“Like a fire ship in the days of old,” Kyra said. “How do we escape the Valkyrie?”
“Fire your anchor rod into the Valkyrie and take it from them. After we blow our ship and the Leviathan with it, the Valkyrie will be the only thing left in the air. Dak and I snatch Eliandra, meet you on the Valkyrie, and we make for clear skies.”
Ronin glared. “No.”
I met her gaze. “Dak has my back. You know how good he is. They’ll never see him coming. Plus, you need to help the Akarri. You’ll have to clear the whole Valkyrie in minutes.”
“There could be a hundred orcs aboard the Leviathan,” Tammagan said.
“We’ll figure it out.” I wasn’t so sure, but it was the best idea on the table.
Ronin’s gaze blistered. She hated me for it; hated that I was right.
“I’ll go with Grawflefox,” Tammagan said. “I did a turn on the Leviathan. I know her.”
“And I’m going with you,” Elsie said, skipping from her spot at the rigging.
“Like hell you—”
“I’ve fought hip to hip with Grawflefox. I know the stupid wizard-boy better than you.”
Just then, Dak tromped his way on deck and glanced around furiously. “Why the hell didn’t someone wake me for the war? Did I miss it? You bastards better not be hogging the XP.”
“Dak!” I hollered. “Eliandra’s in a Spider-Man’s-girlfriend situation on a giant boat, so we’re feeding the Rancor.”
“Feeding the what?” Elsie asked.
“It means bringing more firepower than a trap can handle,” Dak said.
I nodded. “The Akarri will Jack Sparrow another ship while this one Randy-Quaid-from-Independence-Days the huge boat. Got it?”
Dak shot me a big thumb up. “Shiny.”
“He needs his sword,” Tammagan said.
“About that.” Dak produced iSword, which sang the lyrics “I’m not sorry, no I’m not sorry” over and over, and each iteration Tammagan looked angrier.
“We’ll discuss that later.” Tammagan turned to the crew, shouting, “Listen up! We’re abandoning ship. Destroy all documents, gather what you can carry into battle, and sharpen your steel! Kyra, disable the containment fields and rig the float stones to blow.”
Everyone moved at once and I was lost in the pandemonium. Dak fetched my computer stone and Leo from downstairs. I put my gear into my vest, holding the reptile in one arm. “Where do we stick Leo?” I couldn’t give him to an Akarri if they had to fight. And I’d never checked my extra-dimensional pockets for turtle compatibility.
“Just hold on to him for now,” Dak said. “You shouldn’t be fighting anyway. You’re squishy.”
I looked Leo in the eye. “Don’t worry. I’ll protect you.”
He grinned and rubbed his beak on my nose—turtle for, “Hey, I like your nose. Wish I had one.”
Elsie passed us copper tubes. “These are zip-pipes. When they catch the anchor chain that connects a castor turret to its anchor rod, these tubes glide across the beam. We use them to drop into combat zones, pick people up, and board ships. It’s our best way over, so long as the castors survive.”
I pocketed mine and Dak stuck his in his belt.
We sailed into brightening dawn, where a ship gathered in size and bore down on us. Once near enough, it pulled to the side and presented a flank—the gargantuan bastard was longer than a football field and three times our size. Its seven masts sported twenty-five puffed sails. Its nose scooped upward and bristled with forward-mounted lightning cannons. Its flank had so many that three could hit us no matter how close we snugged. One of its castors fired; a gleaming anchor rod thrummed through space and sank into our hull. The violet anchor chain crackled into existence and the deck shuddered as it reeled us in.
“No turning back now,” Tammagan warned. “Furl sails and take cover! Power those cannons! Be ready for anything.”
The Akarri scuttled for defensive positions and wielded longbows or directed our own pair of lightning cannons outward. A line of orcs on the Leviathan’s rail leveled crossbows. The Valkyrie sank into position on our other flank, sandwiching us between the vessels. On the one hand, they had more guns on us. On the other, it was a great position for our plan. Of course, when the Akarri scrambled for the Valkyrie they had to somehow survive the five or six cannons trained on us…
Ronin, I remembered. She’ll tilt it in their favor.
They dragged us to just below their rail to give themselves the high ground and dropped a plank. Tammagan and Elsie led me, with Dak behind. The orcs gave Dak the stink-eye.
