by J. S. Morin
The crew of the Frostwatch Symphony were traders in death spices. Their employer, Parjek Ran-Haalamar, was a blight in Rakashi’s eyes. The pirates might have been no better, but they were certainly no worse.
Rakashi used the flat of his blade where he found it convenient, and set about laying into his former associates. He was willing to test the name of the pirates’ ship and see if there was mercy to be had after the battle. Some among the hired blades might have been worthy of it.
* * * * * * * *
“So these three are yours?” Stalyart asked, touring the deck of the prize ship he had captured.
Soria, Zellisan, Rakashi, and Tanner stood amid the pirate crew who were rounding up the few survivors who had surrendered, as well as the ship’s original crew. The rest of them were largely unhurt, but Tanner was limping. He had read in a storybook once about a pirate who slid down a sail using his dagger to slow his fall. Tanner’s runed blade had cut through the Symphony’s mainsail as if it had been made of parchment instead of sailcloth.
“Yes, just these three and myself,” Soria answered.
“And you, sir. What is your name here?” Stalyart addressed Rakashi directly.
“I am known as Rakashi dar Fandar,” Rakashi replied. “You look older here.”
Stalyart laughed. “I am older. I have not seen you in many years.” He clapped the Takalish warrior on the shoulder. “The girl should have sent you to negotiate. We could have shared a drink while the rest fought.”
“Wait, you know each other?” Soria asked Rakashi.
Rakashi was the only one of the four of them who did not live in Kadrin, and only Tanner had met him on the other side. They knew he was from Safschan, but Veydran politics were of little concern to them, even should they find themselves on opposite sides of the war between Kadrin and the Megrenn Alliance.
“Yes, for many years, though not for many years,” Rakashi replied cryptically. “We held a common cause once and aided one another. I feel better now about your plan, since I know whose head to cut off should we be betrayed.” Rakashi smiled at Stalyart, who took the threat in stride, his own smile never faltering.
“Well, this ship is in good enough shape to sail. We can make repairs to the main sail once we are in calm winds or when we reach our destination. Someone throw the rest of those coinblades in the water, but not the crew. We will let them sail their own ship,” Stalyart ordered.
“Hey!” objected one of the aforementioned survivors from among the dozens of hired blades who had been brought on board. “How ’bout some o’ that mercy. I’ll fight for ya, work for ya, pay a ransom if ya put me ashore. C’mon!”
“Ahh. You make a common mistake, I am afraid,” Stalyart explained. “I once sailed with Captain Denrik Zayne when his ship was the Honest Merchant. Once, when we captured a ship and took its cargo, their captain said, ‘You claim to be a merchant? Your ship’s name is a lie.’ Zayne replied, ‘It is the ship whose name is Honest Merchant. My name is Denrik Zayne and I am a pirate.’ So you see, it is the ship that is merciful, not I. My name is Robbono Stalyart, and I am a practical man.”
Stalyart was merciful enough, though, that he allowed the condemned men to remove any armor or clothing they wished, and he was dropping them in the water along a major trade route. There was a chance they might be rescued before drowning or being eaten.
“Where are we heading?” Soria asked as they headed back to the Merciful. She had hardened herself to killing long ago, but tried not to be wanton about it. The callousness of the pirates condemning men to the sea with some faint whiff of hope for rescue sat poorly with her. Her die was cast, though, and she had to see how it fell.
“Denku Appa,” Stalyart replied. He looked Soria over appraisingly: tall, fierce, driven, and beautiful with her natural green eyes and auburn hair displayed once more. “I think you will not like it there.”
Chapter 18 - A True Beginning
A cold, patchy grey-white blur rushed past them, obscuring all vision. The men on deck were bundled against the elements as if it were the dead of winter, and not early springtime. The winds were of their own making, not any natural current of the air. Krogen would not be able to keep them at such a pace for long, but they needed to keep their speed up for their next maneuver.
