by Dan Allen
Nehal kept by Toran’s side, but fled behind a barrel when the sounds of the massacre became unbearable.
Toran turned from the boy, taking in the mass of pirate ships in the harbor. The enemy ships ran out in two lines, like claws reaching out on either side, surrounding the trapped Serbani armada.
Flames climbed the masts of five of his ships and in moments, twelve, and then twenty.
Serbani ships answered back with scattered fire, but the cannons were quickly silenced by crossing broadsides from enemy gun decks.
Toran stood mid-deck trying to see a way out the massacre—and this was just the beginning. The real massacre would start when the ships began raiding the unprotected Serbani ports.
“Captain!” Nehal shouted from where he cringed behind a barrel. “We have to get out of the harbor. It’s a trap.”
“Yes, and I led us into it,” Toran roared angrily. He paused, wincing, as if trying to squeeze the grief of his body. “This is the end for us.” He did not attempt to make polite denials, as if the facts were somehow avertable.
The boy’s face twitched with emotion, fighting back a sudden urge to cry.
“Nehal, if you want to be by my side, you must be brave. I need someone brave by my side.”
“Yes, sir.”
“The honest brave children are made Guardians in heaven.”
Nehal nodded and started from behind his hiding place.
“Hold fast!” Toran dove and tackled the boy.
A cannon shell exploded into the ship’s stern, sending wooden splinters overhead and high into the air.
Both were on their feet again instantly. Nehal glanced at the point of impact then straightened and bit his trembling lip. He stood with his heels together and his arms tucked behind his back. “Are we . . . going to die, Captain?”
Toran put a hand on his shoulder without looking. The two stared straight at the incoming warship that had just blasted a hole in the ship’s stern with its bow cannon. Nearby, sailors desperately hauled in the anchor.
“Nehal,” Toran said. “I’m afraid the only men that will leave this harbor alive will be on Hersian ships.”
The enemy dreadnought was closing fast, cutting directly through the center of his helpless fleet, chasing his admiral’s flag.
“The only ships that get out of here are Hersian . . .” Nehal rehearsed. “Then you’d better get one!”
Toran exchanged a surprised expression with the boy. “I just might.”
The approaching dreadnought was a wide-bodied vessel, built to ram. Oars raised, the ship listed slightly as its helmsman worked it against the gusting wind to keep Toran’s flagship, the North Forest, in its sights.
The Hersians wouldn’t ram the ship and risk sinking such a prize. Toran and his ship would both be taken back to the witch queen’s island to net a hefty favor from the demon ruler of the corsairs.
The Hersians meant to board the North Forest.
The pirates were greedy. That would be their undoing.
“Nehal—quickly. Get the dragon skin bag from the chest in my cabin. Climb up the mast as high as you can and dump it out on the deck. Then wait there until you see me on the deck of that dreadnought, then swing across. Go!”
Nehal nodded and darted aft toward the captain’s quarters, dodging sailors as he went.
The dreadnought closed quickly against a backdrop of explosions and flaming masts. The Hersian pirates had the wind at their backs, black sails hoisted and guns loaded. Dozens of the Hersian ships slashed through the helpless Serbani fleet. To Toran, it was like being in a collapsing house, trapped and watching one pillar at a time crumble and crush a loved one in a helpless, hopeless horror.
Toran had time to issue only one order. “Under and over!”
The command echoed across the deck and Toran’s men dove overboard in droves as the dreadnought maneuvered alongside Toran’s flagship. Hersian sailors packed the enemy ship’s deck, waiting for the distance to close to grappling range.
Toran glanced at the mast of his ship. Nehal was climbing with difficulty. The bag was at least half his weight.
“Do it, Nehal!” Toran shouted, praying his voice would be heard over the roar of the battle.
Nehal looked to Toran then dumped from the bag a staggering amount of gold coins. Glittering, gleaming, gold circles bounced and rolled across the deck.
The pirates on the looming dreadnought leaned forward, pressing against the deck rail as their grappling lines shot out greedily toward the North Forest.