“Thoughts?” I asked Dak as we crossed the plank.
“Dracon made these orcs?” he asked.
I nodded.
“I want to attach that guy to a perpetual-motion machine that kicks nuts forever.”
There were three weather decks. We boarded the one lower deck, which was continuous from back to front, then climbed stairs to the smaller mid-deck, which in layer-cake fashion contained the upper deck and the captain’s wheel. Each layer had its own rails, but the mid-deck was crowded with orcish soldiers. My spirits sank at the sight of the crowd, big enough to fill the bleachers at a Little League game.
We hadn’t brought enough.
“Going to get lots of use out of my multi-attack,” Dak said grimly.
The crowd of beasties chuckled and prodded Dak with swords, mocking the “smoothie lover,” and I gathered smoothie meant me. “Play wit yer food much?” asked one with a sneer. The mid-deck was about thirty feet square, not including the far end where the upper deck started. Behind the rail of that top deck were seven orcs leveling crossbows on us.
At the center of the archers stood an elf in spectacular golden armor, her wondrous hair the same bright gleam as the metal. Her armor made my Akarri design look positively chaste by comparison. A strip of metal links draped her bosom, and though the forearms and shins were plated, her thighs and midriff were on display. Her only other covering was the sheer scarf that billowed from its point of attachment on a pelvic plate that—honest to God—seemed to be locked in place.
“Is that a goddamn chastity belt?” Dak asked in his best “It had better not be” voice.
But it was.
“I am Captain Tivarra. You must be Magister Grawflefox. Odd. I was expecting more.” She chuckled darkly and snapped her fingers. Two brutish orcs opened the door to the captain’s cabin, nested in the space beneath the upper deck. They carried a chained Eliandra between them. She saw Dak and me and rolled her eyes.
“You’re an elf,” I said to Tivarra. “Why are you helping Dracon?”
She smirked over the rail at us. “An elf with quite a nice boat, thanks to my grateful master. And once I turn you over to him, I’ll get the whole fleet.”
I stood frozen. This was the trap-springing phase of our “plan,” though an orc and two Akarri no longer felt like much of one. Not with forty orcs at our backs. We’d even predicted this, but it felt different seeing them all firsthand.
“Go ahead,” the captain teased. “Show me how clever you are.” She spoke an arcane word and a sizzling blue orb hovered over her palm. “You couldn’t possibly have expected to leave peacefully with the Queen. So what’s it to be? Another sky ship? Ah, but my dragon’s patrolling for it beneath the cloud cover. Do you have a summoning up your sleeve? My archers will perforate you the second your fingers touch the page.” She squinted at Leo. “Is the turtle a bomb?”
“He’s the bomb, but no, he doesn’t explode.” I frowned at Eliandra, who pierced me with a hot glare. “We were kind of thinking we could fight our way off?”
“Brilliant,” the Queen said.
“You’re not very good at this.” Tivarra bounced the glistening orb in her palm.
“There’s this one weird thing you might not know about Northern Spine orcs,” Dak said.
Uh-oh. I tensed.
“Oh?” Tivarra shifted to face him—as did the crossbows.
“We jump.
” Dak cleared six feet from a standing leap, clapped palm to rail, and swung over. He slammed his foot into Tivarra’s unarmored midsection and threw her from view. The orcs fired their crossbows, sinking bolts into Dak’s shield and shoulder blade.
Now that it had gone to hell, Leo tucked safely into his shell. Too bad there’s not room for two.
At once, Elsie and Tammagan’s swords flashed out and the two orcs holding Eliandra folded, dead. Tammagan whirled to fend off the horde while I scrounged in my pocket, tossing Elsie my skeleton key. I flattened against the cabin wall, turtle clutched tight.
Above, Dak laughed and two orcish bodies sailed to the mid-deck, toppling some of the advancing horde. The remainder pressed on, stepping over fallen bodies and snarling at us.
Thunder broke the sky. Lightning flashes erupted off to our left, signaling the Akarri had started their attack.
Tammagan swatted aside three sword strokes, skewered an orc, and broke another’s knee with her heel. She wrenched her blade out, driving the point of her elbow through another’s teeth, shattering his mouth into a gory mess. An orc’s swinging hatchet nearly took her head off, but she flicked back, retreating half a step to counter with a fatally precise throat stab. She retook her lost ground, giving not an inch.
