Demontech: Onslaught

by David Sherman

  When all the cargo was aboard, some shipmasters wanted to weigh anchor and sail on the first outgoing tide for their next port of call, but most gave their crews a last night of shore leave before heading out to sea; it might be a long time before the crews had another chance for drink and women, and too long a time without drink and women can breed sedition or mutiny. More of the masters wanted to stay another night than wanted to deport immediately, so the admiral commanding the dozen or so men-o’-war shielding the harbor from raiders did his best to persuade the impatient ones to wait for the morrow, so the merchantmen could sail altogether in convoy, protected by the warships and the offshore flotilla. He succeeded with most but close to fifty fat merchantmen sailed on the evening tide. Some of them made their destinations.

  During the witching hours, that time of the late night when nearly all men, even those who set out to feast and drink and whore the night away, were dead asleep, a fleet of small coast-huggers crept around the headland and into the harbor. With muffled oars they glided to the ungainly ships that wallowed together, spars and tackle and gear creaking and groaning, waiting for their crews and the morning tide. Leaving the dozen shielding men-o’-war at peace for the moment, the first wave of coast-huggers reached the outermost of the anchored merchantmen, and small groups of small men, clad only in loincloths, armed only with long daggers, swung aboard.

  Each merchantman had left a mate and two or three seamen aboard overnight as fire watch. It was those the small bands of small men slew swiftly and silently. The small bands went the width and breadth of the harbor, stepping from ship to ship. When they had secured all the fat merchantmen, a mage among them dispatched an imbaluris to the warlock attending the kamazai who was the General Commanding of the invasion force. The warlock reported to the general that the merchantmen were secured. On the kamazai’s order, larger groups of small men, uniformed and armed, crept aboard the outermost merchantmen and walked the length of the harbor across the ships. When four thousand of the ten thousand in the invasion force had reached the docks, their magician again dispatched an imbaluris to the kamazai’s warlock.

  The General Commanding gave another command. Hordes of small men then swarmed onto the men-o’-war and slew all aboard. Lost in the creaks and groans of the wallowing ships, the clashes of battle and screams of the wounded and dying went unheard on shore.

  At the same time, four thousand small, uniformed soldiers left their landing beach on the headland and marched inland to encircle the two regiments of Bostian troops guarding the city’s landward approaches. On another command, the four thousand on the docks moved rapidly into the city, where they captured the Guard and the city officials, slaying all those who offered the slightest resistance. They took prisoner all foreign seamen and soldiers, slew all who failed to surrender quickly enough. On yet another command from the kamazai, two thousand of the troops who took the city departed it to reinforce those surrounding the Bostian forces. Soon afterward, white flags fluttered above the Bostian encampments.

  The conquest was so well designed that not one of the magical weapons carried by magicians and specially trained soldiers had to be used.

  By dawn it was over. When the General Commanding came ashore, he was accompanied by the Dark Prince, the half bastard fourth son of Good King Honritu, liege lord of the mountain realm of Matilda.

  “You will have your kingdom, my Lord Lackland,” the kamazai said to his companion. During the long years in which the sages and magicians had worked on deciphering the tomes the Dark Prince’s magic had wrought, the hated nickname had returned.

  The Dark Prince’s lips twisted into a smile. Oh, how he hated that name, and he hated no less those who used it. “No small thanks to you, Kamazai,” he said. Then his smile straightened and his eyes glowed as he envisioned the arrogant Jokapcul warlord impaled at his command—impaled along with the other kamazai, and that unspeakable High Shoton. He looked forward to the day he would give that command.

  The freeport of New Bally was secure in the hands of the Jokapcul invaders, as were the merchantmen and men-o’-war in her harbor. The bivouac of each thousand-man Bostian regiment sat under a white flag. The entire invasion had cost twenty-seven Jokapcul casualties: all wounded, none dead, few likely to die of their wounds.

  The General Commanding issued an edict to the Bostian troops, the New Bally Guard, and the captured seamen and sea soldiers of a score or more nations: join us or die.