Toran gathered a great breath, bolted for the far deck and launched himself off. A terrifying fall later, he splashed into the water and surfaced among the able Serbani seamen, sturdy Erdali cavaliers, and enormous Furendali spear throwers who had already abandoned ship. Toran found only a few survivors bobbing. As if the chilly sea was taking its own toll, the men went down one by one.
The tactic was meant to look that way.
Toran dove. Deeper and deeper he swam, kicking and pulling with desperation. The pressure tortured his ears. His lungs throbbed and bucked, desperately trying to release the load of air they held. His fingers went numb at the ends. His whole body racked with convulsions as his desperate lungs fought with his mind to take in a breath.
The hulls of both ships drifted above, one wide dark shape alongside the sleek form of his abandoned flagship.
Toran could hold his breath no longer. His whole body screamed out, tempting him to gasp, to suck in, to swallow.
Toran kicked for the surface, struggling to get his water-soaked boots and trappings clothes toward the surface that now seemed to never get any closer. But he was not alone.
A stronger swimmer caught him under the arm and pulled him toward the rippled ceiling between air and death.
Quietly the two surfaced on the far side of the dreadnought, joining the silent company of his crew.
Rising and falling in the growing waves, Furendali spearmen, hulks of hair-covered men, threw grappling hooks trailing heavy, water-soaked lines that snagged the railing on the deck many yards overhead. Toran took the first line, climbing toward the deck of the enemy ship. As he scrambled up the slick outer hull, he passed the ship’s painted title “Devil’s Tail.”
The noise of battle hid any sound of their sneak attack. Deafening explosions echoed off the steep cliff walls and the roaring wind carried every shouted word into oblivion.
When Toran reached the first row of openings in the ship, he gazed in where rows of slaves sat still, their oars retracted.
None so much as opened their mouth when they saw him.
They want the ship to be captured. They’re betraying their masters.
Betrayal!
Was it possible he had been betrayed?
Only the captains and commodores knew the rally point, and only three were yet to arrive. All of them were from Ruban.
Traitors.
Toran’s heart bled empty at the thought that a cabal of well-to-do backstabbing doubters had ransomed the lives of thousands of his volunteers who had come to help the Serbani fight against the Hersian menace.
It was the Rubani who had sold his location to the Hersians.
The hollow, cold, unfeeling emptiness—he had felt it before, once, deep in a cavern.
Tira had stolen the crystal pendant that activated the Lyrium Compass. He had caught her using it—she would have siphoned the life out of him if her sister hadn’t been there to prevent it. Tira had chosen power over his love.
He should have killed her then, when he had the chance.
Betrayal.
Disbelief at the brazen treachery burned into rage. The Rubani had sold him and their own Serbani blood kin to the Hersian menace.
A single thought drove out all others.
Never again. No more betrayals.
Anger fueled h
is formidable frame as hand-over-hand he hauled himself higher. He reached the deck and put his iron grip on the rail where ten grappling lines were already teaming with men climbing out of the sea. He gave a great pull and vaulted onto the deck of the Devil’s Tail.
The pirate sailors were abandoning their posts, swinging from the masts onto the gold-speckled deck of the North Forest. Others dashed boldly across unsecured boarding ladders and even hung from the grappling lines, desperate for the spilled treasure. The Hersian pirate mercenaries already on the deck of the North Forest clobbered each other in a mad dash for the massive wealth that littered the deck—the entire annual tribute of the Montazi. Even the Devil’s Tail’s captain appeared in the fray.
Toran charged at the pirates still left on the Devil’s Tail. Behind him, massive Furendali spear throwers and his able Serbani mariners surged onto the deck. A bevy of tavern-clearing tackles sent dozens of the Hersian pirates overboard.
Toran drew the potato-peeling kitchen knife with his left hand and used it to draw a sailor’s eyes before knocking out the hefty sea-faring Hersian islander with a skull-crunching punch that drew a roar of cheers from the warlike Furendali storming the deck.