Elsie, having activated the skeleton key, twisted it in the padlock and the Queen shrugged from her chains. An orc came from Tammagan’s flank, so I did the only thing I could—with nothing but Leo, I lifted his durable shell in the way of an orcish axe head.
The force of the blow hammered through me, tossing me into a wall. The orc threw a huge paw over Leo’s shell to wrench him away, but the turtle’s head poked out and his beak sank into the meat of the orc’s thumb.
It howled and threw its arm back, trying to fling Leo away. Leo unlatched his pincer hold on the orc’s digit and soared behind the orc. In spite of my own predicament, I fretted where he’d land.
In mid-air, Leo’s head retracted again; his shell flashed brightly and changed from a deep earth tone to a familiar Koopa green. The shell bonked into a mast, deflecting off at cannon speed. I lost track of its trajectory as the orc lifted his axe to end me.
The beast’s torso exploded in streamers of gore. Leo’s shell flew through his gaping ribcage and thumped solidly into my grasp.
“Sweet Mushroom Kingdom. You’re not a bomb, you’re a missile!” Blood streamed off the striations of Leo’s shell, never quite marring that video-game green. “Everyone get behind me.”
Tammagan blinked, but Elsie—in the process of arming the Queen—had seen what Leo had done. She dragged everyone back and I looked out across the troop of orcs Tammagan had been holding back. They stared at me and the bloody turtle shell, trying to figure out our game.
I dropped Leo’s shell to the deck.
They shifted forward.
I delivered my kick to the side and Leo skated with arrow-like velocity. I’d banked him like a pool ball so that he cut a zigzag track across the deck, bonking from parapet to parapet and advancing only a foot for each deflection.
One orc tried to kick him. Leo blew his leg off at the knee and the orc fell on his back in Leo’s path. The next pass smashed the orc through the air and sent his remains spraying over the side of the ship.
Seeing that, the horde flailed back all together, but the bunching-up only meant Leo hit a whole crowd of them at once. He didn’t even slow. My turtle was immune to the laws of thermodynamics.
His first pass just tore off a bunch of legs. The second, more legs, because it took them a moment to fall. The third? It was bad. The air filled with gore and I couldn’t look. Pieces came our way and hit the Queen—the sound was like someone had hurled a water balloon. I could see her silhouette in the non-gruesome parts of the wall behind her.
When Leo thumped into a mast, he deflected back at me, seeming to slow so I could stamp on his back. He stopped neatly beneath my heel.
Elsie offered me her sword.
Patting Leo, I shook my head at the weapon. “No thanks, I’m good.”
“I was offering to trade,” she said.
“Get your own turtle. This one’s mine.”
The surviving orcs charged, but Dak dropped from the upper deck and met them. His singing sword plunged into the first. “Three edge!” he cried. Whirling, he slammed his shield into another, lifting the orc from its feet. It made a wet crunch against the mast. “Five bash, knockback!” Two swung at him and his sword flashed, chopping both their blades in half. “Sunder, sunder!” He kicked one off the deck while stabbing another through the face. “Two bash, three edge!”
“It’s not a LARP,” I shouted, “you don’t have to call your damage!”
“Sorry—old habits.”
“Where’s Tivarra?” asked the Queen.
“She ducked below deck somewhere,” Dak said. “Think she’s coordinating the fight from there. Let’s go.” His eyes were solid, shiny black.
“Are you raging now?” I asked.
“Totally. Not even angry, though.” The words came fast. “Humans call it rage. Orcish word for this is tur. Means ‘focus’ and feels more like that time I drank four espressos and thought I’d merged with the Matrix. Except look at my hands.” He held out his sword arm, hand totally steady. “Orcish bullet time.”
The beat of leathery wings drew our attention to the sky, where a serpentine dragon swooped down at us. Its jaws opened and a column of roaring fire sprayed across the deck. Dak tossed me aside and lifted Not-Captain-America’s-Shield, which seemed to suck the flames into its shiny obsidian surface where they disappeared.
The monster flicked by, overshooting the ship. Glancing down at the turtle in my hands, I whispered, “Can you do a red shell?”
I’d never seen such a determined look on a turtle’s face. With a flash, his shell turned bright red.
