by Lisle, Holly
So what were these two doing, coming to the end of the Thousand Dancers, beyond the edge of the civilized world?
Kait’s nerves jangled at the sight of them, and fear crawled beneath her skin.
“Ry . . . ,” she said, “do you see those?”
He glanced in the direction that she pointed and froze. He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.
Kait could make out the gondolas strung beneath the huge envelopes, and the catch-ropes trailing like a hundred spider legs beneath. “They shouldn’t be out this far, or headed this way,” she said.
“I know. But we still have leagues until they come level with us.” Ian, standing on the other side of the deck with Hasmal, had noticed what they were looking at. He squinted, frowned, and after a moment’s hesitation, came over to them. “Airibles?” he asked.
The advantage of Karnee eyesight. They were perfectly clear to Kait. “Yes.”
Ian nodded. “You think they’re a threat?”
“I don’t know,” Ry looked at Kait, a worry crease furrowing his brow. “They’re making straight for us. If it’s coincidence, and we take evasive action, we’re a few stations behind schedule, and we make Merrabrack Island the day after tomorrow. If they are coming for us and we don’t try to escape—we give them what they’re after without a fight.”
Ian closed his eyes and it seemed to Kait he turned inward. He stood that way for a long moment, his arms crossed over his chest, his body swaying with the movement of the ship. Finally he drew a deep breath, straightened his shoulders, and opened his eyes. Kait could tell he’d come to some sort of decision; the anger that had been in his eyes since she’d accepted the captain’s bargain was either gone or well hidden, and some of the tension had left his face. He said, “If we turn south now, we’ll be pushing straight against the Deep Current. This time of year it runs close to the continent. We have to get to Merrabrack before we can catch the shelf countercurrent. If it were a few months on . . .” He shrugged. “It isn’t a few months on. We try to run south now and we’ll be as good as sitting still, and those airships will have their way with us. And if the airships aren’t here for us—and why would they be?—we’ve run for nothing, cost the Wind Treasure stores and time, and put ourselves right into the path of seasonal storms.”
Ry and Ian both looked at Kait. Ry said, “Your Family, your nightmares. Your call.”
Kait thought for only an instant. “I say we get out of their way.”
Ry left them without another word. Within moments, the sailors were scurrying in the rigging giving the ship more sheets, and the captain at the wheel was taking the Wind Treasure hard north, straight into the heart of the Thousand Dancers.
Kait, Ian, and Ry moved to port and stared west again, watching the airibles. After a few moments, Hasmal joined them.
The four of them were silent, waiting and watching. The airibles maintained their swift, majestic course, heading due east.
“We’ll be out of their path soon,” Ry said. “We’ll skirt a few of the islands and when they’ve gone past us, we’ll resume our previous course. The captain wasn’t thrilled, but like you, he couldn’t think of a time when he’d seen airibles this far east.”
“Thank you,” Kait said. She leaned against the rail, weak-kneed with relief. She wouldn’t have to face the doom Hasmal had warned her about. She would, perhaps, survive the adventure, give Solander his Mirror of Souls, and then . . .
And then, find a way to return to whatever might remain of her Family and resume her life.
They stood that way for a long time, watching the islands growing larger off the ship’s bow, and the airibles growing larger off its port side. The airibles kept their course, running due east, giving no notice to the Wind Treasure.
Finally Kait let out her breath, only then realizing that she’d been holding it, only taking the air in scared little sips since she first saw the dots on the horizon.
Hasmal to that point had said nothing. Now, however, Kait heard him whisper, “I thought so.”
The dismay in his voice was warning enough. She turned to the southwest.
Both airibles were turning. Northeast. A course designed to intercept the Wind Treasure.
“Not our shadows after all,” Kait whispered.
“Ah, Brethwan,” Ry muttered, at the moment that Hasmal said, “Help us, Vodor Imrish.”
Ry turned to Kait. “Do you know anything about those ships that might help us survive what’s coming? Can you even tell us what’s coming?”
