by Nathan Long
Captain Ku sent his crew scrambling to make us ready to fight. Dead sailors were given sketchy last rights and then stuffed into the ballast. Leaks in the canopy were patched up. Sails were taken down and replaced by fresh ones. The blood on the deck was mopped up and sand was sprinkled around so it wouldn’t be slippery. The surgeons went to work too, patching up everybody who could still fight, then seeing to the guys who were down for the count.
They patched Lhan and me up too, and we joined the rest of the crew at the rail, staring back at the oncoming ships. Shal-Hau and Sei-Sien stood with us.
Shal-Hau sighed. “So ends our brave rebellion.”
Lhan stuck out his lip. “There is still hope.”
Sei-Sien laughed at him. “Where? The Aldhanan is dead. The church knows our plans. This fool giantess threw away the only chance of salvaging things. And we shall die here on this ship, leaving no one to spread the truth of what happened.”
“There are still the Aldhanan’s daughter and her consort, Sai-Far. She will inherit the throne and he will help her rule, and having first-hand experience of the church’s hospitality, they will continue the fight.”
Shal-Hau stared over the side. “If they are not killed first.”
I clenched my fists. “That’s not going to happen. I promised the Aldhanan I wouldn’t let anything happen to them.”
Sei-Sien raised an eyebrow. “And how will you do this when you are dead?”
I wanted to punch him in the mouth for being a doomsayer, but I couldn’t disagree with him. There was no way to escape the bastards who were trying to catch us, and we weren’t gonna survive when they did. No amount of hopping around and kicking ass was going to beat six-to-one odds.
“Then I’ll just take as many with me as I can.”
Lhan looked at me like he wanted to say something personal, but then looked around at the others and kept quiet.
We all just went back to looking over the rail.
***
I’ve never been so bored and so tense at the same time in my life. Airship chases are like watching the minute hand catch up with the hour hand on a clock. You know it’s going to get there eventually, but it’s about as exciting as watching paint dry. At the same time, I was straining the whole time like I was trying to pull our ship through the air all by myself. It was exhausting. And pointless too. We all knew they were going to catch us. What was the point of running?
Amazingly, Captain Ku-Rho had an answer for that when I asked him.
“You see the moons through the clouds? Both will be down in two hours. And we may be able to slip away when they cannot see us.”
Yeah, well. It was a nice thought.
Unfortunately, after an hour, the priests’ ships were so close that they were never going to lose us, no matter how dark it got. Ku-Rho started throwing everything that wasn’t nailed down over the side, trying to take us higher and make us faster. It was no use. In another half-hour they’d caught up and two of the priests’ commandeered ships split left and right and started paralleling us just out of bowshot, while the third one inched up on our rear. Then, a horn trumpeted from the ship on the left and they swooped in.
This was where an Oran ship of the line had the advantage—in those few short seconds when they were in range but hadn’t managed to hook onto us yet. There were five massive bolt throwers on either side of our ship, all loaded with what looked like pointy-tipped fence posts.
The gun crews cranked the elevation as the priests’ ships came in, and Ku-Rho watched left and right, his hand raised.
“Prime!”
The crews doused the fence posts in lamp oil and set ’em on fire.
“Fire!”
The bolt throwers twanged like an out-of-tune guitar and the bolts shot straight at the balloons. It was too soon, at least on the left. Those bolts ripped across the deck of the left-hand ship, killing priests and sailors, but missing the balloon. The ship on the right, though, took two where it hurt the most. They punched through the skin of the balloon like harpoons through a whale, and that was all she wrote.
Christ, it was bad… Hindenberg bad. The balloon didn’t explode like I thought it was gonna, but it burned so fast it was like somebody had sped up the film. I mean, one second, there’s a little patch of fire along the flank of the thing, the next second, all the ribs are showing and there’s a huge fireball rising up off it and everybody on the deck is screaming and running around with their clothes on fire.
The second after that, the ship dropped like a rock, burning all the way down and leaving drifting flags of black char coming over our rail and making us cough. The other two ships, however, kept closing, and there was no time to crank back the bolt throwers for another volley.