  Without giving their captives a chance to make the decision, his soldiers then grabbed a hundred prisoners and hanged them in full sight of the others. The rest of the prisoners immediately declared allegiance. The Jokapcul executed one in ten of those, singling out the sea soldiers of a score of nations, especially Frangerian Marines, when they could find them. The remainder they held as slaves.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  The women woke them before dawn.

  “You must go,” one hissed as she pushed one of the men.

  “Hurry, hurry,” whispered the other as she tugged at her man.

  They acted with such urgency that the half-awake men automatically groped for their weapons before remembering they’d left them on the ship—all they brought with them on shore liberty were the knives on their belts. They grasped their knives and held them ready.

  “Why? What’s happening?” Haft asked in a low voice. His eyes probed the shadows of the small, dark room.

  Spinner listened closely to the indistinct sounds that reached them from the street. He scabbarded his knife when he realized the trouble wasn’t in the room with them.

  “Go,” the one woman urged, and bundled Haft’s clothes into his arms.

  “Rush,” the other hissed as she helped Spinner pull on his jerkin. Both women did all they could to speed the men on their way, made certain they had all their belongings, ensured they left nothing incriminating behind.

  “You must be gone,” whispered one.

  “They will kill us if they find you here,” said the other.

  “Who?” Haft demanded. His eyes probed more deeply into the shadows, his knife held ready to slash or jab or parry if necessary.

  “Jokapcul?” Spinner said. The woman nodded.

  The women didn’t particularly want to save the two men they were quietly expelling from their garret room. The men, of the Frangerian Sea soldiers called Marines, only meant pay for a night’s dalliance to them. But the invaders were coming, and the men created mortal danger by their mere presence.

  “Let’s go.” Spinner put a hand on Haft’s arm and guided him from the room. “Thank you,” he said back into the darkness of the room. The door closed on them.

  “What?” Haft demanded. “It’s not dawn yet. We paid for the entire night, and the morrow’s breakfast as well.” If they weren’t being attacked, he felt he was being cheated.

  “Quiet,” Spinner snapped softly. He pulled on the rest of his clothes.

  Haft didn’t know what the urgency was, but his friend’s voice held an edge that made him obey the command. His clothes barely rustled as he pulled them on.

  Without consulting, both men pulled their cloaks close around them, green side out so they could slip through shadows with lesser likelihood of being seen.

  Dressed, they stood on the small landing outside the garret chamber for a moment and listened. The faint street noises that came to them through the walls of the inn were unexpected at that hour of the night. They crept down the narrow stairs, willing the treads not to creak.

  The public room of the inn loomed huge in its darkened emptiness, appeared far larger than it had when filled with boisterous men. It seemed to have hidden recesses where an enemy could lurk until ready to spring an ambush. Spinner ignored the skin-crawling sensation of eeriness that the darkened common room caused. Haft held his belt knife as though it were his axe, prepared to fight off any ambush.

  Faint starlight barely filtered through the glazed, unshuttered windows, but it was enough for them to make their w
ay to the door without knocking anything over. They stood at the door and listened to the street outside. The unexpected noises were clearer, but none sounded on the street outside the inn. Haft released the catches that held the door bar secure, and Spinner lifted the bar from its brackets and set it aside. They eased the door open and slipped out, leaving the door ajar behind them. It didn’t bother them that anyone could walk right in to the now unsecured inn; the noises they heard, unmuffled now by walls, told them that barred inn doors would be battered down. Better the innkeeper didn’t have to replace his door because it resisted the people coming his way.

  Cries rang out in the night; some triumphant, some fearful, some death rattles. Here steel clashed against steel, there a ram battered down a barred door. The noises were coming closer. Haft clenched his hand so tightly on his knife that his knuckles almost glowed white in the night; he wished they had proper weapons, so they could better defend themselves if they had to fight. Spinner was glad they had only their belt knives—better armed, they’d be more likely to get into a fight, and he didn’t want to fight without knowing more about what they were up against.

