting men and monsters for hours, apart from his wounds. He had to give way in his turn, retreating to the railing and making his stand there, sword and axe whirling like some deadly machine. The barrier they made between him and his opponents was impenetrable. Even worse for the pirates, at any slackening of the attack sword or axe would leap out into their ranks, a deadly tongue of steel licking out, smashing, ripping, maiming. There were so many of the pirates that they blundered into each other’s way as they sought to get at Blade, and to make a blunder against Blade was a death sentence. There were fifteen pirates to begin with, then twelve, then ten.
Blade found a moment to appreciate the fact that he was nearing the end of his adventure in this Dimension as he had begun it-fighting singlehanded against a mass of Neraler pirates. But he was filled with yet more fury that these poor fools he kept smashing down to the deck were keeping him from getting at Cayla. There were moments when a pause in the swirl of bodies before him let him see her, standing with one hand on her hip and the other urging her men on with flourishes of her sword. Then she disappeared for a time,
and when he saw her again, she was stalking away down Witch’s deck, hands busy with the straps and buckles of her armor. At that sight Blade’s fury boiled still higher, and he bellowed like a bull and launched himself like a battering-ram against the men in front of him, lunging under sword and pike strokes.
The sheer impact of his giant body hurtling forward at full speed threw half the men opposing him to the deck, some of them stunned. Before the others could rally and block his path again or attack his now undefended rear, navymen from the Royth galley alongside began to swarm over the railings to join the battle. Blade turned for a moment to watch them and nearly died for his curiosity, as Cayla sprang around in a complete half-turn as graceful as a ballet dancer’s and lunged at him. Her light sword was razor-sharp. It ripped open his right arm deep enough to make him gasp. The axe fell from his suddenly limp fingers and crashed to the deck. He brought the sword up to parry another lunge, but instead Cayla ran lightly forward until she was at the foc’sle. She leaped up on the railing, kicking off her boots as she did so, and gave a wild cry ending in a sibilant note that made Blade’s flesh crawl. Then she shrugged her unbuckled cuirass off, leaving herself bare to the waist. She threw up one slim arm in a mocking gesture to Blade, sending her sword flying through the air. As he ducked aside, she sprang from the railing and vanished over the side.
She was already many yards ahead of Blade by the time he hit the water and rose from his dive to follow her, and she was gaining every second. She might have been easy to overtake for Blade at his full strength, but he was far from fresh, and his disabled arm slowed him down even though he had also dropped his axe. But his remaining arm, his legs, and a single desperate thought drove him ahead at a muscle-wrenching, throat-searing pace. It was the thought that he must catch up with Cayla, must silence or stun her, before her serpent allies could respond to her call to rise out of whatever part of this bloody sea they now swam through and destroy him.
He soon realized she was making straight for shore. She was keeping well ahead of him, but the gap between them was no longer widening, and she had never found a second chance to pause and call the serpents. On and on they churned, through water now spotted thickly with floating bodies, balks of timber, masts complete with sails and rigging, overturned boats, odd bits of wood, and personal gear. Again, Blade felt he was ending this adventure as he had begun it-swimming through a wreckage-strewn sea-and again reminded himself that the true end to it all swam twenty yards ahead of him, white limbs thrashing along as tirelessly as his own.
Then he saw Cayla lurch to her feet, turn toward the sea, and give her serpent call again, now with a note of desperation that came clear even to Blade’s water-deafened ears. And this time it was answered, as two hideously familiar heads writhed their way up out of the sea fifty yards off to the right.
Blade for a moment kept going by sheer reflex, as the prospect of those fanged, slime-dripping jaws closing on his body made him turn chill all over. Then he was churning through the water even faster, angling off to the left but still heading toward shore. He was swimming for life itself now; if he could get ashore safely he might find a weapon or at least a chance to outrun the two monsters, a chance he would never find in the water. He swam until he was certain that both arms would snap off like rotten twigs if he lifted them for another stroke, until his chest felt as though one of the giant serpents was already coiled around it, until he could almost feel the joints of his hips and legs squeal protestingly as he forced them to keep moving.
It seemed that the minutes had already stretched into hours and the hours were stretching into days, when he felt solid bottom strike his feet. By reflex alone he changed his legs’ motion from swimming to a staggering run. He splashed through the water, and behind him another splashing sounded, growing louder and louder. He was out on the hard-packed sand of the beach now, running like a hare, his eyes darting from right to left, searching less for possible enemies than for loose weapons he might snatch up. He would not worry about human opponents now; what was slithering out of the sea behind him was a far more deadly danger.
A low rise loomed ahead, and behind him he heard the splashing die away in favor of a grating noise of scales on sand as the monsters writhed their way up onto the beach. He topped the rise, tripped, went face down in the sand, rolled down into a hollow, and fetched up hard against an abandoned tent. Cautiously he rose to hands and knees and peered inside the tent-then grinned. The tent was full of barrels and bales, except for the center, where a hastily-pegged-together rack held a long row of spears and pikes, some upright and some lying flat. There was no one to stop him as he darted in and snatched up three twelve-foot spears.