Drawing the homing shell over my shoulder like a football, I tossed him in the dragon’s direction. Leo fired off like a shot. Soon, all I could see was his smoky contrail slicing a clean arc for the serpent. When dragon and contrail met, both the dragon’s wings ripped clean off and it plummeted like a stone.
There was no sight of Leo returning and I worked to quash my sense of panic. “Do—do you think he’s okay?”
“I don’t know, but if I had to pick a turtle to be ‘okay’ after that, it’d be the dragon-slaying kind,” Dak said solemnly. “If he’s gone, he died as he lived. At full throttle.”
Elsie stuffed a crossbow in my empty hands and we rushed for the lower deck together. Dak bowled through a handful of orcs, the Akarri stabbing the fallen ones as we passed. We hit the rail, getting our first look at the other battle.
The Akarri had zip-piped to the Valkyrie. I couldn’t see Ronin and suspected she was fighting below deck. Above deck, Akarri fired longbows at orcs back on the Leviathan. Rent, smoking metal on both sides showed where most of the lightning cannons had been destroyed in the exchanges, and now they were down to bows versus crossbows. Thank God the castor turret on the Valkyrie was intact—that was our ride.
Our own vessel was still against the Leviathan’s hull, though I startled when the castor turret holding it there started pushing it away. “They’re jettisoning our bomb-ship.”
Tammagan wrenched her sword out of an orc. “Tivarra suspects us. We have to seize that turret. If the Leviathan survives the blast, we’re through.”
“No time.” Elsie motioned down the rail to the orcs firing on the Valkyrie, who just now noticed us. She waved across the clouds at the Akarri in the castor turret, who fired an anchor rod, which splintered into a wall by Elsie. The violet-hued anchor chain glowed into existence, promising escape. “We’re about to have company. We need to get the Queen and Grawflefox off this boat. Like, now.”
“Agreed.” Tammagan’s mouth was a grim line. “Elsie, take the Queen on your zip-pipe.”
“We could always ride together, Captain.” Elsie winked while readying her pipe.
Tammagan actually smile
d, which was the moment I knew something was terribly wrong. “I’m afraid not. Now, go!”
Elsie hesitated. Something dimmed in her eyes; her voice was flat and small. “You’re staying.”
“I’ll catch up after I take out that turret,” Tammagan lied.
“There’s no time!” Elsie shouted frantically. “Captain, we’ve got to go.”
The orcs rallied, drawing weapons, and stalked down the deck toward us—they were gathered all together and only Dak’s readied steel and solid-black eyes kept them at bay. That, and Eliandra’s cutlass, which seemed elegant and deadly at once in the Queen’s grip.
Tammagan seized Elsie by the trim of her cloak, dragging her near. “For once in your goddamn life, follow an order.” She seemed about to release her soldier, then growled in consternation, tugging Elsie flush.
Their mouths fused. The kiss was a crush of ferocious want, Elsie sinking into the Captain’s one-fisted grip.
An orc popped around the corner, saw them, and lifted his axe. My crossbow snapped to attention. With the smooth ease Uncle Scott had instilled while squirrel hunting, I squeezed the trigger. The string twanged. A bolt thumped into the orc’s forehead and it toppled. “Shh,” I told the dead orc. “They’re having a moment.”
Tammagan broke the kiss by thrusting Elsie at us. “Now go, you obstinate girl.” With the shortest of glances—and eyes so full of unspoken feelings and unmade memories that it hurt to see—she spun and sprinted for the turret.
Elsie jerked, as if to give chase, but Eliandra snagged her shoulder. “We’re leaving this boat, soldier.” The tide of orcs from our flank had engaged Dak. He was glorious to see—so fluid and powerful I wondered what the hell level he was. But they’d landed a few shots nonetheless, and he bled from a cut over his brow.
Tammagan had disappeared into a crowd of orcs, and packs of them were swarming from elsewhere on the ship. The Queen and Elsie both leaped onto the anchor chain and coasted across on one zip-pipe. I drew mine from a pocket, abandoning my crossbow, and gripped it in both fists. Leaping at the glowing chain, my pipe made contact with the stream of energy and I flew across space.
Only Broken Things Are Free (A Pygmalion Fail Book 3) Page 5