By now the Serpent lies nearly dead in the water, main sail half lowered, and fluttering in the light breeze, as several men hack at the wrecked bowsprit and sail that drag into each swell.
“Kyl, can you destroy the rudder with another rocket?”
“We can try.” Kyl turns. “Fire another one. Right aft and below that poop porthole there.”
Three black iron missiles later, the rudder hangs uselessly, and the Serpent begins to list ever so slightly to starboard.
Occasional fireballs flash past the Hammer, from both the Serpent and the surrounding ships, as the small ironclad continues to circle the larger schooner.
A seaman pants up into the pilot house. “Styl says that the shaft’s running hot, Master Dorrin.”
Tyrel looks from the helm to Dorrin. “Told you we’d have trouble with those bearings.”
The bearings work better than grease seals, but they do not work well enough. Dorrin can only hope the shaft will last for a while. “How hot?”
“Need to shut down and grease her ‘fore long, Styl says.”
Dorrin looks at Reisa. “Send up the boarding crew. Tyrel, bring her around to the starboard side of the Serpent.”
“They’ll fry you, Dorrin!” protests Kyl, standing halfway up the ladder into the pilot house.
“That’s what the shields are for.” That’s also what he is for, he thinks. “If we can’t hold the deck, start firing rockets.”
“The angle’s lousy. We can only hit a couple of places.”
“Fine. Put several large holes in the hull, right at the water line.”
Dorrin grabs the staff, and nods to Reisa, who stands below in the space below the ladder to the main deck. The ten men and women in black, with the black blades and matching shields, wait behind the hatch door.
“We’re right opposite her gangway point.”
“Go ahead and grapple.”
The hooks go out, cast from beneath the turtleshells on the Hammer’s deck. Dorrin watches as the forward grapple bounces off twice. The third cast is successful, and the Serpent and the Hammer are locked together with the rope/chains that cannot be burned.
“You take care of the shaft, Tyrel, and we’ll take care of the wizard. Bowmen!”
The iron shutters on the side of the pilot house roll open half a cubit in three places. Behind each opening stands an archer, each with a quiver of black iron and lorkin arrows.
The shafts immediately clear the deck area opposite the Hammer.
“Boarders away!”
Quenta swarms up and onto the Serpent’s deck, swinging his shield forward as he bounces over the railing. The first fireball sprays around him, followed by several arrows.
“Archers! The poop deck!”
The black arrows fly aft, and the white arrows cease.
Reisa, Petra, and two others reach the deck, and Dorrin scrambles up. Even before he is steady on the white oak planks, Quenta and another black trooper lock shields before him.
Dorrin probes, his senses out, for the feeling of concentrated chaos, his staff automatically pointing toward the higher poop deck.
“Get the Black bastards!” Nearly a score of White armed men charge from the forecastle toward the handful of Blacks.
The black arrows drop five before the defenders reach Dorrin’s party.
Dorrin’s staff drops another, and the black blades begin their work.
“ Aeeeüi…” One White guard’s arm flames from the bite of Reisa’s blade.
Two firebolts flash toward the Black forces, but Dorrin turns his staff and thoughts, and they flare harmlessly onto the deck as the infighting intensifies.
Quenta slashes and drops one White guard, but loses his blade as the white sword of a third man slices his biceps. He swings the shield on his left arm to block the next slash.
Petra’s blade drops that White guard, and Dorrin steps farther left, using the staff to disarm and drop another guard. He ignores the twinges beyond his eyes.
A screaming black arrow knocks down yet another attacker.
Out of the corner of his eye, Dorrin can sense a black figure-and another-go down before the Whites are felled or thrown down their blades, the second falling as fire blazes past his ear. He lifts his staff and deflects another fireball, and a third, searching for the White Wizard. Dorrin finds the man in white standing to the left edge of the poop deck, shielded by the overhang from the archers on board the Hammer.
The three remaining White crewmen hold their hands up. One White archer lies propped against the port railing of the Serpent, his body almost level with Dorrin’s eyes because of the schooner’s list.