Arrows with lines attached to them zipped out from the priests’ ships and stuck in our sides. I grabbed a hatch cover for a shield and jumped to the rail to chop through them as they reeled themselves in and arrows thudded into the hatch. I couldn’t cut enough. There were too many. The ships kept closing, one along the side, one side-on to the stern.
I threw the shield across the gap and clocked a few guys, then ducked behind the rail with the others as bolts whiffed above us. Lhan, Sei-Sien and Shal-Hau knelt with the sailors, swords out and heads down, all waiting now for the ships to come together and the boarding to start. Sei-Sien’s knees were knocking. I couldn’t give a shit about him, but Shal-Hau was looking sick too.
I gave him a nudge. “Better go below, professor.”
He shook his head. “They will kill me in my bunk just surely as they will here. Better to die fighting for the cause.”
“If you say so.” I turned to Lhan. “Soon as you engage, I’m goin’ over their heads and attacking from the rear.”
“No. Make the crossbowmen your first target. They can kill us from afar.”
“Got it.”
He squeezed my hand. “Be careful, belove— er, Mistress.”
I shot him a sideways look. He was blushing.
“Forgive me. I did not mean—”
I caught him around the back of the neck and kissed him hard. He pulled back, fighting it, then gave in and kissed back, and for a second the world went away, until a jolting double bump woke us to everybody shouting and the paladins pouring over the rail like an orange wave.
Lhan looked away as we broke off, his face hard, then tore after the others, stabbing and slashing like a lunatic as the two lines smacked together like a car wreck. It looked like he was trying to kill himself.
“Lhan! Goddamn it!”
I wanted to run in after him and pull him out of trouble, but I knew he’d hate me for it. Besides, the priests’ crossbows were tearing our back ranks apart. If I didn’t do something, we’d be done before we got started.
I jumped over the fight and launched straight at a guy in the rigging who was firing down with one leg hooked through the ropes. He yelped and tried to get off a shot, but I chopped through his crossbow, then through his neck. He flopped down, swinging from his hooked leg, and I kicked off his back for the foredeck, where three more were aiming for me. I swung my sword out hard and jerked sideways in the air.
The bolts whumped past me and I landed in the middle of ’em, and cut ’em all off at the knees—literally. It really was sick what that sword could do, and it made me a little sick using it sometimes, particularly when I was scrambling to my feet in a pick-up sticks pile of severed legs and screaming amputees. That’s the thing they never show in those comic book movies—Superman, Wolverine, the Hulk—when you’ve got super strength or razor sharp blades, or both, you don’t just knock guys out, or poke polite little holes in them. You chop them to fucking pieces. There is blood and flying arms everywhere. You’re not a hero. You’re a fucking monster.
And the worst thing is—it’s not all bad.
A bolt punched through my sleeve and into my arm and I looked around, hissing. There was another guy in the rigging, cranking back his piece for another shot. I picked up one of th
e legless bodies at my feet and hurled it at him. It knocked him to the deck. There were four more on the aft deck. I hoisted up another dying guy by the arm strap and bounded toward them, holding him in front of me.
He jerked as bolts thudded into him, and his arms went slack. At least he stopped screaming. I whipped him at the crossbow guys as I bounced over the rail and knocked two of them off their feet. The other two scattered, but my sword was six feet long. I hamstrung ’em before they took two steps, then finished off the two guys I’d knocked down.
By this time I was drunk on slaughter and feeling pretty good. Nobody could hurt me. Nobody could stand against me. I was the fucking goddess of war. Time to do some real killing. I jumped down to the lower deck, right in the middle of the scrimmage at the rail—and promptly got a spear upside the head.
It was more a bash than a cut, but it rang my bell and hurt like living fuck, and popped my red rage balloon like a pin. All of a sudden I was human again and there were a lot of swords coming at me and everything was blurred and too bright. I must have slipped too, because the next thing I knew Lhan was catching my arm and holding me upright as I swung at the bad guys. He was bleeding from a cut across the chest.
“Thanks.”
“Think nothing of it… ah, Mistress.”