  “What are the Jokapcul doing? Why are they here?” Haft whispered.

  “Two ways to find out,” Spinner replied.

  Haft nodded; he knew the two ways. The first way, to walk openly toward the street noises, was too risky. They took the second way. They ran toward the corner closest to the approaching noises and peered cautiously around it.

  Forty yards away was one of the many squares that dotted New Bally. It was ringed by fifty or more torches held by soldiers. They wore the dun-colored summer uniforms of the Jokapcul light infantry. Another fifty of the dun-clad soldiers formed a second ring inside the ring of torches; the soldiers in that ring brandished swords and spears at the mass of men they encircled, and barked commands at them in the harsh, unintelligible language of the Jokapcul Islands. Some of the men who were prisoners wore the scarlet uniforms and plumed helms of the New Bally Guard. Most of them wore the tatter-rags of the sailors of a score of nations. While Spinner and Haft watched, more guardsmen and sailors were roughly brought and shoved into the square.

  Spinner nudged Haft and pointed. One of the prisoners wore the same green-side-out cloak they did. “Rammer,” he said.

  Haft nodded. Rammer was their commander, the sergeant of the Frangerian Marine contingent aboard the Sea Horse, their merchantman.

  Before either could give voice to the question each held—how to rescue Rammer—he looked directly at them and his mouth shaped the single word “Go.”

  The two looked at each other and saw nothing but deepest shadow, and wondered how Rammer, even with his legendary sharp vision, could have seen them. Without further thought, they obeyed their commander’s order and quietly sped to the nearest alley leading away from the square, its guards and their prisoners. They knew they had to get back to the Sea Horse and join up with any crew members who might still be aboard and free. They wanted to free Rammer and the other prisoners in the square, but they were essentially unarmed. Before they could do anything, they needed weapons and manpower. They headed toward the docks.

  Slowly, cautiously, they made their way through the alleys of New Bally, always careful to avoid stumbling through the middens or stepping into piles of slops. When the street noises and their route threatened to converge, they changed direction to avoid meeting the noise-makers. They went this way and that and sometimes the other, but always they wended toward the docks. The straight-line distance from the inn to the docks was less than half a mile; what with their innings and outings and roundaboutings, it took them more than an hour to travel the distance.

  By the time they reached the mouth of an alley that opened onto the docks, dawn was drawing a line of light over the hills of the eastern headland. But they didn’t need to see the color of the uniforms, or the narrow-billed, peaked caps of the soldiers standing guard on the ships, to know they were Jokapcul. Even if they hadn’t been able to see at all, the guttural, doglike barking of the sergeants would have identified the soldiers as Jokapcul. The sight of the enemy soldiers on the ships’ decks told them they wouldn’t find any of their shipmates alive or free on board the Sea Horse. They edged back into the deepest shadows of the alley.

  “We’ve got to get to the ship,” Haft whispered hoarsely. “We need our weapons.”

  Spinner nodded. After a brief moment he whispered, “This way,” and headed back and around until they came out again near the end of the docks, where there were no guards. An ancient shed nearly blocked the entrance of the alley they were in, so that from the dockside it might be possible to look at the shed and not realize there was a passageway behind it.

  By then dawn was a glow that covered the lower quadrant of the sky. Stars faded away as the glow spread higher.

  They slipped unseen into the shed, then Spinner dropped his cloak and started stripping off his uniform. “What are you doing?” Haft demanded.

  “Getting us to the ship. Strip.” When he was down to his pants, the legs of which reached barely below his knees, he redonned his belt with its single cross-body shoulder strap—his knife was scabbarded on the belt.

  Haft looked curiously at Spinner, then realized what he had in mind and likewise stripped down. They bundled their clothes and hid them behind a crate in a corner of the shed.

  “Watch your step,” Spinner whispered as he pointed ahead.

