by Holly Lisle
He raised his other hand, and ran a finger down my cheek, along the line of my jaw, over my lips.
“You are not as I had thought you might be. And yet, I find that you are beautiful nonetheless,” he said.
I told him, “You don’t have to lie. I know the Eyes are ugly. It was to avoid ever wearing them that I called out so long for rescue. But in the end, I made myself a volunteer. It was part of my mission.”
He brought his face closer to mine, and stepped nearer me. “Don’t talk of missions just now,” he said. “I am weary of missions.”
I could feel the heat of his skin through his clothing, touching me.
In that moment, filled with heat and hunger, I desperately wanted … something. Though I could not put a name to it, I ached for it.
The men on the ship fell suddenly quiet, and I heard footsteps running toward us before I caught the form of the man who raced in our direction.
“We have … something … coming at us, Cap’n. We need you.”
Aaran swore. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered, and stepped away from me.
I followed without being invited.
“Out there,” the sailor said. I could make out the bones of the man’s arm, lifting, the bones in his hands curling. One finger outstretched.
And the captain turned in the direction that the finger pointed. I did, too.
Aaran
Aaran peered across the sea. The islands were disappearing. Quickly. Everything was fading into a gray blur.
“A storm?” he asked. “It doesn’t look like a storm. The sky is still clear.”
And next to him, Hawkspar said, “A line of dead men comes toward us. And a ship that floats upon the sea of their bones.”
He turned to stare at her. “You can see what’s out there?”
“Some things. Things that are watery blend with the water to me—I cannot see them. But things dense as bone, I see quite well. I can see what comes. And as well, what is already here.”
“Here?”
“I saw the first two when we stood upon your tall deck beneath the horse’s head. Great sea beasts that circled beneath this ship. But I did not give them any importance. They did not seem interested in us. Now, though, others are gathering with them beneath this ship, curling tentacles up toward us. They are, I think, bound to the one who pursues us across his sea of death.”
One of his men screamed, “Behind us! Beside us!”
Aaran looked, and saw that in every direction, the grayness encroached, swallowing islands, swallowing the horizon.
Aaran turned in all directions, realizing that he had been careless and overconfident, and that because of it, he had allowed his ship and everyone on it to become trapped.
He’d eaten. He’d danced. He’d stood in sunlight on his own ship, captivated by the line of a woman’s throat, by the delicate curve of her ear, by the soft fullness of her breasts. He’d been fascinated by the sweet curves of her lips, and curious about the golden brown glints in her eyes, which did not bother him so much when he let himself just accept them.
He’d been resentful of the sailor who’d called him away from her.
But the resentment and his desire ebbed together. He stared out at the sea, and down into the black glass of the water that gave him back nothing but the reflection of his own ship, and his skin started to crawl. Monsters. Tentacled monsters? The great squid had been known to rip ships apart. And he could not even say that the danger he faced was that known one. They still navigated the waters surrounding the Dragon Sea. The depths could hold some new and more horrible nightmares.
The Taag had picked up a light breeze and Aaran was giving the windmen a well-deserved rest. He turned to Ves and said, “Get the windmen going. Quickly.”
And then he turned back to her. “What, exactly, do you see?”
“At this very moment, fish with toothy maws big enough to swallow a man in one bite pace this ship, running deep. I count half a dozen of them, and with them, three curling balls of tentacles that, when they uncoil, are longer than this ship.” She closed her eyes and bowed her head, still for a long moment. He waited. Abruptly, she started speaking, but her voice had taken on a distant quality. “They could attack now, but they await the coming of the master whose pets they are. The master wishes to claim the bounty this ship carries before you and it are destroyed. He is coming.” She stood very still, her head still bowed.
Aaran had gone so far to save Hawkspar, and all those with her. And in her he had found something he wanted to explore.
And now there were monsters.
He told Potyr, who with a runner’s instinct had attached himself to Aaran’s side the instant trouble started, “Get Ermyk. Tell him I need him and his men. We’re about to be under attack.”