Three guards stabbed at me. I knocked ’em back. “You can call me beloved if you want, Lhan. I won’t mind.”
Lhan said nothing, just kept fighting.
I rolled my eyes. “I mean we’re all gonna die here anyway, right?”
And we were. There was no way out. As I’d predicted, all my hopping around hadn’t mattered one bit. Me and my gang and the sailors were still being driven back from the left rail by the temple guards, and the paladins who had swarmed over the stern were pushing Captain Ku-Rho and his men down off the aft deck and into the waist of the ship. We were all getting squeezed together and surrounded, and more troops were coming. Behind the guys we were fighting a whole new mob was charging across the deck of the priests’ ship and leaping onto ours.
“Oh, come on! How can there be more? Where the fuck are they coming from?”
I groaned, really wishing I hadn’t already been in two fights today, and got ready to have a whole new crop of spears stabbing my way, but as I tried to drive the dude in front of me back so I could get myself a little swinging room, a foot of sharp steel ripped out of his belly from behind, and he fell at my feet.
All along the line the same thing was happening. The temple guards were dying like flies, stabbed and bashed and chopped down from behind. I stared, then looked beyond them and saw that the guys who were pouring over the rail weren’t reinforcements after all. There wasn’t an orange robe among them, but there were a hell of a lot of earrings and wild clothes and second-hand armor. There was also a red-ballooned warship hanging off the right-hand rail that hadn’t been there five minutes ago.
“Pirates!” shouted a sailor.
“We’re flanked! Turn about!” shouted a paladin.
I joined the shouting. “Kill the priests! Kill ’em!”
Between us and the pirates the orangecicles were dead in half a minute. Surprised and trapped, between us they didn’t stand a chance. What had been a slow slaughter with me and my pals as the slaughtered, became a quick massacre. No matter where they turned, the priests were getting stabbed in the back, and we didn’t take mercy on them. Not a single one.
When it was all done, Captain Ku-Rho saluted the leader of the pirates, a big burly guy who I gaped at as he stepped forward. Was my vision still wonky, or…?
“Thank you, friend. You have saved us from certain death.”
The burly guy put his sword to Ku-Rho’s neck. “I wouldn’t say saved, Captain. Not exactly.”
A little woman in red swaggered out from behind the big guy’s bulk and gave Ku-Rho a jaunty salute. “Postponed your death is more like it. But you can postpone it indefinitely if you hand over what you have in your hold with no—”
“Kai-La!”
I whooped with relief and pushed forward grinning and waving my sword.
“Kai-La! Where the hell—?”
Burly swung his sword at me, wild-eyed, and Kai-La backed up, drawing hers. Another pirate with a braided beard lunged at me, murder in his eyes. I was so surprised I almost didn’t block in time, and Burly’s sword came within an inch of chopping through my ear and into my brain. The guy with the braid grazed me, and I fell back with a gash across my abs. I knew him too—Lo-Zhar, the guy I’d called Braid Face. He didn’t seem to know me.
“Wait! Wait!” I threw down my sword and put my hands up like I’d just been pulled over for a traffic stop. “It’s Jane! Remember? I saved your asses at Toaga!”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
PIRATES!
Burly checked his swing, and pulled Lo-Zhar back.
Kai-La stared, frowning. “Jae-En? Is it truly you? Where is your pink skin? Your flame-colored hair?”
I shrugged. “Disguised again.”
Lhan stepped forward, smiling. “And again in disreputable company.”
Kai-La gave him the once-over, then grinned. “The dandy! So it is you. Well met!” She clapped me on the shoulder, then turned to her crew and raised her voice. “Hold a moment, friends! We will parley. See to your wounded, and let the Orans see to theirs!”
Lo-Zhar looked disgusted, and turned away.
I shook my head, still staggered, as she faced me again and the two crews started picking up their dead and maimed. “How are you even here? I though you were headed for the border and not looking back. What an insane coincidence.”
