Corsair

by Brian Ruckley

  He turned the point of one spear down so hard and fast it buried itself in sand and bucked its length out of its wielder’s hands. Yulan killed him. He caught another man on the side of the head with an elbow, and managed to put a gash into his neck as he fell. The third was less rash, less clumsy, and Yulan had to meet sword with sword. The clash of blades was an assault upon the ears in those hard confines. It did not last long. A few hacks and parries and Yulan’s greater strength and precision told. His opponent let his sword dip into the water and Yulan had the space to lay a hard backhanded slash across the man’s face.

  The water rocked. Curls and currents of blood were in it, almost black in the muted light. Lake was standing before Yulan now. The Orphanidon restrained those men behind him with outstretched sword and shield.

  ‘Kottren Malak is dead,’ Yulan said.

  ‘I know it,’ Lake replied. ‘I saw the deed done.’

  He took a long step forward, brushing past the floating, limp arms of a corpse.

  ‘Then there’s no need for this,’ insisted Yulan, easing himself back. ‘Whatever service you owed him is done. All we’re trying to do is leave.’

  ‘The man might be dead, the service is not,’ said Lake. ‘No one ever told you it was Kottren Malak I guarded or served, sellsword.’

  Yulan suppressed the frown that twitched beneath the surface of his face.

  ‘I was brought here – and paid – to keep his daughter safe,’ the Orphanidon said. ‘It is her I promised to guard and serve, not her father. He is gone but the promise remains. You stand between me and my ward, and I judge you a threat to her.’

  ‘She’s a Clever, most likely unhinged by grief. I’m no threat to her unless she is one to me.’

  ‘So you say. But I would take counsel with my ward, and mean to do it now.’

  With that, Lake surged forward, shield before his chest like a battering ram. It was different from the very first instant of their engagement. Yulan was the faster, the stronger, but Lake was unlike any opponent he had ever faced. All direct in one moment, cutting at Yulan’s flanks with savage aggression; all feints and deceits in the next, flashing the shield across Yulan’s face and shifting his footing in ways that belied his intent.

  It was only speed that kept Yulan alive in those first desperate flurries of blow and block. There was no time for stratagem, only reaction and survival. He fell back as best he could, hoping to get close enough to the quay to swing himself up out of the water. As soon as his weight was on his back foot, Lake would press in and test his balance. As soon as he lashed out with his sword, the Orphanidon was ducking or twisting himself tantalisingly out of reach. Always the water was there, like leaden hands about Yulan’s legs, limiting him and robbing him of freedom.

  Yulan felt his flank touch the side of the quay. He pushed himself backwards along it. Seawater was dripping from his arms. He could feel it wet over his face. He spat it from his lips and tasted the gritty salt of it. He could smell the oil burning in the guttering lamps. Everything was sharp to his senses. He was present as he had seldom been before.

  ‘You fight well,’ Lake said.

  A sliver of hope there, in the pulses of hurried breath. The rapid rising and falling of the Orphanidon’s chest. The man was not young, after all. Drips fell from Yulan’s brow. He did not brush them away.

  ‘And you like to talk,’ he said to Lake.

  ‘There are few things I like, in truth. The Empire taught me that.’

  Lake was edging closer. He left no simple openings for Yulan to punish. Yulan was willing to wait. Time was what he sought to purchase here, after all.

  ‘I thought I served something worthy of the service,’ Lake continued, ‘but it was not so. I thought I had ten thousand brothers and sisters, but it was not so. Pledge yourself to lies and liars and in time they will betray you.’

  ‘I believe it,’ Yulan said.

  A thin, reedy whistle pierced the air. Yulan dared a snatched glance to the side. He was all but level with the wide, open doors at the back of the quay. Beyond them he glimpsed a broad ramp sloping up. That was where the distant whistle came from: Hamdan making an invitation.

  ‘We neither of us fight for our own cause here,’ Yulan said. He wanted respite as much as Lake now. A few breaths to gather himself, to think. ‘Seems folly for either of us to die today.’

  The Orphanidon smiled coldly.