Hawkspar spoke again. “The warlock—this vile oathbreaker who deals in the dead—comes by fog. He knows your name. He knows your ship. He travels surrounded by the screams of his victims, and he sought to meet you once before.”
The fog curled closer on all sides. The day had become silent as oblivion, all wind dead, all life aboard and away from the ship hushed with fear, hoping to escape detection. Hawkspar’s description twisted the final knot in Aaran’s gut.
“Oh,” he said. “Him.”
She smiled a little, the corners of her lips curling like the tips of a drawn bow. “He let you get away then, because he discovered that you carried no treasure that he might wish to take. Now … now your ship carries his favorite treats.”
“Gold? Jewels?”
“Women. Girls. And especially … objects of power. Once—perhaps a hundred years ago—this wizard sought to meet with the Ossalenes, hoping to enter the Citadel in the guise of a friend, so that he might kill the oracles and steal the Order’s Eyes. The Hawkspar of that day saw his intended duplicity, and the Citadel gates did not open for him. He was sent away with arrows, catapults, and fire. Now he senses that we are with you, and he hungers for what you have obtained that he, with all his magic, could not.”
“Great. A jealous wizard. I wish we had Senders and Shielders with us.”
Hawkspar straightened and turned her face toward him. “I have warriors I can offer to you. Our Obsidians fought with your men yesterday, and killed as many of the enemy as your people did.”
He hadn’t been up there with the fighting. He’d been down where he had to be, in his ship, ready to give the orders that would set the Taag on her way should the rescue attempt turn into a disaster.
But Aaran had seen Hawkspar dance. And she claimed herself less than the least of the Obsidians.
And the men had talked—of black shadows that had dropped on the Citadel’s attackers, of silent death that had ripped enemy heads from their shoulders and moved on before rescuers who had been about to die could even identify what it was that had saved them.
The Obsidians.
Three of the stone-eyed women stepped forward. They had been standing in the shadows, Aaran realized, but for some reason he hadn’t noticed them until they were ready to be noticed.
They made his skin crawl. Unlike Hawkspar, they had no feel of softness about them, no gentleness hinted in movement or gesture. They were like arrows drawn, swords unsheathed, catapults winched. Hawkspar said, “Redbird, stay with me.” To the other two she said something in a language Aaran couldn’t catch, and both women flowed away inhumanly fast; their movements were almost impossible to watch. They reappeared moments later, followed by a stream of black-clad women. Aaran judged their numbers the way he would have an enemy force, and guessed about fifty of them stood before him.
They wore twin swords at their hips and the braids that hung down their backs had been capped with metal balls. Their black eyes gleamed, bottomless in the reflected light.
“These women are at your disposal,” Hawkspar said.
Aaran wasn’t about to be picky. “I’ll put them below as final forces if my men fall.”
Hawkspar said, “Use them in the first lin
es, as you use your own men. They are especially trained to fight against magic. They can accomplish feats your men cannot duplicate, or even imagine. The warlock dares attack you only because he does not yet suspect what they can do. Their Eyes give them power he will regret.”
Aaran had sixty-three marines, and he’d planned to fight them in a first and a second wave. With the addition of Hawkspar’s Obsidians, he could decrease the number of marines in each wave and increase the number of waves, and keep fresh fighting forces at the front. He figured quickly, and came to the conclusion that he could have three waves of almost forty fighters each. Forty of his own fighters on the deck would take all the space there was. He had qualms about fighting with women, but the black-eyed creatures had comported themselves well in the fight in the Citadel tunnels.
His runner skidded to a stop in front of him. “The windmen are at their places, and I await your orders.”
“Wait in the cabin, Potyr. Tell Neevan he has orders to stay in there as well.”
“Yes, Cap’n.” Aaran did not miss the disappointment in the boy’s face as he turned away and slunk across the deck like a chastened dog.
