*
“They’re moving to steal our wind,” Vulta told her captain, pausing in her relentless prowl of the deck.
“Sheet in and take her a point to windward. If she luffs, bear off, but I want every man on the sheets.”
“Aye, Captain. Finthie! Snatch-block the jib sheets inboard and take in the mainsheets! Borell, shift what cargo we have to the windward side. That should level her out.”
“Captain, I—” Cynthia paused to swallow hard; her knees quaked and her head swam with the drastic heel and movement of the ship, but her main concern lie in the pressure being put on the rig. “Have a care for her, Troilen. She’s just getting her sea legs.”
“She’s fine, Mistress. No better way to break in a ship than a little trouncing.”
“Breaking in is fine, just make sure it doesn’t become breaking down.” The shrouds creaked and groaned as they eased upwind. “If we part a shroud…” She looked to Ghelfan for support, but his eyes were focused aloft as if mesmerized by the play of canvas and sky. She looked up, but her head swam with dizziness.
“Part these shrouds?” Troilen’s voice sounded strange, as if amused at her naïve notion. “Not likely in this weather, Mistress.”
“We’re a point to windward, Capt’n,” the helmsman announced, bracing himself at the wheel. “She’s not luffin’ but she wants to round up somethin’ fierce.”
“Something’s not right,” Ghelfan said, his voice barely audible above the rush of wind and water.
“What?” Cynthia tried to look aloft again, and stumbled with dizziness. She forced it down, grasped one of the leeward shrouds, and looked up. All seemed well. The mainsail luff was backfilling slightly with the rhythm of the ship’s pitch, nothing to cause alarm, and certainly nothing she would consider unusual. “I don’t see…”
Troilen’s gaze shot aloft. “Vulta, tighten the main halyard and tend the mainsheet! She’s pulling from her bow.”
“Aye, sir. We’re cutting a tighter line to the wind, but we’ve lost a bit of speed. She’s coming up on our port stern.”
“We’ll cross her bow and steal her wind.”
Cynthia looked over her shoulder at Orin’s Pride and tried to make sense of Troilen’s tactic. She knew what he was trying to do, but the words somehow would not make the proper picture in her mind. She looked to Ghelfan for help, but he was still staring straight up.
“Koybur, what’s going on? I don’t understand what…” She looked at her old mentor’s face, and the scars marring his features flowed and writhed into a flesh-hued chart of the Shattered Isles. His one good eye squinted, and the coastline of his face collapsed into a whirlpool of swirling skin and bone as he spoke.
“Cyn? What’s wrong? Ya don’t look good.”
“Your face…” She knew something wasn’t right, knew what she was seeing could not be real, but her mind refused to tell her what she should be seeing, or what should be real. A tiny little man fluttered before her face, his shrill little voice ringing in her ears before he flew away. She raised a hand and looked at it, and her fingers lengthened into writhing tentacles before her eyes. “Koybur, I think there was something…”
She looked to her friend, her mentor, and saw despair darken his ruined features.
“The tea.” Ghelfan’s voice sounded strange, and when she turned, he was falling to the deck. She stared in astonishment as he splashed into the wood and floated there, but then she was falling, too, and nothing she saw, heard or felt made any sense at all.
*
Yodrin watched the two crumple to the deck and smiled. For a moment, all eyes were focused on Cynthia and Ghelfan. He stepped behind the helmsman, drew his dagger and buried it in the man’s back. One sideways jerk cut the man’s heart in half. With a gurgling cry of shock, blood fountained from the helmsman’s mouth. The wheel spun free, and the ship rounded up into the wind alarmingly. Yodrin blew a single long note on a boatswain’s whistle—the agreed-upon signal—then turned to take care of Vulta as everyone aboard grabbed something and hung on for their lives.
“Captain! The wheel!” Vulta reached for the spinning wheel just as his knife slashed for her neck. Whether she saw the blade or just dodged instinctively, the edge skittered along her jaw instead of slitting her throat. Yodrin swore and lunged again, but she had already rolled away.
“Koybur! Finthie!” Vulta’s shrill cry alerted the entire crew, but Yodrin knew his men were already carrying out their deadly duties. Forward and belowdecks, he heard shouts and cries. Nearby, a sailor groaned and fell to the deck with a knife wound to his back. Here by the wheel, only his first mate and the boatswain remained.
