by William King
Valerius and Rhea stood nearby glancing at the horizon warily. Both of them looked out of place on the metal deck, garbed for war. They looked like actors on a stage playing a part, not like sailors whose lives might soon be forfeit in an inferno of conflict. Valerius clearly felt more comfortable here than amid the grizzled veterans on the command deck.
Lines of warships filled the sky, stretching out on both sides to the furthest horizon; flotillas of destroyers, cruisers and battleships. Every armed craft in the city of Typhon had been assembled and thrown into this makeshift armada.
The flags of a dozen Houses fluttered in the breeze, alongside the emblem of the city and the Imperial House. It was a sight to stir the heart -- so many mighty warships all in one place.
Ulrik let out a long sigh. Soon he might be dead. Of course, he could activate his lift harness and float to the earth below. He might escape with his life, at least until Valerius died and the demon was released once more to devour his soul.
And yet he did not want to go. He felt strangely happy, elated even, to be where he was. It gave him a sense of belonging being part of this enormous fleet; to feel the huge destructive power all around him. He was curious to see what would happen when the fleets clashed. He wanted to be part of it as well. If this was going to be the greatest battle of the modern age, he wanted to be there, not just as a witness but as a participant. He wanted to stand in the centre of the vortex where history was being made. He wanted to fight and to kill and, looking at the faces of those all around him, he knew that they all felt the same way. Of course, for them, national pride was involved and something else, a desire to grasp the victory that they believed would inevitably be theirs.
They did not know what was coming, or what they would face. They could not imagine anything else but triumph. And looking at the fleet that surrounded them, Ulrik could understand their thoughts. He had stopped counting at three hundred ships. Against any normal enemy, the Typhonians would have been right to expect success. But they were not facing a normal enemy. They were facing all the combined fleets of Hydra reinforced by Molok’s most powerful sorcery.
Rhea moved closer to him and looked up into his eyes. He glanced down into her strangely slit pupils. A spark of something passed between them. “I wish you had stayed in the city,” he said. He had to shout to be heard over the thunder of the engines.
“My place is here, with the pair of you,” she replied. “And, anyway, how often in this life will I get a chance to witness such a battle as this?”
“This might be your last and only chance,” he said.
“The same applies to you,” she said, turning her back on him and folding her arms.
Ulrik glanced over at Valerius. The wizard was garbed in a full set of sorcerous battle armour. It encased his flesh in bands of steel and orichalcum. Runes glittered on the chest plate. In his hand he held a long staff, tipped with a glowing power gem.
“Nervous?” Ulrik asked. The deck rocked slightly beneath his feet as they hit a small pocket of turbulence. Rhea did not even seem to notice it but Valerius stumbled against the guard-rail and had to catch himself.
“I don’t mind admitting that I am. This is the first major battle I have ever seen.”
“It is for me too. It was always boarding actions in my earlier career.”
“You did well getting us to Typhon. I will not forget that. If we survive this I will do my best to free you from what I did.” The wizard sounded sincere but Ulrik suspected that he was really only trying to encourage him to do his best to keep him alive. Certainly, that would ensure that he had the motivation.
“What do you think our chances are?” Valerius asked.
Ulrik considered. “Against any normal enemy you would win. But you’re not fighting a normal enemy. Molok is sure to have some surprises up his sleeve - some sort of magic.”
“We’re not without magic ourselves. Typhon is famous for its sorcerers.”
“As you yourself have pointed out, Molok knows that. He will be ready unless he’s completely mad.”
“I think he’s completely mad,” said Valerius. “But I don’t think he’s a fool. You’re right. He’ll be ready for us. He has the full power of Jolgotha to draw on. Anyone who can command a Demon Prince is to be feared indeed.”
The wizard lapsed into silence as he studied the distant scout ships running ahead of the Typhonian fleet through his spyglass. One of them was running up a signal now, saying that they had spotted the enemy and were moving to engage. The thunder of distant combat rumbled across the wastelands and was audible. In the distance lightning flashes and great sunbursts of light marked the areas where warships did battle.
Soon the first of the Typhonians scouts were streaming back towards the main body of the fleet, they looked battered and their crews were heavily depleted. They had gotten the worst of the early engagement.
First blood to the Hydrans, Ulrik thought.
A black cloud on the horizon revealed the presence of thousands of small flyers, all part of the Hydran fleet. Many of the Typhonian sky sailors laughed. Some of them compared the Hydrans to a cloud of flies, not realising that this was not the main body of the Hydran fleet but only its outriders.
Signal sounded, flags were raised. The order was given. Full speed ahead. Engage the enemy. Lines of mighty aerial dreadnaughts streamed forward.
If they had expected the Hydrans to retreat, the Typhonians were disappointed. Swarms of the smaller aircraft swooped in towards them. As they did so, their crews dropped overboard, floating earthwards supported by their lift harnesses, leaving their ships on collision course with the largest of the Typhonian battleships. Most of them were slashed from the skies by the prismatic cannon of their foes, but a few of them survived to make contact, and reveal Molok’s plan. When they impacted on the Typhonian battleships, they exploded, wreaking havoc wherever they touched.
