By Blood Hunted: Kingsblood Chronicles Part Two (The Kingsblood Chronicles Book 2)

by David J. Houpt

  “Some warmth if you would, Gem,” Lian asked, and she thrummed a new song as she warmed the man and goblin gently. A down side to Lord Grey’s cold ward, the necromancer had warned them, was that a person could overheat because while it protected against cold, it also prevented the loss of externally applied warmth. Despite that mild danger, both of them sighed in relief as the sword’s spell broke the chilled feeling, and she cut it off before either of them got warm enough to start sweating. With the slackened weather, even though the wind still blew mightily, and the relief from the cold and wet, it was almost pleasant on the afterdeck. If they weren’t in danger of running aground in their storm-driven push southward, it might have even been enjoyable.

  Chapter Twenty Six

  While it is true that many of those afflicted with lycanthropy are forced to change shape at full Aliera, one should never think that they cannot change at other times. Nor is it true that all lycanthropes lose control when the Moon of Beasts rises at dusk. Weres of any beast can be very hard to identify, and truly, only one means exists to be sure that a suspect is or is not a lycanthrope, and that is to expose the alleged creature to Blacksilver.

  If human, the substance the elves call vesharin is only mildly poisonous, as if they were exposed to a small amount of antimony, and the prisoner will only be subjected to trifling symptoms. For any lycanthrope, however, piercing the skin with Blacksilver will produce an immediate and highly dramatic reaction, for I have never witnessed a were-beast with the capability to keep human form when so exposed.

  That vesharin is highly poisonous to lycanthropes is a bonus, of course, for it is almost immediately weakened and therefore much easier to destroy.

  -- “Blacksilver and Alleviating the Were-Beast Infestation,” by Inquisitor-General Ti’erol D’nar of Peloria, c. 227 PE

  In the end, they did not have to rely upon Gem’s enhancement of Lian’s hearing to pick out the sound of the breakers, for they had sufficient forewarning in the lightening seas as the bottom rose up. After talking to the experienced sailors (and regretting none of the officers, especially the sailing master, had survived), Lian decided that he had no choice but to turn Indigo Runner to the south and suffer a following sea as they approached the coast. The wheel would spin port freely as soon as they unpinned it, and holding the merchantman on course toward the shore should prove relatively simple since wind and wave would both work with the rudder rather than at cross purposes with it. If they didn’t time the turn wrong and end up being rolled by a particularly powerful wave, Indigo Runner should respond to helm and slot them in facing the shore.

  That was the Coin Lord’s side.

  On Bes’ side, the wave action was much more violent this close to shore, and the possibility of the merchant ship being dashed against rocks or a shallow reef was dangerously real. The breakers were forming well out to sea from the beach, curling forward, and then collapsing in a great crash of spray and foam. The sailors on Searcher had told Lian of men who rode such waves on long slender boards of wood, for sport. He had found the tales difficult to believe at the time. Now he wished fervently for one of those “surf riders,” as they were called, to be beside him at the helm, to advise him on the best way to bring Indigo Runner to beach without being destroyed.

  The wind was still putting on heavy airs, and it was stronger than he liked given the weakness of their makeshift foremast, but he still ordered a half-reefed jib rigged up, ready to raise as soon as he, Snog, and Jinian loosed the wheel. The other three were all the way forward, ready to raise the sail at the signal from Lian, and now he waited for the right lull between the ten to twenty-foot waves to shout the order. Seeing his opportunity and praying it was the right opportunity, Lian ordered, “Heave!” and he and Jinian strained against the wheel, taking the stress off the pin so Snog could haul it out of the stop.

  “Stand clear!” the goblin bellowed as he pulled it free, and all three of them jumped back from the wheel as it spun hard port fast enough that it would have either hurled Lian over the wheel or pinned Jinian beneath it. This was the signal to the men in the bow to raise the partially reefed jib, and they hauled on their lines right on time, the sail immediately pulling taut even though they were sliding down the trough of the current wave.