  ‘I doubt you believe that. I fight for a promise freely made, and that is the only thing I would die for today or any other day. It is the last vestige of honour I have left to me.

  ‘And you … you are of the Free. None but fools think the Free fight only for treasure. I have heard it said that you always find a way to make another’s cause your own. Wise or not, it is what you do.’

  Yulan flailed his sword and arm through the water, sending up a sheet of spray into Lake’s face. He let the movement carry his body round and sprang, throwing a leg onto the quay and rolling. In the corner of his eye he saw Lake hunching behind his shield, the water breaking over its wooden surface. He saw the Orphanidon’s sword flashing yellow reflections of the lamps as it darted up and down.

  The blade struck sparks from the edge of the quay a finger’s width from Yulan’s foot. He flowed into a crouch and swung his own sword round into the space where Lake would be if he tried to follow up out of the water. The Orphanidon was not so foolish. The shield was there instead, and it turned Yulan’s blow aside.

  Yulan rose to his feet and stepped towards the open door. That saved him, for a spear spiralled in and passed across the back of his head, so close he felt it in his hair. It hit the wall and rebounded, quivering. Yulan thanked his luck and ran.

  The Sorentines had cut a long and wide sloping passageway with a vaulted roof up from that subterranean harbour. Yulan sprinted up it into darkness, for there were no torches or oil lamps here. He almost turned his ankle over in a groove running down the length of the ramp. Cursing he ran on, ignoring the twinge of protest in that joint. Long, long ago, there must have been carts hauled up and down, their wheels riding in the grooves. Not now. Now there was only damp and the dark and silence.

  A silence broken by a strange, trilling whistle from up ahead. It sounded vaguely familiar to Yulan, but he could not place it. Hamdan, he supposed, but what it meant he had no idea. An alarm? His stride faltered, skipped a beat.

  And out of the gloom came a splinter of movement that sighed past his eyes. An arrow. He lurched to the side and pressed himself to the arching wall in time to avoid the second, and then the third that went straight and true as stooping falcons down the long slope towards the figures at the foot of the passageway. He heard at least once the distinctive thud of arrow meeting flesh, and a startled cry. After that, there was no more movement. No pursuit.

  Yulan trotted on and up. His ankle ached, but not too much. The knife wound in his upper arm was throbbing, but distantly. He was alive when he could as easily – more easily – not have been. On another day, Lake would have had him. There was a unique kind of exhilaration to be had in knowing that this was not that other day. But then, it was still early.

  XI

  Hamdan was waiting in the doorway of an old storage cellar. As Yulan passed through, the archer heaved the great oaken door closed behind him and hammered a wedge in beneath it with his foot.

  The chamber was a mess. There was only the light of a couple of lanterns to see by, but it was enough to know this was where Kottren Malak had hoarded much of his loot. Barrels were stacked along half of one wall, rolls of cloth and heaps of fishing net strewn over and between them. There were tall clay jars with cork stoppers; oars leaning in one corner, boathooks and spears and pitchforks in another. A chest here and there, long loops of chain and boat tackle hanging on the walls. A neglected heap of clothes that smelled of rot and mould. A sorry and meagre treasury, all in all. Hardly worth a single death, let alone the many that had followed upon the Corsair King’s heels.

  Corena was at
the far end of the cellar with the children, peering through another doorway into a rising stairwell.

  Yulan gave Hamdan a grateful pat on the shoulder.

  ‘I’m glad you waited.’

  Hamdan shrugged.

  ‘What else would I do? We’re the Free, you and I. Unless we’re different from just about everyone else riding under that banner, it means we’re all we’ve got. We always wait. Until we can’t.’

  Yulan nodded.

  ‘I’m impressed,’ Hamdan was saying. ‘Not many can say they’ve faced an Orphanidon and lived.’

  ‘Once an Orphanidon. He is good, but old. Probably not as sharp a blade as once he was.’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ Hamdan grunted. ‘I was just trying to be encouraging. If it’d been a young one, still in the Empire’s service, I might not have bothered waiting.’

