Now he dreaded where King Grieve was taking them, to the main Norukai islands.
Belowdecks, the oar master pounded on his drum, and the unfortunate slaves chained to the benches pulled at the oars to drive the serpent ships faster than the sluggish breeze.
After being beaten unconscious at the river mouth, Lila had been tossed to the deck near Bannon, her ankle also secured with a chain, the chain that had once imprisoned Erik. Now the morazeth lay bruised and battered, a captive just like him. Bannon couldn’t understand why she had allowed herself to be captured. She had caused it! It seemed a foolish risk.
As she lay motionless under the hot sun, he studied the symbols that marked her skin. The runes protected her against magic, but they did nothing against the brutal Norukai. Her body was mottled with bruises.
Lila finally groaned, and her eyelids flickered open. She snapped awake in an instant, fully conscious and alert. She thrashed against the ankle chain, and her wince told Bannon just how much pain she must feel. When her gaze locked on to his, she visibly relaxed. “So, I succeeded then. My memory is … fogged.”
“You certainly drew their attention.” The words bubbled out of him, rising in intensity. “That was a foolish stunt! Why would you do that? We’re both prisoners. Now you’re in as bad a place as I am.”
“I am in the same place as you are,” Lila said, as if that were reason enough. “That was my intent.”
“But why? What can you hope to achieve here?”
“More than I could achieve if these ships sailed off and I never saw you again. It was the only way I could stay with you. Now we have a chance.”
Bannon hung his head, and his long hair drooped over his face. “A chance? You are maddening. I don’t understand how you think.”
She frowned. “It is perfectly obvious. The Norukai ships were going out to sea, and that was my last opportunity to intercept them. If they had sailed into the ocean, how else could I rescue you?”
“This isn’t much of a rescue,” he said.
“Obviously, I am not finished yet.” She winced again as she shifted her body to inspect her bruises. She flexed her fingers, ran her tongue over the caked blood on her smashed lip. “I will heal.” She strained at the bindings around her wrists until blood stained the knotted rope. “I can work myself free eventually, but the ankle chain will be problematic.”
He looked across the open water, but he could no longer see the coastline, only endless ocean. “I have no doubts about you, Lila. I know what you’re capable of.”
“Of course you don’t have any doubts. I have never given you any reason to.”
Now that she was helpless, he feared the Norukai would drag her across the deck and rape her, although most of the raiders seemed to prefer their own beefy women, and their nightly lovemaking on the open deck sounded more like a brawl. Still, he had seen Norukai men ravish three of the female Ildakaran captives, treating them so brutally that two were mad and one was dead and tossed overboard. They thought of their slaves as nothing more than “walking meat.” Lila was a beautiful woman with a lean and shapely body. He dreaded what would happen to her, but he also felt a sick inevitability.
The first night at sea, a sneering young Norukai with fresh red scars on his face grabbed Lila’s leg chain, unfastened it, and dragged her away. She didn’t scream. Instead, she coiled, made herself ready. Bannon threw himself to the end of his own chain. “Leave her alone!”
The Norukai laughed, but Bannon was more stung when Lila turned and snapped at him, “Be quiet, boy! You only make it worse. I can handle this.” She tugged on her own chain, pulling back against the raider, but the Norukai yanked the metal links, nearly dislocating her shoulder.
After the Norukai man dragged her into the shadows beside stacked crates of stolen supplies, Bannon strained to hear her voice, sure that Lila would challenge her attacker, but she spoke no words. He heard a scuffle, a grunt, then a scream—but it was not Lila’s scream.
The Norukai man reeled back out of the gloom, drunk with agony, as he staggered across the deck. Holding her own chain, Lila stalked back to return to Bannon’s side. Several Norukai came running in response to their comrade’s groans. He pressed his palms to his crotch and blood dribbled between his fingers. The angry Norukai stared at Lila, but she faced them defiantly, holding up a fleshy handful in her palm. “I tore off his testicles, but I stopped at that. If another man tries to take me, I will make him eat them as well.”