Toran continued his berserker assault, driving toward the side nearest his own ship, chancing occasional glances into the masts for the cabin boy between backbreaking open arm tackles and shoulder-
dislocating throws.
A sword came within his reach as a pirate tripped over a fallen comrade. Toran yanked the sword free of the pirate and wielded it with all the rage he could summon. Blade in his hand, the enraged attack took on a deadlier color. The steel cut down opponents like a scythe moving through yellow Erdali barley fields. Fueled by his near single-handed onslaught, the storming of the Devil’s Tail quickly turned from a dangerous stunt to a miraculous heist.
The grappling lines snapped loose as his sailors cut them free. The dreadnought’s sails caught the fiercely whipping wind and the captured ship surged away from the North Forest.
A counterattack broke out from the galley and a bevy of pirates—the slave taskmasters—climbed onto the deck from below.
Toran drove his saber through two of the pirates with one stab, like game hens on a spit. He kicked his sword free and whirled to separate another man from his sword arm. Desperately he searched the masts of both ships for the cabin boy.
Nehal was nowhere to be seen.
Toran turned his eyes back to the thickest fighting in time to see Nehal drop out of a net, lock his arms around a pirate’s neck and clamp his legs around the man’s waist like a monkey. “Sock him, somebody! I’ve got him pinned.”
Toran put a heavy fist into the unlucky pirate’s gut, plied Nehal off, and tossed the heavier of the two over the side.
“What did I tell you about fighting with the men?” Toran roared.
“Don’t start a fight you can’t win. Or was it, ‘don’t surrender when you can still fight’?”
“Oh, I can’t even remember now.” Toran leapt onto a water barrel lashed to a mast and bellowed to a sailor near the helm. “Get this ship turned around!” He shouted down through the grate into the galley. “Oars out. Spear throwers get below deck—back up those slaves.” Toran’s crew leapt into action, readying their escape out of the hell they were trapped in.
“That’s the only way out,” Nehal said, pointing toward the gap in the cliffs where ships burning with black smoke and listing awkwardly jutted out of the water like tombstones. “We have to go against the wind,” Nehal shouted as a broadside gust rocked the vessel.
“Furl the sails!” Toran ordered. “Tie them down!”
Sailors scampered up the rigging. As the heavy sails collapsed, the pressure against the ship slackened and the work of the oars sent the ship surging forward with each thrust.
The work of death was all but finished on the deck, but all around the harbor it continued in urgent, merciless horror. Explosions of gunpowder ripped through decks. Flaming pieces of ships littered the water where bloodied and dismembered bodies floated among the detritus of the massacre.
Ahead, a lone ship, the Fair Acres, captained by a young Serbani commodore named Eastwick as Toran recalled, had cut across the enemy and slowed the attack. The bold move was soon to become suicidal. The ship, which had just emptied its cannons on both sides, was about to be overtaken.
“Mark the Fair Acres!” Toran bellowed to the Serbani who had taken up the helm. The man gave him a confused look, so Toran leapt up the ladder, grabbed the wheel and turned it until the Devil’s Tail was headed for the Fair Acres.
The Devil’s Tail’s oars stroked the water rhythmically from one deck below the guns, closing the distance to the Fair Acres and its attacker.
“Ramming speed!” Toran ordered.
Drums beat below decks, speeding the pace of the rowers.
“Ready guns to starboard.”
“They don’t know,” Nehal said with a grin as he came up to the pilot deck. “The pirates think we’re coming to help them fight the Fair Acres.”
Toran nodded, pleased at Nehal’s intuition. The attacking frigate turned and came broadside to the Fair Acres, taking cannon fire in return. But its wind-filled sails carried it swiftly past the Fair Acres—a wise move, considering the Devil’s Tail was coming up the opposite side, ready to deliver a brutal broadside before the men on the Fair Acres’s cannon deck could cross over to ready a volley on the port side—a nautical one-two punch.
