"Did ye hear that? Did ye hear?" someone rasped, the suddenness jerking many a slumped form to alertness.
"What is it? Report without the soddin' panic!" Grimm snarled, hawked and gobbed blood overboard.
"Dunno, Cox'n, it was well forrard on't big T'. A bang or somethin'." Grimm exchanged a resigned look with Van Reiver, as though each man was reluctant to speak first. Then, as though to drape demoralisation around them like a blanket, deep muffled crumps rang from Tryphon's main deck, rising in volume as they peered at the stern. The shock vibrated their boat from prow to transom, rattling teeth and equipment alike.
"Row!" Van Reiver ordered.
"ROW!" Grimm thundered.
The trapped warship gave a violent jerk to steerboard, as if battered by an invisible gale attempting to stem the flames. The remains of the three towering masts sheared off at deck level. Their ears howled with the agonised screech of tortured timber and clatter of falling lines and lethal swinging blocks. A blast of sultry air and a roiling wave of sooty yellow flame flashed overhead, singeing any exposed skin as the air sizzled outwards to eviscerate the fog bank for hundreds of yards. Debris hurled skywards. Masts, spars and sections of burning sails raised dozens of waterspouts all around them.
The blast flattened them in the rocking boat as it jerked away with the splash of oars. It drenched each person with a deluge of soot-stained, salty water. Once again Van Reiver picked himself up. He ached from hitting a thwart bracket with his elbow, suggesting the earlier healing potion was consumed.
"Don't just sit there gawpin', fuckin' row. Get yer backs in it!" Grimm hollered.
Van Reiver saw Grimm throw out an urgent arm as men marched to the stern rail of Tryphon. His blood froze ice-solid as he glimpsed the familiar feathered apparel. A second later, an even heavier set, more elaborately regaled man in a dark-grey feather mask shook a glowing onyx-tipped staff with a black and pink feathered collar. He roared at the escapees in an unknown ringing tongue, his angry words seething with power, unintelligible but writhing with sibilant menace. The raiders dropped their spears and nocked arrows to bows. Unlike earlier, they were standard shortbows rather than the more complicated ankhbow, or crossbow.
Merizus whistled across to the captain's barge, packed with marines, and gestured at the stern.
What could they do? What? Fuck! Van Reiver spun and looked around. "Jimi, engage them on the dinky ballista!" The navigator saw the boy freeze as he gaped open-mouthed at the outlandish men. "Jimi!" Van Reiver jerked the boy standing behind the weapon mount back to reality. Jimi swung the short barrel dangerously around. "On the up-roll lad," Van Reiver instructed, calmer than his guts felt, willing on the youth. The boy squinted with fear-driven intensity through the iron sight, with youthful fingers yanking the firing handle. Several of the men at the stern fell to the marine's, likely not all with injuries, but the quarrels aimed at the staff wielder missed.
The masked apparition silhouetted by flames waved the staff, gesturing at the marines in the captain's barge. The weapon unleashed a dazzling globe of sooty fire which sizzled through the air. It sent up steam from the sea in its wake and exploded into the larboard side of the boat, sending panicked men flailing and burning into the sea. It blasted the marine in the stern in a perfect horizontal arc, still holding the banewood tiller arm, to splash stunned into the water, close to Van Reiver's boat.
"Gods!" someone gasped.
Van Reiver hurled himself from his half-crouch to yell at the man in the stern port from which they'd departed, two decks below the enemy. "Captain! This way! Hur—" Thwack! Van Reiver never completed his entreaty. An arrow slammed with a sickening thump into his shoulder. It spun him like a top and the wind fled from his lungs as darkness fell.
.*.*.
Across from Dagmar, the coxswain twisted about at the explosive grunt and threw himself across a man to grasp for Van Reiver's charred clothing as the navigator lurched. Get him, Dagmar wanted to scream, and pulled himself upright, the only thing he could do. The cox'n missed, his fingers clenching at Van Reiver's cuff too late as the fabric moved, snatching only air. Carla screamed, her hand darting to mouth as Van Reiver flopped into the sea.
More arrows thunked. Grimm howled, legs rising in the air when he landed on a crate of food and the carpenter's mate's leg. An arrow punched through his right foot to project an inch from Dagmar's face. The sunjammer gaped, horror-struck at the vicious obsidian arrowhead, as crimson gore pattered his face and slid slug like downwards.