She tossed the bloody sac with a splat onto the deck. The would-be rapist whimpered, then collapsed in a bloody mess. The Norukai prowled toward Lila, ready to tear her to pieces.
Bannon hoped his leg chain would be long enough for him to fight. Lila stood her ground and prepared to die.
King Grieve strode over and saw the writhing, moaning man on the deck, the bloody testicle sac next to him, and he guffawed. Moments later, the other Norukai joined the king in bellowing laughter. “Throw him overboard,” Grieve said. “Worthless.”
They tossed the moaning raider, still alive, into the sea.
Lila went back to her place beside Bannon, and the angry Norukai men glowered at her before loudly declaring that she was too scrawny for their tastes.
* * *
The next day, after several captives were worked to exhaustion belowdecks, the oar master herded them back up on deck with shouts and growls and cracking whips. Bosko released Lila and Bannon from their manacles on deck and commanded them to go down to the benches. A foul stench wafted around him, which even the sea breezes couldn’t dissipate.
During the stifling heat of the afternoon, Bannon and Lila sat side by side as they pulled on the oars. Lila was a friend and sometimes lover, but she had never been much for conversation. As they pulled on the oars, Lila stared with hatred at the Norukai captors, yet with a calculating gleam in her eyes.
Chalk came down to jabber, fearful of Lila, but fascinated by her as well. In a clumsy whisper that was easily audible over the creaking oars, he muttered to Bannon as if it were a secret, “Pretty lady. Dangerous lady.” His pale face was mottled purple and yellow from where she had struck him. “No love for Chalk, though. Not me. I’ll never have love.”
Lila growled, “Cut me loose and I’ll love you until I break you into tiny pieces.” Chalk scuttled away with a last look at Bannon and retreated up the wooden ladder to the deck above.
“Pull!” the oar master scolded.
The serpent ships sailed north from the estuary for days. Grieve paced the deck, and Chalk followed him like a puppy. The king placed his iron-knuckled hand on the shaman’s bony shoulder. “We’ll be at the Bastion soon.”
“The Bastion,” Chalk cried. “Home!” He ran up to Bannon, leaned close, and repeated, “Home!”
Grieve’s expression darkened as he turned to his shaman. “I hoped Ildakar would be the center of my new empire. What went wrong? What didn’t you foresee? We should have been victorious!”
Chalk’s pale eyes gleamed with a cracked edge of madness. “There will be war, a big war! I promised a war. Many ships. My Grieve, King Grieve! They’ll all grieve!”
“Soon,” the king vowed.
The serpent ships sailed onward. For Bannon and Lila, the days were an endless blur of being chained on the open deck or sweating in the miserable hold as they worked the oars. When the wind picked up and stretched the sails, the oars were withdrawn, and the slaves remained bound with nothing to do but fear their fates.
One afternoon, the lookout called from the top of the mast. “Selka in the water! Starboard side.” Grieve strode to the bow, where he shaded his craggy brow and stared out on the waves.
Bannon raised himself up so he could scan the water. “Do you see them?” he asked Lila.
“What are selka?”
Squinting across the choppy water, he felt a thrill of terror as he spotted five swimming figures. “They look human, but they are definitely not human.”
Lila’s brow furrowed. “Fish people?�
��
“That’s as good a description as any. A race of humans long ago altered to live under the water. They can rip sharks apart with their claws.” He shivered even under the hot sun. “Nathan told me that during the great war thousands of years ago, powerful wizards manipulated captives, gave them gills and changed their skin in order to form an undersea army. The war is long over, and the selka have built an entire civilization beneath the surface. They hate humans and they still prey on ships.” He swallowed hard as the memories washed over him.
“They attacked the Wavewalker when we were traveling south. The selka swarmed over our ship at night, killed the entire crew to get revenge against the wishpearl divers that raided their reefs. Nicci, Nathan, and I were the only ones to survive when the Wavewalker wrecked on the Phantom Coast. The selka queen had some connection to me, didn’t want to kill me … for whatever that was worth. But they were unstoppable.”
“The odds are better now. This time you have me to fight beside you,” Lila said. “And I am a morazeth.”