Dorrin steps toward the wizard.
Another fireball flies toward the engineer, but he lifts the staff and the heat flares away from him as he takes another step aft.
“Stop, you Black worm. I’ll destroy the entire ship.”
Dorrin takes another step and stops. “Why?” He casts his senses out, circling the white flame that is the chaos wizard, a man with a square beard.
“Why not? You’re out to destroy me.”
“You’re not exactly here on a mission of peacefulness,” Dorrin points out, strengthening the wall of order around the wizard.
“What are you-” Before the wizard finishes his sentence, another fireball flares toward Dorrin, who lifts the black staff and lets it absorb the energy.
A second fireball flashes, and a third. The third is far weaker, and dies even before it can reach the staff
Dorrin walks steadily across the planks toward the bearded figure in the white cloak.
A bit of flame erupts from the wizard’s fingers, then dies.
Dorrin extends the staff, almost gently, cracking the wizard, now aged and creaking, across the wrists, and then the neck. A dead body pitches headfirst onto the deck.
Dorrin turns.
The White crewmen all kneel, as if in reverence, pleading. Dorrin ignores them, instead dropping to the prone figure on the deck and rolling her gently over. His fingers feel clumsy as he fumbles out the dressings and the powdered astra from the pouch at his belt, as he simultaneously tries to hold order within Petra’s wiry body.
The thrust is deep, but her heart and lungs are safe, and he can use order to bind the slash together, thank darkness, once he spreads the powdered astra into the wound, although the pool of blood on the white deck tells the real danger. Dorrin’s eyes burn as he works, Reisa standing over him like a one-armed avenging angel.
Finally, he straightens up, and nods to Reisa. “We’ll need something stiff to carry her on.”
“How… will she…” Reisa’s voice is like frozen iron, blocking all feeling.
“She’s lost a lot of blood, but I think I stopped it in time.”
Styl vaults over the side of the white ship, carrying a canvas stretcher one-handed as if it were a toy, and Dorrin looks at the young man, at the rage and the tears, and then at Reisa, realizing that, once again, he has been so tied up in his own world that he has not seen the loves and pain of others.
“She be all right… master Dorrin?”
Dorrin eases Petra onto the stretcher. “I hope so…”
“White bastards…”
They carry the injured woman back to the Black Hammer, though it takes four of Reisa’s troopers, including Quenta, to ease the stretcher between the grappled ships.
Dorrin slowly reenters the deckhouse and climbs to the pilot house.
“Hadn’t you better take care of that shoulder?” Tyrel asks.
Dorrin looks stupidly at the gash in his shoulder, its throbbing lost in the anguish of Petra and Reisa, and his own headache. “Oh…” He uses the last of the astra, and Tyrel helps him bind it.
“The shaft fixed?”
“For a time. You need to figure out something better, though.”
Dorrin sighs. He is always trying to figure out something better. “Cast off.”
Tyrel raises his eyebrows. “Release grapples.”
When the Hammer stands well clear of the Serpent, Kyl turns to Dorrin. “Do you want us to fire her?”
“No. Not unless we have to.”
Dorrin turns his attention to the remainder of the fleet. More than ten ships have already turned back westward, their sails tiny white triangles upon the horizon.
Another handful, each bearing a wizard, circles just beyond the Hammer and the Serpent.
“Head for that one.” Dorrin jabs at the largest, a bark with a high freeboard.
Once again, the fireballs splash off the black iron as the Hammer plows toward the bark, disregarding the wind.
“Run up a parley flag.”
The white banner with the blue stripe flutters upon a short jackstaff aft of the pilot house. Shortly, a similar banner flies from the bark bearing the nameplate Whitefire.
When the Hammer is abeam the bark, Dorrin. opens one of the iron shutters and calls out to the man at the railing. “I’d like you to take a message back to the High Wizard.” Dorrin manages a half-bow, one hand on the iron shutter:
The captain yells back, between the hissing of swells and spray. “That’s not for me to say, Master. I can only ask the White one.”
