by Nathan Long
He was close to popping his stitches again. “Lhan! You’re gonna hurt yourself!”
He stayed clenched for a long minute, then sagged back and let out a breath. “How… how did you know? About Rian and Wae-Fen?”
“I went to see him. I came back to Waar inside the Temple of Ormolu, and found out that the priests were hunting you in some place called Toaga. So when I escaped, I went to ask him for a map, and—”
Lhan was staring at me like I’d just grown horns and turned green. “You… you escaped from the Temple of Ormolu?”
“Yeah. There was a teleport gem thingy, and—”
“No one escapes from the temple of Ormolu. But for the priests, no one who has entered it has ever come out again. There are no doors, no windows, and no one is ever seen to enter or leave.”
I tied off the last stitch, then cut the thread and looked for more wounds. There was a nasty one that cut across his hip and halfway around to his butt. I started undoing his loincloth. “That’s because they have teleporters like I was saying. They don’t need—”
Lhan caught my hand as I started to strip him. “That is not necessary.”
“Bro, I’ve seen you naked, remember. And that’s infected.”
“Very well, then I will do it. Give me the salve.”
I started tugging again. “Come on, Lhan. Don’t be a prude. Let me—”
“No! I insist. I—”
The fabric ripped as he tried to pull my hand away, and the loincloth fell apart. He had a thin strip of leather tied around his waist, and there was some kind of stone hanging from it. It hadn’t been there the last time we got naked. He closed his hand around it.
I stared at his fist, shaking. The thing reminded me of the thing I’d seen around Kedac-Zir’s waist when I’d stripped him naked in front of the entire Oran court—a balurrah it was called—only his had been silver. A balurrah was a secret token people on Waar wore next to their skin to remind them of their lover, and it didn’t matter if you were married or engaged to somebody else, you were supposed to only wear the balurrah of the person you truly loved. It was meant only for their eyes. Nobody else’s. And Lhan was hiding his from me.
“What’s that?”
Lhan clenched tighter. “Nothing. Pay it no mind.”
“Lhan, don’t be a douche. Show me.”
He didn’t like it, but he opened his hand, then turned his head away. “Forgive me, mistress.”
I took the thing in my hand and looked at it, heart pounding. It was a smooth pink pebble, about the size and shape of a pocket watch, and there was something scratched into one side of it. It looked like a drawing of a knife with a blade that curved at the tip.
“This is a balurrah, right?”
“Aye.”
My heart sunk. “Whose is it?”
“It… it is yours, mistress.”
“M-mine?”
“Aye. That crude etching is meant to represent your sword, while the pebble is the color of your skin.”
Fucking hell. It was my sword. A breath went out of me that I hadn’t know I’d been holding. “Oh, god, Lhan. I—”
He gripped my hand. “I beg you to forgive me, mistress. It was presumptuous of me to make such a thing without knowing your heart, but I believed I would die, and did not want to—”
“Lhan, you fucking idiot!” I lay down beside him and hugged him so hard I heard him grunt. “What the fuck do you need to be forgiven for? Didn’t I tell you? I came back for you! All I wanted to do when the priests sent me to Earth was get back here. All I wanted was to find you again. I….” I held him away from me and looked into his eyes. “I decided I didn’t want to go back home the second we kissed.”
Lhan looked at me, still unsure. “Truly?”
“Truly.” I held up three fingers. “Scout’s honor.”
It took a minute for Lhan’s brow to unwrinkle, but at last he clasped my hands and smiled. It was like a bath in warm whiskey, that smile. It made me all hot and gooshy inside.
“And I decided I would ask you to stay at precisely the same moment. I believed I had not a hope to convince you, but I knew I must try, or lose half my world.”
“Aw, Lhan.”
I leaned in to kiss him, but he held me off and looked into my eyes, all serious. “Mistress. Jae-En. ’Tis sudden, I know, but I fear we have little time left to us, so I would speak now.”
“Uh, speak about what?”
“This.” He took my hand. “That if we are truly of like minds, then I would pledge myself to you as a dhan of Ora should—heart, soul and arm. From this day forth, however few they may be, you will be my dhanshai and I will be your dhan. Your safety and well-being will be my only concern. Your love will be my only goal.”