Kai-La laughed. “Do you call it coincidence that the greatest pirate in all Ora should raid the fattest prize in all Ora? We have been following the tax ship since Rivi. Indeed, we would have waited for it to get fatter still but for fear these priests would make off with—”
“You know these villains?” Captain Ku-Rho was giving me and Lhan the fish eye all over again. I felt for him. First he thinks we’re a priestess of Laef and her escorts, then he finds out we’re heretics helping the Aldhanan defeat the Church of the Seven, then he finds out the Aldhanan is dead and the church thinks we did it, and now we’re best friends with the pirates who are robbing his ship.
Well, I could ease his mind there. “This is Kai-La, who helped the Aldhanan stop Kedac-Zir in his tracks a few months back. She’s one of the good guys, remember?”
Ku-Rho curled his lip. “I do remember. She was given a pardon and a rich reward for her brave actions, and now she is back robbing ships?”
Oh.
Yeah.
I’d been so surprised to see her again that I’d forgot about that part. Kai-La seemed to take it in stride. She laughed.
“Worry not, Captain. I will retire again once we bank these tithes—at least for a time. Now, open your hatches.”
Ku-Rho drew himself up. “I am sworn to protect the imperial tithes against all thieves. You will not—”
“You’re in no condition to protect anything, Captain. Besides, the Aldhanan won’t miss it. He has plenty more where this came from.”
Ku-Rho was getting hotter and hotter as she spoke. I was afraid he was going to pop. I stepped between them.
“Kai-La. The Aldhanan is dead.”
That made her blink. She turned to Lhan like she was expecting him to say it was a joke. He didn’t. She stared.
“Dead? What do you mean, dead?”
I swallowed. “Dead dead. Laid out on a slab dead. The priests killed him. He was traveling with us in disguise. They found out and—” The images of him lying there ambushed me again and I choked up. I pulled my thumb across my neck instead of talking. “Now—now they’re after us ’cause we know they did it.”
Lhan nodded. “They have named us his assassins.”
Burly whistled. “I wondered why priests attacked an imperial ship.”
Kai-La was frowning. “So, this has to do with the kidnapping of the Aldhanan’s daughter and that
fool Sai-Far? He went to war over it?”
“Not that alone.” Lhan stepped forward. “He discovered that the priests were guilty of worse crimes, not just against his family, but against all Ora.”
“He asked us to help take ’em down.” I motioned to myself, Lhan, and Shal-Hau and Sei-Sien, who were sitting with the wounded and helping patch each other up. “We hitched a ride on the tax ship so we could go to each of his Dhanans in secret and tell ’em to get ready for war.”
Kai-La smirked sadly. “But there was a spy. You were betrayed.”
I nodded.
She sighed. “I am sorry. He was a good man, as far as Aldhanans go, and did right by us where others would have hanged us.”
“And yet you repay his mercy by robbing him of his gold?” Ku-Rho sneered.
Kai-La gave him a sharp look. “It is his people’s gold. And we will spend it more freely than he ever would have. Instead of sitting in some treasury for a hundred years, it will go right back into the purses of the poor wretches your tax collectors twisted it from.”
Ku-Rho rolled his eyes. “The rationalizations of an outlaw.”
Kai-La grinned. “Then you had best learn them, Captain.”
“What?”
“Come, do we not both sail the same side of the wind now?” She looked around at us all, suddenly serious. “Friends, I have often before offered men the choice between ransom, death, or life as a pirate, but this is the first time fate has made the offer before I, and she has narrowed the choices to only two—death or piracy.”
She grabbed a rope and stepped up on the rail so everybody could see her. “If you have angered the church, if you are accused of killing the Aldhanan, then there is only death behind you. No one will ransom enemies of the Empire—except of course the Empire itself, but they will care not whether you are dead or alive.”
There was a lot of murmuring at that. She waved it down.
“Fear not. Fear not. I’ll not turn you in. They would hang me beside you. What I say is, as you are already outlaw, what objection can you have to joining me? Ora is no longer your home, and the church has a long reach. Fly with me and you will be beyond it. Freedom and chance for vengeance will always be yours. With a ship such as this and the gold it carries, it would be we who were rulers of the air, and the Oran navy who were mere pretenders to our throne.” She threw out a hand. “So what say you, will you sign the articles?”