With her hands bound and her ankles shackled, Bannon doubted even Lila could do much against a selka attack.
At the railings, the Norukai held their bone-tipped spears, ready to hurl them at the swimming figures, but the selka kept their distance. Grieve bellowed a challenge out on the water. “Come close enough for us to kill you!” The selka remained tauntingly out of reach.
Chalk groaned with fascination. “Selka fish! Fish people!” He nervously ran his palms over the puckered, scarred skin of his stomach. “I don’t want to be gutted, King Grieve, my Grieve.”
The king glowered down at him. “I won’t let them gut you, Chalk.”
The shaman chanted in a singsong voice, “Wrong, wrong, wrong!”
As if bored, the selka swam away, while the Norukai doubled their lookouts to keep watch on the water.
Lost in his memories, Bannon mused quietly to Lila, “I don’t know why the selka queen spared me the first time.” When he was much younger, he had stolen a small fishing boat and sailed away from Chiriya Island without charts or knowledge. He drifted for days until he ran out of water and food, sunburned, in despair. He’d been sure he would die at sea.
“I knew stories of the selka,” he told Lila, “but I’d never seen one. I thought they were just fisherman’s tales, but that night when a sea fog closed in, I huddled in my boat and fell asleep. In the darkness, something pulled my boat, brought me back to the island. When I woke, I was home, and the boat was dragged up on the rocky shore. I saw only the imprint of a webbed foot in the beach.” He looked at her. “When they attacked the Wavewalker, the selka queen seemed to recognize me.”
Lila gave him a skeptical look. “I believe you overestimate your charm and attractiveness, boy.” Her voice was flat, but he thought she was teasing him. “But if the queen wishes to be your lover, I will fight her.”
He shuddered at the thought. “I don’t ever want to see her again.”
CHAPTER 43
After Ava’s spirit ransacked the archives, Cliffwall went on high alert. General Zimmer dispatched scouts out of the canyons to monitor the oncoming army that was already marching out of the mountains. Nathan called an emergency meeting so that everyone could discuss how they might possibly prepare against such an overwhelming force.
As he and Verna hurried toward the gathering chamber, the prelate said with hard skepticism, “I’m not confident we have any viable options. This archive is no longer hidden, and Utros is on his way. How can we defend Cliffwall?”
Nathan clucked his tongue. “I’m sure we’ll find something, my dear, if we just think hard enough.”
She walked ahead of him into the large gathering chamber. “You sound like a naive fool.”
“I prefer the term ‘optimist.’ Remember, I’ve helped save the world before.” But he’d had the help of Nicci, and Richard, and others. Knowing that Nicci was still alive did not help him, because she wasn’t there. He had no idea where she actually was, only that she had somehow killed the sorceress Ava.
The prelate responded with only a roll of her eyes.
Franklin and Gloria sat at a speakers’ table before the anxious audience. Zimmer shifted uncomfortably in his seat; his D’Haran armor was clean and professional, as if he were reporting to Lord Rahl himself. Nathan and Verna took the remaining seats at the front table before the gathered crowd. Intent scholars filled the room, sitting on the available benches while others stood shoulder-to-shoulder. The low buzz of conversation was not the casual talk usually heard at such meetings.
Thorn and Lyesse stood with weapons at their sides. Eight Sisters of the Light sat watching the prelate, confident and waiting to learn how they could help. Oliver and Peretta remained close to Amber.
Gloria nodded to her memmers as the Cliffwall inhabitants asked questions of one another. Scholar-Archivist Franklin folded his hands in front of him, waiting for the crowd to quiet down. Crowded at the entrance to the chamber, some of the ungifted workers listened in, deeply worried.
Nathan cleared his throat. “We don’t have time to waste, and someone needs to call this meeting to order, although I believe meetings are often a waste of time when action is required. The enemy army knows exactly where to find us. A hundred thousand soldiers will take over this archive, unless we figure out a way to stop them.”
“How can we possibly stop that many?” cried one of the memmers.
“By killing them,” Thorn interjected, as if the answer were obvious.