He was so serious I wanted to laugh, but I kept it in. I couldn’t keep the tears in, though. They were running down my cheeks.
He took my hand and kissed it. “Will you have me?”
There was a dirty answer to that, but I kept that in too. Now wasn’t the time. “Yes, Lhan. I will,” was all I said.
“The One be praised.”
Lhan stretched up and kissed me, and that whiskey bath turned into a sauna. Wounds or no wounds, I was ready to push him down and “have him” as often as he could manage, but all of a sudden he went all floppy again and slumped back, his eyes fluttering.
“Lhan!”
He gripped my forearm. His hand was clammy and cold. “Forgive me… beloved. There has been no food for so long. I… I have little strength. At least we will be Dhan and Dhanshae when we die.”
I stared down at him, feeling helpless, then shook my head, angry. “Sorry, Lhan. Fuck dying. I’m not giving you up after I just found you again. I’m gettin’ us off this rock, and then we’re gonna go have a happily-ever-after somewhere.”
I stood and turned to the door. “Wait right here. I gotta go see some priests about a ship.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
BREAKOUT!
“I don’t get it. I’ve seen y’all take on a navy ship before, and win. And that was twice as big as that boat out there. How did that one little ship wipe out thirteen of yours?”
Okay, yeah, I know I made it sound like I was gonna go handle shit all by myself, but I ain’t stupid. I knew going kamikaze wouldn’t get me anywhere but dead, and as I’d said to Lhan, fuck dying. So, instead of going to see the priests about a ship, I went to see the pirates about the priests, and now I was sitting around a dusty stone table with Kai-La and Burly and Lo-Zhar—yeah, him too—in what looked like an old kitchen.
Kai-La curled her lip. “A single wand of blue fire.”
I blinked. “Damn. Really?”
Lo-Zhar rolled his eyes.
Burly was a little more helpful. “The levitating air that fills our canopies is flammable, and the blue fire can burn through the envelope in the blink of an eye, and then… boom.”
Kai-La sighed. “We saw the ship on the horizon and took our time preparing to fly, thinking we had at least an hour before it would be close enough to engage. But a wand of blue fire…” She shook her head. “I know not the limits of its range, but it destroyed us from more than an iln away, every ship that was anchored here.”
Lo-Zhar bared his teeth. “I lost forty men.”
It still made no sense. “But then how the hell do y’all operate at all? If one wand of blue fire can burn a whole damn fleet out of the sky, what’s the percentage in being a pirate?”
Burly raised his head. “Because we never face them. Neither Ora’s army or navy possesses one, nor have I ever heard of a temple ship carrying one either.”
Lo-Zhar snorted. “Until now.”
“That is why we were taken by surprise.” Kai-La leaned back. “But for the two in the possession of the Aldhanan’s guard, only servants of the Temple are allowed to carry wands, and they are so rare, and so valuable, that they are almost never used, for fear of losing them or allowing one to fall into the hands of the enemy.”
“Hu
h. So why don’t they just make more?”
All three of ’em laughed at me this time.
“The wands are gifts of the Seven, lass, made by the gods themselves, and beyond the ken of mortal man to understand.” Burly chuckled. “The priests don’t even know how to fix them, let alone build another. If one breaks, it is gone for good, and there are so few now that they are named—Tyrant Slayer, The White Death, The Guardian of Modgalu, and the like.”
More Waarian Lord-of-the-Rings bullshit, giving a ray gun a fancy name. On the other hand, we did the same thing back on Earth all the time—The Peacemaker, Fat Man, Little Boy. Shit, I knew guys who named their dicks. Anyway, back to business.
“Okay. So there’s only one of these wands on the ship?”
Burly grunted. “One is enough.”
“I just wanna know what I’m gonna be up against once I get on board.”
Lo-Zhar snorted again. “Once you get on board? Shouldn’t your first worry be how you get on board? Do you mean to fly? That ship never comes closer than bows’ reach.”
Kai-La grinned. “You’ve not seen our girl in action, have you? She’ll get on board.”