Yodrin grinned and drew a second dagger, letting the ship round up through the wind and across the path of Orin’s Pride. He glanced at the onrushing ship, her bowsprit dead centered on Hippotrin’s mainmast. It would be close.
“Koybur, mind the helm. Steer her downwind while I see to our unwanted guests.” He didn’t even bother to spare a glance at the cripple, knowing he would follow the order. He’d been following Bloodwind’s orders for more than a dozen years. Why should he falter now?
*
“Koybur!” Vulta could not believe her eyes. How could Koybur be part of this insanity? Troilen advanced on her with two bared daggers, one bloodied to the hilt. Staying alive suddenly required more of her attention than gaping at Koybur as he calmly took the wheel.
“Finthie!” she shouted, rolling to her feet and out of reach of the traitorous captain’s blades. The cut on her jaw stung and blood ran freely into her shirt. All she had was a rigging knife—sharp enough, but not a fighting weapon. She spared a glance and saw Finthie using a boat hook to fend off two crewmen with daggers. The helmsman and another crewman were dead, and Mistress Flaxal and Ghelfan lay on the deck, either dead or unconscious; Vulta had no way to tell, and could do nothing to help them. Was this some kind of crazy mutiny?
“Troilen! You’ll die for this, you traitorous pig!” She sidestepped his advance and leapt to the leeward shrouds.
“The name’s Yodrin,” he replied, advancing and following her up the lines. The grace of his movements caught her eye as he sheathed one dagger and climbed after her; this man was a trained fighter. “And I’m no traitor. I’ve served the same master for more than a decade, and that master is Captain Bloodwind.”
Realization of exactly what was happening hit her; the crew had been infiltrated by pirates. Two of her crewmates lay bloody on the deck while others she’d known for months advanced on Finthie. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw something that made her hang on for her life and cry out. Orin’s Pride had turned upwind and now bore down on them. Mayhem had broken out on the other ship, too. As her cry rang out, the other ship’s bowsprit passed over Hippotrin’s stern, snapping the mainsail sheet with a crack like a coach whip. Orin’s Pride’s bobstay struck the taffrail, shaving off two inches of teak in passing.
With the sheet parted, Hippotrin’s mainsail swung wide, the force of the wind pushing the boom forward into the very shroud to which Vulta and Yodrin clung. She had to move or be killed.
Vulta leapt to grab the main gaff sheet and swung wildly as Orin’s Pride thundered past, missing by no more than five feet. She almost wished the two ships had struck, for the impact would have torn the stern out of Hippotrin and sent her to the bottom, denying the pirates their prize. But she also had a way to deny them their trophy.
The lightkeeper’s gift! she thought, realizing what she had to do.
A glance as she scrambled up the line confirmed that Troilen—Yodrin, as she now knew him—had not been crushed by the swinging mainsail boom as she’d hoped, but had fallen to the deck. Finthie still held her attackers at bay, but even as Vulta opened her mouth to shout out her revelation, the cook Borell lunged up from the companionway behind the harried boatswain, cutlass in hand.
“Finthie!” she cried, swinging crazily on her halyard.
The boatswain turned too late. The blade took her in the armpit. She
cried out, slamming her boat hook against Borell’s shoulder, but the force of the blow only tore the blade from her, and her scream turned into a torrent of blood.
“No! Gods damn you all to the Nine Hells!” Vulta climbed for her life. It was all she could do. She blinked back tears, swallowed her sobs of anguish and loss, and climbed. Three other sailors were still after her. Koybur—the unbelievable traitor, Koybur—stayed at the wheel, steering them downwind while another crewman tended the sheets to set their sails for the new point of wind.
She reached the foregaff and stopped. She had nowhere to go. The question now was what to do before the traitorous crew of Hippotrin killed her. She drew her knife and set the blade against the topsail sheet. The line parted with little coaxing, and the sail flapped free. Next was the main gaff sheet, the line controlling the very boom on which she perched. The boom swung wildly, sweeping forward of the foremast yards. The men climbing after her shouted in alarm as the flapping sail threatened to knock them from the rigging.
