He wasn’t at her side.
She had no time to look for him as Avnai and Ulzhe circled again. Avnai was limping noticeably, now. Ulzhe grinned. His face held none of the exultant joy Azriyqam had seen while Ambassador Celaeno had toyed with her. This was a professional concentrating on his work.
Avnai’s own face was grim and shadowed with pain.
Ulzhe attacked again. Each time he attacked, he drove Avnai to his left, forcing more and more strain on his injured leg. Even Azriyqam could see it. All he needed was for Avnai to stumble once, and he pressed his advantage. Avnai was tiring quickly. Each stroke came just a little slower.
Ulzhe drove in from Avnai’s right, forcing him to parry and take the weight on his left leg. Avnai screamed, his leg folding under him. Ulzhe closed, sword raised high for the kill.
Then Avnai’s left leg uncoiled like a spring, propelling him out from under Ulzhe’s descending stroke.
It was a feint! realized Azriyqam.
Avnai cut from his left hand, the one holding the blade-grip, and the guard blade smashed into Ulzhe’s side below the ribcage. The man screamed and dropped to the deck, his eyes bulging in shock. Avnai wrenched the blade free and raised it above his head for the killing blow.
Metal gleamed in the fallen man’s left hand. Azriyqam shrieked just as the small dart-thrower fired. Avnai staggered, choking on the pain of it, but the long point of his omnisword slammed down into the spy’s chest, pinning him to the deck.
Then Avnai collapsed, coughing blood.
For a frozen instant, Azriyqam damned herself and her brother together. We should never have trusted them. They always cheat, why do we fight them fair?
Then Haraad leapt forward, his blade drawn. “They’ve killed each other!”
Azriyqam didn’t know what Haraad intended, but she wasn’t about to let him get closer to her brother with naked steel in his hand. Elazar obviously concurred. He was even faster, and his airswords were out. Azriyqam drew her own.
“Treachery! Save the high captain!” a voice cried out. Suddenly, four of Haraad’s bravos charged the quarterdeck, armed with heavy cutlasses. Elazar and Haraad fought over Avnai’s slumped body. Azriyqam’s wings were under his shoulders, trying to get him up without stabbing him, but he was so heavy and Haraad’s men were almost on her. Now Merav was with her, and they were pulling, but there was no time.
A big man with a beard raised a cutlass to strike her—
The world exploded in a globe of fire.
The Century Ship shook.
When she opened her eyelids against the dull red glow, half the sky was ablaze. It took her a moment to understand what she was seeing: The Fool Errant, its bow ablaze, was falling, sinking like a sunset seen close up. The fire crawled aft with deceptive slowness, the flammable liftgas consuming the skin of the great ship like paper, leaving the skeletal frame.
Fire, she thought, horrified. My dream.
The decks were filled with screaming people, diving for the hold, some running astern to fight the fire that was about to descend on them. But the airship was no longer moored. It fell like a dying mountain, slipping beneath the deck, sinking behind Ekkaia.
Haraad’s men were not distracted for long. They staggered forward, forcing Azriyqam to drop Avnai. The big man with the cutlass slashed at her and she barely got her airswords up in time to parry. Elazar drove Haraad back, but three of his men were converging on him. There was no time for anything except a desperate defense. She stepped in and slashed desperately with her swords. She felt one bite her enemy’s arm. He roared with rage and swung his fist, striking her a buffet on the side of her head that made her see stars. She fell away.
His chest sprouted a feathered bolt. He looked curiously at it, then fell like a cut tree. Suddenly, through the fog in her brain, arms lifted her up. She heard voices crying “Strike! Strike now!” and “Get them out of here.”
The world whirled and went dark.
* * * * *
Chapter 15
The burning dream was familiar now, but no less frightening. She ran from the flames, higher and higher, up the endless stairs, through the decks of the burning Century Ship. No matter how far she ran, she couldn’t get to a hatch or door. There were no ports through which she might leap into the cool air and escape.