From his blood smeared view, Dagmar witnessed the flash of the third arrow clattered into the ballista mount, then struck Jimi in the face. Time froze. Everyone stared in horrified helplessness as the boy tottered, splattering spittle, snot and blood from his shattered face. Jimi stumbled, his nose and jaw missing, eye bobbing on the nerve within flapping flesh before toppling overboard, the rocking of the empty ballista and a solitary ripple the only marker for a young life spent.
"Fucking bastards!" Dagmar shoved Grimm's foot out of his face and wobbled upright. He felt the speckles of blood harden on his face as though he faced a rising sun. The boy's projectile had shattered on the stern rail, showering the archers with burning splinters. They ran, screaming and pawing at their armour, which blackened with their flesh. Dagmar gaped as one marine—still holding the tiller—flew past. Beside him a huge marine scrabbled across a thwart clutching his bloody side tight and a seaman with an axe grabbed a coiled line and threw it after the foundering marine. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the swimming man splash at it before grasping it tight. Another seaman with a blood-stained sleeve grabbed the rope and barked encouragement as they dragged the man closer.
The sunjammer saw the axeman flick his head from an arrow as a small marine shrugged out of his armour. "You pull, Harcux, I'll push!" The marine rasped, then dropped over the side and paddled a dozen feet to Van Reiver, rolling him over, pulling him close.
"Help him!" Dagmar croaked, pointing at the men kicking towards them, ignoring the falling arrows splashing in an obscene rain. The sunjammer breathed deep, body wracked with an unbelievable level of agony, yet thankful that someone had taken the initiative with Van Reiver to ease the burden. "Get a line to the other boat," he barked to a familiar deckhand—Seaman Meaun, his brain supplied from some obscure recess—jolting him from a stupefaction Dagmar had felt moments before. The magus stared with a growing malevolence at the caster dancing free from the flames on Tryphon. Words of power Dagmar had once rejected and buried deep in his mind now roiled unbidden across his thoughts. A boiling anger trampled the pain of his ravaged body, fuelled by rage and frustration, and the dreadful yearning to abuse his mana.
Dagmar blew his cheeks out, thinking, knowing the blow to the head had addled his wits. He needed to concentrate as men moved about calling out unfamiliar names and tasks. Trevir—the small marine?—pushed Van Reiver towards the side of the boat where Harcux leant over, hands like spades hovering above the water. The pair moved his comatose friend with careful efficiency to avoid the arrow jutting through him and lifted him back into the boat.
Staggering at the motion, Dagmar kept his balance by windmilling his arms. Muttering a quick prayer to any god that listened, he saw Meaun tie off the line to the other boat.
"You—Trevir? get a firm grip on the side. Serjeant Merizus, isn't it? Tell your man to keep hold of the rope."
"Huh?" Merizus grunted, nonplussed. A burned deckhand covered for him and bellowed the instruction. Dagmar ignored them, lost in the clarity of a spell he'd studied as an apprentice magus. One he'd practised, once. A single occasion, terrifying him in such a manner he'd decided on a different vocation. He chanted the words with total clarity of recall, almost singing the incantation. Glowing syllables flashed before his eyes as energies coalesced within. With a sharp gesture to the booming cadence of his magic-augmented voice, he released. Mana spent, he revelled in the spell's climax as his soul cringed.
A sphere of energy coalesced into a fiery cobal
t blue ball over his hand, several inches across, with pale blue flickers of lightning caressing its surface in miniature roiling fury. With a yell of triumph, and ignoring the need to brace himself against the flow of energy, he hurled it at Tryphon. The man who'd so casually decimated a third of the survivors with one effortless spell, gaped with incredulous eyes as someone retaliated in kind. The roiling ball screeched at the ship and struck the magic user square in the chest, hurling him from view with a cut-off shriek. A human needed lungs to howl, Dagmar thought, with grim satisfaction forming a twisting wrongness to his mind.
The boat responded in an instant and jerked into the fog. The sudden momentum caused Harcux to clamp his arms, dragging Trevir face first against the boat. A startled oath erupted astern, as they pulled the bobbing marine several hundred feet into the fog and away from the growing inferno.