Verna looked annoyed. “An excellent suggestion, but unhelpful. We have to prevent them from capturing all the knowledge stored here. They cannot have it!”
“At the pace of their march, they are maybe four days away,” Zimmer said. “But my scouts suggest they have picked up speed.”
A wave of anxious whispers rippled through the chamber.
Lyesse said, “The soldiers are gaunt and hungry, and they are stripping the landscape clean, devouring everything in sight.”
“But they continue to march nevertheless,” Thorn added. “On our last reconnaissance, we killed six of them.”
“Each,” Lyesse added. “For good measure.”
Captain Trevor spoke up, frustrated. “We cannot stop them one or two at a time.”
“With the maze of narrow canyons, the sheer cliffs, the mesa rising above the valley, Cliffwall is defensible,” Zimmer explained. “A small number of fighters can hold the bottleneck at the mouth of the canyon. With the proper preparations, we could ambush the enemy, slay thousands as they funnel into the canyon.”
“Their piled bodies form another wall of defense,” Lyesse said, relishing the thought.
“You are quite ambitious, General,” Nathan said, “but with so many thousands of warriors who refuse to give up, Utros will overwhelm us no matter what his losses are. The soldiers will keep coming and keep coming. Given what his dead sorceress told him, he will want to possess the knowledge stored here, and he is not a man to give up.”
“We can still try to hold them off,” said the wizard Leo. “Can’t we?”
“It remains an incredible risk,” Franklin pointed out. “We must evacuate as many people as possible, get them to safety. I won’t let all those innocent families just huddle here waiting to be slaughtered. We have to accept that Cliffwall may be captured. We could pack up some of the most important volumes and rush them in pack trains up into the highlands above the canyon.”
“I concur,” said Gloria. “If my memmers go with them, at least they will take the knowledge they carry in their minds, and that is the equivalent of thousands of books.”
“The knowledge in the archive is too dangerous,” Verna said. “We must not let that information fall into enemy hands. We cannot!”
“It took years and years to install all those works here,” Franklin said. “Even if we took wagonloads of books above the canyon, we could only save a tiny fraction. It’s simply not possible! We haven’t even sorted them yet.”
&nbs
p; “We can’t move the archive,” Nathan said. “That much is obvious. Who would choose the volumes to save? Even if we merely hid the most dangerous books in caves, then what? With limitless enemy soldiers to search the surrounding areas, Utros would find the books. And the spirit of his sorceress can flit anywhere.”
“We don’t dare let General Utros have any of those books. The knowledge is too dangerous,” Verna insisted.
“My memmers are meant to preserve information,” Gloria said, “but if they were captured and tortured…” She looked at her gifted followers in their blue robes. “What might they be forced to reveal?”
Groans of dismay went through the audience. The scholars began to talk heatedly.
Zimmer rose to his feet, crossed his arms over his chest armor. “We have to defend Cliffwall. Evacuate all the civilians to safety, but my defenders must stop the army from breaking through into the canyon. We will stay here and use every possible defense to block the invasion.”
“Ava knows exactly what the archive contains,” Nathan said. “Her sister Ruva is likely still alive, too, unless Nicci killed her as well.” He stroked his chin.
“She is just one sorceress,” Oron said.
“And a hundred thousand soldiers,” Leo pointed out.
“All the wizards of Ildakar could barely scratch that giant army,” Olgya said. “We have far fewer defenses here.”
Zimmer placed his fists on the table in front of him. “Let us be realistic.” Black stubble shadowed his cheeks, and his forehead glistened with perspiration. “I have about fifty D’Haran soldiers as well as a few city guards from Ildakar. We have Oron and Leo, Olgya and Perri from Ildakar, along with Nathan, Prelate Verna and her Sisters of the Light, and some gifted Cliffwall scholars who can fight with magic.” He drew a deep breath. “Even with the natural defenses of the canyons here, I doubt we could hold against General Utros and his army.”
“But we will try,” Captain Trevor said. “We will fight to the last, and make them pay a very high price!”
Heart of Black Ice Page 25