I sat forward, trying not to look smug. “I hope I will, but what I want to know is, can you reel it in once I do? The last thing I want is to do something stupid and heroic and end up giving myself up to ’em.”
Lo-Zhar smiled, nasty. “It wouldn’t trouble me in the slightest.”
Kai-La and Burly gave him a dirty look, then Kai-La patted me on the wrist.
“Worry not, sister. A pirate always has a grappling hook or two lying about. We’ll hook your fish.”
“I just hope you do it before it swallows the bait.”
***
It took an hour for me and the thirty or so pirates who Kai-La and Lo-Zhar rounded up to get into position without being seen by the priests’ warship. I felt like we were a bunch of mice, trying to sneak across the kitchen floor while a fat orange cat walked around on the counters above. We could only move when the ship’s view was blocked by a wall or a tower, and we had to make sure wherever we stopped we couldn’t be seen from any angle, because the ship was constantly circling. The whole scheme woulda been impossible during the day, but with the big moon down and the little moon low on the horizon, the shadows were as black as caves, and there were plenty of them.
The whole plan hinged on that three-story building which I’d used as cover before. The battlement at the top of it was the only thing tall enough and close enough to the edge to get me to the level of the ship. It also had a pretty much intact stairway inside it that would give me enough run up for my jump. Unfortunately, it also had one big problem. When I was in position in the stairwell, I couldn’t see out, which meant I couldn’t tell when the ship was coming, which meant I didn’t know when to start my run. It’d be embarrassing as hell to do a perfect run up just to miss the boat and jump to my death.
In the end we worked out a system where Kai-La would stand watch outside the building and give me a whistle when the ship was coming in range. All I had to do was run when I heard her toot.
We finally got into position just as the ship passed the tower, and so we had to wait another endless fifteen minutes for it to circle all the way around again, but finally I started hearing the flap of its sails and the whispers from the pirates around the tower, and I went into a runner’s crouch at the bottom of the stairs.
Ten seconds later, “Weet!”
I tensed, but didn’t go. What if she’d whistled too soon? I better wait. One, two, three, four, five—okay go!
I launched like a sprinter coming off the blocks and pounded up the stairs as hard as I could, then kicked off the wall of the landing and ran up the second flight, skipping more and more steps with each stride. Another turn and there was night sky above me and I rocketed up onto the top of the tower, jumped onto the battlements, and kicked up into the air with the empty plains dropping away a thousand feet below me—and the priests’ ship slipping out from under from me to my right.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ATTACK!
Fuck.
So, I guess Kai-La musta counted to five to make sure I didn’t go too soon, and then I counted to five, and… and I was dead. The flank of the balloon was right in front of me, but too far out. My trajectory was angling me down toward the deck, twenty feet below, just like I’d planned it, except it was already passing me by. I was gonna miss the stern rail by about two yards. It was funny in Roadrunner cartoons. In real life? Not so much.
I had one chance—the trick I’d learned in gladiator school when we’d been trying to figure out some fancy moves I could do in the arena. I whipped my big-ass sword out of the sheath on my back and swung it as hard as I could to the right, then let the weight of it jerk me around after it.
It worked. Well, almost.
I needed six feet. I got five. The mid-air swerve swung me toward the ship just like I’d hoped, but I didn’t quite make it to the deck. Instead, I bounced tits-first off the back rail and started to fall away again, head spinning and nose bleeding, but at the last second, I managed to throw out a desperate hand and caught the bottom of the railing.
Saved!
Sorta.
I really coulda used a minute to just hang there and catch my breath, but there were footsteps pounding across the deck above me. I had to move. With a grunt I braced my feet on the hull and vaulted onto the deck—and ended up face to face with a shitload of surprised priests and paladins, all staring like a shark had jumped in the boat.
“It’s her!”
“The other one!”
“The demon!”
“But she was sent away!”