The spell and surge of motion sent Dagmar to his knees. His headache returned with a dreadful vengeance, pulsing white-hot crushing waves of pain. He resisted the impulse to huddle and cry. Instead, he forced himself to crawl over feet and legs to the ruby sunjammer crystal in the heavy mounting within its half-domed canopy. Almost blind in his agony, his hand reached on instinct across to the crystal, slapping it. As whiteness engulfed him, he muttered an incantation he could recite in his sleep. The ruby emitted a soft hum, giving off a faint glow. He could feel from the heat of from the energies contained within the gem. There was a jerk, then a smoother movement forwards at a few knots. Dagmar withdrew his hand from the minuscule mana expenditure to collapse unceremoniously across the doctor's legs.
Before he faded out, he heard the marine being dragged to safety, and a voice gasped for air. "I have to say, lads, that is up there with the worst fuckin' evenin' I ever had." Dagmar wanted to agree, but a vast weight dragged him down.
.*.*.
Carla pulled herself away from covering her father and chanced a glance at her new predicament. She saw Merizus haul in the rope, which to everyone's surprise still had the marine attached. A gasping red face peered up and clutched the boat with whitened knuckles.
"Ephraim, you feral bastard, you never cease to amaze me!" The serjeant exclaimed between wheezes and slapped the dripping helm with a calloused ring. A pair of fitter men hefted Ephraim into the bilges where he retched.
He looked up, his pockmarked face bemused, "Cheers. I never knew the choir boy had it in him. Maybe our sea leach ain't such a useless twat."
"Neither did I." Merizus slumped and glanced at his side and red fingertips.
"It saved our bacon, so don't knock it," Ephraim grunted and wafted his hand as the air misted around him. Merizus closed his eyes. Carla could almost sense him feeling the pain as the boat twisted, flowing with the ripples of the sea. They lurched as a massive ball of yellow flame blossomed behind them and glowed through the tendrils of fog. "Shit!" We left Bullsen! Can anyone see him?" Merizus blurted, running a hand over the bald pate Ephraim mocked, leaving fresh blood behind.
Carla shook her head and cleared her throat. "No, you didn't." Her tone was such it caught Merizus's attention, and those still conscious. A horrific audience, but they listened. "I saw him fighting two men. They disappeared inside when Mr Dagmar cast his spell, then reappeared. I saw him collapse, covered in blood by the window we came through.
"Are you sayin' he's dead?" Merizus demanded. She felt his angry eyes boring into hers, rank and status disregarded. His dark face twisted, then paled.
"Yes. How could he survive serious injury and the detonation? I'm so very sorry."
"Shit! We're royally fucked. How the fuckin' fuck did we get reamed double wide, huh? They're savages! Half the fuckin' half-troll cocksuckin' dog-pizzles didn't have proper weapons, or clothes!" Ephraim profaned, his voice soaring as he shuffled amongst feet, his face sour and bleak.
Merizus glared at him for several long seconds, face rigid. The fire died in Ephraim's gaze, quenched by the larger man's stare and veneer of discipline. "We need to figure out the runnin' away, without yowlin', eh?"
Carla looked up, slowly laying eyes on figures who sat half-dead in two small boats and allowed despair to wash over her. Not again. She saw Robsin looking balefully around, wondering where to start of their misadventure. She could sympathise—she should—but Carla knew this was just the start. It was unbelievable and unjust and she was helpless bar her knife being a weight in her sleeve. For a moment, just a moment as her anger stirred, she wished she had used it on that pathetic excuse for a man.
16
"Hand me the lantern, son," Doctor Robsin requested. A calming voice when Dagmar's eyes snapped open.
"Gnrrr, shit. How long have I been out?"
"A couple of hours." The white-haired man cracked the shutter of a brass lantern to emit a beam of yellow light. "I'm surprised it wasn't longer with the bang you had, and your heroics. It proves nothing was going on in your noggin to damage."
"Ha, I suppose I should ask how we're doing." Dagmar sat up with a helping hand from Trevir. His head felt thick, as though suffering a cold from hell with sharp twinges pulsing above his temple. Robsin nodded, inspecting Dagmar's bruises, and extinguished the light. Robsin puffed his red-veined cheeks out, looking beyond exhausted. His bloodshot, hangdog eyes wore huge black circles, and he looked older than his fifty-eight years.