However, Toran’s cannons fired deliberately early, missing the stern of the Fair Acres and slamming into the enemy ship. In quick succession, three cannonballs broke into the Hersian frigate’s hull near the waterline and a fourth cannon shell hit a powder keg. A series of deafening explosions blossomed in a storm of red and yellow flame.
Nehal gave a smart salute to the infuriated pirate captain whose vessel would soon be at the bottom of the cove. Meanwhile dozens of sailors from the sinking Fair Acres swung on lines across to Toran’s dreadnought, adding to his crew.
“I say, I made it!” shrieked a long-limbed man as he fell from a swinging mast line and rolled across the dreadnought’s deck.
“Not him again,” Nehal said disappointedly.
“Ranville!” Toran bellowed. “Get below before I throw you overboard. To the oars—every man to the oars!”
Toran looked back. The enemy frigate that had seen Toran’s treachery coughed thick, black smoke. No signal from that wounded ship could warn the Hersians that one of their own ships had been captured—he hoped.
Rain splashed down on the deck as the hurricane released a violent barrage on the harbor.
“Into the storm!” Toran shouted, pointing to the gap in the cove that led to ocean. “Take us out!”
The Fair Acres captain climbed to the pilot deck and joined Toran at the helm to brace the wheel as the ship pitched over a huge breaker and onto the other side of the huge ocean swell.
“Heading, sir?” the captain shouted over the wind.
“Due south, Eastwick. Take us south.”
“South?”
Toran narrowed his eyes. “We row for the storm, for Hersa and her unguarded ports. We’ll take the fight to their coasts and force them to turn back to defend their own.”
“Yes, admiral.” The subordinate captain turned and bellowed a bevy of orders that echoed across the deck as the Fair Acres seamen fought to tie down the last of the sails. “We aren’t out of the fight yet.”
Toran leaned into a second swell. As the ship rose, another Hersian frigate, triple-masted with double-gun decks, rounded the point and turned into the gap of the inlet, blocking the Devil’s Tail’s path.
“Toran, we don’t have enough men to man the guns and the oars,” Eastwick shouted. “And we’re too slow against the wind. We’re sitting ducks.”
Patience spent, Toran roared back at the young captain. “
Haven’t you got a magician or something? What are you Serbani good for anyway?”
“I have one,” Eastwick replied.
“Well, where is he?” Toran shouted.
“How should I know?”
“Pellin!” Nehal cheered. He jumped up and down on the deck pointing to the center mast. “The weather mage!”
Toran looked to the crow’s nest of the tallest mast. A lone man with a gray beard that whipped in the wind struggled to keep his balance in the pitching sea. As the ship crested a wave, he raised both hands over his head.
A tingle ran up Toran’s spine and all the hair on Nehal’s head stood up. A look of smug satisfaction crossed over Eastwick as a single, tiny flash of lightning danced down from the sky and flickered about the inlet until it made contact with the enemy frigate. Suddenly twelve bolts of lightning forked downward, joining into a torrent of electric fire. The sails glowed blue for one silent moment before the thunderclap reached the Devil’s Tail, followed by an even more deafening blast as the gunpowder detonated. The combined firepower obliterated the ship, sending broken, flaming pieces of hull and deck spinning in to the storm.
“Is that good enough for you inlanders?!” Eastwick shouted triumphantly at Toran.
“Get Pellin!” Toran bellowed.
The exhausted magician rolled sideways and collapsed over the railing of the crow’s nest, but his secure line held and he swayed loosely like a marionette while a fellow sailor climbed to his aid.
“Grace of the Guardians,” Eastwick sighed as he wiped damp hair away from his face. “I never saw anything like that.”
“He just blew up the ship!” Nehal cheered.
A huge wave swelled in front of the ship. Toran seized Nehal under one arm like a bushel basket and clamped the steely grip of his other arm around a belay pin. A wash of heavy seawater hit them like a slap of a giant’s hand.
Eastwick held the wheel as the ship climbed the swell and pitched down again, in clear view of the open ocean.