  They walked the length of the cellar. Yulan heard the skittering of rats behind some of the barrels. He thought – though this might be imagining – that he could hear the whispery scuttling of beetles in there too.

  ‘See anything?’ he asked Corena as he peered over her shoulder up the shadowy spiral of the stairway. ‘Hear anything?’

  She did not have to answer. The castle above them provided its own response. A low howl of wind, then the crash and groan of something falling or moving. The cracking and creaking of stone that made Yulan think of fissures opening. None of it promising. None of it certain of provenance, but to Yulan’s ear it had the ominous sound of a young Clever, half-maddened by grief and anger. Raging, searching, wailing. Hurting.

  ‘It’s not easy shooting along a sloping passage, you know,’ Hamdan observed, as if they were taking their ease in an alehouse. ‘You’re supposed to get down when I give a grass-shrike whistle.’

  ‘That second whistle? I didn’t know what that meant.’

  ‘Did you never go hunting before you left the drylands?’ asked Hamdan incredulously.

  ‘Of course I did. Often. We used our hands for quiet talking, and if we needed calls it was a black plover to stay down and still.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really. A black plover’ll sit on its nest so stubborn you can pick it up.’

  ‘Well, I know that.’ Hamdan looked thoughtful. ‘Makes sense. Don’t know why we used a grass-shrike.’

  ‘Are you two forgetting where we are?’ muttered Corena. ‘On a sinking ship is where, and I don’t hear anyone saying which way we should swim.’

  ‘Not forgetting it, no,’ said Hamdan.

  ‘So which way are we swimming?’ Corena demanded.

  ‘I’ve got half an idea about that,’ Yulan said.

  And he did have an idea. He did not like it, and he did not think anyone else was going to like it much, but it was all he had.

  ‘We need to get up and out of here before we can do anything else,’ he said. ‘No other choice.’

  ‘Always wanted to meet an angry child-Clever,’ Hamdan sighed. ‘Help me block up that other door a little better first. At least we may be able to delay your Orphanidon long enough that we only need to have one nightmare at a time.’

  Yulan led the way up the spiral that would carry them once more into the castle, sword in one hand, lantern taken from the wall of the cellar in the other. He was beginning to feel cold. His clothes were sodden and heavy, sucking all the warmth from his limbs. The children, he knew, were shivering behind him. They had not been well dressed in the first place, and certainly not for thrashing about in the sea. He could hear someone’s teeth rattling.

  It was not helped by the fact that the higher they rose, the closer they came to whatever awaited them above, the more restless the air grew. It shifted and gusted, blowing cold across the face. Where it should have been still, here in this tight stair deep in rock, it had life and movement.

  Yulan could think of two possible reasons for that. Either the fabric of the fortress above them was so rent, so damaged, that the winds coming off the sea flowed through it without let or hindrance; or it was Enna, giving form and intent directly to the air. Neither was a comforting notion.

  They emerged into a short corridor that ran off to both left and right. Yulan looked this way and that before stepping out from the stairwell. He struggled for a moment to orientate himself. The only windows were tiny slits high at each end of the corridor, each showing only a thin bar of featureless sky. The dim sound of waves told him which way the sea, and the back of the keep, lay. That was what he wanted.

  He led the others to a corner and held them just short of it with a silent spreading of his fingers. From around that corner, the shifting air was bringing an unsettling sound: heavy, rasping breathing.

  He edged forward and looked into the new stretch of passageway, into the glare of unexpected daylight. A hole had been torn open, right through the keep from top to bottom, admitting the glare of a sun now high in the sky. Yulan could hear the cries of seabirds, and beneath that harsh surface the rumbling, faltering breath of the beast that lay in the corridor. A great bear, a cave-dweller, was sprawled there, half crushed beneath great slabs of masonry that had plunged down from the roof and walls above.

  Its hindquarters were pinned – and surely broken – by massive stonework. Its jowls were bloody and trailing strings of thick saliva. Its mangled tongue sprawled limply from its jaws. But it was not dead, and its eyes went to Yulan as soon as he emerged before it.