  As soon as the wheel slowed, Lian and Jinian threw themselves back on it, bringing it around hard to port as the ship responded to the sail’s pull. “Come on, Runner!” Lian shouted as they brought the rudder around full to port, and the ship began to turn through the maneuver. Now they were at the bottom of the trough in the weakest wind and only slightly port of broadside to the wave, but as the starboard side and aft began to rise up the wave, the combination of gravity (wanting to pull Indigo Runner down into the trough), the sail, and the rudder kept her coming about until she was flying full before the wind before they reached the top of the towering wave.

  For a moment, it almost seemed the ship would take flight as she rode the crest, surging forward with the majority of the wave force, and then the moment was past, and she was sliding downslope again, this time dead astern to the next wave.

  Snog helped the two helmsmen slip leather-wrapped loops around their arms as they were around his, tying all three of them to the helm post, and they gripped the wheel tight as the stern of the ship slammed into the wall of water already rising behind them. Cold water sluiced over the stern of the ship, striking Lian full in the back and pushing him hard into the wheel despite his being braced for it, and Jinian was yanked off the wheel at the same time. The sailor, however, had moved the loops all the way up to his shoulders and then crossed them across his neck like bandoliers of throwing knives, and he was able to grab and hold onto the ropes as he fell back. As soon as the wave passed, he got his footing and grabbed the wheel again, a fierce grin on his face. Slow, Jinian might be, but he made keeping his feet and weathering the wave look easy.

  The ship had suffered no hull damage in the attack or the storm, and so it bobbed right back up out of the water as it rose, aft first, up the wave. Thank Tysleth the wind’s on course with the waves, Lian thought and prayed, spitting saltwater out of his mouth. When they reached the top of the wave, and this would get worse the closer they got to shore, the rudder would be fully out of the water and only the jib would keep pulling her bow toward shore. If the ship skewed on its way up the wave—for the motion of the water was chaotic and they could be pulled port or starboard—Lian and Jinian at the helm would be powerless to stop her from continuing her skew, and the ship could roll over in the turbulent waters at the wave’s crest.

  Each time Indigo Runner crested and the winds snapped to their strongest point, the jib Virinos had rigged up kept her headed straight inland, and each time the rudder fell back into the water, the helmsmen kept her true, fighting against the tendency to slip west or easterly.

  Lian’s heart was pounding as they fought the waves and the ship, and he struggled to keep his head about him and to stay aware of everything happening. In the clear skies and bright afternoon sunlight, it almost seemed comical to be fighting the seas this way, but he didn’t find it the least bit funny. A single mistake from him and Jinian, or if the all-too-tiny foremast snapped, their situation would go from desperate to disastrous. Indigo Runner herself was likely doomed no matter what they did, but he would fight with all his strength to keep all the survivors aboard her alive. What might happen later, when they reached civilization again, haunted him, but for now he would do all in his power to keep the Deathlord at bay.

  Mikos suddenly turned back astern, shouting and pointing to something ahead and to port. Even Gem’s senses couldn’t make sense of it, so both men and the goblin jumped when Lord Grey said clearly, “‘Cove ahead, to port!’ he says.” The ship was sliding down the current wave, so Mikos had spotted it just as the bow had reached its highest point. Lian nodded his thanks to the skull, and the three hung on for the plunge into the water at the bottom of the wave.

  “I’ll let her come port one point
when we get steerage back,” Lian said to Jinian, who nodded. His job was to help Lian keep whatever bearing he chose, but Lian wanted him to know where he was supposed to go if the wave smacked Lian’s head against the wheel.

  This time, the stern didn’t bite as deeply into the sea, and both men kept control of the wheel as the stern began rising, turning the wheel slightly to port as she did so. “Be ready to correct back to starboard,” Lian cautioned, keeping his eyes peeled on the coast. East of their current position, framed by a rocky entrance, was a large cove, just as Mikos had said, and Lian pointed to it as he looked across the ship to the forward men. Mikos excitedly acknowledged the captain’s signal that he’d seen the cove.