“I recognize both airibles,” Kait said. “Those are the Galweigh greatships. Galweigh’s Eagle and Heart of Fire. Each holds fifty armored men plus armaments, a captain, a first mate, and eight engine crew. I might even know the captains and crews—or I would have before the Sabirs attacked our House. In any case, they’ll be carrying fire pitch and quicklights, and they’ll have stones in the ballast that they can drop on us to hole us. They can take those ships higher than this ship’s catapults can fire, and they can destroy us from that height.” She looked at one island not too distant, where umbrella trees grew down to the shore and their canopy overhung the bay, forming an arboreal cave. She pointed. “They couldn’t get in among the trees. . . .” She looked at the Wind Treasure’s three masts and forest of yards, sails, and rigging. “But then, if we got into them, we probably wouldn’t be able to get out. But we can’t outrun the airibles.”
“You know a lot about them,” Hasmal said.
Kait nodded, still watching the approaching ships. “I’ve flown smaller ships. There’s nothing we can do to them that they can’t do to us first. And worse.”
Ry laughed—a dry, humorless sound. “Then what do we do?”
The airibles could cover as much as three times the distance of the fastest sailing ship running flat out in open water, and the Wind Treasure wasn’t going to get to go flat out. She was already in the nest of islands, and having to watch her channel closely.
“Die?” Kait sighed. “Make it a little harder for them to kill us? The best we can do is get in under the trees—force them to come at us from the side to board. If they have to do that—get within our reach—we can hurt them with our catapults. Maybe shoot the envelopes with fire arrows—though the cloth has been treated to keep it from burning. I’m guessing that they know we have the Mirror of Souls. That fact should keep them from sinking us until they can get it.” She’d kept her eyes on the airibles while she talked, but now she turned to Ry. “I’m also guessing that once they get the Mirror, they’ll want us dead, so anything we do to them, we have to do before they board us. We can’t fight them once we have nothing they want.”
Ry ran to talk with the captain. After a moment, the ship changed course and nosed in toward the island Kait had pointed out.
Hasmal was at her shoulder again. “Kait? Would a hard wind dispel them?”
“It might.”
“Well, I might be able to conjure a wind. The way I did on the Peregrine, when we were trapped in the Wizards’ Circle. Perhaps.”
Kait turned to stare at him, feeling a sudden, impossible hope. “I’d forgotten about that.”
“Yes. Then, I offered my blood and my flesh and my life and my soul in exchange for getting us out of the Wizards’ Circle, and Vodor Imrish got us out. But there’s a problem. I can sacrifice my blood again, but he already owns my life and my soul. So perhaps he’ll feel that I’m already in debt to him with everything I have, and he may choose to collect rather than let me go even deeper into debt. What else do I have to offer him?”
Kait frowned thoughtfully. “I don’t know. He’s your god. What does he like?”
“Mostly, he likes to be left alone.”
“Then I suppose all of us had better hope he likes you.” She put a hand on his arm. “Will you summon him?”
Hasmal said, “I’ll try.”
“I’ll go with you. Last time, you almost bled yourself to death making your offering. I’m still surprised you lived.”
&
nbsp; “He wasn’t done with me yet.”
The airibles were close, close enough that it would be a race to see whether they could get above the ship before the ship could get under that tangle of umbrella trees that grew down to the water’s edge and arched far over it.
“Let’s hope he still isn’t,” Kait said as they ran for the hatchway and their cabin.
Chapter 18
Ry stared at the oncoming airibles, and tried to think of what he could do to turn them around. They were Galweigh ships, true, and within them he felt the touch of Galweigh magic—but with it, he felt the touch of the Sabir Wolves as well. That mix felt foul . . . greasy . . . tainted. What sort of alliance had sprung up in his absence . . . and why did it stink of the Hellspawn Trinity? He could feel the influence of his second cousins, the brothers Crispin and Anwyn and their cousin Andrew, dripping through the spellcastings like poison.