Vulta shouted curses down at them, knowing instantly what she would do next.
She shimmied along the gaff boom until she reached the foresail halyard and stood up, using the taut line for support as she made her way to the topmast hounds. Her pursuers were still ten feet below her when her knife parted the foresail halyard and sent the boom crashing down to the deck. The ship slowed markedly with the lost sail, and she grinned.
“Now for one more,” she said, reaching down to the forestay where the jib halyard ran through its block. The taut line exploded with a slash of her knife, sending the sail flapping to the deck.
“Ha! Having trouble keeping her helm, Koybur, you bastard?” she screamed, even as she looked for something else she could damage. The shrouds were wire and would not yield to her knife, and she couldn’t climb down to cut the forestaysail halyard without fighting her way through her pursuers.
Someone on deck eased the main gaff sheet, and the great sail billowed out fully, pulling Hippotrin forward. Vulta looked down at her pursuers, only feet below, and made up her mind. She grasped the block that ran to the mainmast from the foremast for tensioning the rake, and cut the tarred hemp binding it into place. The mast shuddered under her feet as they left the fore topmast hounds. She swung free, clutching the block with one hand and her knife with the other, right into the tightly drawn mainsail.
She slashed the canvas, and it split beneath her from gaff to boom in an explosion of tearing cloth. She cut one of the lines running through the block, jammed her knife in the sheave to slow her descent and rode it to the deck.
“You’ll pay for that, you black bitch!” Yodrin spat, advancing on her with a cutlass in one hand and a dagger in the other. Borell advanced from the side, his sword red to the hilt with Finthie’s blood.
“I’ll see you all in the Nine Hells, first, Captain,” she said, feinting toward the rail, then lunging past Borell in a roll.
His blade whistled past her head, but the companionway belowdecks lay open before her. She dove and rolled down the steps, bruising her back but managing to land on her feet. She dashed toward the captain’s cabin, not even bothering to close the hatch behind. What she had to do would only take a second, then they would all burn.
The cabinet looked like a storage bin for charts, but she knew better. She slipped the pin free of the lid and wrenched it open. Inside, a two-foot sphere of fired clay lay lashed into a teak frame, its only feature a wide, red-painted handle dangling from a stout hemp cord. Pulling it would release the fire. She gripped the handle and pulled smartly, muttering a quick prayer to Odea that her traitorous captain would burn for his treason.
The cord broke.
“What the…?”
Something struck her in the back, and she stiffened with the shock. Her numb fingers released the red handle, and slowly wrapped around the crimson-stained blade of a cutlass protruding from her chest. Vulta felt herself falling, the numbing shock of hitting the deck, then searing pain as the blade pulled free, cutting her fingers to the bone.
“You didn’t really think we was that stupid, did ya?”
Borell’s sarcasm was the last thing she heard before despair and darkness overwhelmed her.
CHAPTER Twenty-Eight
Blood in the Water
“She’s roundin’ up!”
All eyes shot forward at Brelak’s bellowed warning, just as Hippotrin turned hard into the wind directly across their path. Curses rang out across the deck, and the helmsman was already turning the wheel when Ulbattaer cried out, “Hard a-lee!”
“What the hell’s Troilen thinkin’?” Brelak asked rhetorically, lending his weight to the wheel to avoid crashing into the other ship. Then the high-pitched note of a boatswain’s whistle cut the air. He looked toward the sound, toward Hippotrin, and on the down-roll saw no-one at the wheel and several figures lying on the deck. One wore skirts, and another bore a broad red stain.
“Capt’n! Somethin’ ain’t right!” But his warning came too late, for when he turned to his captain, he met only the vacant stare of a dying man.
Rafen Ulbattaer’s mouth gaped silently, his hands clutching at the horrible wound in his throat. Blood flooded from between his fingers as he fell to the deck. Karek, a bloodied dagger in each hand, lunged—one blade was aimed at him, the other at the helmsman’s back. Brelak stared in shock, but reacted without thinking. He released his grip on the wheel and shoved the helmsman aside while trying to block the thrust aimed at his gut.