At some point, she realized she was climbing a tower, and the tower was the Kreyntorm. Its wooden stones burned behind her as she climbed up and up, desperately clawing at the slitted windows. But still she couldn’t get out. At last, she reached her chambers, but her wide balcony was gone, replaced with a solid wall that mocked her. Higher she climbed, lungs bursting and legs shrieking their agony. In her father’s chamber, she heard him crying for help, but she couldn’t pause. The heat drove her onward, and even if there had been a window, she couldn’t have carried him to safety.
* * *
When she woke, it was her head that was burning. The smell of roasted fish and herbs flooded her mouth with saliva in spite of the pain, and she felt hunger and nausea at the same time.
“Easy, you took quite a knock on the head there,” said Elazar.
Azriyqam opened her eyes. Elazar had mostly finished his own meal, an enormous filet of tuna with kelp and brine onions. Another full plate sat on a low tray beside the hammock in which she lay.
“Avnai!” she cried. “Is he—” she hissed at the pain in her head as she sat up quickly.
“He lives, for now.” His eyes dropped.
“How badly is he hurt? I have to see him!” She struggled to rise.
“Sit down,” Elazar said firmly, but not unkindly. “You can do nothing for him that is not already being done. You need food and rest and healing. Merav is using all her skill in sorcery to attend him, but his lung is collapsed and he isn’t fully conscious.”
“Can’t you help him?”
Elazar shook his head. “I am a warrior, not a sorcerer. The closest to magic that I can do is called alchemy, and I know nothing of medicines.”
“I should be helping—”
“Merav is a more skilled sorceress than you, and you’d do her no good, especially as you are now. In fact, you’d distract her. Now eat.” Azriyqam reluctantly started on the food. The flavors of her childhood, though, awoke her appetite and cured her nausea. “Will Avnai recover?” She finally got up the courage to ask.
“Merav doesn’t know. She is at the limits of her skill.”
“What happened, at the last?” Azriyqam asked. “Avnai won. Didn’t he?” She remembered the dart. The blood, and then— “Haraad tried to kill him! I was right, wasn’t I, Elazar? Wasn’t Haraad trying to kill him?”
“Oh, most definitely,” the old dragon nodded. “He was going to make sure that your brother died. Probably in the name of delivering a mercy-stroke. You and I bought him his life, there.”
“And the spy? Is he definitely dead?”
“Oh, he’s dead. Your brother finished him, right enough. I’ve never seen a dead man, else.”
“Then what happened?” Azriyqam pressed. “Haraad tried to blame it on us, and then there were all these people—”
“Things on this Ship are not as straightforward as they seem. The barricade you noticed, and the strange behavior of the Ship, did have a common purpose, as you surmised,” Elazar began. A complex knock sounded and Zhad ducked in.
“Her men are on their way,” he said.
“Where did you go?” blurted Azriyqam. “I looked for you, and you’d vanished!”
“To find things out. I don’t really find watching things very rewarding, you know. So, I thought that with everyone watching the duel, no one would be watching me. I was right, too.”
A young man Azriyqam didn’t know came in and regarded them all with a curl of his lip. “The garden-captain wants to see you.”
Azriyqam’s heart leapt. Cana? Oh, please…he would listen.
They rose and followed. They were led down toward the Century Ship’s immense forward cistern. She could
smell the fresh water by the time they turned aside to a small hold chamber. Their escort knocked, saluted, and stood aside.
Azriyqam entered. The hold had been cleared and a table placed opposite the door. A half-dozen weary, uniformed officers sat at it. At the middle of the table was Tselah. Tall and broad for a woman, her father’s huge uniform jacket nonetheless hung off her. Her face, the color of black teak, might have been carved from that hard wood.
Azriyqam’s heart sank. “Cana…” she breathed.
Tselah’s eyes examined Azriyqam as though she were a particularly repulsive pest she had discovered in the Ship’s garden. At last, she said, “I did not think you would ever dare to show your face upon this Ship again, Responsibility.”