The cloud they flew through turned wispy as they reached the end of it, before giving way entirely, and bathing the crew of the Thunderstorm in crisp, clean sunshine. Below them spread the majesty of the north Kadrin landscape, verdant hills with blossoming wildflowers, plowed farmland with endless furrows planted for the summer harvest, and an army camped about the hillside city of Munne.
Munne was not a beautiful city. Viewed from on high, it looked like an ugly blemish on the pastoral wonder of the countryside, a block of grey and brown buildings surrounded by high walls that rose and fell as they traced the contour of the dozen or so hills that constituted the city’s geography. Bridges spanned the Sweetwater River that cut the city in two. Others occasionally joined hill to hill over less hospitable terrain or connected buildings at heights other than ground level. Bridges and walls were Munne’s defining features, other than the hills it sat upon. With naught but a fifth of Kadris’s population, it still counted itself among the Kadrin Empire’s larger cities.
While Munne was not a great prize of artistry or architecture, the army that camped all about it was far more colorful and diverse. There was the monohorn cavalry that had made the sacking of Temble Hill so easy, camped before the rest of the Megrenn forces like a shield of thick, tough hide. Native Megrenn infantry spread across the plains, settled into brightly colored tents, with cook fires burning. The large, black tents held sorcerers from Ghelk, few in number, but safe behind wards if the scouts’ tales proved true. Safschan had sent horsemen and bowmen, but the vexing contribution of theirs was the stripe-cats: hulking felines larger than horses and faster in short bursts, with claws and fangs that would send many Kadrin soldiers to their pyres before the war would end. If possible, worse still were the rock-hurlers.
The goblin-made devices were impossible to defend against, and the Thunderstorm and her two sister ships—the Cloud Maiden and the Dragonhawk—had devoted much of their efforts to harrying them and their crews. At Marshal Brannis’s insistence, Munne’s defenders had filled empty grain sacks with gravel, dirt, sawdust, and anything else they could find and piled them before the walls. Between the airships’ efforts, the sacks dispersing the effects of the Megrenn siege engines, and Munne’s hilly geography hampering the monohorns, the city continued to hold out.
“Sorcerer Krogen, prepare us to dive!” ordered Captain Drecker, shouting over the shrieking wind. “Port side, prepare to rake the stripe-cats as we pass!”
With all the other efforts of the Megrenn forces held at bay, the arrival of the stripe-cat cavalry—the pride of Safschan and an integral part of the Megrenn Rebellion twenty-one winters ago—was cause for serious concern.
“Aye, sir!” Krogen shouted back.
The Thunderstorm pitched forward, giving the crew a spectacular panoramic view of the siege far below. Archers scrambled to catch hold of the high netting that kept the crew from falling over the ship’s railings. Once situated, they took hold of the net, each gripping both it and their bows with their left hand while drawing with the right. Though Drecker had given no specific order, men at the aft of the ship were opening crates of blacksmithing debris: worn shoes, rusted plows, spare ingots, and the like. The airship was traveling at a terrific speed, and even without aiming, the flotsam would play havoc among the encamped forces.
The ground rushed up at them. Captain Drecker felt his stomach clench. A man of the sea, he had ridden out storms that had pitched his ship thusly in times past. Ever before, there had been water before him, and the promise of another wave. It was a grueling ordeal at sea, but there seemed to have been so much more room for error then than with the Munne countryside hurtling toward them with no promise but a messy demise should they fail to p
ull up in time.
“Hard to port! Level us out!” the captain screamed. His stomach dropped into his boots as the Thunderstorm pulled out of its dive a dozen paces above the battlefield and no more. It was the closest they had come to hitting the ground in the eight times they had tried the maneuver. Either they were getting better at it or they had narrowly averted disaster. Captain Drecker had yet to decide which.
As the ship banked hard, the deck pitched precipitously beneath their feet. The archers at the port railing were facing nearly straight down as they began firing, their boots jammed firmly to the deck by the force of their turn. They passed their targets too quickly to survey what damage they had wrought, but between the twoscore archers and the spilled iron scrap, they must have left a mark upon their adversaries.