  Beyond the crushed beast, he could see what he sought: an old and part-rotten door that by his reckoning must open onto one of the balconies at the rear of the keep.

  ‘Wait here,’ he whispered over his shoulder, and advanced cautiously upon the bear.

  He had not gone more than a pace or two before he was startled into immobility by a shuddering that passed through the walls and floor, the very bones of the whole castle. It shook mortar and dust into little clouds that drifted in the sunlight streaming in from above.

  He had no concept of what the creation of a Permanence would be like. He barely had a clear notion of what it really meant, if the little girl somewhere here was truly being consumed by the very forces she had called up. Would it sound like this? Would it be the ceaseless movement of air that should be still, the trembling of an entire castle?

  There was nothing he could do about any of that right now, so he concentrated on that which he could affect. He stood by the bear, just out of reach of its huge paws and massive teeth. It rumbled and growled and tried to lift its boulder-like head. Tried to reach for him, he guessed. Following its instinct and its fear even in its crippled state.

  Yulan planted his sword deep, straight down into the back of the bear’s neck just behind its head. It died without another sound.

  The door that led out onto the balcony was jammed, so long had it been unused. Yulan kicked it out, splitting the soft and rot-riddled planks and knocking it off one of its rusted hinges. Its condition did not fill him with confidence about the state of the balcony. His first step was hesitant. The stonework of the platform and balustrade was pitted and corroded, crusted in places with salt. It felt solid, though.

  He brought the rest of them out there. To face the immense expanse of the sea, rolling away to a vast arc of the horizon. A thousand thousand white-flecked waves, rank upon rank of them to the very limit of sight. It was dwarfing. But it was not what Yulan was interested in.

  He looked down instead. Over the edge of the balcony and down to the still, quiet bay and its harbour directly below. One boat – the one that had carried Lake on his sweep around the island – was already easing its way out from the cove, butting into the larger waves beyond its shelter. Yulan could just make out a handful of figures on the deck, none he could really recognise. The four people they had left at the harbourside, perhaps, or some of Lake’s men deserting him. Not Lake himself, of that Yulan was sure.

  Four boats remained, serenely resting in that little sanctuary. There was no one to be seen. As Yulan had hoped and assumed, Lake and whatever warriors had staye
d at his side were on their trail, not guarding the anchorage.

  The height made him uncomfortable. It seemed a great abyss, the straight drop from balcony to the crystalline waters away down there beneath castle and cliff. He steeled himself and turned to Corena.

  ‘Can we jump?’

  He heard Hamdan groaning behind him, though he was sure the archer must have guessed his intent before now. He paid no heed to that, keeping his attention locked upon Corena. She leaned out and peered down at the glistening sea, at the boats in their quiet mooring.

  ‘Yes,’ she said with just enough confidence to make Yulan believe her. ‘It’s shallow, but it shouldn’t kill you if you stretch your arms out, bend your knees.’

  ‘Carrying a child?’ he asked her.

  That put a flicker of doubt into her face. Her eyes slipped from his, searched out the children.

  ‘The girls should manage it on their own. The boy …’ Her voice trailed off.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Yulan said calmly. ‘You have to go first, and you need to take Tessunt with you.’

  She thought about it for a moment and then nodded.

  ‘Choose us a boat and unmoor the others so that they drift, or break on the rocks or … anything, so that no one can quickly come after us,’ Yulan said. As if he were asking something easy of her, almost nothing.

  ‘Yes,’ Corena said. As if he was indeed asking something easy.

  Because, Yulan wondered, she has already done harder things than she would once have thought possible? Or because she has already done the one and only thing she wanted to do – kill the Corsair King – and she cares nothing about what happens after? He did not know which, if either, was true. And he doubted it mattered. If she would attempt it, that was enough. Everything from this moment on was attempt. Nothing more.

  He turned to the three children, who were watching him with fretful, frightened eyes. He sank down so that his face was on a level with theirs.

  ‘Corena here is going to jump down with Tessunt,’ he said. ‘She will ready a boat for us. You two girls, I need to ask something a bit harder of you. Can I do that?’