“I know that.” Dorrin nods, and drops a waxed pouch containing a heavy parchment and a brief message, the first of three Dorrin had Liedral prepare almost an eight-day earlier, into a basket. The young seaman attaches the basket to a long-handled pole and extends it across the gap between the ships until an equally young seaman on the bark can take the pouch. The dark pouch is passed to the ship’s captain and then carried aft.
“Stand off, or whatever you call it,” Dorrin orders.
The wizard on the Whitefire has only one response to the request-another barrage of fireballs.
“Idiots!” snaps Dorrin, turning to Kyl.
“A set of the nasty ones?” asks his brother.
Dorrin nods, and winces at the headache that strikes behind his eyes.
“Fire rockets.”
Five rockets depart the Hammer, each landing with a gout of flame upon the wooden-hulled Whitefire, a flame that clings and spreads until the Fairhaven ship is a torch upon the water.
Shortly, the Hammer chugs up beside a third Fairhaven ship to pass across another pouch.
Dorrin closes his eyes, not that it matters, because, between the blindness and the headache, he can no longer see.
This time, when the Hammer stands off to wait for the response, there are no fireballs, only a double dip of the parley flag.
Kyl puts the second pouch in the basket for the master of the Pride of the Easthorns. The master even leaves the parley flag in place as his ship heels and turns westward. The other three ships carrying wizards follow.
Dorrin wipes his forehead and turns in Tyrel’s general direction. “Let’s head back. No sense in wasting coal.”
“I think we have enough to spare.” Tyrel laughs.
“I wish you’d burned them all.” Reisa stands at his elbow, and her low voice blazes.
“It won’t heal Petra.”
“I know. And it was her choice. But I still hate the bastards.”
“And I… I do like seeing…” Dorrin’s shoulders sag. He should be strong, like Creslin, and to light with the consequences, but he enjoys looking at Liedral, at the sea. Even now, he worries whether, this time, his sight will return. The pounding in his skull is not so pronounced as when he destroyed the Gallosian levies outside Kleth, but it seems that each use of order for destruction requires less impact to create head-wrenching pain and blindness-blindness that has been temporary so far.
“I know.” Reisa touches his shoulder, and he can feel her pain, the sources past and distant, and present and near. “Letting them make their own choices and knowing they did doesn’t always help. Someday, you’ll understand that better.”
Dorrin already understands that. How many have suffered so far for his dreams? He does not remind Reisa of that. Instead, he says, “The world, and the Balance, don’t care much for what we feel. That doesn’t mean I don’t feel.”
Reisa drops her hand. “That’s why you’re a great wizard… and why so many will offer themselves up for you. Somehow, along the way, you learned to keep your feelings and your dreams without betraying either.” Reisa slips away and down the ladder to check on Petra once again. Dorrin grasps the railing to balance himself against the rolling as Tyrel brings the Hammer about on the last course line into harbor.
“What now, Master Dorrin?” asks the captain conversationally.
“We build a better version of the Hammer. And a Black city. What else?”
“Darkness help us if’n you’d been White,” mumbles the captain.
Dorrin turns his sightless eyes eastward toward the hillside above Nylan, wondering how Liedral is, and whether he should have allowed her to come.
CLXXXII
DORRIN PAUSES AT the door, then knocks. Beside him, Liedral is silent.
“Master Dorrin, come in.” Rylla stands back from the doorway.
“I just wanted to see how Kadara and Lers were. I had to leave in a bit of a hurry.”
“I know. Rushing off to teach those Whites a lesson. We saw it all from the porch-the ship you fired, and the rest of them scuttling away across the Gulf.”
“Even Kadara?” asks Liedral.
“I wouldn’t let her. But she must have made me tell her three times what happened.”
Dorrin rubs his forehead and gingerly feels his way into the house. He can sense Rylla’s hand going to her mouth. “You’re not…”
“Hush… not a word,” he says. “Not a word.” His fingers lightly hold Liedral’s hand as she guides him to the bedroom. He stands just inside the door.