  Haft looked, and barely made out a darker place on the floor where there were no boards, just a narrow hole. He heard the gentle lapping of water.

  Back outside, hidden by the night that still lay over the docks, they lowered themselves into the water between the last two ships along the dock.

  Ships don’t go straight down to the water; their hulls curve down and in. Even when nuzzled together, bumper to bumper at deck level, there is a wide space below their decks at the waterline. In the predawn, the darkness between the ships was stygian. The two paddled blindly through the dark, hands groping for anchor chains, mooring lines, low hanging bumpers, and the flotsam that always accumulates around ships in port. They made noise; they couldn’t help it. But the washing of the harbor’s water against the hulls masked their sounds from the guards on the ships above.

  They didn’t try to swim centered between the ships, but swam along them so they could keep track of where they were and where they had to go. They counted the bows and sterns they swam by; the Sea Horse was berthed the fourth row out, on the flank of the massed ships. When they were past four ships, they turned right and swam to the very end of the line, to where they were no longer under and between the ships. The sky was by then bright enough that they could make out the curve of the bay’s western shore as it bent away from them.

  Haft silently cursed the light. Spinner didn’t waste thought on it. He held himself steady in the water by grasping the bow anchor chain and looked up to see the best way of boarding the ship. The most obvious was to climb the chain, then use the hawsehole as a step to climb over the rail, but that would leave them briefly silhouetted. Then he saw, a few feet aft of the hawsehole, a darker spot on the hull—someone had left a porthole open below the forecastle, in the hold that was the crews’ quarters. He poked Haft to get his attention and pointed at the open porthole.

  Haft looked, nodded, and immediately clambered up the chain. At the top he grabbed the edge of the hawsehole and swung himself to the porthole. In a trice he pulled himself through it. A few seconds later his head poked back out. Spinner was nearly at the top of the anchor chain, so Haft reached out to help him through the opening.

  “Trouble,” Haft whispered. “Smell.”

  Spinner sniffed. The crews’ cabin held the odor of death.

  It was too dark in the cabin for them to see, and they didn’t dare light a lamp, but in seconds their hands found the source of the smell. Three corpses were dumped in a corner of the cabin. One had multiple knife wounds, as though he died fighting. The others had their throats
neatly cut. Their clothing had the feel of sailors’ tatters rather than Marines’ uniforms.

  “The sailors left on fire watch.”

  “Poor squids.”

  A moment’s blind searching revealed no weapons—not that they expected to find any in the crew quarters. The Marines kept their weapons on their persons or secured in their quarters. Weapons that might be issued to the sailors in an emergency were kept in a locked chest in the bosun’s cabin amidships. The sailors each had a utilitarian knife that was of less use as a weapon than the belt knives carried by the Marines. To get weapons, they had to go aft, to their own quarters, hard by the captain’s cabin. The main passageway was nearly a hundred feet long, with who knew what in between.

  Spinner listened at the hatch. When he heard nothing, he undogged it and eased it open. Three dim watch lights spaced evenly along the passageway that ran from the crews’ quarters to the captain’s cabin gave a feeble illumination, just enough so two men approaching from opposite directions wouldn’t bump into each other. He opened the hatch far enough to step through and signaled Haft to follow. Haft closed the hatch behind himself but didn’t dog it—they might have to come back that way in a hurry.

  They ran silently on the balls of their feet toward their own cabin, and pulled up short while still a few yards from it. Directly ahead, at the end of the passageway, was the captain’s cabin. Just out from it was another hatch on each side of the passageway. Those hatches led to the Marines’ quarters, small, inboard cabins, each of which was shared by six men. The hatch on the right—their cabin—was open, and a low glow came from it. Scuffling noises came from inside the cabin. Someone was there. But who?

  They slipped closer to the hatch. When they were just outside it, they heard chinking, as of coins being dropped into a pile, and a low, guttural humming. Whoever was in the cabin almost had to be a Jokapcul soldier. But was there only one or were there more? They drew their knives.