  “Mikos gets an extra ration of rum tonight,” he said to Jinian as they steered the ship gently eastward, being careful not to let her pull too far to port, “and so do you.” The waves were crashing all about the entrance to the natural harbor, and the surf was still churning inside it, but if he could keep them off the rocks and slip into the channel, the ship would come to rest inside.

  As they neared the cove, Gem could see, and reported, rocky bottom east and west of it, but the lagoon’s channel was deep and straight, sandy instead of rocky. Still, for a few wave cycles Lian wished he’d simply beached Indigo Runner on the beach ahead of their original heading because the jagged rocks around them were generating side-currents as they passed into the channel. The sea crashed against the rocks each time a wave came in, shooting saltwater up dozens if not a hundred feet into the air in places, and then draining across the rocks’ rough and uneven surfaces in hundreds of different directions as the sea rose and fell.

  He yelled to the men in the bow to unreef the jib and pantomimed it in a prearranged hand signal in case they couldn’t hear him over the surf crashing about them. Virinos and Mikos had been waiting for this, and they cut the reef lines as Naryn shook the sailcloth out. He needn’t have bothered because the sail snapped itself full with the continuous gust, but the mast held. They had no way to reef the makeshift sail when it was already flying, but unreefing it was the simple matter of a sharp knife.

  The extra forward motion the full sail imparted gave Lian that much more steerage, and in three more wave cycles the ship shot past the two black basaltic monoliths that guarded the harborage and into the cove, riding a final wave that would have driven them hard into the beach if they stayed on their original course.

  “Hard aport!” Lian yelled, and they hauled the wheel hard over as she passed the pillars of rock, turning Indigo Runner behind the natural seawall and deeper into the cove’s much stiller waters. Momentum carried them forward, and in a few minutes the ship gently grounded on the sandy bottom east of the cove entrance.

  The cessation of sound was deafening, almost maddening, and the release of tension almost made him see spots, but Lian shook it off. It was late afternoon by now, and it was low tide. He realized that low tide was the worst time to have made passage into the cove, but he’d had little choice; the only thing to make it worse would have been having to do it while they were still in the grip of the rain and fog.

  They needed to secure the ship, and there would be time to do it, but the tide would be coming in all too soon. The last thing they needed now was for Indigo Runner to float herself and get pulled out to sea by the outward flow after the ferocious near-full tide. Lushran and Aliera weren’t quite opposite in their cycle any more, so the tide wasn’t going to be at its absolute maximum, but it still might be quite strong. They wouldn’t know how strong until the tide cycled around a few times.

  The storm had driven flotsam and jetsam all up and down the cove, and while there still seemed to be a high tide mark (about two yards above the current waterline), he didn’t know if he could trust it. “Snog and Jin will stay on the ship and feed us line,” Lian ordered as he ran forward, the other two in tow. “We’ll find something massive to tie her off on.”

  Mikos didn’t see why, and said so, but the quick way the more experienced hands joined their captain in lowering knotted ropes over the side to descend into the warm, clear water of the cove and splash their way ashore got him moving without an explanation; that could come later. He’d reduced the number of holy symbols he carried after the first few nights, but he still struggled with their weight. Fortunately, the shallow water had a firm sandy bottom, and he kept his feet.

  Jinian expertly threw the monkey’s paw right over Lian’s shoulder, and the four men on the beach hauled the light line attached to it toward them. Shortly afterward, through an eye just starboard and aft of the bowsprit, a heavier cable began to feed out. “Call us a chanty, Mr. Mikos,” Lian said, and the young man blushed with pride at the assignment, usually reserved for the most experienced hand.

  They hauled the heavy line together in time to Mikos’s chanting, joining in once he set the meter. They were still in danger, they all knew, but they’d survived the storm and found the shore, and all of them were in a tremendous mood. It wouldn’t last, Lian knew, but it was something to be a part of it while it did.