Archers screamed and shied away from the railings as a riderless stripe-cat leapt at the ship. Its claws caught in the netting, jerking the ship in the air before cutting through the heavy ropes. It took no order for Krogen to pull them up and begin their climb to escape retributive fire from the ground.
Kthooom.
Something whistled past the Thunderstorm. Captain Drecker did not need two guesses as to what it might have been.
“Get us up and out of here, now!” he ordered. “The frolicking whoresons have managed to aim the blasted things up.”
I hope those dratted iron balls rain back down on their own lousy heads, Drecker thought.
Kthoom.
The captain saw a blur as the second shot whizzed past.
Kthoom—CRACK!
“Turn us back to the city. Get us up to cloud level, on the double!” Drecker ordered.
He did not see the damage. Had they been at sea, a hit below the waterline was sure to sink a ship unless the damage was miniscule. There was no chance of that with the Megrenn weapons. Warded as the ship’s hull was, it was suited to turning aside arrows and spears, not the iron balls the Megrenns’ goblin weapons threw. Fortunately the worst they could take on was air, which seemed harmless enough, so long as no one fell out through the hole.
“Krogen, up, I said!” he shouted again.
“It’s no good, sir,” Krogen said into the captain’s ear, stumbling into the man as the ship lurched. “Those runes were damaged. We aren’t even going to have the up we’ve got for much longer. It has been a pleasure to know you, sir.”
“Indeed.” Captain Drecker solemnly took the sorcerer’s offered hand and shook it.
The ground hurtled toward the Thunderstorm once more, Megrenn troops scattering at their approach. This time, they did not pull up.
* * * * * * * *
Commander Stotaala Bal-Kaynnyn eased her stripe-cat through the throng that surrounded the downed Kadrin airship. Soldiers fell over themselves to get out of the beast’s way. With the tight-packed groups that wanted to get up close to the wondrous ship that had been harrying them for days, there was only so much room to give. The stripe-cat found its footing with a grace that belied its bulk.
The commander was wearing a shaggy, hooded fur jacket over her leather armor, dyed to match the brown-and-green striped pattern of her mount. Had the Kadrin weather been akin to her native Safschan, she would have painted her skin to match instead. Pressed against Katiki’s back, she would be hard to discern for archers or sorcerers looking to remove the beast’s rider. She would much have liked to press herself against Katiki’s back, and nuzzle against her warm fur. The Kadrin idea of springtime was a farce, colder than the deepest winter she had ever known back home, or even visiting her mother in Zorren.
She made a circuit of the wreckage, with two of her fellow stripe-cat riders helping to keep the bystanders back. She was no sailor, but she had traveled by ship. What had crashed from the sky was very much a ship. What odd magics the Kadrins work against us, she mused. They lack the strength to stand against us, so they try to lift their boats above us like archers’ towers in the sky.
Blood and broken bodies spattered the tall grasses amid the wood, rope, and sailcloth that had once been a ship. She considered dismounting to have a closer look, but decided to let others examine the wreck.
Too cold here. I will stay with Katiki. Like the other stripe-cat riders, she spent much of the day in her saddle. Her legs were strapped securely to the sides of her mount, her strong thighs squeezing and twisting to guide the well-trained animal. The act of dismounting took either great flexibility to reach all the buckles and straps, or one or more assistants. She took meals from the saddle, and sometimes slept atop her mount as well, burrowing into the thick, luxuriant fur for warmth and comfort. Katiki would grow restless if she was away from her for long. She was bonded to the great cat, raising her from a kitten the size of a mastiff. Katiki sensed her moods, and could read her thoughts just a bit—enough to obey Stotaala unhesitatingly, but not so much as to understand plans. It was a welcome defense against intrusive magic as well, as Kadrin sorcerers were known to bewitch beasts to defy their nature.
“Pull all the bodies from the wreck and lay them out. Search for orders, logs, journals, rank insignia, personal belongings—especially ones with names or sigils on them,” she ordered, directing Megrenn troops as if she were their commander. Since none of higher rank in the greater alliance army were around, obeisance was hers.