They knew he was aboard the Wind Treasure. Perhaps one of them was the hidden watcher who had haunted Kait’s sleep.
He joined his lieutenants, who had been assisting the crew, and said, “There are Wolves aboard those ships. Some of them are Sabir Wolves, and some are Galweigh Wolves, but we are going to shield the Wind Treasure from their attack. All of you to the foredeck now.”
Ian Draclas had been a ship’s captain too long to avoid the action; the fact that his ship had been stolen from him and that he found himself virtually a prisoner aboard the ship his half-brother had chartered mattered not at all to him. He knew how to fight, and he knew how to survive, and he intended to survive this encounter.
He hammered volley shields into place beside the catapults along with the crew, and when that was finished, went to stand beside Captain Sleroal, who held his place at the ship’s great wheel.
“They’ll be overflying us soon,” he said. “We aren’t going to make the trees before they get off their first volley.”
“I can see that,” the Rophetian said quietly. “You got anything you can do besides tell me the obvious?”
Ian kept his temper. Sleroal flew the Sabir flag on his topmast; a flag that would ward off most enemies before they even attacked. The Sabir reputation for retribution protected them as surely as if they rode protected by an armada. Ian, who had been both attacked and attacker throughout his years captaining the Peregrine, figured himself to have much more experience in actual battle than the older man.
He said, “They’ll most likely hit us with burning pitch first. But if you have your men fill the scrub buckets with seawater while there’s still time and soak our stores of canvas in the sea, we’ll be able to put out the worst of the fires before they can spread.”
The captain glanced at him. “Decided to join our side, eh?”
“I’d prefer to live through the day.”
“I, too.” Sleroal shouted at several of his sailors, “You . . . and you . . . fill every bucket on the ship with seawater. You and you . . . below for the stores of canvas and soak all of it. Ready it for the fires. Everyone, stand ready to run for buckets.”
Both Ian and the captain looked up at the airibles. They blocked off what seemed like half the sky. One had moved itself neatly behind the other; he assumed this was so one flying ship could pour fire and arrows down on them and then move to reposition while the second took its place.
“You have any other ideas, I’ll be more than happy to hear them now,” Sleroal said.
“Not until I see what they do.” The Wind Treasure couldn’t hope to win. Ian didn’t give himself much chance of survival, either. But he was determined to give the bastards as much fight as he could muster. “They’ll be over us in just an instant,” he said.
“Aye.” The captain stared around his ship and grimaced. “Best get under the volley shields.” He locked the wheel and shouted, “Men! Under cover!”
Like a school of fish in front of a shark, the sailors poured into the hatches and beneath the volley shields. Ian and the captain were last under. Ian peeked out from beneath the shield’s edge and watched as the leading airible’s gondola moved toward the Wind Treasure. Anytime now. . . . He braced himself for the burning pitch that would come pouring out of the base of the gondola, or for the stream of rocks that would begin to pound the ship’s frame.
The airible sailed gracefully overhead, dropping nothing.
A sailor next to him growled, “Y’ mean t’ tell me we did all this scramblin’ an’ worryin’ an the damn things were na’ after us at all?”
Someone laughed, and then someone else. Everyone still waited under the shields, watching, because caution only made sense. But the second airible soared overhead, doing nothing more than the first had, and the laughter got louder.
The sailors poured out from beneath the shields and started for their stations, and the captain murmured, “I told him it was just coincidence them being here when we were.” He returned to his helm.
Ian felt like a fool, and figured Kait felt twice the fool, since she was the one who had finally declared the airibles a threat. She deserved to feel a fool. She was a paranoid, a freak, not even human.
He wished he didn’t love her. He wished he could excise her from his mind.
The first airible reached the island to which the Wind Treasure had been running. The ship changed speed, so that it hung over the canopy of trees that would have sheltered the ship. Hatches in the rear of the gondola opened, and dark streams of liquid began to pour out. It spread as it fell, turning into a faintly green cloud that covered the area—they weren’t pouring unlit burning pitch, then, but something else. Ian wondered what it was and what it did.