The helmsman cried out and fell as the blade cut him along the ribs. The wheel spun freely for a moment, and the ship turned upwind toward Hippotrin. Brelak felt the stinging slash of the second dagger across his forearm even as he knocked it aside and brought his left fist around to smash Karek in the face. The force of the blow knocked the boatswain back, giving Brelak a moment to grab the wheel and heave it over to point Orin’s Pride downwind.
“Hold the helm over!” he shouted to the helmsman, never taking his eyes from Karek.
“Aye, sir,” came the shocked reply. The man held the gash in his side with one bloody hand, but reached up with his other to grasp one spoke of the wheel, his eyes wide with terror.
Brelak let go of the wheel and dodged Karek’s next attack, a sweeping slash that would have opened his belly. A scream from the deck told him that Karek was not the only traitor, but looking away from the daggers now would mean his death. He sidestepped to the rail and grabbed a bolt pin; a poor weapon, but better than nothing. More shouts rang out from the deck behind him, shouts of alarm and fighting.
“To arms!” he bellowed, slipping the reins on his rage. “We’ve got traitors among us! Fight fer the ship! Fight fer Orin’s Pride!”
More cries rang out from the crew, punctuated by the dull thump of a body falling to the deck. A crewman yelled out, “We’re gonna hit!” and Brelak spared a half-second to glance, just as Orin’s Pride’s bowsprit lanced across Hippotrin’s stern. He braced himself, but the ship only jerked as their bobstay raked Hippotrin’s taffrail, sending a shower of splinters flying. A glance as the two ships passed showed more than he needed to know. Finthie Tar fought off two men on deck, while Vulta scampered up the rigging and Troilen leapt to evade the mainsail boom as it swung free, a bloodied dagger in his hand. All hell was breaking loose on both ships.
Karek lunged at him again, trying to take advantage of Brelak’s inattention. “Yer not gonna survive this one, Morrgrey! Not like in Tsing!”
“Come on, then!” Brelak brandished his bolt pin and reached for another, his mind reeling as he realized how deep this plot must be. “I took three of yer friends down that night. You think you can do what they couldn’t?”
“I know I can,” Karek said with an evil grin. He feinted low, but shifted, sweeping his other knife toward Brelak’s face. The tip of the blade cut a line from the Morrgrey’s cheekbone to his nose, but did little real damage. Brelak jammed the end of one of his bolt pins into the boatswain’s gut as he dodged.
/> He circled carefully, putting his back to the open stern of the ship. The maneuver brought the deck into view, and he risked a quick assessment. One of the tall northerners hired in Scarport lay sprawled flat, his head split open by the heavy blow. Next to him lay Keelson, rivulets of blood flowing from his body to the leeward scuppers. The helmsman, Horace, lay on the deck, but held grimly to the wheel. The other tall northerner fought against three more seamen, while another sailor struggled to control the sails.
“Yer outnumbered, Karek,” he said, grinning and backing away, hoping to draw the man away from the injured helmsman. “Give it up and I’ll spare yer life.”
“Brave words from a man holdin’ a couple o’ sticks.” Karek lunged as quickly as a striking snake.
Brelak knocked one dagger aside and easily sidestepped the other, but the thrust had not been as ill-aimed as he thought. The blade cut the mainsail sheet, letting the huge boom swing free to crash into the leeward shroud with an unhealthy crack. It snapped in the middle, and the mainsail tore from gaff to boom, sending the ship slewing into the wind, the delicate balance of her sails destroyed. If they crossed the wind and then jibed, the foresail boom could also be damaged.
“Get the sheets off the jib and forestays’l! Don’t let her round up!” Brelak called out. Karek’s tactic was simple, draw the defenders away by putting the ship in peril, and then finish them off. Brelak suppressed a grim smile, seeing one element Karek had not figured. He sidestepped and backed up to the taffrail to draw the traitorous boatswain toward the stern.
“Where you runnin’ to, you Morrgrey coward? There’s nowhere to go but… but…”
Karek collapsed to his knees and fell forward, face down onto the deck, one of Rowland’s heavy cleavers buried in the back of his head.
“Well done, Rowland!” Brelak clapped the cook on the shoulder. The old cook held another cleaver and had two long butcher knives tucked into his belt. “Now let’s see to that last one and—”
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