“They must be filled with some new alchemical explosive,” said Valerius, watching in horror as an aerial dreadnaught was torn asunder and began plummeting earthwards like a stone. “I’ve never heard of anything so powerful.”
“I think this will only be the first of Molok surprises.”
“I fear that you’re right, Ulrik,” said Valerius.
Now the main body of the Hydran fleet became visible. Sky sailors gave gasps of amazement when they saw the size of floating citadel. It was hundreds of times larger than the biggest Typhonian dreadnaught. All around it were hundreds of other Hydran warships, the motley cruisers of the pirate fleet led by Black Ships. The pirates looked like a disorganised horde compared to the clean battle lines of the Typhonian fleet but the sheer power radiated by the demonic vessels in their midst was awesome.
Ulrik felt a terrible sense of foreboding as he looked upon them.
Off to port a group of Hydran ships clustered around a Typhonian dreadnaught exchanging salvoes. To starboard and below, two ships were bound together by boarding grapnels, their crews swarming the decks, locked in a life or death struggle.
Looking up Ulrik could see a pirate vessel approaching the Ravager. From the way it came in he could tell that its captain knew his business. It was taking exactly the same line as he would have taken, angling in from above, out of the line of fire for the Ravager’s main batteries. Its own side-mounted turrets were in a position to rake the Karnak ship from above.
Rhea leapt for cover, cat-quick.
Ulrik pushed Valerius into the shelter of an armoured doorway as prismatic lightning danced across the deck, slaughtering sailors. Moments later, pirates dropped from above, their fall slowed by their lift harnesses. They had chosen their spot well. There were few in this section of the deck to oppose them. If they proceeded according to the normal plan, they would make for the engine rooms or the command deck and try to put the Ravager out of action by making it a floating, unguided hulk that could be picked off at leisure. Under normal circumstances such a relatively small band would have little chance but in the heat of a
closely fought chaotic battle, things might turn out differently.
As the pirates hit the metal of the deck, Ulrik saw that their limbs and bodies were augmented by twisted grafts, and their eyes blazed with strange fanaticism. Ulrik turned to Rhea. “Go! Warn the deck officer; tell him we have been boarded and tell him where. I’ll try and slow them down.”
“What about me?” Valerius asked. Ulrik glanced at him. Common sense told him that he should stay here, make sure the wizard was safe, but the battle lust was on him. He felt the need to do something, to assert some control over his own destiny. It went against the grain to remain hidden here while the ship he was on fought for its life.
“Stay hidden or come with me, if you want. We need to stop those killers before they can get deep into the ship. I’ve seen what men like that can do if they take control of an engine.”
He expected Valerius to protest but the wizard just nodded his agreement. Rhea glanced from one to the other and raced off, bearing her message of alarm. Ulrik drew his blade and rushed from hiding, jabbing his blade into the back of a surprised pirate. His prey fell, the multiple tentacles attached to his left arm flailing the air like a cat o’ nine tails wielded by a demented bos’n.
Ulrik lashed to the left and right, striking down more victims, shouting loudly, hoping to confuse his targets, make them think they were under attack by more assailants than they actually were. In a fight like this, his one advantage was that he knew much more about what was going on than they did.
One, two, more fell beneath the fury of his blade but by now the surprise had worn off and the pirates begun to recover. A man with an enormous demon claw reached for Ulrik, his talons dripping greenish venom. Ulrik dived forward, plunging his blade into the man’s throat. The momentum of his rush carried them both to the guardrail on the edge of the ship. For a brief vertiginous moment, Ulrik caught sight of the ground far below, saw ships locked in deadly combat beneath them, was dazzled by the flare of magical weapons. The guardrail vibrated under the impact of their combined weight. He stabbed again, and again, and sprang to one side, as the pirates came at him in a pack.
For a moment he danced and whirled, the centre of a storm of blades. He parried a strike, ducked another, then sidestepped a third. A painwand struck him a glancing blow, numbing his shoulder. He responded with a short chop that took his opponents hand off at the wrist and sent it, fingers spasming like the legs of a dying spider, dropping to the blood-slick deck.
Ulrik grinned, at home at the heart of the carnage. His blade licked out like the tongue of a striking dragon. Only his skill with his weapon and the quickness of his reflexes kept him alive. He felt the press of bodies all around, saw the fear and the fury in the faces of his foes and laughed out of sheer blood madness that was partially his own and partially that of the demon within him.
The pirates focused all of their efforts on dragging him down, like a pack of rabid ulsio attacking a banthar. He lashed out with his fist, knocking down one serpent-fanged youth and then struck down another with his blade. He was bleeding from a dozen small cuts now, but he ignored the pain, knowing that there was nothing he could do about it right now anyway.
“Drag the bastard down,” someone shouted from the back of the ruck.
“Come and get me,” Ulrik bellowed in response. It came to him at that moment that he really was going to die here and that he didn’t care. It would be a cleaner death than any he had been expecting in the past few weeks. In fact, it was the one he had been expecting all his life, to fall on the blood-stained deck of a ship under pirate attack. The only difference was that he had expected to be one of the attackers not the defenders.