Now it was his turn to attack. Keeping low, he crawled up the tumbled sand and peered through a clump of beach grass. To the north was nothing but a swirling gray-brown wall, fed by fires both afloat and ashore, with the northern breeze drifting the murk thicker and thicker toward where he lay. He could see nothing and hear little to suggest how the battle was going elsewhere. He cared even less, for his own private fight was not yet finished.
Cayla herself now stood ankle deep in the water, entirely nude. The two great serpents were coiled up on the beach in front of her, with perhaps the rear thirty feet of their bodies still submerged and their vast heads swaying gently back and forth some ten feet above the sand. Their mouths open and shut as she spoke to them in the half-bark, half-hiss Blade now knew so well. Behind her, drifting in toward shore, bobbed a great tangle of planks, spars, and canvas. Blade rose to his knees and hefted a spear. It was not his preference to kill an unarmed woman, but far too many attempts to kill him lay between them, and from this distance it would in any case be folly to try for a disabling shot. He might well miss entirely and have the serpents on him in seconds. He sprang to his feet and hurled the spear.
It was a good throw but not good enough. The spear grazed Cayla’s hip and skittered into the water behind her. Before the ripples of its fall had vanished, she spun about, thrust out a hand toward Blade, and screamed out triumphantly. Blade snatched up the second spear and ran at the nearer serpent before it had time to uncoil most of itself. The head was still hovering uncertainly in the air as the flaring red eyes sought to focus on its prey when Blade ran in under that head, leaped as high as he could, and thrust the spear into the monster’s throat.
Again a death-hiss tore at Blade’s ears, again the fumes of the thing’s blood tore at his lungs and stung his skin. He let go of the spearshaft barely in time to avoid being hurled into the air, as the monster reared up with the spear still embedded in its throat and lunged toward the sea. But he did not avoid its flailing coils entirely, as a yard-thick section of body whipped out and slammed into him hard enough to hurl him to the sand.
He saw the other monster rear up, clawed frantically backward to get at the remaining spear, then heard Cayla’s cry of triumph change to a gasp and a bubbling scream. He lurched to his feet with the last spear in his hand and saw Cayla staggering, the point of a pike jutting from her body just below the left breast. A blood-smeared, smoke-blackened figure stood just behind her, and as Blade watched the figure jerked the pike free and thrust it into Cayla again. This time she went face down into the water, which instantly turned red about her thrashing limbs. As the figure stood over her and raised the pike for a third thrust, Blade recognized the face, darkened as it was by blood, smoke, and rage.
«Brora! Enough!»
«Captain Blahyd!» Brora turned, showed white teeth in a smile, and took a single step toward Blade. Then the last serpent, no longer under the control of its dying mistress, no longer responding to anything except hunger and rage, turned and noticed the two figures almost beneath its head. The head dipped, lunged downward, and Brora’s final scream mingled with Cayla’s as both vanished in a flurry of water. The creature’s jaws snapped shut and blood began to spread in the water; then Blade sprinted across the sand and through the water to drive his last spear into the snake’s eyesocket.
It reared up in a final agony, letting its prey drop as the blood-dripping jaws sagged open. Blade had one good look at what Cayla and Brora had become, then turned and ran as though the flames of hell were licking at his heels, back onto the dry beach, back up the slope and down the other side into the tent. There, and there only, he finally collapsed, too spent even to be sick, too deaf to the world to hear the final thrashings of the last of Cayla’s monsters.
What broke into his semi-oblivion was an unexpected but not unfamiliar sound-the sound of somebody calling cadence, accompanied by the rhythmic thump of a large body of men coming down the beach in step. Such a style of marching did not suggest to Blade a mob of fleeing pirates or camp-followers. It was with as much jauntiness as his sagging limbs could muster up that he went out to greet the approaching men.
It was no surprise to see two companies of the Royal Guard of Royth coming down the beach at full march-step, weapons drawn and scouts thrown out in front. But what was a surprise was to see Tralthos tramping along at their head. And Tralthos was equally surprised when he recognized the preposterous figure that tottered into view, naked as the day of its birth, as the Constable Blahyd.
Blade had regained enough energy and had enough sense of the dignity of the occasion to keep from falling on his face a second time as he and Tralthos embraced each other and pounded each other on the back. But after that he had to sit down, and Tralthos followed him. They squatted on the sand while Tralthos told Blade of the great victory of Royth.
«We got out of the Keltz as easy as eating a gooseberry tart and hugged the coast all the way south, moving by night. Last night we sent some tough lads ashore from the fleet to take out the sentries on that little peninsula up north-«Blade nodded as Tralthos pointed «-and mounted some of our engines up there. This morning, we got the galleys around the point and in through a deep passage the local pilots knew about but the pirates didn’t. Then we just rolled up their line from the north while the merchantmen went farther out and kept their big ships from getting away. I think we must have sunk or burned or captured more than three hundred ships. The admiral decided a couple of hours ago we might as well land some troops to clean up the camp, so he ran the transports inshore and unloaded the two battalions of the Guard he had along.»