Kadara lies in the bed with her sleeping son cradled next to her. “Rylla told me Lers wouldn’t have lived if you hadn’t been here… and that you risked losing the battle to save him.”
Dorrin drops his head. “I can’t say that. We had time.”
“You have to be honest, don’t you? No matter what it costs?”
“Yes. Mostly, at least.”
“I suppose that’s why you have to calculate everything- probably even… never mind. I know you don’t, but still… it’s hard.”
Sensing her anger and the deep and endless pain, Dorrin touches her shoulder. “The Balance, and the world, don’t care much for what we feel. But I still feel, and it still hurts.”
Kadara’s fingers curl gently around the infant. “That’s why you’re a great one… and why Brede is dead, and why everyone looks up to you. You can hold on to order without losing your feelings.”
“You give me too much credit. I just… tried to do… what I had to.” Dorrin’s head continues to throb, and his knees feel weak.
“You’re tired, aren’t you?” Kadara asks.
“Yes.”
“So am I. Take him home, Liedral. And… Dorrin…”
Dorrin looks toward her, sightlessly.
“… thank you for my son. Brede would thank you too… and I hope it won’t be too long before you can see again.”
Dorrin can’t help grinning.
“… can’t fool me… Take him home and make him sleep, Liedral.”
“Get well, Kadara,” answers the engineer gruffly as he leaves.
Liedral edges him into the hallway. They step onto the front porch, and she says, “You’ve given too many people too much. Kadara was right. You need some rest.”
“What about you?”
Liedral laughs, a sound that is edgy, bell-like, and happy, all in one. “I have you… and more. I was more fortunate than Kadara. I think we’ll have a daughter.”
“How do you know? I can’t even tell.”
“It doesn’t matter. We will have a daughter.” She kisses him full upon the lips, warmly and without reservation. “We need to get you fed and rested. You really shouldn’t have stopped to see Kadara.”
“I had to.”
“I know.”
The late af
ternoon wind whips around them with a chill that borders on frost. They have covered perhaps two hundred cubits toward their home when Liedral takes a deep breath. “Oh, darkness!”
Dorrin can sense just that, although he still can see nothing except occasional white flares of light. “What is it?”
“Your damned father! He can’t even let you rest.”
Dorrin gathers himself together. “Let’s get on with it.”
They walk through the shadows Dorrin cannot see and into the house.
“The Black wizard is in the kitchen,” Frisa announces. “He says he’s your father. Is he? I didn’t know your father was a big wizard.”
“He’s my father.” Dorrin walks into the kitchen. Before he can speak, Liedral steps almost in front of him. “Merga, get something hot, and some bread and cheese for Dorrin before he collapses. Dorrin, you sit down now. Right here.” She pulls out the chair at the end of the table and guides him into it.
“Would you rather I come back?” Oran says mildly. “No. I just need something to eat. It’s been a day.”
“Here’s the bread, ser.”
Dorrin manages to break off a corner and begins to chew. Liedral, sitting on the end of the bench to his left, uses the cheese sheer on the yellow brick cheese, then hands Dorrin a slab. Only then does she turn to Oran. “Would you like some?”
“No… that’s fine.”
After he has chewed and swallowed the first chunk of bread and cheese, and sipped some hot cider, Dorrin can feel the shakiness in his knees begin to subside, and the throbbing in his head decreases. He rubs his forehead. “Why did you come?”
“To see how you would handle the Whites, and then to talk to you. Your ship was very effective, it seems.”
Dorrin raises his head, still letting the warm vapor from the mug seep around his face.“That’s true. Tyrel really didn’t need me. He and Kyl could have burned every ship in the Fairhaven fleet.” A sharpening of the throbbing in his head causes him to revise his statement. “Not at once. They would have needed to return for more rockets. But I’d guess around ten ships like the Black Hammer will be more than adequate to ensure that no one ever restricts trade with us again.”
“Why can’t they build ships like that?”
Magic Engineer Page 66