He turned to Hawkspar. “Send some of your fighters below as a defense for the children—”
She interrupted him. “Fifteen Obsidians guard that small space, and the passage leading to it. My people are well guarded. Those who stand before you now are entirely at your disposal.”
“Then have your people split into three groups. Each of the groups will join a group of my men, and they will fight together. We will have one wave on deck and two in reserve at all times,” he told her.
She bowed slightly, and he caught the hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth. “As you command,” she said, and turned to her fighters. She gave them quick, sharp orders in that other language, and they flowed away like liquid, into three groups.
He asked her, “Can you still see through this fog?”
“To me, it is the same as it was.”
“In which direction, then, will we face the least resistance?”
“Aside from straight up?” she asked. But she pointed. “That way.”
He did not know if she pointed east or west, north or south. He knew only that she pointed toward their possible escape.
The sea lay black beneath him, made blacker by the fog-blanketed world through which no sun could penetrate. He could track a channel, and steer the ship through it, so he ran to the steersman’s castle and displaced Baaksa, who once again had the tillers.
The sails snapped full as the windmen began to call up as much of a gale as they could manage. In the riggings above, men unfurled tragadyl sails and snap sails to catch the extra wind. Aaran drove the ship through deep water keeping it from the reefs and sandbars that laced the treacherous nest of islands in which they’d taken their rest.
The Taag plunged forward.
Not quickly enough. As the wind whistled through the rigging, something in the air changed. Aaran could smell cold and sour rot. Fog, suddenly glowing, curled around him.
He did not fear natural fog. But a fog of light was another matter.
Screaming. Close and sudden, and in all directions. Sound battered the Taag, forward and back and sides all at once.
The fog grew brighter, and in the midst of it, Aaran saw the twisting shapes of reaching men, flesh falling from their bones, eyes clouded or eaten away, some mere collections of rag-draped bones. They all screamed, though, and he was grateful that he did know the words they cried out in their anguish.
Massive tentacles whipped up, over the sides of the ship, grasping and feeling. Aaran shouted, “First wave forward!”
A tentacle slipped out of nowhere and wrapped itself around his waist; its strength crushed the breath from him. Aaran slashed once with his sword, raised it to slash again, and then Hawkspar leapt into his path, blades flashing in the evil glow of the fog. She moved faster than his eyes could follow, and when she stepped away, the tentacle was cut from the monster’s body. It went limp around him and fell to the ground, and he sucked in air, his ribs aching.
“Worse comes! Get away from the edge!” she shouted.
He stepped back, his sword ready, and saw, coming up behind him, a man in a boat spun of light. The man stood in the center of his little coracle, with the hands of dead men dragging his ship forward at terrifying speed. This had to be the mighty wizard, but he looked nothing like Aaran would have expected. He wore simple clothes—plain pants, a rough shirt such as any Tonk farmer would wear while chasing his herds, coarse boots. The wizard held nothing in his hands. They were spread wide, palms up, fingers splayed; he would have looked welcoming had he not traveled in such dire company.
He grinned at Aaran.
Aaran heard the battle continuing behind him. Heard his own men shouting, heard the clang of swords, heard the Obsidians speaking in their incomprehensible tongue, and he knew that he should turn. Help them fight.
But he could not look away.
The man and his illuminated coracle rose free of the water, and sailed a sea of dead men’s arms, passed hand-over-hand toward Aaran.
“Bada da hedu,” the man said. “Sheki da hedu gosha shpa emi. Shemik emiab glespakat, gees hedu od geesak ema sphevimamo ema pikpu emi didogado hofu.”
And in Aaran’s ear, the voice of Hawkspar said, “‘You have come. You have brought to me that which I have most desired. Give over to me the treasure you carry, and your ship alone of all the ships that have trespassed my territory I will permit escape.’ This he says. And I and mine are what he most desires. If you pass me to him now, and all the Ossalenes aboard your ship, he will do as he says he will do, and you will be permitted to take the children, and the hold full of other treasures, and flee to safety.”