  Looping a long length of the heavy line into a coil, they then began hauling it in toward the treeline, all of them realizing they hadn’t really taken a look at their little haven. The trees were conifers, huge marsh cypress, and Lian was glad they had plenty of freshwater on board because in his limited knowledge of such trees they often grew in brackish conditions, and finding drinkable water inland might be a difficult and lengthy proposition. So far, no biting insects had managed to find them, but Lian suspected that as soon as they entered the trees and the bushy undergrowth they’d be on them quick enough. While they hauled the rope to a huge tooth of basalt and looped it four times around the big rock, Lian was careful to keep an eye out for animal or intelligent life, but there was little sign of either.

  Snog and I can scout it out… he started to think, then realized that would leave the crew unprotected from Radiel if she descended on them while the two were away from the ship. Guess we’ll scout the area together, he thought with a bitter smile. Moving back toward Indigo Runner, the men on the beach signaled Jinian and Snog to retract the slack, and before long the ship was tied with a longline to the shore.

  “When we’ve rested, I’d like to run another line abaft the starboard side, if we can find another big rock,” Lian said, “but for now, even a six-yard full tide would be hard pressed to drag her back out.” The sailors agreed—though that agreement was suspect given the lazy nature of sailing men—and the four of them made their way back aboard the merchantman, each one reverently patting the ship in various places when they did so. She was likely beached for years to come until some merchant house got a crew out here to salvage her, but she’d done her job admirably and gotten them to shore.

  ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

  The storm had not been as violent on the eastern side of the continent as it had in the center and west, but it had grounded Ammon’s flight for half a day as it passed in the fury it did offer. Wind shears could disorient a flier and make it impossible to tell which way was up and which down, the assassin well knew, and he had little desire to smash into a mountain inside a stormcloud.

  He’d taken advantage of the break to rest and meditate, considering the best way to deal with Lian and any companions he might have. No doubt, Indigo Runner was caught in the same storm, for he had a good bearing on her as he approached and she was northwest of him by a few hundred more miles.

  The storm was driving her south at much greater rate than she’d moved before, and Ammon considered that a shipwreck and drowning would make his job simpler, if possibly messier. Still, unless Lian was already dead and merely floating in the water, rather than on the merchant ship, the sea wouldn’t have that much time to work his body over before Ammon collected his head. He knew spells to allow him to operate underwater, so even if the prince’s body sank to the bottom he’d likely be able to recover it. The ocean had crushing deeps even such spells couldn’t reach, and that might make retrieving the body diffi
cult, but Ammon had no control over that unfortunate, but hopefully unlikely, prospect.

  The storm was a sending from the gods, Ammon felt, for it would slow Wavecrest’s progress to a crawl, as the ship would be forced to head at least partially into the waves and wind. Their progress west would be cut in half, and that was if the seas were kind to the caravel, which was not as capable of handling rough seas as Iliuthien, Searcher, or the Island Kingdom warships.

  He still wondered what had happened to Indigo Runner to put her this far adrift, but it was clear something had happened. Great monsters inhabited Tysleth’s deeps, from the mindless sea dragons to great squid-like monstrosities. Or it may have been something simpler, like a pirate ship, although that would have been exceptionally bad luck for the merchant on such a route as the path from Avethiel to Kavris. Literally dozens of possible courses would have made the chances of a pirate ship finding them in the deep ocean slim. Perhaps Lian lay dead in the bilges of a ship set adrift and now hurtling toward shore where she’d break up against the rocks. Who knew?

  What he did know is that he was about to collect a truly staggering bounty, and that made him smile, as it nearly always did.

  ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

  And when I’ve managed to get a handle on my anxieties and fears, Celewyn thought sardonically, the gods put new worries in Lian’s path. Not subject to seasickness, the elf was still forced to stay in his cabin and hold on tight as Wavecrest continued to be battered by the waves. The Avani knew that whatever had happened to Indigo Runner must have at least partially damaged her masts, or the remaining crew—Lian himself, if that was all who lived—would have been sailing eastward under partial sail if nothing else.