“Where is Cana?”
“Where you put him, in the bottomless ocean. In his grave.”
“B-but I couldn’t have…” she protested.
“High Captain Haraad blamed him after you escaped with his prisoner. He had him beaten in your place. My father was an old man, but he might have survived that, or he might have survived the wound you gave him, though it was a deep cut, but he couldn’t survive both. He took an infection and died.”
“Haraad beat him?” The words tumbled out of Azriyqam’s mouth. “A captain?” Officers weren’t beaten, captains least of all!
“He got fifty lashes,” said Tselah.
Azriyqam shuddered. Fifty!
“Many of the captains protested, but none of them did anything. After all, it wasn’t their family. Yet.” She glanced bitterly to her side. Here were the net-captain and the birth-mistress, along with several lower officers. Their gazes were cast down. Tselah continued, “After all, it would be less than a year before we came to the Grove. Then justice would be served before the Lords of the Admiralty. So, they decided we would wait, lest our names be tarred with the disgrace of being mutineers against an acting high captain whose acts violated every law of the sea but that one.”
Azriyqam swallowed and nodded, once. Mutiny. Worse than unthinkable. Mutiny was where the pirates had come from, when the First Fleet split, hundreds of years ago. A mutineer’s family was hacked from the Tree of Life and cast out of the Grove.
“But then that stranger, Ulzhe, came aboard.”
“What happened?”
“No! Now is the time when you answer our questions! Did Ulzhe tell you a tale? What was it? How did your pirate come to fight him? For that matter, how did you come here, on a skyship that bore the insignia of a legend?”
“Avnai warned you he was an officer of the Consortium, all those months ago. He wasn’t lying. The Near Islands fought a war with the Consortium. They lost. It’s how I came to be here in the first place. My mother was fleeing that war. But eventually, peace was made, and my brother now serves in the Consortium Navy.”
“Your brother?” Tselah hissed. The looks around the table turned to disgust.
Azriyqam’s jaw hardened, but she decided to push right past it. “Yes. He’s an officer in the Consortium Navy and he returned here to warn you about a plot to destroy this ship!”
Tselah snorted in derision. “No one can destroy a Century Ship. Fight us, yes. Extort us—as you pirates have been doing for years—but who would destroy one?”
“The Consortium.”
“How?” snapped one of Tselah’s followers.
“They have ships that travel under the water. One of them awaits you at the island this Ulzhe told you about. When you get there, it will burn you to the waterline and then shoot under the hull to sink you. Haraad and a few of his followers—the ones he wants to serve him on his new Century Ship—will escape and be rescued by the Consortium fleet and taken back to the Grove. He’ll have killed you all, and he’ll be a hero for doing it. No one will survive to discredit him.”
“Ships that sail under the…” Tselah stared at her. “I always wondered if your twisted body housed an equally twisted mind, and now I am certain of it. Are you mad? Do you even hear what you are saying? Your pirate here is actually an officer of the Consortium who has come on a mission to warn us that his own people are planning to destroy us? What madness is this?”
Azriyqam took a deep breath. Tselah was hateful and proud, but she had never been stupid.
Elazar looked at her. “Kyria—”
“Elazar, we have to tell them the truth.”
Elazar shrugged.
Azriyqam turned back to Tselah. “The Consortium has never forgiven our kingdom for refusing to lie down and be conquered. We lost the war with the Consortium, but we forced them to treat us as an ally rather than a conquest in exchange for peace. They don’t want that. The Consortium is planning to acquire the Grove as a willing vassal against the kingdom. By burning this Century Ship and blaming it on our dragons, they will accuse us of violating our treaty with them and enrage you against us. Then Ulzhe—the Consortium’s real agent—was to offer the Consortium’s aid to the Grove, so that you can retaliate.”
One of Tselah’s attendants barked laughter. “The Consortium wants our help to finish off the pirates? Why not just ask us? We’d be more than willing to wipe you off the face of the Ocean.”