The torrent of liquid stopped abruptly, and an instant later the single flaming arrow launched toward the trees from the front of the gondola answered his questions. The air itself caught fire, that one arrow spreading flames through the deadly rain faster than anything Ian had ever seen. In an instant, the entire island forest was alight, and their hope of sheltering there gone.
Bastards. Filthy bastards. Not just attacking, but cutting off the Wind Treasure’s only escape route first.
“About!” the captain screamed. “Give me mains and forecourses. Fly, you whoresons! Fly, or we’re dead men!”
The Wind Treasure hove hard to port, her bow digging into the choppy strait, turning back the way she’d come. The men on the ratlines unfurled sails with frantic speed, and the sails dropped and caught and filled, bellying out with a wind that hadn’t been there a moment earlier. A hard wind.
By the gods, a hard wind couldn’t have come at a better time. Ian stared up at the airibles—they were taking a hellish buffeting. One had been caught sideways; the wind tore at its envelope, and he saw the side ripple as if punched by an invisible first. The sailors cheered, and Ian cheered with them. The other airible managed to keep its nose into the wind, but the sudden gale pushed it off course, away from the Wind Treasure.
Sleroal saw what was happening and reversed himself. “Furl sails and drop anchor,” he bellowed, and as quickly as the sails had appeared, they disappeared. The anchors splashed into the strait, and in an instant the Wind Treasure was tugging at them, fighting the rising waves, but watching the two airibles blowing away.
Every man on the deck screamed defiance at the airibles, and they cheered their fantastic luck . . . and then a flash of brilliant green light in one of the airible gondolas shot out of a near-side port, lobbed gently through the air, and struck the center of the Wind Treasure. Fire blossomed, an eerie, silent, green chrysanthemum in the center of the deck. It consumed the mainmast and the men on its riggings, the captain and the wheel, and a perfect circle of deck in one burst of light. The stricken men hadn’t even had time to scream before they ceased to exist. The fire didn’t spread, it didn’t die out slowly, it didn’t leave embers in its wake. As quickly as it appeared, it was gone. The sailors were too stunned to react. Ian stared at the airibles, where another flash warned him that another volley of the deadly fire was on its way.
“Cover,�
� he screamed. “Take cover! Incoming!”
Men fell off the ratlines in their hurry, and lay stunned on the deck. Others, more graceful or else just luckier, pounded over and around their fallen comrades and flung themselves down the ship’s hatches as the second green fireball descended. Ian judged arc and trajectory and guessed the thing would hit the foremast; he raced aft and was under cover in time to see foremast, forecastle, yards, sails, ratlines, part of the cabins, and another circle of deck disappear as if they’d never been. But the gale kept blowing, and the next fireball one of the airibles launched fell into the sea short of its target . . . and the next fell even farther away.
The ship hadn’t been holed. That was a mercy—or else planning on the part of the attackers. Boring clean through it with that green fire of theirs could have destroyed the thing Ian was certain they had come to get: Kait’s artifact. They wouldn’t risk that. They’d just disabled the ship.
But they hadn’t counted on that lovely, sudden, wonderful wind. The airibles blew out of range of their target and, while the sailors watched, almost out of sight. That was a hellish wind. Ian would have cheered, and certainly felt that his own survival deserved a cheer, but the survivors had much to do. The Wind Treasure was a wreck. They might manage to limp the ship to a safe port on just spritsails and mizzens, but they’d have to shore up the bowsprit to do it. They’d lost all but their aft square sails, all their jibs, and even the top spritsail, and they’d have to rig a tiller to the rudder since the ship’s wheel was gone. Nevertheless, with sufficient time, Ian thought he could get them to safety. To do it, the wind would have to remain in his favor and keep the airibles at bay.
A wave of nausea overcame him suddenly. It felt like it had rolled over him from outside, and when it left him, he was weaker, and plagued by a nagging feeling of sickness that hadn’t been there before.