The count went amiss somewhere beyond forty. That was the point where partial bodies became problematic, and double-counting might have begun. The worst news was that only one on the ship wore any garment indicating membership in the Kadrin Imperial Circle. I had hoped to find ten aboard, to make a ship fly like a hunting bird. Ten fewer among the Kadrin sorcerers would be cause to celebrate. One less feels hollow. If one sorcerer can make a ship fly, how many more will we see?
“Find some chunk of that thing with Kadrin runes on it. Send it over to the Ghelkans to examine,” she added.
They managed to shoot the thing from the sky. Let them pick at its bones to see its workings.
* * * * * * * *
With one Kadrin airship felled, the other two beat a hasty retreat for the city. They seemed to have realized that the Megrenn reinforcements meant that the forestalled attack would be resumed. Their last chance to own the field had just ended.
Stotaala took the spear and shield her spearmaidens handed her. Twelve and nine summers they had and awaiting kittens of their own. The elder, Shaminai, might be riding to war beside her in just two summers. Though weaker with arms than older girls, or the few young men among the stripe-cat riders, control of the beasts was paramount in battle. While Stotaala’s spear was deadly, Katiki would kill twelve or fifteen men for every one that died on her spear. Riding the great cats was a task for the young. It took supple limbs and a healthy back to sway with the stripe-cats as they walked, and when they ran, it took a skill not to be thrashed about, even with the rider’s legs strapped in. Even Stotaala’s legendary mother Kaynnyn had not made it to her thirtieth winter before retiring from the cavalry.
A trumpet sounded, and the ground rumbled beneath Katiki’s feet. Despite their ineffectiveness attacking uphill against the city’s defenses, the monohorns were leading the advance. The behemoths would provide cover against the archers and sorcerers on the walls as the stripe-cats and infantry made their advances.
A series of high-pitched whistles pierced the air. Stotaala could not hear them, but rather felt them through her bond with Katiki, whose ears were far more sensitive than her own. General Felana Haliff, Stotaala’s commanding officer, had signaled the stripe-cat cavalry to begin their own advance.
Perched high atop her mount, Stotaala still could not see above the monohorns as she trailed the monstrous cattle in their advance. The terrain around the city was flatter than the city itself, but still rolled a bit. She felt nothing but disdain for the monohorn riders as their mounts slowed and sped based on the grade. The brutes just pull to the left and right. The beasts go whatever pace they find easy.
They were in no rush. Arrows rained among them, but the cover from t
he monohorns made the passage less risky, at least as battlefields accounted such things. They conserved energy for the assault on the walls.
Katiki lurched to the side suddenly, narrowly avoiding freshly dropped monohorn dung. I cannot wait to be out from behind these foul animals. They reek of manure and grime. Had other, more genteel officers caught a whiff of Stotaala away from her mount, they might have thought much the same of her. She and Katiki were one, though, and the smell that the stripe-cat had was invisible to her nose.
No thunderous reports were heard from the goblin siege engines. They were being held in reserve in case the Kadrin airships made another appearance above the battlefield. Thus, when the whistles blew to signal the charge, they were heard across the plains.
Katiki needed no prodding. She sped forth, shooting between two shielding monohorns as if they stood grazing. Stotaala swayed in time with her stripe-cat’s bounding gait, pressing her torso as flat as she could manage while still keeping a tight grip on spear and shield. She peered up as best she could, but knew that until they reached the wall, she was best off leaving their path to Katiki’s discretion and staying sheltered against her back.
Bowmen, who had been patiently awaiting the Megrenn army’s arrival at the base of the hilltops, opened fire in earnest. Arrows filled the air, occasionally snagging in thick fur, but rarely doing serious harm to the stripe-cat cavalry as they advanced. Stotaala felt one graze her leg, but the sting would not hinder her unless it started bleeding badly.
Thunder echoed in the air under a clear sky. Roars of wounded cats answered back. The Kadrin sorcerers have decided to join this battle. They must respect our charge. They know we mean to enter their walls.