"Well, as you can see from the gloom, we're somewhere in the fog you sent us into; the second boat is behind us with our sulking quartermaster. I've wrapped Edouard up, as I want daylight, before I poke at the arrow he's carrying. He has no major bleeding, but the shaft's near a few things he needs." He jerked his head at the shrouded lumps. "The others are the usual case of cuts, bruises, burns and broken bones you get from a nasty rumpus. I've removed Grimm's arrow and gave him a few stitches. It's messy, but I think he's been lucky. I also had to bully that man-mountain Merizus into letting me have a proper look at him."
"Oh, he didn't seem injured?" Dagmar cocked an eyebrow. Fuck—even that made his face hurt and his skull throb.
"Other than almost bleeding to death? No. He had a sizable gash under that armour in his side the size of my fist where someone has given him a good poke. Luckily, the threat of Harcux laying him out in front of a boat of sailors—"
"—and a woman," Valant added sotto voce from behind the sunjammer dome, looking out and smirking at Dagmar.
"—and a woman," Robsin rolled his eyes, "saved his life. I doubt my stitching is any good, but I had to stop the bleeding."
"Do you have no potions?" Dagmar asked, hoping for an alchemical miracle.
"I only had a few, Gabriel. As a magus, you know how costly the damn things are." The red-rimmed eyes fumed at the inability to play healing god. "We had key officers incapacitated within minutes. I had no choice but to use them, and let needier men, good men, go. To stand by helpless, like an old wandought."
"Aye, I know, apothecaries and herbalists charge a baron's ransom to the earth goddess. If they don't get you with the materials, it's the fees without guarantee. Oh, the despair of being poor, or a crocus without the means." Dagmar dripped irony, but he appreciated the old man's bitterness more now than ever. The venom of failure. He inclined his head at the hump he assumed were the passengers. "How are they?"
"Asleep, the man will sleep for a while. Young Carla has been assisting me and supervising them. She's a fine nurse. I knew many like her at university when studying medicine. Ah, those were the days." Robsin's eyes turned from hangdog to wistful, then back a moment later, when spume slapped him in the face. The Doctor sighed, his memory killed off like most of their crew.
"Lucky him," Dagmar attempted a grin. The girl would scrub up, if quiet from what he'd seen earlier—until the temper and her knife came out. He rubbed his head, looking at her borrowed uniform and hoping Merizus hadn't lied about where his cut had came from. Looking back at her, he was thankful it had been too dark to see if her blade had fresh blood on it. Maybe if Eddie didn't fancy his chances… He groaned and shook his head. It wo
uld be more entertaining seeing if they'd fight, or watching his friend run. The fucking headache pained him worse than any hangover, but there'd be no relief with their stingy resources. Shit.
Robsin chuckled as though reading his thoughts, understanding his pain, and cracked the lantern again. He bent to the grisly task of sewing up a long gash on a sailor's leg. "Try to keep it dry, you know the routine," the doctor advised. Dagmar looked away, people's insides should stay inside. When he heard a dressing being wrapped, he turned back.
"Aye, Doc, cheers." The man bit his lip and grimaced to Dagmar and hobbled back to his seat.
.*.*.
Grimm jerked awake stifling a raucous snore and looked around for what woke him. He saw Dagmar and gave a wry smile. A coxswain's responsibilities only went so far when there was an officer about. Dagmar, to their fortune, didn't stand deck watches like others, being a specialist. However, with convoluted commissions and bickering between the magus Citadel and their crown, he still ranked as a commissioned naval officer.
"How's the head, sir?" Grimm asked to see how together the red eyed bugger was.
"Painful. Unpleasant. Throbbing away like your foot, I imagine. Throwing that spell hurt. Are the others okay?"
"Well, to speak for us, sir. I'm happy you did. It'll be brutal, but we're alive 'n' afloat. The other boat's like us. Okay for now, but they've lost a few. We picked up two lads who jumped early on. Frend and Morrel, of all people. Useless to us unless we want to count the pot lickers who jumped us to death. Speaking of them, touch and go with breathing."
"Great. Who else did we lose?"
"Several seamen in both our boats, most of the badly wounded and nearly all the marines and the ankhbows in the other. We haven't any prayer scrolls, so we said a few words and put them over, quiet like. I know it's not the done thing, but the others don't need the reminder and the Doc needs some room." Grimm looked at the man and waited for the objection. He grunted when none came.
THE TRYPHON ODYSSEY (The Voyage Book 1) Page 15