Aaran had not come so far and worked so hard to give the women he’d fought to save—Tonk women, most of them—to some monster. He had not followed Hawkspar’s desperate plea to hand her to the horror he faced.
Aaran might not have got what he wanted, exactly, but he wanted what he’d got.
“Why don’t you step off your little boat and come talk with me. Man to man,” he suggested, and heard the woman beside him translating his words for the wizard.
“‘If I did as you asked, you still would pose no threat to me,’” the wizard said, translated by Hawkspar. “‘But as I hold the upper hand, I think I’ll keep it.’”
“Well enough,” Aaran said. “If you won’t come parley like a man, you don’t deserve to be treated like a man. You can’t have what is mine. You can’t even have what isn’t mine. The women stay, the treasure stays. And you go.”
The tracker who’d trained him, Fergan av Radavan, had spent time making sure Aaran had a good foundation in the uses of the Hagedwar, not just tracking and basic communication, but also attack and defense. He said that in desperate times, the tracker ended up being all things to all men, and if Aaran wanted to be a good tracker, he’d keep that truth in mind.
So Aaran shielded himself against attacks by magic—not a simple task—and caught the coracle that floated just above his head, and swung himself up into it.
The wizard stared at him, then spewed angry-sounding words. The translation came quick enough—“‘Those who touch my boat die.’”
“By Ethebet, I didn’t know that,” Aaran said. “Had I, I’m sure I would have fallen over dead.”
He swung his sword, whipping it side-to-side once, then thrusting. He tore through his enemy’s clothes but did not seem to cut flesh. If he had, the man was bloodless.
“Orsheka hedu te dega badi fendogo goro!” the wizard howled. But this time no translation followed.
Aaran couldn’t look around to see what had happened to Hawkspar. The best he could manage was a quick prayer to Ethebet.
He had a fight on his hands; the wizard glared at him and unsheathed a sword of his own that had been tucked on his back between his shoulder blades. When the wizard lifted both arms to grab it, Aaran lunged at
him with a neat forward and down stroke that should have skewered him through the gut. That it didn’t—that in fact his sword point hit his enemy’s gut and skidded off as if it were water beading and bouncing on a griddle—scared Aaran.
The wizard grinned at him, and Aaran had only the time to realize that his enemy had filed his teeth to sharp points before he had to fight off a powerful downward blow meant to cleave him in half. “Bastard,” he snarled.
The wizard’s blade snaked off his and Aaran slashed quickly across the monster’s throat.
Again, he might as well have spit on his enemy for all the damage the blow did.
That two-handed blade was flashing back at him—a sidestroke this time, and he barely arched back out of its way in time. He could have been two Aarans had it connected. Both shorter.
His sword wasn’t working as it should have. Aaran didn’t trust gimmicks and tricks, but he was at the mercy of a man who was a better swordsman than him, and who had a better magical shield—one that protected him from physical blows. Without a trick or two, Aaran was going to die in the next handful of blows.
He knew a trick or two.
He bent the light around him. It was a coward’s move, and served little against a man with magic at hand—unless the man had never seen the trick before. But from the look of the wizard’s face when the light streamed around Aaran and he appeared to vanish, this wizard never had.
Well and good. Time to see what might be accomplished by a man the enemy couldn’t see.
18
Hawkspar
Aaran had stepped into the wizard’s coracle, and the dead hands of the wizard’s many victims held them up. They were not taking Aaran away from me. But they would. I could see that the wizard planned to toss his body into the sea, to join the rest of the dead.
Time swirled around me. I stood half in its river, half out. I could hear the screaming, I could see the dying, and the dead, and the dozen different paths in which everyone was still dying, dying, dead. What I could not see, trapped against the aftermast with giant creatures of the deep feeling across the deck for me, was the path in which we did not all end up dead. In which the escaping members of the Order were not dragged into lifetimes of torture and horror by the disgusting, twisted man who’d brought his pets to steal us. In which the brave men who’d come to find us did not end up as corpses carrying the bastard’s little boat above the waves until they rotted into pieces.