He lashed out again and again, and the pirates fell back, none of them keen to be the next to die. He knew, though, it was only a temporary lull. In a moment they would gather their resolve and throw themselves on him en masse. He put his back against the guardrail and waited for death to come.
Lines of light slashed out at the pirates. Flesh sizzled where they touched. They pierced bodies like white hot pokers. Some emerged from chests, mouths, exploding eyeballs. Ulrik half expected to die then, but somehow the lines never touched him. In a heartbeat he was the only man standing on this section of the deck. Valerius stood there grinning, a fading nimbus of light dying around his hand.
“Took me a while to get a clear shot,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
A thunderous boom vibrated the air. A titanic beam of magical energy slashed out from Molok’s citadel and impacted on a Typhonian battleship. The magical shields surrounding the doomed vessel blazed into incandescence, winked out like a snuffed candle and then the beam slashed through armoured plate. The metal sides of the ship melted and ran like hot wax. There was an enormous explosion as the trapped elementals within the warship’s engines were freed then the liftkeel failed.
A few heartbeats after the impact the mighty vessel and its crew of thousands plunged earthwards. Most of the men aboard did not even have time to jump over the sides. Those that did tumbled earthwards, their lift harnesses overloaded by the colossal forces that had destroyed their craft.
Ulrik and Valerius looked at each other stunned. Ulrik could tell that they were thinking the same thing. Neither of them had ever seen a weapon of such power before. He had not even dreamed such a thing was possible. Valerius stroked his chin thoughtfully.
“He’s tapping Jolgotha’s energy to do that. It’s the only thing powerful enough.”
“Surely not even a Demon Prince could unleash too many bolts like that?”
“He might be able to if he was being well fed.”
“With human sacrifices, you mean? That’s what all the captives were for.”
Ulrik wondered where Rhea was. He had not seen her since they were boarded. He hoped that nothing had happened to the cat-girl.
The Ravager rose as the captain tried to get out of the line of fire of Molok’s infernal weapon. As it gained altitude, Ulrik got a view of the battle, spread out below him. Thousands of ships swarmed the sky, magical shields shimmering in the warning colours of predatory insects. Multi-coloured blasts of energy blazed through the sky as they unleashed the full power of their prismatic cannons. Ships crashed earthward, disintegrating, trailing plumes of smoke and sparks as their elementals broke free.
Ulrik could appreciate the battle’s pattern now. He saw the neat lines of the Typhonian fleet were beginning to dissolve as the ships drifted into closer, more violent encounters. The enormous ravening beam of energy from the citadel sheared through the battle indiscriminately, dropping friend and foe alike from the sky.
Signals sounded through the Typhonian fleet. No matter how overmatched it was, it was not going to give up without a fight, and still its discipline and training were superb. The fleet changed formation, whole squadrons dispersing. A few rose to gain height above the pirate fleet, most turned into line abreast formation so that they could bring the greatest number of broadsides to bear on Molok’s flying citadel.
The air between the Typhonians and the Hydrans blazed with unleashed energy transforming it into the mouth of hell. Every weapon that could be focused on the citadel was. The gigantic Hydran flagship vanished in a storm of alchemical shells and mystical bolts. Clouds of smoke and steam obscured it. Smaller ships surrounding it vanished, flickering into oblivion like moths that have flown too close to an inferno.
Cheering erupted from the Ravager’s crew as the citadel vanished. For a moment, Ulrik allowed himself to hope, but then he saw the huge engine of destruction emerge from the storm unscathed, the magical aura surrounding it intact. It looked like the volley of energy that would have levelled a mountain had done it no harm whatsoever.
In the meantime, the Hydrans had surged forward, moving around and over the field of fire, closing with the Typhonian fleet. Their vessels were older, more patchwork, less efficiently crewed, but the attempt to overcome the citadel had given them time to close the gap and take advantage of thei
r superior numbers.
A few had closed to within boarding distance, and the crews were lobbing alchemical grenades onto the decks of Typhonian warships before leaping across the intervening space. In the ensuing close combat the Hydrans ferocity and numbers would overcome their enemies’ superior discipline.
“The battle is lost already,” Ulrik said.
“Not if we can destroy the citadel,” Valerius replied. “If we can do that it will demoralise the pirates.”
“Your optimism is impressive.”
Valerius shrugged. “At the moment, it’s all I’ve got.
Looking down Ulrik could see a glowing point of energy at the centre of the ship. It blazed with a startling intensity to Ulrik’s altered gaze.
“Look at that,” he said to Valerius. He recognised it as the well in which he and Rhea had seen hundreds of people being sacrificed. Perhaps they still were.
“That is where Jolgotha is bound,” said Valerius.
“I’ll take your word for it,” said Ulrik. “What can we do about it?”
“Prayer would seem our best bet.”
“And on the off-chance that doesn’t work?”
“Surrender.”
“And if that proves unacceptable?”
“Then we shall have to do what I am about to instruct our captain to do.”
“And what is that?” Ulrik asked, with a sinking feeling that he was not going to like the answer one little bit.
“We’re going to ram that floating fortress. If we can hit it exactly where Jolgotha is bound we can free him from his bindings and deprive the citadel of its energy source.”