“Silence, Racan,” said Tselah wearily.
“Because the Consortium has already offered us membership,” said Elazar, “they don’t want their other resentful member states to know that they will make war against their own allies without cause. That might trigger a rebellion. They need us to violate their treaty, stupidly and obviously. Since we are not planning to be so stupid, they will frame us. You get to be the sacrifice to accomplish that.”
“After all,” said Azriyqam, “the Consortium suspects you might not treat their emissaries with the greatest respect. For some reason.”
Tselah’s face darkened. “Haraad. The old high captain would never have been so stupid.”
“Is he dead, then?”
“Yes,” and the word came out dripping with anger. “After you and Haraad murdered my father, we were sailing home to the Grove, waiting to bring him to justice. Then, at Lastport, this Ulzhe showed up, begging for passage in exchange for revealing a hidden cache of riches. Dragonbone, he said, from a secret burial ground of your kind. Some were tempted,” she spat. “Haraad most of all, because he knew it would buy him praise when we arrived home. But the rest of us only wanted to see Home. We didn’t trust this stranger’s promises, and we would not sell our justice for wealth! We demanded a Captains’ Council and voted Ulzhe and Haraad down, but he gave the order to change course anyway.”
“So, you mutinied.”
“Haraad is not the true high captain! The council could have relieved Haraad when he defied them. They should have, but they said they wouldn’t out of respect for his father who conveniently died two days later.”
“Assassinated,” Azriyqam said. It wasn’t a question.
“We have no proof, and they still won’t relieve Haraad. But we know this Ulzhe is behind it. That duel of yours is the only time we’ve even seen him since we tried to take the ship back! So, we took the chance we had.”
“What did you do?”
“You saw it.”
“I was practically knocked senseless in the fight,” snapped back Azriyqam. “Now what did you do?”
“We burned the Consortium’s skyship.”
“Why?”
“That idiot Haraad had let all his men down from the rigging to watch the duel. It was an opportunity we would never get again!”
“You fools,” the words dropped from Azriyqam’s lips like ash. “Then why not kill all of us, if that’s your preferred solution? You obviously didn’t save me for the fond memories you have of me at your feastday table. What stopped you from slaughtering us all?”
A small voice cleared its throat. Azriyqam whirled to see Zhad waving from the corner where he sat cross-legged. He looked slightly embarrassed. “Um, hi.”
“Zhad, what did you do?”
“I told you, I got bored with not watching the epic duel, so I
wandered off. I figured whatever was on the other side of that barricade you described was something we ought to know about. So, I slipped through the hatches that most of you have forgotten even exist and wandered around until someone found me. Fortunately, they’re a little paranoid, being rebels and all, so they wasted no time in bringing me to the mutineer captain, here. I explained what was really going on just in time for her to lead your rescue after the airship went up.”
“And you didn’t try to stop that?” Azriyqam said, aghast. “Zavat’s dead!”
“I mentioned it, sure,” Zhad shot back, “but she said it was too late. Besides, I was more focused on saving your scaly ass. Azriy, I love that you think you can somehow save everyone who doesn’t deserve to die, but last I checked, those people die every day. I didn’t kill Zavat. He was a big boy who joined a navy, and if he didn’t realize he might die, he’s even dumber than I thought he was. Bottom line is, and I say this to you, too, Captain Tselah: the only friends we have on this Ocean are each other. And if we’re not friends, we sure both have an enemy we’d better decide we hate worse. I’d appreciate it if you two ladies would figure that out.”
Azriyqam just stared at Zhad. From the corner of her eye, she saw Tselah doing the same. She wondered distantly just how alike their faces looked.
“Captain Tselah.” Elazar’s voice cut through the moment like a sword. “Past mistakes will not show us the way forward. We have told you what you wanted to know, regardless of whether it is what you wanted to hear. Sir Zhad is right, the only real question here is whether you believe us or not. The next question follows from it. Will you fight with us to save this Century Ship?”
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