You know, back in the stairwell, waiting to charge out and do this, I hadn’t been sure I’d be able to get it up to slaughter a whole bunch of people I didn’t know, but that did it. These were the guys who’d sent me back to Earth. These were the guys who’d chased Lhan halfway across Waar and put an arrow in his side. These were the guys who’d tortured Rian-Gi and killed his lover. These were the guys who’d sent thirteen ships crashing to the ground and killed hundreds of men. This wasn’t going to be a problem at all.
I jumped forward, hair flying, blood spraying, screaming like a banshee, and landed in the middle of ’em, chopping left and right. Four of ’em went down like pinatas, opened up and spilling their insides everywhere. The rest scattered, bellowing for help. I charged after ’em, howling, ready to lose myself to the red rage, but then I remembered I had a job to do, and changed direction.
The reason the pirates hadn’t been able to pull this stunt before now was because every time they’d tried to hook the ship and reel it in, they’d been pin-cushioned with crossbow bolts or zapped with blue fire and had to fall back. That’s what I was here for, to keep the firepower busy.
I leapt for the starboard rail, slashing wide and wild at the crossbowmen lined up along it. They scattered, screaming, but I caught ’em in a step, cutting the legs off one guy, and kicking two more over the side, then charged after the rest.
It was inevitable that some of ’em were going to start firing back, and I almost flinched myself overboard as a bolt glanced off my blade and nearly took my nose off. I hit the deck with more whiffing past me, and by the time I rolled back to my feet I was alone in the middle of the deck with the whole ship reloading and aiming at me.
I leapt straight up, screaming like a school girl, and a handful of bolts zipped under my feet, but a bunch more followed me, whizzing past my ears and sticking in the balloon over my head. I landed on the foredeck and charged another knot of shooters, my back tingling, expecting to be a pincushion with every step, but instead, all the crossbow guys started shrieking and falling and turning toward the rail.
Whew! Part two of the plan was a go. The pirates were finally firing from the mesa, shooting grappling-hook bolts over the rails and picking off the guys who were trying to pick me off. Now we had ’em in the crossfire. I attacked the crossbow gu
ys from behind as they took cover behind the rail, and the pirates pegged ’em when I made ’em break cover. The poor fuckers were like chickens in a dog pen, they didn’t know which way to run.
But just as the pirates started hauling on their hooks and I figured we had it in the bag, the door to the under-decks slammed open and a bald-headed, buzzard-beaked priest with an extra fancy robe strode out with six paladin spear carriers for an escort and a motherfucking wand of blue fire in his hands.
He aimed it at me and the world stopped like someone had hit the pause button. I stopped. He stopped. Everybody stopped. The only thing I could hear was the blood pounding in my neck. Then he spoke. He sounded like a juvie school principal giving a lecture.
“I have orders to spare you, demoness.” He swung the barrel of his white plastic Casio-looking gun toward the mesa, where Kai-La and Burly and all the rest were still reeling in the ship. “But no such orders for your friends. Surrender or they die.”
I’d seen one of those pop guns in action before, so I knew he wasn’t bluffing. It might look like a vacuum cleaner tube with some Christmas lights on the side, but the fucking thing could carve a mountain in half if you wanted it to. It scared the living piss out of me. On the other hand, I could see it in his beady little eyes that I scared the living piss out of him too. Maybe I could bluff him.
I took a step towards him, sword low but ready. “And how many do you think you can kill before I cut you in half? You wanna try it? You wanna take your shot?”
He edged back, eyes twitching from me to the pirates and back, as his guards stepped in front of him, spears leveled. “You would not risk it. Your lover is among them. You—”
With a sound like a fastball hitting a catcher’s mitt, a crossbow bolt appeared in his shoulder and he shrieked and fell and dropped the wand.
“Ha! Nice shot!”
Score one for my pirate pals, and more bolts started to thud into the deck all around him as the crew on the mesa reeled the ship into close range. A bolt took out one of Beaky’s paladins. The others were ducking and backing away.
I sprang at ’em, hoping to finish ’em off and get a hold of that fucking zap gun, but they were a lot tougher than the guys I’d cut down earlier, even under fire, and kept me back with some fancy spear work, stabbing and backing and stabbing and backing as Beak-Nose staggered to his feet with the wand clutched to his chest and ran for the foredeck.